The Twins (7 page)

An inspector came to the school to compile a register of the pupils. He stood in front of the class with a list: they had to stand up one by one and say their names. In a flat, routine voice he added: ‘And what does your father do?’ They answered without faltering. Lotte owned to the surname of her Dutch parents absent-mindedly: Rockanje. But she stared at him open-mouthed without saying anything when it came to her father’s profession. ‘Lotte,’ said the mistress affably, ‘you do know what your father
does?’ It took a great effort of strength to emit the words: ‘I d-don’t yet k-know.’ Her head was ready to burst. Did she have to list everything her father did? Where ought she to begin? The
inspector
bypassed this hitch in the machinery and continued his
checking
with a neutral expression. Suddenly Lotte had an inspiration. She raised her finger, ‘I k-know it now.’ ‘Well,’ said the mistress and inspector in unison, ‘what is your father then?’ ‘Tower
watchman
for the Queen!’ she cried without stuttering.

‘If grandfather had known that you had gone straight into a Communist nest …’ cried Anna with hilarity. ‘What a joke!’

‘But my mother was against it. “Don’t think,” she said to him, “that the workers will be more humane if they seize power.” She would sometimes pull him down petulantly from his pink cloud when he wouldn’t leave off his glorification of Marx and kept
harping
on righteously about money and work. “Try to live like that yourself, dear. Only fine words come out of your mouth.”’

An old man came in, stamping his boots, snow on his bushy
eyebrows
. His watery blue eyes timidly assessed the clientèle. He left a track of melting snow behind him on the way to the counter. Lotte had red blotches on her cheeks from the Ratafia de Pommes. Anna’s eyes were shining. Lotte’s old-fashioned, precise German sounded like music to her ears, interspersed now and then with a Cologne word that had gone out of fashion long ago.

‘That Schicki-Micki type,’ she said, ‘who fetched you from Cologne, what kind of a person was she?’

Lotte stared outside the window. ‘I went to stay with her in Amsterdam from time to time. If you looked from the living-room into the mirror by the window you could see the Albert Cuyp market. In the mornings, we went to the market together while Grandpa went to the barber to be shaved. First she bought meat and vegetables. But her real aim was to touch the things on a stall full of beads, buttons, velvets, laces, silks. There she stood, endlessly dreaming; everything passed through her hands. After
deliberating for a long time she bought something minuscule, a pair of mother-of-pearl buttons or something. She was still so
elegant
. “Look,” she said once, “this is what I was like when I was young.” She pulled her sagging skin taut with the tips of her
fingers
. I was shocked. I didn’t recognize her like that. “Can’t I go to see Anna?” I asked her one day. “Ach du, Schätzchen, you have no idea how stubborn and narrow-minded our family is. We have absolutely no contact with them. Later, when you’re grown up, you can look for Anna on your own account. Then the two of you together won’t give a damn about that whole tribe.”’

Anna laughed. ‘A photograph of her hung above grandfather’s chair when he was still alive – as a young girl in a white dress, her face shaded by a straw hat. Ein wunderschönes picture. That photo would be a hundred years old now. Think of it, Lotte, a hundred years! The world has never changed as radically as it has in the last hundred years. No wonder you and I are a bit confused. Let’s drink something more!’

The layers of time were grating over each. Before the war, after the war, the depression years, a century ago … diverse landscapes that Anna was hurtling through tipsily, as though in a runaway train. One moment she was in a steam train and wisps of smoke were drifting past the window, the next moment she was sitting on bright green leatherette in a modern express train. Figures from the past were standing in the stations they whizzed past. They did not wave but looked at the phantom express with screwed-up eyes and frowns. The station in Berlin was on fire, the platforms were full of smoke and dust. Where did this journey end? At the edge of time? It left her cold. She clinked her glass against Lotte’s and toasted her health.

‘I also asked her …’ said Lotte.

‘Who?’

‘Grandma … Aunt Elisabeth … I asked her: Did you know my father when he was young? I mean: my real father. “Your father,” she said, “was a nice, intelligent boy, the revolutionary of the
family. I was very taken with him. That’s why I was at his funeral and you are here now, du Kleine. Ach ja, sensitive types die young and those Schweinehunde grow ancient – that is how the world is…”’ Lotte added tenderly, ‘Grandma loved swear-words.’

‘If only such a fairy godmother had appeared for me at that time,’ said Anna not without bitterness, ‘I would have been spared a lot of suffering.’

Thirty-five marks per month orphan’s allowance was paid for Anna. That was a lot of money – yet Aunt Martha carried on as though she were a parasite, a blood sucker who had clamped onto the young family with two suckers. She projected onto Anna the chronic displeasure that she had brought into the marriage with her as a dowry; Anna was broken in spirit and numb from the work, and defenceless against her deviousness. Whenever Anna looked in Uncle Heinrich’s cracked shaving mirror, she said
scornfully
, ‘Why look in the mirror? You’re going to die anyway. Your father had tuberculosis, your mother breast cancer, you’ll get one of the two as well. Don’t fancy your chances.’ Anna, who had read many fairy-tales, recognized in her the cliché of the wicked
stepmother
, but the justice that always triumphed in the stories was a long time coming in reality. ‘Why do you need a new dress? Why should you drink milk? You are going to die anyway.’

