The Crooked Maid (7 page)

There wasn’t much noise now after that initial, startling charge. His movements were shuffling, searching, full of doubt. She could hear him walk down the corridor and push open doors, much as she had done some hours earlier; heard his quick, hoarse whisper calling through the empty rooms, using some word or name she failed to understand. Somehow (with his hand, she imagined, or the crown of his hat) he must have brushed the hallway lamp, sent dancing the bulb, and forced an eerie sense of movement on the ceiling, walls, and floor. She listened and waited and struggled with vertigo.

When he stepped into the doorway of the room, pushing open the door with a quick slap of his hand, the bulb at his back made him look impossibly large: a backlit giant who stood swaying, framed by wood and light. He was wearing a greatcoat; mud-caked boots upon his feet. It was impossible to see his face.

Still she did not move. The rectangle of light that fell from the open door (twitching, quaking, taking orders from an agitated bulb) reached all the way over to the sofa: caught her hair, she hoped, the slender curve of her silk blouse. Indeed he seemed to make her out at once: gave a cry, or maybe coughed, and staggered forward. His movements were alien to her, and it flashed in her that he must have been wounded and robbed of his gait.

At the edge of the sofa he fell to his knees; reached forward with both hands (but how different they seemed to her than those that she remembered: enormous, calloused hands, thick and knotty at the knuckles); cupped her cheeks, her throat, her neck, and pushed his face right into hers. His breath was poison, catarrh and vodka, the features coarse, and sheer, and bony, with a sloping forehead and enormous brows. He held her, tilted her head into the light, and studied her with open disappointment.

“
Schaaßdreck
—shit,” he said, and lost his balance, fell against the sofa’s armrest, then slid in a heap onto the floor. A moment later he had started
snoring, arms spread, head drooping, one hand dug into the cushion by her knee.

It wasn’t Anton. Even now—sitting there, staring at his sprawling limbs and picking through his coarse, broad features (
“as though dug with a spoon from out a lump of rotten wood”
)—she could not accept this simple fact. Perhaps, she thought, he had been beaten, the face reset by army surgeons who cared too little for his noble brow; had his fingers broken one by one, then pulled them straight in some dark prison and tied them to some sprigs of kindling in the hope that they might heal.

Distraught, not daring to wake him, she slipped down next to him; sat on the floor, with her back leaning against the sofa, and measured herself out against his long and sprawling legs. The man was enormous, a full foot taller than herself. Something gave in her, physically gave, a sense of tension that had run from rib cage to the dimple at the base of her throat; snapped, recoiled onto itself, pushed out a hoarse, impatient grunt. Her husband could not have grown this much: there wasn’t a rack (not even in Russia!) that would account for the extra height. All at once she grew angry, jumped up, and started kicking him awake. She wore no shoes, bruised her toes upon his greatcoat’s buttons; put a heel into his face and pushed it over, startled him awake.

“What?” he asked, shook himself, tried to focus, eyes gone bleary with the booze.

“Who the hell are you?”

She had to say it twice until he understood, grinned, shook his finger at her, mumbled something, fell asleep. Again she kicked him, again he came awake, swung out with one arm as though with a cudgel, hit her knees, and nearly slapped her to the ground.

“
Ticho!
” he yelled, in Russian, Polish, God knows what; crawled his way face down onto the couch and threw forward one arm in the manner of a swimmer. His snore was heartfelt, rumbling, rich in bass; head, chest, buttocks rising up like a bellows with every slurp of cushion-thickened air.

“I will call the police,” she yelled, but wasn’t heeded. He snorted, shifted, and slept on.

5.

Anna Beer calmed herself. She was not, by nature, easily frightened. Just to see whether it worked, she picked up the phone on the little table in the hallway alcove. There was no signal, just the tinfoil rattle of the static, feigning interest in her lot.

Pensive, her hand still holding the receiver to her chin and ear, she stared back into the study, at the snoring, sprawling sleeper on the couch. Water might wake him, a glass poured over the face, or, better yet, a bucket. But water would not sober him: he would wake, grow violent; lash out at her with those enormous hands. Who was he? She replaced the receiver and had a look at the apartment door, wondering whether he had somehow forced his entry; found his key still stuck into the lock. Mechanically, considering its implications, she pulled it out and slipped it in one pocket. She left the hallway, went first into the kitchen, where she searched the drawer for the carving knife, then back to the living room, where she drew up a chair next to the sleeper and sat there with the blade across her skirt-clad thighs.

