The Crooked Maid (35 page)

Frustrated, too worn out to challenge her directly, Eva left the kitchen, went upstairs. She got ready for bed, shoed Yussuf off her pillow, dirty claw prints on the linen. Robert was there, looking at her but avoiding her eyes.

“You are afraid to ask,” she accused him.
“‘What will you say? When you walk through that door tomorrow? Will you bury my brother or rescue him?’
It’s been written all over your mug the entire day.”

He blanched, fidgeted, sat on the bed, and lay down on his side. “Just tell the truth,” he said.

“You don’t mean it. You might not like the truth. But then, it’d be immoral to ask me to lie.”

He did not answer, and she climbed behind him so her hump was to the wall. He was wearing his nightshirt and a pair of underpants. She knew both intimately. In the past few months Eva had returned to doing the washing.

“Turn off the light,” she said. “And close the window. It’s cold.”

“Did you talk to Mother?”

“Turn off the light,” she repeated, and after some minutes he got up and did.

9.

The girl had finally gone upstairs. Frau Seidel stood immobile for some further minutes, then sighed and took a vial out of the pocket of her cardigan, mixed some drops into a glass of water, drank it down. Each of her movements was reflected in the window’s dirty pane. Her handbag lay on the windowsill, a bundle wrapped in a dishcloth at the top. The garden outside was totally dark. As the drug took its effect, a detached calm rose up in her like the waterline of a hot bath. She sat down at the kitchen table, her legs very heavy, stretched them out across a second chair.

When she woke, she was disorientated at first; was cold too, her feet wooden and dead to the touch. It took some minutes to stamp new circulation into her heels and toes, a painful tingling that cut through the drug. It might have been midnight by now: a waxing moon clinging to the window frame. Its light caught the newspaper, the red circle around paragraph five.
Herr Seidel’s charwoman
, it read,
one Anneliese Gruber. Further sensations are expected
. They seemed unable to get a single fact straight.

Her feet revived, her body heavy, Frau Seidel rose and started on the stairs. She bypassed the first floor, carrying on up; walked the long corridor that led to the maid’s quarters. Outside she stopped, dug in her handbag, her shoulders hunched. She opened the door, peered inside, waited for her eyes to adjust. They lay on their sides, her front pressed into his back, both heads on the pillow, one behind the other. Emotion came to her, came
dimly, through the wall of opiates; not all of it was laced with spite. Her son looked peaceful, happy, his hair very dark. She could count his breaths by the rise and fall of his narrow chest; a snort of cold in his nose when he exhaled. The room was icy, they had failed to close the window properly, had kicked the too-thin duvet down to the level of their waists.

The open door added a draft to the cold, and it was this draft that woke them, first him, then her: two pale faces, stirring, robbed of features by the dark. She spoke to the girl, not to him.

“You can have him,” she declared, her hand in her handbag, amongst vials, tissues, a dead weight wrapped in threadbare cotton.

The girl sat up enough to signal confrontation. “How do I know?” she whispered. “That you’ll honour the bargain?”

“He heard it, didn’t he?” Frau Seidel said. “You have it, I say. My consent.”

She waited for some further humiliation: chest squared, chin drawn into the soft skin of her throat.

“Thank you,” said the girl on the bed, said it almost softly.

Frau Seidel closed the door before her son could add his thanks.

Five

1.

Anna was in bed when the doorbell rang. She woke, disorientated, within the sweat-damp tangle of her hair. For some strange reason she decided that it must be Frisch bringing news of Anton. She rose quickly, slipped into her dressing gown, hurried over icy floorboards without taking the time to locate her slippers. A hand run through her hair and a quick adjustment of the belt had to suffice as her toilette. She opened the door with a touch of drama: head cocked, brow raised, one fist pressed into a pushed-out hip. Her excitement was misplaced.

It was Sophie.

“What time is it?” asked Anna.

“Ten past six.”

“You’re early.”

“I couldn’t sleep. I was hoping you’d be up.”

Anna let her in. It was tempting to send her away and crawl back into the warmth of her bed, but there was on Sophie’s face a restless urgency that appealed to Anna’s sense of decency if not to her compassion.

“Come in, then. Let’s have some coffee.”

