The Tenant (3 page)

There was nothing in all of this information that could be considered an obstacle to Trelkovsky’s future. He was angry with himself because this pleased him. It seemed almost inhuman. To punish himself, he thought back to this woman who had tried to kill herself.

“Perhaps she will pull out of it,” he said, but without conviction.

Stella shook her head. “I don’t think so. Did you notice? She didn’t even recognize me. I still can’t get over that. What a tragedy! I know I won’t be able to work this afternoon. I’m just going to stay alone at home, and have a fit of the blues.”

Trelkovsky did not have to go to work either. He had asked his department head for a few days off while he looked for an apartment.

“That won’t do any good,” he said. “On the contrary, what you should try to do is, take your mind off it completely. It may sound like very bad taste, but what I would advise you to do is to go to a movie.” He paused, and then added hastily, “Perhaps . . . If you will permit me . . . I have nothing to do this afternoon myself. Would you like to have lunch with me? We could go to see a film afterward. If you have nothing else to do . . .”

She accepted.

After lunch in a nearby cafeteria, they went into the first movie theater they saw. They were scarcely seated, and the film itself had not yet begun, when he felt her leg pressed tightly against his own. He would have to answer her in some way! He was unable to make up his mind what to do, but he knew he could not just sit there and do nothing. He put his arm around her shoulders. She gave no sign that she had noticed, and after a moment or two he developed a violent cramp in the upper part of his arm. He was still sitting in this uncomfortable position when the lights went on for the intermission before the film. He dared not look at Stella. She pressed her thigh even harder against his.

As soon as the theater was again in darkness, he lifted his arm from her shoulder and passed it around her waist. The tips of his fingers were touching the beginning swell of her breast, of that breast he had seen earlier, in the hospital, beneath the taut sheath of the green sweater. She made no attempt to rebuff him. His hand moved up beneath the sweater, coming at last to the brassiere, and he managed to slip it between the breast and its envelope of nylon. He could feel the thickness of the nipple beneath his index finger, and began to rotate it slowly back and forth.

She let out a little gasp, and wriggled abruptly in her seat, freeing the breasts entirely from the restriction of the brassiere. They were soft and warm. He moulded his hand to them convulsively.

And even as he did so, he thought back to Simone Choule.

“Perhaps she is dying, right at this very moment.”

But as it happened, she didn’t die until a little later, just about sunset.

3
The Transition

T
relkovsky telephoned the hospital from a public booth to inquire about the condition of the former tenant. He was told that she was dead.

He was deeply moved by this brutish ending. It was as if he had just lost someone who was very dear to him. He experienced a sudden, heartfelt regret that he had not known Simone Choule in an earlier, better time. They might have gone to films together, to restaurants, shared moments of happiness that she had never known. When he thought of her, Trelkovsky no longer saw her as she had been in the hospital, but imagined her as a very young girl, weeping over some youthful peccadillo. It was at such moments that he would have liked to be with her, to point out to her that, after all, it was simply a matter of a peccadillo, that she was wrong to weep, that she should be happy. Because, he would have explained, you won’t live very long, you will die some night in a room in a hospital, without ever having lived.

“I’ll go to the funeral. It’s the least I can do. I’ll probably see Stella there . . .”

He had, in fact, left Stella without even asking for her address. When they left the theater, they had looked at each other awkwardly, without finding anything to say. The circumstances under which they had met had caused a vague sense of remorse. For his part, Trelkovsky had had only one consuming desire: to flee, at once. They had parted company after a purely perfunctory assurance that they would see each other again.

At the moment, his feeling of solitude made him regret that he had not taken advantage of this occasion to escape from it. And for all he knew, she felt the same way.

There was no funeral. The body was to be sent to her home in Tours, to be buried there. A mass would be held in the church of Menilmontant. Trelkovsky decided to attend.

The service had already begun when he entered the church. He sat down very quietly on the first chair he came to, and glanced around him at the other participants. There were very few. He recognized the back of Stella’s head in the first row, but she did not turn around. He set his mind to passing the time.

