The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  “Not especially. He beat up people for a living.”

  “You were afraid of him? You seem like a bold young woman.”

  “My station in life necessitates caution.”

  “So you are not put out that the defendant has not been in the house these past months?”

  “Put out? No. For all I care, he can go to hell.”

  “Well,” said Ratenkolb, “it’s beginning to look like he may.” He bowed his head, took a moment, then spoke as though to his desk. “One last question, though. A matter of a minor discrepancy. Or perhaps an oversight. In the report, I mean. The time you saw the defendant leave the house without his shoes on—the day he called his father names—when exactly was that?”

  “Around noon.”

  “You are certain?”

  “There are several clocks in the house. I heard the chime.”

  “And when was Herr Seidel’s body found?”

  “At half past one.”

  “Yes,” said Ratenkolb. “That agrees with the other witness statements. A whole hour and a half after his son threw him out the window. How do you explain the lag?”

  “How do I explain it?” Eva sneered. “I suppose nobody passed the house. Or they did pass but had their noses in the air. One would have to look over the little fence.”

  “Quite.” Ratenkolb waited, smoothed his jacket and waistcoat, consulted his papers. “Do you remember what you did after you had cleaned the upstairs bathroom?”

  “I swept the stairs.”

  “And then?”

  “Windows. Front parlour, then dining room, then kitchen.”

  “You are certain?”

  “I follow a routine, Herr Ratenkolb. The twenty-fifth was a Friday. I swept the stairs then cleaned the downstairs windows.”

  “Bathroom, stairs, windows. An odd routine, if you’ll excuse my saying so.”

  “You want to tell me how to clean house? Come over sometime. You can give me lessons.”

  Ratenkolb smiled thinly at her joke. “Please, Fräulein Grotter. This is a murder trial after all. Can you tell us at what time you cleaned the windows in the parlour?”

  “At twelve-thirty.”

  “You sound very certain.”

  “I am.”

  “Well, in that case you have lied to us, Fräulein Grotter. You told the court that you did not see Herr Seidel’s body until some passersby drew your attention to it by the noise they made out on the street.”

  “That is correct.”

  “But surely the windows of the front parlour look out onto the front lawn.”

  “They do.”

  “Is it possible that you could have cleaned the windows in the front parlour at half past twelve in the afternoon and not seen the body of your employer lying broken and bleeding right in front of you?”

  A whisper went through the audience, a sort of collective bracing.

  “Is it possible?” she repeated lightly, lazy with the words. “No, of course not. He fell not five steps from the window. I assure you, the front lawn was quite empty at the time.”

  Pandemonium broke out, was stoked rather than soothed by the drumming of Judge Bratschul’s gavel. Fejn had leapt out of his chair and was gesticulating wildly. The word “perjury” was heard from a variety of corners; for once, all sides of the audience seemed equally outraged. Eva sat through it all with exceptional calm; was a little flushed, it is true, and held her hands knotted against her stomach, but made no other movement, her chin held high, poking from the shadow of her hat.

  Eventually the judge’s entreaties brought some semblance of order to the room. Cautioning Fejn to return to his seat, he addressed the witness directly.

  “Fräulein Grotter. You will have noticed that your statement has thrown the court into quite a state—yes, yes, quite a state. You see, the sequence of events on June 25 is a matter of great importance. We have a witness, one of the neighbours, who discovered Herr Seidel’s body at around half past one. And other witnesses who saw the defendant—barefoot—at around two. It was assumed—that is, the prosecution has assumed—that he left the house in the wake of—after, you understand, after—Herr Seidel was thrown—or let’s say fell, one mustn’t influence the jury!—out the window of his study. Now you tell us the defendant left the house while his father was still inside. May I point out that there are, um, grave penalties for lying in court, very grave penalties, and that, if you are mistaken, this, perhaps, is the last point at which you can correct, that is take it back, and, in short, enlighten the court …” He trailed off, exhausted, sat kneading his gavel between nervous, blue-veined hands.

