The Crooked Maid (52 page)

7.

Karel found work as a night porter at a hotel near the harbour. The owner, a Moravian in his sixties, took to him: he was starved of compatriots. Every evening, at the start of Karel’s shift, he would join him behind the reception desk, drink beer and play chess. Within six months Karel was given the day shift, then was promoted to manager when the old one got caught with his hand in the till. His salary increased, and before long he took a loan on a house, with the old man’s word as collateral. Eva watched his transformation from tramp to respectable citizen with quiet bemusement. She was attending night school and had expressed the wish to go to university once the children were in school.

At night she would sit by the children’s bedside, running her fingertips up the beeline of their spines, Karel standing in the doorway, watching her smile.

8.

Blanka and Antonín. She had insisted on Czech names. “Nothing that sounds German,” she said. They might have chosen Canadian names, but Jack and Jill sat too alien in their throats. At home she spoke English with Karel—accented, brisk, imperative: to her it was a language of commands. Only to the twins did he catch her whispering German, telling stories, the gentle singsong of Vienna alive in every word. He pretended to sleep sometimes, and listened to these melodies from home.

9.

She studied, earned a degree, found a job as a librarian. Now it was his turn to watch her change: the glasses, the tailored suits designed to minimize the hump, the expanding bookshelves of their house. She nagged at him. The fence needed painting, the hedges pruning, he left his dirty clothing on the floor. He grew angry, they argued, he in German, she in
English, to signal her contempt. Afterwards he made it up with flowers, with chocolates, with little funny stories that he adapted from the papers. It never ceased to bother him: how his irritation should swim topmost, undissolved within the ocean of his love.

10.

He never confessed Beer’s murder to Eva. At first he was afraid. Then the fear gave way to something else, more akin to a contract.

“Did you hear—” he asked her one day, meaning the news of the day, that Stalin was dead. She didn’t let him finish.

“Don’t ever ask me that question,” she shouted.

It took him days to figure out the nature of their miscommunication.

11.

In the early 1960s a letter arrived for Eva from Vienna. Karel did not have to read it to know it was from Robert. She took it without comment and only mentioned it once, over dinner, ladling soup out for the twins.

“He married Anna Beer, but she can’t have any children.”

“You still love him,” he whispered, and was at a loss how to interpret her frown.

It was only later that it occurred to him that, in her own way, she had told him she was happy with her life.

Three

1.

“Stalin’s dead.”

“So they say. Do you believe it?”

“No.”

“How long have you been here, brother?”

“Five years in all. Two in this camp, two other camps before.”

They spoke while cutting down trees. It was April: snow still on the ground, but a hint of spring in the warm air. Around them the woods of Siberia: birches, spruce, firs, and pine. The work left them little breath to speak. They left longer talk for later, lying side by side in narrow cots, searching their prison garb for fleas.

Vladimir was new to the camp. He was weak-chested, an
intelligent
. Until a year ago he had been a research neurologist at Leningrad University. He was still at the stage of imprisonment where he was adamant that a mistake had been made.

Aleksei let Vladimir speak before he shared the story of his arrest. There were rules of etiquette to this, and besides, they had plenty of time.

“I knew a neurologist once,” he started, when it came to be his turn, “or rather a psychiatrist. He was my prisoner of war.”

He built the story slowly, taking joy in the details, describing the camp, his rise to camp commander, then the sudden onset of depression. “It was like a trap door had opened under my feet. Darkness all around. I wrote to my wife, and all she did was send me socks. I thought,
Any day now I will take my life
.” He paused, more for effect than any need to collect his thoughts. “He noticed it. He hardly saw me at all, I was shut up in my barrack, avoiding the camp, but the few glimpses he had of me convinced him of my condition. His Russian was not bad. When I passed him, inspecting the condition of the sick bay in which we made him work, he said to me, ‘It’s like when a potato catches the blight. You break it in half, and all you find is rot. That’s how it feels.’ He said it quietly, so only I would hear. I stared at him and ran away as though he were the devil.

“Three days I waited until I sent for him. I really thought he was some kind of devil. I shut the door behind him, made him stand while I sat in an easy chair, polishing my handgun. I wanted him to know I could shoot him any time. But he already knew. It was myself whom I wished to remind.

