The Stronger Sex

My self-therapy in the Klofft case was simple, but I couldn’t think of anything better. I called Frauke that afternoon. She was cool, as I had expected after neglecting her for the last few days, but finally let me invite her to an open-air concert by the river that evening. As well as the music there was to be an ox roasted on the spit, cool beer from the cask and finally a firework display. Simone had tipped me off about it.

Down there in the evening sunlight we also met Simone herself in the crowd, with her boyfriend of the time, a student of German literature in his eleventh university term, thin as a rake, working on the side as a copy-writer with an advertising agency. He ate two large plates of roast beef with several heaped spoonfuls of potato salad, and turned out to tell good jokes. He annoyed Simone by making fun of the first band on stage, thus also winning Frauke’s approval.

In his place I’d have shown more consideration for Simone. She had been sensible enough not to wear her red stilettos for this expedition to the water-meadows, and instead had on brown sandals with a broad heel. They came up to her ankles, but suited her just as well as the stilettos. Frauke said later, when the conversation turned to footwear, that they “had a slimming effect on her legs”. Meanwhile Simone, who did not rise to this back-handed compliment, found a piece of cardboard in a waste bin, crouched down, picked up my foot and scraped off the mud that was sticking to the soles of my shoes.

The evening ended harmoniously, all the same, apart maybe from the fact that after the last drink of the evening, at a stand-up bar, Simone sent her literature student home, a situation that he accepted without too much fuss, at the most with slight surprise. On our way back to Frauke’s apartment she and I dropped Simone off at her front door, and I took a look – unobserved, I thought – at her retreating legs and thought that luckily for her they were curvaceous, even in those sandals.

I thought that this entirely undeserved criticism deserved an answer, but I let it go, so as not to endanger our truce. And the night passed very pleasantly. Frauke seemed to need to make up for lost time, which among other things gave me the pleasing certitude that during the days when I’d been so short of time she had not fallen for some other man.

Just in case the previous evening had left a trace of annoyance behind, I got up early, while Frauke was still asleep with the sheet over her face, I laid the breakfast table and even went out to the baker’s to buy fresh rolls and two chocolate doughnuts.

The next few days went very well too. Now and then Frauke seemed surprised when I buried my hand lovingly in her hair or devoted myself with great intensity to exploring her skin with my nose, bit by bit, stroking and kissing it. She let me do as I wanted. In return I didn’t reject any of her ideas for leisure activities.

I accompanied her to a concert given by a young Australian string quartet that had already had considerable success on its present European tour, its first, although its sound struck me as a little penetrating, not to say shrill. I went to another private showing of an art exhibition, at which, however, Cilly did not appear, and we attended the farewell performance in the city of a tenor who was to appear at Bayreuth and then had an engagement at the Met in New York. He was a fat little man with an incipient paunch and a throat like a road roller, and his hefty voice got increasingly on my nerves over the course of three hours.

On Friday evening we came back to my place after the opera. In the night I suddenly woke. I thought I had heard the telephone while I was half asleep. Frauke was lying beside me sleeping peacefully on her stomach, holding the pillow in both arms and occasionally making a little lip-smacking sound. I looked at the clock. It was quarter to four.

Cilly? Not likely. For a while I listened, but the phone didn’t ring. I heard the far-away sound of a train crossing the railway bridge; it seemed to have a great many carriages. Long-distance, probably. Maybe en route for Istanbul. Istanbul Sirkeci. To Vienna by way of Passau, then down through the Balkans by way of Sofia. Our Turkish countrymen visiting their native land, with cases and baskets and pillowcases stuffed full. They would get out at Istanbul Sirkeci, the old central station where the Orient Express once terminated.

How long would the journey take them? I thought I had read somewhere that the train ride to Istanbul lasted two days and two nights. But if so would the train set out in the middle of the night? And perhaps arrive in the middle of the night? No, it would probably start in the morning and arrive in the morning two days later. The train I’d heard must be going somewhere else.

I spent some time thinking of possible destinations to which my train might have been bound. I though of Kiev, where the train could have gone on a southerly route by way of Cracow and Lemberg, and pictured the great gate and the golden domes. Then I conjured up Vilnius, and suddenly, on a dusty unmade road between wooden fences, front gardens and low-built houses, I came face to face with Cilly. She was walking slowly toward me, but she didn’t see me, she was looking at the front gardens to right and left of her where the heads of the flowers were drooping.

That Saturday morning, while Frauke was singing in the bathroom, I suddenly thought of Cilly yet again. I had sent her back the newspaper cuttings with the two articles, as I’d promised, after copying them for myself, but I ought to have called after that to ask when she would have time to discuss the articles with me. As I made coffee and laid the table for breakfast, I felt heat suddenly rise to my head – I was blushing.

It was also an omission on my part that I hadn’t been in touch with Klofft since last Monday. Of course, if he wanted another game of chess, he could have called me, and if I’d been able to fit it in, I would have gone out there, but that struck me as a feeble excuse. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to pester me.

How often had he been alone in his house this week, brooding on his situation? How often had he sat there looking at the view of the green garden, of the world now closed to him for ever, wondering whether to call me? Whether to ask for my company in his isolation?

I put the coffee into the pot, placed the pot on the table and stood there for a moment. Call Klofft? Or call Cilly first? Or before that try preparing Frauke for the fact that I must put my mind to the Klofft case again this weekend? It would have been rather embarrassing to be on the phone to one of the Kloffts if Frauke suddenly came out of the bathroom.

