Marie was confused and left the fishmonger standing there, ran back into the kitchen, disappeared behind the closed door, and said in a whisper, a little indignant, “The fisherman, Nico — but where can you go? Shhh, keep quiet. Your voice—” Nico stood pressed against the kitchen table and looked at Marie, full of distress. What should he do? Go out to the back garden? He couldn’t do that either. God, that stupid milk! Did the fisherman really have to come right then?
Finally she had a saving inspiration. Right next to the kitchen was a toilet, with a door opening onto the hall just to the right of the kitchen door. The hall itself was a good fifteen feet long and the fishmonger stood at the other end, with the big woven basket under his arm, getting ready to leave. Marie decisively opened the bathroom door and directed Nico with a hand gesture out of the kitchen and into the bathroom, whose wide-open door blocked almost the whole width of the hall, covering Nico’s escape. The half-moon on the door turned to “Occupied.” “Come on in!” Marie called to the fishmonger. Let him think whatever he wanted.
It took half an hour for him to scale and clean all the fish, get his money, and, after a little chat, disappear from the house. Nico stayed locked in the bathroom the whole time.
“You could have quietly gone upstairs,” Wim said that evening when they were sitting at the table together and discussing the incident. Nico felt that he was on some kind of trial, even though both the others took the event in good spirits and didn’t give it any overexaggerated significance.
“But then he would have known for sure that someone was there.”
“He knew that anyway.”
“But someone who lives upstairs, Wim…”
“Why not?”
“?”
“Why shouldn’t we have a lodger?”
“Hmm.”
“You know, Nico, we all have to make an effort to act as natural and unaffected as we can.”
Nico looked down at the table, and his fingers drummed a muffled melody on the tablecloth. Finally he said, in a clipped voice and with pauses between the words, “Of course, Wim — you’re right — it was only because of that stupid milk—”
“Nico thought I had left — and he wanted to save the milk.” Up until then she had been careful not to intrude into the conversation between the men. After all, it was uncomfortable enough for Wim already, him being a young man and the other a good deal older. When she said this, she looked directly at Nico and was amazed to notice how agitated he was getting.
“I thought, it’s so hard to get milk nowadays, Marie.”
“Well yes, it is. But still, it’s better…”
“Next time I’ll just let it be,” he blurted out all at once, and he stopped his drumming on the table with a light blow of his fist. “I’ll just stay upstairs and let the milk do whatever the milk is going to do.”
“And I’ll make sure,” Marie replied pointedly, looking with great interest at the picture above the stove as though she were seeing it for the first time, “to turn the gas off in time.”
No more conversation. Painful silence. Nico already felt bad about his light blow to the table. But he sat as if nailed to his chair and looked pleadingly from one to the other.
“Yes,” Wim said with his unshakable calm, and he pulled strongly on his cigarette, “maybe it’s best if we keep everything the way it was before. Everything worked out fine, after all. Marie will call you when she thinks you can come downstairs. When you’re managing a household there are always surprises.”
At least someone had said something. Nico exhaled with relief. This calm, this good-natured calm he had! Marie also felt her annoyance slowly fade away.
“And then,” Wim continued, leaning far back in his chair like a father holding forth before his big family, “then I won’t think that you were — shall we say — trying to criticize Marie.”
“Not at all, Wim,” Nico agreed. He positively hissed out the words so as not to let a second go by in which the others might possibly believe the contrary. “Not at all.” He looked over at Marie, his eyes open wide, his face tense and nervous. His hands were shaking too.
She felt sorry for him; in fact she saw his whole state of mind clearly and saw how much more he had to lose than she with her vanity about being a good housewife. But it was only with difficulty that she found the words to lighten his burden.
“It happens sometimes,” she whispered, and tried to smile.
Even though it was not clear what exactly she meant — her mishap with the milk or Nico’s — it was enough for him to hear that her voice had changed. It was over.
She stood up to serve the tea.
•
“Good,” said the cleaning lady. “It’s a good time for me too, to go to once a week. No, I won’t look for anything else. All that bending over. The likes of us have bladders too. And livers.” And hers were not in good shape. She was a working woman, stuck alone at home with six children, four girls between twelve and eighteen years old and two boys, seven and ten.
“So you’ll only need to clean our bedroom every three or four weeks. Then you won’t have to climb so many stairs.”
“Good,” the woman answered.
Nico stayed motionless in his room on those days. He heard the woman’s footsteps stomping heavily through the house, heard how she carried the laundry into the bedroom, how she moved around with the vacuum cleaner and carried out her other duties. The nearness of another human being, even one who he knew harbored no suspicions, stirred up the tense quiet and solitude of his room.
Then, at around four o’clock, Marie came upstairs with a cup of tea. She had been able to arrange it so that she poured the cup in the kitchen while the woman was taking a break in the living room, sitting tiredly on a chair and drinking her own tea. Marie only had to come to the door and give the signal by knocking, and Nico opened the door a sliver, took the teacup, and immediately shut the door again. On the other days, Marie brought her own cup along and they sat together and chatted. So the weeks went by without the woman noticing that Nico was sitting in his room.
Once, in mid-October, on another Tuesday when the cleaning woman was in the house, Nico heard someone slowly coming up the stairs at around four o’clock. Marie with the tea, he thought, and stood up. Why is she taking such deliberate steps? Maybe she’s carrying her tea, or some laundry?… He crept to the door and waited. The steps came closer; now they were on the last landing of the staircase… right up to his door. There was something tense inside him. It’s Marie, I’ll take the tray from her. He carefully opened the door.
Before him stood the cleaning woman. She was carrying a laundry bag and breathing heavily. Her gray hair was disheveled from working and it hung down to one side and over her forehead into her yellowish gray, slightly puffy face. Her pains were back, and while she was climbing the stairs with the load of laundry, bending forward to put pressure on the stabbing pains in her body, her thoughts had drifted to the wrong door. She held the laundry bag pressed tight against her chest and looked, with astonished eyes, at the man who suddenly stood there in the doorframe turning dead white.
It’s all over, Nico thought. He understood that he had done something stupid that could never be made right again. He staggered and shut his eyes. His body fell lightly against the side of the half-open door. When he opened his eyes again, the woman still stood two steps away from him in the hallway. Her suffering face now wore an understanding smile, which also made it possible to see the gaps in her teeth. Nico put the index finger of his right hand to his mouth, nodded slowly and sadly at her with his contorted face, and gently shut the door.
The woman went to the next door and put the laundry bag down in the bedroom. When she climbed back down the stairs, Nico lay wet with sweat on his bed, as though paralyzed, his face covered with both hands. He no longer knew if the encounter had been real or just a dream. His head ached.