Chez Krull by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon [Simenon, Georges]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

'Where the carpenter lives now, there was a little farm, where people from the town came on Sundays, to drink milk.'

'What about this house?'

'It hadn't any upstairs part in those days, and the farm's dunghill was where our yard is now. The port was there already. Mother always says there were more barges then than now, all towed by horses. This was where the bargemen came for drinks. There was no grocery then, only drink for the men and oats for their horses....'

At last she was talking like a reasonable being, and in the oasis of this parlour, with its flowered walls, the anxious atmosphere of the house had melted away. Cigarette smoke curled round the chandelier. Sparrows were hopping on the window-sill.

'We never talk about these things.... Anna knows more about them than I do, because she's older.... She remembers our grandmother.'

'Aunt Maria's mother?'

'Yes.... It was she who kept the café....'

'All by herself?'

'Yes, at first.... I've never found out exactly where she came from, but she looked like a southerner.... They say she was very beautiful.... Mama used to be lovely, too....'

'What about her father?'

'That's why I said Mama had so much to be proud of, Hans.... Several men came to live here, one after another.... Respectable people wouldn't speak to my grandmother.... All that was known about her daughter was that she was born while an Alsatian was here, who left after two years.... Mama used to serve behind the bar.... That's how Father first met her.... What are you smiling at?'

He was not smiling. His lips had actually perhaps twitched lightly, but not ironically. In any case there was nothing ironical in his attitude towards his aunt.

He was interested, that was all.... What a distance to have covered ...! The café, with the woman from nobody knew where, and her daughter.... Then Cornelius, a kind of pilgrim, laying down his wallet at last and bringing his tools from the osier-field into the room behind the shop....

'How long did they live here together, the three of them?' he asked.

'Several years, because Anna can remember Grandmother. I think she was three years old when she died. She used to spend all her time in an armchair in the kitchen, because her legs had become very swollen and she couldn't walk any more. Joseph says it was dropsy and that it runs in the family....'

The grandmother had died, and the atmosphere had begun to grow purer! The bar for serving drinks had shrunk, receding to the furthest end of the counter. The coloured posters boosting alcoholic drinks, and some less respectable pictures, perhaps, had made way on the window-panes for the chaste blue of the Rémy Starch advertisement, with its immaculate lion....

Aunt Maria was young and beautiful then, but she was probably already acquiring her stiffness, her tranquil dignity.

'Why didn't they go away?'

Even he himself thought this question ridiculous.

'Why should they have gone away?' retorted Liesbeth. 'And where to? The house belonged to them. They were doing good business. When the bargemen stop here they buy all their stores for several days.

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