Suddenly it struck me that I might not be able to reach Cilly. Perhaps she had gone to her studio again, as she had the Saturday before. I didn’t know her phone number there. And she hadn’t given me the number of her mobile. I hadn’t asked for it. That would have reinforced my sense that I’d reluctantly entered into a conspiracy.

But Frauke had the studio phone number. She had phoned it to ask whether and when Cilly was going to the Documenta. Although really, of course, to find out whether I was having a tête-à-tête with Cilly at that discreet place. Or so I thought, anyway. I went to the bathroom door and listened. Frauke had gone over to soul music and was singing with a heavy tremolo. I quickly went back to the bedroom, turned once more to fetch my notebook from the desk, listened to the sounds in the bathroom again, returned to the bedroom and looked around.

Yes, there was Frauke’s bag. I glanced over my shoulder, picked up the bag and opened it. Frauke’s organizer was in a side pocket. I took it out and tapped in Klofft. It was ridiculous, but my fingers were trembling.

The display flickered, but then it said No entry. How could that be possible? Cilly had told me that Frauke had called her at the studio.

Had Frauke stored the number under a password? But why would she have done that? She knew Cilly; it wasn’t something she had to hush up.

I was going to put the organizer back, feeling hot under the collar at my breach of Frauke’s confidence, when I had another idea. Maybe Frauke knew Cilly as a painter under her maiden name. Had she stuck to it professionally because she was proud of what she had already achieved before her marriage?

I went to the bedroom door and listened to the sounds in the bathroom again. Frauke seemed to have stopped singing. Was that the hair dryer I could hear?

The alliteration gave it to me: Gherkin Gehrke. I tapped in Gehrke, and the display showed Gehrke, Cilly, and a landline number that I knew. It was the number of the Klofft household. There was also a mobile number beside it. I wrote the mobile number in my notebook, switched off the organizer, stuffed it back into the side pocket of Frauke’s bag, took a quick look to reassure myself that the inside of the bag looked the same as before, and put it down in the place beside the bed where I had found it.

A curiously good feeling came over me. If Frauke would ask me to look for something in her bag, she trusted me. I felt almost as if, by asking for her cosmetics case, she was sanctioning what I had just done.

An odd sort of morality, fitting itself so accommodatingly to the facts. Was that something peculiar to my own conscience, or were other people made that way as well?

I said no, though I wanted to look at a few files, old files that interested me. Earlier cases of Hochkeppel’s that he had recommended me to study. I pointed to the desk on which the stack of files lay. I was fairly sure she wouldn’t look inside them.

These gems regularly got left by the wayside during the week, I said, because I usually didn’t want to read dusty old cases in the evenings.

Frauke laughed. She asked whether I couldn’t just tell Hochkeppel some time that I’d read it all with great interest and learnt something from it, and then I’d be rid of all that stuff.

I said yes, it might well come to that in the long run. Although this weekend I thought it was possible Klofft would call me again. It was Saturday; maybe he felt like another game of chess.

Frauke contented herself with an indifferent murmur. She didn’t ask again whether I had nothing better to do on a Saturday than play chess, nor did she ask what was so special about the case that I had to visit that old fogey even at the weekend.

I took Frauke home. As we parted, she said we could call each other later and see if there was anything we felt like doing together.

Had the last few days – nearly four of them now – when we’d spent our free time with each other seemed a little too much for her?

I was thinking about that as I turned the corner and drew up by the kerb. But after a moment I took out my notebook after all and rang Cilly’s mobile.

“No, no! I… haven’t really begun yet.” She hesitated for a moment and then asked, “How did you know I’m here? At the studio?”

She laughed. “And where did you get the phone number?” After a little pause she added, “Frauke Leisner won’t have given it to you. Or so I assume.”

She didn’t let it drop at once. “And suppose I do mind?” Then she laughed again. “No, no, don’t worry! I’m not about to interrogate you. We all need our little secrets, don’t we?”

“Yes, one can.” She suddenly sounded very decided, but she didn’t seem to want to continue this conversation. “Well, what can I do for you?”

I said, “I really only wanted to know how you are. And… and ask when you’d have the time and inclination to discuss those two articles with me. The one about Tippi Hedren and the one—”

I didn’t know what to say to that. For a moment a plain “Why?” was on the tip of my tongue, but that would have sounded too silly.

Before the silence could become embarrassing, she said, “When would you have time? And inclination, of course. Today, maybe?”

“Let me see… yes, I think I could manage today.” A little reserve seemed to me necessary in case she might think I couldn’t wait to see her in her studio again. I said, “I shouldn’t think it will take us hours.”

I involuntarily swallowed. Then I said, “Fine. I’ll be on my way. I could be with you in about a quarter of an hour. Would that be too early?”

I sat there without moving for a moment. My pulse was beating loud and hard, and I had the feeling that I couldn’t move my legs. What the hell was that all about?

As I was driving there, it struck me that I ought at least to take her a few flowers. What would my father have recommended in such a situation? I wasn’t sure. But I found a florist’s.

The salesgirl began showing me the lavish display on offer and giving me a little professional lecture on each species, but I said, after looking at the time, that I was in rather a hurry, and please would she just make me up a bouquet of the yellow roses.

When I got out of the car with my fifteen long-stemmed yellow roses in the crook of my arm – their cellophane wrapping was tied with a yellow ribbon – I glanced up at the attic storey of the former fitters’ workshop. If there really was an old lady still living up there after Klofft had sold the rest of the premises, and she wanted to do kind Herr Klofft a favour, then she would certainly have something to tell her landlord today.