“There’s always a safe house for urgent cases.”
“Surely it’s…” His voice was still bitter. He started wandering around the room again. Suddenly he stopped in front of her. “You’re right.” He sounded calmer; he had come to his decision. “We have to leave right away. Right away… Neither of us thought of the number, it was nighttime, the room was so dark. I didn’t either, and I helped her dress him too… Well, it doesn’t matter. But still, you’re careful for a whole year, stay alert like a policeman in your own house, everything goes fine, and then, right at the end… It’s almost enough to make you laugh!”
“You’ll come to my house first,” Coba began. “I’ll pass you along later.”
“Good, Coba, we’ll go with you.” He had fully regained his old calm and collected attitude.
It was just such a shock! “The whole thing could turn out to be nothing. Our police are almost all good, they’re on our side. Who knows?” he concluded. Yes, there was still a chance. Wait and see. “It’s just the chief, he’s on the other side. Well, we’ll see. We’ll go with you.”
“You can go by bike; Marie and I will take the streetcar.”
“Where’s Marie?”
“She’s upstairs, packing.”
When he walked into the bedroom, Marie was just picking up the towels from the floor and putting them away. She was crying.
“I didn’t think of it either,” Wim said even before she said anything. He wanted to make it clear that it was a problem for both of them together. “Not to mention the doctor. I mean, he doesn’t leave his business card in someone’s stomach when he operates on him…”
Marie had to smile at that last comparison. “What now?” she said timidly. “Did Coba tell you? I’ve packed everything.”
“We’ll leave the house right now. I’ll bike, you take the streetcar.”
“Don’t you need to go to the factory?”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“I’m done.”
“Let’s go,” Wim said.
“I cut out the other laundry numbers, as many as I could—”
Wim interrupted her. “Don’t bother. They have a list at the laundry anyway, and some of our other clothes are still there too. Come on, let’s go.”
While the two women put on their coats in the front hall, Wim walked through the rooms of the house again, to quickly make sure there was nothing else lying around that could compromise them. That was pointless too, in truth, because if the one thing came out it was more than enough to snare them.
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!
XI
“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.