by Dan Vyleta
He thought this over, neither incredulous nor outraged, his brow creased, as though working on his homework. Halfway through his thought his eyes once again found the half slice of buttered bread. He noticed her noticing, and blushed.
“Well, now,” she said, reached out a chubby hand. “I suppose we can share.”
They ate in silence.
Ten minutes later she led him out past the front desk, where the telephone was ringing.
“I’m Robert,” he said in parting, and as though suddenly grown shy. “You’ve been very kind—”
“Sissi,” she said. “Like the empress.”
She picked up the receiver and through the lead-shot pattern of the clinic’s windows watched him leave: his head bowed, his collar turned up against the early evening air, the white face thoughtful under the mop of dark hair. Then he turned up the driveway and was lost from sight.
When Robert approached his parents’ villa some twenty minutes later, he for a second time that day exchanged glances with the vagrant in the red scarf.
3.
The man was gone before Robert could place him. The boy had walked as he had earlier, on his way from the station: his attention turned inward, placing foot before foot. It was only the man’s movement that alerted Robert to the stranger’s presence, the furtive haste with which he turned tail. He had been standing in the shadow of a mound of cobbles piled up on the side of the street across from the villa’s garden gate, or rather had squatted, the skirts of his greatcoat trailing in the street. His shoulders and hair were wet from the day’s rain. When he heard Robert approach, he rose and turned, stared timidly across the space dividing them, then quickly slipped through a gap in their neighbour’s garden wall. Robert was left with the impression of a thin man, eyes still as buttons sewn onto his face. It occurred to him to follow, but when he stuck his head through the garden wall across, he caught no trace of the stranger and reluctantly turned back towards the house. What stayed with him as he climbed the steps to the front door were the soft, rich coils of the man’s lambswool scarf.
Robert had no key, but he found the door ajar, leaned shut upon its bolt, either from oversight or in anticipation of his return. As he closed it behind himself, his mother’s head emerged in the doorway to the drawing room at the other end of the hall. He saw nothing of her but the sagging, bloated chin and the dark wave of her loosened hair. A black lace collar cut in half her throat; beneath it she was lost in shadow.
Robert ran over to her, wishing to tell her about his visit, the grimy, dark windings of the clinic. But what came out instead was this, somehow too lightly, like schoolyard gossip traded in the dorm:
“There is a man watching the house.”
She started, stared at him, the face puffy and devoid of any definite expression.
“I went to the hospital, Mother. Herr Seidel isn’t well.”
Again she started, as though frightened by a noise, and again her face failed to register emotion. Slowly, thoughtfully, she trained her dull eyes on his face and at the same time withdrew into the room.
“Robert,” she said, faintly yet warmly. “You’ve come home!”
Into the silence that followed, his stomach ejected a long, low grumble, grieving over its missed lunch.
Robert mounted the stairs and returned to his room.
4.
She was still wearing the hat. There it perched, upon her crown, its crimson clashing with the spark of copper the lamplight teased from her thick hair. The angle was getting more rakish by the hour, the left eye in the shadow of its down-turned brim. She sat on his windowsill, her nose stuck in the pages of a book. On top of the desk, amongst the fallen soldiers, she had placed an open tin of English beans and some gammon on a painted china plate.
“Took you a while,” she said, looking up. “Long talk with your father, I suppose.”
The book she was reading was his school edition of Schiller’s The Robbers. His satchel lay upended on his bed. On the bedside table lay his diary, on top of the scrap of paper on which he had scribbled down Frau Beer’s address. Both looked as though they had been moved.
Robert repeated the phrase he had used with his mother. “Herr Seidel isn’t well.”
The girl made a sound, more cackle than laugh. “Was he—?” She rolled back her eyes and let her jaw go slack, mimed the gaping blankness of Herr Seidel’s coma with surprising accuracy. He felt he should tell her off, but sat down on his desk instead, tucked into the tin of beans with the spoon she had provided. The beans were quite cold.
“You should have warned me,” he complained between spoonfuls.
