Obabakoak (31 page)

Alexander’s proposal seemed reasonable. Whether he wanted to or not, he would end up going to sleep and it was best to take precautions. Yes, he would go to sleep for a couple of hours and then go to the airport. Given the circumstances, that seemed the most intelligent thing to do. These final steps had to be taken calmly.

Without getting up from the sofa, he reached out and began to set the alarm clocks. He set the first for two minutes to seven, the second for one minute to seven, and the third for seven o’clock exactly. One of the three was bound to wake him.

He stretched out on the sofa, and, knowing that sleep would not be long in coming, he forced himself to think about that dreamed-of island of turtles. The island was small and in the shape of a snail. However—if the information given him by the travel agency was correct—it lacked for nothing and was suitably equipped to welcome all first-class visitors. It had two hotels, about two hundred bungalows and one hundred country cottages. And there was more: garages, cafés and restaurants, three large cinemas, and a small port bobbing with white yachts. The whole island was full of life and color, and such was the
joie de vivre
of the islanders that they spent the whole day singing. The palm trees were not to be sniffed at either. They were the tallest palm trees in the world; they fringed the beaches. And the beaches—that was the most marvelous part—were tremendously wide and long and encircled the island like a ring of sand. The sea was blue in the morning and emerald in the evening and the vast majority of the fish were red.

Klaus looked hard at those red fish. They let themselves be carried on the emerald waves, advancing and retreating. It was as if the sea were rocking them to sleep.

“You were right,
monsieur.
They are lovely fish. Far lovelier than the fish in the restaurant,” said someone at his side. Klaus opened his eyes and saw that it was Marcel, the waiter from the Paris restaurant. Along with his bow tie, he was now wearing a pair of swimming trunks, white with black dots.

“We don’t eat
savarin
on this island, Marcel,” he said. But the waiter had vanished from the beach.

“He must have gone for a swim,” he thought, looking out at the emerald sea. But only red fish were swimming there.

“He must have drowned,” he decided, lying down again on the sand. He felt the heat of the sun on his face, especially on his eyelids.

“Klaus, get up this instant!” he heard a voice say shortly afterward.

On the very spot where the waiter had stood there was now a child. He was wearing yellow trunks and was smiling scornfully at him.

“What are you doing out there, Alexander?” Klaus asked, averting his eyes from that smile.

Just then he heard a strange whistling noise.

“Who’s that whistling?” he asked. But he got no reply.

No sooner had he asked the question than he heard another whistle just as loud as the previous one and shortly afterward a third whistle.

“Klaus, get up this instant! Get up, you idiot!” shouted Alexander, giving him a kick in the ribs.

“Why are you kicking me, Alexander? If you do that, I’ll throw you in the water and you’ll drown. Just like that day we went on the trip up the River Elbe!” whined Klaus.

“I hate you, Klaus!”

“It was your fault, Alexander! I pushed you in because you kept kicking me!” Crying openly now, Klaus turned his head away. He didn’t want to hear what his little brother was saying.

As soon as he turned his head he saw them. Three very large green turtles. They were sitting on a rock whistling and stretching out their necks.

“So it was the turtles. I never expected them to make a noise like that,” thought Klaus. It bothered him to know that. He hadn’t reckoned on finding anything unpleasant on the island.

One of the turtles fell silent.

“The big one is bound to stop now too,” he thought. And the big turtle also stopped whistling. Only the one on the highest part of the rock continued.

That must be the oldest one,” he remarked.

“Shut up, you old devil!”

It didn’t obey him at once, but then, finally, it too fell silent. Klaus sighed, relieved, and scoured the beach for his younger brother. But the beach was empty.

“You were right to go back inside, Alexander. You’re better off in there. Every time you come out, we quarrel and that’s a terrible thing to happen between brothers,” he said.

