The Crooked Maid (26 page)

It had not been easy to procure formal clothing for the boy. There had been several discussions on the subject between herself and her husband. There was, of course, no money for a new suit, nor indeed for a used one that was in decent nick. For a while they had considered sacrificing her husband’s good coat and having it altered, but in the end she had been able to convince a cousin from St. Pölten to send them their elder son’s Communion suit, provided they paid for the postage and promised not to shorten either sleeves or legs. As a consequence both jacket and breeches looked large on the boy. The trousers had to be belted nearer the chest than the waist, and the child’s hands kept disappearing in the sleeves.

Karlchen, for his part, endured his mother’s touches and adjustments without complaint and watched his brother watch him from across the
room with an expression that was half jealous, half angry, and not without a note of sympathetic fear. During breakfast Karlchen had to wrap a handkerchief around his chest and shoulders and place another in his lap so that there was no danger of staining the suit—and this despite the fact that they were eating nothing apart from bread with a little butter and some slices of boiled egg.

There was, to the boy, something odd in the way his parents treated him that morning, an air of reverence that cut across all pretence of treating him normally, even gruffly, as his mother poured out a quarter mug of milk for him and his father scolded him for chewing his bread so messily and leaving crumbs on the table. And in this reverence there sounded something different yet, a kind of distaste, as though he had contracted a disease to which they now felt obliged to tend. For the first time in his life Karlchen had the feeling of standing apart from his family. He might have cried but was gripped by an unconscious fear that he would not be comforted.

“Time to get going,” his father said at last, and hurried into his coat. They walked hand in hand, the father leading, the boy trailing, taking two steps for his father’s one, watching dust attach itself to the remnants of polish on his shoes. When the courthouse came into sight, grey and forbidding, the father momentarily paused in his stride, causing his son to collide with his thigh.

“I didn’t,” the boy said quietly, squirming at the end of the parental wrist. “I swear. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

His father reached down, straightened his collar, and did not respond.

2.

They entered the building. A porter listened to his father’s request, nodded somehow gravely, and called over an usher. They were led down a series of long, barren corridors, surprisingly shabby in appearance; not narrow, but vaulted so high as to appear narrow, their footsteps ringing in the frigid
air. A row of dirty windows was set high above their heads and admitted no glimpse of the outside world, the shadow of bars falling on the endless stretch of tiling. It seemed they had walked a long time before they arrived at their destination, a narrow, airless waiting room furnished solely with a wooden bench on which they presently sat down. A clock hung on the wall across, very large, like a station clock. The usher cautioned Karlchen’s father to wait until he returned for the boy, then disappeared through a set of double doors that belched a roar of noise as he hastily squeezed through the gap. A silence fell that, far from being dispelled by the low murmur which soaked through the doors, found in it an accomplice, as it did in the sudden, audible movements of the clock. They were alone.

They waited the better part of an hour. From the first the boy was drawn to the doors. He slid down the bench in order to sit as close to them as possible, his father sliding down alongside, wordless, hostile, reaching across to tighten Karlchen’s tie. After some minutes the boy began to distinguish variations in the whisper of the doors. There was, for one, the hubbub of voices, subdued and yet excited, and pierced at times by a laugh, a cough, the sudden bark of censure. From time to time a hush would fall, not a silence exactly, but a noise in its own right, the low, shivering hum of restrained anticipation. Steps fell into the silence, long, careful strides, and once a man shouted, “I object!” The more the boy listed to the noise, the more he yearned to pass beyond those doors—and feared it too, with the same dumb, wrenching fear he knew only from dreams. His collar chafed and his hands were sweaty, and he flinched when his father turned to run broad-pronged fingers through his hair (they had forgotten to bring a comb).

“Here,” his father said, dug a paper bag from the pocket of his starch-stiff suit. He picked a sweet and passed it swiftly, almost with a kind of anger, then watched as Karlchen pushed it past his lips. It sat on his tongue like a stone, then suddenly grew soft and attached itself to one of his molars; sugared woodruff colouring his spit. Karlchen dug for it with one finger, pried loose the sweet, his father’s eyes still on him, watching him as
he folded his spit-slick finger back into his palm and hid it quickly in the pocket of his too-large coat.

