The Woman on the Stairs

by Bernhard Schlink

  22

  The pilot took over the kitchen. The mushrooms and nuts only needed to be warmed up, the barramundi and kangaroo had to be cooked. I set the table on the balcony, dressed the caviar with sour cream, lemon, onions and eggs, and found a jug that would do as a bucket, in which I placed the champagne with ice from the hotel cooler. On the way from the hotel to the airport I had bought a bouquet of roses, red, yellow and white. I put on my new linen trousers and a new shirt, and as I stood on the balcony at quarter past five, Gundlach and Schwind arrived, one from one direction, the other from the other.

  Then Irene came. She hadn’t asked for my help, and I hadn’t offered it; this was her night, her time to shine. She walked serenely onto the balcony, wearing a black top and a long black skirt. She wore her hair up, and lipstick, and a necklace of gray pearls wound twice around her neck. She was radiant and smiling, basking in our admiration. She let Gundlach pass her a glass, let me pour, and let Schwind fix a white rose to her top with a safety pin he conjured up from his pocket. The roe were like pearls, the barramundi juicy, the kangaroo tender, and the conversation skated over trivial things.

  Until I asked Irene: “Do you know now? What’s left from those days? Do you see what you once saw in them? And why you left them?”

  I couldn’t tell how Irene looked at me. Like I’d woken her from a dream? Like she couldn’t believe I’d interjected something? Gundlach and Schwind were clearly taken aback, and I understood why; I had said almost nothing since they arrived.

  “Oh, yes. I recognize Karl’s feet, the big, strong feet he stands on, steady in the world. I recognize his bluster and his confidence, and remember believing I’d be protected between those two pillars. I recognize Peter’s will and strength, and now that he needs a cane, the cane sounds like his steps did back then, when he’d get his cobbler to nail iron caps to the soles of his shoes. I remember how ambitious they both were. Back then I often felt too young for them, like their daughter instead of their partner. Now I feel almost like their mother. I can see that they’ve made their way in the world and been successful, and I’m happy for them. And when I left them, it was the right thing to do. When the children grow up, the mother has to go.”

  “The mother?”

  Irene’s look begged me to say no more, to ask no skeptical questions that would challenge this new role, mother, which she’d traded for the old ones of trophy and muse. Did she just want to look beautiful and be admired, and enjoy the evening?

  “You didn’t leave us because you wanted to send your children out into the world. You didn’t lure us here in order to reminisce about his feet, and my shoes. What did he ask?” Gundlach looked in my direction. “What’s left? Did you really want to know what was left from our years together? From your time with him?” Now he tipped his head towards Schwind. “It was just an interlude. Nothing more. It happened by chance. If you hadn’t been in the Arts and Crafts Museum the day my Japanese guests wanted a tour and the tour guide was missing – and if the other painter hadn’t gone to Rome and I hadn’t had to hire this one,” again, he meant Schwind, “and if he,” he jabbed his chin at me, “hadn’t made a mess of everything…The interlude started by chance, it ended by chance, it’s all a long time ago. Life went on.”

  “Is that how you see your whole life? As a series of interludes?”

  The question took Gundlach by surprise. He gave Schwind a searching look, then decided that his interest was genuine. “Of course not. My father turned a workshop into a factory and I built the factory into a thriving business. My life had a purpose. The encounters that don’t change life’s course or goal may be as beautiful as you wish, but they’re still interludes.”

  “Your wives, your children, your grandchildren…”

  “They are part of the goal. What I’ve built should last – the same goes for you. You see, at sixteen I had to help shoot down war planes. I started off at Deutsche Bank as a trainee and finished as the chairman’s assistant, I took over the factory during the first oil crisis, I was already in America before reunification, and since then I’ve been in Eastern Europe and China as well. We don’t need to grow. But although our world isn’t changing, it’s still in motion, and if we want to keep our place, we need to keep moving too. Whether my children and grandchildren can manage it…The gene pool of a family business is limited.”