From on high the sun dominated the sky and once the whistling of the turtles had ceased, the sound of the waves seemed very pleasant to him. It rocked him ever more gently, growing ever farther and farther away …

LET US SUPPOSE
that what is about to begin is a story of some ten to twelve pages in length, and let us make that hypothesis more specific by saying that the protagonists of the story will be the characters whose names appear in the title, that is, Margarete and Heinrich, twins, who at the time of the events described—the autumn of 1934—were living apart in two different cities in Germany.

We used the third-person plural of the past imperfect, “they were living,” to apply to both brother and sister and to a whole autumn. However, we are obliged to use this second paragraph to clarify the previous statement since the death of one of them—of Margarete, to be exact—is one of the basic premises of the hypothesis. Let us add, then, that Margarete died at a train station right at the beginning of the aforementioned autumn and that she disappeared overnight, suddenly, like one of those seabirds who, on being mortally wounded, abandon the air and plunge into the sea forever.

But death, even a death of the kind we are dealing with now, cannot remain secret; if it is to be complete, it requires someone to record it and to make it known. Let us add, then, a few more details to those already set out: first, those relating to the letter sent to Heinrich by a Bavarian judge; second, those relating to the circumstances surrounding the reading of the said letter. And let us do so in the verbal forms that, although inappropriate for a hypothetical style, are much more comfortable to use.

The Bavarian judge said:

“It is my duty to inform you that your sister Margarete Wetzel died at 00.15 on 22 September. It would seem that she fell beneath the wheels of a train at that moment entering the station. We will write to you again as soon as our investigations are completed. We do not exclude the possibility that it may have been a murder.”

Circumstances and relevant facts.

Firstly, the port of Hamburg, where Heinrich was working a crane on quay number eight and, more specifically, that crane’s cabin of unbreakable glass from which he could easily see the whole deck of the ship he was loading. As regards weather conditions, a rainy afternoon, the second day of October. In respect of the ineffable, an oversight, for Heinrich—who had given no importance to an apparently official letter—did not think to read it until several days after putting it into one of his overall pockets.

Having reached this point, we crave the reader’s indulgence—as the old balladeers used to say—and ask you to allow the writer to forget all about the original hypothesis. Because otherwise the use of formulae, such as those used up until now, would prove unavoidable and would serve only to encumber the narrative flow. Let us, then, continue with the story, telling it as if it had really happened.

As soon as he had read the letter, Heinrich threw his head back so that it touched the steel plate at the back of the cabin. He felt his heart begin to beat wildly, frenetically pumping blood, as if wanting to spread throughout his whole body the blow it had felt on reading the judge’s letter. Very soon the pain reached his knees, his lungs, his guts.

He lay exhausted and absent from the world about him, oblivious to the hard rain falling at that moment and to the other workers shouting up to him from the quay. When, at last, he emerged from his abstraction, he heard the scream of a seagull and, instinctively, began to follow its flight with his eyes. The seagull descended from the clouds and alighted on the prow of the ship he was loading. There he read the name:
Three sisters.

Heinrich’s eyes lost sight of the bird and remained fixed and amazed on the twelve letters making up the ship’s name.

“I only had one sister,” he thought. The pang he felt at what seemed a cruel joke on the part of life cleared his head completely. He returned to the world.

He lowered his gaze to the quay. His fellow workers were gesticulating furiously, signaling to him that the cargo was secured. Why was he waiting before hoisting it up? Couldn’t he see they were getting soaked? He wiped the glass of the cabin clean and did what they asked of him without thinking about it, acting out of pure inertia. Immediately afterward he climbed down the crane ladder and went over to them.

“I have to go home,” he told them in a muffled voice, adding, “I think I may be ill.”

But the ten men on the quay had already noticed the letter sticking out of one of his trouser pockets and they didn’t believe him.

“Don’t worry, Heinrich. All women are the same. You’ll find another one,” remarked the foreman in a mocking tone and all the others laughed.

Those apparently consoling words were not only the fruit of a crude misunderstanding, they were also—and above all—a scornful allusion to Heinrich’s lack of masculinity. The workers on the quay didn’t like this circumspect, well-mannered young man who maneuvered the crane up there, above them. He wasn’t the right sort of person to work in a port. They needed real men in the port, the sort who went out afterward and spent all their money in the St. Pauli brothels.

