The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

Wolfgang smiled, drew a figure in the air with the burning tip of his cigarette. “Depends how the mood takes me.”

  “You’re thinking of jumping off a cliff, aren’t you? Some dramatic confession; in your head you’ve already phrased it, trying to find the most shocking words. It’ll feel good—for a second. Then the ground will hit you. Or rather it won’t. The noose will break your fall.”

  “It’s my neck.”

  “I hate losing.”

  Wolfgang almost laughed. “So tell them your client screwed your strategy. People will understand.”

  They smoked another cigarette.

  “In any case,” Ratenkolb said, “we’ll see what the little hunchback can produce for us. I am leaving her for tomorrow too.”

  “She hates me.”

  The lawyer shook his head. “Not hate, no. Indifference. But there are other interests involved.”

  6.

  When the trial resumed, at a quarter past three, the first thing Anna Beer noticed was that Robert had left. It was the first time he had absented himself from the proceedings; she wondered what it was about the last witness’s testimony that had turned him away.

  The afternoon proved wearisome, young men smiling with good teeth and musing on the weight of duty. Not even Fejn’s remonstrations could draw from them a bead of sweat. The long procession of witnesses was enlivened only by the rumour, spreading like wildfire through the courtroom, that a lone woman was stalking the hallways outside the courtroom and that this woman—confused in her bearing and muttering angrily to herself—was none other than the accused’s mother. A man in the audience, a shabby little postal clerk who had taken his holidays to attend the proceedings, from “civic interest” as he put it, even claimed that she had spoken to him during the recess and had pressed him to tell her whether “the hunchback has spoken yet.” Several members of the public in attendance, Sophie Coburn among them, took it upon themselves to locate this mysterious woman and ascertain whether she was indeed the defendant’s mother. They found her not far from the doors of the courtroom, conversing with an usher; she was holding him by the sleeve of his uniform and making him swear an oath to something or other. The woman left soon after, shaking a fist at this huddle of spectators, her plump face shaking with indignation. It was quickly decided that she was merely some madwoman who had stumbled into the courthouse: the defendant’s mother was rich, it was said, and would not be seen dead in that shabby dress from which a dirty negligee protruded at the back. Anna listened to Sophie’s whispered description without comment, calling to mind Robert’s account of his reunion with his mother. She saw no reason in fuelling the little journalist’s hunger for sensation.

  Ratenkolb’s list of witnesses was not yet exhausted when the weary judge rose from his chair and called for an end to the day’s proceedings. It was gone six by then. Anna and Sophie walked out together, the latter with a distracted sense of urgency that had clung to her the whole day. Anna was about to ask if she would join her for dinner when a man who had been standing in the shadow of the building stepped close to them and, with a wave of his hand, requested a private conversation. His hat and overcoat, and the failing light, made it difficult to study his face and figure, but there was something about his gesture—a studied elegance not quite feminine—that made recognition immediate.

  “Herr Kis,” Anna greeted her husband’s lover.

  “Frau Beer.” His bow held something repulsive for her, insinuated a familiarity, even a tenderness, entirely foreign to their relationship. “I saw your picture in the papers. In the trial coverage. The sketch artist admires your beauty.” He smiled weakly, obviously nervous, both cheeks dappled with light acne.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  He shook his head, flustered by her tone, raised a gloved hand to run it along the line of his moustache. “I have been thinking about Anton,” he said after a pause. “I simply cannot comprehend—” His eyes grew soft; not weepy, mind, but simply soft, filled with remembrance of sweet hours past. It took an effort to remain civil to this man.

  “Have you seen him, Herr Kis?”

  “No, no.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  He shook his head, wearily, sadly, the brim of his soft hat lending drama to the movement.

  “Then I have no wish to speak to you.”

  She turned and he tried to stop her, put his hand to her arm. Her fist came up unexpectedly. It did not hit him but hovered an inch from his face. She uncoiled one finger, defusing the fist but not the gesture; stabbed it into his upturned collar, a dozen epithets for his kind rising to her tongue, barnyard phrases she had not known were hers to command. Kis flushed as she began listing them, ran off in hasty little steps that her wounded heart called mincing. Some twenty yards from her he slipped upon the cobbles, dipped his arse into a dirty puddle, then quickly hobbled out of sight.

