Cover

Also by Bernhard Schlink

The Reader

Flights of Love

Homecoming

The Weekend

Summer Lies

Self’s Punishment (with Walter Popp)

Self’s Deception

Self’s Murder

The Gordian Knot

Title Page

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Translation copyright © 2016 by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Germany as Die Frau auf der Treppe by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich, in 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Diogenes Verlag AG. This translation originally published in hardcover by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd., London, in 2016.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schlink, Bernhard, author. Hackett, Joyce, translator. Schmidt, Bradley, translator.

Title: The woman on the stairs / Bernhard Schlink ; translated from the German by Joyce Hackett and Bradley Schmidt.

Other titles: Frau auf der Treppe. English.

Description: First American edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016042408 (print). LCCN 2016047399 (ebook). ISBN 9781101870716 (hardcover). ISBN 9781101870723 (ebook).

Subjects: LCSH: Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. BISAC: FICTION / Literary. FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. FICTION / Cultural Heritage. GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

Classification: LCC PT2680.L54 F7313 2017 (print). LCC PT2680.L54 (ebook). DDC 833/.914—dc23.

LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2016042408

Ebook ISBN 9781101870723

Cover image by Purcell Pictures, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

Cover design by Oliver Munday

v4.1

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Part One

1

Perhaps you will see the painting one day. Long lost, suddenly resurfaced – all the museums will want to display it. By now, Karl Schwind is one of the most famous and expensive painters in the world. When he turned seventy, I saw him in every paper, on every channel. Still, I had to look a long time before I recognized the young man in the old.

The painting, I recognized immediately. I walked into the last court of the Art Gallery and there it hung. It moved me as it had when I entered the parlour of Gundlach’s villa, and saw it for the first time.

A woman descends a staircase. The right foot lands on the lower tread, the left grazes the upper, but is on the verge of its next step. The woman is naked, her body pale; her hair is blonde, above and below; the crown of her head gleams with light. Nude, pale and blonde – against a gray-green backdrop of blurred stairs and walls, the woman moves lightly, as if floating, towards the viewer. And yet her long legs, ample hips, and full breasts give her a sensual weight.

I approached the painting slowly. I felt awkward, just as I had back then. Then, it was because the woman who, a day before, had sat in my office in jeans, blouse, and jacket approached me in the painting naked. Now I felt awkward because the painting brought up what happened back then, what I’d gotten myself into, and what I had soon banished from memory.

Woman on Staircase, the label read. The painting was on loan. I found the curator and asked him who had lent the painting. He said he couldn’t disclose the name. I told him I knew the woman in the painting, and the owner of the painting, and that its ownership would likely be contested. He furrowed his brow, but again said he couldn’t tell me the name.

2

My flight back to Frankfurt was booked for Thursday afternoon. Since the negotiations in Sydney finished up on Wednesday morning, I could have rescheduled for Wednesday afternoon. But I wanted to spend the rest of the day in the Botanic Garden.

I wanted to eat lunch there, lie on the grass, then see Carmen at the Opera House. I like the Botanic Garden, its Art Gallery, its Conservatory, the way it is bordered by a cathedral on the north, the Opera House on the south – its hills with their view onto the bay. It has a palm garden, an herb garden, and a rose garden; ponds, arbours, statues; many lawns with huge trees; grandparents with grandchildren; lonely men and women with their dogs; picnickers, lovers, people reading, people napping. On the veranda of the restaurant in the middle of the Garden, time stands still: old iron columns, an old cast-iron railing, trees filled with fruit bats, a fountain full of colourful birds with long, curved beaks.

I ordered food, and called my colleague. He had handled the Australian side of the merger, I, the German. We were, as is the case with mergers, partners as well as opponents. But we liked each other: we were the same age, both widowers, both senior partners at one of the last law firms that hadn’t been taken over by the Americans or the English. I asked him which detective agency his firm used and he gave me the name.

“Is there a problem we can help with?”

“No, just something I’ve always been curious about.”

