The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  As for herself she hardly ever read the papers; listened to the radio with no investment in the words. It was only in 1941, the year of victory, and of her second wedding, that she had become more involved. At first it was the social aspect that had drawn her: she, a policeman’s widow, was suddenly courted to join the Women’s League; helped organize the celebrations for the Day of Youth; raised funds for winter clothing for the soldiers at the front. Gradually, though, through the weeks and months of mouthing phrases, something else had taken hold. She had learned Nazism the way one learns any language: through constant repetition. It had felt good, for once, to be certain, on the side of the winners: a lifetime of anxiety taken off her shoulders. Of course, by then she’d become rich.

  Of Paul Seidel there were only two photos in the album: the first, a staged wedding picture in which they gazed into one another’s eyes; the second, part of a news clipping that praised his charity work. In both of them he looked very handsome, if slightly pinched. He had buried his old wife and married the new; had watched with trepidation her gradual transformation from maid to socialite to ideologue. For him the Party had been a business partner, to be negotiated with friendly distrust. His son had felt this lack of commitment and thrown himself into a frenzy of sloganeering. They learned from one another: in no time at all both Wolfgang and Klara spoke fluent Goebbels all day long.

  She paused in her perusal, looked up, avoided once again the eyes of the powdered woman in the mirror. Anxiety took hold of her, came from nowhere, like the touch of a draft. Her moods were restless, like a trapped fly, now calm and quiet, now hurling its weight against the glass wall of its prison. Without hesitation she reached for one of the bottles, withdrew the glass pipette, placed two drops on the back of one hand, and licked them off; her eyes watering with its bitterness. The drug worked quickly, offered distance from herself. All at once it was as though she and the woman in the mirror had traded places. Gratified, she returned the bottle to its place.

  Klara could no longer recall with any certainty when she’d first had recourse to her medicine. Certainly it had started before the bomb raids, the food shortages, the radio speeches instructing them to hang on. It had been so easy to procure. She’d simply asked the pharmacist for something to steady her nerves; a week later she’d requested a pick-me-up. The names entranced her: Luminal, Veronal, Pervitin, Benzedrine, codeine, pethidine, mixed at various concentrations. Powders, liquids, pills. She remembered a woman at a party, young and graceful, a gold chain slung around the long stalk of her neck, dipping its pendant deep into her cleavage.

  “Try this,” the young woman had said at the cloakroom mirror. “Our soldiers take it at the front.” She kept it in a silver compact inscribed with a fashionable rune.

  “I have my own,” Klara had giggled, and they had traded tastes; the sudden rise of the girl’s nipples, laughter as she danced back out into the crowded room.

  “Try this,” she mouthed now to the woman in the mirror, trying to recapture the moment’s careless gaiety, “try this,” the woman sour, swollen, unimpressed.

  She closed the photo album in front of her, planted her fists on its leather, and pressed her head into her aching knuckles.

  When next she looked up, Wolfgang was in the room. It could not have been much after noon.

  5.

  “You’re early,” she said, finding his eyes in the mirror. He stood, half dressed, at the centre of the room; a wedge of cigarette curling from the corner of his mouth.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I gave instructions.”

  “So you did.”

  She seemed more awake today, more present than he had seen her in some time. He thought of saying as much. He said, “You’re losing your hair. There, at the back.”

  Her hand came up before she could stop it, searched her head for thinning hair. Then it was banished to her lap.

  “I want to be friends.” She said it carefully, a pleading note to her voice. For a moment he almost believed it.

  “You know,” he answered, “you never congratulated me. On getting off. True, true, I’ve not been social. Still, you could’ve found a way. A card would have been nice, maybe some flowers.” He grinned, sucked smoke, let it stream from nose and mouth. “Or is it that you are disgruntled after all? For a while there, Robert looked to be the sole heir. Other than you, I mean.”

