The Woman on the Stairs Read online

  “Then one day, I realized that the girl with blonde pigtails in the other circle was the girl I sometimes saw in the store where my grandmother sent me to shop. Like me, she brought a metal pail that the grocer would fill with either whole or skimmed milk. And like me she had a note telling the grocer what to pack in her bag. Unlike me, she didn’t give him her purse, but paid like a grown-up; slowly, the tip of her tongue between her lips, she took out notes and coins, until she had the closest possible amount, and counted her change just as carefully. We didn’t talk to each other. I wasn’t brave enough, and especially not as long as I still paid like a child.

  “So mathematics became the first subject in which I made an effort. I can still remember the first time that I took out the notes and coins from my purse and counted the change. The girl wasn’t there; it took several weeks before we ran into each other at the shop and she saw that I could do what she could. She gave me a quick look – ‘About time’ – and did not put the tip of her tongue between her lips when she counted, perhaps because I did not do it. I didn’t give the grocer the shopping list any more, but read out what I was supposed to buy, and she did the same. I knew by now where she lived; without either of us making a detour, but just taking a different route, we could walk most of the way home together. But neither of us proposed it.

  “Sometimes I would follow her home from school at a distance. I don’t think she ever noticed. But then something happened to her that I knew all too well. Two big boys came up behind her, then they were next to her, and then they were pushing her against a fence. She fought back, but didn’t shout. I heard the boys laughing, yelling ‘Come on’ and ‘Give it up’. I ran, ran into the first boy with all my strength and hit the other in the stomach as hard as I could. I took the girl’s hand and I ran off with her, round the next corner, and into a garden and behind a bush. But the boys didn’t follow us.

  “After a while I walked her home. I didn’t let go of her hand, and she didn’t try to pull it from mine. In front of her house I asked what her—”

  “Is that a true story?”

  “She was not blonde, she was dark, and she was not called Irene, which is what I was about to call her, but Barbara. For two or three weeks we walked home together hand in hand, then she was gone, and I had forgotten all about her until you asked me about school. If it had been you, and you hadn’t moved away, but had stayed…” I took Irene’s hand.

  “Yes.”

  16

  We made it to the boulder at the end of the cove. Then she couldn’t go on. I carried her back to the stairs, and up them, and laid her on the bed on the balcony. It was so early that the sun was still shining on the bed; I opened the sun umbrella and positioned it.

  “Do you smell something?”

  “No. What do you smell?”

  “Fire. But maybe I’m imagining it.”

  I went through the house and checked the gas oven and the boiler and the candles that in the past few days we had sometimes lit. I checked our provisions; in two or three days I would have to drive into town. I would have liked to have had some morphine on hand in case Irene was in real pain. Maybe Kari could get hold of some – or some heroin?

  When I got back to the balcony, Irene was asleep. I sat next to her, and watched her. The hair, combed away from her face and bunched at the nape of her neck. Her forehead lined with wrinkles, and the deep grooves in her cheeks. The mouth with lips grown thin, the round, prominent chin, the empty skin beneath it at her throat. She looked severe. I made all sorts of faces, but couldn’t find one that would have etched the grooves in her cheeks, nor carved the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes – laughing joy at the world, or a fearful rejection of it, with squinting eyes? It wasn’t a sweet face. And yet it was precious to me. It held the joys, and fears, and ruptures in Irene’s life.

  The longer I looked at it, the more I thought I understood her face. There was both: joy and fear around the eyes; harshness and softness in the cheeks; and the thin lips were ready to break into an enchanting smile.

  She opened her eyes. “What are you looking at?”

  “I’m just looking at you.”

  She didn’t like the answer and shook her head, smiling.

  “When I look at your face, I see what I know about you, and what I still don’t know. I’m putting it together. Each time I look at you, I know you better. Each time, I love you more.”

  “I dreamt I was riding on a train, first on an express train, and then on a commuter train, and as I got off, I already knew it was the wrong station, but I got off anyway and it was the wrong station, so desolate and run-down, as if no train had stopped there in years. I went through the station building to the square outside, and everything was deserted there too: no taxis, no buses, no people. But then I saw Karl and Peter, both sitting on their suitcases, old-fashioned things without wheels or pull-out handles, as if they were waiting to be picked up. When I went up to them, they didn’t look up or move, and it seemed to me that they had died long ago, and were sitting there, dead, on their suitcases. I felt a shock – but not like something hitting me, more like something cold, slowly creeping up my spine. Then I woke up.”

  “I can’t interpret dreams. Dreams are just dreams, as my wife used to say. But when the three of you talked about the end of the world and of art and of alternatives – weren’t you at the station where the last train had left long ago? Weren’t you sitting dead on your suitcases?” I had wanted, but forgotten, to ask her just after the others had left: “Do you really believe what you said?”

  She looked around. I brought her pillows so that she could sit up. She arranged herself, and gave me the look I had come to know, and which bespoke tenderness, but also sadness that I didn’t understand what she wanted me to. “My pure fool,” she said. “You go through life fighting your battles like knights fought their tournaments, and like them, you don’t see that it’s the end of an era – that it’s just a game of mirrors now. I love how keen you are to trudge from task to task, dutifully doing yet another merger, yet another acquisition, as if it meant something. It moves me, and it makes me sad.”

