by Martin Suter
THE LAST WEYNFELDT
www.newvesselpress.com
First published in German in 2008 as Der letzte Weynfeldt
Copyright © 2008 Diogenes Verlag AG Zürich
Translation Copyright © 2016 Stephen Morris
Inside cover image, Femme nue devant une salamandre,
by Félix Vallotton, 1900, PD-US.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
The translation of this work was supported by the
Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Suter, Martin
[Der letzte Weynfeldt. English]
The Last Weynfeldt/Martin Suter; translation by Steph Morris.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-939931-27-6
Library of Congress Control Number 2015935266
I. Switzerland — Fiction
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
1
DON’T DO IT, HE WANTED TO SAY. HE COULDN’T.
Adrian Weynfeldt fixed his gaze on the woman’s pale, freckled fists clamped to the wrought-iron balustrade, knuckles glowing white. He didn’t want to risk looking her in the eyes; she had chosen him as her witness, and he hoped that jumping without eye contact would be too impersonal for her.
Her bare feet poked through the gap between the balustrade and the balcony. Every toenail was painted a different color. He had noticed it last night. Red, yellow, green, blue and violet on the right foot; the same colors in reverse on the left, meaning that the two middle nails both gleamed green.
She hadn’t extended the motif to her fingernails. They were lacquered with clear varnish, painted white where they protruded beyond the fingertip. They weren’t actually visible this second, but he remembered them. Weynfeldt was a visual person.
The knuckles turned from white back to pink; she had loosened her grip. “It’s only thirty feet,” he said quickly. “You might survive, but it wouldn’t be much fun.”
The knuckles went whiter again. Weynfeldt shifted his left foot forward, level with his right, then inched the right a half step farther.
“Stay right where you are!” the woman said.
What was her name? Gabriela? He couldn’t remember; he had no memory for names. “Sure. But if I stay where I am, so must you.”
She didn’t say anything, but her knuckles remained white.
The lights were usually on all day in the office building across the street, with its neoclassical façade. Today was Sunday, still early in the morning. There were no people on the street; the streetcars which normally went by were few and far between, and only occasionally could a car be heard. Weynfeldt shuddered at the thought of the scene taking place on a weekday. The woman was wearing a black bra and matching black panties. At least he hoped she was still wearing the panties; the green canvas sheet which hung from the balustrade to provide privacy now obscured his view of her below the waist. And when he woke she had already been standing outside.
He wasn’t sure what had woken him—not a noise, perhaps the unfamiliar perfume. He had lain there a while, eyes closed, trying to remember her name; her face he could see.
A little leaner maybe, less determined, more disillusioned. But the same pale, freckled skin, the same slightly slanted green eyes, the same red hair and, above all, the same mouth, the upper lip almost the same shape as the lower.
It was the face he’d been trying both to forget and to remember for years.
Adrian Weynfeldt had spent this Saturday night as he spent every Saturday night: in the company of his older friends. He had two circles. One was made up of people fifteen or more years younger than him. Among them he was seen as an exotic original, someone you could confide in, but also make fun of sometimes, who would discreetly pay the check in a restaurant, and help out occasionally when you had financial difficulties. They treated him with studied nonchalance as one of their own, but secretly basked in the glow of his name and his money. In their company he could visit clubs and bars he would have felt too old for otherwise.
His other group of friends was composed of people who had known his parents, or at least moved in their circles. They were all over sixty, some over seventy; a couple had already reached eighty. And yet they all belonged to his generation. Adrian Weynfeldt was born late to a couple who had remained childless for many years. His mother was forty-four when he came into the world; she had died nearly five years ago, shortly before reaching ninety-five, when Weynfeldt was fifty.
Adrian Weynfeldt had no friends his own age.
Last night he had been with his elderly friends, in the Alte Färberei, a traditional restaurant in a guildhall in the old town, only ten minutes by foot from his apartment. Dr. Widler had been there, his mother’s doctor, increasingly listless in recent months, several sizes thinner and threatening to vanish inside his tailored suits—his wife Mereth all the more lively, her makeup, hair, and clothes impeccable as ever. And as ever, she took delight in contrasting her china-doll image with colorful language and vulgar remarks.
Remo Kalt joined them, Weynfeldt’s recently widowed cousin on his mother’s side, in his mid-seventies, wearing a black three-piece suit with a gold pocket-watch and a neat Thomas Mann moustache, as if he’d come from a portrait sitting with Ferdinand Hodler. Remo Kalt was an asset manager; he had looked after Weynfeldt’s parents’ capital and continued to manage it for their son. Adrian could easily have taken this over, but hadn’t had the heart to deprive Kalt of his last remaining client. There wasn’t much you could get wrong; these were not immense assets, though certainly solid, and conservatively invested for the long term.
