“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.
IX
“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…