The Woman on the Stairs by Bernhard Schlink
“I’ll call.”
“Nope, can’t call.”
“Can your boy take me, right away? And pick me up tonight?” This time, the man had let me finish my sentence.
He nodded and invited me to wait for his son, Mark, at one of the tables on the terrace. I took a seat and waited, listening to him on the telephone. Then he brought over two beers, sat down next to me and introduced himself. He had lived in Sydney, had had enough of the city, and had moved here seven years ago. He loved the sea, the tranquility, how the sleepy small town awoke in summer, the hustle and bustle of the summer months, the off-peak season, when artists and writers rented more cheaply for a couple of weeks, the return of calm. Everyone came to him: young families, grandparents, teenagers, artists.
“Living where she does wouldn’t be my cup of tea. It’s beautiful, but a lonely beauty…not a single soul, far and wide. What brings you to her?”
“We haven’t seen each other in a long time.”
“I know.” He laughed. “Otherwise you’d have already met me. When did you last see her?”
“Many years ago.”
He didn’t pry further. Mark arrived, took me to an old-fashioned launch, started up the motor, and cast off. He stood in the cabin and steered; I sat on the bench in front of the cabin, facing the sun and wind. The mountains and the coves all looked the same, and the boat rose and fell with a gentle rhythm, slapping the water, as the motor chugged with the same, calm rhythm. I fell asleep.
Part Two
1
I woke up to Mark cutting the engine. The boat drifted into a cove, towards a jetty. Just before we reached it, Mark fired up the engine again, guiding the boat towards the end of the jetty, then moored.
“This evening at six?”
“Yes.” I jumped from the boat. Mark cast off and drove away. I watched him until he rounded the cape and disappeared from view. Then I turned around.
The house on the beach was a one-storey stone house. The roof of the veranda rested on stone columns and was tiled in slate. It looked as if it had stood there a long time and intended to stay there; as if, with this house, civilization had carved a bridgehead in the wilderness that it was prepared to defend.
As I headed down the jetty towards the house, I saw another house, wooden, two-storey, built on the hillside with a view to the sea, that was so tucked into the trees that you couldn’t see it from afar. As solidly as the stone house sat on the beach, the other one hung on the mountain provisionally. The timbers supporting the house tilted at such unlikely angles that they startled the eye. The roof and balcony were bowed, some of the window frames so warped that it must have been impossible to close the windows. They were all open, along with all the doors. A curtain fluttered out of one of the windows.
The door of the beach house was closed. I knocked, waited and finally went inside, entering a large room with an old iron stove and an old iron range, a hutch, a table, a couple of chairs and, through a door into a second smaller room, a bed, a nightstand and a wardrobe. The rooms didn’t look lived in – did Irene live up above in summer, and only come down here when it was cold? From the large room, another door led out behind the house to a pump and an outhouse.
I looked up at the other house. Nothing had changed, all the doors and windows were still open and the curtain was still fluttering in the wind. I sensed that I would not find Irene up there. I could go from room to room, shouting her name, to see her place, and get a sense of her life, but I didn’t want to do that. She had built a terrace onto the slope, where a vegetable patch was planted with lettuce, beans, tomato plants and raspberry bushes. It needed watering.
Suddenly, I had the impression that everything was lifeless. Abandoned. As if whoever had lived here had departed in haste, never to return, inviting the wind to sweep through the house, the rain to seep into the rooms, the floors to rot, the pillars to crumble. The fluttering curtain reminded me of photos of ruins, where a bomb has ripped off the side of a building, leaving rooms and their furniture, pictures, and curtains exposed.
The sun went behind a cloud, and a cooler wind blew in from the sea. The water in the cove lay gray and cold. I put on the sweater I had around my shoulders, but I was still chilled. I found a musty wool blanket on the bed, wrapped it around me, sat down on the bench on the veranda, leant my head against the wall, and waited.
2
I didn’t hear Irene’s boat come in. I had fallen asleep again. I heard her only when she sat down next to me and said: “My brave knight!”
I kept my eyes shut. Her voice sounded as it had then, dark and smoky and, as then, I couldn’t sense what it conveyed. Was she making fun of me? I felt indignant, but indignation was no way to begin. “Shining armour? This knight is tired, he is hungry and thirsty. Do you have anything to eat and drink?” I opened my eyes and looked at her.
She laughed and stood up. I recognized her laughter too, by its sound and by her face, the way her eyes squinted, the dimples in her cheeks, her lopsided mouth. As she became serious, I took in that her eyes were blue-gray – back then, I had only registered that they were light. I saw all the wrinkles on her forehead and cheeks, her heavy eyelids, the tired skin and thinning hair. Irene had grown old, and I can’t say if I’d have recognized her had we crossed paths on the street. But like her voice and her laugh, the way she tucked her hair behind her ears, and the tilt of her head, were familiar. She had grown fuller around the waist, and I asked myself if the teenagers had seen something I hadn’t, in her hips and legs. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a plaid woollen shirt like a jacket. She had put down a bucket of fish she’d caught; I picked it up and followed her to the upper house.
