The Stronger Sex

by Hans Werner Kettenbach

  He suddenly said, vigorously, “Oh, nonsense! Of course we knew why we were excited. Because we were doing something forbidden – but nice. It was all to do with unchastity and breaking the sixth commandment, or was it the seventh? Anyway, we knew that. Well, it amounted to no more than rubbing, side by side, that was all.”

  He sighed. “Only with Nora – she was the girl with the blonde braids – with Nora I never got that far. Luise never came to see me with her. And if Nora was at Luise’s house, I wasn’t allowed in. Or at least I never ventured to go over to see the two of them. Through the little gate in the stone wall between the two yards. Stupid of me, maybe. Perhaps they were just waiting for me. But I was never invited, anyway.”

  He laughed. “Not that they hid away from me. If I went out on the veranda to seem busy with something there, glancing over now and then, over to the annexe on the other side of the wall… they sometimes showed themselves to me. A window would open all of a sudden in the annexe on the other side, a kitchen window or the window of the little living room, and I could hear them running about and giggling and playing jokes. Dressing up, in Granny’s fox-fur stole or one of her old hats, waving their arms, parading their slim little bodies and disappearing again, laughing themselves into fits. And as for me, I stared and stared at that little blonde darling.”

  He nodded, smiled, fell silent for a while. Then he said, “Of course other boys saw what a beauty she was too. I don’t know whether she went out to the Korso later – you know, that part of the suburban boulevard under the lime trees that went from the main street to the pretty park by the river. The young people gathered there in spring and summer, teenagers, boys getting fluff on their faces and with voices breaking, feeling the pleasant throb of their hormones. And the girls with little curves appearing under their blouses. You went to the Korso to stroll along. Up and down, just to look at first, then to touch. To fumble, yes. In the park, in the shade of the trees and bushes.”

  He stopped for breath and then said suddenly, “I wasn’t one of them on the Korso. That’s why I don’t know if she went there. And joined the games.” After a little pause, he said, “I couldn’t be there. I wasn’t the sort to mix with them socially. They were all from the grammar schools, or higher schools, they were called. Higher schools for boys and similar schools for girls. And I was just in the middle school where you didn’t get a higher education. I was from a lower social class.”

  I felt I should convince him I was listening, participating in his feelings. “A lower social class?” I said. “I thought people didn’t go in for that sort of thing under the Nazis?”

  “You’ve no idea! No, no, my dear fellow, there always have been upper and lower classes and there always will be, those who have to slave away for a living and the others. The ones who think they’re so special. The posh farts.” He looked at me. “Anyway, I’d left school, went to train as a fitter, that made me lower class. And I wasn’t in the Hitler Youth either. My father would have tanned my hide if I’d even thought of it. But most of the boys on the Korso belonged.”

  He laughed, and breathed out heavily through his nose. “Some of them went around in their uniforms on Saturdays, a few with the aiguillette, that braided cord on the shoulder or breast pocket, red and white or green. Green was for a squad leader.” He laughed. “If I’d shown up on the Korso… oh, I don’t know, they’d probably have waved their sheath knives in front of my face. And the girls would have stood there gawping. Sheath knives, yes. They carried them about at the time. On Saturdays in their uniform belts. On weekdays to show off. With a comb tucked into their long socks.”

  He thought for a moment, and then said, “But strictly speaking, I couldn’t have cared less about all that showing off. To be honest, I’d have felt a fool strutting about like that of an evening. Waiting until I could take a girl off into the park. It was nothing to me, with one exception.”

  He paused, nodded. “Except for Nora, do you see – except for Nora! I suspected, no, I was afraid she was there on the Korso in the evenings. And in the end she’d disappear into the party with one of those fools. I think I even thought of going there to check up. I probably dreamed of giving the arsehole a punch in the face. And Nora going off with me somewhere, just with me.”

