The Twins

by Tessa de Loo

  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, repor
ted 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.

  An inspector came to the school to compile a register of the pupils. He stood in front of the class with a list: they had to stand up one by one and say their names. In a flat, routine voice he added: ‘And what does your father do?’ They answered without faltering. Lotte owned to the surname of her Dutch parents absent-mindedly: Rockanje. But she stared at him open-mouthed without saying anything when it came to her father’s profession. ‘Lotte,’ said the mistress affably, ‘you do know what your father does?’ It took a great effort of strength to emit the words: ‘I d-don’t yet k-know.’ Her head was ready to burst. Did she have to list everything her father did? Where ought she to begin? The inspector bypassed this hitch in the machinery and continued his checking with a neutral expression. Suddenly Lotte had an inspiration. She raised her finger, ‘I k-know it now.’ ‘Well,’ said the mistress and inspector in unison, ‘what is your father then?’ ‘Tower watchman for the Queen!’ she cried without stuttering.

  ‘If grandfather had known that you had gone straight into a Communist nest …’ cried Anna with hilarity. ‘What a joke!’

  ‘But my mother was against it. “Don’t think,” she said to him, “that the workers will be more humane if they seize power.” She would sometimes pull him down petulantly from his pink cloud when he wouldn’t leave off his glorification of Marx and kept harping on righteously about money and work. “Try to live like that yourself, dear. Only fine words come out of your mouth.”’

  An old man came in, stamping his boots, snow on his bushy eyebrows. His watery blue eyes timidly assessed the clientèle. He left a track of melting snow behind him on the way to the counter. Lotte had red blotches on her cheeks from the Ratafia de Pommes. Anna’s eyes were shining. Lotte’s old-fashioned, precise German sounded like music to her ears, interspersed now and then with a Cologne word that had gone out of fashion long ago.

  ‘That Schicki-Micki type,’ she said, ‘who fetched you from Cologne, what kind of a person was she?’

  Lotte stared outside the window. ‘I went to stay with her in Amsterdam from time to time. If you looked from the living-room into the mirror by the window you could see the Albert Cuyp market. In the mornings, we went to the market together while Grandpa went to the barber to be shaved. First she bought meat and vegetables. But her real aim was to touch the things on a stall full of beads, buttons, velvets, laces, silks. There she stood, endlessly dreaming; everything passed through her hands. After deliberating for a long time she bought something minuscule, a pair of mother-of-pearl buttons or something. She was still so elegant. “Look,” she said once, “this is what I was like when I was young.” She pulled her sagging skin taut with the tips of her fingers. I was shocked. I didn’t recognize her like that. “Can’t I go to see Anna?” I asked her one day. “Ach du, Schätzchen, you have no idea how stubborn and narrow-minded our family is. We have absolutely no contact with them. Later, when you’re grown up, you can look for Anna on your own account. Then the two of you together won’t give a damn about that whole tribe.”’

  Anna laughed. ‘A photograph of her hung above grandfather’s chair when he was still alive – as a young girl in a white dress, her face shaded by a straw hat. Ein wunderschönes picture. That photo would be a hundred years old now. Think of it, Lotte, a hundred years! The world has never changed as radically as it has in the last hundred years. No wonder you and I are a bit confused. Let’s drink something more!’

  The layers of time were grating over each. Before the war, after the war, the depression years, a century ago … diverse landscapes that Anna was hurtling through tipsily, as though in a runaway train. One moment she was in a steam train and wisps of smoke were drifting past the window, the next moment she was sitting on bright green leatherette in a modern express train. Figures from the past were standing in the stations they whizzed past. They did not wave but looked at the phantom express with screwed-up eyes and frowns. The station in Berlin was on fire, the platforms were full of smoke and dust. Where did this journey end? At the edge of time? It left her cold. She clinked her glass against Lotte’s and toasted her health.

  ‘I also asked her …’ said Lotte.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Grandma … Aunt Elisabeth … I asked her: Did you know my father when he was young? I mean: my real father. “Your father,” she said, “was a nice, intelligent boy, the revolutionary of the family. I was very taken with him. That’s why I was at his funeral and you are here now, du Kleine. Ach ja, sensitive types die young and those Schweinehunde grow ancient – that is how the world is…”’ Lotte added tenderly, ‘Grandma loved swear-words.’

  ‘If only such a fairy godmother had appeared for me at that time,’ said Anna not without bitterness, ‘I would have been spared a lot of suffering.’

