by Dan Vyleta
She stopped to catch her breath, then wet her lips again, long tongue tracing the outline of her mouth. Beer took advantage of the pause.
‘Do you ever hear a trumpet player?’ he asked.
‘A trumpet player? Why yes. Somewhere in the attic, I think. I listen to him practise sometimes. I have never seen him though.’ She dropped her voice into a whisper. ‘He’s an Oriental, Vesalius says. From the other side of the world.’
‘Shine-a-man,’ said Dr Beer. ‘Shine-a-man plays the trumpet.’
‘You know him?’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, then turned around demonstratively, and sat down on his chair. ‘You shouldn’t do this, you know. It’s what your uncle does: stand at his window at night, keeping a tally of the neighbourhood. It doesn’t become you.’
Her forehead creased with displeasure. ‘What’s wrong with looking out the window? It’s what everybody does. You think things were so different two years ago?’
He shrugged at that, brushed off his trousers with the back of one hand. ‘Too many suspects in any case.’ He caught her looking at him confused, and consented to explain. ‘If this was a detective yarn, I mean. A reader cannot remember more than two or three.’ He smiled, rolled his shoulders, bent for the bag. ‘You should go back to bed. And I should be leaving.’
‘You promised you would stay.’
‘So I did.’
She returned to her bed, knelt down upon the mattress, then pounded her pillow into some agreeable shape, the straps of her nightgown falling from her shoulders with the violence of her movement. In all her gestures, she seemed half child, half village tart. Another sort of man, Beer thought, might long have contrived to hasten the transformation. He stared inside himself and saw his blood was cold. It hit him as a sadness, almost, and for a moment he wished he could explain. But there were no words for his feelings. So he stood to help her bring some order to her bedding instead. Together, they soon had her buried beneath a low rise of down.
‘Good?’ he asked her and she nodded, freed her arms, laid them down on top of the bedding.
‘Just a little warm. What did my uncle want from you?’
He hesitated. ‘You already know. You were listening in. Along with the housekeeper, like two children at a dinner party creeping up on the adults.’
She made to deny it, then burst into a laugh. ‘Just imagine the scene, both of us standing by the door, pretending not to notice the other. She kept glowering at me, and I kept glowering back. We heard every word. “Do you think she is play-acting?” She was pleased with your answer, if you want to know.’
‘Were you?’
She scratched her nose, like it didn’t much matter to her; answered with a question.
‘What did you make of the Professor?’
‘I thought he kept the Zellenwart well under wraps.’
‘The Zellenwart.’
She repeated the word that, eighteen months ago, neither of them had used or even known about. It came to them from the north, and denoted a kind of public spy, in charge of a whole row of buildings, each of them home to a lesser specimen of his breed, armed with a notepad, a Party pin, a sackful of spite. It was, in Beer’s estimation, a crude sort of job, performed by crude men. There were few professors in Speckstein’s present line of work.
‘My father says he raped a little girl. Years ago. That’s why he had to resign. He was lucky not to go to jail.’
Beer nodded, hid behind a cough. ‘Something like that. But he was very civil to me.’
‘You liked him.’
There was no way to mistake her tone of accusation. Beer endured her glare and considered this; thought of the uniform hanging from her uncle’s door.
‘I suppose I did. Until he bid me goodbye, that is. And told me the police were coming to my home.’
He picked up the file he had been given. ‘You have seen this before, haven’t you? Last night when we talked, you mentioned four dead. And that you drew a map. There is a map like that in this file. Four dead, all within a few blocks of here, just like you said. I was surprised you would know in such close detail. From hearsay, that is.’
She blushed, pursed her lips.
‘So I didn’t draw it,’ she said sulkily. ‘It’s true, though, isn’t it? Somebody’s killing Nazis.’
‘Perhaps. I don’t know. You should sleep now.’
‘There is something you need to see.’
‘Where?’
‘It’s too early yet. At four or thereabouts.’
‘Sleep. I will wake you.’
‘You will stay?’
‘I promise.’
‘Thank you, Dr Beer.’