The clock struck one, a single bleating running solemnly through the flat. Outside, the rain had stopped. The yard was dark and quiet; cloud chasing cloud in the city’s ambient glow. As she sat there, waiting, there came through the ceiling the strains of a muted argument. It was the woman’s voice that carried, high-pitched and insistent, interrupted only by her cough. She kept repeating her phrases, “What a pig you are” and “It cannot be borne,” over and over, in a tear-choked falsetto that seemed to whistle through the building’s brick.

Within half an hour Anna could not listen to it any longer, stood up and shifted to another chair, closer to the bookshelf and the door, where the voice was less audible. The chair was large and cushioned, upholstered
in blood-red velour. She pulled up her feet, slipped out of her jacket, and hugged it like a blanket to her chest. But what if she should chance to fall asleep again? The man might wake first, might approach her: curled up, sleeping, one stockinged heel tucked under her rump. The thought unsettled her.

She picked up the knife, walked over to the sleeper, stared blankly at those giant hands. The palms were nearly square, the backs thick-veined and bony, the fingers broad and flattened at the tips. And everywhere there was a terrible angularity about the man, his giant back and yard-wide shoulders, the unbending stiffness of his neck. It was as though a too-modest wrap of skin had been stretched across an outsized frame of bones: he contrived to be both massive and at the same time very thin. He was not the sort of man she wanted creeping up on her.

Standing there, listening to his snore, the neighbour’s whine still seeping through the ceiling, she came to a decision; turned around at once, left the study, and locked the apartment door from the inside (it could not be opened without a key). Then she picked up a dining room chair and, wedging it under the handle, barricaded herself in the bedroom as best she could.

Anna Beer lit a cigarette, smoked about one-half of it, pacing the room with measured steps, then sat down on the dusty covers of her marital bed, underneath the picture of a pretty girl in a linen nightdress. Ever since leaving Vienna, she had got into the habit of sleeping no more than five or six hours a night, lying in the dark in a state of angry boredom, then waking the next morning feeling drained and restless, unrefreshed. But now she again fell asleep, almost at once, her breathing shallow and even, her features happy, smiling, one hand curved around the handle of the knife.

Four

1.

He slept, not having expected to; slept soundly, the brow smooth but for that wrinkle round his broken eye. When he woke, she was standing in the room, halfway between door and bed, a model airplane hanging from a thread an inch above her head. She smelled of food. It wasn’t anything that she was holding; she herself smelled of it, smoked pork and sauerkraut, the sour tang of pickles. The bedside lamp he stretched to light found a spot of grease still moist upon that puckish chin. From his perspective, belly down, face half burrowed in his pillow, there was no way to see her hump. He noticed other things. The rigid structure of her bra made poignant those gentler protrusions of her body, and for a moment he marvelled at her, at her slimness and her leggy grace, the buttoned tightness of her blouse. But then, as though on purpose, she turned and made a show of her deformity; bent over the corner desk, where tin soldiers, corralled in distant boyhood, still huddled in a circle at the centre of the oaken plane, and went through its drawers one by one. What she was looking for was in the bottom left. She retrieved it, blew off the dust, threw it over to him (tousle-haired, sitting up, fumbling witless for his wits), onto the rustic tartan bedding, the smell of childhood seeping from its down.

“I didn’t steal it,” she said brusquely, took his measure with her sullen gaze. “She put it here herself.”

It took him a moment to realize it was a frame, a picture, he was holding, and another to connect it to the empty square on the wall that had pushed his mother to such fury. A wipe of his sleeve was unable to erase what proved to be not dirt but a crack in the glass that ran from bottom left towards the centre, forked lightning leaping from the lacquered frame. The picture, a portrait, was familiar, not just in outline but in its lighting and pose. It was one of a handful that had been in constant circulation even in Switzerland, a publicity shot taken early in the war. Robert had never cared for the moustache. It sat on the lip like a rectangle of tar; hid the furrow; drained all rhythm from the hard line of the mouth. Adolf Hitler looked sullen in the picture, masterly; a little heavy in the jowls. The hairline crack made incisions in his collared throat. Robert studied the picture, then dropped it on his lap; turned his attention over to the girl. He was wearing nothing but his shirt: buttons gaping at the chest. All at once he worried what sort of bulges his body might have cut into the bedding in his sleep.

