The Twins

by Tessa de Loo

  After the ceremony was over they floated down the steps between Greek columns, obelisks and two white marble angels holding crosses up to the sky. Anna looked round mechanically. The right one was staring at the horizon full of inner calm, the left one looked more stern – and a snake was entwined around her cross. A feeling she had presumed dead, but that was suddenly brought to life by the ceremony, went right through her. Lotte. Not the stranger who had visited her in Cologne, but Lotte as she was then … there she was … if anyone must not be absent from the wedding it was she … and why shouldn’t she be there in the form of an angel? In which case she herself was the other one, with the snake … They were looking at the world with marble eyes as though they understood something of it … The bridal gathering had crossed to the other side opposite the Karlskirche, the wind caught hold of her veil – for a moment tangible reality was something hazy and vague to her, through the fine mesh of tulle.

  They moved into the apartment of Martin’s dead grandmother; the woman’s hairs were still in a comb left behind on the chest of drawers. A house of one’s own … they turned to each other with an insatiable hunger as though the thousands of lost hours had to be caught up. The city and surroundings were a fitting backdrop for their honeymoon, except for one small flaw, when they came across a small group of people with yellow stars on their coats strolling slowly down the worn steps in the Mölker Bastei in the old city. Martin went rigid. With a strange sort of piety he took his arm out of Anna’s and stared at them, affected by it, as they passed in silence. She shrunk more from Martin’s involvement than the procession, which was silently manifesting something that was new and yet immediately obvious to her. ‘Come,’ she pleaded, pulling at his sleeve, ‘don’t look, please, come on.’ He allowed himself to be led away with difficulty. The whole day she reproached the procession for having appeared in their way, like a sombre admonition.

  She wanted to live, to live intensively, in the three weeks that they were allowed – enough for a whole life.

  When she was packing her suitcase listlessly the evening before the departure, the voices of Martin and his father could be heard faintly from the next-door room. ‘Here, my son, I’ve bought long under-trousers for you because it is so cold there, take them.’ ‘No,’ Martin protested, ‘that’s not necessary.’ ‘Why not? Anna won’t be around there.’ A short wry laugh. ‘It’s not that …’ ‘What then?’ ‘Ach, father, that cold doesn’t mean anything compared to the other dangers we are exposed to.’ ‘But surely signals troops run less of a risk, you don’t fight at the front?’ Incomprehensible mumbling, Anna brought her head close to the door-frame. There were partisans everywhere, she heard Martin saying, especially where you least expected them. The signals troops were also vulnerable when they were working in a small group behind the advancing front, placing masts, laying cables, hauling wires. One day a technician high up on a mast couldn’t find his pliers. ‘Hang on,’ cried Martin, who was supervising the work, ‘I’ll just go and get them.’ He walked to the lorry, which was hidden behind pine trees. As he was looking for them he heard short staccato screaming in the distance, followed by an abrupt silence. He sneaked back cautiously, seeking cover behind the trees. Where just a moment before his comrades had been busy with hammers and pliers twelve bodies lay with their throats cut, between motionless stems of tall grass. The perpetrators had dissolved into nowhere, a hasty, soundless hit-and-run operation beneath a cloudless sky.

  Her father-in-law’s comment escaped her. Anna sank down on the edge of the bed next to the half-full suitcase. This then was the other side of the blossoming fields of sunflowers, of an untuned grand piano in a farmhouse, of a case of books in a flea market. It happened like that, from one second to the next, at the edge of a soft green pine wood amid blossoming grass. It did not matter whether the landscape was idyllic.

  There was no convention for saying goodbye. They stood awkwardly on the platform. Whenever their eyes met they smiled encouragingly. ‘We’ll see each other soon,’ he said with forced lightness, ‘my guardian angel never leaves my side, even at forty degrees below zero.’ I must imprint his face on my memory, she thought, his face as it is now. I’ll take it home with me and make it appear whenever I want, whatever happens. It was painful, all the more so as they lacked the art of separating; no tears, no suitable words, at the most a certain impatience, on both sides, to be released from something that was too large for ordinary mortals. The delayed sorrow only burst out in the train going north. ‘My husband …’ she apologized to a surprised fellow passenger, ‘my husband has gone back to Russia.’ It was the first time she had designated him with that term. It filled her with a melancholy pride, which was immediately shouted down by the association ‘widow, war widow’.