They sat in the kitchen, or rather Anna sat, one naked leg crossed over the other. Sophie busied herself with setting the table for breakfast as though she were the host and Anna her guest. Anna let her do it; took a cigarette from the pack lying open on the table and asked Sophie for a light. The journalist hurried to the stove and found the matches.

“Would you like one?” Anna offered, then leaned towards the struck match with a habitual movement, her lips pursed around the cigarette end, her eyelids lowered, showing off long lashes.

“Coffee first. Here, I’ll put on the pot.

“The trial starts at eight,” Sophie added when she had finally sat down and wrapped her hands around a steaming cup.

Some day-old rolls lay in a basket between them; a china saucer with an ounce or two of butter; a glass of synthetic honey; the grey wedge of liverwurst that had not been wrapped properly and had dried out. Neither of them showed any interest in the food.

“You will come, won’t you, Anna? It’s the last day. We might even get a verdict. Depending on the jury, of course.”

Anna did not answer at once; sipped her coffee, remarked on the absence of lipstick, whose flavour she associated with the drink.

“What is it you came to tell me?” she asked at last. It came out more gently than she expected, as though the words themselves carried enough weight to dissolve her petty irritation. Sophie noticed it too, the formality of her phrase; sat up in her chair, a flutter of emotions on her brow and cheeks.

“Have you,” she asked very cautiously, her eyes on the table, “in the course of your life, I mean—Have you slept with many men?”

Again the answer was gentle. “Is that what you woke me for?”

“Yes. In a way.”

“Five or six,” Anna said. “Six. For comfort, mostly.” She smiled: the sort of smile that effaces emotion. “I chose rich men.” She could have softened her answer; explained that there was more to it than that. That she had been lonely, in need of evidence that men liked her; that it was only her husband she had failed to seduce. But Sophie wasn’t listening; and at any rate, Anna hated excuses.

“I only ever slept with my husband. And, you know—with Neumann.” Sophie paused, kept her eyes on the saucers, the honey, and the liverwurst. “He’s a better lover than my husband was. It’s not that he does anything
very different. I mean, the … mechanics, they are the same, give or take. But—” Here she looked up with a reckless sort of courage. “I liked it better. He made me feel things, I hadn’t—And the things that would come out of my mouth … I probably kept half the courtyard entertained.”

Anna wanted to laugh at her, ask her what it was about this morning that had triggered the thought of her past ecstasies; wondered too whether Sophie would be sitting there, suspended between shame and self-discovery, had Karel still occupied her bed and conjured obscenities from the mouth of his lover.
What beasts we are
, she mused,
that it requires loneliness to trigger our sense of guilt
.

What she said was: “We do not choose what we desire.” The moment she said it, it sounded wrong to her, bookish, like something Anton would have said, a phrase from a treatise on the stockyard of one’s soul. Sophie heard it too, and correctly identified the phrase’s likely origin.

“Like your husband,” she said. “Forgive me, Anna. Karel told me. That Herr Beer … ” She paused, lost confidence in her word of choice, found a stand-in. “About his inclinations, I mean. It must be difficult for the wife. After all, you still love—And yet … ”

Anna rose, disentangled her hands from her coffee cup, walked quickly to the door. “I think we have exchanged quite enough confidences for one morning. If you will excuse me now, Sophie, I must dress.”

When they walked to the courthouse an hour later, neither one of them made any reference to their earlier conversation.

2.

Dark caws, the scrape of claws upon unvarnished wood, then the muffled clap of wings on air and a dance of four-toed, hopping acclamation. The birds were preaching again, a rhythm of call and multi-voiced response. It sank into her sleep and commandeered her childhood memories: rode them raw against their inclinations. The pastor of her native village throwing dirt into an open grave, his frock coat torn under one arm, yellowed
linen underneath; behind him, on a table laden with her sister’s wedding feast, her uncle’s wireless was making static-punctured speech; and a speckled Great Dane known as Liebling dragged through the dirt the puzzle of his tractor-broken hip.