“How long have you been here?”

“Some minutes. Your eye moved under the lid. The good one.”

A memory returned to him, of a long valley overgrown with summer wheat; bent stalks swaying to the breath of breeze. Somewhere in that porous sky, where dream had given to reality, he’d been troubled by the ardent caw of crows.

“I was dreaming,” he smiled.

She shrugged, one shoulder leading on her crooked trunk, then peeled a finger from her long-boned fist and pushed it near his face.

“That eye was moving. The other one was dead.” She bent closer, breathed sauerkraut onto his mouth. “Is it blind?”

“No,” he answered, aware that the lid had fallen shut, and pulling it up now with his thumb. In his confusion he edged away from her and drew the bedding closer around him. The movement dislodged the picture on his lap and sent it crashing to the ground. Neither of them moved to pick it up.

The girl turned away again, resumed her survey of the desk. She pulled the topmost drawer out of its compartment then dropped it on the table-top, spilling soldiers left and right.

“It’s full of her stuff,” she said, sifting through the contents with both hands. “Photos, magazine clippings. Letters of congratulations, thank-you notes, commendations. Her Party correspondence. Nice stationery, some of it. She even has a set of napkins somewhere with swastikas stitched on. Your letters are here too.” (She pulled out a tied bundle.) “What rubbish you write! Do you think you are a poet or something?”

While her back was turned, Robert reached to retrieve his trousers from the floor. He looked to the window, found the heavy curtains drawn. It was hard to say how late it was.

“I met Poldi,” he said abruptly, and struggled to pull on the trousers under the bedding. A corner of the shirt got stuck on the buttons. He lay flat on his back and wrestled with his fly. “She said that Wolfgang was arrested.”

“What else did she say?”

“Not much. I think she was tipsy.”

The maid smirked at that, watched his struggle underneath the blanket. At last he threw back the bedding and sat there, with his shirttails hanging out.

“Please,” he said. “I beg you. Just tell me what is going on.”

She seemed about to refuse him, turn away, then stopped short and forced her shoulders into that peculiarly lopsided shrug of hers.

“There isn’t much to tell,” she said. “Wolfgang came home six weeks ago, Poldi in tow. Your parents kept it quiet, of course: no registration papers, no ration cards, all the while hoping the neighbours hadn’t noticed. They were worried he’d be arrested. Wolfgang’s never been denazified.” She paused, wet her lip, the down on her chin catching the lamplight. “And then, ten days ago, Herr Seidel was pushed out the window. He and Wolfgang, they had a fight.”

He looked up at her, found one half of her face eroded by shadow, the other lit up starkly, like the waning moon.

“And it really was Wolfgang who …?” He paused, and she waited him out until he found himself enacting it, making a shoving motion with both his arms.

Again the girl shrugged. “He confessed.”

“You saw it, didn’t you?” he told her softly. “Mother said you saw and you will testify. She’s angry with you.”

He expected a response, perhaps a denial, but she just stared back at him, wrinkling her nose at the last phrase. There was something about her face that moved him to pity; it mingled vulnerability with spite. All at once he wanted to be friends with the crooked girl.

“You come from an orphanage. It’s where Mother found you.”

“And what if she did?”

“How long were you there?”

“Seven.”

“Seven years?”

“Yes.”

“And I was in boarding school for almost six!”

“So?”

“So we have something in common.” He reached out his hand, hoping she would shake it. “And I’m not even angry you read my letters.”

She stared at his hand, first with bafflement, then anger, reached into her blouse, and retrieved a cigarette and matches. It wasn’t until she’d lit up that she seemed to trust herself to speak. “Asshole,” was all she said. She sat down on the desk, spat smoke across the room, kicked her heels into the wood.