I reached the head of the agency, and asked him to track down who owned the Karl Schwind in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, whether it was Irene Gundlach, or an Irene formerly Gundlach, and if a woman by that name lived in Australia. He said it could take a couple of days. I offered a bonus if he could tell me by the next morning. He laughed. Either he’d be able to obtain the information today at the Art Gallery, or it would take a couple of days, bonus or no bonus. He’d get back to me.

Then the food came, and with the food I ordered a bottle of wine I didn’t want to finish, but finished anyway. Occasionally the fruit bats awoke, and all at once whooshed out from the branches, flew around the trees, then returned to their branches, and wrapped themselves back in their wings. Once in a while one of the colourful birds at the fountain let out a cry. Or a child cried out, or a dog barked, or the sound of a group of Japanese tourists wafted up like the twitter of a swarm of birds. Sometimes I heard only the chirr of cicadas.

On the slope below the Conservatory, I lay down on the grass. In my suit. Normally, the prospect of walking around in a wrinkled, even stained suit would have horrified me. Now it did not. I grew indifferent, too, to what awaited me in Germany. There was nothing I couldn’t do without, nothing others couldn’t do without me. In everything that lay before me, I was replaceable. I was irreplaceable only in what lay behind.

3

I hadn’t actually wanted to become a lawyer. I had wanted to be a judge. I had the necessary grades, I knew that judges were in demand, and I was prepared to move wherever I was needed. I regarded the interview at the Department of Justice a formality. It was in the afternoon.

The head of personnel was an older man with kind eyes. “You finished school at seventeen, passed your first state exam at twenty-one and your second at twenty-three – I’ve never seen an applicant so young, and rarely one so qualified.”

I was proud of my grades and my youth, but wanted to appear humble. “I was enrolled young, and the state changed the school year twice, each time making us complete a year in a semester.”

He nodded. “A gift of two half-years. And you gained another half-year when you didn’t have to wait after the first state exam, and became an apprentice right away. So you have time to spare.”

“I don’t understand…”

“No?” He looked at me gently. “If you start next month, you’ll be judging others for forty-two years. You will sit on high, they below; you will listen to them, talk to them, even smile at them sometimes, but in the end you decide who’s in the right and who is wrong, who gets locked up and who goes free. Is that what you want – forty-two years up on the bench, forty-two years of being right? You think that will do you good?”

I didn’t know what to say. In fact, I liked the prospect of sitting on high, dealing with others fairly, justly deciding their fates. Why not forty-two years?

He closed the file that lay before him. “Of course we’ll take you if you really want. But I won’t take you today. Come back next week, my successor can hire you. Or come back in a year and a half, when you’ve spent your extra time. Or in five years, when you’ve seen the world of law from below, as a lawyer, or a legal advisor, or a criminal investigator.”

He stood up, and I stood up too, confused and at a loss for words. I watched him as he took his coat from the closet and laid it over his arm. Then I went with him out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs, and finally stood with him in front of the building.

“Do you feel the summer in the air? Not long now, and we’ll have hot days, and balmy evenings, and warm rainstorms.” He smiled. “God be with you.”

I was annoyed. They didn’t want me? Then I did not want them. I became a lawyer not to heed the old man’s advice, but to spite it. I moved to Frankfurt, joined Karchinger and Kunze, a five-man firm, wrote a dissertation in my free time and made partner in three years. I was the youngest partner at any firm in Frankfurt, and was proud of it. Karchinger and Kunze were friends from their schooldays, and had gone to law school together. Kunze had no wife or children, Karchinger had a jovial wife from the Rhine Valley and a son my age, who was expected to join the firm one day. He struggled with his studies and I prepped him for his exams. Luckily, we got along well, and still do. Today he’s a senior partner like me, and what he lacks in legal expertise, he makes up for in social finesse. He has landed important clients. That we now have seventeen junior partners and thirty-eight employees is his doing too.

4

For the first few years, I got the cases in which Karchinger and Kunze had no interest. A painter who had executed a commission, had been paid, and was now in dispute with the client – the seasoned manager of the firm gave me the case without even asking Karchinger or Kunze.