  Eva looked at him with an air of total unconcern. “Herr Judge,” she answered quietly. “On the day of Herr Seidel’s accident, a policeman came to the house to ask me questions. He was rude and I was upset, so I did not answer his questions. He did not try very hard. I heard him tell his colleague that I was an imbecile and a cripple. Six weeks later an investigative judge requested my presence in the courthouse. He made me wait in a shabby little corridor. There was a long line of people and only one chair. When it was my turn, I went in and closed the door. He was sitting behind his desk, nose buried in some papers. I wondered would he say “Good day” at least, but he never even looked at me, just sat there thumbing through his papers for the whole duration of the interview. He asked me a whole ream of questions, some of them quite personal. I answered them, though he talked too much and did not listen. Whenever he liked what I said, he nodded to the typist to fire away. You have the report in front of you. He read it back to me at the end. It sounded accurate, so I signed it. Then, last month, the prosecutor came by the house, to ‘inspect the crime scene’ and to read my statement out to me again. He came in, drank three cups of tea, and ate all our biscuits. ‘Just stick to the truth,’ he said in between bites, and waved the paper at me. And so I have. I think you will find that nothing in the report contradicts anything I’ve said in court. I assumed the goal of the questions was to ascertain that the defendant was angry with his father. He was. He called him names. I have related some of his language for you. I cannot be held responsible for questions that the investigator omitted to ask.”

  She came to an end. More colour had entered her cheeks. Perhaps, at long last, the gravity of the occasion had become present to her.

  “But surely you had read the papers!” the judge exclaimed. “You knew what was at stake.”

  She reeled off a phrase too tidy not to have been rehearsed. “I refuse to be responsible for your assumptions.”

  There was more shouting after that, and more work for the gavel, but after a few more minutes the witness was dismissed.

  5.

  The moment Eva had finished, while the court was still in uproar and the judge’s gavel was once again swinging in his bony fist as though he were hammering flat a schnitzel, Robert pushed his way to the end of the bench and quickly ran out of the courthouse looking very pale under his mop of black hair. She came out a few minutes later, a coat pulled around her shoulders hiding the thin dress.

  “Well,” she said, looking hard into his face. “You’re not staying for the end? Wolfgang has declined to testify, so they have moved straight to the summations. Fejn goes first. He asked for a recess, but the judge wants to be done with it all.”

  Robert spoke softly, shuffled his feet. “It’s a fraud, isn’t it? It was all prearranged. You told Ratenkolb what to ask.”

  “I sent him a note this morning. So what?”

  “You did not have to do it like that. There was no need to make them hate you. You could have been nice.”

  She grimaced, wiped at her lipstick with the back of her hand. “I thought about it. Playing the sweet little idiot. In a sailor’s collar, no less. I’d have taken you as a model: the bumbling, happy fool. But you know what: it would have been hard to keep a straight face.” She forced a smile, searched his face again with a look that belied her nonchalance. “Anyway,” she said now in quite a different voic
e, “it’s best if they hate me. They needed a villain. Now they can let Wolfgang off the hook.” She bit her lip. “It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Eva. Thank you.”

  He could not help it; his eyes welled up with tears, the left one drooping, its lid sliding down. She reached over to tuck it back, her hand clumsy, the gesture new to their courtship. He let her do it, patient, trusting, took hold of her hand before she could withdraw.

  “Whatever happens,” he said, “whatever the verdict, let’s have dinner tonight. I mean all of us. A family dinner.”

  “With napkins, and Mama doling out soup?”

  “Yes.”

  She frowned; made herself free of his hand; turned to leave.

  “Where are you going, Eva?”

  “We’ll need food, won’t we? And I need stockings.”

  “Stockings? Whatever for?”

  He watched her cheeks colour, with pleasure rather than embarrassment. “You’ll ask me tonight, won’t you? At dinner.”

  He trembled just a little, or maybe his voice did; a chill wind cutting through his clothing. “Yes.”

  “I want to wear stockings when you ask me. Silk stockings. Like a lady.”