“He waited in silence. A patient man, the sort that can fill you with rage. ‘You are here,’ I said at last, just to say something, ‘to be punished for your insolence.’

“He nodded but did not reply.

“‘Who do you think you are?’ I yelled at him.

“‘Anton Beer,’ he said. Just that, no rank, not even ‘Doctor.’ Just his name.

“‘You are a dog!’ I raged at him now; you know how we learned it in the army. ‘A filthy dog!’

“‘Camp Commander,’ he said to me, ‘you are sick. Let me help you.’

“I roared at him and kicked him out. I was too upset even to order any punishment. ‘Get him out of my sight,’ I yelled at my orderly. The doctor followed him without another word.

“Naturally, I gave in. The very same night, I was plagued by thoughts of suicide. These weren’t just idle thoughts, either. I was making plans, whether to use my gun or some other device, where to sit, whether to leave a letter, and if so what to write. It got to a point where I stood at the mirror, combing my hair, so I would look good, or at any rate decent, when they found me. What worried me most was working out when I had last
eaten, and whether I had voided my bowels since then. The thought of killing myself was long familiar, but I was disturbed by the thought that I might shit my pants.

“So I called for him, had him brought to me in the middle of the night. He was cold and walked over to the stove, stood with his back to it, warming his ass.

“‘Speak,’ I said to him, ‘make it quick.’

“‘I am a psychiatrist,’ he said. ‘I have seen people in your condition before and have helped them. Without help,’ he said, calmly, quietly, ‘you will die.’

“I was taken aback. I had not considered my problem a medical issue. ‘There is a drug?’ I asked, hopeful, and immediately sought to dampen my hope. ‘Of course, drugs are very difficult to obtain these days …’

“‘No drug,’ he said. ‘It’s a matter of talking.’ He saw my puzzlement and hostility and quickly carried on. ‘Your soul is clogged up. Constipated. Words have a way of unclogging it. Releasing the pressure. I know this is strange to you, Commander, and I am not putting it very well. But what do you have to lose?’

“I laughed at him, called him names, told him he wouldn’t pull the wool over my eyes. I literally thought he must be some sort of spy, or an agitator perhaps, who was planning mischief. But he was right, of course: I was dying by inches, and had nothing to lose.

“I won’t bore you with the therapy. I asked another doctor about it once, and he told me it was all humbug, and, worse, decadent, reactionary. Unpatriotic. Against the precepts of Marxist-Leninist science. There is no soul, and talk is just talk. For all I know, they are right and I recovered all by myself, the way one wakes from a funk sometimes, quite suddenly and without reason, and catches oneself laughing at it all. There can, after all, be no scientific measure for the effectiveness of talk.

“Nor was there anything very special about what he did. ‘Start anywhere,’ he said, me sitting in my chair, himself placed by one side of me, nearly turning his back. So I would, a little spitefully even, picking some
topic that I knew was useless, how the cook had annoyed me the previous day, and how sick I was of bedbugs. He’d listen and ask questions about some detail. I would elaborate, and next thing I knew I was talking about my wife, or my father, some boyhood memory of trying on his uniform and getting in trouble for it, that sort of rot. At the end of each session I’d send him back, under guard naturally, and think to myself what a waste of time it all was. But I was no longer planning my own death.

“It went on for a few weeks. I got better. Not all at once, and not without setbacks, but slowly the dark cloud lifted from me. I wrote home and thanked my wife for the socks. Beer still came to me, four or five times every week. I knew the boys were talking all over the camp, but what could I do? I was afraid of slipping back into despair.

“In March that year he grew sick. Some sort of infection of the eye. He explained to me what it was, but of course I did not really understand him. There were some drugs that could have helped him, but despite my best attempts I was unable to procure them. The eye had to be removed. The camp surgeon did it. They fixed him up with a patch, a rag, really, just something to keep dirt out of his wound. I asked him did it bother him, and he told me there was an itch. The desire to rip the patch off, scratch inside the socket. The wound was still fresh.

