Thursday, 16 January 2014

The Crooked Maid

By Dan Vyleta
This was an amazing book.   One the best I have read in a long time. The story starts with two  people travelling to Vienna on a train in post WWII Europe.  The woman (Anna) is returning to see her husband from whom she has been estranged. The woman's husband has been a prisoner of war and only recently released.  She is returning to Vienna to see if they can reconcile. The young man, whose eye is disfigured as a result of a schoo fight,  is returning home to his family as his stepfather has been seriously injured.

The boy (Robert)is intrigued by the woman and copies down her name and address from her luggage while she is sleeping.

When they arrive in Vienna, the woman takes a taxi home, the boy walks home.  Their arrival is observed by a scruffy man in a army coat with a red wollen scraft "of better appearance than the rest of him".

When the women arrives at her apartment, her husband is not there but there is a red mark, that looks like blood) on the wall.  When the boy arrives home he is greeted at the door by a young hunch-backed girl.  He is appalled to see the condition of the house, it is not clean, there is no food.  The girl is living in the house with his mother and pregnant sister-in-law.  The girl seems to have befriended a flock of crows who are now living in the attic of the house.  The boy becomes enthralled by the girl and by the end of the story wants to marry her... to his mother's displeasure.  The man with the red scarf is often seen standing outside the boy's house.  It is making his family very nervous.

A drunk, whom people later refer to as a giant, arrives at the woman's house.  He lets himself in with a key.  He claims to know her husband, to have been in prison with him.  The woman is warry of him and kicks him out.  He meets and starts living with an American woman, a widowed reporter, who lives in the same building.

The boy's father dies, he had fallen, or been pushed out of a window in the house.   The boy's brother, who had been in jail charged with assault is now charged with murder and goes on trial. While all this is happening the woman has reported her husband missing to the police.  The police officer, a widower, is attracted to her but she spurns his attention.  The young boy comes to visit her and she kisses him... he is very puzzled by this, he had thought of becoming a priest.  He is more perplexed as his affection for the young girl.  She is cool to him and cruel to his family, she has her own hoard of food which she hides from them.  The strange thing is the family is supposed to be rich and own a factory.  Why are thy living in poverty.

As the story goes on we learn that the women left her husband because he was having an affair with a man.  The boy's brother is believed/hated as a vicious SS interogator and his father a Nazi sympathizer.  His mother was a Hitler devotee and still has a picture of him in the house.  A dead body is found in a basement of an abandoned building, it has a glass eye.  The body is so badly beaten and decayed that the woman is not able to make a positive ID of the body.  She did not think her husband had a glass eye, but.... with the war anything could have happended.  Strangely, the body has had the internal organs removed, it has been sewn up and some chemicals sprinkled on it... who? why?

We later find out that the women's husband knew of the young girl, an orphan and wanted to help her.  Why we don't know.  They boy's father took her in to his household, why?  The girl is going by another name, why did she change her name?  Because she was a Jew?  We also found out that the stepfather had struck a deal with a Jewish factory owner to take over his factory and home, with the understanding that after the war the Jewish man could come back and claim all his property back.  The family thinks the man with the red scarf is the Jew waiting to reclaim his property.

The boy's brother appears to be on the verge of being convicted for his father's murder but the testimony of the hunch-backed girl (she lies) saves him.  She had made a deal with the boy and his mother, if she saved the brother, she would be allowed to marry the boy.  When she comes home she plans to marry but finds that someone has poisoned all her crows,  She is furious and leaves the house, going to stay with the man (the giant) whom she met outside the woman's apartment.  She is familiar with the apartment, obviously had been there at some time with the woman's husband.

It is puzzling as to why so many people are enthralled with the young girl, she seems to entrance men.

As the story concludes we learn that the dead body was indeed the woman's husband.  The man in the red scarf got involved in thing as he took the dead man's coat in which there was a letter from the woman announcing her planned arrival in Vienna and a picture of the hunch backed girl.  This man too seems intrigued by the girl.

The family receives a letter, suppposedly from the Jew, asking to be paid off.  The brothers go to meet him, it seems that the older brother plans to kill him.  The letter has actually been sent by the giant and the girl who hope to use the money to escape to America.  The boy's brother is killed in an altercation. 

Another story line in the book is about the woman's husband, a psychiatrist.  He befriended his prison camp commander, who was suffering from depression, and helped him through it.  When the woman's husband loses his eye to an infection the camp commnander  gets him him a state of the art glass eye to thank him for his help.  Later this commander is charged and imprisoned because it is assumed he was having a homosexual relationship with the prisoner, which he wasn't.

The book ends with the giant and girl making it to America, on their own means.  The woman marries the young boy even though he is much younger than her.  He takes over the family business and seems to do a good job organizing things.

In addition to the main story line there is a lot of animosity demonstrated against homosexuality, jews and nazis.

As I was reading the book I was reminded very much of Dickens, Great Expectations, for example.  At the end of the book the author makes reference to his admiration for both Dickens and Dostoyevsky.  Interesting, I had been thinking about Dostoyevsky recently, but not in connection to the book.

There were a lot of characters in the book and at first it was difficult to figure out how they all fit together.  However, this was an amazing book.  It was complex and puzzling with many quirky characters (like Dickents).  This is definitely a book I will want to read again.

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