The Crooked Maid (25 page)

Time and again he dreamt: not in those intervals of abrupt oblivion, but in between, awake, his eyes wide open, gazing calmly into the room. It was always the same dream. He was a boy, still young enough to wear short trousers and dressed to go to church, and was holding a ledger book up to his mother. The dream was rich in detail: his dark blue Sunday suit with the three-quarter-length trousers; the satin bow that hung limply from his throat; the ledger’s leather binding and the column marked Charity in his own spiky script; his mother’s breath scented with lemons, and the dark, rich folds of her dress. And yet for all these details there was no affect to the dream—no fear, no love, no sense of loss—just a dull sense of inevitability as he dreamt it over and over.

He remembered also, intermittently, abstractly, scenes from his life: how he had spat in the schoolhouse paper bin one day and been punished by the teacher; the painting of a yellow horse that had hung above the bed in his grandfather’s house; the look of a worker, a woman, whom he had dismissed for stealing copper wire, accusatory and weepy, a thick brown mole jutting from her eyelid.

And he remembered too the fall he had endured, the onrush of air, the sudden feeling of weightlessness coupled with disbelief that he (a man, a factory owner!) should be falling through the air. But to this too his mind proved incapable of clinging, just as the thought of his son, Wolfgang, passed through him without emotion, crowded out by the all-consuming awareness of his own dying.

At dusk they sent for a priest, to administer last rites. Seidel felt soothed by the strange, solemn, abstract words, then forgot about them and the fat-cheeked priest no sooner had he left, and returned his attention to his body, gently flexing his puffy wrists and hands, waterlogged with liquid he could no longer pass. His wife left within half an hour of the priest, nervous, sweaty, in need of the tonic her unscrupulous doctor prescribed. Eva followed shortly after: stooped low to look him in the face, reached out with a palm that curled into itself before it reached him; turned on her heel and went.

It was the boy who stayed longest; stayed from duty rather than love, the stubborn determination to do what was right. He had long quit his pacing and sat now on the chair his mother had abandoned, his head folded in his hands. For a moment Seidel wanted to reach out and warn him: tell him how he’d wasted all his life trying to do things from duty, against his inclinations, his vanity, his greed (and how pressing had been this greed, how omnipresent and how joyless; and how hard had he worked to reconcile it with his “conscience,” until his conscience itself had been absorbed into a system of accounting in which he assigned values to every passing act of decency and took out loans at interest like some petty Jew). He wanted to tell him all this and simultaneously confess, explain himself (for how had it started, this joyless, nagging love of money?; had he been born with it or had it been given to him, and if so by whom?; and the weight of duty, how had it come to him, and whatever for?). But the moment when he might have moved and interacted with the world had passed. The hand no longer obeyed. Soon the wish too faded away and returned him again to that sense of perfect isolation, focused only on the breath that filled, then left, his lungs.

Paul Hermann Seidel died in the early hours of the morning, the boy still sitting by his side, sleeping, his chin rolled tight into his body.

Four

1.

It was Sophie who located Karel in the end, drunk in one of the bars near the Gürtel, having walked for hours from one establishment to another and endured the stares of their male clientele. She brought him back as a mother might return a child in disgrace, pulling him by the elbow, her mobile face showing all the marks of vexation, but careful all the same to guide him across potholes and curbs without his falling.

They took a cab to the morgue. Sophie insisted on coming along and sat in the front while Anna shared the back seat with the hulking shape of Karel, who slumped against the window, red-faced and reeking of spirits. It was unclear to Anna whether he had understood the purpose of their journey or the nature of their destination. It would have taken only a moment to ask him whether her husband had had a glass eye, but she found in herself a strange reluctance to be prematurely robbed of all illusion. Instead she sat and observed the drunk with a hostility she herself could not explain.

