The Twins Read online

  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.

  ‘I have something to confess to you,’ said Martin, ‘I have already been walking round all day with it and didn’t dare say it to you … We cannot get married now …’ Anna went rigid. ‘Why not?’ He put an arm round her. His leave was actually illegal, he explained, he had a forged leave-permit. After his company had been in action for weeks they could have three weeks to recuperate. In Russia, mind you. The company commander, a pleasant chap, had suggested: ‘Before you all have to be in that hell again I advise you … go home for two weeks. On my authority.’ Martin would have betrayed them all by getting married: it was an official event that had to be notified to his superiors. Anna nodded without saying anything. Suddenly the war was hugely present again. He laid his head on her shoulder contritely. Everything paled into insignificance beside the fact that he would soon be returning to the east again. And she to the north. That they were no more than pawns on a world-sized chessboard. ‘That hell …’ Anna repeated thoughtfully. ‘Just tell me honestly, Martin, what is it like there? – don’t protect me …’ He put a finger on her lips. ‘Shhh … don’t talk about it,’ he whispered, ‘I’m here precisely to forget it.’

  As the attack of hypochondria began to leave her, the mother rose again from her apparent death. Pottering about the apartment, she took up her positions. Martin and Anna made plans for their last week. ‘I think I’ll go to the savings bank,’ he mused, ‘I don’t want us to have to penny-pinch.’ On the way to the hat stand they heard the front door slam shut. They left the house; the sky, which promised rain, was the colour of the façades in the tenth district. Martin gripped her arm. ‘Well, just look …’ A block ahead of them on the opposite side of the street his mother was dashing in the same direction as they were, head forwards, a large leather bag in her hand like a weapon. ‘What a hurry she’s in,’ he said astonished. They passed a shop window with dirndls. ‘Can you see me in a thing like that?’ Anna said jokingly. Martin turned up his nose. ‘That’s for gushing types who like an Alpine glow and forest horns.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ said the bank official, smiling slightly, ‘two minutes ago your mother wi
thdrew the last of the money in the account.’ ‘But there was a hefty sum in there,’ Martin cried, ‘years of savings.’ He had to sit down. Dazed, staring ahead, he shook his head. ‘Before I left I gave her a letter of authority,’ he said flatly, ‘for emergencies.’ Anna pushed him gently outside. He threw his hat in the air. ‘I’m broke,’ he cried with a shrill laugh that echoed round the walls, ‘O mein lieber Augustin, alles ist hin …’

  He went inside the apartment gruesomely cheerful. His mother was already in the kitchen as though she had never been away. Martin picked up a kitchen chair and stood on it. ‘And what was left in my bank account …?’ he cried rhetorically, ‘nothing …!’ He picked up one of the carefully labelled jars of apricot compote from the shelf, let it slither out of his hands onto the floor and reached out to take a new jar. ‘I’ve been taking care of him all those years,’ his mother began to lament to herself, ‘… gone without food myself … not a shred of gratitude …’ Martin looked down on his whining mother with a jar in his hands. Suddenly he put it back quietly on the shelf, turned it decoratively so the label faced outwards and got down from the chair. ‘Come,’ he said calmly, gripping Anna by one arm, ‘we’re going to pack.’ In a cloud of self-pity, the mother traversed her paltry empire; she threw herself pathetically on her son’s half-packed suitcase on the bed. Anna pushed her wedding dress, which she had hung up, into her suitcase and closed it. A dull throbbing headache located itself between her and the outside world; she followed Martin mechanically out of the house, into the street, onto the tram.

  They were received by the father and his second wife with calm, silent understanding. Anna, who had thought her initiation as a member of the family was now behind her, was brought into the know about the latest mysteries. The father had recently renewed his paternal role after an involuntary interruption of twenty years. All that time Martin’s mother denied him access to his son, and depicted him to his son as a frivolous womanizer and profiteer. When Martin was in the fourth class at the grammar school she refused, for reasons perhaps only she knew the logic of, to accept the father’s monthly study allowance any longer. To the son she said the father no longer wanted to pay, to the father that the son had had enough of studying. She had found a place for him as a pupil in a first-class hairdressing salon just by the Opera in Kärntnerstrasse. Since then, instead of Homer’s hexameters it was the heads of moody divas that he bent over. Her manoeuvres had only come to light when Martin had sought to contact his father on the occasion of his imminent marriage.

  With retrospective force Anna now understood the strange, three-headed reception at the station. The one did not want to yield to the other; the father would not allow himself to be bypassed any more. All that involvement in family entanglement befuddled her. She was inclined to count herself lucky to be someone without parents – although in a certain sense Martin too had become an orphan years ago, with the absence of the father, under the domination of a hysterical mother.

  They resumed their trips with desperate energy. They climbed from the Untere Belvedere, the seventeenth-century summer palace of Prince Eugen of Savoy who liberated Vienna from the Turks, to the even larger Obere Belvedere, the symbol of his power. They visited the Karlskirche, where Martin wanted to be married. They got drunk at the Heuriger tavern. During the days that remained it was as though a reservoir had to be filled with joint pleasures and enjoyments that they would be able to draw from for the rest of their lives.

