The Twins (6 page)

‘The town still has something distinguished about it,’ Lotte endorsed, brushing a strip of snow off the balustrade with a gloved finger. She loved the atmosphere of aristocratic
élan
and faded glory emanating from the buildings below. The nineteenth century was still tangibly present and evoked a longing for a more
harmonious
and better organized way of living that had been lost for ever. At the Thermal Baths, whenever anyone on the staff held out a hand to her to help her out of the bath and into a ready warmed bathrobe, she deluded herself that she was a dowager or a
marchioness
who had brought her own lady’s maid with her.

They shuffled on, from one lamppost to the next, from one pool of light to the next, until they were standing in front of a villa with two round towers. ‘I’m there,’ said Lotte. The building of white fondant sprinkled with icing sugar created an unreal, dreamy impression. This day, with all the implausibilities that had occurred, had been dreamed, and Anna beside her was not real.

‘A palace,’ Anna assessed soberly. ‘I am lodging further on, it’s altogether rather simpler.’

Lotte sensed the criticism but was not inclined to explain that a sober family hotel was hiding behind the de luxe façade. ‘I wish you … a pleasant evening,’ she stammered.

‘I can hardly wait until tomorrow,’ Anna sighed, pulling her firmly to her.

It took a long time for Lotte to fall asleep. A pain-free position
was difficult to find. And whether she lay on her side or her back, she continued to replay the meeting and the unburdenings that had ensued, An amalgam of conflicting emotions hindered a blind submission to sleep. How shall I tell my children, was her last thought as she dropped off, towards morning.

Full of sombre forebodings, Lotte woke. The hotel room appeared strange and hostile to her; the snow-covered branches through the window evoked no poetic sentiments, Everything was painful. This body was evoking aversion in her, not only because she could feel it with every movement but because its origin could not be denied. A Dutch person, in a German body. In Belgium. She would have liked to have made off silently, but the cure was a gift from her children, so how could she take flight from her own
birthday
present? Allowing herself to be led astray by Anna was a form of disloyalty: the pain in her limbs was a warning that she had already gone too far. Those first years of life that Anna referred to – what did they really represent in a human life? They had been put into the world together, half-way through the First World War, while there had been wholesale death not even a hundred kilometres away. There was something improper about being born at such a moment, and twins at that. A curse must lie upon them. Great estrangement deservedly existed between them, it needed to remain so. Perhaps an impersonal historical guilt lay upon them and in the course of their lives, independently of one another, they had had to repay an amount of misfortune brought about by circumstances.

As Lotte was waiting in the basement for the preparation of her peat bath, Anna appeared in the doorway. There was already something familiar about her – hopefully this was not the precursor of some sort of family feeling! Anna slid next to her on the white bench.

‘How did you sleep, meine Liebe?’

‘All right,’ said Lotte superciliously.

‘I slept wonderfully.’ Anna massaged her thighs.

A woman in a white overall beckoned to Lotte. Anna grasped her by her shoulder. ‘There’s a lovely café next door, Relais de la Poste, let’s meet there. This afternoon!’

Nodding vaguely, Lotte glided into the bathroom. How was it possible: once again Anna succeeded in taking her by surprise,
presenting
a
fait
accompli
!

In the Relais de la Poste time had stood still since the beginning of the thirties. Dark brown wooden chairs, white table-cloths beneath plate glass, copper lamps with glass bulbs, everything
originated
from that period. The owner had seen no reason to change anything to the post-war fancies for steel, plastic or pseudo-rustic. It was quiet there, a few regulars chatting softly at the buffet. Passers-by with turned-up collars walked through the snow where, across the street, the walls of the Thermal Institute contrasted grubbily. The woman behind the bar recommended a regional drink to the ladies, to warm them up: Ratafia de Pommes. This apple liqueur infiltrated Lotte’s resistance to the meeting with a sour-sweet refinement. After the second glass she spotted a
primitive
radio in a dark corner, with a lovely wooden case. Delighted, she walked over to it and let her fingers slide lovingly over the polished wood. ‘Look at this,’ she called. ‘That crazy father of mine had one like it too!’

