22

In my letterbox at home I found, as well as the usual stuff, a large envelope with a handwritten address, sender’s name given as C. Klofft. I took it all into my apartment and opened the large envelope first.

It contained two pages with newspaper cuttings, one from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the other from the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Both bore pictures of women, one showing, in black-and-white newsprint, the painting of a seated woman looking at her face in a hand mirror; the other, in colour, was of the actress Tippi Hedren, once a great success as a Hitchcock star, now seventy-seven years old.

With them was a handwritten letter to me from Cilly Klofft. But even before I read it, I could guess why she had sent me those two cuttings.

The first was an article in which a woman writer whose name I vaguely knew assessed the painting of the seated woman. It was entitled, as I discovered from reading the piece, Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida, and it was by the American painter Ivan Albright.

With my lay understanding of art, I’d have described the picture as a realistic painting. Ida – if that was the subject’s name – was shown as a woman no longer young, her figure rather full, in a short two-piece low-cut dress which left her legs bare from halfway down her thighs. She had crossed her plump legs, and they, like her face, showed the slight swellings and little hollows, in short the irregularities left on the body by age, marks that you see on older women in the swimming pool and of course the sauna.

Now and then such marks had even, secretly, aroused me a little, I suppose because they made female physicality so clear. But generally I had looked away.

In her analysis of Ida, however, the writer of the article went far beyond such a reaction, a shrinking from the sight of distinct signs of ageing. She had seen Ida’s face as “dented and crumpled”, as “flesh rich in variation caught by the crushing grasp of time”, and also mentioned her “naked, devastated thighs”. The blue light in which she said the painter had shown his model, although you didn’t see that in the black-and-white newsprint, even made the author of the article wonder whether Ida was phosphorescent, “like an organism in the process of decay”.

Looking the writer of the article up on the Internet, I remembered that I had once looked at a book by this author, the winner of many awards, when Frauke recommended it to me. It began with a woman who has been looking at a pair of men’s briefs in a display window in a shopping mall, stumbling as she moves on and falling to her knees; a man helps her up and impresses her at once.

The account of her fall and the revelations following it seemed to me so painstaking and so contrived that I put the book down and never opened it again, in spite of the enthusiastic opinions of it that Frauke delivered to improve my literary education.

What made me suspicious of the article on Albright and his Ida by this writer, however, was not so much stylistic problems (although I noticed them again here, and I was irritated by them again) as the fear that every line seemed to express – the terror felt by a woman facing old age that would rob her of her smooth skin. An objective analysis of the painting, which one might expect in such an article, seemed to me to have given way here to a subjective cry of dismay.

But maybe it was all very well for me to talk. As I could work out after looking at her dates on the Internet, I was almost forty years younger than the writer. So far I had hardly ever been in touch with the fears – no, the torments and terrors – of old age as the end approaches. Until I had met Herbert Klofft and heard about his nightmares.

Yes, and until I had become friendly with Cilly, right?

Really? Or had that friendship not yet been affected at all by Cilly’s age? Had it really been untouched by that, in spite of my headlong flight from the studio?

The photograph of seventy-seven-year-old Tippi Hedren showed a radiant woman – the blue of her eyes, the gold of her hair, her plain jewellery, the beige shade of her sweater and jacket, the discreet red of her lipstick. I’d seen several Hitchcock films, and I remembered Tippi Hedren’s immaculate beauty in The Birds making itself felt in the middle of the fluttering, cackling, croaking turmoil of the evil-minded birds of the title. Also her chilly, reserved performance as the frigid kleptomaniac in Marnie.

According to the interview she gave the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and as I could see from the photograph, for which of course she will have had the services of a make-up artiste, Tippi Hedren, who is still director of the American Roar Foundation for the protection of beasts of prey, is as lively as ever, in spite of the many little lines radiating from the corners of her eyes, and the deeper lines around her mouth. But – as with Cilly – they don’t make her look old, they make her look… knowledgeable, yes, and possessed of ironic self-confidence.

Only when I was wondering whether to write that in replying to Cilly did I realize that I had not yet actually read her letter. I picked up the sheet of notepaper and read:

Dear Alex, I am sending you something to look at and read and think about. Don’t think I didn’t understand why you left my studio in such a hurry. But there’s nothing for you to fear on your next visit – and there was nothing for you to fear last time either! Cilly.

 

PS: Albright is a painter of whom I think highly. C.

 

I felt rather bewildered. To give myself something to hold on to, I reread the article about the portrait of Ida.

Right at the beginning of it, the author had given information which I may not have taken in properly before: Ida Rogers, who modelled for the portrait, had been a pretty married woman, a mother – and only twenty years old when it was painted.

Maybe I had misjudged the author of the article. Maybe she had described the painting accurately and appropriately. Perhaps it wasn’t her own panic-stricken fear of the end of life and its attendant horrors that dominated the article so much, but the fear felt by the painter himself. If he thought he saw the decay of all living flesh even in a young woman, and had tried to present that, then the idea must have been like a spell throttling him. It must have obsessed and tormented him.

I took a sheet of notepaper out of the drawer and tried to write a letter to Cilly. As I was still wondering whether to begin with “Dear Cilly”, or “Dear Frau Klofft”, or in some other way, I saw the light on my answering machine was blinking. I turned it on, and heard the voice of Herbert Klofft’s detective on the tape.

“Leo Manderscheidt here,” he said. “Bingo, Dr Zabel! Our friend Herr Schmickler did indeed book the two single rooms on Saturday. But,” and after a short pause he went on triumphantly, “but the previous Tuesday he had already reserved a double room. And then on the Saturday he changed the booking to the two single rooms! You see what that means? On the Tuesday he’d thought he could arrive with Frau Fuchs like any other couple. But on Saturday he knew that would make them conspicuous. Because she was supposed to be going to the hotel only for medical treatment.”

Another little pause, and then he laughed. “But who am I telling? You know better than I do what that change of booking from one to two rooms means. Well, goodbye for now. And if you get another bright idea like that, let me know! You’ll always find me a grateful recipient. See you!”