by Dan Vyleta
‘We better get back to work,’ Neurath said. ‘I need to be done by sun-up, return to my post.’ He spoke softly and fast, caught his breath after each phrase.
The janitor acquiesced, followed him in, the smell of blood growing thicker here, along with that of boiling fat. He would let the air out later that morning, once the kitchens got going, two dozen households frying cauliflower, potatoes, pork liver and Speck. He’d ask Neurath to return at the end of his shift, help him clean up the mess. Together, they walked down into the cellar workshop, and as they passed the game table that had taken him three days to build, the janitor indulged himself by running two knuckles across its smooth and polished surface. After school, little Lieschen would come, and they would have themselves a game.
4
And just like that, he was gone out of her life. For three whole days, all Zuzka saw of Dr Beer was a few minutes’ worth of interview when she sent Vesalius to fetch him to her sick bed: perfunctory visits in which he took her pulse and advised her curtly to ‘pull herself together’. She went up to his apartment, mid-morning on the day after she had brought him to the green-eyed lady, and again after dinner, but he saw her off at the door, explaining that he was ‘quite simply snowed under with work’. She asked, of course, whether he had sent for the police to arrest the man who had so mistreated the woman, but was told, with a heat that surprised her in the doctor, that she had misunderstood the whole situation.
‘The man is her brother. Otto Frei by name. I am seeing to the patient.’
And added, in a tone at once conspiratorial and patronising, ‘Better not mention it to anyone. Especially your uncle. Frei has reasons to keep quiet about Eva. Reasons one should respect.’
It stung her, this ‘Eva’, thrown in with a familiarity that contrasted sharply with the hurried formality with which he treated her now.
‘I will come with you when you go to see her next,’ she pleaded, swallowing the sharper words that had risen to her tongue, but was met once again by his shaking head.
‘It’s simply no longer your concern, Fräulein Speckstein.’
And then, with an avuncular benevolence that only served to irritate her further: ‘Look here, the winter semester has only just started. There may still be time to secure a place; no doubt your uncle can pull a few strings. If you are so keen for patients of your own, there is no better place to start.’
She began to protest, but he simply closed the door on her, closed it gently, without haste or anger, as one does with a pedlar whose tawdry wares one has declined. Never in her life had she been so summarily dismissed.
Nor could she gather any more information by keeping up her surveillance of the apartment across the yard. She had watched it on the night Beer had waited for the mime’s return (this despite a deep exhaustion that beset her like a fever), but had not been able to see much beyond the glow of a cigarette, moving up and down the length of the two rooms. For a brief interval – it must have been gone four o’clock by then – the light had been turned on and she had watched them talking, Beer and the stranger: the latter angry, stripped down to his waist. Then they had turned the light off again, and she, overcome by the many hours at the window, had thrown herself on to her bed and fallen asleep, pins and needles running through her calves and lower thighs. The next night, she stood guard from midnight onwards, only to discover that the mime had acquired somewhere a new set of curtains for the first of his two rooms. He drew them just as soon as he came home; poked his head through once, puffed on a cigarette, his face paint still in place, then disappeared again behind their heavy cloth, a cold, sudden rain bearing down into the yard.
She turned to Lieschen next, the only other bearer of her secret; wondered whether she had heard something, seen something; was keen to rekindle in herself the feeling that she stood at the centre of this mystery. Zuzka found her on the street outside the building, skipping up and down the pavement, alternately hitting or avoiding all the many puddles left behind by the rain, the hem of her dress sodden like a dishcloth. A dirty little teddy bear, much worn by use, was dangling from her wrist: it seemed she had tied it there with a piece of string. As soon as she caught sight of Zuzka, the girl smiled and ran towards her, then stopped and blushed as she drew close; raised a hand over one eye, the teddy rising with it, hanging upside down before her face. It was from behind the shelter of this impromptu patch that Lieschen addressed herself to her friend.
‘Fräulein Zuzka!’ she called, putting special emphasis upon her name. ‘Is it true that it’s a Czech name? Imagine, we have been friends all this time and you never told me.’
Zuzka smiled, charmed as ever by the girl’s good nature, trying to make out what Lieschen was hiding with her hand.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s Czech. My sister was Dáša – Dagmar – and my mother, Milena.’
The girl nodded excitedly. ‘Janitor told me. He says when you are Czech it’s “Pani” and not “Fräulein”. Is that right?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What else did the janitor tell you?’
She shrugged, shook her head, laughed. ‘Something I didn’t understand. About politics and so forth: “protect-or-rate of bloody shwaykes”. But you should’ve said something. I said it wrong all along. So it’s “Pani Zuzka”. “Pani, pani, pani”. It’s much nicer than “Fräulein”.’
In her joy at her discovery, the girl let drop the raised hand and spun herself into a clumsy little pirouette. One of her feet hit a puddle and splashed not only herself but Zuzka, too, with a spray of muddy water.
‘Look out,’ Zuzka called, jumping back. Then she caught sight of what the girl had been hiding.
‘But how did this happen?’
