The Twins

by Tessa de Loo

  Lotte sometimes looked at the film star photos Theo de Zwaan had taken of her and Jet before the war. With what self-assurance and defiance they looked into the lens, as though the world lay at their feet. What recklessness, what ignorance! She thought back to how life had been before the war with a sense of bitterness and nostalgia. Although they had been opposed to God and Colijn, under their mother’s lead they had had a romantic belief in justice, humanity, beauty. While Beethoven flowed out of the open window on summer evenings and she looked at the stars and the dark edge of the wood with the others from their wicker chairs, they thought: if such splendid music can exist, life must be splendid too in the most profound ways. Now she was ashamed of those grand feelings. Beethoven was a German, Bach too, Mendelssohn was a Jew; the Nazis paraded with their German composers and prohibited the Jewish ones – never again would they be able to listen to music free from associations. To have to be silent about the Kindertotenlieder. Everything had been defiled.

  They had not noticed it becoming busy around them. Older couples had settled at the tables, the men in suits with starched shirts and ties, their ladies – fresh from the coiffeur – in dresses with pleated skirts and patent belts. The age of jeans and T-shirts had not yet penetrated here. A popular song began to play; a few couples dared to make their way to the middle, now rearranged as a dance floor. A sweet-voiced Louis Prima led them on. They turned their snappy steps proficiently … Buona sera signorina … buona sera …

  ‘How lovely …’ Anna sighed, ‘that they still have so much fun at their age.’

  Lotte followed the greyheads with a disapproving expression round her mouth. ‘Don’t you find it a bit embarrassing,’ she said demurely, ‘that sentimental fuss, for such oldies.’

  ‘Mensch, don’t be so harsh … for yourself. Did you never go dancing with your violin-maker …?’

  That ‘with your violin-maker’ offended Lotte and the idea that they would have danced together like these dolled-up old people was simply revolting. ‘My violin-maker has been dead for years …’ she said sharply, hoping that Anna would be ashamed.

  But it did not trouble her at all. A burly old man presented himself. He was buttoning up his jacket and bowing slightly ironically towards Anna. She stood up with an amused laugh, wormed past two tables and disappeared from view for a short while. ‘Oh mon papa …’ warbled the jukebox.

  Anna circled over the dance floor as though she had never been doing anything else since the nuns had taught her to dance in the shadow of the Von Zitsewitz castle. Chuckling, she thought back to the bother about ‘Was machst du mit dem Knie, lieber Hans’, but the Casanova in Spa behaved himself impeccably. He led her self-confidently, without suspecting that he was holding someone in his arms who had not allowed herself to be led for a long time, by no matter whom. Yes, he even made so bold as to dance his own version of the tango with her, with one arm stuck out straight and abrupt one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turns. Afterwards he brought her back to her seat chivalrously.

  Anna was out of breath. ‘Who would have thought it?’ she laughed hoarsely. ‘A peat bath followed by dancing …’

  They left the café late in the evening, after Anna had been tempted onto the dance floor twice more by her silent partner. The bath house cast its shadow over the road like a mastodon. They turned right, dizzy from the Grand Marnier.

  ‘Those who dance keep death at a distance …’ Anna giggled, bumping into Lotte. ‘Just look what a clear sky! Tomorrow it will definitely be fine weather. We can go for a lovely walk. What do you say to that, Schwesterlein? The pain has gone, I’m telling you, disappeared … ffft …’ She put her arm through Lotte’s.

  She too had lost some of her reserve as a result of the alcohol and the unreal scenes that she had been absorbing all that time. ‘Listen, Anna …’ she said, ‘just then, when I saw you whirling round on the dance floor, I remembered something from earlier, in a flash …’

  ‘You mean from a very long time ago?’

  ‘Yes … You were dancing in the hall, wild, unruly, ungainly – or perhaps you weren’t dancing but playing tag with … there was a boy there …’

  ‘The concierge’s son,’ Anna completed, intuitively.

