by Dan Vyleta
Outside, beyond the station doors, the stranger raised a finger to his mouth, tore with strong teeth at the ruin of a fingernail; and though his hands were cleaner than his coat and fraying cuffs, he found his cuticles encrusted in dark blood. This simple fact seemed to recall him to his purpose. He looked up sharply, fresh urgency grown into his gaze. In the early morning bustle it took the man a few moments to catch sight again of the woman and her young companion, who was helping stow her luggage in a taxi. For a second, through the car’s back window, she seemed to look at him, and he stared back, entranced, as though tracing a softer, younger face through the coolness of her features. Then she turned towards her driver and soon was lost from sight.
The man seemed inclined to shift his attention over to the boy, who stood gathering his things, and in his hesitant way had taken a step towards him, when a policeman started walking in their general direction, drawn perhaps by the stranger’s shabbiness and eager to forestall any pick-pocketing. The stranger started, spun, and walked away in subdued haste. He did not slow until he had crossed the street and disappeared into the shadow of a gateway. There he stopped, rewrapped his scarf, and waited to see whether the boy too would climb into a taxi or join the ragged crowd that stood waiting for the tram.
Across from the gateway, in a house thrown open to the public eye by a bombed-away wall, a woman woke to her doll’s house existence. She stretched, sang a snatch of Wehrmacht song, put a pot of water on the cooker; and, in the coarsest of Viennese dialects, tilting the “a” in arse into a drawn-out, listing oh-ah-rse, she cursed in lazy succession first the Germans, then the Allies, then the Jews, all of whom stood invited to insert into their backsides some unidentified object she seemed to think was clinging to her palm as she thrice performed a shoving motion in front of her broad hips.
The stranger saw her, tipped his cap. Just then the boy made up his mind and set off on foot. Almost at once the man too set off, walking in the same direction as the boy, although he moved too timidly, perhaps, to bring to mind the notion of pursuit. Within minutes they were lost from sight.
Behind them, the morning sun sought out the woman, set alight her reddish hair. Thus favoured by celestial attention, she laughed, dropped a pile of potato peels into her pot, and began to cook herself a starchy soup.
2.
It took Robert more than an hour to get home. He stood gazing after the woman’s taxi for another moment, then shouldered his knapsack, picked up his satchel by its worn leather handle, wedged the hat box between his elbow and his hip, and—ignoring the cabbies who accosted him within twenty steps of the station (though he had plenty of money and could have afforded the ride)—started walking. He walked north at first, following the long bend of the Gürtel, then west towards Vienna’s more affluent suburbs, keeping in sight a stretch of tram tracks but making no move to climb aboard a tram.
Throughout his long march, the boy paid little attention to his surroundings but rather walked with a fast, driving, almost mechanical step. What absorbed his attention so thoroughly, displacing all his pent-up curiosity for a city that, only yesterday, he had been impatient to see, was the thought of the woman who had shared his compartment, cruel mouth screwed into a smile. He thought of the things he might have said to her; invented touches, brushes, a chaste kiss in the darkness of the shorted-out train. Her name was Beer, Gudrun Anna. He’d found a name tag on her luggage when she’d left the compartment to use the lavatory; had pulled out a scrap of paper and made a note of her address. He thought about her husband too, whom he pictured as somehow very tall; witnessed their first handshake across the dusty threshold of their stagnant flat, tentative and awkward, until the husband grabbed her waist and crushed her into the double fold of his embrace. So vivid was this vision of the estranged couple’s reunion that, if challenged to do so, Robert could have described the shade of the husband’s eye (a flinty blue) and the crease made by his hand in the silken blouse at his wife’s slender back.
And then his thoughts abandoned husband and wife, still locked in their embrace, and raced ahead instead, to Herr Seidel’s accident and his mother’s letter, her dark hints of “conspiracy,” the long lists of all her ailments, the blandly tender phrases with which she had instructed him to “stay away” even as she complained about her isolation and the family’s ruin. There was something in the letter’s tone, in its omissions and sudden shifts of topic, that had fed a feeling—long grown into conviction—that there was something odd, fishy, and, so to speak, out of joint going on at the house, and that his mother was, if not precisely suffering, then at any rate besieged, and consequently in need of his help. “The important thing,” he told himself, repeating a maxim he had culled from an English spy novel, “is to keep one’s eyes peeled and one’s powder dry.” But despite this—as he called it—“detective resolution” and the attendant weight of responsibility, he found himself humming, alive with the expectation of “pressing Mother to his breast” (he’d written just such a phrase into his diary). It would have taken a good ear—and imagination—to pick out from these distracted notes the opening bars of “Cherokee.”
So absorbed was Robert in these thoughts that he did not notice entering the old neighbourhood, nor passing the familiar park in which he had played as a child and which now lay denuded of trees. It was only in his own street, walking up the hill past the densely clustered villas, that he finally came to his senses. Robert looked up and, heedless still of the weight of his knapsack that was cutting into his shoulders and of the awkward ridge of the hat box that was biting into his hip, he ran the final few yards to the house.