  “The End of History?” Schwind asked.

  “History goes on. But our world doesn’t change. Nothing threatens it now, no communism, no fascism, no young people who want to turn it upside down. Since the end of the Cold War there’s no alternative to our world. Name one country that doesn’t live under the laws of capitalism – even China’s communism is capitalism now. The word of the prophet, for which the Muslims kill and die, is no alternative – it’s a task for the police and the military. You worry about the poor? As long as they have TV, and beer on the table, they’re no threat. And we can always give them that.”

  23

  “That sounds…” Schwind searched for the right word. “Leaden.”

  “Is your art leaden?” Gundlach asked. “I don’t know much about art, but after we met…”

  “After our interlude?” Schwind said ironically.

  “Interlude, exactly, after which I followed your career, how you got famous and expensive. Representation, abstraction, photography as material, glass as object and image, the structures and the colours – you played with everything, like a child who sits amidst his older siblings’ games picking up one toy from one, another from the other. Everything is available to you, and you make use of everything. And there is no longer any alternative to your art.”

  Irene turned to Schwind. “Is that who you are?”

  Before Schwind could respond, Gundlach went on. “I’m almost done. That is who you are, because the world no longer changes. It continues to move, but the movements in business and finance and culture and politics are all repetitions, they no longer change the world. Your art is in motion too, sometimes in one and the same work. That’s why it’s beautiful. But it changes nothing.” He became earnest. “Yes, I want Irene’s painting back home with me.”

  “What’s art supposed to change? I painted what I saw. Sometimes I saw things that weren’t there, but could have been there, and painted those too. I painted as well as I could. That’s all.”

  “I know. You didn’t set out to make art for which there was no alternative. But you couldn’t make anything else: nobody can, with the world and art being what they are: reliable, manageable, without alternative. One can put on a gag or trigger a scandal. But that too is just always same old, same old.”

  “What will finally melt the lead?”

  “I don’t know. A nuclear war? A meteor strike? Some other catastrophe that brings the end of the world as we know it? But I don’t find the world leaden. I like it how it is, and you like it too. It is how it always was before communism and fascism tore everything apart. There are the rich, and everybody else; the rich take care of things and everybody else makes do.”

  “Take care?”

  Gundlach laughed. “Take care that nothing changes.”

  I looked at Irene and started to worry. The effects of the cocaine were wearing off. Her face betrayed her exhaustion and despair as the illness regained its grip. She saw my gaze, her expression turned defiant, and she stood up. With heavy legs she walked to the stairs, then upstairs.

  “I remember the women,” Schwind was back in the hopes and dreams of the late sixties and early seventies. “The beautiful, clever women from good backgrounds who went over to the left out of political conviction, and because they could sense it was where the avant-garde was, where life was exciting. Before I met Irene with you, I saw her at a debate at the university. All she did was sit and listen, but the way she sat and listened – it was clear that this was where the future was being negotiated.”

  “The future?” Gundlach asked scornfully.

  The pilot came, we cleared the table, broug
ht out dessert, then washed up. I kept my ear to the stairs all the while. Once we were finished in the kitchen, the pilot took a bottle of red wine and left. I watched him go down to the jetty, sit down, and drink and smoke. His cigarette glowed in the dark.

  24

  Then Irene came down the stairs. Had she been waiting for the dark? When I wanted to take two candles out onto the balcony, she signalled that one was enough.

  I hadn’t followed Gundlach and Schwind’s conversation. It had briefly grown loud, then quieted again. As Irene sat down, Gundlach said: “You still haven’t told us what you did in those days.”

  “If I killed someone? Is that what you mean? I was part of it. I still didn’t know that nothing would change. No one knew. We thought: if there was a West and an East, then there could also be something else, better than both. Now that neither world exists any more, I understand what you’re saying. Perhaps I already understood it when I lived in East Germany. It was finished. Exhausted by the ideological excesses, the empty rituals, the efforts that had come to nothing.”

