The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  Müller-Uri devoted many years to the task of manufacturing the perfect artificial eye. He replaced the lead first with milk glass then with cryolite, producing a more durable prosthetic whose subtle shade imitated the spongy white texture of the sclera. Not content with the look of a painted iris, he designed a way of producing its star-shaped, crystalline structures from tiny rods of coloured glass that were woven into the eye’s surface. A specially designed melting process permitted him to suggest a soft, bleeding transition of sclera and cornea. It was left to his nephew, Friedrich Adolf Müller-Uri, to design the “reform” eye, a prosthetic shape much bulkier than the traditional “shell” or “bowl” eye, looking like a thick-walled, scooped-out semi-sphere, designed to fill the socket in patients where the entire eyeball had been lost.

  Demand for all types of prosthetics spiked in the aftermath of the two world wars, though the political and material vagaries of those years left their mark on this, as on any other, industry. The Otto Bock Company, for instance, based in Duderstadt but manufacturing most of its wares in the medieval Thuringian market town of Königsee, provided a score of Great War veterans with leg and arm prostheses but saw its factory and materials confiscated by the Soviet occupational authorities, disrupting production for a number of years. Many World War II amputees flocked to Giessen, where two companies, under the names of Bergler & Rieder and Thöt & Co., sold a variety of made-to-measure prosthetic products. Müller-Uri’s factory in Lauscha, meanwhile, continues to produce cryolite eyes to this very day; and a nearby toy manufacturer still sews looks of demure devotion into the faces of its dolls and teddies and stuffed dogs.

  One

  1.

  Frisch came to Anna Beer’s door early the next morning. He brought the news that her husband was dead. She opened the door but did not let him in.

  “I know,” she said, fetched the autopsy file from the kitchen table, and handed it over.

  “You came to my flat last night,” he said. “Trudi says you were looking for me.”

  Her answer was blunt. “I was. But now I don’t need you anymore.”

  She closed the door and watched, through the spy hole, how Frisch slipped off his glasses and stood polishing their lenses, his face blank, his eyes blinking as though stinging from the cold.

  2.

  Robert came two days later. She had hardly left the flat. He was tired, hollow-eyed, inexperienced in grief. She made him tea and listened to his story; omitted to mention that she’d allowed Karel to leave. Robert sat, head bowed, weeping quietly into his cup. After an hour of this she took him lightly by the hand and led him to her bedroom. He only resisted her once, very briefly, when she lifted the shirt she had only half unbuttoned over his head. Afterwards he slept, one hand stretched across the top of her pillow, entangled with her hair. She lay next to him, taking in his smell, and found it reassured her. When he woke towards nightfall, she was pleased to see he was not ashamed.

  “There’s the funeral to see to,” he said from the door, still doing up his trousers.

  She nodded gravely, saw him out, then went through her wardrobe in search of her black suit.

  3.

  Robert returned the next morning, and the morning after that. After a week of this he stayed the nights too, went home only to change his clothes. They talked very little, spent most of the time in bed. Anna found it was good to be held.

  “I have to go see the solicitor today,” he announced one morning. “The factory is being written over to my name. Mother has agreed.”

  She nodded, considered what he was trying to tell her. “What exactly does it make?” she asked. “That factory of yours?”

  He hesitated. “Some part you need for building radios.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Robert smiled sheepishly, picked up the phone, and called his lawyer, trying to find out.

  4.

  Nine weeks after Wolfgang’s funeral, Robert proposed.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  He looked hurt.

  “No, really,” she said. “I don’t have a death certificate.”

  “It can be arranged,” he said.

  She had noticed this in him: a new sense of certainty. It must come from being rich.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked again.

  “I am too old,” she said, and took him back to bed.

  5.

  She often sat, stroking his face, his eye, thinking of Anton.

  “Tell me about your tussle,” she said.

  “It was a boy from Vienna,” he told her. “His father was a Socialist. He said he’d heard about my father. The detective. He said that he was nothing but a Nazi goon.”

  She smiled. “So you fought to defend his honour.”

  “No. I fought because I feared that it was true. I threw a chair at his head. He ran my face into the wall. For months you could see the stain.”

  “You got angry,” she said. “It was almost like a kind of joy.”

  “Yes,” he answered, looking at her in surprise. “How do you know?”

  “A friend told me that that’s how it feels.”

  6.

  In February that year Poldi gave birth to her child. There were some minor complications, necessitating a week’s stay at the hospital. Robert took Anna along when he went to visit her bedside.

  “Look,” said Poldi, pointing at the baby as though she could not believe it. “It’s a boy. Don’t he look just like his father?”

  Anna stroked his chin and affirmed that he did. She wondered absently whether Herr Seidel had carried that same look of pride and expectation when afforded the first glimpse of his son and heir.

  7.

  Robert proposed again in May. The death certificate had just come through. It came in the post, without explanation, a single sheet of paper, signed and stamped. Robert had arranged it. She did not know how.

  “It’s stupid,” she brushed off his proposal. “An infatuation. You lost your lover and now you think you must have a wife.

