Did Wim feel differently about everything than she did? She would have liked to ask him, but she couldn’t put into words the thoughts rushing in on her. And then she also felt that he wasn’t being very perceptive, not to say rude. Marie started her wandering through the room. She stepped carefully so as not to be heard in the room downstairs.
The two foldaway beds were put up, hidden behind a large blue curtain that ran the length of the room. The mostly faded wallpaper still showed a few traces of yellow. The mirror with its red wood frame, the chair, the table, and the wardrobe presented every shade from dark brown to light brown. None of the colors matched. Altogether it was like a big spray of wildflowers.
On the opposite wall hung a large picture in an imposing gold frame. A showpiece! A maiden stood in the picture, alone under a tree on a mountain, with a spring storm down below in the valley. Cloud drifts were scattered up the mountainsides, and between them shafts of golden light broke through from some higher place. Maybe they were coming from the gold frame.
Marie stopped in front of it. “How can anyone hang a picture like this of their own free will? Can you understand it, Wim?” She shut her eyes tight, made them into tiny slits, as though raindrops from the storm in the valley were spraying her in the face.
Wim quickly read the line of his book to the end and then held his right index finger on it, like a beginning reader who has to keep the lines from getting all scrambled up.
He couldn’t understand it either. “You’re right, it’s just dreadful.” The picture was, in fact, not beautiful. But he really didn’t mind it.
“The storm — look, it rained on the painter’s palette too.”
“It’s not a reproduction?”
“No!”
But by then he had pulled back his finger and submerged himself again in the primeval forests of Mexico.
The first day after their hasty departure with Coba, they had landed here, in a family pension run by an older, unmarried woman. The house: an old-fashioned four-story building in a small, dull side street; the residents: older married couples who, scattered throughout the four floors into one or two rooms each, with antiquated furnishings that reeked of never being aired out, mildly endured the frailty of their old age together with furtive, long-suffering patience, and secretly waited, eagerly and full of curiosity, to see which of them would be the first to have to quit the playing field.
“A safe house,” Coba had said, and “Such a dear old person.”
What sort of dear old friends Coba had! Marie thought, and she kept very skillfully silent during Coba’s next visit. In normal times she would have never held out even half a day in this environment.
“She does a lot for us,” Coba added with a meaningful look, as though she were already revealing too many secrets, and she left it hanging in the air who this “us” actually was.
“Really?” Wim asked, a little skeptically.
Coba nodded vigorously. Yes indeed!
But it was obviously impossible to reveal any more. And Wim left it at that.
The landlady wore a black dress buttoned up high around her neck, which held her delicate figure as tightly as a soldier’s full-dress uniform, and a double-wound gold chain around her neck that hung far down her chest. She walked extremely upright and had an urbane politeness of manner. She was in on the secret. She brought their meals to the room in person.
“My nephew and his wife are coming for a few days,” she had told her immediate circle at the beginning: the maid and two of the older couples. Soon the whole pension knew. “They were evacuated. And they are my guests until they have found a new home.” And bending closer as though she wanted to whisper, but actually still in a loud voice, because the old people were already a little deaf: “The young woman is in her third month…”
Marie and Wim had no idea about any of that; only Coba was in on the plan.
At first Marie was happy just to have a roof over her head. On the second day, she discovered the painting and a few other small color illustrations of dogs’ and cats’ heads. But the painting seemed to grow bigger and bigger. It hung across from the beds. When they went to sleep at night, it was an evening storm and the virginal maiden had lost her way in the mountains; in the morning, she was already there — she was always the first to wake up — peering down into the valley. On the third day, Marie finally said something. She was losing patience and also beginning to wonder if it had really been necessary to leave their own nice house. Now and then the thought struck her that maybe it might have been possible to find another solution…
“Couldn’t they also say—” she began again.
“What?” Wim asked, decisively shutting his book. But he still held the tip of his finger pinched between the pages.
Marie was thinking about the milkman, and the baker. And the neighbor woman telling her husband: “Look — next door it’s been three days that they haven’t been home…”
“Oh—”
“Everyone comes and they never answer their door.”
“—No, she didn’t leave word behind. They must just be head over heels…”
“You mean—?”
“Shh, not so loud, the children!”
Marie couldn’t stand it anymore. She dashed around the room as though dogs were after her.
Wim followed all her movements with concern. He understood her, he understood her completely. But he couldn’t help her. Truth be told, he found it a little childish for her to be so incapable of keeping herself busy. Wasn’t she alone all day at home too, when he was at the office? She didn’t go out very often then either. He felt sorry for her.
He wanted to try again, more patiently this time.
“Maybe you could sit with me a little?”
“Thank you, but I did just say I can’t sit anymore.”
There were tears in her eyes.
“I forgot,” he apologized.
“Forgot,” she repeated, contemptuously.
“We have to try to make the best of it,” escaped him all of a sudden. He himself was amazed at his words. So clumsy!
“The best of it!” Bitter mockery rang out in her voice.
Patience, Wim said to himself. It was going all wrong. But still, he did find it all a bit boring of her.
“Now, if I had my books here, for example, I’d make such good progress for my exams.”
“Oh, you!” He annoyed her with this performance of his alleged laziness.
She sat back down in her armchair.
“But you used to like so much to read,” he said gently.
She only looked at him sadly, and bravely gulped back her tears. Pause.
“And you don’t have nearly enough socks,” she said softly, as though that were the cause of all the unhappiness.
“But I don’t need any.”
“And I need to wash your shirt.”
“I have one more in the closet.”
And then suddenly, utterly inconsolably: “I just didn’t bring anywhere near enough…” But it sounded like: I just had to leave so much behind.
“It’s always like that, Marie.”
“Yesterday the gas man came by, and today it’s the man from the electric company.”
“Really? But you know what I really don’t like?”
“It’s never happened that they’ve come by and had to wait at the door, with no one to let them in,” she went on. She felt a faint fear. What didn’t he like about her? It was so unusual, so strange, to sit all day long with a man, with her husband, together in a single room, with him watching her and observing everything. How would other women do? She scrunched up the lace handkerchief in her hand and asked timidly, “What, Wim?”