  “Why so sad?”

  “Do you guys know the feeling? That, when it comes to it, not only will you die, the whole world will end with you? You might think that once you’re dead, it doesn’t make a difference if the world goes on or ends. But it does.”

  Gundlach had no interest in the death of the individual and the end of the world. “How do you live here illegally?”

  “It’s not hard if you have money in the bank in Germany, if you pay with a credit card and get cash advances from it, and don’t need the state. Bringing the painting here wasn’t quite so easy. Who travels with luggage like that?”

  Schwind had been listening to Gundlach and Irene with visible impatience. “The end of the world, the end of East Germany – all well and good. Can someone finally tell me how I get my painting back? My painting – I painted it, I fixed it when he damaged it,” Schwind pointed at Gundlach, “paid for it…”

  “Paid for it?” Gundlach was outraged. “You had had enough of Irene and brought her to me – you call that paying? I know why you want the painting – you never painted like that again. Ever since then you’ve been recycling the history of art.”

  “I am—”

  “You are a burned-out painter who weeps for beginnings. Go cry elsewhere. You have no claim to make here, neither moral nor legal. You have no right to the painting, which you sold, and no right to Irene, whom you betrayed. Pack your bags, and let him,” he tipped his head in my direction, “take you back.”

  “What an arrogant ass you are! All because of your money, that couldn’t buy you the woman or even the painting? You accumulated it as thoughtlessly as you’d collect beer coasters. You are a coaster collector, and the world without alternatives you talked about is the world of beer coasters. Don’t you get it? Money can’t buy you the things that matter!”

  “Ha!” Gundlach laughed derisively. “The court painter of global capitalism reveals himself as a critic of capitalism. Why do you sell your pictures for millions? Why don’t you just donate them to art galleries?”

  Irene wanted to say something, but couldn’t get a word in, so I tried to break up the argument. “Can the two of you—”

  “Our lawyer!” Gundlach stopped me. “He,” he nodded his head at Schwind, “has at least created an oeuvre and made a fortune with it, and I did what I did, but you? Fancy firm, I know, big cases, but always doing other people’s dirty work – you are a lackey, sir. First you were his,” again he tipped his head towards Schwind, “then mine, then hers.” Then, to Irene, “You’d do best to keep quiet.”

  “What the hell—” I wasn’t going to take that lying down.

  “A lackey.” Schwind laughed, loudly. “A lackey. Like the butlers, who think they’re a cut above, but they’re still just lackeys. I remember your butler. A servile soul, who—”

  “He was a better man than you. He never said it out loud, but he missed the painting too, and I feel bad that he can’t see it in its old place. Irene,” he spoke with the friendly patience one uses with a fractious child, “I want to leave you in peace, no police, no criminal trial, no lawsuit for the painting either. We can’t put everything right that went wrong back then. But the painting needs to go back where it belongs.”

  “Same old tune!” Schwind threw up his hands, fingers splayed, then let them sink down again as he had back in my office. “Everything has a place, where it belongs, and when it isn’t where it belongs – stop it, Gundlach. It’s enough. Irene ought to decide, and that should be the end of it. If she gives you the painting, then you should have it, and if she—”

  Gundlach shook his head. “Irene only has one option, you know that as well as I. Ask our lackey. Ingratiating yourself with Irene won’t help you and it doesn’t help her.”

  “You were married to this asshole? This greedy—”

  “Greedy? You want the painting as much as I do. You’re not fooling anyone with your soft words, with your ‘Irene should decide’ – not me, not her.”

  Irene stood up. She looked awful, old, tired, ill. “I gave the painting to the Art Gallery weeks ago. It is no longer mine to give, to either of you. I just wanted to see you both again.” She looked at me, and I laid my right arm around her and helped her to the stairs and then up the stairs. She lay down in bed without undressing, I pulled the blanket from underneath her and spread it on top of her. She was asleep when I shut the door.

