The Twins Page 4

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Yesterday, in one of the peat baths, someone was singing the Cologne slow-tram song.’

  Anna laughed. ‘I am guilty of bathroom coloratura if I think no one can hear. But … originally you were the one who liked singing.’

  Lotte frowned. Round about them was the sound of civilized chatter; the shop bell went now and then and a snowy customer came inside. ‘I only went on to sing properly,’ she corrected her sister, ‘after I had fallen through the ice.’

  Lotte was standing on the frosty grass at the side of the ditch. Her sisters were gliding by, swaying on Friesian wooden skates, making a long chain with the gardener’s daughters from a neighbouring property and an attached Brabant cousin who was staying there. The cousin’s mother also appeared on the ice, a sturdy woman in a brown felt hat with a weather vane of duck feathers that indicated the wind’s direction. She distributed sea-green and red striped peppermints to the children from a large cone. ‘Just going to visit your Mum for a minute,’ she said, holding on to Lotte’s hand, ‘want to come with me, lass?’ She took a run-up and slithered screaming exuberantly over the ditch, dragging Lotte along with her in her pleasures on the ice. Thus they pelted and slid towards the house, the woman chatting non-stop in an incomprehensible dialect. They reached a dark green, half-submerged rowing boat that marked the start of the danger zone where the tower drained overflow water into the ditch; the children had been warned about this. ‘No further, no further!’ called Lotte, but the Brabant woman was chattering on as mechanically as the little wind-up locomotive at home that permitted no one to divert it from its idiosyncratic route between the table legs.

  As the ice began to crack Lotte instinctively pulled herself free. She was not frightened. The firmness beneath her feet disappeared and the crystal floor opened to admit her into the territory of a sweet, premature death, ornamented with ferns and algae that moved together in a stream of air bubbles. The ice conscientiously closed over her head. As the variety of forms slowly coalesced in light green, turquoise and silver, she thought with regret of the miniature sewing box that she had been carrying since Christmas in a pocket of her underslip … Shame too about her new red pullover and the new-born baby. Like links in a chain her Dutch mother, her father, her sisters were strung out one after the other – a long way behind them came Anna, vaguely visible in a burst of filtered light. No more, she thought. No more aniseed rusks.

  A dying scream rose out of the Brabant woman, alerting the skating children. They scurried over to the woman; she was standing in the water up to her heavy breasts, rigid with terror. Not another sound came out of her wide open mouth. The hat was still straight on her head; only the feather moved. ‘Lotte … where is Lotte?’ cried Jet, the youngest, shrilly. She got her skates off, ran home and returned at a gallop with her mother, who slid over the ice on her front to the unfortunate woman whose lower body had already drowned. With her hands under the woman’s armpits she tried to drag the heavy body out of the water. But the petrified colossus would not move, stuck firmly in the mud. The gardener’s wife came running over, screaming. She observed the rescue from the bank, in no state to do anything, pulling hairs out of her head. Because of her wailing eventually her husband appeared; he had been a military hospital orderly before changing over to cultivating oleanders and orange trees. He stamped on the ice from the bank and, by fragmenting the ice, cleared a path to the drowning one. At that moment Jet’s high-pitched voice pierced through the freezing air. ‘Mister, mister … Lotte’s here … Lotte, my sister’s here!’ With a trembling finger she pointed to a spot in the ice where a triangle of Lotte’s imitation fur coat was shimmering through the ice. The gardener cast an expert glance at his sister-in-law, left her upright where she was and dived beneath the ice. An eternity later he returned to the world of the living with Lotte’s dripping body. ‘Stop,’ he said, spitting water, to her mother, who was still tugging at his sister-in-law’s body ever more desperately but had not managed to rescue more than a packet of sticky sweets, ‘she’s been dead a long time.’ With his free hand he pointed to a trickle of blood dripping from the left corner of her mouth.

  One glance at Lotte’s slack body was enough for everyone to abandon hope. But the gardener, who had not hauled her out of the Lethe for nothing, refused to give in. She was laid naked on the dining-table. It was reckoned that her sojourn beneath the ice had lasted for half an hour. He tried mouth to mouth resuscitation, slapping her body all over, and rubbing her with a towel her mother had warmed on the stove. He persisted desperately until a growling sound signalled the start of breathing. Thus was Lotte slowly rubbed and slapped back to life, through the stubborn perseverance of someone whose actual speciality was keeping plants and trees alive.

