The Woman on the Stairs

by Bernhard Schlink

  17

  By the time I came back with the two of them, a ceasefire was in effect. Gundlach did not interrupt Schwind while he told Irene about his abstract works, and Schwind didn’t interrupt Gundlach while he talked about business succession planning. Irene reigned over them like a queen, and over us: the pilot, Mark, and me as we talked of the first and last cigarettes in our lives. I hadn’t seen her so lively, so effervescent, so beautiful since I had arrived. How long could a cocaine high last?

  After breakfast, Mark went back in the boat. Irene or I would take Schwind to Rock Harbour when the time came. The pilot offered to fly him, but Gundlach snapped at him that he had hired the helicopter and needed it to be kept ready, the pilot should go and make sure that the thing would fly when needed.

  Then Gundlach looked around the group. “Let’s talk about this reasonably. I’m the last authenticated owner of the painting. To claim it as yours, Schwind, you would have to have received it from me in some way – how? On the basis of the contract? The contract was worthless. Indeed, where is it? In any case, you surely don’t want to call on the contract in court and then read in the press that you received the painting in exchange for the woman, because the painting was worth more to you than her.”

  “The press eats out of my hand. I’ll give them a version of the story that leaves you looking like the bad guy, not me. The contract was unenforceable, I know that now, but if you make an unenforceable contract, you’re not entitled to get back what you gave to fulfill your end of it. You gave the painting to me in the house.”

  “Gave? The painting was still on my property, still in the hands of my butler, and had yet to enter your possession. That never happened; the vehicle in which the painting was placed was not in your possession, but rather that of the thief – the lady thief, as we now know, and her accomplice.”

  “If you thought the painting still belonged to you, why didn’t you report the loss? Why isn’t the picture on the register of stolen art?”

  “Why didn’t I report the loss? I suspected even then that Irene stole the painting. I didn’t want to harm her.”

  “How would registering the painting harm her? And if you didn’t want to harm Irene then, why do you want to do it now?”

  “I don’t want to hurt her. All she needs to do is to make it clear to the gallery that it’s my painting. In fact, there’s no reason it shouldn’t stay on display at the art gallery. Or you could show it at your retrospective as a loan.” Gundlach turned to Irene. “But you have to put an end to this.”

  He gave her a pained look, and suddenly I realized what this was about. Yes, the painting and the money, but something else was more important. Gundlach felt inferior to Irene, as inferior as he had back then, when she left him and he couldn’t win her back. Perhaps he hadn’t ever felt equal to her – a woman who had never given up her resistance, refusal, and spite. Irene was the defeat of his life, and he had to compensate that defeat.

  Then he laughed. It was an ugly, mocking laugh. “So from the beginning. If he,” Gundlach nodded in my direction, “still has the contract, he’ll never dig it up in a million years. That’s not the sort of contract you draw up, not even as a young lawyer, and as an old one you’d rather you’d never drawn it up. No, Schwind, the contract is of no use to you. If you’re thinking that you have Irene as a witness – Irene won’t help you either. You won’t testify in court as a witness, Irene.”

  “You’re right, I won’t go to court.” She stood up. “The painting…”

  But Gundlach wouldn’t be deprived of his triumph. “The police are looking for you in Germany. They’ll look for you in Australia if they know you’re here. I don’t know how no one recognized you. Because you were never arrested, never booked. So the police didn’t have a good mugshot, just a photo from a speed camera with you in sunglasses, with dyed hair, with your head down? But I recognized you from the wanted poster, and if you went back into the world, others would recognize you too.”

  18

  Irene didn’t reply. She looked at Gundlach doubtfully, as if she didn’t know what to make of his revelations, or of him, or of herself. Then she shrugged and smiled. “Do you want to turn me in?”

  “What did you do back then? You knew our routines, how we lived, where we drove – your friends could have put you to good use.”

  “We?” Irene gave Gundlach a mocking look.

