The Twins

by Tessa de Loo

  Nevertheless she left the bath house with Anna again the next day – at last the liberation was in view. Their whole meeting was a film she had failed to walk out of in good time; now she also wanted to know how it ended. The sun was shining, the world looked deceptively amiable. They dawdled around a little until they arrived at the Parc de Sept Heures and their nostrils were tickled by the aroma of frites. Anna sniffed with closed eyes, ‘That’s what I want!’ she said from the bottom of her heart. Although Lotte had an aversion to doughnut and frites stalls ‘because they make your clothes stink so’, she walked behind her automatically. A little later they were sitting with paper cones on a bench in the park, surrounded by intrusive doves. The war, the vicissitudes of humanity, painful matters of conscience – all paled into insignificance compared with the adolescent enjoyment of a portion of frites in the winter cold – long, firm, crisp, golden yellow frites. Greasy, salty fingers. But the idea that life was actually very simple only lasted as long as the bag of frites. Then they wiped their mouths and their hands and the war resumed its rights.

  Lotte’s father ran out of flags to mark the Allied victories; his wife, who had read too many war novels in her time, shivered at the thought of the strategic and moral vacuum usually associated with the handover of power – a period in which the enemy reacted blindly to the frustrations of its defeat with arson, rage, devastation, murder. What would happen to them if by chance they were living in the line of fire? This was the first fear she had admitted out loud since the start of the war. The situation had became increasingly distressing. The tension was mounting and for Ernst it was released in a clumsy proposal of marriage. Moved by his awkwardness, Lotte did not play hard to get. Not only did she love him for his frank vulnerability and unmasculine weaknesses, she also nurtured a secret fear that life after the war would resume its normal course again, even though it could never really be the same as it had been before the war. The marriage would save her from having to be involved in the disintegration of the enormous clan of family and people in hiding – a priceless microcosm in a certain sense, although it could be from addiction to anxiety – she hoped to escape via the marriage from the emptiness that they would be leaving behind, and the excess of time, suddenly, to pose yourself difficult questions. She would also escape from her father whose proximity would no longer be tolerable in peacetime.

  A wedding they could not afford: everything they possessed had been turned into provisions. They decided to marry before the war was over – a good excuse to let the ceremony take place quietly. Nevertheless that quiet was tactlessly disturbed at the critical moment by a squadron of low-flying Spitfires. On the way to the town hall the discreet company – the betrothed couple, her parents and two improvised witnesses – continually had to dive into the bracken. On account of the bridegroom’s status as a person in hiding they had chosen an inconspicuous route through the wood; for the same reason the ceremony was performed by the stand-in mayor, who was reliable: Lotte’s father, always so charming outside the house, had his contacts. The formalities were managed without a glimmer of festive spirit, the stand-in mayor’s words were lost in the roar of aircraft. Lotte, picking sprigs of bracken here and there from her brown suit, thought that never in the history of the world had such a joyless wedding taken place. After it was over they rushed back to the house taking the same route, where the lifetime contract acquired a little lustre in the dish of rye cakes and a bottle of gin – the very last one.

  As they crossed the Avenue Reine Astrid, their patience was tested by a military procession – the very one they had seen riding to the west a few days earlier was now returning to the east. Tanks with soldiers in battledress, jeeps, Red Cross lorries, all the colour of mustard.

  Anna observed the procession with a stern expression. ‘Da siehst du, it all goes on as usual,’ she mused. ‘As long as the economy is dependent on the arms industry there will continue to be new flashpoints and we will all be armed to the teeth.’

  Lotte did not rise to the bait. It was such a generalization again, bending the question of guilt into a safe direction. If rearming was a worldwide pattern, then that saved Germany from responsibility for the economic revival in the 1930s – based on the arms industry – and everything that had flowed from it. But she was tired of refuting Anna’s theories so she held her tongue and watched the mud-spattered column with mixed feelings. That was how the occupier, that was how the liberators, had entered the country.

