The Crooked Maid Read Online Free Page A

appearance would lead one to expect. He scanned the emerging crowd with the curiosity of someone who hoped to find a familiar face. It was not long before his eyes settled on the woman in something more than homage to her beauty. In fact he crossed himself and muttered some few silent words; started forward then stopped, and was soon pushed aside in the press of the crowd.
    Some years previously, at school, Robert Seidel had read a story by an American writer in which the protagonist, his nerves still strained from recent illness, was able to discern the profession and indeed the biography of passersby simply by studying their dress, their gait, the lines inscribed by life upon their faces, and who was distraught to find amongst the evening crowd a man who resisted his attempts at interpretation and was, in fact, illegible . Had Robert noticed the stranger, it might have struck him that the man posed a similar riddle to observers: his face obscured by scarf and low-drawn cap; his old man’s gait ill matched by his still-youthful hands; his gestures acquired both in drawing room and barracks. All that could be said with any certainty was that there clung to the man—as he pushed through the crowd with a slinking kind of grace, never quitetouching those who surrounded them—an anxious, timid quality, as though he were awaiting the answer to some fateful question that he himself had asked.
    Outside, beyond the station doors, the stranger raised a finger to his mouth, tore with strong teeth at the ruin of a fingernail; and though his hands were cleaner than his coat and fraying cuffs, he found his cuticles encrusted in dark blood. This simple fact seemed to recall him to his purpose. He looked up sharply, fresh urgency grown into his gaze. In the early morning bustle it took the man a few moments to catch sight again of the woman and her young companion, who was helping stow her luggage in a taxi. For a second, through the car’s back window, she seemed to look at him, and he stared back, entranced, as though tracing a softer, younger face through the coolness of her features. Then she turned towards her driver and soon was lost from sight.
    The man seemed inclined to shift his attention over to the boy, who stood gathering his things, and in his hesitant way had taken a step towards him, when a policeman started walking in their general direction, drawn perhaps by the stranger’s shabbiness and eager to forestall any pick-pocketing. The stranger started, spun, and walked away in subdued haste. He did not slow until he had crossed the street and disappeared into the shadow of a gateway. There he stopped, rewrapped his scarf, and waited to see whether the boy too would climb into a taxi or join the ragged crowd that stood waiting for the tram.
    Across from the gateway, in a house thrown open to the public eye by a bombed-away wall, a woman woke to her doll’s house existence. She stretched, sang a snatch of Wehrmacht song, put a pot of water on the cooker; and, in the coarsest of Viennese dialects, tilting the “a” in arse into a drawn-out, listing oh-ah-rse , she cursed in lazy succession first the Germans, then the Allies, then the Jews, all of whom stood invited to insert into their backsides some unidentified object she seemed to think was clinging to her palm as she thrice performed a shoving motion in front of her broad hips.
    The stranger saw her, tipped his cap. Just then the boy made up his mind and set off on foot. Almost at once the man too set off, walking in the same direction as the boy, although he moved too timidly, perhaps, to bring to mind the notion of pursuit. Within minutes they were lost from sight.
    Behind them, the morning sun sought out the woman, set alight her reddish hair. Thus favoured by celestial attention, she laughed, dropped a pile of potato peels into her pot, and began to cook herself a starchy soup.
    2.
    It took Robert more than an hour to get home. He stood gazing after the woman’s