The Twins (5 page)

It took years for the grandfather to die. He hardly came out from behind the stove – only in a warm draught did his bones stop rattling against each other. He hobbled outside once more on an oppressively hot day and stationed himself on a small bench in front of the house. Anna went to sit next to him. A black barouche came driving by; an old woman in widow’s clothes was sitting on the box – wisps of grey hair clung to her sweaty face. She turned out to be a sister of his who lived six kilometres further on, on a large farm. They had not seen each other in twenty years. ‘But Trude, what are you doing here?’ his voice cracked. ‘Well, if you won’t visit me,’ she snapped, baring three solitary teeth, ‘then I will have to come to you.’

Uncle Heinrich, who preferred reading to milking cows, just like his dead brother, carried the full burden of the destitute farm on his shoulders. Above the stable doors of the Saxon
half-timbered
house built in 1779 it said: ‘Grant, O greatest God – what thou commands from us – we will dutifully accomplish this – in the utmost devotion.’ A prophetic motto, with the emphasis on ‘dutifully’. While Aunt Liesl hurried back and forth between housekeeping, chickens and kitchen garden, Uncle Heinrich had the greatest difficulty allocating his attention between the seduction of the printed word and fifty pigs, four cows with calves, a
carthorse
, fifty acres of their own land and twelve rented.

Even when doing business he scarcely put aside his reading matter. When the cattle dealer, Papa Rosenbaum, turned up,
having
scented that a cow was for sale, Uncle Heinrich would sit dourly in the kitchen with a book and continue reading during the
traditional game of bid and counter-bid. ‘What do you want for it?’ Papa Rosenbaum clapped his fat hands together. His hat was set back on his head as though he were a Chicago gangster. On his square chest hung an antique watch-chain. ‘Six hundred,’ Uncle Heinrich mumbled without looking up. ‘Six hundred? I’m sorry, Bamberg, but that’s laughable! I’m laughing my head off!’ He burst out in an epic laugh; Uncle Heinrich was just becoming engrossed in an intriguing passage; Anna made herself invisible in a corner of the kitchen. When he had stopped laughing, Rosenbaum made a case about the price of cattle in the context of the wretched
economic
condition that the country found itself in. Where was that leading? He could offer four hundred, not a penny more. Uncle Heinrich did not flinch. ‘Four hundred and fifty.’ Nothing. ‘Do you want to ruin me! I really can’t do business like that.’ Papa Rosenbaum stalked out of the kitchen and closed the door behind him with a bang. The tail of his coat had stuck in the door, obliging him to open it again to jerk it out. Hissing, he pulled his coat back. Then they could hear him pacing up and down in the yard,
complaining
loudly. ‘I’ll go bankrupt! My family will starve!’ He got into his Wanderer and started the engine, got out, came inside again. ‘My soul, my poor soul is dying!’ The whole arsenal of threats and self-pity bounced off the invisible wall surrounding the impassive reader. After the ritual had been repeated three times, Rosenbaum took his watch out of his waistcoat pocket. ‘I’ve been at it for an hour already, that’s how my business is going down the drain. Very well, you get your six hundred.’ Later, after she had witnessed this ceremony many more times, Anna understood that the outcome of the cattle trading had been settled by the
antagonists
beforehand and that it was done for both their amusement.

A class photo was taken. Among fifty-four children’s heads, Anna’s was ninth from the left in the third row. She was looking straight into the camera, still wearing a black dress with a loose, drooping black bow on her head. Though the other children were standing close together there was a space around Anna as though
they were instinctively afraid that homesickness might be
infectious
. Yet she had survived the village children’s ostracism and, thanks to her inborn fearlessness, had won her classmates’ trust. When she grew out of the mourning dress she received a collarless garment of indestructible dove grey material made with room to grow. The number of permanent tasks imposed upon her on the farm rose in proportion to the centimetres she gained in height. There was one day of holiday in the year: the expedition to Wewelsburg, a medieval castle not far from the village. The hay carts were decorated with birch bark and coloured paper and pulled by cart-horses, and everyone fought for a place on the cart of Lampen-Heini, a rich farmer who had swift, light horses. On the way they forgot everyday life, which was becoming increasingly meagre, and exuberantly sang walking songs.

