The Twins (35 page)

The whole month she waited in vain for a letter from Martin. She wrote to him at the beginning of October. ‘I am sitting here with a pen in my hand but I have the feeling I am talking into the void.’ She bought a bunch of asters to comfort herself. She was climbing the stairs to her apartment with the flowers in hand when she met the neighbour half-way who usually greeted her noisily with a rolling Viennese ‘r’, but now he shyly quickened his pace. She opened the door. To her surprise her father-in-law was waiting for her in the living-room. ‘No post again,’ she sighed with a glance at the empty table. ‘Yes,’ he said, pointing to the sideboard with his head, ‘there is post.’

A parcel. She leaned over it and read: Nachlass-sache – estate matters. Wildly she tore it open. On top there was an envelope, she ripped the letter out. ‘Dear Frau Grosalie … As Company Commander it is my duty to inform you of the heroic death of your husband …’ Feverishly she read on. ‘… In the Eifel …
grenade
explosion …’ The letter ended with, ‘In the belief that there will be ultimate victory and that this war is justified, I remain … Heil Hitler! SS-Hauptsturmführer, Company Commander …’ The asters fell to the ground. ‘It’s not true,’ she contradicted the contents of the letter in a quiet voice. She began to walk about, round the table, around her father-in-law, faster and more
rebelliously
, calling out ‘not true, not true …’ as though a ritualistic denial of reality could undo the facts. Catatonically she kept
repeating
the same words until her father-in-law managed to force her onto the sofa. Above hung a framed portrait of Martin; she lifted it off the wall. With the photograph in her lap she rocked back and forth. What a tasteless paradox – the unbearable would have to be borne in some way or other. She glided about the apartment,
wanted to put on something dark, saw a repellent stranger in the mirror – the curls of her perm had disappeared instantly. Look at that, her hair was already dying, the rest would from now on.

She hadn’t promised him that she would eat! For days she did not eat, drink, sleep or cry. At night she wandered about among the shattered apartment blocks as though she were looking for something among them. All she wanted was to be there where he was, nothing else. Her restrained father-in-law, who was staying at the apartment with her on his wife’s instructions, tried to see her behaviour as a normal phase in the mourning process. He brought her a long widow’s veil for the requiem mass at the Karlskirche. Where she had advanced down the aisle in a long white veil two years before she now walked vacantly in a black one. ‘The German woman doesn’t shed a tear …’ she heard being whispered in the pews. She allowed the sounds of the requiem to come over her like a deaf mute.

After a week her father-in-law gave up his chaperoning. Because he alone had not been able to end the hunger strike he made her promise to come over to his home that Sunday, in the hope that his wife could persuade her to eat something. Hesitantly she went outside. The world was unmoved by his death; there was no shadow of him even in his own city. She was alone, in a strange city, it was war – those were the facts. In that constellation there was no place for her, just as there was no place for the facts in her life. She sleepwalked into the centre, along the Ring, the glittering Ring, past the theatre, the Hofburg, the opera. She followed her own footsteps towards the Karlskirche in a vague need for
religious
support, but mainly in the desperate hope that He would give her a sign, an affirmation of His ubiquity – a proof of His existence. She could barely push the heavy door open. The Sunday mass had just started. The voice of the pastor reverberated in the dome. The baroque gold trembled with it. At first she was in no state to let the content mean anything to her. Weakened by the fast, she slid down somewhere in a pew. Eventually, within
the walls of the mother church, trusted since her youth, she was threatening to doze off, a result of the persistent lack of sleep. But suddenly she jerked out of her slumber. ‘Every death at the front …’ warned the voice, ‘and every devastated home here is a punishment for our sins …’ A punishment? How did he get that into his head, the idiot! This was the most insincere, the cruellest message she had ever received from the church. In protest she stood up. She managed to walk past the rows to the back. Despite her weakness she had just enough strength to close the heavy door with an ostentatious bang. Still shaking with rage she descended the steps. In a reflex she looked round: on either side there was still an angel, each carrying its own cross and staring ignorantly ahead over the world.

