The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  “De votre mari. En Allemagne.”

  The letter had been dated the twelfth of June. On the second of July she had sent him her reply by telegram and booked her ticket for the train. It had not occurred to her that he might not have made it home.

  Caught by this unexpected thought (and feeling annoyed, too, that it should trouble her: her husband’s absence), she walked through the flat again, more carefully this time, studying the rooms for any sign of his return. That somebody had been there recently was beyond any doubt. Both kitchen counter and sink were littered with empty bottles, some of beer and some of schnapps; a broken glass lay shattered in the bin. The antique clock in the dining room had been wound, set, and dusted, though this care, she noticed, did not extend to the table and chairs. Both her and Anton’s clothes were hanging in the wardrobe; smelled musty, moth holes in her camel hair coat. The sofa in the living room had been made up as a bed: a pair of boots stood at its end, dirty socks stuffed in their shafts. A rumpled blanket had been flung over the backrest, was spotted with filth. Their bed, by contrast, was neatly made and looked unused; a layer of dust on the lip of her sheet and on the pert, downy curve of the pillows. A toothbrush, new and dry, stood in a water glass on the bathroom sink; the mirror hung splattered, encrusted with soap. There was no toilet paper. A ripped-up newspaper lay stacked by the bowl.

  She noticed other things. There was a photo, for instance, above their marital bed, of a young woman in a negligee, lying propped up on cushions. The photo was not framed, but had been pinned to the wall with two nails. She drew closer, staring at it with a stir of jealousy and hope, and saw that it had been taken in this very room, and that the nightgown in question, rather plain and made of ordinary linen, was one of her own. Then too, on the wall of the study, some inches below the light switch, hung a palm-sized smudge, more black than red. Five steps from it, on her husband’s desk, there stood an upturned glass, under which, as though in a bell jar, sat a curiously orange spider: not large, but with a meaty, triangular body ringed by hairy legs. It did not react when she stepped close and shook the glass, then it scampered off as soon as she removed the glass altogether. Underneath was a torn typewritten letter to a Bregenz orphanage pertaining to one of their charges. The final line and signature were missing. Judging by the size of the missing patch and the fag ends that littered the nearby ashtray, it had been used to roll a cigarette. Specks of ashes lay scattered across much of the large wooden desk. She opened a drawer and found a roll of Reichsmark, now defunct. A bottle of ink stood open amongst broken pens and had long since dried out.

  None of these findings was entirely able to settle the question of whether her husband had returned. Anton did not drink, or in any case not to excess. The only time he had been known to sleep on the sofa was on the last night she had spent in the flat, when she had already packed her bags and announced her departure (he’d come to the station with her and offered his handkerchief when she needed to blow her nose). He might, it was true, be the kind of man who would dust the clock but forget about the chairs and table; imprison a spider that had caught his attention under an upturned glass; compose a letter that “begged” the reader’s pardon for the whole of the first paragraph, then “kindly urged” him to address himself to the inquiry contained within. But it wasn’t enough. She needed to be sure of his return.

  Hastily, casting a glance in the hallway mirror and noticing how tired she looked, how wrinkled her clothing, she left the flat and pulled the door shut behind her. There was a flat across from theirs: she would ask the neighbour. Just then—she was still reaching for the bell—she heard voices travel through the stairwell and was reminded of the commotion two floors below. She hesitated, pressed the bell, received no answer. She rang once more, then turned on her heel and quickly walked down the stairs.

  The scene was much as she had left it. Most of the bystanders had dispersed by now, satisfied in their curiosity, but the small woman in the expensive clothes was still standing there, arguing with the police in her broken German. She was very animated, explaining some point with great emphasis and counting off her arguments on the tips of her fingers. The two policemen, by contrast, were quite openly bored with her and in a hurry to leave. When the woman caught sight of Anna (who, like her, was expensively dressed), she flashed her a despairing smile and inquired, “Guten Tag, lieb Frau—you wouldn’t speak English by any chance?”

  “Good morning, my dear,” Anna responded at once, calling to mind the lessons she had taken as a girl. “How do you do?”

