The Crooked Maid (38 page)

9.

Just like Robert, it had been the silence that had drawn her. She’d been dressed and ready, a drop of new perfume dabbed onto the bone between her breasts. No lipstick, if only to invoke no memory of the morning: a clean, scrubbed,
virgin
face, the lashes curled with Italian mascara: petroleum jelly and coal. She had heard him call for her, and had answered—“On my way”—cherishing the domesticity of the phrase, a moment snatched from the pictures. One last straightening of the stockings (they were slightly too big for her) and a quick clamber onto the top of a stool so she could admire her legs in the bathroom mirror, the mirror too low now to reflect her hump. There she stood, smiling, and became conscious of it: the silence of the attic.

No matter, she needed to hurry, he was waiting for her. She made it to the top of the stairs, looked down, heard him pacing at the bottom. The sound of it, leather soles on parquet floor; it reinforced the absence of any sound above. And yet she made to run down; wanted to tell him how cleverly she had bargained for the food and stockings, and how she was certain, today, that the angel had shadowed her on the ride back on the tram. But she’d forgotten her earrings. They were mere trinkets to be sure, silver, if that, each shaped into a simple hoop. Still, she had bought them, they were part of her costume, would draw the candles, look fetching in their living light. She hurried back, found them, put them on, then went left, not right, when she exited her room, for what harm could it do, just
to take a peek? Climbing the ladder in pumps had not been easy; she’d giggled when she’d slipped.

There were seventeen of them. That’s the first thing she did, stand there and count. Who would have thought that they liked jam? It had been spooned onto small squares of bread and placed at intervals upon the floor; each dollop flecked with fine white powder. There’d been enough to kill off the whole roost.

She did not remove the little traps; climbed up and started piling birds into a heap. There was no delicacy to her movements. She picked them up by twos and threes—by the neck, the wing, the scrawny feet—and dumped them in a pile. Only once did she hesitate, when she found Yussuf in the corner, his dark eyes just as blank as they’d been in life. She closed a fist over his head, felt the beak dig into the base of her palm; picked him up and carried him around, kicking at the others now, building them into a messy mound. Somewhere along the line she noticed Robert. Half a bridegroom, the body cut off by the trap door at the waist, his left eye lolling lazy in its socket. He looked pale, but then again, he always did.

She did not trust herself to speak, but the next moment it slipped out, drily, as though she had scripted the line.

“Your mother made me an engagement present. A sort of promise of what’s to come.”

He started shaking his head even before she had finished. “Perhaps it wasn’t her, Eva. We need to—”

She hit him. It was not meant to dislodge him from the ladder; was a push more than a punch, born of frustration, the need to silence his excuses; one hand planted on his face, the other, bird-burdened, slamming hard into his chest. His soles squeaked. Then he fell.

Perhaps his head hit the rungs. At any rate he landed awkwardly, lay crumpled at the base. She came down after him, feet forward, butt to the ladder, thinking,
He can see right up my skirt
. Her pumps caught in the rungs, but she held on; the crow stashed in her armpit, one wing loose, flapping outwards, attempting to soar. She reached the floor, bent down
to him; a deadly stillness to his frame. She should have nursed him, but kicked him instead, a look of anguish on her face; one, two, three vicious little kicks that hit him in the chest, the throat, the face; then ran, the bird back in her fist, riding the air behind like a broken kite.

10.

Afterwards, one of the things that revealed her to herself was the fact that she did not leave the house at once. Rather she went to her room, knelt down by her bed, and found the slit within her mattress in which she had deposited her savings. She took them, put on her coat, struggled with the sleeve until she realized she had to let go of the crow to fit her arm through the hole. She picked the bird up again before she ran down the stairs. There was no thought in her head to punish the mother; at any rate not yet. All she wanted was to leave.

