The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  Quickly, afraid that he was smothering him, Robert shifted his weight; kept a hand on the man’s shirt and slipped to one side of him, crouching low beside his chest.

  “Who are you?” he asked again, calmer now. “Why are you watching the house?”

  He never saw the fist that hit him, heavy, weighted with a large flat stone. It crashed into his chest with that peculiar thump of rock displacing meat and bone. For a minute or so Robert felt he was drowning; his right hand hooked into some part of the vagrant’s clothing while the man flapped and struggled against his grip. The sound of ripping cloth freed him; Robert watched helpless as the man leapt up and ran away. After ten paces the stranger stopped, looked back with frightened eyes, the soldier’s greatcoat drooping from his skinny frame. Then he turned, clambered over a chest-high section of the wall, and was soon lost from sight; a patter of footsteps as he raced along the pavement on the other side.

  Clouds ate the moon; disgorged some slivers; mopped them up. Robert gasped his first breath in the darkness; lay retching, massaging his chest. In his hand he held a square of cloth that at first glance he believed to be a fistful of lining from the stranger’s coat. On closer inspection it proved to be the whole of his inner pocket, ripped out at the seams. Clutching it, Robert rose, still winded, then ran heedless, stumbling after his lost prey. But it was useless, the trail gone cold, no sound or movement in the street. Disappointed, breathless, doubled over, he slipped a finger past the torn cotton lip of the pocket he was holding, pricked his finger on some sort of metal pin. A second probing, more careful now, produced a passport photo double-stapled to the ripped corner of a sheet of paper. He held it, smoothed it, turned his back on the moon. Its light, cloud-bitten, uncertain, found a face, one staple buried in her forehead. Robert stared and could not stop his hands from shaking; whistled, swore, and hobbled back towards the house.

  6.

  The Seidel villa was brightly lit, and silent. Robert did not stop to kick off his shoes; spread muck racing up the stairs. His one thought was to find Eva. Her room was at the far end of the second floor. He had been to its door on two previous occasions and both times found it locked, unresponsive to his knocks. Today it stood open, the room behind it narrow and long and crowded with furniture. At the far end, underneath the window, stood a bed. He ran in, impatient, realized too late that Eva was not hiding in the clutter; turned on his heel and collided with her at the door. She was wearing nothing apart from a towel knotted halfway down the freckled plain between her narrow throat and girlish breasts; was in a hurry, too, to cross the distance from the nearby bathroom, her crooked back laid bare for prying eyes to see. The collision threatened the knot that held her towel; he found himself reaching out with both his hands to stop its slide, grabbed her at one armpit and the stretch of flank that grew directly from her hip. The dirt-stained hands left marks on skin and towel. He forgot to close his eyes before a momentary flash of breast.

  She would not raise her face; ducked away from him, shouting, then remembered her spine; walked backwards, wet hair streaming down her shoulders; threw a book at him, a shoe, some knickers, the rusty tin that held her pencils.

  “Look,” he said, taking cover from this indiscriminate hail; placed the photo on the chair beside him, turned around, and walked out. He didn’t close the door; crouched next to it, his back against the frame, his bruised chest swelling, hurting, making it difficult to breathe.

  He did not hear her move. He expected the door to slam behind him; that she would curse him, chase him, call him names. After some minutes he became aware of the scent of flowers stealing through the corridor, threading a path from the bathtub to her room. It took him a while to understand it was her soap, the smell of hair so freshly washed. Breathless, reckless, he followed the smell, stuck his head around the corner of her door.

  She had taken the photo from the chair to her pillow: sat on her bed, naked legs tucked under, wet hair dripping on her sheets. He drew close to her, bent over the picture, still stapled to a corner of typing paper, its torn edge discoloured by old blood. The blue ring of a rubber stamp cut through the photo, smudged letters curving through the cheek. It was a girl, no older than eleven or twelve. Though the photo cut off at the collarbones, there was no mistaking the kink that governed shoulders and neck. Her hair had been lighter then, a stringy sort of blond that had been braided into pigtails at both sides. One strand had come loose and hung down across her eye, her nose, her lips.

