The Quiet Twin

by Dan Vyleta

  Outside, a voice screamed down into the yard. ‘Quiet, for God’s sake,’ it screamed. ‘There’re honest people trying to sleep here.’

  As for the trumpet: it sang on.

  9

  Frau Vesalius woke her. She did not knock or announce herself, but simply stepped up to her bed and pulled off the bedding, exposing her, the nightgown riding up beyond her hip. She woke from dreams – something about a blind man peeling potatoes, an insurmountable pile, and in her nose the moist and cloying smell of dirt – then saw the housekeeper, those mocking eyes aglow with something wholly new. Assuming she was still asleep, the old woman began to prod her shoulder with one knee, all the while whispering her name. Zuzka flailed, leapt out of bed, then noticed the girl, half hanging from Vesalius’s hand, dirty, writhing in the light of the housekeeper’s lone candle.

  ‘Lieschen!’ she exclaimed; kneeled to crush her in a hug, but saw the girl shiver and withdraw, her small, twisted body struggling in Vesalius’s grip.

  ‘I found her outside the door. She was scratching it. Sitting on the floor and scratching it. Like a dog.’

  It was hard to tell whether Vesalius was disgusted or moved by Lieschen’s behaviour; she pulled at her like an angler hauling in his catch, the girl’s arm taut and straining at the joints.

  ‘She won’t say a word, the stupid thing.’

  ‘Leave her be.’

  Quickly, interposing her body between the girl and the old woman, Zuzka gathered Lieschen’s head into her stomach.

  ‘Let her go, I said.’

  Vesalius did, and the girl slumped in Zuzka’s arms, then slid on to the floor. Her mouth was encircled by sores, mud stuck to her clothes and hair, the childish eyes filled only with suspicion. She whispered something. Zuzka fell to the ground beside her, pressed her ear to her lips.

  ‘A bath tub full of blood,’ she mumbled. She was having nightmares.

  ‘What time is it?’ Zuzka asked the housekeeper, who had not moved and was staring down at them, massaging the hand that had held up the girl.

  ‘After four.’

  ‘He makes them into sausage. Down in the cellar,’ the girl whispered, then hummed a snatch from a popular song.

  ‘I will go bring her to the doctor,’ Zuzka decided.

  ‘I can take her up if you like.’

  ‘No.’ Zuzka pulled a skirt and cardigan over her nightgown. Her eyes never left the prostrate girl. ‘She doesn’t trust you.’

  Vesalius flushed at this last comment, but did not reply. When she had finished dressing, Zuzka pulled Lieschen up by the armpits, marched her out ahead of her. In the hallway she slipped into a coat and wrapped a shawl around the girl, both to warm her and to hide her state of disarray. Zuzka had not seen Beer since the night Lieschen’s father had been found. It was no longer clear to her who had avoided whom.

  They mounted the stairs. The girl was hot with fever and sluggish in her movements. She walked ahead of Zuzka, was prodded on by Zuzka’s hand at her back, and kept repeating odd snatches of phrase under her breath. Her gait was oddly clumsy; she had tied some rags around her feet, and they kept slipping off and trailing, until Zuzka bent down and tied them in a messy bow. Up close Lieschen smelled of wet clothes and unwiped bum.

  When they passed the stairwell window, the trill of a trumpet reached them from afar. It was Otto and the Chinaman making merry behind half-drawn curtains. ‘Rehearsing,’ he’d told her when she called that morning and found them laughing, sitting tired on his bed. She had allowed him to touch her breasts once the Chinaman was gone. He’d unwrapped them, pinched a nipple, then slipped his knuckles in her crotch. ‘Dogs have bones in their peckers,’ he’d told her while she buttoned up her blouse. ‘It’s difficult to draw a knife across.’ She had left when he’d asked her would she lend him some cash.

  They reached the door, and Zuzka pressed down on the bell. Nothing happened. She tried again, and was again met by silence: no ringing could be heard on the other side. A dim memory stirred in her of Beer complaining about the house’s faulty wiring. Annoyed, she knocked instead. The thick door seemed to swallow up her rap rather than amplify it. She knocked harder, hurt her knuckles, but got no response. Next to her, the girl sat down awkwardly, her twisted neck pulling her chin into her chest. She might have been crying, or fallen asleep. Zuzka knocked again, then remembered the key Beer had given her an age ago, in case of emergency. She wondered could it be that he had been arrested. All at once she was angry with him, for not being there when she needed him.

