The Crooked Maid (32 page)

But it wasn’t just Beer that brought her back to Neumann. Truth be told, they hardly spoke of him. She had no interest in soldiers’ anecdotes, did not want to see the man cheapened by accounts of his trudging through the Russian mud. The big Czech himself offered her something she had never had. Naturally, she did not trust him; the orphanage had proofed her against trust. Nonetheless she found that she could talk to him. There was to him a crude sort of honesty that was refreshing, new to her: not the heartfelt earnestness of Robert, with its poetic yearning for a final truth, but something coarser, simpler, more aligned with her experience of the world. Then too, one could never feel ashamed before him, for he was entirely shameless. All that was sour in her nature—all that rankled—could be let out of the box, show itself; preen. Not that she took to talk easily; she weighed every word, guarded it, whistled some back. Even so, more escaped than she would have expected: he summoned them forth, proved astonishingly adept at guessing her thoughts and feelings; it was as though they neighboured on his own. And thus a friendship sprang up between the giant and the crooked girl—a friendship threaded with caution, barbs, and scornful disavowal—but a friendship nonetheless. It only added to its flavour that they conducted it in secret. She held on to it as insurance against the frailties of love.

Up in his room he now stood, stretching and feeding the last of the food to his dog, while she loafed on his bed and thumbed through the paper. Other than her handouts it was not clear what he lived on. True, he hardly paid any rent. Nobody else had wanted to share the room with the sick man. They did not even know his name. He was a young lad, blond, the eyes an eerie shade of grey that turned transparent in the lamplight. A woman had brought him, unloaded him on the manager, and paid a month in advance. Twice a day she stopped by, fed him, changed him, combed his hair. It was a mystery that he was still alive. Much of the time he lay in a sort of delirium, muttering to himself in Polish: a tumour the size of a wasp’s nest grown into the soft parts of his throat. He should have been in hospital, but it was clear he had no papers. A DP camp might have taken him, but it appeared he preferred the flophouse. Eva did not blame him. She thought of camps as another type of orphanage.

Karel, at any rate, did not seem in any way put out by the sick man. From time to time he walked up to him, squeezed a sponge of water against his lips or moistened his eyes; slipped off his diapers when he had fouled himself. Mostly, though, he just ignored him. For all they knew, he had not a word of German.

“So,” Karel said, lighting a cigarette and leaning his bulk against the frame of the open window. “Talk to me. How is the lover boy?”

She picked up his bantering tone, mirrored it. “Absurd. You know what he tells me yesterday? He looks at me, real serious. I am combing my hair, sitting on my bed, and he sidles up, actually sidles, eyes wet with his thought, falls to his knees, and asks me to tell him my life story. ‘You can tell me everything, everything,’ he says, and that he’s ‘infinitely beneath me.’ It’s because I have ‘suffered’ while he was being ‘pampered’ in Switzerland, or something of the sort.” She smiled in attempted mockery. “I swear he has it from a novel. He reads such trash.”

Karel laughed and wagged his finger. “Liese, Liese, Liese. What a silly girl you are. You love this boy, he’s the first who’s been nice to you, you even stay up at night, thinking of his kisses. Don’t say you don’t—you
admitted it the other day, not directly, of course, but all the same. And yet you come here to sneer at him.”

She flushed at his reprimand, grew more reflective. “I told him today that his brother has a blot on his soul.”

“Let me guess. You know because you yourself—” He screwed a thumb into his temple as though squashing a bug, and at the same time wrinkled his nose, to mark a bad smell. “It’s why we get on, eh? My own soul—a
Scheißhaufen
. Pile of feckin’ turds. But singing voice is a nice baritone. It balances out.” He grinned, produced a flask from his pocket, took a swig. “And how is Mama? Picked out a wedding dress for you yet?”

“She’ll see me buried first.”

“Screw her, then. What do you care about her blessing? Run away with him. Or won’t he go?” He studied her, seemed to catch something in her expression. “No, that’s not it. You want him, but you also want the inheritance. Greedy, eh? No, no, don’t get mad, Liese. What’s to admitting it?”

She sat there, angry, then thoughtful. There was something tentative to her justification, as though it were the first time she was trying it out.

“It’ll make me straight,” she explained. “The money.” When he looked at her, baffled, she reached around herself, patted her back.

