And as usually happened, he did not take into account the very thing he should have really taken into account.
Namely that his aunt could see him from her window.
Driven by the irritation of the long wait, she had been pacing helplessly for at least a half hour and happened to stop by the window exactly when Döhring, headed for the telephone booth, appeared on the other side of the street. In her surprise, her head knocked against the windowpane, leaving behind a tiny trace of her deep-red rouge. She did not understand why he was coming from that direction; if he was coming from the train station, he should have been coming from exactly the opposite direction. Besides, the entrance to her house was not on the park side. And if after such a long delay he was finally here, why in the world was he going into the phone booth. She saw him disappear into the booth but could see nothing else; the angle of her sight line from the third floor was too sharp for that. Remaining by the window, she waited a few seconds for the phone to ring.
Very rarely could anyone afford to make her wait so long.
And when nothing happened, when the redeeming ring did not come, she slowly strolled back to the beautifully set table which by now had become irrelevant.
She controlled herself, but her high heels trod furiously across the floor.
Absentmindedly she sipped the cooled-off tea. One must keep oneself busy at all times. As if she had long forgotten that there were things with which she too could be insulted.
Deadly silence reigned in the room. She held the teacup with both hands, did not put it back on the saucer, did not want to hear the muffled clink just now. All the doors stood wide open; one could see across all the rooms. The tall windows locked out the wind’s noise perfectly, but on the opposite wall the dim wintry shadows of branches kept swinging back and forth.
In those years, well-to-do people had long since heaved out of their apartments the objects accumulated during previous decades. Only pared-down spaces remained. To which the immeasurable wartime destruction must have also contributed, the ruined German cities. Empty walls painted blinding white, glittering wood-plank or parquet floors, a few sources of illumination that emitted harsh clinical beams of light, a few accidentally left-behind pieces of furniture. All the aunt had left in her huge dining room were the long bare table and the unupholstered, unadorned chairs. The newfangled bleakness was certainly not just the fashion. As if people were no longer living in space but in time. As if they were no longer attached deeply or intimately to anything, neither to places nor to objects. A person flew from place to place, had some business everywhere, but it was time that set the pace and the standards; one slept in hotels, had more and more flats and vacation homes at places where one had neither lived nor vacationed.
When she was not giving a dinner party or did not sleep in her apartment, the aunt really did not have much to do here. The rooms retained only their names; their functions practically ceased to exist. For example, between the aunt’s so-called study and so-called dining room there was a pièce de dégagement, a kind of transition room, the erstwhile smoking room, in which she left nothing but an antique Chinese rug on the floor. True, a colossal baroque chandelier hung from the ceiling; the two objects were suited neither to each other nor to the rather small room, and they had no real purpose, yet their effect was not embarrassing. They got along well with each other, gazing at each other from an unbridgeable distance; they had nothing to do with each other; they had differing worldviews. And such an effect was perfectly suited to the style of the age.
Since the aunt had always lived by herself, it must not have seemed unusual when she was finally left alone in the empty flat.
Her steady boyfriend left her a few days after her fortieth birthday, but even before then she had not lived with him here or anywhere else in a common residence. At most, they shared their bed for a few hours, occasionally, whimsically, on weekends. Since then, the aunt has had no partner, as they say, though from time to time she slept with one of her co-workers or her agent in Paris, a habit they kept up for many years. Her deeper and more clandestine passion was not ladies’ fashion, or men’s, but collecting pictures.
She collected the work of only a few painters, exclusively the pictures of living painters.
Whoever died ceased to exist for her because the excitements of the moment were gone along with the dead. And she didn’t collect oil paintings, only temperas, gouaches, tint drawings, and watercolors, nothing else, not even pencil drawings or etchings. In her apartment, she left virtually no visible signs of this passion, which was defined by her sophisticated business sense. Although a few notable oil paintings adorned the apartment, of the works she so passionately collected she would hang only one for herself, and not necessarily the most important one. She would carefully change the chosen picture according to the state of her emotions, but to uninitiated eyes the changes could not have been conspicuous because, independently of their creators, the paintings quite closely resembled one another. She stored her collection in the humidity-controlled safe of a bank in Düsseldorf, and only her lawyer and the agent in charge of preparing her purchases knew this. Her agent was a Parisian, or rather a Belgian Fleming who lived in Paris, because the market was best seen from there, though the aunt dreamed of having agents also in Tokyo and New York. But for that, she needed to be richer or, who knows, maybe a bit more daring.
The cold tea clung in stripes to the inside of the cup. When the telephone on the dining table finally came to life, she let it ring for a long time. She slowly put down the cup; the silver bracelet clanked gently on her wrist.
It must have been a good ten years ago that she decided to dress only in black and wear, summer or winter, only silver. To go with this scheme, she painted her lips and nails a thick, excessively dark red, and gathered and almost completely concealed her hair with a kerchief tightly wrapped around her head. She always looked as if she were preparing to put on makeup. She had hundreds of kerchiefs in all shades of black and white. With their help, she bared her attractively symmetrical face, which reminded one of some extraordinary fruit, and her cambered, smooth, radiant forehead. She wore these black or white kerchiefs wrapped around her head, from under which her dark but obviously dyed hair peeked out a little, like some ornament or label advertising her proud personality. Her fingers were covered with rings, her wrists and arms with silver bracelets up to the elbows. She had a deep, penetrating, throaty voice, used to giving orders, but when speaking to her nephew or her agent in Paris, a handsome bald little man, she made an effort to restrain the power in her voice.
But whatever she tried to do, her personality overrode everything.
With these two people, however, she always behaved more cautiously than with others; she never risked anything, always speaking to them as if she were afraid of even momentary misunderstandings.
Döhring, she said quietly and firmly, while walking back to the window, carrying the telephone.
And this is the other Döhring, replied the young man at the other end of the line.
His aunt kept quiet, thinking she had better wait before saying anything.
It rang for so long I thought you’d never pick up, added the young man.
Why wouldn’t I pick it up, the aunt asked, cool and measured; she asked what happened.
I was just about to hang up, the young man said excitedly. I thought you might have gone out.
Where would I have gone, replied the aunt — and now the irritation was clear in her voice — after waiting for you for an hour and a half.
I only said that, the young man explained, stammering, because you didn’t pick up for so long.