The Crooked Maid (3 page)

He paused for effect. She obliged him. “What did it say?”

“That Herr Seidel had fallen out the window. He almost broke his neck.”

“He fell?” She tried not to laugh. “Just like that?”

“Yes. Only maybe he was pushed.”

In the darkness she heard him lean forward, until she could feel his breath upon her face. The thought occurred to her that he had decided to kiss her. But he continued to talk instead.

“There’s a family secret,” he whispered, playfully and yet in earnest, clearly tickled by the thought. “It all started when my stepbrother disappeared. After the war. And now Herr Seidel! Mother thinks the maid … But she never spelled it out, you see.”

“The maid? Your family is rich.”

“Very.” He said it with enthusiasm but no pride, as though it were a remarkable item of trivia that in no way affected his life. “Herr Seidel owns a factory.”

“Then I’m sure everything will turn out just fine.”

He was about to reply when all of a sudden the overhead lamp came alive and flooded the compartment with its bright yellow light. It found them in an odd position, him leaning forward, with his arms thrown
out for balance, his bottom perched on the very edge of his seat; his face so close to hers that she could count his freckles. As for herself, she was sprawled awkwardly across a seat and a half; sat broad-lapped, her thighs spread, her silk shift showing at the hem of her skirt. The boy recoiled as though stung and pressed himself back into his seat, fingers busy straightening his tie. His eyes followed her legs as they crossed themselves in front of her. The milk bottle, she noticed, lay discarded on the floor. He had drained it, and only a white film clung to the inside of the glass, trembling now, as slowly, by increments, life returned to the engine. It was as though one could feel it will itself into a state of deep inner tension: a bass line throbbing underneath their feet and buttocks and their thighs. Tentatively, unsure of its own strength, the train eased into motion, inched forward along the tracks. She checked her watch and was surprised to find it was no later than two. There was still time to make it to Vienna by dawn.

4.

They did not speak again until they were almost at the station. For much of the time she drifted in and out of sleep. Her mouth was parched and she found herself wishing the conductor would stop by with his kettle of tea. The boy too dozed off, murmured gently in his dreams; once he kicked her as he pushed his legs out in front of him. At four-thirty a sudden hunger overcame him, and he fetched an apple down from his knapsack and sat chewing it with great noise. When the conductor came to advise them that they should arrive within the hour, he was a different man and did not carry tea. She accepted a swig from the boy’s hiking flask and was amused to discover it contained some sort of cordial diluted with water. They each reached up to their bags, made sure everything was packed. The boy sat with satchel and hat box piled upon his lap. At the city limits there was another inspection of their papers: a whole committee of men in rumpled uniforms. When the border guards had left them, the boy stood up, stretched, rubbed his shoulders, neck, and face.

“Almost home,” he said.

“Almost.”

“How will it be, you think? Seeing your husband after all this time?” He asked with great simplicity, from curiosity, and compassion, and because he felt he was her friend. She remembered holding his hand in the course of the night. It was hard now to reconstruct what had brought them to that juncture. She flashed him that fleeting, empty smile that she knew men found so beguiling.

“Nice,” she said. “I’m sure it will be nice.”

“You’ll take him back? Despite the—you know.”

“Yes. Despite. Though we’ll have to wait and see, of course.” Her voice turned mocking. “You think I shouldn’t?”

The boy did not answer. He was busy with a different thought.

“How did you find out?” he asked. “Did you find a letter? Or perhaps you came home one afternoon and they—”

He flushed, gestured, fell silent: a boy like a puppy, clumsy, foolish, a constant quiver to his tail. It was an effort to summon the anger required by propriety.

“You’re being a boor,” she said. “You would do well to remember that you are no longer in the schoolyard, or the dormitory.”

He bit his lip and launched into apology. She cut him short. She had told the story before, always with the same omissions.

“I followed him. I suspected, and I followed him. He entered a building and went up to a flat. I waited twenty minutes then rang at the door.” She paused, mimed the gesture, one slender finger pressing down on the bell.

“You saw her?”

“Yes.”

He stared at her, gaily, simply, without malice, yearning to learn and not to judge, the down on his lip twitching with excitement.

