The Twins (4 page)

At night she slept inside the house in a separate room. Then the nighttime landscape unfolded: never-beheld hills and rocks, fir trees and alpine meadows, mountain streams. Her grandfather was hovering above them on the tails of his mourning coat; Anna was hanging from his claws, screaming silently. Lotte dashed over hills, up high, down low, to escape from the shadow he was casting over her. The ground was rolling away beneath her, she was stumbling over cobbles – she woke up screaming and coughing. She was lifted up and put into another bed, where she slept in the crook of her Dutch mother’s arm without further upset.

‘Then why did they rush off with us, like thieves in the night,’ Lotte asked herself, ‘straight after the funeral?’

Anna laughed wrily. ‘Because it was a disaster. With the useful bonus of an extra labourer on the farm. It was a village of
conservative
, Catholic farmers – that’s what it was like then. Father fled from that milieu when he was nineteen. He went to Cologne and became a socialist. That short-sighted old man had never been able to stomach it, verstehst du. And then, as soon as the son who had defected was dead, he came to rescue us from that hotbed of heathendom and socialism. A hit-and-run operation, to prevent Aunt Käthe keeping us.’

Lotte had a light-headed feeling. It was unbelievable that this grotesque family history concerned her too. All of a sudden, just like that, the wax was being broken on a bitter mystery that she had sealed down an infinitely long time ago: shhh, don’t think about it any more, it never happened.

‘But …’ she objected weakly, ‘why did he … me … let me go to Holland then?’ It seemed as though she was hearing only the echo of her own voice, or someone else was speaking on her behalf.

Leaning forward Anna laid a plump hand on Lotte’s. ‘It didn’t suit him that you were ill. A healthy child was a good investment, but a sick child … Doctors, medicines, a sanatorium, a funeral: that could only cost money. It suited him that his sister Elisabeth offered to take you – although he entirely disapproved of her and was deeply suspicious of her fashionable mourning outfit. Her son, she said, lived not far from Amsterdam in a dry, wooded region, which was therapeutic for TB sufferers; there was even a
sanatorium
in the district. Na ja, you know all that much better than I do. This aunt herself had escaped from life on the farm in the previous century – imagine it, about a hundred years ago – to go to Holland as a maid servant and to marry there. I heard all that from Aunt Liesl, years after the war. Grandfather never showed the slightest
interest in you any more, not even after you were cured. A cat that was sickly in its youth never grew into a healthy strong animal, was his attitude.’

‘I wonder,’ Lotte forced a smile, ‘if he would have let me go if he had known that I had been entrusted to a Stalinist who brought me up on torrents of abuse against the Pope and the Church.’

‘Mein Gott, really?’ Bewildered, Anna shook her head. ‘What an irony … because I would not have survived for long without that same Church.’

Bread and hobnails, sausage and safety-pins, nothing was
unthinkable
in the richly stocked shop and adjoining café where Anna read out her shopping list in a clear voice. ‘Do you want to earn ten pfennigs, child?’ lisped the woman behind the counter; the missing front tooth did not restrain her from smiling with a grocer’s cunning. Anna nodded. ‘Then come and read to my mother twice a week.’ The mother, blind from cataracts, sat in a back room by the window, crumpled up in a worn-out tub chair. On the table in front of her were the mystical reflections of Catharina van Emmerik. Each session of reading aloud had to close with the old woman’s favourite passage: the one concerning the flagellation of Jesus before the crucifixion. The saint of Emmerik sketched the various stages of the flagellation without reticence: first he was whipped for a while with an ordinary whip, then a new,
well-equipped
soldier took the former’s place, with a split whip, and as his strength diminished he in turn was replaced by a soldier with a flagellum, the barbs of which penetrated deeply into the skin. At each blow the woman hit the arm of the chair with her bony fingers, her mouth uttered moans that were somewhere between shrieks of pain and encouragement. Anna also reached a climax every time: the fusing together of her compassion for Jesus and her rage at the Roman soldiers and the actual instigators, the Jews. After she had closed the book with trembling fingers, the feeling of indignation slowly ebbed away. ‘Come over here …’ the old
woman beckoned. Reluctantly Anna approached her chair. The old fingers that had drummed rhythmically on the armrest just before, groped at her plump limbs. Coolly Anna noted the signs of decay – liver spots on the white face, bags under the pale staring eyes, thin hair where the scalp shone through. ‘Ach, stroke me on my head …’ said the woman softly, squeezing Anna’s hand. Anna did not obey. ‘Bitte, bitte, stroke my head …’ Was this part of the reading aloud, like an encore? Eventually she did what she had been asked, quickly and mechanically. ‘Our Anna prays for money,’ Uncle Heinrich chuckled to everyone who would hear him, ‘till she foams at the mouth.’

