The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  This moment had now arrived. If the presiding judge refused to call the next witness, then the prosecution’s case was as good as complete. If, on the other hand, the witness was heard, the prosecution’s case was not only not complete, but the whole trial would very quickly transform into a different trial altogether, for it was understood that the witnesses the prosecution wished to call were men and women the accused had met, and indeed interrogated, during his time as an SS officer in the Secret State Police and were, for want of a better word, his “victims,” that is to say a string of Jews, Gypsies, Socialists, and anti-socials whom he had maltreated as an officer of the then law. The significance of the moment was felt all the more strongly because, to everyone’s surprise, no charges had been filed against Wolfgang for his conduct during the war years, neither by the criminal prosecutor nor by the representative of the People’s Courts that had been set up for precisely this purpose. There was to be no other trial.

  Consequently a hush went through the courtroom when the prosecutor announced that he wished to call the next witness. All eyes turned to the presiding judge. Dr. Ratenkolb once again objected to the proposal in the strictest terms, but his comments were brief and pro forma; it was not, at this point, a question of arguing a point. The judge sat, looked over the courtroom, and hesitated. He looked like a man who had made up his mind but now suddenly found himself wavering. He opened his mouth, closed it again; looked over at the representatives of the press, domestic and foreign, who had been given a row to themselves, then at the audience as a whole; at the florid, patrician face of the prosecutor, who precisely at this moment very softly injected into the silence that most Jewish of statements: “Be a mensch.” A murmur went through the room, half of outrage (for was it not bad taste for the prosecutor to remind one and all, at precisely this time, of his own Jewishness, and of the, as it were, “Jewish dimension” that hung—albeit obliquely—over the whole trial and could be summed up with those twin letters, SS), half of expectation, as those amongst the audience who had themselves run afoul of truncheons, fists, and bullets placed all their hopes on this “Be a mensch.”

  For another ten or twenty seconds the judge held his peace, then swallowed, looked down at his papers, and grumpily instructed the prosecutor to “get on with it.” Whether he “was quietly resentful of this well-fed Jew who was seeking to parade Austria’s shame so shamelessly,” as Sophie Coburn later put it in an article she sold to the Toronto Globe and Mail, and only did it because he felt that “the eyes of the world were upon him,” Anna had no means of judging. It must be nice, she felt, to find oneself with such unmediated access to another human being’s soul. On the whole she was inclined to think it a sort of fraud.

  All at once a great feeling of haste seemed to take hold of the court. It was clear from the judge’s behaviour that he wanted this phase of the trial to be over and done with as quickly as possible. He called no further recess, made only the most cursory pretence of examining the witnesses himself, and hurried the prosecution along wherever possible.

  What could have been a strung-out process lasting a day or more thus became a highly condensed spectacle that ran into the early hours of the evening. Witness after witness was called, then rushed through a description of his or her arrest, the conditions at the Gestapo prison, the beatings and humiliations. A number added accounts of violence they had experienced on the streets or in their own apartments. Those amongst the audience who had expected tales of bestial torture—fuelled by the rich rumours that had long attached themselves to that fearful acronym, Gestapo, and its leather-coated goons—were disappointed. The men and women who testified had been slapped, kicked, and beaten; they had been called “pigs” and “sluts” and “bastards” and left to freeze in barren cells. Wolfgang, it must be added, seemed to have been far from the worst of their jailers. Other figures surfaced in the witness statements and were named with peculiar emphasis (“Rosenheim”; “Langfuhr”; “that monster, Hein”). Nonetheless the portrait drawn of the defendant was far from flattering: he emerged as a young man of temper, physically overpowering, and habituated to acts of considerable cruelty.

  The demeanour of the witnesses, incidentally, was by no means uniform. Some were tearful, some proud. Some stared at the defendant in solemn hatred, while others smiled at him with timid nervousness even as they described how he’d taken them “by the ear” and repeatedly slammed their heads into the tabletop “as though bouncing a ball.” Most witnesses seemed to experience discomfort, even shame, at making public the abuse they had endured or witnessed, though one or two seemed to enjoy their sudden stardom. A cleaning lady for the Gestapo headquarters, for instance, who testified to the cries of pain emitting from the cells and especially from the basement of the facility, sat on the witness chair in an elaborate coiffure and recounted her impressions with such zest that even the prosecutor judged it best to dismiss her as quickly as possible lest her air of self-satisfaction influence the jurors against her.

  The defendant, it should be added, listened with remarkable equanimity to the string of witnesses who had queued up to testify to his brutality. Only once did he lose his outward calm, when the fifth or sixth such witness (the order had been carefully arranged by the prosecutor, who was aware of the repetitive nature of the statements and feared nothing so much as boring the court) recounted his interrogation. It had taken place on February 2, 1942, “a year to the day prior to the capitulation at Stalingrad,” as the man explained with odd insistence. His name was Klein; a fine-boned figure with a full head of white hair and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. Klein was dressed very primly, but not only had his jacket been patched in a number of places, but his glasses too showed a fine hairline crack over his small, lively, somewhat watery eyes. He was, in short, the model of a decent man who had fallen on hard times. It did not hurt that, as the prosecutor pointed out in passing, he was the same age as the defendant’s supposed victim. In a brisk, quiet voice Klein recounted his arrest, his imprisonment in a holding cell, “as small as a coffin,” and the humiliation of a strip search.

