The Tenant (15 page)

What would happen if he should refuse to play his part, refuse to accept this as the only possible ending? The answer to this was no more of a mystery to him than the answers to his earlier questions. They would push him through the window. If suicide proved impossible, it would become murder. For that matter, there was no proof that the same thing had not been true in the case of the former tenant!

Down below him, the lights in the courtyard had suddenly gone on. The sound of a galloping horse’s hoofs broke through the silence. Trelkovsky leaned forward a trifle, wondering what could be happening.

He was astonished to see that a man on horseback had actually ridden into the courtyard. He could not make out his features, because he was wearing a mask over his eyes, and a broad-brimmed hat of deep red felt cast the lower part of his face into shadow. A body was slung across the horse’s rump, hanging face down. Trelkovsky could not be sure, but he had the impression that its hands and feet were bound. The courtyard was swarming with people now. Groups of neighbors surrounded the masked stranger, seeming to converse with him by unintelligible signs and gestures. A woman with a pale blue shawl across her shoulders pointed to Trelkovsky’s window. The man dismounted and walked around his horse, moving slowly to a point directly beneath. He cupped his hand across his forehead, as if there were a strong sun, and stared up at Trelkovsky. A boy wearing short, olive-green pants, a yellow-brown sweater, and a mauve beret walked up to him and ceremoniously held out an enormous black cape. The man adjusted it on his shoulders, and then disappeared through the arch that led to the entrance hall. The rest of the people in the courtyard followed him, leading the horse, which still carried the inert form of the prisoner. The lights went out. Trelkovsky might have thought he had been dreaming, but he knew that he had just witnessed the arrival of the executioner. He was undoubtedly climbing the steps to the apartment at this very moment, unhurriedly, moving with the same deliberate pace with which he crossed the courtyard. He would simply throw open the door, not waiting for any invitation, and walk into the room, with all the calm detachment of a man going about his normal daily work. Trelkovsky knew what that work would be. In spite of his cries and pleas for mercy, he would be hurled out into the void. His body would crash through the glass roof, splintering it to a million fragments before being crushed on the ground.

Panic seized at him, plucking him from his apathetic resignation. He raced over to the armoire, his teeth chattering wildly, and began pushing and pulling at it, struggling to move it into position in front of the door. Sweat rolled down from his forehead, blinding him, leaving black streaks of mascara running down his face and onto his neck. The dress they had clothed him in hampered his movements, so he ripped it off and tore open the fastenings of the brassiere. As soon as the armoire was in place he ran back to the window and blocked any entrance through it with the chest of drawers. His lungs seemed about to burst, his breathing was no more than a despairing croak.

Someone knocked on the door.

He had no intention of answering, but he dragged two chairs across the room to reinforce the armoire.

The neighbors upstairs pounded on the ceiling.

All right, he
was
making a racket this time! They could go ahead and pound! If they thought for a minute that they could force him into surrender that way, they were sadly mistaken!

The pounding on the floor beneath him was coming from the landlord.

They were all in it now! But they were wasting their time. Trelkovsky was not going to be influenced by their pounding any longer. He would barricade himself in this room, in spite of them or anything they did.

The knocking at the door was becoming more violent, but he paid no attention to it and went on establishing his system of defenses, utilizing everything he could find. He discovered a ball of heavy twine in the bottom of a drawer and used it to tie the armoire and the chairs together, making one unit of all of the separate elements. He did the same thing with the chest of drawers and the other objects he had placed in front of the window. As he worked, he heard something strike against one of the panes, and the sound of breaking glass. If they tried to get in through here, they would be too late!

“You’re too late!” Trelkovsky screamed. “And I hope you kill yourselves getting down!”

Another pane of the window broke. They were throwing stones at them.

“I’ll defend myself, I warn you! I’ll defend myself to the end! It’s not going to be a game, you hear me! I’ll sell my skin dearly! I’m not a lamb you can just lead to the slaughter!”