  “I know you. Your spite, your antagonism, your rebelliousness. You didn’t just want to hurt me, and him,” he turned his head towards Schwind, “and him,” and towards me, “you wanted to get even with everyone. How far did you go? Did you want to knock on the door one day as if everything was back to normal? And shoot Hannes first, and then me?” Gundlach was talking himself into a rage. “Hannes liked you, he was my butler, but he liked you more than me. Of course he would have let you in and it would have been easy for you…him then me…or me first and then him…” Gundlach was looking at Irene as if she were threatening him even now.

  “You think I wanted to shoot you?”

  “If you didn’t, then your friends would have wanted to, with your help. You think I don’t remember? I remember everything, how you hated our lifestyle, your dream of throwing yourself into some grand cause. To be on the cutting edge of history – do you remember? And when I asked you what you would have done with this idea under Hitler or Stalin, you looked at me defiantly and had nothing to say. Then you thought the artist would be the thing, and then the revolution. Killing the man you’d abandoned anyway – that’s not too much to ask in the name of revolution!”

  “No one wanted to kill you. No one thought you were that important.”

  Gundlach leapt to his feet. He propped his hands on the table, leant down to Irene and barked at her. “And if your friends had thought I was important enough? What then? Would you have joined in? Would you have pulled the trigger?”

  I am always slow to respond, but Schwind too did nothing, and just watched. Kari intervened. Wherever he had been, he had heard Gundlach getting angry and imagined that Irene was in danger. He had quietly slipped behind Gundlach. He took him by his upper arms and sat him back down in his chair. Gundlach was ashen, trembling and struggling for air – I don’t know what a heart attack looks like, but that is how I imagine one.

  Irene stood up, went to Gundlach, took his hand, took his pulse and shook her head: nothing. She wrapped her arms around him.

  19

  No one wanted to speak. Schwind’s brow was furrowed as he watched Irene hold Gundlach in her arms. The sea washed through the pebbles, and a bird sang four notes, over and over.

  “I would never have done anything to you. As crazy as life was, as crazy as I was…” Irene shook her head. “I’d gone to pieces, freed from all confines – and everything that had held me together. Life felt like a drug. Afterwards, it was like I was in withdrawal, with sleepless nights, my heart racing, breaking out into sweats. But that passed too, and then all that remained was this enormous emptiness: everything was far away, colours were dull, sounds were weak, I couldn’t feel anything any more. Except anger. I hadn’t known that I could get so angry, screaming, pounding tables with my fists, punching walls and then weeping, weeping from anger…”

  She let go of Gundlach, who had pulled himself together, and looked at us, one by one. She saw our bewilderment at her sudden confession. She sat down and laughed. “You know, the colours in East Germany were duller than in the West. The plaster was gray-brown, like Brandenburg sand, the old stone buildings were never cleaned, the Reichsbahn trains were a worn-out shade of green, the flags and banners a faded red. But life there saved me. After the crazy years, it was like a stay in a sanatorium, where there was little to be had but peace and quiet. There are no colours to catch your eye, no music to get under your skin, no erotic promises on every billboard, no bargains to be hunted. And in the sanatorium nothing changes, not really, and life goes on the same way, day in, day out.”

  Gundlach waved his hand di
smissively, as if shooing something away. “You aren’t seriously trying to tell us—”

  “I’m not trying to paint a false picture. The nanny state, the inefficiencies, the shortages – that’s all true. But I didn’t suffer. It was…it was like staying with the Amish. The Amish can leave – which wasn’t possible there – but their life is strict and austere, like mine was, and I didn’t want to leave. The way time stood still, the peace and quiet, the absence of sensations – it did me good. Celebrating finishing the dacha after all the effort and cunning required to scrape together the materials, and all the work your friends and family had put in; going to the opera in Berlin with your colleagues; canoeing and camping in the Spreewald; reading the classics, which were easy to get hold of, and the other books, which weren’t – that was enough for me.”

  Schwind laughed mockingly. “A Biedermeier paradise?”

