The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  “How would I know?” Eva replied, irritated, and fingered her own hat as though it had been criticized by comparison.

  “Ah, don’t grow angry, Lieschen. Sit, sit.” He pointed to the foot of his dirty bed. “Sit and talk. You brought me food? You’re an angel, you are.”

  He unpacked the bundle she had brought and immediately set to demolishing its contents.

  They had met two weeks previously. She had been out making purchases. Specifically, she had been looking for silk stockings, motivated by an incoherent but vivid desire to show off her legs “when the time came” (she was very careful never once to shape the word “engagement,” let alone “wedding,” even to herself). The search had brought her to a rubblestrewn courtyard in the fifth district. A number of people, not all of them shabbily dressed, stood nonchalantly next to bundles of goods, not all of them illegal; some boys on the lookout near the gate. Neumann was there, haggling with a man who was leaning on his bicycle with a rucksack worth of produce. She recognized him at once—who else had his frame? As she followed him from vendor to vendor (he seemed to be trying to trade his coat, to no great success), her hand fingered the money she had received from him. It had remained, all those weeks, intact in her pocket, folded in half and made fast to the fabric with a safety pin. She’d had no occasion to break so large a bill.

  At length he too noticed her: whirled around, tried to place her, scanned her hump, and started grinning. “Anneliese!” he called, as though greeting an old friend. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  Her answer was curt. “Karel Neumann. You’re broke.”

  A shrug of the shoulders. “Always. And last time I was handing out the dough like I was growing it.”

  They did not appear to bother him, these vagaries of property and loss. Nonetheless the remark placed on her the weight of obligation.

  She nearly gave it back. The bill was right there in her fist, she even slipped it out of her pocket. But then she stuck it back onto the pin her fingers had so dexterously undone; dug around the much-washed cotton and produced a number of coins, spread them out along her upstretched palm. He watched all this with peculiar focus, as though aware of the lightning struggle precipitated by his casual remark. For a moment there settled between them a kind of perfect understanding. A quiver ran through her, of shame then anger, but—with a grace she had not suspected in him—he diffused it at once, allowing her to pretend he had not noticed her act of aborted generosity; took the coins, shook them jangling in the cup of his great fist, and spoke.

  “I need a drink. Want one?”

  She said no; he bought her one anyway, at the shabby public house right on the corner of the dirty yard, the patrons little more than beggars, nursing dirty mugs of homemade schnapps. She had never before sat with a man to drink. No one around her seemed to see anything unusual in the act.

  “I haven’t seen you since that day,” she said, uneasy with the situation. “I expected to find you loafing around.”

  “So you haven’t heard?” he answered, surprised. “I disappeared. The Russians picked me up.” He sounded hesitant, as though he could hardly credit it himself. “Two months of questions, day and night. Then they let me go again. Funny, eh?”

  “Did you see Anton?”

  The note of hope caught his attention. He shook his head. “They must still have him,” he said curtly, all his usual humour gone out of his voice.

  He went on drinking until he had run through all her coins. She sat there watching him, still on her first glass, each sip a caustic burn on tongue and gums. When the money was gone, Karel staggered to his feet with drunken sadness and reached over to shake her hand.

  “So long, Lieschen.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Emmy-grate,” he said, drawling out the word as though it were some private joke. “Yah-merika. Or maybe Canada. Wherever they’ll have me. I already have a passport. That is to say, I almost do. I know a man who knows a man …” He gestured vaguely over one shoulder. “I just need the money.”

  “You could ask Anna Beer. Does she know you are back?”

  He frowned. “I thought about going to her. To her, or to my Sophie. No good, though. There’ll be a thousand questions. And in the end, they’ll go to the police. And once the police get involved …” He shook his head as though to clear some inner fog, turned away from her then swung right back, grabbed for her arm but missed it, his left foot losing its grip on the slick tiling. “Whatever else you may hear,” he whispered to her as he picked himself up, “he loves you, your Anton. He went looking for you. He told me so himself.”

