by Tessa de Loo
The magic lantern projects a stage; the scenery is a forest of tall tree trunks. The theatre director is in search of a short actress; she must not be more than a metre tall. ‘Listen, Herr Bamberg,’ he says, ‘I’m looking for a girl who can take the part of a poor child who has got lost in the wood. Now I’m thinking of one of your daughters …’ ‘Which of the two did you have in mind?’ ‘Who is the eldest?’ ‘They’re the same age.’ ‘Ah, twins … curious …’ ‘Which did you have in mind?’ the father repeats. ‘Well, I had thought … the one with the darker hair. The blonde one seems to me too plump to play a starving child.’ ‘But she would never dry …’ He fingers his moustache proudly. ‘She is … remarkable, in that respect.’ Mindful of the exhortation above the library door, he usually dedicates his free evenings to classical writers and poets. In between times, as a playful experiment, he has taught her a poem. ‘Our Anna,’ he explains, ‘has the memory of a parrot. She can recite Schiller’s “The Song of the Bell” without missing a line.’ ‘Good,’ the director capitulates, ‘you’re the father, you can judge better than I.’
‘I don’t approve,’ demurs Aunt Käthe, ‘the child is still too young for such a performance.’ But there is no gainsaying this father’s ambition. So there the aunt sits on the day of the performance with Lotte and the father beaming in the front row, flanked by her seven sisters. In the wings, the wardrobe mistress hides Anna’s dress under a grey, worm-eaten winter coat and ties her white hair ribbon loosely to the belt. Without suspecting that it is a dress rehearsal for reality, that she is going to interpret this role for ten years without an audience, without applause, Anna presents such a believable, pitiful child on the stage that tears prick the step-aunts’ eyes. After two men in hunting suits have carried her off between them out of the imaginary forest, she peeps inquisitively into the hall from the wings. The audience, no more than a collection of heads, does not interest her. She sees but one face in the semi-darkness, raised up towards the stage – that of the smallest person in the hall, insignificant and nondescript between the adults. Anna stares at her, overcome by an unfamiliar, terrifying sensation. Through the play and her role in it, Lotte and she for the first time exist as two individuals separate from each other. Each with a particular point of view – Lotte from the hall, herself from the stage. This awareness of separation, of unwanted duality, suddenly upsets her so she storms diagonally across the stage, through the two lovers’ reconciliation scene – the unbuttoned pauper’s coat flaps round her and the belt with her hair ribbon slips backwards and onto the floor. Aunt Käthe’s youngest sister cries excitedly in Cologne dialect, ‘Ach, look at that little one!’ A roar of laughter breaks out in the hall. There is applause as though it is the director’s stroke of genius. Unperturbed, Anna jumps down from the stage. She goes straight over to Lotte and only calms down when she has wormed herself in next to her on the same seat.
The projector, like a moonbeam, illuminates a bed with pale blue sheets. Beneath them Anna and Lotte fall asleep at night, their limbs firmly intertwined like mating octopuses. Without their noticing, the night tactfully unties this knot so that by morning each wakes up on one side of the bed, their backs adjacent.
The magic lantern has access everywhere – it shows us a classroom. It is as though we can hear the scratching of the dip pens. Anna’s passionate temperament does not lend itself to calligraphy. Whereas Lotte appropriates the alphabet with a steady hand, under Anna’s regime the letters will not obey. After school Anna sits next to her father in the office and scratches letters on her slate, which he keeps wiping off saying, ‘Once again, no good,’ until she comes up to his standards. From time to time he goes over to spit into a blue bottle that is then closed tight so that the angry spirits can’t escape. Afterwards, as a reward for her efforts, she is allowed to help with the cash. She deals tattered inflation notes into piles of ten with swift fingers – the balance runs into billions – until a fiery rash on her fingertips brings this pastime to a close.
Every Monday morning before lessons begin, the teacher pierces the pupils with her gaze and asks in an insinuating tone, ‘Which one of you was not in church yesterday?’ Silence prevails, nobody stirs, until Anna raises her finger. ‘Me.’ Immediately Lotte’s higher, brighter voice follows, ‘Me too.’ ‘Then you are the devil’s children,’ decrees the mistress knowingly. The sisters see their excommunication reflected in the other children’s eyes. ‘But you are still far too young,’ their father protests when they inform him of the traditional duty to attend children’s mass on Sunday mornings, ‘you wouldn’t understand a word of it.’ They have never seen either him or Aunt Käthe go inside a church. Each Sunday they implore him; they can no longer bear the annihilating look of the teacher nor their classmates’ teasing. Finally he puts his mug of beaten egg down on the table and rests his hands on their shoulders. ‘Tomorrow,’ he promises, ‘I’ll go to school with you.’