  “I am too old,” she said. That, and her uncle’s maxim, voiced to her cousin when he first came home with a bride: “You don’t have to buy the whole cow if you want a drink of milk.”

  “Will you?” he pressed her.

  In time it became tiresome to demur.

  “Your mother won’t like it,” she objected, her last line of defence.

  “Mother can go to hell.”

  She did not ask what would happen if Eva chose to return.

  8.

  They were married in September. Robert’s mother and Poldi were the only guests. From their excitement and laughter you would have thought they enjoyed themselves.

  “Our life’s a comedy,” Anna said, as they made their excuses after the wedding repast and withdrew to bed. “It started badly and ends in a wedding.”

  He laughed and did his best to get her with child.

  9.

  He got stuck on the thought from time to time.

  “How can it be?” he’d ask, and shift in his seat as though confessing a sin. “I thought I loved her.”

  “And now you love me.”

  He nodded.

  “So you changed your mind. It happens every day.” She could see the words frightened him. “I loved him too. My Anton. Even after.”

  “After what?”

  “After I learned he slept with men.” It felt good to say it. Robert seemed shocked at the revelation, then puzzled.

  “How does it work?” he asked with a blush. “Sleeping with men?”

  She laughed, and a minute later found herself explaining the mechanics as she imagined them. She found she had worked them out long ago, had made an inventory of all the possibilities.

  “You’re disgusted,” she said, studying his face.

  Indeed he had gone pale. But a minute later he confided, “What I was thinking: a man and a woman could do this.”

  “You filthy schoolboy,” she chided him, but her hand reached out and squeezed
her husband’s, grateful for his words.

  10.

  When they packed up her flat, she took down the photo hanging over her bed, of a young woman with short hair. Robert had asked her about it many times.

  “Who is she?”

  She quoted what Eva had told her, the day they had talked in Anna’s bedroom: “We will never understand all that has happened. We weren’t here.”

  In the Seidel house she insisted on hanging the picture on the dining room wall. “It does us good,” she said. “Debris from the past.”

  When strangers asked, she made her out to be a distant cousin, and called her Eva Frey.

  11.

  Two months after the wedding they found Frau Seidel crumpled on her bedroom floor, a frothy vomit on her lips. They brought her to hospital, assuming a stroke, and learned that she had ingested rat poison. Robert went home and threw out her entire collection of pharmaceuticals. It was assumed it was a mix-up, the result of frayed nerves. There was no reason to believe she had attempted suicide.

  Detoxification was hard on her. On the advice of her doctor Robert had his mother committed to a private sanatorium at the edge of the city, where she was treated for morphine addiction. By silent agreement between her son and her physicians, she remained there even after the symptoms of withdrawal had subsided. Robert visited her once a week. They played cards and read the paper. Anna could not tell whether he was punishing his mother with her exile or was motivated by a sincere concern for her health. She did not ask. The house was brighter without her. Frau Seidel and Anna had never got on.

  12.

  Poldi’s son was christened Gotthelf. Neither Anna nor Robert understood how she had decided on that name. As the boy grew into a toddler then a young child, Anna expected Poldi to leave. It wasn’t lack of money that kept her. Robert had written part of the factory over to her; she received a yearly dividend of its profits. But Poldi gave no indication that she was planning to leave; she had never moved out of the room she’d lived in with Wolfgang, and spent much of her time there, listening to records and leafing through magazines. Once Robert’s mother had left, she ventured forth more frequently and gradually took over many of the daily tasks of running the household. She cleaned, did laundry, took her turn at the stove. They lived side by side like strangers: cordially, that is, without friction. The only time she and Anna had a fight was when Anna suggested they hire a maid.

  13.

  They talked about Wolfgang only once. It was hard to say how it came about. Poldi’s boy had slipped playing in the garden, cut open his knee. Robert was away working. The two women sat together and tended to the howling boy. He ceased crying at last, curled up on the sofa with a toy.

  “A tipple?” Anna asked, glad to be relieved from his noise.

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  They had more than one. Halfway through the bottle Anna looked over at Poldi; her lean and sallow face.

  “So did he do it? Wolfgang?”

  Poldi returned her gaze, surprised. “Of course he did.”

  “Tell me.”

  The younger woman shrugged. “They were fighting, you know. Every day a little worse.”

  “About money?”

  “Nah. About me.”

  “And?”

  “It’s just how you think it was. He got drunk, they had a fight, and he threw him out the window. He showed me how.” She made a movement as though throwing a cat off the sofa, by the scruff of its neck. “He came to me after, ran in the room, put on his hat. ‘I did him in,’ he said. ‘To hell with the bastard.’ He was really calm, mind, only he forgot his shoes. I stood shoutin’ after him, ‘Take yer shoes!’ but it was too late. The maid heard something or other and pretended to Frau Seidel that she’d seen for herself. Those two, they hated each other like spiders, they did. God knows why.” Her eyes brimmed up a little, from booze and sympathy for her husband’s ordeal. “I keep thinking he must’ve walked straight past him, lyin’ there in the grass, bleeding like, and him wearin’ only his socks.”

  “That’s all?”

  Poldi blew her nose. “What did you expect?”