  She searched her pockets, she was wearing the same coat. The key was rattling with the small change, was marked by a black leather string. She slipped it into the lock and entered, reached out for the light switch and flicked it, to no avail. There was no electricity.

  ‘Hello,’ she called ahead, feeling awkward now, and again, ‘Hello,’ a little louder. Behind her, Lieschen entered, which is to say she stumbled in and broke into a sudden run: towards the bedroom and Eva, foot cloths flailing in her wake. Zuzka followed, pushing the door shut behind her, then crashed into the girl when Lieschen came to a sudden stop. The living-room door stood open: the girl was staring inside, one hand rising to commence the picking of her nose. Light flared, a phosphorous flash that filled the room, then collapsed into itself. Beer had struck a match.

  For a moment, then, the scene was brightly lit, before the shadows scuttled back and reclaimed the room as theirs. What Zuzka saw was quite simple. Two men were lying squeezed on to the couch that Beer had converted into a bed, their naked white chests jutting from the bedsheet that they shared. The stranger was just waking. Beer was pulling himself up, a wedge of dark hair filling the hollow beneath his breastbone. When the match had burnt down to his fingers he blew it out. In the dark, all she could see was the outline of the two men’s skin. Beer sought to rise, then, staring down at himself, fell back on to the couch. It was clear to her that he was naked.

  ‘Fräulein Speckstein,’ he said, stumbling, looking for another match. ‘My friend, he was thrown out of his lodgings.’

  Then, weaker still: ‘It isn’t what you think.’

  ‘The girl is sick,’ she said, turned on her heel and ran away.

  Two

  Werner Heyde met Theodor Eicke in the early days of March 1933. It is easy to imagine their meeting, the young doctor coming into the room, a clipboard in his neat and well-groomed hands, the patient sitting in his hospital pyjamas, a warden by the door in case he should prove violent. Heyde was thirty-one then, was a ward doctor at the Würzberg psychiatric clinic, a talented man with excellent grades and a bright career ahead of him. Eicke was some years older, a man of forty, a Great War veteran who had spent years running I.G. Farben’s internal security in Ludwigshafen. He was also an active member of the NSDAP and had joined the SS in 1931. The man responsible for his present incarceration on grounds of ‘dangerous lunacy’ was Josef Bürckel, the Nazi Gauleiter for a section of the southern Saarland and the future Reichsstatthalter for Vienna and regions. The two men were close political rivals, and Eicke had made open threats of ‘purging’ the Party of its internal enemies. After several weeks of observation, Heyde concluded that Eicke ‘displayed no signs of insanity or brain disease, nor of any abnormal personality traits consistent with psychopathology’. Eicke was released in June of 1933 and made commander of the Dachau concentration camp in a matter of days. By May of 1934 he had instigated a wholesale revision of concentration-camp administration and initiated the formation of an SS unit of concentration-camp guards, later known as the SS-Totenkopf units. In the same summer, he and his adjutant personally shot the SA leader Ernst Röhm as part of the Night of Long Knives. Dr Heyde, meanwhile, had joined the Party in May 1933 on Eicke’s personal recommendation. In 1935 he entered the SS as a medical officer and was soon put in charge of the eugenic examination of concentration-camp inmates. By May 1940 he had been put in charge of organising the secret programme of terminating ‘undesirable’ life known as ‘Action T-4�
� after the Tiergartenstrasse 4 address of its Berlin operational centre. Most T-4 killings were performed by introducing carbon monoxide into fake shower rooms. The gas was delivered by I.G. Farben, Eicke’s erstwhile employer. I.G. Farben also held the patent for Zyklon B, a cyanide-based insecticide, an odourless version of which would later be used in the systematic murder of inmates of Nazi extermination camps.