He himself had never been a religious person, but he respected the beliefs of others. He was careful now to imitate their movements and their attitudes, to kneel at the proper times, and to rise when they did. But the mournful atmosphere surrounding him gradually took possession of his thoughts. He was overwhelmed by a succession of gloomy speculations. Death itself was present in the church, and he was more conscious of this presence than of any other.

Trelkovsky was not in the habit of thinking very much about death. It was not that he was indifferent to it—far from it—but precisely for that reason he systematically avoided thinking about it. Whenever he became aware that his thoughts were drifting into this dangerous area he broke out the arsenal of evasive weapons he had built up and perfected over the years. In such critical moments, for example, he might begin singing aloud some of the catchy, foolish airs he had heard on the radio, since they provided a perfect barrier to any kind of thought. If this should fail, he occasionally pinched himself until he bled, or took refuge in erotic fantasies. He called up a picture of a woman he had seen in the street, bending over to adjust her stocking; of a bust whose outlines he had traced beneath the blouse of a saleswoman; of some dimly remembered spectacle he had stumbled on by chance. That was the bait. If his mind bit at it, his imagination then took over, and its power was enormous. It lifted the skirts, tore off the blouses, altered and expanded the memories. And little by little, in the presence of swooning women and writhing flesh, the image of death became less clear, faded into the distance, and eventually vanished completely, like a vampire at the first light of dawn.

This time, however, the image would not recede. For one second of terrifying intensity Trelkovsky had an absolute physical sense of the gulf above which he stood. He was seized with dizziness. And then came all the horrible details: the nails being driven into the coffin, the earth falling heavily against its walls and top, the slow decomposition of the corpse.

He straggled to gain control of himself, and failed. He knew that he would have to scratch at his own body before he could be sure that the worms did not exist, did not yet exist. He did it discreetly at first, and then furiously, unable to shake off the sensation of thousands of hideous little animals gnawing at his flesh, boring their way into his entrails. He began humming a stupid tune to himself, but that did no good and he could not sing aloud here.

As a last recourse, he determined to concentrate on death itself. If he could succeed in symbolizing death, it would be a manner of escaping it, of getting away. Trelkovsky threw himself wholeheartedly into the game, and finally arrived at a personification which pleased him. This is what he invented:

Death was the Earth. Having sprung from her, the budding forms of life attempted to liberate themselves from her embrace. They set their sights on the free and open spaces. Death let them do as they wished, because she was very partial to the idea of life. She contented herself with keeping a watchful eye on her flock, and when she felt that they were fully ripe she devoured them up as if they were so many morsels of sugar. Then she lay back and slowly digested the nourishment that would replenish her womb, happy and satiated as a pampered cat.

Trelkovsky shook himself violently. He could stand no more of this ridiculous and interminable ceremony. In addition to everything else, it was terribly cold; he was so numb that his sinus ached.

“The devil with Stella, I’m leaving.”

He stood up carefully, trying not to make any noise. When he reached the door and turned the handle, nothing happened. Seized with panic, he twisted the handle in every possible direction, but in vain. Nothing whatever happened. He no longer dared return to his place, he was even afraid to turn around, since he would have to face the disapproving glances he could feel stabbing at his back. He struggled desperately with the door, not understanding the cause of its resistance, rapidly losing hope. It was some time before he noticed the little door cut into the great one, even though it was just a foot or so to his right. It opened with no difficulty, and with a single leap he was outside. He had the feeling of having awakened from a nightmare.

“Monsieur Zy should be able to give me an answer by now,” he thought, and set off at once to see the landlord.

The air was soft and warm after the cavernous cold of the church. Trelkovsky suddenly felt so happy that he began to laugh to himself. “After all,” he thought, “I’m not dead yet, and before I come to it science will have made such progress that I’ll live to be two hundred!”

