The Crooked Maid (8 page)

But she didn’t leave.

“What’s that?” she pointed, shot a finger at the hat box. It was resting on a chair near the door, where it shared the space with a button-eyed teddy and a cutlass made of wood. The box’s lid was decorated with a glued-on bow.

“A present for Mother. I’ll give it to her after dinner. There was this hat maker’s in Zurich. I had to write away and have it sent.”

Robert had yet to drop the hand he had extended in friendship. The “asshole” did not trouble him. Her name, he recalled, was Eva. He itched to try it out loud.

“Go on, take a peek. They wrapped it up beautifully.”

She jumped down from her perch, snatched up the box, shook it, pulled off the lid. Inside sat a bright red hat with a soft felt crown and delicately moulded brim, cushioned on all sides by little balls of crumpled paper and wrapped protectively in a square of translucent silk. She stared at it with an expression the boy found hard to read: a tender shyness spreading through her features. Slowly, gently, her hands reached in and touched the fabric.

“Better leave it where it is, Eva. I’m not sure I can wrap it up as nice.”

At the mention of her name she flinched, cast off the tenderness. Her hands grabbed the hat, yanked it out by crown and brim, spilled the wrapping to the ground. She snapped it onto her head as though it were a bathing cap, pulled it low on her brow; stood in front of him, planting her hands on those uneven hips, daring him to tell her off.

“So?” she asked. “How do I look?”

“You’re not wearing it right.”

He got up, stepped over to her, reached with outstretched fingers for her head. She recoiled despite herself, then forced her face back into range. He pulled up the hat, set it down again, more lightly and further back upon her head; arranged the brim at some slight angle; reached for a strand of hair that he sought to tuck behind her ear. She slapped away his hand then let him do it, her stare belligerent, flinching every time he touched her skin. Another tuck and she pushed him away, stood scowling, waiting for his verdict.

He struggled for a phrase. “Not bad,” he said at last. “It’s just that it’s not your colour. It asks for darker hair.” And then, moved by a sudden recollection: “There was a woman on the train who could have worn it. Thick auburn curls.” He caught himself smiling, bit his lip. “Do you think Mama will like it?”

“She’s too old for it.”

“We better put it back.”

Eva took off the hat and seemed prepared to surrender it, then replaced it on her head, trying to imitate the adjustments he had taught her. He opened his mouth to protest, but a noise cut him short. It was the front door bell. The ringing was continuous and shrill.

“That’ll be the taxi,” said the girl. “You better go down.”

“A taxi going where?”

“The clinic. It’s gone four. Visiting hours will be over by five. I thought you would like to see your father.” There was something nasty to her smile.

“Gone four? I slept through the whole day!” Robert’s stomach grumbled. “And I haven’t even had lunch.”

He cast around, collected his waistcoat, his jacket, his socks and shoes. It did not even occur to him to resist her will and refuse the taxi. All he wanted to know was: “What time is dinner?”

“Do you think I will cook it for you? You think your mama will?”

Robert looked over to her, standing at the centre of his room, with her arms locked wrist to elbow, wringing cleavage from her lean and narrow chest; the toy plane gunning for the crimson crown of captured hat. Robert found it easy to forgive her manners; he had never learned to hold a grudge.

“You’re angry,” he said. “Life’s been—”

“Fuck you,” she cut him short, and slammed the door on her way out.

2.

Her name was Dorfer. The boy walked into the clinic a little after four and asked her if she could lend him the money for his taxi. He asked her shyly, explaining it all with a good deal of detail, how his mother had taken his wallet and how “Eva” had called the taxi, and in any case the fare was not much.

“Please,” he said. “I’ll come by tomorrow and pay you back.”

What struck her most was the pale, freckled agitation of his face: he did not want to be thought a cheat. When he wrote down his address and named the paltry sum, she acquiesced at last, went outside and paid the surly driver. She did not tip and watched the man drive off: shallow puddles standing in the cobbled courtyard, the smell of pine trees blowing in the wind.

Back inside, the boy had peeled out of his coat and stood rubbing his wet footprints into the hallway rug. He stopped at once when she approached him and made a beeline for her chair. It was her thirty-second year of nursing. She was overweight and tired and fifty-one years old.

