The Stronger Sex

by Hans Werner Kettenbach

  After a pause she said, without looking at me, “And I know more, too. My bedroom is next to his study, you know the one. The room where he spends the day.” Another pause, and then she added, “And on the day she came to see him… you remember, the day when Pauly sent her to him because he didn’t want to decide whether to give her a week off on his own responsibility… the weather was dry and rather hot.”

  She looked back at me. “And his study and my bedroom are connected by the balcony. It runs all the way along the garden side of the house.”

  I returned her glance. Certain things were becoming clear now. “The doors to the balcony were open? And you… overheard the conversation he was having with her? Or anyway part of it?”

  She replied, “Do you know what a normal person would hardly understand? At least, what I wouldn’t understand if I didn’t know him inside out.” She leaned slightly forward. “He turned her out like a mangy dog, he threw the book at her… but he’s still, how can I put it, randy for her, that’s it. Wants to have her at his disposal. At least he acted as if he’d cancel everything he did if she would just… I mean, just once more…”

  She stopped, shaking her head.

  After a small pause I asked, “You mean he wanted sex with her?”

  She said, “As you may well believe, I don’t really care for the woman much. But I can understand her extremely well. I’d use any method that came to hand myself against a man who tried to humiliate me like that. Threatening him would be the least of it. I’d threaten him, oh yes, and I’d deceive him and betray him until he was overwhelmed by it all.” She was breathing hard. Then she said, “I can understand her very well.”

  An alarm bell had started ringing in my mind. I let a few seconds pass, and then I asked, “She threatened him? In their conversation when she was asking him for a week off work?”

  She was looking angry. “So? What about it?”

  I said, “Well… one could perhaps…”

  Suddenly the door was opened. It swung aside and Klofft appeared in the doorway, supported by a walking frame on four wheels, one of those aids for the disabled that also have a seat and a shopping basket fitted. He inspected the scene with his brows drawn together. Then he said to her, “Come with me, would you?”

  He set out laboriously on his way back, turning once and glancing at me. “This will take some time!”

  He disappeared. He had left the door open.

  I looked at my watch. “Oh my God, high time I left anyway.”

  “A pity,” she said.

  I stood up. She took a step toward me, put her mouth close to my ear and said in a low voice, “I’ll call you.” I could smell her perfume.

  9

  I was part of a conspiracy. Conspiracy? Yes, a tacit agreement behind my client’s back! And it was my fault. I had got myself involved in this – let’s call it this commitment.

  I’d be well advised not to let Hochkeppel know. And he mustn’t so much as guess that a curious and unsettling excitement by now dominated my dealings with Cilly Klofft.

  No, not just “by now”. I’d been aware of that… that excitement ever since I first met her. Excitement, yes, that’s the word for it.

  And even more than that: it was possible that I was wrong, but I thought her relationship to me had become more heavily charged in just the same way as mine to her.

  Hell, I could have been looking at another and less impossible variety of such a relationship! It was imaginable, for instance, that this old – well, ageing – woman had simply fallen for me, her feelings flickering up once more, and it would have been normal for me to react with instinctive repulsion, with a kind of shudder, with horror.

  Or perhaps it could have been the other way round. Some kind of mental or physical disturbance, God knows what, could have affected me with a… an abnormal liking for this… for women in their fading years, and this time she would have been the one to keep a clear head, an eye for the natural order of things, and put me in my place, perhaps gently, perhaps, and not surprisingly, with mockery and derision.

  But it was not like that, either one way or the other. Since we first met, I had been wanting to see her again, see her in front of me, talk to her. Touch her? Yes, of course, that too, for God’s sake! And I was sure it had been the same for her.

  As I turned into the expressway, I remembered a book that Frauke keeps among her handsome volumes of art books, a small soft-cover book that she picked up once in an antiquarian bookseller’s and bought. Its pages are already coming loose from the binding. It contains forty drawings by the Hungarian painter Mihály Count Zichy, appointed court painter to the Tsar of Russia in 1859. Erotic drawings, strictly speaking the pornography of the nineteenth century, but now considered works of art, so Frauke told me.

