by Martin Suter
No word from Lorena. Her name had not appeared on Frau Hauser’s handwritten list of answering machine messages. There were none of the question marks his housekeeper placed by unidentified messages. And her name was not among Véronique’s stack of notes and printed e-mails.
Instead Strasser had called several times, insisting—Véronique had underlined the word twice—that they meet. Ideally for lunch; that evening at the latest.
It was the third Tuesday of the month, and lunch-time was reserved for a regular meal in the Krone with the Etter clan, a group of aging art historians associated with Professor Etter, his tutor at university. But given his recent doubts about his theory of regularity, and that Strasser was much nicer company at midday than at night, Weynfeldt excused himself from the Etter clan and arranged to meet Strasser for lunch in Es Corb, a small Catalan restaurant which he knew Strasser liked.
He assumed that this was about Rolf’s trip to the Marquesas and took his checkbook.
He was early. The air in Es Corb was still fresh; they were just closing the windows. Weynfeldt sat at a window seat for two and ordered a water, then added a Jerez, to reduce his vulnerability to attack; Strasser took it personally if someone failed to drink alcohol in his presence.
Es Corb was previously called Raben and had been a bar surviving mainly on its beer sales. Just under a year ago a group of young second generation Catalans had taken the place over, serving a fusion of Catalan and Swiss food.
Unusually, Strasser was almost on time, standing at the entrance while he looked defiantly round the room, before seeing Weynfeldt and making his way to his table.
“Been here long?” he asked Weynfeldt, who had stood up to greet him.
“Just arrived,” he said, and shook his hand. They both sat.
Strasser began studying the menu. Weynfeldt did the same. “The bacalao and saucisson dish sounds interesting,” Weynfeldt observed.
“Just to be clear,” Strasser said, without looking up from the menu, “I’m paying this time.”
Weynfeldt concealed his surprise and said simply, “Thanks. My turn again next time,” and decided against the bacalao. By the time the waiter had come to take their order he had decided on the marinated tuna with onion aspic.
“I thought you were having the bacalao,” Strasser said, irritated. “The gentleman is having the bacalao,” he told the waiter.
The waiter looked at Weynfeldt.
“Perhaps a little heavy for lunch, don’t you think?” Adrian asked.
Strasser didn’t give the waiter time to answer. “It’s only at night you shouldn’t eat anything heavy. Please bring us two bacalao.”
The waiter looked toward Weynfeldt again: “The portions are fairly small.”
“Okay, the bacalao,” Adrian nodded.
“You see, that’s what makes me sick about you,” Strasser began, once the waiter was gone, “always this patronizing attitude. You’re thinking, the poor bastard wants to pay for himself for once, I’ll grant him the pleasure and order something cheap. I’ve had it up to here!” He held his hand up horizontally, level with the bridge of his nose.
Weynfeldt was shocked. He had experienced Strasser’s fits of rage for years, but never seen them at this time of day, in this situation. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I really was just concerned about how heavy it was. I have to work this afternoon.”
“There you go again! Do you think I don’t have to work? Do you think you are the only one who works? You don’t even realize how supercilious you are.”
Weynfeldt sat in guilty silence. The accusation that he was condescending toward people, without intending or realizing it, was not new.
The waiter brought the wine, a small carafe of Ceps Nous. They waited silently till their glasses had been filled.
Adrian considered asking how Strasser’s Polynesia plans were going, to change the subject, but changed his mind. It could be taken as an attempt to remind Strasser of his position as mendicant.
They gazed out of the window, saying nothing. Outside it was pretending to be spring, and the people passing had fallen for it. They weren’t even carrying warm clothes over their shoulders and arms; they were dressed for spring, as upbeat as the misleading weather.
Strasser was the first to speak, once he had emptied his glass and refilled it. “About the Marquesas—forget it.”
“Have you changed your plans?”
“Only in as far as I’m going to finance it myself.”
“Ah. I see.”
