by Dan Vyleta
Within half an hour Anna could not listen to it any longer, stood up and shifted to another chair, closer to the bookshelf and the door, where the voice was less audible. The chair was large and cushioned, upholstered in blood-red velour. She pulled up her feet, slipped out of her jacket, and hugged it like a blanket to her chest. But what if she should chance to fall asleep again? The man might wake first, might approach her: curled up, sleeping, one stockinged heel tucked under her rump. The thought unsettled her.
She picked up the knife, walked over to the sleeper, stared blankly at those giant hands. The palms were nearly square, the backs thick-veined and bony, the fingers broad and flattened at the tips. And everywhere there was a terrible angularity about the man, his giant back and yard-wide shoulders, the unbending stiffness of his neck. It was as though a too-modest wrap of skin had been stretched across an outsized frame of bones: he contrived to be both massive and at the same time very thin. He was not the sort of man she wanted creeping up on her.
Standing there, listening to his snore, the neighbour’s whine still seeping through the ceiling, she came to a decision; turned around at once, left the study, and locked the apartment door from the inside (it could not be opened without a key). Then she picked up a dining room chair and, wedging it under the handle, barricaded herself in the bedroom as best she could.
Anna Beer lit a cigarette, smoked about one-half of it, pacing the room with measured steps, then sat down on the dusty covers of her marital bed, underneath the picture of a pretty girl in a linen nightdress. Ever since leaving Vienna, she had got into the habit of sleeping no more than five or six hours a night, lying in the dark in a state of angry boredom, then waking the next morning feeling drained and restless, unrefreshed. But now she again fell asleep, almost at once, her breathing shallow and even, her features happy, smiling, one hand curved around the handle of the knife.
Four
1.
He slept, not having expected to; slept soundly, the brow smooth but for that wrinkle round his broken eye. When he woke, she was standing in the room, halfway between door and bed, a model airplane hanging from a thread an inch above her head. She smelled of food. It wasn’t anything that she was holding; she herself smelled of it, smoked pork and sauerkraut, the sour tang of pickles. The bedside lamp he stretched to light found a spot of grease still moist upon that puckish chin. From his perspective, belly down, face half burrowed in his pillow, there was no way to see her hump. He noticed other things. The rigid structure of her bra made poignant those gentler protrusions of her body, and for a moment he marvelled at her, at her slimness and her leggy grace, the buttoned tightness of her blouse. But then, as though on purpose, she turned and made a show of her deformity; bent over the corner desk, where tin soldiers, corralled in distant boyhood, still huddled in a circle at the centre of the oaken plane, and went through its drawers one by one. What she was looking for was in the bottom left. She retrieved it, blew off the dust, threw it over to him (tousle-haired, sitting up, fumbling witless for his wits), onto the rustic tartan bedding, the smell of childhood seeping from its down.
“I didn’t steal it,” she said brusquely, took his measure with her sullen gaze. “She put it here herself.”
It took him a moment to realize it was a frame, a picture, he was holding, and another to connect it to the empty square on the wall that had pushed his mother to such fury. A wipe of his sleeve was unable to erase what proved to be not dirt but a crack in the glass that ran from bottom left towards the centre, forked lightning leaping from the lacquered frame. The picture, a portrait, was familiar, not just in outline but in its lighting and pose. It was one of a handful that had been in constant circulation even in Switzerland, a publicity shot taken early in the war. Robert had never cared for the moustache. It sat on the lip like a rectangle of tar; hid the furrow; drained all rhythm from the hard line of the mouth. Adolf Hitler looked sullen in the picture, masterly; a little heavy in the jowls. The hairline crack made incisions in his collared throat. Robert studied the picture, then dropped it on his lap; turned his attention over to the girl. He was wearing nothing but his shirt: buttons gaping at the chest. All at once he worried what sort of bulges his body might have cut into the bedding in his sleep.
“How long have you been here?”
