“I have no idea,” Wim answered. “I don’t know it.”
“Too bad,” the doctor said, “it’s heavenly—the vocals . . .
‘Luxe, calme, volupté.’
” He hummed the melody softly. “I wish I owned it.” He stared at the ceiling, lost in a reverie. “
Enfin
, I’ll come to give your wife a couple of calcium injections against fatigue and general listlessness. There’s a lot of that going around these days. Goodbye.”
In the meantime, Marie had told Nico that Wim had gone for the doctor.
“Isn’t it too risky—for you . . .” he had asked in a dull voice.
“Don’t worry, Nico. Dr. Nelis is good, in every way. And you’re sick.”
“Yes, I do feel sick,” he answered softly, and he leaned back deeper into the pillow and shut his eyes. He had always known that they wouldn’t leave him in the lurch here . . .
“As long as it doesn’t turn into a double pneumonia,” Dr. Nelis said to Marie and Wim downstairs in the back room, after he had thoroughly examined the patient. “He isn’t strong.”
Marie turned pale. “I do what I can, with the food situation . . .”
“I know, it’s impossible to manage,” the doctor replied. “His inner defenses too are not that strong . . . at least that’s how it seems to me. And no wonder!” he added. “I gave him an injection. I’ll come again tonight.”
After a week his condition was unchanged, despite
the new medicine that everyone was talking about at the time.
Marie was gripped by an uneasiness she had never felt before. She suffered. It wasn’t so much the thought that he might not get through his illness, it was the idea that his defenses weren’t strong enough. What could she do?
When he was still healthy and stuck in his room, in recent days and weeks, she had never forgotten to put on a happy and confident face when she walked in. She had read somewhere or other, in a housewives’ magazine that was still appearing at irregular intervals, that you had to stay positive. Positive! That was supposed to be the best way to overcome difficult circumstances. Without her exactly realizing it, this thought had lodged deep inside her and revealed itself first through her attitude toward Nico. Stay positive! But after he fell sick, it didn’t seem to work for her anymore. Carefully, timidly, she crept into his room and watched his feverish, sweaty face with its closed eyes and half-open mouth struggling for breath. In his illness and helplessness, his whole being—or at least so she felt—expressed itself more clearly, and she had never perceived it more deeply than she did now. Sick and helpless, wasn’t this his true state? His behavior before was what was remarkable: playing chess—with himself—practicing French and English, reading books. All of it, all of it, was nothing but a kind of medicine to try to heal his affliction. And Wim and
she had often wondered at his behavior. Sometimes it seemed to her almost uncanny. It stood like a wall between him and them, which slowly, slowly crumbled as the war dragged on and everything aberrant and inhuman became typical and everyday.
“I have to go look in on him again,” she said one night after she and Wim had gone to bed.
“He’s probably already asleep—you’ll wake him up . . .”
She insisted: “I’ll be very quiet.”
Even before she had finished closing the door to his room behind her, she heard a breathless, congested voice: “Marie . . .”
She turned on the light; the bed stood outside its dim circle of illumination. His beard had grown and it covered his chin and cheeks, so that he looked older and more emaciated. She stood next to his bed.
“Should I fluff the pillow for you again?”
“Ah, yes.”
She helped him sit up. He supported himself with great difficulty on the mattress while she hurriedly pounded the pillow with both hands. It was limp with heat. Then she helped him as he let himself fall back. It visibly did him good. His hair was a confused tangle on his head, like the absolute mess after a downpour. It hung damp and sticky over his forehead and temples. The half darkness of the room gave his face an ashy coloring. Two feverish eyes were wide-open in his face, as
though gathering all the shadows of the bedroom into themselves.
“Marie . . .”
“Yes?” She spoke very softly as though afraid to make his condition worse with any loud noise. But he didn’t say anything else. He closed his eyes and lay there as though he had just that moment fallen asleep. Only his arms, stretched out on the blanket but lying right up against his body, trembled now and then. Then he raised them gingerly, straight up, and let them fall again, like wings that he wanted to unfold but then, tired and powerless, just curled up again. It was almost as if he were not breathing anymore. Only the blanket on his body moved, almost imperceptibly, up and down.