  He nodded eagerly, mirrored her smile. Then a worry took hold of his pale face. “I have to stay here. The jury might—that’s to say, you never know how quickly they will—”

  “Stay,” she said, kissed him quickly on the cheek, then skipped off. Halfway down the street, he noticed, she took off her hat despite the cold and crumpled it under one arm.

  6.

  It would have been nice if there had been some paint. Blue would have been good, to suggest a metallic sheen; a dollop of black to conjure the darkness of the cockpit. The boys were alone in their room; dusk in the window, and the clatter of a passing tram. Franzl was building the airplane out of some planks of wood. He had already cut the wings, using a broken-off saw that he had found somewhere, and glued them to the body. Karlchen would have liked to help him—he had an idea how to shape the plane’s rudder—but had yet to be invited. To hide his sense of expectation he lay spread out on the bed, leafing through his comic book. Truth be told, he was bored with his acquisition. In retrospect seventeen marbles seemed rather steep for a dozen pages full of little pictures. It was not impossible that he’d been had.

  Their father came home, heavy boots out in the corridor. The boys did not acknowledge his arrival, and yet they noticed it, each in his own way, and measured his mood by the length of his stride and the time it took him to hang his coat. And though neither of them said anything, the saw ceased working for some moments, and the comic book’s pages remained unturned. Straining his ears, Karlchen could hear Father talk to Mother in the kitchen. She made a sound, something like a squeal, that might have communicated any number of emotions. Almost at once an argument ensued. Only their father’s voice carried, its tenor, not the words. It was more chiding than angry. He fell silent, walked down the corridor, slammed the apartment door to lock himself in the toilet off the stairwell outside—each of his movements so familiar that Karlchen could picture it down to the details. The boy seized the opportunity to jump up off the bed, slip out of the room and into the kitchen. Franz looked after him then rammed shut the door of their bedroom with a shove of his foot.

  Karlchen half expected to find his mother crying. But she was dry-eyed, stirring soup, humming a ditty to herself. When she noticed her son, she first threw an eye at the apartment door then waved him over; crouched down to him and wrapped her apron skirt around his shoulders as though swaddling him in a blanket. He allowed himself to be crushed against her bosom; smelled her; offered the back of his head to her kiss.

  “He’s innocent,” she whispered, nuzzling him. “The man at the trial. It’s just been announced. They let him go.”

  He did not answer, held on to her until she rose again and shook him out of the crumpled apron. They had dinner, talking of other things, his father drinking beer, reading the paper. Only later, sitting on the hallway toilet in the dark, the only room whose door he could lock, did Karlchen allow his tears of relief to flow.

  7.

  The verdict was handed down a little after five. At three, Robert, sick to the stomach with waiting, and anxious to make arrangements for that night’s dinner, had run home. He’d roused his mother, who was sleeping in the drawing room, and discovered that Eva had already dropped off several parcels of food in the kitchen then left again, presumably still hunting for stockings. For an hour he fussed and gave instructions; convinced first his mother, then a nervous, sickly Poldi that Wolfgang would be “acquitted without fail” and that they must prepare a worthy welcome for him. When he left, the two women were standing shoulder to shoulder rinsing and drying the good Meissen and arguing about the preparations for the roast.

  When Robert returned to the courthouse, the judge had just recalled the jury to deliver its verdict. So overwhelmed was Robert by the occasion that he could not later recall any actual words. The judge spoke, then the foreman of the jury; a sigh went through the crowd. It was only when his brother stood up and turned to the public benches with a broad and somewhat stupid smile that Robert understood. Robert hastily shook his brother’s hand across the railing, told him to hurry (there were some formalities to take care of that would detain Wolfgang for no more than an hour), then ran home as fast as he could.

  Back at the house the preparations had faltered. Poldi had left after some argument or other and his mother sat blankly at the kitchen table, picking apart a crust of bread. Eva had yet to return.

