The Stronger Sex

by Hans Werner Kettenbach

  Frauke said, “Are you going to tell me you like those sandals of hers?”

  I muttered, “Why not?”

  “Oh, I ask you!” said Frauke. “Simone can’t wear shoes like that, not with her fat legs.”

  I thought that this entirely undeserved criticism deserved an answer, but I let it go, so as not to endanger our truce. And the night passed very pleasantly. Frauke seemed to need to make up for lost time, which among other things gave me the pleasing certitude that during the days when I’d been so short of time she had not fallen for some other man.

  Just in case the previous evening had left a trace of annoyance behind, I got up early, while Frauke was still asleep with the sheet over her face, I laid the breakfast table and even went out to the baker’s to buy fresh rolls and two chocolate doughnuts.

  The next few days went very well too. Now and then Frauke seemed surprised when I buried my hand lovingly in her hair or devoted myself with great intensity to exploring her skin with my nose, bit by bit, stroking and kissing it. She let me do as I wanted. In return I didn’t reject any of her ideas for leisure activities.

  I accompanied her to a concert given by a young Australian string quartet that had already had considerable success on its present European tour, its first, although its sound struck me as a little penetrating, not to say shrill. I went to another private showing of an art exhibition, at which, however, Cilly did not appear, and we attended the farewell performance in the city of a tenor who was to appear at Bayreuth and then had an engagement at the Met in New York. He was a fat little man with an incipient paunch and a throat like a road roller, and his hefty voice got increasingly on my nerves over the course of three hours.

  On Friday evening we came back to my place after the opera. In the night I suddenly woke. I thought I had heard the telephone while I was half asleep. Frauke was lying beside me sleeping peacefully on her stomach, holding the pillow in both arms and occasionally making a little lip-smacking sound. I looked at the clock. It was quarter to four.

  Cilly? Not likely. For a while I listened, but the phone didn’t ring. I heard the far-away sound of a train crossing the railway bridge; it seemed to have a great many carriages. Long-distance, probably. Maybe en route for Istanbul. Istanbul Sirkeci. To Vienna by way of Passau, then down through the Balkans by way of Sofia. Our Turkish countrymen visiting their native land, with cases and baskets and pillowcases stuffed full. They would get out at Istanbul Sirkeci, the old central station where the Orient Express once terminated.

  How long would the journey take them? I thought I had read somewhere that the train ride to Istanbul lasted two days and two nights. But if so would the train set out in the middle of the night? And perhaps arrive in the middle of the night? No, it would probably start in the morning and arrive in the morning two days later. The train I’d heard must be going somewhere else.

  I spent some time thinking of possible destinations to which my train might have been bound. I though of Kiev, where the train could have gone on a southerly route by way of Cracow and Lemberg, and pictured the great gate and the golden domes. Then I conjured up Vilnius, and suddenly, on a dusty unmade road between wooden fences, front gardens and low-built houses, I came face to face with Cilly. She was walking slowly toward me, but she didn’t see me, she was looking at the front gardens to right and left of her where the heads of the flowers were drooping.

  But maybe there were no trains going direct to Kiev or Vilnius.

  I listened for the phone again, but it didn’t ring.

  That Saturday morning, while Frauke was singing in the bathroom, I suddenly thought of Cilly yet again. I had sent her back the newspaper cuttings with the two articles, as I’d promised, after copying them for myself, but I ought to have called after that to ask when she would have time to discuss the articles with me. As I made coffee and laid the table for breakfast, I felt heat suddenly rise to my head – I was blushing.

  It was also an omission on my part that I hadn’t been in touch with Klofft since last Monday. Of course, if he wanted another game of chess, he could have called me, and if I’d been able to fit it in, I would have gone out there, but that struck me as a feeble excuse. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to pester me.

  How often had he been alone in his house this week, brooding on his situation? How often had he sat there looking at the view of the green garden, of the world now closed to him for ever, wondering whether to call me? Whether to ask for my company in his isolation?