  He took a step closer, watched her shift her eyes in the mirror. “You know, you don’t even love him very much. Was it his picture you were looking at just now?” He pointed to the album. “No, I didn’t think so. You want him to be happy, of course—that is to say, you want him to be rich. But love? You don’t have the knack.” He shrugged. “Then again, who am I to talk? You sent for me, Mother. Here I am. What is it you want?”

  She took her time with the answer; swallowed her spite and raised herself up in her chair. “We’re being blackmailed.”

  Her hand slipped into the album in front of her, withdrew two pieces of paper, handed them to him. They were letters, typewritten and unsigned.

  “Do you remember him well?” she asked while he was reading.

  “Of course. He ate dinner here, two, three times a week. It’s his house.”

  “Well, he finally came out of the woodwork. He found us all the same, even after you shut up your father.”

  Wolfgang ignored the insinuation. “It says here,” he said, “you are to hang a curtain out the study window. As a sign you agree to the conditions. Will you—”

  “I already have.”

  He handed back the letters. “So you’ll pay.”

  “Let’s go downstairs,” she said, “and sit down in the drawing room. Talk it over.”

  He noticed, amused, that she took her handbag along for their interview, and a quart bottle of powders.

  6.

  Robert returned. He no longer entered the house with any hope of finding Eva there. Every day he walked for hours: asked in hotels, marketplaces, hospitals. All he had to help him was her hump: he owned no photo of her, was unsure which name she was using. The problem wasn’t that he got blank stares; the city, it seemed, was full of hunchbacks, a score of false leads. Towards the end of the second week he gave up on asking; walked the streets, staring at passersby, then lost himself in thought and worry, allowing his feet to carry him wherever they wished. Once he was held up at knifepoint and stripped of his good coat; another time he walked headlong into a fight. Detective work, it appeared, did not run in his blood.

  He entered the house, kicked off his shoes, carried his umbrella into the kitchen to drip onto the tiles. Hunger gnawed at him. He had brought bread home, unpacked it, cut a slice. He’d just put on the kettle when he heard his brother’s voice.

  “Robert?” it called. “Over here, in the larder. And now on down the stairs—you have to push at the back shelf. Yes, that’s right, come on down. God, what a racket you made just now. And you probably thought you were as quiet as a mouse. But everything carries through the floor. It’s like moving around on a drum.”

  Robert descended into the cellar. Wolfgang was sprawling on an unmade cot, a bottle of liquor wedged between his thighs. There were open jam jars on the floor.

  “Ah, the look on your mug just now. Priceless! I didn’t know about it either. All the exploring we did as kids, and we never dreamt there was a secret cellar. But sit, sit, join my little party. Only close the door. We want to be alone. Good, good. And now slide the chair closer. That’s it. Ah, brother, here we meet again!”

  He giggled, took a swig, passed the bottle over to Robert. He demurred.

  “Not to your taste, eh? How about this?” He reached under the pillow behind his back, produced a small brown apothecary bottle with a handkerchief stuffed down the neck in lieu of a stopper. “Mama’s little pick-me-up. Have you ever tried it?”

  Robert shook his head. “Did you steal it?”

  “Steal? No, no, she gave it to me. Like giving a child a treat. Perhaps she thinks it’ll g
ive me courage. It might at that.” He pulled out the hanky with a little flourish, poured a small mound of powder into the palm of his hand. “Go on, little brother. Let me corrupt you just a bit.”

  Robert hesitated. “What do you do with it?”

  “Take a pinch, rub it into your gums. That’s it. Like eating powdered sugar. Only bitter. It works right away, doesn’t it? Sends a buzzing down your pecker.” He laughed. “Ah, yes, Mama and I had a nice little chat today. Real cozy it was.”

  Robert, energized, his senses crawling, took another pinch of powder. “What did you talk about?”

  “Rothmann, Arnim Rothmann. The fat man. You don’t remember him? Hm. And here I thought you would.” Wolfgang sat up, took a pull on the liquor bottle, waved Robert closer yet. “A story, then. A family yarn. Best story there is.”