  1

  At two o’clock in the afternoon on the day of the party, Professor Josef Hieronymus Speckstein was sitting at his desk and taking his blood pressure. He had slipped the inflatable cuff over his upper arm, and was holding on to the little rubber ball that served as its pump. The foot-high mercury column stood on the desk in front of him; he had put on his reading glasses to better observe the numbers. The stethoscope was clasped around his neck and caught the sunlight streaming through the open window. The Professor’s posture was very erect, as though he had just sat down to perform an étude at the piano; his necktie neatly knotted at the collar. Having inflated the cuff sufficiently to cut off the circulation of his blood, Speckstein reached for the stethoscope’s earpieces and eased them into place. Gently, he began to let the air out of the cuff and waited for the sudden whoosh of circulation, the first of the five Korotkoff sounds. Ahead of him, through the open door, he saw Vesalius enter his living room, then turn into his study. She stopped when she saw that he was busy, having approached no further than the door. Suspended from her hand, on a wire hanger of the sort used by professional laundries and visible through a layer of thin paper in which it had been wrapped, hung his dinner jacket. At the bottom, the final few inches of the trouser legs peeked out from the protective paper, their outer seam decorated by a braid of lustrous black silk. The Professor gestured to his housekeeper to wait for a moment while he attended to the important task of ascertaining his health. Within two minutes he had read both his systolic and diastolic pressure off the mercury column, one hundred and ninety one over ninety-five. He wrote down the numbers in a little clothbound notebook, then replaced it in his desk drawer, along with the stethoscope that he had gently prised from his ears.

  ‘Please,’ he said, looking up with his most charming smile. It took close familiarity with his physiognomy to understand he was annoyed.

  ‘Very sorry to disturb you, Herr Professor. Your dinner jacket has come back from the cleaner’s. Shall I hang it in your bedroom?’

  ‘Naturally. Much obliged.’ He hesitated, licked his lips. ‘Did you have my uniform cleaned as well?’

  Frau Vesalius did not answer right away. He could very well see that she hadn’t. The uniform was hanging from its peg at the back of his door from which it had not moved in more than a week. The old woman shook her head, then laid her hand across her mouth to indicate she was aggrieved.

  ‘Are you not wearing your dinner jacket then?’

  ‘But of course. Only, perhaps I won’t. After all, the event does have its – official – dimension.’ He hesitated, picked up the mercury column, weighed it in his hands. His fingernails were perfectly groomed. ‘Give the uniform a sponging and a brush, if you will, Frau Vesalius.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘And I think we had better forget about the sit-down dinner. We will make it a buffet affair, push the dining-room table to one side, let people help themselves to food. There will be some additional guests, you see.’

  This item of news drew a reaction from Frau Vesalius that was no longer mocking but openly distressed. She had been told there would be twelve, perhaps fifteen, gentlemen coming for dinner; had already mentally arranged the crockery on the blue damask tablecloth and worked out a way to seat everyone with dignity; had rinsed the crystal wine glasses she had taken from their locked cupboard and polished them to a shine, and prepared most of the dishes, including liver-dumpling soup, a platter of cold ham and thinly sliced Hungarian salami, and eight pounds of boiled beef in cream sauce. Now all her plans had been undone.

  ‘But who –?’ she began to ask.

  Speckstein cut her off at once. ‘Some of the gentlemen are bringing friends,’ he said a little stiffly, then gestured for her to take charge of the uniform.

  ‘A buffet will be less formal. More dynamic.’

  He paused, his displeasure showing more and more in the colour of his cheeks.

  ‘Also, it might be better not to bother with the table silver. But no, do use it. Only make sure it’s the – well, the gentlemen who handle it.’

  Frau Vesalius had recovered her habitual air of nonchalance, and retrieved the uniform from its hook, stood holding it with both its legs trailing on the ground.

  ‘The gentlemen?’ she asked with great innocence.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But who else is coming?’

  He made an impatient gesture to intimate that surely she understood. Vesalius returned his gaze with one of studied incomprehension.

  ‘Worthy men,’ he said at last, ‘only some of them are lacking in – That is to say, they make up in vigour what they lack in – well, in social grace, I suppose. I am sure you follow what I am saying, Frau Vesalius.’

  ‘Yes, Herr Professor. Silver for the gentlemen. The weekday cutlery for the riff-raff. How many can we hope to expect?’

  It was clear to him that Vesalius was laughing at him, though her face remained serious and as though downcast at the news. He had not the strength to admonish her for her choice of words.

  ‘Thirty, maybe forty,’ he said curtly and waved at her to leave. She snorted, turned on her heel and rushed into the kitchen. Within minutes the flat was filled with the banging of big pots. Speckstein listened to it with a vague sense of satisfaction. It well expressed his own emotion.

