The Stronger Sex

It was Klofft. His croaking voice came over the line so explosively that it startled me, and I held the phone a little way from my ear. Frauke looked up from her paper. I said, “Good morning, Herr Klofft. I got your call yesterday, but it was too late to ring back. I wasn’t home until the evening.”

Frauke looked down at her paper again. She doesn’t like lies, so she obviously wanted to avoid even the appearance of participating in what I was up to with my client. I said, “I couldn’t have come anyway, I was otherwise occupied.”

“Fabulous. Really.” He said nothing for a moment, and then brought it out again, as if under some painful compulsion. “Fabulous. Does that mean that you’d like to come for a game of chess this morning?”

Damn it! No, I wouldn’t like to in the least, my dear Herr Klofft! I want to stay here quietly with my darling girlfriend, finish our breakfast in peace, and then maybe go to the flea market with her, if there is a flea market today, if you understand, because you ruined our plans to go last time with your bloody invitation to play chess. And after that we may be going to the racetrack for lunch and to watch the horse-racing, and smell the horses’ leather gear and the jockeys’ boots, breathe it all in, and the smell of the horses’ sweat and for all I care their farting too, but not the piss that you, my dear client, wet your pants with.

Because I can smell life in the flea market, in the flea market and at the racecourse, dear Herr Klofft, but in your house, that anteroom to the cemetery set in its green garden, I can only smell death.

He was waiting for my answer, and the silence was getting awkward. Glancing at Frauke, who was intent on her newspaper, I said, “Well…” and added slowly, “Well, it’s like this… the fact is, I…”

He interrupted me with an inarticulate, high sound that sounded almost like a squeak. Then he cleared his throat hard, and finally got out, “Don’t tell me, please don’t, that you… that you have another engagement today, I mean…” And then he went on, talking faster and faster. “I want to say that of course you can fix engagements with whoever and whenever you like, only today, well, this particular day, it would be very… very unwelcome to me, and why? Yes, why? Because today… oh, today I feel so… so… as if…”

He stopped. I didn’t know what to say. I heard quiet, groaning, breathing sounds, little noises that he was obviously uttering involuntarily, as if he had something very important to say but lacked the words. Then he said, “Today I feel so…”

Suddenly he said, in a small but clear voice, “Lawyer… if possible, then come over. Please come.” After another pause he said, “I need you, lawyer. Please.”

I stood up and looked at Frauke. “I’m really sorry, but I can’t just leave him like that. He’s obviously in a very bad way. And there’s no one there to look after him.”

As I was driving to the exit from the car park, and the barrier came up, I was overcome again by my suspicion that I was driving off to be taught my lesson, a roughing up, if not worse, laid on for me by Klofft. Overheated fantasies. Just as overheated, maybe, as my desire for Cilly. Reality was more prosaic but no less brutal. Cilly had no desire for me. And Klofft was approaching the end.

As I turned off the expressway into the avenue lined by old elm trees, I suddenly wondered how I was going to get into the house if there was no one else in. He couldn’t get down the stairs and open the door to me, could he?

Perhaps he would get to the stair lift with his wheeled walker, sit in it and get downstairs that way. Perhaps Olga had left another walker for him at the foot of the stairs, and using that he would be able to get to the door and open it?

Yes, perhaps he would once have been able to do that! But judging by the last couple of times I’d seen him, he was hardly capable of it by now. He had been rocking back and forth merely sitting in his swivel chair, he had only just about been able to drop into it.

My mouth twisted, I hunched my head down as I heard, in my imagination, a sudden clatter coming from the house after the chimes had died away. And then a soft moaning, and a terrible, broken cry. “Help!”

He had fallen out of the stair lift and then all the way down the stairs to the tiled hall at the bottom, he was lying there with his limbs broken and ridiculously distorted.

I listened intently when I had set the chimes going. But they had hardly died away before the intercom above the bell crackled. I heard Klofft’s voice, blurred but definitely his. “Come in, I’m up here!” The door opener buzzed and I went in.

He was sitting in his swivel chair behind the table where he worked, and he had the chessboard set up on it. He smiled at me, or rather he tried to smile at me. But his features hardly moved. It was the same fixed and slightly grinning grimace that had attracted my attention on my last visit. The rigidity had intensified since then. Because he was leaning forward slightly in the chair, hands under the table, he had to look at me as if from far below. I noticed the fixed stare of his eyes, almost as if he had just opened them wide in a violent shock.

I gave him my hand and thought, too late, that I might be presenting him with a difficulty. He brought his right hand out from under the table, stretched it out slowly; it was shaking. I took his hand, pressed it but only for a moment and let it go. He put it on the table. It was still shaking quite badly, although he was trying to stabilize it on the table top. I had read about that symptom as well; it was a tremor.

“Coming in later,” he said. “She’ll make me some soup. Give me a piece of cake. Home-made. Dessert. That’s all she can do today. Her husband’s out of work. Hangs about the house and…” He made a sound that may have been meant as a laugh. “Arsehole,” he added.

I nodded. He asked, “Like a drink?” He pointed to the cooler, which had a bottle of wine and a bottle of mineral water showing above the rim. “My wife left it ready for me this morning.”

I saw that the water glass from which he had been drinking was empty. When he slowly brought his hand out from under the table and moved it, shaking, toward the cooler, I said, “Wait a moment.” I stood up, took the bottle of water out of the cooler and poured him some. Then I filled the empty glass standing on a little tray beside the cooler for myself. I sat down again and drank.

He had laid his hand on the table beside his glass. It was trembling slightly. He looked undecidedly at the glass. The trembling of his hand was worse when he raised it to take the glass.