  I put the coffee into the pot, placed the pot on the table and stood there for a moment. Call Klofft? Or call Cilly first? Or before that try preparing Frauke for the fact that I must put my mind to the Klofft case again this weekend? It would have been rather embarrassing to be on the phone to one of the Kloffts if Frauke suddenly came out of the bathroom.

  Suddenly it struck me that I might not be able to reach Cilly. Perhaps she had gone to her studio again, as she had the Saturday before. I didn’t know her phone number there. And she hadn’t given me the number of her mobile. I hadn’t asked for it. That would have reinforced my sense that I’d reluctantly entered into a conspiracy.

  Well, there it was.

  But Frauke had the studio phone number. She had phoned it to ask whether and when Cilly was going to the Documenta. Although really, of course, to find out whether I was having a tête-à-tête with Cilly at that discreet place. Or so I thought, anyway. I went to the bathroom door and listened. Frauke had gone over to soul music and was singing with a heavy tremolo. I quickly went back to the bedroom, turned once more to fetch my notebook from the desk, listened to the sounds in the bathroom again, returned to the bedroom and looked around.

  Yes, there was Frauke’s bag. I glanced over my shoulder, picked up the bag and opened it. Frauke’s organizer was in a side pocket. I took it out and tapped in Klofft. It was ridiculous, but my fingers were trembling.

  The display flickered, but then it said No entry. How could that be possible? Cilly had told me that Frauke had called her at the studio.

  Had Frauke stored the number under a password? But why would she have done that? She knew Cilly; it wasn’t something she had to hush up.

  I was going to put the organizer back, feeling hot under the collar at my breach of Frauke’s confidence, when I had another idea. Maybe Frauke knew Cilly as a painter under her maiden name. Had she stuck to it professionally because she was proud of what she had already achieved before her marriage?

  I went to the bedroom door and listened to the sounds in the bathroom again. Frauke seemed to have stopped singing. Was that the hair dryer I could hear?

  Damn it – what had Cilly’s maiden name been?

  The alliteration gave it to me: Gherkin Gehrke. I tapped in Gehrke, and the display showed Gehrke, Cilly, and a landline number that I knew. It was the number of the Klofft household. There was also a mobile number beside it. I wrote the mobile number in my notebook, switched off the organizer, stuffed it back into the side pocket of Frauke’s bag, took a quick look to reassure myself that the inside of the bag looked the same as before, and put it down in the place beside the bed where I had found it.

  I had just reached my desk to put the notebook down when I heard the bathroom door open. Frauke called, “Alex?”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a little red cosmetics case in my bag. Could you bring it over here?”

  “Of course.”

  “The bag’s on the floor beside the bed.”

  “Yes, madam!”

  A curiously good feeling came over me. If Frauke would ask me to look for something in her bag, she trusted me. I felt almost as if, by asking for her cosmetics case, she was sanctioning what I had just done.

  An odd sort of morality, fitting itself so accommodatingly to the facts. Was that something peculiar to my own conscience, or were other people made that way as well?

  After breakfast Frauke asked, “Do you have anything planned for today?”

  I said no, though I wanted to look
at a few files, old files that interested me. Earlier cases of Hochkeppel’s that he had recommended me to study. I pointed to the desk on which the stack of files lay. I was fairly sure she wouldn’t look inside them.

  These gems regularly got left by the wayside during the week, I said, because I usually didn’t want to read dusty old cases in the evenings.

  Frauke laughed. She asked whether I couldn’t just tell Hochkeppel some time that I’d read it all with great interest and learnt something from it, and then I’d be rid of all that stuff.

  I said yes, it might well come to that in the long run. Although this weekend I thought it was possible Klofft would call me again. It was Saturday; maybe he felt like another game of chess.

  Frauke contented herself with an indifferent murmur. She didn’t ask again whether I had nothing better to do on a Saturday than play chess, nor did she ask what was so special about the case that I had to visit that old fogey even at the weekend.

