The Crooked Maid (5 page)

Now the handle gave under his probing elbow and—satchel, knapsack, and hat box still stacked before his chest—he slipped inside. What drew him had little to do with childhood memories. Though his mother had not said so in her letter, he had long formed the opinion that it was here, from one of the windows in the study, that Herr Seidel had had his fall. Quietly, Robert set his things on the floor, rounded the big desk that had frightened him as a boy, both by its bulk and by the authority it represented, and drew to the windows. There were on them no marks of violence. On the sill stood a geranium in vivid bloom.

Robert peered past it, saw the front garden with its tiled path and, with quiet horror, pictured his stepfather’s trajectory. A drizzle had started that seemed to confirm the heat rather than dispel it. It would take a determined leap to fall afoul of the metal fence with its row of ornamental spikes; a dead drop of five yards to drive one’s shins into the mound of bricks that awaited builders near the basement window. Beyond the fence, on the bucking cobbles of the narrow street, a man in a worn soldier’s coat stood looking up at him, his face muffled by a scarf. For an instant their eyes locked. Then the vagrant quickly shuffled on. His furtive speed struck a chord with Robert and he looked after him for some moments before turning his attention back to the room.

How well he remembered all its details! There had always been something bare and monkish about Herr Seidel’s study. The desk, a bookshelf, and a heavy carved chair were its only furnishings; the walls panelled chest-high in dark oak. Only a wooden cross broke the monotony of the walls above, Christ’s body hanging thin and mangled from its nails. As
he took a step towards the desk, Robert noticed that its main drawer had been broken open. Inside, a pile of documents had been rifled and then carelessly replaced. Herr Seidel’s telephone was missing from the desk, its cable cut and snaking across the floorboards.

While he stood trying to reconstruct the sequence of events that would account for these details, a sound reached Robert’s ears, faint yet urgent, and cut up by sudden skips and crackles. Intrigued, he walked to the door, then on down the corridor and up the stairs to the next floor. The music, though quiet, seemed to grow more frantic with every step of his approach. A woman was singing in German, Wagner he supposed, the orchestra rising with her mounting agitation. As he reached the room from which her singing issued, the record jumped and tossed her back to where she’d started, calmer, easing slowly to the edge of her abyss.

“Hello!” he called through the half-open door.

The music wasn’t loud enough to drown out his voice, and yet he received no answer. He knocked against the door frame, stepped slowly into the darkened room. The gramophone was by the open window; summer drizzle weighing down the half-drawn curtains. At the far wall stood a bed, its mattress hidden by a heavy footboard. A hand rose up beyond its edge and waved him over.

He took a step, kicked something small yet solid, heard the slosh of liquid near his toe. He bent down, found a brass chamber pot covered by a wooden lid, in a house that had three toilets. The hand kept on waving, impatient, imperious, slack at the wrist. A cough sounded, phlegm spat into cotton, and a hanky dropped from the side of the bed like a discarded flag of surrender.

Robert approached.

He found a woman, very thin, coughing, grinning, purple bags slung under her eyes. She was young and yet had lost the bloom of youth, along with half her teeth; thin, dirty hair spread like a halo on her pillow. The nightdress piled ruffles onto her bony breast. She spoke coarsely, in some
accent he didn’t know. From Germany, he supposed, somewhere to the east. It was clear to him that she was drunk.

“Who are you, then?” she asked.

“Robert.”

“Robert who?”

“Robert Seidel.”

“Wolfi’s brother?”

“Yes. Stepbrother, I suppose.” He smiled at her and added shyly, “And you?”

She cackled, flashed him a smile, half bashful, half proud, and marred by missing teeth. “I’m the wife, en’t I? Got the papers and all.”

“His wife? I had no idea.
Mazel tov!
”

She stared at him uncomprehendingly, coughed, spat phlegm in one hand. “Muzzle what?”

“It’s what a friend of mine says, when somebody gets lucky. To congratulate them, I mean. In school, in Switzerland—” He broke off, dressed his confusion in another smile.

“Well,” she said, a little pouty, “they don’t say that here.”

