The Twins (27 page)

‘My little boy, my bubele, take him along with you …’ Lotte had to hide her desperation; she felt she was being judged by an invisible tribunal. If she had known that the child would be carried off she would certainly have taken the risk of the train journey. If he had been picked up on that occasion she would definitely have been guilty, but less so than now: now she hadn’t even tried. This was a lacerating, dead-end thought that went back and forth like a diabolo between guilt and guilt. She was being confronted with an intrinsic, subtle cruelty of existence that offered her no possibility of a choice. She had not been prepared for life to become so
serious
. What made it even worse was that no one thought of blaming her at all and she was seemingly struggling with a luxuriously
self-indulgent
problem in comparison with Ruben Meyer’s legitimate sorrow and loneliness. It was decided to be silent about it in front of his mother: what could they come up with for a Jewish mother who was beside herself? They led her to believe that her children had been taken to another address that evening. Every day she complained: ‘But couldn’t they write a letter all the same?’ ‘That’s still much too dangerous,’ her son mollified her with a breaking heart, ‘the post is also being intercepted. No one must know where they are.’ He walked about the house with drooping shoulders; it exhausted him to lie to his mother every day.

David’s father came over carrying a box. Although he had not
received any more news from his son he had regained something of the old indestructibility that had characterized the mood of his songs. ‘We are also going into hiding,’ he said, ‘I’ve got some
knick-knacks
here … some bits and pieces …’ He tapped the box. ‘We would be very sorry if they were lost. Would it be all right with you if we buried it here in your garden or in the wood?’ ‘It’s fine with me,’ said Lotte’s father casually, ‘but not in the garden because every inch of it is in use now.’ He was alluding to the tobacco plants that he had sown and for which he would also have sacrificed a large part of the kitchen garden if his wife had not set limits. Lotte leaned on the balcony and watched the two men
walking
into the wood with a shovel – it made her feel uneasy, although she did not know why.

‘You are still as angry as ever,’ Anna remarked, assessing Lotte accurately, ‘you have been hoarding your rage for almost fifty years. Get it out! I am the obvious person, I offer myself, I’ve
certainly
stood in hotter fires before in my life. You have every reason to be angry!’

‘I’m not angry at all,’ Lotte’s hands were clenched into fists on the table. She spread her fingers out hastily. ‘I am merely telling you what happened.’

‘Why deny you are angry? You have been projecting all that rage onto me for days now, selbstverständlich.’ Anna leaned back contentedly. ‘I am offering myself. Go on, blame me!’

‘But I have been doing that continuously,’ Lotte sighed, ‘and you keep shooting back in defence.’

‘I won’t any more, come on. You must first blow off steam …’

Lotte looked at her sceptically now that they were onto the
therapeutic
tack, in this coffee house with big-city allure, among
business
people and housewives who were calmly sipping their coffee.

‘I’ll help you a little bit. We’ll order another cup of coffee and then I’ll tell you something I’m still as deeply ashamed of as ever.’

Martin’s letters were coming from deeper and deeper south. That mobility stopped just before the Caucasus – he had caught a
dangerous
intestinal infection; Anna received letters written by his comrades. She did not allow herself to be misled by their blatant attempts to disguise the seriousness with anecdotes and
pleasantries
; the anxiety made her throw herself into her work with
monomaniac
industry. Then one day his writing was on the envelope again. The crisis had been averted with a diet of milk and tomatoes; they were crossing the Ponto-Caspian plain towards Taganrog. Anna received several letters in close succession: defects in the lorry were dictating the pace, the vehicle was weary of travelling, Russia was too large. Eight days too late they reached the town on the Black Sea from where they would have to fly to Stalingrad for the grand finale. They had not been expected, had been given up for lost, so the lorry’s crew stood outside the Grand Plan – they were officially sent on leave. One year after the dress rehearsal Martin obtained permission to get married.

‘Anna, Anna, come here, there’s a telegram for you.’ Frau von Garlitz’s voice resounded through the passages. One of the
cleaning
women from the village, who had been keeping a fattened goose at the ready for the postponed marriage, hastily slaughtered the main course of the wedding feast. A pigskin suitcase was packed full of provisions, another with the wedding dress,
necessary
papers and other bits of the trousseau. ‘You don’t really think it’ll really happen now?’ Herr von Garlitz smirked. Ottchen, the old butler, took her to the station with the last remaining horse.

The crowded train was about to depart. Ottchen grabbed the cases from the cart and shoved them inside over the bellies of the soldiers who lay asleep on the platform. ‘Go to the devil with a
capital
D!’ they protested. Anna exhausted herself apologizing,
stepping
carefully between them. After a trek along crowded corridors she found a space in a first-class compartment. The train roared through the night like a maniac; they halted in the protectorate of
Bohemia-Moravia, orders were yelled, and then they continued as far as just before Vienna, where the train had to wait four hours for an air raid alarm to end.

