The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  “Coffee first. Here, I’ll put on the pot.

  “The trial starts at eight,” Sophie added when she had finally sat down and wrapped her hands around a steaming cup.

  Some day-old rolls lay in a basket between them; a china saucer with an ounce or two of butter; a glass of synthetic honey; the grey wedge of liverwurst that had not been wrapped properly and had dried out. Neither of them showed any interest in the food.

  “You will come, won’t you, Anna? It’s the last day. We might even get a verdict. Depending on the jury, of course.”

  Anna did not answer at once; sipped her coffee, remarked on the absence of lipstick, whose flavour she associated with the drink.

  “What is it you came to tell me?” she asked at last. It came out more gently than she expected, as though the words themselves carried enough weight to dissolve her petty irritation. Sophie noticed it too, the formality of her phrase; sat up in her chair, a flutter of emotions on her brow and cheeks.

  “Have you,” she asked very cautiously, her eyes on the table, “in the course of your life, I mean—Have you slept with many men?”

  Again the answer was gentle. “Is that what you woke me for?”

  “Yes. In a way.”

  “Five or six,” Anna said. “Six. For comfort, mostly.” She smiled: the sort of smile that effaces emotion. “I chose rich men.” She could have softened her answer; explained that there was more to it than that. That she had been lonely, in need of evidence that men liked her; that it was only her husband she had failed to seduce. But Sophie wasn’t listening; and at any rate, Anna hated excuses.

  “I only ever slept with my husband. And, you know—with Neumann.” Sophie paused, kept her eyes on the saucers, the honey, and the liverwurst. “He’s a better lover than my husband was. It’s not that he does anything very different. I mean, the … mechanics, they are the same, give or take. But—” Here she looked up with a reckless sort of courage. “I liked it better. He made me feel things, I hadn’t—And the things that would come out of my mouth … I probably kept half the courtyard entertained.”

  Anna wanted to laugh at her, ask her what it was about this morning that had triggered the thought of her past ecstasies; wondered too whether Sophie would be sitting there, suspended between shame and self-discovery, had Karel still occupied her bed and conjured obscenities from the mouth of his lover. What beasts we are, she mused, that it requires loneliness to trigger our sense of guilt.

  What she said was: “We do not choose what we desire.” The moment she said it, it sounded wrong to her, bookish, like something Anton would have said, a phrase from a treatise on the stockyard of one’s soul. Sophie heard it too, and correctly identified the phrase’s likely origin.

  “Like your husband,” she said. “Forgive me, Anna. Karel told me. That Herr Beer … ” She paused, lost confidence in her word of choice, found a stand-in. “About his inclinations, I mean. It must be difficult for the wife. After all, you still love—And yet … ”

  Anna rose, disentangled her hands from her coffee cup, walked quickly to the door. “I think we have exchanged quite enough confidences for one morning. If you will excuse me now, Sophie, I must dress.”

  When they walked to the courthouse an hour later, neither one of them made any reference to their earlier conversation.

  2.

  Dark caws, the scrape of claws upon unvarnished wood, then the muffled clap of wings on air and a dance of four-toed, hopping acclamation. The birds were preaching again, a rhythm of call and multi-voiced response. It sank into her sleep and commandeered her childhood memories: rode them raw against their inclinations. The pastor of her native village throwing dirt into an open grave, his frock coat torn under one arm, yellowed linen underneath; behind him, on a table laden with her sister’s wedding feast, her uncle’s wireless was making static-punctured speech; and a speckled Great Dane known as Liebling dragged through the dirt the puzzle of his tractor-broken hip.

  She woke sweating, her belly heavy with retained water and the growing child, the need to piss pressing urgent on her bladder. Poldi climbed out of bed, squatted low over the chamber pot, relieved herself, then sat down bare-assed on the floor, her back aching, her memory still clinging to poor Liebling, that painful slither, paw over paw. From the attic there travelled a renewed chorus of caws; crows circling the house, more every day, as though to mark its carcass for their peers. She grabbed a slipper that peeked from a pile of dirty clothing; lobbed it hard against the ceiling, earned a burst of renewed agitation, a dozen birds hopping, screeching, trading perches. It had been impossible, these past few weeks, to play any music. Every time she put on a record, the birds responded, drowned whole symphonies within their screams. She’d been falling asleep with her hands clapped around her ears.

