Willem Hermans - The Darkroom of Damocles

He clapped his hands three times, blew a raspberry and smirked.

Labare laughed quietly. Osewoudt didn’t say a word, spread his knees, propped his elbows on them, and let his hands and his head drop.

Then Marianne said: ‘How fortunate we are to have Mr Suyling here keeping the score. No possibility, however remote, is beneath the notice of his mighty brain. But Mr Suyling, if you’re so keen on getting rid of him, if you think he’s a liability, then I take it you know a safe address for him? Because I’m sure you don’t need me to explain how important it is to prevent the Germans getting their hands on him again. He may have been arrested by mistake, he may not be the man in the photo, he may even not be Osewoudt the tobacconist, but that still leaves the fact that he can’t have breathed a word about this place and what goes on here, otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting here pontificating, would you, Mr Suyling?’

It was getting increasingly airless in the back room.

‘Well, Suyling, do you know a good address?’ said Labare. ‘And can you take him there now, straightaway? It’s already quarter to eleven, I’ll have you know.’

Suyling did not reply. No one spoke any more. Quarter to eleven, thought Osewoudt. Marianne would have to hurry. He threw her a look, but she made no move to stand.

Then the door opened and a boy of about fifteen burst in, waving a slip of paper. He shouted: ‘The Americans are coming! We just heard it on the radio! The Germans are retreating at Caen! We might be liberated next week!’

Suyling did not let go of his newspaper on hearing this.

Marianne, Labare and Osewoudt sprang up from their seats. Labare snatched the slip of paper from the boy’s hand. Marianne flung her arms around Osewoudt. She kissed him on his mouth, his neck and, very gently, on his good eye. But her kisses made him sad. Because if the Germans were beaten, what would a girl like Marianne still see in him: an uneducated, unattractive tobacconist, a man who didn’t even need to shave and who, in a liberated Holland, would have lost every chance of being either hero or martyr? He screwed up his eyes and pressed her to him, working his hands up and down her back as if there had to be a way he could clasp her so tightly they would never be prised apart.

The voices of Labare and the boy shrieked in his ears. Suyling too made himself heard: ‘How stuffy it is in here! If you would just shut up for a moment, then I can let in some fresh air.’

He switched off the light and opened the door to the back garden. All five of them went outside. Osewoudt had never been there before. He smelled the garden more than he saw it. There were no lights anywhere, and the neighbouring houses looked deserted too. Maybe the people who lived there had not been listening to the broadcasts from London and didn’t know that the front line had started to shift and that the war would be over in a week. What was that fragrance? There would be a variety of plants growing in the central flower bed, which he could feel at his feet.

Together they looked up at the black sky. But there were no stars, and the blackness wasn’t really black.

He pressed her face so hard against his that the stitches in his eyebrow hurt. She slipped her hands under his jacket and he felt them on his back, through his thin shirt.

He said: ‘I missed you more than I ever thought I could miss anyone. You’re going to have to spend the night here, as it’s past eleven already. You’ll stay with me, I have a small bedroom upstairs.’

These were plain facts, facts that were irrefutable, so much so that he had an instantaneous sensation of having check-mated her.

She said: ‘Why do you put it like that? Even if I could go out all night, if I could come and go as I please, I’d still want to be with you more than anything else. Don’t you under-stand? How suspicious you are.’

‘Sometimes I think I’m afraid of you.’

‘Getting arrested gave you a shock, so now you’re scared of everything, for no reason.’

‘Do you love me?’

‘Yes.’

‘And when the war’s over, will you still love me?’

‘Why ever not?’

He held on to her hair, knowing he was hurting her. He went up on his toes and had to kiss her to stop himself saying: I don’t believe a word of it, because I know what I am, and I have a feeling I know what you are too. (I can’t be sure, he thought, sometimes the strangest things happen, she may go on loving me, but it’s unlikely, if only because things won’t be so mad any more after the war. I can’t keep on dyeing my hair for ever and even if I did it wouldn’t make me the man Dorbeck is. We’re alike, but not the same.)

A ghostly vision entered his mind. The war was over, and he and Marianne were strolling hand in hand in some faraway countryside. Then they saw Dorbeck. Without a word, she went off with Dorbeck and left him standing there. No goodbye, no turning round to wave, just one quick look over the shoulder, only to call back to him: I knew what the man I wanted looked like. Forgive me for thinking it was you. Why must you look so much like him when you’re not him? It’s your own fault. Mine too, because I’m the one who dyed your hair, I made you fit the picture in my head. Now your hair’s no longer black, what are you? A bleached rat.

Or, worse, they had a date one evening and he suffered an accident on the way, so couldn’t be with her on time. By chance she would run into Dorbeck at the very hour they were supposed to meet. She wouldn’t consciously notice the difference, but she’d say: I love you tonight more than ever before! And when he at last caught up with her she would say: now I understand. You’re a fraud, you were always pretending to be someone else.

Marianne slid her mouth away from his and said: ‘This is the longest you’ve ever kissed me.’

He let her go and looked about. Labare, Suyling and the boy had apparently gone back inside. The door was still open. They went into the unlit room, and he groped behind him to close the door. The house was quiet. Taking Marianne by the hand he drew her into the corridor and upstairs to the small room with the narrow bed and the dingy white counterpane, the straight-backed chair, the small table with the enamel basin and the enamel jug, and the framed picture of a family of ginger apes partially clothed as humans.

Their clothes lay in a heap on the straight-backed chair.

Marianne pushed him away and began to laugh.

‘I say, didn’t they give you a bath in hospital?’

‘Yes, why?’

Her laughter became uproarious. He laughed as well and asked: ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Didn’t the nurses think it was funny?’

He stopped laughing. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘You and I are exact opposites!’ giggled Marianne. ‘Don’t look so glum! If they had noticed, the worst they could have done was tell some German they’d seen a patient who’d changed his hair from fair to dark. No harm in the Germans knowing that, is there?’

She made a grasping gesture with her hands, as though plucking the conclusion from the air: ‘How bad could it be? They’re looking for a man with dark hair and the man they arrest turns out to be naturally fair! So then they know they’ve got the wrong man!’

‘No,’ said Osewoudt, ‘because they don’t know how long I’ve been dyeing my hair. It might already have been dyed when that photo was taken. By the way, what did you do with my pistol? I gave it to you in the cinema before I left.’

‘I’ve kept it with me all the time. It’s in my handbag. Do you need it now?’

‘You make me laugh.’

She planted swift kisses in the hollow above his left collarbone, and ran her fingertips over his throat. He raised his left arm to look at her body beneath him. He was aware of their bodies touching all over, and yet it was not as if she were another, separate being. Time passed at breakneck speed, and this, this would be happiness or eternity: bringing time to a standstill but keeping the breakneck speed. Marianne gave a moan, and it was as if he sank into her, or as if he was swallowed up by her and she by him.