The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  “It isn’t like that,” she interrupted, gratified by the flush of loyalty that rose to her throat and cheeks. “Anton is … a good man. And now your sergeant tells me I will find him in the morgue.”

  The detective merely nodded. He had the good grace not to ask her why they had been living apart, she and this good man of hers.

  “Anything else we should know? People he might have socialized with, places he liked? Any personal habits we should be aware of?”

  The question startled her. She shook her head, rose to leave. “There was blood on the wall,” she said abruptly. “A little patch.”

  “Blood?”

  “In the study.” She described the size and position of the stain.

  “It’s probably nothing. He tripped and bumped his head. All the same, I should like to take a look.”

  “Too late,” she said. “I washed it off.”

  The detective looked at her quizzically, then nodded. “Very well, Frau Beer. We will be in touch if we hear anything.”

  She pressed his hand—dry, weightless, without pressure—and left with the vague impression that it was she who was under investigation, or, in any case, had been disbelieved. Anna had boarded a tram by the time it occurred to her that she had not even learned the detective’s name.

  5.

  She headed east, into the inner city rather than back to the apartment, crossed without incident into the international zone, and was amused when, stepping off the tram, she saw her first patrol roll past in a military jeep, four men in the respective uniforms of their nations, the Russian blond and ruddy, the Frenchman with a pencil moustache, the American and the Brit both smoking, laughing, distinguishable above all by the differing quality of their teeth. They were so perfect, so unhurried, they might have been heading to a photo shoot for Life magazine. The Russian even had the good grace to turn and stare after her with his hungry peasant’s eyes; had it been the Frenchman, he might have blown her a kiss. She smiled despite herself, straightened her hat, and headed into the warren of streets behind the Stock Exchange.

  Within ten steps the city absorbed her. She had been born here, knew the streets and intersections, the flights of steps that connected the different levels of the city. As she walked and stared, familiarity began to wrestle with suspicion. It was as though her childhood city had been snatched and then replaced by its near copy: at every corner the relish of homecoming soured by the sudden fear she had been duped.

  For all that, the changes were less dramatic than she had imagined, the bombs’ incisions more precise. The northern part of the inner city had not been subject to direct attack and had only been hit by strays. Most of the rubble had been cleared. There were buildings, upper storeys, that were missing. Her eyes stared up at gaps into which her mind would paint a row of windows; a stuccoed gable perched atop a brass-shod door. Here and there torn walls had been patched: dull, artless plaster clinging like a canker to ornate facades. Men and women walked the streets, hungry, threadbare, dressed in shabby clothes; blind to the pockmarked beauty of a capital whose empire had been mislaid.

  She hurried on, aware of the stares of passersby who looked with envy at her well-cut clothes and Parisian boots; lit a cigarette, smiled at some more soldiers; approached the street she had sought out. The house, she saw, was still standing; was untouched, in fact, save for some bullet holes that marked the plaster, the front door open and letting in the air. Inside, in the entrance hall that connected the door to the inner courtyard, there stooped a cleaner dragging her mop along the floor. Anna nodded in greeting, ran her eyes over the names on the postboxes, then walked up the main staircase to the second floor. She had been here only once, agitated, angry, bent on confronting the subject of her husband’s indiscretion, then had balked when faced with his young lover, whose gestures had been oh so subtly fey. His name was Kis, Gustav Kis: a handwritten sign above the bell. The sign was old and dirty, a pre-war stopgap that had never been replaced. Anna wondered whether the same could be said of her husband’s relation to the man.

  She lingered on the landing; didn’t reach for the bell and kept her distance from the door, soaking in the noises of the house. Anna had not planned to come here. It was only when the detective had asked about her husband’s friends and habits that the thought had risen in her and at once transformed into a necessary duty. All the same it sickened her: the thought of confronting again that pudgy, youthful face, the cheeks still flushed from her husband’s kisses. She had only the vaguest sense of the nature of Anton’s attachment to this man and to his circles, and a vital need not to delve into its details.