  No sooner had the policemen heard her use an English phrase than they turned to her and themselves began beseeching her to intervene.

  “Sie sprechen Englisch, gnädige Frau? Aber san’s keine Ausländerin? Kommen’s aus Wien? Wie fein. Man sieht’s aber sofort. Meine Verehrung die Dame!”

  Anna quickly interrupted their chatter and confirmed that she was indeed Viennese but spoke some little English (“albeit badly”) and that, yes, she would be delighted to stay a moment and translate, provided it did not take too long.

  The situation was this: the woman was renting a room in this apartment and had been burgled the previous night while she was out (“my typewriter, my camera, all my best clothes—in short, everything that has any value”), most likely by one of the other lodgers, of whom there seemed to be a great many. The policemen wanted her to come to the station and fill out the paperwork before they took any further steps.

  “Please tell them that if they would but come inside and talk to all the lodgers, there won’t be any need for a complaint. If I leave now, the thief will simply hide my things elsewhere and we will all be wasting our time. I am much obliged to you.”

  Anna related the argument, but it was evident that it was pointless. The problem was not that the policemen did not understand the woman’s reasoning, but simply that they did not wish to go to the trouble of questioning half a dozen people one by one.

  “Explain to her,” the younger of the two told Anna, holding on to her elbow for greater emphasis, “that it isn’t safe to lodge with so many strangers. Things are bound to be stolen. Surely she can afford a room in a hotel?”

  At long last it was agreed that the woman would come by the police station later and bring along a male friend of hers who was “well acquainted with the law” and would act as her interpreter. The policemen left and, a flight down, could be heard joking about the woman’s accent and discussing where best to have lunch (there was a butcher’s nearby that smoked its own meats). Anna and the foreigner were left behind, still standing on the landing.

  “Thank you very much for your help,” the woman began. She had short, wavy, mouse-brown hair; thin lips, a sharp chin, large dewy eyes; good features, but somehow as though put together in a hurry, without proportion or harmony, and given to twitches. “I saw you arrive. You must be here on a visit. My name is Coburn. Sophie Coburn, Mrs.”

  “Anna Beer.”

  “The doctor’s wife!”

  “You’ve met my husband?”

  “Only in passing, on the stairs. You need to feed him up! He looks frightfully thin. I heard he’s been a prisoner—though he didn’t say so himself. I—”

  “When?” Anna interrupted, not bothering to hide her irritation.

  The woman reacted at once; stemmed her prattle; grew serious. “Two days ago, or maybe three. You—” She interrupted herself, wet her lips, pushed ahead with her train of thought. “You have not seen him yet? Since he came back? It’s been many years—”

  “Nine,” said Anna, nodded her head in parting.

  “I’m a journalist,” the woman called after her, obviously embarrassed by the situation. “Forgive the many questions. I did not mean to pry.”

  “How does he look?” Anna asked without turning.

  “Handsome,” the woman said with a special sort of warmth. “Thin, careworn, but handsome. We hardly exchanged a word.”

  “And your own husband, Frau Coburn?”

  “Dea
d.”

  “My condolences,” said Anna, and returned to her flat, on one of whose walls there hung a smudge she had yet to verify was blood.

  3.

  She decided to ignore the stain; ran a bath, cleaned up. It was somehow very important to her that she look good for her husband’s return, and this despite all that divided them, his infidelity and perversity, the long years of estrangement—but how sick she was of this despite. At the same time she did not want to be surprised by him, and sat in the water listening for the door, then hurriedly towelled off, put on first one set of underwear and then decided on another (it was older, less frilly) and got dressed in a fresh if rumpled suit. Before long she had applied fresh makeup, brushed out her hair (there had not been time to wash it), and composed herself in one of the living room armchairs, wiping off its dust before she sat. It was going on nine o’clock. Anton might return at any moment.

  At ten she felt her stomach grumble. There was very little food in the house, but she found some stale rolls in the kitchen basket and sat dunking them into a cup of malt coffee that she’d brewed for herself. On the way back to the armchair she stepped into the study, wet a fingertip, and ran it through the stain’s black crust. The colour turned and she left behind a crimson print.

