The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  “But how well you improvised! You said, ‘It’s his eye, but not his body.’ Clever. You figured the police would know about the eye. Somebody else would have seen it. Or it would be in his files. You might even have thought that we were testing you: for all you knew, he’d had that eye since before the war. So you came up with a solution: his eye, not his body. And ran away as quickly as you could.

  “It’s almost funny. I talked to Kis tonight. You’ll remember him, you two had a little heart-to-heart. Well, Kis recognized the body at a glance, a constellation of moles, for Christ’s sake, on the back of Anton’s shoulder. But even he didn’t notice the eye.” She shook her head. “It’s too well made.”

  She tried to take another puff, found her hand shaking, ashes spilling on her lap. “Do you know what I think, Karel? You killed him. You killed my husband and then covered it up.”

  Karel did not answer. He looked behind himself. He might have been gauging the distance to the door.

  “Just tell me,” she said. It almost sounded like a plea. “You can cut and run afterwards. There’s an ashtray on the table over there. You can use it to beat my skull in and jump out the window. It’s isn’t ten feet to the pavement. You’ll be gone in no time.”

  Her eyes brimmed up. She wiped at them, furious, almost blinding herself with the cigarette.

  “What did he ever do to you?”

  Karel settled back into his seat.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

  3.

  They sat smoking. When the pack ran out, she stood up, walked past Karel, shouted down to the concierge to bring up another. Karel talked. He only paused when the door opened, then resumed, mid-sentence, as soon as the concierge had left. For the first time since Anna had met him, all traces of the buffoon had left him. It was as though she were listening to another man entirely.

  “I served in the Sixth Army, infantry. ‘Flag-Junker-Exempted.’ A shitty rank; one white V on my sleeve, and my breeches full of crabs. The only man in the unit with a made-to-measure uniform: I did not run to standard size.

  “I was taken prisoner at Stalingrad. They marched us eastward, then loaded us on a train. A succession of camps, first near Uglich, then Smolensk, then all the way out to Turinsk. At Camp 221, I got diphtheria and almost died. A guard broke my ribs in 197 and locked me in an unheated closet for three days. And in 314, in Asbest, I fucked a Russian nurse and paid her with a plate of gruel. She was starving too. In April 1948, I finally got word I would be freed. But it took another six weeks. We had a lovely spring out in the Urals; a bloom of wildflowers, as far as the eye could see.

  “I met Beer on the transport home. We were shut up in the same compartment, sitting on the same dirty floor. He had a friend with him; they had done years at the same camp. A fellow doctor, from Hamburg, judging by the accent, his hair as red as a flame. They were talking through half the night. I knew not a soul in the compartment and spent my time listening in.

  “The thing is, I had heard of Beer before. There were stories going around about an Austrian doctor who had made friends with his camp commander. His personal physician, people said, for ailments of the soul. Head-shrinker stuff. There were some who said it was a little more saucy than that.” He flicked ash. “Prison wouldn’t be prison without stories of bum-fucking making the rounds.

  “In any case, they talked, Beer and his Hamburg friend. About the camp, about home. He talked about you, and he talked about Lieschen. ‘A crippled girl,’ he said, ‘a little darling.’ He’d looked after her in ’39. Then the system took her in its care. Beer had sworn to find her. His friend wished him good luck.

  “At the border they got separated. Hamburg went north, Beer headed south. Beer made his friend memorize his address. I memorized it too: ——gasse 19. We rode the train together all the way to Vienna and never once exchanged so much as a word.

  “When I got here, I forgot all about the good doctor. I was busy getting drunk. Girls, too. Four whole years, Frau Beer. It’s a long time to go without.

  “One afternoon, I ran out of money. Needless to say I was still drunk. I remembered Beer’s address, walked through the front door of the building, slipped on the stairs, and banged the back of my head against the wall. There was a good bit of blood. I passed out on the landing.