  Part 3

  Peace

  Après le déluge encore nous

  1

  The Führer was dead; it was a matter of days. The night before, the capitulation evaporated in general drunkenness. There were pre-war stocks of alcohol under shrouds of cobwebs in the cellars of the former hotel. Fearing that the Americans would start an orgy there and rape the sisters to the rhythm of their perverse jazz music, the hospital management divided the bottles up among the staff. Anna sat on the floor in one of the sisters’ rooms and it gave her bitter satisfaction to undermine her sense of reality with red Martini. Humming, she took her tight nurse’s cap from her head and combed her blonde hair. ‘Take a look at this …’ the others stared at her in surprise. ‘Actually how lovely you look! Why stuff your hair under that cap, show yourself as you are!’ Anna brought the bottle to her mouth again. She had no inclination to explain that ‘to look lovely’ was the last thing she aspired to. Everything to do with feminine coquetry and seductiveness – how perverse in relation to the dead – could count on her contempt. At the end of the evening she was led, laughing and giggling, past the reception to her dormitory.

  The next day the brand-new peace made itself known right through her piercing headache: an endless procession of emaciated, exhausted soldiers dragging themselves along the autobahn, chased by well-fed Americans who blazed with conceitedness and disdain. Anna clambered up the slope and saw a disillusioned mass trudging past her on that sunny liberation day – grey faces, lips cracked from the dryness. She also became acquainted with the phenomenon of the black American. Chewing gum, he turned to her on his thick rubber soles. ‘Hello baby …’ he grinned casually. She turned round offended and ran down the slope straight to the kitchen. She came inside breathlessly. ‘Our soldiers are coming down from the alpine fortifications … my God … they can’t go on any more …!’

  All who could free themselves filled a jug with lemonade and hurried to the road with it. But as soon as three, four soldiers had drunk some, a Wild-West type appeared and pushed, knocked the sisters down off the slope. They quickly scrambled to their feet and climbed up once more to give out lemonade. The boys drank eagerly and stuffed letters into the pockets of their starched nurses’ overalls. ‘Please, please … write to my wife that I am still alive,’ they pleaded as they passed by, ‘tell my mother that you have seen me …’ Inside the hospital the sisters emptied their pockets and filled the jugs; tirelessly they held their positions. They were flung down, threatened with rifle butts, but obstinately kept coming back until the last soldier had passed. Back in the hospital they sorted out the post. Someone had thrown Anna a small parcel, without an address, without a letter. She opened it: inside was dark blue woollen material for an officer’s uniform – a gift? When the postal service was working again she wrote dozens of letters: ‘From Heinz, for my dear Hertha … for Mutti from Gerold … via Anna Grosalie.’

  That same day the guard was changed. Jeeps arrived and the Americans quietly took over the military hospital. Soldiers who had recovered were taken prisoner and removed; doctors, orderlies and sisters had to continue their duties under guard. Huge revolving searchlights were installed in the grounds around the hospital to discourage daredevil dreams of escape. Among the wounded there were dedicated Nazis who had photographs of Hitler and other Nazi things on them. Just in time the sisters had collected these paraphernalia and, fearful of provoking the Americans, thrown them in the Chiemsee. One soldier, who could not be separated from his decorations, his Iron Cross and h
is photograph of Hitler, had withheld everything unnoticed. He buttonholed Anna a few days later. ‘Would you do me a favour, Sister, and hide these things for me?’ ‘But where?’ she said sceptically. ‘In the wood behind here. Bury them, mark the spot and draw a map with it indicated precisely on it. I’ll retrieve them when it’s all over.’

  Anna could not refuse him. In the evening, as soon as the beam had just passed, she ducked as she sneaked along the ground – continually looking round. She dug a hole between two birches, laughing quietly to herself: she saw herself rootling in the ground like a dog hiding a bone. After she had made a quick sketch of the location in the moonlight, with a cross on the spot where the Führer had been buried, she went back the way she had come, cursing the Americans for the ridiculous show of strength of their searchlights, as a result of which, in your own country in peacetime, you could not once move freely.