“I thought you better see for yourself.” She stretched, dangled her legs. “He fell three yards, maybe three and a half, and managed to land on his head. Clumsy, eh?” Her eyes found his, a smile playing on her lips. “You have a good thing coming. If he dies, I mean.”
“You shouldn’t do that,” he told her. “Speak ill of the sick.” Robert sampled the gammon, found it salty and tough. All the same, he kept on eating.
“Did you like him?” she asked abruptly. “When you were a child?”
He took refuge in his usual platitude. “I hardly knew him.”
“Oh, go on. You can tell me. Your big secret. That you hate Seidel’s guts.”
He began to protest, swallowed beans. “You hate him too?” he asked her shyly.
“Me? Oh, no.” She flushed, not quite in anger. “He’s my benefactor.” She paused, leaned back against the window, drew a knee up to her chin. “Did he send you nice things? When you were at school.”
He nodded and chewed, baffled by her change of topic. “For Christmas. And on my birthday. A knife once, and a leather folder. Only …”
“Only?”
He thought about it, constrained by his habitual sincerity, and struggling to formulate his thought. “It’s just that everything he sent—it was never more than it should have been. Though nice all the same.”
“Nice,” she repeated. “Yes. Within reason.” She bent forward now, put her hands on her knees, and spoke animatedly, distinctly, one eye in shadow under the brim of the hat. “It’s like this. He rations it, weighs it out. Just the right amount for each occasion. Warmth, I mean. It’s like he learned kindness from a book.”
“You are very clever. The way you say things.”
She almost smiled when she realized he meant it in earnest; pointed to his bedding, where his report card peeked out from underneath the satchel. “And you are terrible at maths.”
“Not terrible,” he grinned. “‘Satisfactory.’ Dr. Schweizer said that all I lack is ‘application.’”
He laughed then and hoped that she might join him. Perhaps she did, because she hid her face behind a yawn. A sound rose above them, barely muffled by the ceiling, Wagner paced by skips and crackle, and haunted by a thin, light voice. They both kept silent and listened for some moments, wincing when Poldi failed to rise to the high C.
“The tart loves her opera,” said Eva. “It goes with her new station in life. Did she show you the certificate? For the wedding, I mean. She keeps it handy under the bed. It looks like even the registrar was drunk.”
“Is that what they fought about? Wolfgang and Seidel?”
The girl threw down The Robbers and climbed down from the windowsill. The movement was awkward, neck and shoulders stiff upon her trunk. She straightened her blouse before she answered.
“Why don’t you ask Wolfgang yourself? I am sure they’ll let you see him. You are brothers, after all.”
“Has Mother gone?”
“Once.” She smiled. “Came back spitting bile. He kicked her out, I think.”
“What’s wrong with her, Eva? She’s not herself.”
“Nothing much. All it is, she’s in mourning. For that.” She tapped with a foot on the picture of Hitler lying face down on the floor. “Taking powders to soothe her soul.” Eva shrugged, smiled, began walking to the door. “Some family you have, Robert Seidel.”
“I’m not family,” she answered brusquely, but when she turned he could see that she was pleased. As she stood there, in the doorway, one of her hands reached out, plucked the toy plane from the sky. “How did you get that address?” she asked, pointing to the table by his bed. “The one you scribbled on a piece of paper.”
“There was this woman I met on the train. Frau Gudrun Anna Beer. A pretty name, don’t you think? Her husband just got out from a camp. Prisoner of war. Just imagine, she hasn’t seen him in nine years! And before, she ran off because she’d caught him having an affair.”
Something inside Eva seemed to flinch at this, a current running through her crooked frame. She dropped the plane. It fell nose first.
“You met her by chance?”
“Yes. We talked all night. She was very beautiful.”
“Auburn locks,” said the maid. “The one you think the hat would suit.”
“Yes. I’ll need it back, you know. The hat.”
She walked out, turned one more time, looked long and thoughtfully into his eyes. “The whole world is your friend. Isn’t it, Robert Seidel?”