  I took Frauke home. As we parted, she said we could call each other later and see if there was anything we felt like doing together.

  Had the last few days – nearly four of them now – when we’d spent our free time with each other seemed a little too much for her?

  I was thinking about that as I turned the corner and drew up by the kerb. But after a moment I took out my notebook after all and rang Cilly’s mobile.

  She sounded slightly surprised when she answered. I said, “Hello, Alex here. Good morning.”

  “Oh.” She audibly drew breath.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you at work?”

  “No, no! I… haven’t really begun yet.” She hesitated for a moment and then asked, “How did you know I’m here? At the studio?”

  “I worked it out.”

  She laughed. “And where did you get the phone number?” After a little pause she added, “Frauke Leisner won’t have given it to you. Or so I assume.”

  “No, I… I’d rather keep that to myself, if you don’t mind.”

  She didn’t let it drop at once. “And suppose I do mind?” Then she laughed again. “No, no, don’t worry! I’m not about to interrogate you. We all need our little secrets, don’t we?”

  I hesitated. “I’m not sure that one can say that.”

  “Yes, one can.” She suddenly sounded very decided, but she didn’t seem to want to continue this conversation. “Well, what can I do for you?”

  I said, “I really only wanted to know how you are. And… and ask when you’d have the time and inclination to discuss those two articles with me. The one about Tippi Hedren and the one—”

  She interrupted me. “Yes, yes, I know. The one about Albright and his Ida.”

  “That’s how we left it.”

  “Of course.” She laughed. “I wouldn’t have expected you to come back to that subject.”

  “But that’s what we… I mean…”

  “You’re a surprising young man,” she said.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. For a moment a plain “Why?” was on the tip of my tongue, but that would have sounded too silly.

  Before the silence could become embarrassing, she said, “When would you have time? And inclination, of course. Today, maybe?”

  “Let me see… yes, I think I could manage today.” A little reserve seemed to me necessary in case she might think I couldn’t wait to see her in her studio again. I said, “I shouldn’t think it will take us hours.”

  She asked laconically, her tone dry, “Right away?”

  I involuntarily swallowed. Then I said, “Fine. I’ll be on my way. I could be with you in about a quarter of an hour. Would that be too early?”

  “No, no, go ahead.” And she finished the call.

  I sat there without moving for a moment. My pulse was beating loud and hard, and I had the feeling that I couldn’t move my legs. What the hell was that all about?

  As I was driving there, it struck me that I ought at least to take her a few flowers. What would my father have recommended in such a situation? I wasn’t sure. But I found a florist’s.

  The salesgirl began showing me the lavish display on offer and giving me a little professional lecture on each species, but I said, after looking at the time, that I was in rather a hurry, and please would she just make me up a bouquet of the yellow roses.

  “Of course. How many would you like?”

  For God’s sake, why couldn’t the girl decide that for herself? “Thirteen. No! Not thirteen… fifteen.”

  When I got out of the car with my fifteen long-stemmed yellow roses in the crook of my arm – their cellophane wrapping was tied with a yellow ribbon – I glanced up at the attic storey of the former fitters’ workshop. If there really was an old lady still living up there after Klofft had sold the rest of the premises, and she wanted to do kind Herr Klofft a favour, then she would certainly have something to tell her landlord today.

  28

  Cilly was standing in the open doorway wearing her painter’s smock. I wondered whether she took it from one studio to the other or had several. This one, anyway, was flecked with paint just like the one I had seen at the Kloffts’ house. And it too left her brown knees bare.

  “Oh,” she said, “are those Mabella roses? And so many of them!” She took the bouquet from me.

  “Have I done something wrong?” I asked a little uncertainly.

  “Oh, please!” She closed the door behind me and went ahead. “I’m not used to such gallantry, that’s all! I can tell you, when one of my old friends or a colleague comes to see me, he’s hardly inside the door before asking, ‘Do you have a shot of spirits in the place? Or a glass of red wine?’ They usually even forget to say good day. Oh!” She stopped, turned to me and kissed me on the cheek. “Good day, Alex!”