Karl Schwind did not come alone. He, in his early thirties, was accompanied by a woman in her early twenties. You would have taken them for strangers: with his tousled hair and overalls, he looked like a 1968 hippie, while her appearance was immaculate. She moved with poise, and sized me up coolly. When the painter became overwrought, she laid her hand on his arm.

“He doesn’t want to let me take any pictures.”

“You—”

“My portfolio was destroyed, so I have to take new pictures of some of the paintings. I know who bought them, I call these people, and they let me come and take pictures. They’re happy to let me visit. He refuses.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t say why. I called him, he hung up, and when I wrote him, he didn’t reply.” As he spoke, he threw up his hands, splayed open his fingers, clenched his fists, let them sink down. His hands were large, like everything else: his frame, his face, his eyes, his nose, his mouth. “I’m attached to my paintings. I can hardly stand to have to sell them.”

I explained that the law gave artists the right to access their paintings for the purpose of making reproductions. “That is, if the artist has a legitimate interest and there is no conflicting legitimate interest on the part of the owner. Is there a reason that the owner might object?”

The painter stuck out his chin, pressed his lips together, and shook his head. I gave the woman a questioning look; she shrugged and smiled. He gave me the name of the painting’s owner, Peter Gundlach, and his address, a prime location in the Taunus hills.

“How was your portfolio destroyed? Not that it matters, but if I can explain why—”

Once again he interrupted. I was annoyed with myself – back then I always got annoyed when I wasn’t as assertive as I thought I should be. “I had an accident – my car went up in flames and so did the portfolio.”

“I hope—”

“I was fine. But Irene was trapped inside and she,” he placed his hand on her leg, “suffered burns.”

“I’m so—”

He waved it away. “Nothing serious. Healed long ago.”

5

I wrote to Gundlach, who wrote back immediately. He claimed he’d been misunderstood. Of course the painter could come by and take pictures of the painting. I relayed the response to Schwind and considered the matter resolved.

But a week later, Schwind was back. He was beside himself.

“Did he deny you access?”

“The painting is damaged. The right leg – it looks like he took a lighter to it.”

“He?”

“Yes, Gundlach. He says it was an accident. But it wasn’t an accident, it was intentional. I can tell.”

“What do you want now?”

“What I want now?” The woman had come back with him, and again she placed her hand on his arm. But he still began to shout.

“What I want now? It’s my painting. I had to sell it, and now it hangs on his wall, but it’s my painting. I want to fix it.”

“Did you offer to restore the painting?”

“He won’t let me. Says he doesn’t have a problem with a little mark, doesn’t want me in his house, and he won’t let the painting out of the house.”

I found the story somewhat bizarre, but the two of them looked at me seriously, so I explained to them seriously that the legal situation was not a simple one. That, in the case of a damaged painting, the creator has the right to restore it only if the damage endangers his interests, that is, if a lot of people would see it. And that the owner of the painting, seen only in his private space, could do with it what he wanted. “I can write to Gundlach again with this or that legal argument. But if we have to go to court, it doesn’t look good for us. What is the painting of, actually?”

“A woman descending a staircase.” He looked around my office. “It’s a big painting. You see that door? The picture’s a little bigger.”

“And who is the woman?”

“She’s…” His tone became defiant. “She was Gundlach’s wife.”

6

Again Gundlach replied immediately. He regretted this new misunderstanding. Of course he was fine with letting the painter do the restoration. What could be better than having the artist himself restore the damaged artwork? He couldn’t let the painting leave the house, or his insurance wouldn’t cover it, but the painter could come to his house whenever he pleased. Again, I forwarded the response.

My curiosity was piqued. I went into a bookshop, and asked for everything they had on Karl Schwind. A few years before, the Frankfurt Art Association had organized an exhibition and published a slim catalogue – that was all they had. I know nothing about art and couldn’t judge if the paintings were good or bad. There were pictures of waves, of skies and clouds, of trees; the colours were beautiful, and everything was blurry, the way I see the world when I’m not wearing my glasses. Familiar, yet distanced. The catalogue listed the galleries that had exhibited Schwind and the awards he had won. He didn’t appear to be a failure as an artist, but he wasn’t established either – up-and-coming, perhaps. He gazed at me from the back cover of the catalogue, too big for the suit he wore, too big for the chair he sat on, too big for the back cover.