He ignored the provocative remark, left the quay, and, after changing his clothes, crossed an iron walkway onto the main road. He was not thinking about anything. He simply made the screams of the seagulls flying overhead echoes of his own inner scream.

Heinrich had spent three long years working in Hamburg but he had not made a single friend, neither among the people of the port nor in his neighborhood. He hadn’t in fact needed them, because far from seeming a burden to him, the solitude that had appeared in his life when he arrived there had seemed almost a relief, a liberation, and also because the correspondence he maintained with his sister helped him through any difficult times.

That day, however, while he waited for the bus, he regretted that his life had come to this and he searched every corner of his memory for a name, a face. Letting himself be carried along by his imagination, he saw himself in the living room of that “friend’s” house, with a cup of coffee before him, talking about Margarete, telling him how she had been his only sister and, for years, since they were orphaned, had been all the family he had, and that she was a girl of twenty-four, with very blond hair and a very different personality from his, happy, always happy, a great partygoer, and you know what, she had a real weakness for raincoats, for umbrellas too, you can’t imagine how well she dressed and once, at a time when we were rather comfortably off, we went to spend a fortnight in a village on the French Riviera and she said, yes, Heinrich, it is a pretty village, but a place with no rain cannot help but be vulgar and after that we had an argument about the habits of seagulls… and, from the window of the bus, Heinrich watched the seagulls circling over the jetties, looking for food among the rotten wood and scrap iron. These were different seagulls. There was no name in his memory. There was no friend.

He got off the bus and ran home. He needed to hide, to flee the people filling the streets that afternoon, sheltered from the rain, milling around by shop windows or in cinema foyers. Without exception, they all seemed stupid, hateful: stupid because they knew nothing of Margarete’s death; hateful because he knew that not one of them was prepared to share his misfortune.

Heinrich spent more than an hour lying facedown on his bed. Then, feeling a little calmer, he rummaged around in the drawers and collected together all the objects that spoke to him of his sister: the photographs, a little box containing a lock of her hair, the fancy notebook she had given him when they made their trip to the south of France. Lined up on the table, the objects formed a little shrine.

“How come you didn’t see the train, Margarete?” he asked, sitting down at the table. And the ceremony begun with that question lasted until dawn.

But the shrine brought him no consolation. On the contrary, it made the void he could feel inside him grow ever larger. The objects refused to speak of the good times that the Wetzels, brother and sister, had spent together; they spoke solely and vociferously of Margarete’s absence.

He was thinking of bringing the ceremony to a close when he noticed that there was something missing from the objects on the table. Something fundamental perhaps: the dress Margarete had forgotten to take with her after her last visit. He kept it in the wardrobe in his bedroom.

“I’ll put it on,” he thought.

After all, they were twins. For a long time the two of them had been almost impossible to tell apart. Then why try to make do with objects when he already carried a great part of Margarete within himself?

While he walked down the hallway it didn’t occur to him that what he was about to do would change his life completely. His intention was simply to reclaim his sister from death, but only for a moment, just until the ceremony was over. Afterward everything would return to normal.

But the transformation was made as soon as the dress touched his skin, in the same way fairy godmothers in children’s stories—with just one touch of their wand, in an instant—change an ugly house into a palace. Because right at that moment, when he looked in the mirror and saw a woman remarkably like Margarete, Heinrich finally understood. Suddenly, all the circumstances of his life made sense, both the unease that had accompanied him in his native city and the solitude he had experienced later. Even his hatred for the world of the port had an explanation now.

Heinrich felt proud, prouder than he had ever felt. He had spent years like the boy lost in the woods, his body covered in scratches, shouting and shouting without anyone ever hearing him. But there would be no more scratches, no more shouting. He had found the path that would lead him out of the woods, he could see where they ended, he could see the open, friendly landscape that awaited him.