And with that she went to sleep: drew the bedding up over her chin, closed her eyes, and soon drifted off, all tension leaving her body, and her breathing clear now, like the breeze across a field of rye. He watched her, watched her lips curl over a dream, a lovely, thievish, wicked smile; watched the ardour that passed like a ripple through her face, and the mischief, and the want; watched her lips move and her eyes roll, thick lids bruised from long and wakeful nights; and her left foot wiggle free of quilt and bed, pointing sideways up into the room, then hurry back into the shelter of the down.
Dr Beer watched all this, sitting on the hard, wooden chair not a foot away, his fingers leafing through the pictures of the dead. It wasn’t long before he fell asleep himself.
3
When she woke, she was surprised at first to find him there, slumped low in his seat, his chin on his chest, and a line of wet where he was leaking from the mouth. His hands had dropped to either side of the chair, hung lifeless, like the limbs of a marionette. It was easy at this moment to think of him as hers, to play with at her leisure, and she reached out at once to touch his beard, like a schoolgirl on a dare. He was handsome even in his sleep, perhaps more so: a closed man, buttoned up in his soul, the eyes like peeled almonds, half hidden under the broad brow. It was tempting to spend an hour just touching him; lie there, slide a hand on to his thigh. Then she remembered why she had asked him to stay the night and shot up in her bed; shook his shoulder in passing and ran to the window.
‘We are too late,’ she hissed. ‘He’s already got rid of his face.’
To her left, on the other side of the yard, lay the lit-up stage of her obsession. A threadbare curtain billowed in the breeze.
She heard Beer get up behind her, stumble to her side. Together they looked over at the young man across. He had just finished taking off his clothes. One saw the reflection first, staring waist-up from his corner mirror, then the man himself. He stretched, both arms thrown up towards the ceiling, then began to pace the length of his room; lit a cigarette that dangled careless from one limber arm. She breathed and swallowed, excited that he took his time like that, parading for them without haste. The man was well built, and naked. The electric bulb caught the ridges of his shoulder blades, and, upon his turn, the sculptured line where the belly veered to avoid the hip and narrowed to the pubic bone below. His manhood was heavy, half-aroused, a purple knotting on his otherwise pale body; was familiar to her from long nights of watching, and shameful, too, for him and for her. Once he seemed to grab for it; scratched his thigh instead; turned with gusto to send flying that blood-engorged member. The girl and the doctor cowered in the window like soldiers in a trench: it was what she imagined war to be like, two snipers waiting for their cleanest shot. As they stood and watched, she reached over and took hold of Beer’s hand.
‘I’m married,’ he whispered nervously, but she did not relent.
‘I know,’ she said, and placed a cheek against his shoulder. His jacket smelled of cigarettes, and day-old cologne. It upset her when he pulled himself free with sudden violence, and reached across her face to draw the curtain, cutting them off from the yard. There was to his face then that unsavoury quality – at once superior and benign – that she often found in her uncle: the paternal mask of enlightened discipline, calibrated in its wrath. Beer
was getting ready to tell her off.
‘Is that what you do every night?’ he asked. ‘Watch a man prance around?’
She nodded, smiled, was pleased to feel the tightness of spasm rush into her lungs.
‘Every night,’ she said, then let fly the ragged whistle of her breath. Beer steadied her, walked her quickly back to bed.
‘Just a few hours ago you intimated that poor Frau Obermann was a trollop – and anybody watching no better than her.’
‘Did I really? How inconsistent of me.’
‘I’m through playing games.’
He moved the chair noisily, retrieved his bag and the file that had slipped from his knees and had scattered its contents across her floor.
‘With your permission.’
He rose, bowed, walked briskly to the door. She gave him time to almost reach his destination.
‘There was blood,’ she whispered at his back. ‘On his knife. The day the dog died.’
‘Blood?’ he asked.
‘Yes. And he has a woman there. He keeps her hidden. I think she’s not allowed to leave.’
Beer turned now, first to her, then to the window, pushed his head through the curtains to gaze across.
‘It might be nothing,’ he said. ‘It might be his wife.’
‘Nobody has ever seen her. There was blood on his knife. And people are dying all around the house.’
