The Tenant (6 page)

“Or we might invite a few hundred people to a party at your place, and say it was supposed to be a surprise.”

Trelkovsky’s laughter was more miserable than ever. Scope and Simon were probably saying all this as a joke, but he couldn’t be sure of that. He had the feeling that the mere sight of him now brought out the worst in them. Since they had scented a victim, they could very easily become killers.

“And the more they see of me, the more exciting the thing will become,” he thought.

He was perfectly conscious of the absurdity of his behavior, but he was incapable of changing it. This absurdity was an essential part of him. It was probably the most basic element of his personality.

That night, at home, he reread the article in the newspaper.

“Even if I were drunk,” he thought, “I would never be so inconsiderate as to sing arias from an opera at three o’clock in the morning.”

He tried to imagine what would happen if, in spite of his best intentions . . . But the thought was too much for him, and he burst out laughing, alone in his bed, doing his best to stifle the sound beneath the blankets.

From that point on, he avoided his friends. He had no desire to push them into some rash action, simply by his presence. If they lost sight of him, they might, perhaps, calm down. He almost never went out any more. He began to take pleasure in the evenings spent calmly at home, with no noise or commotion. This was sure to be proof of his good faith to the neighbors.

“If it should happen some time later on,” he thought, “that there was noise in here, for some reason, they’ll remember all the nights of absolute silence, and they’ll have to forgive me.”

He found, during the course of these evenings alone, that the building was a theater for a series of strange phenomena, which he spent many hours observing and studying. He tried in vain to understand them. He told himself repeatedly that he was probably attaching too much importance to trivial facts that had no real significance. And yet, when he took down the trash . . .

The trash normally accumulated in Trelkovsky’s apartment for days and days. Since he almost always ate in restaurants, it consisted primarily of discarded papers and contained very little perishable matter. In spite of this, however, there were occasional chunks of bread brought home from the restaurant in his pockets, or the remains of a piece of cheese clinging to its pasteboard container. There was one evening when Trelkovsky could not put it off any longer. He gathered all of the waste together, dumped it into his blue garbage pail, and carried it down to the big trash cans in the courtyard. The garbage pail was filled to overflowing, and as he went down the steps bits of paper and cotton, fragments of orange peel, and various other items dropped behind him. Trelkovsky was too intent on his primary burden to gather them up.

“I’ll take care of them on the way back,” he told himself.

But when he came back, there was nothing there. Someone had cleaned it all away. Who? Who had been watching him, waiting until he was outside the door, and then gathered up the things he had dropped?

The neighbors?

But wouldn’t their interest have been in pouncing on him immediately, insulting him, and threatening him with dire reprisals for having littered the staircase? The neighbors would certainly never have let pass such a splendid opportunity to demonstrate their hold on him.

No, it was someone else . . . or some
thing
else.

It occurred to Trelkovsky that it might have been rats. Enormous rats creeping out of the cellar or the sewers, in search of food. The rustling sounds he had often heard from the staircase supported this hypothesis. But if it was rats, why didn’t they attack the trash cans in the courtyard? And why, for that matter, had he never seen a single one of them?

The mystery of it frightened him. He put off taking down the trash even longer than he had in the past, and when at last he forced himself to do it he was so nervous he dropped something on almost every step. But when he returned, all trace of this clearly marked trail had disappeared.

This was not, however, the only reason for Trelkovsky’s aversion to the simple housekeeping chore of taking down the trash. There was also the fact that it aroused in him an overpowering sense of shame.

When he lifted the cover of one of the trash cans, before emptying the contents of his own pail into it, he was always astonished by its neatness and order. His own trash was the most indecent collection in the entire building. Repugnant and despicable. There was no resemblance between it and the honest, day-to-day trash of the other tenants. That had a solid, respectable appearance, and his did not. Trelkovsky was convinced that when the concierge inspected the trash cans the next morning she would know immediately what portion of their contents belonged to him. He could almost see the expression of disgust on her face when she thought of him. She would imagine him in some degrading posture, and her nostrils would wrinkle distastefully, as if they scented his own body odors in the refuse. In an attempt to make it more difficult for her to identify him, he sometimes went to the extent of reaching into the can and mixing his trash in with the others’. But even as he did it he knew that the ruse was doomed to failure, since she would surely know that he was the only person who would have any interest in such a ridiculous scheme.

In addition to the puzzle of the disappearing trash, there was another mystery in the building that fascinated Trelkovsky. It concerned the toilets. From his window—as the concierge had told him that first day—he could see everything that took place in the little room across the courtyard. At first, he had struggled valiantly against the temptation to watch, but the mere fact that the observation post was there had eventually broken down his resistance. After that, he fell into the habit of sitting before the window for hours on end, with all of the lights in the apartment turned out, so that he might see without being seen.

He became an ardent spectator at the continuing parade of his neighbors. He saw them all, men and women, lower their trousers or lift their skirts, totally unself-consciously, squat down, and then, after the inevitable gestures of necessary hygiene, button or zip up their clothing and pull the flush chain. He was too far away to hear the resultant rushing of water.

All of this was normal. What was not normal was the strange behavior of some of the people who entered the room. They did not squat down, almost out of his sight, they did not adjust their clothing in any way; they did nothing at all. Trelkovsky would watch them closely, for several minutes at a stretch sometimes, and could never discern the slightest trace of movement. It was both absurd and disturbing. Even to have seen them indulge in some obscene or indecent activity would have been a source of relief to him. But no, there was nothing.

They would simply remain standing, absolutely motionless, for a period of time that varied from one occasion to the next, and then, as if they were obeying some invisible signal, they would pull the chain and leave. There were women as well as men, but Trelkovsky was never able to make out their features. What reasons could they possibly have for behaving like this? The need for a period of solitude? Vice? An obligation to conform to some peculiar ritual, if by chance they all belonged to a sect of which he knew nothing? How could he find out?

