by Dan Vyleta
He hesitated, wondering whether to add a word or two about his anxiety concerning his ever-expanding guest list, but found himself unable to find a formulation that was neither politically insensitive nor demeaning to his own sense of worth. ‘Give my love to Milena,’ he ended. ‘Your devoted brother, Josef.’
Speckstein read through the letter one more time, admiring the even flow of his penmanship, then carefully folded the sheets of paper into tidy thirds and eased them into an envelope. Two minutes later he slipped into his coat and left the flat to buy a fresh book of stamps and personally put the letter in the mail.
2
In her room, propped up against her bed’s wooden headboard, and using a world atlas that she held pressed against her pulled-up knees as her desk, Zuzka, too, was engaged in the writing of a letter. It was addressed to her sister, Dagmar. Over the years she had written many such letters to her dead sibling; there was a box in her room at home where she kept them under lock and key, and once or twice a year she would take them out and read through this record of her childhood years.
Zuzka wrote. ‘My dearest, dearest Dáša,’ she wrote.
About six or seven months before you left me alone upon this earth, you told me one morning that you’d overheard the neighbour’s maid say that mothers expect their daughters to bleed during their wedding night. It was summer then, and the neighbour’s daughter had just married. The maid had been doing the laundry, and all the family’s bedsheets were hung out in the garden to dry in the sun. We walked, hand in hand, and sat down under the still-moist sheets. There was a breeze and I remember the flap of cotton, quite loud at times, like the snapping of a whip. Bleed how? I asked you, and you said you didn’t know. Maybe the husbands hit their brides, you suggested. We ran in to look at Julia, but her face was not bruised. Are you happy? we asked her. She smiled yes, a little stiffly, and walked quietly away.
I don’t know myself why I am writing to you about this now. I figured out long ago what the maid was giggling about, and have giggled about it myself since. It turns out, however, that it’s not a laughing matter. Uncle has written an article, would you believe, on ‘Pathologies Pertaining to the Perforation of the Hymen’. His own copy is covered with notes that he scribbled in the margin. Some doctor he quotes gives an estimate of the quantity of blood. I forgot the amount but it’s not very much. There is no mention in the article of any pain. It’s that word Father is so fond of using when he’s being high and mighty. ‘Implicit’. Isn’t it unfair that women should be cursed with childbirth and with this? And yet they say there is great pleasure in it all (and of course there is – I hear my neighbours braying through the night!).
You will have guessed by now that I’m in love. He is a simple man, though honourable; gentle but strong. I thought for a while I loved another but as it turns out he has other attachments (I nearly walked in on him with a lady friend the other night in a situation that might have been compromising). In any case he is too old for me, and a strange ugliness clings to him, behind the handsome looks. My lover is a better creature, roughly hewn, yet gentle, gentle. He seals with kisses any wound he might inflict. Tonight he is coming to Uncle’s party. I thought about Hamlet when I invited him but now I don’t know. It’s lonely in this city, and my legs and lungs, they give me trouble. Perhaps it would be best just to go home.
‘The truth, dear Dáša,’ she concluded, ‘cannot be written. Even to hint at it is to go too far. I remain, for ever, your loving sister, and long to kiss the rough stone of your grave.’
She signed off, struggled to read the letter through her tears, then jumped up and ran over to the little table where she kept matches and a candle. The paper caught fire at once, burned brightly and fast, and singed the tips of her fingers. She threw it down with a cry, watched the flame dance upon the floorboards, reaching (it seemed to her) for the corner of the bedsheet near which it had fallen. Afraid now, she raced for the water glass that was standing on the floor at the other end of the bed. She grabbed it and poured it, heard the sizzle of smothered flame: black ash rising up to her, gliding gently through the air and brushing her bare arms. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Zuzka was still wearing her nightdress. It now became speckled with trails of black soot. Involuntarily, her bare feet standing in the puddle upon the floor, she raised her eyes up to the window and looked over into Otto’s flat.
His curtains were open, and he and the Chinaman were standing by the window. She’d given him what little money she had and they had invested it in food and beer: the knotty stick of a cured sausage lay between them on the windowsill, along with his knife and a loaf of dark bread. Bottles of beer were in both men’s hands.
She turned around quickly, lay down on her bed, and tried to master the sobs that took hold of her body, the whistle of her breathing soon filling the room.
3
Detective Inspector Teuben had long finished dressing. He had donned his parade uniform along with his newly polished boots; had threaded the needle of his Party pin through the cloth over his heart; had shaved and applied cologne not only to his jowls, throat and wrists, but even dabbed a little on his stomach and inner thighs. It was a quarter to six, too early yet to set off, and so he was sitting in his armchair rereading a scrap of old newspaper clipping that two days of research had produced. The name had come first: it had been a matter of tracing a string of addresses and comparing signatures on various registration papers. Fortunately, Otto Frei was attached to his first name, a fact that did much to narrow the search. And then, too, he was a performer, easily identifiable by his work. It had not been Teuben but an assistant who had hit upon the idea of telephoning all the managers of well-known nightclubs to ask if they had ever hired Otto or any other member of his family. Specifically, Teuben was interested in his sister. When he caught trace of her, he was astonished that her exploits were remembered after more than a decade. Her career had been remarkable, in a side-show sort of way. It had stopped overnight. Teuben had found no shred of information that would have told him why.