  He leaned forward and looked at me. “You see, lawyer? I was jealous. Green with envy! All because of a girl I’d never come close to!” He let out breath violently. “A girl I’d never even spoken to! Let alone touched her. I was in love with her, that was it. But there was no more to it. All the same, she was… I thought of her, I saw her as something that belonged to me, and I was jealous! So now do you see, lawyer, how they go together? Love and jealousy! Like your head and your arse!”

  I looked at him sceptically. He nodded. “Yes, they do, my dear fellow, oh yes, they do! Believe you me!”

  I saw his hand going out to try to pick up the glass. I got to my feet, went to his side and put it to his lips.

  34

  When I moved the glass back after his first sip to let him pause, he said, roughly, “Never mind all that! Come on, give it here!”

  And once again he drained the glass.

  I put the glass down and went back to my chair. He cast me an angry glance. I said, “If you want something, you can tell me.”

  “Tight-arsed bastard!” he said.

  I didn’t reply to that one. I refilled the glass and went back to my chair.

  After a while he said, “You put a man telling a story off his stroke with all this fuss!” Then he glanced at me. “But perhaps that was what you wanted?”

  “Nonsense,” I told him.

  He showed a trace of a smile and looked out at the garden. “Right. Well, the girl with the blonde braids. But…” – and he raised his eyebrows, looking askance at me – “that wasn’t by any means the first fit of jealousy I’d suffered. I’d often been jealous before. I don’t expect you’ll believe me, but it started in nursery school. I fell in love at the age of five. Ridiculously enough, with twins. Maybe I was taking precautions in case one of them got away from me.” He laughed. “I used to walk them home at lunchtime every day, one street further from school than mine. I got furious if some oaf of a boy approached my little procession. The girls were good as gold with me. They never strayed off course. They were both blonde too, by the way. And they both had beautiful braids.”

  He looked out at the garden with a slightly twisted smile and moved his lips silently. Finally he said, “But I wouldn’t want you to think it was to do with their physical type. Or that I only fancied blondes. They do stand out in a crowd, yes. And most men chase after blondes.” He shook his head. “My wife used to be dark, but I was crazy about her. And when I had her, I was afraid, right from the first, that some guy might come along, turn her head just like that and have it off with her. One of those painters, or some windbag of a professor, or just a beginner, a novice painter, but a randy one. The mere idea made me wild!” He looked at me, his eyes flashing. “I could have murdered any man who did that!”

  After a while his glance moved away from me. He suddenly looked at the wineglass. Turning his chair slightly, he put his hand on the foot of the glass, bent over it, put his lips to the rim and slurped some wine into his mouth. Then he picked up the glass with both hands, still with his lips on the rim, and poured the entire remaining contents down his throat. When the glass was empty, he put it down a little too hard, let the air he had taken in with the wine come out in a belch, and looked at me triumphantly.

  “Well, what do you say now, lawyer?” he asked.

  “I’m deeply impressed.”

  It didn’t seem to irritate him that there was no mistaking the irony of this remark. He smiled, pleased with himself, obviously enjoying his achievement in independently foiling my attempt to restrict his consumption of alcohol. He looked at the front of his shirt, on which some of the wine he had tipped down himself had spilt, got out his handkerchief and dabbed the shirt with it.

  “I
don’t know whether you’ve entirely understood,” he said, “but that should really do.”

  “Understood what? No love without jealousy, you mean?”

  “Yes, of course, what did you think I meant?” He smiled. “Well, maybe all the girlfriends you’ve had so far have been ugly as sin; no one else would want to stick his prick into them. Then, of course, I could understand why you’ve never been jealous.”

  He paused as if genuinely expecting an answer. I let him wait for a while, and then said, “How do you think your wife used to feel in the past, when you and your friends went off hunting in Hungary or somewhere else, about the things you did when you were… were in your prime?”

  He turned his chair to the balcony door, and looked out at the treetops, with their dense foliage moving in the summer breeze. He leaned back in his chair, stooping slightly. When he spoke again, his voice was suddenly so soft that I could hardly make out what he was saying.