On arrival the pigskin suitcase seemed to have disappeared. A soldier remembered that someone with a suitcase had got off in Bohemia, perhaps he had scented the goose. In the commotion about the lost item Anna did not realize that it was Martin
touching
her discreetly, accompanied by his father. She shrank back. Thousands of kilometres lay between them; for weeks he had only existed in his comrades’ handwriting; he had been a concentric point drawing all her feelings to it, a magnet for anxiety and
longing
… now he was standing there, it was somewhat banal. They greeted each other formally – not here, in front of everyone. In the tram on the way to his father’s house, his clean-shaven neck
fascinated
her, a vulnerable, timid neck, so complete despite snow,
illness
, inhospitability – despite the war.

They were married in the Karlskirche. The bridegroom had made a final attempt to get his mother’s approval and to persuade her to be present. ‘The day of my life!’ he cried, giving her a good shaking. ‘It is the day of my life!’ She pressed the tips of her fingers to her temples and screwed her eyes shut tight. So he left her behind for ever in her domain, where now she only had herself as victim of her domination. Overwhelmed by the scale and excess of the interior of the domed church, Anna let herself be led to the altar. Pillars, wall panels and galleries of pink, brown, sandy and black marble. Behind one of the pillars, she assumed, her future mother-in-law had positioned herself under cover, with a great sense of timing waiting for the critical moment to spring out and perform a tragic drama that would make the bedroom scene of a year ago pale in comparison. But the paintings on the ceiling in the dome distracted her, as did the golden rays that came out of a
triangle
with a Hebrew inscription and angels floating between them, above the altar, a window with golden glass through which a bronze glow shone and enveloped the small bridal procession –
somewhere in the heavenly spheres there had to be a higher
organization
, a secret plan laid out in detail, delineating their lives from moment to moment, with a deeper, unfathomable purpose. She looked sideways at the bridegroom’s profile – his Adam’s apple went up and down as the organ, much ornamented with gold, began a hymn.

After the ceremony was over they floated down the steps between Greek columns, obelisks and two white marble angels holding crosses up to the sky. Anna looked round mechanically. The right one was staring at the horizon full of inner calm, the left one looked more stern – and a snake was entwined around her cross. A feeling she had presumed dead, but that was suddenly brought to life by the ceremony, went right through her. Lotte. Not the stranger who had visited her in Cologne, but Lotte as she was then … there she was … if anyone must not be absent from the wedding it was she … and why shouldn’t she be there in the form of an angel? In which case she herself was the other one, with the snake … They were looking at the world with marble eyes as though they understood something of it … The bridal gathering had crossed to the other side opposite the Karlskirche, the wind caught hold of her veil – for a moment tangible reality was
something
hazy and vague to her, through the fine mesh of tulle.

They moved into the apartment of Martin’s dead grandmother; the woman’s hairs were still in a comb left behind on the chest of drawers. A house of one’s own … they turned to each other with an insatiable hunger as though the thousands of lost hours had to be caught up. The city and surroundings were a fitting backdrop for their honeymoon, except for one small flaw, when they came across a small group of people with yellow stars on their coats
strolling
slowly down the worn steps in the Mölker Bastei in the old city. Martin went rigid. With a strange sort of piety he took his arm out of Anna’s and stared at them, affected by it, as they passed in silence. She shrunk more from Martin’s involvement than the procession, which was silently manifesting something that was new
and yet immediately obvious to her. ‘Come,’ she pleaded, pulling at his sleeve, ‘don’t look, please, come on.’ He allowed himself to be led away with difficulty. The whole day she reproached the
procession
for having appeared in their way, like a sombre admonition.

She wanted to live, to live intensively, in the three weeks that they were allowed – enough for a whole life.

When she was packing her suitcase listlessly the evening before the departure, the voices of Martin and his father could be heard faintly from the next-door room. ‘Here, my son, I’ve bought long under-trousers for you because it is so cold there, take them.’ ‘No,’ Martin protested, ‘that’s not necessary.’ ‘Why not? Anna won’t be around there.’ A short wry laugh. ‘It’s not that …’ ‘What then?’ ‘Ach, father, that cold doesn’t mean anything compared to the other dangers we are exposed to.’ ‘But surely signals troops run less of a risk, you don’t fight at the front?’ Incomprehensible
mumbling
, Anna brought her head close to the door-frame. There were partisans everywhere, she heard Martin saying, especially where you least expected them. The signals troops were also vulnerable when they were working in a small group behind the advancing front, placing masts, laying cables, hauling wires. One day a
technician
high up on a mast couldn’t find his pliers. ‘Hang on,’ cried Martin, who was supervising the work, ‘I’ll just go and get them.’ He walked to the lorry, which was hidden behind pine trees. As he was looking for them he heard short staccato screaming in the
distance
, followed by an abrupt silence. He sneaked back cautiously, seeking cover behind the trees. Where just a moment before his comrades had been busy with hammers and pliers twelve bodies lay with their throats cut, between motionless stems of tall grass. The perpetrators had dissolved into nowhere, a hasty, soundless hit-and-run operation beneath a cloudless sky.

Her father-in-law’s comment escaped her. Anna sank down on the edge of the bed next to the half-full suitcase. This then was the other side of the blossoming fields of sunflowers, of an untuned grand piano in a farmhouse, of a case of books in a flea market. It
happened like that, from one second to the next, at the edge of a soft green pine wood amid blossoming grass. It did not matter whether the landscape was idyllic.