The Woman on the Stairs

by Bernhard Schlink

  I didn’t have a guilty conscience. But I felt forlorn in town, among the shops, adverts, restaurants, cars; and I was annoyed by the bright, cold light in the supermarket, the wide, empty aisles, the sheer range of goods. I calculated: fourteen days ago I had come upon Irene’s painting in the Art Gallery, eight days ago I had arrived at Irene’s. It felt like weeks had passed.

  Sometimes in the morning I tended Irene’s garden, or did the laundry, or tried to fix things: a broken step, a dripping faucet, the Jeep’s spare tyre. I took my time and thought about how our story would continue. But sometimes Irene wanted to hear the next installment first thing in the morning, and I had to improvise and slow it down, and elaborate, and embroider. Then we let lunch go by the wayside, and I sat by her bed on the balcony into the late afternoon, telling our story.

  I recounted our flight across the Atlantic. As we looked out of the window we saw another plane in the distance, just as, in the middle of the ocean, you can come across another ship – a greeting from the new world you’re on your way to. In New York we took a room at the Waldorf Astoria, and enjoyed the city like rich tourists until our money started running out. We went to the Empire State Building, to the Statue of Liberty, to the Metropolitan Museum, to the Guggenheim and the Frick Collection. We walked north through Central Park, past where people had warned us not to go; we ventured into Harlem and to the Bowery, we ate at Café des Artistes and at the Russian Tea Room, and at Tavern on the Green. Irene had never been to New York, and she hadn’t seen a film in a long time, and she enjoyed the sights that everyone has images of in their mind, from films or from their brief trips. There were two beds in our room at the Waldorf Astoria, and Irene wanted to know whether either of us had suggested sleeping in the same bed. But she didn’t love me, she only liked me, so I found that two beds were more appropriate.

  How our days passed – when Irene rested, and we ate, and I talked – depended on how she felt. She did not need the diapers; the mishap she’d had the night Gundlach and Schwind left didn’t repeat itself. But she often felt nauseous, and threw up what she had just eaten. Anyway, she had no appetite. She praised my spaghetti carbonara, my mushroom risotto, my goulash, but the only thing she really enjoyed was my salad.

  Our days had the kind of ease that, back then, I’d dreamed our life in Frankfurt might.

  Once I got carried away and told her so.

  “Yes,” she said, “but it’s a life unto death.”

  7

  Day by day it got hotter. The wind from the sea stayed away, and the air that usually feels like a nothing wrapped itself around us, thick and warm. The birds stopped singing and flying, and the plants in the garden withered. Irene banned me from watering them, saying water would soon be in short supply.

  “Do you want to move into the house on the beach?”

  “Tomorrow, perhaps.”

  The next day she said it again: “Tomorrow, perhaps,” and after that it was as hot in the house on the beach as it was in the house on the hillside. At night, it was even hotter; the stone radiated heat that it had stored during the day. Night brought no relief.

  I told her about August in New York, about the wet heat that clung to us like a hot, damp cloth when we stepped out onto the street from an air-conditioned building. Our money ran out and we looked for work. We also moved out of the Waldorf Astoria. The cheap hotel we found was on a street by the Hudson. Two rooms shared a bathroom between them, and if our neighbour forgot to unlock the door to our room when he’d finished, we had to knock on his door, or, if he’d gone out, get the surly porter to come upstairs to unlock it. There was only one bed.

  “And?”

  “I slept on the floor. It was so hot that I didn’t need a blanket. When I could not sleep, I climbed out of the window and sat on the fire escape, looked out on the lit street and the black river. Sometimes you would come and sit with me.”

  “What did we talk about?”

  “You had found a job in Brooklyn as a waitress. I’d found one at McDonald’s. We told each other about our jobs. Did you know that McDonald’s has its own university? The Hamburger University? When they took me on they promised that once I received my work permit, and if I proved myself, I would be sent to the university. As it was, I was happy when they moved me from the kitchen to the counter.”

