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.
VIII
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.