  One of these drawings shows a view into a studio. On a high couch in front of the easel in the background a little old woman is not lying down but crouching. Seen in profile, her wrinkled face has fallen in around a toothless mouth, she wears a headscarf, blouse and jacket, her long skirt is hoisted up to her belly, her stockinged legs are bent. The painter stands between her legs, obviously about to copulate with her, his trousers down, his buttocks bare, holding his long-stemmed pipe in his left hand so that he can go on smoking as soon as he has finished.

  It’s not a scene of rape, not by any means. As he goes about his performance, the artist looks down with a smile at the old woman, who has her eyes closed, her arms clasped round his back, her feet crossed over his buttocks to draw him to her. No, not smiling, he is grinning. She has brought him fresh vegetables, and as he happened to be feeling randy, he’s doing her a favour and giving himself release at the same time, two birds with one stone.

  I disliked the picture very much, and I said so to Frauke, but she reacted brusquely, as she sometimes does. She said if I was looking for subjects suggesting sexual misconduct that would now be criminal, there were far more suitable specimens than this in the book. And so there are: an old man who has undressed a little girl and is fingering her, a matron in a pleated cap enthusiastically fellating a boy, another woman groping purposefully under the clothes of a child of around two, this one brazenly captioned, “Afin que l’enfant ne pleure.”

  Frauke said I shouldn’t forget that the book was entitled Love, or more precisely Ah, Love! Art, she pointed out, was not as pure-minded as the Civil Code, and life and love most certainly were not.

  Love?

  Yes, love, what else? she said. And she directed me to the quote from Kurt Tucholsky printed on the back cover, almost an ad for the Lost and Found column. He too had owned this collection of pictures by Zichy, and had often picked the book up, and he thought that when he moved to Paris to be correspondent for the Vossische Zeitung his copy had been stolen, along with other items that he treasured. He mourned for the book because it had reminded him of the time when he was still young and full of curiosity, the time before “one cautious eye was always watching when the other eye lit up”.

  I was astonished. Frauke of all people acting as if such heated, uninhibited, destructively irresponsible desires were nothing out of the ordinary? Frauke, who is often as cold as a fish!

  Frauke and the famous Count Zichy. And the even more famous Kurt Tucholsky, too. All of them honest witnesses, of course. But none of them was any help with my problem.

  That problem, which to cap it all was also a professional one, lay in the fact that on the one hand I was in danger, at the very least, of transgressing against my duties as a lawyer if I discussed my client’s case, unknown to him, with his wife, who was certainly not well disposed toward him – but on the other hand I was apparently not going to get the information that I needed to represent his interests properly from my client himself, only from his wife.

  Why hasn’t he told me, I wondered, that Katharina Fuchs threatened him? At least, that was what I understood Cilly Klofft to mean. When she was eavesdropping on the conversation between the two of them, she obviously heard his e
mployee Frau Fuchs lose her temper and threaten him. Indeed, Cilly actually approved of that, as she implied by telling me that it was fair to use any method that came to hand against a man like Klofft – and a threat would be the least of those methods.

  But if the culmination of the scene had really been a threat from Frau Fuchs, why did he not only keep it from me in our discussions, but had also failed to mention it in the written notice of dismissal that he sent her?

  And just what had she threatened him with?

  He hadn’t so much as hinted at any such threat so far. I therefore had to assume that he wasn’t prepared to tell me about it. I could wonder about his reasons as long as I liked, not much would come of that. If Klofft was hushing it up, the truth could, of course, be discovered from the other party to their conversation, i.e. Katharina Fuchs. But as my likely adversary in court, since I was Klofft’s lawyer, she was not someone I could approach. Let alone the fact that she would have been out of her mind to give me ammunition to use against herself.