  “I was interrogated the next morning at half past eight,” he finished, then looked to the prosecutor for permission to carry on.

  “Can you tell the court who was present at the interrogation?”

  “Kriminalassistent Seidel. The accused.” He turned and pointed at Wolfgang. “And an older officer by the name of Pfalhuhn.”

  “They introduced themselves by name?”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” the witness asked quietly. “They were our masters.”

  “What was the point of the interrogation?”

  “They wanted me to sign a confession. I had been denounced for ‘sabotage of the war effort.’ I had made some comments indicating that we would lose the war.”

  “This was when? Your comments, I mean.”

  “November 1941. They showed me the statement. The name of my accuser was blacked out.”

  “November 1941. That was perceptive of you. Did you sign the confession?”

  “I refused.”

  “Even though the accusation was accurate?”

  “I had predicted we would lose the war. I did not sabotage the war effort.”

  “Indeed. What happened then? Were you bullied?”

  The witness here gave a little shrug, indicating the silliness of the question. “They called me a traitor. I was repeatedly slapped.”

  “By the accused?”

  “No, by Pfalhuhn. He had large puffy hands and some very sharp rings.”

  “You were insulted and beaten. Was that all?”

  “No. When I continued in my refusal, the two men exchanged some whispers. The older officer then left the room. As soon as he was gone, Kriminalassistent Seidel asked me to get up from the chair and walk over to the window.”

  “He dragged you over?”

  “Not at all. He stood, went ahead, opened it, and then asked me to join him there.”

  “What did you do?”

>   Again that minuscule shrug. “I had no choice. I walked over to him.”

  “Frightened, no doubt.”

  “I did not know what he was up to. I imagined he wanted to show me something. I was afraid they had arrested my wife and imagined her standing in the courtyard.”

  “And was she?”

  “No. There was no courtyard. Just an air shaft. You could barely see the sky above.”

  “What happened then?”

  “The accused bid me lean out. He said, ‘Go on, take a look, right to the bottom.’”

  “You did, naturally.”

  “I hesitated. Next I knew, he had grabbed me by my jacket and hurled me onto the windowsill. It knocked the wind out of me. My legs were scrambling, hitting the radiator underneath the window. I cut open both knees.”

  “And the accused?”

  “He held me by the collar of my jacket.” Klein took a hold of it himself, sat on the witness chair, dragging his jacket halfway over his ears. “I could feel the buttons straining at my chest. Thirty feet to the bottom of the air shaft. There was a frozen puddle there, and rubbish. He kept yelling at me, right in my ear. ‘Filth,’ he said, again and again, just the one word, and I still could not breathe.”

  “And then?”

  “He hauled me back in. Walked me back over to the chair. He had thrown his arm over my shoulder and watched me as I signed, ruffling my hair. Of all the things he did—” He paused, breathless, made as if to ruffle his own hair, then smoothed it instead, suddenly embarrassed. “That false camaraderie,” he went on, tears gathering behind his cracked glasses. “I dream of it sometimes, and I—” He choked and broke off.

  At this point, even before Klein had a chance to finish his statement, Wolfgang leapt out of his chair, almost falling over the little desk in front of him, and took two steps towards the witness. His face was bloodless, and his right hand was crushing the deck of cards he’d been holding. It was unclear whether he was about to hit the man or apologize. The witness, at any rate, had risen from his own chair and stood, chin raised, as though inviting a blow. But before either of them could so much as utter a word, Ratenkolb let out a sharp, whip-like hiss that was immediately followed by the much milder order to “Please sit down, Herr Seidel. It is customary to let your counsel handle the cross-examination.” The words caused some ripples in the audience, something akin to laughter. It stopped Wolfgang in his tracks.

  Even then it was not apparent what he would do: for three, four heartbeats Wolfgang remained where he was, halfway between his own chair and the witness’s. There were those who swore afterwards they saw him shake with tension. Then he turned abruptly and returned to his place. During the short moment when he walked back to his chair, there stole across his face a peculiar and somewhat haughty smile that, it must be said, made a rather poor impression, most especially on the well-to-do ladies who had otherwise rooted for this young “hussar.”

  “One last question, Herr Klein,” the prosecutor shouted into the growing din of the courtroom. “When you read that Herr Seidel’s father had fallen out of his window, did you have any doubt that he had been thrown out by his son?”

  The witness’s answer was lost in Ratenkolb’s yell of “Objection.” It was, in truth, not needed.

  Wolfgang’s case was as good as lost.

  3.