Into the silence that fell between them, Brünnhilde wailed, or Freia, or Isolde, then was silenced by a sea of strings. The woman snickered, mimed the crescendo’s climax with an elongation of her narrow throat, and threw open her jaws as though she were about to bite into an apple. In the next movement, she had wrapped a hand around his tie and was pulling him closer.

“I’m Poldi,” she said.

“Poldi,” he repeated, quietly struggling. “It’s a pleasure.”

She looked him over, her face inches from his own. “Handsome,” she decided at last. “Only, someone knocked out yer eye.”

She coughed again and let go of his tie, which crumpled back against his breast. His head jerked back too, and he almost lost his balance, swayed over her like a midnight suitor worse for drink. Nervously, on guard against her movements, he tried to explain himself.

“I haven’t heard from Wolfgang in years. He never wrote, you see, not even a postcard, in all the years I was away. And then, last thing I heard, he had vanished. Gone into hiding. Because of the war, I suppose. And now Mother says he is in jail.”

She nodded, scratched under her blankets, licked some spit from off her lip. “The coppers took him. After yer father—” She paused, made a falling motion with one hand, slapped it flat onto the bedding. “He used to be hisself, you know. Police. It’s how we met.”

“You worked for the police?”

She laughed, shook her head. “Don’t be daft now. I was a singer, wasn’t I? Some dancin’ too.”

She lifted the thin blanket and pushed out a leg. It was thin, bony, covered in fine golden hair. She lay bared to the upper thigh, hip and pubic bone sketched by threadbare wool.

He turned away quickly, found his face in a dirty mirror by the side of the bed, the pale, bashful features of a boy with a wonky eye. It vexed him for a moment, precisely this boyishness, and the pallor of his cheeks. But when Robert turned back to Poldi and found her leg still out and folded across the lip of the blanket, his thoughts nonetheless turned to retreat.

“I should go,” he said, eyes glued to her white flesh. “You must be tired.”

“Tired? Oo, I don’t know.” She sat up, waggled her toes. “The thing is,” she said, “there’s sod all left to drink. Got a drop?”

“No.”

“Ciggies?”

He shook his head.

“Money?”

“Mother took it.”

“Be a pet and turn the record. I’m sick of this side.”

“Of course,” he said, and did as he was bidden. Brass began to rumble as he stepped away from the gramophone. On the way out, he once again ran into the chamber pot and, gripped by a solemn sense of duty, picked it up to dispose of its contents in the bathroom downstairs. His
task completed, he collected his belongings in his stepfather’s study, entered his room, and, feeling soiled and exhausted and afraid he might crease, he took off his coat and trousers and lay down for a moment on the bed in which he had slept as a child.

Three

1.

It was less than two miles from the station to the apartment building. At Anna’s request, the taxi left the ring road and headed north through the Neubau district. It took longer this way, but she wanted to become reacquainted with the city and defer the moment when she would stand face to face with her husband. After their initial exchange, the driver made no further attempt at conversation. She, in turn, remained silent and stared fixedly ahead.

Before long they turned into
——gasse
. Another few blocks and she would be home. The car passed their bakery, and the corner
Tabak
: a queue for hot rolls, and the ring of the bell as the tram pulled out of its stop. Their street, as they entered it, seemed unchanged to her. It had been spared by the bombs. Only Pollak’s Auto Repair Shop had changed owners—a painted sign hung low above the gate. It was no longer a garage. They were now mending stoves.

The driver stopped by the side of her building, got out, and unloaded her luggage onto the pavement. Anna produced her wallet. All she had were hundred-shilling bills. He looked at her sourly, rummaged through his pockets, but was unable to produce the full change; shrugged, picked through his pockets one more time, then gave her all he had. It was three shillings short. Without listening to her protests that it didn’t matter and that she would be “quite all right” without his help, he picked up her luggage and walked over to the entrance, then turned around, waiting for her
to take the lead. He was a big man, burly, a roll of fat sitting in the nape of his neck; wore his tie loose around the open collar. Yesterday’s sweat had left a yellow patch on the linen of his shirt. The face was ruddy, sulking. He carried her bags like a personal affront.

