The Twins

by Tessa de Loo

  The discovery of the library put an end to the parasitic feeling. It was a spacious room, the walls clothed in books apart from three windows where bare vine tendrils tapped in the breeze – a treasury that was carefully maintained, supplied with fresh flowers and where even the fire was kept burning in the hearth. Everything for the satisfaction of an imaginary reader: she never found anyone there. La Divina Commedia, the Petit Larousse, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus, Don Quixote, the Prophesies of Nostradamus, Goethe’s Faust and Farbenlehre were next to each other in no order. There were first editions: the books cracked peevishly when they were opened, the accusing smell of neglect rose up – a book that is unread does not exist, was being whispered. Anna saw that an immense task was awaiting her here.

  One day she put the question that had been burning on her lips since the start. ‘Ach ja …’ Pensively Frau von Garlitz pursed her heart-shaped dark red painted mouth. ‘My father was staying here when I was working through all those letters of application. Bamberg, I mumbled out loud, your letter in my hand, Anna Bamberg … My father looked up from his newspaper. “Didn’t I know a Bamberg … wait a moment … one Johannes Bamberg, a splendid chap, a first-rate employee, I have special memories of him, my God it must be thirty years ago …” I said to myself, if Anna Bamberg is related to him I’ll accept her and regard it as a sign from above that my choice is correct.’ Giggling, she continued: ‘I don’t believe in God or Jesus Christ but I do in signs from above, it’s fun!’ ‘What sort of special memories were they?’ Anna asked. ‘You’ll have to ask him that yourself, in due course. My father used to run the factory here. Your father must have worked for him – and made an impression!’

  The house was an island in the effervescing twentieth century, and the library was another island within that house, where the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were better represented than the twentieth. Anna rummaged round at her leisure, reassured about the legitimacy of her privileged position as chambermaid to Frau von Garlitz. She knew now that it was her rightful inheritance: her father’s reputation was his legacy (how much more valuable than money and possessions). Long before her birth he had already bequeathed something with unconscious foresightedness. This same form of parental love, which extended from before birth to long after death, gave her the feeling that he was still concerned about her with retrospective strength.

  Thus she came effortlessly through the winter, spring and summer. Sometimes she walked about the house with an evening dress or a night-dress in her fingers, but mostly she read, with everyone’s assent. She did not know that it was merely an interlude – a long held breath.

  The dripping candle that stood between the plates was reflected in Anna’s eyes.

  ‘The rigid discipline,’ said Lotte, ‘that the chemist’s wife expected from you, that really was typically German.’

  ‘Och, it was her view of household order,’ Anna moderated her observation, ‘simply: I could not function in such a system of total availability.’ She began to laugh. ‘Suddenly it reminds me of something.’ She pinched Lotte’s hand from sheer pleasure. ‘Somewhere in the fifties I met the Stolzs again. I was working in child welfare and was on a delegation visiting Bayer – I believe it was about an unemployment relief project for displaced children. We were grandly received in the banqueting hall, with two liveried attendants to each guest. Half-way through the meal I suddenly heard Frau Stolz’s reproach again: You won’t be satisfied until you … at Bayer … and so on. And now there I was! I choked, my neighbour anxiously clapped me on the back. After it was over I drove off, in my first Volkswagen – a thousand metres up to the house. They still lived there, only the bell was no longer polished spick and span with Sidol and the stairs at the front were no longer spotless, I rang the bell. An old woman stuck her head out of the window: Anna! Of course I must come inside. There were photographs of Gitte with husband and children on the sideboard – its doors had panes of glass that had to be cleaned one by one with a chamois-leather. Just then Herr Doktor came home from work. He was amazed: “Do tell us, what’s brought you here by chance.” I repeated his wife’s prophetic remark. “And today I was sitting there, with two servants!” He burst out in uncontrollable laughter. His wife joined in in embarrassment, I felt sorry for her. “You see,” he prodded his wife, “didn’t I always say to you: you won’t make a housemaid out of that girl in a hundred years!”’