Outside, the rain fell heavier than ever. She had left behind the hat. A three-minute sprint down to the tram stop. The tram’s headlight startled her, caught the blackness spreading from her wrist. She dropped it in a puddle, as simply and mechanically as she had picked it up, the carcass of a
Speck
-tamed pet; climbed on the tram and sat on the wooden bench with her hands on her gut, breathing hard through her open mouth. The doors closed, a drunk jumped out at the last second, the tram moved off.

By the time she looked back, it was too late to see the man step out of the shadows of the building, bend down to the crow, and gently pick it out of its puddle. He wrapped it in a red woollen scarf, then followed the tracks into the city.

The only person who noticed him at all was the drunk who had left the tram at the last moment and immediately started charging up the hill, drawn by the promise of a meal and a pregnant wife who would laugh at his jokes and not begrudge him the bottle he’d drunk to celebrate his innocence.

11.

He didn’t expect her, not on the day of the verdict. The evening paper was full of her, a half-page sketch, sitting proud and crooked on the witness chair.
Good for you
, he thought, the mutt happy, curled up on his lap.

The church clock had stuck nine when she came in. She was soaked to the bone. She peeled out of her overcoat then stood there almost naked, her blouse and dress clinging to her skin. She had the most lovely breasts.

“Here,” Karel said, handing her a rag that served him as a towel; then, realizing its uselessness, he threw her the blanket that covered his bed. “Dry off, you’ll catch your death.” There was, at this moment, no trace of accent in his German.

She wasn’t crying. It had looked like it, her face dripping with water, mascara streaks heavy on her cheeks. But when she dried off, her complexion was clear. Franz Josef, the mutt, ran up to her, licked her ankles through stockings that looked wet and new. She shook him off gently enough, dug into her coat pocket, threw her purse at Karel where he was sitting on his bed. He opened it, counted the money.

“I want to go with you,” she said before he could ask. “To Canada. Or wherever it is you are going.”

Karel nodded, counted the money once more, looked up. “It won’t be enough,” he said. “Passports are expensive.”

She stared at him, wrapped in his blanket, damp hair standing on end from how she’d towelled it off.

He found in his heart the wish to make her happy.

“Perhaps it is time we locate that Jew of yours,” he said, and the Pole in the bed next to them sat up and shouted, “
Ś
winio,
ś
winio
,” before collapsing back into his pillow, the tumour at his throat soft and lumpy like a sponge.

Part Two

The Germans too took prisoners. About five and a half million Russian soldiers were taken into custody. Some 3.3 million died: 60 percent. One hundred and forty thousand were murdered outright: picked out by the “Security Police” for their race or their politics and shot. The vast majority, however, were killed through labour. Amongst this population, starvation was not simply a matter of faulty supply lines and food shortages. It was the continuation of racial war by other means. By central order, many such prisoners’ calorie intake was made a function of their productivity. The weaker they got, the less they produced, the more they starved, and in their skeletal lethargy confirmed the indolence of Slavs
.

The number of POWs was dwarfed by that of forced workers. Some twelve million people were pressed into service both in the occupied territories and in the Reich itself. Close to three million Soviet citizens found themselves abducted and pressed into factory and farm work, many of them young women and teenage girls. In the late stages of the war these forced labourers represented a quarter of the Reich’s workforce. The permutations of their employment were rich and varied. Some built military installations—bunkers, tank defences, U-boat ports, V-1 launch pads, clad in the green uniforms of Operation Todt, an organization whose name, by a stroke of orthographic irony, is only a silent consonant removed from the German word for “death.” Some assembled guns, grenades, mortars; built Fords and Volkswagens; mined for coal, iron, copper. From Berlin factories to the Ruhr Valley mines, from the northern ports to Austrian oil refineries, few were the companies yoked to the Reich’s war effort that did not make use of slaves. Irregularities were common; children fathered; prisoners murdered; workers used for private gain
.

On occasion subtler, more human irregularities arose. An Oberhausen machinist recalls how a pair of Soviet workers lent to him by his employer repaired his private, bomb-strafed roof. For three days and nights they lived amongst his family, sharing their food; sat on stools, perhaps, around a kitchen table made festive in their honour by the Sunday tablecloth, a pair of daughters gawking at these men with hollow eyes who rebuilt their attic beams and bricks and roof tiles, and left thankful for their three days’ holiday from hell
.

