“A blanket?” She stood up quickly and hurried from the room. She had been staring at the clock the whole time; it was after 10:30 and there was no time to lose if Wim was to get home again before curfew. He wanted to call after her that he would get the blanket himself, if she would only tell him where . . . But she was already out of the room.
She was not prepared to see him again, here in the hall and lying on the floor in such a position. She had no doubt heard the men slowly, step by step, coming down the stairs with a heavy weight. But still, catching sight of him like this came as quite a shock. There, where the milk bottles and bread basket and all the other everyday
things stood during the day, where the letters fell when they were slipped through the mail slot, where you walked in and out, and where he himself had come in—there he lay now, dead. The doctor was standing on the stairs, his right elbow propped on the banister and his head in the palm of his hand. In front of him, on the floor between the stairs and the door to the front room: the body.
Since she had left the front room at full speed and shut the door behind her, she had no other choice, her feet acted on their own, defending themselves as though she were suddenly standing in front of an abyss, taking a couple of tiny steps and then jumping over Nico with a little leap, a small, barely noticeable jump, just enough to clear the body. Her eyes, reflecting horror, shame, and sadness, were looking at the doctor, who was watching this performance—first her hesitation and then her helpless decision—without changing his position, bent over with his head in his hand. He nodded to her. “And some safety pins too,” he whispered, “please—”
“Of course,” she breathed, and crept sideways up the stairs.
The three of them wound the body in a blanket that had earlier been on his bed, and fastened the bundle with pins as though preparing him for a sailor’s grave. When they were done, the clock in the hall showed ten minutes to eleven. In ten minutes they could have all this behind them.
Marie turned out the light in the hall and opened the house door.
The moonless night was cold. Marie shivered. It’s good that he’s snugly wrapped in a warm blanket, she thought, and this curious idea wouldn’t let her go even though she realized in the same moment that whether it was cold or warm he wouldn’t feel anything. Nico, Nico . . .
The men in their coats stared out into the shapeless, chilly darkness and listened tensely for any sound. A house door banged shut a little farther up the street. There was a whistle. A dog came bounding with muffled, flying leaps across the gravel, shooting through the night. Silence.
“Let’s go,” Wim ordered softly, and he grabbed the legs from the floor with both hands, bundling them together, and lifted them onto his right hip so that he could walk forward this time, even if he did have to walk turned slightly to the right. At the same time, the doctor pulled the shrouded body up from the ground in one motion and supported it on his right shoulder, wrapping both arms tightly around it.
The first steps down the garden path to the gate and down the sidewalk were hurried and bumpy as the dead body pitched from side to side. They had trouble keeping it from slipping out of their hands. By the time they got to the street they had found their rhythm, or it had found itself, and the body moved back and forth with it,
making it easier for them to carry it. They cautiously crept through the darkness and stepped softly so that no one would hear them. Only a few feet on the other sidewalk, and then they would have to turn into the park entrance. Wim, who went first, felt more than saw where the chain-link fence separating the footpath from the park was interrupted by an opening. The doctor, who was carrying the greater burden, willingly followed.
Here at the entrance to the park, shielded by bushes whose tops cast weak black shapes against the darkness, they felt safer. Thanks to the rain of the past few days, the ground was loose enough to muffle their footsteps, but also not so wet that they would get stuck. After a few hundred feet they crossed over the high arch of a narrow wooden bridge, under which a little waterway flowed through the park and ended in a small pond surrounded by poplars and lindens, right at the edge of the pastures and fields. The planks creaked and they hurried to get back to the path. On the other side, twenty feet away, stood a gnarled, formless mass, black in the darkness. It was a bench—two flat, horizontal planks with a gap in between as the sitting surface and a sharply tilted plank in parallel as a back support, with feet and joints of cast iron.
After they put the blanket onto the bench and rolled out the body, they lifted it over the back of the backrest, put it down on the edge of the grass, and pushed it carefully
between the cast-iron feet. It fit comfortably. Then they took the same way back, in silence, a tired, numb feeling in their arms. It struck eleven. Three minutes later the doctor got on his bicycle in front of the house. Since Wim didn’t know if he should thank the doctor or not, he only whispered, “Good night.”
