The Crooked Maid (17 page)

Kis smiled, as though cheered by the thought of having been the subject of such privilege. “Next I knew, he got up and walked out, shook my hand on his way out the door. It’s the last I’ve seen of him.” He paused, licked his lips, searching them for brandy. “Has he really disappeared?”

Neumann did not answer, sat pondering Kis’s words. His right hand was still thrown around the fat man’s shoulders, holding on to his ear. The left was pouring out the last of the liquor, a sip for them each.

“It’s a good story,” he said at length, as though he were evaluating a manuscript. “The problem is, one couldn’t really print it. Only darkly hint, perhaps. ‘
Fruit-love. Sundered by the swastika
.’ Scandalous, but it won’t do.” He shrugged, swallowed the contents of his glass. “You know what sells these days? Espionage. ‘The Cold War.’ That’s what people want to read. Especially abroad.” He patted Kis’s knee, grateful to him that he had helped him establish the point. “How about you, then? Did you go to a camp?”

Kis shook his head. “I underwent re-education,” he said vaguely.

“Really?”

“There was an operation …”

Karel stared at him, then burst into a good-natured laugh. “They chopped off your balls? Christ almighty, the things they came up with! But listen to this. I had a comrade in the army, had one of his testicles shot off. From behind, mind. Bullet came in from under his arse, shot his testicle clean off. Not a scratch on the rest of him—not the arse, not the thigh, not his peter. There was a physics student there with us, tried to work it
out. The trajectory. Said it was impossible. Against the laws of nature. A real joker he was, too. The guy with the shot-off bollock, I mean. One day, on leave, we go to this brothel. We are hardly through the door when he throws down his gloves and pulls down his pants. ‘I demand satisfaction,’ he shouts. The girls laughed and laughed.” He stopped, again patted Kis’s knee. “But I suppose it’s different when they take away both.”

He yawned, rose from the couch. “One last thing, Kis,” he said. “Did Beer mention which camp he was in? In Russia. Did he mention a number, or a name?”

Kis shook his head, looked at him in confusion. “No.”

“Fine, forget about it. If Beer’s wife comes back—” He paused, considered. “She won’t, you know, but if she does, just stick to your story. You haven’t seen him since ’39. To avoid complications. Don’t you agree? Gustl?”

“Yes.”

“Well then!
Na shledanou
, my sweaty friend.”

And walked out without another word.

4.

She asked him what he had learned.

He told her. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? You were up there a long time.”

“I wanted to make sure.”

“He hasn’t seen Anton?”

“Not since the war.”

“Good.”

She did not hide that she was pleased. Why shouldn’t she be? Some part of her had feared that they would find him there, cuddled into the warmth of Kis’s bedding; that he would stare at her with limp, embarrassed eyes; stretch and sink back into pillows.

“I’m thirsty,” she said. “Let’s find a café.”

They walked some minutes and chose a hotel café whose painted sign insisted on hard currency. A third of the tables were already taken: officers, journalists, NCOs in civilian dress. Most of them spoke English; in the foyer, a slender youth in a dinner jacket stood barking French obscenities into the phone. They chose a table by the window. She was amused when Karel pulled back the chair for her; helped her out of her light summer coat. The big Czech was in an expansive mood and bantered with the waiter, who turned out to be Moravian, from Zlín. On the Moravian’s recommendation he ordered pot roast with dumplings and bread, two different types of cake; a glass of beer and a coffee. Anna stuck to water. She watched Karel eat, hurriedly, crudely stabbing the spoon into his open mouth. She wanted to ask, Do you think Anton loved him? But it was impossible to ask this simple question.

“So that’s that,” she said instead, and he nodded, coughed up gravy, held the rest down with a swig of beer.

“Mind if I have another?”

“Go ahead.”

It was understood that she would pay.

He waved over the waiter, asked for a beer along with the bill. The man bowed, smiled, shuffled, at once obsequious and fiercely independent, a Viennese waiter born in Zlín. They used to write feuilleton articles about figures such as him. Outside, across the street, there was a neat gap where there had once stood a building. In the muddy yard crouched a child, sinking pebbles in a puddle, his buttocks outlined by a double print of dirt. Anna Beer lit a cigarette.