It might have been six-thirty or seven in the morning: a warm and humid summer’s day, sparrows chirping in the garden pine. The ornate metal gate opened under his probing hand, revealed a short flight of steps overgrown by moss and weeds. At their top, a pair of marble pillars flanked the villa’s double doors, the brass knocker green and stiff. He knocked tentatively at first, then with some force; turned, found the doorbell, sent a buzzing through the house.
It took three or four further rings to produce a response. He heard the clatter of feet descending the hallway staircase, too light and fast to be his mother’s. The door swung open and there stood a girl, hardly older than himself. Her face was sleep-creased, her expression sour, the hem of her blouse spilling from the waistband of her skirt as though she had dressed in great haste. Robert whistled in surprise. It wasn’t how he had pictured her.
The girl was pretty, and also—a cripple; had “shot up tall” (as they said in novels) and, it seemed, very recently, especially from feet to girlish waist, her short, rigid torso perching on two stilt-like legs and threatening to topple. She was slender, quick in her gestures; the chest very high, the complexion good, of puckish features, with hair that might have darkened from a childhood blond to its current hue of burnished copper. There were short, sharply angled eyebrows and a plump lower lip; the arms spilling thin and naked from the elastic of her half-length sleeves.
It was her back that was twisted: not hunched, but spun like a twist of hair around a finger. It was as though she’d been caught in a perpetual pirouette, one hip higher than the other, the right shoulder leading, an odd sideways prancing to her ever-shuffling feet. If she could but unscrew herself: throw her chest out, gain some range of movement in that stiff and leaning neck; tuck in the shoulder blade that stuck out like a broken flipper.
The boy stared at her in wonder, a hat box growing from his hip. She returned his gaze with a studied rudeness that wrinkled her nose and put a tidy little crease into the bony flesh between her brows. She raised one hand and scratched herself at the height of the navel where blouse rose out of checkered skirt. It shook her breasts. He lowered his eyes and she adjusted her stance. Her shins were scraped like a tomboy’s.
“You are the son,” she said at last, proved unresponsive to his winning smile. “Just like the letters: meek as a lamb. Though they forgot to say about the eye.” She gestured
, rudely, stabbed a finger in his face.
“Robert,” he said.
“Eva Frey.” Her gaze was defiant: cloudy, grey-blue eyes, the iris rimmed as though by crystals. “The maid.”
She turned without another word, moved away from him, down the hallway and onto the stairs. He remained where he was, on the threshold, the morning sun hot on his back.
She stopped, halfway up, where the staircase swung at a right angle.
“So, here you are,” she called down, the same defiant dismissal still in her voice. “At the scene of the crime.”
Robert felt neither shock nor surprise. “It really was a crime, then? Herr Seidel was pushed?”
“Your mother didn’t tell you?”
“Only hints. She said something about the police coming to question her.” He paused, searched her face. “She also wrote that you were there when it happened, and saw …” He gestured and succeeded only in dropping the hat box at his feet. “But where is Mother?”
“Asleep.”
“Didn’t she get my telegram?”
“Oh, she got it all right. Went to the station last night. You didn’t show.”
“The train was running late.”
She shrugged and continued on her way. Soon only her legs were visible, sticking out of her too-short skirt. She wore socks rather than stockings.
“What do I do now?” he called after her.
She neither slowed nor bothered to turn, her voice loud and ringing in the stairwell. “What do I care? Go wake her up. Or wait for her here. Just as you please.”
Three more steps carried her out of sight. Upstairs, on the lush carpet, her step became inaudible. All at once a great silence settled. There had, in the past, been a cook, a secretary, and a gardener, along with a maid: the steady bustle of busy feet. Now the great villa stood as though empty. Robert put down knapsack and satchel, closed the door, and made his way into the house.
3.
He went into the kitchen first, found it in a clutter of open tins and dirty dishes, a cloud of flies rising as he stepped into the room. Everything—the sink and cabinets, the heavy painted dresser, the kitchen table with its coarse, much-spotted cloth—was familiar to him from childhood, and yet everything seemed subtly distorted in size, as though the intervening years had shrunk one wall and elongated the other, straightened the frame of the dark electric stove and shrunk into a midget’s portal the bent old door that led into the larder. A jar of jam stood open on the windowsill, its mouldy top alive with buzzing movement.
Confused, intrigued, Robert walked to the drawing room next door. Here too, neglect and flies prevailed. Used wineglasses and dirty coffee cups littered the many tables, the ornate mantelpiece and heavy carpets. There hung in the air the smell of cold ashes.
Robert stepped further into the room, swallowed dust motes dancing in the air between the walls and dirty window. Peering out, it was a shock to see the garden, the ground dug up and shaped into black rectangles of soil. Arranged within these patches he made out carrot tops and marrow plants; tomato vines clinging to a length of chicken wire. Ahead, past the hedge that served to bound the property, the neighbour’s house stood reduced to a black shell. A flock of birds patrolled its charred perimeter.
Robert turned, picked his way through dirty cups and overflowing ashtrays back across the room. As he reached the door, his gaze fell on a pair of boots that flanked an ottoman: worn, mud-caked, calf-high boots, their long tongues lolling, as though someone had only just stepped out of them. These boots gave Robert pause. They were army issue, made for marching onto enemy soil. But Herr Seidel had never been conscripted.
