by Dan Vyleta
So she crossed his threshold, stepped into the room, closed the door. His smell was everywhere, cigarettes and sweat, the piles of magazines. It seemed pointless to inspect the back room and she gave it only a cursory glance, saw the rubber sheet rolled up in one corner, a pair of men’s underwear thrown carelessly on the ground. Quickly she returned to a position close to the front door, all the while staying away from the windows. She did not want to be seen by the neighbours, standing alone in a strange man’s room. All the same she found that she was grateful that the windows stood wide open; if she had to scream (and she was preparing her body for just that, breathing more deeply than was necessary, a stiffness spreading through the muscles of her neck), people would hear her, come to her rescue. She wished he would speak to her, explain who he was, and what was wrong with his sister; tell her why her illness was subject to such secrecy. But the man simply stared at her and smoked his cigarette. In his coarse features amusement could be read. He had yet to offer her a seat.
Agitated, focusing on his discourtesy, she cast around for a chair, and noticed instead the knife lying open on the sink, the handle made of bone. The sight of the knife unlocked something in her, and, turning around to face the man, half her mind busy with locating a chair, she found herself talking: not about the woman he’d kept hidden in a darkened room, nor about the man himself, but the murders that she’d heard about, and the killing of the dog. The deaths had not occupied her much of late, there was so much else that had clamoured for attention, but now, as she stood in the stranger’s room, Lieschen’s words came back to her, about the naked woman in the schoolyard, and the death of her sister, too, was tied up in it somehow, and what came out was precisely this, some babble about the ‘dead woman’ whom the policeman had to ‘wrap into his coat’, ‘lying naked, quite naked for schoolboys to stare at’, and about her uncle’s dog, ‘left butchered in the yard across – killed with a knife’. By the time she had finished, the man was laughing at her quite openly, scattering cigarette ash from his grinning mouth.
‘You laugh,’ she said, her temper rising, ‘but I saw you wash the blood down this very sink.’
It wiped the smirk off his face.
In the first moment, she thought he might run at her and hit her. He pushed off from the wall, and dropped the cigarette; took two steps towards her, hands rolled into fists. But then he halted, thinking, the muscles of his jaw and brow bunching with the effort.
‘You think–’ he started to say, then stopped himself. ‘But maybe I just cut myself.’
He paused again, looking for words, when a new thought seemed to occur to him. ‘You didn’t tell anyone,’ he muttered, more to himself than to her, then stared at her as though he saw her for the first time, some strange calculation running through his features. ‘Not even Speckstein.’
She shook her head, perplexed by his changes of mood, wishing to appease, even to please him.
‘I only told the doctor,’ she said, almost a whisper, ‘and he knows how to keep a secret. Your sister is with him now?’
‘Yes.’
‘And she is called Eva? It’s such a lovely name.’
She thought he would smile at that and hasten to agree, but he merely frowned and continued to watch her, chin pushed forward as though itching for a fight. Zuzka had never had a conversation with a man such as this. It was as though they were talking across some great chasm: all her social mannerisms, acquired at her father’s table, in the society of lawyers, teachers, country doctors – they all seemed useless with this man. He was immune to social graces, and seemed impregnable as a result. At home, through the years of adolescence, Zuzka had learned the art of charming men by taunting them with an audacity they were too chivalrous to repay in kind. It seemed to work with Dr Beer. It didn’t work with Otto Frei.
And then, just as she was thinking this, holding on to the smile she had affected at the mention of his sister’s name, his stare changed and became somehow very insolent. It was as though, brazenly – wishing her to know just what he was doing – he was picturing her naked body underneath her jacket, blouse and skirt, and was arranging it into various poses and positions, evaluating them in his mind’s eye. His excitement was obvious, and she quickly stepped away from the sink, made as though to run for the door, but in the end she took no more than one little step. It only brought her closer to this man and his hunger. She, too, found herself remembering his naked body, half-aroused, pacing up and down this very room.
