The Krull House Page 5

  He wasn’t worried about that. It was perfectly fine. He just had to let her weep in his arms and stroke her gently.

  But at the same time, there was a characteristic creaking on the floor below, the creaking of a door being opened cautiously. And by now Hans knew what that meant: Joseph, whose room it was, had heard noises and must already be climbing the stairs in the dark, taking care not to make a sound. In a few moments, he would be listening at the door or peering through the keyhole.

  ‘You’re a sweet girl, my poor Liesbeth … I like you a lot …’

  He was whispering in her ear, knowing that, even though she was still crying, she could hear everything he said and was waiting for what would happen next.

  ‘Really, a lot. But we have to be sensible. There’s no point crying like this. We have to …’

  It was still too early. He contented himself with stroking her forehead and cheeks, then put his cheek against hers.

  There was another outburst, a few moments later, when Liesbeth abruptly clung to him even more strongly than before, saying:

  ‘If you leave without me, I’ll kill myself. I can’t live in this house any more.’

  ‘Then we’ll leave together …’

  He never made a tragedy out of things. He seemed to be cradling a feverish child, which didn’t stop his hands from now caressing his cousin’s body.

  ‘When?’

  ‘One day … Soon …’

  Joseph was there, on the other side of the door! Hans never stopped thinking about it. And he said to himself:

  ‘Provided he stays!’

  Because it would still take a little time, half an hour or an hour.

  The room was in shadow, and the sky seemed to enter through the wide-open window, with, in the distance, the voices of frogs and a train puffing in a station, as if undecided whether or not to leave.

  ‘Shhh! Not another word, little cousin …’

  He was the one talking, babbling on, whispering nonsense in her ear. It all took a little more than half an hour, but less than an hour.

  Liesbeth went quite stiff, because it still frightened her, and her nostrils contracted.

  ‘Shhh, my little Liesbeth … The two of us, just like that …’

  He could almost hear Joseph breathing out on the landing. What he did hear clearly was Aunt Maria turning over in her bed and heaving a sigh, the sigh of a large woman unable to find a comfortable position.

  ‘You won’t cry again, will you, Liesbeth? Ever again?’

  She didn’t know. She was looking at him with a mixture of adoration and anguish. From time to time, her lower lip still quivered. If she had cried, she wouldn’t have been able to say if it was from distress or joy.

  He was smiling. It was a complicated smile, which both surprised her and worried her, and he explained in a casual tone:

  ‘I’m thinking of your sister Anna doing what we’re doing. Don’t you think it’d be funny, Anna in this position?’

  She tried to smile, too, but her eyes misted over. She didn’t understand. She was confused, ashamed of her bare belly, which looked pale in the darkness. Her hands reached out to cling to Hans. It seemed to her that she was descending into an abyss of painful joy and despair.

  ‘I’d like to see that!’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Your sister … Shhh! If you cry …’

  At such moments, Hans’ eyes became so tender, so imploring, so full of gaiety and youth that Liesbeth panted a few more times, calmed down and resumed her regular breathing, a wan smile on her face.

  Nobody even bothered to find out where and when Sidonie had been buried. Not even her mother!

  Children in their Sunday best paraded with their prizes, surrounded by parents even stiffer than them. Liesbeth resumed playing the piano all day long and started eating again. As for Joseph, he now got into the habit of locking his door when he was working and was no longer seen speaking to his cousin.

  ‘Don’t you think he’ll assume you’re angry with him?’

  ‘I don’t care!’

  ‘What have you got against him?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘He is your father’s nephew after all …’

  Anna was turning sly, observing her sister with a little too much attention.

  As for Potut, he was kept in prison until Saturday morning without even being questioned.

  From time to time, the inspector would get a phone call from the examining magistrate, who was getting ready to leave for his holiday.

  ‘Have you found him yet?’