“Surgery?” he asked, confused.

“Not like that. But if I wore furs—do you think anyone would notice I’m bent?”

He thought about this, brow furrowed. “Does the boy mind?” he asked at last.

She blanched. “I suppose,” she whispered. “Surely. He must.”

“Then why would he marry you?” The question was brutal, but the big face was kind.

“Pity.”

“That’s awful, Liese, just awful. But there, you don’t quite mean it. You say it with a quiver. Like you’re hoping it’s a lie. It might be, at that. It’s you who won’t believe it.”

She started, surprised by this assessment, coloured at the thought that
she had given away so much. All the same it was hard to stop. She had so rarely spoken her mind.

“In any case, she
will
give her consent. I’m going to testify. I was meant to go on three days ago, right at the start of things, but I cried off sick. Earned myself a reprimand! They put me at the end instead. For the finale!” Her eyes flashed. “She’s already tried to bribe me. She’ll soon meet my price.”

“She really thinks you can save Wolfgang? What does she care about her stepson, anyway?”

“It isn’t that. She’s worried about losing the factory. And the house.” She smiled, pleased by her sense of power. “You should see how she skulks around. Not a wink of sleep. Stands by the window all night, on the lookout for the watcher. I swear she has a gun.”

Karel leaned forward, interested, one hand stroking his big chin. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Who is this watcher?”

Eva hesitated before she answered, unsure what she might lose by sharing the truth. But what good was it, her secret, if she never once got to show it off? “He is a Jew.”

“Go on.”

“Arnim Rothmann. Has a ring, doesn’t it: ‘Rothmann & Seidel.’” She sketched the ampersand.

Karel whistled. “Seidel’s partner.”

“Senior partner. The factory used to be his. The house, too. Till ’38.”

“I see. Seidel stole them from him. Why fret, though? That was the fashion, wasn’t it? Aryanization. Half of Vienna changed hands.”

She shook her head. “Not like this. There was a contract. Some sort of buyback clause. I found Frau Seidel rummaging for it not half an hour after they had scraped her husband off the front lawn.”

“So ever since the war ended, they have been waiting for Rothmann to come back and ask for the keys!” The big man laughed, pushed off the wall, and started pacing the room, the mutt, Franz Josef, tangling in his feet. “No wonder she is snorting powders. How about him, though, the
right honourable Paul Seidel, RIP? Was he willing to pay up?” He stopped abruptly as a new thought dawned on his face. “Or was it Rothmann who pushed Seidel? He came back, half crazy from the camps, asked for his share. They had a fight!” He returned to his pacing, took a few more turns, digesting the idea. “Is that how it was? But then, how does Wolfgang fit into it all?”

But Eva had no intention of parting with all her secrets. “Who’s to say,” she said blandly. “Perhaps the stranger isn’t Rothmann at all. Rothmann was fat: Frau Seidel has a photo. Though of course—”

“Why yes. The Auschwitz diet.”

She shook her head, thoughtful, defiant. “It could be a mix-up. Perhaps he is simply some madman. Or—”

“Beer? You’re still holding out hope, eh?” He made a face. “Forget about Beer. The Russians have him. He is in Siberia, mining for ore.”

She flinched but did not answer.

“What is he to you, anyway? He was nice to you when you were a child. It isn’t much.”

She stared back at him, defiant. “He didn’t forget about me.”

“No,” he admitted. “He talked about you all the time.” And he told her again how Anton Beer had told him that she was the sweetest girl in all the world.

She listened in silence, slipped out some minutes later, feeling happy; walked the dark streets of the Gürtel, picturing Anton Beer walking like an angel at her back, wings spread and holding a slim white umbrella lest a drop of rain disturb her peace.

6.

Robert was asleep when she returned to the house. He lay, still dressed, underneath the open window, a book open on his chest; a cold draft whistling through the room as she opened the door.

Eva crept inside on tiptoe. She took off her clothes and crawled naked
into bed with him; lay on her flank and did not touch him with more than one breast pressed gently into the fold of his black jacket.

“I love you,” she tried, hesitantly, shyly, not quite in earnest, the way a child might try it out on the playground, playing “family” with the six-year-old son of a butcher who has snot dangling from his nose. “Will you run away with me? To Yah-merika?”