They entered the building. The front door was unlocked, gave way to a hallway that connected it to the inner courtyard. The building’s main staircase rose on their right, its stuccoed ceiling spotted with dirt. The old wooden banister with its elegant curves was gone; perhaps it had been chopped up for firewood. She mounted the first dozen steps, aware of the driver’s movements behind her; looked back once and found him staring fixedly at her legs and rump.

On the first-floor landing they came upon a commotion. The police were at the door of the flat that used to belong to a retired professor of gynecology. A woman, short and slender, and wearing the sort of suit whose very plainness pointed to its expense, was talking at the two policemen in broken German. Her accent sounded American. A group of neighbours had gathered, as was customary in the event of ill fortune, but for some reason they had collected not on the landing but in the flat itself, adding their own comments and observations in muted but excited voices. A fat woman in a housecoat kept repeating the phrase “how shameful it is, how shameful,” but what it was that had her so agitated and what indeed was the nature of the foreigner’s complaint, Anna was unable to discern. She slipped past the group without stopping, the taxi driver two steps behind, still watching her rump. One of the policemen noticed her passing: their eyes met, she flashed him a smile, sweet, playful, and alluring, and he inclined his head to wish her a good day. By the time she reached the next bend of the stairs, she had dismissed him from her mind.

“Here?” the taxi driver asked as they approached the next landing. He was sweating, sullen, hostile; a suitcase in each meaty fist.

“One more flight.”

“Let’s move it, then.”

They carried on. His rudeness did not upset her. He was right: she had been tarrying. The door to their flat came into sight, her husband’s name was on the bell. Dr. Anton Beer. The taxi driver read it with interest.

She pulled the keys out of her handbag and wondered if they would still fit. It was a mystery how she had not lost them through a dozen moves and a series of lovers, but when she had set about looking for them, in the storage closet of her Paris flat, she had found them at once, looking rusty, it was true, and somehow foreign in their shape.

“You can put the luggage down here,” she instructed the driver, and pointed at the floor outside the door. He stood stolidly, ignoring her, holding on to her bags. It was as though he had not heard.

In a hurry now, wishing to “get things over with,” and a little amused, too, at the absurd note provided by the driver’s presence, she slipped the key into the lock. It turned without resistance. She swung open the door, stepped over the threshold, listened for a sound. The driver pushed in behind her. He looked around the spacious hallway, pursed his lips into a whistle. Beside them, in the windowless space that had once been her husband’s waiting room, a dozen chairs stood in an orderly square.

“You live here alone?”

She understood the question. Vienna was overpopulated and had been for as long as she remembered. After the war, with whole parts of the city in rubble, the situation had only become worse. When she had first received news of her husband’s being taken prisoner, she made inquiries about the apartment and learned that the city had seized it and was about to pass it over to some Party functionary. Furious, moved by an odd loyalty to a set of rooms that had been furnished with her misery, she had written to an old school friend who had since become a prominent lawyer and instructed him to reverse the seizure. She’d wired money to cover the rent from then on. Thus, in the middle of the overcrowded city, the apartment had stood empty for the better part of seven years.

“Yes, alone,” she answered, speaking louder than was necessary, still listening into the flat. “Just my husband and I.”

The cabbie nodded, put down the bags, walked past her and deeper into the hallway; scratched his chest and looked around. “But he isn’t here now, is he?”

The face was blank, impassive. One had to look to his hips to form the notion of a leer.

“Go,” she said.

“No need to get gruff, Frau Doktor.”

“Go!”

He yawned and stretched, filled up her hallway; stood lumbering, neither amiable nor threatening but
simply so
, yet all the same somehow expectant, as though she must treat him to a beer, or kiss him, take him by the hand and pet his ugly mug.

“Get out of my sight.”

He winced at the sharpness of the phrase, then nodded, turned sulkily, took two steps, and stopped once more, inches from her, as though waylaid by a thought too momentous to ignore.

“I owe you,” he said, scratched his chest through his shirt, brushed her with his elbow on the side of her left breast. “Three shillings. For the fare.”

“Just leave,” she said, more gently this time, and pointed with a finger to the door.