The Woman on the Stairs Read online

  “Where did you get the Jeep?”

  She laughed. “Stolen. In the beginning we had to lug everything around. One day Arunta and Arthur turned up with the Jeep. A collector had had it in his garage. They had been with me a year and had turned eighteen, and knew they couldn’t stay. But they wanted to make life easier for the rest of us.” She laughed again. “I don’t think much of collecting. Do you?”

  Then we reached a valley with a stream that was almost dried up, and meadows and trees and cows, which gathered in the shade of a willow, like in a seventeenth-century Dutch painting. At the end of the valley lay the first farm. A large wooden house with two barns, some young men and women, lots of children, pigs and hens – I was greeted briefly, then ignored. Irene went into the house, and after a while I followed her. I found her in the kitchen; she was taking a dressing off a girl’s shoulder. She examined the wound, applied ointment from a small tin, and put on a new dressing. “She wanted to smash through the wall with her shoulder,” she said when she saw me, “she won’t do it again. Right? You won’t do that again?” The girl shook her head.

  The other farm felt abandoned. The old lady who opened the door gave me a hostile, suspicious look, took Irene by the hand, pulled her inside the house and shut the door. I sat in the Jeep, taking in the decrepit house, the dilapidated barn and the rusty equipment, fighting the despondency that enveloped the farm, and wanted to envelop me too.

  6

  “He won’t last much longer,” said Irene as she sat back down next to me.

  “And then?”

  She drove off. “Then she won’t last much longer either, and the young people from the other farm will finally take over. They would have done it long ago and looked after the old folks, but they don’t want it. They’ve turned nasty.” She shrugged her shoulders. “We here are no better than you out there. At first I thought so. But it’s not true.”

  “Did you become a doctor?”

  “Nurse. That’s enough for most things. Without equipment, I’d be no use as a doctor.”

  I imagined the scenarios, the burst appendix, the heart attack, cancer. I wondered how they taught the children; where they got their pens and paper and books. What else would the people here need from the outside world? How did the people at the first farm know each other? Were the young families who lived in the same house a commune, a sect? What had Irene looked for here, and what had she found?

  “I used other people, even worse than I did you.”

  “Did you take their money? Their reputation? Their life?” I said it flippantly, each outcome seemed as absurd as the next.

  She laughed.

  I did not like her laugh. She laughed the way you’d laugh at a bad joke, or a nasty trick, or some bad luck that you would rather cry about.

  She said nothing. I had nothing to say either. Although the drive through the bush didn’t invite conversation, the silence between us was loud. When we arrived and she had parked, she stayed seated.

  “Will you help me up to my room? I can’t make it alone.”

  She had parked the Jeep above the house, and on the way down, she leant on my right arm. But then I had to put both arms around her to hold and guide her. The stairs in the house were steep and narrow; Irene said since she often took the stairs on all fours, like a dog, she could let herself be carried by me like a dog as well. I picked her up, carried her upstairs and laid her on her bed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I overdid it. When I do everything nice and slowly, it’s okay. But I’m no good at doing that. I overdo it, then my legs go weak and don’t want to carry me, and sometimes my head doesn’t want to go on either.”

  I fetched the chair and sat down next to the bed. “What do you have?”

  “My brave knight,” she smiled, “nothing you can save me from. Just let me sleep a little.”

  She closed her eyes. Her breathing became regular, sometimes her eyelids fluttered, sometimes her hands wandered over her belly, saliva pooled in the corner of her mouth. She smelled sick, not sick the way my children did when they had their childhood colds, or flus, or stomach aches. Irene smelled strong, strange, repulsive.

  What was I still doing here? I knew what I had needed to know. She was even sorry that she had used me – what more did I want?

  I got up quietly, left the house and went down to the beach. My luggage was on the jetty, with a note stuck in the zip of my travel bag. Mark had come in the morning, because he would be held up in the afternoon and evening; he was sorry he’d missed me and been unable to bring me back, but at least he’d brought my bag.

  7

  I sat down on the bench on the veranda of the house by the beach. While I had sat by Irene’s bed, the sky had clouded over. Rain clouds? I felt a chill and fetched the musty blanket. Sitting here again, cold again, smelling the blanket again – it seemed that time was standing still and I was too.

  No, Irene would not be living here, like this, if she had taken someone’s money. If she had ruined someone’s reputation, the newspapers hadn’t caught on, so it couldn’t have been anything too bad. And if she had taken a life, I would have read about that in the papers too. Or had she committed the perfect murder? Irene?

  I had never felt the desire to kill anyone, be they a competitor or an adversary, a child molester or child killer, Pinochet or Kim Jong-il. Not that I set such a high value on life. The value of life remains a mystery to me. How can one define the value of something lost, if the person who has lost it doesn’t miss it? But of course I abhor violence. Bludgeoning or stabbing someone to death – hideous, and that someone sets off a bomb from afar that tears the victim apart is no less hideous. Perhaps it is even more hideous: an act of violence that divests itself of all the feelings and inhibitions that arise from closeness.