Anna did not ignore the flagellation of Jesus, who had gradually been taking the place of her father. Each Sunday she sat between her grandfather and her aunt in the Catholic church that dated back to the mass conversions of the Germanic peoples. Looking round, her eyes had soon discovered a bas-relief depicting the event on one of the whitewashed walls. One day Alois Jacobsmeyer, the pastor, who was reciting his breviary in a side chapel, saw her
walking
down the aisle with a wooden stool in her hand. Intently, she turned to the right, towards a series of age-old bas-reliefs depicting the crucifixion of Christ. She climbed onto the stool and began to give Jesus’s tormentors a tremendous beating with her fists. ‘So!’ resounded vengefully through the church. ‘So!’ Worried,
scratching
his head, Jacobsmeyer asked himself whether the relief would be able to withstand such iconoclasm.

The get-together was threatening to take on a slightly more caustic character. Lotte had been uncomfortably nettled by the scene in the church as Anna, not without tenderness, described it. Suddenly a razor-sharp, hideous feeling flamed up in her that had lain
smouldering
all that time.

‘And in that way the Church gave all of you a nice little alibi for murdering six million people,’ she said. Red blotches were appearing on her cheeks.

‘Exactly,’ said Anna, ‘that’s it exactly! That’s why I am telling you, so that you’ll understand that its foundations were already matured when we were young.’

‘I do not believe,’ Lotte slowly rose from her chair, ‘I need to understand. First, all of you people set fire to the world and on top of that you want us to go deeply into your motives.’

‘You people? You are talking about your own people.’

‘I have nothing to do with that people,’ Lotte cried, full of abhorrence. Urging herself to be calm, she permitted herself to continue condescendingly, ‘I am Dutch, in heart and soul.’

Did any compassion seep into the glance Anna cast her? ‘Meine Liebe,’ she said soothingly, ‘for six years we sat on the same father’s lap, you on one knee, me on the other. You can’t actually rub that out just like that. Just look at us now, old and naked beneath our bathrobes, in our plastic slippers. Old and a bit wiser, I hope. Let’s not accuse one another, but celebrate our reunion. I suggest we get dressed and go to a pâtisserie in the street named after Queen Astrid. They have …’ she kissed her fingertips, ‘delicious cakes there.’

Lotte’s rage ebbed away. She nodded, ashamed that she had let
go like that. Together they walked along the imposing passage to the lockers. Together – what a word.

A quarter of an hour later they descended the steps of the
monumental
bathhouse, involuntarily holding on to each other because it was snowing and the steps were slippery.

It was not far. They went inside a nondescript shop, walked through to the back, past a display cabinet of delicacies gratifying to the eyes, to a refurbished living-room where elderly ladies in fur hats were succumbing in complete silence to the matriarchal rite of coffee and cakes. A wagon wheel lamp fitting hung from the ceiling and cast flattering light onto the clientèle; on the walls paintings of imaginary landscapes in gaudy colours confirmed the atmosphere of reassuring kitsch.

They ordered ‘merveilleux’, an artful variant on a mouthful of air, held together with meringue, whipped cream and flaked almonds.

‘Now I understand whom I heard singing yesterday.’ The piece of meringue that Lotte was bringing to her mouth came to a
pensive
standstill midway.

‘Who?’

‘Yesterday, in one of the peat baths, someone was singing the Cologne slow-tram song.’