Quickly, impatient now to get to the bottom of the mystery, he charged up the stairs and on towards his mother’s room. Upstairs, the corridor stood empty, the maid long gone. He found his mother’s door wide open, drifted shyly through, then past the garments littering the floor. His mother was asleep, not on the unmade bed with its embroidered drapes, but on a wicker armchair by the window. A pang of tenderness rushed through him, along with a reverent kind of shyness, the solemn hush of church. He paused, glanced briefly at the dressing table, where a dozen little bottles crowded the picture of his father, the policeman, his uniformed chest cut in half by the frame. Two more strides carried Robert to his mother’s side.
He did not wake her right away; stood, gazing down at her small figure. She had aged, grown plump, or rather puffy; was dressed in an old dressing gown, fraying at the cuffs. A knitted blanket, no bigger than a shawl, lay crumpled on her chest; her features cast in caked-in powder, faded lipstick on her mouth. At long last his hand reached down to touch his mother’s; stroked it, recalled her gently from her sleep.
She woke, sat up, threw off the blanket: alarm, then malice, spreading through her features. The next moment she was on her feet, raised her hand as though to strike him, and in this manner chased him halfway across the room. There, from one second to the other, recognition lit within her eyes. Without a word, and without interrupting her movement, she stepped over to him and wrapped him in her arms.
Mother and son were of the same height.
“Robert,” she breathed, and squeezed him, reached up and gently cradled his face. “But will you look at that eye!” She bent his head to one side and kissed it. “And how cold your face is! You must have caught a chill.”
Again and again she bent forward to kiss his cheeks, his brow, the hands she lifted up towards her lips. Robert accepted her caresses with perfect passivity, at once touched and embarrassed by her show of affection, and too moved himself to easily find words.
“Mother,” he managed at last, laughed, and freed himself enough to take a breath. “But what a mess the house is in! I took a turn downstairs, and everywhere it’s dirt and flies.”
She did not seem to hear him, but rather closed the distance he had opened between them with two rapid steps; took him back into her arms. Up close she smelled a little musty, as though her clothes had been neither washed nor aired. Perfume overlaid this, rosewater and honey, hung heavy around her wrists and throat. Again he freed himself, stepped back some dozen inches, held on to her hands.
“You must tell me about Herr Seidel.” He flushed, bit his lip, took hold of his duty to learn the truth. “The maid says he was pushed.”
At the mention of the maid, his mother’s face darkened and a hardness crept into her mouth. She let go of her son’s hands, stepped close again, put her fingers to his cheek.
“He sent everyone away,” she whispered. “All the servants. Everyone but her. And now she walks around as though she owns the place.
“That creature,” she continued. “Would you believe I picked her myself? Out of charity. And look how she repays me!”
She flew into a sudden frenzy, grabbed his sleeve, and tugged him out into the hallway. “She steals like a Gypsy,” she hissed, still dragging him along, then stopped in front of an empty patch of wall near the stairs. “Look! Right there.”
After a moment’s incomprehension Robert made out the faint outline of a rectangle, no bigger than a magazine cover, upon the stripy plain of wallpapered wall. The rectangle was a shade lighter than the wall surrounding it; a picture must have hung there until recently. Now that he looked for it, he found the little hole left by the nail.
“She took it. That and the candlesticks. Sold the lot, she did. She steals like a Gypsy. She, she, she—”
He was startled to see that his mother was literally spitting with each word. Her face was flushed, its loose skin shaking with her anger.
“And now she says she saw, and she will testify. The dirty little bitch.” She choked on the word, shook her tiny, puffy fists. Her voice descended to a whisper. “She says that if he dies, they’ll call it murder. And here he’s left me without a penny. Cut me off, he has, even before. He’s so tight you’d think he was a—” She paused there, waved him over to the corner, put her finger to her brow, and drew a hook nose into her face, her heavy lids rising over manic,
tear-filled eyes.
They stood like that for three or four breaths, their heads together in an empty corner, her bosom heaving as though poisoned by the air. And then, the very next moment, the anger lifted from her features and the tenderness with which she had greeted him stole over her again. She grabbed his neck, his head, his cheeks.
“How big you have grown!” she cooed (though he knew very well that he was short). “And you were such a sickly child. Almost died of the croup. But how cold your face is. You must have caught a chill.”
He tried to say something—reassure her, ask her was she feeling well—but she had already turned away and had taken some steps down the staircase when her eyes fell over the banister and onto his belongings, which lay where he’d dropped them near the front door.
“Just look at what a mess she’s made,” his mother muttered, full of hate, and cut him off when he tried to protest. “She does it to spite me.”
“Those are my things, Mother.”
“Your things?”
“Yes. My knapsack and satchel. And a present for you.”
A thought stole through her, almost comically obvious, ran through her eyes and tugged at her lips. “You have the money we sent you?”
“What’s left of it.”
“Give it to me.”
Her voice was strained, and somehow artificially sweet. She lowered her lids and watched him closely as he descended the stairs to search his satchel.
