The Crooked Maid (13 page)

The corridor widened after a few steps into what seemed to be a cavernous room some fifty feet across. The light of the candle jumped, recoiled before this expanse of space. Decay hung heavy in the room, was cut by something chemical and sharp; piles of litter strewn amongst the wooden posts that supported the ceiling. A patch of sun found its way in through the broken pane of a barred cellar window (the pane itself was caked in dirt). It was followed by a sudden draft: shadows spinning in the flame. Franzl turned to shield the candle, felt Karlchen crash into his arm. He had no memory later of dropping the candle, could not say whether it was the collision or the fall that extinguished the light. All he knew was that all of a sudden it was dark, save for that shaft of sunlight etched into the flying dust. Amongst the rustle of their breathing there was one louder, more ragged, than the rest. Karlchen screamed and Steinbeisser whimpered; it was left to Franz to shut them up. He ordered them to hold their breath, held their mouths shut for good measure, dirty fingers smeared across their dirty mouths. And still there came that ragged breathing, rising, falling in the room ahead.

“Who’s there?” Franz turned and called, releasing the others from his hold. He heard one of the boys run down the corridor, stumble, fall upon the stairs. The other reached and took his hand. He was surprised to find that it was Karlchen. Together they stepped deeper into the room.

“Who’s there?” he called again, willed his eyes to penetrate the gloom. They crossed the shaft of light and for a moment he saw his brother’s face, two lines of quiet tears falling from his scrunched-up eyes, his left fist pushed deep into his open mouth.

Another step took them into renewed darkness, the stranger’s breathing growing louder to their right. The stink grew stronger too, the sticky smell of rot overlaid with antiseptic. Again their eyes adjusted to the dark and shadow peeled itself from shadow. A mound of newspapers rose before them, piled on top of a coal sack, or a corpse. At its side sat a man, his back
against the wall. The boys saw the boots first, coarse soles gaping from the leather uppers: a grin of nails bridging the dark gap. The face came next, was a pale smear amongst shadows, then grew features, mouth and chin lost beneath a double coil of scarf. The scarf, Franz saw, was red and new; the man himself not old but spent, sunken temples pressing in against the hot, dark eyes.

They stopped two yards from him. He rose, stood stooped under the sagging ceiling, his lips shaping words too soft to hear; then a bony wringing of his hands. One step towards them was all it took to panic Karlchen: he spat out his fist and, screaming, dragged his brother through the room. Franz allowed himself to be led; stopped at the entrance to collect the fallen candle off the floor. He turned and marvelled how light the room seemed to him now; a bright, high singing spreading through his abdomen and boyish prick. The man was standing in the middle of the room, haggard, lonely, his body lost within his dirty Wehrmacht coat. His hands kept moving, along with his lips, shaping greetings, pleadings, swallowed by the sound of running feet.

3.

It wasn’t until the brothers were outside, blinded by light, that they realized how bad the air had been down in the cellar. They found Steinbeisser six blocks away at the tram stop. Pale and sulky, he did not speak when Franz returned his candle to him, and though his moon face betrayed the most intense curiosity, he forbade himself all questions. Franz, for his part, started prattling about nonsense and compelled Karlchen’s silence with a series of stern looks. It was only when they saw the tram approach that Steinbeisser cracked. Too loudly, his voice hoarse as though from shouting, he asked whether they’d found the dead man.

“Dead man, my arse,” Franz told him. “Just a scarecrow chasing off the sparrows.”

“A scarecrow?”

“A bum, you idiot! All your stupid dog found was a drunk asleep under some papers.”

“But the smell!”

“So he shat his pants. Looks like you did too.”

Steinbeisser’s moon face rose, cast around for bluster to dismiss the taunt. There was none that could be summoned. “Don’t tell anyone,” was all he managed as the approaching tram screeched to a halt. He held out his hand. Franz paused, then shook it. Steinbeisser climbed aboard and immediately began explaining to the conductor why it was he needn’t pay.

The two brothers turned and made their back way on foot. They did not speak, Karlchen quiet, busy with his thoughts. That night he gave the password listlessly and waited impatiently for a jesting Franz to leave his bed.

