The Twins (31 page)

‘I’ll go and get the rest of the coupons,’ said Lotte, ‘at least if there are any left.’ For the first time she felt a crack in her
self-control
. Calm thoughts, tactical strategies became impossible. She was not herself any more, in a manner of speaking, or perhaps at last she was now herself. Grimly, she set off upstairs, invaded his sanctuary without knocking. There he sat … he was smoking a home-grown cigarette and looked up interrupted from reading an underground newspaper spread open on the workbench. It seemed as though two broken wires at the top of her skull made contact … as though twenty-one years had evaporated … She saw a dark
figure
standing in the doorway of a classroom, his black wings tightly folded … ‘How dare you …’ his voice intoned in the distance, ‘… to two children who are weaker than you …’ It was merely a glimpse, an echo that came and disappeared, but left a strong emotion behind it. ‘How dare you …’ she said with a trembling voice, ‘to mother, who is so weak …’

‘Just come in once again,’ he said, ‘and knock first.’ There was a short circuit between the two wires … she took a step forward and held out her hand ostentatiously. ‘Give me the rest of the coupons that were meant for mother …’ Raising her voice she added: ‘Immediately!’ He began to laugh in disbelief. ‘Where in God’s name did you …’ he said stupidly. ‘You know very well what I am talking about.’ She wanted to injure him as he sat there and played the innocent – too cowardly to come out with it. But her contempt was even greater than her hate. This had to be settled quickly and efficiently, then she would have nothing more to do with it. The map hung behind him framed in blue velvet. Little flags everywhere, stubbornly stuck into it as though they concerned personal victories. Germany, flag free, apparently had nothing to do with the war. Germany was a vacuum, an absorbent hole into which her gaze disappeared. How many ways were there for you to hate yourself?

He laughed in her face. ‘Give those coupons back,’ she said icily, ‘otherwise I’ll tell everyone what a scoundrel you are.’ The grin disappeared from his face. He stared at her as though he was seeing her for the first time, overwhelmed, still not ready to believe it. Then the realization began to move up his neck in a red flush; angrily he pulled open a drawer beneath the workbench,
rummaged
about randomly in it and pulled out a mostly used sheet of coupons. He came at her with it threateningly. Lotte did not move a muscle and stood where she was – she felt no trace of fear. If he asked for it she would squash him like a flea. He pushed the sheet of paper into her hand angrily. ‘A proper Kraut …’ he hissed, ‘as you see, after all those years … still a proper Kraut.’ She had just enough strength to get to her bedroom, apparently composed. In a false scent of perfume and expensive soap she fell down onto her bed. Her heart was throbbing in her head. How did he know how to find her weakest spot so mercilessly … perhaps because he
himself
in effect was half … She was nauseated. With closed eyes she lay there until the knocking in her temples was less and the drone
of English bombers got through to her, flying to the east. How many ways were there for you to hate yourself?

When no one was expecting him any longer the barber turned up with the news that an address had been found for Grandfather Tak and his daughter: a miller who lived in a remote spot on the polder. If it had been for the old man alone they would not have accepted the offer, but everyone breathed a sigh of relief at the thought of being free of the daughter, who believed herself to be too beautiful for this planet and all imaginable worlds. Marie took her away late in the evening by bicycle. Lotte followed the next evening – the old man who weighed nothing sat behind and anxiously held onto her hips. It was freezing, the frosty meadows reflected the light of the moon. Bent, pollarded willows formed a guard of honour either side of the narrow path, of long-dead
greybeards
who were welcoming Grandfather Tak into their ranks. But he was still alive and sighed nostalgically. ‘Ach Lotte, would you believe it … if I were young I would kiss you here in the
moonlight
…’ Lotte turned round laughing, the bicycle swerved
dangerously
. ‘If you say any more naughty things,’ she threatened cheerfully, ‘we’ll end up in the ditch.’

With regret she handed him over to the miller, who stood in the doorway like an apparition in his long white underwear. It was an unreal, disturbing transaction. Grandfather Tak leaned over and kissed the back of her chilled hand. The last she saw of him was his little bald pate shining in the moonlight, because he thought a keppel, such as his Persian son-in-law wore, humbug.