All this research into Otto Frei and his sister had been accomplished in the breaks Teuben took from the interrogation of his prisoner. This, however, progressed at a much more satisfactory pace. The laundry boy was eager to please. There was a moment, it was true, when their research into Otto produced a tantalising link between him and one of the victims. It suggested that they might do better focusing on him rather than the laundry boy. But the lad proved to be so simple and cooperative a soul that Teuben was loath to abandon this most natural of suspects. The boy was willing to sign anything; even when he recanted, as he did periodically, in moments of a near-animal stubbornness, his explanations were so incoherent and contradictory that they only served to implicate him further. It was best therefore to keep private the details of Otto’s file, above all from Beer. The doctor would have much preferred to put away a guilty man, even if he made for a less convenient defendant.
A child came into the room, nine years old, his hair jet black like his father’s. He had a milky and somewhat sickly complexion and was prone to coughs. Quickly, with light, rapid steps, he walked up to the seated man, pressed his face into the sleeve of his uniform, then began to clamber on to his lap. Teuben was indulgent with his only living child and helped him gain his perch. The boy was light for his age. When still an infant he had fought a protracted battle against croup. His name was Robert, after a maternal uncle. They called him Bertl.
‘What are you reading, Daddy?’ Robert asked, scanning the newspaper article and the pages of notes Teuben had assembled on his desk.
‘I am reading about a girl only a few years older than you.’
‘Is she a thief?’ It was an article of faith for the boy that his father was interested above all in thieves.
Teuben shook his head. ‘No, Bertl. A sorceress.’
‘A sorceress? But that’s marvellous! Can she do magic?’
‘A lot of people believed she could tell the future. She was qu
ite a sensation, back in her day.’
‘With a crystal ball?’
‘With cards. She was something like a Gypsy.’
The boy took in all this information and a look of wonder spread through his pale face. He reached to pick up the old clipping, stared at the murky photo, in which a young teen in a party dress and heavy make-up was raising both her arms above her head, as though soliciting applause. She looked big to the boy, much older than he.
‘What’s her name?’ he asked, trying to read it for himself but failing to make sense of it.
‘Hrobová,’ Teuben answered, himself stumbling a little over the double consonant up front.
‘A stupid name.’
Teuben shrugged, half inclined to agree.
‘The father was a Slovak. It means “grave” or “tomb”. Eva Grave. Not a bad nom de guerre, I suppose.’
Robert nodded, not willing to admit that he did not understand the phrase, still studying the photo. He was about to ask something else when his mother showed at the door. She was younger than Teuben and still handsome if not exactly beautiful. Unlike the boy she was plump and ruddy, in sparkling good health. She saw her son sitting on his father’s lap and flashed a smile. The trust he showed in Teuben’s paternal protection always astonished her. As for herself, a quiet fear governed her relations with her husband that she alone mistook for respect. There was great harmony to their conjugal relations.
‘You look nice,’ she said to him now with genuine admiration. ‘Make sure you don’t crease his uniform, Bertl. I’ve just had it pressed.’
She took some steps into the room, then stopped well before reaching his desk. ‘Do you need anything before you go?’
‘No. In fact, I might as well get going.’ Teuben swung his son from out of his lap and on to the floor, then gathered the papers on his desk and locked them away in the top drawer. ‘I want to stop by the office on the way.’
He ruffled his son’s hair, patted his wife good-naturedly on the rump as he passed her, and even took a certain pleasure in her smile as she bid him goodbye. In each of his words and gestures, and in the simple, direct movements with which he put on his hat and coat, then walked out into the mildness of the evening air, there was already a hint of something joyously impatient, the light, teasing touch of sexual anticipation. It was as Beer had said to Eva: Teuben was out on a date.
4
Those of the guests who had received a written invitation had been asked to arrive at Speckstein’s party at seven o’clock sharp, for pre-dinner drinks. Anton Beer did not number among this select group. At a quarter past seven, he was still sitting in his study and had yet to get dressed. His dinner jacket had been pulled out of the wardrobe and hung in the open window to air; and yet he was quite sure that he would not go down to join the party at all, would send a card communicating his regrets the following morning (not to send anything seemed to him ill-bred). At present, he was occupied by writing out the alphabet in large letters on to pieces of cardboard that he had cut to about four times the size of an ordinary playing card. He was using a blunt-tipped coloured pencil and was at pains to invest his labour with a certain formal beauty. Cards that bore the letters A to M lay piled to the right of him; he was working on the N, enjoying its sharp, dramatic angles, and adding ornamental scrolls to both the beginning and the end of the lightly sloping letter.