  She gave him ten yards’ head start then followed after him, wishing to find out where he lived.

  5.

  Since that day, she had gone to see him five or six times. From her second visit she’d been bringing him food. Her reason, she told herself, was this: Karel Neumann was her only connection to Anton Beer. He had seen him, talked to him, as recently as four months ago; had told him about Eva. Her own memory of Beer was disconcertingly vague. He had taken her in after her father had died (her mother had left them in her infancy). There had been some others who had helped, but it was the doctor who remained with her. One scene in particular: Beer at the kitchen table, buttering bread. There had been strawberry preserves that morning: an earthenware jar. Eva would have been most distraught had anyone suggested it had been glass. Her childhood had ended a day or two later; there had been a teddy, a hedgehog, and a box of coloured pencils.

  But it wasn’t just Beer that brought her back to Neumann. Truth be told, they hardly spoke of him. She had no interest in soldiers’ anecdotes, did not want to see the man cheapened by accounts of his trudging through the Russian mud. The big Czech himself offered her something she had never had. Naturally, she did not trust him; the orphanage had proofed her against trust. Nonetheless she found that she could talk to him. There was to him a crude sort of honesty that was refreshing, new to her: not the heartfelt earnestness of Robert, with its poetic yearning for a final truth, but something coarser, simpler, more aligned with her experience of the world. Then too, one could never feel ashamed before him, for he was entirely shameless. All that was sour in her nature—all that rankled—could be let out of the box, show itself; preen. Not that she took to talk easily; she weighed every word, guarded it, whistled some back. Even so, more escaped than she would have expected: he summoned them forth, proved astonishingly adept at guessing her thoughts and feelings; it was as though they neighboured on his own. And thus a friendship sprang up between the giant and the crooked girl—a friendship threaded with caution, barbs, and scornful disavowal—but a friendship nonetheless. It only added to its flavour that they conducted it in secret. She held on to it as insurance against the frailties of love.

  Up in his room he now stood, stretching and feeding the last of the food to his dog, while she loafed on his bed and thumbed through the paper. Other than her handouts it was not clear what he lived on. True, he hardly paid any rent. Nobody else had wanted to share the room with the sick man. They did not even know his name. He was a young lad, blond, the eyes an eerie shade of grey that turned transparent in the lamplight. A woman had brought him, unloaded him on the manager, and paid a month in advance. Twice a day she stopped by, fed him, changed him, combed his hair. It was a mystery that he was still alive. Much of the time he lay in a sort of delirium, muttering to himself in Polish: a tumour the size of a wasp’s nest grown into the soft parts of his throat. He should have been in hospital, but it was clear he had no papers. A DP camp might have taken him, but it appeared he preferred the flophouse. Eva did not blame him. She thought of camps as another type of orphanage.

  Karel, at any rate, did not seem in any way put out by the sick man. From time to time he walked up to him, squeezed a sponge of water against his lips or moistened his eyes; slipped off his diapers when he had fouled himself. Mostly, though, he just ignored him. For all they knew, he had not a word of German.

&nbs
p; “So,” Karel said, lighting a cigarette and leaning his bulk against the frame of the open window. “Talk to me. How is the lover boy?”

  She picked up his bantering tone, mirrored it. “Absurd. You know what he tells me yesterday? He looks at me, real serious. I am combing my hair, sitting on my bed, and he sidles up, actually sidles, eyes wet with his thought, falls to his knees, and asks me to tell him my life story. ‘You can tell me everything, everything,’ he says, and that he’s ‘infinitely beneath me.’ It’s because I have ‘suffered’ while he was being ‘pampered’ in Switzerland, or something of the sort.” She smiled in attempted mockery. “I swear he has it from a novel. He reads such trash.”

  Karel laughed and wagged his finger. “Liese, Liese, Liese. What a silly girl you are. You love this boy, he’s the first who’s been nice to you, you even stay up at night, thinking of his kisses. Don’t say you don’t—you admitted it the other day, not directly, of course, but all the same. And yet you come here to sneer at him.”

