The Twins (23 page)

Her husband did the talking after they had sat down. The reason for their visit was a postcard from David from Buchenwald, in which he asked his parents to convey his greetings to Lotte because he had not been able to say goodbye to her. ‘Buchen … wald …?’ Lotte stammered. De Vries swallowed and stroked his forehead in a gesture of despairing resignation. Staring at the floor he explained that David was arrested on Saturday 22 February in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter while he was making music with a group of friends. The Grüne Polizei had burst in suddenly; they
had to stand with their backs to the wall. ‘Which of you is Jewish?’ was screamed at them. Without thinking for a second, his head was probably still in the music, David had taken a step forward. Two other Jews in the group wisely kept their mouths shut. He was taken to the Jonas Daniël Meierplein, where rows of companions in misfortune were already waiting. Without a charge, without any form of trial they had been transported to a camp in Germany.

David’s mother sobbed into her handkerchief. Desperately
looking
round him, the father took heart: ‘You’ll see that after a few months of labour camp the boys will be sent home. The Germans wanted to make an example: think about it, no more disturbances. David is well, he’s done a lot of sport … He isn’t having a bad time there … here, read it …’ Lotte bent over a few miserable lines on the card buried beneath rubber stamps: ‘… I am fine, we are working heartily …’ He had had this card in his hands. It was rather alarming, a card that could leave the camp freely and find the way home while the sender was held in captivity. Yet the full extent of the seriousness did not immediately get through to her. It was so bizarre, so absurd, so senseless, that it could not be
comprehended
. Automatically she looked at the piano – the sheet music still lay open at the page they had been on. Everything in her resisted the thought that he had disappeared just like that – just like that. Immediately she also clung on to the idea of a labour camp, a sort of scout camp – chopping wood in the open air,
planting
trees.

‘We are sending him back a card,’ said his father, ‘would you like to write a line?’ ‘Dear David …’ she squeezed into the little space under the fully written card. Her pen stopped, floating above the paper. She felt his father’s eyes on her, driving her pen. She wanted to write in code, something personal, something essential. A line from the song cycle came to her – without thinking it over she wrote a variant of it: ‘… I hope you have only gone out and will presently be home again …’ As she reread the line it suddenly evoked a strong fear in her. What in God’s name had she written
down? A quotation from a poem of mourning, an elegy. Too late, too late to change anything. She gave the card back with a
trembling
hand. She could not bear to be in the room any longer. The sight of his parents upset her, but nor could she bear the sympathy of her parents … a world that could let someone disappear just like that took her breath away. She stood up abruptly and went out of the room without polite phrases, out of the house, outside. She sat down on a step at the garden house with a throbbing heart. It
penetrated
through to her like a slow-acting poison, something that was almost as intolerable as David’s disappearance: on 22 February he would have come to her … if she had wanted that.

For weeks she subjected herself to strenuous self-analysis, put herself on the rack: why had she not gone along with his
spontaneous
suggestion … why did she have such a need to keep her options open, for the sake of form … if she had wanted to put him to the test a bit, provoke … why all that reservation …? She lashed herself with questions that she could not answer, questions that bit by bit gave her an increasingly monstrous picture of herself, which invariably brought her to the same merciless conclusion.

His father telephoned again. They had received a second card, this time from Mauthausen, with the cryptic text: ‘If I do not catch my sailing ship quickly, then it will be too late …’ He cried
desperately
, ‘He is imploring us to help, my boy, but what can I do? I wish I could take his place – I am an old man, he has his whole life in front of him.’ Lotte sought for words in vain – when she really needed to find them they seemed not to exist. If David did not
survive
then the whole idea of justice was an illusion – only
arbitrariness
ruled, chaos, in the midst of which one person, with all his plans, expectations, hopes, fantasies, signified nothing – nothing. At night the ship with the billowing sails drifted through her dreams. The Loosdrecht Lakes swelled into an ocean – now he sat beaming and tanned at the rudder, then he was in the water again and trying frenetically to haul himself into the boat, holding on to the edge with petrified fingers while she looked on.