  “I saw him,” he said, standing bowed as though in prayer. “Just now. He hit me in the chest, but I ripped out his pocket.” Shyly he placed the dirty rag onto her sheet. It too was blackened by old blood.

  Eva looked up at him. It was only now he saw she had been crying. The face beneath the tears bore an expression he had not seen her wear before, of meekness and hope, a shy kind of longing. She noticed his wonder and grew angry at once, rancour spreading through her features. But when she lowered her eyes again, back to the photo, something of the earlier expression crept back into her lips and eyes.

  Robert sat down on the floor by the bed. The window was closed, its pane holding her reflection, two girls kneeling on the bedding, proud and tender all at once. With a sudden movement she turned her back on her twin, leaned hard against the window; picked up the hat that lay upturned near the footboard of her bed. An adjustment of its brim served as cover for wiping her eyes. She reached for the photo then thought better of it, left it where it was on the curve of her pillow, the linen clean and without crease.

  “He was here today,” she said.

  “The watcher? He was in the house?”

  “I thought I heard him. In the basement somewhere.” She attempted a smile. “Unless it was rats.”

  Robert tried to fathom the implications of what she was saying. He stared at her in her towel and hat, long shins mottled with light bruises.

  “He must know you. He has your picture. Why does he not just ring the door—”

  She interrupted him. “You saw him. Up close. What does he look like?”

  He thought, recalled the face, lean cheeks bleached by moonlight. “Thin. Scared. I only saw him for a second.”

  “Scared?”

  “Or maybe crazy.” He told her of their fight. “We wrestled. Like Jacob and the angel.”

  Her spite was like a dog guarding against her own weakness. “An angel?” she said. “You’re a poet. Full of shit.”

  It was his cue to leave, but he didn’t; stayed where he was instead, spread out on the floor beside her bed. Above him he heard her shift, lie down flat upon one side. After some minutes, as though by chance, one hand began to dangle past the mattress’s edge: slim, calloused fingers, the nails chewed down to stubs.

  “Piss off,” she mumbled, and he reached to take hold of her hand. He held it palm to palm at first, then interlaced the fingers, his shoulder growing stiff from being locked in an awkward angle.

  “Turn off the light,” she said, and he did; stood up, closed the door, and flicked the switch, then retraced his steps to that patch of floor beneath her bed and strummed his fingers gently through the bones, the tendons, of her drooping hand.

  7.

  While Robert lay, tracing metacarpal bones beneath the white of Eva’s skin, too shy even to press them to his lips, elsewhere in the city a man and a woman, long married and as such familiar with each other’s hands and mouths (and much else besides), sat up in bed discussing a letter, hand-delivered that afternoon, which pertained to their youngest son. Encrypted as it was in a densely bureaucratic German, and as such illegible to both husband and wife, the letter’s only assailable point came in the form of an underlined heading that read Ladung, a word that, depending on context, might be translated as “ammunition,” “load,” or “summons,” and seemed to absorb the more sinister aspects of each meaning with each successive reading.

  A crow watched their argument (for an argument it quickly became, split along lines of gender, in which the woman’s r
ole is to protect her child, and the man’s to toughen him up) with considerable interest, then jerked, pecked at its feathers, converting parasites to food. A moment later it dropped from the windowsill, fell groundward then skyward, with an ease that might have startled Newton. High up it fell in with some brethren. They flew into the failing moon.

  8.