Strasser was not satisfied with this reaction. “I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean every day and think: All this is thanks to Adrian. Thank you, Adrian! Thank you, Adrian!”
“You wouldn’t have to. I’d have been happy.”
“I know. You like it when other people are dependent on you. No sacrifice is too great.”
“It wouldn’t be a great sacrifice, Rolf,” Adrian assured him, and immediately wished he could swallow the words.
“Thanks for rubbing my nose in it. The sum my whole life depends on is chicken feed to you. Thank you, Adrian! Thank you, Adrian!”
The waiter brought the food. Three slices of dark saucisson vaudois topped by three pieces of pale cod, garnished with spring onions and black lentils. They began to eat. Neither had much appetite.
“You have no idea how liberating it is, no longer having to be grateful to you.”
“I didn’t know you felt that way. Please excuse me.”
“Please excuse me, please excuse me. Ditch the fucking politeness for a change. It’s all just part of your unbearable superciliousness!”
For a while Weynfeldt said nothing. Then: “Did you arrange to meet just to pick a fight with me?”
“Damn right!” Strasser yelled. “The great changes in life can’t happen without a fight. Opinions have to clash, emotions, worlds! Fight for once! Live for once!”
People at the neighboring tables were beginning to notice them. Weynfeldt wondered how they must appear to the spectators. Most likely as a gay couple at the climax of a relationship drama.
He made the mistake of saying this to Strasser. Sometimes a joke had the effect of calming him down.
But this time Strasser was not in the mood for jokes. He stood up, drained his glass, threw his napkin onto the table, hissed “Asshole” and left the restaurant.
Weynfeldt watched through the bare window as he wound his way rapidly through the pedestrians, black tie waving in the breeze. He watched him till he was out of sight.
Being punished with abandonment was familiar from his childhood. His mother had used the threat as a deterrent. “I’m leaving now and I won’t come back,” was a sentence she had successfully brought him into line with, even as an adult. Only after he met Daphne did it lose its effect. But it was only when his mother was very old indeed that he first thought—didn’t say, but at least thought—so do it.
He had no idea Rolf Strasser felt such hatred toward him. He had always thought Rolf was just a volatile person, and that because he was also a frustrated artist, this characteristic was often accentuated. He had never taken his nasty comments and coarse remarks personally. Adrian was never inclined to take things personally. Perhaps that was a mistake. Maybe many things were meant more personally than he took them.
It seemed as if the passersby had started walking more slowly. He finished the food on his plate at the same slow pace, and ordered dessert too, a combination of crema catalana and crème brûlée, and a two-glass carafe of the Ceps Nous, as Strasser had finished the previous one.
Weynfeldt asked for the check. It was a tall, slender woman who brought it, not the waiter. “Boa tarde,” he said in surprise. “Como esta?”
“Tudo bem, obrigada,” Frau Almeida replied.
“You’ve started working here?”
“Three times a week at the moment, more often soon. Herr Baier is reducing my hours gradually.”
“Of course. He’s moving to Lake Como.”
Adrian paid the bill.
“Herr Strasser had to leave in a hurry,” Frau Almeida observed, bringing his change.
“He had forgotten an important appointment,” Weynfeldt said, and left a generous tip on the plate she brought the change on. He stood up and said good-bye.
He got halfway across the restaurant then stopped, and returned to the table. Frau Almeida was busy clearing it. “Tell me, how do you know Herr Strasser?”
“He’s a professional artist, of course. He came to visit Herr Baier every day for a long time. To paint.”
“Do we have a Vallotton in the auction?” Véronique asked.
It was nearly three by the time Weynfeldt got back to the office. He hadn’t warned her he would be late, instead bringing a box of assorted macarons—vanilla, champagne, mocha and pistachio—from his favorite confectioners. She took them without a fuss as the compensation due to her for his lateness.
“… because someone called and asked about the Vallotton in our spring auction. I told him there wasn’t one, but he insisted there was. ‘Ask your boss!’ he said.”
