The Woman on the Stairs by Bernhard Schlink

  I found out that, although her internship wasn’t finished, Irene had never gone back to the Museum of Arts and Crafts after the morning we spent together. I also discovered that in addition to the rented flat she’d shared with Schwind, she had another apartment, one she owned, that her friends knew nothing about – a hiding place. The neighbours couldn’t remember the last time they had seen her, only that it had been a long time.

  I was hurt, sad, furious. I yearned for her and, when I picked up my mail, I sometimes wondered if I would find a letter from her, a postcard. But she never wrote.

  Once, two years later, I thought I saw her. Close to our office in Westend, a building had been squatted by students and emptied by the police. The demonstration afterwards, in which thousands of people marched, went by our office, and I stood at the window and looked down. I was surprised at how jubilant the demonstrators were though a supposed injustice had driven them into the streets, how happily they raised their fists, how proudly they shouted slogans, and laughed as they linked arms and fell into a trot. They weren’t bad faces: fathers with children on their shoulders, mothers holding their children’s hands, many young people, schoolkids and university students, a couple of workers in coveralls, a soldier in uniform, a man in a suit and tie. Then I saw her, or thought I saw her, and ran out of the office and down the stairs and onto the street and alongside the protesters, trying to catch her. A couple of times I thought I saw her. But it wasn’t her, and then I found a face similar to hers and thought I’d been tricked by that face, and wanted to give up. But I didn’t give up, and looked more, until a group of demonstrators broke into an empty house, and the police came, and the situation escalated.

  At some point, wounds scar over. But I never liked to look back on what happened with Irene Gundlach. Especially after I understood what a fool I’d made of myself. How could I not have seen that what had started with a lie could not end well; that I did not belong behind the wheel of a stolen car; that women who ran and climbed away from husbands and lovers were not for me; that I had let myself be used? Anyone with an ounce of sense could have seen that.

  I found the ridiculousness of my behaviour most painful when it came back to me how I’d waited at the wall to see if Irene would come or not, want me or not, with my sunglasses, my chills, my fear, and how I had embraced her, and had been happy, and thought she was happy too. I shuddered at the memory.

  I’ve often comforted myself with the thought that, had I not made such a mess of this affair, I could never have run my marriage so successfully. As my wife used to say, every cloud has a silver lining.

  The past can’t be changed. I made my peace with that long ago. But I find it hard to make my peace with the fact that, again and again, the past doesn’t make sense. Maybe every cloud has a silver lining. But every cloud is also just a cloud.

  22

  On Saturday I took the ferry across the bay to the green strip of land and the open sea behind. It wasn’t that I had tired of the Botanic Garden. I just thought I shouldn’t confine myself to this little habitat, day after day. It was never enough for me to spend my holidays lying on a beach. Instead, I always explored the surrounding area, and I always chose places with interesting surroundings to explore.

  The ferry went past a small island, fortified long ago for an imaginary war with some imaginary enemy, past rusty, gray, bobbing warships, past waterfront houses where life was cheerful and light, past woods, a swimming beach here and there, and a marina. The sun, the wind, the smell of the sea – it made for a pleasant morning and, during the tour, children ran tirelessly from fore to aft and aft to fore, where the wind blasted their faces again. I was cold, but was too proud to sit with the old people inside the cabin.

  When the boat moored, I got off, and walked up a slope to see the ocean. It looked no different from the Atlantic or Pacific. But I was moved by the idea that it stretched from there to Chile in one direction, and to the Antarctic in the other. When I felt that breadth and depth, the blue of the sea looked darker, the waves washing softly ashore seemed menacing.

  I walked along the beach until I tired of the beachside road with its traffic. I went back to where I’d started, and rented a deckchair and a beach umbrella. Once again, I had a bottle of red wine in my backpack, a couple of apples, and my Australian history book.

  The history of Australia is short, so the book quickly reached the present day. I learned about the country’s climate and natural resources, agriculture, industry and foreign trade, transportation, culture, sport, schools and universities, cuisine, constitution and administration, population density and demographic trends, geographic and social mobility, careers and recreational activities, men and women, divorce rates.

  Whenever I’m in a foreign country, I ask myself if I’d be happier there. When I walk down a street and see people standing on a corner, talking and laughing, I imagine that if I lived there, I might stand happily on that corner, talking and laughing. When I walk past an outdoor café and a man walks up to a woman seated at a table, and they greet each other warmly, I think, here I would meet a woman once more who would be happy to see me, as I would be happy to see her. And when the evening lights in the windows go on! Every window promises freedom and safety, freedom from the old life, and safety in a new one. Now, even the simple act of reading awoke a yearning for a different life, in a different world.