“It’s so quiet here,” said the boy, looking past the reception desk, down the corridor that led to the patients’ rooms.

“We are a private clinic. Eighteen beds. Not like the bustle of the hospital.”

She did not say that they only had five patients. Half the staff had been laid off.

“Who are you here for?”

“Herr Magister Seidel.”

“You are the son?”

They both noted the surprise in her voice. She had read in the newspapers that he was older. And in jail.

“Stepson.”

“I see. Come, then, visiting time is almost up.”

They walked down the empty corridor together, the boy curious, catching glimpses through half-open doors. There wasn’t much to see: a handful of pale faces made paler yet by the starched radiance of their bedclothes.

“Here.”

She opened the door and stepped out of his way. He entered—hastily it seemed to her, a boy afraid to be thought a coward—then stopped dead in his tracks at the centre of the room. From where she stood, all she could see of the patient was the outline of his calves and feet. The boy, she noted, did not approach the bed. He stood breathing for some moments, his hands forgotten in his trouser pockets.

“Is he always like this?” he chanced at last.

“From the day he came. Once in a while it sounds like he is talking. But all it is is a sort of groan.”

The boy tilted his head to one side, as though he could hear it now, his eyes turned inward, to the half-remembered past. “He used to sing in church,” he said distractedly. “A beautiful voice. Tenor, I think.
Gloria in excelsis Deo
. Afterwards people would line up outside to shake his hand. Or, you know …” He raised his arm briefly and indicated the Nazi salute, unselfconscious, still lost in memory. It was surprising how once so common a gesture now made her wince.

The next moment the boy had shrugged off the past and moved on to questions of logistics. What he was puzzling over was: “How do you feed him?”

“Sugar water. It goes in through that tube.” She pointed. “Thankfully, he can breathe by himself.”

“He’ll die, won’t he?” The voice was quiet but firm.

“It’s in God’s hands.”

She was amused to find his hand mark a cross on chin, chest, and shoulders in response to her words. He kept facing her, unembarrassed under her gaze.

“I’ve been away for several years. At school. I only returned today. My mother—” He paused, rephrased his thought. “They say my brother did it. But nobody told me a thing.”

One of his eyes had been injured and retained a hardness quite at odds with the other. It was as though one half of him was grown up.

“Come,” said the nurse. “We can talk in the tea kitchen.”

It was a room hardly bigger than a closet. Her girth filled it, consigned him to a corner stool. She caught him staring at half a slice of buttered bread sitting on the table but ignored his silent appeal. There was an immersion heater plugged into the outlet. Turning her bulk away from him, she boiled a pot of water and made a flask of rosehip tea. He accepted a cup, drank, burned his tongue, then cooled it in the pocket of his cheek.

It took him a minute to retrieve it and speak. “They told me—that is, Poldi did, his wife—that Wolfgang was arrested. Herr Seidel’s son.”

She nodded, hid behind her cup. “All I know is gossip.”

“Please,” he said again. “I must know.”

“Well, then. What I heard is that he beat your stepfather and threw him out the window. And then your brother went running into town. Never even put on his shoes. Ran his feet bloody, telling everyone he’d killed his father. So they arrested him. The papers say he was SS.”

“Poldi said police.”

“Not what I heard.”

The boy nodded as though he was unconcerned by her correction. “Why?” he asked at length. “Why did he do it?”

She bristled. “How should I know? I wasn’t there.”

He put a hand on her sleeve. It was so young and white and slender, it did not feel like an imposition.

“There must be gossip,” he said, repeating her word, the grown eye flashing boldly in his boyish face. “It’s better I hear it from you.”

Again she acquiesced; drank tea; spoke through its steam. “You have a maid.”

He nodded.

“They say the two of them, your father and your brother, they both—” She broke off. “It happens in the best families, you know.”

He thought this over, neither incredulous nor outraged, his brow creased, as though working on his homework. Halfway through his thought his eyes once again found the half slice of buttered bread. He noticed her noticing, and blushed.

“Well, now,” she said, reached out a chubby hand. “I suppose we can share.”