Now that all worldly needs were being strangled at birth and ridiculed, the old longing to disappear for ever seeped into her again. But to die, how did you do that? If you got a disease, it
happened
by itself. Intentionally instigating the change from
being-there
to not-being-there was more difficult. Uncertainty drove her to the church – time stolen from the pigs and cows that had to be caught up later. By praying as faultlessly as possible she hoped for a miraculous admission to heaven. But God, her second inaccessible father, did not make the effort to descend to the modest Landolinus church. At the very most He allowed Alois Jacobsmeyer to appear out of the semi-darkness; he had had a soft spot for Anna since she
had given the Romans what for. He was the one who had implored her uncle: ‘Send her to the grammar school! There isn’t a better pupil in the village. We’ll pay for it all.’ Anna seized his soutane and authoritatively asked him to give her a means of disappearing from the world that would not cause inconvenience. Shocked, he whispered: ‘Don’t do anything stupid! God has only given you this one life, it is all you have. He wants you to live it until it ends
naturally
. Have patience, you will be free when you are twenty-one.’ But twenty-one was unbearably far off. ‘I’ll never keep going,’ she said angrily. ‘Yes you will.’ He took her head in his hands and rocked it gently to and fro. ‘You must!’

Not long after that, her body seemed to have made a decision, weakened by the daily battle of attrition and the frugal food. She caught a cold that would not clear up. Jacobsmeyer urged her to go to the doctor but Aunt Martha waved his advice aside – that sort of cold would wear off by itself. Then he thought up a trick to combat the cough without being accused of interfering in other people’s business. He wandered over to the farm after mass. Anna was in the cowshed when Aunt Martha stuck her head round the corner, her cheekbones red with suppressed anger. ‘The pastor is here for you.’ Jacobsmeyer was sitting in the kitchen with a gurgling baby on his lap. He drew a narrow brown bottle out of his soutane. ‘It can’t go on any longer,’ he said to Anna. ‘You cough all the way through the mass, I can’t understand my own words.’ With a
combination
of triumph and indignation Aunt Martha cried: ‘That one there? But she has no manners, we know that already!’ ‘I have brought a medicine for her with me,’ Jacobsmeyer continued imperturbably. ‘Frau Bamberg, will you see to it that she takes it regularly?’ Aunt Martha nodded, taken by surprise. ‘And if her clothes are wet from sweat,’ he went on, ‘she must change, so that she doesn’t catch a new cold.’ ‘Oh yes,’ scoffed Aunt Martha, ‘then she’d have to go into the field to hang her shirt up on the willows and wait naked until it was dry. The men here would certainly appreciate that.’ He admonished her, piqued because he had
unwittingly nurtured her banal fantasy: ‘You ought to buy her some extra shirts, Frau Bamberg.’ He stood up with dignity and passed the baby to her. ‘You must think about this little one of yours but also of Anna … they are all God’s children.’ He turned round at the door: ‘And she must drink a lot of milk, with cream.’ ‘If he pays for it himself,’ snarled Aunt Martha when the door had closed behind him.

‘And?’ enquired Jacobsmeyer. Anna looked at the floor, leaning on one of the pillars in the nave. ‘Aunt Martha has given me one of her worn-out old shirts. But I am not allowed to drink milk, that has to go for sale.’ ‘God forgive me,’ he sighed; ‘when you
centrifuge
milk, Anna, put your mouth under the spout now and then. But do look round regularly, otherwise she’ll see what’s going on.’

Uncle Heinrich erected between himself and his wife a screen of work activities, card games with villagers, newspapers and library books, which were read by Anna too in stolen quarters of an hour. He did not object, except when she wanted to read
All
Quiet
on
the
Western
Front
. He forbade it not because of the war horrors but because of an indecent scene, which she was quite unable to discover when she nevertheless read the book in secret, because she lacked the antennae for that sort of wavelength. The fate of four nineteen-year-old boys in the trench warfare of 1914–18
strengthened
her in the belief that a man’s life was not valued. The life of a soldier was something like a candle in front of the statue of Mary – when it had burnt down a new one was put in the holder.

They discussed the books they had read – in the mornings while Aunt Martha was still in bed, in the afternoons when she was having a nap and in the evenings when she was in bed again. Although the conversations were fleeting, fitted in as they went along, they created a secret bond between two who were
like-minded
, the last descendants of one family, against the ominous background of the wife upstairs who was still a stranger to them both. Only much later on did Anna understand that her aunt must
have felt this alliance, through the walls – perhaps in her morbid suspicion she had even seen an unspoken love in it. Her aunt bided her time until a chance arose to drive a wedge between them. Bernd Möller unintentionally became her tool.

Anna went to find him in his workshop to enquire whether the problem with the haycart’s axle had been fixed yet. He did not look up from the threshing cart he was repairing; she had to repeat her question before an intelligible reply came from his mouth. No, he had not yet got round to it. A newspaper was open on his
workbench
, among the nuts and bolts. Anna bent inquisitively over the columns, avid for anything that appeared in print. Quiet returned to the workshop except for the prosaic sounds of repair work. ‘Are you still here?’ said Bernd Möller, surprised. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Reading.’ ‘What are you reading?’ Anna turned back to the front page. ‘The
Völkischer
Beobachter
.’
‘That’s not for you, all politics.’ Anna folded open the paper and held it up to his nose. ‘Who is this?’ With a black fingernail, under which chicken and pig muck had collected, she pointed to the portrait of a man with a clenched fist and a provoked, irate look, who was screaming
inaudibly
, a flag with black spiders’ legs in a white circle in the
background
. ‘Adolf Hitler,’ said Bernd Möller, wiping his nose on his sleeve. She turned up her nose. ‘It looks as though he wants to go and fight.’ ‘That is what he wants.’ The mechanic put his spanner on the floor and slowly stood up from his crouch. ‘For me, for you, for all of us. Against unemployment and poverty.’