  “I hadn’t finished,” he said. “Not quite. I was going to say… if you’re not jealous, never have been, then you don’t know what it’s like when… when you’re trying to find the person you love. When you follow her. Chase after her because you’re afraid she’s fallen for someone else. And when you can’t find out where she is. Surely, you think, she’s here somewhere? After all she’s said, she must be here. But she isn’t. She’s deceived you. She didn’t want you finding her. Spoiling her adventure with the other man. She’s covered up her tracks. She’s deceived you again and again.”

  He glanced sideways at me. “You don’t know any of that. The knife in your heart, you don’t know about it, do you, Dr Zabel? The ancient Germanic concept of fealty, you know about that. But not about the knife some bastard has plunged into your heart. With the friendly cooperation of your wife. And they’re turning it slowly in the wound now. Another little twist every day. With every telephone call she cuts short when you come in. With every occasion she suddenly has to attend somewhere or other in town. With every visit to the cinema.”

  He suddenly laughed. “And so on and so forth. Didn’t really mean to say that. I only wanted to tell you how often I watched the back of the building, the brown-brick back of it. I knew where she lived, the girl with the blonde braids. But I never found her. If she ever did stand at the windows of her house looking out into the yard, then it never seemed to be when I was out on our veranda looking for her. And again and again that question: where is she now? Who’s she with?”

  He started moving his lips in silence and nodding again. He suddenly frowned slightly, apparently with difficulty, and then smoothed the frown out. After a while he said, “I lost her. Back then, every time, after the girls’ performance at the windows of the annexe was over. When the windows were closed. And then for ever. After the War. She’d been evacuated with her family. So had I. When we came back our house, the three-window house, was badly knocked about. We moved to another part of town.”

  He sighed. “And I don’t know where she had gone. I don’t know if I spent a long time looking for her. I think not. She’d disappeared. I never saw her again. But there’s one… one funny thing.”

  For some time he seemed to be searching for the right words. Finally he said, “That yard… all the yards of the apartment block where we lived… that patchwork of scanty grass and paving stones, weeds and storage sheds and metal roofs, old, slanting walls and the backs of old buildings… the place stuck in my mind like an old photo; it may be yellow now but it’s still clear enough, and only the men with moustaches and women in sleeveless overalls are missing, yes, and a little blonde angel with blonde braids and boys in corduroy trousers with that smell they had, that velvety smell with a touch of Brylcreem and suppressed farts and maybe bicycle oil and… I don’t know… I don’t know.”

  I suddenly saw his lips begin to shake. He said, “But that’s all just… just rubbish, old stuff, those old backyards and the… the junk that collected there, all the same, good for nothing but to be jettisoned and demolished, and that’s what happened, the demolition gang moved in with excavators, that was all the place deserved. But… but it lives on in a man’s mind, and sometimes it gets very strong, comes right to the front of your mind so clearly that you think you’re still living in that old house with the narrow kitchen and the bathtub with lion’s paws, and the veranda with the tomato plants. And do you know when that happens?”

  He looked at me, lips shaking, and I saw that there were tears in his eyes. He said, “It always happens just when you’re in a really bad way, like me today. This morning when I called you and asked if you’d like to come out here. For a game of chess! The hell with chess! I thought I was dying and I didn’t want to be alone, not when I died, feeling myself go cold and stiff, starting at the heart, going on and on unstoppably, into my arms and hands and legs, dammit, I didn’t want to be alone without anyone to look at, ask them please to come and help me, I’m afraid. But I couldn’t think of anyone I could say that to. Anyone I could ask to come and help me. Except you, lawyer.”

  The tears were falling from his eyes now, the first two of them running down his cheeks, one on each side. He sniffed and wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. Suddenly he smiled. “And it did help. You came and – well, look, I’m still alive.”