  It was only on Saturday morning, at the market, that the man from Marseille was spotted sitting calmly on a bench, eating a hot sausage. He was taken to the police station and asked what he had been doing for the past week. As calmly as could be, he said he had been in the country.

  He would often leave, just like that, and come back. He didn’t understand what the police wanted with him, given that his papers were in order.

  ‘And Potut?’

  ‘What about Potut?’

  They had assumed they were home and dry. They had a feasible culprit. And now, in spite of the inspector’s tricks, this fellow from Marseille confirmed everything Potut had said.

  ‘If you ask at Léonie’s, they’ll tell you I broke a glass and they threw us out …’

  It was a little bar behind the cathedral. Léonie also confirmed what the man had said, and at eleven they had no choice but to summon Potut to the examining magistrate’s office.

  ‘Sign this!’

  ‘What is it? I left my glasses in the cell.’

  ‘Your statement.’

  ‘What are you going to do with me now?’

  ‘You’re free to go!’

  Done! They put him outside, in the blazing sun, where he was suddenly disorientated. They didn’t mention the man from Marseille, and as the latter had been released an hour earlier, they didn’t have the good fortune to meet again.

  It was increasingly hot. Potut talked to himself as he hugged the buildings, looking with surprise at a kind old lady who slipped a couple of sous in his hand as she passed.

  As nobody was talking about Sidonie any more, there was no point telling the editors of the newspaper that they had had to release the only suspect, which meant that the people of the Saint-Léonard neighbourhood, there at the edge of the town, were surprised to see Potut hanging around the lock as he always had done.

  Some claimed that there was a scene between him and Pipi, that they exchanged both insults and blows.

  Only Hans could have told the truth, because he hadn’t stopped prowling around the barge. It was that same evening, at the fair, that he triggered the ‘Sidonie case’, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps maliciously.

  It was the penultimate day of the fair. There were going to be fireworks. This time, Hans hadn’t asked Aunt Maria for money, he had asked Liesbeth, and she had given him the eighty francs she had in her handbag.

  ‘Tonight …’ he had promised her.

  She would come! She would wait for him as long as she had to! And, for a half hour, a quarter of an hour of tenderness, lying motionless in his arms, listening to him whispering, she would accept whatever fantasy he came up with.

  She didn’t even dare protest when he said with a disquieting curl of the lips:

  ‘You’ll see! One of these days, we’ll arrange it so that Anna …’

  When she was alone, Liesbeth hardly dared touch her own body, and when she was with the others, she almost felt ashamed. But at night, for that quarter of an hour, for that half hour, with the window open on darkness …

  With those eighty francs in his pocket, he was making his way through the crowd, past the fairground booths, when he spotted a strange little thing, a kind of monster, a girl of fifteen already as well shaped as a woman, with short legs, an arched back and a provocative chest.

  He didn’t know her name but he recognized her as the girl who had been with Sidonie the previous Saturday. Her friend bein
g dead, she had a lanky girl with her, younger than she was, and both were laughing and showing off to the men around them.

  ‘Good evening, ladies,’ Hans said, as ceremonious as he was ironic.

  ‘Monsieur?’

  They played along with him, immediately convinced that he was going to flirt with them. The younger one pinched her companion’s arm.

  ‘Would you allow me to buy you drinks?’

  ‘I don’t know if …’

  They were quivering with joy at being accosted like real women.

  4.

  ‘If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather go to Victor’s.’

  They had moved away from the crowd and come to an ordinary-looking café terrace at the corner of a street, where Hans had suggested they sit. The girl-woman had pointed a bit further along the narrow, badly paved street to a lighted globe, beneath which the motionless figure of a policeman could be seen.

  Victor’s was a dance hall, and Hans’ companion, thinking he was having second thoughts, hastened to say:

  ‘It’s no more expensive than anywhere else!’

  She was staggeringly self-confident and composed. Like Sidonie, she was playing a role, or rather, she was having a waking dream, but it was neither the same role nor the same dream.