They had ordered the Berner Platte, a shared meat dish featured on the menu throughout the winter. Dr. Widler had hardly touched a thing. His wife, a woman who had moved from willowy via slender to gaunt over the years, had taken two servings of everything – bacon, tongue, blood sausage, smoked ham. Kalt had kept pace. Weynfeldt had eaten like a man still vaguely concerned about his figure.
The evening was pleasant yet forced. Forced because Mereth Widler’s provocative remarks had long begun to wear thin, and because everyone around the table knew this was one of the last times her husband would sit at it.
The Widlers left early, Weynfeldt drank one more for the road with Remo Kalt, and when shortly afterward they ran out of conversation, they ordered Kalt a taxi.
Weynfeldt waited with him at the entrance. The night was m
uch too mild for February; it felt like spring. The sky was clear, and the moon rising high over the old town’s steep roofs was almost full. The street was empty except for an elderly woman with an energetic spitz on a leash. They watched in silence: powerless, she let her dog walk her, stopping every time he wanted to sniff something, rushing to catch up when he wanted to move on, change direction, or cross the road.
At last headlight beams shone around the corner of the road, followed by a slowly-approaching taxi which stopped in front of them. They parted with a formal handshake, and Weynfeldt watched the taxi drive away, its sign switched off now, its brake lights red as it halted at the junction with the main road.
His route home included a stretch of the river and La Rivière, a bar he found it hard to pass at this time of night; it was nearly eleven p.m. He went in for a drink, as he so often did on the Saturday nights he spent with his elderly friends.
Two or three years ago La Rivière had been a rundown dessert café. Then it was taken over by one of the city’s many gastronomic entrepreneurs, who had turned it into an American-style cocktail bar. Two barkeepers in eggshell-colored dinner jackets mixed martinis, manhattans, daiquiris and margaritas, served in sleek glasses. On Saturday nights a trio played smooth jazz classics at a subdued volume.
It was still half empty, but that would change in the next fifteen minutes as the cinemas emptied. Weynfeldt sat in his usual place at the bar: the first bar stool from the wall. From there he could observe what was going on, and never had to deal with more than one neighbor. The barman knew him and brought him a martini. Weynfeldt would probably just eat the olive; he was a very moderate drinker.
Nor did he indulge in any other excesses. When he dropped by a bar on the way home, he wasn’t hunting for sex, warmth, a little company, like most single men. He did not suffer from loneliness. Quite the opposite: he liked solitude. When he did sometimes go in search of company, it was in a conscious effort to moderate his loner tendencies.
As for sexual needs, ever since a particular episode—or blow—earlier in his life, they had played an ever more insignificant role in Adrian Weynfeldt’s life.
And so the course of events that evening was highly untypical.
No sooner had the barman served him his martini than a woman entered the bar, put her coat and handbag on the bar stool beside Weynfeldt, sat on the next one over and ordered a gin fizz. She was wearing a green silk Chinese blouse, white arms extending from its short, close sleeves, a tight black skirt and high heels a similar shade of green to the blouse. Her long red hair was tied up, secured with an imitation tortoiseshell clasp to free her neck, which the blouse’s high collar circled loosely.
She had not yet looked at him, but when the barman placed her drink in front of her, she took the glass and raised it to Weynfeldt briefly. She didn’t wait for him to raise his glass and return the gesture. But once she had taken a drink, half the cocktail in one gulp, she turned to him and smiled.
It was a smile Weynfeldt knew.
He was so startled he put the glass to his lips and poured the contents down his throat. The woman who had smiled at him resembled Daphne so closely it seemed impossible that instead of speaking English—Daphne’s melodic Welsh-inflected English—she now greeted him with the highly Swiss Pröschtli, no trace of an English accent. Now she had spoken, the spell was broken, and he was no longer afraid he was seeing Daphne’s ghost. Above all because the gin fizz was clearly not her first alcoholic drink of the evening and she spoke with a slight drawl. Daphne hadn’t drunk at all.
“Your olive,” she said. “If you don’t want it, I’ll take it off your hands.”
Weynfeldt passed his empty glass to her. She fished the cocktail pick out and put the olive in her mouth. While she ate, she appraised him blatantly, spitting the stone into her palm and dropping it in Weynfeldt’s empty glass. Then she finished her drink. “Lorena,” she said.
“Adrian Weynfeldt,” he replied. He was not someone who started with first names at a first meeting.
Lorena reached into her handbag, a well-worn, unbranded black leather number, and retrieved a battered wallet. She placed it on the bar, counted her money, half out loud, put the money back in her wallet, and her wallet back in her handbag. “What does a gin fizz cost?” she asked the barman.
“Eighteen francs,” he replied.
“Then I’ve got enough for three.”
“If you have no objection,” Weynfeldt said, “then I can take care of the drinks.”