The news of what happened to him subsequently reached them indirectly and in crumbs. There was one constant: the rapid decline of the thread of the old man’s life. His daughter suffered from claustrophobia in the flat, frozen no man’s land where her charms were wasted; she had bitten her manicured nails until they bled. When the miller was visited by his family she beseeched them to rescue her from dying of boredom and to take her with them to the inhabited world. They yielded to her despair. That
was how she landed up in a village street. She took up a
provocative
pose by the window. At least ten times a day they asked her to move away from there because she brought not only herself into danger but also them and the chain of people who had taken care of her in the past. But for Flora Bohjul to be seen was an essential of life; she would rather give herself up and be interrogated in a risqué striped prisoner’s uniform by a charming commandant than let her days slip through her fingers between pillar and post in a horrible anonymity smelling of cabbage. She slid out of the house and reported to the Ortskommandantur, confident that she was inviolable through her marriage to a Persian Jew. When this news reached the miller he threw the old man out of the house in the dead of night, fearing that she would squeal. Torn out of his deepest sleep he wandered displaced through the meadows. The guard of honour of pollarded willows offered him hospitality again, but he could neither see nor hear anything – the only thing his organism probably desired was a warm bed. No one knew how long his freedom lasted that night. In the dawn light he seemed to have walked into the hands of the Germans, exhausted and numb with cold. To save themselves the formalities and the problems of transport, they put a permanent end to his weariness with a few bullets, in the back garden of the villa where they were billeted.

Dismay was everywhere at Lotte’s home. A very old person who scarcely took up space on this planet. Why? And if an old man’s life was dealt with this carelessly so near home, what was the fate of those who were put on transports? The dismay had double foundations for Lotte – who had neatly delivered him to the one who would send him on to his murderers? Who, in her so-called innocence, had once again become a willing tool in the hands of the occupier? Watch out for me! I am even worse than those who openly make war. I am friend and foe in one. I? There is no I, only an ambivalent treacherous we, who deceives itself in itself … She immersed herself in housekeeping with an almost sardonic
devotion
, simply eliminating herself – her despicable self.

As though crocuses and budding branches were out of tune with the phenomenon of war, spring got off to a hesitant start. Ed de Vries deserted his shelter address to fetch the box; he needed a couple of things that were in it, he said vaguely. Lotte’s father picked up a shovel and dug an immense hole, allowing for shifts in the earth and growth of tree roots, but the box did not surface. Perhaps they had made a mistake about the tree. Another spot was tried. The deeper the holes became the greater the suspicion he was loading onto himself. He took it very seriously. His image to the outside world was at stake. He set the children to work on it. All day long they poked the ground in vain with long iron poles. Max Frinkel advised engaging a renowned clairvoyant; before the war there had been one in Curaçao Street in Amsterdam. Lotte’s father dismissed the suggestion cynically, allergic to anything to do with religion or the supernatural. It was his wife, sufficiently
recovered
to contradict his prejudices, who sent Lotte forth – you never knew.

No glass globes, playing cards, eastern trinkets. The psychic looked like a bookkeeper in a grey suit; his office was bare and
businesslike
. Sobered, Lotte took her seat by his desk. She looked at him expectantly, not knowing how to begin. ‘You have come because something has been lost,’ he said calmly, ‘I will tell you: it is still there. There is a path with trees. Parallel to it is another row of trees …’ She nodded in bewilderment. ‘… It is there … in the vicinity of the fifth tree … I would say.’ It was as though he were walking around in the wood with her and
en
passant
pointed out the spot to her with his walking stick. And that without evident display, without magic tricks or rituals. He spoke in a tone in which one discusses business matters. She did not know what she ought to think about it; a bit of hocus-pocus might perhaps have made him more credible.

‘Then I’d like to ask you something else …’ she said shyly,
fishing
a photo out of her bag, ‘can you say anything about … him?’ He took it. She watched with a calm that surprised her – she could
always disregard his findings. He took the photo in, glanced at her, at the photo, at her – without seeing her. The photo began to tremble; it seemed as though the person who was depicted in it was coming to life of his own accord. But it was the hand holding it that was trembling. The whole man began to shudder. With eyes that were bulging from fear he looked at the photo spellbound. He loosened his tie, wiped randomly over his forehead. ‘I … I … can’t tell you anything …’ he uttered breathing heavily, turning the photo over tormentedly as though he could no longer bear the image. Under his hand he shoved it towards her. ‘… But can’t you say … anything … at all?’ Lotte attempted. He shook his head, with tightly closed lips. She put the photo back in her bag and stammered a polite phrase. As she went down the stairs she felt slightly ashamed for leaving him in that condition.

