The Crooked Maid (24 page)

She stared back at him, startled, confused.

“Piles,” he explained. “Every second soldier on the front. It’s what Anton used to say: a good age for proctologists. Pardon if I’m being free.”

Again she did not laugh, but rather listened to him with a peculiar intensity, her whole being poured into that stare. Had she owned a knife, she might have put it to his throat. It meant that much to her.

“How do you know all this?” she asked. “About me; things at my house?”

“I’ve run into Robert. You spend time around that boy, he’ll tell you the colour of his mother’s knickers. There were some like that at the front. Always busy telling you their lives. It ran out of them like snot.”

He grinned, glad the girl was talking to him and no longer thinking of running away. A pretty lass, actually, never mind the little hump. “Looks like he’s taken a shine to you in any case. But you know that already.”

Some colour rose to her cheeks, confirmed his guesswork.

“I see, I see, things have progressed from the shine. Well, good for you, kid.”

She shoved him, hard, in the chest, her arms looking brittle as she overextended the elbows. Karel stood unmoved, then followed after her when she turned away from him and again started walking by her side. It wasn’t hard to match her stride. They had taught him in the army.

“Not a bad find, you know. Honourable and so forth. Stands to inherit. I doubt she’ll let him, though. Marry a cripple. And boys like that, they take care not to break their mamas’ hearts. Chink them, maybe, from time to time. But never break.”

She ignored him, walked on as though she had not heard. He gave it some twenty yards before he spoke again. “All I am saying is, ask yourself where you want to be in six months’ time.”

From his pocket he took the money Sophie had given him, peeled off a hundred-shilling bill, then snatched her hand from the air beside him and forced the money into it. “Anybody else ever done this for you? Given you something for nothing?”

She opened her hand, stared at the money. He could see that she very much wanted to throw it away, on the ground or at his face. All the same he felt certain she wouldn’t. Thrift would not let her: the memory of a hundred hungry nights turned into habit. Hard to shake what’s grown into your bones.

“What’s this?” she asked, still holding the bill, at once suspicious and intrigued.

“A gift. For daughter of lost comrade.” He wagged his chin, offered her a cigarette. “Maybe you’ll pay me back one day.”

She recoiled two steps, then reached across the gap and snatched the cigarette. It took her some effort to muster her sneer. “You think you’re the devil or something? Fishing for souls.”

He laughed, lit up, passed the match to her. “A soldier home from war. That’s all.”

She took a quick puff, swallowed it, held it down. Jailbirds smoked like that, making each cigarette count. As did orphans; or so it seemed.

“Anna Beer says he’s dead,” the girl told him. “She saw him in the morgue. Only she isn’t sure.” Her anger shook her hand, two fingers clamped around the cigarette in an inverted Victory sign. It’s what the British did, when they told you to fuck off. “She’s his wife and she isn’t sure.”

“Beer? In the morgue?” said Karel. “Shit.” He looked around himself, as though wishing to appeal to the few passersby for their thoughts on the matter; smoke curling from his open lips past cheek and nose.

“It’s not true,” Eva continued. “I’ve seen him.”

“You have?”

“Almost.” She hesitated, and might have said more, then decided against it, slipped the money into the pocket of her dress.

When she turned away from him, Karel Neumann did not follow. Instead he turned around himself and headed back to the apartment. It was only when he reached their street that he changed his mind once more; ducked into a side street and walked back towards the Gürtel. There
was a tavern there that he liked, and he had money in his pocket. Before long he was sitting in front of a mug of beer, a line of schnapps glasses keeping it company.

“You celebrating?” the waitress asked him in her surly manner.

“Mourning,” he said, produced a handkerchief, and blew his nose.

Behind them a man slipped into the public house and sat alone, smoking, wrapped in a dark coat. If there indeed were spies infiltrating every corner of the city, Karel mused, they would look just like that man.

3.

A sound woke him, the tap of beak on glass. Robert raised his head and saw a crow sit in the window, in its jaws the carcass of some insect. It shook its head, tore the remnants of a spider’s web; swallowed, cawed, then took offence at its reflection and once again pecked smartly at the glass.