“Good night,” Dr. Nelis murmured, and disappeared into the darkness. Wim went into the house.
After he had taken off his hat and coat, he stood for a moment—as he never usually did—in front of the little oval mirror in the hall. He straightened his tie, wiped his forehead and between his neck and collar with a handkerchief, combed his hair, and did similar things that you think of only when you’re in front of a mirror. He was amazed and found it hard to grasp that he looked the way his mirror image showed him.
Marie hurried down the stairs. She looked pale, with a touching tension around her mouth and eyes. Doubtless she had been crying upstairs in his bedroom.
“So,” Wim said, looking straight at her a little pityingly.
She didn’t ask anything. He pressed his lips together and nodded a couple times, as if to say: So, we managed it . . .
They went into the back room. Wim fell into the armchair next to the stove, his legs crossed, his hands spread wide, gripping the arms of the chair as though he wanted to jump right up again.
Marie sat at the table.
Silence. She waited like someone who herself had something to hide. Should she go first?
“The stove is off,” Wim said. He stroked its cold iron with his hand.
Would it be better for her to tell him now, after all? It was ultimately nothing very important . . . It was so cold down here.
“I’ll brew us up some coffee,” Marie said, and stood up hastily.
Us? The two of them, Wim and herself. And a dry ship’s biscuit along with it, as always.
While they were drinking their coffee, Wim suddenly stretched and asked, “Is it raining?”
They both listened.
“No—thank God, no.” Pause.
The three of them had ended every single day like this for almost a year, together, with a cup of coffee and a dry piece of hardtack, often in silence, each given over to their thoughts, but still together—waiting, waiting . . . There was gratitude in this habit, and a little tiredness, from the night to come that they were about to enter alone or as a pair, and a furtive, sad happiness in the smiling, incomprehensible futility.
. . . He fit comfortably underneath, Wim eventually thought.
“Did you bring back the blanket?” Marie asked timidly.
“Outside in the hall.”
It got colder in the room. And so empty . . .
Why didn’t Wim say anything? Had he maybe noticed something after all? Should she go first and tell him—oh, it was too insignificant. But it had struck her a blow, this last thing, this revelation, this last, unheard conversation. Tomorrow, maybe, she would be able to tell him.
“Let’s go to sleep, Marie,” Wim said. He started his nightly tour through the house, part of the regular duties of a proper man of the house before going to sleep: front door, door to the shed, back door, all closed, the gas in the kitchen turned off, wood chopped in the cellar for the next morning. In the last few months he had also gone upstairs to check that the windows were closed there too. You never knew . . . Today too he went upstairs. Actually it’s pointless, he said to himself.
But he did it anyway. You don’t unlearn an old, year-long habit as quickly as that.
“As long as it doesn’t rain!” Marie tossed and turned—as she had many times already—onto her right side, pulled up her knees, and listened into the night . . . As long as it doesn’t rain. He should at least be spared that.
She could not get warm. Wim lay next to her in his bed, the blanket pulled up over his head, and he slept. No noise came from outside. Only the warm, muffled beating of his breath against the blanket, next to her, slow and heavy, as though he had to sleep against a certain resistance.
The first night Nico was in the house, she had also not been able to sleep, more from fear and amazement: whether it would all turn out well, and that no one had discovered him yet. Back then at the beginning, everything in the house had seemed so different to her, every slight sound had suddenly taken on a new meaning through the secret that she was hiding under her roof.
A secret! It was not only that they had sheltered him—he himself, his person, his life, constituted the secret. It was as though a no-man’s-land lay all around him, alien and impenetrable. It was impossible to bridge the gap. Even while he was alive, everything she heard him say, everything she saw—his voice, his movements—was like something seen from the opposite bank of a river while mist hung over the water and masked any clear view. It almost melted away into the impersonal, colorless swirls of fog. Now he was dead and they had managed to get him out of the house—but a secret had been left behind, as one last thing. At first it seemed to her that she, tears in her eyes and alone in his room, had discovered it, as though the fog had suddenly lifted and the other riverbank had come closer, right up next to her, so that she could see it precisely and know everything about it: its slope, its bushes and shrubs and hollows. Yet the more she looked, the more it rose like mist from the water, enveloping everything. Marie was frightened when she realized that a secret you discover by chance only conceals another, still greater secret behind it, which can never be discovered. And that every bit of knowledge, every revelation, is only like egg whites whisked until they’re sweet and mixed into the dough to break it up and release its flavor . . .
