The Twins (8 page)

He forgot all about the job he had been engrossed in just before and went to sit on the workbench to explain to her what plans the man in the photograph had for the German people. Long-awaited work, a new order – even for the ordinary man who was driving
himself
into the ground every day for a plate of pea soup. Look, here it was in writing. Bernd Möller had an aura of optimism about him. Someone had appeared on the horizon who was preparing great changes, who was going to put an end to the poverty and chaos in the country. Stirred by his enthusiasm, Anna had the feeling that
something might then improve for her too – even if it were perhaps only something small. A long-awaited father figure who would take up the cudgels for her and who would break through the chains of drudgery, fatigue and hunger. She looked intently at the
photograph
. What he was giving expression to and what had initially aroused her distaste was, on further inspection, precisely what she felt beneath the veneer of slavish obedience: rage and mutiny.

That evening she said to her uncle in a conspiratorial tone, ‘There’s someone who is going to put an end to poverty.’ He was sitting in the chair his father had died in; she was on the sofa beneath the soldier killed in action. ‘That’s good news,’ he said, looking ironically at her over his book, ‘how do you make that out?’ ‘It’s in the
Völkischer
Beobachter.
Adolf Hitler has said …’ ‘What?’ he cried. The book slid out of his hands. ‘That fool? You don’t know what you’re saying. Only dumb, desperate people trail after that ridiculous figure. Who did you learn that nonsense from?’ ‘From Bernd Möller,’ she said, offended and confused. ‘Oh, I get it, that’s his way of rebelling. The
V
ö
lkischer
Beobachter
!
You don’t read that! No one here reads that paper. Every right-thinking person, every right-minded Catholic votes for the Centre Party. Pius X’s encyclical describes exactly how poverty can be overcome from the Christian point of view. Listen, girl – this Hitler with his bragging wants just one thing: war.’ He bent over to pick up his book and looked at her as though he were listening acutely for something. ‘I won’t have you associating with Bernd Möller, understand that.’

But Anna could not allow herself to give up this ray of hope so easily. The following day she scurried over to the workshop. Bernd Möller shook his head at her uncle’s reaction. ‘I’ll explain to you exactly why he said that – so that you don’t look shocked at me any longer with your lovely blue eyes. I can’t stand that.’ He smiled. ‘You simply have to let them talk, those brave farmers, those
obedient
Catholics. They don’t know any better. They are just animals who have lived in a cage for too long: if you throw the door open
they simply stay in there. If we had to wait until the Centre Party settled our problems we’d all starve.’ His self-confidence aroused trust. She needed to believe in a chance of change, there was no alternative. And Bernd Möller kept this belief alive with cheerful hymns. She did her work at a faster pace purely to be able to steal over to his workshop in between times and talk with him, or to watch him while he fiddled inside the motor of a farm machine. They did not only talk politics. The pitfalls of everyday life, the attitude that you should take towards it, the books Anna had been reading, her cough – no subject was taboo in the intimacy of the old, draughty shed, as she sat with one buttock on the open
newspaper
and the other on the scored wood of the workbench.

‘Although you’re only sixteen, you’re an exceptional girl,’ said Bernd. He heaped praise on her; in his eyes she was a little,
philosophical
Virgin with a big heart that was beating for all the outcasts and unfortunates in the world. The new Germany would get off the ground more easily if there were more such young women, She had a great future before her, he assured her, squeezing her hands with their split and broken nails in his fists smeared with engine oil. Over time that future increasingly took on the form of a house he was going to build for her. A rustic, old-fashioned house with a gabled roof, shutters, a Bavarian veranda along the full width of the façade and a massive oak door, which he would push open to carry her across the threshold when she was eighteen. Anna allowed these fantasies to glance off her indifferently. Marriage she had never thought about; merely the idea of it was ridiculous to her. Whenever he conjured up these dream pictures to her she looked intently at the floor strewn with tools and machine parts – apparently this was a sacrifice that had to be made now and then for friendship.