The bill came and was presented to Karel, who glanced at it then handed it to her. She pulled out her purse, counted the money, the big Czech counting along with her, gauging her wealth. She caught his look, overturned her purse, pushed the money across the table. He stared at the little pile of coins, dark eyes puzzled under the overhang of brow.

“Can you find him for me?” she asked. “There’ll be more if you do.”

His face shifted in surprise. “So you really want to find him?”

She nodded, thought. “Yes.”

“You think he’s changed?”

“You tell me.”

Neumann spread his fingers on the tablecloth, a noncommittal gesture. He had yet to touch the money. “And all the years before,” he asked, ignoring her question, “when you were married?” He paused, grinned at her, his meaty tongue hunting for crumbs along the corners of his lips.

“Did I know? Was it love, or was I just happy to have a husband pay my bills?” She sat unflinching before his brazen smile, chin up, shoulders squared, hid her doubt behind her beauty. “You wouldn’t understand, Herr Neumann.”

“True, true, I wouldn’t.” He leaned back and carried on, giving prominence to his accent. “It reminds me, though, of little adventure I had. This was before war. This girl and I, we were in love. Her parents did not like me, so we ran away, to Vienna, and found a room with landlord who did not care we weren’t married. Yarmilla, she was called, a redhead, legs all the way up to her arse. Anyway, one day I come home and she’s in bed with the landlord. I turn around, go to a tavern, get good and drunk. When I come home, she’s still in bed, looking at me same way you are looking at me now. Proud, you see, daring me to tell her off. So I don’t tell her off. I simply ask her, ‘Why did you do it? Are you worried about the rent?’ She looks at me, considers. ‘No,’ she says. ‘For love.’ So I go away again and chew on it, this ‘for love.’ I have another round of beers, then coffee, then more beers, until money is gone. ‘Very well,’ I say, when I come back second time. ‘For love. But we might as well save on rent too.’” He laughed, unrestrained, the whole café turning to watch.

Anna stubbed out her cigarette. “You are a show-off,” she said, irritated, amused. “The sort of man that will brag about anything. His poverty, his baseness, the holes in his socks. Just for a laugh.” She paused, touched his hand with her fingertips as though to assure herself that he was real. “How is it that someone like Anton is your friend?”

He shrugged, a heave of mighty shoulders; swept the coins into his
pocket. “I’ll find him for you,” he said, reached forward, swallowing her hand in his. “Or Sophiĉka will. She’s already making calls.”

He sat petting her hand until she pulled it away from him. “Let’s go home,” she said.

The tip she left was rather meagre. The Moravian waiter scooped it up and sadly shook his head in their wake.

5.

She had expected him to part ways with her on the first-floor landing, but Neumann dogged her steps all the way to her apartment door.

“I thought I’d take a nap,” he answered her questioning glance. “Downstairs—the bed is too small.” He held his hands out mere inches apart. “It’s like curling up in shoebox.

“Please,” he added, not without a brazen charm. “For mercy of God, and Comrade Beer.”

She thought of denying him, but it seemed pointless. Karel Neumann was working for her now, looking for her missing husband. Either he would find him—or she would return to Paris. There was something else to it too: his outsized buffoonery might help fill the flat. The previous night she had walked listlessly through its empty rooms, her heart suspended between foreboding and boredom. Her heart, she thought,
suspended
; pictured it, too, a purplish lump of sodden muscle hanging from a nylon thread, a scrap of butcher’s paper sticking to its side.

“Don’t make a habit of it,” she said, and unlocked the door.

He grunted his thanks and disappeared into the study. She closed the door behind him then went to change into her dressing gown. Cigarettes and a bottle of wine whiled away the evening, the Czech quiet now, catching up on uncramped sleep.

Four

1.

Robert arrived at the stroke of eight. The bell rang, hesitantly, singly, and there he was, the boy from the train, still wearing his dark suit. His face was flushed red, the broken eye drooping in its socket.

The rest of him was beaming at her. “Remember me, Frau Beer? Robert Seidel—we met on the train.” He wiped his feet, smiled, whispered conspiratorially, “I copied your address from your luggage tag.”