  When Anna Beer turned to search for Sophie, the little journalist was nowhere to be found.

  7.

  Sophie was glad she had been able to give Anna Beer the slip without the need for explanation. She had what she thought of as a private matter to attend to. Despite the many hours they had spent together, no real friendship had sprung up between the journalist and the doctor’s wife. There was something cold, unyielding, to Anna that was alien to Sophie; it went beyond reserve and seemed too relentless to be simply a matter of temperament. It was as though Anna Beer had taught herself to stand apart. Sophie had a good understanding of the reasons for this—Karel Neumann had explained it all quite graphically—but nonetheless found it hard not to place the blame on Anna, the spurned wife.

  Herself, she could have used a friend. She was sick of Vienna, of the soldiers and checkpoints, the broken buildings and dirty urchins, the greedy begging for her castoffs; was sick, too, of the shared apartment, the scheming tenants, the filthy hallway, the squalor of her tiny room; was sick even of this trial that she covered so diligently and that was beginning to make her name, somewhere, on the other side of the ocean, where there stood an empty house full of photos of a man who had burned to death for raining bombs upon this city. The longer she stayed, the more she found herself isolated. Even her friends at the embassy returned fewer and fewer of her phone calls. She was a crackpot, a paranoid, had ruffled feathers in her search for Anton Beer.

  Sophie had come, half a year ago, to mourn her husband and to earn a reputation for her pen. Back then these goals had seemed to her harmonious. Now, sitting at home stooped over typed-up notes, she caught a mocking note in the face reflected by the wardrobe mirror, before it was lost in the rehearsal of a hundred neurasthenic ticks.

  She arrived at her destination. She had been there before and found it much as she had left it: a side-street tavern hosting shabby clerks and careworn workers; a group of British soldiers doting on some local girls. Sophie’s arrival called forth the type of scrutiny familiar to unaccompanied women. Her tailored wealth attracted notice, if not the scrawny body that it dressed; her face too foreign to invite the risk of an approach. She sat down at a table, asked for the waiter who had called her on the telephone the previous night, and slipped him a coin as soon as he appeared.

  “You must order a drink,” he said, pocketing the coin. “If you’re going to sit.

  “What?” he added, in answer to her inquiring glance. “I’ve told you all I know. If you want more, you’ve got to ask her.” He pointed to a waitress who was sitting, knees pushed wide, astride a soldier’s thigh and laughing at his joke. “It’s her that saw him. Only she’s busy now. I’ll let her know you’re here.”

  She nodded, ordered wine and water in her broken German, sat and watched, but looked away whenever someone gave her a searching glance.

  The waitress took her time, or rather the soldier did, sat drinking with his comrades, one arm wrapped about the woman’s waist. She was neither young nor yet middle-aged; a bluff face and a bluff body, not without a fleshy sort of charm. What she did command was a brazen sort
of wit: they traded jokes, she and the soldier, drank down shots of apple brandy to giggling, broken-Englished toasts; the soldier’s hand on her stomach, holding on to those maternal rolls of fat. He rose at last, walked her over to the entrance. She came to a halt when Sophie waved at her; stood for a moment, one arm hooked into the soldier’s, torn between two different sources of income; then turned to her suitor, whispered something in his ear, and waddled off, hips swinging, to the back door and the stairwell beyond that housed the toilet. Sophie followed her at once.

  They spoke on the minuscule landing, the toilet door leaning open between them, its painted wood scarred with a hundred invitations and rebuttals, heart-framed commemorations of young love. The floor was littered with strips of newspaper that had been dropped while similar strips were put to sanitary use. Sophie felt her eyes pick through the headlines even as she phrased her question.

  “The waiter—Herr Frobel—he called me last night to say he saw the man I’m looking for. Now he tells me it’s you who saw him. Is that true?”

  The woman shrugged and turned one hand to show a calloused palm. A coin got her started. Her English was surprisingly good.