When the rye was being harvested she had no time for these interludes. A little boy from the village pushed a letter into her hand: ‘This evening at half-past eight behind the Lady Chapel by the bridge.’ It was already twilight by that time and it smelled
intoxicatingly of damp hay. She did not recognize him at first. He crossed the bridge in a brown uniform that was rather a tight fit and he had a parting in his hair. There was an officious expression on his face that did not become him. He grasped her by her wrists. ‘Your house is going to be built, Anna! An architect in Paderborn has done a design. It’s waiting for you, you must approve the
drawing
!’ She gazed at him impassively. All of a sudden she no longer knew what she had been seeking at the Lady Chapel with a wild stranger who was badgering her about a house that ought to remain a fantasy instead of turning up on paper and, even worse, being built stone by stone on this sandy ground with which she had no affinity. Aroused by his own excitement, he threw his muscular mechanic’s arms around her, demanding the impossible of his sleeves. She heard the threads snap and over his shoulder saw the neighbour passing by with a young goat on a rope. Ashamed, she hid her face in his chest; he took it for affection and increased the pressure of his arms. When he eventually let her go she dashed across the bridge towards the farm, stumbling over her own feet as though she had narrowly escaped from a great danger.

The neighbour did not neglect her citizen’s duty and the next day reported Anna’s wooing to Aunt Martha, who understood instantly that this was what she had been waiting for all that time. Concealing her triumph behind an exemplary display of moral indignation, she disclosed the report of the rendezvous to her
husband
, embellishing it with shocking details that unerringly hit him below the belt. Anna, still suspecting nothing, was fetching water for the pigs. When she turned round, Uncle Heinrich was standing on the threshold. Although he was not heavily built, he looked as though he filled the whole doorway. Why was something so
threatening
emanating from him? The figure, cramped by suppressed tension, approached her and came within a metre of her. She felt suddenly that an unknown misunderstanding was festering between them, which had to be resolved as quickly as possible.

‘What would your father say?’ he began, with a gruesomely
controlled voice, ‘if he caught you with that womanizer, that
agitator
? Eh? Would you have dared if he had still been alive?’ Anna stiffened, she could see the whole chain of cause and effect in one second. ‘Would you have dared?’ he repeated, lending force to his question with a slap on her face. ‘Well?’ As she brought a hand up to her cheek in disbelief he hit her on the other cheek. She turned away and ducked to escape his hands; this evasive reflex only
provoked
his frenzy further. His fists landed wherever he could reach her. When she fell over on the slippery ground he pulled her up by her hair and punched her in the stomach. The rage he dealt out to her was greater than himself and greater than the cause. It was
concentrated
from all his resentment against a world in which he was powerless, but also from all the like-mindedness between Anna and him, and their solidarity – perhaps even his defencelessness against the young woman she herself was without having any inkling of it. All that impenetrable, murky motivation: Anna had not the
slightest
suspicion of it – for her all that existed were the blows and punches, and the cries he uttered, as though he was suffering more than she in the thrashing. At one moment one side of the cowshed flashed by, next the other again, and the pigs’ snouts moving on either side like amazed witnesses. She lost all sense of time until, beneath the raised arm with which she was protecting her head, she saw Aunt Martha positioned on the threshhold in order to enjoy the full measure of the punishment. Her appearance brought Uncle Heinrich out of his fury. He stopped abruptly, looking down at Anna with surprise, glassily. Without deigning to look at his wife, he pushed her aside and disappeared outside.

Anna got up laboriously – a searing pain dragged through her whole body. Aunt Martha was a pompous black blob outlined against the daylight behind her. ‘What must the neighbours think?’ she growled. ‘You’ve made a hell of a noise.’ ‘What noise?’ moaned Anna. Who had yelled with each blow? Not her, she had clamped her lips tight. The record had to be set straight, even in the midst of chaos. Collecting the last of her strength, she crawled
towards her aunt, her broken nails reaching for the skin of the weak, naked arms. The woman who was so large and looked so strong, crossed her arms anxiously across her breasts; the deep-set eyes above the wide cheekbones sunk even further into their
sockets
. She fled backwards out of the cowshed; Anna stumbled after her and fell over on the grass splaying out her arms.

No more clatter of weapons, but absolute silence. Guiltily Uncle Heinrich put food and drink on the floor by her bed; like a wild animal she only touched the plates when he had gone. For the first days she lay on her stomach because the pain in her back was so bad, then she exchanged the monotonous panorama of
wood-grain
and knots in the floor for that of the wall, and turned half on her side, because the contractions and stabbing pains in her belly were now drowning out all other forms of pain. It was becoming worse instead of diminishing. An unbearable paradox; she could not endure it any more and yet she was enduring it. With each wave of pain she lapsed into a soft wail that penetrated to the
kitchen
down the chimney hung with hams and sausages. Eventually Uncle Heinrich stumbled upstairs to ask her what could be done to put an end to the moaning. In a rasping voice Anna complained of stabbing in her belly. That frightened him, the reproductive organs were sacred: Go forth and multiply. What had never been
considered
necessary for her cough was to happen now: an appointment was made with a doctor. She had to promise her aunt dutifully to keep quiet about the injuries and bruises. New tortures were announced. The law required an adult woman to be present as a chaperon at an internal examination. Lying on her black and blue back, beneath Aunt Martha’s vulture glare, Anna felt his cool
rubber
finger penetrate a region she had not suspected of existing until then. A piercing pain split her down the middle. ‘It’s a bit
uncomfortable
,’ said the voice of her benefactor. Uncomfortable! Had he ever been cleaved in half? Dull tears slid down her cheeks without her permission, a triumph she did not concede to her aunt. ‘Come, come,’ said the doctor, ‘we’re not making a drama of it. Your
womb is twisted, I’m trying to get it back in position.’