  “Good day, Cilly.”

  She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “A first, isn’t it?” Then she put the roses on the table and undid the cellophane. “Do sit down. And would you like something to drink? A shot of spirits? A glass of red wine?”

  “No thank you, I’m driving.”

  “Oh yes, so you are.”

  I looked around. On a table by the window I saw a large sketchpad and several loose sheets of paper beside it. I asked, “May I look?”

  She looked up only briefly from the roses. “Yes, if you like.”

  I went over to the table. They were all sketches of a man’s head. Head and shoulders, the loose sheets and the one she had been working on, the top sheet of the sketchpad. Charcoal sketches of a man, hair neat and tidy, wearing a suit and tie.

  The sketches were all drawn in rough outline, the proportions sometimes slightly distorted, lines going beyond the contours of the head here and there. But there was no mistaking the fact that my head was the model for all of them.

  On the last sketch, the one still on the pad, the man’s eyes were drawn in detail. He was looking at the viewer with a sceptical, no, a distrustful expression.

  “Do I really look like that?” I asked.

  “As I see you, yes. Well, sometimes you look like that.” She turned away and took the roses and their cellophane wrapping into the kitchen. She stopped in the doorway and turned back, smiling. “It’s the lawyer looking at the viewer then, I think. You don’t always look the same.” She disappeared into the kitchen.

  I glanced at the sketches again. What did she mean? How did I look to her when I wasn’t looking like a lawyer?

  I went over to the corner where the sofa and chairs stood, hesitated for a moment and then sat down in an armchair. After a moment I strained my ears for sounds from the kitchen. I heard the snip-snap of scissors as she trimmed the rose stems. I quickly got up and moved to the sofa where I had been sitting last time, on my first visit to this bewitched place.

  Bewitched? What did I mean? What was the matter with me, for God’s sake? I heard my heart beating fast and loud. I took a few deep breaths.

  She came back with the flowers in a vase, held it out and looked at the roses that she had arrang
ed informally. “Do look, aren’t they lovely? Yes, they’re Mabella roses.” She put the vase down to one side of the table and dried her hands on her smock. “Thank you so much, that was very, very thoughtful of you.”

  I muttered something inarticulate. She sat down in a chair opposite me, placed both hands on her thighs and looked at the flowers, smiling. I was afraid my eyes might move down to her knees and the shadowy place between them that the smock didn’t quite hide.

  I cleared my throat and then said, “What do I look like the rest of the time?”

  She looked at me blankly for a moment.

  “When I’m not looking like a lawyer,” I said.

  “Ah, I see!” She laughed, looked down at her lap and then back at me, smiling. “Won’t you have something to drink now after all?”

  “Well… if you do happen to have one of those mini-bottles of champagne like the ones we…”

  “Of course!” She stood up. “There are even a couple chilled.”

  When she went into the kitchen, I thought I saw the curve of her buttocks outlined under the smock.

  She opened the little bottles standing up, poured the champagne, pushed a glass over the table to me and came round the table with the other to clink glasses with me. “Your good health, Alex!” Then she sat down again, not in the chair opposite but in the one on my left.

  She smiled at me. After a while she said, “What do you look like when you’re not looking like a lawyer?”

  “Yes. That would interest me. I didn’t know I had two different faces.”

  “Oh yes, more than two, in fact. Most people do.”

  I smiled. “Which of my faces do you like… more than the others? The legal face?”

  “No, not necessarily. I like the lawyer’s face because it looks so vital and self-confident.” She put her glass down, leaned a little way toward me and let her eyes wander over me. “But there’s another face that I like better. When you show that face I could almost think I’m seeing into your heart. It’s so open, so… forthcoming. Free of any ulterior motive. It’s… sympathetic in the original sense of the word.”