  When she got back the park around the castle was strewn with chestnut leaves. There was a frost at night. Thousands of stars glittered in the blackness; they were keeping out of the war, whether you saw them from Brandenburg or from the tundra. Martin was there, a hundred Russians were here and sleeping like pigs propped up against each other in the stables. On one particular day two of them managed to escape the permanent guard. At an observation post in the forest, a simple wooden construction with steps and a plank to sit on, they discovered an aged forester intending to shoot a hare for Christmas. He had been shot dead before he could defend himself with his hunting rifle. The escapees took the rifle and ammunition. The body was found the same day and the starvation rations of ninety-eight Russians were halved. Two thousand troops from a nearby airfield combed the cordoned-off wood. The two Russians had buried themselves beneath a covering of leaves; the closing circle passed them without seeing them. They had almost done it when one of the soldiers, who kept his pores wide open as well as his eyes, sensed that two eyes were piercing his back and he turned round.

  By this time, the news had also reached Herr von Garlitz. He hurried to the hunting room, took down a horsewhip and raced through the corridors, hitting out wildly about him with the leather straps, cursing all Slav people. ‘Murdering an old man, that scum, I’ll beat them to pulp, they are going to suffer!’ Anna went into the courtyard, nauseated by the sham masculine courage. The procession arrived there, the two prisoners stumbling at the front. Von Garlitz flew at them with his whip, roaring; two officers held him in check and urged him to calm down. Primitive revenge was not acceptable; officially they had to stick to the rules that applied to prisoners of war. One of them gave the order for the escapees to be freed – hesitantly, in disbelief, they began to walk towards the stables. At that moment he shot them in the back. They fell down silently onto the stones. He turned to von Garlitz: ‘Shot dead while escaping.’

  The incident caused resentment among the Russian prisoners. From then on Frau von Garlitz had personal escorts for Anna and the other members of staff whenever they went for walks in the woods. Anna brushed aside the surveillance, she was not afraid. In her view there was merely a dreadful misunderstanding; through an absurd, senseless exchange, Russian men had ended up in Germany and Germans in Russia. While Russian prisoners waited in frustration and resignation, somewhere in the heart of their native country their fellow countrymen were engaged in a bitter struggle against a backdrop of snow-covered ruins with icicles in the burnt-out windows – there were deaths on a huge scale in order to take one house, one barn, one wall. The fate of the whole world seemed to hang on the outcome of this icy battle in a slowly capsizing town.

  The news that Stalingrad had held firm got through to the stables faster than the castle, where the raw facts were camouflaged in euphemism: we are returning home. The big turning point had arrived. The castle, restored from the rafters to the cellars, prepared itself to receive guests on its shining polished parquet floors, between its white painted walls in the comfortable warmth of the ever-burning stoves: old Prussian nobility who were also going to make a contribution to history. Anna, averse to interest in strategic developments, averse to political opinions, had but one burning d
esire: that he would emerge unscathed from the gunsmoke.

  Lotte stared outside, her gaze glanced off one of the granite church walls. ‘We were putting our lives at risk for those whom you yourself did not wish to look at …’ she said incredulously.

  ‘Now you see it,’ Anna nodded, ‘that’s how it was. I am not a bit better or worse than most people. For a whole year I had anxiously expected news of his death, now he was there in a living body for three whole weeks. Then it was back to the beginning again. All I had for it was that little bit of life we had been allowed. But if I had gone to the Mölker Bastei alone I certainly would have seen them, believe me. I had probably asked myself painful questions, but that bit of luck, you understand, dominated everything at that moment.’

  ‘That’s the way you always have an excuse for yourself,’ said Lotte bitterly, ‘but all of you were without pity for the Jews.’