  A cough sounded in the stairwell below, the cleaner spitting phlegm into her hanky. As though in response, the door swung open at the far end of the landing. A head poked through, stared at her with a pre-emptive hostility much favoured by the Viennese. It was a young woman in a housecoat, a dozen curlers in her hair. She took in Anna’s clothing with derision and actually snorted when her gaze reached her boots. It occurred to Anna that she had been standing at her spy hole for some time.

  “What do you want?” the woman asked, in the overly loud, overly emphatic German reserved for use on foreigners.

  Anna forced her lips into a smile. “Nothing.”

  “So what are you standing around for?”

  “I used to live here. That is to say, a relative of mine. Some time ago.”

  The lie did not appease the woman. Instead her mouth formed a scowl. “Oh yes? Who?”

  Anna too dropped her smile. “What does it matter to you?”

  At the first sign that Anna might approach her, the woman slammed the door. A moment later she opened it again, no wider than a crack, shook her fist through the gap and yelled at her in red-faced fury: “There’s nothing for you here. All over and done with. Legal, too. So don’t come knocking here, from America or wherever. Don’t think I won’t call the police.” She slammed the door again, sent its bang ringing through the stairwell.

  Perplexed, a little embarrassed, and in no mood now to speak to Kis, Anna abandoned the landing and walked down the stairs. In the front hallway the cleaning lady stood leaning against the wall, the mop thrown headfirst into its bucket, her haggard face wrapped in a dirty head scarf, exhausted, malnourished; the eyes meek and wet. Anna stopped, dug in her handbag, offered her a cigarette. The woman took it but refused to have it lit; slipped it in a pocket instead.

  “You heard us?” Anna asked.

  The woman nodded, blew her nose. “She thought you were … you know.”

  “What?”

  The cleaner dropped her voice. “A Jew, I suppose. Some of the flats here”—she pointed up with her chin—“changed hands after the Anschluss.”

  Anna considered this. “Is that what’s happening? Are the Jews coming back?”

  This time the cleaner shook her head: the knot of her head scarf wagging under the haggard chin. “Not really. They’re all dead.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Anna turned to leave, then felt the woman’s hand upon her elbow.

  “What did you want up there?”

  “Herr Kis,” Anna said, slipped her fingers into her bag to fish for another cigarette. “Does he still live here?”

  “His name is on the door, isn’t it?”

  “Does he live alone?”

  “He has some lodgers. To make rent, I suppose.”

  Anna handed over three more cigarettes, then pulled a photo out of her wallet. She had meant to leave it at the police station, then forgotten all about it when she’d met with the sergeant’s litany of questions. “This man,” she said now. “Have you seen him here? Mind, he is a little older now.”

  The cleaner looked at her suspiciously. “Can’t say. Who’s he?”

  “My husband.”

  “Ah,” she said, reassured. “Ran away, eh?”

  “Yes. He ran away. He used to know Kis. Before the war.”

  “Go up and ask him, then. He may be in. I don’t think he has s
teady work.”

  “Some other time,” said Anna.

  Outside, a jeep rolled past, four soldiers smoking, scowling, shielding their eyes against the sun.

  6.

  Anna Beer did not notice the girl who was sitting on the stairs above her apartment when she returned home that evening, having walked for some hours in the inner city before dining in the restaurant of one of the hotels. She was a young girl, unremarkable if rather pretty, save for a cramped and painful twist that held in lock the shoulders, neck and spine. On her head there perched a red, outlandish hat that did no favours to her complexion.

  Had Anna been less tired from her long walk in the city, and less preoccupied with the sense of anticipation that rose in her every time she approached the apartment door (for was it not possible that this time, at long last, she should find her husband home and they would finally go through with their long-deferred greeting and be free to explore what remained of their marriage?), she might have noticed that the girl kept her face averted as she stepped into her line of sight, then stared after her with ill-masked curiosity. Indeed there was something impatient, unsettled, about the girl. She had been sitting on the stairs for more than an hour, rising periodically to stare out the window at the sagging ruin of the building’s back wing and starting at every step that sounded in the stairwell, and at every voice that carried from below. Periodically she had lit a cigarette and calmed herself by blowing rings into the air above her head before crushing the fag end into the stone of the stairs. There were three such shreds of paper and tobacco dotting the space between her feet.