Anna laughed. ‘I am guilty of bathroom coloratura if I think no one can hear. But … originally you were the one who liked singing.’

Lotte frowned. Round about them was the sound of civilized chatter; the shop bell went now and then and a snowy customer came inside. ‘I only went on to sing properly,’ she corrected her sister, ‘after I had fallen through the ice.’

Lotte was standing on the frosty grass at the side of the ditch. Her sisters were gliding by, swaying on Friesian wooden skates, making a long chain with the gardener’s daughters from a
neighbouring
property and an attached Brabant cousin who was staying
there. The cousin’s mother also appeared on the ice, a sturdy woman in a brown felt hat with a weather vane of duck feathers that indicated the wind’s direction. She distributed sea-green and red striped peppermints to the children from a large cone. ‘Just going to visit your Mum for a minute,’ she said, holding on to Lotte’s hand, ‘want to come with me, lass?’ She took a run-up and slithered screaming exuberantly over the ditch, dragging Lotte along with her in her pleasures on the ice. Thus they pelted and slid towards the house, the woman chatting non-stop in an
incomprehensible
dialect. They reached a dark green, half-submerged rowing boat that marked the start of the danger zone where the tower drained overflow water into the ditch; the children had been warned about this. ‘No further, no further!’ called Lotte, but the Brabant woman was chattering on as mechanically as the little wind-up locomotive at home that permitted no one to divert it from its idiosyncratic route between the table legs.

As the ice began to crack Lotte instinctively pulled herself free. She was not frightened. The firmness beneath her feet disappeared and the crystal floor opened to admit her into the territory of a sweet, premature death, ornamented with ferns and algae that moved together in a stream of air bubbles. The ice conscientiously closed over her head. As the variety of forms slowly coalesced in light green, turquoise and silver, she thought with regret of the miniature sewing box that she had been carrying since Christmas in a pocket of her underslip … Shame too about her new red
pullover
and the new-born baby. Like links in a chain her Dutch mother, her father, her sisters were strung out one after the other – a long way behind them came Anna, vaguely visible in a burst of filtered light. No more, she thought. No more aniseed rusks.

A dying scream rose out of the Brabant woman, alerting the skating children. They scurried over to the woman; she was
standing
in the water up to her heavy breasts, rigid with terror. Not another sound came out of her wide open mouth. The hat was still straight on her head; only the feather moved. ‘Lotte … where is
Lotte?’ cried Jet, the youngest, shrilly. She got her skates off, ran home and returned at a gallop with her mother, who slid over the ice on her front to the unfortunate woman whose lower body had already drowned. With her hands under the woman’s armpits she tried to drag the heavy body out of the water. But the petrified colossus would not move, stuck firmly in the mud. The gardener’s wife came running over, screaming. She observed the rescue from the bank, in no state to do anything, pulling hairs out of her head. Because of her wailing eventually her husband appeared; he had been a military hospital orderly before changing over to cultivating oleanders and orange trees. He stamped on the ice from the bank and, by fragmenting the ice, cleared a path to the drowning one. At that moment Jet’s high-pitched voice pierced through the freezing air. ‘Mister, mister … Lotte’s here … Lotte, my sister’s here!’ With a trembling finger she pointed to a spot in the ice where a triangle of Lotte’s imitation fur coat was shimmering through the ice. The gardener cast an expert glance at his
sister-in
-law, left her upright where she was and dived beneath the ice. An eternity later he returned to the world of the living with Lotte’s dripping body. ‘Stop,’ he said, spitting water, to her mother, who was still tugging at his sister-in-law’s body ever more desperately but had not managed to rescue more than a packet of sticky sweets, ‘she’s been dead a long time.’ With his free hand he pointed to a trickle of blood dripping from the left corner of her mouth.