The pain subsided. Aunt Martha’s lust for power was stronger than ever before, as though she had been present at an initiation ritual that henceforth gave her new power over Anna. During mass, behind the stocky straight back of her aunt, she crumpled a letter for Jacobsmeyer into the hand of an old school friend,
containing
a simple but urgent message: ‘Help! Anna.’ During the Gregorian hymns her eyes strayed involuntarily to the bas-relief where Jesus was being flogged. Her breath caught. She quickly directed her gaze up to the vaulted roof decorated with tendrils, where the singing voices joined the echo of the prayers. The note reached the pastor wonderfully fast; he called her as she was
leaving
the church. She rolled up the sleeves of her Sunday dress and said, ‘My back also looks like my arms.’ Although Jacobsmeyer was, from his profession, on familiar terms with violence in the Bible and with the Christian idea that suffering was the shortest route to God, he was put off his stride when confronted by it in reality. He lifted his glasses from his nose, put them back and raised them again before he laid a trembling hand on her head.

‘Non … je ne regrette rien …’

‘Ha!’ Anna cried. Startled roughly out of his reverie, the old man at the bar blinked his watery eyes; there was a puddle of melted snow under his bar stool. ‘Ha! Je ne regrette rien … the queen of love never has regrets. When she had one foot in the grave she took a young lover – her musical heir, her nightingale who sang like a crow …’ She laughed mockingly. ‘Little Sparrow, picked out of the gutter … I was also a little sparrow in the gutter – now I’m an old woman teased by memories. An old woman who’ll have another.’ She snapped her fingers towards the bar.

‘Ach ja,’ Lotte said quietly, in an attempt to neutralize Anna’s emotionality, ‘the older you become the more you live in the past. You forget things that happened yesterday.’

Anna raised her eyebrows at this clichéd remark. But to Lotte it was the practical and ever successful opening for a lament about old age, a conversational ploy for keeping the discussion in safe waters. Full glasses were set before them, with a smile from the proprietress. Perhaps she had been on the wrong side in the war, as had many Belgians? It was difficult for her to imagine Anna, that well-fed, quick-witted woman sitting opposite her, as an
ill-treated
, sickly girl of sixteen in her Sunday dress, gagged by her step-aunt, who had been allocated so many bad attributes that it was a caricature. Wasn’t Anna exaggerating? Had time distorted her memories? She was instantly ashamed of her persistent
scepticism
. Barbarians, her mother had said. She could really see why now. It was all so extreme. Lotte regarded malicious, violent
behaviour
as a sickness, to be cordoned off safely and kept at a distance. In that light she diagnosed Aunt Martha as dangerously mentally
deranged – no wonder Uncle Heinrich slowly went mad under her influence.

‘That aunt of yours was a pathological case.’ She took a reckless sip.

Anna laughed drily. ‘Not necessarily. She was merely a woman who was good for nothing. There are people like that. According to Christian morality they are evil, according to psychiatry they are sick. What difference does it make when you’re the victim of it? But let’s have something more cheerful. About you.’

Lotte did not miss the insinuation: compared with Anna’s youth, hers was, in Anna’s eyes, a model of freedom from trouble. Of the two of them, Anna was the one entitled to sympathy. Although ostensibly she spoke with distance and irony about the past, in ways she was making a subtle call for compassion. The compassion that had always been withheld from her and was now expected from her sister – no, demanded. But that role did not appeal to her.

‘About your singing,’ Anna coaxed, ‘your lovely voice.’

‘God, I’m hot,’ said Lotte. She stood up lopsidedly to take her jacket off. Fumbling with sleeves – cracks had appeared in the
coordination
of her movements as a result of the apple liqueur. There were two possibilities: to give Anna what she requested or to remain silent. The latter felt hard to her; she enjoyed talking about it. Who was still interested in it? Not her children. And if she kept quiet about it it would all be lost, as though it had never happened.