‘So what do you want?’ he asked again, a crude suggestion vivid in his gaze. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Dr Beer won’t let me see Eva,’ she said, squirming under his gaze, and aware at once how childish it sounded. ‘It isn’t good,’ she quickly added, ‘leaving a woman with a single man.’
‘What do you care?’ he barked, though she saw at once that her last remark had stung him: blood shot to his face, sat there like a rash. He turned away from her, released her from his insolent eyes.
‘I’m also sick. Not like your sister, though perhaps – Dr Beer is at a loss.’
She said it as a lie, from self-importance, and because she had long taken a fancy to thinking herself sick, but once the words were out she found she believed them, and believed, too, that there might be a connection, a mysterious connection, between herself and the paralysed Eva Frei.
‘I thought, perhaps, that a pair of sympathetic hands – a woman’s hands, you see … and, besides, I am studying to become a doctor myself.’
‘And you won’t tell Speckstein?’ He had sat down on the bed and leaned against the backboard, put his dirty feet upon the sheet. Where ten seconds ago he’d been bulging first with lust, then anger, he seemed at ease now, his eyelids lazy and as though drooping into sleep.
‘Not about the blood and not about Eva,’ she said. ‘But why the secrecy? After all she’s merely sick.’
He looked up at that, nodded, seemed ready to launch into an explanation; barked out a half-dozen phrases, about the ‘public-health doctor’ and the ‘health court’, and something about the son of a landlady, ‘that rotten swine’, then stopped as though sick of the whole topic and spat on the floor with no regard for what he might hit. ‘Ask the doctor,’ he said after a pause. ‘He explains it all very well.’
‘And she really can’t move at all?’
This, too, created a reaction. He swung his feet off the bed, walked briskly to the window, patted down his pockets for another cigarette. For a moment he looked like a boy, lost in the role of playing a man. It was impossible just then to recall the stare with which he had appraised her flesh.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, grinning nervously from behind a breath of smoke. ‘Sometimes, I think there’s nothing wrong with her at all.’ He coughed, as though embarrassed, swore, scratched between his legs. ‘But it’s out of my hands.’ His eyes found hers, were soft now, boyish. ‘I had no choice, you see. The doctor says she is dying, just from lying still. It eats holes in her skin.’
She nodded, smiled a little at the simplicity of his phrase, then bit her lip for being so unfeeling. And still she pushed on with her questions.
‘How did it start, her illness?’ she asked.
‘There was a – She was only a child, we both were. She was performing, you see, and then. There was –’
Something happened to his train of thought, it seemed to have got stuck somewhere, then turned muddled. He tried to straighten it again by beginning to pace the room, his body thrown forward, one arm swinging like a pendulum. The anger was back in his voice and face.
‘Your uncle touched a young girl. Did you know that? He was thrown out of university because of it. Ask anyone.’
‘But your sister –’
‘To hell with my sister,’ he shouted all of a sudden. ‘Ten years we took care of her, Mother and I. To hell with her. It’s all yesterday’s snow.’
His anger cowed her, drove her over to the door. She grabbed the handle, started turning it, was halfway out the d
oor before she turned to reassure him.
‘You love her very much, don’t you?’ she said to him, her voice very gentle, as though shushing a babe. He stood, legs planted wide amongst the magazines and dirty socks that littered his floor, a man looking for balance: his features trapped between anger, lust and pity. It was a mixture so peculiar it brought a thought to her head, at once flattering and enticing. There is a man underneath, she thought, who is wounded and noble. She would make it her task, she decided, to guide him to the surface.
6
Beer found he liked the little things, the way her eyes moved, following the passage of the shadows as the sun inched forward through the hours of the day; and the flutter of her lids, now fast and imperious, now slow and almost coy, inflecting her answers with impatience or irony or quiet passion, just as she chose. She was not always responsive. There were times – minutes, hours – during which she seemed asleep with her eyes wide open, and would react neither to his continuous banter, nor even to the touch of his hand. This bothered him, filled him with fear, and he was, in those moments, unable to refrain from reaching down, laying two fingers on her narrow throat and reassuring himself as to the beating of her pulse. Beer found that he could talk to Eva, could spell out truths, or at any rate grasp at them with a boldness that he did not otherwise allow himself. She listened with equanimity, and sometimes a wink. Of course it was also possible that it was a purely physiological phenomenon, and that her mind was as empty as a drum.