  25

  When I came back down to the balcony, Gundlach and Schwind had found their voices again. “Can she give away something that doesn’t belong to her?” Gundlach asked.

  “You should have reported the painting to the register of stolen art,” I said. “I’m certain that the Art Gallery contacted them and, since the painting wasn’t registered with them, she is now the good-faith owner. If you want to know the legal details, ask your lackeys.”

  “All the drama with the loan just to lure us here? What did she want from us?” Gundlach shook his head. “Women! They don’t understand that what’s done is done. That if you want to move forwards you have to leave the past behind. Schlepping along old loves and friendships…you grow out of them like you grow out of old clothes. After a while they smell musty.”

  Gundlach may have been right, but he irritated me. “Didn’t you want to stop the march of time? Didn’t you want the painting back so you could stay young with the young Irene?”

  “He said that?” Schwind asked.

  “To stay young with the painting of the young Irene, I didn’t need to come see the old one. Besides, you still haven’t told us what you’re doing here.”

  I stood up. “What does it matter?” I went down and sat on the beach and heard Gundlach and Schwind speculating as to why I was here. Then they recounted their futile journeys in funny little anecdotes, that they might tell at a party. Gundlach boasted about the Hans Gundlach Foundation, named for his father, which had paid for the restoration of village churches in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg. Schwind thought foundations were something for one’s last will and testament, something for whatever was left after women and children, talked of his five children from four marriages, lamented the democratization and banalization of art, and mocked art therapy for the handicapped and painting contests for children.

  I took off my shoes and socks. The sea was warm, I undressed and swam in the bright moonlight, until I could no longer hear the voices on the balcony and no longer see the light from the candle. At the end of the cove, a boulder rose up out of the water. Its slope was completely smooth, and I stretched out. The stone had absorbed the day’s sun and warmed my back, and the balmy breeze stroked my face and chest and belly.

  Had Irene wanted to be the same woman she had been for Gundlach and Schwind in those days? Her coquettishness in the role of mother, her pleasure at the pair’s admiration, her laughter at their jokes, the sanitized story of her life – she had set out to please them. To draw them out? So she could see who they really were?
Or was she still who she was back then to them, the way people say they’re always children to their parents, even when they’re adults and their parents are old?

  It wasn’t my business. I’ve got a sense for when something is or isn’t, and I knew what was happening here was Irene, Gundlach, and Schwind’s business, not mine. They could present themselves however they wanted; I was just a chance observer. I don’t know why I suddenly felt guilty – not because I had helped Irene steal the painting back then, nor because today I’d butted in to the game between her and the two men, or because my wife had driven the car into the tree, or because I hadn’t seen my children in a long time. My children were adults, my wife had been too; I had mostly kept my mouth shut today and back then, done nothing that Irene couldn’t have found others to do. My feeling of guilt wasn’t about any one thing. It was like angst, although there was nothing to fear; sadness, although nothing had happened. It was a physical sensation, and although I said to myself that the body can only feel good or bad, but not guilty, it was a feeling of guilt. I was getting cold and swam back.

  The house was dark and quiet. Kari was perched at the bottom of the stairs; we gave each other a nod, and I smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. There were still glasses and an open bottle of wine on the balcony, I poured myself some and sat down. Tomorrow, I could call my firm from Rock Harbour and have a colleague find out what the terrorist with dyed hair, sunglasses and a bowed head was accused of. But maybe Gundlach was right, and whatever Irene had done was part of a vanished world that had nothing in common with ours.

  As I lay in bed I listened to the rush of the waves, and the rustle as they washed back through the pebbles. It was soft, I could barely hear it. I couldn’t hear the house breathing either. There was a peculiar restlessness in the house, as if Irene couldn’t keep her hands and legs still, as if Gundlach was tossing and turning in bed, as if Schwind was talking in his sleep and the pilot was pacing his room, smoking. As if the house were trembling, not shaken by the wind or a tremor, but under the burden of hosting incompatible people. I lay completely still.