Authors: Dan Vyleta
The Quiet Twin (41 page)
All the while he was eating the rolls, Otto was weighing his options – weighing them not with the head, it was true, but weighing options nonetheless, his body mulling over the next step. Time and again, he stuck a hand in his pocket: touched the money Beer had given him, and the letter promising a fortune far beyond his ken. The girl clung to him, stifled his movements. When he lit up a cigarette, he almost caught her with the back of the hand that struck the match. She flinched, but she held on. They walked together, took a look at the platforms, the station abustle with passengers, porters, the bark of frightened dogs.
On platform number three there sat a woman on her little suitcase, stooped-over and miserable, a fur-lined hat covering her hair. She was young and well built, careless of posture; the skirt had caught upon the suitcase, revealed two shapely inches of calf. It wasn’t until his eyes had rested on her for some moments that he recognised her as Zuzka. He stood and stared at her, then quickly turned around. An unaccustomed lump had risen to his throat that he knew to fight only with anger. He marched off, quickly, back into the station building, the girl running after him, trying to keep pace. Once inside the building, lost in the bustle of the crowd, he found an empty bench and sat down. The action forced Lieschen to let go. She looked at him in dismay, then clambered up next to him, kneeling on the bench’s painted slats of wood. For the first time they were face to face. Otto wondered whether she had seen Zuzka. Perhaps he should run to the platform and pass the girl over, Beer’s instructions be damned. He was surprised when she spoke to him, her fingers pulling at the dirty slats. She spoke quietly; breadcrumbs were sticking to one corner of her mouth. Otto had to lean forward to hear.
‘The Herr Doktor told me that you took care of Eva,’ Lieschen said. ‘For a great many years, he said. Ever since she was a girl.’
He shrugged, then nodded, blew some snot past his thigh on to the ground.
‘Yes.’
Gravely, not looking at him, the little brow creased, she offered him her hand, perhaps to thank him for the service rendered to his sister. He shook it, held it, stared in wonder at this little hunchbacked girl.
He was still holding Lieschen’s hand when they boarded the six o’clock to Innsbruck. They sat in silence, his buttocks shaking with the engine’s tremor, waiting for the station master’s whistle to send them on their way.
It was Frau Vesalius, not the police, who came for him the next morning. Almost despite himself, Beer had fallen asleep: had seen off the girl, then lain down next to Eva, eyes closed, holding her hand, and fallen asleep. When the bell rang and he ran to the door, there clung to him still a snatch of his dream: his wife in a smoking jacket, beating Teuben in a game of chess. Two painted fingernails, swooping down upon his queen. Beer opened the door, smiling a little, then turned around to check his kitchen clock.
It was a little after nine.
Beer had expected someone earlier; he thought it good of the Professor to give him warning before sending for the police. There was an odd agitation in the housekeeper’s features that he had never observed in them before, but Beer was too preoccupied to pay it much heed. She gave him no time to wash his hands and face. ‘You must come at once, at once,’ she kept repeating, and ran ahead down the broad flight of stairs. When they reached the flat, he was surprised to see that she had left the door wide open. Nor did Vesalius bother to close it after them: she simply ran on, through the entrance to Speckstein’s living room, and turned right into his bedroom without pausing to knock. The curtains were drawn and the room was lit only by the bedside lamp. Speckstein was in bed, half buried under blankets, the legs sprawled out at awkward angles. His eyes were open, frothy spit was dangling from his chin. In his struggle he had knocked over a glass of water on the nightstand; it had soaked through the pages of a leather-bound volume of Klopstock’s verse.
‘He usually rises early. I came in to look five minutes ago. Is he –?’
Beer jumped forward, found a pulse.
‘He’s had a stroke. Call an ambulance.’
Vesalius left the room, and Beer began talking to Speckstein, the reassuring, sober queries of his office. He was answered only by a moan.
The ambulance arrived after ten or twelve minutes. Beer was granted permission to ride along. At the hospital, he sat for an hour in the waiting room, then went outside to breakfast on a coffee and a salted bun. On his return, the chief physician agreed to see him. Gruffly, in the blunt shorthand used among colleagues, he confirmed that Speckstein had suffered a severe stroke. The right side was paralysed, he had lost the power of speech, and there was a possibility of brain damage. For now, he was to remain under observation. When asked whether he would contact the next of kin, Beer replied that he would entrust the task to Speckstein’s housekeeper. The man nodded his agreement, then shook Beer’s hand.
‘Speckstein,’ he said as he was leading the doctor out the door. ‘Not the same Speckstein who raped that little girl some years ago?’
‘He was acquitted,’ Beer replied stiffly.
‘Got away with it, eh? Well, now the chickens have come home to roost.’
He closed the door after Beer.
Outside, in the hospital gardens, the sun was shining. Beer bought a piece of pastry in the bakery across the street, then sat down upon one of the park benches, and stared up into the sky. At one point he started laughing and laughed so violently that he spat pastry crumbs all over his chest. He was thinking of a pair of painted fingernails, slowly converging upon the ivory features of a chiselled queen.
