The Twins (20 page)

Throughout the journey the officers were silent to the parcel from Holland that had to be delivered to the station.

In a gust of cold air a boy came in, followed by his father who had bought one of the helmets at the market. He put it on his son’s head, grinning, after he had ordered two Cokes. Even from the table where Lotte and Anna were sitting it was evident that the father–son romance was revived by the purchase of the helmet. As long as the glow lasted they were participants in the same
adventure
, a war in which neither of them had been involved. If there had been a feather headdress in the market, then the battle of Winnetou against the whites would have easily had the same effect.

‘American Coke and a German helmet …’ Anna shook her head, ‘I’m getting old.’

Lotte’s thoughts had not disengaged from that unfortunate New Year’s Eve. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ she murmured, ‘all those drunken, shooting officers … I had the feeling I was among fanatic Hitler-supporters.’

‘Are you mad?’ Anna sat up straight; something needed putting right. ‘The von Garlitz family, they were old nobility, they were industrialists! Of course they had helped that buffoon into the saddle; in return he polished off the communists and got them their Greater German Reich. But you don’t really think they thought much of the son of a customs official? They were able to use him well, for a while; only when it was their turn to die on the battlefield did they realize that that parvenu had used them too.’

She burst out laughing.

‘What is there to laugh about?’ said Lotte tetchily.

‘I can still see myself running through that house in cap and apron. What a misery. All the time I was trying frenetically to forget
that the visit was for me – think about it, for the first time in my life I was being visited. You have no idea what difficulty it caused me. Those officers were a lovely alibi. How I worked!’

Lotte was silently building a pyramid of sugar lumps. ‘It has stayed with me like a decadent image,’ she murmured, ‘those
officers
in the night … an enemy you can expect anything from if he is capable of shooting at towels …’

‘They were dancing on top of a volcano,’ Anna interrupted her. ‘Why do you think they drank so much?’

Anna paced about in her bedroom. Her body hurt with every step, as though someone had given her a beating. She struck her fist into her palm. The recurring silence was unbearable. It was a silence with a double foundation, left behind by someone who had now gone away for good. Not because others had arranged it so, but through her own guilt. She was besieged by images she had seen fleetingly in between work duties: her sister’s figure – in the grounds with coat flapping about, alone at the long kitchen table by an empty plate after the meal, seen from behind as she went upstairs despondently. Piece by piece, silent indictments. Rewinding and playing the film again – differently. Too late, too late, too late. Why, that was what she wanted to know. The answer would not be found in the best-equipped library but was hidden in herself. The only thing she knew was that, from the moment Lotte had turned to her on the platform, she had come face to face with her father. His long curved nose, his narrow face and dark wavy hair, his melancholy, stubborn gaze. There was something improper – as though Lotte had robbed him or caused unfair competition. In Lotte she did not encounter the thickly swathed six-year-old sister who had been abducted by a woman in a veil. Now there was
someone
else who could exert rights over her father, someone who was perhaps more entitled than herself because she looked so
staggeringly
like him. So this was Lotte. Why now?

Restless and self-reproaching, she wrestled on that double trail
all through the winter, that pushed drifts of snow against the house and deposited a crow at the top of the steps, frozen to death, so that Hannelore, one of the maids, saw it as a bad omen, on
finding
it in the morning, after which the washerwoman warned her that superstition brought bad luck, and Anna, forgetting
everything
for a while, had to laugh at this rare form of recursive
superstition
. The past revisited Anna for the second time without her having intended it to. Hannelore, eighteen years old, recently extracted from Lower Saxony by the Countess, had been placed under Anna’s care since her arrival. The girl boldly announced that she was going dancing at the casino on Sunday afternoon. ‘You can’t permit her to go,’ said Frau von Garlitz, ‘unless you go too.’

The casino seemed to be flirting with the new socialism. The walls no longer shut her out; the doors with the copper handles stood wide open. She wore a Marian blue dress; red silk
shimmered
though the skirt; her employer’s perfume still wafted out from the material. Anna handed the tickets in with a chaperon’s characteristic lack of enthusiasm. Thus she gained entrance to her own hall. The field of marble, the leapfrog square, the hide-
and-seek
pillars, the high dome where the songs collected … the
marble
staircase where she had fallen over … everything was still there … Somewhere she must, they must still be there … behind the pillars, in the passages … clouds of condensed breath rose up into the dome. Hannelore disappeared in the foyer. There were the sofas – Anna’s trampolines. She heard a deep rushing silence through the hum of voices, through the dance music, through the clapping and tapping of heels on the dance floor inside. Hannelore had saved places, wine was ordered and gone was Hannelore. Anna caught a glimpse of her now and then, waltzing round in the arms of a soldier whose shaved, thick-set neck kept coming back into view. The Westwall seemed to have been emptied; the
cat-and
-mouse war had transferred to the casino foyer on this Sunday afternoon in April.

She drank her wine without tasting it and looked ahead of her fixedly – all of a sudden somebody placed himself between her and her memories. ‘May I have the pleasure …?’ She stood up
dejectedly
and allowed herself to be led to the dance floor. ‘Was machst du mit dem Knie, lieber Hans’ seemed like something from a
former
life. The soldier carried himself impeccably. She stared at the silver V on his sleeve with a vacant gaze. After the dance ended he returned her to her seat. Just as she was going to sit down a new number started up; he nodded briefly and invited her again. The images slowly ebbed away during the second dance, which was more compelling than the previous one; she now perceived this
soldier
clearly. His face seemed remarkably trustworthy to her – it was more the face of a person than a soldier, she reasoned, without interest.