The minute hand on the clock face moved then quivered, time marching on in reluctant, fettered steps.

At long last the doors opened, spilling voices, laughter, and the usher, who gestured without words then turned at once and slipped back into the room.

Karlchen’s father did not stir. The boy walked in alone, into the roar of noise beyond the heavy double doors.

3.

To his surprise Karlchen entered the great hall of Vienna’s criminal court not from the front—that is to say, from the side where members of the public sat in densely packed rows—but from the back, behind the rostrum of judges. For a moment he froze, feeling as though he had by accident taken the wrong door at the cinema and found himself trapped in front of the luminescence of its giant screen. He did not stop in the doorway for more than a second, however; then ducked his head and ran after the usher. In six, seven steps he had arrived at the chair pointed out to him. He thus gained only a fleeting impression of the auditorium. What he saw, above all, was a sea of ladies’ hats behind which cowered a crowd of people. He did not, in this first glance, see any face that he recognized.

He was asked to sit. He could not have said whether it was the usher who asked him or one of the judges, or someone else altogether; in the noise of the hall the words came to him diffusely, like the hum of traffic, or a thought formed in his own head.

Karlchen sat. To his confusion he found that the chair did not face the auditorium as he had expected (he had for a week now imagined how it would be, lying awake at night to his brother’s even breathing), but the row of judges in black, who sat somehow elevated behind their giant desk and were framed by a vast expanse of ornate wall and ceiling. His own
chair, too, struck Karlchen as unnecessarily big and uncomfortable, and as he slid around in it, one arm tangling in the too-high armrest, his skin came alive with the sensation of everyone’s watching.

Shyly, compulsively, and only dimly aware that someone was talking to him, he craned his neck to once again scan the audience. He saw fingers pointing, was distracted for a moment by the row of sketch artists who sat to one side with large pads of papers hoisted on their knees, then found himself drawn to a young man with feverish eyes who sat in the first row and who was missing not only a leg and an arm, but one entire side of his body, including his shoulder, half his chest, and some of his abdomen. Karlchen heard someone call his name but could not wrest his eyes from this half man, occupied by the question of how his body looked under the shirt (the man kept it from gaping with the help of some clothespins).

He looks like a fish ate him
, it ran through him.
Or a whole swarm of fish
. And he kept on staring at the horrible eroded edge of his torso, and the place where his rib cage should have flared.

“Young man,” the voice spoke again, and he turned at last, reluctant, looked up, and saw that one of the judges, the one in the middle, was speaking to him. “Did you hear what I said?”

Karlchen nodded, blushed.

“You will tell the truth, then?”

Again the boy nodded.

“You must speak up. So the stenographer can record your answer.”

“Yes,” he said, and then again, afraid he had not been loud enough. But each time, what emerged from his lips was little more than a yelp. Behind him, in the sea of sounds that was the audience, he could hear the rising tide of discontent.

4.

The boy was questioned in the late morning of the third day of the trial. The first day had almost entirely been taken up by formalities, including
the swearing-in of the jurors, the reading of the arraignment, the opening statements, and the defendant’s plea. It was only towards the late afternoon that the first witness had been called. But despite the fact that there was nothing in the arraignment, the speeches, or indeed the statement of this first witness that could be of surprise to anyone who had read a newspaper in the week or so coming up to the trial, the rows of the criminal court were packed to the last seat. Indeed there were reports about a lively and somewhat shameless trade in admission tickets being conducted not ten steps from the great hall’s front doors. All this frenzy was owing to the fact that the first day was widely regarded as the earliest opportunity to meet all of the trial’s major “actors,” about whom there had already been so much talk.