On the first afternoon after her arrival, he had set up an impromptu operating theatre in his examination room, sterilised his scalpel and two pairs of tongs, and excised most of the rotten flesh from the two bedsores where the destruction of tissue was at its most advanced. Beer had spent considerable time arranging her bed, going so far as to make a sketch of the three positions between which he had decided to rotate her body, then took pains over finding her a nightgown that would give her a semblance of modesty as well as a little pleasure. He had rejected two of the more risqué gowns his wife had, towards the end of their relationship, ordered from Paris, and settled on a simple but nicely adorned piece made from a double layer of cream silk that lay loosely around Eva’s slender frame.
In the days after Eva’s arrival, there were a number of vexations. First, his laundry, urgently needed, did not arrive, and, when he called by the shop, the door was locked, with no note to explain the absence. Then Otto Frei came every morning, arriving several hours before his first patient. Otto would cast a quick glance at his sister, then insist on sitting in the kitchen and agree to a cup of Beer’s morning coffee. He spoke little, sat sullenly before the steaming cup, and yet was in no hurry to be on his way. In the end some queer little question would flow out of him – How much did one earn as a doctor? Would Eva learn to speak again? What did Beer think about what the papers called the science of ‘he-re-ditty’? – or else an anecdote, choppily told, though not without a suggestive power, about work and his past and the life of a performer. It was the telling of these stories that provided occasions, fleeting seconds, when, freed for a moment from the torrent of emotion and the selfish cunning with which he sought to become its master, Otto’s coarse features became almost beautiful and a vague resemblance emerged between the two twins. These woke in Beer the wish to see Otto Frei perform, though, of course: he couldn’t leave Eva. When he stepped out, as he did one night to go to town and look after some of his own affairs, he did so hurriedly, making sure to return within the hour.
Then one evening Speckstein came to visit, wishing to learn whether the police detective had called, and pressing Beer for his opinion of the ‘case’. He was visibly put out when he learned that Beer had not yet been contacted by the police, and unhappy, too, at Beer’s cautious answers concerning the contents of the files. All through their talk, Beer’s main preoccupation was that Speckstein not find any reason to ask to step into his bedroom, which he had given over to Eva’s use (he himself slept in his living room). Three or four times, in his own answers to Speckstein’s probing questions, he noticed an obscure allusion either to paralysis, to the permanently crippled, or to the bedroom itself. At another time, the mind’s unconscious urge to betray itself through careless words might have amused him, but now he found himself breaking out in a sweat and searching Speckstein’s face for signs that he had somehow latched on to the hidden meaning behind his answers. When Speckstein left, bowing to Beer with all the formality of his outdated manners, he promised again that a detective would call in the next few days ‘for certain’. Beer assured him that he would offer every assistance, then closed the door and returned to Eva’s bedside, rearranging the pillows, and rubbing alcohol into her skin.
On the fourth morning after Eva Frei’s arrival, only a handful of patients presented themselves in Beer’s waiting room. By eleven o’clock he had whittled them down to two men: the first the neighbourhood greengrocer, who hobbled into the examination room, then rolled up his trouser cuff to reveal a torn-open calf, crudely bandaged in a tea towel (he insisted that there was no need to trouble the hospital); the second a man of about forty years of age who complained about stomach cramps. He was a tall man, big-boned and awkward in his physicality: the hips bigger even than his shoulders, with long, flabby legs, and little islands of coarse hair that clustered on his knuckles. He had a thick shock of hair that could not be anything other than a wig. Jet black, it sprang in a double wave from a crisp parting high upon his scalp, then stopped abruptly above the shaven side of his ears and neck. The face was commonplace, doughy; the eyes almost black, the lips very thin and very red. It was as though a hole had been clawed from his face, then circled by a line to mark the mouth. The suit he wore was almost new, yet worn somehow in a slovenly manner; brown lambswool, too thick for the season. When he unbuttoned his shirt, to let the doctor at his gut, Beer was struck by how big his nipples were, clinging oddly to his flabby chest.
