The Twins

by Tessa de Loo

  Suddenly it went quiet up above. Without further explanation their mother got up, dressed herself carefully and left the house in silence with an absent-minded expression on her face. She was stared after by her bewildered daughters, who watched her disappear in the drizzle on her Gazelle in her familiar upright posture. That afternoon a painting one and a half metres wide was delivered, an impressionist representation of the marshlands their mother had a soft spot for: heavy, threatening clouds in a silver sky, reflected in a ripple-free lake edged by reeds and weeping willows. Shortly afterwards, she who had bought it from a very promising painter, and would have to bleed financially for it at home, returned – completely cured, her cheeks flushed with revenge. It was given a prominent place in the living-room, above her husband’s sound system, and in silent competition with it. In safer times he certainly would have started a war on account of her extravagant purchase. Now, with badly faked enthusiasm, he seized the chance to make the unexpected cure permanent. Less than a year later an afterthought was born – Bart – the outcome of the restored peace.

  From the inscrutability of all those emotions Lotte sought compensation in music. There was structure in it: the way the notes were arranged, carried by the beat, each fulfilling its function in the great totality, arousing the spirit by the artful ensemble. After the matriculation examinations were over she applied herself with redoubled industry to studying singing and to harmony theory lessons. An annoying factor was that her piano was in the same room as the gramophone. A symbolic arrangement: while she was practising, her father would come in and quite innocently put a record on or take a book out of the bookcase, gesturing to her to be quiet because he wanted to concentrate. She sat paralysed at the piano, cold sweat running down her back. She could no longer breathe when she was in the same room as him – he used up all the oxygen. She closed her eyes and submitted to his show of strength. Onto her eyelids she projected an Arcadian world in which the whole family, to the accompaniment of a nightingale’s song, was walking in sober black behind his coffin.

  On the day that her youngest sister was four, it looked as though her dream picture was actually going to come true. On his way home from work in the afternoon, her father would collect an order at the confectioner’s shop. As his Harley was being repaired, he had asked for a lift home from a colleague who was just as enthusiastic a motor cyclist as he was. He left the shop with a cake box in his right hand and a bag of butter biscuits in his left. He got on carefully behind his colleague. In the interests of the cake they approached the junction they had to cross at a snail’s pace. From the left at top speed, bent low over the handlebars, came a man on a motor bike, who only realized that he had to give way by the time Lotte’s father was lying motionless on the ground in a strangely contorted position, his head on the edge of the kerb between a bag of crumbled biscuits and a crushed cake box, a trickle of blood coming out of the corner of his mouth.

  He came round in the ambulance. ‘Where are you taking me?’ he enquired suspiciously. ‘To the hospital.’ ‘No, no,’ he protested, sitting up, ‘I want you to take me home. There is no better nurse than my own wife.’ His wishes were respected. He was carried inside on a stretcher. ‘Mind your head,’ he warned at a bend in the stairs, ‘it’s very low here.’ His wife opened the bedroom door with a trembling hand. While the family doctor was ringing the doorbell downstairs they put him carefully to bed. He thanked them politely as they left, but when the doctor was examining him and asked under what circumstances the accident had happened, he mumbled in surprise: ‘An accident? Was there an accident’ ‘You have had an accident,’ said the doctor solemnly, ‘they brought you home just now.’ ‘Who? Me?’ He frowned wearily. ‘Where is my wife?’ ‘She is standing here next to me.’

  While the children waited tensely downstairs beneath coloured festoons, and the cake stand remained ostentatiously empty in the centre of the table, the doctor hesitantly diagnosed serious concussion and broken ribs. To be certain, he called in a specialist whose cool suggestion of a serious fracture at the base of the skull brought a threat into the house that was to extinguish all signs of life for six months. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘we cannot do anything but wait.’ Marie and Jet took the festoons down in the unspoken conviction that every minute they remained hanging up would work to their father’s detriment. Eefje picked listlessly at her new doll in a corner of the denuded room.

  Their father had to lie flat. Grey, motionless, with eyes closed, he lay in the darkened room that smelled of disinfectants and eau-de-Cologne – as though he were already lying in state. For sure he was not dead, but nor was this life. Day and night his wife moistened his forehead, temples and wrists with a wet facecloth and manoeuvred teaspoonfuls of lukewarm water between his cracked lips. His breath rasped past his broken ribs; now and then he moaned from the murky no man’s land where he was floating on the silver wings of morphine. The youngest children were taken to a sister of their mother: absolute quiet was a condition of his recovery. Everything in the house was performed with velvet fingers – they tiptoed, they whispered, they shrank from the sound of their own breath. With this radical absence of sound and the emphatic silencing of Beethoven and Bach, of sopranos and baritones, altos and basses, it seemed as though they were all unintentionally bringing death into the house, creating an atmosphere in which it could prosper. They could hear it rustling behind closed doors.