  Part 2

  War

  1

  On Sunday morning there was a flea market in the nineteenth-century covered promenade that extended deep into the Parc de Sept Heures from the Place Royale. It was sunny, but there was a bleak wind from the east. The traders stamped to keep warm beneath elegant curly flying buttresses; others paced up and down between the wrought-iron pillars. Anna and Lotte strolled past the goods on display: vases, ornaments, old gramophone records, picture postcards. They stopped in front of an unpainted rocking horse that was staring inertly at the statue of a saint.

  ‘You still remember, the rocking horse we always fought over!’ cried Anna, so loud that the market-goers looked in their direction. Lotte thought she could see distaste in their expressions for having disturbed the Sunday quiet. In German, what’s more! Firmly she said, ‘No, I don’t remember.’

  ‘Yes … yes … it was painted blue and white with proper reins and a brown saddle; we pushed each other off until Papa intervened with a tactical proposition: today, Sunday, is Lotte’s day for horse riding, Monday for Anna, Tuesday for Lotte again, and so on. What do you two say about that? I had completely forgotten,’ she clapped her hands, ‘how lovely that it’s suddenly there again.’

  The horse had no effect on Lotte, it just severed the gentle feeling of solidarity that there had been among all those objects from the past. How was it that her memory only functioned properly from after the sick-bed in the garden, in the care of her Dutch mother? It was handicapping her for the first time; it made her incomplete.

  ‘The war is in fashion,’ Anna observed, ‘there’s still money to be made.’ Military helmets and belts were laid out on a piece of velvet cloth. Yes, the war was peacefully present everywhere: a soldier’s water flask lay next to an ancient coffee grinder; beneath crumpled romantic novels and detective stories there was a richly illustrated treatise on military insignias and uniforms in the Third Reich; on a stall with old portraits of married couples, baptisms and confirmations there was a framed photograph of a young soldier who looked defiantly into the lens.

  ‘He did not yet know that a monument would be erected for him here,’ said Lotte.

  ‘Look how he puffs out his chest, the poor boy; he solemnly believed in his mission.’

  ‘Not really … He wasn’t fighting for an ideal, he had to defend his country.’

  Her sister took her arm and pulled her away. I won’t be provoked, thought Anna. Behind in the park, the Chalet du Pare had stood for at least a century by a steep rock wall; here they came to a halt, the sun shone inside horizontally, the vapour from the coffee curled upwards, blue in a beam of light.

  We always get together in public places, thought Lotte, as though there was still something improper about our meeting.

  The sky did not take on the colour of fate, the cook did not break off kneading the dough for a second, the chauffeur did not let his newspaper drop, the servant walked through with a fully laden tray as usual, Anna’s darning needle did not stray off course for a moment, no one anticipated that in the margin of innocent, everyday activity a fracture had occurred that morning, when a familiar voice which they had already heard so often that for a long time they had no longer been listening to it, resounded into the kitchen on the Volksempfänger: ‘At dawn on the firrrst of Septemberrr Gerrrman trrroops crrrossed the Polish borrrderrr … Frrrom today bomb will be rrrepaid with bomb…’

  A few hours later too, when Anna was just standing in the middle of the lawn to enjoy the unreal beauty of the house and grounds, she did not realize that there, bene
ath the same sky, in the same daylight, something had been set in motion that was far more unreal – a process of total alienation that they would all be dragged into together. Something indefinable glistened high up in the air. She narrowed her eyes into slits. Simultaneously with an exploding sound in the far distance, white clouds appeared from nowhere and removed the thing from view. At that same moment the house began to speak; it shouted at her from all its openings: ‘Are you mad? Get away from there, come inside, it’s war!’ ‘What?’ called Anna, walking towards the house, cupping her ears in her hands. ‘It’s war!’ Frau von Garlitz hung out of one of the windows gesticulating wildly; she sent her husband outside to prevent Anna’s kamikaze. They bumped into each other at the doorway. ‘It’s a British reconnaissance aircraft,’ he said curtly. ‘Our anti-aircraft guns are bringing it down. You had better stay inside.’ His Clark Gable moustache moved up and down emotionally, despite his masculine composure. Ridiculous, Anna thought, all that fuss. War – it was no more than a word, she almost wished that something really would happen, something that was more than a dot in the air, so that the word would acquire meaning.