  Robert rushed out of the courtroom no sooner had the last witness of the day been dismissed, pushing past the people sitting next to him, making liberal use of his elbows. He was one of the first to leave the great hall, whose marbled grandiosity extended no further than an arched doorway. It spilled him into a shabby little corridor marked by dirt and broken tiles.

  Poldi was not waiting outside the door as they had agreed but some ten steps to his left, up a short flight of stairs and pressed into the shadows of the wall. She was wearing a new dress, which is to say one of his mother’s dresses, which Robert had sneaked out of her wardrobe and Poldi had altered, clumsily it must be said, and which now clung unbecomingly to her abdomen and chest. Her eyes were on the floor, as though she were counting tiles. Robert ran up to her and reached for her arm.

  “There you are! For a moment I thought you had left. The session overran. But come, we better hurry. I don’t know if they’ll wait for us.”

  Poldi did not come along at once; kept staring at the floor, a stubborn note to her voice. “They’ll wait. They haven’t got a choice, have they? I mean, he en’t back yet either. And besides, you’re chummy with the guard.”

  “It’s the judge’s assistant I’m worried about. He has to be present—otherwise they won’t let us see him. He’s already making an exception, you know. It’s long past visiting hours.”

  “Well, go on, then. Only don’t run. I’m in a certain condition, I am.”

  They set off. Robert seemed unable to impress on her their need for haste, had to pull her along by the crook of her arm like a reluctant child. They didn’t have far to go: the remand prison was in the same building that housed the criminal court. They sped down corridors the length of a city block. As they approached the prison entrance Poldi came to a sudden halt and dislodged herself from Robert’s grip.

  “I en’t ready,” she complained, touching her temples in an oddly affected gesture, Bette Davis coming down with le petit mal. “I have to look my best. Otherwise, what good is it to visit, eh, pet?”

  She smiled at her hand mirror, licked a smear of lipstick off her teeth.

  It was Poldi’s first visit to the prison. Ever since Wolfgang’s arrest she had refused all contact, claiming at first she was too sick to leave the house (she did in fact suffer from almost constant nausea and could be heard throwing up not only in the mornings but practically any time of the day and night), then insisting she’d make “a bad impression on them guards” and would “conspire ’em against him” (she proved resilient to Robert’s argument that the guards had nothing whatsoever to do with the outcome of the trial). Wolfgang, for his part, had seemed undecided whether or not he wanted to see his wife. At times he had asked about her, badgering Robert for all the details of her pregnancy and asking questions of such physical intimacy that they flustered his stepbrother. Then entire days would pass when he displayed no interest in his wife and dismissed any suggestion of a future visit, often in terms crudely insulting to Poldi.

  Robert had come to see his stepbrother three or four times a week since their first meeting three months ago and, in the course of time, had grown familiar with his bewildering range of moods. Quite often, during the first few minutes of these visits, Wolfgang appeared to Robert a changed man, which is to say thoughtful, chastened, engaged in the scrupulous examination of his past. But inevitably a sneering, mocking mood would take possession of him before the visit was over, and more often than not the interview ended on a caustic, even sour note.

  Part of the frustration of these exchanges derived from their setting: visiting rules demanded that they not discuss the trial, nor Wolfgang’s supposed crime. Often they found themselves reduced to the rehearsal of childhood anecdotes. It was, Robert had explained to Eva, not a situation “conducive to the baring of souls.” She had laughed and warned him he should beware his didn’t curdle on exposure. Robert, undaunted, had redoubled his efforts to talk Poldi into making a visit. Three days ago she had finally agreed and at once launched into frantic preparations. It was only now that she’d suddenly grown tardy.

  As it turned out, there was no need for any hurry. The young man who represented the judge during these meetings had himself attended the trial and had arrived, Robert was told, “not a minute ago,” as had the prisoner, who was even now being conducted into the visiting room. They signed the guard’s ledger and listened to his recital of the rules.

  “So you finally got her to come, Robert,” the man added familiarly, tracing with his eyes the clumsy, looping letters with which Poldi had spelled out her name. He started relating some prison gossip, then thought better of it when he noticed Poldi’s mo
od. “Nervous, are we? Come in, then, it’s right over here.”

  Indeed it was hardly more than ten steps. As though by silent agreement they stopped one more time outside the door.

  “You go on ahead, Frau Seidel,” the guard encouraged her gently.

  Poldi faced her little mirror before opening the door.

  4.

  Wolfgang was smoking. He sat slouching on a chair, both elbows on the table, the cigarette wedged between fingers that were threaded through his hair. When he heard the door, he looked up with no special show of interest. His eyes found Poldi, arrested her step; examined her from head to toe with great deliberation and a certain virile cruelty. She in turn submitted to his gaze, a little shamelessly, it felt to Robert, pushing her chest forward (she had filled out in the course of the pregnancy) and allowing herself to be appraised.

  “What’s that, then?” Wolfgang said, his eyes on the abundant fabric of her sleeves. “A curtain?”

  She coloured but did not reply.