Apart from the defendant himself, interest on this first day had centred on the figure of the prosecutor on the one hand and Wolfgang’s defence lawyer on the other. They were, it was decided, a study in contrast, a contrast that extended to the physical, political, even spiritual dimensions. Representing the State was one Julius Fejn. Dr. Fejn was widely believed to be either one-quarter or one-half Jewish, which is to say (by the system of classification only so recently lifted) a mongrel, who had however survived the war years with minimal inconvenience thanks to the intervention of his wife, who was the daughter of a well-respected opera critic and consequently well connected. In any case (it was said, in tones ranging from surprise to a sulky sort of anger) Fejn did not
look
Jewish, was blond, tall, with a burgher’s girth and heavy jowls, and the cutest little button of a nose in his fleshy, ruddy, but otherwise remarkably patrician face. When he spoke, it was with a sonorous, clear, if somewhat lazy delivery that in times of great excitement embraced the ghost of a lisp. It was in this lisp that the connoisseurs of such matters (there was amongst the audience more than one) located something affected, overdone, in bad taste, and consequently Jewish, even though the voice held, of course, no hint of a Yiddish intonation and Dr. Fejn spoke in the purest of German, conscientiously inflected with a touch of Viennese.

Dr. Fejn was facing off against quite a different sort of man, a short and tidy figure who looked as though he had been starched and pressed along with his clothes: a sort of Robespierre of defence lawyers, unyielding in his thought and habits, who had a manner of speaking to witnesses in a dry, flat, quiet voice that invariably succeeded in suggesting that they had not only insulted him, personally, but the moral order of the universe as such (and, really, that these were one and the same). His name was Ratenkolb. He too was rumoured to have been a “victim of recent events,” and indeed it was said that his father, a Socialist, had been jailed immediately after the annexation, had caught a chill in prison, and had died as a consequence (albeit a year later and once again a free man). Dr. Ratenkolb had not maintained his practice during the war years, though whether from choice or because he had been blacklisted was a matter of dispute.

As for the presiding judge, the case had originally gone to one Klemens Meutziller, a fearsome tyrant of a man who had a habit of clearing the courtroom at the slightest provocation and who was known to bully prosecutors, defence lawyers, and witnesses alike, all in the name of common sense. And generally the Right Honourable Dr. Meutziller was said to hate any kind of verbiage and florid speech, as well as any kind of posturing. But just a few days before the court date the judge had suddenly taken ill, and quite seriously at that. Consequently the case went to one of the assistant judges on the case, a certain Bratschul, Alois by Christian name: a timid, indecisive soul who had earned his appointment more through societal connection than any show of legal brilliance, and suffered from some kind of gastric condition that often saw him squirm in his judge’s chair with a mild-mannered impatience. It was therefore expected that rather than embracing the strong, some might say inquisitorial, role accorded to him by the Austrian legal system, he would sit back and allow prosecution and defence to dictate proceedings to a considerable degree.

All this, and much more besides, Anna Beer had learned from Sophie Coburn, who, despite her fragmentary German, seemed to have an impressive array of sources at her command, as well as a willingness to fill in the
blanks with bold intuitive steps. Some other details Anna had learned by herself. She had not at first wanted to come to the trial at all, but the boredom of her situation, as well as the fact that it would have been impolite not to make use of the much-coveted entrance ticket Sophie had procured for her, convinced her otherwise. After her initial visit, midway through the opening afternoon, she found herself returning to the trial day after day, until her fellow spectators became as familiar to her as the judges and jurors, and she was able to pick out new faces and mark conspicuous absences almost as well as Sophie herself.

Anna had come to distinguish three distinct groups in this audience, though they did not, of course, identify themselves as such and sat scattered throughout the hall. The first—perhaps the largest, if also the quietest—was made up of men and women who all shared in a somewhat unhealthy and, as it were, downtrodden appearance. Quite a few of them appeared to be crippled, while others had the air, if not always the scars, of having endured violence of some form or another; were pale, thin, badly dressed, and sat on the benches with quiet, unmoved faces, their hands in their laps. There were many older people amongst this group. Though they tended to betray little emotion throughout the trial, it was understood that they were, to a man, hostile to the accused and had come to witness his condemnation.