‘What’s the matter with you two?’
Bother, has Mummy noticed something after all?
Just then, luckily, a distinguished-looking old lady leans over to them out of the car waiting beside the taxi. She is offering Mummy an illustrated newspaper, and says, smiling, ‘May I make you a suitable present of this?’
Mrs Palfy takes the newspaper, sees the front page, says thank you with a smile, and gives the newspaper to her husband.
The cars begin moving again. The old lady nods goodbye.
The children climb up on the seat of the taxi beside Daddy and stare at the picture on the front page.
‘That Mr Eipeldauer!’ says Luise. ‘Taking us in like that!’
‘When we thought we’d torn up all the photos!’ says Lottie.
‘He has the photographic plates,’ explains Mummy. ‘He can print hundreds of pictures from those.’
‘What a good thing he did take you in,’ says Daddy. ‘But for him Mummy would never have guessed your secret. And but for him there wouldn’t have been any wedding today.’
Luise suddenly turns round and looks back at the Opera House. However, there is no sign of Miss Gerlach anywhere near.
Lottie tells Mummy, ‘We’ll write a letter to Mr Eipeldauer saying thank you to him.’
The ‘newly married’ pair climb the stairs to the Rotenturmstrasse apartment with the twins. Resi is waiting in the open doorway, wearing her Sunday best Austrian costume. She is smiling broadly, and she hands the young woman an enormous bouquet of flowers.
‘Thank you very much, Resi,’ says the young woman. ‘And I’m so glad that you are going to stay with us!’
Resi nods energetically and jerkily, like a puppet from a Punch and Judy show. Then she stammers, ‘I s’pose I ought to have gone home to my pa on the farm. But I’m ever so fond of Miss Lottie!’
The Music Director laughs. ‘And you can hardly bring yourself to say a civil word to the rest of us, eh, Resi?’
At a loss, Resi shrugs her shoulders.
Mrs Palfy saves the day by intervening. ‘Well, we can’t stand about on the landing here all day!’
‘Please come in!’ Resi flings the door open.
‘Just a moment,’ says the Music Director in a leisurely tone of voice. ‘I have to look in at the other apartment.’
All the rest of them freeze. Is he really going back to the studio apartment on the Ringstrasse on his wedding day? (Or no, not quite all the rest of them freeze. Resi isn’t in the least frozen. Instead, she is chuckling quietly to herself.)
Mr Palfy goes over to the front door of Mr Gabele’s apartment, takes out a key, and unlocks the door as if he thought nothing of it.
Lottie runs to him. There is a new nameplate on the door, and the name on the new nameplate says ‘Palfy’.
‘Oh, Daddy!’ she cries, overjoyed.
Then Luise is beside her, reading the nameplate. She seizes her sister by the collar, and begins dancing a kind of jig with her. The old stairwell shakes in all its joints.
‘That will do!’ cries the Music Director at last. ‘You two go off to the kitchen with Resi now and lend her a hand.’ He looks at the time. ‘I’m going to show Mummy my apartment, and we’ll have supper in half an hour’s time. You can ring the bell when it’s ready!’ He takes his young wife’s hand.
Standing in the opposite doorway, Luise bobs a curtsy and says, ‘I hope we shall be good neighbours, Mr Music Director, sir!’
The young woman takes off her hat and coat. ‘What a surprise!’ she says quietly.
‘A nice surprise?’ he asks.
She nods.
‘It was Lottie’s idea in the first place,’ he says hesitantly. ‘Gabele worked the plan of campaign out in every detail, and took command of the titanic battle of the removal vans.’
‘So that’s why we had to go to the girls’ school first?’
‘Yes, getting the grand piano here slowed the removal vans down.’
They go into the room where he will work. The photograph of a young woman from a past but not forgotten time, resurrected from his desk drawer, stands on the grand piano. He puts his arm round her. ‘We’ll all four of us be happy in the third-floor apartment on the left, and I’ll work happily on my own in the third-floor apartment on the right, but with only a wall between us.’
‘So much happiness!’ She holds him close.
‘More than we deserve, anyway,’ he says seriously. ‘But not more than we can bear.’
‘I’d never have thought something like this could happen.’
‘Something like what?’
‘Catching up with lost happiness as if it were a missed lesson at school.’