The girl Anneliese was sitting not far from him. She kept to the floor though he had twice offered her a chair, and had accepted only the comforts of a blanket that he had fetched from the living room and spread out for her in one corner of the room. There she sat, her legs splayed before her, drawing clumsy outlines of people and animals on a pad of paper and colouring them in. At present she was working on what might have been a zebra or a horse. Its lines ran in strict vertical order. If it was a horse she was drawing, it was dressed in prison garb. The girl’s fingers were dirty from the oil pastels she was using.
Beer had tried to talk to her several times over the past few days, and through tender insistence had learned some details about the days she had spent since the death of her father, Tobias Grotter. By putting them together with what the doctors had told him at the hospital and at the clinic, to which he had placed several calls, a picture had emerged, too vivid perhaps to be entirely realistic. He saw her waking in the hospital ward, sullen and in shock, and running at once for the door. A nurse had restrained her, asked her questions, while the girl pressed her hands over her ears and stamped her frightened little feet. No parent came to claim her, nor were the police looking for her. A hospital doctor who spent half his time working at a clinic on the western edge of the city had her transferred there: they had a children’s ward. She escaped almost immediately, climbing out a bathroom window when her registration was still incomplete, then made her way back into the city, barefoot, disorientated, avoiding the questioning glances of strangers. Beer could not fathom whether she had got herself lost or had deferred her home-coming on purpose. The girl, so talkative but a week ago and boundless in her confidence in strangers, had become suspicious and withdrawn. Beer wondered to what degree she understood what had happened to her father, and whether it wouldn’t be best for her if she were gently forced to acknowledge the truth. He had already made several attempts in this direction. He had also tried to reassure her with regard to the janitor, whom she had seen ‘draw a bath with blood, not water’, as she had told him when he’d stood her in his own bathtub and rubbed her down with a sponge and tepid water.
‘I went down and talked to him at length,’ he’d said. ‘He’s a good man, really. You have nothing to fear from him.’
The girl had merely nodded and asked to please be towelled off.
As for the scene she had witnessed two nights previously, when she and Zuzka had appeared in his living-room doorway: about this, the doctor and the little girl had not exchanged a word. He felt that anything he could say to her would but burden her with yet another secret, at once bewildering and without consequence. She seemed oblivious in any case, and since neither Otto nor Zuzka had shown their faces in the past few days, and Anneliese liked to spend all her time either in his study or in Eva’s bedroom, there was no possibility, at present, that she might say the wrong thing to anyone and put him in immediate danger.
Sighing, taking a break before embarking on the O, Beer stood up from his desk and crouched down next to the girl, one knee joint creaking in complaint. He pointed to the wall, where the hedgehog the janitor had sent up for Lieschen was sniffing at the window curtains, but the girl was impassive, refused to give so much as a smile. He had seen her play with the animal a few times, but mostly she had ignored it and had even thrown a pen at it on one occasion, then watched it roll itself into a ball.
‘Prince Yussuf,’ he said gently. ‘Isn’t that his name?’
She shrugged her crooked little shoulders, then nodded, never looking up at Beer.
‘Don’t you think he looks a little lonely?’
Again the girl shrugged, sucked in her lip, threw a glance over to the animal.
‘Maybe,’ she said.
‘And you? Are you feeling lonely, Anneliese?’
This time she gave no response at all. Frustrated, he settled one knee on the floor, laid some fingers on her shoulder, half expecting her to pull away.
‘You don’t talk as much as you used to.’
The girl wrinkled her nose, stopped colouring.
‘Eva doesn’t talk.’
‘Eva is sick. Look here, Anne–’ He paused, corrected himself, struggled for a phrase. ‘Lieschen. You found your father, didn’t you? Before you woke up in the hospital.’
Her body went still, the eyes staring into him without emotion.
‘I know it must have been terrible. You mustn’t be afraid, though. It wasn’t – murder. Your father was very sad, and he was drinking far too much. And then he – That is to say, there was a kind of accident. He hurt himself.’
She shrugged yet again, ra
ised the pencil she was holding and drew it, point first, across the front of her dress, leaving a bright purple mark. He had seen her make that movement once before: in the janitor’s cellar, when Beer had asked what had happened to poor Walter. Back then she had fanned her fingers before her abdomen to suggest the spilling of the animal’s guts. This time she eschewed such drama.
‘It’s a good way to go,’ she murmured. ‘For a dog.’
Beer heard the phrase and knew at once it wasn’t hers. Its callousness stung him, and he leaned forward to be closer to the girl.
‘Is that what your father said?’ he asked. ‘When they found Walter?’