She received a recent photograph from his father. Painfully innocent, David was laughing at the photographer. That naïvety had cost him his freedom, perhaps his life. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time – she could not look at the
photograph
without that thought. Reverence prevented her from tearing it up, again and again she forced herself to look at it. David had cycled out of her life waving cheerfully; that movement of his arm, back and forth, stayed longest with her as though something more was being conveyed, which was of great significance. And what had he been humming as he disappeared in the darkness?

Music irritated her. All those melodies, measures, subtleties, struck her as ridiculous – useless frills, false sentiments. Her voice refused to work in the upper registers, in the lower it vibrated uncertainly. Catharina Metz sent her home: ‘Pull yourself together a bit first.’

Where did all the water come from and where did it go to? Anna lay in a shining copper bath-tub. Bubbles of air took off from her skin, a network of scales. Her body lay pale and fish-like in the water. There must be an ingenious system of pipes through which the water flowed from the springs to the Thermal Institute and, via the bath-tubs, was conveyed away again – the body it lapped around for half an hour was merely a way-station. All that water, invisible, flowing inaudibly, like blood in the arteries, the
bath-tubs
a pumping heart. In how many bottles of mineral water am I lying? she thought.

Long ago this same body sat in a bath-tub on the kitchen floor. Uncle Heinrich drummed mockingly at the closed kitchen door: you must be really filthy if you have a bath every week. It seemed a loaded silence reigned in this bathroom, as though the guests of the past were invisibly present and anxiously ensuring that they did not reveal themselves. How many, which famous dead had been in this bathroom, in this bath-tub? Were their thoughts left behind here, could the silence be top heavy from it? What they had thought wouldn’t have been up to much, she chuckled.

From those unknown dead it was but a small step to Lotte’s death. Shame, rage, sorrow had prevented Anna sleeping the whole night. Yet we are sisters, she remonstrated stubbornly with herself. But didn’t age go together with leniency, with wisdom? If the two of us can’t surmount all those barriers, how do others
manage
? Then the world will stay in the grip of irreconcilability for centuries, then you can multiply the duration of each war by at least four generations. Of course – Germany had been able to extort the reconciliation with all its money, but one football
competition was enough to reveal that the old enmity was still alive and kicking.

Something in the angle of the light, in the green reflection off the tiles, in the peaceful privacy, brought her back to the casino. Lotte was sitting opposite her in a bath on lion’s feet, a dark woman (Aunt Käthe?) leaned over them and poured a thin trickle of cold water down their backs from a blue enamel jug. They took it in turns to shiver, trembling with pleasure. She could see Lotte very sharply before her, with her damp dark hair, her eyes screwed tightly closed – the picture was clear, more lifelike than that of Lotte as she had sat opposite her the previous day. It is still all there, she said full of surprise. Although the bombing had left no tile, no stone of the casino intact, it is still all there in my head; those years in between signify nothing.

What history has subjected us to we cannot weigh on the scales, she thought. Suffering does not separate us, but connects us – as pleasure connected us then. This insight, however absurd it seemed, relieved her. At the same moment the woman in an overall came in to help her out of the bath. She offered Anna an inviting hand. Without strange antics, upright and dignified, she stepped over the edge of the bath and descended below. Like Pauline Bonaparte, assisted by her chambermaid, she grinned inwardly.

They found each other in the coffee-room at the end of the morning. Although the door was always invitingly open, they had never come across anyone in there. Now and then a guest shuffled through the labyrinth of passages but mostly it was quiet and empty – January was the slack season.

‘I slept so badly,’ Anna confided, ‘the whole night I saw the image of that one young man who stepped forward unsuspectingly.’

Lotte nodded absent-mindedly, sipping her coffee and a glass of mineral water alternately. Anna had the feeling that she did not want to go on with it.