Marie bent down over his stubbly face so that she could pick up the softest sound from his lips in case he looked like he was about to speak. She waited like that for a time. She saw the beads of sweat on his forehead and the little rivulets slowly dripping down his face and neck and sinking into the cavities above his collarbone. His pajama top was half open, and a warm, strong smell rose up toward her from the damp shining skin under the hair on his chest. When she felt under his armpits, she noticed that the fabric was soaked through with sweat, the fabric at his sides and his elbows too.
She took a washcloth and first wiped his face and head; then, after opening another button of his pajama top, she washed his chest and painstakingly wiped his
armpits. She felt the heat from his body. She fetched a bottle of eau de cologne from her bedroom, a bottle she had saved for special occasions, sprayed a few drops onto his forehead, and blew on it lightly to spread the perfume so that its coolness would pleasantly refresh his hot skin. It helped. She saw his face become more lively again.
“I’ll get you a fresh pair of pajamas, yes?” she said, bent closely over him.
A weak nod was the answer. When she was going over to the hiding place where his clothes were, she heard him say, with great effort, “I don’t have any more . . .”
He didn’t own much, and what little he had had been used up in the days he’d been sick. She went out to the hall, where the laundry bag was still full of the clean clothes that had come back from the laundry that day, and she pulled out a pair of Wim’s pajamas from the bottom of the bag. She called Wim to come help her, and together they dressed Nico. Even though he couldn’t do much to help, since he was already so weakened by his illness, and even though they themselves had no experience nursing sick people, everything went smoothly.
“Thank you, it was so hot,” he said weakly, when he was lying motionless on his back again. Wim was already in the doorway.
“So, you’ll sleep better now. Good night,” Marie said, and she left the room on tiptoes.
Outside in the hall, they stopped for a moment and listened, as though standing outside a room where a child was sleeping. Their eyes met.
“Come on, Marie!” He opened the door to their room.
She followed slowly after him, still on tiptoes.
The doctor was standing in the front hall in his hat and coat. It was quarter past ten. He rubbed his hands together. “I came on my bicycle,” he said. He usually used a motorcycle, since he’d had to put his car into a garage because of the shortage of gasoline. It was pitch-black outside. “We’re going right now?” he asked, and he peered up the steps.
Marie had taken off her apron. Her hands were puffy and red, her face was shining. Still, she was calm and focused. “Can I help with something,” she said, “or . . .”
“Let’s go,” Wim said to the doctor, and let him go first. Then, turning back to Marie, “It’s better if you wait here downstairs, maybe in the front room . . .”
“Don’t forget the coat,” she replied.
Wim stopped on the stairs. “Right,” he said, and he leaped back down in two big jumps. He pulled his hat down tight over his head.
“Which door?” the doctor asked when Wim came running back up the stairs behind him. He was a little
out of breath because he was wearing his heavy winter coat.
They walked into the room in their hats and coats like two men from some commission, officials who had come to launch an investigation into a case of death where foul play was suspected. They stepped decisively up to the bed, stood standing alongside it for a second, and calmly considered the case before them, their hands buried deep in their coat pockets. Then the doctor shoved his left hand under the dead man’s neck, grabbed his stiff left arm with the other hand, and pulled. The body slid out of the symmetrical position it had been in until then, and now lay a little diagonal and tilted onto the right side of the face and body. The doctor looked at the prominent Adam’s apple of the dead man in silence. Wim stood hesitantly next to him.
“If we sit him up first,” he said.
“That won’t work,” the doctor answered, puffing up his cheeks a little, “with the rigor mortis.” He had already tested it out. Silence. Wim held his hands clasped behind his back; he had the strange feeling of not being in his own house, but rather in a strange house for a wake.
“It’s not so simple, really,” the doctor began anew.
Wim turned back the covers and measured the length of the body. “It seems to me, Doctor—like this—if we lay him across our shoulders, like a plank, I could maybe do it myself . . .”
“Impossible! You think with a dead body . . . !”