  The truth was that ever since that oaf Teuben had invited himself to his party, Speckstein had received cards and phone calls from various sources thanking him for his gracious invitation and asking him whether they could bring along ‘a friend or two, all impeccable Party comrades’. The Professor suspected this was Teuben’s doing. The man seemed bent on mobilising a social element which, apart from its indubitable devotion to the Führer, had little place at his table and had spread news of the party to such an extent that every brazen little Blockwart and SS ensign thought himself entitled to invite himself. Conversely, six or seven of the guests on whose company he had counted had called to cancel at short notice, claiming that a sudden cold or a professional engagement prevented them from attending. When the Vice Chancellor of the university rang to indicate he would only be able to ‘stop by for a moment or two’, Speckstein finally lost his patience and called on the Chief of Police in person to complain about Teuben and the rabble he was dragging into his house. The Chief commiserated with him, but indicated that ‘important Party dignitaries’ were pleased to see that he was throwing open his doors to the Party faithful irrespective of their social background, and that Teuben, for all his failings, had promised to deliver this very week the killer who had been terrorising the city and was on the verge of becoming an important and respected personage to whom promotion would doubtless have to be granted. It was hardly the time to enter into conflict with the man. When Speckstein began pressing the Chief nonetheless, he was curtly reminded that he should endeavour to bury his Hapsburg prejudice against the little man, and was told that he would no doubt benefit from rubbing shoulders with the Volk. The Chief himself, alas, would have to leave right after dinner, but the police service would be well represented even in his absence. In short, Speckstein had long lost control of his own celebrations, and his dream of conducting a dinner party reminiscent of those that had punctuated his life as an academic dignitary, where brilliant conversation had been exchanged over choice cuts of veal and a selection of fine wines, had been quietly perverted. Now he would be playing host to a Party rally better suited to a beer hall, with a clochard clown for entertainment.

  It was with a sigh, then, that Speckstein locked away the blood-pressure meter in a cupboard adjoining his bookshelves, and with a sense of trepid
ation that he began walking around the flat, inspecting it as a general might inspect the field on which he had been forced to give battle, and moving out of sight various valuable trinkets on display. He looked in on the kitchen, where Frau Vesalius was busy cutting up strips of tripe for an impromptu soup. On the kitchen counter there sat a long thin loaf of Strudel, still steaming from the oven’s heat. For a moment he stood in the doorway, watching the housekeeper wield the heavy knife and taking in the aromas of cinnamon and baking apple; then his restlessness rushed him on down the corridor, past his niece’s closed door (he was undecided as of yet whether he should urge her not to attend the festivities or simply require her to withdraw by nine o’clock), into the small drawing room that was used for little more than storage, and then back again towards his office. The thought of his niece stayed with him, and in a sudden burst of energy he got out his pad of writing paper, gold-embossed with his name and title, and retrieved his favourite fountain pen from the gilt holder on his desk.

  ‘Dear Brother,’ he began.

  I am writing once again to report on your daughter’s health. Do not be alarmed when I say that the recent signs of recovery have been superseded by new bouts of nervousness. I remain of the opinion that hers is a routine case of neurasthenia brought on by overstimulation, and that she would benefit from being removed from the city with its noise and pollution, and the questionable company its cramped situation thrusts upon its denizens. Health and virtue are as one, as you well know, and it is to both that I perceive a threat which is further aggravated by her idleness. The semester has started some weeks ago now, and despite two or three haphazard outings to the university, Zuzana has given little sign of taking up her studies in earnest. When I asked her, she told me straight out that her fellow students did not interest her much. I retorted that it was the subject of medicine and not the look and manners of her peers that should wake her interest, whereupon she gave me a morbidly enthusiastic description of the anatomy room (whether she took her details from that which she had witnessed or culled them from a book I was unable to ascertain). In short, I find it doubtful that she will make a proper fist of the study of medicine at this point, and am anxious lest she contract a moral and physical disease from which it will take her years to recover. My advice, dear brother, is to recall her, surround her with the support of a proper family (something that I, by myself, am hardly able to do), and, if she should formulate the wish to enter the medical or any other faculty at the start of the next semester, to send her to Salzburg or to Graz, where she will find herself in a more tranquil environment that will benefit her nerves. As for myself, I am well and am preparing for my party tonight, which promises to be a great social success.