  Irene laughed. “You can’t help it, you have to make a career.”

  “But not at McDonald’s. I wanted to be a lawyer again and I had found out that while I couldn’t take the bar exam in New York without first getting a law degree, I could in California. So I wanted to go to California. At the same time, we liked New York; we had seen how much the city had to offer, even to people with no money. We made friends, we had an apartment lined up. But then…”

  I wasn’t sure if I should tell her what had just popped into my head. Well, it hadn’t occurred to me just like that; during my first trip to New York, when I was still a student and couldn’t afford a hotel, and stayed with friends of friends in Brooklyn, I’d wandered into a café to get coffee, and this was the café in which I now imagined Irene waitressing. The restaurant had the standard menu and the standard football above the bar; the staff were friendly in the standard rough-and-ready way, and the atmosphere was completely unerotic. It was a restaurant like any other, except for one thing.

  “Then?”

  “Then I came to visit you at work, and saw that you had to waitress topless, and I took you away, and we bought a used car, and left the next day.”

  “You can’t just…It was my job, right? If it didn’t bother me…Were you jealous?”

  “Think what you like. I am telling the story. I have to look away in our bedroom, while you show the entire world?”

  “Understood.” Irene smiled – teasing, friendly, pityingly? What right did she have to smile at me with pity? But it was my own fault. I’d sensed that the story was taking a delicate turn, and I should have just dropped it. I didn’t want to be jealous. I wanted to come off well. I would have liked to rescue Irene from a rapist in Central Park, to snatch her back on a crosswalk from a drunk-driver, to foil a pickpocket on 5th Avenue. I would have liked to be a hero. But I couldn’t think of any deed that didn’t sound corny, that didn’t sound like I was trying to build myself up.

  “Do you like cars? Ours was old, a 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air, green with a white roof, white fins and whitewall tyres. Its hood ornament was a cross between an airplane and a rocket – it flew ahead, and all we had to do was follow.”

  8

  When I carried Irene to bed that evening, she shifted to one side and pointed to the other. She wanted me to sit down.

  “Do you remember why Parsifal never asked?”

  “Didn’t his mother teach him never to ask unnecessary questions? And he took it more literally than she had meant?”

  “Why don’t you ask anything?”

  “On the first evening you evaded my questions, and I thought…”

  “That first evening is a while ago.”

  I shrugged. “My grandparents asked only the most basic questions. Do you want to learn to play piano? To play tennis? To dance? And I too asked only for what I needed. I’d like to go to the theatre, to the opera, or on holiday to Spain with friends – could you give me the money? Until one day they raised my allowance and I didn’t have to ask for money any more. They were truly generous.”

  “What was it like in your family? With your wife and your children? Did you ask them a lot of questions?”

  Under Irene’s questions, I began to feel uncomfortable. “I thought I was supposed to ask more questions. But instead you are interrogating me.”

  “Sorry.” She placed her hand on mine. “Sleep well.”

  I went down to the house on the beach and sat on the bench on the veranda. The water was so smooth that it reflected the sickle of the moon like a mirror, and made no sound on the pebbles. I missed that sound, and I would have preferred to see the moon dancing on the waves. I was upset. Did Ire
ne want to psychoanalyse me? Therapize me? What business of hers was it how many questions I asked my wife and children? Some families ask more questions than others. With our children, my wife handled the questions and the talking. And with her – the beauty of it was that we understood each other without questions. She lived her life and I mine, and I was there for her when she needed me. Did I need to justify that to Irene?

  Parsifal. I remembered that on his first visit to the castle he didn’t ask the old man about his suffering, and didn’t relieve him of that suffering, so lived under a kind of curse until, on his second visit, he asked the redeeming question. But how did he know that he was supposed to ask the question that time? How was I supposed to know what sort of questions Irene wanted me to ask? Unlike Parsifal, I had at least asked about her illness.

