The Crooked Maid (12 page)

“Let me in,” he bawled.

“Piss off.”

“Let me in. I need a bed.”

“Go find a hotel. I gave you money.”

“All gone,” he yelled, dropped to his knees all of a sudden, then sank onto his bum. He resumed his knocking but received no answer. After some minutes he gave it up.

He fell asleep then, for no more than a minute, woke up with a start, and pushed himself to his feet; lost his balance, charged forward, half ran, half fell into the wall across, then slipped onto the bottom step of the upward flight of stairs. His eyes rose, found Eva. He stared at her with the quizzical look of someone urging his brain to help him make sense of the world. The face was big-chinned, bony, the brow a ridge of coarse brown hair.

“Is Dr. Beer back?” the girl asked him as he struggled to get up. He teetered, threatened to topple into the stairwell. There was no banister there, just a sheer oblong hole. The girl slipped the Schiller back into her pocket, stood up, and grabbed him by one flailing hand. He regained his footing, stumbled back onto the landing, dragging her along. Again his eyes found her, discovered her hump.

“
K
ř
ivá
,” he said, the language unknown to her. “Bent like a—” He stopped, considered his simile, stuck out a pinky, and laid it in a curve. “Ah, to hell with it.”

“Dr. Beer,” she repeated. “Is he back?”

The man shook his massive head and began his descent, dragging her down with him, his hand locked now on her wrist. “No, no, no. The wife.
Madame Beer
. From Paris.” He pushed up his chin, pursed his lips, flashed her a study of self-importance. “Nice legs, though. And an arse on her—” He stopped, found a wall to lean against, threw his head back to consider Eva’s rump as a point of comparison. “You have bed for me, sweetheart?”

The girl was undeterred. “Where is her husband?”

At this the man opened his eyes comically, waved her closer, spat, and whispered in her ear. “Nobody knows.”

“He’s still a prisoner, then?”

“No, no, no. He came back. And then …” He paused, leered, slapped a palm against the wall. “ … whoosh, he disappeared.”

They passed the apartments on the second floor, carried on.

“What about the bed, kid?”

“Forget it.”

The girl broke loose and prepared herself for the giant’s anger but was met instead by drunken equanimity.

“In that case,” he said, “goodbye and
na shledanou
!”; said it, charged down towards the first-floor landing and the door of the apartment ahead; applied his fist before he found his balance, leaning hard into the wall. “Sophie!” he pleaded with the spy hole. “Sophie, Sophiĉko, darling, open up.

“Coffee,” he yelled. “Eggs and bacon, little widow. Come on, be a good girl, open up. It’s Karel, Karel Neumann, come to show you a good time.”

Eva stayed until the door flew open, a commotion of tenants shouting questions at the drunk. Then she ran down the last flight of stairs and out into the summer night.

Part Two

More numbers. Of the 91,000 German, Austrian, Romanian, Italian, Hungarian, and Croatian soldiers taken prisoner at Stalingrad, fewer than 6,000 returned home. The majority died in the first year, on the foot march to Beketovka, or on the train to Frolovo (or Yelabuga, or Saratov), where half the barracks had been bombed away by German raids. Picture these barracks, count the lice. In the mornings they stacked the dead outside the doors. Dysentery is an infection of the colon. Typhus, scabies, diphtheria spreading through the ranks. A whole barrack itching, sweating side by side; the brotherhood and anger of a thousand shared excretions. It may be impossible to write a stench
.

Capitulation had carried with it hopes of food. In a propaganda leaflet dropped over Wehrmacht lines in the fall of 1941, prisoners were promised a daily ration of 600 grams of rye bread; 10 grams of wheat; 70 grams of groats; 10 grams of pasta; 30 grams of meat; 50 grams of fish; 10 grams of tallow fat; 10 grams of oil; 10 grams of tomato paste; 17 grams of sugar; 2 grams of fruit tea; 10 grams of salt; 0.1 grams of bay leaves; 0.1 grams of pepper; 0.7 grams of vinegar; 400 grams of potato flour; 100 grams of cabbage (pickled or fresh); 30 grams of carrots; 50 grams of beets; 10 grams of leek; 10 grams of roots, cucumbers, or herbs. In the accompanying photo a smiling prisoner held aloft a gleaming ladle; in another an injured man, half stripped, enjoyed the ministrations of a feisty nurse
.