‘I don’t want to give the impression that I am bidding against
you in terms of the distress that befell me,’ she said carefully, ‘but my husband was killed in the war too, in the same bloody war, after I had gone through years of worry …’

The first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony sounded in the dining-room. ‘Ta ta ta ta … The Wehrmacht High Command announces: The twenty-eighth infantry division on the advance to Russia …’ Anna was preparing a piece of bread for Rudolf. Slowly she spread some butter on it mixed with tears. Old von Falkenau, sitting opposite eating breakfast, watched her pityingly. ‘You mustn’t cry, Fräulein,’ he shook his head, ‘after all, your fiancé isn’t in the infantry! He isn’t in any danger with the signals troops. Anyway, you’ll see, the whole operation will be over in six weeks. Did you think that that nation was going to defend itself? They are glad to be being released from Communism.’ Anna laughed
dejectedly
. Although von Falkenau, a war-horse with connections in the highest military circles, got his information first hand, no
reassurance
from outside was adequate to soothe her anxiety. What was one soldier among a million soldiers? – a bit of fluff in the wind over the tundra, in the wastes of a country where the sun rose on one side as it set on the other. It was a nonsensical war, chiefly expressed in huge numbers that far exceeded the powers of imagination: ‘Ta ta ta ta … The Wehrmacht High Command announces …’: thirty thousand Russian prisoners of war, forty thousand, fifty thousand. What happened to them, where did they manage to live? Questions that the practical spirit, at home, posed itself quite
innocently
while the victory chatter zigzagged outside from the radio through the open garden doors and whipped the roses up into more profuse flower. When a letter eventually arrived it was already fourteen days old. Meanwhile perhaps Martin had already been killed in action. She went to see the newsreel in the nearby town, she read the paper, but the more efforts she made to assess his chances of survival in relation to the advancing armies, the more she felt a powerless outsider. Sitting at home and unable to
do anything – a front that nobody spoke about.

A telegram arrived at the end of October. ‘Please come to Vienna. Immediately. We will get married.’ Her suitcase,
containing
a home-made wedding dress and an officially authenticated family tree, had been ready for months. She travelled to Vienna in great haste. As she got off she hesitated. For one moment it was as though a strong gust of air was pushing her back inside the train. There he stood in actuality, after having died a hundred deaths in her imagination. He was there, returned from an immensity in which an ordinary person would be lost. Time and space had brought him back here as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. He was flanked by his parents. She envied him slightly for having two parents with whom he could wait for her: look, that’s her now. Father and son both wore suits and hats, Martin’s was crooked, the other’s was straight. The father was slim and youthful, but there was a troubled expression on his face in the shade of his hat brim, as though he were constantly looking into a strong sun. The mother also gave the impression that existence demanded a superhuman effort from her. She pursed her lips together stiffly as though she were blowing up a balloon; she wore her heavily permed black hair like a cap on her head. Between these two people, who seemed to be ignoring one another, Martin stood and beamed.

The father said goodbye in a wide, treeless shopping street where trams rumbled past, at the entrance to a massive six-storey building. The moment had now come for him to go back to his wife again, he explained courteously – but by the way, she warmly invited them round. Anna looked from one to the other in
amazement
. Why hadn’t Martin told her that his parents were separated? The father raised his hat and walked to the tram stop. The three of them climbed the steps of the building where Martin had grown up, on the first floor, above a chemist’s. Anna, having become used to large rooms with carpets, antique furniture, paintings and family portraits, recoiled when she entered the small rooms crammed with
knick-knacks.

After his mother had sent Martin out on an errand she led Anna to her guest room with exaggerated hospitality. ‘So,’ she said, glad to be closing the door behind them, ‘now we can talk to each other as woman to woman. Listen. I want to warn you, for your own good. Don’t get married. Abandon the wedding while you still can. Marriage is men’s invention, they are the only ones to benefit from it. Through that one transaction they acquire a mother, a whore, a cook, a worker, entirely for themselves. Everything in one go, gratis. You never hear anything about the wife. She sits nicely locked up, in those few square metres, with her scanty
housekeeping
money. She has walked into a nasty trap, but by the time that dawns on her it is too late. Don’t do it, dear, be wise. I am
saying
this to you in friendship.’ Anna tried to release herself from the black hypnotic eyes. ‘I can assure you that I love Martin very much …’ she declared to her. ‘Ach, love …!’ said the woman
condescendingly
, ‘all lies and deceit to drive the woman mad.’ Anna began to open her suitcase with trembling hands, she took out a blouse at random. ‘Would you excuse me,’ she said weakly, ‘I would like to change.’ ‘Think it over!’ The woman left the room triumphantly. Anna sagged onto the edge of the bed. She finds me unsuitable, was her first thought. What kind of mother is this who tries to upset her son’s plans behind his back? The plans of a
soldier
who has to return quickly, to the war! Staring at her wedding dress in a state of shock, she subsided into a tangle of thoughts and reflections until Martin knocked on her door, full of impatient
happiness
. ‘May I come in …?’ Courageously she decided to hold her tongue.