He had gas on his stomach and, like a child, he began to amuse himself by breaking wind at every step and glancing out of the corner of his eye at the people walking behind him. But an elderly, well-dressed man stared back at him severely and frowned, causing him to go scarlet with embarrassment and removing all desire to go on with his foolish game.

It was Monsieur Zy himself who opened the door for him.

“Ah, so it’s you again,” he said.

“Good afternoon, Monsieur Zy. I see that you recognize me.”

“Yes, of course. You came about the apartment? You’re interested in it, but you still don’t want to put up the price, is that it? You think that I’m the one who is going to give in.”

“You have no need to give in, Monsieur Zy,” Trelkovsky said hurriedly. “I’ll give you your four hundred thousand right away in cash.”

“But I wanted five hundred thousand!”

“We don’t always get everything we want, Monsieur Zy. For myself, I would have liked to have the toilets on the same floor, but they are not there.”

The landlord burst out laughing. A vast, mucuous laughter that almost drowned out Trelkovsky’s timid echo.

“You’re a clever one, aren’t you?” he said at last. “All right then, let’s say four hundred and fifty thousand cash, and we won’t talk about it any more. I’ll draw up the lease for you tomorrow. Now are you satisfied?”

Trelkovsky stammered thanks, and then said, “When will I be able to move into the apartment?”

“Right away, if you want to—on condition that you give me an advance on the fee. It’s not that I don’t trust you, but after all, I don’t know you, do I? In my business, if I were to trust everyone who came along I wouldn’t get very far. Put yourself in my place.”

“But it’s perfectly natural!” Trelkovsky protested. “I’ll bring some of my things tomorrow.”

“As you like. You can see that no one has any trouble getting along with me, so long as he behaves properly and pays the rent regularly.” The landlord paused briefly, and then added, as if he was imparting a confidence, “It’s not a bad thing you’ve got here, you know. The family has informed me that they don’t intend to send for the furniture, so it will all be yours. That’s something you certainly didn’t expect. The whole amount of my fee wouldn’t have paid for that.”

“Oh,” Trelkovsky shrugged, “a few chairs, a table, a bed and a chest of drawers . . .”

“You think so? Well just go out and buy them and come back and tell me what you found. No—believe me, you’ve got a good thing here. And you know it very well!”

“I’m very grateful to you, Monsieur Zy,” Trelkovsky murmured humbly.

“Oh, gratitude!” Monsieur Zy laughed loudly again, and pushed Trelkovsky back onto the landing, closing the door in his face.

“Good-by, Monsieur Zy,” Trelkovsky shouted, but there was no reply. He waited a moment or two longer, and then slowly walked down the stairs.

When he returned to his old studio room, a vast weariness overcame him. He stretched out on the bed, without even taking off his shoes, and remained there for a long time, with his eyes half closed, just looking around him.

He had lived so many years in this room that he still could not quite grasp the idea that now it was finished. He would never again see this place which had been the very center of his life. Others would come into it, destroy the order of things that existed now, transform these four walls into something he would not even recognize, and kill off forever any lingering assumption that a certain Monsieur Trelkovsky had lived here before. Unceremoniously, from one day to the next, he would have vanished.

Even now he no longer felt really at home in this room. The uncertainty of his situation had intruded on his last days here. It was like the final minutes spent in a compartment on a train, when you knew that you would arrive in the station at any moment. He had given up such concerns as cleaning and dusting, filing his papers, or even making his bed. The result had not been a state of wild disorder—his possessions were too few to cause that—but an atmosphere of vacancy, of a suddenly canceled departure.

Trelkovsky slept uninterruptedly until early morning. He set to work then, gathering together all of his personal belongings, which he had no trouble packing into his two suitcases. He handed the key to the concierge, and took a taxi to his new address.

He spent the rest of the morning withdrawing his money from the savings bank and concluding the necessary formalities with the landlord.

At noon, he turned the key in the lock of the apartment for the first time. He set the two suitcases just inside the door, but did not go in. He went down the stairs again, and out to a restaurant, because he had eaten nothing since luncheon of the day before.