The Crooked Maid (53 page)
Authors: Dan Vyleta
He paused, tired from his long story, then looked around. “I wonder about that boy, though. The glass-blower. He might have got arrested just
for making that eye. Every time new prisoners come here, or I am moved to another camp, I look for him, my heart shrinking.” He clenched a fist in front of his chest in illustration. “I should not have drawn him into it. But the truth is, he made a beautiful eye.”
2.
The prisoner, Vladimir, listened to all this without comment and with a slight air of discomfiture. Perhaps he disliked the former camp commander and his veiled confession about his German lover. Or else he knew too much about prosthetics to believe in tales of magical eyes. He shook his head in any case and did his best to change the topic.
“Tell me, friend. Do you have a wife and children? You do? Tell me, what are they called? Anna and Yulia. Beautiful names. And how old—Ten! A good age, that. Go on, why don’t you tell me about them.”
Not far from them, in the bunk across a narrow strip of floor, sat a prisoner, hunched over, listening to them, cutting open a sparrow with the sharpened handle of his spoon, and slowly, carefully, pulling its delicate skin from off its flesh. Nobody knew his name. He spoke only to himself, called himself a ghost. Even the professional criminals, who served their time alongside the “politicals” and often exploited them without pity, avoided him. The right side of his face was caved in where his interrogators had beaten in his teeth, and one of his fingers had been broken so many times it stood up almost vertically from the back of his hand. When asked straight out what he had done to earn such treatment, he’d once whispered a story of how he’d “fought against God.” There could be little doubt that he was mad.
When I set out to write
The Crooked Maid
, I had contracted the Balzacian bug: I wanted to write a world, not a book. All the same, a world must be assembled piece by piece. The train ride came to me early, as did the theme of parricide, both in conscious homage to Dostoevsky, whose books I love. Other, less conscious, Dostoevskianisms have crept in, further proof that books are dangerous things: you read them and they impose on you not just their words but a whole sensibility; not incidents but a mode of seeing reality.
Structurally, the book owes much to Dickens. I read
Our Mutual Friend
early into its writing, and took note of Dickens’s daring in stacking incident upon incident (and coincidence upon coincidence); of his ability to connect characters high and low through crime, family scandal, and the brittle threads of chance; of his book’s unstable tone that drifts from comedy to tragedy and back and is capable, despite its author’s much-decried sentimentalism, of calling forth real emotion; and of his deft management of the book’s vast cast (Dickens would have made a good film director).
The trial at the centre of
The Crooked Maid
owes much to Kay Boyle’s wonderful 1950
New Yorker
reportage on a Frankfurt war crimes trial. Many of its details are directly inspired by this report, which is a wonderful literary performance in its own right and (along with Boyle’s other essays on postwar Germany) deserves to be rediscovered by a wider readership.
The Crooked Maid
is set only two years after my first book,
Pavel & I
(albeit in a different city), but the postwar moment it depicts is quite distinct. If
Pavel & I
captures the catastrophe of deprivation at its lowest—and coldest—point,
The Crooked Maid
is interested in the social and moral flux that accompanied the early years of reconstruction. The year 1948, when the book is set, was a year of change. West Berlin had been cut off by the Soviets and had to be supplied by air; Czechoslovakia had gone Communist; and Vienna was rumoured to be riddled with spies: the Cold War had started in earnest. At the same time, identities were shifting, and an assertive type of Austrian nationalism that distanced itself from Germany, and was given licence by the Allies to describe Austria as the first victim of an expansionist Reich rather than its willing bride, was gaining ground. POWs were still returning home, displaced persons languished in camps, denazification was slowly being wound down. In Vienna itself—a city that combines aspects of the metropolis and the village—neighbours, work colleagues, and families faced each other across the chasm of their respective war experiences, a drama played out in the shadow of entire strata of society who had been murdered by the Nazi regime. I did not want to exploit the suffering that took place in this age of uncertainty but simply to understand it: so I started far from it, in a cozy train compartment, over a cup of sweet (yet bitter) tea.
Inevitably, the book contains inaccuracies. Some of these are conscious simplifications and anachronisms for the sake of brevity, suspense or poetic effect; others will have snuck in despite my best efforts. It is hoped that neither sabotage the larger truths at stake. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to those historians who continue to expand our knowledge about Austria under the Nazis; to Wolfgang Wieshaider, whose legal expertise helped me decode the things I saw while shadowing a number of present-day criminal trials in the Viennese courts; to Martin Herles and Žofia Mrázová, who are my first port of call for all questions Viennese; to Petra and Carolus Stiegler, for the generosity of their hospitality; to A. H. Merrills and J. Boyd White, for reading early versions of the manuscript
and offering invaluable feedback; and to Joe Peschio and Elena Zakharova, for their linguistic insight and friendship.
I also wish to thank Jennifer Lambert, Jane Warren, Kathy Belden, and Helen Garnons-Williams at HarperCollins Canada and Bloomsbury for their enthusiasm, insight, and hard work, as well as Alex Schultz for the deftness of his editorial pen. To write a novel is to take risks: one follows one’s impulse, against all reason. It is in the nature of the editing process to balk at risk and try to contain it; to err on the side of the conventional, safe, innocuous. I am grateful to be working with editors who are willing to defy this dynamic. They have helped me become a better writer every time I run the gauntlet of their criticism. My thanks also go to Simon Lipskar, my agent, who has been unwavering in his support, and to the team at Writers House.
Much of
The Crooked Maid
was written at a time of great personal sadness for me. I should not have finished it were it not for the support of my wife, Chantal.
This is her book also.
Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s.
He holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. His first novel,
Pavel & I
, was published to international acclaim. His second novel,
The Quiet Twin
, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. An inveterate migrant, Dan Vyleta calls Canada his home.
Copyright © 2013 by Dan Vyleta
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Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR
eISBN: 978-1-60819-947-1
First U.S. Edition 2013
This electronic edition published in August 2013