The Woman With the Bouquet (23 page)

“And then?”

“My friend who’s a neighbor told me the rest. Did I mention him? He lives one street over from Frau Steinmetz.”

“Yes, yes. Go on, please.”

“That evening, the man went with her into the house. She ordered her maid to go out and to only come back the next day. An order which the Turkish woman duly obeyed.”

“And?”

“She didn’t come back until the next day.”

“And?”

“When she came in, the lady with the bouquet was dead.”

“Pardon?”

“Dead. A natural death. Her heart had stopped.”

“It couldn’t have been the man . . .”

“No. There was no doubt about it. The doctors confirmed she’d had a heart attack. He is completely innocent. Particularly as he—”

“Yes?”

“He had disappeared.”

“What?”

“Whoosh. Gone! As if he had never been in the house at all. The Turkish woman claims she never saw him.”

“And yet you just—”

“Yes. My neighbor friend testified that the man went in the house but the maid denies it, totally. In any case, the police aren’t interested one way or the other, because there’s nothing suspicious about her death. My friend is keeping quiet now because the more he insisted, the more the neighborhood took him for a cretin.”

We sank further into our leather armchairs and started on our cocktails. We thought for a moment.

“So there’s no trace of him? No information about him?”

“None at all.”

“Where did his train come from?”

“No one could tell me that.”

We asked the barman for a second round, as if the alcohol might tame the mystery.

“Where is the Turkish woman?”

“Gone. Back to her country.”

“And who inherited the villa?”

“The city.”

So no motive of foul play could provide an explanation. A third round definitely was called for. The barman began to look at us with a worried air.

We were silent.

Ulla and I could make nothing more of the story, but we still enjoyed thinking about it. Ordinarily, life kills off stories like this: there are mornings when you feel that something is about to begin, something pure and rich and unique, then the telephone rings and it’s all over. Life chops us up and scatters us, leaves us in fragments, refuses the clean brushstroke. What was special about the woman with the bouquet was that life took a certain shape again: her fate had all the purity of literature, the economy of a work of art.

At two o’clock, we left each other to go off to sleep, but sleep was slow in coming: until morning I sought to know who the woman with the bouquet was waiting for on platform number three at Zurich station.

And I think that until my very last day, I will wonder whether it was death, or love, that alighted from the train.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, playwright, novelist, and author of short stories, was awarded the French Academy’s Grand Prix du Théâtre in 2001. He is one of Europe’s most popular authors. His books include
Oscar and the Lady in Pink
(1999),
The Gospel According to Pilate
(2000), and
The Most Beautiful Book in the World
, published by Europa Editions in 2009. The film
Odette Toulemonde
, Schmitt’s debut as screenwriter and director, was released in 2007.