“Was she very beautiful?”

In her mind’s eye she relived the scene, saw the door swing open and a young man standing there, dressed in his shirt sleeves and trousers, a silver
cross around his neck. He wasn’t painted or perfumed or even particularly clean. One of his buttons was undone.

She’d pretended she had mistaken the door.

“Beautiful?” she answered at last. “It’s hard for me to judge. I should not have thought so, no. It wasn’t how I expected. A woman in garters. That’s what I had pictured. Someone who’d thrown on a dressing gown just before she opened the door. Charming, pretty, a sort of gentleman’s whore. But I see that I shock you.”

The boy had indeed blushed a deep crimson, but he quickly composed himself and shook his head.

“No. It’s how I pictured her myself just now. I mean, something like that. Not that I know about …”

“Garters? Or whores?”

“Neither,” the boy managed, and fell silent.

Outside, dawn broke as they rolled into the station.

He carried her bags for her. Once on the platform she was surprised by the crowd of men, women, and children that spilled out of the second- and third-class compartments. It was as though, all of a sudden, they had entered the bustle of the city. Some tired relatives stood freezing near the barrier gates. They had waited all night to greet the husbands, wives, sons, and daughters now threading down the platform. Above them gaped the bombed-out roof.

A porter approached her, loaded her things onto a cart. The boy walked by her side, scanning the faces in the crowd. There was nobody there to welcome either one of them, just the morning light and the broken cobbles of Vienna. Out on the street a taxi driver accosted them and the boy insisted she should take it. They pressed hands briefly, and the boy bowed as though he wished to kiss the back of her hand (the tennis racket that stuck out of his knapsack nearly whacked her on the head). In the end his courage left him and he let go of her, mumbling that it had been a “deep pleasure.”

Through the rear window of the taxi she watched him turn away from
her to gather up his luggage. Behind the boy a vagrant shuffled, restless in his Wehrmacht coat, and a child sat selling nuts and berries from a handdrawn cart. At length the woman too turned, ahead to where her husband would be waiting in whatever might be left of their apartment.

“You come from abroad?” the driver asked, studying her clothes across one burly shoulder.

“Just drive,” she said, and dug in her handbag for makeup and mirror, intending to paint new life upon her fading lips.

Two

1.

As they disembarked from the train and left the station, there stood amongst the crowd a man neither tall nor particularly short, and self-effacing of manner, if wrapped somewhat conspicuously in a dyed army coat and a red woollen scarf of better quality than the rest of his appearance would lead one to expect. He scanned the emerging crowd with the curiosity of someone who hoped to find a familiar face. It was not long before his eyes settled on the woman in something more than homage to her beauty. In fact he crossed himself and muttered some few silent words; started forward then stopped, and was soon pushed aside in the press of the crowd.

Some years previously, at school, Robert Seidel had read a story by an American writer in which the protagonist, his nerves still strained from recent illness, was able to discern the profession and indeed the biography of passersby simply by studying their dress, their gait, the lines inscribed by life upon their faces, and who was distraught to find amongst the evening crowd a man who resisted his attempts at interpretation and was, in fact,
illegible
. Had Robert noticed the stranger, it might have struck him that the man posed a similar riddle to observers: his face obscured by scarf and low-drawn cap; his old man’s gait ill matched by his still-youthful hands; his gestures acquired both in drawing room and barracks. All that could be said with any certainty was that there clung to the man—as he pushed through the crowd with a slinking kind of grace, never quite
touching those who surrounded them—an anxious, timid quality, as though he were awaiting the answer to some fateful question that he himself had asked.

Outside, beyond the station doors, the stranger raised a finger to his mouth, tore with strong teeth at the ruin of a fingernail; and though his hands were cleaner than his coat and fraying cuffs, he found his cuticles encrusted in dark blood. This simple fact seemed to recall him to his purpose. He looked up sharply, fresh urgency grown into his gaze. In the early morning bustle it took the man a few moments to catch sight again of the woman and her young companion, who was helping stow her luggage in a taxi. For a second, through the car’s back window, she seemed to look at him, and he stared back, entranced, as though tracing a softer, younger face through the coolness of her features. Then she turned towards her driver and soon was lost from sight.

