The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  Paul Hermann Seidel died in the early hours of the morning, the boy still sitting by his side, sleeping, his chin rolled tight into his body.

  Four

  1.

  It was Sophie who located Karel in the end, drunk in one of the bars near the Gürtel, having walked for hours from one establishment to another and endured the stares of their male clientele. She brought him back as a mother might return a child in disgrace, pulling him by the elbow, her mobile face showing all the marks of vexation, but careful all the same to guide him across potholes and curbs without his falling.

  They took a cab to the morgue. Sophie insisted on coming along and sat in the front while Anna shared the back seat with the hulking shape of Karel, who slumped against the window, red-faced and reeking of spirits. It was unclear to Anna whether he had understood the purpose of their journey or the nature of their destination. It would have taken only a moment to ask him whether her husband had had a glass eye, but she found in herself a strange reluctance to be prematurely robbed of all illusion. Instead she sat and observed the drunk with a hostility she herself could not explain.

  Frisch met them outside the building as he had promised he would. Anna had called ahead and got hold of him at the police station. The large eyes swimming in his glasses seemed to reflect some of her own suppressed excitement. For all that, his voice was as monotonous as ever as he shook hands with both Sophie and Karel then guided them past the porter into the morgue. It was a quarter past four and many of the staff had already gone home. They were met outside the examination room by the same tanned doctor in his creased lab coat. He was smoking a cigarette, dropping ashes onto his trousers and the floor.

  Inside the examination room the smells of the morning seemed to have intensified. They filed in, Frisch in the lead, then huddled by the door, far from the gurney that held the dead man. When the pathologist crossed the room in order to remove the sheet, she looked away and fastened her eyes on Karel’s face instead. The big man approached the corpse with a slow, unsteady stride. Disgust, unease, spoke from his features, were quickly chased by incredulity. He bent low, threw a questioning glance first at her then at Frisch, confused, suspicious, as though they were having him on somehow; returned his attention to the body, peeled a knotty finger from one massive fist and slowly lowered it to the corpse’s face. Even the pathologist winced when he pressed down on the glass eye. It gave, and produced a wet little squeak. Again Karel turned his face towards them, the cheeks flushed from either drink or anger. He released the eye; stood up; walked quickly over to the door.

  “It’s not him.”

  She did not believe him. “How do you know?”

  “He had his appendix out. In camp. This one—” He tapped his own pubic bone through his trousers. “Stitches across the belly. But no scar!”

  “And the eye?”

  He bent down to her, anger, vodka, in his breath. “The eye is his all right. Bastards stuck it in another face.”

  When they left the morgue some ten minutes later, not Anna, nor Frisch, nor Karel, nor yet Sophie noticed the pair of men standing in a nearby doorway, smoking, watching them go their separate ways.

  2.

  Trudi heard her father come in quietly that evening. She heard him sneak into the bathroom and wash his hands, and knew by the length of time he took over the task that he had handled a dead person that day. It was not clear to her whether his hands were actually covered in blood or whether it was the smell that he was scrubbing off so arduously; did not know for sure how dead people smelled, though she had once seen a hedgehog broken in a gutter, had sniffed at it and watched the flies alight from its small body. When her father finally came out of the bathroom, he found her in the corridor, nose curled, breathing in his scent.

  “You shouldn’t be barefoot,” he said.

  “I’m not cold.”

  “All the same. Your slippers are right here.”

  He took her by the hand and led her to the kitchen. They had dinner together, rye bread and Speck, some slices of tomato, a mug of tea for the girl and a beer for the detective.

  “Who died?” she asked, picking her teeth with one finger for residue of sticky bread.

  He did not bother to deny it. “You see,” he said, surly with disappointment, “I really don’t know.”

  She laid a hand on his arm as she had seen her mother do in moments of crisis or grief, and together, bound by the gesture, they finished the food one-handed, then sat in silence until it was time to go to bed.

  3.

  Once darkness had settled on the city, two men broke into the city morgue in ——gasse.

  There was a night attendant who manned the little booth near the entrance, but he had stepped out for a moment to answer the call of nature, and the pair used his absence to break into the premises. There was no finesse to their entry. They simply broke down the door. It took them longer than they expected to orient themselves within the building and locate the corpse with the glass eye. They found it at last in a room reserved for refrigeration; wrapped it in the oilcloth they had brought for the purpose. As luck would have it, the night attendant returned to his post just as they were crossing back through the gateway. He was still adjusting his braces. A scuffle ensued during which the attendant was thrown to the ground and repeatedly kicked. When questioned the next morning, he asserted that the men had been speaking some foreign tongue that might have been Russian, or Yiddish, or perhaps even French. A report was drawn up and filed with all four of the occupational authorities. They each denied knowledge and promised to investigate. The identity of the corpse, meanwhile, remained unresolved.

  4.

