A poignant tale of three men in love with one woman

It’s a large island off Rock Harbour, just a few hours’ drive north of Sydney, with no services and no regular connection to shore. He charters a boat to take him across. Many years before, in Germany, he fell in love with a woman, “Nude, pale and blonde… against a grey-green backdrop of blurred stairs and walls… floating towards the viewer,”  painted by an emerging young artist. The painting disappeared for decades but now, mysteriously, reappears at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It brings a Frankfurt lawyer, staid, unimaginative, sober, to an almost deserted island on the opposite side of the world.

But what is the connection?

The Woman On The Stairs, a book by Bernhard Schlink, is an easy reading and yet involved tale about three men in love with one woman, the beautiful Irene Gundlach. It is written first-person by an initially young lawyer – whose name we never learn – contracted to draw up an agreement between the powerful businessman Peter Gundlach, married to Irene, and the artist Karl Schwind, with whom Irene now lives. The contract is for Gundlach to get back his wife in exchange for the painting’s return to Schwind. Irene had been the model portrayed in the painting.

The young lawyer meets Irene and realises he is in love with her. In his profession client confidentiality is crucial, but he tells her details of what is to be done, how she is to be a veritable pawn in a game being played by the two men in her life. He declares his love, helping her elude a night-time handover and to escape with the painting. Returning home, he waits for her to join him. By dawn, he realises she is not coming.

Decades later as a corporate lawyer, concluding a German-Australian business merger, he has a few hours to spare in Sydney and enters the Art Gallery. Seeing the painting, he approaches it slowly, finding it “…awkward because (it) brought up what happened back then, what I got myself into…” The gallery has too much integrity to divulge the name of the owner so he hires a detective agency who establish it is owned by a woman who lives on an island.

On arrival, she is not there so he sits on the verandah of an old house. Dozing, he doesn’t hear her boat arrive, awakening only to her words, “My brave knight!” He realises she is no longer the lovely model in the picture but is now an old woman – they have all obviously aged – and is invited to stay a night or two at her rickety house.

Irene is not alone on the island, now a nature reserve, there are others living in the outback. (There are two examples of the translation from German having a minor bearing on the story. The English is perhaps a trifle too English [teach us a lesson?] and outback to us has a different sense to ‘across the other side of the island,’ for example.) She has spent her years taking in strays and down-and-outs and, a one-time nurse, ministering to the island’s other residents.

They discuss what happened back then. He explains how he made it easy for her to get away but that he felt let down and hurt; she hadn’t even bothered to send him a postcard. She had used him. Irene offers an explanation: To Gundlach she had been no more than the trophy wife; to Schwind she was the muse, the packaging was enough. To him, though, beyond the trophy and the muse, she had been the damsel in distress; he would have been the prince who saved the princess and, in his own way, used her just as much as the others. In point of fact, they none of them loved her for who she was so much as for what they perceived her to be.

All three of the men from Irene’s early life trace her to the island. What ensues, with everyone briefly present, is a discourse that covers a lot of ground, including rights, responsibilities, culpability, blame, ownership; there is a touching glimpse of love and forgiveness before the tragedy of the ending.

Despite our lawyer remaining dull and nameless throughout, I found the book both unusual and appealing.

The Woman on the Stairs by Bernhard Schlink is available now from Dymocks. Click here to learn more.