The Stronger Sex (23 page)

He hadn't answered my question: had he coerced or wanted to coerce Katharina Fuchs into a sexual act? Could he have simulated that sudden call of nature to avoid replying?

Of course that was possible. But nor could I rely on his outright No when I asked whether Katharina had threatened him. However, if he was lying on that point, it was a mystery why he was reticent about such a telling argument in his confrontation with his former lover.

And furthermore, if he had put Katharina Fuchs under pressure with his demand for sex, why she had not said so in her charge against him was an even greater mystery. No one had to tell Gladke what a good weapon
that
would have given him.

Maybe my legal friend was saving it up for the court hearing.

However that might be, it looked almost as if the disputants were sparing each other: Klofft by not saying that she had threatened him, she by keeping quiet about his attempt to coerce her into sex. Or even,
de facto
, of
having
coerced her into sex.

When I heard sounds in his room I went back in. Olga had escorted him back and was holding his swivelling chair while he sat down. I was not sure, but I thought he had been wearing a different pair of trousers with his short-sleeved blue shirt just now.

Olga said, “Soup come soon. Must taste first.”

“Off you go, then, out of here!” he said. “Taste your soup, but leave me alone!”

Olga flip-flopped to the door. Before she went out, she said distinctly, “Arsehole!”

He did not react. He looked at his hands, which he had laid on the table. Finally he raised his eyes and looked at me.

I cleared my throat once, then again. Then I asked, “How are you feeling?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “The way anyone feels when he's wet his pants.”

24

I didn't want to hear any more of this horrible, miserable stuff. But he wasn't stopping, he wasn't letting me get away, he was continuing the spectacle as if exposing himself to me brought him relief.

However, he seemed to notice my distaste for his admission that he had wet himself. He raised a hand, fingers spread: “No, no, don't worry! I don't stink!” He smiled. “Olga's cleaned me up.”

I hardly knew where to look. He solved the problem for me by putting out a hand to the bottle of water on the table. I took it and poured him a glass. He thanked me, drank thoughtfully, and looked out at the trees and the sky, where a few large white clouds were gathering.

“She's good at that, our Olga.” He laughed. “If necessary she'll hold your prick on the way to the toilet to make sure it all goes in the bowl and nothing spills over.”

He seemed to be bent on talking dirty, in the same way as he had after the attack he suffered during our game of chess. I wondered whether I should simply say goodbye, but he got in first.

“I expect you're surprised I'd tell you a thing like that,” he said. “But who else would I tell? Except Olga, yes, but I'm not so sure that she understands everything I say. She nods, of course, sometimes she even smiles, when she thinks I'm waiting for her to smile and it will do me good.”

I said nothing. After a while he shook his head. “Maybe you're wondering why I have to talk about something like that at all. Such disgusting subjects.” He snorted. “Embarrassing, eh?”

Since he was looking at me as he said that, I felt bound to answer. I said, “Well, you know…”

He smiled. “All right. Then let's say you're
not
embarrassed. Very kind of you. But
I
am embarrassed, believe you me!”

For a moment I was afraid he was going to burst into tears. But it was probably only the curious blurring of his voice, the laboriously accented way in which he brought out his remarks.

Suddenly I realized that this was part of the Parkinson's disease that had its claws into him. I had looked up a few technical pages on the Internet, and some of what I read there about the disorder had stuck in my mind. The unnatural attitude, the fixed smile were presumably to do with the rigor, the involuntary tensing of the muscles that afflicted its victims.

After moving his lips silently and obviously with difficulty for a while, he said, “I used to be someone. Maybe a good many people didn't respect me very much. I was too vulgar for them. Too primitive. But at least they were wary of me. Everyone was wary of me. And that's a kind of respect, I think. Don't you agree?”

“Well… yes, of course, one can say so.”

His smile grew broader. And suddenly I felt the expression on his lips was pitiful. It was like a soldier lying on the ground with his legs blown off by a shell, still trying to salute.