  Three days later, after England and France had declared war on Germany, Frau von Garlitz gathered her children, her staff and the most essential possessions and breathlessly handed the premises over to Anna. ‘Put the upper floor in order for the Saarland refugees,’ she laid her hands on Anna’s shoulders, a gesture symbolizing the transfer of goods and chattels, ‘we are going to the east.’ On her head an asymmetrical cloche hat like a crooked helmet, on either side a child, and in her wake the obedient, giant household, she departed for the family estate in East Brandenburg.

  Anna, in her new function as the housekeeper, opened her book and continued where she was, in calm expectation of the Saarlanders. No fear was aroused in her of being alone on the ship after the rats had deserted it – her nervous system was not sensitized to vague threats. During the eighteen days that the Polish campaign lasted, her body benefited, uninhibitedly, from the enormous provisions in the cellar, her mind from those in the library. One day, instead of a group of dispossessed refugees, the whole troop was there at the main door again and daily activities were resumed as though they had not been away – except for Herr von Garlitz, who had marched off to Poland as an officer, and at the Tucheler Heide had had the good fortune to dislocate his kneecap, thereafter the expensive godchild was immediately removed from the front line.

  The war became a farce. The troops at the Westwall and Maginot Line lay in wait like boy scouts. Opposite each other in their ambushes, they grew cabbages and potatoes between the fortifications and toasted each other’s health with beer mugs raised high. After his recovery, Herr von Garlitz, who was stationed somewhere in the district with his regiment, came home every Sunday with a company of officers who fell upon the supplies of drink in their reckless boredom. Despite rationing, all through the week his wife was busy obtaining the ingredients for a celebration meal. But Anna was only half aware of it. Shortly after the Polish campaign she had received a letter from Holland.

  Disturbed by the political developments, Grandmother travelled from Amsterdam to Cologne to find an old bosom friend, in case the borders were about to be closed. She came back mortified to the depths of her soul and swore that she would never set foot over the border again. One rainy day in October she came to give an account of her stay. The whole afternoon she kept on her black hat with purple velvet violets, which undoubtedly came from the Albert Cuyp market stall with the frilly bits and pieces. She had caught a streaming cold in Germany, she said, from the emotions. Lotte did not move from her side. Grandmother sighed, in the shade of the hat brim, ‘It was a very unpleasant situation …’ Her German accent had deteriorated. Continually interrupting herself to wipe her nose with a lace handkerchief, she related that whenever they spoke about the war her Cologne friend put a tea cosy on the telephone, fearful of being overheard. When a daughter-in-law came to visit with a child in Hitler Youth uniform, the friend nervously changed the subject to an insignificant topic. ‘German women adore the Führer,’ she explained afterwards. ‘I am ashamed,’ Grandmother coughed, ‘I am ashamed for all those crazy German women,’

  Grandmother had also been to her second cousin Franz, ‘a sympathetic chap …’ She had heard a few things about Anna from him. She looked fleetingly at Lotte’s mother as though seeking support. She nodded indulgently. The blood rose in Lotte’s head, she did not know where to look. ‘And …?’ she said with a pinched voice. Grandmother applied her handkerchief again, it seemed interminable … Anna had ended up well, according to Franz, with an aristocratic family on the outskirts of Cologne.

  Lotte stared at the network of broken veins on the ruddy cheeks and tried to locate the eyes above them, which hid behind slits through the heavily drooping eyelids. Grandmother was somewhat impenetrable, despite her readiness to communicate; one day she would suddenly not be there any more and would take away with her for ever a wealth of images, sounds, secrets, pieces of information, smells from another period, irretrievably. A sudden anxiety came over Lotte: the old woman was the only umbilical cord that joined her to the formative past. ‘Do you have her address?’ she asked agitatedly. ‘Why?’ said her mother. ‘Then I can write to her.’ The two women exchanged a knowing glance across her, the rain came over the field in waves, lashing against the windows. ‘Yes, I have her address,’ Grandmother said softly. ‘I want to go and find her,’ Lotte explained. ‘Now …?’ her mother cried shrilly, ‘in this situation?’ ‘It will have to happen sooner or later, of course’ said Grandmother pensively, ‘we can’t prevent her.’ ‘It’s war there!’ Lotte’s mother argued. With both hands Grandmother lifted the hat from her head – to supply herself with air or to acknowledge her powerlessness against the force of attraction between two halves of twins? She placed the hat in her lap and stared wearily and dejectedly at the violets as her fingers mechanically fingered the brim. ‘If an old person like me can come back unscathed from this dreadful story,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders, ‘then a healthy young woman will certainly manage it too.’

