The Woman on the Stairs

by Bernhard Schlink

  The fire rushed down the mountain and up the tree trunks into the crowns. They lit up like torches before they fell, or they exploded, throwing burning bark in the air. I ran to the boat and started the engine. Even down in the cove the firestorm roared, whirling sparks and ash through the air. The upper house was in flames; for a moment the gold-red fire outlined the edges and corners of the house and glowed from the windows, before the piles supporting the house buckled. It collapsed in on itself with a huge crash. The fire leapt to the old house on the beach, hissed through the beams, popped the windows from their frames, and the roof and veranda caved in.

  The entire cove was burning. I headed out to sea, away from the cove, away from the heat and the scraps of burning bark and the embers and ashes. I do not know how long the fire raged, an hour, maybe two. Then only the afterglow remained, orange under a red moon. I was completely exhausted. I lay down next to Irene, who hadn’t woken up during the fire, and didn’t wake up now. She shifted towards me, and as I laid my arm around her she nestled herself into the curve. That was how I fell asleep.

  20

  When I woke up, the day was bright, the sun was high in the sky and the boat was bobbing at the mouth of the cove. I sat up. The branches on the mountain trees were charred black skeletons, sometimes with rust-red crowns, or they had turned into thick or thin black totem poles, or they lay in a mess of black trunks. The upper house was a heap of charcoal, the lower one was blackened stone walls and columns, into which the roof and the veranda had collapsed.

  Irene was gone. At first I didn’t take it in, because I couldn’t imagine it, then because I didn’t want to take it in. Next to me, the mattress was empty, Irene was not sitting in the prow either, she wasn’t huddled behind the helm, she didn’t answer when I called her, and she didn’t wave from the water where she had gone for a swim. As if she would have been capable of swimming. I started the engine and guided the boat to the jetty, crossing a warm carpet of gray ash to reach the beach house. I called out into the house, along the beach and up the hills. As if, while I was sleeping, she had been able to pilot the boat to the jetty, moor, go onshore, then send me back out to sea on the boat.

  I sat down between the fallen roof tiles on the bench where Irene had woken me and greeted me, and didn’t know how to bear that she was gone. That I could not see her face, hear her voice, touch her, hold her hand in mine. That she had woken up in the morning and seen the ruined old house, and thought she would now be taken to Rock Harbour and to Sydney to die in a white room. That she hadn’t trusted me. But what could I have done? How could I not have taken her to hospital? Could we have lived on the boat until she died?

  She had woken up in the morning, had struggled to the side of the boat, and let herself fall. Had she kissed me, stroked my hair or said something? Could I have woken up? I understood that she did not want to die in a white room. But I would have stayed with her day and night, we would have been close, we would have loved one another.

  There is always something better than death. Could Irene not have known that? There is always something better than death, somewhere, whether in a white room in a hospital in the Outback or in Sydney. It must have happened differently from the way I had imagined. She had felt nauseous, as she had so often these past few days, she wanted to vomit over the side of the boat, and she had lost her balance and fallen in the water, too weak to swim or cry for help.

  Kari came, saw that Irene was not there, asked no questions, said nothing, squatted down on the beach and stared out to sea. Could I hear plaintive humming notes from where he was squatting, beyond my field of vision? I don’t know how much time passed, how long I sat and he squatted. Occasionally the notes of grief came into my ear. At some point I stood up and looked in his direction, but he was gone.

  I went to the boat, took the bed out and dragged it onto the rubble of the old house. I searched the boat and between oars, fishing gear, canisters, tubes, brushes and rags I found a piece of rope that was long enough to tie the wheel tight and keep the boat on course. I left my clothes on the beach, went back to the boat, started the engine and stayed on board until I could be sure that it was headed straight towards the centre of the mouth to the cove. Then I jumped in the water and swam back.

  At first I had wanted to sink the boat. Sink it at the spot where I had woken up that morning and where, I thought, Irene had fallen into the sea. The boat as coffin or tombstone or burial offering at a place where I could grieve and say farewell. But then it felt like sinking the boat would make Irene’s death even harder.

  So I sat on the bench and watched the boat go. It crossed the quiet waters of the cove, reached the open sea, danced in the wind and waves, but it stayed on course and kept heading out to sea. The sea was empty; no container ships, no yachts, nothing except Irene’s boat, which grew smaller and smaller in the afternoon light. Then I didn’t know if I still saw it, or was just imagining it. That tiny black dot on the horizon – was that Irene’s boat?

  21

  I looked out at the empty ocean and counted the days I had spent with Irene. They totalled fourteen – it was Tuesday, and I had arrived on a Tuesday, and we had been together not just one week, but not three either. It came to me how proud my children were when they learned to count to ten, or to a hundred, but they were in awe once they realized that numbers have no end, and thus discovered infinity.

  I would look for Irene’s daughter. I didn’t know how to ensure that she got what was left of Irene’s mother’s estate. Irene must have been in contact with a bank or an attorney in Germany. How would I find them? How would I alert them to Irene’s last wish? I wanted to ponder the problem, but I couldn’t. I also couldn’t fathom how I might approach my children. With a business proposition, by offering to set up a firm with them, as Irene had suggested? By slowly showing more interest in them and their children, so that we slowly grew closer? By telling them what had happened to me?

  Although my thinking led me nowhere, I did not switch it off. But the knowledge of Irene’s death again and again burst like a flood through the dam of thoughts I was attempting to erect. How could I live without her? How could I live without her? How, without her, could I live out what I had learned from her?

  I ate some apples I had saved from the fire. I felt certain that on one of the next days, the boat from Rock Harbour would come to check up on us. I would not perish here. But I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had already perished. I didn’t want my old life; I had looked forward to a new one – as if the new one could have been with her. I hadn’t taken in that she was going to die.