  She left the room. Downstairs, Frau Seidel’s door stood ajar, the bed untouched, one window open to the October cold. On the ground floor a half-drunk cup of herbal tea upon the kitchen sideboard; everything much cleaner now that the boy lived in the house. Hungry, Poldi tried a handful of drawers, found most of them locked. They had left some bread out for her, a thimbleful of margarine; some dried-out cheese, a packet of malt coffee. The charity of relatives. She ate some bread and cheese, hungered after something sweet.

  There was a larder at the back of the kitchen, three steps deep and vivid with the smells of former bounty. Now it stood bereft of food, save for a sack of flour, a basket of spuds, and a mound of onions covered with rough canvas sacking. At the back the row of shelves hung somehow crooked, as though one side had been pushed into the wall. It was only after stepping close that Poldi realized the entire section swung on hinges, like a door. Behind it a flight of stairs led downwards, to an unknown part of the cellar.

  She descended slowly, less from any sense of trepidation than mindful of her own clumsiness, the slowly shifting centre of her body’s gravity. The room at the bottom held a bed and chair, a cot, and some more shelving; a bare concrete floor, cracked in parts, glazed with a patina of mould. The room was lit by a tall floor lamp with a flower-patterned, tasselled shade. It stood by the dirty cot like a dandy at the bedside of a pauper; spread a soft, red-tinted glow. The light gave weight and volume to the figure sitting at the table, spooning jam into her mouth. The tabletop was cluttered with tins and jars.

  “Frau Seidel! You gave me a right fright. I had no idea there was a room down here.” Poldi spoke quickly, unsure what would be her reception. “I suppose you en’t goin’ to the trial, then?”

  Frau Seidel shook her head without looking up.

  “Me neither. He asked that I don’t go, Wolfgang did. I went to see him last night. He was pale, and in a bit of a temper. I suppose he must be nervous and all. Said he had in-di-gest-shien. I could tell. He smelled a little from the mouth.” Poldi smiled, conjured the memory of their sour kiss. “He’ll get off, won’t he, Frau Seidel?”

  The emotion behind the question was so raw that even Frau Seidel seemed startled. She paused, looked over, a spoonful of jam still in her mouth. Then she swallowed, raised a plump wrist to her eyes, read the time on her gold watch.

  “Ten o’clock. The little cripple will have testified by now. It’s all up to her.” Anger flooded her features, changed the direction of her thought. “The conceited little bitch. Thinks I’m an idiot or something. She kept the food locked away all these months and never once realized I had this.”

  She pointed at the rows of shelves laden with jars. Poldi followed the gesture, first with her eyes then with her feet, and quickly realized that the entire supply consisted of store-bought jam and tinned fruit. There had to be a hundred jars lining the shelves.

  “Apricot!” she called out in childish excitement, reached for a jar. “If it’s all right with you.” She turned to solicit permission, a hint of curtsy to her movement. “Got a sweet tooth, I have. It’s been months since I had jam.”

  Frau Seidel did not object, and Poldi brought the jar to the table. She ate with her fin
gers, fishing out the sticky chunks of fruit and licking them off with obvious relish.

  “And what’s this here?” she asked halfway through the jar, reached for one of the larger tins that sat on the table, then recoiled when she saw the tar-black skull printed on the label.

  Frau Seidel watched her, grinned, stuck her jam-smeared spoon into the open tin. She scooped out a quantity of fine white powder, stirred it into the dregs of the jam jar in front of her. Carefully, moving with surprising dexterity, she laid the jar on the ground then rolled it across the room in the direction of the shelves. The jar disappeared in the shadows at their base: a grating sound as glass rolled over concrete. Poldi made to say something, but was cut off by a warning finger. They sat and waited, heard nothing. Then a subtle movement of the jar, a quarter turn, the scritch-scratch of a careful paw.

  “Rats?” Poldi asked. The notion failed to disgust her. She had been fighting vermin all her life.