He smiled, took it as a compliment. “I got into a fight once,” he said. “Someone said something, about my father, you see, and I—”
“Oh, shut up, you spoiled, ugly brat.”
She seemed hell-bent on always leaving him with an insult.
Five
1.
She woke to blood. Her feet were wrapped in it, a knot of scarlet top sheet, not wet but as though dyed along the outlines of her shins and ankles, the graceful hollow of one arch. She reached down, confused, still drunk with sleep, searched with her hand in the bedding and had her fingers nipped by metal: new blood forming in a bead upon her thumb. It broke before she had time to stick it in her mouth.
Slowly, licking the wound, she began to pull her legs from out of the bedsheet. As her red feet emerged, so did the wooden handle of the knife. In the course of the night it must have slipped out of her hands and made its way towards the ankles. She wasn’t badly cut, but both her feet and the lower parts of her shins and calves were covered in a dozen nicks, shallow like paper cuts. They had dried and now broke open under her probing fingers; stung when she wet a corner of the sheet with spit and tried to wipe away the blood. It was a mystery she had not woken. The knife tip scarred the parquet floor when she pushed it out of bed.
She got up, rushed for the door, intent on scrubbing off the dried-in blood. It was only when she found it barricaded with a chair that she remembered the stranger in her flat. Taken aback, she reversed her movement, turned back into the room; smoothed down her crumpled blouse and cast around for her stockings, the only item of clothing she had taken off when she had gone to bed. She found them flung over the top of the radiator; but when she tried to pull them on, a scab on her heel broke and bled an angry smear into the stocking’s silk. It was barefoot, then, that she took to the corridor, the knife back in her fist. She held it hidden behind the long curve of her hip.
Quietly—taming her pulse, her lungs, the nervous need to force her pace—she walked to the doorway of the living room, a brisk, light stinging in her calves and feet; stopped on the threshold, peeking in. The sofa was empty, the cushions scattered, a wet spot where his mouth had drooled into the armrest’s leather crook. She swallowed and tasted smoke upon her tongue, found the stub of a cigarette crushed halfway between desk and door. It was tempting to stamp and shout and go tearing through the rooms, the knife blade flat against one haunch. She mastered the impulse; turned soundlessly and tiptoed on. Her feet were sweating: the itch of salt along her wounds. When she passed the hallway mirror, she was surprised by the mask of courage she saw etched into her face; pearl earrings glowing in both lobes.
She found him shaving in front of the bathroom mirror. The door stood wide open. He had taken off his coat and shirt and was standing there in a cotton vest, threadbare and filthy, lather on his cheeks and throat. On his feet were his soldier’s boots, enormous, muddy, spreading dirt upon the patterned tiles. A cigarette lay balanced on the edge of the sink, the ash long and curling, its thread of smoke alert to the shaver’s every move. The cigarette’s smell mingled with the aroma of his lather. The whole bathroom reeked of man.
She could see his face quite clearly in the mirror, the giant jaw and bony cheekbones, a dark ring of lashes around each eye. As for him, he appeared not to notice her at all: his attention was poured into his task. She stood undecided for a moment, watched him shave. Just then he was working the cutthroat’s blade along a length of leather strap that he had suspended from a hook. Perhaps it was his belt. His forearms were enormous, so muscular as to look swollen, with a thick cord of vein running from elbow to wrist. Beneath the vest his ribs wrote great wide arches into its much-boiled cotton. Tufts of hair collected on the tops of his shoulders, charged up the sunburned line of his strong neck. He was like a man carved from a block of wood: coarse, unyielding, riddled with knots. Each time the blade touched his skin, the sound of scraping carried through the room.
It occurred to her that it might be better to conduct their interview through a closed door. All it would take was for her to pull the key out of the keyhole; slam shut the heavy door; insert the key back from the outside, lock him in. She gauged the distance between them, wondered how fast he would move. Then she caught his eye in one corner of the soap-flecked mirror. He was watching her. Perhaps he had been watching all along.