It took some moments before Robert realized that he wasn’t in his room. Girls’ stockings settled the question, dangled limply from the backboard. Robert smiled and stretched, felt a great pain rising in his chest. The bruise was coming out in green and purple across the sternum and the curve of his left ribs; he had felt feverish for much of the past day. Now, as he hopped out of bed and struggled into trousers, he once again felt a clammy light-headedness take hold of him. He shook his head to clear it and gently buttoned up the shirt, wincing every time his muscles moved within the bruise.

It was tempting to linger in Eva’s room. He had never been in there alone and found himself looking over the things that lay out in the open, on her table and commode. There was a brush there, its bristles half clogged with hairs; some pens, some books, a blouse that she was mending with a needle stuck into its sleeve. A second blouse hung airing from a hanger. He approached and sniffed it for a trace of Eva, found it smelled of bleach and lilac soap. Against one wall she had stacked some tins of food of English manufacture. There were no pictures hanging on
the walls, no scrap of decoration; no childhood toys tucked in a box along with postcards, presents, letters received from long-forgotten friends; no pretty pages cut from fashion magazines. He opened the wardrobe, found little there apart from a dun, much-mended shift; three empty hangers, a scarf on a fourth, loosely knotted to its hook. Discouraged, closing the wardrobe door, he realized he had been searching for Eva’s past. There was none; just the sombre absence of all luxury, relieved only by the pages of some seven novels, Kästner, Kleist, Zweig, and Mann, all in cheap editions, spilling pages from their broken spines.

Robert left the room. He went to the toilet first, then on to his own room, changed his shirt for a fresh one, combed out his tangled hair. A quick survey of kitchen and living room convinced him that Eva was either in her hideout or had gone out. Nor did he see his mother; there was a quiet to the house that suggested he might be altogether alone. He headed back up, intent on climbing to the attic, when he heard the distinct noise of someone retching. It came from Poldi’s room, stopped him in his tracks: a noise so violent he concluded it was caused by real distress. Slowly, unsure what to expect, he approached the door and knocked. To his surprise the voice that answered was quite cheery.

“Come in, come in. Ah, it’s you, Robert. Well, don’t be shy.”

Poldi was lying belly down in bed, with her shoulders, neck, and head thrown over the mattress’s edge. Beneath her stood a fancy metal bucket intended for the icing of champagne. Its bottom was filled with watery sick. The smell that rose from it was intense; above all sour. While Poldi rolled over and propped herself up against some pillows, Robert quickly rounded the bed and opened the window. He returned to her side, watched her wipe her mouth with a dirty handkerchief, and tried to ignore the fact that one of her breasts was showing through her threadbare nightie.

“You’re sick.”

She shrugged, watched him stoop to remove the bucket. He’d have to hose it down outside. But when he touched it, she put a hand on his arm and shook her head.

“Leave it. I might need it again.” She rubbed her stomach. For a confused moment he concluded she was telling him that she was hungry. She saw the look and laughed.

“I’m, you know,” she said, and kept on rubbing. “Bun in the ol’ oven. Muzzle toff, eh?”

He stared at her, then found himself won over to her mood. “Pregnant!” he said. “Well, congratulations. That’s wonderful. Does Wolfgang know?”

“Not yet.” She did not seem unduly concerned by this fact, gestured for Robert to sit. “I thought you could tell him. Gentle, like.”

Her drawn young face lit up when Robert followed her invitation and sat down on the edge of the bed. When sober there was an open, trusting quality to Poldi that he had not encountered in anyone else since returning to Vienna. Perhaps it was because she wasn’t very bright. In a gesture of spontaneous affection she placed a hand on the side of his cheek, then started wagging a finger in front of his face.

“So what’s this with you and Eva?”

He blushed, beamed, slapped away her finger’s admonition. “Who told you?”

“Yer mother did. I heard her arguing with Eva. You’ve been sleeping with her!” She cackled, then coughed. “You rogue, you!”

Robert did his best to defend himself. “All I did was take her hand. Two nights ago. I wasn’t planning on it or anything. She was upset.”

“And then you jumped her bones! Did you—” She formed a circle with the thumb and finger of her left hand, then punctured the hole with the index finger of the right. It was not a gesture Robert had ever seen a woman make.

He shook his head in vigorous denial. “Of course not. I just, you know. Held her.”