After the evening meal the mother placed a porcelain plate with a flower pattern in front of her son. ‘I have another surprise for you my boy, something you’re absolutely crazy about.’ With a
mysterious
laugh she conjured up a jar of apricot compote and began to fill the plate with it. ‘Doesn’t Anna get any?’ said Martin. ‘But I kept it specially for you …’ a mischievous, warmongering glitter in
her eye. Martin sighed. ‘I would like you to lay another plate.’ The mother stood there without moving. In the cluttered rooms she was queen, whoever ventured into her territory was exposed to strange specimens of deranged maternal love. Warmongering made way for being the injured party. ‘Ach so … therefore I have to do it for her …’ ‘Yes, otherwise I won’t eat a mouthful of it.’

Outside the four rooms she had no hold over them. Breathing more freely, they went into the city that showed itself off stylishly with its churches, palaces, symmetrical parks and ponds, botanical gardens and orangeries, cake shops. This was his city, the preview of her future. Here she would live as soon as the war was over. In a museum they admired the Habsburg art treasures, they looked down over the roofs from the Leopoldsberg. Tickets for the opera and theatre were scarce, except for a soldier with a leave-permit. To every performance they went to he also invited his mother. She insisted each time that her close friend should accompany them, an ample Viennese, quickly moved to emotion, with many frills and lace – during the performances she felt impelled to inform them of every whim that fluttered through her head. ‘Mother,’ Martin said eventually, ‘I am happy to take you with us, but please … that friend doesn’t always have to be there?’ ‘So …’ she raised her chin, offended, ‘isn’t my friend to your liking? Though you didn’t ask for my approval in the choice of your friend.’ Martin apologized for her in the bedroom, watching Anna wearily. ‘I am sorry, don’t blame her … she has been like that since the day my father left her. I was only small then. She has never been a normal mother, as a mother ought to be. She has always wanted to possess me, in a tyrannical way. To provoke him. Nothing can be done about it, that is simply how it is now.’

The sense of expectancy that the city had aroused in Anna slowly ebbed away. It seemed to her that her mother-in-law was floating over it with outspread wings – no district, no building escaped her shadow, wherever they went. One day when they came home, the house had an atmosphere of a morgue. The curtains
were closed, a sharp smell of vinegar struck their throats. Cautiously they opened the bedroom door. The mother lay in bed with eyes shut; her close friend sat next to her and reverently applied a heart compress soaked in vinegar. ‘Shhh …’ she
whispered
with a finger to her lips, ‘your mother has had an attack of nerves.’ Martin clenched his jaw muscles. After a cool look at the scene he turned round and left the room. Anna lingered at the foot of the bed, looking down uneasily at the ashen mother. My God, she thought, if he deals with his mother like this, how will he deal with me later if there’s anything the matter with me? She found it stuffy. She tiptoed out of the room with her hand on her throat. Martin was sitting at the kitchen table, depressed. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said, ‘but I tell you: it’s all play-acting. There’s nothing wrong with her.’ ‘How can you be sure of that now?’ said Anna indignantly. ‘Fine,’ he sighed, ‘you’re being
sympathetic
in spite of everything. Go back there and feel her pulse, then you’ll see how serious she is about it.’ Anna returned to the bedroom timidly. She put a finger on the substantial pulse. The friend nodded blandly to her. The heartbeat was calm and regular, just as it should be. The eyes did not open a chink; she was lying on the pillows like an enormous black dahlia.