For the first time in his life he held a secret from his brother, and it placed a weight upon his heart. Nor did he see a way to shift it. If he were to say what he had seen, Franz would want to return. Karlchen’s eyes, down in the cellar, had adjusted more quickly to the darkness than his brother’s, and when he’d stood before the stranger, they had fastened on the pile of papers by his side, where a heavy hand, half pale, half livid, lay unwrapped amongst the newsprint, its fingers long and fanned and broken, and sprinkled with a fine red dust.

Karlchen slept badly that night and by morning had developed a light fever. Franz went out to play alone.

Two

1.

It took him four days to arrange his visit to Wolfgang. Robert might have been able to see him sooner, but when he went to the police station to inquire how to proceed, it was noticed that he no longer held valid registration papers for Vienna and had, in fact, failed to deregister upon leaving his school in Switzerland. It took visits to four separate offices until this oversight had been cleared up and Robert was not only registered but had been issued a ration book and received official permission to visit his stepbrother.

Robert experienced, in these encounters with Viennese bureaucracy, an impatience that went beyond the natural annoyance of waiting in line only to be sent on, with well-rehearsed rudeness, to some other office in some other building with its own queue of shuffling petitioners. Whenever he emerged from the last of his day’s errands, he found himself running, first to the clinic to inquire after Herr Seidel’s health, then on home, slowing his step only when he approached the villa’s front door.

He felt he roamed the great house like a ghost—or a detective. All evening he’d be on his feet, drifting through its corridors and rooms, looking for conversation; for answers, explanations, some magic phrase that would allow him to reconstruct the events of the past weeks. But neither his mother, nor Poldi, nor Eva seemed to notice him on these wanderings; were wrapped up in lives he struggled in vain to understand. He who hungered after conversation—some “true and fateful word”—had to contend
with the dross of pleasantry and small talk. His mother petted and ignored him; Poldi sang and drank and offered glimpses of her tired skin; Eva went out, returned to scold him for unspecified ineptitudes, then left again on errands of her own devising. Only now and then would something more be said, some shard of talk that dropped out of the rest of the words and urged the study of its meaning. At night he dreamt of screaming crows. Home was a riddle to Robert. He was looking to Wolfgang to provide the key.

The visit was scheduled for the mid-afternoon. Robert spent the morning first taking a bath, then ironing his underwear and shirts. Four days into his stay his clothes remained stuffy and wrinkled from being packed in a bag. Initially he had hoped that his mother might pick them up if he left them draped over a chair in a corner of his room, or perhaps Eva, the maid. Growing familiarity with the house had disabused him of the notion. His mother was not interested in his linen. Neither was Eva. At long last Robert had decided to see to it himself.

It was no later than ten o’clock in the morning. Robert stood, stripped to the waist, in front of his desk, where he had spread a towel to stand in for the ironing board he had been unable to locate. In his left hand he held a brass watering can, intended for the care of household plants, which he used to moisten the cotton; in his right, a flatiron whose handle was so badly insulated that he had to wrap it in a sock. Two shirts hung freshly ironed from the doorknob behind him. He was seeing to the cuffs of a third.

A bird walked into his line of vision. It did not fly, or hop, but precisely walked, one funereal step after the other: sparse, toe-splayed, brittle feet, their talons snagging in the much-washed flannel of his towel as it walked along its seam. A black bird, its black eye cold and oily like spit-moistened tar. When it reached the towel’s edge, it flapped its wings and gave a caw, thin tongue flicking at the centre of its open beak. Robert recoiled, iron in hand; then drew close again, shooing the bird with the hot wedge of metal without discommoding it in the slightest. When the bird reversed
direction and hopped from towel to shirt, the movement shifted the angle of a button: it caught the sun and blinked. The bird saw it, pounced, and cut the button from its moorings, the shirt front rising in a ghostly wave until the thread snapped against the knife edge of the horn-black beak.