The purchase of a gramophone from the firm Grammophon and Polyphon in Amsterdam brought a cause of quarrels and
sleeplessness
to the home, apart from a source of pleasure. Hours of musical gastronomy had preceded the definitive choice. Lotte’s father
listened
with eyes closed to Caruso’s divine voice; his ‘Hosannah’ and ‘Paliaccio’ almost caused Polyphon’s luxurious auditorium in Leidsestraat to come apart at the seams. The turntable lay beneath a flap in the top of the new piece of furniture. It acquired a
prominent
position in the living-room; from then on the house was
permeated
with the symphonies of Schubert and Beethoven, with the
voice of the famous tenor Jacques Urlus – who sang ‘Murmelndes Lüftchen’ – but also with the serene voice of Aaltje Noordewier in Bach’s Passions. He played the new machine until deep into the night; it enabled his love of music and for the very newest
achievements
of electrical technology to enter into a perfect symbiosis. His wife kept him company to the very end of his nightly sessions since she had discovered that in his intoxicated state he forgot to put out the lamps and stoves before going to bed. He liked it loud. The children were developing sleep problems through the excess of heavenly sounds. They dozed over their arithmetic books at school; Lotte could hear the melting songs of
Orfeo
in surging waves right through reading lessons.

Polyphon’s warehouse contained a stock of four thousand five hundred different gramophone records. Lotte’s mother was
regularly
surprised by a representative from the firm holding a bill under her nose. A quarrel about money then flared up through the music in the evenings. ‘I’ve already paid it.’ ‘You haven’t paid it. They were at the door again. That’s no way to behave.’ Jet and Lotte slid out of bed and sat on the top stair, their arms round each other’s shoulders. What had merely sounded like a threat from the bedroom grew into danger out here. The music continued
mercilessly
, their parents’ anger raised above it. Sometimes an object hit the floor with a bang. Eventually they descended the stairs crying, and entered the scene of battle in bare feet, preparing themselves for the very worst. ‘We had a bad dream,’ was their alibi. Lotte held on tightly to the sleeve of Jet’s night-dress. An instant
ceasefire
was declared. Their father went to the miraculous object to put another record on; their mother hugged them guiltily to her bosom.

Their father’s hunger for new music was, however, surpassed by his addiction to sound machines. Soon the reproduction of the gramophone no longer satisfied his demands. The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam was his standard; that was how it had to sound in the living-room too. He installed all kinds of experimental
advances in his workshop, amid a chaos of transformers,
distributors
, switchboards, loudspeakers and earth electrodes – the tips of his moustache were singed from the soldering. He already had a series of successful attempts as a radio builder to his name; his home-made Chrystalphone surpassed those from the Edison works. He introduced so many ingenious alterations to the
gramophone
that the original machine could hardly be recognized any more. When an Ultraphone was unexpectedly launched on the market, he adapted it immediately. This machine, which delighted even the most reserved of critics, had two sound arms and two needles at its disposal, so that the sound was transmitted twice with a short pause in between – a stereo effect ahead of its time. The gramophone with the human voice, wrote the press. Lotte’s father took this as a personal declaration of war. Once more he
stationed
himself in his workshop; he did not rest until he had built a unit with two conical loudspeakers. Not only did the sound come from different sides, as in the concert hall, but he was the
front-runner
in the race to conquer surface noise. The two polished beech cases that dominated the room brought him a fame that extended beyond the rivers Maas and Waal. Engineers from the light bulb industry drove north in a company car to hear the
acoustic
phenomenon with their own ears. Sound technicians from the broadcasting company, musicians, hobbyists, vague acquaintances followed – evening after evening new interested parties enjoyed the brilliant sound reproduction and the ever expanding record
collection
. The instigator of all these technical and musical
tours
de
force
, completely autodidactic in the world of sound, found himself in a permanent state of spiritual inebriation as a result of the overdose of interest and recognition. He put his records on the turntable with just as much vanity as a violinist tucks his violin under his chin. His moustache, once again restored to its former glory, shone as never before.