Poldi laughed and clapped her hands. “Held the maid!” she repeated, happy for him.

“Listen, Poldi. There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask.” He paused, gathered his courage. “Did Herr Seidel ever—You see, I heard a nurse say
it. At the hospital. That he and Eva—And Wolfgang too.” He blushed, found himself repeating her gesture.

Poldi watched it with a giggle. “Nothin’ like that. Wolfgang wouldn’t; he’s faithful, he is. And Herr Seidel, he was, you know. Being kind, like.”

Robert was far from reassured. “He was in love with her, wasn’t he?”

Poldi thought, shook her head. “You know what he said to me once? I passed him in the corridor, a little sloshed, like, going to the loo. There I sit, peein,’ and when I get out, he’s there, waiting for me. ‘I object to you on principle,’ he says. ‘On what?’ I says. ‘On principle.’ Standing there with his hands on his trouser seams, like he is about to sing the feckin’ anthem. And that’s how it is with Eva too.”

“He loves her on principle?”

She shrugged, embarrassed to be taken so seriously. “Summat like that.”

They laughed and the phone started ringing in the house below. Both Poldi and he quieted down at once to listen for some further sound, but nothing carried up the two flights of stairs.

“I better look—” he said, and Poldi nodded.

“Thanks for stopping in. You’re sweet, Robert Seidel.”

She lifted her arms up over her head, a dancer’s gesture, forearms crossing at the wrists; her lean breasts rising with the movement. He could not tell whether she was stretching or seducing him, a pot of vomit rancid by her side. Outside in the corridor the air was sweet and fresh. He hurried to the stairwell, heard his name being called from down below.

“Robert, Robert!”

It was his mother’s voice.

“That was the clinic. They say he’s awake.”

Robert ran down the stairs, too startled yet to take stock of his emotions. Outside, climbing into the taxi they had summoned, they saw Eva walk towards them up the street. Quickly, ignoring his mother’s protestations, Robert opened the car door and explained the situation; ushered her inside.

For once, Eva did as she was bidden, sat beside him, her hand a fist inside the pocket of her dress.

4.

They came and crowded his bedside. Paul Hermann Seidel was awake, yet felt as though enclosed by a glass cage. He had in fact been awake for two whole days without anyone’s noticing, until he had committed the imprudence of moving his eyes while a physician was present. The doctor and nurse had questioned him without success. Seidel felt quite capable of speech now and was no longer afraid that every word might bring on a renewed seizure; but at the same time he had not only no desire to speak but felt something akin to nausea when he contemplated interacting with those who had assembled—to watch him die, why else?—and observed them with detached hostility, wishing only they would leave.

But they did not leave, and at length, almost against his will, his thoughts disengaged themselves from his own vital processes and fastened one last time on the people surrounding his bed. There was his second wife, Klara, sitting on a chair, her plump hands folded in her lap, and he remembered with sudden clarity a certain night when she had served him dinner and he—quite naturally, as though the thought had only just occurred to him—asked her to remove her apron and join him at the table. She had eaten her dinner with her eyes on her plate, never raising them to meet his, a blush on her cheek that seemed impossible to connect to the flaccid, calculating creature sitting across from him and yearning only for his death.

Seidel’s gaze fell next on her son, who paced nervously from one corner to the other, his soles squeaking at every turn; then on the cripple, their maid, who stood head bowed, a fist thrust into her pocket. Of all the details he observed, this alone roused his curiosity, the question of what she was holding there, and holding so desperately, the row of knuckles visible through the fabric of her skirt. Then he blinked and the thought vanished. And a great blankness came over him that was not sleep nor quite yet death, but simply the discontinuation of all thought. It would spit him back to wakefulness an hour hence, leaving him with no recognition of the passage of time.

He had woken first precisely in this manner—alert and wary, as though yanked from a dark cupboard—to find a man standing, hat in hand, halfway into the room. He had stood there long enough for them to fall into the rhythm of each other’s breathing: his stubbly throat corralled by a red scarf. The man had fled when a nurse approached and left Seidel to wonder whether he knew him. It was then that he’d felt the change in himself: the question had held for him no interest. His mind had discarded it, turned inward; had listened to his pulse, the rush of blood, the pressure slowly mounting in his skull.