“Or I could have him on my back, piggyback, and you could prop him up from behind so that he doesn’t fall backward”—and he lightly bent forward and pulled the arms into two curves at chest height, as though putting them into two stirrups—“like this.”
The doctor hesitated before he answered: “The joints are still too stiff.”
Wim was silent.
“Have you ever actually seen a corpse?” the doctor asked suddenly, and turned the body onto its back. Wim gave a start.
“Of course,” he said hastily, “my father, a long time ago, I was very young.”
“I see.” And then he went on, staring at the blankets: “I am always surprised how few grown men and women have actually really seen a dead body. That is, in normal times. A lot of people see one for the first time in their thirties. It’s strange. Everyone has a lot more to do with love, earlier and more often, of course. But they should have to see a dead body at least once a week. Then everyone would have a better sense of equilibrium, and lots of fears and anxieties would just disappear.” He pulled his gaze back from the blankets and raised it to Wim. “Do you still remember it, then?”
“Sure I do,” Wim answered, and reflected back, thinking hard.
He was a boy, seven years old, when one day—he
was wearing a black velvet coat with a cream-colored pointed collar—his mother called him into the music room, where there was an open coffin. She herself was standing, with tear-swollen eyes, in a posture that he would never forget, tall and straight with her thin figure, as though she were growing from one minute to the next, leaning against one of the double doors and saying in a soft, melodious voice—she was a singer—and a tone he had never heard her speak in before and would never hear again: “Wim, that’s Father. He is dead. Say goodbye to him, my boy.” And Wim had stepped up to the open coffin, which had a long piece of glass lying across the top, lengthwise, and had looked closely at Father. What was that under his chin? A long, wide block of wood lay on his chest and held up Father’s chin. His face looked serious and was almost totally without wrinkles. He looked different, better than he did before when he was lying sick in bed. He was wearing a frock coat with a big white carnation from the garden in the buttonhole. Wim examined the carnation and noticed that you can’t smell a flower through glass. Only in this flower, blooming behind glass but giving off no more scent, did the astonished child recognize the sign of death. His father also lay behind the glass covering and you could see him but not smell him. Two thick, burning candles stood at the head end of the coffin, and at the foot end lay a big wreath with a blue ribbon, on which was written in golden letters:
TO THEIR BELOVED DADDY—THE CHILDREN
.
“He’s still too young,” his aunt whispered to his mother when she saw the boy standing there.
“Thank God,” his uncle whispered back. Father’s brother had been living in the house for a week and taking care of all the necessary business. The following year, he married Wim’s mother and moved to India with her. The children were sent to boarding school.
When Wim’s aunt led him quietly out of the room, Coba came in through the other door. She was very pale and sobbing uninterruptedly. Even though she was older, the rules of family precedence demanded that the son take his leave of his father first . . .
“The two of us will manage it.” The doctor interrupted the silence.
“Yes,” Wim answered with conviction, as though he had had the exact same thought at the same time. How yellow Nico’s teeth looked already, like wax. Were they cold to the touch too?
“Grab his feet,” the doctor said as he gripped under the armpits and lifted the upper body from the sheets. They laid him on the floor. Then they started over, their faces turned toward each other, Wim at the foot end and the doctor at the head end, and they carried the corpse by the armpits and feet, the way it was done in old “Burial of Christ” paintings, slowly and carefully—Wim was walking backward—out of the bedroom and down the stairs.
The light was on in the stairwell. When they opened the door, they would be visible from outside.
“Let’s put him down again,” the doctor said. He seemed uncomfortable carrying the body this way.
“Here in the hall?” Wim replied, and laid the legs down on the carpet. Something inside him resisted the idea of laying the dead body right down here in the hallway, where everybody walked back and forth all the time.
The doctor straightened up, since he had been bent over the whole time they were carrying the body. “A sheet—we need some kind of sheet to wrap him up,” he said. “The pajamas will be too bright outside.”
“Marie, get a sheet, or a blanket,” Wim said after opening the door to the room where Marie sat waiting with nothing to do. “We need to wrap him in something dark.”