Frisch met them outside the building as he had promised he would. Anna had called ahead and got hold of him at the police station. The large eyes swimming in his glasses seemed to reflect some of her own suppressed excitement. For all that, his voice was as monotonous as ever as he shook hands with both Sophie and Karel then guided them past the porter into the morgue. It was a quarter past four and many of the staff had already gone home. They were met outside the examination room by the same
tanned doctor in his creased lab coat. He was smoking a cigarette, dropping ashes onto his trousers and the floor.

Inside the examination room the smells of the morning seemed to have intensified. They filed in, Frisch in the lead, then huddled by the door, far from the gurney that held the dead man. When the pathologist crossed the room in order to remove the sheet, she looked away and fastened her eyes on Karel’s face instead. The big man approached the corpse with a slow, unsteady stride. Disgust, unease, spoke from his features, were quickly chased by incredulity. He bent low, threw a questioning glance first at her then at Frisch, confused, suspicious, as though they were having him on somehow; returned his attention to the body, peeled a knotty finger from one massive fist and slowly lowered it to the corpse’s face. Even the pathologist winced when he pressed down on the glass eye. It gave, and produced a wet little squeak. Again Karel turned his face towards them, the cheeks flushed from either drink or anger. He released the eye; stood up; walked quickly over to the door.

“It’s not him.”

She did not believe him. “How do you know?”

“He had his appendix out. In camp. This one—” He tapped his own pubic bone through his trousers. “Stitches across the belly. But no scar!”

“And the eye?”

He bent down to her, anger, vodka, in his breath. “The eye is his all right. Bastards stuck it in another face.”

When they left the morgue some ten minutes later, not Anna, nor Frisch, nor Karel, nor yet Sophie noticed the pair of men standing in a nearby doorway, smoking, watching them go their separate ways.

2.

Trudi heard her father come in quietly that evening. She heard him sneak into the bathroom and wash his hands, and knew by the length of time he took over the task that he had handled a dead person that day. It was not
clear to her whether his hands were actually covered in blood or whether it was the smell that he was scrubbing off so arduously; did not know for sure how dead people smelled, though she had once seen a hedgehog broken in a gutter, had sniffed at it and watched the flies alight from its small body. When her father finally came out of the bathroom, he found her in the corridor, nose curled, breathing in his scent.

“You shouldn’t be barefoot,” he said.

“I’m not cold.”

“All the same. Your slippers are right here.”

He took her by the hand and led her to the kitchen. They had dinner together, rye bread and
Speck
, some slices of tomato, a mug of tea for the girl and a beer for the detective.

“Who died?” she asked, picking her teeth with one finger for residue of sticky bread.

He did not bother to deny it. “You see,” he said, surly with disappointment, “I really don’t know.”

She laid a hand on his arm as she had seen her mother do in moments of crisis or grief, and together, bound by the gesture, they finished the food one-handed, then sat in silence until it was time to go to bed.

3.

Once darkness had settled on the city, two men broke into the city morgue in
——gasse
.

There was a night attendant who manned the little booth near the entrance, but he had stepped out for a moment to answer the call of nature, and the pair used his absence to break into the premises. There was no finesse to their entry. They simply broke down the door. It took them longer than they expected to orient themselves within the building and locate the corpse with the glass eye. They found it at last in a room reserved for refrigeration; wrapped it in the oilcloth they had brought for the purpose. As luck would have it, the night attendant returned to his post just as they
were crossing back through the gateway. He was still adjusting his braces. A scuffle ensued during which the attendant was thrown to the ground and repeatedly kicked. When questioned the next morning, he asserted that the men had been speaking some foreign tongue that might have been Russian, or Yiddish, or perhaps even French. A report was drawn up and filed with all four of the occupational authorities. They each denied knowledge and promised to investigate. The identity of the corpse, meanwhile, remained unresolved.

4.

