The Crooked Maid by Dan Vyleta Page A

kicked her out, I think.”
    “What’s wrong with her, Eva? She’s not herself.”
    “Nothing much. All it is, she’s in mourning. For that.” She tapped with a foot on the picture of Hitler lying face down on the floor. “Taking powders to soothe her soul.” Eva shrugged, smiled, began walking to the door. “Some family you have, Robert Seidel.”
    “You seem nice,” he said quietly, talking at her hump.
    “I’m not family,” she answered brusquely, but when she turned he could see that she was pleased. As she stood there, in the doorway, one of her hands reached out, plucked the toy plane from the sky. “How did you get that address?” she asked, pointing to the table by his bed. “The one you scribbled on a piece of paper.”
    “There was this woman I met on the train. Frau Gudrun Anna Beer. A pretty name, don’t you think? Her husband just got out from a camp. Prisoner of war. Just imagine, she hasn’t seen him in nine years! And before, she ran off because she’d caught him having an affair.”
    Something inside Eva seemed to flinch at this, a current running through her crooked frame. She dropped the plane. It fell nose first.
    “You met her by chance?”
    “Yes. We talked all night. She was very beautiful.”
    “Auburn locks,” said the maid. “The one you think the hat would suit.”
    “Yes. I’ll need it back, you know. The hat.”
    She walked out, turned one more time, looked long and thoughtfully into his eyes. “The whole world is your friend. Isn’t it, Robert Seidel?”
    He smiled, took it as a compliment. “I got into a fight once,” he said. “Someone said something, about my father, you see, and I—”
    “Oh, shut up, you spoiled, ugly brat.”
    She seemed hell-bent on always leaving him with an insult.

Five
    1.
    She woke to blood. Her feet were wrapped in it, a knot of scarlet top sheet, not wet but as though dyed along the outlines of her shins and ankles, the graceful hollow of one arch. She reached down, confused, still drunk with sleep, searched with her hand in the bedding and had her fingers nipped by metal: new blood forming in a bead upon her thumb. It broke before she had time to stick it in her mouth.
    Slowly, licking the wound, she began to pull her legs from out of the bedsheet. As her red feet emerged, so did the wooden handle of the knife. In the course of the night it must have slipped out of her hands and made its way towards the ankles. She wasn’t badly cut, but both her feet and the lower parts of her shins and calves were covered in a dozen nicks, shallow like paper cuts. They had dried and now broke open under her probing fingers; stung when she wet a corner of the sheet with spit and tried to wipe away the blood. It was a mystery she had not woken. The knife tip scarred the parquet floor when she pushed it out of bed.
    She got up, rushed for the door, intent on scrubbing off the dried-in blood. It was only when she found it barricaded with a chair that she remembered the stranger in her flat. Taken aback, she reversed her movement, turned back into the room; smoothed down her crumpled blouse and cast around for her stockings, the only item of clothing she had taken off when she had gone to bed. She found them flung over the top of the radiator; but when she tried to pull them on, a scab on her heel broke andbled an angry smear into the stocking’s silk. It was barefoot, then, that she took to the corridor, the knife back in her fist. She held it hidden behind the long curve of her hip.
    Quietly—taming her pulse, her lungs, the nervous need to force her pace—she walked to the doorway of the living room, a brisk, light stinging in her calves and feet; stopped on the threshold, peeking in. The sofa was empty, the cushions scattered, a wet spot where his mouth had drooled into the armrest’s leather crook. She swallowed and tasted smoke upon her tongue, found the stub of a cigarette crushed halfway between desk and door. It was tempting to stamp and