Authors: Dan Vyleta
The Quiet Twin (37 page)
For a good few hours yet, there was to be little such observation, casual or other. At the moment of the man’s fall, the yard had but a single occupant, a burly, forty-seven-year-old Japanese male with a pockmarked exterior whom his neighbours routinely, if not maliciously, identified by a racial epithet pertaining to the Chinese. We know him as Herr Yuu. He had stepped into the yard from the narrow door leading to the apartment building’s side wing (of which he was a resident) with the express purpose of recovering a bow tie that he had removed – and subsequently forgotten – during his performance at a festive gathering hosted by Professor Josef H. Speckstein on the first floor of the building’s front wing. Yuu entered the yard at eleven sharp. It was not yet raining, despite the dense cloud cover that had gathered in the city’s skies in the hours after dusk, and he, surprised to find no other guests of said festivity out in the yard, had lingered a moment to smoke a cigarette. His stomach was full, and he was dyspeptic, the result of consuming too hastily too great a variety of rich and sugary foods. The noise he heard was slight. The branches gave a rustle, some twigs were snapped off, and the metal bar sang out a ringing note that his musician’s ear registered as a B flat. Of the man himself, Yuu saw nothing apart from his prone shadow. Confused by the noise, slight as it was, and the lumpen outline of the man, Yuu looked up and attempted to trace the trajectory and origin of what his ears had witnessed. What he saw was the white breast of a dress shirt leaning out the empty window frame above. It lingered for a breath or two, then withdrew with considerable haste. In the face of this event, Yuu, trumpeter, did not persevere in his intention of retrieving the missing bow tie, but turned on his heel instead, and retreated into the side wing, at the top of which he was renting a garret room decorated with an unusual number of mirrors. There were no other witnesses.
At 11.19 that night, driven out by an urgent call of nature, a young, handsome
Rottenführer SS
emerged into the yard and parted with his water not two feet from the corpse. He was in an advanced state of inebriation. As he struggled with his trousers’ fly, a bout of nausea overcame him. He fell to his knees and vomited up a mixture of tripe soup, roast beef in cream sauce, and apple strudel in custard; then, unable to keep his balance, he fell face down into the leaves and was soon overcome by sleep. Within minutes, two magpies swooped down from the higher branches of the tree and began pecking through his sick. A third magpie found a separate source of food clinging to the metal bar some yards away from them. Several other birds would join their efforts in the course of the night.
At 5.07 a.m., with no sign of dawn yet in the eastern skies, a sudden and intense rainstorm hailed down upon the scene, dispersing what was left of the vomit and washing off a good part of the organic matter that remained sticking to the iron bar. It roused the SS man, who, disorientated, turned on to his back, completed the buttoning of his fly which he had commenced six hours previously, and then staggered off without giving his surroundings a second look. He was pleased to find that the tram service was already up and running and would deliver him home in a matter of minutes.
At 5.39, the building’s janitor entered the yard from the direction of his front-wing, ground-floor flat. Despite the prevailing gloom he saw the prone body almost at once and, walking over to shake it awake with the tip of his boot, realised that the man was dead rather than drunk. For a moment he stood over him and looked up at the windows surrounding him. All the curtains remained drawn. He shrugged, moved away from the corpse and unlocked the metal door leading to his cellar workshop, where he planned on eating some slices of sausage and drinking the day’s first bottle of beer.
By 6.55 three further persons had passed the dead man. Two of these – Hermann Berger and Petr Novak – had not only noticed the body but quickly ascertained that it was dead. Neither raised the alarm. After a quick inspection of the windows above him, Hermann Berger continued on his way to join a friend whom he had promised to assist in the early-morning repair of his privately owned motorcycle, which had got mangled in a collision earlier that week. Afterwards the two friends planned on spending their Sunday in the Prater, away from their wives, drinking beer and partaking in its many amusements. Petr Novak had entered the yard because, having been woken by his wife’s cold-induced snore, he had looked out the window and made out a boot through the latticework of branches of the slowly balding chestnut tree. Curiosity drove him down. When he found the boot belonged to a dead policeman in his dress uniform, he judged it best to return to his apartment and remain by the window until some other person had discovered the corpse.
