by Dan Vyleta
Identifying the correct door proved harder than she had imagined. She knew that his apartment was on the second floor of the building’s side wing, its windows facing into the courtyard. But when she climbed the narrow staircase of the side wing – itself very different from the elegant revolutions of the main flight of stairs – and came out on a cramped little landing, she found that all three of the doors before her might plausibly lead to a set of rooms with courtyard windows diagonally across from her own. Not one of the doors bore a name. There were no mail slots and no bells, just crude knockers set into the flaking paint. In the top quarter of each door, an inch above the crown of her head, a small window of green milk-glass replaced the lacquered wood, and bled faint traces of light on to the landing.
She stood around for some minutes, unsure of herself, then was startled when a corpulent man in a dirty tuxedo pushed up the stairs behind her, and brushed her buttocks as he squeezed his way past. She turned around after him without speaking, and he stopped halfway up the next flight of stairs, his features in darkness.
‘May-I help you?’ he shot out, the accent odd to her ears.
‘I am looking for the man with the painted face.’
This seemed to puzzle the stranger, who came down a step, the lower half of his face entering into the light. His skin was rough and as though yellow, the cheeks fleshy and pockmarked, full lips framed by the wisps of a beard. It angered her briefly that he had not bothered to remove his hat. She noticed now that he was carrying a case under one arm, black and cylindrical in shape. Its handle seemed to have fallen off.
‘Pain-ted fa-ce,’ he said, in his oddly accented German. ‘You-are look-ing for the clown.’
‘I don’t know what he is.’
‘There,’ said the man, pointing his free hand at the door to her left, then raising it upwards to lay a warning finger across the swell of his lips.
‘Bet-ter don’t disturb. He works all-night. And sleeps in daytime. Just like my-self.’
He chuckled at that, and, as he threw back his head to grant space to his mirth, she saw for a moment the contours of his face, unusually wide, the eyes slanting upwards under the heavy bones of his brow.
‘Thank you, Herr–’
‘Yuu,’ he said, ‘simply Yuu,’ and finally doffed his hat to reveal a head of black hair, cut very short above the ears and somehow jagged, as though he had done it himself. He bowed, turned, and was off, the leather heels of his dress-shoes loud against the staircase’s naked stone.
She waited until she heard him enter an apartment high above her in what she surmised was the garret, then reached out to rap the knocker of the door on her left. There was no answer. She waited, reached out again, wishing now that she had brought a warmer coat, for it was chilly on the narrow landing. A third rap was answered by a squeaky noise as though of a man sitting up in his bed. A fourth rap got him moving; she heard him stand up, cast around for clothes. When the door swung open, his hands were still busy buttoning his trousers. He wore no shirt and had pulled his braces over a ribbed, cotton vest, the shadow of old sweat forming a wedge between the muscles of his chest. His feet were bare, turned on their sides to limit their exposure to the floorboards’ chill, the toenails chipped and dirty.
‘What do you want?’ said the man, and leaned an arm against the door frame, exposing to her the dark tangle of his armpit. ‘You lost or something?’
She shook her head and stared at him. The first thing that struck her was that he was much shorter than she had thought, more muscular. There was a deep solidity to his arm and shoulder, to that compact body underneath the dirty, sleeveless shirt. His face, too, was alive with the movement of his muscles, the eyes open and passionate: the face of a boy itching for a schoolyard brawl. All this surprised her. He had seemed so calm behind the shelter of his make-up.
His eyelashes, she thought, were much longer than her own.
‘Can’t you speak?’ he asked her, more gently now, though the gentleness dissipated as soon as she had forced her tongue into an answer.
‘I am here about your wife.’
‘My wife?’
‘Yes. I heard that she was sick.’
‘My wife is sick? That’s what you have heard? Where?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I suppose Dr Beer told me. In passing, you know. He probably doesn’t even remember.’
‘Dr Beer told you my wife is sick?’
‘In a word, yes. I bring medicine.’ She reached into her handbag to produce the bottle she had so carefully marked. ‘It is sure to give relief.’
It was hard to make out all the emotions that ran through his face as she spoke. There was anger there, and scorn; fear, too, as he leaned out the door and shot a glance up and down the stairs. She wished he would open the door further and allow her to see more of the room. His sink, for instance, was invisible to her, as was the bed; the pile of magazines about whose contents she had so often wondered. All she could make out was an edge of the windowsill, and an ashtray that stood overflowing not far from the heels of his still out-turned feet. His armpit filled the air between them with the smell of his sweat. She found herself intrigued by the smell: it seemed to her, at that moment, more intimate an imposition than if he had stooped to grab hold of her hand and kissed it. Not that he seemed in the mood for gallantry: his anger was palpable, a physical presence, like a dog straining at the leash. And yet there was, in all his gestures, an odd awareness of her. She saw it in his eyes, which made a survey of her chest even as they glowered, and in the cock of his narrow hips. It was something her mother had once tried to tell her about, before embarrassment had slipped a gag into her thoughts: she had whispered a phrase about their milkman’s ‘quiet hunger’, and dropped her bony hands to rest a moment on the swell of her thighs. All of a sudden it struck the girl that this was the closest she had been to a man, unsupervised, if one disregarded her father, that is – and Dr Beer. The thought brought home to her her own audacity. She would have to find someone to whom she could brag about it later.