  Frau Seidel nodded, her face a mask of dried-in makeup. “They know it smells funny, but they eat it anyway.” She spat on the spoon, wiped it on the hem of her dress, then opened a fresh jar of jam and resumed eating. “I kill a dozen every week. They breed like—” She broke off, stuck for a comparison, then looked over at Poldi and fixed her eyes on her stomach and lap. “You’re feeling well?” she asked abruptly, the voice slipping instantly from triumph to sympathy.

  Poldi shrugged, one hand to her abdomen. “All right, I suppose. Peein’ a lot. And chucking up my lunch.” She got up from her chair, walked over to the unmade cot, struck anew by the oddity of her surroundings. “But what about this room? You come here to sleep, do you?”

  Frau Seidel shook her head, all sympathy extinguished. “He stayed here. In ’42. You can still smell him in the sheets.” Her nose wrinkled. “Have you read the numbers? One million, five million, ten!” Frau Seidel swallowed, stuck a tongue into the pocket of one cheek, found sufficient spit to wet her venom. “You’d have thought they could have got this one. He came here the morning they rounded them all up: his wife and daughter, his father, his mother-in-law. He’d run away. Sat in our basement, sweating, saying, ‘I’ve got to go.’ Only he didn’t. Four days he stayed; the house full of servants, all those curious eyes! Seidel refused to kick him out. Not that he didn’t want to, mind. But it wasn’t right. Running to church every three minutes, and to the crapper. Stomach ulcer. Because we owed him, you see. Well, he left in the end, gave himself up to the police and asked to be brought to his wife. And what a disgusting face he had, such cheeks, always greasy, hanging down over his bones.” She touched her own face as though fearing she’d taken on the man’s features; took hold of the fatty tissue of her throat and stuffed it under the high collar of her blouse. “It’s been almost six years, and the room still smells of Jew.”

  Poldi looked at her, rose, and slowly climbed the stairs. At the top she spoke, sadly, quietly, though loud enough to make herself heard.

  “You’re mad, you are,” she said.

  Back in her room the ceiling sang with mating crows. Poldi lay down, stuffed fingers in her ears, and prayed for Wolfgang.

  3.

  “Would you describe your duties to the court, Fräulein Grotter?”

  “My duties? I’m a servant. I do what I am told.”

  “Quite, quite. There is no need to grow angry. I suppose you must be nervous.”

  “Must I?”

  “Well, at any rate, it’s only natural, with all these people watching. But really there is nothing to it. Just tell the truth.”

  “Well, get on with it, Herr Prosecutor. I have chores to see to.”

  From the first, then, Prosecutor Fejn seemed a little put out by the final witness of the trial. The person he had met to prepare her testimony some weeks earlier had been quite a different entity: taciturn, for one; dull to the point of stupidity. He recalled a working girl dressed in her Sunday best, her virgin bosom sheltered in much-mended lace. Her statement had been as colourless as her clothes.

  Today she was different. Anneliese Grotter—Eva—had appeared in court in a getup that was nothing short of provocative. She wore a scarlet hat cocked at a precarious angle and an old dress that seemed too tight, too short for her: it accentuated her breasts, her hump, and invited a view of her naked calves stretched out before her in the witness chair. There were other details of her costume that drew the eye. She had painted her lips, the colour clashing with the hat, but had left her eyes naked; had brought no jacket or cardigan and sat with exaggerated stiffness in her chair, turning only her head on occasion to stare flatly at the members of the jury. When her eyes fell on the defendant, she made no effort to hide a sneering indifference to his fate.

  “We won’t detain you for long,” Fejn continued, dissolving his consternation in a smile. “Far be it from the court to interpose itself between you and the household linen.” He paused just long enough for the first wave of audience titters to arrive, then waved off the joviality as though it were his regretful duty. “To business, though. I really only have a single little question. Where were you at midday on June 25, Fräulein Grotter?”

  “That’s your ‘single little question,’ Herr Dr. Fejn? I was in the Seidel residence.” She made as though to rise, had to be shooed back into her chair; her expression haughty, spiteful, each movement hampered by her hump.