Supply problems dogged the Soviet army, and fighting men took precedence over captured enemies. More often than not the captors starved alongside their captives. Each kilo of body fat holds 7,000 calories. The brain needs sugar to stay alive. In the absence of sufficient food intake, the physiological adjustments made by the body to convert fat into sugar-substitutes lead to the gradual souring of the blood. Acetone builds up and is released in urine and breath. Within a week starvation starts to smell, each exhalation laced with the scent of ripe fruit: entire camps suffused in the sweet reek of the body’s self-cannibalization
.

One

1.

The boys shared a room. There used to be a girl too, their sister, and the boys had been forced to share a bed, but Rosi had died a year ago, of pneumonia and flu, and they’d each had their own ever since. Karlchen, the younger of the brothers, was ten; was slight, sandy-haired, and timid by disposition, with a small, solemn voice. He worshipped his brother, who consequently treated him with despotic disdain. Franzl was thirteen, bold-chinned, gap-toothed, a “daredevil” and a “bruiser.” Both boys were dirty, tanned, and underfed. They were also very happy. It was summer. School had been out for almost a week.

The boys had been sent to bed at eight. It was nine o’clock now, the window open to the yard. Neither of them was asleep. The situation was as follows: Karlchen was waiting for Franzl to come over and climb into his bed. Some nights he came as late as nine-thirty or ten, and other nights he did not come at all. If Franzl found Karlchen asleep, he’d almost always do something nasty: yank a hair from the back of his head, or tie his feet together with a sock so he’d trip when getting up to pee. Once he had placed a dead frog under the covers, right on Karlchen’s naked chest, then held his mouth shut so Karlchen could not scream. He remembered the feeling, the still, clammy weight at the centre of his chest where the ribs flared out from the flat shovel of the central bone. He had endured the trial as he endured all of Franzl’s humiliations, in the full acceptance of their justice. A sentry must not fall asleep. Karlchen was on duty seven nights a week.

Karlchen heard his brother move and did not dare to draw another breath. Any sound now and Franz would crawl back into his bed, make him wait another quarter of an hour, or more. Karlchen lay still with his eyes screwed shut until he could feel Franzl’s breathing on his skin.

“Password?” his brother asked.

“Ithaca.” Ithaca was an island in Greece. Oddisses had lived there, a hundred years ago, and had owned a horse that knew how to fly.

“Wrong,” whispered his brother.

“But you said—”

“Password?”

Karlchen bit his lip. “I thought it was Ithaca.”

“You mustn’t think.”

For a moment Franz hesitated, trying to decide whether it behoved him to punish the infraction. In the end he opted for leniency. He had news to convey.

“Never mind, make space.”

He crawled into bed. Karlchen rolled onto his side, stuck out his bum, felt his brother mould himself around his form. The bed was so narrow there was no other way for both of them to fit. Franz reached out a hand, put it on Karlchen’s biceps, asked him to flex. He did so, awkwardly, trying to find space between his body and the wall.

“Not bad,” said Franzl. “You’ve been doing your exercises.” Then added: “Steinbeisser found a body today. Dead. Not a soldier, mind; a fresh corpse. He says he saw an arm sticking out from under a newspaper.”

Karlchen pictured it. “What if it’s only an arm?”

Franzl did not answer at once, which meant that he was thinking. Karlchen hoped he hadn’t said anything to make his brother mad. Franz did not like to see his authority questioned.

“Well,” he pronounced, “we’ll just have to go and see. We are meeting Steinbeisser after breakfast. He’ll take us to the place.”

Franz broke wind noisily under the linen sheet, and they lay, shoulder pressed to shoulder, evaluating the aroma.

“A real stinker,” Karlchen said at last.

“We had eggs today,” Franzl reminded him. It would have been immodest not to acknowledge he’d had help.

He left the bed a few minutes later and crawled back into his own. As he got settled, Karlchen asked him, “What was the password?”

“Ikkerus.”

“Ikkerus? Another island?”

“No, stupid. It’s a bloke who could fly.”

“Like Oddisses’ horse.”

“Yes.”

“Did they fly together?”

“Yes.”

“They were friends?”

“You can’t be friends with a horse.”

“Oddisses and Ikkerus then. Were they friends?”