  She only properly regained consciousness in her mother’s bed, ringed by interested parties who came to inspect the medical miracle. She was not surprised. Years ago Aunt Käthe had taken over caring for her, then someone unfamiliar took her by the hand to Holland, and now a total stranger had taken her to the world on the other side of the ice. What else could she be but sanguine about a pattern that kept repeating itself with almost aesthetically well-founded insistence?

  Downstairs the other drowned one was now lying on the table. They had placed her hat on her belly with her hands over it, so that it looked as if she was reporting bashfully at the gates of heaven. ‘It’s my fault she’s dead,’ cried the gardener’s wife, rocking tormentedly back and forth on a kitchen chair. ‘God has punished me! I saw Lotte lying there all that time and I said nothing. I thought: if I tell, you’ll let go of my sister and she’ll drown.’ Lotte’s mother corrected her, ‘Don’t deceive yourself. Your sister’s heart gave out because she had just had a hot meal, your husband said, and Lotte was saved because she hadn’t eaten yet.’ ‘And I had cooked such tasty chicken livers with sauerkraut and fried bacon,’ lamented the other. ‘That couldn’t kill a person, surely …’

  Back at school, the girl who had drowned was allowed to sit by the stove. She was her old self again except for one small flaw: her speech had not entirely thawed. She stammered so badly that her privileged position by the stove was nullified because she was passed over when it was her turn to speak in class. It took too long for her to express herself. A little monster sat between her thoughts and their utterance, pulling back the syllables just before they left her mouth. A superhuman effort was required to speak aloud through this opposing force, her head was put under great pressure, her heart went wild, her paralysed tongue twisted out powerlessly. A cruel censor was standing at the entrance and let almost nothing through.

  Her mother discovered that she did not stutter when she sang with the others. Her clear voice could be heard above everything, she knew all the verses and effortlessly improvised a second part without stumbling over a word. The sandy path beside the football pitch led on to an avenue lined by beech trees that passed through a district of old villas to the radio station’s studios. Lotte’s mother cycled there on her Gazelle and persuaded the conductor of the children’s choir, which sang on the radio each week, to give Lotte a chance. The fact that she was the smallest was amply compensated for by her voice, which lost none of its purity even in the straitjacket of a simple nursery rhyme. Each week the conductor selected someone to make their début singing a solo song of their choice. Lotte was placed on an orange box to reach the microphone. The artificial situation did not trouble her; the diffuse anxiety about stuttering that always lay dozing on the threshold of her unconscious – one eye open, one eye closed – disappeared instantly as soon as she started her song. Focusing on the conductor, whose grey mane waved in time with his baton, she broadcast ‘In Holland there is a house’, her favourite song, into living-rooms without a hitch. A couple of days later a picture postcard was delivered for her. ‘You have a lovely voice,’ was written in ornate handwriting. ‘I hope your parents take pains with it.’

  ‘Ach ja,’ Lotte sighed, ‘the conductor was deported in th
e war. He was Jewish.’

  There was an uncomfortable silence. How can there ever be talk of forgetting, Lotte asked herself, looking furtively at Anna. You have to be vigilant, with every representative of this people.

  ‘I don’t really know if it is wise,’ she hesitated, ‘to be sitting here with you eating cakes and behaving as though nothing was the matter.’

  Anna sprang up. ‘Who says we have to behave as though nothing is the matter? I was brought up in a culture you detest. You escaped from it just in time. Let me tell you now how your life would have turned out if you had stayed. Let me …’

  ‘We know that past history of yours,’ Lotte interrupted her wearily. ‘The insult of Versailles. The depression.’

  Anna shook her head. ‘Let me tell you something about the place the Jews occupied in our lives, in my life, before the war. In the countryside. We’ll order another cup of coffee. Listen.’