“Some minutes. Your eye moved under the lid. The good one.”
A memory returned to him, of a long valley overgrown with summer wheat; bent stalks swaying to the breath of breeze. Somewhere in that porous sky, where dream had given to reality, he’d been troubled by the ardent caw of crows.
“I was dreaming,” he smiled.
She shrugged, one shoulder leading on her crooked trunk, then peeled a finger from her long-boned fist and pushed it near his face.
“That eye was moving. The other one was dead.” She bent closer, breathed sauerkraut onto his mouth. “Is it blind?”
“No,” he answered, aware that the lid had fallen shut, and pulling it up now with his thumb. In his confusion he edged away from her and drew the bedding closer around him. The movement dislodged the picture on his lap and sent it crashing to the ground. Neither of them moved to pick it up.
The girl turned away again, resumed her survey of the desk. She pulled the topmost drawer out of its compartment then dropped it on the table-top, spilling soldiers left and right.
“It’s full of her stuff,” she said, sifting through the contents with both hands. “Photos, magazine clippings. Letters of congratulations, thank-you notes, commendations. Her Party correspondence. Nice stationery, some of it. She even has a set of napkins somewhere with swastikas stitched on. Your letters are here too.” (She pulled out a tied bundle.) “What rubbish you write! Do you think you are a poet or something?”
While her back was turned, Robert reached to retrieve his trousers from the floor. He looked to the window, found the heavy curtains drawn. It was hard to say how late it was.
“I met Poldi,” he said abruptly, and struggled to pull on the trousers under the bedding. A corner of the shirt got stuck on the buttons. He lay flat on his back and wrestled with his fly. “She said that Wolfgang was arrested.”
“What else did she say?”
“Not much. I think she was tipsy.”
The maid smirked at that, watched his struggle underneath the blanket. At last he threw back the bedding and sat there, with his shirttails hanging out.
“Please,” he said. “I beg you. Just tell me what is going on.”
She seemed about to refuse him, turn away, then stopped short and forced her shoulders into that peculiarly lopsided shrug of hers.
“There isn’t much to tell,” she said. “Wolfgang came home six weeks ago, Poldi in tow. Your parents kept it quiet, of course: no registration papers, no ration cards, all the while hoping the neighbours hadn’t noticed. They were worried he’d be arrested. Wolfgang’s never been denazified.” She paused, wet her lip, the down on her chin catching the lamplight. “And then, ten days ago, Herr Seidel was pushed out the window. He and Wolfgang, they had a fight.”
He looked up at her, found one half of her face eroded by shadow, the other lit up starkly, like the waning moon.
“And it really was Wolfgang who …?” He paused, and she waited him out until he found himself enacting it, making a shoving motion with both his arms.
Again the girl shrugged. “He confessed.”
“You saw it, didn’t you?” he told her softly. “Mother said you saw and you will testify. She’s angry with you.”
He expected a response, perhaps a denial, but she just stared back at him, wrinkling her nose at the last phrase. There was something about her face that moved him to pity; it mingled vulnerability with spite. All at once he wanted to be friends with the crooked girl.
“You come from an orphanage. It’s where Mother found you.”
“And what if she did?”
“How long were you there?”
“Seven.”
“Seven years?
”
“Yes.”
“And I was in boarding school for almost six!”
“So?”
“So we have something in common.” He reached out his hand, hoping she would shake it. “And I’m not even angry you read my letters.”
She stared at his hand, first with bafflement, then anger, reached into her blouse, and retrieved a cigarette and matches. It wasn’t until she’d lit up that she seemed to trust herself to speak. “Asshole,” was all she said. She sat down on the desk, spat smoke across the room, kicked her heels into the wood.
But she didn’t leave.
“What’s that?” she pointed, shot a finger at the hat box. It was resting on a chair near the door, where it shared the space with a button-eyed teddy and a cutlass made of wood. The box’s lid was decorated with a glued-on bow.
