Authors: Dan Vyleta
Anton Beer settled in for the wait. He turned off the light, opened the curtains, gave his eyes time to adjust to the spare glow of the moon. His feet hurt from an afternoon of house visits, and he wondered how he would while away the hours. There were two chairs in total, one in each room. He tested both of them for comfort, found them unsatisfactory. They were cheap, barren things, badly put together. One wobbled, the other had a nail protruding through the seat, threatening to snag his trousers. He returned his attentions to his patient, cleaned, as best he could, the wounds upon her back, whispered to her about the therapies he was planning to attempt. There was time, he thought, to return to his quarters and fetch rubbing alcohol, prepare an antiseptic; pick up a cushion, some reading matter for himself. But he was afraid to leave the woman; afraid, too, that the door would bang shut behind him, or that one of the neighbours would discover it open, and run to the janitor. He found himself stuck here, stooped over this silent woman and searching for ways to excise her dead flesh.
‘We might try maggots,’ he whispered to her, bending low so she could see his face. ‘It sounds worse than it is.’
Beer could have sat on the ground, but it seemed undignified in front of a patient.
Once upon a time he had taken well to waiting. Beer thought himself a patient man. It had infuriated his wife, and impressed his professors, the calm placidity of a man of science who understood there were things beyond his control. Now his bladder tugged at him. He did not want to step out and use the hallway toilet and fought to suppress the urge; felt queer at the thought of pissing down a stranger’s sink. He excused himself from the bedside, took to pacing the rooms, found a chamber pot in the near darkness that, once disturbed, grew vivid with the stink of old urine and to which he now found himself compelled to add his own. The noise was loud in his ears, embarrassing; he had made up his mind that the woman next door could hear just fine, that her paralysis stopped at the neck and left unaffected the senses of the head. And yet she couldn’t speak, or felt disinclined to do so; had a cared-for mouth and healthy tongue, pink and narrow like a cat’s. Her toenails had been recently cut. In his brief examination, he had found no evidence of sexual assault.
Having passed his water, Beer straightened, slid the pot back under the bed with a careful push of one foot. There was a bar of soap on the sink, a shaving brush and razor. The basin itself was covered by a film of white grease; the mirror and fixtures rust-eaten and mouldy. The rag that served as a hand towel bore the parallel lines of a dark stain. Beer stood washing his hands, then took the rag off its hook and walked over to the window, held it high into the moon. The stains looked as though someone had wiped a knife with it: a single movement over a four-inch blade. Even with the better light he could not be certain it was blood.
The sight stirred memories in him, of the photos that lay scattered across his desk, and of other such photos that he had studied in his life; of lectures, heard at the University of Graz, that searched for meaning in the patterns of a smudge. It also worried him: called to mind the dangers of his chosen course of action. In her summary of the day’s events, Zuzka had told him of the stranger’s anger, had used the word a half-dozen times, the tremble of awe lending spice to her story-teller’s voice. And he had seen him, stripped down to his socks, strutting his brash virility across the length of his messy room. If the man chose to attack, Beer would be no match for him. He returned the towel to its hook, and slowly, feeling uneasy about the violation of privacy it implied, began to search the man’s room for a weapon. Beer considered the razor, but found it at once too feeble and too deadly; it would be no help in keeping the man at bay, and might kill him in a single, unlucky stroke. A club would be better, some sort of long stick, but Beer could find nothing with sufficient heft. There was some cooking equipment next to a corner stove, but all of such shabby quality that it seemed to have no weight at all, the frying pan drooping from its handle and the saucepan hammered from a penny-sheet of tin. He moved to the bed, considered the table lamp with its broken, cheesecloth shade; opened the wardrobe to find nothing apart from two cotton vests, stiff with dirt, and a change of underwear so threadbare he could see the glow of his own palm as he ran it through its knit. On a shelf near the washbasin he discovered a parcel wrapped in newspaper that responded to his touch with an odd spongy softness. Disconcerted, his mind still haunted by images of the dissected dead, he carried it to the window; opened it gingerly, a handkerchief wrapped around the tips of his fingers. But all he found was a hunk of smoked fish, the eye staring dark and oily into the moonlit sky. The newspaper itself, four weeks old, was a copy of the
Kronen-Zeitung
. Its headlines announced the Russian occupation of eastern Poland; the encirclement of Warsaw by the
Wehrmacht
’s might. The picture of Hitler had been altered by a lead-pencilled squiggle, his moustache grown to resemble Stalin’s Cossack brush. For a moment Beer experienced a rush of sympathy for the fish’s owner, and he felt ashamed of his dogged snooping. Then he shook the thought, and returned the fish; bent low to a box he’d seen stashed near the bed, and pulled a screwdriver from its clutter. It was big and heavy and crude; there was no edge to it, but a flat, rusty head that if need be could be raised to threaten a man’s eyes, or be jammed into the softness of his groin. He weighed it wearily, the oath of his profession falling from his lips.
