The Twins (11 page)

‘Ça vous a plu?’ asked the waitress, bending towards them with a smile.

‘Non, non, je ne veux plus,’ Lotte said hurriedly.

Anna began to laugh. ‘She was asking if you liked it.’

Yes, of course Lotte liked it. She blushed. What in heaven’s name had she eaten? She had been chewing and swallowing
automatically
, absorbed by Anna’s account. The enemy image that she had been fostering for years was coming increasingly under review. Everything was upside down – the alcohol had not yet worn off, the plentiful meal was taking a toll, inviolable certainties were crumbling. Two pairs of eyes looked at her expectantly – what
dessert
would she like? A list of sweets was rattled off, she could not understand another word of French. Coffee, she just wanted coffee.

‘So you see,’ Anna was indefatigably picking up the thread again, ‘how Hitler caused a furore among us in the village. I’ll tell you something else. A couple of years ago on a trip, by chance I went back to the Wewelsburg, you know, where we used to go for
picnics with farm carts. In the war Himmler selected that castle to establish a cultural centre for the Third Reich. He had a tower built of gigantic dimensions, of diabolical beauty, a symbol of power. They could do that, the Nazis. More than four hundred people died in the construction of that monument. The cemetery where they are buried was obliterated later on. The irony is that people flock there now from all over the world – everyone is
overawed
by its beauty. Himmler’s scheme still works, that’s the
gruesome
thing. They should paint that tower bright red; they should paint the Jews’ martyrdom on it.’

Lotte looked around startled. Anna was becoming louder as she got more excited. The last sentences resounded provocatively through the sedate, salmon pink space. She gave Anna hand signals to turn the volume down a little.

Anna took the hint. ‘Oh well,’ she continued more softly, ‘since the political relationships have changed they have set up a little war museum there. I looked around it a bit. There were all sorts of things on display. Right away I discovered two ballot papers from our village, neatly framed. One from 30 January when Hitler came to power and one from March in the same year on the occasion of a constitutional amendment that empowered him to make regulations, thus bypassing the parliament. My heart stood still. Uncle Heinrich seems to have been badly mistaken – at that time he thought there were only a few idiots in the village with National Socialist sympathies. From those papers it was evident that on 30 January one-quarter of our fellow villagers had already voted for Hitler; two months later it was already two-thirds. The farmers, the baker, the greengrocer, Uncle Heinrich’s card-playing chums – suddenly they appeared in a different light. I was shocked, after all those years. It was lurking there all that time but he didn’t know it.’

She rested her hand on Lotte’s and looked at her with concern. ‘Sometimes I worry that it is repeating itself. That ridiculous “One Nation” clamour for reunification, the rising nationalism. I never
thought people would still be susceptible to that idiocy, in
a Europe where you can fly from Cologne to Paris in an hour, to Rome in two hours. It bothers me. I don’t want to be a Cassandra, but …’

‘It’s different for us,’ Lotte interrupted her.

‘The Dutch, yes … damned spice traders!’ Anna retorted. ‘You have a different attitude towards foreigners because you were involved in world trade from early on. But the Germans – have you ever really thought about what kind of people we are? The ordinary man was never anything, never possessed anything. He never had any possibility of a decent existence. And if by chance he ever did have something, then there would be a war and everything of his would be lost again. And so it goes on, for ages.’

‘But where did the Prussians get their pride from then?’ Lotte forced herself to stay alert through the tiredness.

‘If you’ve got nothing and are nobody you need something else to be proud of. That’s what Hitler cleverly took advantage of. The little man acquired a function, got a rank, a title: block warden, group leader, provincial commander. In that way they could
command
, they could act out their assertiveness.’

The coffee arrived. Lotte was relieved. She raised the cup eagerly to her lips. Anna observed her wrily. ‘The Dutch and their cup of coffee. Their lives and happiness have depended on it ever since they shipped the first coffee beans from the colonies.’

Lotte counter-attacked. ‘Did you never have the slightest
sympathy
for Hitler again?’

‘Sympathy? Meine Liebe! I found him loathsome. That general’s voice: “Vórrr Vierrrzehn Jáhrrren! Die Schande von Verrrsáilles!” I felt nothing for him. I was an obedient child of the Catholic Church and believed what the pastor said to me because he was good to me. Very simple. Yet many obedient Catholics eventually allowed themselves to be tempted. Goebbels, who
himself
was brought up by the Jesuits, craftily introduced the
traditional
Catholic values that lay deeply embedded in people into
Nazi propaganda. The purity, the chastity of the German people, was glorified. The German man didn’t meddle with sex, except when he had chosen a wife: a proper German woman, of course, who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t make herself up and had no illegitimate children. They married and had twelve children whom they donated to the Führer. Those ideals were hammered into them.’