He took his time in any case, stared at the bottle with intense suspicion, then grabbed it from her without touching her hand. He unscrewed the stopper, drew the pipette out of the liquid, and squeezed a drop into his hand.
‘What’s this?’ he mumbled, then shot another glance into the dark of the staircase behind her.
‘Medicine. I’m afraid I forgot the name. I can make enquiries. But I’m sure it will do your wife no end of good.’
‘I have no wife,’ he said, harshly, and shoved the bottle back into her hand. ‘Who the hell are you?’
This drew her up short. There had been, in all her preparations, no plan for an answer. All she had imagined was this: her talking to the man across the yard. He should have thanked her by now, invited her in to meet his wife; or broken down and confessed to her the nature of his crimes. She had not reckoned on the menace of his physicality, the spastic bunching of his fists. It called to mind the blood she had seen washing down his sink, and she took a step back.
‘I am very sorry,’ she said. ‘I was told you live with your wife.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I live in the house. With my uncle. Main wing, first floor.’
She watched him turn his head to the window, work out her provenance. His face was very dark now, muscles bunching on cheeks and chin.
‘Did Speckstein send you? Is he watching me? Are you his maid or something?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ she said, then became uncertain. Perhaps it was better to signal that she wasn’t on her own. ‘Though he knows I am here.’
She paused, swallowed, stepped closer yet to the top of the stairs. ‘My room faces the yard,’ she said. ‘There was a woman–’
He grew angry again, eyes flashing in his bulging face. It cost him a great effort to speak. ‘You have been watching,’ he said. ‘Whatever you think you have seen … I’m an artist, you see. An artist. I perform … There are important people, you unde
rstand. They come to see me. My show, it uses props – mannequins – you understand?’
The door had opened more widely during his tirade and left unobstructed the view of the room, and the room beyond. She found herself staring past his shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of the unknown. He followed her gaze, then lifted a fist before his face. For a moment she thought he would leap out, smash her head in, but he quickly jumped back and closed the door until it stood open no wider than a crack. Only one eye remained visible to her.
‘There is nothing here,’ he hissed. ‘Nothing of interest. You hear?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, drawing closer again to the door. They stood breathing as though after a fight, his eye hanging head-high in the gloom.
‘Where do you perform?’ she whispered across the silence that had risen between them. ‘Perhaps I could come one evening, and–’
He slammed the door in her face: put a shoulder to it and slammed it, the wood cracking under his weight. She stumbled back as though she had been slapped, lost her balance on the stairs and fell down four or five steps, bruising her ankle and her buttocks in the process. If Dr Beer comes tonight, it ran through her head, he’ll find my bottom black and blue. The giggle escaped her before she could stop it: a single high peal that ran up the stairs. She wondered whether the angry man heard it, standing barefoot behind his door, and whether it made him angrier still. As quickly as she could, she stood up, and hobbled down the stairs, into the warmth of the courtyard. As she crossed it, her eyes still scrunched against the brightness of the light, she thought about what she had seen over the man’s shoulder in that short moment when he had opened the door wide enough to grant her access to the flat. A foot was little to go by. It might have been dead, or made out of wood, the stain on its heel nothing but dirt.
Right there, out in the yard, her legs still shaky with her triumph and her fall, it occurred to her what she must do in order to find out.
5
All afternoon she waited for the man to leave: a clot in her stomach, pins and needles running up her spine; one ankle swelling, the other leg numb; bruises stirring deep within her rump. At first she stood by her window, peered anxiously across the yard. To see him clearly she had to draw close; press her face to the glass, or open it up, push her head into the open. He had drawn the curtains, tattered, threadbare rags that billowed in the breeze and revealed as much as they hid. He tugged at one such curtain to slide it across a foot-wide gap and succeeded only in pulling it down, his face blackening with anger. To his side, in the back room, the other set of windows remained in utter darkness: perhaps, she thought, he had painted the panes, or nailed some blankets to the window frames. They might hide a darkroom, or a slaughterhouse.
Then, the ripped fabric of his curtain still in his hands, he caught her watching him. The brow shifted, muscles moving through his meaty face. He dropped the rag and leaned out into the yard – head, shoulders, breast all threading through the woodwork – and shouted something she didn’t hear, his hand rolled into a fist; shook it too, high over his head, with the violence of a man wielding a club, cotton vest sweat-soaked from his efforts. She recoiled from the window, bit her lip; drew close again after counting to a hundred, and found his eyes still peering across, the hand raised, ready to punch. His stare poured into her: her lungs caught it and met it with a wheeze; pushed it downwards, to her stomach, where acids rose to drown it. She burped a sour burp, then licked the spittle from her lips; checked the window again and found him there, staring darkly, waiting to pounce.