They ate in silence.

Ten minutes later she led him out past the front desk, where the telephone was ringing.

“I’m Robert,” he said in parting, and as though suddenly grown shy. “You’ve been very kind—”

“Sissi,” she said. “Like the empress.”

She picked up the receiver and through the lead-shot pattern of the clinic’s windows watched him leave: his head bowed, his collar turned up against the early evening air, the white face thoughtful under the mop of dark hair. Then he turned up the driveway and was lost from sight.

When Robert approached his parents’ villa some twenty minutes later, he for a second time that day exchanged glances with the vagrant in the red scarf.

3.

The man was gone before Robert could place him. The boy had walked as he had earlier, on his way from the station: his attention turned inward, placing foot before foot. It was only the man’s movement that alerted Robert to the stranger’s presence, the furtive haste with which he turned tail. He had been standing in the shadow of a mound of cobbles piled up on the side of the street across from the villa’s garden gate, or rather had squatted, the skirts of his greatcoat trailing in the street. His shoulders and hair were wet from the day’s rain. When he heard Robert approach, he rose and turned, stared timidly across the space dividing them, then quickly slipped through a gap in their neighbour’s garden wall. Robert was left with the impression of a thin man, eyes still as buttons sewn onto his face. It occurred to him to follow, but when he stuck his head through the garden wall across, he caught no trace of the stranger and reluctantly turned back towards the house. What stayed with him as he climbed the steps to the front door were the soft, rich coils of the man’s lambswool scarf.

Robert had no key, but he found the door ajar, leaned shut upon its bolt, either from oversight or in anticipation of his return. As he closed it behind himself, his mother’s head emerged in the doorway to the drawing room at the other end of the hall. He saw nothing of her but the sagging,
bloated chin and the dark wave of her loosened hair. A black lace collar cut in half her throat; beneath it she was lost in shadow.

Robert ran over to her, wishing to tell her about his visit, the grimy, dark windings of the clinic. But what came out instead was this, somehow too lightly, like schoolyard gossip traded in the dorm:

“There is a man watching the house.”

She started, stared at him, the face puffy and devoid of any definite expression.

“I went to the hospital, Mother. Herr Seidel isn’t well.”

Again she started, as though frightened by a noise, and again her face failed to register emotion. Slowly, thoughtfully, she trained her dull eyes on his face and at the same time withdrew into the room.

“Robert,” she said, faintly yet warmly. “You’ve come home!”

Into the silence that followed, his stomach ejected a long, low grumble, grieving over its missed lunch.

Robert mounted the stairs and returned to his room.

4.

She was still wearing the hat. There it perched, upon her crown, its crimson clashing with the spark of copper the lamplight teased from her thick hair. The angle was getting more rakish by the hour, the left eye in the shadow of its down-turned brim. She sat on his windowsill, her nose stuck in the pages of a book. On top of the desk, amongst the fallen soldiers, she had placed an open tin of English beans and some gammon on a painted china plate.

“Took you a while,” she said, looking up. “Long talk with your father, I suppose.”

The book she was reading was his school edition of Schiller’s
The Robbers
. His satchel lay upended on his bed. On the bedside table lay his diary, on top of the scrap of paper on which he had scribbled down Frau Beer’s address. Both looked as though they had been moved.

Robert repeated the phrase he had used with his mother. “Herr Seidel isn’t well.”

The girl made a sound, more cackle than laugh. “Was he—?” She rolled back her eyes and let her jaw go slack, mimed the gaping blankness of Herr Seidel’s coma with surprising accuracy. He felt he should tell her off, but sat down on his desk instead, tucked into the tin of beans with the spoon she had provided. The beans were quite cold.

“You should have warned me,” he complained between spoonfuls.

“I thought you better see for yourself.” She stretched, dangled her legs. “He fell three yards, maybe three and a half, and managed to land on his head. Clumsy, eh?” Her eyes found his, a smile playing on her lips. “You have a good thing coming. If he dies, I mean.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” he told her. “Speak ill of the sick.” Robert sampled the gammon, found it salty and tough. All the same, he kept on eating.