“What was his name?”
“Gauguin, like the painter. He sounded drunk.”
Weynfeldt smiled and shook his head. “I know him.”
“And? Do we have a Vallotton?”
“If we get a Vallotton, you’ll be the first to know.”
He did two hours of work in his office. At five he took his leave from Véronique. The macaron box lay between the two computer screens. It was empty.
He must have pressed the wrong button. The elevator that opened its doors was the size of a whole room. He went inside and pressed floor six.
It stopped on the second floor, the doors opened and a blue-clad orderly wheeled a bed in. Weynfeldt clung to the wall. In the bed lay a man of around thirty, hollow eyed and apathetic.
“That one is normally the elevator for visitors,” the orderly said, pointing behind him. The patient ignored Weynfeldt.
The doors closed and the elevator rose. At the head of the bed sat a yellow, worn teddy bear, as listless as its owner.
The elevator stopped one floor higher and the orderly pushed the bed out. The doors closed and the elevator continued. Weynfeldt wished he hadn’t seen that teddy bear.
Mereth Widler was waiting for him outside Room 612. The attendant had informed her of Weynfeldt’s arrival. From a distance she still looked very much the china-doll lady, but close up Adrian saw that she had freshened her lipstick for his arrival without using a mirror, hastily, with an unsteady hand. Her eyes were tired, and her hair was lopsided. But she knew that her reputation came before her and as she embraced him, muttered, “I should warn you, he looks like a bag of shit.”
Dr. Widler lay in the bed as if a part of it, not its contents. His skin, his hair and his nightdress were identical in tone to the sheets surrounding him.
As Adrian entered, he turned his eyes toward him, showed a hint of a smile, raised his right hand with the thumb pointing down and let it drop onto the quilt, like an object which had nothing to do with him.
Weynfeldt lifted it up again, held it and placed it carefully back down. He handed Mereth a box of sweets, from the same confectionery as Véronique’s macarons. “I wasn’t sure if you …” he said, “but if not, I’m sure Mereth will …”
With his eyes, the old doctor pointed to the chrome chair next to him, upholstered with green plastic. A classic hospital visitor’s chair with an adjustable back such as he’d sat on at his father’s sickbed and, twenty years later, his mother’s. He decided to find out who had designed them and perhaps include an example in his collection.
Weynfeldt offered the chair first to Widler’s wife. Only after she had categorically rejected it, did he sit down. The room smelled of flowers and disinfectant and sickness. An IV tube fed into the crease of Widler’s thin, sinewy left arm, dusted with white down. Two tiny plastic tubes were inserted into his nostrils. Further tubes emerged from under the covers. Weynfeldt knew better than to wonder where they were going or coming from.
The doctor wanted to say something. His lips began forming a letter, a syllable, perhaps a word. His whole face seemed to be trying to help his lips with this difficult task. But just as Adrian thought that now, now he would succeed, Widler raised his right hand again, with a dismissive gesture, and let it fall to the bed in the same moment.
Weynfeldt nodded as if he’d understood what the sick man had said. Then he started describing the weekend in St. Moritz, passing on the others’ greetings and reporting on the races and the results, as far as his memory served him.
After a few minutes Dr. Widler fell asleep. Weynfeldt went silent and gazed at the white, shrunken face. He was not quite as old as he looked, not yet eighty. His mother had been over twenty years older than him. He remembered that when she first became his patient, she had said, “You know you’re getting old when your doctors are younger than you.”
Mereth indicated that he could reasonably leave now—with a grateful nod and the understanding the old show the young when they let them go and have their fun.
Weynfeldt glanced once more at Dr. Widler. He was reminded of Ferdinand Hodler’s portrait series of the dying Valentine Godé-Darel.
