If the planes came later, when he was alone in his room, sometimes even in bed, he sat up straight and uttered this formula into the silent bedroom.
Of the three of them, he was always the first to hear the airplanes.
Wim didn’t let it bother him. “Well…,” he answered, more in question than in agreement. But not directly skeptical or denying either. Rather, in the tactful, uninterested way one leaves a matter undecided when it is theoretically possible at some point in time, even if not exactly this one. He certainly never interrupted his meal because of it.
“Yes it’s true,” Marie said, and hesitated before taking the next bite from the fork she was holding in place —“Yes, Nico’s right… can you hear it?” She speared her knife into the air.
“So early today,” Nico went on, and looked at the clock on the opposite wall. “Ten past seven.” His eyes shone because his ears had not betrayed him. The droning grew louder. Wim heard it too.
The first shots of the night — dull, thudding pops — were in curious contrast to the fine, almost musical sound of the airplanes. The windowpanes and doors shook and rattled, and the whole house, too lightly built, answered the explosions with a quick shudder. The beginning was always exciting, no matter how many times a person had already lived through it.
“They want to get back home early; pass the potatoes please, Marie,” Wim said. He was satisfied with this dry explanation and felt that he had rid the world of this not particularly interesting situation. “Eat! It’s getting cold!”
“No, Wim, no,” Nico responded, a little worked up, as though for him it was an existential question, and he let his head with its stuffed cheeks sink forward again until he was looking straight ahead. “No, there are reasons… they have a long flight ahead of them, you understand? Maybe Berlin or — yes, it must be Berlin, we are right in the flight path to Berlin here.” He spoke with conviction, as though he bore active responsibility for preparing the plans for this night of bombing.
“And how was it for you today, Nico?” Wim usually went on, breaking off then and there all questions of Berlin.
Nico answered in the same good-spirited tone: “Good, Wim, thank you; I am satisfied, the lodgings are good, I practiced my languages for a while, English and French”—or whatever he had done that day.
“How many chess games did you win?”
For he played chess, not especially well but with undiminished zeal.
When Nico had had a good day, he answered this obliquely mischievous question with a similar sort of answer, something like: “None, Wim, not even one. My opponent was too clever for me today…”
He always played himself. Hour after hour he sat at the little square table in his bedroom, the board with the pieces in front of him. The chair on the other side of the table was empty… e2-e4, e7-e5, g1-f3, and so on. He often sat for a long time with his head in his hand, deep in thought. About a chess problem? Or about ——?
The next day, he could barely wait for Marie to appear upstairs at five in the afternoon with the newspaper.
Hidden behind the curtains he had watched the newspaper delivery woman come quickly across the small front garden. He often left his room just as quickly — in slippers, of course, as they had agreed at the beginning — so that leaning on the banister upstairs, he could hear the newspaper rustle as it was stuffed through the mail slot and then hear it fall onto the stone floor. The seconds that followed next were often the richest in tension and suspense of his whole concealed life. Did they truly understand that, his hosts?
He stood on the last step and waited the short while until Marie appeared from her room, where she would sit, busy with her sewing, at this time of day. She picked up the paper, unfolded the page, read the headlines — lies! nothing but lies! but what could you do, you had to have a newspaper for the groceries — turned it over, read the personal announcements, the deaths, engagements, births — even in wartime people still fell in love and brought children into the world, of course — and then, still reading, walked up the stairs.
“Nico,” she called out, in a half-whisper that even an eavesdropper would never have been able to hear; only he could hear it; she knew he was standing and waiting upstairs —“Nico, you were right again, it says…” She was glad to give him these little pleasures.
But it often happened that she forgot, and Wim was the first to pick up the paper when he came home from the office. Or that she was out shopping in the city when it came.
Then Nico sat on the top step and fought a terrible battle with himself about whether he shouldn’t try it and carefully, carefully… he could take off his slippers too, creep downstairs in his socks; it would make a small bit of a difference, surely… or down the banister, the way he used to as a boy — he knew exactly on which steps the wood gave and creaked, the third and the fifth from the top, and the first and fourth after the turn in the stairway.
