The Parent Trap

by Erich Kästner

  Lottie is holding the photograph of a man aged about thirty-five. She gazes lovingly at her father. So that’s what he looks like! And this is what it feels like to have a real, live father!

  Luise reads what he has written to her aloud. ‘My dear, my only child!’

  ‘What a liar!’ she says, looking up. ‘When he knows perfectly well that he has twins.’

  Then she goes on reading the letter. ‘Have you quite forgotten what the head of your household looks like, writing to insist that you want a picture of him, at the end of the holidays too? At first I was going to send you a photo of me when I was little. A picture of me as a baby with nothing on, lying on a polar bear skin rug! But you said it had to be a brand new picture! So I went straight to the photographer, although I didn’t really have the time, and I told him just why I needed it in such a hurry. Otherwise, I told him, my Luise won’t recognize me when I meet her at the station! Luckily he said he could understand that. So here you are, and the picture ought to arrive in time. I hope you’re not leading the ladies at the summer camp such a dance as you lead your father at home, but he sends you lots of love and kisses, and he can’t wait to see you!’

  ‘That’s lovely,’ says Lottie. ‘And funny, too. Even though he looks so serious in his photograph.’

  ‘I expect he didn’t like to laugh in front of the photographer,’ suggests Luise. ‘He always looks stern with other people. But when we’re on our own he can be very funny.’

  Lottie is holding the picture very firmly. ‘Can I really keep it?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Luise. ‘That’s why I got him to send it!’

  Chubby-cheeked Steffie is sitting on a bench, holding a letter in her hand and crying. She cries without making any noise. The tears just keep running down her round, motionless, childish face. Trude strolls past, stops, feeling inquisitive, sits down beside Steffie and looks at her expectantly. Christine comes along and sits down on Steffie’s other side. Luise and Lottie, walking that way, stop. ‘Is something the matter?’ asks Luise.

  Steffie simply goes on crying. Suddenly she looks down and says, in a dull tone of voice, ‘My parents are getting divorced!’

  ‘How mean of them!’ cries Trude. ‘First they send you away for the holidays, and then they go and do a thing like that! Behind your back!’

  ‘I think Daddy is in love with another woman,’ sobs Steffie.

  Luise and Lottie quickly walk on. What they have just heard upsets them very much indeed.

  ‘But,’ asks Lottie, ‘our father isn’t in love with another woman, is he?’

  ‘No,’ says Luise. ‘I’d know if he was.’

  ‘Maybe one he isn’t married to?’ asks Lottie hesitantly.

  ‘No,’ replies Luise. ‘Of course he has friends, and some of them are women, but he acts just the same with them all. What about Mummy? Does Mummy have a … a special friend who’s a man?’

  ‘No,’ says Lottie confidently. ‘Mummy has me and her work, and she says that’s all she wants from life.’

  Luise, rather baffled, looks at her sister. ‘Yes, but then why did they get divorced?’

  Lottie thinks about it. ‘Maybe they haven’t been to get it settled in court yet? That’s what Steffie’s parents are going to do.’

  ‘And why is Daddy in Vienna and Mummy in Munich?’ asks Luise. ‘Why did they divide us up?’

  ‘Why,’ Lottie goes on, still thinking it over, ‘did they never tell us that we’re not only children at all, we’re twins? And why hasn’t Daddy told you that Mummy is still alive?’

  ‘And Mummy’s kept it a secret from you that Daddy is alive!’

  Luise puts her hands on her hips. ‘Nice parents we have, I must say! Wait until we get a chance to tell them what we think about it! Won’t they be surprised!’

  ‘But we can’t do that,’ says Lottie, shyly. ‘We’re just children!’

  ‘Just?’ asks Luise, tossing her head.

  Chapter Four

  Stuffed pancakes, yuk! · The mysterious octavo exercise books · Ways to school and goodnight kisses · A conspiracy · Dress rehearsal at the garden party · Goodbye to Seebühl on Lake Bühl

  The holidays are coming to an end. The piles of clean clothes in the girls’ wardrobes have shrunk to almost nothing, while the children are partly sad because the holidays will soon be over, but partly happy because they look forward to going home.

