The Crooked Maid (18 page)

She shook her head, charmed by this boy. “Is this why you kept coming here today? To declare yourself?”

He rose, almost knocking over his chair. “No,” he protested. “You’re
married. And besides—” He gestured wildly, ran out of words and reasons, jumped a little when she got up too.

“Well, it’s late,” she said vaguely, adjusted the belt that shaped her dressing gown. She made no motion for the door.

He rounded the table to shake her hand goodbye, stepped too close, and nearly trod on her toe, then stood distracted, holding on to her palm as though he had lost his bearings and was at a loss to say what might come next. His pale face had grown paler yet, no trace now of its earlier flush.

“What now?” she asked. “You want to kiss me?”

Robert frowned and nodded, lifted his head (he was a good inch shorter than her) and searched with his mouth for a patch of proffered cheek.

She smiled, evaded him. “Not like that,” she chided. “Like this.”

She took him by the scruff of his neck, swooped down on him, taking his lips in hers, slipped a tongue into his open mouth, and ran it between lips and gums. Anna felt the boy’s excitement grow against her hip and his immediate attempt to shift his weight away from her; followed the motion, backing him into the wall. From habit—a long history of kisses—she dropped one hand and put it on the tender portion of his inner thigh; the other hand still pressed to his neck and hair, her lips exploring his, the scent of his skin sweet in her nose.

And just like that he came, not ten heartbeats into their kiss. She felt the jerk under her fingertips, heard him moan into her mouth. It surprised her, happened without warning, went on for longer than she was accustomed (she had never had a lover quite so young). The moisture seeped through the thin wool of his trousers onto the tips of her long fingers; she raised her hand and stared at it, then wiped it dry against the downy curve of his pale cheek. All this she did firmly yet tenderly, not from play or calculation, nor yet from love, simply to give him pleasure, something maternal rising in her and mixing uneasily with the heat of her blood. Her caress was too old for him—she understood this. It had had many lessons and came burdened with technique: the echo of other couplings, other lovers written into every touch. And yet she smiled
quite tenderly and held on to him a moment longer. He allowed himself to be held.

When they stepped away from one another, Karel Neumann was in the room.

2.

He walked in without hurry, his shirt unbuttoned over his cotton vest, stinky despite his morning bath; turned to the larder and fetched a beer.

“Neumann, Karel,” he nodded calmly to young Robert, pushed out the stopper with a flick of his thumb.

Anna looked at him. “You’ve been listening,” she said. She did not say watching. But then, what did it matter to her what Karel Neumann might have heard or seen? “It’s time for you to leave.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Sophiĉka will be waiting. She gets frisky after dinner.” He smiled, stayed where he was, drinking his beer.

Robert, flushed and panting, kept staring at him and adjusting his clothes, the trousers sticking to his thigh. “It’s time to leave,” he repeated mechanically. His eyes fell on the kitchen clock, which showed the time as ten past nine (it was a little fast). A great haste overcame Robert; he ran out into the hallway, paced up and down searching for his coat. He had avoided looking at Anna since their kiss; kept muttering to himself in great excitement.

It was impossible to make out his words.

He headed for the door. His fingers were shaking and proved unable to work the lock. It was left to Karel to open it for him. He too had fetched his coat, and he slipped into his unlaced boots. The two men stepped out onto the landing and started on the stairs together. Halfway down the first flight the boy detached himself, made a racket tearing down the stairs.

Anna closed and locked the door behind them.

He’s running to his crooked maid
, it flashed in her. The next moment the thought was greeted by another. It sent her to her husband’s study and
the torn letter sitting on the desk. It was addressed to an orphanage and described the undulations of a twisted spine.

She read and reread the letter, then upended all his drawers, determined to make a thorough search of her husband’s correspondence.

3.