  ‘Hold on with that “all of you” … that little bit of luck was all I had, I had the right to it, I think, I had to make do with it for the rest of my life.’

  The sun broke through, a wintry white ray shone on their hands – on a spreading network of blue veins. Skin, blood vessels, muscles – fragile and mortal.

  ‘Here I believe we have the kernel of our disunity …’ said Anna pensively, ‘and we have arrived at the cause of your rage …’

  ‘Will you leave off my rage as something to be regarded as constructive, which will transform itself into forgiveness if I air it sufficiently.’

  ‘Forgiveness doesn’t concern me,’ Anna said sharply, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘Let’s drop it shall we,’ Lotte sighed, overwhelmed by a feeling of predictability, ‘things are simply as they are now. You mentioned Stalingrad … I still well remember how relieved we were … our euphoria … and yet afterwards it became really difficult …’

  Papa Stalin was not going to let himself be pushed aside just like that. The Allies had swept North Africa clean and marched off to Italy. For a short time they lived under the illusion that it was merely a question of waiting and persevering. The Frinkel family had returned in a overwrought state, having narrowly escaped two raids and forty-eight cats. At each meal the animals ate with them as full companions at table; the Noteboom ladies placed pieces of raw heart between their teeth so that the cats, decoratively standing on their hind legs, could tug them away. Excessive maternal love and spoiling had turned them into selfish nest soilers who began to miaow en masse when Max and his son did their daily finger exercises.

  Since Lotte, as a member of the radio choir, had refused to register with the Nazi Department of Culture, singing had officially ended too, and she became an essential cog in the fourteen-person giant household. Life became increasingly complicated not only in a practical sense but also in the abstract. From then on anxiety was permanently present, slumbering, subcutaneous. A sudden silence, a strange noise, hugely swaying tree tops, rumbling in the distance, a vague rumour – a trifle was sufficient to inflame it. It could happen at any minute, no particular moment was in principle unsuitable. No one could imagine it yet they imagined it, their powers of imagination forcing the unthinkable, unbearable. The anxiety drove the Meyers and the Frinkels into the wood on a false alarm, winter coats hastily thrown over their pyjamas. They lay for hours in a wet ditch beneath layers of overhanging spruce branches; in the distance there were voices and dogs barking. Mrs Meyer chewed the soggy tails of her fox stole, Max Frinkel massaged his finger joints to prevent the moisture affecting them. Eventually the master of the house constructed a more refined hiding place in a deep built-in cupboard in his bedroom. He reduced the cupboard door to a hole in the wall and hung a full-length mirror in front of it, which clicked open on a cable and was closed again from the inside after the hatch was shut. Everyone could fit in. They dived through their own mirror image into the hole – an ambiguous form of existence and non-existence. After that Lotte’s mother shoved her dressing-table in front, with purple and dark red perfume bottles sparkling attractively on it. From then on Mrs Meyer would only sleep in the cupboard; from their bed they could hear her crying and praying in a strange key.

  It was not easy to call a halt to the constant expansion of the household. For example, the doorbell rang. Lotte was alone at home – except for five invisible, inaudible personages who were playing whist upstairs. A young man with short red hair was at the door, his right hand on the shoulder of a small, very old man wearing a black hat, who raised his wrinkled face expectantly to Lotte. ‘I’ve come to bring the father-in-law of Mr Bohjul of the gramophone record shop,’ the young man declared. Mr Bohjul had been arrested, he explained, while his wife and daughter were in Amsterdam. Someone had caught up with them at the station and warned them not to go home. Bohjul had managed to smuggle the message out from the police station that his father-in-law was still in the attic and undiscovered. He advised the old man to go to a good client of his, more a friend actually, who would certainly be able to find accommodation: Lotte’s father.