But in the end he didn’t dare to do it. Even if he was convinced that no one, no one in the world, could hear him… It was against their agreement, so he didn’t do it. It was almost too much for his strength. No one knew what battles raged inside him.
He quickly called to mind something else then, ordeals, the horrors that had certainly awaited him but which he had escaped — to other, new tortures here. “Ordeals and horrors are waiting everywhere,” he muttered to himself. “Everywhere.”
After a while he stood up and crept back to his bedroom. —
“Well, well,” the doctor said as the strikes of the antiaircraft guns thundered hard nearby, “those are some big ones.”
An unending row of night bombers came over the block of houses. It was as though they were flying through every room in the house at once.
He looked back and forth at this wife and husband, felt their suppressed fear of the death that came both quietly and loudly, and looked at the shadow play of the hanging lamp on the yellowish wall of the room.
Then he bent over the bed again and touched the body with his fingers. It was slowly growing cold.
Wim had clasped his hands behind his back, and he stared at the floor. We have to bury him, he thought, of course we do, you have to bury a dead man. But how—?
“A night like this in the bomb shelter, while the house collapses above you…” The doctor didn’t finish his sentence. Dead is dead, you can die anywhere. And live…?
Marie put her hand tenderly on the curved edge of the high footboard. For her it was like touching the dead man himself. She looked at him. Unshaven and worn out, he lay there with eyes closed. The hair on his head, falling tangled and uncombed onto his bony, low forehead, was black; the whiskers of a beard that had run rampant during his sickness glimmered red. The relaxed, half-open mouth and somewhat hanging chin gave the suffering face a more oval shape. How old he looked! All this together, and her memories of Nico, the man she had kept in hiding in her house, combined into a specific train of thought in Marie’s mind. Strange that it had never come to her while he was alive, not like this. She couldn’t help thinking of the Bible, even though she was not a church-minded type at all. She thought of the Old Testament, that he was a son of its people. Job could have looked just like that, she thought.
II
“What was his real name?” The doctor asked.
Isolated gunshots still in the distance… the same as in the beginning, a humming sound from the house next door, or from the basement…
Wim shrugged his shoulders. Even now he didn’t reveal the name. It remained a secret. “We called him Nico.”
“Nico? Nicodemus? — Wasn’t he the only one of the ancient rabbis who…”
“Yes, yes,” Wim said. “Ours sold perfume.”
The doctor made a wry face.
“A perfume salesman? Yes, well, we’ll all need a little prettying up after the war. It’s not the worst thing. Poor Nico!” His words sounded bitter, almost as if reproaching Nico for deserting them.
Wim pressed his lips together and audibly expelled the air through his nose with a quick jerk of his throat. “Hmmph.” A bit embarrassed, they stared at the bed.
Marie was reminded, by the fact that he had been lying there motionless the whole time in the same mute position, that he was dead. A dead man lay in her house, a house in which no new life had yet been born. Over and over again this thought came into her mind. The doctor started to pump the dynamo on his pocket flashlight with his thumb, so that a delicate whirring sound filled the death chamber. The stubby bulb’s bright light meandered across the unresponsive face and lifeless hands on the blanket and highlighted individual parts of the dead body more clearly.
“How long was he here with you?”
“Almost a year, he came in April.”
“Such a long time? — And how was it? Was he difficult?”
“Not at all,” Marie interjected. She followed the men’s conversation only insofar as it ran parallel with her own thoughts. “Not at all.”
“I see. It isn’t always that way. Did you know him from before?”
“No,” Wim responded.
“Things happen sometimes, with these accidental combinations… We’re all only human, and it lasts so long.”
“I know,” Wim answered calmly. “Not him. It went well. It’s such a shame, about Nico.”
Silence.
“Yes, well, he can’t stay here.” The doctor interrupted their silence and stepped decisively back from the bed into the middle of the room. The husband and wife followed him.
“Of course not. But how—?” Marie asked, so soundlessly that no one could hear her.
“Maybe someone could try to contact the police,” Wim said. He looked directly at the doctor. He had been thinking this for a long time.
“The police, Wim?”
“Yes—”
He avoided looking at her. Thoughts whirled in his head like the airplanes arriving from unknown distances.
“Wim!”