  9

  The next day we drove west. Sometimes the highway led us over long bridges, or in loops above and below other highways, through the backyards of cities; and we saw only crumbling roads, deserted parking lots, boarded-up houses, trash, and beyond, the silhouette of skyscrapers. Sometimes it would leave us in the middle of a city, at a crossing with traffic lights, honking cars, rushing pedestrians, offices and shops. Over farmlands it spun out like a broad ribbon, flat, or gently rising and falling, far from the towns and villages named on the road signs, far from farmhouses and factories too. We saw forests, cornfields, pastures, a couple of cattle on the pastures here and there, behind the cornfields maybe a silo, or a smoking chimney, or a steaming tower. On the third day all we saw were wheat fields. Under the huge sky, they stretched to the horizon; your eye lost itself in the distance. The music on the radio changed, we heard banjo and fiddle, accordion and harmonica, catchy songs about women and love, simple ballads about struggle and death. The news reported on rodeos, quarrels and fistfights, births, deaths, school and church fairs, run-over dogs, runaway cats, false alarms, and that Jesus loves us. The highway had narrowed into a two-lane road, and the heat shimmered on the asphalt.

  We drove slowly, and Irene put her seat back, rolled the window down and stretched her legs out. After the first verse she knew the melody of a song and would hum along with the rest. From time to time, something on the news would trigger her imagination and she would spin it into a story. How John Dempsey caught the biggest fish of the summer. What the patrons at Crossroads Café had started fighting over. Why Catalina Fisk didn’t call the ambulance, although she could have been saved.

  “Are you afraid of death?”

  Irene thought about it so long, eyes closed, that I wondered if she had forgotten my question or even fallen asleep. It happened more and more that in the middle of a conversation she lost herself to other thoughts, or to the fatigue that was her constant companion. “The things I missed out on…Is that fear of death, that things will forever be unsaid, undone, unlived? But really, they already are now, and have been for a while. The time to put things right has long since passed.”

  Should I keep asking questions? Had Parsifal asked the old man more questions after the first? Where does compassion end and intrusion begin? “What would you like to put right? What you did with dyed hair and sunglasses?”

  She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Oh, that…No, I would like to see my daughter again or just to know how she is, what she’s doing with her life.” She saw the question in my eyes. “I got married in East Germany and – it was a surprise, I was already too old – I had a daughter. I didn’t want to take her away from my husband. It must have been hard enough for him that I vanished without a trace, but to take Julia as well…in his pedantic way, he really loved us both.”

  What made you choose someone like that? I wanted to ask. I’d also have liked to know why she left her husband and daughter, and never got back in touch with them, and what she had to fear, after the time of dyed hair and sunglasses. Had she actually killed someone? What had she said to Gundlach? That she had been involved. That could mean anything. “I can take the boat to Rock Harbour and call my firm and have them find out about Julia.”

  “Can you do it after I’m gone? And see if she needs anything? And make sure she gets what’s left of my mother’s estate?” She took my hand.

  I didn’t feel good. What if Julia really needed something? An education? Medical treatment that her insurance wouldn’t pay for? Psychotherapy? Rehab? What if she wasn’t just a drug addict, but dealt drugs as well or walked the streets to pay for the drugs, or committed petty crimes – or even serious ones? Money for a defence lawyer or treatments or a course of study was one thing. But what if I had to go look for her in the red-light district in Berlin, night after night, and finally discovered a stupid, common person, would it be my job to help her get her act together? I had refused, even with good friends, to be a godfather to children, because the responsibility was too much for me. But I nodded.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was a sweet girl. I left when she was coming into the terrible twos, but she didn’t really throw tantrums, she would sulk and pout with tears in her eyes, and when I explained to her why she couldn’t have what she wanted, she stopped straight away.”

  Irene cried. At first I heard quiet whimpering, then loud howling, and then I could scarcely recognize her face, the crumpled forehead, the mouth torn open; she threw her head from side to side, then buried her face in the pillow.