  So only Cilly Klofft was left.

  Heaven help me.

  When I got back to the office, I was relieved to find that Hochkeppel had already gone home. He had left a message that he was going to spend the weekend out in the forest with his wife. Out in the forest meant in the holiday house that he had bought a number of years ago in the Bergland area, south-west of the city.

  He has a photo on his desk showing him on the veranda of the house, an attractive log cabin, with one hand on his plump wife’s shoulder – she is smiling cheerfully – and the other on the fair hair of a thin, pale girl aged ten or eleven who has obviously been made to pose with the two of them, and who is looking at the camera with a serious expression.

  This grave little girl, his granddaughter, moved with her parents to Unna some time ago when her father was appointed principal of a high school there. So when Hochkeppel goes out to the forest, I always picture him alone on that veranda, stretched out in a deckchair, an open book or a newspaper over his face, snoring gently while the clatter of china comes from inside the house as his plump wife, smiling brightly, sets the supper table.

  Simone and Frau Enke were both still at work. I got myself a coffee and started looking for a certain magic spell – a judicial ruling of which I’d been reminded in talking to Cilly Klofft. It might help me and my client out of the fix we were in. It didn’t take me long to find it.

  First, however, I strayed into a ruling delivered in Düsseldorf, at the provincial employment tribunal of the state of North-Rhine-Westphalia, setting out in depth the reasons that were or were not admissible as grounds for dismissal without notice. I was able to imagine, in graphic detail, the key scene of the case which had led to the lodging of an appeal with the Düsseldorf tribunal. A haulage entrepreneur had gone to collect one of his trucks from its driver, who was to blame for the temporary seizure of the vehicle in France. When the entrepreneur and his wife got into the driver’s cab and were about to move away, the driver had climbed up to the door of the vehicle, threatening his boss with the words, “Get out of there so as I can smash your face in!” and adding, for good measure, “I’ll beat you to a pulp!”

  The entrepreneur had dismissed the driver on the spot, the driver had laid charges of unlawful dismissal with the local employment tribunal and the local tribunal had declared the dismissal invalid. The entrepreneur, in his own turn, had appealed to the higher authority of the state tribunal against this verdict.

  The point at issue in the court of first instance, the local employment tribunal, was whether, before he was threatened, the entrepreneur had described the driver and the driver’s wife, who was also present, as “You anti-social scum!” In the ruling of the judge at the tribunal, other forceful terms with possible relevance to the dismissal were quoted and discussed, for instance, “I’ll break your nose for you”, “arrogant bastard” and “stupid sod”. On the basis of its research and experience, the employment tribunal had come to the conclusion that threats and abuse of this nature could be regarded as “colloquial language of a nature customary in that line of business”.

  It was true that the provincial employment tribunal found itself unable to endorse this view, but in case of any doubt it believed the driver’s wife rather than the entrepreneur’s wife. The latter had got muddled up in her evidence, while the driver’s wife said clearly that her husband had not threatened his boss until after his boss had described the pair of them as anti-social scum – so, according to the appeal court, the threat had been uttered in reaction to this insult and was on a similar level, and consequently the incident as a whole did not provide “grounds for dismissal as specified in i. S. v. § 626 Paragraph 1” of the Civil Code.

  It was possible that Frau Fuchs had called Herr Klofft a stupid sod and threatened to smash his face in, but the provincial employment tribunal had also considered the dismissal without notice of the truck driver invalid and rejected the appeal. The case was entertaining, but obviously no use as a precedent for my purposes. I was being paid for doing the reverse of the points it raised, for helping the employer, that hot-tempered brute Klofft, to make his dismissal of his ex-lover incontestable in retrospect.