  Evening came, and night fell. I made a bed for myself in the ruins of the old house and while I was making it I found a couple of coins and my house keys and the keys to my rental car. My documents, my credit cards, my money – they had all burned in the fire, and I did not care. I lay there and again heard the waves washing ashore, the rush as they came in, the rustle back through the pebbles. I had never slept so close to the beach, and heard the rush and rustle so clearly. Smoke still hung in the air, and again and again the wind rose up and brought the scent of burned wood, sometimes with a note of eucalyptus, or dusted me with ash. I woke up at first light, watched the sun rise red from the sea, turn orange, then yellow as it set out across the sky.

  I went up the hillside, poked around in the charred remains of the house, kicked the burned-out shell of the Jeep, stood before the dead black tree trunks. Then I noticed that between them there was life, here a couple of green blades of grass, there a couple of green branches. Disaster had come crashing down on the forest in such a frenzy, and rushed through it with such wild speed, that it hadn’t been able to destroy everything small, only what was big. I climbed up to the top of the mountain. The hills ahead of me, the plain, the mountains in the distance – it all looked black. But up close there were traces of green everywhere. Traffic flowed along the motorway.

  Then a boat steered into the cove, and I ran down the mountain. It was not Mark
, but his father.

  “You alone?”

  “Irene is dead.”

  He nodded, as if he had expected it. “How did it happen?”

  “She was very ill and weak, and she often felt nauseous. When the fire got here, I carried her to the boat and we sailed out into the cove. I think she must have felt sick during the night, and vomited over the side of the boat, and fell into the water. I have no other way to explain it. I was asleep, and in the morning she was gone.”

  “You should tell that to the Sheriff. She wasn’t here legally, but everyone knew that she was here, and there might be questions.” He looked around, looked at me and smiled. “You don’t have any luggage?”

  I smiled back. “No.”

  “Let’s go.”

  22

  My rental car was where I had left it in Rock Harbour, my cell phone still in the glove compartment. There were dozens of messages. I listened to the newest ones, a question from a colleague from my firm, a message from my cleaning lady, who was keeping an eye on my house in my absence, a reminder from the head of my travel agency that I urgently needed to postpone my flight again. I deleted those messages. I deleted all the others as well.

  I spoke to the Sheriff, who made a note of Irene’s death and took down my name and address. He had not known Irene, but he had known about her and done nothing. He had said to himself that time would take care of things.

  I called the Australian colleague with whom I had prepared the merger. He was happy to lend me money and had the real-estate agency in Rock Harbour advance me some cash immediately. The German consulate in Sydney promised me new papers. The head of my travel agency had already postponed my flight, and postponed it again to two days later.

  I spent the night in the same hotel by the sea that I had slept in on my journey out, sat on the terrace again, and watched the night fall. With the view of a marina and the noise of a busy restaurant, it wasn’t what it had been in Irene’s cove. That made me sad, and because I was afraid I might cry I went to my room. But I didn’t cry, not this time, nor any of the many other times I felt a lump in my throat.

  I stopped in the same hotel in Sydney I had stayed in before Rock Harbour, and once again I was given a room with a view over the Opera House, the bay, and at the end of the bay, the green strip of land that separated it from the ocean. My Australian colleague invited me to dinner and I made the mistake of telling him about Irene. He winked at me conspiratorially and waxed lyrical about the young secretary he’d been having a fling with these past two weeks. The German consul greeted me personally, and kindly asked how I had managed to get myself into and out of a wildfire, and gave me temporary papers.

  The question of whether I should go to see the painting spun round and round in my head. Sometimes I lost myself in a dream in which everything began again, and I went to the Art Gallery and saw the painting and thought that I had stumbled upon the past, whereas in fact I had come across the future. I longed to see Irene again, and I didn’t care that I might cry. But I was afraid of the sadness that was sometimes unbearable, and I longed for the old Irene who had come down the stairs to me, not the young Irene, so I decided not to go. But I went anyway; the painting was gone, and I was told it was on its way to New York.

  I didn’t tell anyone I was coming back. No car to pick me up, no chauffeur to recount what had happened in Frankfurt, no flowers would be on my desk. The taxi dropped me off. I unlocked the door and walked through my house like a stranger. Yes, that was the furniture my wife and I had bought, the pictures we’d found at the Frankfurt art dealer we befriended, the three wooden saints we had discovered in Buenos Aires. Those were the rooms where the children still slept when they came to visit, although they had removed everything of importance to them. That was our – my – bedroom; I had cleared my wife’s clothes out of the closet, but had changed nothing else. My cleaning lady had laid my dressing gown on the bed. After returning from a trip and unpacking and showering, I liked to wear it to read the mail that had piled up in my absence. There was a lot of it; I had seen the table full of it right away.

  I would wait until tomorrow to go to the firm. Today I would go to the cemetery and talk to my wife. I wanted to ask her forgiveness. I also wanted to say goodbye and explain to her why I could no longer live in our house and with our things. I wanted to tell her about Irene. I would call my children. I would prepare myself for the meeting with Karchinger and the other partners. I would have no answer to many of their questions. But what did that matter.

  Author’s Note

  The painting of Irene on the staircase may remind some readers of Gerhard Richter’s Ema (Nude on a Staircase). In fact, a postcard of Richter’s painting has stood on my desk for years, in rotation with other postcards and photographs. Nevertheless, Irene’s painter, Karl Schwind, has nothing to do with Gerhard Richter, and is purely fictional.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Bernhard Schlink is the author of the internationally best-selling novel The Reader. He is a former judge and teaches public law and legal philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin and at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.

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