  He burped happily, closed his eyes to collect himself, held on to Robert’s shoulder. “Once upon a time there was a businessman, an Austrian by the name of Seidel, who invested all his money in a factory run by a fat Jew. God knows what they were making exactly, radio parts, transistors, who cares. The factory did well, in any case. The Jew wanted to expand. But for this he needed money: capital. He was a convert, our Jew, went to church every Sunday. Which is where he knew Seidel from. They got talking one afternoon, in the back pew. You can picture them sitting there, haggling. Conducting their business, with the blessing of the Lord.

  “Things proceeded quickly. The Austrian, Seidel, well, he wasn’t daft. He knew a good thing when he saw it. He put in all his money, everything save for some bonds, and before the month was out, he’d become the Jew’s junior partner. This was in 1931 or ’32: early days. They worked side by side and made one another rich.

  “Now the thing to remember is that up to this point the Seidels had been small fry. Upstarts, that’s the word; their money so new it put a blush on their cheeks. Grandpa, you see, was a shopkeeper. Came from the country and started selling hosiery. A crude man, but clever all the same. He made a small fortune somehow before the Great War and then held on to it when everyone else lost theirs. Mean as they come: he saved up every penny he ever made. Might be there was a little Jew in him too.

  “In any case, the factory flourished, and Dad grew rich. Buried the old shopkeeper, started going to a better church. We moved into a flat in the first district; he bought himself a nice tweed suit. Then ’38 rolled around. The Reich paid us a visit and decided to stay. And here something interesting happened. On that day—the day the army walked in, when all those people lined the streets, clapping, hailing Hitler—well, on that very day, it wasn’t even clear what was really happening yet, some hooligan stepped up to fat Jew and knocked his hat off his head. It was nothing worse than that, but it happened in his own factory. One of his engineers. They got into an argument, right on the shop floor, and the man knocked his hat off.

  “Rothmann took it as a sign of the times.

  “Now the Jew proved to have vision. Prescient, that’s what he was, like a Gypsy woman with her cards. That very day, he came to Father and made him another business proposition. He’d sell the factory to him, all of it, for a very modest price. There was a condition, of course. Any time he wanted to, Rothmann could buy it right back. Oh, it was more complicated than that, they drew up a whole contract, but that was the gist of it. They signed the papers and that was that. Seidel was the sole owner.

  “It didn’t stop there, either. Two weeks later, the Jew came back and sold father his house. Same conditions, same outcome, he even sold the furniture. Rothmann and family moved into more modest lodgings. We moved in here and everyone sent flowers. Only my mother did not join the celebrations. She was already sick, a hundred pounds going on eighty, thin as a stick.

  “Now at the time, all this seemed crazy, or at any rate premature. Then the wave of Aryanizations hit all across Austria and Jewish businesses were being sold off for a pittance, whether they wanted to or not. And all at once Rothmann looked like a genius, let me tell you. He had Aryanized before the season—but on his conditions. We, meanwhile, lived like kings. We buried my mother six months after the move.

  “By the time your mother came into the house, we’d got used to it all. You won’t remember how pleased she was with herself: one day she was the maid in a nice, perky uniform, the next she was bossing around her own. It’s funny, all that energy Father had spent on leaving the shopkeeper in him behind. But the moment he’d made it, entered the first circles—cigars, cognac, a private booth at the opera—he went and married a bit of rough. She learned fast, your mother did, transformed herself into a lady. Only, when she wanted something, the fishwife would come peeking out.

  “Those were glory times in any case; we never had so many servants. Life would have been grand, if it hadn’t been for that Jew. Every other day he’d come for dinner, sometimes with his whole family in tow. Father practically fawned on him. It was, ‘Try this cigar, Herr Rothmann, I had it sent from overseas,’ and, ‘Take the good chair, Herr Rothmann, here, by the fire, it’s chilly out,’ ‘Such a delight to see you, you must come back soon,’ on and on—and me already in the police! It was then your mother and I started discussing Party business over dinner. Good God, we had such fun.

