Chapters (83)
The question of whether I should go to see the painting spun round and round in my head. Sometimes I lost myself in a dream in which everything began again, and I went to the Art Gallery and saw the painting and thought that I had stumbled upon the past, whereas in fact I had come across the future. I longed to see Irene again, and I didn’t care that I might cry. But I was afraid of the sadness that was sometimes unbearable, and I longed for the old Irene who had come down the stairs to me, not the young Irene, so I decided not to go. But I went anyway; the painting was gone, and I was told it was on its way to New York.
I didn’t tell anyone I was coming back. No car to pick me up, no chauffeur to recount what had happened in Frankfurt, no flowers would be on my desk. The taxi dropped me off. I unlocked the door and walked through my house like a stranger. Yes, that was the furniture my wife and I had bought, the pictures we’d found at the Frankfurt art dealer we befriended, the three wooden saints we had discovered in Buenos Aires. Those were the rooms where the children still slept when they came to visit, although they had removed everything of importance to them. That was our – my – bedroom; I had cleared my wife’s clothes out of the closet, but had changed nothing else. My cleaning lady had laid my dressing gown on the bed. After returning from a trip and unpacking and showering, I liked to wear it to read the mail that had piled up in my absence. There was a lot of it; I had seen the table full of it right away.
I would wait until tomorrow to go to the firm. Today I would go to the cemetery and talk to my wife. I wanted to ask her forgiveness. I also wanted to say goodbye and explain to her why I could no longer live in our house and with our things. I wanted to tell her about Irene. I would call my children. I would prepare myself for the meeting with Karchinger and the other partners. I would have no answer to many of their questions. But what did that matter.
Author’s Note
The painting of Irene on the staircase may remind some readers of Gerhard Richter’s Ema (Nude on a Staircase). In fact, a postcard of Richter’s painting has stood on my desk for years, in rotation with other postcards and photographs. Nevertheless, Irene’s painter, Karl Schwind, has nothing to do with Gerhard Richter, and is purely fictional.