He points to a picture on the wall. A small, grave, childish face, drawn by Mr Gabele, looks down on Lottie’s parents from the frame. ‘We owe every second of our new happiness to our children,’ he says.
Luise, with a kitchen apron round her waist, is standing on a chair, fixing the front page of the Munich Illustrated to the wall with drawing pins.
‘Lovely,’ says Resi appreciatively.
Lottie, wearing another kitchen apron, is hard at work by the stove.
Resi dabs a tear away from the corner of her eyes, sniffs quietly, and then, still standing in front of the photograph, asks, ‘Which of you is really which?’
The little girls look at each other in dismay. Then they stare at the photo fixed to the wall. Then they look at each other again.
‘Well …’ says Lottie undecidedly.
‘I think I was sitting on the left when Mr Eipeldauer pressed the button,’ says Luise thoughtfully.
With a little delay, Lottie shakes her head. ‘No, I was on the left. Wasn’t I?’
The two of them crane their necks, looking at their portrait.
‘Well, if you two don’t know which is which yourselves!’ cries Resi, quite beside herself, and she begins to laugh.
‘No, we really don’t know ourselves!’ cries Luise happily. And now all three of them are laughing so much that their laughter reaches the apartment next door.
In the apartment next door their mother, almost alarmed, asks, ‘Will you be able to work with all that noise going on?’
He goes over to the piano and says, lifting its lid, ‘Only with all that noise going on!’ And as the laughter in the other apartment dies down, he plays his wife the duet in E flat major from the children’s opera, and it travels through the wall to the next-door apartment. The three in the kitchen work as quietly as possible, so as not to miss a note.
When the song has died away, Lottie asks awkwardly, ‘What else could happen, Resi? Now that Mummy and Daddy are back with us and we’re all together, could we have more sisters or brothers?’
‘Yes, of course,’ says Resi confidently. ‘Would you like that?’
‘Of course,’ says Luise firmly.
‘Boys or girls?’ asks Resi out of interest.
‘Boys and girls,’ says Lottie.
And Luise cries, from the bottom of her heart, ‘And every last one of them twins!’
About the Author
Erich Kästner was born in Dresden in 1899. He began his career as a journalist for the New Leipzig newspaper in 1922, but moved to Berlin in 1927 to begin working as a freelance journalist and theatre critic. In 1929 he published his first book for children, Emil and the Detectives, which has since been translated into 60 languages, achieving international recognition and selling millions of copies around the world. He subsequently published both Dot and Anton and The Flying Classroom, before turning to adult fiction with his 1931 satire Going to the Dogs. After the Nazis took power in Germany, Kästner’s books were burnt on Berlin’s Opera Square and over the period of 1937-42 he faced repeated arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo, resulting in his blacklisting and exclusion from the writers’ guild. After the end of World War II, Kästner moved to Munich and published The Parent Trap, later adapted into a hit film by Walt Disney. In 1957 he received the Georg Büchner Pr
ize and, later, the Order of Merit and the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for his contribution to children’s literature. Kästner died in Munich in 1974.
Walter Trier was born in Prague in 1880. In 1910 he moved to Berlin, where he would later be introduced to Kästner, and began his career drawing cartoons for the Berliner Illustrated. He also contributed to the satirical weekly Simplicissimus, where during the 1920s, despite great personal risk, he ridiculed Hitler and the Nazi Party in a series of cartoons. In 1936 he fled to London, where he was involved in producing anti-Nazi leaflets and political propaganda drawings. He would go on to have a rich career, producing around 150 covers for the humorous magazine Lilliput. He died in 1951 in Ontario, Canada.
Anthea Bell is an award-winning translator. Having studied English at Oxford University, she has had a long and successful career, translating works from French, German and Danish. She is best known for her translations of the much-loved Asterix books, Stefan Zweig and W.G. Sebald.
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Copyright
Pushkin Children’s Books
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The Parent Trap first published in German as Das doppelte Lottchen in 1949 by Atrium Verlag AG, Zürich
Text and illustrations © 1949 Dressler Verlag, Hamburg
English language translation © Anthea Bell 2014
This translation first published by Pushkin Press in 2014
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs
ISBN 978 1 782690 72 6
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
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