  ‘He’s not in,’ she said, ‘I can’t decide here on my own initiative.’ She stood holding the door. No one said more, they looked at each other shyly. It seemed as though the old man, in his total dependency, was the only survivor of a catastrophe, as though he had been deemed too small and too light to go under with the others. Suddenly she was ashamed of her reticence. ‘You can wait for him inside,’ she said, opening the door wider. She led them to the dining-room. The old man waited meekly, his hat on his knees, his white eyebrows curling downwards over his deep-set eyes. His companion took in the surroundings as though he were sitting in a waiting-room. When her father got home he scowled at them with a frown until the name Bohjul was mentioned – ah, the owner of the record business where he was one of the family, how many heated discussions they had had about specific recordings. Indeed he had certainly once seen his father-in-law – Grandfather Tak – shuffling through the shop. Of course he would do his best to find him a good address. ‘Apropos …’ he said, turning to the old man in surprise, ‘I don’t understand, your son-in-law is a Persian Jew isn’t he? I have nothing to fear, he said to me last time; because Germany is not at war with Persia, we can go about freely.’ ‘Don’t ask me,’ sighed the other, ‘until 1914 the world could still be understood by an ordinary person … since then it has gone over my head …’ ‘Hat,’ his guide teased him, pointing wrily to the black hat that lay in his lap, now suddenly like a corpus delicti that had brought about the loss of the former world.

  The TB-house was patched up provisionally. Because his stay was temporary he was not to know that he was not the only one in hiding. When the sun shone he sat dreaming on a rickety folding chair, an amber pipe in the corner of his mouth. Lotte brought him his meals. He told her about the diamond-cutting business, long ago, when the world was still worth living in. His white hair, in which the sun spun an aura of better times, his defeatism, his transparent skin – she felt despondently as if he had just popped over from death to cast a surprised glance at chaos, in the safe knowledge that he could go back whenever he wished to. There was no success at finding him another address; new categories were going into hiding: students, soldiers at risk of becoming prisoners of war, men who wanted to avoid forced labour in German industry. Theo de Zwaan joined the people in hiding – as did Ernst Goudriaan soon afterwards, who was so endearing in his heroic efforts to hide his anxiety that Lotte’s mother empathized with him. He was put up with Grandfather Tak; he enlarged with a stylish extension the more frivolous than solid TB-house that squeaked in the wind, and there he got on with his violin-making, with a view onto a field of blooming tobacco plants. Koen had to hide too because he had reached the age for military service. His temperament did not suit him to waiting quietly at home until the war ended. He slipped out of the house onto the road, got picked up and taken to Amersfoort. At the end of a column of randomly captured fellow victims who had been picked up off the street, he was walking in the twilight through the ol
d town centre towards an unknown destiny. The road was narrow; unseen he slid sideways into a porch and pushed backwards against the door, knocking on the wood with his knuckles. ‘Open up, open up,’ he pleaded. ‘Are you a Catholic?’ ‘No,’ he moaned. ‘Pass on then,’ said the voice.

  They were taken to a barracks near Assen, where a plague of lice was in charge. Disgusted by the millions of crawling insects, he could not get any sleep. He slipped outside and gently dozed off, sitting against a wall. At the crack of dawn he was woken by a wood-fuelled post van driving in through the barrack gates. The postman climbed out and slowly emptied the letter box, then reversed and turned, the chimney smoking. The following day, the instant the man climbed back behind the wheel, Koen opened the back doors and hoisted himself in among the mailbags. He emerged at the ferry over the IJssel. The postman blanched. Although he was impressed with Koen’s ability to improvise, he was not inclined to take this unorthodox postal parcel further with him across the IJssel. ‘Boy, I absolutely cannot do that,’ he complained, ‘it is much too dangerous.’ ‘Hide me under the pile of wood,’ Koen suggested. The official had to give in in the face of so much ingenuity. ‘I must be absolutely mad,’ he growled, carefully covering the stowaway with sawn fruit-tree logs. Koen returned home with undiminished self-confidence. His mother took him in her arms after two sleepless nights, trembling with fatigue and relief. He freed himself from her embrace to make a sudden clothes inspection, for fear that he in turn had brought a stowaway with him from the barracks.