The Twins

by Tessa de Loo

  Aunt Martha’s retraction did indeed appear, clearly legible in the newspaper. Anna’s satisfaction about it quickly ebbed away in the middle of the metre-long roll of lining paper, the Dead Sea Scroll of social work, that had to be studied for the examination. She became acquainted with Freud and with the significance of the first six years of life. She thought about her father for the first time in a long while, in that context, about his cough, the tapping of his stick on the cobbles, his black coat, his hat, his pride when his daughters succeeded at something, his suppressed sadness when he could no longer take them onto his lap. The memories came in waves, that all-recording memory of hers did not spare her. She had to remember Lotte now too. Together in the bed, together in the bath. The self-evident inseparability, as though it would remain so in the years to come. Whispering in bed in the evenings, competing for their father’s attention during the day – he could not simultaneously give both of them affection or reprimands. They had each developed their own talents and characteristic attributes in the competition for their father. Anna her legendary memory in the art of recitation, her empathy with a poor girl (a good exercise for later) on the stage in the casino, and her irrepressible vitality: running, jumping, falling, groaning, screaming. In contrast to all that commotion, Lotte presented her singing. With childlike veneration for her own voice she directed her songs up high to the round dome in the hall and listened to the reverberation with amazement. When she was not singing she was silent and compliant – her way of gaining her father’s special protection, such that Anna, in her jealousy, ran, jumped, fell even harder. The more Anna remembered, the more her interest grew. These two people who had been her closest and most intimate family aroused an academic curiosity in her. Or was it longing, a profound, rash longing, now that she had been left alone more emphatically than ever before?

  Old acquaintances spoke to her in the street to tell her that Uncle Heinrich was back and to describe, each in their own rhetoric, what sort of effect Russia had had on him. He was back, he was alive! An irrational, ambivalent excitement came over her: she did not want to see him, she wanted to see him. The image of Uncle Heinrich back from the event at Bückeberg came to mind: shocked, speechless, full of fear and loathing. He had seen visions of what was to come, in the perfectly recorded Great Germanic harvest festival, in the enthusiasm of the crowd, in the inflammatory, hypnotic language of the Führer. He knew it but could not prevent himself being sent to Russia as part of the same stage directions. It was so poignant that her heart would have winced, if all the other things had not already existed in contrast. She did not want to see him, she wanted to see him. She wanted to ask him for clarification about the guardianship declaration. She wanted to say to him: my husband was in Russia too. She wanted Lotte’s address, which she had lost, and her father’s books, a row of bound German classics – the only thing he had bequeathed to her. She wanted to show: look, the simple-minded, frail child is still alive, she is a tough one – surely we did have a bond, once, or have I imagined that?

  When she realized she would never be able to manage not to go, she borrowed a bicycle and went. She had carefully chosen Sunday morning. Her aunt, who ignored God’s commandments, never missed a high mass. Anna had gambled well, the house was empty except for the small living-room, where she found her uncle by the stove in the chair where his father had slowly died, a little more each day, beneath the print of the dead soldier. She had prepared herself for this, that he would be thinner, but what she encountered in that history-laden, genetically determined spot was an emaciated old man who looked at her without seeing her, with a hollow, faded gaze. A thin neck poked out of his shirt collar, narrow wrists emerged from the sleeves of his jacket, his fingers hung snapped on the arm rests. His stiff blonde hair had gone grey, a bony skull shone through it. Nowhere was the young uncle recognizable, the muscular farmer’s son who parodied Christmas carols in Cologne. She greeted him shyly. Did she detect a reply in a very slight nodding of the top-heavy wrinkled face? The next obvious step would have been to ask him how he was – a question, she now understood, that would demonstrate obtuse lack of feeling. A sour air hung in the stuffy room, just as before she had sensed she could not breathe in there. But he sat in silence; it even looked as though he rather blamed her for something. The things she had wanted to say died in her mouth. She moistened her lips. ‘Uncle Heinrich …’ she began. He did not react. How should she continue? To start with the declaration was impossible in these circumstances; Russia was a painful subject, Lotte taboo. The only one to occur to her as tangible, not dangerous, was the row of classics. ‘My father’s books …’ she said hurriedly, ‘you remember: Schiller, Goethe, Hofmannstahl … I would like to take them with me.’ A miracle happened: the head moved from one imaginary end of the horizon to the other. ‘Why not …?’ whispered Anna, but no further enlightenment followed. He looked at her, froze her out. She was suffocating beneath the low ceiling, between the oppressive walls, between two dead and one apparently dead. She turned to the door and fled.

  She cycled back at a furious pace, oscillating between indignation and sympathy. You really would have thought that Russia had been an exercise in detachment – what did possessions matter if you were hungry, thirsty, in pain? But she corrected herself: don’t you see that he is broken, a piece of ice from the tundra? Don’t you see that all he can still say is a big square no to everyone and everything? This man, this shadow of a man, she would never again be able to call him to account, let alone ever be able to make peace with him.

  A day later she was thinking differently about it. If everyone eluded her all that remained was the material. She decidedly wanted to have the books, her father’s only tangible memorial. Once again she went to the district court. She got an official order, a written order to release the books. She made the pilgrimage to the farm for the last time. Nothing had changed inside. Although he did not speak he could still read. Respect for authority had been ingrained in him, first by his tyrannical wife, then by the army and after that by camp regime. He understood very well what the official document that he held between his fragile fingers contained. This time the top-heavy wrinkled head moved from the low beamed ceiling to the wooden floor and back. Anna lifted the books off the shelf above the sideboard. Clutching the pile to her chest she looked at him one more time, over the classics. Faust was on top. She looked at the desolate figure next to the stove and swallowed. Why was the Faust figure always masculine? Their Faust was in church with hands in prayer.

