Comedy in a Minor Key (11 page)

When he walked by the little table in the front room, where the vase stood, the thought flashed through his head how quickly, when it’s necessary, people can leave behind all the things they possessed in happier times. Exactly as fast as a settled person becomes a refugee. And he heard Nico’s voice in his head, telling him how he had left his own apartment.

“. . . it was just a two-room sublet, with morning light. I didn’t own much furniture that was worth saving. I gave a picture and a few books to a colleague.”

“‘You can keep them if I don’t come back . . .’”

“‘I’ll keep them safe for you.’ ”

And Nico went on: “Still, it was painful, like a little twinge. After all, I had lived in that apartment more than ten years. But then I left. I had my suitcase . . .”

Coba stuck her head through the half-open door:

“We’re leaving. See you at my place.” They left.

Wim was alone. The voice kept speaking: “. . . at first I thought, before it happened, that I would not survive it. But then I left. It was fine. As for whether I’ll ever be back?” . . . The voice broke off.

Wim understood it better now. He waited a little longer. Then he left. He shut the house door quickly behind him. As for whether they’d ever be back? His bicycle stood there, leaning against the wall of the house, just how he always left it when he came home from the factory. “Like a little twinge, Wim—”

But in any case: It was fine!

“I can’t sit here anymore.” Marie sighed, loud enough for Wim to hear her from where he sat next to the other window. She pushed off from the well-worn arms of the chair and heaved herself up. “My back! What am I supposed to do now?”

His legs crossed, right over left and every once in a while changing to left over right, Wim leaned contentedly back in his chair, a bulky volume on his knee: a novel, his second in three days. It took place in Mexico.

“I don’t know,” he said, as though from another world, and kept reading. Marie waited.

Such an uncanny silence in the building, only rarely the sound of a door opening or closing. Did anyone even live here? It was as quiet as a cemetery.

Had they already buried him? And did they already know . . . ?

They occasionally heard the wailing of sirens. Air raid! Up here on the fourth floor they could hear it especially
well. Sometimes twice a day. Now they were coming during the daytime too! A whole orchestra of sirens starting up one after the other. They whipped up excitement; when they were going full strength and ratcheted up higher, your whole body was practically pulled up too, into your ears. And they also awakened sadness and pity, when the air went out of them and the tone fell off and you ran out of breath yourself. Marie was filled with fright. It only reinforced her feeling of being rooted out and hunted.

Then Nico came to her mind again. She
had
understood him. The whole time he was hidden in her house she thought she understood better and better—understood both him and the other thing that stood behind him, invisible, which he embodied—until at last, alone in his room, she got to what was behind his secret too. But now it seemed different to her, as though she herself had entered into this secret in a new way. And she remembered having seen, every once in a while, a flitting in his eyes as though dogs were hounding him.

When she walked up to the closed window and looked steeply down into the little back garden, she was overcome by a kind of vertigo. She leaned her forehead against the glass to feel some support. It started in her eyes, a strange, particular turning and pulling that gradually sucked her whole body into the whirlpool as though she were losing consciousness, while at the same time fear rose within her. “Ridiculous,” she said to herself.

But the fear remained, like a tongue of flame suddenly leaping out from some secret fire pit and burning a deep and painful wound in her, so that she almost broke out in tears. She had never felt it like that. She moved quickly away from the window.

“You like it better too, when I don’t show my face on the street too much,” she started again. Neither of them spent—of course!—the whole day in their room.

But once again came the same answer:

“Yes, better—I mean, it’s up to you . . .” He kept reading.

She was plunged still deeper into her indecision. She could see no specific danger in going downstairs either. The truth was, people couldn’t tell by looking at them, the way they could tell with Nico, so they didn’t have to stay hidden away. It was highly unlikely that the police were already looking for them. Here, in the big city! There were more important things, more significant people, claiming their attention.