  When it was Lotte’s turn to take over the watch and she was looking at the stubble adorning the sunken cheeks like mould, she had the sneaking anxiety that the strength of her powers of imagination had landed him in this condition. She regretted the vengeful fantasies he had provoked in her. Had there really been covert angry intent in his behaviour or had it been his usual, familiar egoism? She fervently hoped he would survive, otherwise from then on she would have to practise strict censorship over her thoughts. More than that, the picture of her own father as he had awaited death, surrounded by members of the family, radiated through her sense of guilt. All those years she had successfully stashed it away, but it came up again as a result of the striking likeness, together with the alienating, anxiety-producing feeling that it had caused. In this way the watch was a continually recurring form of self-torment because it evoked this gamut of feelings every time.

  After a few hours she was relieved again by her mother, who kept watch like a sphinx for the rest of the twenty-four hours. Sometimes she leaned over him to check with her ear that he was still breathing. ‘You will not slip away from me,’ she whispered, ‘my old rascal.’ She did not neglect herself. Regularly she changed her dress so that, on the rare occasions he opened his eyes, he would find an attractive woman by his bed. Through a chink in the curtains she saw the sun come up and go down, she saw the mist over the meadow, she heard the cooing of the wood pigeons. At night she saw the stars; she could not put a light on to read a book – perhaps that was her greatest sacrifice.

  Yet even with her stubborn presence, she could not prevent him getting double pneumonia with pleurisy after three weeks. The doctor was a bad actor: it was obviously difficult for him to conceal that he might pass away at any moment. He arranged for a night nurse, who treated the peaks of the fever with cold compresses. At night the patient’s delirium was the only sound in the house. The nurse attached bags of ice cubes to his head. ‘No,’ he protested, shooting upright out of his dream with staring eyes; he flailed them away with spastic arm movements: ‘I don’t want that crown! I don’t want to be king of England, I won’t, I won’t!’ The nurse grabbed the bags from the pillow and pushed him back with gentle insistence. ‘You must stay lying flat,’ she exhorted him. ‘I don’t want that crown,’ he whined, ‘I want Miss Simpson!’ Rebelliously he sank back into his deep feverish sleep.

  When the crisis had abated, he opened his eyes and in chastened calm saw the strange woman’s face wreathed in a shock of stiff hair that stood on end. She looked back fiercely beneath her bristly eyebrows – her normal facial expression which was
not meant to convey anything in particular. ‘You look strikingly like Beethoven,’ he said with amazement. ‘You are very observant,’ she admitted, ‘in fact he was a relation.’ They were just about to heave a sigh of relief when a blood clot in his leg reintroduced the possibility of dying. The doctor became entangled in conflicting treatments: the patient had to sit up on account of the thrombosis, while it was vital that he stayed lying flat for the skull fracture.

  Because visits to the patient had been forbidden, the house had been cut off from the world, an island, with the poor, afflicted body at its centre. To escape from this vacuum, this interruption of the usual vitality, Lotte strolled in the garden and ended up at the back in the orchard. She stroked her hand over the peeling paint of the TB house, she picked off a piece of moss, broke a twig from the walnut tree whose robust crown embodied the fourteen intervening years. The swivel mechanism of the house had rusted completely so that the open side pointed permanently to the east. The east. She sat down on the rickety kitchen chair and imagined an unfamiliar Anna in the year 1936. Not in a clearly defined physical form, but as an accumulation of energy, lit up, vital; Anna was alive. She was full of remorse and shame for having thought so little about her for so long, as though Anna had become a lost cause. She tried to put herself in the place of the child with a lung infection who had lain here looking about her in fevered amazement. What she had been too young, too sick, too dependent for then, now seemed ridiculously simple: get on a train back to Cologne. She fantasized about seeing it again – just thinking about Anna was already a mild antidote to her father’s continuing flirtation with death.

  On Sunday he suddenly became short of breath. Like a fish on dry land he gasped for air with a gaping mouth. His wife propped him up against the pillows, gave him water, unbuttoned his pyjama jacket – he clutched at his heart. The doctor was alerted. An unfamiliar locum doctor gave him a large injection straight into his heart. ‘A last rescue bid,’ he whispered, putting the syringe away in his bag, ‘prepare yourself for the worst, madam.’ Hours of waiting. It was a miracle that her resilience had not yet been exhausted after all those months. The question Will he pull through or won’t he? so permeated the atmosphere in the house that Lotte walked in the wood because she feared that an involuntary thought escaping the censor at such close quarters might be fatal to him at the critical moment. By the evening his breathing was regular. He took a drink of water and asked his wife to put Mozart’s Requiem on downstairs, full volume with all the doors open. She let the needle descend onto the record with a trembling hand. Melancholy sounds floated up the stairs. Jet burst into tears. ‘Be happy,’ said her mother, ‘that you aren’t hearing the music at his funeral, but that he can enjoy it himself now.’