‘So what is it, Doctor?’ he asked after repeated prods, each of them answered by a low and almost comical groan. ‘Is it very bad?’
Beer asked a few routine questions, then gave his verdict. ‘You have nothing to worry about. It’s just wind. It can be very painful.’
‘Farts,’ laughed the man, though his eyes took on no lustre. ‘And here I was expecting a death sentence.’
He swung around, sat with his legs dangling from the examination table and listened to Beer’s dietary advice, his hands busy with his shirt buttons. When he was done, he stood up, put on his jacket, then neither pulled out his insurance papers nor made any movement towards the door but simply stood there, looking about the examination room, and especially at the shelf of books that Beer had moved there, feeling that the presence of some volumes was expected by his patients. He passed a hairy hand over the names embossed on the spines, and even took the liberty of fetching down a volume of basic pharmacology. Beer was about to object, but the man cut him off with a question.
‘You used to work as a neurologist, didn’t you? Or a psychiatrist, I never quite understood the difference. You have read Dr Freud, I suppose? The Jewish doctor.’
The black eyes took a hold of Beer.
‘His books are forbidden.’
‘Yes, but you’ve read them. They are in your field, wouldn’t you say? An interesting fellow. You are familiar with his theory of repression? He is speaking about people who keep everything welled up inside. It’s like a cork they’ve stuffed into their souls. In a strong man, one might call it stoicism.’
‘Repression,’ said Beer, feeling that the man was laughing at him somehow, and experiencing an urge to show him up. ‘It’s a mechanism, not a personality type. We all have it. It keeps ourselves hidden from ourselves, for our own good. Otherwise it might be hard to carry on.’
‘Ah, so you have read him.’
The man picked up a pencil and a piece of paper from Beer’s writing desk, and, with remarkable self-assurance – as though he were standing in his own office, helping himself to his
own stationery – scribbled a note, put a date next to it.
‘Force of habit,’ he smiled, folding the paper into his jacket. ‘I’m sure you don’t mind.’
Beer watched the gesture with a sinking heart.
‘You are the detective,’ he complained. ‘You should have said.’
‘Let’s sit down somewhere,’ said the man. ‘Professor Speckstein assures me you are a font of wisdom when it comes to murder. Perhaps you could ask your maid to put on some coffee. But I forgot. I am told you don’t have a maid. Nor a receptionist. Somewhat peculiar, wouldn’t you say? I suppose you will have to put it on yourself.’
Beer led the man into his study, then had no choice but to leave him while he put on the kettle. When he returned, the man was standing at his bookshelves, taking down some titles on the same piece of paper on which he had recorded Beer’s cognizance of Freud. They were all of them books that ‘violated the precepts of National Socialist science’, or however the phrase ran. Beer watched him do it, until the hiss of the kettle called him back into the kitchen. He brought the coffee in upon a tray. The two men sat down, stared at each other across the file-littered desk. For a moment Beer thought of Lieschen holding the picture of dead Walter, and almost smiled. He wondered what would happen to Eva if the man should choose to arrest him. His name was Teuben, Franz Teuben; not half an hour ago Beer had taken down his details on an index card. An address in the fifth district: too far away for an ordinary patient. The man took up his coffee cup, tasted the brew without adding milk or sugar, gave a nod of approval.
‘You’re here about the dog,’ Beer said quietly. ‘I expected a Boltzmann.’
‘Boltzmann is sick,’ answered the man, then smiled. ‘So, Dr Beer. Here I am: investigating a dog killing and imposing on your hospitality. And all because of a Zellenwart who used to be a professor, of all things. Before he was caught with his hand up a girl’s cookie jar, that is. And here you are, some kind of expert.’