She was itching to tell Wim about it; best would be now, while it was still close to her. When he woke up, she would start. Should she wake him up?
Marie straightened up, dug her elbows into the soft pillow, and supported her head in her hands. Next to her was the hidden, muffled beating of a warm body. It was so cold tonight! She pulled the blankets up over her shoulders and back. Again she saw the picture before her eyes.
After she had carefully shut the house door behind the two men, she had run quickly up to his room. She could still hear the footsteps hurriedly and unsteadily moving farther and farther away on the gravel. Then it was quiet. She looked around the room and began straightening up. Not so much out of fear that when they found him someone might come here, where he had hidden, nor from a desire to remove all his traces, as out of a secret wish to have him near her again. The men carried the body; she too could carry something—his things, what he had lived with.
She had always taken care to keep his room so that, if necessary, just a quick tidying up would make it look uninhabited. His suits and coat stayed in Wim’s closet; his clothes, writing implements, papers, and toiletries remained concealed in the hiding place.
Once, on a Sunday, the doorbell rang and an older man, a stranger, asked to speak to Wim. Marie let him into the front hall and asked, just in passing, what matter this might be concerning.
“Are you the woman of the house?” the stranger replied, and he looked at Marie with what seemed to her
a peculiar, rather pointed smile. It made her uneasy. When she said yes, he hesitated a moment before saying, “Well, I’d much rather discuss it with your husband, confidentially.” Confidentially! Marie was terribly afraid. This didn’t sound good.
She called Wim and then hurried upstairs. “Nico, a strange man . . . Come on, disappear.” She helped him stuff his things into a small valise that stood prepared for cases like this, and opened the closet. The hiding place was behind it. They had come across it by accident.
Between the two rooms on the second floor ran the stairs to the first floor. If you took out the side wall of the built-in closet in Nico’s room, on the side where the stairs were, you found an empty space roomy enough to hide someone. Wim, in his spare time, had cleanly sawed off the bottom half of the wooden wall, put in molding to conceal the signs of the sawing, and run the molding around the entire closet, halfway up, to give a uniform impression. On the bottom too, where the wall met the floor, he had added a baseboard for support. With one skillful hand movement, which Nico soon practiced and mastered, you could take out the wall, slip inside, and fasten the wall from the inside with bolts and crossbars while someone put the wall back in place from the outside. It was good work, well made, and they had all taken pleasure in it.
The strange man stayed a bit longer than half an hour—he had come on someone’s recommendation and was looking for a place to house someone who had gone
into hiding. Wim had to bring all his cleverness to bear, to decline in a circumspect way without letting it show that they already had someone: “It’s just that we’ve been married such a short time, you understand, and we’re much too careless and inexperienced with such things, especially my wife, no, no, and I’m gone all day too.” Even when someone came recommended, you had to be careful. It might be a provocateur trying to get into your confidence . . .
—Well, Nico stayed the whole time like a scared little sheep in his pen and waited until they let him out again. Luckily such visits didn’t happen often.
Marie pulled the sheet off the bed. By now they must be turning into the park. No, this was not the ending they expected. They had imagined it differently—not ending for them until it all ended. How, exactly? Maybe that she and Wim would one day appear upstairs and tell him: “Nico, we made it!”? Or in the middle of the night, the thunder of the artillery from the coast, the indescribable din of thousands of airplanes, bombs, and the delicate, rhythmical clattering of the machine guns? . . . And he, yes, what would he do? What would he have done . . . Cheer? Hug them? Marie! Wim! It’s happened, at last, too late but at last—at last! Or, in a weak voice, half questioning, as though he couldn’t quite believe it: “Really?” He would look at her hopelessly, his eyes filled with tears, as if he were in shock. “But Nico, aren’t you happy?” Yes, of course, but still, could you call this happiness? He had grown so tired
from the long wait, from being shut away. His happiness too had grown so tired, so locked away . . . What would he actually do? She had often thought about it. But in truth it was impossible to imagine.