“No objection, but I still don’t want to drink more than I could pay for myself. An old single girls’ rule.”
“Very sensible.”
“If it’s sensible I’ll have to think twice. ‘Sensible’ makes you look older. Will you order me another?”
Weynfeldt ordered a gin fizz.
“And a martini for the gentleman.”
The barman looked to Weynfeldt. He shrugged his shoulders and nodded.
“You don’t have to drink it,” Lorena said. “It’s okay for men to be sensible.”
“It doesn’t make us look older?”
“You’re already old.”
Weynfeldt kept Lorena company for four gin fizzes, his martini remaining untouched at his elbow. When she asked for a fifth, he insisted on accompanying her home, and ordered a taxi.
“Where are we going?” the driver asked Weynfeldt.
“Where are we going?” Weynfeldt asked Lorena.
“How should I know?” she replied.
“You don’t know where you live?”
“I don’t know where you live,” she said, her eyelids drooping.
And so for the first time in more years than he could remember, Adrian Weynfeldt returned home after midnight in female company. The security people would be amused when they came to watch the videos.
He opened the heavy door to the building, led Lorena in, and closed it behind him, keeping an eye on his guest, who seemed in danger of losing her balance at any moment. He took his magnetic ID card out of his wallet, pushed it into the slot next to the inner security door, led Lorena to the elevator, controlled by the same card, and rode to the third floor.
Weynfeldt’s apartment was in a nineteenth-century building in the center of Zurich’s financial district. He had inherited the building from his parents. While they were still alive a bank had taken out a lease on the ground floor, using three of the remaining four floors for their offices. The bank’s security measures were sometimes tiresome, but were ultimately in Weynfeldt’s interest as his apartment held a valuable collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Swiss art.
He ignored the bank’s repeated advances, luring him with suggestions of apartments in quieter districts so they could take over his floor too. Apart from his time at boarding school and his year in London, he had lived his entire life in this space. As a child he had slept in a room close to his parents; as he grew older he had moved farther toward the periphery of the apartment, which extended over five thousand square feet. While he was at university the servants’ quarters were converted into a separate apartment for him, and the housekeeper moved into one of the three guest rooms. Another guest room was soon occupied by the nurses looking after Weynfeldt’s father, who was homebound by the age of seventy-five.
His mother survived his father by nearly twenty years, which she also spent in the apartment, receiving round-the-clock care herself for the last four. Soon after her death Weynfeldt commissioned an architect from his circle of younger friends to refurbish the rooms from scratch. The old-fashioned bathrooms were transformed into superbly designed facilities, with sandblasted glass, darkened chrome and gray granite; the creaking walnut parquet was replaced with light oak; the walls and plasterwork were painted white or gray and the whole apartment was freed of the mustiness accumulated over the last hundred years.
Aside from a few special pieces, Weynfeldt put the furniture in storage and filled the rooms with his growing collection of 1920s-50s Swiss desi
gner furniture.
This was the apartment into which he ushered the somewhat tipsy Lorena, who dropped her coat and handbag on the polished floor of the vestibule and said, “Wow!”
She said it a few more times during their tour of the rooms. “Wow! Like a museum.” And later, “Wow! You have all this to yourself?”
The inspection seemed to sober her up a little. In Weynfeldt’s study, a large room with a floor-to-ceiling window opening onto the rear courtyard, also added during the refurbishment, she asked, “and here?”
“Here is where I work.”
“What do you do?”
“I work for Murphy’s. I’m an expert in Swiss art.”
“What does that involve then?”
“Writing expert’s reports, supervising auctions, producing catalogues, that sort of thing.”
“Sounds boring.”
“No, it’s not.”
“That’s why you have all this art?”
“The other way round. The job is because of all the art.”
“Is there anything to drink in this palace?”
“Only nonalcoholic.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“What would you like then?”
“Whatever you’re having.”
“Lemon verbena tea, it is.”
When he came back with the tray she had left the study. And wasn’t in any of the sitting rooms. He finally found her in his bedroom. She was lying in her panties and bra on his bed, apparently asleep.
Weynfeldt went into the bathroom, took a shower and put on clean pajamas. As he did every night. He owned fourteen pairs of pajamas, all tailored by his shirtmaker, all with monograms: six light-blue ones for the even days, six blue-and-white striped for the odd days and two for Sundays—one of the small quirks he allowed himself, providing his life with a little luxury and a little regularity. He believed that regularity prolonged life.
There was also the opposing theory: regularity makes each day indistinguishable, and the more events and habits are repeated, the more the days resemble each other and the years too. Till your whole life feels like one single year.
Weynfeldt didn’t believe this. If you do the same things more often, go to the same places and meet the same people, the differences become subtler each time. And if the differences are subtler then time passes unnoticed. Someone you see every month instead of every year never appears to age. And you never appear to age to them.