  Not that I had ever felt shackled to my life. My wife and I made a good team, yet each of us had our freedom. Had she wanted to, she could have worked. We could have afforded a nanny. But she did not want to and, without her, the children would not have turned out as they did; perhaps I would not have either. When she decided to go into local politics, she would not have got as far as she did were it not for my influence. No, I was not shackled. I could never have abandoned everything overnight – house, family, firm – and started out elsewhere. And the colleagues and friends who abandoned marriages and careers, and found a new, younger wife, or a different, more modern job, a thirty-two-year-old event manager replacing a fifty-year-old housewife, a position as a therapist or mediator instead of as a lawyer – after a few years they were back where they’d started: quarreling at home and fed up at work. No, I was not shackled to my life, rather I had chosen it with care, and held on to it with care. It is not as if I couldn’t have found a new, younger wife. I do not turn heads, but I keep in shape, and can afford things, I have something to offer a young woman. But I didn’t want that.

  Odd, how what happened in my life seems both inevitable and to have happened by chance. My choice of career, of wife, of having one child then another and another, my choice of a big law firm – one thing led to the next. I chose my career out of spite; I married because there was no good reason not to. The first decision led to the big law firm; the second, to three children.

  23

  The head of the detective agency called me on Monday. He asked if I was still in Sydney and if I wanted to drop by. It was better, he said, to talk in person.

  I spent Sunday in my hotel room. I don’t know why I couldn’t sleep on Saturday night, why I watched pay-per-view TV – action films, a romance, a family comedy, porn – why I drank whisky, although I usually stick to beer and wine. It was as if I wanted to get drunk. At any rate, I was drunk when I woke on Sunday morning. I stayed in bed and dozed the day away. I had wanted to call my children, but it was too early, and then it was too late.

  I do not remember ever having been drunk, much less having intentionally gotten drunk. Of course I had been around drunk people; my partner Karchinger, raised by his cheerful mother from the Rhineland, could have one too many at firm retreats, and hit on the female interns. I had always looked down on him a little for that. I had also looked down on my wife a little when she was drunk, even though her character and circumstances meant she could not have been an alcoholic. I emphasized this after her accident, not only to the police, but also to the children, who even reproached me – as if the shock of her death weren’
t bad enough. But sometimes I had smelled alcohol on her breath, and her stride and speech were shaky. When she came home at night that way, or I found her at home like that, I slept in my study. Her loud snoring then was unbearable.

  I was ashamed of myself when I got up in the evening. I went to the gym, ran on the treadmill, and lifted weights. I was alone, and found the switch to turn off the music, then the one to raise the blinds. I had never seen the harbour and the bay this way. The sky was dark, full of clouds piling up into peaks and ridges. In the distance there were flashes of lightning, sometimes in front of the clouds, like bright scribbling, sometimes behind, lighting their rims white, or blue, or green. Whitecaps danced on the black water. No boat, no ship was out.

  I showered, dressed, took the lift to the lobby and walked out of the hotel. Like the bay, the streets were empty. An ambulance drove past, lights flashing and sirens wailing, as if the coming storm had already claimed its first victim. Otherwise it was still. There was no wind. The waves were not choppy, but billowing in from the sea.

  I found the calm before the storm depressing, and its arrival a liberation. It swept through the streets and over the square in front of the hotel, driving papers, cups, bags and cans before it – whirling dervishes chasing and overtaking each other. The air chilled and then ice burst from the sky, hailstones that pounded the roof of the entrance, as if wanting to shatter it. I stepped back into the lobby and watched the hail cover the square, a vibrating layer of white.

  The staff and guests of the hotel talked about the great hailstorm of 1999, the millions of pieces of hail, their diameter, their damage, their victims. The hailstorm I had seen was small by comparison.

  When the hail turned to rain, I went out. The rain fell heavily, and after a few minutes I was wet and clammy. But shuffling through the hail, which the rain was melting, stomping and splashing through the water, making the raindrops fly – it was such a joy that I didn’t mind my cold, wet feet or the pain in my side when I slipped and fell. I stood up and went to the harbour, where the rain, sea, land and sky flowed together. It was overwhelming. A flood.

  Then the cold and wet became uncomfortable, and I went back to the hotel. I ended Sunday sensibly, slept well, and started Monday sensibly. When the head of the detective agency called, I hailed a cab and drove to him.

  24

  A secretary led me in. He came out from behind the desk, greeted me, offered me the chair opposite, and retreated behind the desk. He was as I had imagined him: an elderly bald man with a paunch. Like all men my age with a paunch and bald head, he made me proud that I had no belly and still had my hair.

  “We found her.” He settled into the chair and waited for a sign of appreciation.

  I had seen this in colleagues. They do what they’re supposed to do, the tasks they have been assigned and for which they are being paid. But they cannot simply deliver results, they want to be fussed over, and patted on the head. Sometimes they try to make a game of it and have the results teased out of them. In my firm I drove such bad habits out of my colleagues. I would not be able to drive them out of the head of the detective agency. I nodded in appreciation and asked excitedly: “Where is she?”

  “It wasn’t easy. She’s lived here for twenty years. But…” He paused, shook his head, and only continued when I repeated: “But?”

  “But she’s an illegal. She entered the country as a tourist, and did not sort out anything – residency permit, work permit, citizenship, health insurance, nothing. We haven’t tracked down where she’s been for the past twenty years or what she’s been doing. Today she lives on the coast, north of here – three, four hours away. She must have money in Germany, she pays with a German credit card. That is why she’s slipped through the net. If she had worked here and opened a bank account and ordered a credit card, she would have needed to present papers she didn’t have.”