“By then the talks had ceased. I felt quite healthy. It would have been best to disassociate myself from him, of course, ship him off somewhere, but I felt I owed him somehow. I had been unable to obtain the drugs needed to save his eye, but perhaps I could organize a prosthetic, something to replace the patch. I wrote letters and managed to obtain an eye from Moscow. It was so crude that one could barely recognize what it was meant to represent; when he wore it, it sucked all life out of his face. He soon returned to wearing his patch.

“There was a glass factory in the town not far from the camp. They were building scientific equipment of some sort and stayed operational all through the war. I had taken to drinking with its manager from time to time, and he had told me about one of his workers, a young man who—on
his own time, after hours—amused himself by blowing glass in the old manner, with a long sort of straw. He had learned it from his grandfather, he said, who had himself mastered it in some factory in Germany. The youth, the manager told me, was nothing short of a genius. He could mix colours of perfect radiance, and shape the most delicate of forms, cutting and polishing them with an astonishing level of detail. He showed me a figurine he had made, an animal half lion, half peacock. I could not believe the detail of the feathers. It would have fetched a fortune in the city.

“I had him brought to me, from curiosity more than anything. He was almost still a boy, a peasant type, with a broad face and thick blond hair. I described what I wanted. At first he showed little interest. After the wonders he had already produced, a coloured marble seemed to represent little challenge. But then he grew intrigued by the idea of fashioning an eye that would imitate the real thing down to the smallest of details. He insisted on meeting Beer. It was highly illegal, of course, taking a civilian into the camp, but I figured what the hell. We were a thousand miles from the front.

“The boy made no sketches, he just stared Beer in the eye. ‘I must remember the precise shade,’ he said. They stood right by a window, sunlight slanting in. There is an angle, when the sun hits the eye from the side and behind, where it will glow, really glow, and turn almost transparent. He stood an hour, memorizing the eye. Then he went home and made it.

“It took him several months. When he delivered it, it was gorgeous, a true work of art. I was tempted to keep it, as a souvenir, so to speak, but in the end my sense of indebtedness won out. I had Beer called to my quarters, presented him with the eye. The boy had used the earlier prosthetic as a guide for the eye’s shape and size, and it was a good fit. When he wore it the next day, everyone stared. It was put around that he had somehow regrown the eye. ‘It still itches,’ he told me, ‘but when I see myself in the mirror, I myself can’t believe it. I close my good eye, to test whether I have sight.’

“Shortly after, I was transferred. A promotion, really: I was to run a
camp much closer to home. I had stopped having anything to do with Beer by then. For some reason, seeing him with his new eye had become irritating to me. I left without saying goodbye and was demobilized a few months later. Before long, I was back home. Very soon I had forgotten about Anton Beer. Oh, sure, he had saved my life, and we had come to like one another, I suppose, insofar as that was possible, given our stations in life. But when I was home, the whole thing took on a somewhat different aspect. I felt sheepish about it, almost as if I had somehow been tricked. So I pushed it from my mind; went back to the ‘business of living,’ as they say. I had long before applied for a new apartment, and it finally came through. Then there were problems at work, a difficult superior, a secretary who made eyes at me. You know how it is. I was busy.

“When they arrested me, all I could think about was whether I had been denounced by someone at work. Oh, I was indignant! Ran through the names, looking for the one it could be. Maybe Stepan Stepanovich, the boozy swine! And then the interrogation started, and all they wanted to know about was the camp. They already knew everything. They even got hold of the eye! Tracked down Beer, the camp guards, some of his fellow prisoners. A whole folder full of statements. And the things they did to the doctor! They showed me pictures of his body. They picked him up abroad, they said. He was tortured like nothing you have ever seen. Confess, they said, Beer told us everything. I did, of course, but it was never enough. ‘Swine,’ they said. ‘What else did you talk about?’ ‘Confess, you traitor. What state secrets did you pass on?’ ‘He tried to recruit you, didn’t he? How was the information to be relayed?’ Whole months of this, and beatings too, of course, until my every bone ached and my teeth hung loose in my gums. In the end they charged me with ‘collaborating with the enemy.’ I was fortunate I was not shot. Mother Russia needs loggers. I got twenty-five years. The price for survival, eh? But you know what, brother? I am glad to pay.”