  He sniffed again. “But that wasn’t really what I wanted to say. Know what I wanted to say? I was going to say that before you arrived, only one thing did me any good. You may not believe it, but it was those backyards. The memory of them. And the times I knew there. Until the War. I was, I mean back then… nothing could really happen to me. When I was out on the veranda in the early evening, opposite the back of that house, the reddish-brown wall with the windows, secretly searching the windows, and feeling pain in my heart because I suspected she was out and about on the Korso.”

  He thought for a moment and then said, “Ah, well… and then I went back into the kitchen. It was really quite simple. I went into the kitchen where my mother was making supper. I went back home, do you understand? My mother was there, and a good smell came from her pots and pans. And my old man was there, reading the paper, and usually he’d found something in it that he wanted to read aloud and discuss with me. He was a tough old so-and-so, and I got plenty of hard knocks from him, often out of the blue; the reason and the lesson I was to learn from it came afterwards. But I knew he would never let me down. I felt… OK with him. I felt safe. Yes, that was it. The same with my mother. And her pots and pans.”

  I saw another tear running down the cheek that was turned to me. He glanced to one side, and I thought he wanted to reassure himself that I wasn’t laughing at his sentimentality. But he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at the wine cooler.

  I got up and went over to him, took the bottle out of the cooler and poured him some more wine. He turned his chair, laid his head back, and I gave him some of the wine to drink. After the first sip he said, “That’s enough.”

  I put the glass down. He said, “Thank you, lawyer.”

  As I sat down in my chair again, he said, “And I’ll bet I wasn’t the only one in that big block of apartment houses who felt like that. Later, in the evening when it was dark, there were lights on in many of the windows. Naked bulbs, some of them, hanging from the ceiling by a cable. Others were shining under carefully home-made lampshades, behind white net curtains. People sat at tables, they went back and forth, they talked to each other. And no one was alone. You just had to look out and see all those lights shining over the yards.”

  He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand again, and looked at me. “Maybe I was just shit-scared this morning.” He smiled. “Because there was no one with me. I felt alone. Lonely. This old house can feel like a grave. It was so deathly quiet here this morning. Maybe that’s why I imagined my heart was stuttering and palpitating. Death reaching his bony fingers out to squeeze it.” He shook his head and laughed. “Sorry to have unloaded all this onto you.”

  I said, “There’s nothing at all to apol
ogize for.”

  He nodded. Then he said, “Thanks.” And then: “Well, now get out of here!”

  “But—”

  “Off you go!”

  I stood up, hesitated, and offered him my hand.

  He shook his head a little reluctantly. “That’s OK.”

  I walked away. When I had almost reached the door, he cried, “Wait!”

  I turned back. He was sitting there, slightly stooped in his chair; he turned, and twisted his face as if he were feeling physical pain. I was about to go back to him when he said, “You were always saying there were two things you wanted me to tell you. Two questions. Two things you needed to know before the hearing. That’s right, eh?”

  “Yes, that’s right. First…”

  He waved that away. “No need to tell me. I remember.” He sat up straighter. “First: yes, Katharina Fuchs did threaten me. When I refused to give her the time off she wanted. She said then she’d just be off work sick. From what you’ve told me, in court they’ll see that as an inadmissible threat.” He breathed out hard. “And she also said she supposed I didn’t think I could still decide about her private life just as the whim took me.”

  “But why didn’t you want to tell me that?” I asked.

  He waved that away as well. “Just a moment! I haven’t finished! And second, yes again. It’s true. On her last visit I tried to have it off with her once more. Wanted to sleep with her one more time. That all-over-between-us stuff had been too sudden for me. And then again,” he said with a wry smile, “then again, that fellow I had to thank for it, the one who’d turned her head, I wanted to make that bastard wear the horns. I wanted him to feel, to guess, to know outright for all I care, that she’d opened her legs for me again, and then again. I wanted him to suffer raging jealousy, I wanted him to feel the torments of hell that I’d been through before myself!”