  As soon as Anna had locked up behind herself, the crooked girl crept down from her perch, approached the Beers’ door, and pressed an ear against the wood. She heard muffled steps and, some minutes later, the rush of water from the toilet; no talk, no greeting, nothing that would have pointed to the presence of another person in the flat. Quickly, her face annoyed and hostile, the girl reclaimed her place upon the steps, then dug a book from one of her pockets, a school edition of a classic play. As soon as she started reading, her brow smoothed and an excited, girlish look stole across her features. She looked younger then, unguarded, the lips mouthing scraps of Schiller too ardent not to be picked off the page.

  A man’s steps interrupted her. They sounded from below, near the building’s entrance, and threaded their way up; shuffled, then charged, the unsteady zigzag of the drunk. Soon the stairwell spat him out onto the landing beneath her, a scarecrow figure, tall, broad-shouldered, very thin. He pulled out a hand that had lain buried in a pocket, bunched it up into a massive fist; leaned his weight into the door and began to hammer on it with great force. It was only now, with him measured against the door frame, that she realized how big he was, his large head stooping to avoid the lintel. And still the fist went on hammering, driving his drunken agitation into the varnished panel of the door.

  The woman answered. She did not open the door but simply called from the other side, telling the man to stop making a racket. She had to repeat it a number of times before her message sank in. The man lowered his arm.

  “Let me in,” he bawled.

  “Piss off.”

  “Let me in. I need a bed.”

  “Go find a hotel. I gave you money.”

  “All gone,” he yelled, dropped to his knees all of a sudden, then sank onto his bum. He resumed his knocking but received no answer. After some minutes he gave it up.

  He fell asleep then, for no more than a minute, woke up with a start, and pushed himself to his feet; lost his balance, charged forward, half ran, half fell into the wall across, then slipped onto the bottom step of the upward flight of stairs. His eyes rose, found Eva. He stared at her with the quizzical look of someone urging his brain to help him make sense of the world. The face was big-chinned, bony, the brow a ridge of coarse brown hair.

  “Is Dr. Beer back?” the girl asked him as he struggled to get up. He teetered, threatened to topple into the stairwell. There was no banister there, just a sheer oblong hole. The girl slipped the Schiller back into her pocket, stood up, and grabbed him by one flailing hand. He regained his footing, stumbled back onto the landing, dragging her along. Again his eyes found her, discovered her hump.

  “Křivá,” he said, the language unknown to her. “Bent like a—” He stopped, considered his simile, stuck out a pinky, and laid it in a curve. “Ah, to hell with it.”

  “Dr. Beer,” she repeated. “Is he back?”

  The man shook his massive head and began his descent, dragging her down with him, his hand locked now on her wrist. “No, no, no. The wife. Madame Beer. From Paris.” He pushed up his chin, pursed his lips, flashed her a study of self-importance. “Nice legs, though. And an arse on her—” He stopped, found a wall to lean against, threw his head back to consider Eva’s rump as a point of comparison. “You have bed for me, sweetheart?”

  The girl was undeterred. “Where is her husband?”

  At this the man opened his eyes comically, waved her closer, spat, and whispered in her ear. “Nobody knows.”

  “He’s still a prisoner, then?”

  “No, no, no. He came back. And then …” He paused, leered, slapped a palm against the wall. “ … whoosh, he disappeared.”

  They passed the apartments on the second floor, carried on.

  “What about the bed, kid?”

  “Forget it.”

  The girl broke loose and prepared herself for the giant’s anger but was met instead by drunken equanimity.

  “In that case,” he said, “goodbye and na shledanou!”; said it, charged down towards the first-floor landing and the door of the apartment ahead; applied his fist before he found his balance, leaning hard into the wall. “Sophie!” he pleaded with the spy hole. “Sophie, Sophiĉko, darling, open up.

