The Stronger Sex

by Hans Werner Kettenbach

  She was watching me, smiling. I realized I’d let my tongue run away with me. She raised one hand and laid it against my cheek. “You’re a remarkable man,” she said.

  Now she had me totally confused again. I stammered, “Oh, I… I only meant to say that’s what your drawing reminded me of.”

  She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

  When she moved away, I saw her eyes with the cloudy grey irises very close to me. The little lines under her eyes were growing deeper and merging together. She was smiling.

  I heard her say, “You’re not going to apologize for thinking such wonderful, crazy thoughts, are you? Onion domes! Attic rooms!” She took me by both shoulders and shook me gently.

  I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly I felt her lips on mine, my lips on hers. I was holding her in my arms. Her lips were soft. Suddenly the idea shot through my head that next moment she would be sucking wildly at my lips, pushing her tongue into my mouth, deep and still deeper, without any inhibition. As if beside herself.

  She did nothing of the kind. She moved her lips slightly; it was a very gentle kiss.

  When she took her lips off mine, I felt that she was reaching behind her with one hand. I opened my eyes. Hers were still closed, but she was groping on the coffee table next to the sofa and behind her with her left hand. She found a small black box that looked like a remote control. She pressed a button and put the box down again, placing her left hand back on my shoulder.

  I heard a faint humming sound that seemed to come from above. Looking up, I saw a pale grey curtain moving sideways below the large skylight. The further it moved, the more diffuse the light became. The big room was in twilight now.

  Her lips sought my mouth.

  Suddenly I thought I knew what was going on: she was darkening the room so that pitiless daylight wouldn’t reveal her age. She wanted to offer me what I’ d seen in my fantasies of her, naked on the deckchair in her garden. But she didn’t want me to see the lines and wrinkles, the slack skin, the brown age marks disfiguring her body.

  I was to see her only vaguely, only in half-light.

  Did she want me to make love to a phantom?

  I moved away from her, sat upright, turned my back to her and rubbed my face. After a while I said, “I’m sorry. I think I must go now.”

  She did not reply. I turned to her. She was not looking at me. For a moment there seemed to be nothing but the humming of the curtain as it moved. She picked up the remote control and switched it off. The curtain stopped.

  I said, “Thank you… for inviting me here. And for… well, thank you anyway.” I was looking for words, but I couldn’t find anything to say.

  I turned away and fled from the studio.

  16

  Before reaching my apartment I slowed down, and when I saw a parking place free, I drove into it. It was just after twelve on a Sunday morning, and the streets were not yet as empty as they would be at lunchtime and just afterwards. A good many people were out with their children, going for a walk, maybe on their way home after church. I didn’t want to put the car in the garage and go home myself yet.

  I’d find deathly silence waiting for me in the apartment. The only sounds to be heard would be the clattering of the pan in which I’d heat up my lunch, the tearing of the sachet, the sound of the dried soup as I tipped it into the pan. The muted click of the fridge door closing when I took out the butter to spread some on a slice of bread.

  I thought of Cilly Klofft. Cilly.

  Was she still sitting on that sofa in the dim light under the curtain? Was she wondering about the reason that had driven me out so abruptly?

  What had I said as I turned away from her? When I so suddenly and rudely turned my back before I left? What kind of explanation of my behaviour had I offered?

  Not even an attempt at an explanation. I’d got something out, the sentence saying I must go, but I hadn’t even adorned it with an “unfortunately”. And I hadn’t given her any reason for my abrupt departure.

  She was too alert not to have noticed that I had taken to flight at the moment when the curtain began veiling the scene. And she was much too intelligent to deceive herself about the connection. True, I had not actually wiped my mouth after removing my lips from hers. But there’d been no need for that with Cilly Klofft.

  She had understood my horror, I was sure of that, horror at the prospect of holding a fake in my arms, a carefully staged illusion. An old woman trying to cling to life in artfully dimmed light. A woman, closer to death than life, wanting to experience the ecstasy of the act of love just once again.

  I had wounded her deeply. I must have hurt her badly, very badly.

  I pictured her sitting on the sofa, leaning a little way forward, head bent, eyes down. Her elbows on her thighs. A small handkerchief crumpled up in her right hand. Now and then she mopped her eyes with it, wanting to catch the tears before they ran down her cheeks and fell.

  She suddenly seemed to me very small.

  Diminished. Shamed. Humiliated.

  When, to make matters even worse, Zichy’s drawings of women appeared before my mind’s eye, I started the engine and moved out of the parking slot. But once again I didn’t like the thought of going back to my apartment, closing the door and hiding away. I drove that way but passed the garage, and took the road to our chambers.

  I’d been there two or three times before on non-working days. I knew, of course, that silence would reign there as well. But it would be different from the silence at home in my apartment. More like the silence you get in a university department at the weekend. Or on a hot summer’s day that positively invites you to go swimming. Not necessarily in a university law department, with hordes of people always milling around, but maybe among medievalists, where I’d been a guest now and then. A silence making you want to read and work.

  The door to the secretaries’ office stood open. I glanced in and thought briefly of Simone and her stiletto heels. But Cilly got in the way. Cilly and the hidden marks of age that I had seen on her body. Well, that I thought I had seen.