  They lost track of time and distance while Anna was doing the talking. They had already twice passed a crease in the map when Anna stopped in mid-sentence, clutched her heart with an almost pathetic gesture, and gasped for breath. Lotte stood next to her resigned. She recognized it. First running and jumping, then a broken arm or a tooth through the lip – first overwhelm the other under a torrent of words, then breathlessness.

  ‘Let’s … go back …’ Anna uttered.

  Lotte nodded. She actually gave her sister an arm; step by step they walked back on the winding paths to the rhythm of Anna’s lumbering body and rasping breath. It struck Lotte that the return journey had taken an eternity, as she unloaded Anna in the lounge of her hotel. Coffee … Anna gesticulated, strong coffee. Coffee had brought her back to life before in the past. With a forced laugh she dropped into a chair, fanning herself with a waving hand. Her pale face was shining with sweat; she waited with closed eyes until her breathing calmed down. Lotte sat there sheepishly without worrying: Anna emerged from her own life story as indestructible, as someone who would make even death flee by telling it the frank truth, straight to its face. And sure enough, Anna slowly came to. Her eyes opened again. She was already looking at Lotte cheerfully and perceptively again.

  ‘Entschuldigung, my body is a spoilsport from time to time … we’re so comfortable here … please, order something yourself … Do you remember …’ She made an effort to move closer to Lotte and lay a hand on hers. Stepping airily o
ver her own body, which came to a halt now and then, as though over a fallen tree lying across the road, she said, ‘Do you still remember, Lotte, when I came to look for you in The Hague?’

  Lotte froze. But Anna waltzed on; it seemed as though she genuinely was in a hurry.

  ‘But first I went to Cologne … hoping that Uncle Franz was still alive, the only one who had your address ….’

  Anna ordered a second cup of coffee. Two hotel guests went past looking at the noisy old lady with surprise. Lotte thought she could see aversion, yes, hostility in their gaze.

  ‘Cologne …’ Anna said dreamily, ‘I shall never forget being on the east bank of the Rhine and looking right through the city to the west where the lignite factory chimneys stood out against the horizon. You could tell it was Cologne from the two spires of the Cathedral, which had miraculously been spared. There were still walls here and there, nothing in between. I was on the bank with some others – we looked at it but did not believe what we were seeing, because the city had always been there between the Rhine and the lignite factory. All the bridges had been destroyed. We were standing there and wanted to get over to the other side; a canoe paddled up to take us across as though it were a thousand years ago. Someone was waiting on the other bank with a cart for our suitcases and we began a journey along winding paths between the heaps of rubble and around the heaps of rubble, and people were living somewhere in a shelter or beneath the remains of a wall …’

  Lotte listened uneasily. She felt a strong urge to go to her hotel. Not to have to hear, just for once, not to have to react to anything – to succumb to a languid Sunday afternoon feeling, no more.

  ‘I wanted to see you, it had all begun there … Of course I also wanted to know whether my uncle and aunt were still alive. They had been lucky, the hospital had been spared – they were not suffering from hunger, the English supplied the hospital plentifully with food. The only thing I could utter after the surprise of seeing them again was “I’m hungry”. They made me a saucepan of rice pudding, I ate until I could eat no more. I got Aunt Elisabeth’s address from them and thus eventually I came to you … Gott im Himmel, I’ll never forget that!’

  While Anna was waiting for news from her great aunt in Amsterdam, of whom all she remembered was that she had separated Lotte from the symbiotic duality with surgical precision long ago, the anxiety suddenly crept into her that Lotte was no longer alive either. She remembered the successful bombing of Rotterdam at the start of the war – beyond that she had no idea what the war had brought about in Holland.

  Some weeks later it appeared a little more rosy. Lotte was expecting her; in a cryptic letter she had assented to Anna’s coming. From the train the destruction of the Netherlands turned out not to be as bad as expected. The meadows looked smooth and mown, the cattle looked well-fed in a picture postcard with bridges and church spires. The situation was less panoramic in the tram in The Hague. All seats were taken; the passengers were pushed against each other in the central gangway on each bend. A middle-aged man politely stood up for Anna. She flopped down with her inseparable stage prop, the leather suitcase, whispering ‘Danke schön.’ ‘What …?’ cried the man in shock. ‘You are a German! Stand up immediately!’ Anna stood up, only half understanding what he was saying but understanding quite well what he meant. All faces turned accusingly in her direction. ‘I understand you very well,’ she apologized clumsily, ‘I understand very well that you don’t want to have anything to do with us. But I was not a Nazi, whether you want to believe me or not, I am an ordinary woman, my husband died in the war, I have no one else. I cannot say anything else to you …’ There was a very telling silence around her. People turned away from her disapprovingly. Anna hung on tightly to the strap and sensed for the first time what it would mean to be a German from now on. To be found guilty by people who knew nothing about you. Not to be seen as an individual but as a specimen of a type, because you said danke schön instead of dank u wel.

  But an unshakeable solidarity with her own history and the lack of political awareness temporarily preserved her from the schizophrenia of collective guilt and individual innocence. For her, Anna Grosalie, this was a historic day. She was not so much a German as someone who, left alone in the world, was in search of the security of her first years of childhood. The ties of blood that were taken for granted by most people, that you could always fall back on, were for her something that had to be reconquered. She got out, stopped a passer-by and showed him the letter with the address, without saying a word. She would not let her own language cross her lips – perhaps he sent her in the wrong direction on purpose.

  ‘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.