  The same night the corpse was stolen, Karel Neumann also disappeared. He had, Sophie Coburn later told Anna, not returned home with her after their visit to the morgue, but had gone out instead to “wash the stink of death out of his mouth.” When he had not turned up by the evening of the next day, Sophie made the rounds of the public houses he frequented and soon caught his trace in a bar called Erdmann’s, whose painted female clientele implied that its owner had diversified his business interests. The barman remembered Karel, a habitual customer. He had arrived after midnight, drunk steadily for an hour or two, then been joined at the table by two men in long dark overcoats. They had talked, neither aggressively nor in a particularly friendly manner, and had left together, the big man supported by a stranger on either side. The barman had not been close enough to overhear their discussion, though he indicated that they had spoken with an accent, or “at any rate did not belong.” Sophie thanked him and interviewed some of the Erdmann’s habitués, none of whom was able to add anything of substance. She spent another day waiting for Karel, then notified Frisch of his disappearance, though she did not file an official report. There seemed to be little point.

  It was understood that Karel Neumann was once again in Russian custody.

  Book Two

  Part One

  There was a story that made the rounds amongst the inmates of the Russian camps. It was about a man, a soldier, returning home from the Great War. He must have been young, of course, but they imagined him old, the way they felt themselves. Some liked to give a date to his return. December 1918: the day before Christmas. The sixth of January, 1919: the feast of the Epiphany. Wintertime, in any case; snow on the ground. He is late coming home; an injury, in most versions of the story, has detained him since the armistice. His arm is in a sling. He is a farmer, a joiner, a postal clerk. In no version of the story is he rich.

  Here is how it goes: The man arrives at the local train station late one evening, then walks the five miles to his village. He walks slowly, head bowed, hobbling. It’s gone midnight when he arrives; not a light burning in his house. He is about to rouse his wife by knocking, then remembers; bends down, retrieves the key from under a loose brick. The front hallway opens straight into the kitchen; floorboards creaking with his every step. There is no fire in the oven, no coals to make one; a painted cupboard
stacked with dishes; a kitchen table and some chairs. The man is about to go on, find his wife and his bed, but something stops him. A man’s coat is thrown over the back of a chair. He walks over, runs a hand over the wool. The coat isn’t his. His eyes find his wife’s slippers, not two feet from the coat. Again and again he looks at the slippers, then at the coat; strokes it, all the while listening into the quiet of the house.

  It does not come to him at once, the sound, but once he is conscious of it, there can be no doubt of its origin. Two people breathing, one louder than the other, a throaty exhalation that isn’t yet a snore. He sits down on the chair, careful not to disturb the coat over its back; sits in the draft between window and door, and listens to this breathing that isn’t yet a snore. By morning he is frozen solid. It’s the man who finds him, the wife’s brother, who has come to wait with her for her husband’s return.

  The first of the German POWs were released from American incarceration as early as May 1945. The last returned from Russia in 1955. Those first ones, they were soldiers, not inmates, the camp no more than an episode at the close of the war. Back home they found their cities in ruins, their wives half starved, their children running the black markets; the streets alive with occupying soldiers; refugees; DPs; KZ survivors; profiteers; journalists and film crews; the fear of a winter without coal.

  Those who came last, in ’55, found their cities rebuilt, the Economic Miracle in full swing, Marshall monies paying dividends; found their wives aged, their places in their beds usurped, their daughters copying fashions from American magazines. These men were different; some had been soldiers for one year and prisoners for thirteen. They returned as anachronisms, shaped by the struggle of the camps; spoke Russian, read Marx—and found a democratic world devoted to consumption.

  Both groups might have told the story, during the hours of transport, going home. Not one of them froze in the draft “between window and door.” But then again: who knows?

  One

  1.

  It was the twenty-second of October. A cold spell had taken hold of the city and seemed to suggest an early winter. In Karlchen and Franzl’s room in ——gasse, Karlchen’s mother was helping him dress. The boy kept shivering under her hands as she smoothed out his dress shirt and coat and bent down to give his shabby shoes another polish. He seemed unable to stop fidgeting, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and had to be reminded to hold still. His face had taken on an unhealthy reddish sheen; only the centre of his cheeks refused to fill with blood and stood out in pale blotches. She pinched them once or twice, hard enough to draw a wince, but it was useless. Perhaps he had simply caught a cold.

  It had not been easy to procure formal clothing for the boy. There had been several discussions on the subject between herself and her husband. There was, of course, no money for a new suit, nor indeed for a used one that was in decent nick. For a while they had considered sacrificing her husband’s good coat and having it altered, but in the end she had been able to convince a cousin from St. Pölten to send them their elder son’s Communion suit, provided they paid for the postage and promised not to shorten either sleeves or legs. As a consequence both jacket and breeches looked large on the boy. The trousers had to be belted nearer the chest than the waist, and the child’s hands kept disappearing in the sleeves.

  Karlchen, for his part, endured his mother’s touches and adjustments without complaint and watched his brother watch him from across the room with an expression that was half jealous, half angry, and not without a note of sympathetic fear. During breakfast Karlchen had to wrap a handkerchief around his chest and shoulders and place another in his lap so that there was no danger of staining the suit—and this despite the fact that they were eating nothing apart from bread with a little butter and some slices of boiled egg.

