The Crooked Maid (40 page)

“There’s no space for a cot in here. There’s the big bedroom downstairs.” She paused. “Frau Seidel won’t say nothing. You’re in charge now, en’t you? The master of the house.”

She used the phrase awkwardly, pinning an odd hope to it. The thought had been on her mind of late, that she was now
mistress
. She’d played with it shyly, in her pocket as it were, not daring to bring it to the light.

“Shut your hole.” He never so much as raised his head from the pillow.

“At least get out of bed, Wolfie. I’ve got to change the sheets. They smell. It’s been two weeks.”

Wolfgang neither moved nor answered. After two days of drunken celebration he had fallen into a black funk, not leaving the bed for more than a moment, let alone the house. He had even stopped drinking; ate little, stared at the wall.

She stepped closer, lowered herself onto the far side of the bed. “It’s all right to go out, you know. They let you off.” She paused, considered reaching for his hand, but did not dare touch him. “So what if people talk. People always talk. Let them.”

He rolled onto his side, turned his back on her; a wedge of dark hair poking from the elastic of his underpants, marking the cleft of his buttocks. Poldi stretched out next to him, cast around for a topic that might capture his interest.

“Frau Seidel got a letter today. Second one this week.”

She studied the nape of Wolfgang’s neck but could discern no reaction.

“I had a look at it. While she was washin’.” She paused for effect. “It’s from that Jew. The one that used to live here, in the basement. He wants money.”

“There were no Jews living in no basement.” There was, in Wolfgang’s irritation, just a hint of curiosity.

“Were too. I saw the bed and all. But I bet they didn’t tell you. Afraid that you’d blab. Bein’ still in school and all.” Pleased at having got Wolfgang’s attention, Poldi stroked her belly and carried on. “I’ve been thinking about it since she told. How come he left his wife and child.” She
closed her eyes as though she were literally trying to picture it. “Maybe they got sep’rated in all the mess, while they was being rounded up. People yelling at them, everybody scared. Or maybe they had a fight the evenin’ before, a bad one, and he spent the night away, hooked on a bottle.” She shook her head, saddened by her inability to step into their lives. “He must have come here feeling so ashamed. And every minute he stayed—”

Wolfgang turned around at her, looked at her with something more than condescension. Wonder, perhaps. “My wife’s a romantic,” he said. “Who would’ve guessed?”

It was her turn to ignore him. “I know how it was,” she went on. “My father was a union man. Red as they come. They locked him up too, you know.”

“Next you’ll tell me you’re a Communist yourself. Spent the war in the resistance. That titty-bar was just a front.”

Poldi bit her lip. “She wants to see you, Frau Seidel does. In the drawing room at three. She said to tell you it’s important.”

This drew a chuckle from her husband. “In the drawing room at three? It appears I’ve been summoned. Did she say I should wear a tux?”

He rose from the bed very suddenly, stepped into his trousers, and, still in undershirt and socks, left the room.

4.

There were two sets of curtains, one behind the other. The inner was a sheer curtain made from cotton lace; the outer, a heavy velvet drape in a vivid shade of bronze. It proved impossible to shut the window with both curtains hanging out: the velvet was too thick. She tried several times, putting her weight against the glass. In the end she used a piece of string to tie the handle to its neighbour. It would prevent the window from blowing open but left it gaping a good few inches. Outside, the curtains billowed in the wind until the weight of the rain settled them, the velvet’s bronze
turning a flat brown. Her hands felt raw from the cold and the exertion; arthritic pain deep in the joints. Without looking back, Klara Seidel left her late husband’s study and hurried back into her bedroom.

She settled down to lighter work; sat at her vanity and saw to her hair. There was a brush she liked that Seidel had given her for their first anniversary: solid silver, its handle and back inlaid with ivory, the horse-hair bristles a light, speckled grey. Her eyes avoided the mirror. She worked by touch alone, each movement the echo of some childhood original, her entire life measured out in five-inch strokes. On occasion she caught a glimpse of the woman sitting across from her, frightened eyes and bloated jowls. It would have been good to reapply her makeup, but to do so required a longer meeting face to face. Powder served as a stopgap; hid her face, obscured the mirror in fine mist.