And further she went. The Hitler Youth was marching
enthusiastically
across the Ring with brand-new flags. Anna was shuffling past in her black veil. One of the boys barred her way. ‘Heil Hitler!’ She stared ahead silently. ‘Can’t you salute the flag?’ he snarled. He was at least a head taller than her, she tapped him on his chest. ‘I’ll say one thing to you. My husband has just died for that very same flag.’ She brushed him aside and continued on her way. Exhausting himself with apologies he came after her. Anna did not look up or round; she had reached a state of collapse that made her immune to someone else’s shame.

She did not know how she got to her parents-in-law’s house. As the door opened she slumped onto the threshold. All that time she had been on the point of fainting but her organism had waited decently for a suitable moment. They laid her on the divan. In her muzzy twilight state she could hear arguing in the room next door. ‘You haven’t taken enough care of her …’ sounded her mother-
in-law’s
voice. ‘You promised Martin you would take care of her and now she collapses in our hands.’ Anna threatened to faint again. A pot of strong coffee was made. A cup with real coffee made from coffee beans was moved back and forth under her nose. Anna
herself
did not react. It was primitive life spirits that forced her to
open her mouth and take a swallow, provoked by the irresistible stimulus. Similarly she ate a piece of cake mechanically. In this way the suicidal idea was driven away very prosaically with coffee and cake, in order to make room for being merely unhappy. That she still knew; she had been familiar with it for years.

Then the second part of the promise had to be kept. A black Mercedes with the SS emblem on it drew up in front of the cardboard-patched apartment where she continued her marriage on her own. The SS took good care of its people. The Head of the SS and Chief of Police in the Danube region welfare board came to give the widow his condolences. He was friendly, knew faultlessly how to find the right words of comfort for which she had gone to the Karlskirche in vain, asked if there was anything he could do. ‘I would very much like to work in a military hospital,’ said Anna in a flat tone of voice, ‘I promised him. But in my employment papers it says “Housekeeper” so I’ll never be able to get a nursing
position
.’ ‘Come to the office and we’ll give you an official testimonial,’ he promised, shaking her hand sympathetically.

After the visit by the high-up, which had been observed by all those living around Anna, she was no longer ‘that German’ but ‘the SS aunt’. The more the bombing increased in severity and Hitler lost further ground, the more openly she was stigmatized. That’s how it is, she consoled herself, as long as it’s going well they cry Hosanna, when it goes the other way: crucify him. She reported to the employment office. The necessary document was already waiting for her. ‘Frau Grosalie is an orphan and childless and now that her husband has been killed she would like to be taken on as a sister in the Red Cross. I request you to issue a dispensation and to put nothing in the way of her commencing work with the German Red Cross. Oberscharführer Fleitmann.’

At the Chalet du Parc, where they had walked from the Thermal Institute, a woman made of stone stood ringed by soldiers, trying to fend off a bayonet. There was no inscription, not even a list of
names. Anna and Lotte stopped, each sheltering inside their upturned collars.

‘Where was … Martin buried in fact?’

‘In Gerolstein in a military cemetery. But first in …’

‘But didn’t they bring him home?’

‘Are you crazy? He was ripped to pieces by an artillery grenade in the Eifel. They gathered him up and put him in the ground. Did you think they brought the dead home in 1944? There were far too many of them! In Russia, France, the Ardennes, they lay all over the place, the torsos here, the legs there. Come off it, it’s a wonder they even mentioned where he was.’

Lotte was hurt and silent. Anna adopted a tone towards her as though she were stupid, as though she, Anna, had exclusive rights over the war because her husband had been killed.

‘He had seen it all coming,’ said Anna thoughtfully, ‘that night in Nuremberg. Instead of being frightened of death, because he was the one that was going to die – he was concerned about me. A boy of twenty-six, so mature and well balanced, as though he had achieved the inner development of a whole life at an accelerated pace. He knew it all, that night.’

The younger children, a risk factor, had been well tutored; as well as the four times table they had learned never to speak about it under any circumstances whatsoever. If they brought a school friend home unexpectedly then they called out from the wood: ‘Mum, isn’t it nice, Pete is with me!’ In other words: get them all upstairs. The war had made them suspicious and inventive. Bart had been accosted in the wood by the gardener’s wife from the next-door property. ‘Tell me, who is that woman at your place who sits at the sewing machine?’ He understood immediately that she must have seen Mrs Meyer who did sewing and mending from time to time. ‘I went to borrow sugar from your mother but there was no one there, only that woman in the dining-room.’ ‘Oh,’ he improvised casually, ‘that is one of my aunts, a sister of my mother, who sometimes does some sewing for us.’

