The Twins (46 page)

Old acquaintances spoke to her in the street to tell her that Uncle Heinrich was back and to describe, each in their own
rhetoric
, what sort of effect Russia had had on him. He was back, he was alive! An irrational, ambivalent excitement came over her: she did not want to see him, she wanted to see him. The image of Uncle Heinrich back from the event at Bückeberg came to mind: shocked, speechless, full of fear and loathing. He had seen visions of what was to come, in the perfectly recorded Great Germanic harvest
festival, in the enthusiasm of the crowd, in
the inflammatory,
hypnotic
language of the Führer. He knew it but could not prevent himself being sent to Russia as part of the same stage directions. It was so poignant that her heart would have winced, if all the other things had not already existed in contrast. She did not want to see him, she wanted to see him. She wanted to ask him for clarification about the guardianship declaration. She wanted to say to him: my husband was in Russia too. She wanted Lotte’s address, which she had lost, and her father’s books, a row of bound German classics – the only thing he had bequeathed to her. She wanted to show: look, the simple-minded, frail child is still alive, she is a tough one – surely we did have a bond, once, or have I imagined that?

When she realized she would never be able to manage not to go, she borrowed a bicycle and went. She had carefully chosen Sunday morning. Her aunt, who ignored God’s commandments, never missed a high mass. Anna had gambled well, the house was empty except for the small living-room, where she found her uncle by the stove in the chair where his father had slowly died, a little more each day, beneath the print of the dead soldier. She had
prepared
herself for this, that he would be thinner, but what she encountered in that history-laden, genetically determined spot was an emaciated old man who looked at her without seeing her, with a hollow, faded gaze. A thin neck poked out of his shirt collar,
narrow
wrists emerged from the sleeves of his jacket, his fingers hung snapped on the arm rests. His stiff blonde hair had gone grey, a bony skull shone through it. Nowhere was the young uncle
recognizable
, the muscular farmer’s son who parodied Christmas carols in Cologne. She greeted him shyly. Did she detect a reply in a very slight nodding of the top-heavy wrinkled face? The next obvious step would have been to ask him how he was – a question, she now understood, that would demonstrate obtuse lack of
feeling
. A sour air hung in the stuffy room, just as before she had sensed she could not breathe in there. But he sat in silence; it even looked as though he rather blamed her for something. The things
she had wanted to say died in her mouth. She moistened her lips. ‘Uncle Heinrich …’ she began. He did not react. How should she continue? To start with the declaration was impossible in these
circumstances
; Russia was a painful subject, Lotte taboo. The only one to occur to her as tangible, not dangerous, was the row of
classics
. ‘My father’s books …’ she said hurriedly, ‘you remember: Schiller, Goethe, Hofmannstahl … I would like to take them with me.’ A miracle happened: the head moved from one imaginary end of the horizon to the other. ‘Why not …?’ whispered Anna, but no further enlightenment followed. He looked at her, froze her out. She was suffocating beneath the low ceiling, between the
oppressive
walls, between two dead and one apparently dead. She turned to the door and fled.

She cycled back at a furious pace, oscillating between indignation and sympathy. You really would have thought that Russia had been an exercise in detachment – what did possessions matter if you were hungry, thirsty, in pain? But she corrected herself: don’t you see that he is broken, a piece of ice from the tundra? Don’t you see that all he can still say is a big square no to everyone and everything? This man, this shadow of a man, she would never again be able to call him to account, let alone ever be able to make peace with him.

A day later she was thinking differently about it. If everyone eluded her all that remained was the material. She decidedly wanted to have the books, her father’s only tangible memorial. Once again she went to the district court. She got an official order, a written order to release the books. She made the pilgrimage to the farm for the last time. Nothing had changed inside. Although he did not speak he could still read. Respect for authority had been ingrained in him, first by his tyrannical wife, then by the army and after that by camp regime. He understood very well what the
official
document that he held between his fragile fingers contained. This time the top-heavy wrinkled head moved from the low beamed ceiling to the wooden floor and back. Anna lifted the books off the shelf above the sideboard. Clutching the pile to her chest
she looked at him one more time, over the classics.
Faust
was on top. She looked at the desolate figure next to the stove and
swallowed
. Why was the Faust figure always masculine? Their Faust was in church with hands in prayer.

They lost track of time and distance while Anna was doing the
talking
. They had already twice passed a crease in the map when Anna stopped in mid-sentence, clutched her heart with an almost pathetic gesture, and gasped for breath. Lotte stood next to her resigned. She recognized it. First running and jumping, then a broken arm or a tooth through the lip – first overwhelm the other under a torrent of words, then breathlessness.

‘Let’s … go back …’ Anna uttered.