  “I heard that some weeks ago you came here to ask for the giant,” she said. “I had not the telephone number. Frobel has. So he makes the call. He wanted to earn some shillings too.”

  “He got his coin. But it’s you who saw him. Karel Neumann. That’s who I’ve been looking for.”

  The waitress shook her head. “His name I do not know. But it’s the one that was here, three, four months ago. Drinks much. A big man. Very ugly. Thin, no meat on the bones, but his shoulders like a bull.” She spread her arms. “A giant.”

  “Tell me all you know. Here, I’ll give you five more shillings. That’s all you’re getting.”

  The waitress took the money and made an odd movement with her body. On reflection Sophie identified it as a curtsy.

  “It was like this. He comes in two days ago. Before midday. Nobody was here, only I, cleaning. He buys beer to take home. I need somewhere to put it. He has no glass, but has old—” She hesitated, pointed to the light hanging off a cord inside the toilet. “A Scheinwerfer.”

  “A bulb? A lamp of some kind?”

  “A lamp, yes. From the front of a motorcycle. Like this.” She formed her hands into a globe some six inches across. “He says, pour beer in here. I want to see money first. He pays, I pour. Four litres go in and the lamp is not half full. He drinks a little from top. Then he goes.”

  “Did you follow him?”

  “No. I was cleaning, I must stay. But I asked around. People have seen him. They say he lives on Gürtel somewhere. And that he has a girlfriend.”

  “A girlfriend?”

  The waitress laughed, threw her shoulders up and forward, retracted her neck. “Girl with lump. On her back. Young, I hear.” She laughed again, then noticed the effect her words were having on the journalist. “You like him?” she asked, surprised. “I see. He belongs to you. I’m sorry. He’ll come back.”

  But Sophie had already come to a decision; stood chin raised in defiance of her emotions and the implications of the waitress’s news. “It wasn’t him,” she said. “Not Karel. He’d contact me if he’d escaped. To ask for money if nothing else.” She smiled a half smile, too unformed to call bitter, then dismissed the waitress with a movement of her head. “Go. Your soldier is waiting. I have given you all I’m going to.”

  To Sophie’s surprise the woman did not argue, but rather left her with a comradely clap upon one shoulder, her hand as strong as any man’s.

  No sooner had she gone than Sophie Coburn locked herself in the toilet and sat in the dark upon the wooden lid, not crying, not thinking, her square heels planted amongst the scraps of soggy newspaper strewn upon the ground.

  8.

  The night was growing late. Eva was restless, contrived reasons to walk into the kitchen, sat at the table chewing crackers, chocolate, tinned sardines. Frau Seidel never turned to look. She seemed immobile, rooted to the spot; stood by the window, eyes fixed on the glass. Yesterday’s newspaper announcing that Eva would testify lay where she had left it the previous night, thrown upon the kitchen sideboard, the section circled in red ink.

  The day had not gone as planned. All morning, dressing, brushing her hair, Eva had waited for Frau Seidel to notice the paper and intervene: to approach her, beg her, sell her son. Eva had waited so long that she arrived at the courthouse long after the appointed hour. Robert had been there, greeted her outside the courthouse, led her inside. He was friendly with the ushers, was allowed to sit with her in the waiting room reserved for witnesses, an unspoken question in his eyes. Around nightfall a clerk had relieved them: her testimony had been postponed. When they arrived back home, Frau Seidel had already taken up her station, mute, unyielding, absorbed in the study of the yard.

  Frustrated, too worn out to challenge her directly, Eva left the kitchen, went upstairs. She got ready for bed, shoed Yussuf off her pillow, dirty claw prints on the linen. Robert was there, looking at her but avoiding her eyes.

  “You are afraid to ask,” she accused him. “‘What will you say? When you walk through that door tomorrow? Will you bury my brother or rescue him?’ It’s been written all over your mug the entire day.”

  He blanched, fidgeted, sat on the bed, and lay down on his side. “Just tell the truth,” he said.

  “You don’t mean it. You might not like the truth. But then, it’d be immoral to ask me to lie.”