  I wanted to protest. I wanted to justify what I did, to explain that mergers and acquisitions mean something. That the battles I fought were more than a game of mirrors. That nothing had come to an end; that everything went on and on.

  “Don’t worry. When people talk about the world, they’re usually talking about themselves. Perhaps it’s just that I can’t bear that I’m coming to an end, without the world ending too. Come here!”

  We held one another, both lost in our thoughts, but still together. Then my thoughts grew stale, and I was sad, because I too sensed the barrier that kept us from fully understanding and feeling for each other. Not just Irene and me – from early on, a pane of glass had prevented me from really reaching others – my wife, my children, my friends. I was, always, on my own.

  I could have again – but I had already cried enough the evening before. In any case, I tried to remain present in our embrace and to release all the other feelings, all the other thoughts as soon as they came. I didn’t find it easy.

  17

  The next morning, Irene smelled fire again.

  “Wouldn’t Kari be here if something was wrong? Should I go see Meredene? We need to stock up anyway.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t go. You’re right – if something’s wrong, Kari will come.” She looked at me anxiously. “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to hold it in today. I feel so weak – I’ve never been this weak before. I was sick once, when I still had the kids. My temperature kept rising, and finally I went to bed and I was grateful that I didn’t have to do anything, and could just lie there. Actually it can be nice, just lying there. Lying down, sleeping, maybe even dying. Would you tell me something?”

  “I have two memories of my mother. Right after the war, my parents and I moved from north to south Germany, and we made the trip in the trailer of the moving van, which had a cab with a b
ench seat and a window, like in a truck, but without the steering wheel or engine. Sitting on my mother’s lap and looking out the window – that is one memory. The other is being with my mother at a playground once. It was behind the empty lot where the synagogue had stood until 1938, a small, oblong park with trees and benches and a sand box.

  “I remember that it was evening, and it was getting dark. My mother was sitting with me in the sandpit, building a sandcastle. She had brought a flat piece of wood with her and she used it as a roof on the first level of the tower to build a second storey on. She had brought a little pail of water with her, that helped, but still, the tower was a miracle: on the second floor one could see into the room through the door and out through the window on the other side. She worked with utter concentration, and was lost in the project as though I wasn’t there. Still, I was totally happy. She was with me and only with me; she was doing something for me and me alone. By the time it got dark, she was done. The street lights came on, gas lanterns giving off a soft light, and we sat and looked at the castle. I’m sure it had a rampart and one or two other buildings, but the thing I remember most clearly is the tower with two storeys, and I saw Rapunzel roll down her hair and the prince climb up to her. Then I looked up, and a little blonde girl was standing next to me. She was looking at the castle too, with bright blue-gray eyes and with an awestruck, slightly crooked smile.”

  “You just made that up.” Irene reproached me gently.

  “Yes. The strange thing is, now I wonder if I made up the whole story. There really was a playground, but why do I have no other memories of playing with my mother, at home or outside, and why would she have done it that particular evening? She was not especially good with her hands, she was impatient, far too impatient to build a two-storey tower out of sand. Sometimes she would read me fairy tales. Did I imagine a fairy tale of my own? But that evening is in my memory, not as fantasy but reality, and I can see it all before me, clear as day: the sandpit, my mother in a blue dress, the castle in the twilight, then in the dark, then in the light of the gas lanterns.”

  “How old were you when your mother died?”

  “Four. It couldn’t have been long after that.”

  “How did she die?”

  “She drove into a tree.”

  Irene looked at me as if she was waiting for me to say more.

  “She was a good driver. Sometimes she would take me with her, I would sit or stand next to her on the passenger seat. There were no seatbelts or booster seats back then, and I loved it when she drove fast. I felt completely safe.”

  Irene was still waiting.

  “My grandparents said once that she was drunk. That she was an alcoholic. But my grandparents were against the marriage, they didn’t like my mother and never had a good word to say about her. I would have smelt it if she’d been an alcoholic. Children smell those things.”

  Irene took my hand. I could tell exactly what she was thinking. Like your wife, she thought. I didn’t like that thought, but her eyes grew heavy, and I thought it was better that she slept the thought away than if I contradicted it. She fell asleep, and I held her hand and resented her.

  18

  Then I too smelled smoke. It had the sharp, sweet scent of eucalyptus; it was faint yet penetrating and almost intoxicating. I stood up and looked around, but I saw no smoke and no fire. The mountains, the cove, the trees, the bush, the jetty, the sea – everything looked the same.

  Suddenly, Kari was standing next to me and signalled that I should come along. I wrote a note for Irene saying Kari had come and wanted to show me something. I thought we would take the Jeep, but Kari headed up the mountain in quick, light strides, and I struggled to keep up with him. I only knew the way the Jeep took, through the mountains along the coast into the rolling plain where the two farms lay. Now Kari led me up a path on one of the mountains. We went ever higher, the cove was small and blue beneath us like an illustration from Treasure Island. After half an hour we stood on the mountaintop.