One glance at Lotte’s slack body was enough for everyone to abandon hope. But the gardener, who had not hauled her out of the Lethe for nothing, refused to give in. She was laid naked on the dining-table. It was reckoned that her sojourn beneath the ice had lasted for half an hour. He tried mouth to mouth resuscitation, slapping her body all over, and rubbing her with a towel her mother had warmed on the stove. He persisted desperately until a growling sound signalled the start of breathing. Thus was Lotte slowly rubbed and slapped back to life, through the stubborn
perseverance of someone whose actual speciality was keeping plants and trees alive.

She only properly regained consciousness in her mother’s bed, ringed by interested parties who came to inspect the medical miracle. She was not surprised. Years ago Aunt Käthe had taken over caring for her, then someone unfamiliar took her by the hand to Holland, and now a total stranger had taken her to the world on the other side of the ice. What else could she be but sanguine about a pattern that kept repeating itself with almost aesthetically
well-founded
insistence?

Downstairs the other drowned one was now lying on the table. They had placed her hat on her belly with her hands over it, so that it looked as if she was reporting bashfully at the gates of heaven. ‘It’s my fault she’s dead,’ cried the gardener’s wife, rocking tormentedly back and forth on a kitchen chair. ‘God has punished me! I saw Lotte lying there all that time and I said nothing. I thought: if I tell, you’ll let go of my sister and she’ll drown.’ Lotte’s mother corrected her, ‘Don’t deceive yourself. Your sister’s heart gave out because she had just had a hot meal, your husband said, and Lotte was saved because she hadn’t eaten yet.’ ‘And I had cooked such tasty chicken livers with sauerkraut and fried bacon,’ lamented the other. ‘That couldn’t kill a person, surely …’

Back at school, the girl who had drowned was allowed to sit by the stove. She was her old self again except for one small flaw: her speech had not entirely thawed. She stammered so badly that her privileged position by the stove was nullified because she was passed over when it was her turn to speak in class. It took too long for her to express herself. A little monster sat between her thoughts and their utterance, pulling back the syllables just before they left her mouth. A superhuman effort was required to speak aloud through this opposing force, her head was put under great
pressure
, her heart went wild, her paralysed tongue twisted out
powerlessly
. A cruel censor was standing at the entrance and let almost nothing through.

Her mother discovered that she did not stutter when she sang with the others. Her clear voice could be heard above everything, she knew all the verses and effortlessly improvised a second part without stumbling over a word. The sandy path beside the football pitch led on to an avenue lined by beech trees that passed through a district of old villas to the radio station’s studios. Lotte’s mother cycled there on her Gazelle and persuaded the conductor of the children’s choir, which sang on the radio each week, to give Lotte a chance. The fact that she was the smallest was amply compensated for by her voice, which lost none of its purity even in the
straitjacket
of a simple nursery rhyme. Each week the conductor selected someone to make their début singing a solo song of their choice. Lotte was placed on an orange box to reach the microphone. The artificial situation did not trouble her; the diffuse anxiety about stuttering that always lay dozing on the threshold of her
unconscious
– one eye open, one eye closed – disappeared instantly as soon as she started her song. Focusing on the conductor, whose grey mane waved in time with his baton, she broadcast ‘In Holland there is a house’, her favourite song, into living-rooms without a hitch. A couple of days later a picture postcard was delivered for her. ‘You have a lovely voice,’ was written in ornate handwriting. ‘I hope your parents take pains with it.’

‘Ach ja,’ Lotte sighed, ‘the conductor was deported in the war. He was Jewish.’

There was an uncomfortable silence. How can there ever be talk of forgetting, Lotte asked herself, looking furtively at Anna. You have to be vigilant, with every representative of this people.

‘I don’t really know if it is wise,’ she hesitated, ‘to be sitting here with you eating cakes and behaving as though nothing was the matter.’

Anna sprang up. ‘Who says we have to behave as though nothing is the matter? I was brought up in a culture you detest. You escaped from it just in time. Let me tell you now how your
life would have turned out if you had stayed. Let me …’

‘We know that past history of yours,’ Lotte interrupted her wearily. ‘The insult of Versailles. The depression.’

Anna shook her head. ‘Let me tell you something about the place the Jews occupied in our lives, in my life, before the war. In the countryside. We’ll order another cup of coffee. Listen.’