The Stronger Sex

by Hans Werner Kettenbach

  He had laid his hand on the table beside his glass. It was trembling slightly. He looked undecidedly at the glass. The trembling of his hand was worse when he raised it to take the glass.

  “Just a moment, I…” I said, jumping up. I skirted the table, went up to him and took the glass. Then I suddenly realized that I was hurting his feelings quite badly. I said, “I don’t know… may I?”

  “Please,” he said.

  I put the glass carefully to his lips. He laid his head slightly back and cautiously drank what I poured into his mouth. He was obviously thirsty. Only when the glass was three-quarters empty did he utter an inarticulate sound, and said, when I took the glass away from his lips, “Enough.”

  I put the glass down, refilled it and sat back in my own chair. As I drank some water from my glass, he said, “Thank you,” and after a while added, “Yes, yes, my dear fellow!”

  Then there was a long silence before he went on. “Yes, yes, the paint’s wearing off the old banger.” He gave a croaking laugh, his eyes fixed. “And not just the paint. Holes in the carriage-work the size of your fist, my dear fellow. Rusty holes. Nasty gaps. Looks like it’s had gangrene or some other filthy illness. No point in patching it up and respraying and polishing it now. No, might as well throw the whole thing out.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Let’s not exaggerate.”

  He didn’t seem to have heard what I said. He pointed to the table in the corner where the computer stood. “Luckily I got ready in advance. Took precautions. For days like this. Days when there’s not a soul about to look after me. When they all go away and leave me here on my island. Like a leper. A shipwrecked leper.”

  He raised his fixed eyes and intensified his grin a little. “You know how lepers got kept away from other people’s society, for fear of infection.”

  “Yes, I know.” I wanted to get him off this track, which would only drive him deeper into his depression. “But what do you mean about getting ready for days like this?”

  He pointed to the table in the corner again. “Well, things like making sure I have all the important cables to hand. I have a microphone here and the loudspeaker for the intercom at the door. And the door-opening thing too, of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to let you in.”

  I nodded. “No, of course not.”

  “And if necessary then I can see the people who want to come in.”

  “What?”

  He tried grinning again, and suddenly saliva was running from one corner of his mouth. He tried catching it, with a slurping sound, put his hand to his trouser pocket, fished out a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his chin and mouth with it. Then he said, “With the door camera, of course.”

  “The door camera? But there’s no camera fitted at the door, is there?”

  “A fine thing it’d be if you could see it right away.” He turned in his chair to look at the computer, pressed a couple of keys, and a video picture of the front of the house came up onscreen, taken sideways and from above.

  For a moment I was tempted to suggest that he was showing me a still, but then a blue tit suddenly flew into the picture and settled on the lowest step of the three up to the door, turned this way and that, showing its yellow stomach plumage, then hopped off the step into the flower bed beside it and disappeared.

  He was obviously proud of the effect and waiting for my reaction. I said, “Doesn’t your wife feel… feel herself restricted by such devices?”

  “My wife?” He shrugged the shoulder that was already twisted a little way forward. “Could be. But never fear, she knows how to hit back!” He laughed. “She thought I’d had her studio bugged too. Stuffed full of secret cameras. She got an electronics firm, a pretty expensive one, to check it all out and certify it as clean. Yes, she did that without telling me, but I found out. I knew the boss of the company, I’d worked with him myself now and then. And the results of his research in her studio were zero. Though not his bill, of course.” He laughed. “That cost her about ten thousand. There you are, then, trust is good but control is better. Even if it costs the earth.” He laughed, and then said, “Do you know where that saying comes from?”

  “Trust is good?… Lenin, they say.”

  He nodded. “Clever lad!”

  “But it’s obviously wrong. About that saying, I mean. I read somewhere that Lenin never said any such thing. Or not in his works – you know, all those umpteen volumes published in Moscow and East Berlin.”

  “I know. I even have them in German translation. Handsome volumes. Bought them once in the bookshop at Friedrichstrasse station; it was still in the east at the time. Dirt cheap they were. Of course the exchange rate was one to one between east and west, but they were still dirt cheap. Only they’ve been stored away ever since. I always meant to take a look at them some day at my leisure.” He breathed out heavily. “Too late now. Like so much else.”

  What would this man think he’d make of Lenin? Was there a Bolshevist in disguise somewhere in him? I’d believe anything of Klofft, even that. His origins were probably lower middle class, a background well known to produce more revolutionaries than the working class. Or was it that he had first-hand experience of manipulating people?

  Or then again, was he just the typical social climber who devours or tries to devour everything he considers part of higher education?

  He had half-turned in his chair and was looking out at the green treetops. After a while he said abruptly, “My wife has never spied on me. Or at least I’ve never noticed anything like that.” He laughed. “She’s probably never heard of Lenin, or what he’s quoted as saying.”

  I said, “Or she didn’t think much of control. Checking up on people. She’d have had an aversion to that kind of thing, I should think.”

  He turned his chair half back again, looked at me and nodded. After a pause he said, “Or else she never loved me.”

  I was so surprised that I said nothing for a moment. Then I frowned as if I thought his comment wholly inappropriate. I asked, “How do you mean that?”