  “Coffee,” he yelled. “Eggs and bacon, little widow. Come on, be a good girl, open up. It’s Karel, Karel Neumann, come to show you a good time.”

  Eva stayed until the door flew open, a commotion of tenants shouting questions at the drunk. Then she ran down the last flight of stairs and out into the summer night.

  Part Two

  More numbers. Of the 91,000 German, Austrian, Romanian, Italian, Hungarian, and Croatian soldiers taken prisoner at Stalingrad, fewer than 6,000 returned home. The majority died in the first year, on the foot march to Beketovka, or on the train to Frolovo (or Yelabuga, or Saratov), where half the barracks had been bombed away by German raids. Picture these barracks, count the lice. In the mornings they stacked the dead outside the doors. Dysentery is an infection of the colon. Typhus, scabies, diphtheria spreading through the ranks. A whole barrack itching, sweating side by side; the brotherhood and anger of a thousand shared excretions. It may be impossible to write a stench.

  Capitulation had carried with it hopes of food. In a propaganda leaflet dropped over Wehrmacht lines in the fall of 1941, prisoners were promised a daily ration of 600 grams of rye bread; 10 grams of wheat; 70 grams of groats; 10 grams of pasta; 30 grams of meat; 50 grams of fish; 10 grams of tallow fat; 10 grams of oil; 10 grams of tomato paste; 17 grams of sugar; 2 grams of fruit tea; 10 grams of salt; 0.1 grams of bay leaves; 0.1 grams of pepper; 0.7 grams of vinegar; 400 grams of potato flour; 100 grams of cabbage (pickled or fresh); 30 grams of carrots; 50 grams of beets; 10 grams of leek; 10 grams of roots, cucumbers, or herbs. In the accompanying photo a smiling prisoner held aloft a gleaming ladle; in another an injured man, half stripped, enjoyed the ministrations of a feisty nurse.

  Supply problems dogged the Soviet army, and fighting men took precedence over captured enemies. More often than not the captors starved alongside their captives. Each kilo of body fat holds 7,000 calories. The brain needs sugar to stay alive. In the absence of sufficient food intake, the physiological adjustments made by the body to convert fat into sugar-substitutes lead to the gradual souring of the blood. Acetone builds up and is released in urine and breath. Within a week starvation starts to smell, each exhalation laced with t
he scent of ripe fruit: entire camps suffused in the sweet reek of the body’s self-cannibalization.

  One

  1.

  The boys shared a room. There used to be a girl too, their sister, and the boys had been forced to share a bed, but Rosi had died a year ago, of pneumonia and flu, and they’d each had their own ever since. Karlchen, the younger of the brothers, was ten; was slight, sandy-haired, and timid by disposition, with a small, solemn voice. He worshipped his brother, who consequently treated him with despotic disdain. Franzl was thirteen, bold-chinned, gap-toothed, a “daredevil” and a “bruiser.” Both boys were dirty, tanned, and underfed. They were also very happy. It was summer. School had been out for almost a week.

  The boys had been sent to bed at eight. It was nine o’clock now, the window open to the yard. Neither of them was asleep. The situation was as follows: Karlchen was waiting for Franzl to come over and climb into his bed. Some nights he came as late as nine-thirty or ten, and other nights he did not come at all. If Franzl found Karlchen asleep, he’d almost always do something nasty: yank a hair from the back of his head, or tie his feet together with a sock so he’d trip when getting up to pee. Once he had placed a dead frog under the covers, right on Karlchen’s naked chest, then held his mouth shut so Karlchen could not scream. He remembered the feeling, the still, clammy weight at the centre of his chest where the ribs flared out from the flat shovel of the central bone. He had endured the trial as he endured all of Franzl’s humiliations, in the full acceptance of their justice. A sentry must not fall asleep. Karlchen was on duty seven nights a week.

  Karlchen heard his brother move and did not dare to draw another breath. Any sound now and Franz would crawl back into his bed, make him wait another quarter of an hour, or more. Karlchen lay still with his eyes screwed shut until he could feel Franzl’s breathing on his skin.