  Robert refused to be daunted. He shouted out his news, rallied the troops; sent Poldi into a dance of joy, then into a frenzy of preparation as she searched her wardrobe for something to wear. Robert had no time to serve as critic. He tore down the stairs, ran to the kitchen; tied an apron to his tidy frame. Pleading, cajoling, Robert got his mother to explain how to prepare the meat; browned the pork loin in a casserole then surrounded it with chunks of onion and stuffed it in the oven. Rushing, a manic joy taking hold of him, he began to set the table; stopped to sweep the dirty floor and beat the dust out of the chair cushions, then begged his mother to iron the good tablecloth that he found neatly folded at the bottom of a cupboard. As he arranged the soup bowls, he realized they had no soup and immediately ran back to the kitchen to boil up the bones Eva had brought. While he stood at the counter, cutting vegetables into the thin broth, his mother entered the kitchen with a pile of embroidered napkins and began folding them. He looked over at her, grateful, and she beckoned him close with the curl of one finger.

  “I had a dream last night,” she whispered. “A dog was nuzzling me, right in the stomach. But also he was feeding. The muzzle was wet.”

  “That’s terrible, Mother.”

  She waved away his concern, folded a napkin. “Only a dream.”

  Some minutes later, standing by his shoulder as he was peeling the last of the carrots, she bent over to him, kissed his cheek. “Are you happy, Robert?”

  “Very happy, Mama. You will see, everything will be all right.”

  She seemed embarrassed but also pleased, excused herself, and returned a half-hour later glassy-eyed, edgy, out of sorts.

  “It’s a hard life,” she muttered to his inquiring look. But the good mood held, despite her fix of drugs.

  At length the house was as though transformed. Robert had found candles and lit a row of candelabra; the table silver, a little tarnished, reflected their light. Each place setting was flanked by two glasses of fine Bohemian crystal, a tumbler and a wineglass, chosen for their beauty rather than their function (he had yet to locate the wine). The plates and bowls were pure white porcelain and seemed to glow on the dark blue tablecloth, a painted symbol on their backs vouchsafing their provenance. Outside it had started to rain, and the grim weather made a pleasing contrast to the cozy scene inside. The smell of pork roast filled the house. Robert had changed into a fresh shirt and tie and done his be
st to polish his shoes. The kitchen was cleaned, and at the last minute he had even remembered to put on the potatoes: the nervous titter of the lid over boiling water. Now all there was left to do was wait and make sure the meat did not get overcooked. Both Wolfgang and Eva were long overdue.

  At half past seven Poldi came down, sat in a corner with a cheerful grin, rubbing her tummy and darning some old socks. She was dressed plainly, but her blouse was clean and she had washed and brushed her hair. They sat across from one another and waited.

  Eva returned. She came in wet, sodden hat in hand. “How long do I have?” she called as Robert ran to meet her in the hallway. “I want to take a bath.”

  “Hurry. The meat is getting tough. Wolfgang will be back any minute.”

  She nodded, kicked off her dirty shoes, headed for the stairs. Before she had taken two steps, he caught up with her, pulled her quickly through the door into the front parlour, kissed her as he had not done before, which is to say firmly, on the lips, holding her cheeks between his palms and taking time to taste her breath. She did not struggle, but when he paused, her look was suspicious. “Why?” she asked.

  “You are my—That is, we will marry, won’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “So there.” He kissed her again, holding her firmly, leaning into her, feeling her body pressing into his.

  When they were done, she blushed and smiled. “You do this rather well,” she whispered, seeming younger, stripped of her defences. She ran off before he had a chance for a third embrace; skipped up the stairs like a child.

  Robert looked after her, leaning on the door frame, hands shoved into pockets: the only blemish on his happiness the sombre recognition that it was Anna Beer who had taught him how to kiss.

  8.

  Wolfgang did not return, and Eva would not come down. He called to her after ten minutes, and again after fifteen, received a hollered answer that she was on her way. Then, nothing. Robert called again, his young voice rising up the stairwell. His mother and Poldi were sitting on armchairs in the drawing room; sat stiffly, hands folded in their laps, the younger woman nervous, determined not to crease her blouse, his mother glassy-eyed and frowning. He called a fourth time, was answered by silence.