‘Primum non nocere.’
First, do no harm.
At long last he shrugged, shoved it in his pocket, and bent down again to sort through the other items in the box.
Beer found nothing of value. There was a torn handbill announcing a cabaret act in Munich, with a picture of a long-legged woman hitching her skirt high over her knickers; five or six leather balls, sand-filled, with some seepage at the seams; a pack of cigarettes, and a pound of sugar wrapped in a brown bag; two crumpled tubes of grease-paint; and a pair of thick woollen trousers, tied into a bundle with a belt. He also found some photos, a series of three, all taken on the same day in a photographer’s studio: the backgrounds changed, from a monochrome curtain to a painted vista of the Alps, but the clothes stayed the same. It was a family of four, the boy and the girl of similar height, neither of them much older than Lieschen. Both parents and son were cheaply if neatly dressed, the Sunday outfit of a working family, starched white linens erupting from the coarse fabric of their trousers, jackets, skirt. Only the little girl was different. In the darkness of the room it was impossible to make a study of her features, but Beer saw enough to notice the little fur cape that had been thrown around her shoulders, from which issued a dress that looked like a crude imitation of an evening gown. Her eyes were outsize, bruised with eyeshadow, small lips vivid as though painted on to the blank little face. The feet were strapped into a pair of narrow boots that grew out of a two-inch heel. In all three of the pictures she held hands with the little boy, her legs spread shoulder-wide, as though struggling for balance. Puzzled, Beer returned the picture to its box; exchanged it for the pack of cigarettes, which he prised open after a moment’s hesitation. He had long since smoked the last of his own. Of all his impositions this seemed the least offensive to him, and he lit up the cheap tobacco, having carefully turned his back to the window before he struck the match. It was then, smoking, coughing lightly into one fist, that he returned to his patient’s bedside and sat down again on the edge of her bed. She had not moved, but her eyes were wide open. In the patch of moonlight that fell on her face, her features looked fragile, as though made from glass.
He sat and he talked. An hour passed, and the moonlight disappeared behind a drift of clouds, left only the residual glow of the city. Beer was unused to silent patients and found his repertoire consisted largely of questions, which he reeled off into the dark. At times her wink seemed to answer him, and, at a moment’s inspiration, he begged her to move her eyelids once for a yes, and twice for a no, then bent close to catch her answers, felt her breath upon his cheek and lips. In this manner he confirmed that she could indeed not speak, nor move her limbs; that she wasn’t in pain. When he asked her whether she feared the man in whose flat he had found her, she closed her eyes with what seemed like deliberate torpor and kept them shut. After a while her breathing suggested that she must be asleep. Beer shrugged, lit another cigarette, found he wasn’t done talking.
‘You must think me queer,’ he said into the darkness, one arm stretched to touch her in that bony curve where neck meets skull. ‘Sitting up all night in a stranger’s place, without so much as asking permission. I’m afraid it must strike you as impertinent.’
And a little while later: ‘My wife left me. I suppose I deserved it.’
The woman slept through his comments, her breathing even, the boyish hair thick and knotted underneath his petting, soothing hand. In the morrow, when she was awake again, one would have to comb it out. When he moved, to regain the circulation that had been lost to his left leg, the screwdriver he’d shoved into a trouser pocket bit sharply into the flesh of his thigh. He cursed, stood up, and waited for the mime to hurry up, come home.
