The Quiet Twin (33 page)

‘I went down and talked to him at length,’ he’d said. ‘He’s a good man, really. You have nothing to fear from him.’

The girl had merely nodded and asked to please be towelled off.

As for the scene she had witnessed two nights previously, when she and Zuzka had appeared in his living-room doorway: about this, the doctor and the little girl had not exchanged a word. He felt that anything he could say to her would but burden her with yet another secret, at once bewildering and without consequence. She seemed oblivious in any case, and since neither Otto nor Zuzka had shown their faces in the past few days, and Anneliese liked to spend all her time either in his study or in Eva’s bedroom, there was no possibility, at present, that she might say the wrong thing to anyone and put him in immediate danger.

Sighing, taking a break before embarking on the O, Beer stood up from his desk and crouched down next to the girl, one knee joint creaking in complaint. He pointed to the wall, where the hedgehog the janitor had sent up for Lieschen was sniffing at the window curtains, but the girl was impassive, refused to give so much as a smile. He had seen her play with the animal a few times, but mostly she had ignored it and had even thrown a pen at it on one occasion, then watched it roll itself into a ball.

‘Prince Yussuf,’ he said gently. ‘Isn’t that his name?’

She shrugged her crooked little shoulders, then nodded, never looking up at Beer.

‘Don’t you think he looks a little lonely?’

Again the girl shrugged, sucked in her lip, threw a glance over to the animal.

‘Maybe,’ she said.

‘And you? Are you feeling lonely, Anneliese?’

This time she gave no response at all. Frustrated, he settled one knee on the floor, laid some fingers on her shoulder, half expecting her to pull away.

‘You don’t talk as much as you used to.’

The girl wrinkled her nose, stopped colouring.

‘Eva doesn’t talk.’

‘Eva is sick. Look here, Anne–’ He paused, corrected himself, struggled for a phrase. ‘Lieschen. You found your father, didn’t you? Before you woke up in the hospital.’

Her body went still, the eyes staring into him without emotion.

‘I know it must have been terrible. You mustn’t be afraid, though. It wasn’t – murder. Your father was very sad, and he was drinking far too much. And then he – That is to say, there was a kind of accident. He hurt himself.’

She shrugged yet again, raised the pencil she was holding and drew it, point first, across the front of her dress, leaving a bright purple mark. He had seen her make that movement once before: in the janitor’s cellar, when Beer had asked what had happened to poor Walter. Back then she had fanned her fingers before her abdomen to suggest the spilling of the animal’s guts. This time she eschewed such drama.

‘It’s a good way to go,’ she murmured. ‘For a dog.’

Beer heard the phrase and knew at once it wasn’t hers. Its callousness stung him, and he leaned forward to be closer to the girl.

‘Is that what your father said?’ he asked. ‘When they found Walter?’

But Lieschen simply went back to her colouring, drawing a person this time, fat of body and of limb; drew slits for eyes and a wide-mouthed, yellow funnel that jutted from its red-lipped mouth. Beer’s knee gave another creak as he stood up. He felt he couldn’t help the girl. It shamed him to admit that she was the least of his problems that night.

He walked into the kitchen. On the table there stood an array of beer bottles, five in number, placed in no particular arrangement and looking for all the world as though they had been plonked down at random. One of the bottles was open, the porcelain cork dangling from the metal hoop that attached it to the neck, and a third of the contents was missing. Beer fetched a glass, placed it next to the bottle, poured out an inch or so. It stood there, the foam first rising then settling in the narrow glass. He turned his back on it, took two steps out of the kitchen, only to run back and throw the beer down the sink. He did not want, in some unguarded moment, for the girl to come sampling what stood poured out on the table. When the time came, he thought, he would have to lock her in the study so that Teuben did not see her. She was vulnerable now, an orphan. As there were no living relatives, she would end up in an orphanage: the hunchbacked daughter of an alcoholic suicide. It would have been much better to remove her from the flat, but Beer was not sure where he could bring her. The janitor might have been happy to look after her, but she seemed so crushed and traumatised he did not dare suggest it, and after a fashion it was true: the man drew baths of blood and not of water. When the time came, he would have to lock her in. The thought repeated itself. When the time came. He replaced the glass on the kitchen table, a smear of dried-on foam climbing up its side. The clock struck eight. It was time to turn Eva.