“Yes. They flew together and killed many Russians.”

“Russians! That’s marvellous. A hundred years ago. In Greece.”

He would have liked to continue the discussion, but it seemed that Franzl had fallen asleep.

2.

Steinbeisser was a fat child. Or rather he was skinny like the rest of them, but he had sloping shoulders and a moon face, which made him look fat all the same. He did not like to play football and was always out of breath. Despite this handicap he enjoyed a certain status at school. His father was a tram driver, which was almost as good as driving a lorry. That, and he claimed he had flown in a balloon once, and knew all of Russia’s rivers by heart. Franzl treated him with respect. “He’s full of shit about the balloon,” he had explained to Karlchen, “but it’s true about the rivers. I tested him myself.”

“Are there a lot of rivers in Russia?”

“Fifty-seven. There’s a map in the science classroom. Me and Gernot, we counted them up.”

Karlchen had looked up to Steinbeisser ever since.

He met them in front of the
Tabak
and greeted them by sticking out his chin and spitting from one corner of his mouth. Inside the
Tabak
a woman in a tatty housecoat was trying to sell the vendor some embroidered shirts. When the man steadfastly refused, she started yelling at him. The boys listened as the argument escalated. In the end the woman hurried off in tears while the vendor shouted abuse at her. The range of his vocabulary was impressive.

Franzl whistled in appreciation. “Did you hear that? He called her a stinkin’ tart.”

“You think she was?” Steinbeisser asked, looking after her.

“No idea.”

They walked a few steps, with Steinbeisser taking the lead.

“So you want to see the dead guy,” he said nonchalantly, as though offering them a round of fizzy sodas.

Franzl shrugged and pretended indifference. “I found a cat the other day. Dead in a drain.”

“This isn’t a cat. It might even be a woman. We could take off her blouse, look at her titties.” Steinbeisser spent considerable time these days hatching plans for how to get a look at titties. Neither Franz nor Karlchen could quite see the point.

“Where are we going?”

“Better save your breath. It’s quite a hike. Last time I went by tram. For free, mind. I never pay.”

It took them a good forty minutes to reach their destination. Gradually the character of the city transformed around them as they entered one of Vienna’s more industrial areas. The bomb damage in these parts remained extensive. Hole-pitted work yards sat amongst the ruins of residential buildings, their walls blackened and crumbling. In some streets whole blocks of houses had disappeared, leaving behind nothing but the gaping mazes of their raided cellars.

They came to a stop at last in front of a bombed-out block of flats: from the outside it seemed in good-enough nick, but once they had stepped through the entrance it became obvious that the entire back of the building had been blown away. Even at the front none of the flats seemed inhabited. A crew of workmen were putting gas pipes into a gutted room at ground level; a crate of beer stood on the threshold. The boys peered inside but were soon shooed away. Across the hall a space that might become either a bakery or a butcher’s shop was taking shape. Shop tables and shelving had already been put into place, and the walls were freshly painted. An electrician was wrestling with a tangle of wires that hung from the ceiling. He too shouted at them to be on their way.

Steinbeisser led them into what would have been the inner courtyard; turned and found the door that led into the building’s cellar. A hand-painted sign identified it as an air-raid shelter, with a capacity of sixty-nine. The door had warped within its frame and stood ajar; they had trouble squeezing through the gap. Inside, a steep flight of concrete stairs led down into darkness.

“This is grand. How did you find it?”

“I had Rüdiger with me,” Steinbeisser said. Rüdiger was his dog, some sort of terrier mix with a salt-and-pepper coat. “I was walking around, exploring, and he sniffed it out.” He reached into his trouser pocket, brought out a candle and a match. “I came prepared this time.”

They lit the candle huddling on the topmost stair. An odd smell rose from below, at once stale and biting, of rotting wood and worse. A sudden hesitation seemed to take hold of Steinbeisser: he fussed with the candle, pretended the wick had not quite caught. Behind him Karlchen kept his back pressed against the door, as though afraid of losing his footing.

“Let’s go,” Franz urged them on. A peculiar calm came over him in moments of grave danger, along with a sort of prickling in the loins. Steinbeisser did not resist when he wrested the candle from his hand. At the foot of the stairs the corridor split into a T.

“Right or left?”

“Left. Rüdiger went nuts when we got here, kept pulling at the lead.”