  Mrs Muthesius is planning a little goodbye party. The father of one of the girls – he owns a department store – has sent a big crate full of Chinese lanterns, garlands, and many other things. Now the helpers and the children are busy decorating the veranda and the garden for the party. They drag ladders from tree to tree, hang coloured lanterns among the leaves, string garlands over the branches, and get a long table ready for the tombola. Other children write ticket numbers on little bits of paper. The big prize will be a pair of roller skates with ball bearings!

  ‘Where have Ringlets and Braids gone?’ asks Miss Ulrike. (That’s what Luise and Lottie are called at the summer camp these days.)

  ‘Oh, them!’ says Monika dismissively. ‘They’ll be sitting somewhere or other in the grass again, holding hands in case the wind blows them apart!’

  In fact the twins are not sitting somewhere in the grass, but in the garden café that belongs to the forester’s wife, and they are not holding hands. They have no spare time for that. They have octavo-sized exercise books in front of them, they are holding pencils, and at the moment Lottie is dictating to Luise, who is scribbling busily, ‘Mummy likes soup with pasta and beef in it best of anything. You buy beef from Mr Huber the butcher. Half a pound of beef cut across the ribs, nicely marbled with fat.’

  Luise raises her head. ‘Huber the butcher, on the corner of Max-Emanuel-Strasse and Prinz-Eugen-Strasse,’ she murmurs.

  Lottie nods, satisfied. ‘The cookery book is in the kitchen cupboard, bottom shelf on the left. All the recipes I know how to cook are in that book.’

  Luise notes it down. ‘Cookery book … kitchen cupboard … bottom shelf on he left.’ Then she props her arms on the table and says, ‘I’m terrified of all this cooking! But if it goes wrong in the first few days, maybe I can say I forgot how to do it in the holidays, can’t I?’

  Hesitantly, Lottie nods. ‘And you can write and tell me if something doesn’t work. Write to me often! And eat lots at the restaurant in the Imperial Hotel! Daddy likes it so much when I enjoy eating something there.’

  ‘What a pity stuffed pancakes are your favourite food!’ mutters Lottie. ‘I suppose it can’t be helped, but I’d rather have had veal schnitzel and goulash!’

  ‘If you eat three pancakes on the first day, or four or five, then you can say later that you ate too many, and now you’ve had enough to put you off them for life,’ suggests Luise.

  ‘That ought to do it,’ replies her sister, although her stomach is already turning at the mere thought of eating five pancakes, but she’s not going to make a big fuss about it.

  Then they both lean over their exercise books again, and each listens to the other reciting the names of her school friends, the seating plan in class, the teacher’s habits and the exact way to school.

  ‘You’ll have an easier time getting to school than me,’ says Luise. ‘You just have to tell Trude to call for you on the first day back! She sometimes does that. And then you can simply walk beside her, and notice the street corners and all the rest of the chaos in town!’

  Lottie nods. Suddenly she jumps in alarm. ‘I forgot to say – when Mummy puts you to bed, don’t forget to give her a goodnight kiss!’

  Luise stares dreamily ahead of her. ‘I don’t need to write that down. You bet I won’t forget.’

  Have you worked out what’s going on? The twins don’t yet want to tell their parents that they know what happened to them. They’re not going to face their father and mother with decisions; they guess they don’t have any right to do so. And they are afraid that their parents might decide immediatel
y, once and for all, to destroy their newfound happiness in being sisters. But the only alternative is to go back to where they came from as if nothing has happened, and they can’t bring themselves to do that either! Are they to go on with the half of a life that their parents gave them, without asking what they felt about it? No: in short, this is a conspiracy! Their fantastic plan, built on longing and a love of adventure, goes like this: they will swap clothes, the way they do their hair, suitcases, pinafores – and lives! Luise, with the braids of a good little girl (and determined to be a good little girl in other ways as well), will ‘go home’ to their mother, whom she knows only from a single photograph, and act as if she were Lottie! And Lottie, with her hair down her back in ringlets, and being as lively and amusing as she can, is going to their father in Vienna!