Next Robert knew, the bird had leapt onto the windowsill then flung itself into the air: the button, a double-punctured pearl, twinkling on each corkscrew turn as the bird rose towards roof and sun. Above them a hoarse chorus greeted its ascent and roof-tile landing, a sound both resonant and hollow, as though rising from the house itself. Robert recognized it at once. Without the slightest hesitation, throwing a shirt over his naked shoulders, he ran out of the room and up the stairs.

At night he dreamt of screaming crows
.

He had not known his dreams would summon a live murder.

2.

She found him amongst birds.

He had hit upon her hideout in the attic and was curled into her armchair by the window, in his hands one of the books she had stolen from his satchel. The sun that fell in through the open pane lay on his face and chest. He did not notice her at once. Her entrance had been masked by bird call.

They were everywhere, a dozen crows lining the rafters; discussed his presence with wild chatter, watched him with their flat black eyes. At times Robert stirred: drew up a leg, or turned the pages, shifted his weight from one slim buttock to the other. Each movement was greeted by fresh catcalls, the subtle rearrangement of his watchers’ constellation; a hop, a flutter, the quick ingestion of a woodlouse pecked from a crack within the wood. It was different for Eva. Her entrance drew no comment from the birds. She was a member of their tribe.

For another minute or two she stayed where she was, halfway through the trap door up between the top floor and the attic, her feet on the sixth
rung of the ladder. She stood and watched him, her face shielded by the brim of her hat. Eva liked watching Robert. It was not often that one got to see a perfect fool. One of his lids had slipped, hung like a flap over the orb of his eye, a vein snaking through it like a piece of black thread.

Ever since his arrival the whole house had been alive with Robert, its many rooms resounding with his bumbling footstep, his every movement marked by a benevolent sort of haste. Always he seemed to be looking for her, and, through her, for answers. She avoided him, gave hints not answers, rationed the truth as she rationed the household’s butter, the lion’s share for herself. It helped at times to trace in his features those of his mother: remind herself that he was her son.

She climbed two more rungs of the ladder and he noticed her at last.

“Eva!” he called, and sent the birds into a chorus. “I’ve been dreaming of crows all week.” He smiled, unstuck the lid from his eyeball with a finger. “And here you shelter a whole roost.”

He made to get up, but a warning gesture stopped him. “Watch!”

Her right arm rose in a slow and ritual gesture until it was level with her shoulder. Immediately one of the crows detached itself from the rafters and swooped down onto her wrist. She scratched its head, fed it a crumb of
Speck
she dug from a pocket.

Robert broke into applause. “What’s his name? He’s quite in love with you!”

“Yussuf,” she answered tartly. “All it is, I’m feeding him
Speck
.”

The phrase drew an angry blush from Robert, as though she had caught him in some foolish supposition. In his white shirt and black trousers he looked as neat as a button.

She let go of the bird, walked over to her chair. He gave it up without a murmur, from courtesy, or pity, she’d have liked to know which. The seat was still warm. The window claimed his interest, while she pretended to read.

He spoke abruptly. “I’ve seen him again. The man watching the house.” He pointed outside, as though the man were there even now, standing
sentry in the noonday sun. “I’ve seen him four times now. Once outside the clinic, and otherwise right here. Whenever I try and approach him, he runs away from me. There is this look on his face: expectant. Like he is waiting for something. I thought at first he was police. Undercover or something. But it doesn’t go with that look.”

“So?”

“So Mother asked me about him. Last night. She came to my room and showed me a photo. Is this the man? she asked. Only she asked more slyly than that, the way a child thinks it is being sly. Is this the man? Is this the man? Petting me, waving the photo at my face.”

“And was it?”

He shook his head. “The man in the picture was fat.”

“That can change.”

“That’s just what Mother said.”

He paused, watched her, hoped for information. At length she obliged him.

“Your father was waiting for someone. Someone other than your brother. Sometimes he’d send me out when he saw a stranger pass the house. He never told me what to say.”

“So who is he?”

“Ask your father.”

“He’s dying. And besides, he’s not my father.”

“Ah, the policeman. I forgot.”

Silence fell between them, was broken by an avian squabble. Robert waited until the dispute had been settled before returning the conversation to the subject of his mother. She feigned a lack of interest, sat leafing through the book.