The Twins (47 page)

‘Those are the things you never forget in your whole life,’ said Anna.

‘You don’t forget anything,’ suggested Lotte sombrely.

‘What a disillusion that was, my visit to you … You refused to speak German, I could only communicate with you via your
husband
– in so far as there was contact at all. He translated everything I said, the brave soul, and the rare answers you gave.’

‘No further word of German passed my lips. I had no more to do with that language. You might as well have spoken in Russian.’

‘But surely that couldn’t be so, your mother tongue! Even now you still speak it fluently.’

‘Yet it was so.’

‘It was psychological of course. You did not want to have to deal with me and you entrenched yourself behind Dutch …’ Now Anna became fierce. ‘You have no idea how difficult it was for me. You were the only one I still had. I wanted to get to know you, I wanted to apologize for my behaviour when you came looking for me. I wanted to show that I had changed. But you were busy with your baby. A baby – that made it all the worse! You bathed the baby, fed the baby, combed the baby’s hair … You ignored me. I did everything to awaken your interest: I was thin air to you. Your husband was embarrassed with the situation. He tried to take care
of it as well as possible … Why didn’t you rant and rave at me, call me everything under the sun, so I could have defended myself? But that evasiveness … I did not exist to you.’

Lotte looked round with agitation to see if anyone was walking about whom she could pay for her coffee. She wanted to get away and as fast as possible. The longer it went on the crazier it got. She was even being called upon to justify herself now. The world was on its head. ‘I hadn’t asked for you to come, you didn’t interest me.’

‘That’s true, I didn’t interest you … you had your baby …’

‘That child was my rescue,’ she snapped at Anna. ‘It reconciled me to my life … my children are everything to me.’

Anna sighed despondently. Her sister was still unreachable behind the fortification of her progeny; she herself was still alone and childless, notwithstanding the hundreds of children she had helped in her life. She sensed a vague pain in her chest … from the excitement … stupid, stupid, stupid. Silly to have thought that she could still put anything right.

‘Lotte, don’t walk away,’ she said remorsefully, ‘it’s all so long ago. Let’s … let’s eat together, I’ll treat you. It really is a miracle that we have found each other again, here in Spa, let’s enjoy it as long as it can be …’

Lotte allowed herself to be persuaded. What was she making a fuss about actually? It was Sunday evening, there was nothing she had to do. They transferred to the dining-room and ordered an aperitif.

‘I’ve brought my sister with me,’ Anna cried proudly. The waiter laughed formally. Lotte felt the irritation creeping up like an itch.

‘When did your husband die in fact?’ Anna asked, ‘I liked him. He was serious, civilized … refined, I would almost …’

‘Ten years ago,’ Lotte interrupted her curtly.

‘From what?’

‘A heart attack … overwork, all those years …’

‘Do you ever go to his grave? Or was he …?’

‘Sometimes …’ Lotte refused any form of companionship here. She was not inclined to compete on this point – with an SS officer killed in action.

‘I go twice a year, on All Saints’ Day and in the spring, with a wreath and a candle.’

Twice a year she was warmly welcomed by the mother and her daughter to commemorate the tragic death and the miracle of the survival. It gnawed away at her that the grave had not been blessed. She decided to speak to the unyielding pastor. She waited for him, straight after the mass, at which the holy commandment ‘Love your enemies’ had been the theme. He was still in full regalia. ‘Father,’ she buttonholed him, ‘one of the three soldiers in the cemetery was my husband. We are Catholics, my husband and I, that is why I ask you to bless the grave.’ He laughed scornfully. ‘I do not care whether you are Catholics or not, they were in the SS.’ ‘But …’ Anna reminded him, ‘you have just been preaching: Love your enemies. He raised one of his heavy black eyebrows, which made him look rather mephistophelean himself, and sneered, ‘I do not bless the grave of a member of the SS.’ ‘He had only been in the SS for a fortnight,’ she cried, ‘he had absolutely no choice!’ In response to her emotional outburst the pastor cast her a dismissive look before leaving her where she stood and walking away down a dim aisle.

Blessed or not, from the first money she earned as an employee of the Cologne local authority she saved up for a headstone together with a sandstone cross with all three names chiselled on it. That was in place between the yews and conifers for a decade, well tended by the three women, until the end of the fifties, when the rumour was going round that the three soldiers were going to a newly laid-out military cemetery in a nearby village. In that case, thought Anna, I would rather take him to Cologne. She succeeded in getting a permit from the city council to have him interred in the soldiers’ cemetery in Cologne. Thus armed she went to visit
the pastor once again – the graveyard came under the church’s
jurisdiction
. After she had informed him, formally and neutrally, of her intentions, and had shown him the permit, she left her address with him with the request to warn her when the grave was being emptied.