He said, “Well, I think so, anyway. And if you'd known me before, at my works, I don't think you'd have had any doubt of it.” He snorted, then went on. “But now? Well, look at me!”

He glanced down at himself, almost as if checking that his flies were done up. He said, “If I stand up, and I can't
hold on to anything with both hands, I'd fall flat. Probably. When I'm peeing I have to support myself with one hand on the wall. And something usually goes over the edge of the bowl.”

He breathed out heavily through his nose as if stifling laughter. “I need a rustic Pole to help me take a pee. And wipe up after me. And get me something dry if I wet my pants. Or my bed. That sometimes happens too, and then I'm in a fine state!”

With a gesture that he was obviously trying to control precisely, he reached for the box of cigarillos lying on the table. Laboriously, he fished one of the thin, black cigars out of its pack. I took the lighter and gave him a light. He puffed the cigarillo a couple of times, then put it in his left hand, rested the hand on the table and looked out at the garden. Because of his awkward attitude he had to shift in his chair to do so.

He put the cigarillo to his mouth once again, drew on it deeply and let out the smoke. “I can think myself lucky to have our Polish Olga to look after me and my… orifices. Otherwise my wife would have to do it.” He turned to me. “Can you imagine what that would mean?” As I desperately tried to think of an answer that wouldn't be too close to the bone, he turned away again. “Imagine you wake up in the morning and you have to tell the woman who once loved you that you had a little accident in your sleep. You dreamed you were on the loo, and let it out, and you can't clean up after yourself. Wash the sheets, dry the mattress, make the bed and God knows what. It's just beyond your powers, so your wife has to do it, who else?” He nodded. “The woman who's seen you as a strong man all her life. And that's not surprising, because after all you've played the part of a strong man for a lifetime. But now it's curtains! The show is over!” He laughed. “Can't keep your orifices closed any more, not in front and not behind. You can think yourself
lucky if you don't fart in front of strangers. Only in front of your wife.
Only
, understand? Or suppose your… your valve doesn't keep the liquid in any more, and you have to say goodbye to visitors with a damp patch showing. Can you imagine that, lawyer?”

I said, “Well, it's…”

He didn't leave me floundering for words very long. He said, “It's shit, that's what. And I'm not the only one in this way, oh no! I know a few more folk like me, lame or deaf or half blind, all of us old dodderers. They're all to be found among my friends. My former friends. Because now they're no good for anything, not even friendship. Yet they were all once big strong fellows. Macho men, like me. The stronger sex, we say, don't we? And now they're all tied to their wives' apron strings. Have to be led about by the hand. Have to get their wives to shout in their ears, so they'll know what the man on TV is saying. Have to be fed because they can't even get a spoonful of soup to their mouths without spilling it.”

He leaned slightly forward. “They have to get their wives to wipe their arses. The women they used to go to bed with, understand? Because they can't reach that far behind them. Arthrosis, see? It's the joints, the joints of the stronger sex go rusty! In the end a proud man like that can't even knock a nail in! The mother has to do it herself, and she does, oh yes, she does, even if she hits her thumb!”

He laughed. “The stronger sex my arse! You know which is the stronger sex?” He leaned forward again, both arms propped on the table top, never taking his eyes off me. “Well, who do you think?”

It seemed as if he actually wanted to get an answer out of me, but the question was purely rhetorical. After a moment of dramatic silence, he announced, “Women, my dear fellow, that's who! Women, yes. The stronger sex, that's women! And the men who once thought themselves so strong, in
the end they're just a limping, stinking, slobbering picture of misery! Too weak to keep their holes closed in front and behind.”

He stared at me for a moment. Then he leaned back, smiling to himself as if at some great achievement.

After a while he added, “Women don't just live longer than men, they're tougher too. And in the end the women are the ones who have to support the men. Keep them alive. And most of them do! Support their menfolk. But some don't. Or they let a man feel he's at their mercy.” He nodded. “Have you any idea, lawyer, how shitty that is, how humiliating? Even if your wife is prepared to wipe your arse? Particularly then!”