  The view stretched all the way to the mountain range on the far side of the plain. Even before I saw the fire, patches and lines of reddish gold on the mountains, I saw the smoke billowing black into the clear sky. When it drifted over a gorge where the fire was burning, it lit up gold-red. It lit up, too, when it passed over a mountain whose far side was already ablaze; the ember glow announced that the flames would soon reach the summit and crown it with fire. Then they ate their way down the mountain, and by the time they reached the bottom, they had devoured everything above, and left only embers, black ash, and charred wood.

  Fire engines with flashing lights sped down the stretches of motorway that were visible. Helicopters flew over them.

  “Will the fire reach us?”

  “The plain is wide. But it’s dry, and if the fire jumps the motorway…” Kari shrugged.

  “Then?”

  “I don’t know. It depends on the wind. We still can’t smell much and we still can’t see too much smoke – the wind is still weak. But if it picks up…”

  “Have you had a wildfire here before?”

  “No, not here. Further north, though. The fire makes the wind and the wind drives the fire.”

  “Oh God!” I saw a town burning at the foot of the mountains, the one where Meredene and I had gone shopping.

  Kari stayed on the hilltop. I went down to Irene. She was up. “I know. The mountains are on fire. What will Meredene and her family and the old couple do?”

  “They can come here. The motorway’s still open, someone will pick them up.”

  “And the animals?”

  I imagined one of the children driving the animals to us in the cove, and if the fire reached us, into the water. I could already hear the cows lowing and the pigs squealing and the chickens clucking. But nobody came, not the people from the farms and not the animals. I don’t know what became of them.

  I was not worried about us. The boat was moored to the jetty, I filled the tank, and tried the engine, and it ran smoothly and reliably. I took a mattress out to the boat and made a bed in front of the helm and loaded food, lots of water, blankets. I stored all the towels and linen I could find in the house on the beach so that if the fire came I could soak them and protect the wooden roof structure, and windows. I brought everything we would need down to the old house as well. If the fire came we would go out onto the sea and wait until it was over. And then, presumably, if not into the upper house, we would at least be able to move back into the house on the beach.

  In late afternoon, smoke drifted over the cove. Ash rained down, very light, very fine; it landed on our skin, and in the folds in our clothes, and on our teeth, leaving a bitter taste behind. I found my way up the mountain and squatted down next to Kari. Beneath a murky, yellow-gray sky the edge of the plain was in flames; the fire had managed to leap the motorway. The forest was burning gold-red, and sometimes, as if an invisible hand were reaching into the fire and hurling a flame, a tree or bush far beyond the fire line would burst into flames, followed by the surrounding grass.

  “When will the fire get here?”

  As if in answer to my question, the wind picked up. It stoked the fire, drove it forwards, and blew the black smoke up into a huge cloud, a growing monstrosity alive with embers and flame. At one point a fireball burst from the belly of the cloud, soared in an arc as if launched from a catapult, landed at the foot of the hill before us, and the trees burst into flames. Smoke and ash blew in our faces, sometimes with a whiff of eucalyptus, sometimes with an ember as well.

  As suddenly as the wind had picked up, it died down. The fire was no longer bent forwards, like someone running a race, but stood upright, as if awaiting instruction.

  “You can go. If it becomes dangerous, I’ll try to come. If I don’t come, but the fire gets over the mountain, get in the boat and head out to sea. Don’t wait for me. If the path to you gets cut off, I’ll find another one.”

  19

  Irene was lying as I had left her. I told
her about the fire in the plain, about the wind, about Kari. She listened, but her eyelids were heavy. “Could you clean me up?” I fetched a new mattress and made up a bed, undressed Irene and washed her, then dressed her and moved her to the new bed. As I did so, she again put her arms trustingly around my neck, and it made me happy.

  “If the fire comes over the mountain during the night, we’ll get in the boat.”

  “I won’t get in the boat.”

  That was so stupid that I had no idea how to respond. “Do you want to die in the fire? You aren’t going to die when you want, you are going to die when it’s your time.”

  “If the house burns down, it’s my time. I won’t burn, the smoke will suffocate me. It’s an easy death.” She said it mournfully and stubbornly, like a child clinging white-knuckled to the railing. “I don’t want to go to Rock Harbour and to Sydney and to hospital. I don’t want to die in a white room. I want to die here.”

  I leant over her and took her in my arms. “I won’t let you die in a white room. You’ll die here. When it’s time. We’ll get in the boat when the fire comes, and when it’s gone, we’ll move back into the old house and we’ll have some more time together. We wasted so many days, we can’t lose any more.”

  “Promise me that I’ll die here? Whatever happens?”

  I promised, and she let go of the balcony railing and fell asleep in my arms. Black smoke drifted over the mountains and rolled over the cove. Everything went dark, although the dull white disc of the sun could still be made out behind the smoke. Then I saw fire coming over the mountaintop. I lifted Irene up, carried her to the boat, soaked the towels and sheets in the old house and plastered them on the wood. A powerful wind came down from the hills. It bent and buffeted the trees, made the upper house groan and tremble, and whipped up the sea so the waves slapped the jetty. The air tasted of smoke and salt.