Singing gradually elbowed out the stuttering: the pleasure of
singing
was greater than the anxiety preceding the first letter. Her body grew and her voice grew with it – actually her voice was always rather older than herself. When she was accepted into a famous teenage choir, only her voice properly belonged there. The choir was directed by Catharina Metz, a dark, melancholy woman with a fluffy moustache that she sometimes shaved off but more often left,
from indifference – the delicate hairs trembled with her vibrato. There were still yellowed newspaper cuttings about her singing career, which had come to an abrupt end with her father’s illness. They never got to see the mysterious invalid; he lived his abstract existence in a wing of the house overgrown with virginia creeper and wisteria, and it only manifested itself in the dark rings under his daughter’s eyes. Sometimes she suddenly stopped the rehearsal with a raised finger to listen with concentration to something that was inaudible to the pupils. She guided them with a gentle hand via unfamiliar French and Italian composers into the territory of the great classics.

Whenever the choir performed for the radio, Lotte’s mother urged everyone to be in place in a circle round the Chrystalphone, in an improvised amphitheatre of kitchen chairs. On one Sunday morning Lotte’s voice came into the living-room unexpectedly, separate from the choir, in a Bach cantata. Uncertain of the result she came home – she could not hear her own voice in the studio. There a celebration was in progress: alcohol was on the table. Her mother hugged her, moved, and presented her with a bouquet of flowers that tickled her nostrils. She had a sneezing fit. ‘Mind your voice!’ cried Mies sarcastically; she liked to be the centre of attention herself. Her father was looking feverishly in his record collection for that particular cantata – his way of indicating his appreciation. Lotte fell into an armchair, bewildered, and pensively spooned down a brimming glass of advocaat that Marie had held out to her with a respectful laugh. It gave her a scandalously
pleasurable
feeling that she was earning success with something that she herself enjoyed to the roots of her hair (the reward was already there in the singing itself). Two days later she received a perfumed letter: ‘Your timbre is unique, it is a rare gift. I will still remember your voice in twenty years, and that is something others would give everything for.’ Catharina Metz recognized the sender as a notoriously severe music critic. Blushing, Lotte packed the letter in the suitcase she had come with from Germany. Along with her
mourning dress and Anna’s embroidered handkerchief that had been in one of the pockets, here she kept the sewing case that had drowned with her and a newspaper cutting about Amelita
Galli-Curci
. Later she moved the letter to a drawer in her dressing-table where a scent of violets still lingered after sixty years.

She had first heard Amelita Galli-Curci in a duet with Caruso. It was a hot afternoon in September; she was walking home through the wood after school with Jet. The water-tower shimmered through the trees when suddenly she stopped. Like a force of
nature
, a voice was coming from an open window which was so enchanting that Lotte was all ears – a gigantic, immobile ear. Jet pulled impatiently on her sleeve and then walked on, shrugging her shoulders. Lotte wanted to delay as long as possible the banal moment of coming home and discovering that the voice emanated from a groove in an ebony disc. So she stood there with eyes closed until the last sounds had died away between the tree trunks.

The queen of coloratura singing, Galli-Curci, married to a
marquis
from the foot of the boot of Italy, scored triumphs in the United States immediately after the First World War ‘as a lyric soprano of unusual beauty, pure and crystal clear from low A-flat to high C’, according to
Opera
World
of the day. In the cutting that Lotte kept, there was a photograph of a majestic, dark-haired woman who defied the camera with a raised chin – a
Rembrandtesque
hat on her head at an angle, a shawl with large flowers and birds draped over her shoulders, and two showy rings on her right hand, which rested militarily on her breast, just above the heart. A Napoleonic stance. Thus inspired, Lotte slipped into the
water-tower
, ignoring the strict prohibition – long hair or ribbons could get caught in one of the machines. She positioned herself – chin up, hand on chest, directed her gaze upwards and brought about a change of scenery: the metal stairs no longer led to a reservoir filled with sand, gravel and coals, but spiralled endlessly upwards on their own axis, into a firmament full of stars – they might also have been theatre lights. As yet unhampered by excessive self-criticism,
she sang ‘Caro Nome’ or ‘Veranno a te’ in her own Italian version as she had managed to learn it from the record. Her voice filled the whole tower from the low A-flat to the high E, ascending the stairs to where the steps became fainter and fainter, in a never-ending Escherian revolving. Her chest expanded. Drunk from the melody and the sound of her own voice, she floated away to another phase in her life – the reservoir arched high above her, a stained-glass window separated the light into coloured fragments, somewhere behind her the sound reverberated through the marble corridors of a labyrinthine building. It was an indefinable feeling that
nevertheless
half penetrated her consciousness and was immediately
forgotten
, as soon as she stopped singing.