  “Simple. If you don’t love someone, you don’t feel jealous. Or want to check up on them. Don’t you agree?”

  “Are you saying that… that love and jealousy go together, so to speak?”

  “Yes, isn’t that so?”

  The wide, fixed eyes seemed to look at me watchfully. His twisted mouth appeared to smile.

  “I don’t know.” Then I said, “But I don’t think you’re right. Of course, there are probably a fair number of people who—”

  He interrupted me. “Yes, yes, fair enough, of course there are. People who find out or have known for a long time that someone or other, or several of that kind, that all and sundry are fucking their wives. People who find out that their own wives are letting themselves be fucked by someone else. Or several someones. People who don’t care about it. You mean people like that?”

  “I’d put it differently, but… yes, in essence I mean something of that nature. And such people may love their partners very much, and do care if their partners… find someone else but… well, they can live with it. They don’t run amok.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Run amok… no, they don’t do that!” He looked out and shifted slightly in his chair. Then he said, “I’m going to tell you something.” He rubbed his forehead, took a deep breath and finally went on, “I was born here, in this city. Grew up here.”

  Oh God. How far back was he planning to go?

  He said, “In a suburb. It was savagely bombed in the War, but they’ve closed the gaps by now and even restored some of it the way it used to be, very pretty. The Turks live there now. They overran that part of town on the quiet, in secret. Including the house where we lived. It was a three-window house, built around the turn of the century or a little before. Like most of the houses in that street. In the latter part of the nineteenth century. Built with the money we took from the French in the Franco-Prussian war.”

  He stopped and looked at me. “You know
the three-window house?”

  I hesitated. “I’m not quite sure…”

  “Meaning you don’t know it. Not so clever after all.”

  I said, annoyed, “What do you mean? I assume the house has three windows!”

  He gave me a mocking glance. “You assume that, do you? Quite right, bull’s-eye! Only there are a lot of them, built together in several rows, clever clogs! They have two storeys, or three or even four, five storeys, the three-window houses, depending on the architect’s plans. Or what funds were available. But there were those three windows at the front of every storey! Get it? Not on the ground floor, of course, the door had to go there. Understand now, clever lad that you are?”

  “Yes, thank you, I understand. But why do you think I should know the houses?”

  He bent his head slightly forward. “Because you live in this city, my learned friend. And there are houses like that all over it!” He shook his head, then asked with a doubtful expression, “What was the subject of your doctoral thesis?”

  That was a question I had been apprehensively expecting for some time, although I had expected Cilly to be the one more likely to ask it. But it was uncomfortable enough to have him ask it just now.

  33

  I hesitated, but then I said, “The effects of the old Germanic concept of fealty on legal thinking in the Middle Ages.”

  He stared at me for some time and said, “Really? You’re not joking? That’s what it was called?”

  “Literally. That was the title of my dissertation.”

  “And there were some of those effects? Really?”

  “Not many, no, but some. Really.”

  “Well, well! Who’d have …” Here a fit of laughter overcame him. He suppressed it with some difficulty and went on, in a careful, higher voice, “Who’d have thought it of those old Germanic people! All I knew about them was they hunted bears and got sozzled on mead. And took fat blonde women to bed, of course.” He gave his laughter free rein, which set him coughing once more. He overcame the cough after some hawking and spitting.

  I gave him an enquiring look and indicated the water glass, but he waved it away. Finally he sat exhausted in his chair, his eyes still moist with tears of mirth. “You of all people,” he said, “an expert on fealty! Wonderful!”

  An uncomfortable feeling was beginning to come over me, but I kept quiet. He took out a handkerchief, wiped his eyes and said, “But then I’m sure you’ll understand the story I am going to tell you.”

  Putting the handkerchief away, he shifted slightly and looked out of the balcony door. “Right. The three-window house. A very common type of housing. In this city, all over the Rhineland. All over Germany, I think. And presumably further afield. Northern France, for instance. Belgium. Maybe each originally intended for one family. But what with the huge demographic growth of the cities, they turned into apartment houses for several parties, provisionally at first, then permanently.”

  He began drawing me a kind of sketch in the air with his right hand. “Three rooms per storey, one at the back next to the stairs, two at the front, a big one with two windows and a small, narrow one with the third window. You could have your kitchen in the narrow room. And families of six or seven could live and sleep in the two larger rooms. You just had to squeeze up tight to fit in.”

  He looked at me, raised his forefinger and lowered it again. “And the great advantage of those houses was that they didn’t need windows at the sides. So they could be built side by side in terraces, close together. Which lowered the building expenses. And the heating expenses, only no one talked about that much in those days. Briquettes of brown coal were cheap. The coal man went through the streets with his horse and cart or his handcart and tipped two or three sacks of them, whatever you needed, through the hatches into the cellars under the ground floor.”

