The Stronger Sex

by Hans Werner Kettenbach

  Manderscheidt said, “Sorry, Dr Zabel, but you’ll have to take a taxi back after all. Enjoy the rest of your day.” He caught the eye of his theology student, who had risen and was looking around him rather uncertainly, jerked his thumb at himself and followed the mole out.

  I stayed in the stands a little longer. There was another race to be seen, and several more loving kisses were exchanged by Frau Fuchs and her boyfriend, but then I felt bored, and I left the stands before the Hypo-Bank Grand Prix was announced. I strolled over to the paddock again, where the next set of strong-smelling, high-stepping horses were stalking around in a circle, but the girl was nowhere to be seen. Probably feeding Black Desire an extra carrot or two. Or soaking in a hot bath to relax after her bone-shaking ride.

  Finally it occurred to me that my horse had won, and I had money to collect. I went to the cash desk at the Tote, and a plump, black-haired woman whose fingers were covered with rings paid out six hundred euros. I was so overwhelmed that at first I walked around aimlessly on the wide expanse of the racecourse grounds, over turf, past hedges, through small groups of trees.

  After a while I began to feel I had company. I looked back, and saw two young men whom I had noticed before. They were following me.

  I got close to other members of the public as soon as possible, and then went back to the taxi rank. Had the two men been watching me when I collected my winnings?

  Only in the taxi did another idea occur to me. Had Herbert Klofft hired the couple to teach the randy young dog who was after his wife a lesson? Rough him up a bit, for instance?

  31

  When I got home the light on my answering machine was blinking. I had my hand stretched out to listen to the taped message when I suddenly stopped. Who would this be?

  Nonsense, I thought. Frauke, who else? Had spending time on her own already palled on her?

  Nonsense again. But who?

  Cilly.

  Of course.

  It troubled her to think she had rejected me so harshly. She was sorry almost as soon as I left. She had been afraid that she’d alienated me for ever. That I would never again put my hand on her bare knee, her thigh, close my fingers on her knee. Hadn’t she made me feel repelled by such intimacy?

  I thought about it for a while, but I did not feel repelled. Her thigh had been warm, firm and smooth. I had felt the life in it under my fingers, and in my memory I still did.

  I listened to the message. The tape had recorded neither Frauke nor Cilly; it was the voice of Herbert Klofft. Although I didn’t recognize it at once. He gave his name in more of a croak than words. “Klofft here, Herbert Klofft.” He laughed. “Only old Klofft here.”

  He laughed again, seemed to choke, coughed with difficulty, blew his nose noisily, apparently into a handkerchief, finally got out, faintly, “Sorry, Dr Zabel.” He took a deep breath. “Good morning, Dr Zabel. Herbert Klofft here.” He laughed again, but obviously with more caution. “Well, you’ll have noticed that by now.”

  After a few stertorous breaths, he said carefully, “I wondered how you are. Better than me, I hope.” He laughed. “Me, I’m feeling bloody awful.” A moment’s silence. Then he said, “Oh, nonsense, don’t you believe it. Listen to my wife instead. She’s always saying no one can believe a word I say.”

  He cleared his throat noisily again. Then he said, “Well, you did say maybe we could play chess again before the hearing. It was just an idea.” He cleared his throat again. “How about this morning, for instance? Seems like a good opportunity.” He laughed, nearly fell into another coughing fit. After a moment he said, “All quiet here. Not a soul in the place but me. My wife has gone out, Olga has left. There won’t be anyone else coming, we’d be undisturbed.”

  He said nothing for a moment, as though expecting an answer. Suddenly he said, “Well, like I said, it was just an idea.” He paused again, and then said, “Have a good day, lawyer.” He seemed about to put the phone down, but then he added, “And a nice weekend.”

  Damn. Of course it was my own fault. I hadn’t said no when he asked if we could play chess again some time. I could have said, “I don’t know, but I rather think not. You see, Hochkeppel has been unloading so much work on me that I hardly get to sleep, let alone take any time off. What? Oh, well, I wouldn’t call him a slave-driver. But he certainly keeps one’s nose to the grindstone.”

