“So…” Marie replied. She couldn’t see his face. Her heart began to pound but she stayed standing calmly in the door. “Any yogurt today?”
Without answering, he dragged the milk canister back to the street, lifted it onto his cart with one swing, and reappeared next to her with two little white bottles full of yogurt.
“Thanks.”
“A dead man—” he continued.
“Here… in our park?” Marie asked, and she heard something else start to sound in her voice, a feeling of relief, of resolution… “Where did you hear that?” Did this question go too far? It suddenly struck her that he was offering up the same sensational piece of news from one house to the next, like a town crier, wherever his cart took him… They found a man here in the park this morning… A dead man!… Yes…
She had to laugh to herself, and something inside her made her want to keep going and finish the conversation with the milkman in a natural, genuine way.
“At six-thirty,” he went on, “Melker saw it, biking in from the fields.”
“So — what kind of man was it?” She held her breath, waiting for the answer.
“That I don’t know,” the milkman said, sticking both hands contemplatively into his pants pockets. His face grew serious, his lower lip protruding a little. “Some poor devil — sometimes you read it in the paper, too, that they found someone, on the road or wherever…” And then, in a soft voice, cautiously, “It’ll probably turn out to have been a Jew…”
Pause.
“Oh, I see,” Marie responded slowly, as though a light were dawning on her. “You mean… yes, it could be.” She held the bottles tight against her body with her left arm, and the milk pot stood on the floor in the doorway to the house. She was still waiting. And…?
A few houses down, a woman came out the door and through the front garden, milk pot in her hand. “Milkman!” she cried in a trilling falsetto voice, before she caught sight of him standing and talking with Marie in front of the house. With little nervous steps she hurried up to the cart he had left standing on the edge of the sidewalk. She held her milk pot up in the air and waved.
“Coming,” the milkman called back, and he stayed, hands in his pockets, without moving from his place. And, turned to Marie: “She’s in quite a hurry.”
“Maybe,” Marie replied. She had learned what she wanted to know — and another customer was already waiting at the milk cart. She could make it quick now, then disappear.
“Well… he couldn’t have been with her, in any case,” the milkman said, very softly, so that Marie could barely hear it.
She understood right away. Nevertheless she asked, innocently: “Who?”
“Well—” He waggled a big thumb quickly a few times back in the direction of the park.
“Why not?” Marie said, and a significant smile ended the sentence, as though she knew all sorts of secrets…
“Her?” the man whispered, and he took his left hand out of his pocket and bent closer to Marie. “She’s much too scared.” And his soft voice said everything he felt in that moment, his little contempt and mockery. And a laugh too, as though he knew still other secrets…
But he didn’t really know them, he couldn’t know them, Marie decided when she was alone in the house again. He was only trying to get across that he knew his clients. Of course it was easy to tell whether someone you sold milk to was acting scared, or more scared than usual. But still, it was eerie. She felt a little strange about it.
But Nico wasn’t lying under the bench anymore! She could have screamed out loud when she heard the news, screamed for joy. This feeling of satisfaction suddenly rising within her — that he wasn’t lying in the park anymore, under the sky, like a dead bird — it had given her the courage to conduct this conversation with the milkman to the end, in a rather daring and dangerous way. Eventually every house near the park would come under suspicion. Of course. She hadn’t thought of that before.
When she stood in the kitchen again and put the bottles of milk and yogurt on the cold stone ledge, she knew at last that Nico had stopped living in her house. In her grief at his death, which broke through fully for the first time now that her fear was gone, there was mixed in a feeling of happiness, of satisfaction, that someone had found him and that nothing more could happen to him now. They would be alone again within the four walls of their house, just like before. Maybe a new guest would come but he, Nico, would never be standing at the top of the stairs again, waiting for someone to bring him his newspaper. He would never have to wait for anything again. He had defended himself against death from without, and then it had carried him off from within. It was like a comedy where you expect the hero to emerge onstage, bringing resolution, from the right. And out he comes from the left. Later, though, the audience members go home surprised, delighted, and a little bit wiser for the experience. They feel that the play did turn out a bit sad after all, at the very end. We thought he would enter from the right…
And then there was also a little embarrassment, a little disappointment. Why did he of all people have to die? Why did precisely the one who was hiding in their house have to die a perfectly ordinary, normal death, the same way people die all the time, whether in wartime or peacetime? It was practically a trick he had played on them with this death, on the people who had kept him hidden for an entirely different purpose. He didn’t need to go into hiding in order to die, he could have just simply…, like all the countless others…
And then, too, there was a small, all too human disappointment left over: that he had died on them. You don’t get the chance to save someone every day. This unacknowledged thought had often helped them carry on when, a little depressed and full of doubt, they thought they couldn’t bear this complicated situation any longer and their courage failed them. Always a stranger in your house, someone who never does anything, always someone’s fate in your hands, always danger, never free to say and do what you want, never, never, never!
She had secretly imagined what it would be like on liberation day, the three of them arm in arm walking out of their house. Everyone would see right away what he was from his pale face, the color of a shut-in, which his appearance only emphasized even more. How the neighbors and everyone on the street would look when he suddenly walked out of their house and strolled up and down the street with them. It would give them a little sense of satisfaction, and everyone who makes a sacrifice needs a little sense of satisfaction. And then you’d feel that you, you personally, even if only just a little bit, had won the war.
It all had gone up in smoke. It wasn’t even a dream anymore. None of the three of them had any luck. But really, him least of all.
Poor Nico!
Hadn’t he, on that first night, when Wim said, “Everyone in your situation,” answered: “And it’s not just Jews…”?
It had made them happy to hear those words; he didn’t demand any special pity for himself. He stepped modestly back, so to speak, into the circle, the brotherhood of all those who suffer — the same as everyone else, one among many. It was a sympathetic gesture for him to make — a gesture, but not the full truth.
“Actually they’re all unlucky.”
“Who?”
“The Jews.”
They were not in the habit of talking about “the” Jews. If someone was Jewish, that wasn’t a problem for them.
“They have it hard,” Wim said. “They’re like rabbits, hunted. And now it seems like the off-season, when they’re safe, is over.”
“Why do they let themselves be hunted?”
“What else should they do?” Wim asked. “Run away or let themselves be caught…?”
“And yet they want to keep on being rabbits,” Marie said. “Can you understand that?”