Whispers, Echoes
A sound wave is a longitudinal wave whose speed of diffusion through air at twenty degrees Celsius is approximately three hundred and forty-three metres per second. As it passes through air, molecular friction and related effects begin to absorb the sound until it leaves the range audible to human ears. If initiated within an enclosed space, the wave will be both reflected and absorbed by the enclosing walls, in proportions that depend on the walls’ physical properties. Absorbent materials such as glass wool will convert the sound wave’s energy into heat and have a dampening effect; polished concrete, by contrast, will bounce back the wave with minimal absorption and can, in specially designed spaces, be utilised to direct and focus the sound towards a specific place within the room. Individual objects whose natural frequency of vibration matches the frequency of the sound wave (or one of the wave frequencies belonging to its harmonic series) will absorb the wave’s energy and register a corresponding increase of vibration in a process known as ‘material resonance’; in specific cases this may lead to an amplification of the sound and/or to the destruction of said object. If the enclosed space within which the sound wave is released is connected to other enclosed spaces through a system of open pipes such as those found in ventilation and heating systems, the pipes’ diameter is likely to match the amplitude of specific pitches of sound, and thus allow for their easy entry and transmission. In the case of cylindrical tubes this may result in their undistorted transmission across surprising distances
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Professor Josef Hieronymus Speckstein did not recover his powers of speech. The right half of his body remained paralysed. After two days of near-total immobility, he summoned sufficient strength to reach for a pencil and a piece of paper left on his bedside table for that purpose, but his left hand was so shaky, and so unaccustomed to writing, that nobody could make any sense of his wild squiggles. Perhaps they were nothing but squiggles: it was possible he had lost a substantial part of his mental faculties. Faced with the nurse’s incomprehension, he closed his eyes and whimpered like a dog.
Six days after his initial attack, Speckstein suffered a second, more violent stroke. Resuscitation was attempted but proved futile. The physician on duty did not reprimand the nurse when he overheard her telling her colleague that it was ‘just as well the old pervert is dead’. He signed the death certificate at 4.57 in the morning. He had three more hours on his shift.
The funeral was splendid, if small. The
Gauleiter
and Mayor both sent flowers. Of the guests who had attended his party ten days previously, only Dr Anton Beer was present. The Professor’s brother, Ernst, came by himself and left no sooner had he settled all formalities. He explained to the priest that his daughter was very sick; otherwise he would have come to sit with his brother during his final moments on this earth. They shook hands by the side of the fresh grave. In the air between them hung the winter’s first snow.
Frau Vesalius was also present at the funeral. She is not reported to have cried. Some weeks after the ceremony, she was pleased to receive a letter from Speckstein’s executor informing her that the deceased had left her a sizeable inheritance in his will. She opened the first bank account she had ever had, rented lodgings of her own, and indulged her taste for pastries to the full. Within three months she had put on fifteen pounds. They suited her. Her face filled out and lost some of its habitual sourness of demeanour.
Zuzka arrived home to the news of her uncle’s stroke. No sooner had he greeted his daughter than her father announced he must leave for Vienna the next morning. Zuzka’s lungs had cleared up the hour she had left the city behind, but that very night the numbness in her lower body spread to such a degree that, by the early hours of the morning, she was no longer able to move either of her legs. Her father postponed the journey, then postponed it again when her health deteriorated further. A specialist was called in from Graz, who diagnosed a neurological disorder caused by an untreated infection. He was liberal in his abuse of ‘whatever quack’ had looked after her in Vienna, and gave detailed instructions to the young doctor who had recently opened a general practice in their neighbourhood. As for Zuzka’s erstwhile shortness of breath, the specialist blamed an allergy, perhaps to mildew. When questioned, Zuzka remembered a patch of blackened wallpaper by the side of her bed.
Two months into Zuzka’s treatment, the young doctor who looked after her suggested that her recent bouts of nausea had a cause other than her disease. Zuzka burst into tears when she received this item of news, and the young man sat by her bedside and held her hand in sympathy and consolation. When he went home that evening he carried with him the memory of her smile and the many glimpses of her naked flesh he had caught throughout the period of treatment. These confused him and he spent a sleepless night. In the morning, he spilled the hot cup of coffee his landlady had brought him and suffered an unpleasant burn on his inner thigh.
The next time the young doctor visited Zuzka, she confessed to him some details of the rape she had endured. He believed her. He wanted to believe: the doctor was not a handsome man. It took him all of three days to declare himself. They married in haste. Once her condition had become obvious, some wagging tongues in town claimed that the doctor had screwed her while she was too sick to object. Bride and groom stayed up late on their wedding night, playfully haggling over the unborn’s future name.
Otto and Lieschen made their way to Innsbruck, then on to Bregenz and Dornbirn. From there, the former mime boldly approached the border, but turned tail when he caught sight of the border guards, their holstered guns hanging from their belts. Unconvinced that his papers would pass muster, and unsure what story to tell them concerning the little girl, Otto moved south to Hohenems, where he made cautious enquiries about crossing the border by some other means. After a day of nervous questions, Otto found a farmer who agreed to smuggle them across in the back of his van. The man took his money and shook his hand. They ate well that night, pork sausage and mash, the girl smiling, chewing, one fist buried in the fabric of his coat.
On the night before their journey, they slept in the farmer’s barn. Otto heard the police while they were still out in the yard. It was snowing outside. He sat up, pulled all the money from his pocket, and slipped it down the side of one sock. Next he tore up Beer’s letter and stuffed the fragments in his mouth. He was still chewing paper when the farmer led the inspector up the ladder to the loft. Lieschen woke only when the policeman shook her by the leg. Otto bent to kiss her hair before being led off.
They were separated at once. Otto was questioned, his papers scrutinised. They wired to Innsbruck, then to Vienna, but neither his description nor his fingerprints matched anyone on their wanted list. Faced with the inspector’s questions and threats, he stuck to silence. The only time he spoke was to deny that he had wished to go across the border. The farmer had quite simply misunderstood.
They put him in a cell and charged him with vagrancy. A policeman, posing as a fellow bum, was placed in the cell with him and instructed to pump Otto for information. The man’s hands were dirty, but when he took off his shoes to sleep, Otto noticed that there was not a shred of dirt underneath his toenails. The next day, annoyed by the man’s clumsy attempts to ingratiate himself, Otto broke his nose and shoulder by throwing him into the wall of their cell.