  They have made thorough preparations for the coming adventure. The octavo-sized exercise books are crammed full of notes. They are going to write to each other, arranging to collect letters at the post office when necessary, if anything important but unexpected happens.

  If they both pay careful attention, maybe they will even manage to work out why their parents separated in the first place. And maybe, then, one wonderful, beautiful day, the two of them and both their parents will succeed in … but they hardly dare to think that far ahead.

  They see the garden party on the evening before all the girls go home as a dress rehearsal. Lottie comes as lively Luise with her ringlets. Luise comes as good little Lottie with her braids. They both play their parts to perfection. No one notices anything, not even Trude, Luise’s school friend from Vienna! They both have great fun calling each other by their own real names. Lottie is so full of high spirits that she turns somersaults. And Luise is so quiet and gentle that you’d think butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

  The Chinese lanterns shine in the summer trees. The garlands sway in the evening breeze. The party and the holidays are coming to an end. The prizes from the tombola are given out. Poor little Steffie gets first prize, the roller-skates with ball bearings. (Better a small consolation than none at all.)

  At last, keeping the pretence going, the sisters sleep in each other’s beds, and they are so excited that they have strange dreams. Lottie, for instance, is collected from the railway station in Vienna by a photograph of her father, larger than life-size, and a hotel chef in a white cap is standing beside it with a wheelbarrow full of steaming stuffed pancakes – yuk!

  First thing next morning, very early, two trains come into the railway station of Egern, near Seebühl on Lake Bühl, arriving from opposite directions. Dozens of little girls get into the compartments of the separate trains, chattering like mad. Lottie leans right out of the window of one train. Luise waves from the window of the other train. They smile, secretly wishing each other good luck. Their hearts are thudding. They’re beginning to get stage fright. If the locomotives weren’t hissing and spitting out smoke, maybe, at the last moment, the two little girls would change their …

  But no, the train timetable has the last word. The stationmaster waves his flag. The trains begin to move at the same time. Children wave their hands.

  Lottie is going to Vienna, pretending to be Luise.

  Luise is going to Munich, pretending to be Lottie.

  Chapter Five

  A child sitting on a suitcase · The lonely old gentlemen in the Imperial Hotel ·Peperl and the infallible instinct of animals · ‘Luise’ asks if she can wave in the Opera House · The sums in the housekeeping book are wrong · Shirley Temple was not allowed to watch her own films · The complicated private life of Music Director Palfy

  Munich Central Railway Station, Platform 16. The locomotive is standing still, trying to get its puff back. Islands of reunion have formed among the torrent of travellers. Little girls are hugging their beaming parents. What with all the touching but happy noise around them, you quite forget that they aren’t home yet, but only on the station platform!

  However, the crowds gradually drain away.

  Finally there is only a single child left. A child with two braids, tied at the ends with ribbon bows. Until yesterday, her hair fell down her back in ringlets. Until yesterday, her name was Luise Palfy.

  The little girl is sitting on her suitcase, firmly gritting her teeth. Waiting at the central station of a strange city for the mother you’ve seen only in a photograph, a mother who hasn’t turned up yet, is not exactly child’s play.

  Mrs Luiselotte Palfy, née Körner, known as Luiselotte Körner again for the last six and a half years (since her divorce), has been kept late by the arrival of material for the news and current affairs pages at the publishing offices of the Munich Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, where she is a picture editor.

  At last she has found a taxi. At last she has managed to get a platform ticket. At last, and at a run, she has reached Platform 16.

  The platform is empty.

  No, it isn’t! Right at the back there is a child sitting on a suitcase! The young woman races along the platform as fast as a firefighter!

  The little girl sitting on her suitcase is trembly at the knees. Her heart is full of a feeling she has never known before. This young woman, radiant with happiness, this real, live young woman whirling her way along the platform, is her mother!

  ‘Mummy!’

