Authors: Dan Vyleta
‘The yard in there?’ he asked his little guide, who was dragging him to a squat building somewhat diagonally across from their own. It was some fifty or sixty years older than most other structures in their street, its plaster flaking, the window frames low and plain and rotting with age. At its centre stood a high, narrow gateway – just wide enough to allow passage to a horse-cart or a car – that extended through the depth of the front building and led up to a sheet-metal gate, near six feet high, its dented surface broken only by the square iron grille that surrounded its handle. The girl led him on, from the light of the street into the darkness of this tunnel, its cobbles subtly grooved by the many wheels that had passed. Beyond the gate – visible to Beer on tiptoe – lay a small, rectangular yard, littered with rubbish and enclosed on all sides by two-storey buildings that housed a row of garages and workshops.
‘But that’s Herr Pollak’s auto-repair shop.’
‘Herr Pollak has left,’ the girl told him as she pressed her face against the grate. ‘They’ve been gone since winter. He and Frau Pollak. She used to give me raisin buns.’
‘Left? I didn’t know they were –’ he started to say, then saw the scrawl of a symbol across the flank of one building, jagged like a scar. It might have been less prominent had the day been overcast; Beer thought it shameless of the season. All of a sudden he wished to hurry on the sun.
‘Things are prettier in the dark,’ he mumbled, and the girl looked up at him as though she agreed. They stood in silence while the chimney sweep passed in the street behind them, black-faced under the warm October sky.
‘The dog was found right over there.’
She stretched one arm through the bars of the gate, then hooked it into an acute angle and pointed to a pile of rubbish to their right. Beer could not see it from his vantage point and bent down next to the girl to peer through the grating.
‘The rain washed away the blood,’ she said.
‘There was a lot of blood?’
The girl shook her head thoughtfully, made to say something, then sucked in her lip and settled on something else.
‘You want to see up close?’
‘We haven’t a key,’ he said, and for a moment he feared she would suggest clambering over the gate. ‘Besides, it’s private property. We mustn’t break the law.’
‘There’s another way,’ she said, and reached up once again to take hold of his hand. ‘Come. There’s nobody round there this time of day.’
Against his better judgement, he let the girl lead him to a small wooden door set in the side of the short tunnel that connected courtyard and street. To his surprise it was unlocked. Inside, a steep, open staircase led up to the second floor, while the corridor bent ahead of them, turning sharply into the building’s wing. There were signs of a recent fire, and a blackened mattress leaned against one wall. Beer remembered no fire but supposed it explained why the yard remained abandoned: its new owners would have to repair the building before business could be resumed.
The girl led him down the corridor, past broken windows and shattered light bulbs, angry slogans scrawled across the floor. Beer wondered for a moment what the neighbours made of this gutted building in their midst, then reminded himself that they were the same people who had witnessed the windows being smashed and the symbols being daubed, and done nothing about it. People like him. Some of them might even have lent a hand. In a month or two, the property would have new tenants, and a new lick of paint. Their name wouldn’t be Pollak, but that was all: there’d be another kind of name – no different really, yet somehow better all the same – and a row of motor cars standing polished in the yard.
The girl let go of his hand and cut into a hallway on their right in a lopsided gallop. The corridor was narrow and so cluttered with broken furniture that for a moment Beer lost sight of her. When he caught up with the girl, he found her standing at the top of a staircase of three steps that led up to what must have been a service entrance to the workshop and was now blocked off by two large pieces of plywood, one of them stained by what seemed to be old blood. She stuck a finger into the wood’s cracked lower corner, wrinkling her nose at the stains, and lifted the board up like a flap.
‘It’s loose, see. We can go in here.’
‘We really shouldn’t,’ he protested. ‘Besides, I’ll get my trousers dirty.’
‘I come here all the time.’ She ducked through, then turned in the entryway, still holding up the piece of wood. Her body, in this hunched position, seemed intolerably twisted: bent double over the crooked line of her waist, her head and left shoulder fused at the seams. Her little arms were shaking with the strain.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘let me help you.’