Soothed, her face a blank, a trail of particles shadowing her every movement, she reached into the vanity’s drawer and withdrew a leather-bound album of photos. In recent weeks she had often had recourse to its comforts. Setting it down required the rearranging of bottles in front of her; a clink of glass on glass. She lined them up along the mirror’s base, arranged them by size; arthritic fingers making order with exaggerated care. She paused over a particular bottle, removed the stopper, took a pinch, and dropped it quickly on her tongue. Eyes closed, she opened the album to a random page.

There was no chronology to the progression of pictures. She had arranged them quite recently, by size, mood, and association; had cut herself loose from the tyranny of sequence. Nonetheless it was all there: her childhood, both weddings, Robert’s christening, the time Herr Baron von Schirach had shaken her hand. A reception of the National Socialist Women’s League; the mayor’s birthday; a commemorative postcard of the Führer’s visit in 1938. Mum, Dad, three brothers; an albumen print of Grandpa, looking young and dapper in his Sunday suit.

There were pictures she lingered over. A picture of Robert, taken at school, dressed formally in jacket and tie; he had sent it one Christmas, a declaration of love neatly written on its back. A Sunday outing with
her first husband, Franz Teuben, holding a gingerbread heart against his breast. The picture had been taken at the Prater amusement park; from his hat there grew the spokes of the great Ferris wheel. It might have been 1934 or ’35; they were, neither of them, yet wearing their Party pins. She studied his face quite without emotion. Her love for him resided on the level of pure fact. True, things had been imperfect. Franz had drunk and gambled; had beaten her; had strayed, other women’s smells clinging to the inside of his underwear, a half snatch of memory of her sniffing, crying, scrubbing at stains with a brick of soap. Nor had Franz had any real commitment to the Party; it merely suited his career.

As for herself she hardly ever read the papers; listened to the radio with no investment in the words. It was only in 1941, the year of victory, and of her second wedding, that she had become more involved. At first it was the social aspect that had drawn her: she, a policeman’s widow, was suddenly courted to join the Women’s League; helped organize the celebrations for the Day of Youth; raised funds for winter clothing for the soldiers at the front. Gradually, though, through the weeks and months of mouthing phrases, something else had taken hold. She had learned Nazism the way one learns any language: through constant repetition. It had felt good, for once, to be certain, on the side of the winners: a lifetime of anxiety taken off her shoulders. Of course, by then she’d become rich.

Of Paul Seidel there were only two photos in the album: the first, a staged wedding picture in which they gazed into one another’s eyes; the second, part of a news clipping that praised his charity work. In both of them he looked very handsome, if slightly pinched. He had buried his old wife and married the new; had watched with trepidation her gradual transformation from maid to socialite to ideologue. For him the Party had been a business partner, to be negotiated with friendly distrust. His son had felt this lack of commitment and thrown himself into a frenzy of sloganeering. They learned from one another: in no time at all both Wolfgang and Klara spoke fluent Goebbels all day long.

She paused in her perusal, looked up, avoided once again the eyes of
the powdered woman in the mirror. Anxiety took hold of her, came from nowhere, like the touch of a draft. Her moods were restless, like a trapped fly, now calm and quiet, now hurling its weight against the glass wall of its prison. Without hesitation she reached for one of the bottles, withdrew the glass pipette, placed two drops on the back of one hand, and licked them off; her eyes watering with its bitterness. The drug worked quickly, offered distance from herself. All at once it was as though she and the woman in the mirror had traded places. Gratified, she returned the bottle to its place.

Klara could no longer recall with any certainty when she’d first had recourse to her medicine. Certainly it had started before the bomb raids, the food shortages, the radio speeches instructing them to hang on. It had been so easy to procure. She’d simply asked the pharmacist for something to steady her nerves; a week later she’d requested a pick-me-up. The names entranced her: Luminal, Veronal, Pervitin, Benzedrine, codeine, pethidine, mixed at various concentrations. Powders, liquids, pills. She remembered a woman at a party, young and graceful, a gold chain slung around the long stalk of her neck, dipping its pendant deep into her cleavage.

