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.
She lifted out the wall and took the things from the hiding place: the little laundry bag, a few stockings, a folder with a pen, books. When she pulled out a few newspapers that he had saved, God knows why, a little packet fell to the floor. She bent down. What was that? It was a tiny little bundle of sealed yellow paper, half opened on one corner, lucky star printed in big black letters. A pinch of tobacco fell out and scattered on the floor. Cigarettes! American cigarettes! She smelled them. Delicate, spicy American tobacco, the kind she had smoked before the war and not since, not for years. How did he get a hold of this packet? From Coba? Or had he saved it as a kind of relic? Why? And hidden it from them here in the hiding place? It was still more than half full, he had smoked maybe six or seven. Smoked them alone! Wim too, he would have so loved to… But he smoked them alone!
And suddenly she had understood, fully understood. She saw it in front of her. She felt an ache, a constriction in her throat, which had gone dry, and without realizing it tears came to her eyes. She sat down on the couch, the packet still in her hand. Smoked them alone! Smoked when he was alone — when he felt lonely — when he couldn’t go on… He hid it from them!
She saw him lying here on the couch, staring at the blanket. His left arm curled under his head on the pillow, his right hand on his forehead. Nothing about him moves. Only when he breathes, a quaking and trembling fractures the flow of air into countless little clipped puffs of breath… I can’t go on, I can’t! But no screams, no rage, no tears. He stretches out his arms alongside his body and leaves them lying there, two worn-out, rotten wooden hooks. His breath gets shallower; there is no more quaking. His heart in his chest beats slowly, slowly; there’s time, lots of time… Then he turns his head a little to the right and shuts his eyes. He is taken up into a kind of fog, his body gradually sucked into a whirlpool, limb by limb, casting up spray. But he doesn’t feel any bliss, any salvation, any relief from the approaching annihilation… can’t go on… can’t go on. He lies there like that for a long time. Then all at once he sees himself lying there, as if in a mirror. He is frightened. He is lying across from himself; he could stretch out his hand and touch his own body over there. But no, at the same time he is immeasurably far removed from himself. And this combination, near and at the same time separate, awakens a feeling of tension, of torment, that takes away all his senses. There is nothing around him. Only him, alone, cut off from everything that is usually his, everything that binds him as with fine, thin nerve fibers to life itself.
Something in him arises, something in him has had an idea. Still numb, he slowly gets up and slips like a sleepwalker to the closet, opens up the hiding place, rummages around, and finds the little yellow packet. It is still bulging, still full. He pulls out a cigarette and puts the rest back into the hiding place.
And then, on the edge of the couch, he smokes this cigarette, pull by pull…