The reaction to his outburst was immediate. The pounding on the walls and the door stopped. There was silence everywhere.

They must be holding a conference about what to do next. With some difficulty, Trelkovsky managed to climb inside the armoire and place his ear to the wall at its back. He was close enough to them this way, but he could hear nothing of their conversation. He clambered out and sat down on the floor in dead center of the front room, all of his senses alert and waiting. The minutes passed, interminably, but there was no sign of life from the neighbors. Could they have gone away?

He smiled. That trap was a little too obvious! They were just waiting for him to open the door. But there was no danger of that. He was not going to move a finger.

After two or three hours of silent, motionless waiting, he noticed the sound. The sound of water dripping slowly from a leaky faucet. At first he tried to ignore it, but the sound became too irritating. He stood up very slowly, and went over to the basin, walking as softly as he could. His fingers reached out to touch the faucet, and found it perfectly dry. But the moment he turned his back, the sound began again. In order to be absolutely certain, he held his hand beneath the faucet, listening intently. The dripping sound continued. It was coming from somewhere else.

He made a complete circuit of the apartment, studying the walls and ceiling, searching for the origin of this persistent, nagging sound. He found it very quickly. Drops of some brownish liquid were filtering through one of the cracks in the ceiling of the back room. At varying intervals a single heavy drop would form, lengthen into a tear, and fall, splashing into a little puddle formed on the floor by the drops that had fallen before. The moonlight through the single uncovered chink of the window gave the puddle the appearance of a precious stone, a deep red ruby. Trelkovsky lit a match and bent down to study it. Yes, the liquid was a reddish color. Blood?

He dipped a finger in it and then rubbed the finger against his thumb, trying to gauge the consistency of the liquid. This operation, however, told him absolutely nothing. He decided, against his will, that he would have to taste it. But he learned very little from that—it had almost no taste.

He remembered then that it had rained a great deal in the past few days. Perhaps there was a leak in the roof . . . But this explanation seemed hardly feasible. There were three other floors between the roof and his ceiling. Of course, it was possible that water had worked its way down through some kind of continuing crack. That might be it . . .

But suppose it was the blood of the prisoner he had seen slung across the executioner’s horse in the courtyard? Suppose his mutilated body had been left on the floor of the apartment above, just so that this would happen, so that Trelkovsky would know the fate that lay in store for him?

The drops were falling more regularly now, the puddle was growing larger.
Ploc! Ploc!
The miniature waves rolled out across the dry surface of the floor, rhythmically, steadily, like an incoming tide. Could they be planning to flood the apartment, to drown Trelkovsky in blood?

And what was this sound that had begun to echo the dripping from the ceiling? He went back to the washbasin. The faucet must somehow have loosened, because drops of liquid were falling steadily from it too. He tried to tighten it, hammering at it with his fist, but it was impossible. How could the washer have given out from one minute to the next, when the faucet was not even turned on?

The two leaks seemed to be answering each other, creating the illusion of a dialogue between the two liquids.

The ticking of the alarm clock had become incredibly loud, and Trelkovsky was suddenly conscious of the fact that the dripping sounds were synchronized with its steady ticking. He picked up the clock, intending to stop it, and then dropped it angrily on the bed and covered it with a pillow. There is no way to stop an alarm clock except by breaking it.

Someone knocked at the door. The neighbors were returning to the attack. He glanced hastily around him, checking the condition of his fortifications. They seemed satisfactory. There was, however, that one unprotected chink at the window, because the chest of drawers was not quite wide enough to cover it completely. A very small form—a child or a monkey, for instance—might be able to get in through there. The thought worried him; there was no telling what these people would attempt.

And then, just as he was staring at the narrow opening, wondering what he could do about it, he was horrified to see a tiny hand, brown and very hairy, reach through one of the broken panes and grasp the base of the framework. He seized the only kitchen knife he possessed and began hacking desperately at the thing. There was no sign of blood, and after a minute or two the hand released its grip on the sill and vanished. He waited for the sound of something falling on the glass roof, but all he heard was a burst of sardonic laughter.