It wasn’t until half past seven that a neighbour, conscious of the various pairs of eyes that might be looking on, gave vent to her upset at finding a ‘dead copper with a bashed-in head’ out in the yard, and made enough noise to oblige Herr Novak (who owned a telephone) to dial for the police. Two young policemen presently showed up. Amongst the first of their actions, as several neighbours would subsequently confirm in pubs across the city district, was to tug at the dead man’s thick mop of hair. They wished to ascertain whether or not it was a wig. It wasn’t. By nine o’clock Teuben’s body had been slipped on to a stretcher and carried off, and two detectives were making the rounds, questioning first the neighbours, then tracking down the guests who had attended Speckstein’s party. But it was as so often in such cases.
Nobody had seen a thing.
Lieschen woke a little after five. It was the rain that had woken her, a sudden storm that beat against the windowpane at the far end of Beer’s study and raised her startled from a dream. The girl had slept on the floor, on the little nest she had made from two of Beer’s blankets. She had fallen asleep shortly after being locked in by the doctor, her colouring pencil still in her hand; had woken once, an hour or so later, needing to use the chamber pot that Beer had provided, and then been unable to sleep as several shadows had passed the locked door. Frightened, suspicious, she had walked over to the keyhole and looked out. She had seen a pair of legs and polished boots being dragged past the door, closely followed by the doctor. A little later he had returned and begun to crawl on his hands and knees up and down the corridor, a tea towel in his hand, his face close to the ground. A bucket of water had been by his side. He’d pushed it along as he had crawled forward inch by inch, on his way to Eva’s room. Somewhat shaken by this odd behaviour, the girl had retreated to her nest and once again fallen asleep, burying herself deeper and deeper in the blankets, then kicking them off altogether later in the night.
It was cold when she woke, and the patter of raindrops confused her. Around her, half crumpled, lay the pictures she had drawn the previous day, a collection of animals that rustled as she stepped over them with naked feet. There was very little light. The curtains leaked a little of the city’s luminescence. It sufficed for the girl to make her way from blankets to window. Rather than pushing the curtain aside, she crawled under it and emerged on the other side: stared at the raindrops streaking down the pane. The yard was dark beneath her, though there was in this darkness the suggestion of shadows: of the tree whose crown spread out before the window; and of something moving down below. Curious, Lieschen opened the window and leaned out enough to see straight down. Somebody switched on the light in the hallway that connected the courtyard to the building’s front door: his shadow was thrown into the yard. The light was soon switched off again. And yet, in this brief interval of illumination, staring through the swaying branches of the tree, the girl thought to have made out the shape of someone lying in the yard, and held on to the impression of a pair of boots, black and polished, the heel of one gently wedged into the shaft of the other, and the toes pointed out.
In the darkness that resumed it would have been easy to dismiss the vision as a flight of fancy: it was cold and rain kept blowing in; there was a warm and cosy nest of blankets not five steps away. But the girl decided to stay where she was and even leaned further out on occasion, exposing more of herself to the elements. For the next three hours she stayed at the window, leaving only twice: once to fetch some blankets and wrap them around her frame, and a second time to scoop up the hedgehog, which she could hear scrambling around near the table behind her, and lift it up on to the windowsill, where it sat, unmoving, twitching its nose at the rain.
The downpour passed, and very gradually some light began to permeate the yard. With every minute she became more convinced there was a body stretched out in the leaves beneath the tree, though at any given moment she could see only a part of it through the ever-changing constellation of its swaying branches. She watched the janitor come into the yard and walk over to what she thought to be a boot; watched Herr Berger and Herr Novak crouch down next to the prone form. They all looked up but not one of them saw her, standing between the curtain and the windowsill, the twitching hedgehog by her side. By the time the police arrived, a group of neighbours had formed a ring around the man and stood talking, smoking, shuffling their feet.