Lotte’s mother was back in charge. She baked potato cakes and enormous loaves. The people in hiding took it in turns to grind grain in the coffee mill. Meanwhile she rushed upstairs to settle a dispute that had arisen about whist. Her husband, who played it fanatically, was not a good loser. Mrs Meyer cheated if she was driven to it. The Frinkels were immersed in an English
correspondence
course in preparation for their emigration to America as soon as the war was over. As soon as the war was over! A lofty phrase, a toast, a hopeful expectation, now that the Allies were in France and no one any longer looked up at the English bombers daily flying east in formation – everyone was agreed that the peace, alas, could only be achieved by means of destruction. Meanwhile two more people arrived to come into hiding. A saboteur who worked at the post office and read all the letters for the Security
Service had discovered that Sammy Goldschmidt and his wife’s address in hiding had been betrayed. They had to be taken
somewhere
else at once. Without wasting words, two beds were added and everyone shoved up a bit.

Two large brooms were slowly coming closer, one from the east, one from the south. Brooms with long bristles that were sweeping the Germans up into a heap, like dust. It was awaited impatiently all round. On Monday evening, 4 September, Radio Orange reported: ‘According to Dutch government sources the Allied armies have reached Breda.’ The people in hiding hugged each other, laughing and crying; the master of the house fetched a bottle of gin out of his war supplies. But some days later the report was already being weakened. The Allies had only liberated a
vulnerable
corridor crossing through Brabant. They were marching north through this groove. A number of bridges over the rivers had been taken in a lightning raid, but at the bridge over the Rhine
outside
Arnhem it had failed. The onward march had been brought to a standstill. Lotte’s father had to withdraw a couple of premature flags.

In the pale blue studio Lotte allowed herself to interpret
everything
in terms of millimetres of thickness; Ernst Goudriaan took off his glasses and brought his face close to the wood – he seemed to be involved in a secret conspiracy with the emerging violin. He forgot to put his glasses back on as he embraced her clumsily amid the shavings and a pot of bone glue, which fell on the floor and immediately began to spread a sickly rotting smell. Perhaps it was love, perhaps they used each other as an antidote to the war that put his nervous system and her conscience too much to the test. Unconsciously he was banishing her tarnished origins from her, releasing her from her earliest memories that had to do with a
previous
life.
Tabula
rasa
–
with him, through him, she was becoming undilutedly Dutch.

In broad daylight they were walking in the wood; he was coolly tempting fate with her at his side. They rested on a fallen oak.
Over his shoulder he discovered a beefsteak fungus on one of the heavy branches, a tongue-shaped red-brown piece attached to the bark – he loosened it carefully. That evening Lotte fried it quickly on both sides watching that the blood did not run out. The fungus appeared at table like a
pièce
de
résistance
; everyone was served a portion of this gift from the gods, because everyone was always hungry.

The food shortages were becoming dire. They took it in turns to walk to the soup kitchen in the village, lugging back a chum of watery cabbage and potato stew. In response to the rumour that geese could be bought in Barneveld, Lotte and Koen, who still couldn’t stay at home, went over on their bicycles. Just before Amersfoort they came across a caravan of evacuees from Arnhem including two little girls who were stumbling along with a cat on a rope. Further on they swerved into the verge, ahead of a bus full of Blitzmädel dashing past at full speed. ‘Bats,’ said Koen scornfully, ‘to hell with those bitches.’ They cycled on in the stink left behind by the bus. It began to rain. An aeroplane skimmed so low over the road that the birds flew out of the trees in terror. A second later they were startled by an enormous bang – right in front of their eyes, in the distance, the bus exploded. A column of fire shot up, the smoke evaporated into the rain clouds. Koen, astonished that his wish had been fulfilled so rapidly, stared at the scene
openmouthed
, hesitating whether to think it was great or terrifying. Lotte, on impulse, in a dumb reflex that she was not responsible for, thought of Anna. They had still been there a minute ago, they had whizzed past in bird flight in their spotless grey uniforms – the war was visible in a bizarre manner here, between the meadows in the drizzle. Imagine that Anna had been in that bus, then she would have just lost a sister. Then she was actually, definitely free now. The thought did not arouse a single feeling in her. Anna had already become so blurred into a shadow figure that it was all the same to her whether she went up in smoke right in front of her nose or not. Yet she cycled on with a slight reluctance, until an
evacuee stopped them and told them breathlessly that the station at Amersfoort had been bombed and all the transport trains were ablaze. It was no place to cycle through, for a goose. They heaved their bicycles over the ditch into the meadow and went round the town in a semi-circle, from where the wind carried apocalyptic sounds. They found their goose. With the goose and a bag of wood shavings, in which fresh eggs were packed a safe distance from each other, they returned home via a short cut.