“A present for Mother. I’ll give it to her after dinner. There was this hat maker’s in Zurich. I had to write away and have it sent.”
Robert had yet to drop the hand he had extended in friendship. The “asshole” did not trouble him. Her name, he recalled, was Eva. He itched to try it out loud.
“Go on, take a peek. They wrapped it up beautifully.”
She jumped down from her perch, snatched up the box, shook it, pulled off the lid. Inside sat a bright red hat with a soft felt crown and delicately moulded brim, cushioned on all sides by little balls of crumpled paper and wrapped protectively in a square of translucent silk. She stared at it with an expression the boy found hard to read: a tender shyness spreading through her features. Slowly, gently, her hands reached in and touched the fabric.
“Better leave it where it is, Eva. I’m not sure I can wrap it up as nice.”
At the mention of her name she flinched, cast off the tenderness. Her hands grabbed the hat, yanked it out by crown and brim, spilled the wrapping to the ground. She snapped it onto her head as though it were a bathing cap, pulled it low on her brow; stood in front of him, planting her hands on those uneven hips, daring him to tell her off.
“So?” she asked. “How do I look?”
“You’re not wearing it right.”
He got up, stepped over to her, reached with outstretched fingers for her head. She recoiled despite herself, then forced her face back into range. He pulled up the hat, set it down again, more lightly and further back upon her head; arranged the brim at some slight angle; reached for a strand of hair that he sought to tuck behind her ear. She slapped away his hand then let him do it, her stare belligerent, flinching every time he touched her skin. Another tuck and she pushed him away, stood scowling, waiting for his verdict.
He struggled for a phrase. “Not bad,” he said at last. “It’s just that it’s not your colour. It asks for darker hair.” And then, moved by a sudden recollection: “There was a woman on the train who could have worn it. Thick auburn curls.” He caught himself smiling, bit his lip. “Do you think Mama will like it?”
“She’s too old for it.”
“We better put it back.”
Eva took off the hat and seemed prepared to surrender it, then replaced it on her head, trying to imitate the adjustments he had taught her. He opened his mouth to protest, but a noise cut him short. It was the front door bell. The ringing was continuous and shrill.
“That’ll be the taxi,” said the girl. “You better go down.”
“A taxi going where?”
“The clinic. It’s gone four. Visiting hours will be over by five. I thought you would like to see your father.” There was something nasty to her smile.
“Gone four? I slept through the whole day!” Robert’s stomach grumbled. “And I haven’t even had lunch.”
He cast around, collected his waistcoat, his jacket, his socks and shoes. It did not even occur to him to resist her will and refuse the taxi. All he wanted to know was: “What time is dinner?”
“Do you think I will cook it for you? You think your mama will?”
Robert looked over to her, standing at the centre of his room, with her arms locked wrist to elbow, wringing cleavage from her lean and narrow chest; the toy plane gunning for the crimson crown of captured hat. Robert found it easy to forgive her manners; he had never learned to hold a grudge.
“You’re angry,” he said. “Life’s been—”
“Fuck you,” she cut him short, and slammed the door on her way out.
2.
Her name was Dorfer. The boy walked into the clinic a little after four and asked her if she could lend him the money for his taxi. He asked her shyly, explaining it all with a good deal of detail, how his mother had taken his wallet and how “Eva” had called the taxi, and in any case the fare was not much.
“Please,” he said. “I’ll come by tomorrow and pay you back.”
What struck her most was the pale, freckled agitation of his face: he did not want to be thought a cheat. When he wrote down his address and named the paltry sum, she acquiesced at last, went outside and paid the surly driver. She did not tip and watched the man drive off: shallow puddles standing in the cobbled courtyard, the smell of pine trees blowing in the wind.
Back inside, the boy had peeled out of his coat and stood rubbing his wet footprints into the hallway rug. He stopped at once when she approached him and made a beeline for her chair. It was her thirty-second year of nursing. She was overweight and tired and fifty-one years old.