‘Four,’ he said. ‘Only four dead. And only one of them a woman.’
‘Will you go talk to him?’ she asked.
‘I will think about it.’
‘You must, you know.’
‘I could call the police. Or tell Speckstein.’
She caught his eye and saw that he wouldn’t.
‘If I was a man,’ she said, ‘I would go knock on his door. As a doctor, you see. Make out I was concerned.’
He seemed to consider this, searched his pocket for a gold watch, pulled it out and looked at the time.
‘I need to go now, get some sleep,’ he said. ‘It’s Friday. I will be doing house calls all afternoon. The young man across’ – he gestured back to the window – ‘he can wait for the weekend. Most likely it’s nonsense in any case. A young man with a sickly wife. And a girl’ – he smiled at her, condescendingly, tenderly, she wasn’t sure – ‘with too much time on her hands.’
‘Call for me,’ he added, ‘if the paralysis recurs. And stay away from the window.’
He left hurriedly, before she could say another word. She heard him at the apartment door, fumbling with the deadbolt and the lock. Twice he put his weight against the door, trying to wedge it loose, the reverberations running through the walls. It dawned on her that Vesalius must have locked it from the inside: slipped shut the bolt and locked it for good measure, hung the key back on its hook. Zuzka swung out of bed, smiling, pleased at the thought that he could not escape her so easily, and made her way down the corridor in total darkness. The doctor had not dared to put on the lights, unwilling to wake the housekeeper. She was about to round the corner to the main hallway, when she heard Frau Vesalius’s shuffle in the kitchen behind her: stopped and pressed herself into the gap between two hallway cupboards; smothered her breathing to a quiet rasp. The widow passed without the slightest hesitation and rounded the corner. Zuzka imagined Beer must have jumped when he heard a sudden voice call out at him in the dark.
‘Just a moment, Herr Doktor. Let me find the switch.’
Light flared in the milky bulb above the door, chased shadows down the corridor. To Zuzka, who remained hidden around the corner, they turned into a play put on for children: she could make out Vesalius’s hair, unruly like the wreath of snakes that crowned Medusa, and the square-cut shoulders of the doctor’s coat; her crooked posture, arms wrapped around the bathrobe gape, clutching to her bosom the hard-bought reputation of her chastity; his listing, leftward stoop as his bag imposed its weight upon his balance. They stood too close for comfort, the doctor rattling weakly at the door.
‘It won’t open,’ he said imploringly, as though he had exhausted his allotted range of tether and now longed for nothing more than sleep.
‘It’s locked, Herr Doktor. Here, let me find you the key.’
The widow took her time sorting through the row of hooks and hangers from which hung a variety of implements. Beer literally stamped his feet in impatience.
‘Here. This one, I believe. My eyesight, you understand. It isn’t what it used to be.’ She shuffled to the door ignoring the doctor’s outstretched hand. ‘Ah, yes.’
The door opened slowly under her guiding hand, but she had yet to step out of the way, her body blocking the exit, the doctor pressing from behind.
‘I heard something, you know. That night, I mean. A sort of bleating, high-pitched, shrill. More like a sheep than a dog.’
The doctor finally passed the threshold, thus stepping out from under the doorway light. His shadow simply disappeared: shifted, then collapsed on to itself, leaving Zuzka alone with Vesalius’s shade. It was a surprise, therefore, to hear him speak again. He must still have been standing there, out on the landing, pinned down by the old woman’s words.
‘You heard the dog? When?’
‘The night it was killed. An hour after midnight. I had trouble falling asleep.’
‘And it came from the yard across the road?’
The shadow shook its head. ‘No. It rose within the building.’
‘From our courtyard, you mean.’
‘From within the building, Dr Beer. It was like the stones whispered it.’
‘But that’s absurd.’
There was a silence then, and once again Zuzka wondered whether Beer had left; whether Vesalius was standing there, doorknob in hand, quietly watching as he walked up the stairs. But again he spoke.
‘Did you tell the Professor? And the police?’
‘The police?’ Vesalius answered. ‘Who wants them in the house?’