“The police will get him in any case,” the doctor said airily, and he rubbed his eyelids with his right hand. “But you have to stay out of it. Then they can make their arrangements with a clear conscience.”
“What arrangements, Doctor?”
“Burying him, of course. — But now it’s still too bright. I’ll come back around ten. It’s lucky that it’s a new moon. I’ll work everything out with your husband.”
Wim nodded. He had understood what the doctor meant by this talk of the new moon and it still being too bright outside. Of course, so that’s what you did when this happened. It wasn’t too bad. He’d be careful breaking it to Marie. She wouldn’t sleep a wink tonight. Still, what a strange thought, that while you are lying in your warm bed the other man, even if he’s dead — or rather, because he’s dead…
Before the doctor left he went up to Marie, took her right hand in his hands, and said in a solemn voice, “There is no one here to offer condolences to. That’s often how it turns out. But still, it must be a loss for you. In fact, you probably have the most difficult burden — problem,” he corrected himself.
Marie looked at him calmly. Her face was serious and she thought about what he had said. A problem, yes, but she had happily taken it upon herself. It seemed to her that she had learned something in the process.
“But it’s not as dangerous as you think,” the doctor continued, because he had the impression that they were still a little frightened. “There are a lot of other things that could have happened. Never mind infectious diseases that we have to report — diphtheria, a child with polio. That is very, very unpleasant. But there are also children born in circumstances like this…”
“That’s impossible,” Marie stammered. It was horrible to think of. Children? Did people have no sense of responsibility?
“Really, it’s true,” the doctor confirmed, having guessed Marie’s thoughts. “I have personally brought quite a few into the world. Four little Jewish babies. Strong boys. They scream just like every child screams when it comes into the world. But that’s the danger! Someone could hear them! The neighbors! In childless marriages, after twelve, fourteen barren years, suddenly there are children born. Naturally they are sent off to other families.”
Wim and Marie exchanged a glance and smiled. It might be serious, even slightly sad, but they had to laugh. What couldn’t you find in this world! But the doctor was right, children are born everywhere, in bomb shelters, during air raids, and often quicker than you might like. Everywhere, in the grip of death, life goes on too. And in terms of their situation here, it was better to have a dead man in the bed than a woman with a screaming newborn. He was right about that too.
“I have to go now,” the doctor said. Wim walked him downstairs.
When he came back upstairs, Marie was standing at the end of the bed by the dead man’s feet. He went over to her and together they looked at Nico in silence.
“Wim, do you actually know how Jews bury their dead?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, they have rules and customs for everything, they must have some for when someone dies.” Behind her curiosity there was a burning pain that cried out for more consolation than it was possible to give.
“Of course. I read something about it once.” He spoke quietly, whispering, as though it wasn’t proper to speak out loud, in front of a dead man, about the way you propose to bury him. Especially since he hadn’t expressed any preference himself. Wim considered for a moment, then said, “I think they wash him and put him in a burial cloth with no seams.”
“Well, we could wash him too.”
“Oh, Marie, let’s let it go. Nico didn’t follow the laws anymore. He won’t hold it against us.”
“We don’t have a shroud, and I’m sure he didn’t have one for himself. Who goes into hiding with a shroud? Or should I look and see?”
“And then they sit with him all night, say their prayers by candlelight — yes, I think they call it sitting shibbe or something like that.”
“Hmm. Well, we can’t do any of that.”
“Beforehand they lay him, when he’s died, on the ground, wrapped in a sheet.”
“Maybe that, Wim?”
“Yes, Marie, we’ll do that.”
She took a step back. “Come, I’ll help.”
“Not now. Let’s wait, the doctor is coming back around ten o’clock. He’ll help me.”
“He’s coming again?”
“It’s too hard to carry a dead body, you know.”
“To carry?” She gestured down with her hand. “Here, on the floor?”
He hesitated. “Not here, Marie.”
He raised his hand and gestured in the direction of the window. “We, the doctor and I, will lay him on the ground — in the park. It’s a new moon. Under a bench. No one will see us.”
“Wim.”
A quiet crying rose within her and shook her body with delicate shakes. “No, oh no — yes — what else can we do?… Nico, Nico…” She held her hand over her eyes. Wim led her out of the room and down the stairs.