by Tessa de Loo
4
‘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 st
icking 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.’
‘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.
5
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.