She took his coat and led him to the kitchen.

He sat down without taking in the details of the room, started talking without invitation, words spilling out of him, carried away by an enthusiasm that proved hard to resist.

“It’s already the third time I came by today. I tried at three, and then again at five. But you were always out. So I headed back into the city, walked around. The funny thing is, it didn’t hit me until today—and even then not all at once. That this is my home. But then, this afternoon, between your door and the Ringstrasse, with every step it suddenly grew on me, precisely this feeling that this is
home
, the city I grew up in, and all of a sudden I have tears in my eyes and I am staring at some building, and quite an ordinary one at that, just another building among many, and I want to hug and kiss it or something like that, I’m really moved.” He shook his head, flushed and merry, filled to the brim with his own foolishness. “And then this worker started yelling at me not to stand in the way like a blasted oaf (his words were coarser than that,
but that was the gist of it) and I—well I just wanted to go over and hug and kiss him too. Isn’t that funny?” Robert laughed. “Just picture it—if I had kissed him! He’d have broken the other eye! It’s like something you read in a book.”

He looked around himself, suddenly conscious of his surroundings, accepted the glass of water she put down in front of him. Really she should have been serving him milk. Her wineglass was on the windowsill, and she fetched it over, sat down across from him, registered his eyes swooping down the curve of her close-fitting dressing gown. His train of thought was so transparent, she very nearly laughed out loud.

“So where is your husband?” he asked.

“Out,” she said, unwilling at that moment to go over the details of her predicament. “And how are things at home, Robert Seidel?”

“Home?” he grinned. “You just wouldn’t believe—”

And he told her, in great detail, everything that had happened to him since he parted with her outside the train station. He did so not in the order the events occurred, but the way a drunk tells a story, rushing first to whatever was most exciting, then realizing that what he was describing made no sense if he did not explain something else altogether, and thus continuously chasing back upon himself and getting into a tangle. He seemed to know himself that this mode of telling a story was both inefficient and confusing, but rather than changing it and starting over, he simply laughed and redoubled his efforts, speaking fervently with that same hot, urgent flush on his cheeks.

“In a word,” he finished, at long last (he must have been talking for the better part of an hour, dwelling on details, his feelings, the shade of a hat), “Wolfgang’s in jail eating Hungarian goulash. And I—I haven’t had a square meal in days.”

He tucked in cheerfully when she cut him some slices of bread and cold sausage. Anna watched him eat as she had done with Karel Neumann. It was one of the female roles that men enjoyed and she did not resent. There was something heartening about an appetite.

“So,” she summarized, picking through his story and wondering distractedly if she should tell him hers, “your brother is a war criminal, your mother an addict, and there is a man watching the house. It’s like something by Dumas.”

“Yes,” he said, unable to hide his excitement. “Isn’t it marvellous?”

“It’ll be quite a trial. The sins of Austria coming down on your brother’s head. If they choose to revisit them, that is. They may not. Let sleeping dogs lie. It’s the national pastime.” She lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the boy. “What about the other thing? Did he do it? Attack his father?”

Robert hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said at length. “Eva does.” He smiled somehow nervously, grew bashful. “From what you’ve heard,” he asked, “do you think she likes me?”

She laughed, watched the warmth that spread across his skin. “I should think she loves you a little already. You’re very easy to love.” She suppressed the urge to pet his cheek. “And you?” she asked instead. “Do you like this Eva?”

Robert nodded, stopped. “She has a hunchback. Though not really a hunchback.” He swivelled around in his chair, placed his hands on the base of his neck. “Something about the spine.” He turned back to face her, looked shyly at her face. “She’s not as pretty as you.”

She smiled, flattered despite herself, ran a hand through her hair. “Next you’ll tell me you’re in love with me. That I’ve been haunting your dreams.”

“Frau Beer!” he said, embarrassed.

“Call me Anna.”

“Anna? I thought it was Gudrun.”

“I prefer Anna. Though my husband calls me Gudrun. Anton and Anna, he says. Too silly. I dare say he’s right.”

At the mention of her husband Robert flinched, looked about himself. “Is he really out?” he asked furtively. “I thought I heard something.”