  I have never dealt with murderers. My firm doesn’t take criminal defence cases. But I simply couldn’t imagine Irene as a murderer. She knew how to keep her cool; she knew how to get her way. I could think of nothing that would have driven her to murder. Even if her second husband had seen her as no more than a trophy, like her first, even if her next lover had also wanted to take advantage of her, if the manager whose advances she had rejected demoted her or her neighbour had harassed her in the hall – Irene would have known how to deal with all of it. If someone had tried to rob or attack her, it would have been self-defence, nothing she could have been reproached for or that she would have had to reproach herself for. So what was she talking about?

  I was making the same mistake I had back then. At the time I had assumed I knew who she was, yet I knew nothing. Our intimacy had existed only in my imagination. Once again, I was imagining that I could feel and think my way into her head, that we were close. Why? Only because she had walked naked into my life? In a painting?

  I stood up, folded the blanket, went up to the house on the hillside and into the kitchen. In the pantry cupboard I found spaghetti, tins of tomatoes and a glass of olives, and anchovies and capers in the spice rack. Cooking doesn’t come easy to me, but I wasn’t in a hurry. By the time I heard Irene get up and walk to the stairs, the table was set and the meal was ready. I helped her down the steps, led her to the table and served her food. She looked at me; I was proud and she saw my pride and smiled.

  “You’re still here.”

  “The boat came while we were out, left my luggage and went back. Now you’ll have to take me to Rock Harbour.”

  “When?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Tomorrow?”

  “Whenever you like.”

  8

  That annoyed me. Could she not have said: You don’t have to go, you can stay if you want? “Did things have to go the way they did? Could they have gone differently?”

  She looked at me, astonished. “My brave—”

  “Drop the ‘brave knight’ bit. I loved you. You told me then that I had never been in love – do you remember? – and you were right, I never had, that was my first time. I was a bit clumsy, I know, bu
t I’m not complaining, that would be ridiculous. All I want to know is whether I could have done something better, and if so, could things have worked out between us.”

  “You mean, could I have been part of your law firm life in Frankfurt, with golf clubs, tennis, a subscription to the opera?”

  “We could have gone abroad, to America or Brazil or Argentina. I would have settled in quickly and learned the language and the legal system and—”

  “And soon you’d have had a prosperous legal firm and joined the high society of wherever we ended up.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Have you ever represented normal people – workers, renters, people whose health was ruined, battered women? Have you ever brought a case against the state? The police, the church? Have you defended political activists? Have you ever risked anything? I was looking for someone like that. Someone who would take a risk, someone I could take a risk with. Even life itself. What did you say yesterday? Mergers and acquisitions? Who cares who merges with whom, and who acquires whom? Not even you can be interested in that. You enjoy the fact that you can do it, that other people aren’t getting one over on you because you’re getting one over on them. You like the money, the fancy hotels, the first-class flights. Did you ever stop to think about the real world, about justice in the real world?”

  “There can be justice and injustice in mergers and acquisitions.”

  “Have you never dreamed of more? Of justice for the exploited and the oppressed? Tell me you haven’t always been this way.”

  I poked around in my spaghetti and focused on eating. She ate too, but kept her eyes on me and waited for an answer. What was I supposed to say? I was proud of my pragmatism; the most extravagant fantasy I’d had in my entire life had been to move with her to Buenos Aires, serve drinks by night and study by day – and soon be back on top. If that hadn’t worked out, if I’d been stuck in Buenos Aires with Irene, living in a hole, scraping by with third-rate cases, engaging with abstruse political causes – I didn’t want to imagine that life.

  “Yes, I always was. I dreamed of moving to Buenos Aires with you and studying by day and serving drinks by night, and for a new life with you, I would have become a gaucho, or washed dishes in New York or been a lumberjack in the Rockies. But at the end of the dream was the good life. The exploited and oppressed – they have to figure out their problems themselves.”

  She looked at the plate. “It tastes good.” We ate. I served her another helping and refilled the wine and water glasses. After a while she said: “Don’t have any regrets. You couldn’t have done anything different back then. You would have had to be a different person.”

  9

  When I returned to the table after clearing it and washing the dishes, Irene was asleep, her head on her arm. The last time I carried her to her room she had made herself light, this time she lay heavy in my arms. I set her down on the bed, took off her shoes, jeans, and heavy shirt, then tugged the covers out from under her and tucked her in.

  The rain I had expected had not arrived, and I sat on the balcony. From time to time the moon peeked out from between the clouds and made the sea sparkle. Otherwise, it was dark. The cicadas were as loud as a tree full of birds.

  Irene had gone too far. I would have had to be someone else? I should have dreamed of justice for the exploited and oppressed and not just dreamed of it, but lived for it?

  It takes many masons to build the cathedral of justice; some hew blocks, others carve plinths and cornices, still others, ornaments and statues. They are all equally important to the project: prosecution and defence are as important as judgement; the drafting of rental, employment and inheritance contracts is as important as the implementation of mergers and acquisitions; the lawyer for the rich as important as the lawyer for the poor. The cathedral would still rise without my contribution. It would rise without this cornice, or that ornament, but still they are part of it.