  She flushed at his reprimand, grew more reflective. “I told him today that his brother has a blot on his soul.”

  “Let me guess. You know because you yourself—” He screwed a thumb into his temple as though squashing a bug, and at the same time wrinkled his nose, to mark a bad smell. “It’s why we get on, eh? My own soul—a Scheißhaufen. Pile of feckin’ turds. But singing voice is a nice baritone. It balances out.” He grinned, produced a flask from his pocket, took a swig. “And how is Mama? Picked out a wedding dress for you yet?”

  “She’ll see me buried first.”

  “Screw her, then. What do you care about her blessing? Run away with him. Or won’t he go?” He studied her, seemed to catch something in her expression. “No, that’s not it. You want him, but you also want the inheritance. Greedy, eh? No, no, don’t get mad, Liese. What’s to admitting it?”

  She sat there, angry, then thoughtful. There was something tentative to her justification, as though it were the first time she was trying it out.

  “It’ll make me straight,” she explained. “The money.” When he looked at her, baffled, she reached around herself, patted her back.

  “Surgery?” he asked, confused.

  “Not like that. But if I wore furs—do you think anyone would notice I’m bent?”

  He thought about this, brow furrowed. “Does the boy mind?” he asked at last.

  She blanched. “I suppose,” she whispered. “Surely. He must.”

  “Then why would he marry you?” The question was brutal, but the big face was kind.

  “Pity.”

  “That’s awful, Liese, just awful. But there, you don’t quite mean it. You say it with a quiver. Like you’re hoping it’s a lie. It might be, at that. It’s you who won’t believe it.”

  She started, surprised by this assessment, coloured at the thought that she had given away so much. All the same it was hard to stop. She had so rarely spoken her mind.

  “In any case, she will give her consent. I’m going to testify. I was meant to go on three days ago, right at the start of things, but I cried off sick. Earned myself a reprimand! They put me at the end instead. For the finale!” Her eyes flashed. “She’s already tried to bribe me. She’ll soon meet my price.”

  “She really thinks you can save Wolfgang? What does she care about her stepson, anyway?”

  “It isn’t that. She’s worried about losing the factory. And the house.” She smiled, pleased by her sense of power. “You should see how she skulks around. Not a wink of sleep. Stands by the window all night, on the lookout for the watcher. I swear she has a gun.”

  Karel leaned forward, interested, one hand stroking his big chin. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Who is this watcher?”

  Eva hesitated before she answered, unsure what she might lose by sharing the truth. But what good was it, her secret, if she never once got to show it off? “He is a Jew.”

  “Go on.”

  “Arnim Rothmann. Has a ring, doesn’t it: ‘Rothmann & Seidel.’” She sketched the ampersand.

  Karel whistled. “Seidel’s partner.”

  “Senior partner. The factory used to be his. The house, too. Till ’38.”

  “I see. Seidel stole them from him. Why fret, though? That was the fashion, wasn’t it? Aryanization. Half of Vienna changed hands.”

  She shook her head. “Not like this. There was a contract. Some sort of buyback clause. I found Frau Seidel rummaging for it not half an hour after they had scraped her husband off the front lawn.”

  “So ever since the war ended, they have been waiting for Rothmann to come back and ask for the keys!” The big man laughed, pushed off the wall, and started pacing the room, the mutt, Franz Josef, tangling in his feet. “No wonder she is snorting powders. How about him, though, the right honourable Paul Seidel, RIP? Was he willing to pay up?” He stopped abruptly as a new thought dawned on his face. “Or was it Rothmann who pushed Seidel? He came back, half crazy from the camps, asked for his share. They had a fight!” He returned to his pacing, took a few more turns, digesting the idea. “Is that how it was? But then, how does Wolfgang fit into it all?”

  But Eva had no intention of parting with all her secrets. “Who’s to say,” she said blandly. “Perhaps the stranger isn’t Rothmann at all. Rothmann was fat: Frau Seidel has a photo. Though of course—”

  “Why yes. The Auschwitz diet.”