It was he who spoke first. “What’s that, then?” he asked. “You step on glass or something?”
His voice was deep and playful, hard to place. There was something odd about his intonation. She waited until she was sure of her own voice, watched him raise the blade and cut a path of skin into the soap and bristle of his throat.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He turned his waist and shoulders, not the feet, gave the ghost of a bow. “Neumann, Karel, pleased to meet.”
His cutthroat rose in the space between them, its handle lost in one enormous fist.
Alarmed, unthinking, she too revealed her knife, then let it droop from her thin wrist. He followed the gesture with a laugh.
“No question about it. Yours is bigger than mine.” His eyes sank down, from knife to thigh, on to her naked feet. “Or did you cut yourself shaving?”
“Who are you?” she repeated. “What are you doing here?”
He shrugged, turned back to the mirror. “Looking for Beer.”
Again she noted his accent, faint and playful, the open vowels of a Slav.
“You are his wife.” He opened his eyes comically, made a whistle from his soap-framed lips. “Enchanting.”
“Talk, before I kick you out.”
“In my undershirt?” He grinned, winked, went on with his shaving. “We are friends. Beer and I. We met out there.” He tilted his head, indicating a direction, as likely east as any other. “Five years in Russian spa. Lots of fresh air.”
“And you were what?” she asked, grateful for her anger. “His camp guard?”
He looked up, puzzled, then laughed. “His camp guard! Very funny. You mean because of accent. No, no, we were prisoners together.”
“You are Austrian?”
“Czech,” he answered. “Ethnic German. With Austrian passport.” He made a gesture indicating that he could be many things if the circumstances required: an odd little flutter of his spread-out hand. “Austro-Hungarian at heart.”
She refused to be charmed. “Who gave you the key?” she demanded. “To the flat?”
“Beer did. We are comrades. Army buddies. Thick as thieves.”
“Where is he? Where is my husband?”
He shook his head. “I thought he’d be here. I need a place to kip. My landlord—” He paused and smiled, ruefully she supposed, curled a finger to scratch within his beard of lather. “We had disagreement about rent, you see. That and his wife, she is crazy for
men. Completely shameless. Nobody is safe.”
“Listen to me. I want to know where I can find my husband, and then I want you to leave.”
He considered this, ignored the first part of her request. “Perhaps I can finish shaving first? I also need—” He pointed down the hallway, where the door to the toilet stood open near the front door. “Something I ate. Regret to be so frank. With a lady, what is more.”
His German seemed to grow worse the more he grew into his role. She was not ready yet to choose for it a name.
2.
The doorbell rang. It had a peculiar sound she had forgotten, high-pitched, urgent, threaded with a darker buzzing as of an insect caught between two windowpanes. She turned automatically, started for the door. It was clear to her it must be Anton. She raised her fingers to her messy hair, realized she was still holding the knife; dropped it on the table near the phone, smoothed down her blouse, got blood from her thumb onto its fabric.
The spy hole disabused her of her mounting hope. She opened the door and found the woman journalist there, looking small and tidy in a light grey summer suit. Her hands were hung with shopping bags.
“I’m bringing rolls,” she smiled. “For breakfast, Frau Beer. I wanted to thank you for your help.”
She spoke slowly so that Anna could follow her English. Her eyes were roaming, on her, past her, up and down her crumpled clothes.
“But what’s happened to you? Your feet are bloody!”
“It is nothing,” said Anna stiffly. “I stepped on glass.”
“You need to clean the wound. Here, let me help.” She pushed in, leading with the shopping, half ducking under Anna’s arm. “Alcohol is best, for disinfection. Is your husband in? Ah, here he is himself—”
The sight of the half-dressed giant cut her short. He had stepped out of the bathroom, one cheek still painted white with lather, the cotton of his vest struggling to contain his chest. Its straps looked flimsy on his bony shoulders. The fabric finished level with his hairy navel.
“Goot day,” he said in terrible English, wiped the cutthroat on his wrist. “Brakefast? Goot, Goot.”