All Souls came round again and Anna made her ritual journey. A thick mist hung low over the earth; it smelled of wet leaves and chrysanthemums. Experienced, she pushed the squeaking gate open. She walked between graves with burning candles; the flames were motionless in the damp air. At the spot where her journey usually ended in wreath-laying and a prayer she found an
impersonal
square piece of grass with dry autumn leaves on it. Puzzled, she looked around. Had she walked the wrong way? My grave, she thought in panic, where is my grave? A procession was approaching along the mossy central path, enshrouded in the mist. The pastor was at the front in his chasuble followed by the villagers with their candles. It dawned on her. There he strode, the unbending
representative
of the mother church, in his solemn robes that were a harlequin costume on him. There went the uncharitable
sanctimonious
one, under whose direction people were going to pray for the salvation of the favoured dead. Perhaps he would be called to account one day, but she was not inclined to wait quietly for that. With large vengeful strides she walked up to him and stationed herself half-way along the path with her hands on her hips. The heavy eyebrows rose. ‘Where is my grave,’ she flung in his face, ‘where is my husband, where is my headstone? After all, I gave you my address, you should have warned me!’ The villagers stared at her in amazement. They knew precisely what Anna was talking about: she was their war widow. The pastor said nothing; he shifted his weight from one foot to the other and observed her
disapprovingly
, as though he had a hysteric in front of him. ‘There’s nothing there any more …’ she cried, ‘nothing …’ She heard a ringing in her ears, the sound of her own voice disappeared into the background. She wobbled out of the way, overcome with dizziness,
sinking down disrespectfully onto a slanting tombstone, her head in her hands, the wreath lost in the grass beside her. As the
procession
moved on an old woman knelt down by her and whispered: ‘They were exhumed and taken to Gerolstein, to the memorial cemetery.’

Having come to her senses again, hours later in Gerolstein, she found no idyllic cemetery with mossy tombstones and crosses
overgrown
with ivy but a brand-new field divided into geometric square. Parallel strips of white sand between vertical planks with numbers on them. She laid her wreath in the middle of the field of the dead. I am sorry Martin, she apologized, the wreath is for all of you now.

‘Crosses were erected later on there. The three soldiers are still next to each other.’ Anna laughed. ‘The fact that the three of them stayed behind instead of pinching apples has bound them to each other for eternity. It says “Unknown soldier” on many crosses. I still go there sometimes, mostly in the spring. The cemetery is high up on a hill, on the edge of the world, forgotten. It is quiet there. Sometimes mothers walk there with small children, because it is a peaceful spot. I sit on a little wall, right by the grave; they chat to me, ask me where I come from, why. Then I say: I am
visiting
my husband here. That terrifies them. They cannot place it any more, it was so long ago. Actually, nor can I either. In recent years I have asked myself: what am I doing here?’

Lotte nodded drowsily. She was drinking more wine than was good for her. The subject did not suit her. And Anna still went on with it, bringing yet more facts to light. That the death of a hero could have such consequences.

‘Now I ask you,’ Anna was imperturbable, ‘why do we really believe that the spiritual existence of the deceased should still be connected to that one spot? Why do we go back there? Out of
nostalgia
? And whom does it benefit? The flower sellers, the
groundsmen
, the people who make headstones – there’s a whole industry
connected with it. It’s their livelihood, and that’s why we still come … Do you want to be buried?’

‘Me?’ Lotte started. ‘Of … of course,’ she stuttered. With an inappropriate frivolity provoked by resentment she said: ‘I want a grave full of wild flowers … I have five children and eight
grandchildren
to care for them.’

‘When I die there will be nothing left of me,’ said Anna being contrary, ‘then there won’t be any public garden you can go to and where anyone has to spend money to put flowers there. Who would do that for me? Who would interest themselves in it? After all, I myself won’t be there at all.’

Lotte pushed her empty coffee cup aside and stood up slowly. ‘I really must go now,’ she murmured. It seemed as though the alcohol had shifted all her weight to her head. She left the
dining-room
with a top-heavy feeling, Anna busy talking behind her.

She grabbed her by one shoulder, breathing heavily; ‘Do you remember the day that … mother … was buried?’

‘No, absolutely not.’ Lotte hazarded a grab for her coat. No more cemeteries, she implored silently.

‘They had placed her coffin on the sofa. We had climbed up onto it, to look out from the bay, to see if she was coming yet. Our feet were resting on the window sill. We drummed loudly on the window with our patent leather shoes because the waiting went on so long, hoping she would hear it and hurry up. Indignant
members
of the family lifted us off the coffin. Only now do I understand that we were sitting on top of her …’

‘Well …’ said Lotte unmoved. For her there was only one mother: the other one. She buttoned her coat and looked round wearily.

‘I’ll see you out,’ said Anna. Beneath the harsh ceiling light she could see an expression midway between resignation and irritation on her sister’s face. She remembered her father had looked exactly like that in the latter days of his illness. That facial expressions could have been inherited! She did not dare state her discovery out
loud. Lotte pushed off so swiftly, there could only be one reason for it: she had been too boisterous again.

With all the tipsy old lady’s strength she could muster, Lotte pulled the heavy front door open. She hesitated on the doorstep. ‘Sleep well,’ she said weakly to the round figure who filled the doorway and still radiated an uncurbed vehemence.

‘I am sorry I talked nineteen to the dozen today.’ Anna put her arms round Lotte guiltily. ‘Tomorrow, I promise, I will let my quieter side show. Sleep well, meine Liebe, schlaf gut und träum süss …’

That night Anna lacked the light-heartedness to fall asleep just like that. Images of funerals and cemeteries jostled each other. Her life had been punctuated by the dead, when she looked back over it, in the way that a cross-section of a glacier recalls the ice ages – how often it had given her life a brusque, harsh turn. She was full of a wonderful elation, as though something celebratory was going to happen. What else could it be but the apotheosis of the approaches she had been making for two weeks now? It was time for a proper reconciliation with her stubborn, squirming sister,
discussed
out loud. If the two of them, born simultaneously from the same mother, loved by the same father, would not succeed in
stepping
over silly obstacles tossed up by history, who on earth could do so? What was the prospect for the world if even the two of them, who were supposed to become milder in their old age, could not throw that one little stone?