As we went up, first up a path, then a wooden stairway – like the stairs from the beach up the dunes – Irene started breathing heavily. She leant on my arm and more than once had to take a break.
“Maybe I’ll move back down into the lower house,” she said, once we were inside. “It’s cold in winter, but it’s nice and cool in summer.”
“It has a stove.”
She looked at me. I didn’t know whether she was still sizing me up or was already disappointed, but I could tell what she was thinking: that lawyer can’t listen, he has to tell me I have a stove, as if I didn’t know that.
“That was a stupid thing to say.”
She smiled. “I don’t usually need to heat up here in the winter. Down there, the stone walls hold in the cold. It was a postal station, built more than a hundred years ago for the farms in the outback. The farms are long gone; the soil is poor and, one by one, the farmers gave up. The outback is now a nature reserve. I think the last mail boat came at Christmas, 1951.” The sweeping gesture of her arm encompassed the room we were standing in, the crooked door, the crooked windows, the crooked beams that carried the weight of the top floor, and the crooked stairs that led to it. “You don’t need to tell me that it will fall apart soon, I know. But that day hasn’t come just yet.”
The room – kitchen, dining room and living room all in one – took up the entire ground floor. The range with six hobs, the table to seat twelve, the three sofas made it much too big for Irene. I refrained from enquiring further, and let her show me how to scale fish. I peeled potatoes, washed the lettuce and made a salad dressing; I can’t cook, but I can make a good dressing. Irene asked what I had been doing in Sydney, what I did in Frankfurt, asked after my wife and children and whether I was content with my life. I didn’t want to give away any more about myself than she did, but she turned any of the few questions I managed to ask into a question of her own, giving nothing away. And yet, when we were finally sitting on the balcony, eating, we had created a bit of intimacy – while cooking, talking, the moments when we’d touched, when I held her as she used a ladder to get a bottle of oil from a high cupboard, when I helped her with a blocked drain and a sticky drawer.
I saw the boat before I heard it. I had not looked at the time once. As the putter of the engine came into earshot, Ire
“I’ll come again tomorrow.”
“You can stay here. There are six empty rooms upstairs. I’ll find pyjamas and overalls for you, so you don’t get your clothes dirty when you help me tomorrow.”
So I went down to the jetty and talked to Mark. He asked whether I didn’t want to give him my car keys. Then he could bring my luggage with him tomorrow. In case I stayed longer.
3
By the time I had got back to the balcony, she had cleared the table and opened a bottle of red.
“Did Schwind want to keep all his paintings, or just the one of you?” I wanted to tread lightly.
“He wanted to keep the pictures he felt defined him as an artist. That spoke to issues in contemporary painting: what representation and abstraction can offer, their relationship to photography, how beauty and truth interact.”
“And your painting?”
“It was an answer to Marcel Duchamp. Do you know Nude Descending a Staircase? A cubist figure, breaking up in the moments of descent, a vortex of legs, ass, arms and heads? Duchamp’s work was talked about as the end of painting, and Schwind wanted to show that a naked woman descending a staircase could still be painted.”
I did not understand. “Why should what Duchamp painted be the ‘end of painting’?”
“You came here so you could finally understand modern art?” She smiled amicably, but behind the friendliness was something I couldn’t tease out. Was it contempt, rejection, exhaustion? The thought entered my mind that people say “dead tired” when they are very tired but full of life, but when they use “tired of life”, they’re near the end.
“I want to understand what happened. I made it easy for you. But you used me, and you let me know that clearly. You could have called or written a letter or a postcard. If you felt you had to use me and hurt me, why didn’t you—”
“Package it in friendliness?” She spoke now with open contempt. “For Gundlach I was the young, blonde, beautiful trophy, only the packaging counted. For Schwind, I was a muse, the packaging was enough for that too. Then you came along. A woman’s third stupid role, after the trophy and the muse, is the damsel in distress who must be rescued by the prince. To stop her falling into the hands of the villain, the prince takes her into his own hands. After all, she belongs in the hands of some man.” She shook her head. “No, I wasn’t interested in friendly packaging.”
“I never forced a role on you. When I approached you, you could have kindly refused me and gone on your way.”
“Kindly refused…”
“An unfriendly refusal then. In any case, you didn’t have to use me.”
She nodded, tired now. “Roles make you predictable, interchangeable, useable. The prince who saves the princess – you used me just as much as Gundlach and Schwind.”
My firm employs more women than the statistical average. We operate our own kindergarten with the tax advisors on the floor below us and the accountants on the floor above. I supported my wife’s career and, after my daughter studied art history, I also paid for a law degree. I don’t need to be lectured on feminism.
“Are you trying to tell me that the only choices you had were trophy, muse or princess? Between what Gundlach, Schwind and I wanted from you? With your money and your career, you had every opportunity to find your own identity. Don’t shove responsibility—”
“Responsibility? You don’t want to understand, you want to judge.” She looked at me in disbelief. “Is that what matters to you? That you can judge me? That you can have a clear conscience? Your life must surely add up to more than just ‘not guilty’!”
I didn’t understand what she wanted from me.
“Is this what happens to someone who spends their life with law? It doesn’t matter who you are any more, only that you’re in the right? And that the other is in the wrong?”
