Authors: Dan Vyleta
The Quiet Twin
The Quiet Twin
DAN VYLETA
For Mom and Dad, who taught me to take joy in life.
And I will take a further secret to the grave: that I once observed Mother, how she secretly went into the cellar larder, cut herself a thick slice of ham and ate it downstairs, standing up, with her hands, hurriedly, it didn’t even look repulsive, just surprising, I was more touched than appalled. [. . .] Curiously enough, I like those of whose kind I am: human beings.
Heinrich Böll,
A Clown’s Perspectives
Contents
Killers
When Peter Kürten was but a young boy, he would watch his uncle attend to the slaughter of dogs. The uncle was a dog catcher by profession. This was before the Great War, in the final decade of the nineteenth century. He will have gone about it with a knife, the throat slashed ear to ear, and bled it into a bucket. It is not known whether young Peter was ever asked to eat the meat. At his trial, in 1931, Kürten reminisced how he had taken to torturing dogs not long after: he’d fed them with nails stuffed into sausage, watched them bleed to death from the inside. When asked whether it was this experience that had made him into what he had become, he demurred, and explained that the main responsibility should be seen to rest with the sensational crime reporting of the papers: it was the printed word that served as his inspiration. He also begged the court to keep his crimes in perspective. Compared to the doctors of the Stuttgart hospital who were responsible, he said, for more than five hundred abortions, his nine murders were the work of a mere amateur. Halfway through the trial Kürten changed his plea from innocent to guilty. He was sentenced to death by guillotine and executed in the correctional facility Klingelpütz, near Cologne. Immediately after the execution, Kürten’s head was bisected and his brain removed for scientific scrutiny. The head itself was mummified, and purchased by a collector of crime memorabilia. Today it resides in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Museum in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin.
He had not quite finished dressing when he heard the knock on the door. It was a quarter past eleven, a half-hour earlier than they’d agreed. He opened up quickly, a note of reprimand already on his lips, then grew flustered as soon as he saw it wasn’t the party he had expected.
‘What is it?’ he stammered and sought to soften his rudeness with the ghost of a smile.
‘It’s the girl, Herr Doktor,’ the woman said, eyeing him and the entrance to the apartment that also served as his practice with open curiosity. ‘But I see you’re dressed to go out.’
Now that his eyes had adjusted to the gloom of the stairwell, he recognised her as Frau Vesalius, the postal clerk’s widow, who served as housekeeper in the main apartment on the first floor.
‘What girl?’ he asked, stepping out on to the landing with her, and drawing the door half shut behind himself. Frau Vesalius did not back away from him, and his movement brought them into uncomfortable proximity. He noted absently that she wore nothing but a dressing gown that was belted over a cotton nightdress; to this she had added a pearl necklace to make herself more presentable. Strands of hair were curling from beneath her hairnet, iron grey. He was struck above all by the coarseness of her features, and the cold, systematic manner in which she embraced her role as petitioner.
‘She’s sick and cannot sleep. She pants and raves. It is very frightful, Herr Doktor. I fear she has a fever. I tried a poultice, but she shrieked at me and told me to run for the doctor. I fear for her life.’
The woman’s eyes sought out his own; he thought them mocking. ‘Though if you are going out–’
‘You go on ahead. I’ll just be a moment,’ he said and turned back into his apartment, shutting the door in her face. He considered for a moment taking off his good shirt and waistcoat and slipping into the clothes he had worn during the day, but then simply fetched his doctor’s bag and made sure he had all the necessary instruments. His name was Beer. He was thirty-four years of age.
When he reopened the door he found to his annoyance that Frau Vesalius had not moved a step, and had waited him out right there on the landing. There she stood with that same hulking, insolent presence with which she had explained her situation to him, her fake pearls catching the light of the bulb.
‘You lead the way,’ he said, and she shuffled down the stairwell ahead of him, slowly and as though rheumatic, though he noticed she did not feel any need to steady herself against the banister.
‘So good of you,’ she kept on mumbling, like a litany, but devoid of any affect. When she stopped on the landing to theatrically catch her breath, he lost his patience and brushed past her, went on ahead.
‘I haven’t much time,’ he said.
She followed, quicker now, muttering abject ‘Thank yous’ at his back.
Once inside the flat, the postal clerk’s widow refused to turn on the lights.
‘The Professor turned in an hour ago,’ she explained, in a sort of stage whisper as loud as normal speech, and instead lit a candle that she had ready beside the door. She led him down a gloomy corridor, past the stink of the toilet, and deeper into the flat.
‘In here,’ she pointed, stopping outside the door as though she were too delicate to enter. She held out the candle on its little metal saucer. He took it from her and ventured in, then turned on the bedside lamp before drawing a chair up to his patient. She was so wrapped into her bedding that only her face was visible, a small, wan face with deep chestnut eyes. Her lids were open but she was staring fixedly ahead, neither moving her head, nor any part of her body. The window was closed and the room was stifling.
‘How long has she been like this?’ the doctor asked the widow, who hovered behind, observing his movements with studied servility.
‘She’s been complaining about headaches for days. And then, last night, she said she couldn’t feel her legs and started moaning in her sleep. Tonight she has kept us all up.’ And again that empty, jeering phrase of hers: ‘I fear for her life.’
‘Yes,’ he mumbled, not turning his head. ‘Leave us alone for a moment.’
He heard her presence shift behind him, then rose to close the door she had left ajar, and opened the little window to the night. Late-summer smells came wafting in, along with the heat of the city. The branches of the courtyard chestnut nearly reached the pane. If he stretched for it, he might be able to pluck a leaf.
‘She’ll be back,’ said the sick girl. She said it so softly that just for a moment he wasn’t sure he had heard it at all. It might have been he who spoke.
‘I haven’t much time,’ he told her.
Her face and body showed no reaction. She was eighteen or nineteen years old, not a wrinkle in her pale and pliant skin.
The door opened a crack. It was Frau Vesalius again, leaning through the gap until the whole of her upper body seemed to have entered the room.
‘Do you need anything, Herr Doktor? A glass of water perhaps? Or tea?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just some peace and quiet to examine the patient.’
‘So good of you–’
He crossed the room once more to close the door, then returned to the girl’s bedside. Slowly, deliberately, he took a watch from his pocket, opened it, then reached for the girl’s wrist. It lay buried beneath her sheet.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘I must take your pulse.’
She did not stir. He changed the watch over to his other hand, took hold of the lip of her sheet and drew it back far enough to expose a naked shoulder, and the sweat-damp ruffles of a nightgown; beneath it, the plump outline of a breast, the areola as big as a cow’s eye. He hesitated and surprised himself by his hesitation. The girl did not move. Her eyes remained fixed upon some spot on the ceiling, a dense clot of stucco, painted over one too many times. He searched for some words to reassure her, to tell her she need not be afraid, but the conventional phrases seemed out of place with her. They sat in silence for a moment to the ticking of his watch, the smell of his cologne between them. He watched her nostrils dilate as she breathed, and imagined her sorting through the scent; was conscious of wearing too much of it, and of the incessant chafe where his collar bit into freshly shaven skin.