But when they are on the way, one on each side, it seems more as though they have to protect their father, so feverish and fragile does he look in his black coat that sways roomily about his thin figure. Leaning heavily on his stick, he has to pause every ten steps to breathe. The tap of the stick on the cobbles echoes behind him – a chain of echoes that prevents him from falling. They go inside the school building; he gestures to them to wait for him in the corridor and knocks on the classroom door. The mistress, thoroughly unsettled by the unusual interruption, invites him in with forced courtesy. Leaning side by side against the wall, Anna and Lotte fix their gazes on the door and listen. Suddenly their father’s hoarse voice lashes out above the mistress’s, which is struggling to maintain its self-control. ‘How dare you! To children who are weaker than you!’ Anna and Lotte look at each other dumbfounded. They straighten their backs; they no longer need to lean against the wall. A delightful, against-the-grain strength flows through them. Proud, triumphant, self-assured – they cannot put a name to it but it is there. Thanks to him.
The door swings open. ‘Come in,’ he says, suppressing his coughing. Anna crosses the threshold first, quickly followed by Lotte. They stand by the blackboard. The mistress is not on the floor in small pieces. Yet it looks as though her spine has snapped in several places. She grips her desk, with bowed head and sagging shoulders. The pupils, motionless on the benches, look up shyly and respectfully at their father, whose handling of the stage management is faultless. ‘Right,’ he pushes Anna and Lotte gently towards the teacher, ‘and now apologize to my daughters, and that goes for the whole class.’ The mistress eyes them obliquely. Her gaze immediately slides away again, as though it has come into contact with something unclean. ‘I am sorry,’ she says without feeling, ‘for what I said to you. It won’t happen again.’ A silence falls. What now? Could anything be added to the mistress’s humiliation? ‘And now I’m taking them home with me,’ they hear their father’s voice above them, ‘but they will be here again tomorrow. If I get to hear of anything like this ever again I shall be back.’
Fortunately the mistress kept the promise that had been exacted from her, because he would not have been able to carry out his threat. He is already much less able to cope with the trench warfare raging in his lungs. A new slide: stretched out on the sofa like a romantic poet, he deals with his administrative work, wheezing. In between he receives friends, who carefully hide their concern behind cheery chatter – his promising daughters in checked dresses with white starched collars are a welcome distraction with their poems and songs. That Lotte’s song is interrupted as many as three times by a dry cough alarms no one, except Aunt Käthe. Experience having taught her to be suspicious, she has Lotte examined by the family doctor. For several minutes he taps her thin chest, simultaneously bringing the stethoscope and his moustache close to her pale skin. He asks her to cough, which she does very easily as though she has practised the cough like a song. ‘I’m not happy about it,’ he murmurs behind her, ‘I hear a weak sound in the right lung.’ Lotte stands in front of an anatomic
al dummy and fingers the pink heart with a slight shiver. With a bottle of cough syrup and an appointment for X-rays, he lets them go.
It is not only the father’s declining days we see in the dusky gold-yellow slide but also the family’s, in this ensemble. From the casino the same influence emanates as when gambling was still going on there: all or nothing, to the death. It was a building one entered full of expectations and left ruined, an alchemical trick whose secret recipe was kept within the four walls of the sanctuary. With his long, thin index finger he beckons his daughters over to him. Breathing heavily, he sits on the edge of the sofa. ‘Listen,’ he says slowly, as though speaking with a thick tongue, ‘how long do you think I’ve got to live?’ Anna and Lotte frown – this is a sum of astronomical numbers. ‘Twenty years!’ Anna bets. ‘Thirty!’ Lotte adds a little extra. ‘So, that’s what you think,’ he says indulgently. He looks at them, his mouth open, with feverish, glancing eyes, as though he wants to say something else, but then he is overcome by a rasping coughing fit and drives them away with a fluttering hand.
A few days later, as soon as they come back from school, they are led to the bedroom by Aunt Käthe. A smell of red cabbage with apples and cinnamon hangs in the house. The company in a circle round their father’s bed contrasts unpleasantly with this spicy-sweet smell. Uncle Heinrich, a crumpled cap in his hands crossed in front of his belly, stares at his sleeping brother with a farmer’s distrust. Is this such a special spectacle that they all must stand there and watch? Aunt Käthe pushes Anna and Lotte towards the bed. ‘Johann,’ she says, bringing her mouth close to his ear, ‘here are the children.’ When he discovers his daughters, his eyes begin to shine as though he is surreptitiously amused by the ridiculous play-acting around his bed. He will get up immediately, Lotte thinks, and send them all home. But then his mood collapses. His gaze goes agitatedly from one to the other. He raises his perspiring head – from his secret inner world he seems to want to say something to them that cannot be delayed. ‘Anneliese …’ he utters. Immediately the head falls back onto the pillow and he sinks away again. On the sunken cheeks there is the dark bloom of stubble. ‘Why does he say Anneliese to us?’ asks Anna offended. ‘He’s thinking of your mother,’ says Aunt Käthe.
After the meal, one of the seven sisters takes them away from the celebration that is not really a celebration. They are put into an unfamiliar bed, a raft on a strange ocean that they can only prevent from sinking by hugging each other fervently and lying without budging exactly in the middle of the bed. In the night, they dream that Aunt Käthe wakes them up and kisses them with a wet face, but when they do wake in the morning she is nowhere to be seen. Seven pairs of hands get Anna and Lotte out of bed and lift them onto a chair, to make it easier to dress them. ‘Your father,’ remarks one of the seven, pulling on an underslip, ‘died in the night.’ At first the communication does not produce any reaction, but during the laborious lacing-up of the boots Anna sighs, ‘Then he won’t have to cough any more.’ ‘And won’t have any more pain in his chest,’ Lotte backs her up.