  Lotte wrote a letter in which courtesy and romantic yearning created a peculiar friction against one another, and ended with the statement of her readiness to come to Germany. In reply she received a formal letter, elegantly signed by Anna Bamberg, with the invitation to spend New Year’s Eve at the estate of the von Garlitz family. Up to the last minute Lotte was worried about whether she would get a travel permit. Eventually she was able to travel on 30 December. In her coat pocket was the embroidered handkerchief that she had kept in her suitcase all those years, being returned to its original owner with her.

  When they crossed the border and the customs officials asked for her papers in German, she said to herself: my country. She tried to see the image of her father before her, but that other father kept pushing himself into the foreground. It suited her better to think of ‘the country of my birth’ or: the country of composers and conductors, of symphonies and songs – how much easier it would be to sing a song such as ‘The shepherd on the rocks’ in a country with mountains instead of meadows. That each second was bringing her closer to Anna was almost incomprehensible. She had depicted the reunion in numerous versions in her fantasies, and still it remained a blind spot. The nearer it came the more her longing was further thwarted by anxiety – an irrational anxiety without any logic. To distract herself she looked outside with exaggerated attention. She bit into one of the apples that her mother had put in the bag. Just for a moment a slight feeling of guilt flared up, or treason, but it changed into pity immediately: from Germany she looked insignificant, puny.

  At last the train slowed down and came into the station. Anxiety won. She wanted to stay inside the intimacy of the compartment for ever, but the train stopped and began to unload its passengers who thronged outside, mesmerized by the journey. The cold hit her in the face, she swayed back, put her suitcase down on the platform and loathed the pressing
throng around her, the winter, the strange station, herself in her sudden cowardice. Shivering, she fished the handkerchief out of her winter coat. Instead of waving it, as had been arranged, she held it up awkwardly between thumb and forefinger. The reunion was suddenly so unavoidable that she observed the passing faces without attempting to look for anything familiar in them. A conductor blew his whistle somewhere. The sound skimmed over the travellers’ heads like a bird’s shriek. Then behind her she heard her name being spoken softly, hesitantly. It sounded like a quiet sigh from the mouth of the crowd. She turned round slowly, a pale face lit up between the winter coats … a round and yet pointed face where the contrasts seemed to balance each other. Lotte thrust the handkerchief forwards in a reflex, the other accepted it cautiously. ‘Anna?’ The woman opposite her closed her eyes in acknowledgement. In the poetic picture in Lotte’s head the two sisters fell into each other’s arms, on the platform in Cologne they shook hands formally and their smiles made little clouds in the frozen air. Then the woman picked up Lotte’s suitcase and began to walk towards the exit, exhorting Lotte to follow her with a nod.

  Everything was enormous and overwhelming: the lofty, sooty roof of the station, the immense hall dominated by an advertisement for 4711 in coloured glass, the monumental presence of the Cathedral, the towers like two guards watching over Cologne – a double warning to the above, twins, in fact. Everything was enormous and overwhelming except the reunion, which was proceeding with such aloofness and efficiency, as though they were both operating on behalf of someone else and it was not about each of them. At a dry fountain at the foot of the Cathedral Anna shifted the suitcase to her other hand to get money out of her pocket for tram tickets. It occurred to Lotte that there was a greater degree of intimacy between the numerals of Route 11, which was taking them through the narrow streets of the inner city, than between Anna and herself. In vain she looked for family features in the pale face. ‘So this is Cologne,’ she remarked with a stiff laugh, to break the silence. ‘Yes, one can indeed say so,’ said Anna ironically. She leaned towards Lotte: ‘And … do you still remember this song …?