  However, I hadn’t said that. So I could hardly be surprised that after a week he was taking me up on the chess idea. Embarrassing for me, but entirely understandable.

  And he really did not sound well. Was that cough a new symptom of his progressive illness? Did he feel it eating away at him, affecting his brain and his muscles? Cilly out, Olga not there either. And not another soul likely to call?

  Was he sitting there alone in his armchair at the open balcony door? Had fear overcome him in his house, where it was silent as the grave? Panic in the face of Death gently holding out a bony hand to him?

  Damn it. Bloody hell. I didn’t want to go out there. Bury myself in that house beside him. Watch the spasmodic twitching of his muscles. Be there when he pissed in his trousers, what else? Was I to clean him up and dry him because there was no one else looking after him?

  I deleted the message and called Frauke’s number.

  No answer.

  I sat down on the sofa and stared ahead of me. After a while I let my head drop back on the upholstery.

  Someone had once told me he thought that position must be very comfortable, very relaxing, because all you saw was the white ceiling above your face, but he, unfortunately, couldn’t tolerate it. Sometimes he very soon felt dizzy looking up like that, and it was no use closing his eyes because then he felt sick. So much for relaxing, he had to raise his head again quickly. Was it Hochkeppel? No, even if he had allowed himself to adopt such an informal position, he wouldn’t tell me about it.

  Hochkeppel’s wife? Yes, it must have been her, that plump, friendly hostess. She had told me at some social occasion, maybe the lawyers’ ball. She had asked me how I coped with stress, in court but also in Hochkeppel’s chambers. There was probably plenty of it there, if she knew her husband.

  I had said that it wasn’t too bad, I managed pretty well, and as if she were hard of hearing and I had confirmed her suspicion, she had told me this anti-stress method which, unfortunately, she couldn’t use herself because of the dizziness. But as a young person, she had added, I probably never had a dizzy fit, and I could try out that way of relaxing.

  How old would she be? Sixty-five, perhaps. Or older. If Hochkeppel was a year younger than Klofft, then she could be seventy like Cilly.

  And suddenly I remembered Herr Manderscheidt’s story of the randy young dog. Did Klofft want me to go to his house for a showdown? And would he, as soon as I had said yes, get a hit squad ready to teach me a lesson – on the way back, probably, because he’d want to give me a piece of his mind first?

  Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. The man was finished, suffering badly in his isolation. And he might even be dying. Even if he were to suspect there had been something in the offing between his wife and me, even if he had intended to revenge himself on me for it – there could be no question of that now. That phone call had been a cry for help!

  In the next few minutes I might have had doubts of my interpretation again and tried another version, perhaps the teaching-me-a-lesson theory, but I didn’t get around to it because the phone rang. It was Frauke.

  She seemed to be in a bad mood. She let fly at once, asking me what I really wanted and whether I was feeling claustrophobic or what? No, I said, quite the contrary, but it had obviously seemed to her too cramped in my apartment. What did I mean? Well, she was out and about all the time today, or had she just not wanted to answer the phone?

  Oh, this was ridiculous! She had gone round the corner to the Café Krämer because she felt like eating something sweet. But it had been terrible, a café like that open on a Saturday afternoon, full of old ladies with shopping bags, all do
lled up but sweaty, and the cake hadn’t been anything to write home about either, she’d left half of it.

  I said well, perhaps I could offer her something better. She said she couldn’t wait to hear what. I asked if I could invite her to the Etoile for dinner this evening.

  After a moment she asked, “Do you mean the restaurant?”

  “Yes, of course. This evening.”

  She asked if I’d won the lottery. I said, “No, but I did win on a horse at the races.” She asked if I had been drinking since first thing this morning, and I told her the story of Herr Manderscheidt and the rather shady atmosphere, and his theological student with the high voice, but mainly I told her about Black Desire and the girl who was expected to press the horse too hard, but instead she’d won me six hundred euros.