  ‘It could have been … you were romping about up the stairs, your excited screaming echoed through the corridor … Suddenly you were lying at the bottom of the stairs shrieking … there was something wrong with your arm … I was frightened and shrieking with you. I don’t know what happened then … although yes, wait a minute …’ She spoke louder from the excitement. The memory was unstoppable once it had got going. ‘You were taken to the hospital and came back with your arm in plaster in a sling. I was jealous … I wanted everything that you had … your pain, and also your bandage. They put my arm in a tea towel or something … as consolation.’

  ‘Now you say that …’ Anna stopped, ‘now you say it … yes … I had completely forgotten. It was broken, in two places even, I believe … You still remember it! Now you see!’

  She wanted to say something else but instead she embraced Lotte. The alcohol and the emotions were beginning to ferment dangerously. Their bodies swayed back and forth alarmingly above the asphalt, as though they were clinging tightly to each other on a ship in a storm. Before Anna’s eyes the Athenae sailed with them in the background, before Lotte’s the oranges and lemons in a greengrocer’s window. They walked on step by step, the town of springs, Spa, came and went pleasantly, as though it had over-indulged itself on Grand Marnier. Anna stopped in the middle of the bridge over the railway. Leaning heavily on the balustrade, she made a grand gesture towards the stars, which were sparkling above the silhouette of roofs and surrounding hills, and recited in a pompous voice:

  ‘For seeing begotten,

  My sight my employ,

  And sworn to the watch-tower,

  The world gives me joy.

  I gaze in the distance,

  I mark in the near,

  The moon and the planets,

  The woods and the deer …

  ‘Er … how does it go on …?’ she cried plaintively. ‘My God, I can’t remember it any more …’ Her arms were still raised to the stars, in an empty gesture now.

  ‘Come,’ said Lotte, tugging at her arm.

  3

  Lotte had chosen a route with the idyllic name ‘Promenade des Artistes’ with the help of a walking map. She regretted her sentimentality of the previous evening. A shared memory was no reason for fraternizing – strange that the word ‘sisterizing’ did not exist. She maintained a careful distance and placed her hands firmly in the pockets of her winter coat. A watery sun shimmered between the branches. A narrow brook meandered like silver beside the path.

  With each step Anna rejoiced at the suppleness of her joints – the peat was beginning to take effect. She inhaled the tingling forest air and thought she could feel the oxygen penetrating deep into her lungs. Very soon her cheerfulness translated into communicativeness. She chuckled to herself, ‘You’ll never guess, Lotte, who came looking for me in Salzkotten.’

  The Institute for Social Work was located on the top floor of a Franciscan convent. Successful studying depended a good deal on the talent to improvise. There were no textbooks or exercise books. Those who managed to get hold of a roll of wallpaper or a sheet of wrapping paper could take notes. The lecturers, who had been scraped together from all over the country, arrived at the Institute from their ruined towns after an adventurous journey over a devastated railway network. They stayed at the convent and drove the students into the ground non-stop for fourteen days on psychology or sociology. Mindful of the Gospel of the Nazarene, the nuns shared their scarce provisions with the pupils, and when winter came they willingly sat in the cold so that the classroom could be warm.

  There was an ironic coincidence – the village on the Lippe where her father had been born and her grandfather had died was within walking distance of Salzkotten, the village in the fairy-tale about the swineherd – but withou
t the prince. She preferred not to assume that her peregrinations and destiny had calculated that she had to land up here, as an element in the inescapable course of nature. That that spot of calamities was so nearby she ignored; even the finest weather could not entice her to walk in that direction. But Salzkotten with its weekly market was the hub of the surrounding villages. One day she ran into someone from her village who had once sat next to her in class. They exchanged information, surprised at the reunion.