There was a shortage of flour. Sara Frinkel remembered a gentleman farmer in the vicinity of Deventer, before the war a
vigorous
admirer of Max’s antics on the violin. She volunteered to make the journey herself: nothing could happen to her, she had an impeccable identity card in the name of an Aryan seamstress from Arnhem. She dismissed Lotte’s mother’s objections: ‘He won’t give you anything without me.’ On a wet autumn day Sara and Jet set off for Deventer by train armed with two empty sacks and Bart’s old pram. Max Frinkel’s fame had not yet faded: they left the farm with full stomachs and an overflowing pram. On the way back they found shelter for the night in a stately manor house on the IJsselkade in Deventer. The next day another address flashed into Sara’s mind. She was becoming ambitious: the one time she had left her hiding place she wanted to come back laden with
provisions
– there was still room in the bags. They left the pram behind under supervision and walked out of the town. There had been a storm in the night; the road was strewn with broken branches. Autumn rain assaulted their faces. A German police van stopped half-way – the window was wound down. ‘Where are you going?’ Daringly Sara named the village. ‘Get in,’ invited the driver jovially. ‘Two lovely women in this beastly weather, that’s not on.’ They got in the front between the driver and an officer with a tight, tense face. They drove on in silence. Although the driver needed all his attention to keep the van on the road as it was being buffeted by the wind, he smiled roguishly at them in between. The other cast furtive looks to the side and discovered one of the famous
noses of the Rockanje family, the hallmark of authenticity. ‘You are a Jewess,’ he cried, shocked. ‘Stop … stop …!’ The driver braked. Trembling, Jet took her identity card out of an inner
pocket
to show it. He was not at all satisfied with its innocent contents. ‘Nevertheless you are a Jewess,’ he said stubbornly. ‘Come now,’ said Sara in High German, ‘if she is a Jewess then I certainly must be one.’ ‘Let them be,’ said the driver. The rain beating on the roof created an intimate, oppressive atmosphere in the cab. ‘But she is a Jew …’ droned the other, ‘a child can see that.’ He threw the door open in anger because he could not prove anything: ‘Get out, both.’ ‘You’d better get off,’ said the driver, giving them a defeated look. They did not know how to get out of the van fast enough. When it had disappeared behind a mist of raindrops they fell into each other’s arms. The rain streamed down, but they did not feel it, wet as they were with anxious sweat. The
élan
for filling the bags had passed. They now had to conserve their strength for the journey home the next day with a laden pram.

But it did not turn out like that. That night the town was bombed. They fell into a shelter and waited, crammed together in the
semi-humid
darkness. At the moment when the attack seemed to become more intense and the floor and walls were shuddering so violently that they no longer knew what was up or down, left or right, Jet began to scream incredulously, indignantly. ‘The whole shambles is coming down like this all at once …’ She went on ranting and
raving
, slumped, her hands over her ears. The fear gave her voice a volume that exceeded the din of the air raid. Sara tried to calm her in vain. Hours later she was still on the verge of a breakdown – rigid and unapproachable, she crouched on the floor, only prepared to leave the shelter if she could go home on the first train. ‘And what about the pram then …?’ said Sara. Jet looked at her witheringly.