It had become a familiar pattern by now: tired of eating, talking, raking up the past, tired from listening, softened up from the
conflicting
sensations, they were leaving a restaurant. Anna put her arm through Lotte’s, who accepted it with a certain resignation.

They found themselves in the Place du Monument. Anna stopped at the foot of the monument, bending forward to read the text on the plinth.

‘Cette urne renferme des Cendres provenant de Crématoire du Camp de Concentrations de Flossenburg et de ses commandos, 1940–1945.’ She exaggerated the pronunciation like all foreigners.

Lotte pulled her away, annoyed by so much perverse German curiosity.

‘Mensch, Mensch, are you still troubled by a guilty conscience?’ Anna exclaimed.

Now that was going too far. ‘You twist things so beautifully,’ she said irritably. ‘I have absolutely no guilty conscience, why should I? That at the time I did take all the guilt onto myself … I was young and egocentric, thought I was the linchpin the world turned on, that I had influence over the fate of another. The
arrogance
of youth …’

‘You’re saying something there …’ Anna looked at her, touched. ‘It was like that with me too, young and egocentric. You hit the nail on the head … With heart and soul I only cared about that one person …’

Lotte shook her head with annoyance. The egocentricity of her youth could not be put on a par with Anna’s just like that in one line – there was a chasm of difference between the two. Anna had a crafty habit of turning everything round. She sighed. She could
not find the arguments fast enough to enfeeble this presumptuous equal treatment. She walked off, offended.

‘Wait … wait … Lottchen …’ Anna pleaded after her.

That sounded like a very long time ago. As a child she had already been much faster than her plump sister. A whiff of
nostalgia
for her youth threatened to surface.

‘Listen here, do wait a minute … I want to tell you something, something you’ll be flabbergasted at … wait …’ Anna was panting. ‘Did you know that I could have changed the course of history? There was a moment when I …’

Wearily Lotte turned. That tactic she recognized too from long, long ago. Anna would try to tempt her by making her curious: ‘I have discovered a jar of sweets somewhere, a jar of marbles …’

Anna caught up with her. ‘There was a moment,’ she grinned, ‘when the war turned on a stupid housekeeper in West Prussia, a certain …’

‘Anna Bamberg,’ said Lotte laconically.

‘You don’t believe me.’

With the flow of a caravan of refugees from Berlin, which probably no longer existed, Anna returned to the estate. Frau von Garlitz had received a billeting order. The castle swarmed with homeless townspeople who had to be provided with everything in the way of food and clean clothes, and, on Anna’s shining parquet floors, were trying to come to terms with the trauma of their burning,
collapsing
city.

When the castle was already thoroughly saturated, the wife of a senior officer arrived, with a baby and a whining toddler.