14
SOMETIMES ADRIAN WEYNFELDT FOUND IT EERIE TO return home. The harsh neon light in the entranceway, between the creaking oak door to the street and the noiseless sliding security door. The knowledge that his every move was recorded and saved for two months. The elevator which took him in silence past the floors closed to him, in a building he owned. The steel door which opened and released him into the paneled hallway with oak parquet. The double doors to his apartment, Art Deco motifs etched into their frosted glass panes.
On nights like these he felt as if he had been sucked through a steel tunnel into another world and time. And when he entered his apartment, he felt like the sole survivor of a distant disaster. No other human being lived in this building, or in the surrounding buildings. He was entirely alone with his collection of paintings and furniture. Witness to an extinct culture which no one would ever revive.
He opened the door with the key his father had used, and his father before him, put the lights on and was happy that the flooring was another of the issues where Casutt had overruled him. The old parquet boards, creaking at various pitches, had not been restored, replaced instead by solid-oak ship-deck planks, which he could now walk on without hearing ghostly steps behind him.
Frau Hauser had left him her usual note, written in her small, neat handwriting and attached with a magnet in the form of a yellow duck to the chrome expanse behind which the fridge, freezer, climate-controlled cabinets, roasting oven, steam oven, microwave oven and warming drawers were all concealed.
Kaspar Casutt had provided Weynfeldt with a professional kitchen. Its chrome surfaces alone occupied a large proportion of Frau Hauser’s ever changing assistants’ time. The consequences of Casutt discovering the duck magnet were unthinkable.
The note said, “Roast beef and mixed salad in climate cabinet; salad dressing ditto, separate; remoulade ditto; toast, ready toasted, in microwave—one minute (yellow button); no messages on answering machine; bon appétit! Hauser.”
Adrian had to open several doors before he found the climate cabinet. It contained vegetables, fruit and other foodstuffs, each in different climate zones, the temperature and humidity regulated separately. He took the tray with the roast beef and salad out, poured the dressing on and mixed it with the designer salad servers also chosen by Casutt. Then he pressed the yellow button on the microwave, waited for the machine to beep, took the toast out with the bread tongs waiting nearby in ready position and placed it in the bread basket, also handily placed and lined with a napkin. This was about the extent of his culinary abilities.
He found the wine cooler immediately, however, chose a local pinot noir, and carried the tray all the way to his study, the one room aside from his bedroom where he felt alright on nights like this.
He flicked on some light switches. The room’s indirect lighting came on, and a spotlight threw a beam onto the Vallotton in the center of the room.
Adrian switched the reading lamp on and turned the indirect lighting off, made some space on his desk and placed his supper on it. He put a CD on the stereo—J. J. Cale, music from his youth. He poured himself a glass of wine and started eating.
The room became a shade darker as the lights went out in a row of windows in one of the office buildings opposite. He sat in the cone of light thrown by his desk lamp, lonely as the man on the moon. A few feet away from him, Vallotton’s model knelt in front of the salamandre stove; she too was lit by a single light source.
Why had he obscured her lower extremities? Such a virtuoso draftsman and practiced anatomist as Vallotton? Was the author of his catalogue raisonnée, Marina Ducrey, right that it was a reference to the Cycladic idols from 2000 BC? And that it preempted Man Ray’s Le Violin d’Ingres, the phallic female torso with f-shaped violin holes superimposed?
J. J. Cale’s soft, husky voice sang “After Midnight.” Adrian fished through his salad, removing the radishes. He didn’t like radishes, they made him burp. He had missed the opportunity, some time years ago, to tell Frau Hauser this. Since then he had been finding more or less imaginative ways of making radishes disappear. Sometimes he suspected Frau Hauser had known for years and was tormenting him pedagogically so he would one day pluck up the courage to tell her.
His thoughts wandered to his strange lunch with Rolf Strasser. How had Rolf’s feelings built up like that, without his realizing? Were there other people who felt the same way? How little he knew about his friends. Rolf thought he was supercilious. Saw his politeness as a form of condescension. Found his generosity intolerable. Knew Baier. Had been visiting him for a long while, to paint.