  And what about these crows? A branch of the family Corvidae, there are, according to the usual authorities, some forty species of crow. With the exception of New Zealand, Antarctica, and some oceanic islands, they inhabit every known land mass and are, as a genus, some twelve million years old. Crows have long been regarded as the most intelligent of birds, capable of counting to at least four, associating abstract symbols with real-life objects or actions, and adept at mimicking the voices of other birds and mammals, including those of humans, cats, and dogs. The social and behavioural patterns of each species are adapted to its habitat. In the wide plains in North America the common crow can form flocks of up to two hundred thousand individuals and travel, for food, up to fifty miles a day. The European carrion crow prefers smaller associations, though it too will band together, often at dusk, to form large clouds of feather and caw. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the reduced agricultural output drew many thousands of crows to the city, the site of refuse, and of high-density death.

  To believe, then, that of all these birds we should find the very one we last saw swooping from a windowsill in grubby Hernals alight two miles to the west (as the crow flies), in a narrow courtyard once dominated by a chestnut tree and lying open to view to the back windows of Anna Beer’s apartment, is to believe in coincidence as the prime mover of all story. And yet there is something familiar about this bird, the jerky swivel of its head, the solemn strides it takes across the roof’s wet tiling. There it stalks; stops, convulses, retches; performs, with the disturbing lack of self-consciousness peculiar to animals and children—and with the complete stoicism in the face of habitual humiliation, found, amongst humankind, only in the very old—a ritual known to naturalists as “pelleting,” in which the indigestible portions of the recent (gustatory) past are dredged up and spat out, pressed into a tight wad of matter from which a patient man may pick a wealth of components, including teeth, fur, feathers, bones, and the exoskeletons of insects. Why it is that birds must purge in this peculiar way, and why men—not all men, of course, and some women too, though in small proportion—feel compelled to tackle this question, armed with tweezers and a scientific bent, does not concern us here. The bird, in any case, spat a pellet; and Anna, some thirty feet up, oblivious, slept, her lips pursed around the memory of a kiss more robbed than stolen.

  Part Three

  Most made it back. Including those taken at Stalingrad, some three million Wehrmacht soldiers were incarcerated in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps. A little under two million returned. There were camps in which the ration supply soon normalized. In Camp 50, in Frolovo, north of Stalingrad, a Latvian major by the name of Pichelgast encouraged prisoners to read the classic works of German literature. He founded a chess club, an orchestra, and a dramatic troupe. In Camp 286, in Tallinn, Estonia, the prisoners rebuilt the city theatre and concert hall and were invited to its inaugural concert. In Camp 27, in Krasnogorsk, prisoners had vegetable patches and held sporting competitions. In a small sub-unit of this camp the Soviet Military Secret Service trained an elite of German Communists who would later run the GDR.

  The prisoners were paid for their work, assuming they fulfilled the daily norm. It was a matter of luck: being paired with strong and knowledgeable workers, nobody weak or sick. For those less fortunate in their work companions there were other modes of self-advancement. The skilled could trade their expertise: in building scales, or knives, or lighters; speaking Russian; advising on escapes. Then there were those who grew friendly with the camp authorities. No jail can operate without informants. It is said that the pen-pushers—the teachers and clerks, engineers and journalists, those unused to physical privations—took to spying more readily than their less educated comrades. Conversion, too, was popular: to Marxism, the faith of the victors. Like all converts, some were in earnest, while others were lured by the opportunity for social advancement. Privileged inmates were given passes to leave the camps. Some had friends amongst the civilian population of the neighbouring village or town. A few had lovers. A number were shot when trying to escape.

  Of those who returned, some brought friends back from the camps, dear as brothers. Some brought God, the Revolution, or a wooden leg. Some brought enemies: born of politics, of inequality and loaded dice, of information bought and sold between prisoners and guards.

  One

  1.