  It took years for the grandfather to die. He hardly came out from behind the stove – only in a warm draught did his bones stop rattling against each other. He hobbled outside once more on an oppressively hot day and stationed himself on a small bench in front of the house. Anna went to sit next to him. A black barouche came driving by; an old woman in widow’s clothes was sitting on the box – wisps of grey hair clung to her sweaty face. She turned out to be a sister of his who lived six kilometres further on, on a large farm. They had not seen each other in twenty years. ‘But Trude, what are you doing here?’ his voice cracked. ‘Well, if you won’t visit me,’ she snapped, baring three solitary teeth, ‘then I will have to come to you.’

  Uncle Heinrich, who preferred reading to milking cows, just like his dead brother, carried the full burden of the destitute farm on his shoulders. Above the stable doors of the Saxon half-timbered house built in 1779 it said: ‘Grant, O greatest God – what thou commands from us – we will dutifully accomplish this – in the utmost devotion.’ A prophetic motto, with the emphasis on ‘dutifully’. While Aunt Liesl hurried back and forth between housekeeping, chickens and kitchen garden, Uncle Heinrich had the greatest difficulty allocating his attention between the seduction of the printed word and fifty pigs, four cows with calves, a carthorse, fifty acres of their own land and twelve rented.

  Even when doing business he scarcely put aside his reading matter. When the cattle dealer, Papa Rosenbaum, turned up, having scented that a cow was for sale, Uncle Heinrich would sit dourly in the kitchen with a book and continue reading during the traditional game of bid and counter-bid. ‘What do you want for it?’ Papa Rosenbaum clapped his fat hands together. His hat was set back on his head as though he were a Chicago gangster. On his square chest hung an antique watch-chain. ‘Six hundred,’ Uncle Heinrich mumbled without looking up. ‘Six hundred? I’m sorry, Bamberg, but that’s laughable! I’m laughing my head off!’ He burst out in an epic laugh; Uncle Heinrich was just becoming engrossed in an intriguing passage; Anna made herself invisible in a corner of the kitchen. When he had stopped laughing, Rosenbaum made a case about the price of cattle in the context of the wretched economic condition that the country found itself in. Where was that leading? He could offer four hundred, not a penny more. Uncle Heinrich did not flinch. ‘Four hundred and fifty.’ Nothing. ‘Do you want to ruin me! I really can’t do business like that.’ Papa Rosenbaum stalked out of the kitchen and closed the door behind him with a bang. The tail of his coat had stuck in the door, obliging him to open it again to jerk it out. Hissing, he pulled his coat back. Then they could hear him pacing up and down in the yard, complaining loudly. ‘I’ll go bankrupt! My family will starve!’ He got into his Wanderer and started the engine, got out, came inside again. ‘My soul, my poor soul is dying!’ The whole arsenal of threats and self-pity bounced off the invisible wall surrounding the impassive reader. After the ritual had been repeated three times, Rosenbaum took his watch out of his waistcoat pocket. ‘I’ve been at it for an hour already, that’s how my business is going down the drain. Very well, you get your six hundred.’ Later, after she had witnessed this ceremony many more times, Anna understood that the outcome of the cattle trading had been settled by the antagonists beforehand and that it was done for both their amusement.

  A class photo was taken. Among fifty-four children’s heads, Anna’s was ninth from the left in the third row. She was looking straight into the camera, still wearing a black dress with a loose, drooping black bow on her head. Though the other children were standing close together there was a space around Anna as though they were instinctively afraid that homesickness might be infectious. Yet she had survived the village children’s ostracism and, thanks to her inborn fearlessness, had won her classmates’ trust. When she grew out of the mourning dress she received a collarless garment of indestructible dove grey material made with room to grow. The number of permanent tasks imposed upon her on the farm rose in proportion to the centimetres she gained in height. There was one day of holiday in the year: the expedition to Wewelsburg, a medieval castle not far from the village. The hay carts were decorated with birch bark and coloured paper and pulled by cart-horses, and everyone fought for a place on the cart of Lampen-Heini, a rich farmer who had swift, light horses. On the way they forgot everyday life, which was becoming increasingly meagre, and exuberantly sang walking songs.