No sooner had Lieschen recovered her balance than she realised her secret was out. Her first instinct, clumsily deceitful, was to throw her hand back up to her face and deny that anything was wrong; her lips were set for the lie, eyes hardening with a fierce sort of pride. But almost immediately something else won out, and Lieschen lowered arm and teddy once again and stood gazing at her adult friend. A blush spread, started at neck and cheeks and shot upwards, to the roots of her hair. Zuzka noticed it, felt moved, her own childhood stirring in her, inarticulate and grave. She lowered herself into a crouch to look more closely at the discoloration that covered Lieschen’s cheekbone and sat in a loop around the eye: green, yellow, blue, the elusive colours of an oil slick spread against her fragile, childish skin.
‘How did this happen?’ she repeated, more gently now, and took hold of the girl’s shoulders. ‘Did you get into a fight at school?’
The girl shook her head, then shrugged. She seemed very much ashamed of something, was fidgeting under Zuzka’s hands.
‘Your father then?’
Again the girl shrugged, wet her mouth: pink tongue lingering on the bow of her upper lip.
‘He’s very sad,’ she said at last. ‘More than usual.’
‘He’s drunk, you mean. Did he beat you when he was drunk?’
The girl hung her head and dug around in the pocket of her dress, retrieving a handkerchief still carefully folded, as though it had been purchased like that and not yet been spread out. She pointed to its pattern with a strange insistence, and held it up for Zuzka to admire.
‘It’s pretty, isn’t it? So many colours.’
‘Your father gave you that?’
The girl nodded, her eyes pleading for something that Zuzka couldn’t quite grasp. She was about to tell Lieschen that it was monstrous, buying her off with a gaudy piece of cloth bought from some penny vendor, and promise that she would have words with her father – or with her uncle! – when it dawned on her that the girl was beseeching her to let it drop. Lieschen was not ashamed for running around with a black eye; she was ashamed that people would realise her father had hit her: in this, it seemed, she sensed some terrible humiliation. It was almost as though it was she who had done the hitting. Touched, exasperated, Zuzka straightened and offered the girl her hand.
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‘We need to put some meat on the eye. A steak or a pork chop. That’s what my mother did when somebody got hurt in the face: put meat on the bruise. I don’t know why, but it seems to work.’
‘A steak?’ Lieschen asked dubiously.
‘Yes,’ said Zuzka. ‘Come, we’ll go upstairs to Frau Vesalius’s kitchen and fetch one. I dare say you’ll look funny with a steak over one eye.’
The girl smiled at that, took Zuzka’s hand, and allowed herself to be walked up to Speckstein’s flat.
It might have been better to buy a steak at the butcher’s shop, but Zuzka did not want to spend the little money she had. Also, rationing had started some weeks ago, and she had no access to the household’s coupons. Perhaps it would be possible to take the meat without Vesalius noticing: Zuzka had no interest in explaining it to her, and had avoided the widow since their conversation about marriage some three days before. She asked the girl to wait outside on the landing and let herself into the flat, the hallway carpet swallowing the sound of her tread. She was in luck: Vesalius was not in the kitchen just then. Zuzka ran to the larder, searched the meat shelf, found a stack of cutlets wrapped in red butcher’s paper. She took the topmost, felt the cold, spongy moistness of meat. It called to mind, for a moment, the strange woman’s back: the blackened holes that gaped at hip, bum and shoulder blade. Disgusted, momentarily dizzy, she felt a stab as though of something cold deep in one lung; felt a rash of goosebumps charge up one leg; stood wheezing by the kitchen window, recovering her wits. It was there that Vesalius found her. The widow stepped into the kitchen and saw her holding the packet of meat. Something ran through the housekeeper’s face, it might have been worry. It was soon expunged by her habitual sourness of expression.
‘That’s tomorrow’s lunch, that,’ she said gruffly, and moved to take it from Zuzka’s hand. Zuzka would not let her, tore it away from the woman’s grip, then clasped it to the shiver of her bosom like a letter from some beau.
‘I will bring it back,’ she shouted and broke into a run, slammed the door on the way out, then stood upon the landing searching her blouse for stains.
‘Is that the steak?’ asked Lieschen, her hands raised over her ears, startled by the bang of the door.
‘Pork chop,’ said Zuzka and quickly dragged her down the stairs.
Out in the street, Zuzka’s breathing calmed, and sensation returned to the toes of her left foot, which, for some minutes, had lain stuffed in her shoe as though dead. They walked half a mile until they had reached the grounds of the hospital, where there was a row of park benches shielded by trees.
And so they sat, Zuzka and the girl, on a bench watching invalids take the air, Lieschen with the unwrapped pork chop placed over one eye, its juices running in thin rivulets down her face and chin, a bloody moustache forming in the down over her upper lip. It did not take long until they both broke out in laughter at their adventure. It rose in Zuzka first: she thought of Vesalius, the scene in the kitchen, their wrestling like fishwives over a pound of flesh (in her imagination they stood, legs spread for balance, arms bloodied to their elbows, tugging at either end of half a pig), and then of her desperate gesture as she cradled the meat against her breast. When the laughter burst out of her, Lieschen was, at first, surprised. She looked up from under the chop, blood drops like tears streaking down her cheek, then fell to laughing herself, hesitant at first, unsure why Zuzka was so merry, then – the floodgates opened – with ever greater energy, until she drummed her feet into the ground and dropped the pork chop into her lap. It was only the stares of passers-by that convinced them to calm down, little by little, and then the slow onset of a cold rain which bid them leave the bench and make for home.