He realized then that the neighbors in the apartment beneath could very easily have placed a glove on the end of a long pole and lifted it up to his window, simply to frighten him. He put his eye to the open space between the chest of drawers and the wall, trying to see what was going on in the courtyard.

The neighbors had apparently used the stratagem of the glove on the pole simply to attract his attention, because they were obviously waiting for him. They had prepared an extraordinary spectacle, and the moment he saw it he was convinced that its sole objective was to drive him out of his mind.

A large number of wooden packing cases were strewed around the courtyard in stacks of differing heights, so that they looked like the row of skyscrapers on post cards of New York. And on top of each of the piles of cases squatted one of the neighbors. Some of them were directly facing him, others in profile, and still others sat with their backs to him. From time to time they pivoted slowly, changing their positions without seeming to move their limbs at all. Suddenly, an old woman stood up, and Trelkovsky recognized her at once as the Madame Dioz who had tried to get him to sign her petition. She was wearing a long, violet-colored dress, cut so low that it revealed the whole upper part of her withered breasts. She raised both of her arms toward the sky and began a heavy, awkward kind of dance, leaping clumsily from case to case. Each time she jumped from one to another she let out a raucous scream. “Youp!” she screeched, and then leaped into the air. “Youp!” and she leaped again.

This ritual lasted until the bald neighbor sitting on the tallest pile of cases stood up and began swinging a heavy bell that gave out a deep and echoing sound. The neighbors then hurriedly descended from their perches and disappeared, carrying the cases with them. The boy who had handed the black cloak to the executioner suddenly appeared in the deserted courtyard. He was carrying a long pole over his shoulder, and at the end of the pole hung a cage containing a live bird. A woman clothed in a flowing red chasuble trotted behind the boy, with her face thrust close against the bars of the cage. She was waving her arms in the air, imitating flight, and making hideous little chirping sounds, trying to frighten the bird. The boy made a complete circuit of the courtyard without once turning around to look at her.

After these two came the pregnant women, their faces daubed with every shade of red, old men riding on the backs of other old men on their hands and knees, rows of little girls gesturing lewdly, and dogs as big as young steers.

Trelkovsky clung to reason as tightly as though it were a life line. He recited the multiplication tables to himself, and when he had exhausted that he began on the fables of La Fontaine. He set himself to accomplishing difficult movements with his hands, verifying the proper co-ordination of his reflexes. Speaking aloud, pretending he was giving a lecture, he even drew up a complete picture of the political situation in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Morning came at last, and with it an end to the witchcraft of the night.

As soon as he dared, Trelkovsky removed all trace of the make-up on his face, changed the remnants of the female clothing he still wore for his own, and moved the armoire away from the door. He raced down the staircase as fast as his feet would carry him, never even glancing to either side. Once, a hand reached out, trying to hold him back, but he was moving so fast that it failed to get a grip on his shoulder. He passed the concierge’s room at a dead run, and began running even faster as soon as he was in the street.

A bus was stopped for a red light just ahead of him. He leaped onto the rear platform at the very moment it started off.

He would forget about the lease, and about the savings he had exhausted to pay for it. His only chance of safety, now, lay in flight.

15
Flight

T
o flee, to get away—that was all very well—but where?

Trelkovsky went through a feverish review of every face he had known, trying to discover the one that might come to his aid. But they all seemed curiously cold, indifferent, or forbidding.

He had no friends. There was no one in the entire world who cared. No, that wasn’t true—there were people who cared about him, but what they wanted was only his madness and death.

Why should he try to save himself, when the effort was clearly useless? Wouldn’t it be preferable simply to extend his neck to the executioner? He might spare himself vain and endless suffering. He was terribly tired.