  Frauke’s temper improved considerably, and when I collected her in the evening she was wearing a little black dress I hadn’t seen before, very plain and simple, very elegant, and the necklace I’d given her for Christmas. She wasn’t quite so plain and simple when it came to choosing from the menu and deciding what to drink; we began with a glass of champagne, she suggested a bottle of Côtes du Rhône costing nearly ninety euros with the main course, my monkfish was relatively inexpensive, but in the end my bill came to a good two hundred euros.

  However, the evening was worth the money. Frauke was in a very good mood now, she talked amusingly, and I had some trouble in not letting myself in firmly for taking her to the races the next day, Sunday. I left the car where I’d parked it and we took a taxi back to my place.

  On Sunday morning we were still reading the papers when the telephone rang.

  32

  It was Klofft. His croaking voice came over the line so explosively that it startled me, and I held the phone a little way from my ear. Frauke looked up from her paper. I said, “Good morning, Herr Klofft. I got your call yesterday, but it was too late to ring back. I wasn’t home until the evening.”

  Frauke looked down at her paper again. She doesn’t like lies, so she obviously wanted to avoid even the appearance of participating in what I was up to with my client. I said, “I couldn’t have come anyway, I was otherwise occupied.”

  Frauke looked up from the newspaper again, for just a split second.

  Klofft croaked, “Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. Yesterday’s old history.”

  After a moment of hesitation, I said, “But I was just about to call you back now.”

  “Fabulous. Really.” He said nothing for a moment, and then brought it out again, as if under some painful compulsion. “Fabulous. Does that mean that you’d like to come for a game of chess this morning?”

  Damn it! No, I wouldn’t like to in the least, my dear Herr Klofft! I want to stay here quietly with my darling girlfriend, finish our breakfast in peace, and then maybe go to the flea market with her, if there is a flea market today, if you understand, because you ruined our plans to go last time with your bloody invitation to play chess. And after that we may be going to the racetrack for lunch and to watch the horse-racing, and smell the horses’ leather gear and the jockeys’ boots, breathe it all in, and the smell of the horses’ sweat and for all I care their farting too, but not the piss that you, my dear client, wet your pants with.

  Because I can smell life in the flea market, in the flea market and at the racecourse, dear Herr Klofft, but in your house, that anteroom to the cemetery set in its green garden, I can only smell death.

  He was waiting for my answer, and the silence was getting awkward. Glancing at Frauke, who was intent on her newspaper, I said, “Well…” and added slowly, “Well, it’s like this… the fact is, I…”

  He interrupted me with an inarticulate, high sound that sounded almost like a squeak. Then he cleared his throat hard, and finally got out, “Don’t tell me, please don’t, that you… that you have another engagement today, I mean…” And then he went on, talking faster and faster. “I want to say that of course you can fix engagements with whoever and whenever you like, only today, well, this particular day, it would be very… very unwelcome to me, and why? Yes, why? Because today… oh, today I feel so… so… as if…”

  He stopped. I didn’t know what to say. I heard quiet, groaning, breathing sounds, little noises that he was obviously uttering involuntarily, as if he had something very important to say but lacked the words. Then he said, “Today I feel so…”

  I asked, “What? What’s the matter?”

  He was babbling and stammering to himself again.

  “Are you on your own?” I asked.

  He said, “Yes. Alone in the house. All gone.” He groaned. “All gone away.”

  Alarmed, I asked, “Shall I call your doctor?”

  He snapped at me. “Are you crazy? He’d have me carted off to hospital! Right away.” A pause, and then he said, “He’d dispose of me.”

  I had to say something in reply to this nonsense, but I wasn’t sure whether the right answer would occur to me.

  Suddenly he said, in a small but clear voice, “Lawyer… if possible, then come over. Please come.” After another pause he said, “I need you, lawyer. Please.”

  I said, “It could take me a little while to get there. I left my car in the city centre last night. But I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

  Frauke raised her head and looked at me.

  He said, “Thank you,” and rang off.

  I stood up and looked at Frauke. “I’m really sorry, but I can’t just leave him like that. He’s obviously in a very bad way. And there’s no one there to look after him.”