He entered the bedroom without haste and went about his nurse’s business. Eva endured it without so much as a wink. While he was changing her nightgown into one of plain cotton, his eyes neither lingered on nor avoided her naked form. He had expected himself to be seized by agitation, but felt preternaturally calm instead, and found himself thinking that – one way or another – things would come to a rest that night.
It’s the gambler’s moment of repose
, he thought:
when all the bets have been placed and the ball is spinning around its wheel
. And he was strangely happy about this, the inexorability of fate, and strangely indifferent towards Eva, whom he’d worked so hard to save. It was as though all his feeling for her had long been exhausted and he was reduced once again to nothing more than his function, a doctor looking after his patient. He smiled at her without warmth, tucked the sheets up to her chin. A noise travelled in through the window he had opened, of young men talking loudly on a floor below. Beer turned, opened the door, lingered a moment to light a cigarette. And then, in that very instant, his hands still in his pockets, searching for the matches, a new tenderness rose up in him, fresh, livid, unexpected. He gave a cry, whipped around, fell to his knees beside the bed, green eyes watching him with the sadness of the damned.

‘Oh Eva,’ he whispered.

She winked at him to say she understood.

He stayed another hour. They did neither of them cry. Beer spoke a little, his lips bowed low over her ear. He was holding Eva’s hand.

‘It’s like this,’ he told her. ‘All your life you keep yourself hidden. Even from yourself. Your brother, now – Otto – he’s the type of man who lives at the surface of things. He has to paint his face to disappear, and seal his lips. Everything he says, it’s indiscreet, even when he’s telling lies. I think that it’s a gift of sorts. These days, of course, it might just help to get him killed.

‘But I – I never speak, not really. I use my words to hide behind. I don’t speak and I don’t act, even when I’m out and pursuing my vices. I feed them, it is true, but it’s only so that I keep them in check. All of my life I have been calculating the odds: an economics of prudence, buying off desire so I can live in peace. I am doing it even now, speaking to the living dead. But it’s better than not speaking at all.

‘I’m sorry, Eva,’ he told her. ‘I’m so sorry.’

The clock struck 9.30. Exhausted, unable to bear the wait any longer, Anton Beer ran out of Eva’s room, threw on his dinner jacket, locked up Lieschen in the study, and went downstairs to join the party.

Chapter 5

Beer was met by the first signs of the party no sooner had he stepped out his door. Noises rose within the stairwell, of drunken men shouting, laughing, breaking into song. Halfway down, a youth of eighteen, nineteen years was sitting on a step, his body bent double, clutching his thick flaxen hair. A companion, some years older and swarthy in complexion, was squatting next to him and whispering ceaselessly into his ear. Both men were wearing brown shirts and armbands, had tucked their trousers into thick woollen socks. Beer stepped past them without greeting and continued towards the noise. On the next landing three policemen in dress uniform were passing a carafe made of cut glass back and forth, trading snatches of popular songs in which they had substituted the lyrics for pornographic equivalents. Just then, one of them dropped the carafe’s heavy stopper and watched it bounce down the stairs, then drop into the central chasm and shatter on the floor below. All three of them burst into laughter. Beer passed this group, too, without so much as a word.

When he turned the next bend of the large and littered staircase, he saw from afar that the door to Speckstein’s flat stood wide open. Laughter rang out from it, followed by a trumpet’s comic whistle. In the doorway, straddling the threshold and leaning casually against the doorpost, stood a tall, thin SS officer with a pointy chin and finger-wide moustache. A cigarette was smoking in his long-boned, handsome hand. When the doctor tried to walk past him, he reached out with a sudden movement and took hold of Beer’s arm.