  “Next thing I know, Beer is there, looking down at me. He’d just come home, had a sheaf of letters in his hand. ‘Comrade,’ I say, ‘we were on the same train, we shat in the same bucket.’ He got me to my feet and took me into his flat.

  “We sat in his study. I chose the floor: I was too dirty for his chairs. My head was bleeding. It bled on the wallpaper. Comrade Beer was too busy reading his letters to notice. He had changed since I’d last seen him, and not for the better. There’d been a sense of peace to him back on the train. Now his nerves were frayed. I recognized the symptoms. It’s tough leaving the camp. A city full of people. And that strange sense of freedom: decisions waiting to be made. He told me you were coming back to him.

  “That was later, though. First, he got excited about a letter. ‘Lieschen,’ he said. ‘Finally, I found a trace.’ She’d changed her name, apparently. ‘Eva Frey.’ He said it like it answered everything. A smile on his face, rushing to the larder to locate a bottle. ‘Here,’ he said, handing me a glass. ‘We must celebrate.’ It was then he noticed I was bleeding.

  “He turned into a doctor. A dab of iodine and a bandage; he patched me up in minutes. ‘Can I kip here for a night?’ I asked. He thought about it. ‘One night,’ he said. ‘My wife’s coming back tomorrow. She wouldn’t understand.’ I thanked him like a good boy and asked did he have some food. We drank and ate until we ran out. He was quite drunk by then. ‘Let’s go out,’ I said. ‘Make a night of it.’ I did not mention I hadn’t any money.

  “We hit the bars. You wouldn’t believe how many bars there are. People starving, scrapping over ration cards, but at every corner someone will sell you apple brandy, or some vodka they’ve concocted from some rotten spuds. In any case, we got good and rat-arsed. Worked our way outwards, to the working-class districts, where the booze was cheaper. Beer paid for everything. ‘Brother,’ he called me. ‘You’re as big as a house.’ We got chased by a Frenchy when he saw us pissing on his jeep. Then the drizzle turned into a proper storm. We ran down a street, hid in a gateway. A door was standing open, and inside was a gutted shop, undergoing renovation. Holes in the plaster, the smell of blocked sewage. But dry. I plonked down on the ground and was soon fast asleep.

  “When I woke, Beer’s hand was in my hair. He had a gentle touch. There was very little light: just the glow of the city seeping through the broken windows. All I could see clearly was one eye. And the look in that eye: cold, mechanical, fixed on my own. That, and he was stroking my hair. It scared the living daylights out of me.

  “It took me days until I realized what he was doing. The wound on my head: he was tending the wound. The bandage had slipped with the rain. I found blood all down my neck later on. At the time, all that came to me were the rumours from the camp. His face so close, I felt his breath in my mouth.

  “You know, it’s funny. There was a lot of that sort of thing in the camps. Men loving men, it’s as common as dirt. I got propositioned once or twice—subtle, mind; a hand on my shoulder, a questioning glance—and said no without raising a stink. But this, it scared me, my guts ran cold. All I wanted was to get away from him.

  “I shoved him hard. He fell on his back, his wind knocked right out of him. I leapt up, scared and angry, looked at him in the gloom. If he had said something, or closed his eyes, made a gesture of apology—But all I saw of him was that look, that cold, dispassionate, somehow questioning look, one eye only, the other in shadow. So I kicked him, wishing to knock that look right out of him, kicked him hard in the belly, a soft sound, like kicking a football that is short on air. He rolled, tumbled over, came to rest on his back, the eye unmoved, unmoving, staring up at me with something close to glee. God,
how I hated that look. I didn’t know the eye was made of glass.

  “I went on kicking him. I kicked him mechanically, my head empty of thought. It was only afterwards that I understood that I was angry. Have you ever been angry like that? Something takes over, it’s almost like joy. You forget yourself. All there was, was action: the fact of my kicking him. I kicked him good and proper. Stamped on him too, stamped on his face, the hands, the ankles, wanting them to break. I only stopped when nausea took over. I was drunk after all. I went outside to vomit. The rain drenched me. I went back inside and saw what I had done.