  “Maybe that’s not a bad comparison. There was no political freedom in the Biedermeier period either.”

  “But beautiful furniture, trips to France, and if you’d had enough, you could go to America.”

  “I don’t need beautiful furniture. I don’t need to travel, not unless I need to. I loved the countryside, the lightness around Saale and Unstrut, the melancholy of Mecklenburg and Pomerania, even the bleakness of the strip mines. I loved the mild summer rain in Bitterfeld, a mist of damp and smoke and chemicals. And the spring rain that pours down the worn-out streets and washes winter dirt from the cracks and potholes. I loved the trams, they were run-down, but they were allowed to just be trams, and not billboards for Coca-Cola and long legs.”

  “The grime over there was no better than the pomp and bombast of the Nazis.” Gundlach was indignant. “There are political truths.”

  “I lived with a painter. Wherever you are, there is more to daily life than happiness and unhappiness, justice and injustice. There’s beauty. Ugliness too, but I took pleasure in the beauty that was there and is now gone for ever.”

  “Why didn’t you stay there?”

  “You know why. After 1990, there was no more ‘there’. All there was was ‘here’ and the photo of the woman with sunglasses and dyed hair.”

  “Why didn’t they catch you?”

  “Like the others? Because I left as soon as the Wall fell. I had my old things at my mother’s, I had my old passport, issued in 1980 and valid until 1990, just long enough to make it here. They never looked for me under my real name, until the Wall fell they just had my photo and the name I had lived under in the East.” She got up. “I need to lie down, I hope you don’t mind. Shall we see each other at five for an aperitif and then eat together? Will you have dinner flown in today, as you offered yesterday? Can you help me up the stairs?”

  20

  I helped her up the stairs and into bed. After looking in her leather bag, I could reassure her: she had enough cocaine for tonight and tomorrow morning and beyond. She was asleep before I left the room.

  I remembered the wanted posters that hung in government buildings and post offices and were shown after the television news. I never took a close look. Under the label “Terrorists” – Irene? With sunglasses, dyed hair, her head bowed? Wanted for involvement in murder, criminal use of explosives, and bank robbery? With a warning that she was armed and dangerous? With the promise of a reward? No, I didn’t remember that.

  My wife had a hard time with faces; prosopagnosia is, as I have since learned, a cognitive disposition like dyslexia or dyscalculia. One struggles to identify faces and also to recognize them again. It’s a terrible handicap for a politician; it cost my wife a great deal of energy and discipline not to upset the people she dealt with in local politics. Because she hadn’t realized that it was a cognitive disorder, she had blamed herself and thought she was a bad person who didn’t pay enough attention to her fellow human beings. I never had a problem with faces.

  I couldn’t find Schwind and Gundlach in the kitchen, nor on the balcony. Then I heard their voices on the beach, but they were hard to make out. They must have been sitting on the bench on the veranda.

  They were no longer arguing. It sounded as if they were licking their wounds. Was Irene the great defeat of Schwind’s life, as she had been of Gundlach’s? Had he imagined then that he could have both – the painting, because Schwind owed it to him, and Irene, because she belonged to him? And then Irene had robbed him of both, had taken the painting from him and then left, herself?

  I thought of my grandfather, who would sometimes say that he had dreamed of his finals at school again. At the time I couldn’t believe that an early experience, which had been followed by a long, full life, could remain so present. My grandfather had passed his finals without any difficulty, studied medicine, opened a practice and run it successfully. And still he dreamed about his finals? Schwind was the world’s most famous, expensive contemporary painter, idolized by students, courted by critics, desired by women – and still he suffered over some trivial setback from decades ago? And Gundlach, a man who was successful several times over, worth millions, father of two adult children, happily married, couldn’t come to terms with the fact that this defiant woman had left him so long ago?