At this point Lieschen’s attention wandered elsewhere. The hedgehog, having grown confident after hours of dormancy, had begun to explore the dimensions of the wet windowsill and was inching ever closer to its edge. She watched its slow, grasping movements with peculiar fascination: rested her chin on the window frame, and clasped her hands behind her back as though to prevent herself from making any move to save it. The hedgehog reached the edge and teetered; one of its feet had stepped into emptiness and the others were scrambling for balance, a movement that only brought the animal closer to its doom. In the last instant, when the hedgehog had already begun to curl itself into a ball to avert this unknown danger, Lieschen suddenly cried out and snatched it up. She did it so clumsily that her left hand batted the animal rather than grasping it, and it was only by clapping together both hands with great force that she managed to gather it up. A good dozen of the spikes buried themselves in her palms and wrists. The punctures did not bleed but immediately started to itch. Lieschen turned away from the window, pushing aside the curtain as she did so, and dropped the hedgehog on to the floor. There it remained motionless, rolled up into its ball. The girl stared at it, head bowed, and for the first time in many days she felt like crying.
When Lieschen looked up, Beer was standing in the door watching her. He walked over to her, drew aside the curtain that still clung to her narrow, crooked shoulders and looked out.
‘So you already know,’ he murmured, and crouched down beside her. He seemed to want to say more, but kept stumbling over his words. His hands rose, tried to touch her, but Lieschen dodged them, stepped away. One of Beer’s fingers was bandaged. The girl sat down on the blankets and massaged her itching hands.
‘It’s like this. I might have to go away for some weeks. On business, you see. If – if I am not back by tonight, find Zuzka. You will, won’t you? You like her.’
The girl did not respond or even look up, and when he inched closer and tried to touch her hair she once again evaded him. His cheeks, she noticed, were pale and as though shaking, and he had not yet shaved. After some minutes, he stood up and began to walk out. She caught him up in the corridor, pulled at his coat-tails with finger and thumb.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said.
It was a surprise to see how happy this made him: his whole face lit up.
‘Come then,’ he said, ran ahead to the kitchen and cut her some slices of their two-day-old bread.
Beer sat and watched the girl have breakfast. She was quiet, her hands were red and swollen, but she was eating one slice of buttered bread after the other, piling on strawberry preserve with a spoon. Sometimes, when she thought he wouldn’t notice, she looked up and searched his face. It took him some minutes to name the emotion that spread across her features during these furtive looks. Pity. And yet she kept her distance, and flinched every time he moved too fast.
Beer was tired. He had been up much of the night, crawling along his floorboards and cleaning up every speck of blood he could discover. There hadn’t been much. Teuben’s hat and uniform had served as effective bandages. Three times he had ventured out on to the landing to see if there was any obvious trail leading back towards the flat, but had seen nothing at all, just the muddy dirt of a stairwell that had not been cleaned for days. In the end he had fallen asleep in the living room. By the time he woke up, the police were in the house.
It was Sunday, the day of rest. After breakfast, Beer spent an hour drawing the remaining letters of the alphabet on to the cards he had prepared for the purpose. When he was done, he put them away in his desk and went to tend to Eva. Ever since leaving for Speckstein’s party he had barely been able to look at her. Her eyes seemed to bore into him, an unfaltering stare, the sclera yellow and inflamed. Beer had no words to counter this stare. He fed and hydrated Eva as one did a plant. When he turned his back on her, some aural illusion suggested to him that she was doing likewise: he heard the rustle of her cotton sheet. It made him pick up the pace. Later, when he stood in the bathroom, trying to shave, the blade kept catching on a mole upon his cheek. He left the door open so he would hear when the police came knocking.
As the hours of the morning passed and the police still had not come for him, Beer found his thoughts drifting above all to the morgue, that dank and smelly room in which one rifled through the dead, as he had done with Grotter, Teuben watching, sucking on his mints. It seemed inconceivable to him that the pathologist on duty would not notice the twin grooves in the detective’s skull and conclude that they did not match up with the trauma received during his fall into the yard.