He sighed in his sleep and did not wake.

Four

1.

Halfway between the State Opera House and the Burgtheater, on the western side of Vienna’s most sumptuous street, the Ringstrasse, which encircles the inner city like a wedding band—or a vise—there lies, boxed in by those architectural twins the Natural History Museum and the Art History Museum, a small but beautifully manicured park whose geometric bushes and ornate benches had to contend, at the time, with a mound of rubble that had been swept there from adjacent streets and formed a sizable pile. In this park, on one of the benches not far from the rubble, there sat, on a damp day in late October, a policeman’s daughter in a mud-streaked dress and a runty little boy who had recently served as witness in a murder trial. The two children were deep in discussion. They had stuck their heads together and were not so much speaking as transferring confidences from mouth to ear. The subject of their powwow was the weighty question of whether the girl’s father harboured feelings for Frau Anna Beer. The girl—Trudi—rather inclined to the opinion that he did.

“I saw her kiss his hand. Like this.” She acted out the scene she had witnessed in the café, using Karlchen’s hand for a prop. “She isn’t even very pretty. She’s got a mean face. But father is feeling lonely. Ever since Mammy died.”

Karlchen sat there, rubbing the back of his hand. They were eating candies that his brother, Franz, had procured. Her kiss had been sticky.

“Maybe it’s her bum,” he said at length. “Steinbeisser says that it’s the bum that matters. It has to be round. From underneath.”

Trudi bit down on her lip, intrigued by this theory, which was quite new to her. “Mine’s flat,” she said, getting up from the bench, drawing the dress tight around her body, and looking down over one shoulder.

“That’s because you’re a girl. It only grows once you turn into a woman.” He paused, followed her gaze, the two of them studying her rump with close attention. “When it does, it’ll be just right. You’ll see.”

The topic closed, he pulled a torn and wrinkled comic book from his pocket and offered it to his friend. It showed a muscular woman in a short, star-spangled skirt and boots. She was lifting a car and throwing it at some men. Her bum was very round indeed. The words, Karlchen explained to his friend, were in English: speech was in bubbles and thought was in clouds; fat words meant someone was shouting.
Woman
was English for Frau. Karlchen had traded an American boy for the comic: seventeen marbles, the negotiations handled with gestures and nods.

They slid closer together, sat thigh to thigh, and tried to make sense of the story. There was no problem identifying Wonderfrau’s enemies: they wore big-shouldered suits and brandished guns; they did not shave. The simple fact of their conspicuousness impressed itself upon the girl.

Without introduction, she started talking about the trial.

“Father says that if the man is convicted, they will hang him. They pull out the floor from under you and then you die.”

The boy understood her at once. The thought was not new to him. “It’s because of what I said,” he whispered. Then added, “Do you think he’s a bad man?”

Trudi mulled it over. “I thought he looked nice,” she said at last. She might have said “handsome,” but felt it was too old for her; their neighbour had said it when she’d seen his picture in the paper: “That poor, handsome lad.”

“Then they’ll hang a nice man,” the boy said glumly, and cursed himself for having spoken the truth.

2.

On the fourth day of the trial of Wolfgang Seidel, suspected parricide, the court was as crowded as ever. If anything, more people were jostling for space in the corridors outside the great hall, trying to push their way in and arguing with the ushers. The ushers had their hands full, for there were some in the crowd who seemed hell-bent on pressing their point. At long last they closed the doors and took position just inside the courtroom, from where they followed the trial with the same rapt attention as the audience. There was a rumour, fanned by a report in the papers, that the defendant had recanted his earlier refusal to testify and would be called up that very day. The jurors too seemed to have heard of it; one could discern a new level of interest amongst their ranks.

First, though, the chief prosecutor, Dr. Fejn, was to continue with his interrogation of those witnesses who could testify to Wolfgang’s propensity to violence. Just as Fejn was about to start, however, the presiding judge, Bratschul, interrupted him, leaned forward, and in a somewhat malicious phrase requested that he “spare” the court all witnesses other than those “who have been thrown out of windows, or nearly so.” This phrase, unusually bellicose for this otherwise rather mild-mannered man, people at once ascribed to a “hemorrhoidal attack,” whose effects, it was said, could also be traced in his complexion, which, truth be told, was a little sallow that day.