He bought a secondhand pair of opera glasses, but they taught him nothing. The individuals whose conduct intrigued him so were really doing nothing at all, and their faces were unknown to him. Moreover, they were never the same, and he never saw any one of them a second time.

Once, when one of these individuals was engaged in his incomprehensible task, Trelkovsky resolved to set his mind at rest once and for all, and raced across to the toilet. He arrived too late; there was no one there. He sniffed the air, but there was no odor, and the toilet seat showed no sign of having been used.

Several times after that he tried to take one of these mysterious visitors by surprise, but he always arrived after they had left. One night, he thought he had at last succeeded. The door would not open; it was held fast by the little steel bolt which guaranteed the occupant’s privacy. Trelkovsky waited patiently, determined not to leave before he had learned who that occupant was.

He did not have to wait very long. Monsieur Zy came out, nonchalantly buttoning his trousers. Trelkovsky smiled at him amiably, but Monsieur Zy ignored him completely. He walked off with his head held high, every inch a man who has no reason to be ashamed of his actions.

What was Monsieur Zy doing here? He must certainly have a toilet in his own apartment. Why, then, didn’t he use that?

Trelkovsky gave up trying to solve these mysteries. But he went on studying them and forming conclusions which never completely satisfied him.

6
The Robbery

S
omeone had knocked again. This time it came from the apartment above. And he had not caused any great amount of noise. This is what had happened.

On that particular night, Trelkovsky had gone directly home from the office. He was not hungry, and since he was also a little short of money, he had decided to spend the evening getting his few belongings in order. Although he had been in the apartment for two months now, he had never unpacked anything beyond his daily necessities. As soon as he arrived, therefore, he opened the two suitcases, but then he forgot about them and began examining his surroundings with a critical eye. The eye of an engineer about to embark on some vast project of reclamation.

Since it was still early, he decided to move the big armoire from the wall against which it stood, but he was extremely careful to make as little noise as possible. He had never before attempted anything like this in the apartment. Until tonight, the arrangement of the furniture had seemed to him as unchangeable as the walls themselves. He had, of course, moved the bed out into the front room on the unhappy night of the housewarming, but a bed wasn’t really a piece of furniture.

Behind the armoire, he made a strange discovery. Beneath the fleecy layers of dust that covered the wall, there was a hole. Just a small excavation, really, about three feet above the floor, but he could see that a little grayish ball of cotton wool had been stuffed into it. Intrigued by this new mystery, he went to get a pencil, and used this to pry out the wad of cotton. There was something else behind it. He was forced to prod about for a minute or two with the pencil before the object finally rolled out into the palm of his left hand. It was a tooth. An incisor tooth, to be exact.

Why was he so suddenly overwhelmed by emotion when he remembered the yawning cavity of Simone Choule’s mouth as she lay on her bed in the hospital? He could still see, with startling clarity, the empty space where an upper incisor should have been, a breach in the rampart of teeth, through which death had entered. Staring down at the tooth, and rolling it mechanically back and forth in his palm, he tried to imagine why Simone Choule would have put it in a hole in the wall. He vaguely remembered some childhood legend in which a tooth hidden in this manner was mysteriously replaced by a gift for the child. Was it possible that the former tenant had still believed in such childish fantasies? Or had she just been unwilling—and Trelkovsky could have understood this perfectly—to part with something that was, after all, a part of herself? Trelkovsky recalled having read about a man who had lost an arm in an automobile accident and wanted to bury it in a cemetery. The authorities had refused permission and the arm had been incinerated, but the newspaper had not reported what happened after that. Had they also refused to return the ashes of his arm to him? And if so, by what right?

Naturally, a tooth or an arm was no longer part of a person, once it had been removed. But it was not really as simple as all that.

“At what precise moment,” Trelkovsky asked himself, “does an individual cease to be the person he—and everyone else—believes himself to be? Let’s say I have to have an arm amputated. I say: myself and my arm. If both of them are gone, I say: myself and my two arms. If it were my legs it would be the same thing: myself and my legs. If they had to take out my stomach, my liver, my kidneys—if that were possible—I could still say: myself and my organs. But if they cut off my head, what could I say then? Myself and my body, or myself and my head? By what right does the head, which isn’t even a member like an arm or a leg, claim the title of ‘myself’? Because it contains the brain? But there are larva and worms, and probably all sorts of other things, that don’t possess a brain. What about creatures like those? Are there brains that exist somewhere, and say: myself and my worms?”

Trelkovsky had been on the point of throwing the tooth away, but at the last minute he changed his mind. In the end, he just changed the ball of cotton wool for a new and cleaner one, and replaced it in the hole.

But now his curiosity had been aroused. He began exploring the room inch by inch, and he was soon rewarded. Underneath a small commode he found a package of letters and a pile of books, all of it black with dust. He found a rag and gave them a preliminary cleaning. The books were all historical novels, and the letters seemed of no importance, but Trelkovsky promised himself that he would read them later. In the meantime, he wrapped the whole bundle in yesterday’s newspaper and climbed up on a chair to put them out of sight on the top of the armoire. It was then that the catastrophe occurred. The package slipped out of his hands and fell noisily to the floor.

The reaction of the neighbors was almost instantaneous. He had not yet stepped down from the chair when there was a series of furious thumpings on the ceiling. Was it already after ten o’clock at night? He looked at his watch: it was ten minutes after ten.

He threw himself down on the bed, literally consumed with rage, determined not to make a move for the rest of the night and thereby deprive them of the pleasure of any new pretext for intervention.

Someone knocked at the door.