  She took him to the train with his father. ‘I’ll manage fine …’ he cried from the window of the departing train, ‘Russia is large and the Tsar far away!’

  ‘I still well remember how afraid we were,’ said Lotte, ‘that autumn, that the Russians would lose.’

  ‘I only thought about the life of that one …’ Anna stared at her nails, ‘that was the only thing that interested me. Beyond that I didn’t see, didn’t hear. I hoped and prayed that he would come back. People totally forget that now, the continuous anxiety within which every one of us, at home, had to live – there were millions of boys like Martin there.’

  Lotte felt compelled to help her recall that millions of Russians had been slaughtered by those same boys.

  Anna sprang up. ‘We simply didn’t think about that. With us all you heard was: Advance, advance, Bialystok, Leningrad, Ukraine. Hermann Goering delivered a major speech: “We have conquered the most fertile country in the world …” He promised: “We will do some fine things there. From now on we will have enough butter, enough flour.” Germany was getting thinner: anyone who had skills to contribute was sent there to give advice about farming, health services. Even the greatest fool was somebody there and could do something. The prisoners of war were brought back here to work in the factories. It became a crazy organizational machine, a huge achievement in a certain sense. People at home became ingenious too – you made a jacket out of an old table-cloth, you made your own shoes …’

  ‘The Dutch did that too,’ Lotte snapped.

  ‘Naturally … an emergency mobilizes all the forces that normally lie fallow. That’s why people are so bored now. They have to go on creativity courses. That is the malaise of this age.’

  Lotte cut Anna off vindictively, sensing that her defence was increasingly acquiring the character of a hymn of praise: ‘… And then the winter set in.’

  ‘Yes, General Mud. Then the swift advance was over.’

  ‘Napoleon had already got stuck in the mud and cold – we fervently hoped history would repeat itself and it did. Now Hitler has lost the war, we said straight away.’

  ‘We thought: we must help the boys get through the winter. They wrote home that they were cold and everyone got going – even the children and the patients in hospital. Everyone got on with knitting. Sheets and table-cloths were sewn together, fur coats sent, all via the Red Cross, behind the party leaders’ backs. Everyone took care that their husband, their son, their father wouldn’t be cold. Ach ja …’ She stared outside; colour of the slate roofs. ‘I still have his Gefrierfleisch-Abzeichen at home – the decoration for that dreadful winter in Russia when there were so many frozen toes, fingers, noses. The order of the deep freeze, the people dubbed it cynically.’

  Herr von Garlitz’s mother, at one time a courtier of the empress, decided to spend her last days in the inhabited world and moved to Potsdam. The forty-five-room castle she left behind was on the other side of the Oder in a Frederickian ribbon-built village, of which there were many in Brandenburg. At one time Frederick the Great had reclaimed and populated this border province – he put a prince there; in the middle of the fields a castle was built for him, a road was paved, to the right and left of it houses for the farm workers were built, there was a church, a small school. In exchange for their total availability, the workers were given grain and a piece of land large enough to keep a pig and a cow.

  Because it was far away from where the bombs were falling, Herr von Garlitz decided they should all move to the estate where he had grown up. He travelled ahead with his wife in order to make the arrangements, leaving the children behind in Anna’s care in his parents-in-law’s house. Six weeks later she received a summons from Frau von Garlitz: ‘Come over here. I need you. We have tracked down Adelheid, Rudolf’s former nanny, she will assume care of the children.’ And once again Anna set off with her two suitcases, one with the wedding dress and Martin’s Feldpost letters, and one with her other possessions. She was fetched from the station in a horse cart; her employer sitting on the box, less soignée than before, appeared slightly dishevelled. She had acquired a charming indifference, a laissez-faire that surprised Anna, accustomed to her good manners and self-control in all circumstances. ‘You’ll laugh to death,’ said the Countess at the top of her voice, trundling over the unmade country road, with the same abandon as when she had carried Anna off in her Kaiser-Freser a century ago. ‘All you can do is laugh, the castle is so dreadfully run-down, you can’t imagine it, you’ll have to see it with your own eyes.’
/>   After a half-hour journey through an uninhabited world where even the succession of forests and fields conveyed a certain monotony, they drove into a village. All the ingredients were there: church, school, workers’ houses on either side of the road. Only the castle was hidden from view on account of a wall, draped wearily with the branches of old chestnut trees and maples. The gate was opened by a man who had such a squint that it looked as though he was welcoming other people alongside Anna and the Countess. The cart bumped inside. The gate was closed behind them. And there was the castle, massive, robust, light grey walls covered with creepers, white window frames and a forest of chimneys on the red roofs. It was turned in on itself, shy, as though it were an individual who would not readily divulge its secrets. Out of a Frederickian need for symmetry, a porch had been introduced in the middle of the front façade with a staircase that began broadly and invitingly but narrowed as it approached the double front door. Square pillars either side of it supported a tympanum above which the family coat of arms had been sculpted in relief. They drove round the side to the service entrance. Various outbuildings and sheds enclosed a cobbled inner courtyard.