  Back in the living room Anna scanned the shelves for something to read. She fetched down a volume of The Complete Chekhov that she’d bought for her husband one Christmas and started reading the first story she chanced upon, a nasty little anecdote about a man who froze both his arms as he tried to ferry his sick wife to the hospital in the middle of a storm (the wife died, naturally). Annoyed, she threw down the book, aware it would rumple its pages, walked over to the window, stared out onto the street below. Twice she saw a man who she thought might be her husband, though what led her to the supposition it was hard to say: she was high above and they were all wearing hats, so that not even the hair could be seen with any clarity. The first passed by the building altogether; the second entered the front door—her heart skipped a beat, and she composed her lips into a winning smile—but somehow failed to arrive at the flat and had to be given up for a stranger.

  By noon she had returned to the smudge, stood scrubbing it with a wet rag that stained pink a yard-wide section of wallpaper. There was no rip or bullet hole beneath; no bandage or soiled handkerchief amongst the refuse in the bin. A noise roused her, sent her running to the door and out onto the landing, empty but for the echo of a neighbour’s shuffling step. Retreating once again into the living room, she trod upon the crumpled Chekhov lying prostrate on the floor. Anna picked it up and read. She read of peasants picking bugs from out their bowls of tepid soup. A village bum caught fish and slept with someone else’s wife. A doctor settled, prospered, and grew fat, all because he’d failed to marry in his youth.

  At two she rushed out to the butcher’s, then on to the baker’s; ran back expectant but found the apartment just as empty on her return. She ate in the armchair hunched over a plate of cold cuts, bread, and gherkins, then at once fell asleep; woke up ten minutes later and hurried to the mirror, worried that her hair might be dishevelled; laughed at her own vanity but grew angry, too, at her useless, tardy husband, whom she had rushed to join from Paris after a decade spent apart. Some cigarettes calmed her, then a bottle of beer she picked from a crate in the kitchen. She sat drinking, smoking on the windowsill. Three o’clock passed, four-thirty, five; she nodded off, spilled ash on her blouse and skirt, dabbed at the specks with a spit-moistened cloth. Weary now, she shifted to the couch, stretched out upon the dirty sheet, and decided just to “rest her eyes.”

  Within minutes she was fast asleep.

  4.

  She woke to the sound of a key in the front door lock. At first, disoriented, she could not make sense of where it was that she was lying. It had been a long time since she had slept this soundly. The light was on in the corridor but not in the living room, where she lay in darkness on a sofa, a pillow spread under her head. She registered dimly that it was night; was raining by the sound of it, a faint patter on the pane. Then the latch snapped back within the lock and summoned all her senses out into the hall. She heard the front door being swung wide open; heard it thrown shut again, crash into its frame. Footsteps sounded in the breath of time between, more like a soldier’s charge than a doctor’s measured step, ringing loudly on the hallway parquet. She stirred, sat up, fell back onto the sheet, lay motionless, eyes fastened on the living room door. It had been left half open when she’d decided to lie down for a moment’s rest. A column of light cut across the swirling patterns of her husband’s Turkish carpet and stopped just short of the sofa’s feet. She lay and listened, followed his progress through the flat.

  There wasn’t much noise now after that initial, startling charge. His movements were shuffling, searching, full of doubt. She could hear him walk down the corridor and push open doors, much as she had done some hours earlier; heard his quick, hoarse whisper calling through the empty rooms, using some word or name she failed to understand. Somehow (with his hand, she imagined, or the crown of his hat) he must have brushed the hallway lamp, sent dancing the bulb, and forced an eerie sense of movement on the ceiling, walls, and floor. She listened and waited and struggled with vertigo.

  When he stepped into the doorway of the room, pushing open the door with a quick slap of his hand, the bulb at his back made him look impossibly large: a backlit giant who stood swaying, framed by wood and light. He was wearing a greatcoat; mud-caked boots upon his feet. It was impossible to see his face.