Night had fallen, again it had only taken minutes. But the night wasn’t black; the moon cast a silver light on the leaves and the sea. It shone on Irene’s face, highlighting its tiredness, its wrinkles and sagging so mercilessly that I felt pity for her – and myself. We were old, it was all such a long time ago. Why worry her, why worry myself with this old affair?
But I couldn’t leave that old affair behind so easily. Just as I was admitting it to myself, she said: “I’m sorry that I hurt you. I felt so caged that all I wanted was to break free. I didn’t care about anything else. When I think back…you were still such a child.”
4
If I had still been a child then, what was I now? As I lay in bed, Irene’s remark kept me awake. Of course, I know far more about human nature and how to handle people now than I did then; what one owes them, what one should not put up with, how to act during negotiations and how to act in court. But I knew it all then too, the rudiments at least, and I hadn’t felt like a child.
The small room that Irene had given me faced the sea. If I listened closely, I could hear in the silence the waves washing ashore, the rush as they came in, the rustle through the pebbles as they retreated. The room was lit with moonlight; I could clearly see the cupboard, the chair, the mirror.
If I listened closely, I thought I could hear Irene’s breathing. But that couldn’t be; there was another room between hers and mine. But if I wasn’t hearing her breathing, I was hearing the house breathe, and that was even more impossible. A steady, heavy flow in and out. Then I heard an animal screech, a cry that peeled out as if the creature had awoken from a nightmare, or been petrified by something awful.
Or it had been startled by the wind that suddenly kicked up. Out of nothing it blew around the house, shaking it until the beams creaked. I got up and went to the window, expecting the first drops. But the sky was clear and the moon shone. The wind brought no rain with it; it only bent the trees and made the house groan.
The wind felt weird. It came without clouds, and without rain; it had no right to show off, but it did. It did not blow on me, but around me and through me and let me know how frail I was, as it let the house feel how fragile it was. Then things became even weirder. On the balcony someone was squatting, and turned their face towards me. A youth with dark skin and short hair, a broad nose and wide mouth, his feet on the ground, knees bent, his bottom hovering above the ground. I would tip over backwards, I thought, if I were to squat like that. His eyes must be deep-set, I thought, since I couldn’t see the whites. But I saw that he had fixed me in an unmoving, inscrutable gaze.
Should I wake Irene? If the boy planned to rob us, alone or with others, or to set the house on fire – it didn’t fit with his calm posture or the bright moon or the roar of the wind. The weird feeling had come over me not because I was afraid. It was because I didn’t understand what everything here meant – the boy, the wind, what Irene had said, what kept me here.
5
When I awoke, the sky was still pale. I heard a loud rustling, went to the window and saw a flock of blackbirds circling above the trees, close and loud, then distant and soft, and when the flock was distant and soft I heard the other birds, which sang the same three notes over and over again, or repeated the same short caw, or chirped the same trembling staccato. I imagined their bills desperately held open, until the flock surged back and drowned them out.
A pair of overalls had appeared on the chair, in the same way the pyjamas had appeared on the bed the previous day. I heard Irene descend the stairs slowly, then start working in the kitchen. I got dressed.
Over coffee, Irene explained that her Jeep had a flat tyre and the crank on the jack was broken. I needed to lift the Jeep so she could push a stone underneath and change the tyre.
“They told me no roads lead here.”
“When they made the area a nature reserve the roads were abandoned. Where they joined the road network, they were blocked off. But the old tracks are enough for a Jeep, and you can drive around the barriers. We insiders know how to get out, the people out there, luckily, don’t
“We?”
“There are still two farmsteads. That’s where I need to go later.”
The Jeep was too heavy for me. The piece of wood I tried to use as a lever broke. Finally, I found an iron pipe, managed to lever up the Jeep, and Irene slid a stone underneath. The rest was easy, even if I couldn’t remember the last time I had changed a tyre.
On the way, I asked Irene about the boy who had squatted on the balcony in the night. Kari used to live with her and came from time to time to make sure everything was okay. She could tell that I wanted to know more.
“I used to take in children – abandoned kids, strays, drug addicts, alcoholics. Not officially, not through social services or child services, I’m not here officially myself, but word got around among the children. Some came for a few days or weeks, to rest awhile, some stayed for a year or two. A couple of them managed to get back into school or into work. Others returned in a worse state than when they’d left. If they were still under eighteen, I took them back in. No one over eighteen, that was the iron rule.”
“How many children did you have?”
“The house has seven rooms, and there was a child in each, occasionally two. I lived downstairs.”
“What did you all live on?”
“We had chickens and goats, grew all sorts of produce, the farms helped us, and sometimes the children brought stuff they had stolen. They learned that you have to share and that you can’t steal for yourself, only for the group.”
It was a bumpy conversation. Irene drove quickly and confidently, steering the Jeep steadily over every bump in the road, through washed-out riverbeds and dried-out ponds, sometimes straight through the underbrush; the trail kept disappearing and appearing again. I was thrown up, and from side to side; I wedged my foot against the chassis and held fast to the seat, wishing the Jeep had a roof or at least a door that closed. But it was open, an old Jeep straight from a war film.