  Sidonie had seen herself draped in lace and silk, or even an ermine cape, her skin translucent, her eyes nostalgic and distant, and she couldn’t have had to make much of an effort, when the fairground crowd turned to look at her, to imagine young noblemen in tails.

  This other girl, who was dumpy, with swollen breasts and buttocks just asking to be slapped, had pitched her ideal a few degrees lower in the hierarchy of seduction.

  She was playing the worldly-wise girl of the people, a girl with her head screwed on, someone who, although capable of tender feelings, wasn’t born yesterday.

  The lighting in the dance hall was purple, which distorted the faces of the women. All you could see were eyes with dark rings under them, blueish cheeks and white lips, and Hans’ companion underwent this transformation like the others.

  ‘Hello, Victor!’ she cried, passing the counter.

  Victor almost didn’t notice her, but when he did, said as if bestowing alms:

  ‘Good evening, Germaine.’

  The other girl, the younger one, made her way fearfully through this atmosphere bristling with accordion music, occasionally looking Hans up and down.

  ‘Shall we sit here?’

  ‘If you wish, Mademoiselle Germaine.’

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  He had just heard it, there was nothing clever about it! She knew that. It made a good impression, all the same.

  ‘What will you have?’

  ‘A mint lemonade. With a lot of mint! What about you, Ninie?’

  ‘I’ll have the same!’

  Ninie was overawed. Like a child, she couldn’t take her eyes off Hans. Lips half open, she gradually assumed a dumbfounded expression.

  ‘You’re foreign, aren’t you?’ Germaine simpered, powdering her face: a pointless activity in this lighting.

  To which he replied, simply or cynically:

  ‘German …’

  That gave Ninie a little shock, and her eyes opened a bit wider. As for the plump Germaine, she said sententiously, like someone who knows what she is talking about:

  ‘Oh! Just like the Krulls!’

  Couples were dancing with expressionless faces, occasionally glancing at the mirrors on the walls. Ninie’s legs, as she sat on the banquette, didn’t reach the floor. She sucked at the straw she had been given. Did Hans frighten her just a little?

  He wasn’t like anyone she knew. Not in any way! First of all, he wasn’t ‘someone from the street’, he went about without a hat, in an open-necked shirt – and it wasn’t the kind of shirt that men wore in the country or at sea.

  His square shoes were almost slippers, so soft you didn’t hear him walking.

  He wasn’t a student. Nor was he a worker, or a young man like those who deliberately wore their caps at an angle.

  ‘Fancy a dance?’ Germaine suggested when she couldn’t find anything to say.

  He was twice as tall as her. He had to stoop. You expected to see him lift her off the ground. In spite of that, he wasn’t ridiculous, nor was he embarrassed. Ninie watched the couple move around the room.

  ‘You dance well, but you don’t dance like the people here,’ Germaine commented, resuming her seat.

  ‘Do you often come to Victor’s?’

  ‘On Sunday afternoons. Sunday evenings, too, sometimes …’

  People were looking at them. Everyone had noticed Hans, and there was a touch of contempt in their eyes, because he was with two such young girls. He wasn’t the least bit affected by it.

  ‘Did you come here with Sidonie?’

  She was surprised, and there was a hint of suspicion in the look she gave him.

  ‘Did you know Sidonie?’

  ‘I heard about her.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘Friends.’

  ‘What friends? I knew all Sidonie’s friends. We were pretty much inseparable.’

  She had already learned how to sigh solemnly to indicate her grief. She dabbed at the corners of her eyes with her handkerchief and said, in the tone of a precocious child imitating grown-ups:

  ‘It’s really awful!’

  ‘Did she have lots of boyfriends?’

  Little Ninie touched her friend’s arm. Germaine, unconcerned with the unlikelihood of it – given that Hans was German – asked:

  ‘You’re not police, by any chance?’

  Javas followed waltzes, and the same figures, the same waxen faces, glided around in the unreal light.