  He stopped, nodded, began moving his lips silently again as if rousing his memory and enjoying it. After a while he said, “Our house was in a terrace with three other three-window houses. All the same height, with two upper storeys. So with the ground floor, that made three apartments for three sets of tenants per house. The owner of our houses lived next door with a whole house for his own family. They had two living rooms and a piano. There weren’t many of them, only the owner who was our landlord, his old mother and his daughter. His wife was never there; she was very ill, was in a home somewhere. They had a maid too, Gundel; she slept in the attic at the top.”

  I was feeling impatient. Where was this story going, for God’s sake? I shifted involuntarily, looking for a different position to sit in. “Just a moment,” he said. “We’re getting to the point!”

  After a short pause he went on a little faster. “I should say our houses had been slightly extended. Each had a small annexe built out into the yard and half the width of the main house. In ours the kitchen was on the first floor there and the bathroom behind it, or anyway a room with a bathtub in it. Free-standing, with lion’s paws. And behind the annexe a wooden veranda. Window boxes of flowers on the balustrade and a few tomato plants.”

  He took a breath, shifted in his chair. “And from that lookout post, that veranda, which my imagination sometimes turned into the wheel house of a pirate ship, from there you had a view of the yard at the back of the block, colourful strips of patchwork paving, like in our yard, and green straggly weeds, sheds with flat metal roofs, a warehouse in the yard of a larger house that belonged to a grocery shop. And the plain backs of other buildings.”

  He nodded, then made a sound as if he were laughing. He said, “A girl lived in the house opposite. Opposite ours, in one of the houses on the other side of the block, so quite a way off. An old building, the back of it, the one I could see, red-brown brick, unplastered. Plaster would have cost too much for the back of the building. And anyway that brown brick was a handsome, grainy building material. Well, never mind that.”

  He stopped and then went on. “The girl, then. Pretty as a picture. Same age as me, so seven or eight when I first saw her. And getting older every year, and taller, and prettier.” He sighed. “Blonde. Long, thick braids. Just like the Nazi painters showed in pictures of beautiful Teutonic girls, good German girls. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen pictures from that period.”

  I nodded. “I think so, yes.”

  He tried to grin. “Ah, you think so!”

  I said as if in passing, “Adolf Ziegler. Sepp Hilz.”

  He raised his eyebrows and tried to purse his lips. “Good God! What’s all this? You really do know something about it!”

  I smiled and shook my head regretfully, as if sympathizing with his desire to know better. Then I said, in a matter-of-fact voice, “My girlfriend works on the arts supplement of the paper. She’s quite an art expert.”

  “You want to keep that woman sweet! You can learn something from her, seems to me.”

  I said, “Yes, of course. I suspect that you owe your own knowledge of art mainly to your wife.”

  He stared at me, turned his eyes away and looked at the cooler, raised a hand and pointed to it. “You can pour me a glass of that wine now.”

  As I was uncorking it, he asked, “Do you know Adolf Ziegler’s nickname?”

  When I shook my head, he said, “They called him Reich Pubic Hair Painter. He painted female nudes, might have been straight out of the Nazi picture book. Under Hitler he was president of the Reich Chamber of the Visual Arts. Hence the name.”

  “Charming.”

  He looked at me as I poured the wine, waved an impatient hand as I took a sip to taste it. Then I filled the glass for him.

  “But less officially,” he said, “he was Reich Pubic Hair Painter. And like you say, Hilz was another fan of those German farmers’ daughters, the tall girls with white skin and a velvet band around the throat, he painted them by the dozen, nudes. But because Ziegler had the top job, he was the one who got called Reich Master of the Pubic Hair.”

  The man was frail, but his inclination for talking dirty seemed
undiminished.

  I saw that he was in some difficulty with raising the wineglass to his lips, so I went over to him and took the glass in my right hand. Without another word he put his head slightly back and waited for me to help him drink. I put the glass to his lips, let him take a sip and put the glass down.

  He rolled the wine around in his mouth, and then said, “What is it – are you planning to stay here beside me giving me little sip by little sip? That won’t do the trick, so come on, hurry up!”

  I very much doubted whether gulping it down would agree with him, but what was I to do? I raised the glass and he drained it, gulp by gulp. When I put the glass down he waved briefly to the cooler. I refilled the glass, then sat down opposite him again.

  He hesitated a moment, as if he couldn’t decide whether to ask me for more, but in the end he left it at that. “Well,” he said, “the girl from the house opposite.” He nodded and continued. “She went to school with our landlord’s daughter. They were in the same class. I probably first saw them together on the way to school. Her blonde braids down her back, dangling and flying about in the air. Or out to the side, when their conversation got lively. And knee-length socks. White socks, I mean. Not brown ribbed long socks like so many girls wore, fixed to a liberty bodice with suspenders. Boys wore something similar too. No, the socks she wore were chic.” He laughed.

  After a sidelong glance at the glass and then at me, he said, “And then I saw her from in front too. Closer. She was coming to see Luise, the landlord’s daughter. To do homework together and play.” He laughed. “I spent time with Luise too, playing and telling stories. Sometimes we got under the bed together. In the dark. Can’t remember what our excuse was for that. Probably we were playing at hiding from burglars who had broken into the house. Anyway, we crawled up close to each other. In the dark, under the bed. And rubbed up against each other, and didn’t know why we felt so excited.”