Less than a week later, he was back in my office, again with the woman. He really was big, bigger than I had realized during his first visit. I am six foot two, slim, and have always been in good shape, and he was no taller than me, but so strong and angular that, next to him, I felt almost small.

“He did it again.”

I had an idea of what had happened, but I never put words in my clients’ mouths. “What did he do?”

“Gundlach damaged the painting again. I worked for two days on the leg, and when I went to finish it on the third day, there was an acid stain on the left breast. The paint is streaked, swollen, blistered – I need to scrape it off, re-prime it, and repaint it.”

“What did he say?”

“That it must have been me. He said he’d found a little bottle among my things, and that the liquid smelled just like the stain. He insists that the painting be restored, at my expense, but not by me. He’ll never trust me again.” He looked at me, distraught. “What should I do? I won’t let someone else near my painting.”

“Are you ready to restore the new mark?” I was less and less sure what to make of the whole thing.

“Mark? It’s not a mark. It’s the left breast!” He reached for the left breast of the woman sitting next to him.

I was irritated, but she laughed – not embarrassed, not shy, but cheerful, her mouth a little crooked, a dimple in her cheek. She was blonde and I would have expected a light laugh. But her laugh was dark and smoky, and so was her voice. She said “Karl,” and she said it affectionately, as if to an overeager, clumsy child.

“I offered to fix the painting again. I even offered to buy it back, even for double the price. But he wants none of it. He doesn’t want to see me again.”

7

This time I called Gundlach. He was friendly and contrite. “I don’t know how he could have let this happen. But it goes without saying that it’s as painful for him as it is for me, and that he wants to see the painting restored to its former beauty as much as I do. And no one can do that better than he. I neither accused him nor did I withdraw my trust. He’s particularly sensitive.” He laughed. “At least compared to people like you and me. Maybe for an artist, he’s normal.”

Schwind was both relieved and despondent. “Hopefully, it will all go well.”

For three weeks I heard nothing from him. For three weeks he painted a new left breast. When he came to apply the finishing touches, he found the picture overturned – it had fallen over in the night, struck the small iron table he had set his paint and brushes on, and had been torn.

Gundlach called me. He was beside himself. “First the acid, now this – he may be a great artist, but he’s horrendously careless. I can’t force him to restore the picture yet again. But I have some influence, and I will make sure that he doesn’t get another commission until he restores the picture.”

The threat was unnecessary. Schwind, who came into the agency that same day, was prepared to fix the picture, even if it would cost him another few weeks. But he was desperate. “What if he does it again?”

“You mean…”

“Oh, I know that it was him. You think a painter can’t lean a picture against a wall so that it stays? No, he knocked it over, and he made that tear with a knife. The table’s edge is too dull to make such a sharp cut in the canvas.” He laughed bitterly. “You know where the tear is? Here.” This time he ran his hand not over the woman, but over his own belly and crotch.

“Why would he do that?”

“Out of hate. He hates the picture, because it’s of his wife, and he hates his wife because she left him. And he hates me.”

“Why should he…”

“He hates you because I left him for you.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t hate the picture. He doesn’t care about it in the slightest. He wants to get at you and he gets at you when he damages the painting.”

“Instead of having it out with me, he destroys the picture? What kind of man is that?” Schwind couldn’t contain his outrage and contempt, and leapt to his feet. Then he sat back down, and let his shoulders droop.

I tried to make sense of what I had heard. She had modelled for the painter and run off with him? Traded in the old man for the young one? Squeezed as much out of the old man in the divorce as she could squeeze?

But she wasn’t my client, he was. “Forget about him and the picture. Legally he can’t touch you, and I wouldn’t take his threat to use his influence seriously. Write the picture off, however much it hurts. Or paint it again. I hope, to an artist, that’s not an offensive suggestion.”

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