Karel followed the boy. He did so openly and without haste, taking not the least precaution, simply dogged him with his steady step. The boy made it easy for him. He ran some thirty, forty yards then slowed down and continued instead at a slow, distracted, shambling pace, heading to Hernals, the working-class district to the west. After some three or four blocks he stopped beneath a street lamp (dusk was falling and the lamp had only just been turned on), staring at a smudge of blood that ran from the bottom of a shuttered door across the width of the pavement to the grate of the gutter. One look at the sign above the door would have informed him it was a butcher’s shop, but he never raised his head; stood still instead, his brow furrowed, as though puzzling over the shape of the stain. And in general the boy seemed to get stuck on details—first the stain, then a broken bottle standing in a windowsill, where it contrived to catch the failing light of the sun; a bare-chested man standing in his open window high above, breathing smoke into the night. Each of these observations would stop him dead in his tracks and root him to the ground; a moment later he would catch himself, start, and carry on down the street. It did not take long for Neumann to tire of the chase and cut into a bar.

It was a workers’ tavern, quite empty at this hour; commanded an intersection, dirty windows blind to the boy’s retreat. Karel sat, ordered a brandy; invited the barkeep to stay and talk.

“Ever seen a spider eat a fly, friend?”

The man shrugged and said nothing, wiped the table with a sodden rag.

“Well, it ain’t pretty. Like eating an olive. You suck it dry and spit out
the pit.” He pursed his lips, spat into his hand. “And all the while he is in love. With a girl called Anneliese.

“The husband, then. Comrade Beer. Say the Russians took him. Hypothetically, I mean. For rooting around in some general’s soul. It’s not impossible, after all.

“What I need, my friend, is an informant. Someone who sells secrets, on the quiet, from out the back room of some dive.” (Here Neumann looked up and scrutinized the little barroom.)

“Do you know what a double agent is, friend? No? A man on the make. Empty pockets and a story to tell.”

The barman finally broke his silence. “Sounds like half the city.”

“You know, friend, I like you. Why don’t you get me another.”

And he finished his glass and pushed it over to the barkeep, dug in his pockets for Anna Beer’s change.

4.

Robert walked. He soon found himself in unfamiliar surroundings. There weren’t many people in the streets, though some of the windows stood open, the sound of voices carrying into the night. There were arguments and laughter; an old man shouting, yelping, behind a curtain, cursing his rotten teeth. Robert listened without hearing, circled rubble, horse dung, piles of refuse, as so often lost in thought.

What he was thinking about was sex: “physical love” as he liked to call it, somewhat pedantically, using a phrase he had picked from a book. About this physical love Robert had formed two rather contradictory opinions to which he subscribed in quick rotation, and at times quite simultaneously. The first of these opinions was that sex—physical love—was a tender, joyful, healthy, even holy thing; that it befitted a young man to be in love “fully, passionately and above all with his body” (to talk about the soul in this connection would have been retrograde and gauche); the other that sex, on the contrary, was a vile and somehow sinful thing, degrading to
the man but above all to the woman; that it did not and could not do otherwise than estrange two people from one another who were bound to regard each other henceforth with shame; and that, anyway, he wanted to become a priest. All this—with the exception of his planned priesthood, which was secret—he had expounded many times to his boarding school friends, who had alternately teased him for his prudishness and shrugged at his fiery vision of passion (most of them were absorbed by no more abstract a question than whether they’d dare approach the village whore).

For all his many speeches Robert had, until that night, never held a girl or kissed one in earnest, and had been in love only once, from afar, with a baker’s daughter whose stockings had a fetching habit of sliding down towards her ankles. The attachment had withered when a schoolmate reported he had paid her chocolate to reach down his pants.

Despite his attempts to keep his mind focused on this more general and, as it were, philosophical plane, Robert’s thoughts kept leaping quite naturally and inadvertently to Gudrun—Anna!—Beer and the moment of intimacy they had shared. But here the “problem of sex” that he had settled so clearly (if inconsistently) in the abstract seemed infinitely more confused. Every time he went over the scene in his head, a strange sort of tremor took hold of him and he marched on as though breathless, waiting for it to subside. The thing was, he could decidedly make no sense of the scene. Had he really gone to visit Anna in order to secure some token of her affection? But how did things get to the point they had?

Anna’s behaviour, too, struck him as extraordinary, and it was not long before he found himself looking for excuses for her shamelessness. Robert found them in her long estrangement from her husband.
It’s changed her somehow
, he mused.
She must have been chaste before. But ever since, she’s been in turmoil
.