“It’s so quiet here,” said the boy, looking past the reception desk, down the corridor that led to the patients’ rooms.
“We are a private clinic. Eighteen beds. Not like the bustle of the hospital.”
She did not say that they only had five patients. Half the staff had been laid off.
“Who are you here for?”
“Herr Magister Seidel.”
“You are the son?”
They both noted the surprise in her voice. She had read in the newspapers that he was older. And in jail.
“Stepson.”
“I see. Come, then, visiting time is almost up.”
They walked down the empty corridor together, the boy curious, catching glimpses through half-open doors. There wasn’t much to see: a handful of pale faces made paler yet by the starched radiance of their bedclothes.
“Here.”
She opened the door and stepped out of his way. He entered—hastily it seemed to her, a boy afraid to be thought a coward—then stopped dead in his tracks at the centre of the room. From where she stood, all she could see of the patient was the outline of his calves and feet. The boy, she noted, did not approach the bed. He stood breathing for some moments, his hands forgotten in his trouser pockets.
“Is he always like this?” he chanced at last.
“From the day he came. Once in a while it sounds like he is talking. But all it is is a sort of groan.”
The boy tilted his head to one side, as though he could hear it now, his eyes turned inward, to the half-remembered past. “He used to sing in church,” he said distractedly. “A beautiful voice. Tenor, I think. Gloria in excelsis Deo. Afterwards people would line up outside to shake his hand. Or, you know …” He raised his arm briefly and indicated the Nazi salute, unselfconscious, still lost in memory. It was surprising how once so common a gesture now made her wince.
The next moment the boy had shrugged off the past and moved on to questions of logistics. What he was puzzling over was: “How do you feed him?”
“Sugar water. It goes in through that tube.” She pointed. “Thankfully, he can breathe by himself.”
“He’ll die, won’t he?” The voice was quiet but firm.
“It’s in God’s hands.”
She was amused to find his hand mark a cross on chin, chest, and shoulders in response to her words. He kept facing her, unembarrassed under her gaze.
“I’ve been away for several years. At school. I only returned today. My mother—” He paused, rephrased his thought. “They say my brother did it. But nobody told me a thing.”
One of his eyes had been injured
and retained a hardness quite at odds with the other. It was as though one half of him was grown up.
“Come,” said the nurse. “We can talk in the tea kitchen.”
It was a room hardly bigger than a closet. Her girth filled it, consigned him to a corner stool. She caught him staring at half a slice of buttered bread sitting on the table but ignored his silent appeal. There was an immersion heater plugged into the outlet. Turning her bulk away from him, she boiled a pot of water and made a flask of rosehip tea. He accepted a cup, drank, burned his tongue, then cooled it in the pocket of his cheek.
It took him a minute to retrieve it and speak. “They told me—that is, Poldi did, his wife—that Wolfgang was arrested. Herr Seidel’s son.”
She nodded, hid behind her cup. “All I know is gossip.”
“Please,” he said again. “I must know.”
“Well, then. What I heard is that he beat your stepfather and threw him out the window. And then your brother went running into town. Never even put on his shoes. Ran his feet bloody, telling everyone he’d killed his father. So they arrested him. The papers say he was SS.”
“Poldi said police.”
“Not what I heard.”
The boy nodded as though he was unconcerned by her correction. “Why?” he asked at length. “Why did he do it?”
She bristled. “How should I know? I wasn’t there.”
He put a hand on her sleeve. It was so young and white and slender, it did not feel like an imposition.
“There must be gossip,” he said, repeating her word, the grown eye flashing boldly in his boyish face. “It’s better I hear it from you.”
Again she acquiesced; drank tea; spoke through its steam. “You have a maid.”
He nodded.
“They say the two of them, your father and your brother, they both—” She broke off. “It happens in the best families, you know.”