She woke sweating, her belly heavy with retained water and the growing child, the need to piss pressing urgent on her bladder. Poldi climbed out of bed, squatted low over the chamber pot, relieved herself, then sat down bare-assed on the floor, her back aching, her memory still clinging to poor Liebling, that painful slither, paw over paw. From the attic there travelled a renewed chorus of caws; crows circling the house, more every day, as though to mark its carcass for their peers. She grabbed a slipper that peeked from a pile of dirty clothing; lobbed it hard against the ceiling, earned a burst of renewed agitation, a dozen birds hopping, screeching, trading perches. It had been impossible, these past few weeks, to play any music. Every time she put on a record, the birds responded, drowned whole symphonies within their screams. She’d been falling asleep with her hands clapped around her ears.

She left the room. Downstairs, Frau Seidel’s door stood ajar, the bed untouched, one window open to the October cold. On the ground floor a half-drunk cup of herbal tea upon the kitchen sideboard; everything much cleaner now that the boy lived in the house. Hungry, Poldi tried a handful of drawers, found most of them locked. They had left some bread out for her, a thimbleful of margarine; some dried-out cheese, a packet of malt coffee. The charity of relatives. She ate some bread and cheese, hungered after something sweet.

There was a larder at the back of the kitchen, three steps deep and vivid with the smells of former bounty. Now it stood bereft of food, save for a sack of flour, a basket of spuds, and a mound of onions covered with rough canvas sacking. At the back the row of shelves hung somehow crooked, as though one side had been pushed into the wall. It was only after stepping close that Poldi realized the entire section swung on hinges, like a door. Behind it a flight of stairs led downwards, to an unknown part of the cellar.

She descended slowly, less from any sense of trepidation than mindful of her own clumsiness, the slowly shifting centre of her body’s gravity. The room at the bottom held a bed and chair, a cot, and some more shelving; a bare concrete floor, cracked in parts, glazed with a patina of mould. The room was lit by a tall floor lamp with a flower-patterned, tasselled shade. It stood by the dirty cot like a dandy at the bedside of a pauper; spread a soft, red-tinted glow. The light gave weight and volume to the figure sitting at the table, spooning jam into her mouth. The tabletop was cluttered with tins and jars.

“Frau Seidel! You gave me a right fright. I had no idea there was a room down here.” Poldi spoke quickly, unsure what would be her reception. “I suppose you en’t goin’ to the trial, then?”

Frau Seidel shook her head without looking up.

“Me neither. He asked that I don’t go, Wolfgang did. I went to see him last night. He was pale, and in a bit of a temper. I suppose he must be nervous and all. Said he had in-di-gest-shien. I could tell. He smelled a little from the mouth.” Poldi smiled, conjured the memory of their sour kiss. “He’ll get off, won’t he, Frau Seidel?”

The emotion behind the question was so raw that even Frau Seidel seemed startled. She paused, looked over, a spoonful of jam still in her mouth. Then she swallowed, raised a plump wrist to her eyes, read the time on her gold watch.

“Ten o’clock. The little cripple will have testified by now. It’s all up to her.” Anger flooded her features, changed the direction of her thought. “The conceited little bitch. Thinks I’m an idiot or something. She kept the food locked away all these months and never once realized I had this.”

She pointed at the rows of shelves laden with jars. Poldi followed the gesture, first with her eyes then with her feet, and quickly realized that the entire supply consisted of store-bought jam and tinned fruit. There had to be a hundred jars lining the shelves.

“Apricot!” she called out in childish excitement, reached for a jar. “If it’s all right with you.” She turned to solicit permission, a hint of curtsy
to her movement. “Got a sweet tooth, I have. It’s been months since I had jam.”

Frau Seidel did not object, and Poldi brought the jar to the table. She ate with her fingers, fishing out the sticky chunks of fruit and licking them off with obvious relish.

“And what’s this here?” she asked halfway through the jar, reached for one of the larger tins that sat on the table, then recoiled when she saw the tar-black skull printed on the label.

Frau Seidel watched her, grinned, stuck her jam-smeared spoon into the open tin. She scooped out a quantity of fine white powder, stirred it into the dregs of the jam jar in front of her. Carefully, moving with surprising dexterity, she laid the jar on the ground then rolled it across the room in the direction of the shelves. The jar disappeared in the shadows at their base: a grating sound as glass rolled over concrete. Poldi made to say something, but was cut off by a warning finger. They sat and waited, heard nothing. Then a subtle movement of the jar, a quarter turn, the scritch-scratch of a careful paw.