They had a whole lot to forget. The millions of unemployed in the towns, for example, who had no money to buy anything, so the farm butter, potatoes and pork kept being sent back. Because of the rent, artificial fertilizers and taxes they could not afford, they could only dream of a pair of new shoes or a skein of wool to mend
stockings
. There was a state of emergency in the Ruhr area. The
unemployed
were being sent out to the countryside to work for the farmers in return for bed and board. The children came next, the church doled them out to every willing farmer’s wife. The
mysterious
arrival of the pale, listless children and the almost
metaphysical
mediating role of the church so moved the imaginations of Anna and her friends that they invented a game: ‘The Ruhr
children
arrive’. With a stick they drew an imaginary village in the
compressed
earth, with a church and the farms scattered around. They took it in turns to play mother. She fetched a Ruhr child from the church, walked through the village with it and brought it into a house they had designed. What happened after that did not bother them – it was about accepting a poor child; it touched their
awakening
maternal instinct. Anna played passionately, identifying with the displaced children, until the game became unexpectedly
real in the person of Nettchen, who was brought home by Aunt Liesl.

This was a Ruhr child in flesh and blood. She came into the house with Aunt Liesl, spindly and grimy and in worn-out shoes. Two long brown plaits were pinned on top of her head; there were scabs on her lips which she could not leave alone. She laughed mysteriously at everything they said to her but said nothing in reply. Initially they imagined that Nettchen could not speak, but eventually, once she opened up falteringly, it appeared that she simply did not have many thoughts. She could not keep up at school. She came home with corrected homework – underneath on the slate the teacher had written: ‘Dear Anna, aren’t you ashamed to let Nettchen go to school with such exercises? Is there no time for you to help her?’ Anna could not ignore this challenge. Evening after evening she dedicated herself with iron discipline to the
renovation
of Nettchen’s neglected intellect. She was baffled that her efforts bore no fruit at all. Nettchen’s mysterious laugh at every question she persisted in answering incorrectly drove Anna to
despair
. ‘Why give yourself all that trouble?’ Uncle Heinrich said
laconically
. ‘Isn’t Nettchen much better off as she is than you or I?’

Nettchen was certainly interested in love. The handsomest of all the boys living on the banks of the Lippe for miles around was in love with Aunt Liesl. Each Sunday Leon Rosenbaum came to the farm with a bunch of flowers. Their impossible love hastened to an untimely end on a rusty garden bench overlooking a bed of young cabbages. They were mute about what they had to say to each other. Instead they held each other’s hand and mumbled
generalities
that instantly evaporated. Anna and Nettchen lay behind the gooseberry bushes, expecting greater boldness. Sometimes Leon gave Aunt Liesl a chaste kiss. Her bosom rose and fell
languorously
, the golden cross heaved with it and Nettchen pinched Anna’s arm.

During the Friday liturgy Anna grasped a vague sense of the connection between the half-heartedness of the advances and the
ending of the ever-recurring passage ‘Flectamus genua’ uttered in kneeling position: ‘Let us pray for the Church, the Pope, the bishops, the government, the sick, travellers, the shipwrecked …’ No single category was missed out, not even the Jews. When it came to their turn, at the very end, the faithful rose as one to their feet from their kneeling position – after all, the Jews had knelt mockingly before Jesus with the words: ‘King of the Jews!’ The prayer was rounded off: ‘May our Lord God lift the veil from their hearts so that they too acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ.’