  He did not answer, and she climbed behind him so her hump was to the wall. He was wearing his nightshirt and a pair of underpants. She knew both intimately. In the past few months Eva had returned to doing the washing.

  “Turn off the light,” she said. “And close the window. It’s cold.”

  “Did you talk to Mother?”

  “Turn off the light,” she repeated, and after some minutes he got up and did.

  9.

  The girl had finally gone upstairs. Frau Seidel stood immobile for some further minutes, then sighed and took a vial out of the pocket of her cardigan, mixed some drops into a glass of water, drank it down. Each of her movements was reflected in the window’s dirty pane. Her handbag lay on the windowsill, a bundle wrapped in a dishcloth at the top. The garden outside was totally dark. As the drug took its effect, a detached calm rose up in her like the waterline of a hot bath. She sat down at the kitchen table, her legs very heavy, stretched them out across a second chair.

  When she woke, she was disorientated at first; was cold too, her feet wooden and dead to the touch. It took some minutes to stamp new circulation into her heels and toes, a painful tingling that cut through the drug. It might have been midnight by now: a waxing moon clinging to the window frame. Its light caught the newspaper, the red circle around paragraph five. Herr Seidel’s charwoman, it read, one Anneliese Gruber. Further sensations are expected. They seemed unable to get a single fact straight.

  Her feet revived, her body heavy, Frau Seidel rose and started on the stairs. She bypassed the first floor, carrying on up; walked the long corridor that led to the maid’s quarters. Outside she stopped, dug in her handbag, her shoulders hunched. She opened the door, peered inside, waited for her eyes to adjust. They lay on their sides, her front pressed into his back, both heads on the pillow, one behind the other. Emotion came to her, came dimly, through the wall of opiates; not all of it was laced with spite. Her son looked peaceful, happy, his hair very dark. She could count his breaths by the rise and fall of his narrow chest; a snort of cold in his nose when he exhaled. The room was icy, they had failed to close the window properly, had kicked the too-thin duvet down to the level of their waists.

  The open door added a draft to the cold, and it was this draft that woke them, first him, then her: two pale faces, stirring, robbed of features by the dark. She spoke to the girl, not to him.

  “You can have him,” she declared, her hand in her handbag, amongst vials, tissues, a dead weight wra
pped in threadbare cotton.

  The girl sat up enough to signal confrontation. “How do I know?” she whispered. “That you’ll honour the bargain?”

  “He heard it, didn’t he?” Frau Seidel said. “You have it, I say. My consent.”

  She waited for some further humiliation: chest squared, chin drawn into the soft skin of her throat.

  “Thank you,” said the girl on the bed, said it almost softly.

  Frau Seidel closed the door before her son could add his thanks.

  Five

  1.

  Anna was in bed when the doorbell rang. She woke, disorientated, within the sweat-damp tangle of her hair. For some strange reason she decided that it must be Frisch bringing news of Anton. She rose quickly, slipped into her dressing gown, hurried over icy floorboards without taking the time to locate her slippers. A hand run through her hair and a quick adjustment of the belt had to suffice as her toilette. She opened the door with a touch of drama: head cocked, brow raised, one fist pressed into a pushed-out hip. Her excitement was misplaced.

  It was Sophie.

  “What time is it?” asked Anna.

  “Ten past six.”

  “You’re early.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I was hoping you’d be up.”

  Anna let her in. It was tempting to send her away and crawl back into the warmth of her bed, but there was on Sophie’s face a restless urgency that appealed to Anna’s sense of decency if not to her compassion.

  “Come in, then. Let’s have some coffee.”

  They sat in the kitchen, or rather Anna sat, one naked leg crossed over the other. Sophie busied herself with setting the table for breakfast as though she were the host and Anna her guest. Anna let her do it; took a cigarette from the pack lying open on the table and asked Sophie for a light. The journalist hurried to the stove and found the matches.

  “Would you like one?” Anna offered, then leaned towards the struck match with a habitual movement, her lips pursed around the cigarette end, her eyelids lowered, showing off long lashes.