Lotte sighed, staring at her empty cup.

‘Why do you sigh?’ Anna asked.

‘It’s all too much for me right now, Anna.’

Anna opened her mouth and closed it again. She realized that she preferred doing the talking, that she wanted to explain
everything
, everything, endlessly setting out the justifications. About the fate of the populations in the areas they had occupied, of which the Germans meanwhile had been fully informed. But they were obliged to keep quiet about what they themselves had experienced during twelve years of tyranny: for what reasons did the aggressor have to complain – had he not brought it on himself?

She controlled herself. ‘If I blather on too much you must tell me to call a halt, Lotte. Father did that too, long ago, do you remember? He stuck his fingers in his ears and cried: “Quiet, Anna. Please be quiet!”’

Lotte did not remember it at all. Every time she tried to bring her original father to mind, the screen of her Dutch father slid over his image precisely because of the outward likeness – dominant, indelible. The coffee was beginning to work, she was reviving again. But Anna would have to restrain her facility for once. Enough politics, now it was her turn.

They were sitting on the raked gravel, the scent of a dark red climbing rose became more profound in the summer evening heat. Lotte was staring at the edge of the wood that was becoming
progressively
blacker. Her mother was swaying gently in time with Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G, which lost none of its strength as it emerged through the open window. Opposite them sat two music lovers who came to admire the sound reproduction. Sammy Goldschmidt, flautist in the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra,
listened
with his eyes closed; Ernst Goudriaan, a student
violin-maker
from Utrecht, rested his chin on the tips of his fingers. The host himself was operating the equipment, out of sight behind the scenes. After the concert was over he came outside to refill his glass and to decline their praises with charming modesty. At that instant a nightingale began to sing in the wood, which had now turned into an impenetrable immensity.

‘He means to compete with Bruch,’ suggested Ernst Goudriaan. They listened with amazement to the mysterious solo song – a clear nocturnal jubilation, not intended for an imagined audience but purely for its own enjoyment. Lotte’s father sat on the edge of his chair, struck by the record playing on a perfect machine in the depths of the wood. He knocked back two glasses of mature gin one after the other and shook his head: exceptional, what a sound! The following evening he stole into the wood like a thief, lugging his recording equipment, to find a strategic position, but the nightingale cancelled the performance. Much patience was
dedicated
to this. Evening after evening he hunted for its voice with stubborn perseverance until one night the miracle was repeated right over his head and he could secure it on a lacquer disc for
ever. He went to the radio station with this hunting trophy. ‘We have a surprise for the listener’: the broadcast was interrupted in order to transmit the nightingale, almost live, into the ether.

Why doesn’t he record my voice? thought Lotte. The more meticulously her mother followed her performances – she never failed to turn up whenever the choir was appearing somewhere, instantly recognizable among a thousand strange heads by the squirrel-coloured glow in her chignon – the more absent-minded he became when she sang on the radio. To everyone’s great
irritation
he would begin to twiddle the knobs distractedly, as though there was something interfering with the sound reproduction. Could he not bear it that he was not the only one in the family who brought music into the house? Or was it because she had not
inherited
that musicality from him? Her own father was sometimes vaguely visible in the form of an imprecise longing, as though she was looking at him through a clouded pane. She wanted to clean the condensation off the glass in order to see him as he had been, to smash the cocoon of silence, to hear his voice as it had sounded. All those years he had slumbered in her – now his utter absence was infiltrating her, a negative, a total nothing. It was different with Anna. Lotte remembered her chiefly in a busy succession of
movements
, swift feet on a stone floor, jumping up and down, a
powerful
voice, a plump body that joined up precisely with her own in the middle of an enormous mattress. Anna. An illegal thought, a secret feeling. Not only did a border separate her from Anna, not only the distance, but above all the time period that had lengthened meanwhile, and opaque family relationships.