  A little later, however, I did find a dispute that had gone all the way to the Federal employment tribunal, and I could draw on it. A book-keeper, a woman aged twenty-eight, had gone on holiday to Greece for two weeks, and two days before the end of that time had phoned the appropriate person in her firm applying for two days extra. Her request had been turned down, whereupon the book-keeper had said she might fall sick, and she had not been back at work when she was supposed to turn up. Later she produced a medical certificate from a foreign doctor, prescribing her seven days’ bed rest at the resort where she was staying for menorrhagia, excessive bleeding during her period.

  By then, however, the firm employing her had dismissed her without notice. In reply to the charge brought by the book-keeper, the local employment tribunal had declared that dismissal unlawful too. The firm had appealed, and its appeal was thrown out by the provincial employment tribunal. The firm was not giving up, but lodged an appeal with the Federal employment tribunal. The Federal tribunal decided that there should be a new hearing and a new ruling, and threw the case back to the provincial tribunal. In fact the Federal judges quashed the original ruling of the appeal court only because of some errors of form, but they also said that a series of points relevant to the content of the case should be considered by the provincial employment tribunal in coming to its new conclusions.

  For instance, the Federal judges thought that an employee who went off work sick if a request for more leave was disallowed was not acting in line with his or her “contractual duty to the employer”, and was thus providing a good reason for dismissal without notice. It was not even necessary for the employee expressly to threaten to be sick; it was enough for “a sensible third party” to be able to “evaluate the mere mention of sickness as a clear indication that if longer leave is disallowed a medical certificate may follow”.

  After that the judges went into the specific facts of the case. They said that the book-keeper must explain how a prescription of seven days’ bed rest by the foreign doctor could be reconciled with the fact that, only three days after its date, she felt “able to set out on a drive home to Germany lasting several days”.

  They also emphasized the “great value as evidence” of a medical certificate, but expressed severe doubt of whether the certification by a foreign doctor complied with “the terms of German employment laws and social legislation”, and whether the circumstantial evidence assembled by the defendant – the company employing the book-keeper – did not allow conclusions to be drawn about “abuse of the employment laws by the plaintiff”.

  There was some reason to suppose that in the dispute between Frau Fuchs and Herbert Klofft we could cite this case, and that I had dug up a reasonably strong argument in my client’s favour. Although I still couldn’t be sure of that.

&
nbsp; For I did not know what Katharina Fuchs had threatened her boss with. Probably she had no heavier artillery than the book-keeper, but simply announced that she was going to be off work sick if Klofft didn’t give her the week’s holiday she wanted. And according to the Federal employment tribunal that was indeed sufficient grounds for dismissal without notice.

  I also assumed that what Cilly Klofft had overheard was exactly that threat, and it was the information she would have given me if I had asked. But before I could put the question, her husband had interrupted our tête-à-tête.

  That impossible, rough-spoken man again!

  Should I call her to make sure?

  It was a great temptation. But I also realized that Klofft’s pent-up anger with me could be taken out on her if I was so quick to ring again. Maybe he might pick up the phone himself this time.

  I sat there for some time, deep in my own thoughts. My own thoughts and feelings, yes, those too. I jumped when there was a knock at my door. Simone came in with a few provisional files that I was to sign and return to Frau Enke. She put them down on the corner of my desk and said goodbye for the weekend.

  She was wearing a floaty yellow summer dress and what looked like new red shoes, or rather sandals with stiletto heels and little straps, fastened around her bare legs with more little straps. When she had gone out, I remembered Cilly Klofft hinting that her husband had still wanted sex with Frau Fuchs.

  She had said he was still “randy” for his employee in spite of the fact that she had broken the relationship off. And she hadn’t said no when I asked whether he had demanded sex from Frau Fuchs when she was asking for time off. Instead, Cilly Klofft had replied that she herself would have used any method that came to hand against a man who tried to humiliate her like that.

  Had that repulsive creature suggested some kind of barter with his ex-lover? Just once more and you can go on leave? Or just ten times more, beginning now, on the spot, and the other nine when you come back? Once a week or however it might turn out?