  “Don’t tell Robert,” said Anna. “It’s better that he doesn’t know.”

  14.

  In the spring of ’51 Sophie wrote from New York with belated congratulations. She did not explain how she had heard about the wedding. Two months on, Anna received a card announcing Sophie’s own engagement; a year later, a similarly formal card announced the birth of a child. That was all they heard from the little journalist.

  On none of the three occasions did Anna feel moved to respond.

  15.

  It was more than five years before Anna saw Frisch again. They ran into each other in the street. He was on his way home and invited her up for a coffee. She accepted and sat in his study, playing with her wedding ring.

  “How extraordinary,” she said, pointing at the top of his bookshelf. “What is it, exactly?”

  “Police evidence,” he said, fetching down the stuffed crow. “It’s got some sort of infestation. And the beak has fallen off. I suppose he couldn’t get the right chemicals after all.” He told her the story of interrogating a Russian chemist in connection with her husband’s murder.

  Anna listened politely but showed no sign of real interest.

  “It’s all in the past for you, Frau Seidel, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said, “all in the past.” Then added, “One thing, though, that I’d like to know. How did Robert’s father die? The real one, the detective. We never found out the truth.”

  She expected Frisch to plead ignorance, but he answered her at once.

  “He fell out a window,” he said, and looked baffled when she started to laugh.

  “It’s almost a pattern,” she said.

  Frisch smiled his phlegmatic smile. “No, no, nothing like that. There was no suspicion of foul play. Teuben was drunk and slipped. He went to a party and attempted to urinate out of a window.”

  Again he had to wait until she finished laughing.

  “Will you tell—the young Herr Seidel?” He had almost said “the boy.”

  “No,” she decided. “He has quite enough on his plate thinking his father was a Nazi swine.”

  “Well,” said Frisch, straightening his shirt front. “He was that too.”

  It was a morning full of mirth.

  16.

  On her way down from Frisch’s flat Anna surprised two teenagers kissing on one of the landings. They jumped apart, embarrassed. Anna recognized the boy as the witness in the trial all those years ago. The girl was Trudi Frisch.

  “What are you looking at?” Trudi barked.

  “You’ve never liked me.” Anna smiled, then looked at the boy. He was sixteen or thereabouts, something soft and trusting to his lean and girlish features. “Just like Robert used to be,” she muttered to herself, and bestowed on him a smile.

  The boy returned it at once.

  “A handsome lad,” she said to Trudi, then went on down, put an extra something to the swaying of her hips. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she could hear the two youths enter into argument. She pressed the front door gently shut behind her.

  17.

  In the summer of 1959 a woman rang the doorbell of the Seidel villa. She was young, smartly dressed, and evidently well-to-do.

  “How do you do?” she said in English. “My German, I’m afraid, is very bad.”

  When Robert asked her to state her business, she blushed and gave her name.

  “I am Judith Rothmann. I believe—Well, you see, my uncle used to live here.”

  Robert froze. Anna, standing in the corridor behind Robert, spoke past his shoulder.

  “We owe you money,” she said.

  She said it quickly. She could not bear the thought that Robert’s hesitation had roots in something other than his surprise.

  The woman, meanwhile, looked from Anna to Robert, trying to establish if she was his mother, or his wife.r />
  Two

  1.

  Eva and Karel left Vienna that same night. They woke up the forger, paid what they owed on the travel documents they’d commissioned, and headed north, then crossed the border into Germany on foot. By the new year they had made their way to Den Haag and spent most of their money on two berths to Boston.

  All through their slow journey north, Karel was troubled by the thought that Eva had eavesdropped on his conversation with Anna Beer. He watched her closely for signs and caught her looking about herself from time to time, scanning the faces of strangers.

  “No more guardian angel, eh?”

  “No,” she said, anger rising in her voice. “Now I’ve got you.”

  He expected to wake one morning to the sight of Eva holding a bucket of boiling water over his face.

  2.

  The boat had a two-week delay. It would have been wiser to leave her, but he found he did not wish to. The police must be after them, and as a couple they were easy to identify. Also, Eva herself was a risk. He could not fathom her emotions. She hardly spoke to him, shouted him down whenever he brought up Vienna, Robert, his killing of Wolfgang. All the same she stuck around, seemed reluctant to let him out of her sight. When he went drinking, he found her insisting on coming along.

  “You are making them nervous,” he told her, pointing at the patrons at the bar. “You don’t look like a working girl, and nobody comes here to drink with his wife.”

  “You’re ashamed of me,” she flared up, quietly, but with venom in each word. He started to deny it, but a look from her shut him up. “Leave, if you like. I can do without you.”

  There seemed to be no bottom to her spite.

  3.

  Two days into the crossing Eva fell sick. She was running a high fever. Concerned, the ship’s doctor insisted on quarantine. Karel pleaded to share her isolation, arguing that, whatever it was, he was sure to be infected. He had not cared for anyone like this since his mother had died, more than a decade before: swaddling Eva, changing her sheets and nightdress, forcing beef broth down her swollen throat. In the early hours of the morning she grew lucid and stared at him in surprise. He thought she did not recognize him and attempted to soothe her with his voice.