  “He wasn’t moving; lay on his belly, legs spread, one foot turned against its ankle, pointing up into the room. I thought for sure that he was dead.

  “Shame hit me. Not regret, mind, nothing as complex as that, just hot, raw shame, the sort I knew from childhood, when you’ve peed in your bed. I had no thought of running away. What I needed to do was hide him. Nobody must know.

  “I bustled about for some minutes, trying to come up with a plan. There was a yard full of rubble outside. And there was a cellar. I dragged him by the turned-up foot; heard his head bounce on the stairs. The cellar was black as a cave. I dragged him into what felt like a room, dropped him. When I was already back at the stairs, he made a sound. Not a cry; something like a sigh. An exhalation: the rustle of leaves. I jumped and ran.

  “Out in the yard, going into the gateway, I saw his keys and wallet. They’d dropped out while I was dragging him. I scooped them up without thinking. Hiding the evidence. I ran until I found a patch of grass out by the edge of town. I passed out, woke to a goat eating the soles off my shoes and a boy running, arms spread into wings, making noises like a Stuka. He watched me vomit in a ditch and shot a salvo after me when I picked myself up and walked back into town.

  “As soon as I passed a bakery, I remembered the wallet. I discarded it, everything apart from the money; threw it in a gutter. God, that cup of coffee tasted good; ersatz of course, but even so. I had five rolls and bought some schnapps from a Tabak. By lunchtime, I felt right as rain. It was only when evening rolled around that I started thinking about Beer. That final rustle of his breath. If it hadn’t been for that, I could have buried the whole affair. As it was, it sat on my conscience. No, not my conscience, exactly. I just carried it around. It grew heavier with every hour.

  “All that night I wandered around town. Aimless, drinking, muttering to myself. You see, I wasn’t sure what to do. Even if I’d wanted to, I’d never have found that yard again. Still, the thought persisted. Perhaps he wasn’t dead. Wasn’t it possible, perhaps, that I had overestimated the state of his injuries? That he had woken after a few hours and gathered himself up. With a broken leg, to be sure, and a head like a wasps’ nest, but alive. He was a doctor, after all; he would know what to do. I had visions of him with a little bandage around his leg: sitting in his easy chair, stuffing a pipe. So what if he’d tried to kiss me, stroked my hair? Who was to say the two of us could not be friends?

  “By the time the next night rolled around, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I returned to the neighbourhood of Beer’s flat. I thought I would just take a peek. From outside, I could tell which windows were his. A light was on. God, if you could only imagine how happy I was about that light. I was sure we had turned it off when we left. I remembered it distinctly. The thing I forgot about, though, was that you were expected home. I drank myself stupid, plucking up my courage, then made it up the stairs.

  “Out on the landing, doubt snuck back into my heart. ‘What if he’s angry?’ I thought. ‘For all you know, he’s after revenge.’ So I bypassed the bell. Dug his keys out of my pocket, opened the door. Better not give him time to prepare. I would walk in and tell him I was sorry. Of course, it took me time to fit the fucking key. You’d think I was trying to thread a needle: stood hunched over, eye at the lock, swaying and jamming the key into the knob.

  “You know the rest. I rolled in, you were sleeping on the couch. I was well in the bag already; the shock of it gave me the rest. Come morning I had made my peace with it. I’d got used to the weight, or thrown it. A flexible conscience, mine. You questioned me, and it made sense all of a sudden. Beer was a queer. You had left him over an affair of his. Then Sophie entered the picture, and you both showered me in money. I had no reason to move on. Not until they found the body.”

  He paused, seemed about to say something else, then fell silent, his head dropping into his hands, more from tiredness than remorse. Anna watched all this and smoked her cigarette down to the butt.

  “You are lying,” she said. She said it coolly, without pathos, as though testing a theory out loud. It was too early yet for her to assess what she felt about Karel’s revelation. “You went out with him, lured him to a quiet yard, and killed him for his money. Then you came back to rob the flat.”