The same night the corpse was stolen, Karel Neumann also disappeared. He had, Sophie Coburn later told Anna, not returned home with her after their visit to the morgue, but had gone out instead to “wash the stink of death out of his mouth.” When he had not turned up by the evening of the next day, Sophie made the rounds of the public houses he frequented and soon caught his trace in a bar called Erdmann’s, whose painted female clientele implied that its owner had diversified his business interests. The barman remembered Karel, a habitual customer. He had arrived after midnight, drunk steadily for an hour or two, then been joined at the table by two men in long dark overcoats. They had talked, neither aggressively nor in a particularly friendly manner, and had left together, the big man supported by a stranger on either side. The barman had not been close enough to overhear their discussion, though he indicated that they had spoken with an accent, or “at any rate did not belong.” Sophie thanked him and interviewed some of the Erdmann’s habitués, none of whom was able to add anything of substance. She spent another day waiting for Karel, then notified Frisch of his disappearance, though she did not file an official report. There seemed to be little point.

It was understood that Karel Neumann was once again in Russian custody.

Book Two

Part One

There was a story that made the rounds amongst the inmates of the Russian camps. It was about a man, a soldier, returning home from the Great War. He must have been young, of course, but they imagined him old, the way they felt themselves. Some liked to give a date to his return. December 1918: the day before Christmas. The sixth of January, 1919: the feast of the Epiphany. Wintertime, in any case; snow on the ground. He is late coming home; an injury, in most versions of the story, has detained him since the armistice. His arm is in a sling. He is a farmer, a joiner, a postal clerk. In no version of the story is he rich
.

Here is how it goes: The man arrives at the local train station late one evening, then walks the five miles to his village. He walks slowly, head bowed, hobbling. It’s gone midnight when he arrives; not a light burning in his house. He is about to rouse his wife by knocking, then remembers; bends down, retrieves the key from under a loose brick. The front hallway opens straight into the kitchen; floorboards creaking with his every step. There is no fire in the oven, no coals to make one; a painted cupboard stacked with dishes; a kitchen table and some chairs. The man is about to go on, find his wife and his bed, but something stops him. A man’s coat is thrown over the back of a chair. He walks over, runs a hand over the wool. The coat isn’t his. His eyes find his wife’s slippers, not two feet from the coat. Again and again he looks at the slippers, then at the coat; strokes it, all the while listening into the quiet of the house
.

It does not come to him at once, the sound, but once he is conscious of it, there can be no doubt of its origin. Two people breathing, one louder than the other, a throaty exhalation that isn’t yet a snore. He sits down on the chair, careful not to disturb the coat over its back; sits in the draft between window and door, and listens to this breathing that isn’t yet a snore. By morning he is frozen solid. It’s the man who finds him, the wife’s brother, who has come to wait with her for her husband’s return
.

The first of the German POWs were released from American incarceration as early as May 1945. The last returned from Russia in 1955. Those first ones, they were soldiers, not inmates, the camp no more than an episode at the close of the war. Back home they found their cities in ruins, their wives half starved, their children running the black markets; the streets alive with occupying soldiers; refugees; DPs; KZ survivors; profiteers; journalists and film crews; the fear of a winter without coal
.

Those who came last, in ’55, found their cities rebuilt, the Economic Miracle in full swing, Marshall monies paying dividends; found their wives aged, their places in their beds usurped, their daughters copying fashions from American magazines. These men were different; some had been soldiers for one year and prisoners for thirteen. They returned as anachronisms, shaped by the struggle of the camps; spoke Russian, read Marx—and found a democratic world devoted to consumption
.

Both groups might have told the story, during the hours of transport, going home. Not one of them froze in the draft “between window and door.” But then again: who knows?

One

1.

It was the twenty-second of October. A cold spell had taken hold of the city and seemed to suggest an early winter. In Karlchen and Franzl’s room in
——gasse
, Karlchen’s mother was helping him dress. The boy kept shivering under her hands as she smoothed out his dress shirt and coat and bent down to give his shabby shoes another polish. He seemed unable to stop fidgeting, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and had to be reminded to hold still. His face had taken on an unhealthy reddish sheen; only the centre of his cheeks refused to fill with blood and stood out in pale blotches. She pinched them once or twice, hard enough to draw a wince, but it was useless. Perhaps he had simply caught a cold.