Before he knew what he was doing, he had mounted the steps and taken hold of the loose board. He crouched down low to do so, one knee pressed into the dirty floor. The little girl was close now, looking him straight in the eye: he could see the fine web of crystalline ridges that threaded her iris; the pink curve of her lip.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked quickly, her breath sweet in his face.
‘Dr Beer.’
‘And otherwise?’
‘Otherwise? Anton. Anton Beer.’
‘Anneliese Grotter,’ she said, then turned on her heel and ran ahead into the darkness beyond. He really had very little choice but to follow.
Getting past the plywood wasn’t as easy as he had thought. He tried to duck through as the girl had done, but didn’t seem able to make himself fit; straightened up again and began pulling at the board in an effort to widen the gap. It wouldn’t budge, then came loose with sudden violence and flew nail-studded into his arms. He almost lost his footing and slipped off the stairs; threw the board behind himself in a temper, then stood peering about as though to check whether anyone had witnessed the mishap. But the corridor remained as deserted as before, and Beer quickly slid through the narrow doorway he had created, hoping his clothing wouldn’t catch on any edges.
The part of the building that lay on the other side seemed unaffected by the fire and the vandalism. Within a few steps, the whitewashed passage Beer had entered opened into a sort of tea kitchen, roughly furnished with shelves laden with cheap plates and mugs and some tin cutlery. The scorched coil of an immersion heater lay not far from an empty metal sink. It struck him that whoever had left this place behind had gone to the trouble of scrubbing the sink clean until it sparkled, and he pictured Frau Pollak standing hunched over its surface, a wad of steel wool in her hand, her suitcase already sitting in the yard. The cutlery was dusty, but none of it soiled.
Beyond the kitchen lay a further corridor, which in turn led to a mechanic’s garage, now barren of tools but still alive with the vivid smell of motor oils. On his right, the garage doors stood wide open, blue sky beyond. He stepped out and saw the girl waiting for him by the pile of rubbish she had indicated before, arms thrown high over her head, and rushing her body through a drill of awkward pirouettes that tossed up the hem of her purple dress. The yard was in disuse but not as badly littered as it had seemed from outside. Most of the rubbish was close to the front of the yard, where people had rid themselves of items of household waste by tipping them over the gate. Cabbage stumps and potato peelings lay scattered amongst broken bottles and the carcass of a bicycle, rusted beyond repair. A pulpy bundle of newspapers lay rotting in the sun.
When she saw him coming over, the girl cleared a patch of yard with her dirty canvas shoes, then threw herself down on to the ground as though gripped by a sudden seizure and bent her limbs into a particular shape, one knee tucked up towards her chest, the other stretched behind her, with both arms wrapped tight around her head. The doctor rose on tiptoe to see whether anyone was watching them from the other side of the gate, then crouched down very close to the girl, pulling down her dress a little where it exposed the edge of her dirty knickers.
‘You shouldn’t do that,’ he said mildly. ‘You’ll get filthy.’
‘Just like this,’ answered the little girl. ‘And the tummy was all slit.’
She gestured to her abdomen, and made a disgusted face. ‘There were rats, you know, but the boys threw stones at them and chased them away.’
‘And you really saw it for yourself?’
‘Him,’ she corrected, then nodded. ‘His name was Walter.’
‘Walter,’ he said. ‘It’s a funny name for a dog.’
She got up from the ground and dusted off her knees. ‘Janitor says it’s better this way because he was so very old.’
Her eyes darted up to see what he made of the idea.
‘That’s probably true,’ he said, grudgingly, annoyed with the man for being so open with the girl. ‘It’s not a nice way to go, though.’
‘No,’ said the girl, and for a moment he saw in her eyes all the fear and horror that had been engendered by her encounter with Speckstein’s cut-open dog.