‘My husband holds the Knight’s Cross,’ thus Frau von
So-and
-So introduced herself, reckoning that all doors would now be opened for her. Those who were awarded that cross had killed a lot of people, Anna knew. Whenever it was mentioned on the radio that someone had received this medal, Martin always said, ‘Somebody will have a sore throat again,’ because the order was
worn hung tight around the neck. Anna had no idea where to accommodate the hero’s wife. She crossed the courtyard brooding until her eye fell on the coachman’s house above the stables. The coachman had disappeared at the same time as the horses. He had left an adequate dwelling behind, a large living-room, two
bedroom
s
, a bathroom and a kitchen. We could let the high-up lady live here without us needing to feel embarrassed, Anna decided. But three days later another young mother arrived with baby and toddler – the wife of a factory worker without a ‘von’. Anna
reasoned
: if the noble lady gave up one room, and they shared the bathroom and kitchen in a friendly manner, they could live together in the coachman’s house.
En
passant
she buttonholed Frau von Garlitz half-way up the stairs for her approval. ‘What?’ she cried scandalized, ‘You can’t saddle a lady of status with a woman from who knows where.’ ‘She’s just a mother,’ said Anna calmly, ‘with two children, nothing else, and that other one is also a mother with two children. She will still have two rooms to herself all the time.’ Frau von Garlitz looked at her as though she had a dangerously mentally ill person opposite her. She shook her head. ‘It is not on.’ War or no war, she was not allowing a headstrong housekeeper to remove with one stroke her conviction that different sorts of people existed who, from their birth – each at their own level – had a
different
destiny and therefore lived in different worlds. ‘Then I’ll give her my own rooms,’ cried Anna. ‘Out of the question.’ Their argument blared down the staircase; everyone could enjoy it. ‘You are a Bolshevik!’ the Countess accused her. ‘Fine, then I’m a Bolshevik.’ Anna turned her back on her and left her standing there. At the foot of the stairs Ottchen was waiting with a stern expression, he who had licked his superiors’ boots since childhood. ‘How dare you take such a tone with the gnädige Frau,’ he hissed. Anna positioned herself right in front of him. ‘Otto, I’ll tell you something. What I have to say to her I say to her face. I’d give my life for her if needs be. You bow low but with a knife in your boots. You say “Jawohl, gnädige Frau” slavishly but at the same time
your eyes sparkle with hate. I’ve seen it, you don’t fool me.’

For the mother, who was unaware of the storms raging over her head, Anna eventually found a draughty attic room without stove, without water, without window. The unsuitability of it deprived her of all the pleasure of continuing to have civilized
contact
with her employer. She had been accustomed to waking her in the mornings, drawing open the curtains and having a gentle morning conversation with her from the end of the bed. For Frau von Garlitz this was a precious ritual that reconciled her with the umpteenth day of war in the scarcely manageable chaos that had the estate in its grasp. Now Anna snapped her a contemptuous morning greeting, tore the curtains open and disappeared fast. After five days the Countess could endure it no longer. ‘Damned mule,’ she cried unladylike from her four-poster bed, ‘can’t you say good morning at least?’ ‘I said good morning.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ she sat up against the embroidered pillows, ‘but how! Come …’ she tapped her fingers on the edge of the bed, ‘don’t be cross any more … sit down. Go and fetch that woman and take her to the
coachman’s
house … do what you wish … you understand so much more about that sort of thing than I do …’

One Sunday in March a younger sister of the Countess was
getting
married. Frau von Garlitz set off with her children before the crack of dawn to her parents’ castle, where the wedding was to be celebrated: her husband would come by aeroplane from Brussels to Germany.
Deo
gratias
,
thought Anna, the empire alone at last. As she was turning over in bed once more, a popular song went through her head: ‘This is my Sunday delight, in bed till ten o’clock, then nobody can get me out of it …’ But at nine o’clock there was a merciless knocking at her bedroom door. It was Ottchen, so agitated he could scarcely get his words out. The
military
aircraft that was to bring Herr von Garlitz to Berlin had crashed over Bohemia: none of the occupants had survived. Anna was quick to get
over the shock. She did not delude herself into believing that she was sad. The only one she was anxious about
was Frau von Garlitz, who reappeared at the gate half-way through the afternoon. The wedding had been postponed. She gave orders with the remarkable self-control required of her position – only her nostrils were trembling slightly. She kept a cool head about
everything
: a state funeral had to be prepared.

Anna was sent to Frau Ketteler at great speed to tell her in
person
of the tragic death of the apple of her eye. With a horse and carriage she rushed to the remote villa. Through a dark tunnel of spruces that exuded a damp spicy smell she walked to the staff entrance. She pushed the door open. No one was there. The only thing that was sounding, with regular interruptions, was the
electric
bell with which the lady of the house summoned the maid to her room via a pedal next to her armchair. Surprised, Anna walked along the corridor. Where was the staff? Did they all have Sunday off? What was the point of calling them then? Although Anna did not know Frau Ketteler’s villa, it was not difficult to find her room – she only needed to look for the source of the staccato sound. The door stood open a crack. She looked in on a dim room, spruce branches pushing up against the windows. On a Persian carpet in front of the hearth, where a professional fire was blazing, lay Herr von Garlitz’s aunt – on her back. She was being mounted by her favourite sheepdog: both were at full gallop, which explained the continual on and off of the bell as she was lying on top of the pedal. Apparently she had not allowed herself enough time before the ride to pull this out from under her back. Anna held her breath. She had never suspected that what she saw here, illuminated from the side by the flames, could exist at all and even now, as she looked at it, she did not believe it. With fascinated horror she stared at the animal lover’s flushed face – this was an unsuitable moment to trouble her. The sheepdog looked into the distance with glazed eyes. Suddenly Anna was afraid that he would get a scent of her presence. She fled down the passage, out of the house, between the antiseptic spruces to the ordinary world where the spectacle easily seemed like a bizarre dream.