When Leon realized that all his efforts were foundering on the golden cross, he ceased his visits. Aunt Liesl relapsed into dull
taciturnity
. For weeks she seemed to do her work blindly, until she made a decision that was more fitting to a threepenny opera: she took herself off into a Carmelite nunnery. On her departure she clasped Anna passionately to her and kissed her tenderly on the forehead. Nervously she fished a curled photograph of Leon out of the black handbag that she would have to relinquish at the convent gate and pushed it into Anna’s hand.

Her departure fired the starting shot for a series of radical changes. Nettchen was returned to the church. The grandfather, whose all-seeing eye had maintained symbolic control to his final days, exchanged his earthly existence for immortality. He was
buried
in a snowy churchyard next to his wife, who had departed
fifteen
years earlier.

Back on the farm Uncle Heinrich rested a hand on Anna’s shoulder. ‘So, Anna, now there’s only the two of us and the stock. And you and I are no farmers at all. Come, let’s get down to work.’ The heroic acceptance of this lot reminded Anna of her father, who had reconciled himself to his illness in the same way. In an empty gesture she clutched him by his funeral coat. When he dies too, she thought, I’ll really be alone.

‘I wrote you dozens of letters,’ Lotte sighed. ‘I lay in my garden house and wrote. My mother had bought special writing paper for me with violets in the top left corner. All my letters ended with, “Dear Anna, Why don’t you write back? When will we see each other again?”’

‘They must have intercepted all those letters and thrown them away – after they had read them out of their farmers’ curiosity. And there I was thinking you had forgotten me.’

Their eyes strayed to the other tables. Both were silent. Here they sat, almost seventy years later, and they still felt taken in and deceived; they did not know what they ought to do with these feelings. Had the lives of all these ladies here, with their silk blouses, their gold earrings, their carefully painted lips, also gone awry through such misunderstandings? Anna began to laugh sarcastically.

‘Why are you laughing?’ said Lotte suspiciously.

‘Because my indignation has lost nothing of its strength, after all these years.’ Anna drummed her fingers on the table. She remembered she had decided one day that Lotte had died from the illness she was meant to have recovered from in Holland. Nobody had thought to send her an announcement of the death. Perhaps her grandfather had indeed received it, but kept quiet about it so as not to upset her. She had made Lotte dead like that because a dead Lotte was more bearable than one who had simply forgotten her. Moreover, dying ran in the family.

‘It’s like a book,’ said Lotte. Time was rustling past her. Still she could hear her mother, talking about Anna and saying
compassionately
, ‘The poor child, landing up with such barbarians.’ This
description, which she had taken over gratuitously from her German mother-in-law, made Anna’s fate became more and more puzzling. Was Anna herself a barbarian too now? Didn’t barbarians have any writing paper? She invented all sorts of excuses for Anna in this way, in order not to have to live with the thought that Anna was simply not allowing her to hear from her at all.

Between Uncle Heinrich and the delicate, blonde daughter of a gentleman farmer, strict unwritten laws stood in the way that were best expressed as statistics: the quantity of livestock, the number of servants, acres of land. With Martha Höhnekop, who was her opposite in every way, he was trying to rid himself of his chosen one. He met Martha at the shooting match. In mutiny against the terror of rank and position, and capital, he had allowed his eyes to fall on someone who had nothing to lose. She was the eldest of a family of fourteen children. Her father ran a café that everyone with a dash of self-respect avoided. But Uncle Heinrich was drunk and Martha Höhnekop available.