  Crying: that cheap trick women use to put us in the wrong. I cannot stand it, and I thought highly of my wife for the fact that she stopped crying soon after we were married, because she understood that the crying game wasn’t fair, that it repulsed me, that I refused to play it. I can say with pride that my children didn’t cry either; when my eldest was eight, he broke his arm and ran home from the playground, and rode with my wife and I to the hospital, without shedding one tear.

  But how was I supposed to explain to Irene that her pain wasn’t my responsibility; that I was an inappropriate recipient of her tears? She kept crying and held onto my hand so that I couldn’t just get up and go. Finally, I couldn’t stand her crying, her face buried in the pillow, her shaking shoulders, or the way I was sitting awkwardly beside her, and I took her in my arms and rocked her, and made soothing sounds until she fell asleep.

  When she woke up in my arms, she looked at me kindly, even happily, and smiled and said: “Thank you.” I didn’t understand what she was thanking me for, but I didn’t want to question something that seemed to please her, so I smiled back.

  10

  Then the harvest began in the fields of the Midwest. Irene had once seen pictures of combine harvesters, rolling in unison over wheat fields, and asked: “Where are the combine harvesters?” In her memory, flags flew from the machines, and the operators, male and female, laughed with joy – more Soviet propaganda than American reality, but a couple of flags on the combine couldn’t hurt, and we couldn’t see the faces of the drivers. So on we drove. For hours on end combines would pop into view, sometimes in a row, though more often just one monster machine. They all flew flags.

  We slept in motels. The rooms were always big, with two beds, and a TV screwed to the wall near the ceiling. There was a soda machine with Coke and Sprite and ice cubes in the lobby, and before we went to sleep we would lie in bed watching TV, drinking the beer and eating the chips we’d bought in the last town.

  “I was worried about what awaited us in San Francisco and how we would get by there. I wanted to talk about it, but you didn’t want to plan, you wanted to take things as they came. I think you thought I was petty. Actually, why did you choose a pedantic husband?”

  She looked at me that way again.

  “Not that you should think I’m jealous. I’m simply interested why you did what you did. Too many questions already? You just said I should ask more questions.”

  “No, it’s not too many. Helmut was like East Germany. I liked that he was reliable and caring, if maybe a little paternalistic. The way I felt about you – I can’t recall. Are you petty?”
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  What a question! I take things seriously, sometimes too seriously, I aim for precision in everything I do, sometimes too much precision: again and again I have difficulty understanding why people become emotional in difficult situations instead of solving the problem rationally; and I find it’s often the little things that people stumble over, that cause them to fail. But I don’t split hairs, or bear grudges, and I’m not cheap. Petty?

  I left the question unanswered and drove with Irene over the Rocky Mountains. We saw a lot of forest, calm and wild rivers, water that fell from high cliffs – from afar, a silver beam, up close a tumbling, spraying roar – the snow on the peaks, the quick-changing weather, the terrible thunderstorms echoing off the mountains like the noise of a battle. I would have liked to rescue Irene from a bear, but we never met one, nor would I have known how if we had. Instead, a lost or abandoned dog joined us at a rest spot, a black thing, with white, spotted nose, chest and paws, anxious and trustingly demanding at the same time. It accompanied us everywhere, jumping and circling us. When we drove with the windows open, and Irene stretched her feet out the front window, it stuck its head out the rear one and couldn’t get enough of the smells of the world.

  “What was its name?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me!”

  “Was it a he or a she?”

  “A she.”

  Irene fell asleep before she could tell me its name. Night was falling, but the heat didn’t lift – the dry, red-hot, parching heat that we had woken up to and fallen asleep with for days. I made gazpacho from canned tomatoes and Irene ate a few spoonfuls before she fell asleep again. I let her sleep on the balcony, and brought a mattress out for myself as well. It was no cooler than inside the house, but there was more air.