  “One time, early on—I remember it like it was yesterday—Rothmann leaned over to your mother, very discreetly, mind, speaking under his breath, and instructed her how to hold the fork, ‘in a good household.’ You should have seen her blanch. I swear, she signed her soul over to the Party and cheered Rothmann’s entire race to the gas chambers just for that ‘in a good household.’ Not that he was wrong, mind. Your mother handled cutlery like she was digging a latrine.

  “Then they stopped coming, the Rothmanns. ‘To forestall unwanted attention.’ Oh, he was a grandiose bastard, Rothmann was. Fat as a barrel, always a sweet in his pocket for you and me. I’m surprised you don’t remember. But then, there were a lot of people who came and went. We ran a busy house back then.

  “But in the end, even a clever Jew like Rothmann made a mistake. He left it too late to leave the country. He wanted to, kept on talking about London and New York, how he had business connections there. But the wife wouldn’t go without her parents, and her parents refused.

  “Next thing you know, well, history took its course. They got rounded up and shipped out of town.” Wolfgang waved, as though seeing off a departing train, then leaned back and took another swig. “After that, nothing. Until now.”

  “He’s come back.”

  Wolfgang grinned. “He sent us a letter. And how nicely it’s written. You’d swear Fontane wrote it, or maybe Kleist. Says he has been watching us all along.”

  “The man with the red scarf. He wants everything back.”

  “Actually, he just wants money. A mere trifle, really. Ours is a modest Jew.” He ran a hand through his stubble, gave Robert a sideways glance. “Your mother’s not too happy about it, though. We had a little meeting, she and I. Down in the drawing room, real cozy. She closed the door after us, turned the key, then started right in. What a beast that man is, a Jew-swine, a usurer, you know the phrases. I listened to it, she worked herself into a right lather, and then I said, poking fun, like, ‘I see you don’t want to pay.’ That stung her, she went red and started to lecture me. ‘It’s not about the money,’ she said. I laughed. ‘You’re still fighting the war?’ I asked. ‘Is that it? You want to win?’ She got angrier yet and started shouting at me in earnest. The words she came out with! Right out of the gutter. I pretended I’d taken offence (really, it isn’t nice to be shouted at), I rose and walked to the door.

  “She stopped me, of course, and all of a sudden she was soft like butter. She took hold of my sleeve and tugged me over to the armchair, gentle, though, making sure I didn’t bump my legs. She tugged me down into the seat, sat down on the footstool, just by my side, and as she was talking, she stroked my jacket like she was testing the quality of the fabric, only tender, tender. And how she crooned! ‘Wolfie,’ she crooned (
and when is the last time she called me that!), ‘Wolfie, remember when you came home that day, wearing your uniform for the first time. Your father pretended not to notice, but I—Remember how we drank jenever together, glass after glass, toasting your new position, I got tipsy real quick, but you kept on pouring, one arm around my shoulder …’

  “And the funny thing, Robert, was that I did remember and felt moved. It rose before my eyes, jenever and all. Of course I knew she was just buttering me up—it was crude after all, very crude—but all the same, my eyes welled up and I was grateful to her. She sensed my change of mood and, still sitting there on the footstool, stroking my jacket sleeve, she started humming the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ and telling me how her first husband, your father, had been fond of whistling it, but somehow with feeling—it’s absurd, laughable, and yet I got all soft inside. I even let her hold my hand.

  “So we spent a pretty little hour. I wish there’d been tea. And then, at the end, without looking up, without even changing the tone of her voice, she said, ‘Will you get rid of that Jew?’ ‘What will you give me?’ I said, unruffled, cozy with the moment. ‘One hundred thousand,’ she said. ‘And twenty percent of the factory.’ We shook on it, like the thieves we are.

  “You know,” he finished, patting the basement wall, “she’s a little touched, your mama, but the truth is that half the people on this street, they have a Jew walled in their closet. God, how they are hoping the mortar will hold.”