The widow turned her head to stare deep into the flat. ‘I thought it better to mind my own business. Know what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ said the doctor, and Zuzka saw his shadow re-enter the doorway in order to shake Vesalius’s hand. It looked to the girl like they were congratulating one another on their prudence.
‘Goodnight, Frau Vesalius. Rest assured this will remain between you and me.’
‘Thank you, Herr Doctor. So good of you to come.’
And with that she shut the door on the departing doctor. Zuzka used the cover of its bang to slip back into her room.
4
She did not come to a decision until halfway through the day; stayed in bed, in fact, complaining of ailments whose symptoms she enumerated to a sour-faced Vesalius. The idea itself was an old one, had been conceived in the depths of her, quietly, through those long nights of watching. It was the doctor who had brought it to the surface: the weary caution with which he took the measure of all action. ‘If I were a man,’ she had told him, prodding him onwards like a donkey. Her idea paid no heed to her sex’s frailty; it would ride with hussars, feasting on raw meat.
Once she had embraced it fully, she acted quickly, her cheeks flushed now by her own daring. She ran to the double doors that separated her uncle’s set of rooms from the rest of the apartment: opened them quietly and sneaked down the corridor to the bathroom on her left. Once inside she turned the key, ran a quick eye over the shaving paraphernalia that lay spread out on the sink. As a girl she had liked to play with her father’s razor: had cut shavings off the top of her fingernails, and collected them in a jam jar by her bed. At night, they would plant them, her sister Dáša and she, in the soft dirt of the herb patch, in the vague hope of growing an enamel child. Even now her nails had little divots at the centre, ragged, like the mark of small teeth. When she painted them, something of which her uncle disapproved, the polish would pool there, then harden and flake.
The image of her red-dipped fingertips returned her to the man with the painted face, and hence to her plan. She turn
ed away from the sink; found a perch on the edge of the bathtub, then reached over and opened the medicine chest that hung screwed into the wall right next to the door.
She came to it often, would sit on the tub and study the array of pills and powders; had spent many an hour plucking the stoppers out of the brown pharmacist’s bottles and sniffing at their contents. There was morphine there that, on a handful of occasions, she had dared drip on to her tongue; powdered Veronal piled up in a jar; castor oil and iodine (she had once smeared her breast with it, painted a circle around the nipple); a brown paper bag marked ‘Acetylsalicylic acid’ in Speckstein’s careful hand. More than half the medicines carried no identification other than a series of letters and figures, and sometimes the date. The poisons were marked by a bright red skull, the alcohols by the jagged suggestion of a flame.
At times, on one of those long afternoons when there was nothing for her to do, she had picked a bottle at random, uncorked it and then upturned its neck on to the skin of her thumb. She had burned herself on acid once, and made herself giddy with the fumes of some potent type of ether. It wasn’t much of a game but it carried with it a whisper of risk: some years ago, back in her father’s house, she had read a story in which Russian officers held a revolver to their heads without knowing whether or not the chamber was loaded. It was a game she should have liked to play, but only if she knew in advance that she would live. It was the sound of the hammer bearing down upon the chamber that spoke to her, not the violence of the bullet. Her father used to say that there clung to her ‘the faintest whiff of brimstone’; would kiss her then, after he said it, to take away the sting, the palms of his hands sitting warmly on her ears and shutting out the noises of the world.
It took her a good few minutes to pick a drug. She reached for the ether first, then decided its fumes were too familiar; dabbed a spit-wetted pinky into an unknown powder and brought it to her lips, then spat the foul stuff into the sink. In the end she settled on a harmless solution of colloidal silver, putting a little into an empty bottle whose glass-and-rubber stopper doubled as a pipette. She found a length of masking tape, stuck it on the bottle, and boldly marked it with the letters ‘Ag-H2O (Lq)’ in a manner that approximated her uncle’s mode of classification. Her preparations complete, she closed up the medicine chest, unlocked the bathroom door, and quickly returned to the safety of her own room, where she stuffed the bottle into a leather handbag and chose a topcoat to wear out. There was no need to alert Vesalius to her leaving. She took the spare key off the hook in the corridor, slipped out on to the landing, and quietly turned the lock.