  ‘I swear I’m not from the police. But I was near the canal when they took the body out.’

  Germaine shuddered. Ninie looked around to make sure she wasn’t in any danger, then, for further reassurance, took a big gulp of her mint lemonade.

  ‘I thought someone might have followed the two of you last Sunday.’

  It was too late to take back this unfortunate sentence, which would set it all off. Hans clearly sensed a barely perceptible shock in Germaine.

  From one second to the next, she stopped being a young girl proud of strutting about in a dance hall with a man. A thought had struck her. She stopped looking him directly in the face.

  ‘Why are you asking me all these questions?’ she said. She wasn’t playing a role any more, wasn’t listening to the sound of her own voice.

  Ninie touched her arm again and whispered:

  ‘Let’s go!’

  ‘That’s why you accosted us in the street, isn’t it?’

  The thoughts were coming thick and fast now. She was breathing heavily, her chest heaving.

  ‘We have to go …’

  ‘Why the hurry all of a sudden?’ Hans said mockingly.

  That was when she uttered the words:

  ‘You’re one of the Krulls, I bet! I should have noticed you look like the doctor.’

  The local people already called Joseph the doctor.

  With that, the two girls literally ran away, after each stammering:

  ‘Goodbye, monsieur.’

  When Hans got to the top of the stairs in the sleeping house, he stopped for a moment and, hearing nothing, touched Liesbeth’s door. It swung open on to the darkness of the room; Liesbeth was standing by the door in her nightdress, barefoot, waiting.

  He went in, walked over to the window and leaned his elbows on it. His cousin came and joined him. The rising moon illumined both of them, adding a greater sense of mystery to these two creatures motionless in the dark, framed in the window as if it were a picture hung on the side of the house.

  Liesbeth had slipped her icy fingers into Hans’ hand. She was waiting for whatever share of tenderness he might see fit to give her but didn’t dare look at him for fear of seeing a bored or weary expression on his face.

  But tonight Hans did
not push away her cold hand. Instead, he put his arm round her shoulders, while still gazing out at the canal beyond the boatyard, where the beginning of the long line of poplars glowed silver in the moonlight.

  ‘Do you also think I look like Joseph?’ he asked under his breath.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter! What do you think?’

  ‘Not at all! The two of you are quite different.’

  ‘That’s good!’ was all he said in reply.

  Without thinking, he was stroking one of her breasts through the thin material of her nightdress, and it took her a long time before she dared to sigh:

  ‘You’re hurting me.’

  She was at one and the same time happy and anxious. He had never before been the way he was tonight: dreamy, as it were, almost tender. After a long silence, she huddled closer to him and ventured:

  ‘When are we leaving?’

  He didn’t know if Joseph was behind the door or not. He hadn’t listened out for those revealing little creaks. And now he was looking at Liesbeth, her sharp nose, her eyes that were always full of anguish when they came to rest on him.

  ‘Come …’

  He lay down on the bed, fully dressed, and let her lie down next to him and snuggle up against him. She didn’t know if his eyes were open or closed, but she could hear his regular breathing, even the throbbing of his heart against her ear.

  She was avoiding the slightest movement, almost stopping herself from breathing, so afraid was she of disturbing this state of things even a little. At last she heard a longer, deeper breath and felt his limbs relax.

  He had fallen asleep, on her bed, and still she didn’t move. She listened out for his heartbeat, held his wool-clad shoulder in both hands.

  When she abruptly opened her eyes, day was breaking. She leaped off the bed, amazed that Hans was still there, asleep, a fine layer of sweat on his forehead and upper lip.

  It was very early in the morning. On the canal, the barges hadn’t yet got going. A carter was leading his horse along the quayside, with the harness and the ropes, but without the wagon.

  ‘Hans …’

  She touched him, almost timidly. When he opened his eyes, she was shivering. He raised his wrist to look at the time on his watch, yawned and moved first one leg, then the other off the bed.