  “And what were you doing?”

  “At noon? Cleaning the toilet, I expect. Or the mirrors, perhaps. Some annoying little task.”

  “You were in the bathroom, then.”

  “In one of the bathrooms. Top floor. Where the young Herr Seidel has his room.”

  “And while you were there, going about the cleaning, did you see the accused?”

  Fejn pointed, and her eyes duly followed, studied Wolfgang coldly head to foot.

  “I did.”

  “Doing what?”

  “He was getting dressed. And talking to his wife.”

  “What state was he in?”

  “He was drunk.”

  “Please, Fräulein Grotter. You seem rather eloquent when you put your mind to it. Describe the scene for us.”

  She snorted, adjusted her hat, scratched—actually scratched—the place where her upper arm disappeared into her sleeve. “It was like this,” she said. “The accused was in his pyjamas and had just stormed up the stairs. He was pulling on his clothes, yelling at his wife. His face was flushed and he was reeling. I believe he slumped against the wall once or twice while attempting to step into his trousers. A matter of balance. He’d left the door wide open, so I could see it all quite clearly.”

  “Where did the accused come from?”

  “His father’s study.”

  Fejn hid his surprise behind the shuffle of notes. They made no mention of this detail. “From his father’s study! You know this for a fact?”

  “Yes, of course. I could hear them shout at each other. I couldn’t make out the words, but they were shouting. Then he banged the door, ran up the stairs, and yelled at his wife instead.”

  “And what is it he was yelling at his wife? Surely you could hear the words this time around?”

  “He was cursing his father.”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “Oh, just incoherent words. ‘Bastard,’ ‘asshole,’ ‘hypocrite.’ He may have called him a cunt.”

  The word froze Fejn for a moment, and he looked around him like a man wishing to ascertain that he had not misheard. But the jurors and spectators mirrored his shock. From the ranks of the jurors came a single cackle, suppressed to be sure, but quite audible in the sudden silence of the room. Eva searched out its origin, pinpointed the youngest of the jurors, a department store clerk not much older than herself, and bestowed on him a look of frank amusement.

  “I am merely quoting the accused.”

  Fejn recovered, smoothed down his hair. His robes billowed with the motion. “And what, er, was the defendant’s tone as he made these remarks?”

  “His ton
e?” She smiled up at Fejn, pursed her painted lips, deliberated. “Murderous.”

  “Murderous?” Fejn repeated, gratified, appeased, his voice still ranging through the octaves. “What happened then?”

  “He left. Stormed out, you would say. He banged all the doors.”

  “Did he put on his shoes, Fräulein Grotter?”

  “No. I saw him holding them in one hand, but then he threw one as he was yelling and dropped the other. He left sweaty marks on the stairs. The socks, I mean. They were far from clean.”

  “And when was the next time you saw the elder Herr Seidel?”

  “Never. Not conscious, that is. A little later there was shouting in the street. They’d found his body.”

  “Thank you, Fräulein Grotter, that will be all. The prosecution is done with this witness.”

  Fejn bowed to the judge, took out his handkerchief, and wiped sweat off his brow.

  4.

  Ratenkolb took over. He did not speak at once but rather sat at his desk, shuffling through papers, the eyes of the court upon him.

  “Fräulein Grotter,” he said at last. “I notice that there are significant discrepancies between your police statement and the report of the investigative judge.”

  She did not answer but merely looked at him: naked, hostile eyes.

  “What I mean to say, Fräulein Grotter, is that initially you refused to make any statement at all.”

  “So?”

  “You have no comment to make?”

  “You have asked no question.”

  Ratenkolb nodded slowly to himself as though he appreciated her precision. “Let me put it like this, then, Fräulein Grotter. What changed your mind?”

  “At first, I did not want to get involved. A maid must know her place.”

  “Come, come, you do not strike the court as such a wallflower.”

  “Well, then, I thought the police could do their job without my help.”

  “The investigative judge convinced you otherwise?”

  “Evidently.”

  A pause commenced, during which Ratenkolb once again leafed through his papers. “Tell me,” he asked thoughtfully. “Do you like the accused?”