One day she walked into Anna’s life. With big, rough strides that contrasted coarsely with the cream-coloured lace on her
wedding
dress, she entered the stuffy living-room, threw her bouquet of roses and phlox onto the table and dropped, puffed out, into grandfather’s chair. She could breathe again: the town hall, the church, the celebration meal – it exhausted her to try to be civilized and charming. Anna observed her closely. A sturdy woman with a large, flat face, narrow lips and broad jawbones; above were her eyes, crooked, mysterious, unfathomable, sunken. Her shiny black hair was pinned up; the rose that had been stuck there that
morning
and had stayed in place the whole day now slid out slowly. Her cheeks looked unnaturally red. Anna thought that was because of the wedding, but later on it seemed that the blush in her cheeks had been tattooed, as though she were suffering from a permanent excitement that could find no outlet. ‘Send that child to bed,’ she said to Uncle Heinrich, waving her hand at Anna. ‘We’ve only just
got married and yet we’ve such a big girl already,’ replied the bridegroom with a false laugh. ‘Not many could imitate us.’ But the bride, who had had enough of Anna’s candid, staring gaze, did not see what there was to laugh about.

The one thing about Martha Höhnekop that worked was her womb: a child was born every year. Beyond that she did not make the grade at all. When she got up at nine o’clock, yawning and scratching her head, Uncle Heinrich’s day was already four hours old. From then on, she knew how, in her pigheaded manner, to give the impression that she was kept busy by the housekeeping, but in fact, with her gross body like an elemental force, she
swaggered
about the small dwelling without lifting a finger. Much work would have been left undone had an outlawed eleven-year-old girl not gone round seeing to it. A girl who actually belonged to no one although she ate with them and slept under the same roof. The one who is lazy has to be clever. Aunt Martha understood that an
indispensable
labourer had fallen into her lap in the form of this
so-called
niece.

With every baby that was born, a part of the child in Anna shrivelled up and the beast of burden increased in size in its place. Seven days of her week began with milking the cows – the churns had to be standing by the road by six o’clock. Then she had to feed the pigs, horses, cows, calves and chickens, pump drinking water for them, clean out the cowshed and cook the pigfeed, rub down the cows. This chain of activities was called morning work, the pendant of which was evening work. It began all over again in the afternoons at four o’clock – after school. If the pendants had been figurines on the mantelpiece, they would have shown two slaves sagging at the knees with their backs bent – the clock ticking
inexorably
between them.

The existence she had been dreaming of, that of a grammar school pupil, was becoming progressively more tenuous. In that dream her life was still proceeding according to the original plan, in which her father set high demands on her intellect – which fitted
in badly between the cows and pigs. Two teachers and a pastor had naïvely come to the house to persuade Uncle Heinrich to permit her to go to the grammar school. But their hymn of praise to her talents was cast aside by that single primitive argument, ‘No, we need her on the farm.’

He was never to surface from the shock of his impulsive
marriage
. Apart from being an escape, his lightning raid had perhaps also been a juvenile attempt to repair the fragmented family life. That he had brought a much greater woe on himself as a result was clear. He armed himself against his disillusion by throwing himself into his work with grim doggedness. He acquired the harsh, fixed expression of a farmer who already knows early on that, however hard he drives himself into the ground, his fate is immutable, so out of pure masochism he adds a little extra to it. If Anna had not been there, his little companion in misfortune and sorrow, then he would have had to do battle with the primal force calling herself his wife, in order to get her to work too – a battle in which the loser would have been certain from the outset.

High mass on Sundays freed the house from Aunt Martha’s
presence
for a few hours. This offered Papa Rosenbaum’s youngest son the opportunity to take Anna by surprise one hot summer’s day. She had just put the potatoes and carrots in the soup simmering with a piece of bacon. All of a sudden, through the steam, she saw a boy standing in the doorway. He took a few steps into the kitchen. She recognized Daniel Rosenbaum, who had sat near her in class. ‘I’m going swimming in the Lippe,’ he said casually. ‘Can I undress here?’ Anna looked at him absent-mindedly. ‘I suppose so,’ she said, vaguely pointing, ‘you can use that room there.’ Swimming in the river, she thought with surprise, nobody ever does that. She did not know anyone who could swim. Peering at the bubbles and swirls on the surface of the simmering soup, she saw before her the life-threatening whirlpools of the Lippe. When she heard a sound behind her she turned round automatically. The young Rosenbaum was standing naked on the doormat, his erect member
was swathed in a beam of sunlight that was entering through the window. He stared at her with defiant seriousness. The cooking spoon fell out of her hand. Independent of his thin boy’s body standing out there darkly, the thing with the eye at the top seemed to be aiming straight for her, like a rising cobra poised on the point of attack. She did not know anything like it existed, she refused it, she would have nothing to do with it and fled from the kitchen, past the salute that had been brought to her, outside, to hide behind the privet hedge. She was trembling. In the far distance the severe spire of the Landolinus church was sticking up above the trees. That was pointing upwards too. She stooped to pick a bundle of grass, and pulled the blades apart one by one. How was it
possible
that, while high mass was being celebrated there, here
something
like this could manifest itself – that both could exist in the same world?