“Try this,” the young woman had said at the cloakroom mirror. “Our soldiers take it at the front.” She kept it in a silver compact inscribed with a fashionable rune.

“I have my own,” Klara had giggled, and they had traded tastes; the sudden rise of the girl’s nipples, laughter as she danced back out into the crowded room.

“Try this,” she mouthed now to the woman in the mirror, trying to recapture the moment’s careless gaiety, “try this,” the woman sour, swollen, unimpressed.

She closed the photo album in front of her, planted her fists on its leather, and pressed her head into her aching knuckles.

When next she looked up, Wolfgang was in the room. It could not have been much after noon.

5.

“You’re early,” she said, finding his eyes in the mirror. He stood, half dressed, at the centre of the room; a wedge of cigarette curling from the corner of his mouth.

“Does it matter?”

“I gave instructions.”

“So you did.”

She seemed more awake today, more present than he had seen her in some time. He thought of saying as much. He said, “You’re losing your hair. There, at the back.”

Her hand came up before she could stop it, searched her head for thinning hair. Then it was banished to her lap.

“I want to be friends.” She said it carefully, a pleading note to her voice. For a moment he almost believed it.

“You know,” he answered, “you never congratulated me. On getting off. True, true, I’ve not been social. Still, you could’ve found a way. A card would have been nice, maybe some flowers.” He grinned, sucked smoke, let it stream from nose and mouth. “Or is it that you are disgruntled after all? For a while there, Robert looked to be the sole heir. Other than you, I mean.”

He took a step closer, watched her shift her eyes in the mirror. “You know, you don’t even love him very much. Was it his picture you were looking at just now?” He pointed to the album. “No, I didn’t think so. You want him to be happy, of course—that is to say, you want him to be rich. But love? You don’t have the knack.” He shrugged. “Then again, who am I to talk? You sent for me,
Mother
. Here I am. What is it you want?”

She took her time with the answer; swallowed her spite and raised herself up in her chair. “We’re being blackmailed.”

Her hand slipped into the album in front of her, withdrew two pieces of paper, handed them to him. They were letters, typewritten and unsigned.

“Do you remember him well?” she asked while he was reading.

“Of course. He ate dinner here, two, three times a week. It’s his house.”

“Well, he finally came out of the woodwork. He found us all the same, even after you shut up your father.”

Wolfgang ignored the insinuation. “It says here,” he said, “you are to hang a curtain out the study window. As a sign you agree to the conditions. Will you—”

“I already have.”

He handed back the letters. “So you’ll pay.”

“Let’s go downstairs,” she said, “and sit down in the drawing room. Talk it over.”

He noticed, amused, that she took her handbag along for their interview, and a quart bottle of powders.

6.

Robert returned. He no longer entered the house with any hope of finding Eva there. Every day he walked for hours: asked in hotels, marketplaces, hospitals. All he had to help him was her hump: he owned no photo of her, was unsure which name she was using. The problem wasn’t that he got blank stares; the city, it seemed, was full of hunchbacks, a score of false leads. Towards the end of the second week he gave up on asking; walked the streets, staring at passersby, then lost himself in thought and worry, allowing his feet to carry him wherever they wished. Once he was held up at knifepoint and stripped of his good coat; another time he walked headlong into a fight. Detective work, it appeared, did not run in his blood.

He entered the house, kicked off his shoes, carried his umbrella into the kitchen to drip onto the tiles. Hunger gnawed at him. He had brought bread home, unpacked it, cut a slice. He’d just put on the kettle when he heard his brother’s voice.

“Robert?” it called. “Over here, in the larder. And now on down the stairs—you have to push at the back shelf. Yes, that’s right, come on down. God, what a racket you made just now. And you probably thought you
were as quiet as a mouse. But everything carries through the floor. It’s like moving around on a drum.”

Robert descended into the cellar. Wolfgang was sprawling on an unmade cot, a bottle of liquor wedged between his thighs. There were open jam jars on the floor.

“Ah, the look on your mug just now. Priceless! I didn’t know about it either. All the exploring we did as kids, and we never dreamt there was a secret cellar. But sit, sit, join my little party. Only close the door. We want to be alone. Good, good. And now slide the chair closer. That’s it. Ah, brother, here we meet again!”