But Anna was alive. Even if it was via Bram Frinkel, eight years old, who had come to the Netherlands from Berlin half-way through the school year. Koen brought him home after school – football did not trouble itself with language barriers. Lotte got chatting to him in his own language; the words presented
themselves
as though they had never been out of use. For him she was an enclave of his home country – and he for her. Airily he told her
why his parents had left it: there was no room for Jews in Germany any more. His father, a violinist, could pursue his
profession
in the Netherlands. Lotte taught him to say Dutch tongue twisters, he grimaced at the impossible ‘g’ sound and the
meticulous
‘ij’. Koen reacted to his sister’s fluent German with surprise and distaste. He played alone with the ball a few metres away, offended, during her private chats with Bram.

Something happened that no one had thought possible. Lotte’s mother, the radiant, the indestructible, caught an ailment that could not be dismissed with a reassuring diagnosis as flu or a cold. The first symptom was that she drove her husband out of the
bedroom
. From then on he slept on an improvised bed in his
workshop
, in a smell of solder and blown fuses, and during the day he moved about the house in a grim state – his worst moods of the past paled in comparison with this. From her bed by the
three-bayed
window with the view onto the rhododendrons, the meadow, the ditch and the edge of the wood, straight through the floor the children heard a torrent of enraged accusations directed at their father. The family doctor climbed the stairs with bowed head. It looked as though even he was threatening to succumb beneath the forces that were let loose on him on the first floor. Leaning on the dining-table defeated, her daughters speculated on the nature of the strange illness, not suspecting that they would get to the
bottom
of what was possessing their mother only after all the taboos had been gradually lifted years later.

The disease had begun with mistrust of her husband, who came home ever later from his trips to Amsterdam. One evening she had followed him with a friend – heavily made-up, dressed in fashionable coats with turned-up collars and Pola Negri hats. They spoke to him in disguised voices in Amsterdam slang. He did not recognize them beneath the street lamp in the shade of their hats. When, like a regular, he indicated his readiness to go along with their advances, they had linked their arms tightly and run off in shock and left him there puzzled. The next phase of the disease
was brought home with him from the capital city and passed on to her. This was the most tangible symptom, which the doctor could combat with injections. Afterwards she lapsed into a state of great moroseness, which was followed by eruptions of rage – seen in
retrospect
it was the phase that preceded the cure, a cure that she
herself
would adopt in an unorthodox way.

Of all these things her daughters had not the slightest notion as they deliberated at the dining-table like foolish geese. They had been equipped with a minimum of sexual information, which could be summed up in their mother’s breezy motto: nature must be left to its own devices. But that nature, which drove her back into the arms of the great troublemaker again after each row, aroused their fundamental suspicion. The idea of being stuck with such a man as their father for their whole lives was such a hundred per cent safe contraceptive that none of them ‘had ever been kissed’. Not even Mies, with her close-fitting suits and her wide, greedy mouth. It was simultaneously tangled up with the fact that their mother seemed unconsciously to rebel against this fate imposed by nature, by allowing her daughters to read social
conscience
literature. About desperate servant girls who got pregnant by the master of the house, about mothers of twelve children in damp basements who had to defend themselves evening after
evening
from the roving hands of their drunken spouses, about black female slaves abused by those who had bought them for a few pieces of silver. Women out of Emile Zola, Dostoevsky, Harriet Beecher Stowe. If that was the ‘full life’ where nature was left to its own devices, for the time being her daughters wanted nothing to do with it, as they sat there round the table. So they bowed their heads timidly during the outbursts of rage that came from upstairs like a thunderstorm, which they too were powerless against.

Suddenly it went quiet up above. Without further explanation their mother got up, dressed herself carefully and left the house in silence with an absent-minded expression on her face. She was stared after by her bewildered daughters, who watched her
disappear in the drizzle on her Gazelle in her familiar upright
posture
. That afternoon a painting one and a half metres wide was delivered, an impressionist representation of the marshlands their mother had a soft spot for: heavy, threatening clouds in a silver sky, reflected in a ripple-free lake edged by reeds and weeping willows. Shortly afterwards, she who had bought it from a very promising painter, and would have to bleed financially for it at home, returned – completely cured, her cheeks flushed with revenge. It was given a prominent place in the living-room, above her husband’s sound system, and in silent competition with it. In safer times he certainly would have started a war on account of her extravagant purchase. Now, with badly faked enthusiasm, he seized the chance to make the unexpected cure permanent. Less than a year later an afterthought was born – Bart – the outcome of the restored peace.