One

At three o’clock in the morning Aleksei Semyonovich Kozlov, resident of the fourth floor of apartment building thirteen in ——Street in Alma-Ata, the capital and industrial heart of the Soviet Empire’s second-largest constituent republic, was pacing the floor beside the bed of his five-year-old daughter, Yulia. It was, incidentally, quite a new apartment building, with central heating and good electrical wiring, and, what is more, twenty-four-hour hot water. He and his family had moved there quite recently, after years of waiting on a list, and had only been able to secure it due to Aleksei’s “spotless” and “heroic” war record.

But none of that mattered now. Yulia was sick, her cheeks burning red and her blond hair clinging to her forehead. What had started as a light temperature early in the afternoon had turned into a raging fever. Her stomach was swollen, and she answered all their attempts to minister to her with the same piercing animal shrieks that were quite simply unbearable. Aleksei’s wife stood by the telephone in the corridor. They had already called the hospital a half-dozen times, each time receiving the promise that an ambulance, and a doctor, would be dispatched “at once.” She had just asked the operator to once again connect her to the hospital when the doorbell rang.

“I’ll go,” he said, hurried past her, his feet clumsy in their well-worn slippers that were not made for haste.

There were two of them, dressed in overcoats, their hats still on their heads. This confused him for a moment—that they should have shown up
as a pair—until he chanced on the happy idea that the life of his daughter was so important that two men had been dispatched. Without listening to their announcement—this was no time for introductions, they must hurry, hurry!—and impatiently shaking himself free when one of them grabbed his sleeve, he ran ahead into the flat and led them to his daughter’s bedside.

But now something strange began to happen. Rather than examining the girl, or even approaching her bedside, one of the men started talking, and talked not at all like a human being at the bedside of a sick child, but in those crisp, precise, practised phrases that did not belong to the human but to quite another sphere of life. At the same time they stared at him with a certain expectation and even frowned in consternation when he did not react to their words at all, but rather stood there, both hands stretched towards his daughter, inviting them to step up to her bed. As for what precisely they were saying, he could make neither head nor tail of it. The words reached him, but he was unable to attach any meaning to them; brushed them away, turned to his daughter, and reached for her little hand, an action she answered once more with a high, yelping shriek. He looked over to his wife and was surprised to find her crying. She turned away, left the nursery, and went across the corridor into their own bedroom. Through the open door he watched her pull out a suitcase and pack clothes into it, above all his socks and felt booties, and underwear of the warmest kind.

“Here,” she suddenly shouted, running back across the corridor, “you must put this on,” and handed him his dress uniform, the row of military honours neatly pinned to its chest. “You have been arrested, you fool.”

Down in the car, nobody would speak to him. He sat on the back seat in his uniform and the thick winter coat his wife had pressed on him. One of the men was next to him, the other was driving. Aleksei sat there, overheated, placid, still trying to make sense of that word, “arrest.” He put a hand to his chest, ran a finger up and down his honours as though along the keys of a piano.

“I am a war hero,” he said, distractedly and without force.

“Quiet, friend,” the man next to him advised. “Best to save your strength.”

They gave him a cigarette and drove him to the squat grey building that served as the local headquarters of the secret police.

He was processed, stripped, searched, put into a holding cell. He tried to sleep, but the light was kept on in the room and his hands had to show above the blanket at all times. When he finally managed, a man came to shout at him that there was “no sleeping in daytime.” He protested he was innocent.

“My daughter is sick,” he explained to the guard. “I must send a message home.”

The guard reassured him. “You can explain it all to the investigator.”

“When?” he asked.

“When it is your turn.”

“I insist on seeing him right now.”

“You insist?” the guard repeated, his peasant face turning mean. “I’ll smash in your head, you shit, you prostitute.”