The Stronger Sex by Hans Werner Kettenbach Read Free Book Online

laughed when he made another joke, which I didn’t catch. I made my way slowly forward along the wall, taking care not to touch any of the pictures. Their glaring colours seemed to me to be laid on a little too thickly.
    The speaker was standing at the far end of the room beside a delicate desk with an inlaid top and curved legs. He wore a green blazer with black buttons and emphasized the
high points of his lecture by leaning the thigh of the leg on which he was putting his weight against the desk, crossing his other leg over it and tapping the toe of his shoe on the floor. Behind the desk stood a tall, black-haired woman who wore a finely worked silver brooch at her neckline and looked as if she must be Frau Novotna.
    On the other side of the green blazer, not far away but in the second row, I saw Frauke with a notepad in her left hand, apparently making notes of what the speaker was saying. I listened to his pleasantries for a while, but then gave up because he was boring me, and anyway I didn’t understand most of his many allusions. I looked at the people I could see from where I was standing.
    The tall, thin man holding a champagne glass, standing in the middle of the front row opposite the speaker, must be the artist whose work was the subject of this exhibition. He wore an open-necked shirt, white with grey stripes, and black trousers with sandals on his bare feet. However, contrary to my expectations he wasn’t long-haired and bearded, but clean-shaven and with his hair cut short. I liked the look of the man at once, because the fixed expression with which he listened to the speaker was unmistakably a forced smile. I studied his face for a while. Suddenly I seemed to feel that I was being observed in my own turn.
    I looked away from the artist and round the room. On the opposite side of it and facing me stood Cilly Klofft, wearing a plain black short-sleeved dress. She smiled at me and raised her glass. I showed her my two empty hands, smiled and shrugged. She moved her lips, but I couldn’t read what she was saying from them, so I nodded and turned away. But a few seconds later I felt compelled to look back at her. She was still watching me, and smiled again.
    When people began clapping, she symbolically joined in the applause by tapping the fingers of her free hand on the hand holding her glass, and then came straight over to
me. She arrived in front of me at almost the same time as Frauke. Frauke looked a little surprised when Cilly Klofft put out her hand. When Frau Klofft had greeted her too, Frauke asked, “You know Herr Zabel already?”
    â€œOh yes,” said Frau Klofft, smiling. “We know each other well.” For a moment she seemed to be enjoying Frauke’s obvious astonishment. Then she explained, “Alex Zabel is representing my husband in a legal dispute.”
    â€œOh yes?”
    â€œYes, really!” She smiled at Frauke, then at me, then at Frauke again. “And how do you know Herr Zabel?”
    Frauke opened her mouth, but then she closed it again. I had a vision of the two of them falling on each other in the next moment tooth and claw. I said, “We… we’ve been friends for some time.”
    Frauke smiled sweetly. “You could call it that, yes.”
    This was turning out to be a difficult conversation. To relax the tension I asked who the speaker had been. Cilly Klofft said that it was Dr Guido Albers, deputy head of the municipal department of culture. I said that judging by the rhetorical flights in which he had indulged that wasn’t an elevated enough job for him. Frau Klofft smiled. Frauke asked me what that was supposed to mean, and said she thought he had spoken well. Willy Ferber, she added, was a rather complicated subject.
    I asked, “Is that the artist? Willy Ferber, I mean.”
    Frauke looked away from me, looked at the ceiling above Cilly Klofft and rolled her eyes, sighing heavily. Frau Klofft smiled. “Yes,