From the inscrutability of all those emotions Lotte sought
compensation
in music. There was structure in it: the way the notes were arranged, carried by the beat, each fulfilling its function in the great totality, arousing the spirit by the artful ensemble. After the matriculation examinations were over she applied herself with redoubled industry to studying singing and to harmony theory
lessons
. An annoying factor was that her piano was in the same room as the gramophone. A symbolic arrangement: while she was
practising
, her father would come in and quite innocently put a record on or take a book out of the bookcase, gesturing to her to be quiet because he wanted to concentrate. She sat paralysed at the piano, cold sweat running down her back. She could no longer breathe when she was in the same room as him – he used up all the oxygen. She closed her eyes and submitted to his show of strength. Onto her eyelids she projected an Arcadian world in which the whole family, to the accompaniment of a nightingale’s song, was walking in sober black behind his coffin.

On the day that her youngest sister was four, it looked as though her dream picture was actually going to come true. On his way
home from work in the afternoon, her father would collect an order at the confectioner’s shop. As his Harley was being repaired, he had asked for a lift home from a colleague who was just as
enthusiastic
a motor cyclist as he was. He left the shop with a cake box in his right hand and a bag of butter biscuits in his left. He got on carefully behind his colleague. In the interests of the cake they approached the junction they had to cross at a snail’s pace. From the left at top speed, bent low over the handlebars, came a man on a motor bike, who only realized that he had to give way by the time Lotte’s father was lying motionless on the ground in a strangely contorted position, his head on the edge of the kerb between a bag of crumbled biscuits and a crushed cake box, a trickle of blood coming out of the corner of his mouth.

He came round in the ambulance. ‘Where are you taking me?’ he enquired suspiciously. ‘To the hospital.’ ‘No, no,’ he protested, sitting up, ‘I want you to take me home. There is no better nurse than my own wife.’ His wishes were respected. He was carried inside on a stretcher. ‘Mind your head,’ he warned at a bend in the stairs, ‘it’s very low here.’ His wife opened the bedroom door with a trembling hand. While the family doctor was ringing the doorbell downstairs they put him carefully to bed. He thanked them politely as they left, but when the doctor was examining him and asked under what circumstances the accident had happened, he mumbled in surprise: ‘An accident? Was there an accident’ ‘You have had an accident,’ said the doctor solemnly, ‘they brought you home just now.’ ‘Who? Me?’ He frowned wearily. ‘Where is my wife?’ ‘She is standing here next to me.’

While the children waited tensely downstairs beneath coloured festoons, and the cake stand remained ostentatiously empty in the centre of the table, the doctor hesitantly diagnosed serious
concussion
and broken ribs. To be certain, he called in a specialist whose cool suggestion of a serious fracture at the base of the skull brought a threat into the house that was to extinguish all signs of life for six months. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘we cannot do anything but wait.’ Marie
and Jet took the festoons down in the unspoken conviction that every minute they remained hanging up would work to their father’s detriment. Eefje picked listlessly at her new doll in a corner of the denuded room.

Their father had to lie flat. Grey, motionless, with eyes closed, he lay in the darkened room that smelled of disinfectants and
eau-de
-Cologne – as though he were already lying in state. For sure he was not dead, but nor was this life. Day and night his wife
moistened
his forehead, temples and wrists with a wet facecloth and manoeuvred teaspoonfuls of lukewarm water between his cracked lips. His breath rasped past his broken ribs; now and then he moaned from the murky no man’s land where he was floating on the silver wings of morphine. The youngest children were taken to a sister of their mother: absolute quiet was a condition of his recovery. Everything in the house was performed with velvet
fingers
– they tiptoed, they whispered, they shrank from the sound of their own breath. With this radical absence of sound and the emphatic silencing of Beethoven and Bach, of sopranos and
baritones
, altos and basses, it seemed as though they were all
unintentionally
bringing death into the house, creating an atmosphere in which it could prosper. They could hear it rustling behind closed doors.

When it was Lotte’s turn to take over the watch and she was looking at the stubble adorning the sunken cheeks like mould, she had the sneaking anxiety that the strength of her powers of
imagination
had landed him in this condition. She regretted the vengeful fantasies he had provoked in her. Had there really been covert angry intent in his behaviour or had it been his usual, familiar
egoism
? She fervently hoped he would survive, otherwise from then on she would have to practise strict censorship over her thoughts. More than that, the picture of her own father as he had awaited death, surrounded by members of the family, radiated through her sense of guilt. All those years she had successfully stashed it away, but it came up again as a result of the striking likeness, together
with the alienating, anxiety-producing feeling that it had caused. In this way the watch was a continually recurring form of
self-torment
because it evoked this gamut of feelings every time.