  Still she did not move. The rectangle of light that fell from the open door (twitching, quaking, taking orders from an agitated bulb) reached all the way over to the sofa: caught her hair, she hoped, the slender curve of her silk blouse. Indeed he seemed to make her out at once: gave a cry, or maybe coughed, and staggered forward. His movements were alien to her, and it flashed in her that he must have been wounded and robbed of his gait.

  At the edge of the sofa he fell to his knees; reached forward with both hands (but how different they seemed to her than those that she remembered: enormous, calloused hands, thick and knotty at the knuckles); cupped her cheeks, her throat, her neck, and pushed his face right into hers. His breath was poison, catarrh and vodka, the features coarse, and sheer, and bony, with a sloping forehead and enormous brows. He held her, tilted her head into the light, and studied her with open disappointment.

  “Schaaßdreck—shit,” he said, and lost his balance, fell against the sofa’s armrest, then slid in a heap onto the floor. A moment later he had started snoring, arms spread, head drooping, one hand dug into the cushion by her knee.

  It wasn’t Anton. Even now—sitting there, staring at his sprawling limbs and picking through his coarse, broad features (“as though dug with a spoon from out a lump of rotten wood”)—she could not accept this simple fact. Perhaps, she thought, he had been beaten, the face reset by army surgeons who cared too little for his noble brow; had his fingers broken one by one, then pulled them straight in some dark prison and tied them to some sprigs of kindling in the hope that they might heal.

  Distraught, not daring to wake him, she slipped down next to him; sat on the floor, with her back leaning against the sofa, and measured herself out against his long and sprawling legs. The man was enormous, a full foot taller than herself. Something gave in her, physically gave, a sense of tension that had run from rib cage to the dimple at the base of her throat; snapped, recoiled onto itself, pushed out a hoarse, impatient grunt. Her husband could not have grown this much: there wasn’t a rack (not even in Russia!) that would account for the extra height. All at once she grew angry, jumped up, and started kicking him awake. She wore no shoes, bruised her toes upon his greatcoat’s buttons; put a heel into his face and pushed it over, startled him awake.

  “What?” he asked, shook himself, tried to focus, eyes gone bleary with the booze.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  She had to say it twice until he un
derstood, grinned, shook his finger at her, mumbled something, fell asleep. Again she kicked him, again he came awake, swung out with one arm as though with a cudgel, hit her knees, and nearly slapped her to the ground.

  “Ticho!” he yelled, in Russian, Polish, God knows what; crawled his way face down onto the couch and threw forward one arm in the manner of a swimmer. His snore was heartfelt, rumbling, rich in bass; head, chest, buttocks rising up like a bellows with every slurp of cushion-thickened air.

  “I will call the police,” she yelled, but wasn’t heeded. He snorted, shifted, and slept on.

  5.

  Anna Beer calmed herself. She was not, by nature, easily frightened. Just to see whether it worked, she picked up the phone on the little table in the hallway alcove. There was no signal, just the tinfoil rattle of the static, feigning interest in her lot.

  Pensive, her hand still holding the receiver to her chin and ear, she stared back into the study, at the snoring, sprawling sleeper on the couch. Water might wake him, a glass poured over the face, or, better yet, a bucket. But water would not sober him: he would wake, grow violent; lash out at her with those enormous hands. Who was he? She replaced the receiver and had a look at the apartment door, wondering whether he had somehow forced his entry; found his key still stuck into the lock. Mechanically, considering its implications, she pulled it out and slipped it in one pocket. She left the hallway, went first into the kitchen, where she searched the drawer for the carving knife, then back to the living room, where she drew up a chair next to the sleeper and sat there with the blade across her skirt-clad thighs.

  The clock struck one, a single bleating running solemnly through the flat. Outside, the rain had stopped. The yard was dark and quiet; cloud chasing cloud in the city’s ambient glow. As she sat there, waiting, there came through the ceiling the strains of a muted argument. It was the woman’s voice that carried, high-pitched and insistent, interrupted only by her cough. She kept repeating her phrases, “What a pig you are” and “It cannot be borne,” over and over, in a tear-choked falsetto that seemed to whistle through the building’s brick.