  I shook off the horror and turned my mind to making the decisions that ought to help me… help me to do what?

  Assert my client’s autocratic manner and the obstinacy of old age against his former young lover? For Heaven’s sake no, of course not! No: I wanted ideas that would help me to win this unwelcome case and be done with it once and for all, along with everything else involved in it.

  I set to work, and immediately found several rulings confirming the fact that it was suicidal for an employee to threaten an employer, even if the threat consisted only of the employee’s intention to be off work sick. One of the cases concerned a male nurse who had quarrelled with his employer’s manager and threatened to get a medical certificate giving him three weeks’ sick leave. The manager fired the male nurse without notice. Later, the man’s doctor did indeed certify that he suffered from a painful tumour on the wrist that in his, the doctor’s, view required an operation. But all the same the provincial employment tribunal in Cologne confirmed that the dismissal was lawful.

  Only after I had read this ruling and was starting on the next did it begin to dawn on me that this was a superfluous task. The legal precedents had already been clear to me on Thursday, three days ago, when I had found the ruling of the Federal employment tribunal in the case of the book-keeper who had said, while on holiday, that she was going to be sick in bed on what should have been her first day back at work. I didn’t need anything else for the time being, unless I wanted to add these further precedents to my response to Katharina Fuchs’s bill of complaint. But that could wait.

  I undoubtedly had more important things to do.

  And very likely I could do or not do whatever I wanted; it would be no use, because I faced insuperable barriers in the Klofft case.

  My fundamental problem was the client himself. That was clear to me at this point without any shadow of doubt: I might be sure that Cilly Klofft had correctly
heard and understood the threat made by Katharina Fuchs to her employer – but I couldn’t exploit information gained by devious means in court. As long as Klofft did not give it to me himself, my hands were tied. And obviously he was keeping it to himself, and intended it to stay that way. He hadn’t even mentioned it in his written notice of dismissal to Frau Fuchs.

  So at the most I could bring that fact in only at a later stage. For instance, in examination by the judge I could ask Frau Fuchs about it as a suspicion, so to speak, if she were under interrogation as one of the parties to the case. But if Klofft himself did not like that, he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to disassociate himself from me.

  I couldn’t believe he had forgotten that threat of sudden illness, if it had really been made, or that he had underestimated its significance. But he had let it go by the board, God knows why. I understood the man less and less, and his ideas and feelings too. This case was getting harder to handle and more repulsive the further I went into it.

  Repulsive? Yes, that too, at least if I believed Cilly Klofft. A garbage heap of unpleasantness and obscenities. And some of them were surely relevant to my case. However, I was even more dependent on speculation here than with that fateful illness. And even if Cilly were to overcome her distaste and tell me the “rather unpleasant” things that she had overheard – I would have obtained that information too by inadmissible means, and I couldn’t use it in court.

  Unless one of the two concerned were to testify to it. However, I could probably exclude any idea that Klofft would talk about the scene himself. If one of the couple had been involved in such an act unwillingly, it certainly wasn’t him. She could hardly have raped him.

  What about Katharina Fuchs? Of course as one of the parties in the case she could be interrogated by the tribunal, but that very fact gave me more reason for fear than hope. Klofft – if I had understood his wife correctly and thought her credible, which I did – had demanded sex from Katharina Fuchs when she came to ask him for time off. So my assumption that he had offered to do some kind of tit-for-tat deal with her was not so wide of the mark. Be nice to me just once more – or a given number of times – and then you can have your holiday.

  But if that was so, and Katharina Fuchs came out with it in court, I could wave goodbye to my case. I’d be rid of it, and of all conceivable complications of the labour laws, if only because if it came to that point Klofft didn’t need an aspiring young man like me, he’d need a wily defence lawyer. It probably wasn’t charges of physical sexual coercion that he’d have to answer, since extreme violence or danger to life and limb had presumably not been involved, but he would certainly have been exerting massive psychological coercion, let alone committing other and subtler offences that I couldn’t immediately call to mind.

  Suddenly I saw Klofft before my mind’s eye.

  I saw him sitting at his open balcony door, lips closed, jaws working as if he had something between his teeth. After a while he looked at the ashtray standing in front of him, put out his hand, picked up the cigarillo lying on the rim of the ashtray and stubbed it out. A few sparks scattered. I stared at the glowing tip, spellbound. The hand that he held in the air began to shake. He withdrew it and put it on the arm of his chair, clutching the arm.

  In this scene, as I imagined it, nothing reminded me of Herbert Klofft the entrepreneur who hired and fired his staff as he thought fit, or Klofft the husband who tried treating his wife as if she were subject to him, a person of lesser importance, or of Klofft the macho man appointing a young woman in order to make her his mistress, or even of the pasha hiring a Polish household help, selecting her for her physical attributes and groping her whenever the fancy took him.

  Instead I saw a sick old man whose body refused to serve him any more. He sat there a picture of misery, too weak to pick up his cigarillo and carry it to his mouth, inhale deeply as he wanted to do.