  “What name does she go by?”

  “Irene Adler. Her maiden name and a name that sounds good in both languages, English and German. I hear her English is perfect.”

  “What do you know about her connection to the art gallery?”

  “She offered the curator her painting, and he accepted. He did some research and didn’t see any problems. The painting is mentioned in an early catalogue of Karl Schwind’s work, and isn’t on the international registry of stolen art. Since then other museums have shown an interest, and the New York Times wrote a long article about the rediscovered masterpiece.”

  It sounded as though his agency had found someone at the art gallery who had abused the curator’s trust and had looked into his files; and they had then looked into the immigration agency files; and finally asked around where Irene Gundlach lived. I had hoped for more. I had hoped I would learn where she had lived, how she was living now, who she was now. At the same time I knew that hope was foolish. I had not asked for that, just whether the picture belonged to her, and if she lived in Australia.

  I took down the address, Red Cove in Rock Harbour, thanked him, and paid. On the way to the hotel I bought a pair of cotton trousers, a pair of linen trousers, shorts, and shirts. The hotel found me a rental car, and after I had packed and thanked them, I paid and set off.

  25

  I could still have made it to Rock Harbour on Monday. After I had survived a couple of close scrapes as I made turns, or passed, I adjusted to driving on the left. I drove elatedly, first on a six-lane motorway, and then on a two-lane road that sometimes hugged the coast, sometimes diverged from it. And suddenly my courage vanished.

  I pulled onto the shoulder, stopped, and got out. What did I want from Irene Gundlach, or Irene Adler? To tell her that I still resented her? To finally tell her in person what I had said in my thoughts? That it is not right to use people and drop them? That I had been too naïve and awkward, but that I had loved her nonetheless, and that it is not right to play with someone else’s love? That she could at least have written me a letter, an explanation to ease the sting?

  I would only make a fool of myself again. It all happened forty years ago; she would think I was an idiot who was stuck in the past. I myself found it idiotic, how present the past was to me. It was as if we had sat on the bench by the Main River only yesterday, as if only yesterday I had waited for her in the VW bus, only yesterday that she dropped me off outside the village. As if I would still be the person I was back then, when we sat on a bench together now.

  Is that how it is with things that don’t quite come to an end? But things do not come to an end, one has to bring them to an end. I should have brought that episode to an end back then; I should have given it a meaning. I had wanted to convince myself that without Irene things would have not gone so well with my wife, but it wasn’t true. I had filed away my schooldays and university years, my deceased mother, my father who visited me at my grandparents’ a couple of times before moving to Hong Kong and dying there, as things that were as they were, and couldn’t have been different. Why did something inside me insist things could have turned out differently with Irene?

  I had stopped on a rise. To the west, the mountains were covered in brush and scrub, straight trees and bowed trees. The upright trees had pale, barkless trunks, as if naked or sick. The sea lay to the east, beyond two mountain ridges. I crossed the road and sat down on the embankment. The sea was dappled, gray and blue, smooth and rough. In the distance, two ships were sailing but appeared to be staying in the same spot.

  Sailing and staying in the same spot – that was how I felt. Then I said to myself that it only appeared as if the ships were staying in the same spot. Perhaps I too was moving even though it didn’t seem that way to me. I thought of the spots on my suit and had to laugh. These stains, which would have alarmed me before, hadn’t frightened me since the afternoon at the Botanic Garden. Yes, I had moved from the spot. Making a fool of myself in front of Irene Gundlach, or Irene Adler, would matter no more than having a stain on my suit.

  The sun was shining. The air smelled of pine and eucalypt
us. I thought I could also smell the distant sea, a weak, damp, salty scent. I heard the cicadas chirr and sometimes, in the valley, the roar of a saw. I decided not to worry. I would drive to Rock Harbour the next day, but today, find a hotel by the sea and watch the spectacle of the sunset from the terrace. In Australia day turns to night in only a few minutes, bright blue becoming dark blue, then black.

  26

  Rock Harbour had four streets, a small harbour with a few yachts and boats, a shop with a café and a postal counter, a real-estate agency, and an iron soldier on a stone pedestal, commemorating those who fell in the World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. The streets were empty, but not because of the early hour, as I initially thought, but rather because the summer houses were still without tenants. I found neither a street nor a house that went by the name “Red Cove.” I went into the shop and asked.

  “You want to see Eye-reen?” A man with white skin, white hair and pink eyes who sat by the counter laid down his book and stood up. Eye-reen? His way of saying her name was not mine: in German it was three short syllables, three bright vowels, three notes of a waltz – a name meant to be sung, to be danced to. For me, “Eye-reen” sounded stretched out like chewed gum. “She lives an hour from here. Do you have a boat?”

  “I have my car.”

  “You can only get there by boat. You could wait for her here, but she only comes every two weeks and she was here yesterday. You can’t call either, there’s no reception there.”

  “Are there ships that go along the coast?”

  He laughed. “A ferry service? No, we don’t have that. My boy can take you over in the boat. He can also pick you up if you know when you want to be picked up.”