Lotte nodded. She actually gave her sister an arm; step by step they walked back on the winding paths to the rhythm of Anna’s lumbering body and rasping breath. It struck Lotte that the return journey had taken an eternity, as she unloaded Anna in the lounge of her hotel. Coffee … Anna gesticulated, strong coffee. Coffee had brought her back to life before in the past. With a forced laugh she dropped into a chair, fanning herself with a waving hand. Her pale face was shining with sweat; she waited with closed eyes until her breathing calmed down. Lotte sat there sheepishly without
worrying
: Anna emerged from her own life story as indestructible, as someone who would make even death flee by telling it the frank truth, straight to its face. And sure enough, Anna slowly came to. Her eyes opened again. She was already looking at Lotte cheerfully and perceptively again.

‘Entschuldigung, my body is a spoilsport from time to time … we’re so comfortable here … please, order something yourself … Do you remember …’ She made an effort to move closer to Lotte and lay a hand on hers. Stepping airily over her own body, which came to a halt now and then, as though over a fallen tree lying across the road, she said, ‘Do you still remember, Lotte, when I came to look for you in The Hague?’

Lotte froze. But Anna waltzed on; it seemed as though she
genuinely
was in a hurry.

‘But first I went to Cologne … hoping that Uncle Franz was still alive, the only one who had your address ….’

Anna ordered a second cup of coffee. Two hotel guests went past looking at the noisy old lady with surprise. Lotte thought she could see aversion, yes, hostility in their gaze.

‘Cologne …’ Anna said dreamily, ‘I shall never forget being on the east bank of the Rhine and looking right through the city to the west where the lignite factory chimneys stood out against the
horizon
. You could tell it was Cologne from the two spires of the Cathedral, which had miraculously been spared. There were still walls here and there, nothing in between. I was on the bank with some others – we looked at it but did not believe what we were
seeing
, because the city had always been there between the Rhine and the lignite factory. All the bridges had been destroyed. We were standing there and wanted to get over to the other side; a canoe paddled up to take us across as though it were a thousand years ago. Someone was waiting on the other bank with a cart for our suitcases and we began a journey along winding paths between the heaps of rubble and around the heaps of rubble, and people were living somewhere in a shelter or beneath the remains of a wall …’

Lotte listened uneasily. She felt a strong urge to go to her hotel. Not to have to hear, just for once, not to have to react to anything – to succumb to a languid Sunday afternoon feeling, no more.

‘I wanted to see you, it had all begun there … Of course I also wanted to know whether my uncle and aunt were still alive. They had been lucky, the hospital had been spared – they were not
suffering
from hunger, the English supplied the hospital plentifully with food. The only thing I could utter after the surprise of seeing them again was “I’m hungry”. They made me a saucepan of rice pudding, I ate until I could eat no more. I got Aunt Elisabeth’s address from them and thus eventually I came to you … Gott im Himmel, I’ll never forget that!’

While Anna was waiting for news from her great aunt in Amsterdam, of whom all she remembered was that she had
separated
Lotte from the symbiotic duality with surgical precision long ago, the anxiety suddenly crept into her that Lotte was no longer alive either. She remembered the successful bombing of Rotterdam at the start of the war – beyond that she had no idea what the war had brought about in Holland.

Some weeks later it appeared a little more rosy. Lotte was expecting her; in a cryptic letter she had assented to Anna’s
coming
. From the train the destruction of the Netherlands turned out not to be as bad as expected. The meadows looked smooth and mown, the cattle looked well-fed in a picture postcard with bridges and church spires. The situation was less panoramic in the tram in The Hague. All seats were taken; the passengers were pushed against each other in the central gangway on each bend. A
middle-aged
man politely stood up for Anna. She flopped down with her inseparable stage prop, the leather suitcase, whispering ‘Danke schön.’ ‘What …?’ cried the man in shock. ‘You are a German! Stand up immediately!’ Anna stood up, only half understanding what he was saying but understanding quite well what he meant. All faces turned accusingly in her direction. ‘I understand you very well,’ she apologized clumsily, ‘I understand very well that you don’t want to have anything to do with us. But I was not a Nazi, whether you want to believe me or not, I am an ordinary woman, my husband died in the war, I have no one else. I cannot say
anything
else to you …’ There was a very telling silence around her. People turned away from her disapprovingly. Anna hung on tightly to the strap and sensed for the first time what it would mean to be a German from now on. To be found guilty by people who knew nothing about you. Not to be seen as an individual but as a specimen of a type, because you said
danke
schön
instead of
dank
u
wel.

But an unshakeable solidarity with her own history and the
lack of political awareness temporarily preserved her from the schizophrenia of collective guilt and individual innocence. For her, Anna Grosalie, this was a historic day. She was not so much a German as someone who, left alone in the world, was in search of the security of her first years of childhood. The ties of blood that were taken for granted by most people, that you could always fall back on, were for her something that had to be reconquered. She got out, stopped a passer-by and showed him the letter with the address, without saying a word. She would not let her own
language
cross her lips – perhaps he sent her in the wrong direction on purpose.