  They had a whole lot to forget. The millions of unemployed in the towns, for example, who had no money to buy anything, so the farm butter, potatoes and pork kept being sent back. Because of the rent, artificial fertilizers and taxes they could not afford, they could only dream of a pair of new shoes or a skein of wool to mend stockings. There was a state of emergency in the Ruhr area. The unemployed were being sent out to the countryside to work for the farmers in return for bed and board. The children came next, the church doled them out to every willing farmer’s wife. The mysterious arrival of the pale, listless children and the almost metaphysical mediating role of the church so moved the imaginations of Anna and her friends that they invented a game: ‘The Ruhr children arrive’. With a stick they drew an imaginary village in the compressed earth, with a church and the farms scattered around. They took it in turns to play mother. She fetched a Ruhr child from the church, walked through the village with it and brought it into a house they had designed. What happened after that did not bother them – it was about accepting a poor child; it touched their awakening maternal instinct. Anna played passionately, identifying with the displaced children, until the game became unexpectedly real in the person of Nettchen, who was brought home by Aunt Liesl.

  This was a Ruhr child in flesh and blood. She came into the house with Aunt Liesl, spindly and grimy and in worn-out shoes. Two long brown plaits were pinned on top of her head; there were scabs on her lips which she could not leave alone. She laughed mysteriously at everything they said to her but said nothing in reply. Initially they imagined that Nettchen could not speak, but eventually, once she opened up falteringly, it appeared that she simply did not have many thoughts. She could not keep up at school. She came home with corrected homework – underneath on the slate the teacher had written: ‘Dear Anna, aren’t you ashamed to let Nettchen go to school with such exercises? Is there no time for you to help her?’ Anna could not ignore this challenge. Evening after evening she dedicated herself with iron discipline to the renovation of Nettchen’s neglected intellect. She was baffled that her efforts bore no fruit at all. Nettchen’s mysterious laugh at every question she persisted in answering incorrectly drove Anna to despair. ‘Why give yourself all that trouble?’ Uncle Heinrich said laconically. ‘Isn’t Nettchen much better off as she is than you or I?’

  Nettchen was certainly interested in love. The handsomest of all the boys living on the banks of the Lippe for miles around was in love with Aunt Liesl. Each Sunday Leon Rosenbaum came to the farm with a bunch of flowers. Their impossible love hastened to an untimely end on a rusty garden bench overlooking a bed of young cabbages. They were mute about what they had to say to each other. Instead they held each other�
�s hand and mumbled generalities that instantly evaporated. Anna and Nettchen lay behind the gooseberry bushes, expecting greater boldness. Sometimes Leon gave Aunt Liesl a chaste kiss. Her bosom rose and fell languorously, the golden cross heaved with it and Nettchen pinched Anna’s arm.

  During the Friday liturgy Anna grasped a vague sense of the connection between the half-heartedness of the advances and the ending of the ever-recurring passage ‘Flectamus genua’ uttered in kneeling position: ‘Let us pray for the Church, the Pope, the bishops, the government, the sick, travellers, the shipwrecked …’ No single category was missed out, not even the Jews. When it came to their turn, at the very end, the faithful rose as one to their feet from their kneeling position – after all, the Jews had knelt mockingly before Jesus with the words: ‘King of the Jews!’ The prayer was rounded off: ‘May our Lord God lift the veil from their hearts so that they too acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ.’

  When Leon realized that all his efforts were foundering on the golden cross, he ceased his visits. Aunt Liesl relapsed into dull taciturnity. For weeks she seemed to do her work blindly, until she made a decision that was more fitting to a threepenny opera: she took herself off into a Carmelite nunnery. On her departure she clasped Anna passionately to her and kissed her tenderly on the forehead. Nervously she fished a curled photograph of Leon out of the black handbag that she would have to relinquish at the convent gate and pushed it into Anna’s hand.

  Her departure fired the starting shot for a series of radical changes. Nettchen was returned to the church. The grandfather, whose all-seeing eye had maintained symbolic control to his final days, exchanged his earthly existence for immortality. He was buried in a snowy churchyard next to his wife, who had departed fifteen years earlier.

  Back on the farm Uncle Heinrich rested a hand on Anna’s shoulder. ‘So, Anna, now there’s only the two of us and the stock. And you and I are no farmers at all. Come, let’s get down to work.’ The heroic acceptance of this lot reminded Anna of her father, who had reconciled himself to his illness in the same way. In an empty gesture she clutched him by his funeral coat. When he dies too, she thought, I’ll really be alone.