But the new role that had so unexpectedly been assigned to her was one that Marie didn’t yet know how to play. She felt unsure of herself. To think that he had brought them into a situation like the one he was in when they met him! This uncertainty, increasing from day to day while they waited, while the life they had led up until then slowly crumbled like a mountain eroding away with time until nothing remains but an abyss gaping wider and wider but hidden from sight by the mass of stone deposited there. And even so, their situations
were only roughly the same. Cut off from everything they cared about, not knowing if they’d be able to go back, the long waiting, the fear—everything was similar, but their situation only hinted at his. You could hardly compare the two. She didn’t regret having made the decision to take him in. But even the best actors can’t change from one character into another—unprepared—just like that.

Did Wim feel differently about everything than she did? She would have liked to ask him, but she couldn’t put into words the thoughts rushing in on her. And then she also felt that he wasn’t being very perceptive, not to say rude. Marie started her wandering through the room. She stepped carefully so as not to be heard in the room downstairs.

The two foldaway beds were put up, hidden behind a large blue curtain that ran the length of the room. The mostly faded wallpaper still showed a few traces of yellow. The mirror with its red wood frame, the chair, the table, and the wardrobe presented every shade from dark brown to light brown. None of the colors matched. Altogether it was like a big spray of wildflowers.

On the opposite wall hung a large picture in an imposing gold frame. A showpiece! A maiden stood in the picture, alone under a tree on a mountain, with a spring storm down below in the valley. Cloud drifts were scattered up the mountainsides, and between them shafts of golden light broke through from some higher place. Maybe they were coming from the gold frame.

Marie stopped in front of it. “How can anyone hang a picture like this of their own free will? Can you understand it, Wim?” She shut her eyes tight, made them into tiny slits, as though raindrops from the storm in the valley were spraying her in the face.

Wim quickly read the line of his book to the end and then held his right index finger on it, like a beginning reader who has to keep the lines from getting all scrambled up.

He couldn’t understand it either. “You’re right, it’s just dreadful.” The picture was, in fact, not beautiful. But he really didn’t mind it.

“The storm—look, it rained on the painter’s palette too.”

“It’s not a reproduction?”

“No!”

But by then he had pulled back his finger and submerged himself again in the primeval forests of Mexico.

The first day after their hasty departure with Coba, they had landed here, in a family pension run by an older, unmarried woman. The house: an old-fashioned four-story building in a small, dull side street; the residents: older married couples who, scattered throughout the four floors into one or two rooms each, with antiquated furnishings that reeked of never being aired out, mildly endured the frailty of their old age together with furtive, long-suffering patience, and secretly waited, eagerly and full of curiosity, to see which of them would be the first to have to quit the playing field.

“A safe house,” Coba had said, and “Such a dear old person.”

What sort of dear old friends Coba had! Marie thought, and she kept very skillfully silent during Coba’s next visit. In normal times she would have never held out even half a day in this environment.

“She does a lot for us,” Coba added with a meaningful look, as though she were already revealing too many secrets, and she left it hanging in the air who this “us” actually was.

“Really?” Wim asked, a little skeptically.

Coba nodded vigorously. Yes indeed!

But it was obviously impossible to reveal any more. And Wim left it at that.

The landlady wore a black dress buttoned up high around her neck, which held her delicate figure as tightly as a soldier’s full-dress uniform, and a double-wound gold chain around her neck that hung far down her chest. She walked extremely upright and had an urbane politeness of manner. She was in on the secret. She brought their meals to the room in person.

“My nephew and his wife are coming for a few days,” she had told her immediate circle at the beginning: the maid and two of the older couples. Soon the whole pension knew. “They were evacuated. And they are my guests until they have found a new home.” And bending closer as though she wanted to whisper, but actually still in a loud voice, because the old people were
already a little deaf: “The young woman is in her third month . . .”

Marie and Wim had no idea about any of that; only Coba was in on the plan.

At first Marie was happy just to have a roof over her head. On the second day, she discovered the painting and a few other small color illustrations of dogs’ and cats’ heads. But the painting seemed to grow bigger and bigger. It hung across from the beds. When they went to sleep at night, it was an evening storm and the virginal maiden had lost her way in the mountains; in the morning, she was already there—she was always the first to wake up—peering down into the valley. On the third day, Marie finally said something. She was losing patience and also beginning to wonder if it had really been necessary to leave their own nice house. Now and then the thought struck her that maybe it might have been possible to find another solution . . .