But no matter how often he repeated the phrases, clinging most especially to those two words,
chaste
and
turmoil
, which seemed to him singularly fitting and endowed with a strange poetic power that attested to their truth, Anna Beer seemed less beautiful to him now than she had on the
train. He knew he would never think of her again without the memory of her hand upon his lap.

Just as he came to this somewhat mournful conclusion, a new thought fell on him with sudden force. “And who was the man who walked into the kitchen? He wasn’t her husband, that’s for sure. How he winked at me! Like a proper cad. Only he was charming, too, and part of me wanted to wink right back.”

This last bit, incidentally, he muttered quite audibly, even loudly, so that a passerby, a worker in a greasy waistcoat, who was carrying beer, or perhaps milk, in an opaque flask, stopped and looked after him in consternation. Robert did not notice him. His outburst had nudged his thoughts right back to where they had started, and as he finally entered the familiar surroundings of his stepfather’s neighbourhood, he found himself reliving once again not only his meeting with Anna Beer but also his conversation with Eva, who had taunted him precisely by saying that he’d failed to kiss her when he’d had the opportunity.

“It’s Anna who should have the crooked back,” it suddenly came to him. “But what nonsense, stupid nonsense!

“All the same,” he carried on, “I wonder if she’s still awake.”

Again he had spoken out loud, and again he frightened a lone pedestrian, who started and quickly moved out of his way. It was a vagrant draped in a scarf and heavy coat. There was little chance Robert would have recognized him as the watcher had the man not started running no sooner had they passed.

Robert heard it and gave chase at once.

5.

He caught him, not on the street that rose to the hillside park, nor on the wall separating the one from the other, but, having scrambled over, in the cabbage leaf–scented darkness of the far side, amongst vegetable patches and tree stumps whittled to their roots by a population starved
for firewood: two bodies colliding shoulder to hip and tumbling to the ground. One, the older, came to rest in the dirt, mud-smeared, winded, clawing at the earth and the weight that sat astride him. A dirty fist rose into the moon, rained down upon the vagrant. Robert was not so much hitting the man as knocking on his rib cage, one time, two times, three, heat in his mouth along with a question—“Who are you? Who are you?”—sown carelessly, with no hope of an answer. Indeed there was none. After some minutes the stranger ceased in his struggle and lay still in the calf-high weeds, his scarf dislodged and trailing past him like a noose. His breath came heavy, in irregular shivers; he coughed and seemed to breathe no more.

Quickly, afraid that he was smothering him, Robert shifted his weight; kept a hand on the man’s shirt and slipped to one side of him, crouching low beside his chest.

“Who are you?” he asked again, calmer now. “Why are you watching the house?”

He never saw the fist that hit him, heavy, weighted with a large flat stone. It crashed into his chest with that peculiar thump of rock displacing meat and bone. For a minute or so Robert felt he was drowning; his right hand hooked into some part of the vagrant’s clothing while the man flapped and struggled against his grip. The sound of ripping cloth freed him; Robert watched helpless as the man leapt up and ran away. After ten paces the stranger stopped, looked back with frightened eyes, the soldier’s greatcoat drooping from his skinny frame. Then he turned, clambered over a chest-high section of the wall, and was soon lost from sight; a patter of footsteps as he raced along the pavement on the other side.

Clouds ate the moon; disgorged some slivers; mopped them up. Robert gasped his first breath in the darkness; lay retching, massaging his chest. In his hand he held a square of cloth that at first glance he believed to be a fistful of lining from the stranger’s coat. On closer inspection it proved to be the whole of his inner pocket, ripped out at the seams. Clutching it, Robert rose, still winded, then ran heedless, stumbling after his lost prey.
But it was useless, the trail gone cold, no sound or movement in the street. Disappointed, breathless, doubled over, he slipped a finger past the torn cotton lip of the pocket he was holding, pricked his finger on some sort of metal pin. A second probing, more careful now, produced a passport photo double-stapled to the ripped corner of a sheet of paper. He held it, smoothed it, turned his back on the moon. Its light, cloud-bitten, uncertain, found a face, one staple buried in her forehead. Robert stared and could not stop his hands from shaking; whistled, swore, and hobbled back towards the house.