  She shook her head, thoughtful, defiant. “It could be a mix-up. Perhaps he is simply some madman. Or—”

  “Beer? You’re still holding out hope, eh?” He made a face. “Forget about Beer. The Russians have him. He is in Siberia, mining for ore.”

  She flinched but did not answer.

  “What is he to you, anyway? He was nice to you when you were a child. It isn’t much.”

  She stared back at him, defiant. “He didn’t forget about me.”

  “No,” he admitted. “He talked about you all the time.” And he told her again how Anton Beer had told him that she was the sweetest girl in all the world.

  She listened in silence, slipped out some minutes later, feeling happy; walked the dark streets of the Gürtel, picturing Anton Beer walking like an angel at her back, wings spread and holding a slim white umbrella lest a drop of rain disturb her peace.

  6.

  Robert was asleep when she returned to the house. He lay, still dressed, underneath the open window, a book open on his chest; a cold draft whistling through the room as she opened the door.

  Eva crept inside on tiptoe. She took off her clothes and crawled naked into bed with him; lay on her flank and did not touch him with more than one breast pressed gently into the fold of his black jacket.

  “I love you,” she tried, hesitantly, shyly, not quite in earnest, the way a child might try it out on the playground, playing “family” with the six-year-old son of a butcher who has snot dangling from his nose. “Will you run away with me? To Yah-merika?”

  He sighed in his sleep and did not wake.

  Four

  1.

  Halfway between the State Opera House and the Burgtheater, on the western side of Vienna’s most sumptuous street, the Ringstrasse, which encircles the inner city like a wedding band—or a vise—there lies, boxed in by those architectural twins the Natural History Museum and the Art History Museum, a small but beautifully manicured park whose geometric bushes and ornate benches had to contend, at the time, with a mound of rubble that had been swept there from adjacent streets and formed a sizable pile. In this park, on one of the benches not far from the rubble, there sat, on a damp day in late October, a policeman’s daughter in a mud-streaked dress and a runty little boy who had recently served as witness in a murder trial. The two children were deep in discussion. They had stuck their heads together and were not so much speaking as transferring confidences from mouth to ear. The subject of their powwow was the weighty question of whether the girl’s father harboured feelings for Frau Anna Beer. The girl—Trudi—rather inclined to the opinion that he
did.

  “I saw her kiss his hand. Like this.” She acted out the scene she had witnessed in the café, using Karlchen’s hand for a prop. “She isn’t even very pretty. She’s got a mean face. But father is feeling lonely. Ever since Mammy died.”

  Karlchen sat there, rubbing the back of his hand. They were eating candies that his brother, Franz, had procured. Her kiss had been sticky.

  “Maybe it’s her bum,” he said at length. “Steinbeisser says that it’s the bum that matters. It has to be round. From underneath.”

  Trudi bit down on her lip, intrigued by this theory, which was quite new to her. “Mine’s flat,” she said, getting up from the bench, drawing the dress tight around her body, and looking down over one shoulder.

  “That’s because you’re a girl. It only grows once you turn into a woman.” He paused, followed her gaze, the two of them studying her rump with close attention. “When it does, it’ll be just right. You’ll see.”

  The topic closed, he pulled a torn and wrinkled comic book from his pocket and offered it to his friend. It showed a muscular woman in a short, star-spangled skirt and boots. She was lifting a car and throwing it at some men. Her bum was very round indeed. The words, Karlchen explained to his friend, were in English: speech was in bubbles and thought was in clouds; fat words meant someone was shouting. Woman was English for Frau. Karlchen had traded an American boy for the comic: seventeen marbles, the negotiations handled with gestures and nods.

  They slid closer together, sat thigh to thigh, and tried to make sense of the story. There was no problem identifying Wonderfrau’s enemies: they wore big-shouldered suits and brandished guns; they did not shave. The simple fact of their conspicuousness impressed itself upon the girl.