Back at the castle she said she had not found Frau Ketteler at home. The truth could not cross her lips – it would be thought that she was imagining perverse fantasies. Moreover, everyone was preoccupied with the mystery of how the military aircraft had crashed over Bohemia. That was surely far off the route from Brussels to Berlin? There had been no bombing raids that day that one would have had to avoid. Secretly it was suggested that a
political
reason existed for taking Herr von Garlitz out of the way;
discredited
individuals were increasingly having accidents. Anna remained level-headed. She could think of no single reason why the life of this clever dick would be worth the sacrifice of a military aircraft. Yet she also slowly realized that another truth might exist behind the generally accepted one. Just as beneath the exterior of Frau Ketteler something lurked that was completely, inconceivably different.

The coffin with the material remains was delivered after a few days. It was entrusted to the gardener. He grabbed her behind the hedge and said, looking round with panic: ‘Did you know there’s absolutely … nothing in the coffin …’ ‘Oh no,’ Anna swayed back. With a weathered hand, which had toiled in the earth for half a century, he led her by the elbow to an outbuilding where the coffin stood on trestles in the semi-darkness. It was too small to contain an adult man. When they lifted it up it seemed remarkably light, something rattled back and forth inside. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ the gardener whispered, ‘not a whole person in any case.’ ‘Frau von Garlitz mustn’t notice,’ Anna said hurriedly. ‘Put stones into it before the funeral so that the coffin weighs as much as a person. That thing will have to be carried. Cover it with flags, decorate it with flowers and greenery …’

Until late into the night she sat at the sewing machine in her room making a mourning dress out of a black evening dress of Frau von Garlitz’s for her daughter, fourteen-year-old Christa. ‘What are you doing Anna?’ the Countess’s voice suddenly sounded through the noise of the machine, flat and robbed of any
inflection. ‘Christa doesn’t have a dress for the funeral,’ Anna mumbled with three pins between her lips. Frau von Garlitz dropped down into a chair in her night-dress. She followed Anna’s actions with an empty gaze. ‘What would I do without you,’ she whispered, ‘no one has done so much for me as you.’ Anna, who had little experience of receiving compliments, blushed up to the hairline and cranked the sewing machine with double force. Her employer was seated on the upright chair, nodding off, as though Anna were her last remaining refuge. Her head sagged onto her chest – now and then she lifted it with a jerk as though the inner realization of early widowhood kept occurring to her. Anna’s head was reverberating with worries about the funeral the following day: the state guests had to be offered a welcome fitting to their status and function; no element must be missing from the military
ceremonial
… the whole farce in memory of a nonentity had to go off faultlessly.

When the sun rose the dress was ready. There was no point in going to bed. She felt a strange lucidity that overcame her tiredness and would have prevented her sleeping. She took Frau von Garlitz, leaning heavily on her, to bed, and hurried downstairs. It was a chilly, lustreless day. Everyone conformed to the scenario: the official guests played their parts with a practised, abstract
dignity
that led to the suspicion that funerals were just as much a commonly occurring and obvious aspect of their careers as thinking up strategies or inspecting troops. In the front rank, behind the coffin professionally draped with Nazi flags and flora, walked Goering’s representative with clenched jaws, broad and massive as a tank. Frau von Garlitz, flanked by her children, floated behind like a black angel, pale and serene and not of this world. To the accompaniment of speeches, in which his services for the
fatherland
were made much of and rhetorically vanished between the chestnut trees, the deceased was placed in the family grave on the estate where he had been born – not for long, as history would relate.