The man seemed inclined to shift his attention over to the boy, who stood gathering his things, and in his hesitant way had taken a step towards him, when a policeman started walking in their general direction, drawn perhaps by the stranger’s shabbiness and eager to forestall any pick-pocketing. The stranger started, spun, and walked away in subdued haste. He did not slow until he had crossed the street and disappeared into the shadow of a gateway. There he stopped, rewrapped his scarf, and waited to see whether the boy too would climb into a taxi or join the ragged crowd that stood waiting for the tram.

Across from the gateway, in a house thrown open to the public eye by a bombed-away wall, a woman woke to her doll’s house existence. She stretched, sang a snatch of Wehrmacht song, put a pot of water on the cooker; and, in the coarsest of Viennese dialects, tilting the “a” in arse into a drawn-out, listing
oh-ah-rse
, she cursed in lazy succession first the Germans, then the Allies, then the Jews, all of whom stood invited to insert into their backsides some unidentified object she seemed to think was clinging to her palm as she thrice performed a shoving motion in front of her broad hips.

The stranger saw her, tipped his cap. Just then the boy made up his mind and set off on foot. Almost at once the man too set off, walking in the same direction as the boy, although he moved too timidly, perhaps, to bring to mind the notion of pursuit. Within minutes they were lost from sight.

Behind them, the morning sun sought out the woman, set alight her reddish hair. Thus favoured by celestial attention, she laughed, dropped a pile of potato peels into her pot, and began to cook herself a starchy soup.

2.

It took Robert more than an hour to get home. He stood gazing after the woman’s taxi for another moment, then shouldered his knapsack, picked up his satchel by its worn leather handle, wedged the hat box between his elbow and his hip, and—ignoring the cabbies who accosted him within twenty steps of the station (though he had plenty of money and could have afforded the ride)—started walking. He walked north at first, following the long bend of the Gürtel, then west towards Vienna’s more affluent suburbs, keeping in sight a stretch of tram tracks but making no move to climb aboard a tram.

Throughout his long march, the boy paid little attention to his surroundings but rather walked with a fast, driving, almost mechanical step. What absorbed his attention so thoroughly, displacing all his pent-up curiosity for a city that, only yesterday, he had been impatient to see, was the thought of the woman who had shared his compartment, cruel mouth screwed into a smile. He thought of the things he might have said to her; invented touches, brushes, a chaste kiss in the darkness of the shorted-out train. Her name was Beer, Gudrun Anna. He’d found a name tag on her luggage when she’d left the compartment to use the lavatory; had pulled out a scrap of paper and made a note of her address. He thought about her husband too, whom he pictured as somehow very tall; witnessed their first handshake across the dusty threshold of their stagnant flat, tentative
and awkward, until the husband grabbed her waist and crushed her into the double fold of his embrace. So vivid was this vision of the estranged couple’s reunion that, if challenged to do so, Robert could have described the shade of the husband’s eye (a flinty blue) and the crease made by his hand in the silken blouse at his wife’s slender back.

And then his thoughts abandoned husband and wife, still locked in their embrace, and raced ahead instead, to Herr Seidel’s accident and his mother’s letter, her dark hints of “conspiracy,” the long lists of all her ailments, the blandly tender phrases with which she had instructed him to “stay away” even as she complained about her isolation and the family’s ruin. There was something in the letter’s tone, in its omissions and sudden shifts of topic, that had fed a feeling—long grown into conviction—that there was something odd, fishy, and, so to speak, out of joint going on at the house, and that his mother was, if not precisely suffering, then at any rate besieged, and consequently in need of his help. “The important thing,” he told himself, repeating a maxim he had culled from an English spy novel, “is to keep one’s eyes peeled and one’s powder dry.” But despite this—as he called it—“detective resolution” and the attendant weight of responsibility, he found himself humming, alive with the expectation of “pressing Mother to his breast” (he’d written just such a phrase into his diary). It would have taken a good ear—and imagination—to pick out from these distracted notes the opening bars of “Cherokee.”