  This chance meeting provoked one that was far less coincidental. Some days later there was a knock at her door. ‘You have a visitor,’ said a fellow student bashfully, ‘if you would come to the parlour.’ ‘I have a visitor?’ Anna exclaimed. ‘That can’t be so, I have no one in the whole world. Who is it, then?’ ‘Well, it’s not a lady … It is some woman or other who claims she is your family.’ Anna walked downstairs unsuspecting. At the doorway she stiffened. The soberly furnished room was completely taken over by the figure awaiting her; the mere fact of her presence was itself a form of sacrilege. She was hefty and flabby, her skin gleamed, her eyes and hair were darker than ever, her vulgar self-importance contrasted stridently with the modest biblical subjects on the walls. ‘Mein Gott,’ she said in a whining, small voice adapted to the surroundings, ‘what are you doing here, are you becoming a nun?’

  Anna kept a suitable distance; an extreme self-control was required to resist the tortures and humiliations that emanated from her like a dark devil’s aura. No … oh no … she thought, warding it off … not this … In a flat impersonal manner she explained what the purpose of her stay at the convent was. ‘Ah, is that so …’ sighed the visitor, still insatiably curious. ‘Listen, whatever you need – butter, cheese, eggs – you just have to say …’ Anna was forced into a dilemma by this reckless offer of hers. The threats of ten years ago buzzed in her head: ‘You will come crawling to me begging for bread …’ On the other hand there plainly was hunger, for everyone in the convent, and there was the settling of old scores: she plainly was entitled to all that this aunt owed her. ‘Terrific,’ she heard herself saying haughtily, ‘we would all be glad of that, it can be left at the gate.’ Her aunt nodded, not completely satisfied, and Anna thought that it was not something evil in her demeanour but a primitiveness in which every form of morality, of self-doubt, of intelligence, was alien: when there was no more to say. Aunt Martha left with her great breadth, having entirely fulfilled her role as amiable aunt who, concerned, had searched for her hungry niece with the nuns. Flabbergasted, Anna remained behind. What drove her to the convent? It could not be charity. Was she trying to bring inside the fencing the sheep that had escaped from her influence ten years ago? Did she still need a cheap source of labour, someone on whom she could indulge her destructive tendencies?

  Nothing was delivered to the gate. Rather, Anna met people from the village more often, who brought her up to date, in fragments, with how her aunt had led her sordid, unpalatable life. While Uncle Heinrich had been fighting on the Russian front, his wife, it seemed, had to have turned out to be the most disreputable black marketeer in the whole area. Unhampered by sympathy, she had taken everything the refugees from the towns possessed – a jewel, table silver, a tobacco box, a portrait in a gilded frame – for an egg, a piece of bread. She made every piece of bread pay four times over. She was respected and admired in the wider district; hunger was stronger than fear. And the only one who could have put the brakes on her was now a prisoner of war in Russia.

  The latest item of news that reached Anna was so bizarre that initially she burst out jeering. But her laughing very soon turned into an unchristian anger that contrasted painfully with the tranquillity within the convent walls. Aunt Martha was broadcasting it that she was financing her niece’s studies at the Institute for Social Work. If you thought you had seen everything after a fashion and had coped with it you were immediately punished for your naïvety. The squirms of a perfidious spirit – again it was succeeding in upsetting Anna’s barely regained peace of mind; it was proceeding as usual, as though she had never been away.

  But the influence of the intervening years did make itself felt. Anna crossed the meadow landscape of her youth at a brisk walking pace – no hills or mountains but fields as far as the eye could see. She was not burdened by melancholy or nostalgia – her resolution shut out all other feelings. She avoided the elder tree and the Mary chapel by the bridge over the river; encountering the farm again and the grown-up children did not disturb her equilibrium. She burst into the kitchen unannounced and seized her bewildered aunt by the blouse with both hands, at the height of her bosom, ‘So, you are paying for my studies!’