So she shifted to the kitchen. The angle was bad, and Vesalius was there, busy with tomorrow’s lunch, but she found she could watch the side wing’s door from there, sitting in the shadows of the wall. In time she relaxed a little, put water on for tea, then sat, both hands around her steaming cup, eyes on the yard, and was lulled to peace by the noises of the house. The sounds here were different from those that collected in her room: running water, the growl of a flush, then the angry phrases of an argument, raining down from high above, a man and his wife having it out about his mother. She listened and imagined the scene, her body calming with each moment; reached in her mind to that other marital sound that had flown in through her window in the depth of night, its origins opaque to her, unspeakable. She had spent much energy unravelling its mystery, had once watched two horses couple in the country, and stolen books down from her uncle’s shelf. The mystery had not lifted with these instructions in anatomy. One had to marry to learn what made a woman bark her pleasure rudely out into the yard. The doctor had borne the sound as one bears a whipping, shoulders rolled into his chest, palms on his trousers, as though to steady his thighs. He didn’t wear a wedding ring. Perhaps he found it interfered with his duties. She wondered if Speckstein had worn one, back when his wife was alive and he had made a living looking up his patients’ skirts. Behind her, Vesalius dropped a saucepan lid and dissolved the argument upstairs in its clean, insistent ringing. She bent low to pick it up by its wooden handle, then swore and held her back in sudden agony; dropped hard into a chair, the lid still ringing in her lap, and smothered its song between her palms. At the centre of the gesture there sat a hard little sound when her ring-finger collided with the metal. Zuzka noticed it, looked up into the old woman’s face, found nothing there but pain and spite. It puzzled her, and she decided to ask, making sure she sounded polite.
‘Frau Vesalius,’ she asked. ‘Were you ever married?’
The other woman swore, rubbed the soreness in her spine, nodded.
‘Twenty-seven years.’
‘Twenty-seven years,’ the girl echoed, finding it easy to summon her wonder. ‘How was he?’
Frau Vesalius stopped her movements to consider this, fingers still dug into her spine.
‘A good husband,’ she said at last. ‘Never missed a day of work, then lost all his savings all the same. He had hands like a schoolgirl.’
She stretched out one of her own, hard as a shovel. The ring was silver, tarnished; cut deep into a fold of skin. Her knuckles dwarfed it, trapped it, each finger knotted like a root. Zuzka looked from hand to face and found the same hardness in each. Her own hands lay soft upon her knees.
‘Was he, you know – faithful?’
She threw it out quickly, fearing reprimand, and was surprised to see that Vesalius refused to take insult.
‘On the whole,’ she said. ‘Had an eye on my sister. As a young man, that is. It goes after a while.’
‘It?’
‘Don’t play daft.’
They locked eyes for just a moment, until Vesalius got up, set the saucepan lid down upon the counter and took a knife to a cluster of beets. Her fingers were soon running with their juice. It provoked the girl, being ignored like this; there were other things she longed to learn.
‘How did you know?’ she asked in the end, of this woman she didn’t like, had never liked, not from the day she’d come to the house, two months ago and more. ‘Before you married him. How did you know you were in love?’
‘Love,’ Vesalius said, and sneered across one shoulder. ‘That’s what we’re after. The good doctor, is it?’
The girl had no choice then but to march off, back to her room, and leave the woman to her cackle. Tears of fury almost made her miss her man.
By the time she had dried her eyes and was back at the window, he was already halfway across the yard, his hat hiding his features, a duffel bag heavy in one hand. She recognised him by his movements, the angry roll of his shoulders, feet stomping as though he sought to punish the ground. Even so, she wanted to make sure, and sneaked into her uncle’s bathroom whose high narrow window afforded a view of the main road. She climbed upon the bathtub’s rim, pressed her nose against the narrow vent, and watched him walk up to the tram stop: light a cigarette, his features crude in the late-afternoon sun. When it was clear he wouldn’t return, she clambered down again and ignored the throbbing in her ankle; fetched a coat and tied a scarf over her hair. Vesalius saw
her leave. She stood in the kitchen door, the beet knife still in her hand, and watched her slip out. As Zuzka descended the stairs, the snap of the deadbolt followed her down.
The janitor was not in his flat. She rang the bell, then walked into the yard, staying close to the wall, in the hope of avoiding Vesalius’s gaze. The metal door led down into the odour of wet-rot. She listened, hoping he would be alone; heard nothing apart from the shuffling of feet. The door to his workshop stood ajar: she saw his back, bent at his workbench, a bottle of beer standing open by his feet. An odd sort of table stood pushed against the wall, its sides elevated, two wood-planers cluttering its surface.
She knocked and pushed through the doorway. It wasn’t until she had entered completely that she noticed the child. Lieschen was standing in a chalkmark circle she had drawn upon the floor, was red-faced and somehow dishevelled. When the girl saw Zuzka, she squealed in delight and spun her body into a pirouette, careful not to step outside the circle’s confines. She got through a turn and a half before she lost her balance and had to throw out a leg to take her weight; panted and laughed, and pushed her braids back over her shoulder’s hunch.
‘Fräulein Zuzana,’ she shouted. ‘I’m learning to dance.’