  Or is it the small defeats that we can’t get over? The first tiny scratch on a new car is more painful than a big one later on. The small splinters are harder to remove than the big ones and sometimes won’t come out however much you poke them with a needle, and they fester until they work their way out. The big early defeats change the course of our lives. The small ones don’t change us, but they stay with us and torment us, little thorns in our side.

  Then there seems to be a chance to put things right; it seems so close that you reach out and try to take it, but then it’s all smoke and mirrors. I was starting to understand Gundlach and Schwind. Not that I felt a connection with them. My experience with Irene has nothing in common with theirs.

  21

  When I went to join them on the beach, they were talking about their children and grandchildren. How many they had, how they were getting on in life, whose children and grandchildren were more successful – for a fraction of a second I was tempted to join them and boast about my own children and grandchildren.

  I asked Schwind something I had been wondering about since his arrival. “Did you really reserve the right to decide what happened to all your paintings, whom they could be sold or lent to?”

  “What?” He looked at me blankly.

  “You said to me then that you would never let what happened to Irene’s painting happen to another painting of yours. That all your paintings would remain under…”

  He shook his head. “Did I say that? That sounds more like the sort of thing you’d say, something you’d write in one of your little legal notebooks. I don’t need to have control over my paintings.” He chuckled. “It’s enough that they have control over the viewer.”

  Gundlach joined in with a contemptuous laugh.

  I didn’t know whether the object of Gundlach’s scorn was me or Schwind. I didn’t want to let him annoy me. “It’s one o’clock, and we’re meeting at five for an aperitif. Don’t you want to dispatch your pilot?”

  Gundlach waved his hand dismissively. “Do you want to take care of dinner? He should put it on my tab at the hotel.”

  So I went. We flew along the coast with the sea below us, little waves with white crests, which gleamed in the sun and were dull in the shade. To the right there was rock and sand, green and brown land, towns and roads. We could see Sydney from a long way away; the city sprawled up the coast. The flight was loud, despite the headphones with ear protectors, but after our talk over breakfast about our first and last cigarettes, we had nothing else to talk about. Anyway, I preferred to look down. Everything looked cozy from up here: the houses, the gardens, the cars, the parks, the beaches, the yachts with their colourful, billowing sails, the people. Then we flew over the sights of Sydney, Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, the Botanic Garden. People were lying in the grass on the big lawn next to
the Conservatory – I could have been one of them.

  We didn’t land on the roof of a skyscraper, as I had imagined, but at the outer edge of the airport. In the taxi, it came out that the pilot loved cooking, and he told me all about barramundi, crocodile and kangaroo, about Australian desserts, the country’s grape varieties, its wine-growing regions. He put together our evening menu enthusiastically. Caviar, barramundi with shiitake, kangaroo with macadamia nuts, passion fruit pavlova with Granny Smith sorbet as a palate cleanser between courses, with champagne, Sauvignon Blanc, and an assemblage of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Shiraz. Anything we couldn’t have prepared, because it would get cold, he’d finish in Irene’s kitchen – it all sounded fine to me. I left him negotiating with the chef, went and sat on the hotel terrace and watched the harbour.

  I needed to call. Even if my children wouldn’t be worried about me, and most probably hadn’t even thought about me, they should at least know where I was. It was between five and six in Europe, too early to wake them. In our family, we did, and still do things by the book: no loud fights, no love fests or orgies of joy, no lazing about, as much work as possible, as much rest as necessary; day is day and night is night. The kids should sleep. But I could call the firm’s manager; he has to work for the firm even when he’s at home.

  He was as awake as if it were the middle of the day. “Are you ill? You still don’t know when you can fly? The doctor says there’s no cause for alarm? You’re hard to get hold of.” The connection was bad, and his questions reassured him that he had understood me correctly. “Call your children?” He was ready to take care of that too and was certain he could give me my colleagues’ regards in return for mine.

  I turned off the phone. I never had, nor wanted a boat; the sea and new shores and foreign ports never tempted me. But now I had the happy feeling that with that call, I’d cut the line that kept my boat moored.