  Luise rushes to meet the woman, stands on tiptoe and flings her arms round her neck.

  ‘My little housewife!’ whispers the young woman, in tears of happiness. ‘At last, at last I have you back again!’

  The child’s little mouth passionately kisses her soft face, her loving eyes, her lips, her hair, her smart little hat. Yes, even the little hat!

  There is an atmosphere of happy excitement in both the restaurant and the kitchen of the Imperial Hotel in Vienna. The darling of the regular guests at the hotel, the daughter of Ludwig Palfy, Music Director at the Opera House, is back again!

  Lottie – sorry, Luise – is sitting where everyone is used to seeing her sit, on her usual chair with the two extra cushions, bravely forcing stuffed pancakes down her throat.

  The regular guests come up to the Palfys’ table, one by one, stroke the little girl’s curly hair, pat her affectionately on the shoulders, and ask if she had a nice time at the summer camp, but they expect it will be even better, they say, to be back in Vienna with Papa. They put all sorts of presents down on the table: sweets, chocolates, chocolate bars, coloured crayons – one of them even takes an old-fashioned little sewing set out of his pocket and tells her, shyly, that it had belonged to his late granny. Then they nod to the Music Director and stroll back to their own tables. This evening the little girl’s adopted uncles, those lonely old gentlemen, will enjoy their dinner properly again at last.

  But of course Music Director Palfy is enjoying himself more than anyone else. He has always prided himself on the necessity of solitude to the ‘true artistic nature’, he has always regarded his former marriage, being a venture into ordinary middle-class life, as a mistake, but today he feels like a family man, warm at heart in a highly inartistic way. And when his daughter, smiling at him, shyly takes his hand as if she were afraid her father might run away from her, he actually has a lump in his throat, even though he is eating beef on the bone and beans, not dumplings or meatballs that might stick in it!

  And here comes Franz the waiter, bearing aloft another pancake!

  Lottie shakes her ringlets. ‘I can’t eat another bite, Mr Franz!’

  ‘Why, Luiserl!’ says the waiter reproachfully. ‘It’s only the fifth!’

  After Mr Franz, looking slightly injured, has steered his course back to the kitchen along with the fifth pancake, Lottie plucks up her courage and says, ‘I tell you what, Daddy, from tomorrow onwards I’ll eat whatever you are eating!’

  ‘Well, well!’ cries the Music Director. ‘But suppose I’m eating something smoked? You know you hate smoked meat or fish! You say it doesn’t agree with you.’

  ‘If you’re eating something smoked,’ she says,
remorsefully, ‘then I can always have pancakes again.’ (Being your own sister isn’t as easy as you might think!) Now what?

  Now Dr Strobl turns up with Peperl. Peperl is a dog. ‘Look, Peperl!’ says Dr Strobl, smiling. ‘See who’s back again! Go and say hello to Luiserl!’

  Peperl wags his tail and trots eagerly over to the Palfys’ table to say hello to his old friend Luise. But she’s not the person he is expecting! When Peperl reaches the table he sniffs at the little girl, and hurries back to his master without saying any hellos. ‘You silly animal!’ says Dr Strobl crossly. ‘Doesn’t recognize his best friend, just because she’s been away in the country for a few weeks! And people talk big about the infallible instinct of animals!’ But Lottie is thinking to herself: what a good thing that doctors aren’t as clever as Peperl the dog!

  Music Director Palfy and his daughter have gone home to the apartment in Rotenturmstrasse, taking with them the presents from the regular guests at the Imperial Hotel, Lottie’s suitcase, her doll and her bag of bathing things. And Resi, the Palfys’ housekeeper, was acting so pleased to see the little girl again that she hardly knew what to do with herself.

  But Lottie knows, because Luise has told her, that Resi is a nasty fat cow and the way she acts is all pretence. Of course her father doesn’t notice that. Men never notice anything!

  He fishes a theatre ticket out of his wallet, gives it to his daughter and says, ‘I’m conducting Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel this evening. Resi will take you to the theatre and collect you after the end of the performance.’