‘Are you sure you are invited?’ he asked, eyeing the dinner jacket with some suspicion, then leaned in close to blow cigarette smoke into Beer’s face. Before Beer had time to formulate an answer, the man let go of him again.

‘But what the hell. Go ahead. Most of the food’s gone, but some of the lads brought beer and spirits. You might just catch the tail end of the show.’

Inside, the flat seemed strangely empty until Beer reached the doorway that led to Speckstein’s living room and study, where a tight press of people stood shoulder to shoulder and were pushing and shoving for a better view. The air was hot and stale here, a mixture of smoke and sweat. Muttering excuses, and taking advantage of a group of three or four elderly gentlemen who disrupted the crowd with their attempt to leave, Beer managed to squeeze past the outermost row of spectators and slip inside. All eyes were directed to the far end of the room, where Otto Frei stood upon the dining-room table, which had been pushed against the wall. Used plates and dirty cutlery had been stacked at one end of the table; at the other a big terrine of soup still presided amongst several towers of bowls. The space in between served Otto as his stage.

The room was dark, lit only by a desk lamp that a pimply youth in an ill-fitting suit held angled at Otto’s painted face. The mime’s body, dressed entirely in black, was visible only as an outline, all apart from the white cotton gloves that emerged from the surrounding darkness with a curious intensity. One of these gloves – the right – was holding a rolled-up newspaper. Just now there was no movement to Otto’s body or his face. He stood stock still, chin out, legs spread, the paper raised like a club above his head, in the aspect of a man who is listening intently for some faint and far-off noise. The audience was quiet, hushed: it, too, was straining its ears. Beer looked around himself but in the near darkness it was impossible to make out anything but shadows; the glow of cigarettes hung scattered in the dark.

And then a strange, soft buzzing rose within the room, as of a fly caught against a windowpane, struggling to get out. The sound was so vivid, and the mime’s reaction so immediate and natural, that Beer did not think to search for its origin in anything but the air in front of Otto’s scrunched-up face. The mime’s head and eyes were following the fly’s trajectory. Disgust, anger, then cunning flashed across his whitened features as he watched it dart in front of him before settling on the rim of a champagne flute that balanced precariously at the top of a pile of dirty crockery. The mime took aim with infinite deliberation. Twice he raised the newspaper as a conductor raises his baton, wrist first, preparing the
fortissimo
, then, dissatisfied by his approach, cut short the down-swing and started the motion all over again. Each of his movements was accompanied by a subtle variation of the fly’s buzzing. It was as though it too were watching him and preparing its evasive manoeuvres. At long last he swung, his face lit up by such a blissful sense of triumph that half the audience burst out laughing, then stopped themselves lest they shoo the fly. The tip of the newspaper caught the champagne glass at the side of its stem and lobbed it with surprising softness high into the air above the audience’s heads, from where it was plucked by a brown-sleeved arm and hand. As for the fly: it escaped, buzzed furiously around its attacker, then settled on the mime’s white and twitching nose. He stared at it, cross-eyed, began to slap at himself with wild abandon, gouging first one eye, then the other, slapping each cheek in repeated motions, then hitting his crotch on a mistimed back-swing, to the merriment of all. The fly sought the only shelter left to it and flew into his gaping mouth, then bounced half-crazed between his puffed-up cheeks, its constant changes of direction closely mirrored by the bulging roll of Otto’s eyes.

It was only now, during this invisible game of tennis, that Beer caught sight of Yuu and thus was able to pinpoint the origin of all the sounds: the buzzing, the whistle of displaced air when Otto swung his baton, the booming slaps when it collided with his cheeks. The fat Japanese sat on the windowsill at one side of the table, half hidden by the curtain that fell around his shoulders like a cape. Balanced on his meaty thighs there lay a variety of objects – a rattle, a cheese grater and spoon, a pan filled with rice – that he would manipulate with his left hand while his right pressed his trumpet to his lips. His eyes, meanwhile, were trained across and on the stage, taking in each little movement and translating it into sound. He matched it so closely that even once alerted to his presence it was hard to believe that it was Yuu and not the stage that was the source of his sly ruckus.