Once they had arrived inside the building, Zuzka took back the chop and wrapped it up again in the red butcher’s paper in order to return it to Vesalius’s larder. Before she took leave of the girl, who stood wet and shivering in the front hallway, peering into her father’s letter box, she remembered why she had sought her out in the first place and quickly asked her a question: had Lieschen heard any more about the green-eyed lady with the torn-open back, or seen anything to do with the man the doctor claimed was her brother? To her surprise, Lieschen had. In quick, simple phrases, she told ‘Pani Zuzka’ that, early in the morning when Zuzka was still sleeping, exhausted by the long hours she had stayed awake, she had watched the ‘sad, angry man’ walk up the main staircase just as she was on her way to the bakery to fetch some rolls for breakfast. Curious, aware that this was the man who lived in the flat where Zuzka and she had found the ‘beautiful angel who doesn’t move’, Lieschen had followed and watched him go into Dr Beer’s practice; and this not just that ‘first’ morning, but ‘yesterday, too’ and ‘once again this morning’: she had waited for him out here by the letter boxes, even though it made her late for school.
‘He kept on yawning and didn’t even raise his hand like one does when one has manners,’ Lieschen said, proud of all the knowledge she had managed to accrue. ‘Is he really very bad?’
Zuzka shook her head. ‘I really don’t know,’ she said, bowed down to the girl and kissed her on the crown of her head. They took their leave then, young woman and girl, each of them off to rest a little and change into dry clothes.
5
She went to talk to Beer the next morning, determined to show him that she would not be shut out of his secrets. Her first step was to beg her uncle for an alarm clock and then set it for the break of dawn: she wanted to see for herself how Otto Frei called on the doctor. Speckstein obliged, but seemed out of temper. He’d spent much of the afternoon on the phone, and had gone out around six, not wearing his coat, to return half an hour later with a look of restrained frustration. At dinner, sitting across from one another at the dining-room table, sharing a plate of cold cuts and cheese, he had spoken little apart from enquiring after her health, his tone quietly contemptuous as it always was when addressing his niece. She declared she was ‘somewhat better’ and told him she might be able to enrol at the university this semester after all, or in any case audit a number of lectures. He made a note to contact an old colleague, producing a leather-bound diary for the purpose, and urged her to rejoin the Party youth group Faith and Beauty, now she was in better health. Zuzka was in bed an hour later and listened to the tinny bleating of the Oriental’s trumpet, rehearsing mourning in the confines of his garret. When she pressed her hands to her ears, reaching vainly for sleep, she was surprised to find the melody persisted undiminished.
The alarm clock woke her, rang first in the distant reaches of her dream, then spat her out into a rainy dawn, her curtain open, water streaking down the windowpane. Zuzka sat up, silenced the bell with her hand until she found the little lever that shut off the action of its clapper. She was dressed and waiting by the window long before she saw Otto Frei’s figure step into the yard. He passed their front door not two minutes later: she stood at its peephole, caught him trotting past, hair tousled, sleepy, a cigarette jutting from his fleshy lip. Otto stayed at the doctor’s for a quarter of an hour, then returned. Zuzka was back at her window, watched him cross the yard and open the door to the side wing. She had long put on her shoes and jacket, and now left her room at once; had dressed, on purpose, in the oldest of her clothes, a blue cotton blouse and mouse-brown skirt, twice mended where moths had eaten through the fabric. At the last moment, walking out of the flat, she opened the hallway cupboard and took out the short coat with the fur collar which her mother had given her, ‘to wear to the opera’, and which she very much liked but had not had any occasion to wear. Why she took the coat she could not herself say, other than a vague sense that she wanted, after all, to look good before the stranger, and this despite having decided it was best to approach him ‘humbly’, in the oldest of her dresses. Zuzka was outside, crossing the yard, before it struck her how ridiculous she must look, in the shabby, twice-mended skirt and fur collar, running to avoid the rain, but it seemed too late now to turn back, an
d in any case, what did it matter? She was meeting a man who might be a murderer, never mind what the doctor said. It took a minute to climb the stairs to Otto Frei’s door, and ten to find the courage to knock. He opened almost at once.
Otto Frei was dressed in dirty trousers and the black sweater that he wore for work. His face was sleep-creased, blotchy; he was drinking coffee from a blue tin cup. Zuzka noticed at once that the door to the back room stood wide open; that the room was light, its curtains open to admit the day; that there was no foot that would stick out the end of the bed. Otto followed her gaze, shrugged. He turned around and walked a few paces into his room to fetch a packet of cigarettes; leaned against the wall lighting one, clearly feeling much at ease.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
She did not answer, found just then she had no voice, her gaze still fixed on the back room, and the questions it implied.
‘She’s gone,’ said the man, some of his anger re-entering his voice. ‘The doctor says you know and will keep your trap shut. But come in, see for yourself.’