  After this apotheosis the healing process slowly got going: he returned to life in style. Bit by bit he was allowed visits. ‘But what’s happened to Hans Koning?’ he complained, still translucent with weakness. ‘He’s sure to come,’ his wife pacified him. ‘But does he really know what’s going on?’ ‘Of course.’ But the professor did not get in touch at all. As dependable as the weekly visits with which he had honoured the house before the accident had been, so was his absence now obstinate. Lotte’s mother telephoned. He turned up on the doorstep with a dejected face, in polite response to her summons. He stumped upstairs, bumped his head at the turn in the stairs, and stood embarrassed at the end of the bed without shaking the patient’s hand. ‘How are you?’ he enquired, coughing drily behind the enormous fleshy hand with which he was used to waving objections away. The patient did not conceal his joy. The mere presence of his bosom friend and fellow spirit brought more colour to his cheeks than all the other visitors put together. ‘I’m lying here but …’ he sighed, ‘would you believe that I crave an old-fashioned Saturday evening …’ Hans Koning looked at him tensely. ‘Listen, my dear fellow, I’m no good in sickrooms …’ To demonstrate this he looked around him tormentedly as though he were trying in vain to survive in a poisonous atmosphere. ‘I mean it, I simply cannot stand it for a minute!’ ‘But …’ the patient sputtered in disbelief. The professor proceeded towards the door. ‘Give me a signal when you are your old self again,’ he turned round holding the doorknob. ‘Get well soon.’

  Faithful to his allergy, he did not show up again during the months of slow recovery. The patient had to struggle with bouts of depression. Why was his best friend staying away, just now when he had a crying need for his company to sharpen his splintered mind again, to stimulate his fantasies, so that he could repossess the viewpoints of his former opinions with bravura? The professor’s absence was a personal defeat. ‘What do I matter to anyone actually?’ he asked himself, propped up against the pillows. ‘I am nobody. What have I achieved? Nothing. I haven’t any standing in the world. Why didn’t I simply die?’ His wife hastened to convince him of his excellence, enlarging expansively on his merits, spiriting away his unpleasant characteristics. She sincerely believed it, so fervently did she hope that he would become his old self again. His resistance to so many flattering words collapsed at once. ‘You are a tremendous woman,’ he whispered, falling asleep consoled.

  It was an impressive crossing of boundaries, which they would not forget among all the other events, that day he came downstairs, shuffling step by step into the living-room, dizzy from the effort, to drink a cup of coffee in an armchair that was hastily pushed by the fireplace. The bench in the garden was the next milestone. He won territory bit by bit in this way until, one day when he was alone at home, he grew too ambitious in his urge to conquer. Perhaps the absence of his wife made him anxious, perhaps he could no longer resist after months of suppressing the longing for an exchange of spiritual views. Giving in to a light-hearted impulse, he waddled over the plank across the ditch, into the wood, slowly and concentrating – his one leg limped a bit as a result of the thrombosis – his heart beating excitedly. When he reached the Koning family’s house on the other side of the wood, in pure exhaustion he hugged one of the two dark green pillars supporting the porch over the door. He did not know how long he hung on there like that, fighting against breathlessness and palpitations, and the fear that the professor would find him in that state. He only pressed the bell when he had recovered a little. His friend opened the door himself, in a three-piece suit, a silver watch chain like a festoon on his breast. His beard bobbed up with fright. ‘Heavens, what are you doing here? You’re the last person I expected here. I regret …’ he toned his voice down as though he were on the point of letting the other in on a secret, ‘we’re just expecting visitors, they’ll be here at any moment. How could you have timed it so wretchedly? You had better come in, then you can leave via the kitchen door.’ Lotte’s father stumbled along the passage and sank into a kitchen chair. ‘One moment,’ he panted, ‘I must just … may I … might I have a glass of water?’ ‘I’ll have a look for you …’ The professor threw open all the kitchen cupboards and slammed the doors closed with a bang. ‘God, where does she keep the glasses? … A cup will do.’ The unwelcome visitor drank his water. The professor opened the kitchen door with a wave. ‘Better luck next time, old fellow. Jesus you look lousy.’

  Lotte’s mother looked up when she heard crunching on the gravel. She saw her husband, whom she had thought to be in bed, stumbling along the garden path, seeking support from a pear tree half-way along and staring at the house with a dazed, hollow gaze as though he had sensed something dreadful there. When she looked more closely she saw he was crying. That same evening she told the professor by letter she was terminating the friendship. Her dip pen, scratching over the writing paper, called him an arch-egoist whose humanity disappeared on the threshold of sick-rooms and on the doorstep of his own house.

  ‘Yet it is striking,’ said Anna, ‘that you had a fantasy about travelling to Cologne at just that time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because at that time the urge in me to go to Cologne became stronger and stronger.’

  Anna had reached th
e age at which her own father had become oppressed in the symbiotic world between the church and the river: no more than a collection of farms and their inhabitants who watched each other being born and dying. Similarly in her case that mental tedium did not convert into fatalistic acceptance of destiny, but into rebelliousness. She tugged Jacobsmeyer by the sleeve of his soutane. ‘How am I ever going to get out of this village?’ Her voice disturbed the calm in the Landolinus church. ‘Surely it isn’t my vocation to lug pig muck for the rest of my life?’ Jacobsmeyer nodded pensively. ‘Perhaps I do know of something for you …’ He stroked his chin contemplatively. ‘The Archbishop of Paderborn is looking for a young woman to replace his elderly housekeeper in the long run. He wants to have her trained at an institute in Cologne where the daughters of well-to-do families learn about managing maids and servants. A school for ladies …’ He laughed ironically.