Free The Tenant by Roland Topor Page A

nasty old woman, monsieur. She does everything she can to make things hard for me. Just because I have a crippled daughter . . .” She lifted the long skirt that shrouded the girl’s legs, and pointed to the heavy, orthopedic shoe on her left foot. “She hates me, because I have a crippled daughter. And now I get a letter saying that I make disturbances at night! It’s not you, monsieur? You’re not the one who made the complaint?”
    “Of course not,” Trelkovsky said. “I told you, I’ve never made a complaint.”
    “Then it must be her. I asked downstairs, but they hadn’t done it either. They said it might have been you. But it must be that old woman.” Her face was bathed in tears, her voice cracked and faltering. “I don’t make any noise, monsieur. I go to bed very early, every night. I’m not like her. If I were, I would have made a complaint about her, long before this. She’s an old woman, monsieur, and like all old women she can’t get to sleep at night, so she walks up and down in her apartment, she moves furniture, and she keeps me from sleeping—and my daughter, too. I had the most awful time finding this hovel we live in, monsieur; I sold all of my jewelry, I sweated blood, and if that old woman has me thrown out I don’t know where we’ll go. Do you know what she did, monsieur?”
    Trelkovsky shook his head, but the woman had obviously not expected an answer, because she went ahead with her story almost without a pause.
    “She put a broom across my door, to keep me from going out. She wedged it against the doorknob—you could see it was done deliberately—and when I tried to go out that morning I couldn’t open the door. I pulled and pulled and I must have twisted something in my shoulder; it was black and blue for days. And do you know what she told me? She said she had just left it there by accident! And now she’s made a complaint about me; I have to go to the police station. If she has me thrown out . . .”
    “But she can’t have you thrown out,” Trelkovsky said, feeling an enormous sympathy for the unhappy woman. “She can’t do anything like that.”
    “Do you really think so? I never make any noise, monsieur, honestly . . .”
    “Even if you did, she couldn’t do anything! They don’t have the right to throw you out if you have no place else to go. She couldn’t do it . . .”
    The woman seemed slightly reassured. She thanked Trelkovsky, between little fits of sobbing, and started down the staircase, still leaning on her daughter.
    Where did she live? Trelkovsky leaned across the railing, trying to see where she went, but she did not stop on the floor below. She disappeared from sight before he could learn anything.
    He went back into his own apartment, and as he shaved and dressed to go to the office he kept turning over in his mind this business of the complaint. When he considered it objectively, it looked very suspicious. In the first place, he didn’t even know where this woman lived; and in the second, he thought it odd that the tenants beneath him—the landlord and his wife—would have given his name as the probable plaintiff. Wasn’t it much more likely that they had wanted to show him what could happen to him if he continued to disturb the neighbors? Without meaning to imply anything wrong about her, wasn’t it possible that this woman had been paid to come to his door and play this part? Who was the old woman she kept talking about? He had never seen anyone in the building who remotely resembled her description. Something about the whole story rang very false.
    He went down the stairs as silently as possible. He had no desire to meet Monsieur Zy this morning. He was forced, as always, to make a mock genuflection in front of the row of mailboxes in the courtyard, to see if there was anything in his. There were two letters.
    One was addressed to Mademoiselle Choule, and the other to himself. It was not the first time he had received mail intended for the