  I suddenly imagined Irene’s mocking question. How did I know I was building a cathedral and not an apartment building, a shopping mall, a prison?

  Something came back to me. I had only just started at Karchinger and Kunze when I took on the defence of a guy I knew at school and university. He had gone back to our school and convinced several of the students to take part in a demonstration. He was leading them from the schoolyard when a teacher stepped in their way, there was a scuffle, the teacher fell and was injured. Did my old schoolmate have no money for an attorney? Did he challenge me by saying that defending him would be too much for me? Was he flattering me, that I would be the perfect choice to defend him? In any case, I took him on. I did it pro bono, informing only the firm manager, not Karchinger and Kunze. But they caught wind of it and they were furious. I was defending someone who had incited a riot – what would our corporate and industry clients think? I had to give up the case, and although I found a replacement, the prosecution won. The fact that I gave up the case right after the teacher was admitted to hospital, and the defendant faced conviction on an even more serious charge, made it look as though I was distancing myself from my old schoolmate. That did nothing to help his defence.

  Would I have obtained an acquittal? I was confident; I wanted to win my first and presumably only criminal case, so I had hired a private investigator and discovered that the furious janitor had started the scuffle, and that the teacher had previously suffered epileptic fits. I had told all this to my replacement, but he had not been good enough. Perhaps someone else would have been better – and more expensive. I had promised my former schoolmate that I would pay the costs.

  He could not have afforded the lawyer I found him, let alone a better one. I owed him nothing. We had been friends in school and during the first few semesters at university, but that was a long time ago. He was an eternal student. I did not want to idle away my life, so soon we had nothing in common. At the time, sentences in political cases were draconian, and he was sent to prison without probation. Maybe it was not so bad for him, maybe it didn’t make a difference to him whether he idled away his days inside prison or outside. I didn’t visit him in prison, and he never got in touch again. What became of him?

  I am in nobody’s debt. Nor do I owe anyone a debt of gratitude. When I get something, I find a way to reciprocate. When someone is generous to me, I return the favour double or threefold. I can safely say that I don’t profit from my relationships with friends and acquaintances. At work it’s different, but there you don’t have anyone’s generosity to thank for the profit on your balance sheet, only your own hard work.

  It was raining. I stood in the doorway and listened to the rain. But then I heard a strange noise upstairs, and went up. The wind had blown the curtain in Irene’s room away from the window, and the wet fabric was slapping against the outside wall. I pulled the curtain back in and struggled to close the warped window.

  Irene slept fitfully. I lit the candle next to the bed, and I saw the same restless hands and fluttering eyelids, and the sweat on her brow and above her upper lip. Occasionally she murmured something that I did not understand. I wiped the sweat from her face. As I shook out the blanket to cover her better, I saw that her T-shirt and underpants were soaked through with sweat. Find pyjamas and a towel, get her out of those wet things, dry her off and get her into the pyjamas – that’s what needed to be done. But I stood there looking at her and thought, What do I have to do with this woman?

  I did what needed to be done anyway. I found pyjamas in the wardrobe and towels in the bathroom. When I lifted Irene and took off her T-shirt, she put her arms around my neck without saying a word, without opening her eyes, without waking up. When I slipped on the pyjama top she did the same. She probably just wanted to make it easier for me to lift her, as she had learned as a nurse and had taught her patients. But it touched me as a childlike, tender gesture. I got her out of her undergarments, and, before putting her pyjamas on, dried her off: her shoulders, her chest, her belly, her thighs. She must have weighed more, once; he
r skin was too big for her body. Once again I smelled the scent of illness.

  Occasionally, I catch sight of my naked body in the mirror and pity it. All it has been through, how it has struggled, the pain it has endured. I have no self-pity, I despise that. It’s not me I pity, it’s my body. Or decay in general. Now, I pitied Irene’s body. So frail, vulnerable, needy, so trusting when she laid her arms around my neck. I felt sorry for it. Still, I was annoyed that she hadn’t invited me to stay longer.

  10

  Over breakfast Irene talked about her plans for the day. She needed to give the old man an injection. She wanted to bake bread with the young people; Thursday was baking day. She didn’t offer to take me to Rock Harbour, and I didn’t ask her to. As I accompanied her to the Jeep, she said: “I’ll be back at the same time as yesterday, hopefully in better shape. Are you cooking again?”

  Again, I sat on the bench on the veranda. Unlike in the last days, the sun was shining, I wasn’t cold and I didn’t need a blanket. And yet, I again had the feeling that time was standing still and I was too.

  I needed to make decisions. I needed to call my firm. I needed to delegate work. A good firm runs like a machine in which every cog starts at the right moment and stops at the right moment. If one cog fails, another replaces it. For a long time I had thought that I was the drive belt, and when the drive belt fails, the machine runs a little longer, then starts to grind, then shudders, then comes to a halt. But there is no drive belt, there are only cogs, and even a big cog is soon replaced, either with another big cog or with a couple of small ones. If I was absent for a while the firm wouldn’t grind to a halt. But it just isn’t done, to simply be absent. If a senior partner doesn’t act like he is irreplaceable, the other partners start feeling dispensable too and lose their motivation.