  Was he sorry, maybe for the first time, for what he had done? Did he confess to himself, if to no one else, that he feared the consequences? Did that fear suddenly, isolated as he was, now become fear of anything and everything?

  Was he afraid of evening, of the sunset? Of the night that would move inexorably in on him? Of the voice that would call from afar, but then come closer and closer, the voice that only he and no one else could hear?

  Olga, I thought, had probably gone home.

  It would be very quiet in the house, deadly silent in that room above the lush green garden full of sap and strength.

  Wasn’t Cilly back yet?

  Was he beginning to wonder, for maybe the umpteenth time, what she did all day and every day in her studio? Cilly and some whippersnapper with his cheese-white prick. In the studio or elsewhere. In a secret apartment, maybe. An apartment he had never seen and never would see. Or what she and that other man were doing in her bedroom behind the studio. Or on the sofa in the studio itself, after she had closed the broad grey curtain under the skylight.

  How might he be feeling if he thought such things, imagined such scenes? Wouldn’t the ideas, the images that began to proliferate in his mind and couldn’t be turned off or driven out, torment him all the time? Wouldn’t they become unbearable?

  How could he be feeling, a man no longer capable of getting about on his own two feet, of travelling, of seeing that his orders were carried out? The skirt-chaser who couldn’t even do it on his own preserves any more, who didn’t know whether and when his wife was deceiving him? The man of action chained to his chair, with his pathetic walking frame on wheels.

  I startled myself by bringing my hand down suddenly on the papers in front of me and sweeping them off the desk. After a while, during which I suddenly heard myself breathing hard, I got up and collected them again. I put them into my file on the Klofft case, closed it and left my office.

  At the door of the secretaries’ office I stopped for a moment and looked in. Then I drove through the now quiet city to Frauke’s apartment.

  On the way I was on the point of turning back a few times. I was afraid of the unfriendly rejection I could probably expect if she was in.

  And I was even more afraid of not seeing her. Because she had a date right through the middle of the day. Or she was seeing other people. Or she was out with someone else.

  I pressed the bell and quickly took my fingers away as if I’d burnt myself. I was afraid I might have pressed it for too long.

  It was some time before the intercom crackled, and I heard Frauke’s cool voice. “Yes, who is it?”

  “It’s me. Alex.”

  Another few seconds passed. But then the door opener buzzed.

  She had obviously been lying on the sofa with the weekend papers scattered over it, the table and the floor. She was barefoot and wearing a dressing gown. Her hair was untidy. It looked as if she’d fallen asleep over the papers.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked.

  “I had a good breakfast, that will do me.”

  “Want a coffee?”

  As I drank my coffee, she threw the newspapers off the sofa, stretched out and lay down on it, close to the back.

  I took off my shoes and snuggled down beside her.

  17

  On Monday I came back from court around two p.m. Simone gave the thumbs-up sign and pointed over her shoulder at Hochkeppel’s room.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Is he still here?”

  “His wife probably cooked too well out in the forest.” She laughed. “Or they quarrelled. Anyway, he didn’t go home for lunch. Only down to the Italian. He was back half an hour later.”

  “Right. Well, I think I’ll go to the Italian myself.”

  “I don’t think you will.” She bent her head slightly and raised her eyebrows. “He wants a word with you at once.”

  “What’s the idea of that? And why?”

  “No idea. Anyway, I’m not to let you go for lunch now. You’re to see him first, please!”

  I turned away angrily, went to my office to put my briefcase down, changed
my mind and marched to Hochkeppel’s sound-proofed door with the case.

  “Take it easy!” said Simone. “Like me to get you something up from the Italian?” She looked at her watch. “There’ll still be time.”

  I hesitated and then said, “Yes, please. Polpettine with macaroni. Wait a minute, I’ll give you the money.”

  “No need, I’ll lend it to you. Off you go, quick!”

  Hochkeppel had a file in front of him, but he immediately closed it and pushed it away when I came in. “Well, how did your morning go?”

  “Could have been worse, thanks.” I began telling him about the three meetings I’d had, but he waved them away. “Never mind that, unless something special happened.”

  “No, nothing special.” I said no more.

  He hesitated, and then said, “Anything new about Klofft?” He seemed to want to add something. I waited, looking enquiringly at him. He said, “Frau Fuchs hasn’t filed her bill of complaint yet?”

  “No. That is, I haven’t looked at my post yet today.” I paused and then said, “Simone told me I was to go straight to see you.”

  “Well… I didn’t mean it quite so literally!”

  I said, “Klofft did promise to call me as soon as he’d seen the exact charges. Or don’t you think he can be relied on?”

  “Oh yes, he’ll call you all right. It’s in his own interests.” He hesitated again. Then he said, “No, I only meant… it could have been that he’d been in touch with you lately.”

  Suddenly I thought I saw why he was beating about the bush like this. He’d got wind of the fact that I had been at the Kloffts’ house on Saturday – I had no idea how, but it looked as if he wanted to question me about that.

  I said, “Yes, in fact he has.”

  “Oh?” He looked at me through his tinted glasses, but said no more.

  I said, “He called me on Saturday morning and asked if I’d like a game of chess with him.”