  ‘Please, please, what’s the matter …’ Aunt Martha’s eyes narrowed with fear, like a vicious cat grabbed by the scruff of its neck. ‘What are you paying, how much, since when? Well?’ Her aunt’s greedy mouth dropped open, closed and open again. No words emerged, only incoherent protesting. Anna continued unperturbed, without sympathy, without triumph. ‘Do you really know how much you owe me? You owe me my youth, you owe me everything! I’ll turn you in! I’m telling you. If you don’t retract the lies you have been spreading all over the place, officially in the newspaper, I will set the police on you!’ ‘Please … please …’ She wriggled free, nervously looking for a way out. ‘Paper!’ Anna commanded, ‘bring me a pen and paper.’ With revolting servility, Aunt Martha brought her what she had asked for. Anna smoothed the paper flat on the kitchen table, pushed the pen into her hand and dictated in forceful High German: ‘I, Martha Bamberg, withdraw the remarks made by me about the studies of my niece, Anna Grosalie-Bamberg, in Salzkotten. When I made out that I was paying for her studies I was not speaking the truth.’ Anna checked the text, altered some writing mistakes and ordered her aunt to place the retraction in the local paper. Although in the corner of her eye she could see the draining board and the stove, two of the fixed reference points from her youth, from a time of serfdom, she did not deign to look over the whole mess. She closed the door behind her and walked across the yard without turning round.

  With her hands clenched into fists she marched back across the fields. She would let nobody trifle with her any more, Anna Grosalie, war widow, Red Cross sister, training to be a social worker in child welfare. The pathetic creature that should have succumbed to tuberculosis, cancer or a bombing raid a long time ago would let nobody trifle with her any more – she was studying subjects the names of which Aunt Martha would not even have been able to pronounce.

  But the fanfare of triumph became blurred, because above her head in the rustle of the poplars she could hear the hoarse lament of herself as a girl of twelve. She slowed down. She realized that, irrespective of the sweetness of revenge, irrespective of the number of children she would support in the future, she could not protect with retrospective strength the child she herself had been. That child had permanently, irrevocably been handed over to Aunt Martha’s will, she would have free disposal of her until eternity. The idea of repayment was ridiculous in relation to a rudimentary soul that would never be able to think in terms of good and evil – the most she was capable of was to recognize that Anna was the stronger one now. A pyrrhic victory.

  New teachers braved the obstacles of public transport to bring the group of chosen ones at the Institute into contact with such unfamiliar disciplines as the law of guardianship. Anna’s thoughts went back involuntarily to the peddlers of the sterilization order and the guardianship declaration in which for years Uncle Heinrich had written that she was a bit simple-minded and frail. What kind of judge had he been in fact, if it had never occurred to him to send an inspector to the farm? To find that out she presented herself at the district court. The judge from that period seemed to have been replaced by a new one immediately after the war, a young man who presided there dejectedly as though he had been locked up in the heart of a pyramid with the job of finding the exit.

  ‘How is it possible?’ he sighed, when Anna had explained the story to him. ‘That�
�s what I am asking you,’ she said, ‘how is it possible? And why, please?’ The judge played with his fountain pen for a moment. ‘The law to which you allude …’ he said thoughtfully, ‘had at that time to prevent congenital disorders being passed on, by seeing to it that affected persons were sterilized. A judge in the Nazi period, sitting in this chair …’ he faltered, ‘… had to prove that he was a Nazi by actively co-operating. If he said: there are no simple-minded cases in my district, then he put himself under suspicion. Whereas if he offered such a case, a poor child, moreover an orphan: there, thank God, he had something in black and white.’ He laughed shamefacedly. ‘Might I see that declaration?’ said Anna. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it must be somewhere in the archives. We will find it and send you a copy.’

  But the declaration seemed to have disappeared without trace. She received a letter a fortnight later: the declaration preceding hers was still there, properly preserved, the declaration following it too – but hers was missing. Who had allowed her declaration to disappear, when, why, could not be found out. If Uncle Heinrich survived Russia she would not be able to go to him and push the declaration under his nose. The truth about her youth, including the lies, could only be found in the archive of her own parrot-memory now, where nothing ever disappeared for inexplicable reasons.