They could only think in terms of food. A pram full of flour, that was so many loaves, which so many people could eat for so many days. This simple logic drove Lotte to Deventer, where Sara had left the pram behind with a bleeding heart. She went on a
man’s bicycle without tyres but with panniers, oversized lace-up shoes from Ernst Goudriaan on her feet over a pair of worn-out socks held together by Mrs Meyer’s home efforts. In Deventer she loaded the contents of the pram into the panniers. The big barrier was the bridge over the IJssel. First she went without the bicycle to take the pulse. There was a wooden building at the entrance where WA men were inspecting the traffic; half-way along was a shelter where a German sentry went through things once more. He noticed her and winked. ‘You want to bring food across the bridge?’ he said softly. ‘If possible,’ she whispered. She would not be the first he had helped, he told her. He had thought up a system to lead people unseen past the Hollanders who stole everything edible. The bridge consisted of two parts, one for motorized
vehicles
and one for pedestrians. Between the two was a high wall, interrupted half-way along by his sentry box. If she navigated through the ruins of the Sperr district with the laden bicycle and, as she walked via the pedestrian part, ducked towards the back of his sentry box, he would take the sacks of flour from her. Then she would have to walk back with the empty panniers and go past the Hollanders on the official road. Finally he would load the bags up again. She took his advice. They ordered her to go inside the Dutch post with the bicycle and all – a promised land of confiscated
potatoes
, bread, butter, cheese, bacon. The sentry peeked into her empty panniers, saw from her passport that she was far from home and said cheerfully: ‘We’ll give you some bread to take with you.’ He took a loaf from an enormous pile and shoved it in her pannier. She could continue. Wheeling the bicycle she approached the German sentry. A squadron of Spitfires swerved over the bridge like a storm out of nowhere. ‘To the wall, quick …!’ she heard shouted in German. She threw down her bicycle and pressed
herself
against the dividing wall. The bridge came under heavy fire, it groaned right through the infernal racket. From the corner of her eye she saw that one of her sacks had been hit; the grain was
beginning
to flow out like a column of ants. Her breath caught: as the
shells flew all about the German crawled towards it to stop up the hole with a rag, as carefully as though he were dressing a wounded soldier. The Spitfires circled over the bridge once more then
disappeared
leaving a gloomy silence behind. Beneath the bridge the IJssel flowed on impassively. Crumpled, Lotte struggled to her feet. She was still alive and everything was going on as usual. The German heaved the grain over into the panniers. His generosity so confused her that she thanked him in his own language. ‘You remind me of my wife,’ he said, melancholy. ‘We have two little children. I am looking forward to the end of the war with longing and fear. Hamburg has been bombed heavily. I don’t know if they are still alive …’

The grain, the grain … only the grain mattered. She set off on her journey. On the road from Apeldoorn to Amersfoort the broad-leafed trees flamed orange and yellow between the
permanent
green of the pines. The sun was low and cast a sharp,
uncompromising
light on the colourless pedestrians wrapped up in old coats who were trudging along the road with anything that could be ridden, exhausted, hungry and continuously on their guard, fearing that at the very last moment they could still be deprived of the meagre supplies they had obtained in exchange for a ring or a brooch that had been their great grandmother’s. Lotte walked among them and lugged her spoils of war with her. Two men were stumbling just in front of her; the contrast between them and the autumn colours on either side of the road was striking – they looked as though they had come out of damp dungeons and had not seen daylight in years. Their coats seemed mouldy, their hands and feet were wrapped in filthy bandages. The moment she caught up with them a deafening tumult broke out. The shadows of
bombers
slid over them, explosions sounded behind the copse. German soldiers appeared out of the crêpe-paper shrubs. The two men looked around bewildered. ‘Come, help me push,’ yelled Lotte to give them an alibi in case there was a sudden checkpoint. ‘Push!’ They seized the handlebars, the luggage rack. Something exploded
nearby; the three of them fled into the ditch, dived into a manhole. Gradually they realized that the railway line, parallel to the road, and soldiers’ transports were the target. Hidden in the earth, a grey film over their thin faces, in the pandemonium around them, in fits and starts the men told the story of their flight from Germany. As prisoners of war sent to work in a steel factory, at morning roll-call they had to jump up high like circus artistes because the guards, for amusement, whipped them under their feet. Feet that were hurt became ulcerated; the ulcers did not heal because of the chronic malnutrition. When the factory was bombed they fled in the chaos through the woods at night to the west – sleeping during the day. Their families lived in The Hague; they doubted whether they would get to them, the soles of their feet were festering away, their strength was exhausted by persistent delirium from hunger.