The last slide shows the farewell. The funeral is invisible, as is the constant dreadful ‘curtseying’ that is expected of the girls on this occasion. Also invisible are the rows, Aunt Käthe’s tears, her threat of legal action, and the packed suitcases. The last Lotte sees of Anna: she is standing half-way down the staircase in the hall, surrounded by members of the family who have come from afar. To one side, already cast off, stands Aunt Käthe, the traces of futile lamentations on her face. Anna is full of self-confidence, in her mourning dress, with a large black bow like a crow settled in her blonde hair. Next to her stands the uncle who made fun of the Christmas carols; on the other side an aunt with a bust of intriguing dimensions, on which a golden cross rests, glittering. Several unclear figures without distinctive features complete the row. Behind Anna, his bony hands on her shoulders as though he has already appropriated her, stands a stiff old man in a worsted suit with a ragged moustache and a rampant growth of tufts of withered grass sticking out of his ears. The last Anna sees of Lotte: she is already by the door, right under the stained-glass window. Only from her face can you tell it is her; the rest is thickly wrapped up as though she is going on a polar expedition. Next to her is a stylish old lady leaning on an umbrella, with thin leather gloves loose between her fingers and an elegant hat with a veil. All day she has addressed the old man, whose hands press heavily on Anna’s shoulders, in a superior, teasing tone of voice as ‘Lieber Bulli’.
Neither Anna nor Lotte are worried. They do not throw themselves into each other’s arms, they do not cry, they do not say goodbye in any way whatsoever – how could they do that, they have no notion of the phenomenon of distance in space and time. The only one who makes the slightest gesture towards the fitting pathos of farewell is Aunt Käthe, who dashes across the hall at the last moment and in a torrent of tears presses Lotte to her breast.
2
‘J’ai retrouvée ma sœur, madame!’ Anna accosted a passing spa guest who shrank back horrified. Lotte recognized with distaste the impetuosity and clamorousness of long, long ago.
‘It’s unbelievable.’ Anna grasped her by her shoulders and stroked her arms. ‘Let me look at you.’
Every muscle in Lotte’s body braced itself. To have to be inspected now as well! That familiarity provoked her repugnance – she was somehow being sucked in and lacked the strength to resist that pull. But to have been born virtually simultaneously from the same mother seventy-four years ago was not something she could walk away from, however sophisticated the mechanism of repression she had developed over half a century. Two shrewd, light blue eyes were looking her over curiously and somewhat ironically.
‘You’ve turned into a real lady,’ Anna decreed. ‘Still so slim and with that pinned-up hair … sehr schön, I must say.’
Lotte regarded Anna’s opulent form and short hair with reserve; it suggested something youthful and self-willed about her.
‘I never managed that,’ said Anna with a laugh that resounded with self-deprecation as well as pride. She squeezed Lotte’s arm, brought her face close, a shining, determined look in her eye. ‘And you have Daddy’s nose, wunderbar!’
‘How … did you come to be here?’ Cornered, Lotte deflected her. Thank God, Anna let go of her.
‘I’ve got arthritis. The body’s entire locomotion system is worn out, you see.’ She pointed to her knees, her hips. ‘Someone told me about the peat baths at Spa – it’s not far from Cologne. And you?’
Lotte hesitated, anticipating that what she was going to say would please her sister. ‘Arthritis too,’ she mumbled.
‘It must be a family complaint!’ Anna cried enthusiastically. ‘Listen, let’s go and sit somewhere. I can’t stand up for so long.’
There was nothing to be done. Something inevitable had commenced; resistance was of no avail.
‘Meine Schwester, just imagine it!’ Anna rejoiced, half-way along the corridor. An old man dozing on a bench by the wall jolted upright, his bony hands clasping his stick.
Carrying cups of coffee from a machine, they went into the lounge dominated by a bold painting of a young woman in the company of a swan. By the time Lotte was comfortably seated and had drunk a few mouthfuls of coffee she was regaining some of her former equanimity.
‘Who would have thought we’d ever see each other again …?’ Anna shook her head. ‘And in such an extraordinary spot too … that must have a deeper meaning.’
Lotte squeezed the plastic beaker. She did not believe in deeper meanings, only in dumb coincidence – and it had considerably embarrassed her.
‘Are the peat baths doing you any good?’ Anna did not know where to start.
‘I’ve only been here three days,’ Lotte vacillated. ‘The only effect so far is a leaden tiredness.’
‘That’s the toxins coming out.’ Anna assumed an annoyingly professional tone. Suddenly she bounced up. ‘Do you still remember our bath-tub in Cologne? With lion’s feet?
In the kitchen?’
Lotte frowned. Another bath came to her mind. She gazed outside contemplatively, where a wintry sun gave the buildings a naked look. ‘Every Saturday evening my father washed us one by one in a wash-tub.’
‘Your father?’