  Frauke nodded. Then she said, “I thought you said he was a revolting old horror?”

  “Yes, he was,” I said. “Maybe he still is sometimes. But he’s very ill.”

  “Where’s Cilly, then?” she asked. “Frau Klofft?”

  “No idea. He may not even know himself. She could be at her studio.”

  She nodded.

  I said, “I’m sorry, but now I really must…”

  She said, “Yes, yes, off you go,” and looked around her. “I’ll clear up here and then I’ll go too. I’ll leave the key in the letterbox.”

  I ordered a taxi and paced up and down the pavement while I waited for it. Then I had myself dropped at the car park where I had left the car.

  As I was driving to the exit from the car park, and the barrier came up, I was overcome again by my suspicion that I was driving off to be taught my lesson, a roughing up, if not worse, laid on for me by Klofft. Overheated fantasies. Just as overheated, maybe, as my desire for Cilly. Reality was more prosaic but no less brutal. Cilly had no desire for me. And Klofft was approaching the end.

  As I turned off the expressway into the avenue lined by old elm trees, I suddenly wondered how I was going to get into the house if there was no one else in. He couldn’t get down the stairs and open the door to me, could he?

  Perhaps he would get to the stair lift with his wheeled walker, sit in it and get downstairs that way. Perhaps Olga had left another walker for him at the foot of the stairs, and using that he would be able to get to the door and open it?

  Yes, perhaps he would once have been able to do that! But judging by the last couple of times I’d seen him, he was hardly capable of it by now. He had been rocking back and forth merely sitting in his swivel chair, he had only just about been able to drop into it.

  My mouth twisted, I hunched my head down as I heard, in my imagination, a sudden clatter coming from the house after the chimes had died away. And then a soft moaning, and a terrible, broken cry. “Help!”

  He had fallen out of the stair lift and then all the way down the stairs to the tiled hall at the bottom, he was lying there with his limbs broken and ridiculously distorted.

  I listened intently when I had set the chimes going. But they had hardly died away before the intercom above the bell crackled. I heard Klofft’s voice, blurred but definitely his. “Come in, I’m up here!” The door opener buzzed and I went in.

  There was no on
e in the hall. I went upstairs. The door to his room was open. I went in, cautiously, very much visiting the sick.

  He was sitting in his swivel chair behind the table where he worked, and he had the chessboard set up on it. He smiled at me, or rather he tried to smile at me. But his features hardly moved. It was the same fixed and slightly grinning grimace that had attracted my attention on my last visit. The rigidity had intensified since then. Because he was leaning forward slightly in the chair, hands under the table, he had to look at me as if from far below. I noticed the fixed stare of his eyes, almost as if he had just opened them wide in a violent shock.

  It was his illness, I was sure of it. The symptoms of his Parkinson’s disease.

  I gave him my hand and thought, too late, that I might be presenting him with a difficulty. He brought his right hand out from under the table, stretched it out slowly; it was shaking. I took his hand, pressed it but only for a moment and let it go. He put it on the table. It was still shaking quite badly, although he was trying to stabilize it on the table top. I had read about that symptom as well; it was a tremor.

  He put the hand under the table again.

  I sat down in the chair opposite him. He pointed to the chessboard. “Olga got it out yesterday. And I set it up.”

  I nodded, and then asked, “Isn’t she here at all today?”

  “Coming in later,” he said. “She’ll make me some soup. Give me a piece of cake. Home-made. Dessert. That’s all she can do today. Her husband’s out of work. Hangs about the house and…” He made a sound that may have been meant as a laugh. “Arsehole,” he added.

  I nodded. He asked, “Like a drink?” He pointed to the cooler, which had a bottle of wine and a bottle of mineral water showing above the rim. “My wife left it ready for me this morning.”

  I saw that the water glass from which he had been drinking was empty. When he slowly brought his hand out from under the table and moved it, shaking, toward the cooler, I said, “Wait a moment.” I stood up, took the bottle of water out of the cooler and poured him some. Then I filled the empty glass standing on a little tray beside the cooler for myself. I sat down again and drank.