  Karel did not answer her, sat without moving, no emotion showing on his face. After some time she found the need to speak again.

  “And tonight?” she asked, her eyes on his blood- and mud-stained hands, the bruises rising on his head and face. “Did you go out and murder someone else?”

  He winced, started shaking. It took her some seconds to realize she had hit the mark. Her shock was genuine.

  “You did, didn’t you?”

  He shook his head, though not in denial. “I went back to that yard,” he said. “The strange thing is, I did not recognize it until tonight. I picked it out because the cellar door had no lock. Other than that, a yard like a hundred others. Mud and war rubble, and an old air-raid shelter underneath the main building. It never even crossed my mind that it might be the same.

  “But when I was crouching there, behind the cellar door, it came back to me. I even heard something down in the darkness below me. The rustle of a man’s breathing. Anton Beer come back to haunt me. And yet I sat and waited, despite his breathing at my back. Almost like a brave man.

  “I should have waited longer after he’d dropped off the parcel; long enough to make sure he was gone. But the breathing got to me at last. I needed air.” He shrugged: enormous shoulders heaving under the weight of fate.

  “Whom did you—” she began asking, confused by his account, then stopped herself. She had no intention of administering justice. Let each bury their own.

  “He wore a red scarf, Beer did, the night we went carousing. I laughed at him, but he said he’d caught a chill. A soldier’s coat, dyed, and a red scarf worn like a muffler. ‘I’ve been cold since ’41,’ he said. He hid his face and went boozing with me.” Karel looked up, puzzled and worn out. “You know, all that night, I really thought he was my friend.”

  4.

  They smoked their way through the second pack of cigarettes. She sat there, picking through his story; pictured it—Anton’s fingers in Karel’s hair—got Kis entangled in the thought, and herself too, the brittle memory of Anton holding her, stroking her head in the tender minutes after consummation.

  “Do you hate them?” She forced the word. “Queers.”

  He waved it away. “Not especially. I got angry. That’s all.”

  She nodded sombrely and considered the thought that she had lost her husband without reason. Just like all those other widows of the war.

  Karel stirred. He rose slowly, not wishing to startle her. They had been talking by the light of a table lamp, and the single light source, shining upwards, emphasized the crude ridges of his cheekbones and brow.

  “What do I do now?” he asked.

  She did not hesitate. “Go. I never want to see you again.”

  “You won’t call the police.”

  “There is no point.”

  Still he hesitated. “I have Eva here with me.” He gestured behind. “What do I tell her?”

  Anna winced at his appeal and refused an answer. He carried on all the same.

  “Maybe she’ll want to go back. To Robert. He doesn’t know that—It was his brother whom I—”

  She surprised herself with the force of
her response. “Take her away. The boy deserves better.”

  Karel seemed relieved by this assessment. When he opened the door, he found Eva halfway down the corridor. She looked at him blandly, her face composed.

  “The night porter said you had returned.”

  It was impossible to tell whether she had been approaching the door or retreating from it. She did not seem to notice the figure of Anna sitting behind him; at any rate she did not acknowledge her presence.

  “Do you have the money?”

  “Some of it,” he said, and pulled from his pocket the soiled wad of bills. “But we have to run.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’m sick of waiting.”

  He tried to place a hand on her shoulder as they climbed the stairs, but she shook him off.

  She had never liked for anyone to touch her hump.

  Part Three

  When the Würzburg opthamologist Heinrich Adelmann first contacted Ludwig Müller-Uri, the young glass-blower was barely twenty-one. This was in 1832. It was a doll that prompted Adelmann’s letter, of Sonneberg manufactory, that had curiously lifelike eyes. Eye prosthetics were primitive devices then, and French. A select number of Paris artisans manufactured them as painted shells made of thin-walled, lead-darkened glass. These eyes were transitory objects: once inserted, the lacrimal fluid corroded the lead, roughening their surface; after a matter of months—sometimes mere weeks—the prosthetics caused such irritation they could no longer be worn.