Jesus had said, ‘Be perfect, as Our Father in heaven is perfect.’ Anna tried to keep this commandment scrupulously although her efforts were put to the test severely on All Souls’ day. All prayers for the salvation of the souls of the dead were heard on this day in November. Those who had the opportunity to do so went to church six times to make the most of the chance. But the prayers were not only for dead loved ones. The greatest sacrifice was a prayer on behalf of the godless, ‘Do something good for the sinner too.’ She had already prayed for her father, for her mother,
grandfather
and for Lotte too, to be on the safe side. For whom else can I pray now, she brooded, what is the very greatest penance I should do? Then the naked Rosenbaum appeared unbidden before her, on the doormat, swathed in a sunbeam. In a flash the sacrifice being demanded of her was clear: why shouldn’t she pray for one –
arbitrary
– dead Jew?

Lotte sipped a glass of Grand Marnier that accompanied the third cup of coffee. ‘It could just as well have been a non-Jewish boy.’

‘Of course! I am only telling you to show you how ambivalent my attitude towards the Jews was and how that was fed by the church. Now comes the worst.’ Anna tossed back the final dregs. ‘At some point they had disappeared: there were no more Jews in our village. No Rosenbaum came to buy cattle any more; a Christian cattle dealer took his place, without ceremony. Yet I never asked: where has the Rosenbaum family gone? Never, you understand. Nobody ever asked anything, not even my uncle.’

‘What did happen to that family?’

‘I don’t know! It’s true when people say “we did not know”. But why didn’t we know? Because it didn’t interest us at all! I reproach myself, now, that I didn’t ask: where have they gone?’

Lotte had been getting hot, she was feeling dizzy. Anna’s
self-reproach
sounded hollow in her ears – what could you do with it? All the fur hats around them had disappeared. The lights in the wagon wheel were still on, but at half strength. ‘I believe they want us to be on our way,’ she mumbled.

Anna stood up to pay, Lotte would not hear of it. But Anna beat her to it. She had already paid when Lotte was still searching for the lost sleeve of her coat. The Germans were too quick for everybody, with their strong Deutschmarks.

They had just been roaming about in the 1930s; now they stepped outside into a white, timeless world – the compelling silence that now prevailed created the presentiment of a great void. Anna took Lotte’s arm. Under the impression that their ways would part here, they stopped by the Lanciers monument in the Place Royale – a heroic rider marching to war wearing a helmet of snow.

‘Until tomorrow.’ Anna looked at Lotte solemnly and kissed her on both cheeks.

‘Until tomorrow …’ said Lotte weakly.

‘Who would have thought it …’ said Anna again.

Then they both crossed the road in the same direction.

‘Where are you heading?’ Anna asked. 

‘To my hotel’

‘Me too!’

They both turned out to be staying at hotels on the other side of the railway line. ‘That can’t just be chance,’ Anna laughed, holding onto Lotte’s arm again. Thus they walked on, the snow crunching pleasantly under their feet. On the railway bridge they stopped to look out over the snow-covered roofs.

‘Just think,’ mused Anna, ‘of all the famous celebrities who have come here to take the cure over the centuries. Even Tsar Peter the Great.’