  There was, to the boy, something odd in the way his parents treated him that morning, an air of reverence that cut across all pretence of treating him normally, even gruffly, as his mother poured out a quarter mug of milk for him and his father scolded him for chewing his bread so messily and leaving crumbs on the table. And in this reverence there sounded something different yet, a kind of distaste, as though he had contracted a disease to which they now felt obliged to tend. For the first time in his life Karlchen had the feeling of standing apart from his family. He might have cried but was gripped by an unconscious fear that he would not be comforted.

  “Time to get going,” his father said at last, and hurried into his coat. They walked hand in hand, the father leading, the boy trailing, taking two steps for his father’s one, watching dust attach itself to the remnants of polish on his shoes. When the courthouse came into sight, grey and forbidding, the father momentarily paused in his stride, causing his son to collide with his thigh.

  “I didn’t,” the boy said quietly, squirming at the end of the parental wrist. “I swear. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  His father reached down, straightened his collar, and did not respond.

  2.

  They entered the building. A porter listened to his father’s request, nodded somehow gravely, and called over an usher. They were led down a series of long, barren corridors, surprisingly shabby in appearance; not narrow, but vaulted so high as to appear narrow, their footsteps ringing in the frigid air. A row of dirty windows was set high above their heads and admitted no glimpse of the outside world, the shadow of bars falling on the endless stretch of tiling. It seemed they had walked a long time before they arrived at their destination, a narrow, airless waiting room furnished solely with a wooden bench on which they presently sat down. A clock hung on the wall across, very large, like a station clock. The usher cautioned Karlchen’s father to wait until he returned for the boy, then disappeared through a set of double doors that belched a roar of noise as he hastily squeezed through the gap. A silence fell that, far from being dispelled by the low murmur which soaked through the doors, found in it an accomplice, as it did in the sudden, audible movements of the clock. They were alone.

  They waited the better part of an hour. From the first the boy was drawn to the doors. He slid down the bench in order to sit as close to them as possible, his father sliding down alongside, wordless, hostile, reaching across to tighten Karlchen’s tie. After some minutes the boy began to distinguish variations in the whisper of the doors. There was, for one, the hubbub of voices, subdued and yet excited, and pierced at times by a laugh, a cough, the sudden bark of censure. From time to time a hush would fall, not a silence exactly, but a noise in its own right, the low, shivering hum of restrained anticipation. Steps fell into the silence, long, careful strides, and once a man shouted, “I object!” The more the boy listed to the noise, the more he yearned to pass beyond those doors—and feared it too, with the same dumb, wrenching fear he knew only from dreams. His collar chafed and his hands were sweaty, and he flinched when his father turned to run broad-pronged fingers through his hair (they had forgotten to bring a comb).

  “Here,” his father said, dug a paper bag from the pocket of his starch-stiff suit. He picked a sweet and passed it swiftly, almost with a kind of anger, then watched as Karlchen pushed it past his lips. It sat on his tongue like a stone, then suddenly grew soft and attached itself to one of his molars; sugared woodruff colouring his spit. Karlchen dug for it with one finger, pried loose the sweet, his father’s eyes still on him, watching him as he folded his spit-slick finger back into his palm and hid it quickly in the pocket of his too-large coat.

  The minute hand on the clock face moved then quivered, time marching on in reluctant, fettered steps.

  At long last the doors opened, spilling voices, laughter, and the usher, who gestured without words then turned at once and slipped back into the room.

  Karlchen’s father did not stir. The boy walked in alone, into the roar of noise beyond the heavy double doors.

  3.

  To his surprise Karlchen entered the great hall of Vienna’s criminal court not from the front—that is to say, f
rom the side where members of the public sat in densely packed rows—but from the back, behind the rostrum of judges. For a moment he froze, feeling as though he had by accident taken the wrong door at the cinema and found himself trapped in front of the luminescence of its giant screen. He did not stop in the doorway for more than a second, however; then ducked his head and ran after the usher. In six, seven steps he had arrived at the chair pointed out to him. He thus gained only a fleeting impression of the auditorium. What he saw, above all, was a sea of ladies’ hats behind which cowered a crowd of people. He did not, in this first glance, see any face that he recognized.

  He was asked to sit. He could not have said whether it was the usher who asked him or one of the judges, or someone else altogether; in the noise of the hall the words came to him diffusely, like the hum of traffic, or a thought formed in his own head.

  Karlchen sat. To his confusion he found that the chair did not face the auditorium as he had expected (he had for a week now imagined how it would be, lying awake at night to his brother’s even breathing), but the row of judges in black, who sat somehow elevated behind their giant desk and were framed by a vast expanse of ornate wall and ceiling. His own chair, too, struck Karlchen as unnecessarily big and uncomfortable, and as he slid around in it, one arm tangling in the too-high armrest, his skin came alive with the sensation of everyone’s watching.