She moved her gaze away and discovered a large framed
photograph
of the Norwegian fjords on the wall. Were conquests already being flaunted? ‘They are suitably topical with their wall
decorations
here,’ she said gruffly. ‘It might also have been the bridges over the Moldau,’ he added. His accent surprised her. ‘You are an Ostmarker …’ ‘Austrian,’ he corrected her with a courteous nod. ‘But they are all soldiers out of operettas with red roses in their rifles instead of bullets.’ His face set. ‘Not much to laugh or sing about in Czechoslovakia.’ ‘Being a soldier is not your vocation, so it sounds.’ ‘I was called up,’ he smiled, ‘I’d a thousand times rather be at home in Vienna … with roses in my rifle.’ He spoke so
melodiously
that it seemed as though everything he said was in jest. Holding her more tightly, he began to describe passionate circles over the dance floor. When the number was over he brought her back ceremoniously – a pattern that kept repeating itself, as soon as the orchestra started on a new number he raced across the parquet floor again and stood before her. At about half-past eleven he excused himself. He had to be back in the barracks by twelve. ‘May I see you again?’ he asked. ‘Excuse me, I haven’t introduced myself: Martin Grosalie.’ ‘You can telephone me,’ she said flatly,
‘number fifty-two thousand.’ ‘Are you serious?’ He looked
uncertainly
at her. ‘Why?’ ‘It is such an improbable number.’ ‘You don’t really think I’m imagining it,’ she said annoyed. Blushing, he leant forward to kiss her hand. ‘Ich küsse Ihre Hand madame,’ said Anna ironically, pulling her hand away from beneath his lips.

The soldier was not deterred. He telephoned two days later. No argument instantly occurred to her to refute the request for a
meeting
. They met in a café on the Alter Markt; it was raining
incessantly
. A feeling of alienation, shame, overcame her as they sat opposite one another without the dance’s option of escaping. But with the bravura of a schoolboy he took upon himself full
responsibility
for the meeting. He described Vienna to her, Schönbrunn, the Nashmarkt, the Prater, the house where Schubert was born, the house where Mozart lived, the house where Haydn died. The survey reviewed all the sights; he recreated his city and strolled through it with her, pointing everything out on the way, lively, enthusiastic – not in order to win her over but to put something else at a distance, something that was increasingly present in the background and was biding its time. Anna too, who thought she had nothing to do with it, felt it was there. Yet it still broke through unexpectedly. ‘And now we’re here,’ he sighed, ‘opposite the French, with all that equipment, and they are opposite us. Why? I hope that joke is over soon, then we can all go home again.’

Other meetings followed. He collected her from the house; everyone called him a nice, polite boy, which needled her. She
harassed
the nice polite boy with teasing, which he openly enjoyed – she poked fun at his accent, his courtesy, at Austria. One evening there was a dancing party at the Stadthalle. When it was drawing to a close Anna dragged him towards the exit. ‘Come, it’s over.’ ‘No, no, they’re playing a couple more numbers,’ he implored her. ‘Shall we have a bet? If I win I can say
du
instead of
Sie.
’
He won. They sauntered silently through the deserted avenues in the
suburb
, the moon curved behind the clouds, there was a sweet smell of
young foliage. I can’t start saying
du
just like that yet, thought Anna. At the bottom step in front of the house he kissed her, abruptly, as though he were settling a score with a voice that had forbidden him to do so all the way there. ‘You’re crying …’ Anna was shocked. ‘Not
Sie
,
du
,’ he corrected her hoarsely. Under these circumstances she did not dare to take her leave: she could not abandon a weeping soldier at the foot of the steps. Although she would have preferred to run inside to think about it behind a locked door, she pulled him into the grounds towards a stone bench that seemed to be pointed out in the moonlight, surrounded on three sides by a shining, clipped yew hedge. They sat down. Fragments of films and books shot though her head, in which the characters turned out all right in the next phase; embraces, official declarations … but a weeping admirer was not included among those. Although she regarded crying as a sign of weakness in
herself
, it occurred to her that on the contrary, for a man it demanded courage. The last time she had cried – an eternity ago – it was in rage, humiliation and pain. In the soldier’s case it had to be
something
else; she did not dare to embark upon it. He pressed her hand and looked serenely ahead towards the sleeping house. Something in her that had been waiting all that time fluttered away. An agreeable languor overcame her. ‘I’m so sleepy all of a sudden,’ she yawned. ‘Lie down,’ he whispered, ‘put your head in my lap.’ Without hesitating she stretched out, dozed off, stupefied by soldier smell.

During her sleep the sickle of the moon moved to another place in the sky. She woke relaxed, in a condition of complete
submission
such as she had not known since her childhood. She observed him unnoticed. Sitting there, motionless, he reminded her of her grandfather’s dying soldier who lifted his face to a
descending
angel. It looked as though he were communicating
wordlessly
in an intimate way with something that was invisible to her. He swallowed. His Adam’s apple rose and fell, which gave him back his earthliness. Ashamed of her clandestine observation she
said his name, He bent over her. ‘I had never thought …’ he laid a finger on her lips, ‘that anything so beautiful could exist as when a girl falls asleep on your lap.’ ‘Didn’t I say so?’ She remained sober: ‘You are a Rosenkavalier.’

In the following days her thoughts went on circling round the soldier like a cloud of summer flies. How could he be
simultaneously
trustworthy and mysterious? – this paradox held her in pleasant confusion. There did not seem to be a way back. They arranged to go to the Drachenfels at Whitsun. A picnic basket was packed. But that eponymous dragon did not wait for their arrival. It had been woken from a sleep that had lasted about two decades, it stretched, yawned, looked in the mirror to see if its eyes were in place and its scales were shining, sharpened its claws on the rock face, opened its mouth wide to check the fire and sulphurous fumes mechanism and descended from the mountain, thrashing about with puffed-out chest and sweeping tail, in a westerly direction.