  It did not take long for the Americans to discover the charms of the original hotel: you could swim and sail in the Chiemsee. They requisitioned it for their general staff. The military hospital was disbanded; the SS were sorted out and transported; the Red Cross sisters were taken as prisoners to a Wehrmacht barracks in neighbouring Traunstein, where little remained of the celebrated German orderliness. When the Americans were so close they could smell their fried bacon, the High Command had chosen to seal the Third Reich’s downfall by carousing – the sisters were ordered to clean out the pigsty they had left behind. They felt degraded by their captivity, which conflicted with the neutrality of the Red Cross, and by the filthy work that was so remote from their calling. But all that very soon paled into insignificance in the light of the daily ration of one cup of black surrogate coffee, a slice of dry bread and a plate of watery soup. Light-headed from hunger, they scrubbed floors. After a week Anna could only carry buckets that were a quarter full.

  One day one of the sisters broke the solidarity of the collective empty stomach and bartered herself to the Americans for a plate of food. Full of self-hate she returned; she wrung out her mop, crying about the irretrievable. They took it in turns to try to comfort her but she stubbornly refused to accept charity from those whose self-respect was still intact. Sister Ilse, who was friendly with her, knew that it was her birthday that week. ‘We should do something for her,’ she said to Anna, ‘something nice.’ Anna nodded gently – excessive movements of her head made her dizzy. ‘There are marguerites growing on the other side of the road …’ she suggested cautiously, ‘but how could we ever get past the sentry by the gate?’ ‘Leave that to me,’ said Ilse, ‘I speak a little English.’

  Ilse succeeded in softening the sentries after lengthy dealings in a charming gibberish mixing English and German. The gate opened – they had to restrain themselves not to run into the meadows like liberated calves, but rather to set foot with the absentminded detachment of privileged prisoners. Walking in blossoming grass, marguerites, buttercups, sorrel … lying down in it and ceasing to exist! As Anna picked flowers the stalks of the grass on the banks of the Lippe scratched her legs again and she smelled once more that prickly green smell which was like nothing else. It did not bother her that there were American army tents further on, just as, long ago, she had ignored the proximity of the farm in which her step-aunt concocted new torments. From the constant bending she fell into a dizzy fuddle, a dazed sensation of almost fainting in the Arcadian meadow and forgetting everything.

  All of a sudden a piece of chocolate landed at her feet, and another, and a piece of bread, and something else, and something else. She came back to the here and now with a bump. ‘Verdammte Schweine …’ she snapped. She wouldn’t even think of touching it. Ilse was also carrying on as though she hadn’t noticed that anonymous delicacies were flying at them from the tents. One of the sentries cried from the other side, ‘Jesus, pick it up, they’re only giving it to you!’ Ilse wavered. ‘If we take it with us,’ she whispered, ‘then we could all enjoy it … then it will be a proper birthday party …’ Anna had not yet seen it like that. She picked her Red Cross apron up by the corners, bent down and began to fill it. Eventually she stood up with a bulging apron and called haughtily: ‘Danke schön!’ The birthday girl would never in her life receive a bouquet to equal the exuberant bunch of wild marguerites. The sisters sat down in a circle. Each had a little heap of American benevolence in front of her. The birthday girl got the most and naturally shared it out again.

  On the other side of Traunstein there was a military hospital. Since the brown sisters had been arrested and taken away there was a shortage of nurses there. One of the SS doctors, who worked under guard, drew the Americans’ attention to the Red Cross sisters at the barracks – under an escort of two soldiers they were fetched and taken to the hospital. Anna was not in a state to carry her suitcase – someone put it in a cart. All she carried was the parcel of blue officer’s material under her arm. Thus they walked in procession through Traunstein, stared at by the inhabitants. They were relieved: not only could they get on with their normal work in a hygienic environment where the reliable SS orderliness still prevailed, but they could also eat again. The head of bookkeeping, an SS sergeant-major born and brought up in Traunstein, had his connections in the hinterland. While the Americans stood in front at the gate, the farmers shoved smoked pork, sausage and potatoes through the rear windows and the Traunsteiners dug a tunnel to the cellar to bring the stocks up to the required standard. Anna stuffed herself for three days.