  Thirty-five marks per month orphan’s allowance was paid for Anna. That was a lot of money – yet Aunt Martha carried on as though she were a parasite, a blood sucker who had clamped onto the young family with two suckers. She projected onto Anna the chronic displeasure that she had brought into the marriage with her as a dowry; Anna was broken in spirit and numb from the work, and defenceless against her deviousness. Whenever Anna looked in Uncle Heinrich’s cracked shaving mirror, she said scornfully, ‘Why look in the mirror? You’re going to die anyway. Your father had tuberculosis, your mother breast cancer, you’ll get one of the two as well. Don’t fancy your chances.’ Anna, who had read many fairy-tales, recognized in her the cliché of the wicked stepmother, but the justice that always triumphed in the stories was a long time coming in reality. ‘Why do you need a new dress? Why should you drink milk? You are going to die anyway.’

  Now that all worldly needs were being strangled at birth and ridiculed, the old longing to disappear for ever seeped into her again. But to die, how did you do that? If you got a disease, it happened by itself. Intentionally instigating the change from being-there to not-being-there was more difficult. Uncertainty drove her to the church – time stolen from the pigs and cows that had to be caught up later. By praying as faultlessly as possible she hoped for a miraculous admission to heaven. But God, her second inaccessible father, did not make the effort to descend to the modest Landolinus church. At the very most He allowed Alois Jacobsmeyer to appear out of the semi-darkness; he had had a soft spot for Anna since she had given the Romans what for. He was the one who had implored her uncle: ‘Send her to the grammar school! There isn’t a better pupil in the village. We’ll pay for it all.’ Anna seized his soutane and authoritatively asked him to give her a means of disappearing from the world that would not cause inconvenience. Shocked, he whispered: ‘Don’t do anything stupid! God has only given you this one life, it is all you have. He wants you to live it until it ends naturally. Have patience, you will be free when you are twenty-one.’ But twenty-one was unbearably far off. ‘I’ll never keep going,’ she said angrily. ‘Yes you will.’ He took her head in his hands and rocked it gently to and fro. ‘You must!’

  Not long after that, her body seemed to have made a decision, weakened by the daily battle of attrition and the frugal food. She caught a cold that would not clear up. Jacobsmeyer urged her to go to the doctor but Aunt Martha waved his advice aside – that sort of cold would wear off by itself. Then he thought up a trick to combat the cough without being accused of interfering in other people’s business. He wandered o
ver to the farm after mass. Anna was in the cowshed when Aunt Martha stuck her head round the corner, her cheekbones red with suppressed anger. ‘The pastor is here for you.’ Jacobsmeyer was sitting in the kitchen with a gurgling baby on his lap. He drew a narrow brown bottle out of his soutane. ‘It can’t go on any longer,’ he said to Anna. ‘You cough all the way through the mass, I can’t understand my own words.’ With a combination of triumph and indignation Aunt Martha cried: ‘That one there? But she has no manners, we know that already!’ ‘I have brought a medicine for her with me,’ Jacobsmeyer continued imperturbably. ‘Frau Bamberg, will you see to it that she takes it regularly?’ Aunt Martha nodded, taken by surprise. ‘And if her clothes are wet from sweat,’ he went on, ‘she must change, so that she doesn’t catch a new cold.’ ‘Oh yes,’ scoffed Aunt Martha, ‘then she’d have to go into the field to hang her shirt up on the willows and wait naked until it was dry. The men here would certainly appreciate that.’ He admonished her, piqued because he had unwittingly nurtured her banal fantasy: ‘You ought to buy her some extra shirts, Frau Bamberg.’ He stood up with dignity and passed the baby to her. ‘You must think about this little one of yours but also of Anna … they are all God’s children.’ He turned round at the door: ‘And she must drink a lot of milk, with cream.’ ‘If he pays for it himself,’ snarled Aunt Martha when the door had closed behind him.

  ‘And?’ enquired Jacobsmeyer. Anna looked at the floor, leaning on one of the pillars in the nave. ‘Aunt Martha has given me one of her worn-out old shirts. But I am not allowed to drink milk, that has to go for sale.’ ‘God forgive me,’ he sighed; ‘when you centrifuge milk, Anna, put your mouth under the spout now and then. But do look round regularly, otherwise she’ll see what’s going on.’

  Uncle Heinrich erected between himself and his wife a screen of work activities, card games with villagers, newspapers and library books, which were read by Anna too in stolen quarters of an hour. He did not object, except when she wanted to read All Quiet on the Western Front. He forbade it not because of the war horrors but because of an indecent scene, which she was quite unable to discover when she nevertheless read the book in secret, because she lacked the antennae for that sort of wavelength. The fate of four nineteen-year-old boys in the trench warfare of 1914–18 strengthened her in the belief that a man’s life was not valued. The life of a soldier was something like a candle in front of the statue of Mary – when it had burnt down a new one was put in the holder.