As a result of these exciting evenings, the local community’s power and water supply was at risk. These were his responsibility –
a job he had attained through years of self-tuition about electrical theory. He was sleeping late in the mornings. Because there was no one else to do it, on dark winter mornings his wife got out of bed, where she had spent no more than four hours, putting a housecoat over her night-dress, to turn on the pressure pumps in the ice-cold water-tower. Sometimes it got too much for her. ‘You think only of yourself,’ she flung at his head when he eventually stumbled downstairs, his eyes still thick with sleep, ‘when it suits you. Egoist. Salon socialist.’ He protested weakly, looking in vain for arguments with which to defend himself. She, driven to despair by the sudden irresponsibility he hid behind, punched him. The children saw him stagger; they fled over the bridge into the wood to build a hut as an alternative to the parental home. The building activities were drawn out as long as possible in the hope that the war would have subsided when they crossed the bridge in the reverse direction. Hours later, hungry and agitated, they walked gingerly back to the house. From the wood they could already see their parents sitting on the garden bench under the climbing pear tree, arms wound around each other and blissful smiles on their lips – equilibrium had been restored.

The children did their homework in the back room; the
gramophone
was silent whenever their father was out on a tour of
inspection
. A company Harley Davidson took him round the outskirts of the district. He raced along majestic avenues in his long leather coat, leggings on his calves, his eyes protected by huge goggles, the flaps of his cap fluttering against his head like the wings of a
drunken
bird. When he got home and had taken off his rig, he took a volume of the collected works of Marx or Lenin from the bookshelf and flopped into an armchair with it.

Suddenly the sliding doors would open. ‘What are you doing?’ he said sternly. ‘Homework.’ ‘Which subject?’ ‘Dutch history.’ ‘Close those books, you can learn much more from this. Listen: “… Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the labourer, free or not free, must add to the
working time necessary for his own maintenance and extra working time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production, whether this proprietor be the Athenian perfect gentleman, Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus, Norman Baron, American slave owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern
landlord
or capitalist.”’ He cast a meaningful glance at them over the cover of
Das
Kapital
,
decorated with floral stems. ‘Understand, the worker labours by the sweat of his brow so that the rich can
dedicate
themselves entirely to doing nothing. That’s how the world works. Get that into your heads.’ And he continued his lecture, which could last for hours when he got into his stride, until they were released by their mother, who would assign them imaginary tasks. When they complained about having to weed the kitchen garden he rubbed their noses in the fate of people of their age from the previous century. ‘At two, three, four o’clock in the morning children of nine to ten years were dragged out of their unhealthy dormitory towns and forced to work for their mere subsistence until ten, eleven, twelve at night, while their limbs wasted away, their bodies bent, their features dulled and their human
countenances
stiffened into expressionless masks, just one glimpse of which was terrifying.’

He treated guests with more subtlety. First he tempted them with heavenly music. When he had entirely hooked them and their souls were enfeebled by emotion, he turned the volume knob low and, as though in spontaneous inspiration, opened a book which just happened to be lying ready there all the while. Some politely managed to do a bunk in time, others got into strenuous disputes that lasted deep into the night. He only really provoked genuine resistance when, in the early hours, with the imposing loudspeakers in the background as proof of his resourceful intellect, he made known his opposition to the monarchy. Spurred on by the gin, they were prepared to go a long way with him in his arguments about historical materialism; they were even prepared to turn a blind eye to his philippics against Christendom, but as soon as the
royal family was mentioned he was stepping over a boundary: this was implacably opposed. His music, alcohol and powers of
persuasion
were no match for their love of the House of Orange. He did his best to conceal his contempt, stroking his moustache with a pointed index finger. One of the guests became so addicted to the debates that he came back to philosophize every Saturday evening until the bottom of the gin bottle showed: Professor Koning,
lecturer
in colonial history at the University of Amsterdam. Lotte’s father, who had a child-like, unsocialist respect for authority in the province of learning, was very proud of this friendship, which went so far that the professor bought a thatched house on the other side of the wood.

On the Queen’s birthday, her father refused to hang the flag on the water-tower. But a prominent member of the provincial
council
, who lived in the neighbourhood and took a stroll in the wood every day, reported his negligence. ‘Come on,’ said his wife the following year, ‘hang out the flag, otherwise we’ll get into trouble.’ ‘Preposterous,’ he protested, ‘to hang out the flag for a perfectly ordinary woman.’ ‘You’re talking about the Queen.’ She looked like a queen herself, in her cream-coloured shantung dress, proud, charming and unrelenting. The children supported her, and had decorated their bicycles with conifer branches and orange lanterns: ‘Everyone hangs out the flag, Dad.’ He sniffed: the masses! ‘If you won’t do it I will.’ His wife marched off with large strides; he followed behind angrily. At the door of the water-tower he grabbed her and turned her round. He went in, jaws clenched.