The man returned to his flat at what might have been a little after four. It was too dark now for Beer to read the pale dial of his watch. He had managed to stay awake through much of the night, dozing off only once or twice, and then coming awake with a start as he felt his body falling forward towards his patient. Every ten minutes or so he had got up, paced the rooms, looked across the yard to where he assumed Zuzka might be watching. He saw nothing of her, and avoided standing close to the window for more than a few seconds at a time. A light breeze had struck up, drew a coy little dance from the tatters that served as curtains in the first of the two rooms. Beer had smoked ten or twelve of the man’s cigarettes, his throat raw with their tobacco. In his boredom he’d found himself clearing up a little of the front room’s clutter, had picked up socks, magazines and newspapers, and stacked them in a corner near the bed, then wet his hands, his face, the back of his neck.
When he finally heard steps approach the door, followed by the jingle of a set of keys, he was back at the woman’s bedside, crouching low next to her sleeping features. Quickly, abiding by a decision he had made some hours before, he moved a step or two into the other room so that the man might see him at once. Beer had no desire to surprise or frighten him, and felt certain he would not sound any alarm. His hand was shoved down his trouser pocket, fingers wrapped around the screwdriver. It took an age for the man to understand the door wasn’t locked. It was possible, Beer thought, that he’d had too much to drink.
When he finally entered, he did not deign to notice him at first: shrugged his coat off near the door, threw down a cloth bag no larger than a school satchel, reached behind one ear to retrieve a cigarette that was wedged there against a dark tousle of hair. His neck, torso, arms and legs were all dressed in the same jet-black cloth; even his hands were covered, rose invisible in the dark. It was only the cigarette that moved, left its perch and was thrust into the centre of a ghostly face. A match was struck, lit up his eyes, dark, bulging orbs that stared across the distance of the room. The man had yet to close the door. It occurred to Beer that he was making up his mind whether or not he should run. He took his sweet time.
It puzzled the doctor.
In the hours of the wait, going over in his head what Zuzka had told him, and walking amongst the squalor of his room, Beer had resolved that this was a primitive man, easily angered. He’d expected shouting: a drunk and clumsy charge. But the man who was walking towards him now was composed, the white face a wall, unreadable, dark eyes staring from it with a wet sort of passion for which the doctor could not find a name. He was heading for Beer, his eyes fixed beyond the intruder, on the doorway to the back room. As soon as Beer realised the man’s intent, he got out of the way, took three, four quick steps to one side, his hand sweaty against the screwdriver’s grip. The mime disappeared: Beer heard him step up to the woman’s bed, then quickly turn to draw the curtains, the spare light growing dimmer yet. When he returned to the front room, he was holding a pocket knife, the blade opened over a handle made of bone. It might have been four inches long. The bone shone white in his gloved hand: it seemed to reflect the pallor of his face. Beer spoke, wishing to forestall the man’s decision to attack.
‘Is she your wife?’ he asked.
There might have been better places to begin.
The mime just looked at him with that blank of a face. His forearm rose, the one with the knife, wiped hard across the length of his lips: greasepaint staining the cuff of his black sweater. A mouth emerged, thick, heavy lips gaping open like a wound. All of a sudden his anger was obvious. When he spoke, the words rushed out amongst a shower of spittle.
‘Who the hell are you?’
The knife was stretched forward, pointing at Beer.
‘I’m a doctor. I live in the house. Anton Beer.’
The man nodded at the name, as though he’d heard it before. The upper half of his face remained as unreadable as before.
‘How did you get in here?’
‘All I want is to help your wife. We can call the police if you like.’
With an effort of will, Beer let go of the screwdriver and showed the man both his palms. His fingers looked thin to him, the knuckles chapped and swollen. He must have lost weight in the past few months. The man observed the gesture, but did not lower his knife. Only the mouth showed emotion, a tremendous, quivering anger. Regardless, the doctor pressed on.