She reached out to him, and he took her hand again, and together they made their way through the garage and the kitchen, and on through the windings of the corridors beyond. The girl was quiet now, lost in her thoughts. When they came out by the gate once more, she tugged at his hand and stopped him; stood once again with her temples pressed against the grating near its handle.
‘I heard the policeman say something,’ she murmured quietly, then sucked in her lips. ‘He said – he said the dog had “
bled out elsewhere
”. What does that mean?’
‘It means there wasn’t enough blood on the scene. It must have been killed somewhere else.’
She nodded, then abandoned her stance and turned her back on the gate: a hunchbacked guardsman, turning on her heels, pigtails for a helmet, her lips rolled inwards over the double ridge of teeth.
They were back in front of their own building by the time she spoke again.
‘I didn’t like the policeman.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he said that Father was a drunk,’ she explained, patiently, as though to someone younger than herself. ‘He is, you know, but it was unkind of him to say so. Don’t you think?’
Her eyes had fastened on him yet again, were serious, haunted, playful. He had not thought a child could have eyes such as these.
‘How old are you?’ he asked, shaking his head in wonder.
‘Nine,’ she answered. ‘Almost ten. Only thirty-eight days.’
‘You’re a very smart girl,’ he said, and she blushed with pleasure and skipped through the open doorway, her body crooked like a broken doll’s.
She ran to a letter box, reached up and through the flap to search its contents, pulled out a bent envelope. Each step was a broken dance: was broken, but a dance nonetheless. He was aware that she was showing off for him, and he thought he saw in her smile that she was aware of it, too. She drew closer once again to where he stood on the threshold with the front door still in his hands.
‘Do you want to know who did it?’ she asked, and curled a finger towards him.
Beer bent forward at the waist.
‘The dog?’ he asked, surprised. ‘You mean you know?’
‘Shine-a-man,’ she whispered very seriously, shaping the sounds like she was a little unsure of their pitch.
‘Shine-a-man?’ he asked.
She nodded, raised a finger to each of her eyes and stretched the lids until they formed two narrow slits. ‘He plays the trumpet.’
‘Shine-a-man plays the trumpet.’
‘Maybe,’ she said, then turned away, as though no longer certain she should have parted with her secret.
He looked past her into the gloom of the house.
‘Coming?’ she asked.
‘No, Anneliese. There is an errand I want to run.’
‘Goodbye then, Anton Beer.’
‘Yes, goodbye.’
He watched after her as she ran into the courtyard and across to the back stairwell, the right leg longer than the left.
It was only when she had disappeared from sight that he turned his back and headed for the tram stop up the road.
Smiling, crooked Anneliese Grotter said goodbye to the doctor and raced up to her rooms. The stairs gave her some difficulty, the steps were so high, and she was out of breath when she reached the apartment door and dug around her dress pockets to locate the key. Her father wasn’t back yet. He rarely came back before eight, and she had grown used to eating before he got home, then laying his dinner out for him on the kitchen table. She would sit with him and watch him eat: a humped little girl perched on the edge of the counter, her heels drumming against the door of the cupboard underneath. Sometimes, when he was in a good mood, he would tell her stories from work, of the day when the boss’s mother had come to visit and told her son off for yelling at the men, or about the fellow worker who’d drunk all the oil from a tin of Polish sardines and minutes later shat his pants. She would laugh then, and make sure he ate seconds. There were nights when he would hardly eat at all. There were nights when all the food was gone and all the money, and he sat cursing, running dirty hands through the locks of his hair.
The girl climbed on a chair and surveyed the kitchen cupboards. There was still some cheese, a jar of pickled cucumbers, and a half-loaf of old bread that she could toast for him. They had no butter left, but the clay bowl was half full with pork lard that her father had brought back from work Monday last, and there were a quarter of a cabbage and some carrots for soup. Satisfied, she took out the lard and the bread and clambered down; made a sandwich for herself, ate it, then drank deeply from the tap.