  The man with the torn pocket stood hunched forward in the cellar’s dark. He was wearing a pair of work gloves and had tied the scarf over his mouth to shield himself from the smells of putrefaction. First he cleared the newspapers away from the body. Some of them were moist, stuck to the man’s face and hands, leaving smudges on his livid skin. He fished for a sack, reached in with one arm, and retrieved a fistful of a fine crystalline powder, more pink than white. Like a man who salts his garden path against the winter ice, the man threw fistfuls of the powder over the corpse. A sharp antiseptic smell spread through the cellar room and cut through the fumes of decay. The man waited for the dust to settle, turning away and closing his eyes lest they become irritated. Only then did he bend down and, breathing still through the fabric of his lambswool scarf, begin to arrange the man’s shirt collar and retie his necktie, smooth out his waistcoat over the maggot-studded mess that was his shirt. Throughout these various actions his lips were moving as though he were rehearsing benedictions for the dead. In his head the words were quite audible.

  “I saw her again, brother. Once at the window, and then, when she went out, I followed, keeping well behind. How changed she looks! Three times she turned, or maybe it was three times three. But I hid and stayed out of sight.”

  He paused, blew his nose through a gap in the coils of scarf.

  “I went to see him too. Herr Seidel. From curiosity, I suppose, idle, idle. I snuck into his room and held my hat in hand, but in its crown I formed a fist. I swear his eyes moved when he saw me.

  “The young man is the son. Robert, they call him. I met him today, nearly ran him over in the street. He saw me and we fought.”

  The man grinned, bent forward, tapped the corpse upon its open eye. The sound was surprising, a bird pecking on glass, having mistaken its reflection.

  “A handsome lad,” he said. “Has a broken eye like you.

  “We wrestled,” he went on, “amongst cabbage leaves. Our teacher used to tell it, how the angel tried to get away. Strong as an ox he was, the teacher said. The angel hit him on the thigh and it popped out of its socket, going plop.” (He shook off a glove, slipped a dirty thumb between his lips, hooked it into the soft part of his cheek, then flicked the thumb away from him, produced a sound as of a stone that has been hurled into a village well, the wet, low drumbeat of its impact.)

  “I hit him on the chest, brother, a nice flat stone, and he lay there gaping, gasping, a fish pulled fast from out the river. Jakob, I should have said to him, Israel, the angel gave him a new name just for holding on with all his strength.

  “Suppose then, brother, I’m an angel, and the angel, really, he was God, wrestling madly in the mud.”

  The man grinned a wild grin through his slipping scarf, looked about himself, made sure there was no witness to his blasphemy.

  “Suppose then, brother, I am God, and everything obeys if only I go say it. Go on, then, get up, you lazy swine! Go on, Lazarus, get up, get up, let’s warm some soup and play a hand of cards.”

  And he laughed and cackled to himself, and in his head it sounded loud and merry.

  2.

  A noise cut short his laughter. It came from outside the room, the scrape of metal across stone. The man recognized the sound. Someone was trying to force o
pen the bent metal door at the top of the stairs that led into the cellar. Quickly, picking his way through the littered floor, he crossed the room and peeked out into the corridor.

  Daylight filtered down from up above, was joined by the cone of a flashlight that roamed the bottom step. The man watched it with great concentration, fear spreading through his hollow eyes. He had been nervous ever since his encounter with the boys and at once looked for a hiding place. Across from him, on the other side of the corridor that formed a T with the short stairwell, the door stood open on a warren of wooden storage booths, each roughly built from planks of wood, and half of them still packed with wartime junk. If he could but make his way across, it would be an easy thing to disappear; it’d take a dozen men with dogs—and patience—to sift each cubicle for stowaways. But to run across meant to expose himself to the beam of the flashlight and the eyes of its owner. He had no idea who it was that was standing there, watching, breathing, shuffling at the top. Thus transfixed by indecision to a spot halfway between the room at his back and the stairwell ahead—shoulders slumped, chin raised, a quiet heave to his quick breathing—the man with the torn pocket stood bargaining with God. He pledged prayers, fasting, “to return on home”; repented in earnest that he had laid claim to God’s immortal name; ran his hands beseechingly through the stubble of his close-cropped head.