Another pause in which he moved his lips silently again, and then he said, “We had one in our club who was…” Suddenly he began to laugh so hard that he had to cough, panted and groaned, finally took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes and the corners of his mouth. After he had put it away again, with difficulty, he went on in a weaker voice, “He was a real bastard, he was. Really.
I
was quite something, but as for
him
…”

Another fit of laughter seemed about to overcome him, but he suppressed the impulse. After a brief pause he said, “He was a doctor – ear, nose and throat specialist. Had a flourishing practice. Once he – yes, that was in Hungary, end of September, little hotel somewhere near the border with Slovakia. We'd gone there for the hunting, eight or ten of us. It was inexpensive at the time. The red deer cost… just a moment. I think with antlers weighing five kilos a red deer cost you about twelve hundred euros, no, wait, of course it was still marks back then.”

He rubbed his forehead and looked into space silently for a while. Then he said, “The professional huntsman with us got the canine teeth as a trophy.” Finally he sat up straight. “Well, never mind that.” After drawing on his cigarillo, he
said, “We hired the whole hotel, anyway. And our friend, the ear, nose and throat man, he hired extra services through a colleague he knew in the nearest big city. Knew him very well, of course. I say services, well, they were just tarts from a brothel in the city. Lovely women, though. Maybe one or two of them were doing it privately, I wouldn't know. Housewives after a bit of pocket money.”

He cleared his throat, reached for his glass and drank a few sips of water. Then he went on. “They came before dinner in a bus, ancient little bus. Green. A Skoda twelve zero three. Pretty little black-haired girl at the wheel. Looked like a Gypsy. Well, and then the fun began. The hotel people had gone off, had their own place, a little house thirty or forty metres away.” He laughed. “OK, we had to give them a thousand marks. Just in case anything got broken. I suppose they knew the sort they were dealing with!”

He looked out of the window, smiling, leaned back a little as if lost in his memories, and suddenly straightened up. “Well, to cut a long story short. Don't want to bore you. At some point, must have been around the end of the party, at some point our friend the doctor, the ear, nose and throat man, he got the idea the ladies should leave us with a little memento, like a personal document, he said. So one of the girls took her knickers off, and our friend and the professional huntsman picked her up and put her bare bum down on the photocopier in the little office, gently, very gently, so as not to break the glass.”

He was laughing to himself and shaking his head, hand in front of his mouth, as if to dam up his mirth. “Never thought it would work so well, but it did… we got really good portraits, or then again you could say literally bum portraits, life-size, black and white but almost artistic because they were a bit blurred and looked strange. I don't know if our friend had tried it out in advance in his consulting rooms, maybe with his receptionist. I asked him, but he said no.”

After a sigh of what sounded like satisfaction, he said, “Yes, so then we put one after another of them on the photocopier in turn. Not all of them wanted to go along with it – the Gypsy girl, for instance, she hit out at us – but we ended up with half a dozen of those documents. It was worth it for the girls, too, they signed the things, and anyone who wanted one had to pay a hundred marks.”

He drew on his cigarillo, watched the smoke rising. “In the end of course the glass pane did break. Under a really sturdy, strong girl; Julischka was her name. I've suddenly remembered it. Just the name for her. A redhead. Real red, down below too. She was lucky, when the glass broke it didn't cut her bum.” He looked at me, smiling. “Your boss was one of the two helping to lift her on, it was their fault. Didn't put her down properly so as she'd be leaning a little way forward, or it wouldn't have happened.”

After a moment's horror I asked, “What do you mean by ‘your boss'?”

“What do you think I mean?” His smile grew broader – laboriously, but distinctly. “Hochkeppel, who else? Oh, I beg your pardon.
Dr
Hochkeppel! He even bought one of the portraits. The best one of Julischka, if I remember correctly. Probably liked her fat bum, the sly old fellow. That'll be why he felt weak at the next shot of schnapps and couldn't hold on to her any more.”