  Even so, they still had prisoner status. It was high summer. The landscape of the alpine foothills spread out seductively, but they were not allowed beyond the gate. Anna leaned out of the window of her room with claustrophobic longing and stared at the Garden of Eden. Free citizens were walking on a country road that wound round a hill until it was swallowed up in a wood. Two anachronistic soldiers were patrolling on the same road and cried ‘Hello baby’ to each skirt that passed by – did they do that in the prairie too? She decided to take the law into her own hands. She took off her Red Cross uniform, and fished a crumpled two-piece out of the suitcase that had been through so much. Disguised as a citizen, she wormed her way out of the window; under cover of scattered bushes she managed to get to the wood unseen. It was an ordinary wood, in the simplicity of its multifaceted appearances. An oak was an oak, no more, no less – she greeted the beech, hugged the oak, ran from one tree to the next, inhaled the smell of humus, clambered onto a fallen pine tree and started a distracted song that turned into a fit of crying half-way through. The trunk bounced beneath her in time with the sobs – it was a fit of crying like a natural phenomenon, a cloudbreak that cleansed the dust from the leaves. It was not so much a question of heartache: her whole body was crying to the roots of her hair, everything contracted together and opened wide – the crying sang itself free from rationality until it became a free-standing form of more rarefied crying that slowly dissolved. When she came to herself dusk was falling. She picked sprigs out of her hair and went in search of the path. The way back was barred by two soldiers involved in conversation. She waited, crouching behind a tree. Eventually they strolled off together in the evening twilight and Anna could walk some way along the public road as a free citizen. She passed a farm – look at that, she thought in amazement, people are sitting there eating, no bombs are falling, the light is on! She realized that since 1939 she had not had an evening without black-out; she had got so used to the abnormal that she regarded the normal with astonishment.

  From one day to the next the hospital at Traunstein too was disbanded. The patients were taken away, the guards disappeared, the doctors and nurses were left to their own devices – not one of them had thought of quitting. After two days a goods lorry drove up with an American at the wheel. They climbed into the back all together and sang at the top of their voices, ‘I am a prisoner of war …’ – a surgeon conducted the crew with his sensitive hands. The sun was shining, apples were hanging on the trees, there was no shooting, no vehicles jumped in the air, there were no swollen kn
ee joints. Surprise and uncertainty were modified into fatalism, transformed into collective wantonness. The war was over, no matter how – slowly, slowly this awareness was trickling inside.

  Singing, they entered captivity once more, this time at Aibling near Munich, a massive prisoner of war camp on a former airfield, The women, nurses and Blitzmädchen had been accommodated in hangars; the leaders of the Wehrmacht in the other buildings. Further on, under the open sky, separated from the rest, were thousands of SS soldiers, on the ground, in sun and rain, anxiously guarded by soldiers with machine guns. Anna and Ilse walked to the washroom to clean off the dirt from the journey. Women were jostling each other in front of the mirrors over the wash-basins. They were painting their lips and making themselves pretty. In the background popular music echoed through the hangar. Between two numbers a disc jockey sent greetings from Wolfgang to Sabine in a horrible accent, and congratulated Hans on his birthday on behalf of Uschi. ‘What is this, in God’s name?’ Anna said. ‘Have they gone mad?’

  The purpose of the finery soon became clear. Outside, past the hangars, the heavyweights of the Wehrmacht mooched about in their uniforms with medals, decorations and pips – the tarted-up women at their sides, one lovelier than the next. The Americans, crazy about a show even thousands of miles from home, took care of the music and played the records they also played at home. Each day, from five to seven, it was a great courtship display for the top Wehrmacht, for those who had sent thousands and yet more thousands to their deaths, while beyond the reach of loudspeakers and pretty women, the SS soldiers who had survived it lay down in the fields like cattle. Anna and Ilse looked at the grotesque show with open mouths. The generals, the senior officers who had stayed out of range in the war, were parading round like honoured prisoners in time to the music of their conquerors. Anna stood there and watched and listened with clenched jaws to the inane native music of America’s aboriginals and did not know what to do with the rage that flared up in her. Rage against all those self-important fops without whose orders the war would not have been waged, without whose co-operation Hitler’s wings would have been broken. Rage against the conceited cowboy-stupidity of the Americans. Rage against her own powerlessness – all that was needed was for her to join in the applause or go and paint her lips too.