A walnut piano of obscure East European make was acquired so that she could accompany herself. The money for it and the lessons was scraped together by her mother, to her father’s
bloodthirsty
delight: now it was his turn to make a row about
irresponsible
expenditure. He readily over-indulged himself in the idolatry of such famous figures as Marx and Stalin, Beethoven and Caruso, but he could not imagine that something exceptional, for which sacrifices had to be made, could be developing within reach in his own surroundings, where the trivialities made him bad tempered increasingly often.

The piano brought a tuner to the house every three months. He was long and thin with a gypsy’s bird-of-prey nose. His black curly hair was shaved on the sides but stuck up on top so that from a distance he looked as though he had a beret on his head. He always wore the same close-fitting black suit that elicited all kinds of speculations. Was it a wedding outfit from before the war, the dress coat of an undertaker, a morning coat with the tails cut off, or a theatrical costume worn by the devil or death? Below his tight trousers he wore modern American shoes which he kept in
impeccable
condition. He was a man of contrasts. The leanness of his body was compensated for by the visible dimensions of his
genitalia
, which, because of the shortage of space, he gave air in his
right trouser leg, or on another occasion in his left. The whispering modesty of his voice was cancelled out by the honky-tonk sounds he elicited from the piano. The sisters fled to the kitchen, united in their aversion to his thing, but also amazed that his face remained so neutral in the presence of that which made itself so evident below his belt. They were commissioned to take him coffee, but no one dared. They clung to each other, giggling. Eventually Lotte took the cup in – he was her tuner. He accepted it with a smile, unaware of the consternation he was arousing with his
controversial
body. After his visit the cup was washed up with extra soap.

He was also a serviceable amateur photographer. Lotte’s mother persuaded him to take a family portrait on the occasion of Eefje’s birth. She had invited him on a Sunday afternoon in May; above the white garden bench that was selected to be the central
ornament
, a swallow’s nest hung beneath the roof gable – the parental couple were doing overtime flying back and forth. Nervous activity prevailed before the photographer’s arrival; up to the last moment dresses were being adjusted and straightened. Lotte’s father refused to put on another suit. He was not planning to pose, he said; only the Tsar and Tsarina had themselves commemorated
en
famille.
‘What have I got to do with that man?’ he added
scornfully
. ‘You don’t have to do anything with that man,’ said his wife, ‘he’s coming here to take photographs, I shall offer him a cup of coffee convivially and you will present a cigar.’ But he was in the mood for sabotage, enjoying the power tossed into his lap by the occasion.

He was nowhere to be found when the photographer arrived lugging a heavy telescopic camera and stand. Irresistible in a dress with poppies on a cream background, Lotte’s mother steered him into the garden. Her offspring trickled outside while he was
positioning
himself and his equipment where she indicated, directly opposite the bench. Mies, who worked in a milliner’s business, wore a cognac-coloured suit with an inverted bird’s nest of raffia on her head. Marie wanted to establish for posterity that she was the
ugly duckling of the family; she had on a high-necked grey dress and refused to remove her glasses for the photograph. Jet and Lotte walked about stiffly, like fallen angels, in white organdie dresses with flounces and ruches. Koen, still a baby when Lotte had fallen through the ice, refused to wear long trousers to hide the grazes on his knees.

At the photographer’s request, their mother, with the
newborn
in her arms, seated herself in the middle of the bench and, in the interests of the composition, she was flanked by the organdie dresses. The others stood behind, a climbing rose pricking them in the back. ‘Lovely …’ he murmured, studying the tableau vivant in his lens, ‘er … isn’t sir to be part of it?’ ‘Sir is in a bad mood,’ said Lotte’s mother, ‘so we don’t want him in the photograph.’ ‘Could there be a little smile perhaps?’ They did their best to forget the big spoilsport and troublemaker and stared straight at the camera; the young swallows piped, a light breeze wafted the scent of lilacs, the photographer bent behind his magic box – the whole situation could have been agreeable if that lacuna had not existed there in the middle behind the bench, a missing figure who let his hands rest on their mother’s shoulders. The photographer implored them to laugh. Forced attempts – only Mies smiled attractively, like a film star, eyeing the lens with a sensuous expression; Koen was scratching open the scabs on his knees.