“Just a moment, I…” I said, jumping up. I skirted the table, went up to him and took the glass. Then I suddenly realized that I was hurting his feelings quite badly. I said, “I don’t know… may I?”

I put the glass carefully to his lips. He laid his head slightly back and cautiously drank what I poured into his mouth. He was obviously thirsty. Only when the glass was three-quarters empty did he utter an inarticulate sound, and said, when I took the glass away from his lips, “Enough.”

I put the glass down, refilled it and sat back in my own chair. As I drank some water from my glass, he said, “Thank you,” and after a while added, “Yes, yes, my dear fellow!”

Then there was a long silence before he went on. “Yes, yes, the paint’s wearing off the old banger.” He gave a croaking laugh, his eyes fixed. “And not just the paint. Holes in the carriage-work the size of your fist, my dear fellow. Rusty holes. Nasty gaps. Looks like it’s had gangrene or some other filthy illness. No point in patching it up and respraying and polishing it now. No, might as well throw the whole thing out.”

He didn’t seem to have heard what I said. He pointed to the table in the corner where the computer stood. “Luckily I got ready in advance. Took precautions. For days like this. Days when there’s not a soul about to look after me. When they all go away and leave me here on my island. Like a leper. A shipwrecked leper.”

“Yes, I know.” I wanted to get him off this track, which would only drive him deeper into his depression. “But what do you mean about getting ready for days like this?”

He pointed to the table in the corner again. “Well, things like making sure I have all the important cables to hand. I have a microphone here and the loudspeaker for the intercom at the door. And the door-opening thing too, of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to let you in.”

He tried grinning again, and suddenly saliva was running from one corner of his mouth. He tried catching it, with a slurping sound, put his hand to his trouser pocket, fished out a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his chin and mouth with it. Then he said, “With the door camera, of course.”

“A fine thing it’d be if you could see it right away.” He turned in his chair to look at the computer, pressed a couple of keys, and a video picture of the front of the house came up onscreen, taken sideways and from above.

For a moment I was tempted to suggest that he was showing me a still, but then a blue tit suddenly flew into the picture and settled on the lowest step of the three up to the door, turned this way and that, showing its yellow stomach plumage, then hopped off the step into the flower bed beside it and disappeared.

“My wife?” He shrugged the shoulder that was already twisted a little way forward. “Could be. But never fear, she knows how to hit back!” He laughed. “She thought I’d had her studio bugged too. Stuffed full of secret cameras. She got an electronics firm, a pretty expensive one, to check it all out and certify it as clean. Yes, she did that without telling me, but I found out. I knew the boss of the company, I’d worked with him myself now and then. And the results of his research in her studio were zero. Though not his bill, of course.” He laughed. “That cost her about ten thousand. There you are, then, trust is good but control is better. Even if it costs the earth.” He laughed, and then said, “Do you know where that saying comes from?”

“But it’s obviously wrong. About that saying, I mean. I read somewhere that Lenin never said any such thing. Or not in his works – you know, all those umpteen volumes published in Moscow and East Berlin.”

“I know. I even have them in German translation. Handsome volumes. Bought them once in the bookshop at Friedrichstrasse station; it was still in the east at the time. Dirt cheap they were. Of course the exchange rate was one to one between east and west, but they were still dirt cheap. Only they’ve been stored away ever since. I always meant to take a look at them some day at my leisure.” He breathed out heavily. “Too late now. Like so much else.”

What would this man think he’d make of Lenin? Was there a Bolshevist in disguise somewhere in him? I’d believe anything of Klofft, even that. His origins were probably lower middle class, a background well known to produce more revolutionaries than the working class. Or was it that he had first-hand experience of manipulating people?

He had half-turned in his chair and was looking out at the green treetops. After a while he said abruptly, “My wife has never spied on me. Or at least I’ve never noticed anything like that.” He laughed. “She’s probably never heard of Lenin, or what he’s quoted as saying.”

I was so surprised that I said nothing for a moment. Then I frowned as if I thought his comment wholly inappropriate. I asked, “How do you mean that?”

He interrupted me. “Yes, yes, fair enough, of course there are. People who find out or have known for a long time that someone or other, or several of that kind, that all and sundry are fucking their wives. People who find out that their own wives are letting themselves be fucked by someone else. Or several someones. People who don’t care about it. You mean people like that?”

“I’d put it differently, but… yes, in essence I mean something of that nature. And such people may love their partners very much, and do care if their partners… find someone else but… well, they can live with it. They don’t run amok.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Run amok… no, they don’t do that!” He looked out and shifted slightly in his chair. Then he said, “I’m going to tell you something.” He rubbed his forehead, took a deep breath and finally went on, “I was born here, in this city. Grew up here.”

He said, “In a suburb. It was savagely bombed in the War, but they’ve closed the gaps by now and even restored some of it the way it used to be, very pretty. The Turks live there now. They overran that part of town on the quiet, in secret. Including the house where we lived. It was a three-window house, built around the turn of the century or a little before. Like most of the houses in that street. In the latter part of the nineteenth century. Built with the money we took from the French in the Franco-Prussian war.”

He gave me a mocking glance. “You assume that, do you? Quite right, bull’s-eye! Only there are a lot of them, built together in several rows, clever clogs! They have two storeys, or three or even four, five storeys, the three-window houses, depending on the architect’s plans. Or what funds were available. But there were those three windows at the front of every storey! Get it? Not on the ground floor, of course, the door had to go there. Understand now, clever lad that you are?”

He bent his head slightly forward. “Because you live in this city, my learned friend. And there are houses like that all over it!” He shook his head, then asked with a doubtful expression, “What was the subject of your doctoral thesis?”

That was a question I had been apprehensively expecting for some time, although I had expected Cilly to be the one more likely to ask it. But it was uncomfortable enough to have him ask it just now.