“Couldn’t they also say—” she began again.

“What?” Wim asked, decisively shutting his book. But he still held the tip of his finger pinched between the pages.

Marie was thinking about the milkman, and the baker. And the neighbor woman telling her husband: “Look—next door it’s been three days that they haven’t been home . . .”

“Oh—”

“Everyone comes and they never answer their door.”

“—No, she didn’t leave word behind. They must just be head over heels . . .”

“You mean—?”

“Shh, not so loud, the children!”

Marie couldn’t stand it anymore. She dashed around the room as though dogs were after her.

Wim followed all her movements with concern. He understood her, he understood her completely. But he couldn’t help her. Truth be told, he found it a little childish for her to be so incapable of keeping herself busy. Wasn’t she alone all day at home too, when he was at the office? She didn’t go out very often then either. He felt sorry for her.

He wanted to try again, more patiently this time.

“Maybe you could sit with me a little?”

“Thank you, but I did just say I can’t sit anymore.”

There were tears in her eyes.

“I forgot,” he apologized.

“Forgot,” she repeated, contemptuously.

“We have to try to make the best of it,” escaped him all of a sudden. He himself was amazed at his words. So clumsy!

“The best of it!” Bitter mockery rang out in her voice.

Patience, Wim said to himself. It was going all wrong. But still, he did find it all a bit boring of her.

“Now, if I had my books here, for example, I’d make such good progress for my exams.”

“Oh, you!” He annoyed her with this performance of his alleged laziness.

She sat back down in her armchair.

“But you used to like so much to read,” he said gently.

She only looked at him sadly, and bravely gulped back her tears. Pause.

“And you don’t have nearly enough socks,” she said softly, as though that were the cause of all the unhappiness.

“But I don’t need any.”

“And I need to wash your shirt.”

“I have one more in the closet.”

And then suddenly, utterly inconsolably: “I just didn’t bring anywhere near enough . . .” But it sounded like: I just had to leave so much behind.

“It’s always like that, Marie.”

“Yesterday the gas man came by, and today it’s the man from the electric company.”

“Really? But you know what I really don’t like?”

“It’s never happened that they’ve come by and had to wait at the door, with no one to let them in,” she went on. She felt a faint fear. What didn’t he like about her? It was so unusual, so strange, to sit all day long with a man, with her husband, together in a single room, with him watching her and observing everything. How would other women do? She scrunched up the lace handkerchief in her hand and asked timidly, “What, Wim?”

“That they only show the maiden from the back.”

“What maiden is that?”

“There, in the picture!”

He laughed when he saw her baffled face, and the laughter was infectious.

He said, “A back, now that’s extremely uninteresting.”

But her thoughts had already taken another leap. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. “Was it really in the newspaper?”

“I completely forgot to ask Coba.”

“Do you think she’ll come today?”

“I’m sure she will. She’s come every day so far. Maybe—”

“Oh, how long will this last?” Marie sighed.

“How long will this last?” Nico had asked it so many times too, Wim remembered. The same question! In a similar situation! And yet really so different. They still had the possibility that, for example, Coba would appear and tell them that everything was all right.

And all at once Marie shoved her chair closer to his and said, in a wavering voice, “If Nico could see us sitting here . . .”

Wim was startled. He too hadn’t been able to help thinking about it. Again and again this thought had pursued him, even deep into the Mexican forests, like a poisonous beast in the thickest underbrush: “If he could see us sitting here!” What would he say?
Marie? Wim? Because of me?
And he turned pale . . . The roles had been
switched. The distance between them had narrowed. Now he could take them under his wing. And they understood him better. “I know all about it. It’s always like that in the beginning. You get used to it . . .” Wim saw him standing there, almost bodily saw him, with an understanding, slightly sarcastic smile on his tight lips, a wreath of countless wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. But his eyes looked sad.
Because of me?
But when he saw that there was no reprimand in Wim’s face, no trace of blame or regret, only the patient readiness of someone who, once he has started something, carries it through to the end, his own features relaxed too. They looked calmly into each other’s eyes.