by Tessa de Loo
All Souls came round again and Anna made her ritual journey. A thick mist hung low over the earth; it smelled of wet leaves and chrysanthemums. Experienced, she pushed the squeaking gate open. She walked between graves with burning candles; the flames were motionless in the damp air. At the spot where her journey usually ended in wreath-laying and a prayer she found an impersonal square piece of grass with dry autumn leaves on it. Puzzled, she looked around. Had she walked the wrong way? My grave, she thought in panic, where is my grave? A procession was approaching along the mossy central path, enshrouded in the mist. The pastor was at the front in his chasuble followed by the villagers with their candles. It dawned on her. There he strode, the unbending representative of the mother church, in his solemn robes that were a harlequin costume on him. There went the uncharitable sanctimonious one, under whose direction people were going to pray for the salvation of the favoured dead. Perhaps he would be called to account one day, but she was not inclined to wait quietly for that. With large vengeful strides she walked up to him and stationed herself half-way along the path with her hands on her hips. The heavy eyebrows rose. ‘Where is my grave,’ she flung in his face, ‘where is my husband, where is my headstone? After all, I gave you my address, you should have warned me!’ The villagers stared at her in amazement. They knew precisely what Anna was talking about: she was their war widow. The pastor said nothing; he shifted his weight from one foot to the other and observed her disapprovingly, as though he had a hysteric in front of him. ‘There’s nothing there any more …’ she cried, ‘nothing …’ She heard a ringing in her ears, the sound of her own voice disappeared into the background. She wobbled out of the way, overcome with dizziness, sinking down disrespectfully onto a slanting tombstone, her head in her hands, the wreath lost in the grass beside her. As the procession moved on an old woman knelt down by her and whispered: ‘They were exhumed and taken to Gerolstein, to the memorial cemetery.’
Having come to her senses again, hours later in Gerolstein, she found no idyllic cemetery with mossy tombstones and crosses overgrown with ivy but a brand-new field divided into geometric square. Parallel strips of white sand between vertical planks with numbers on them. She laid her wreath in the middle of the field of the dead. I am sorry Martin, she apologized, the wreath is for all of you now.
‘Crosses were erected later on there. The three soldiers are still next to each other.’ Anna laughed. ‘The fact that the three of them stayed behind instead of pinching apples has bound them to each other for eternity. It says “Unknown soldier” on many crosses. I still go there sometimes, mostly in the spring. The cemetery is high up on a hill, on the edge of the world, forgotten. It is quiet there. Sometimes mothers walk there with small children, because it is a peaceful spot. I sit on a little wall, right by the grave; they chat to me, ask me where I come from, why. Then I say: I am visiting my husband here. That terrifies them. They cannot place it any more, it was so long ago. Actually, nor can I either. In recent years I have asked myself: what am I doing here?’
Lotte nodded drowsily. She was drinking more wine than was good for her. The subject did not suit her. And Anna still went on with it, bringing yet more facts to light. That the death of a hero could have such consequences.
‘Now I ask you,’ Anna was imperturbable, ‘why do we really believe that the spiritual existence of the deceased should still be connected to that one spot? Why do we go back there? Out of nostalgia? And whom does it benefit? The flower sellers, the groundsmen, the people who make headstones – there’s a whole industry connected with it. It’s their livelihood, and that’s why we still come … Do you want to be buried?’
‘Me?’ Lotte started. ‘Of … of course,’ she stuttered. With an inappropriate frivolity provoked by resentment she said: ‘I want a grave full of wild flowers … I have five children and eight grandchildren to care for them.’
‘When I die there will be nothing left of me,’ said Anna being contrary, ‘then there won’t be any public garden you can go to and where anyone has to spend money to put flowers there. Who would do that for me? Who would interest themselves in it? After all, I myself won’t be there at all.’
Lotte pushed her empty coffee cup aside and stood up slowly. ‘I really must go now,’ she murmured. It seemed as though the alcohol had shifted all her weight to her head. She left the dining-room with a top-heavy feeling, Anna busy talking behind her.
She grabbed her by one shoulder, breathing heavily; ‘Do you remember the day that … mother … was buried?’
‘No, absolutely not.’ Lotte hazarded a grab for her coat. No more cemeteries, she implored silently.
‘They had placed her coffin on the sofa. We had climbed up onto it, to look out from the bay, to see if she was coming yet. Our feet were resting on the window sill. We drummed loudly on the window with our patent leather shoes because the waiting went on so long, hoping she would hear it and hurry up. Indignant members of the family lifted us off the coffin. Only now do I understand that we were sitting on top of her …’
‘Well …’ said Lotte unmoved. For her there was only one mother: the other one. She buttoned her coat and looked round wearily.
‘I’ll see you out,’ said Anna. Beneath the harsh ceiling light she could see an expression midway between resignation and irritation on her sister’s face. She remembered her father had looked exactly like that in the latter days of his illness. That facial expressions could have been inherited! She did not dare state her discovery out loud. Lotte pushed off so swiftly, there could only be one reason for it: she had been too boisterous again.
With all the tipsy old lady’s strength she could muster, Lotte pulled the heavy front door open. She hesitated on the doorstep. ‘Sleep well,’ she said weakly to the round figure who filled the doorway and still radiated an uncurbed vehemence.
‘I am sorry I talked nineteen to the dozen today.’ Anna put her arms round Lotte guiltily. ‘Tomorrow, I promise, I will let my quieter side show. Sleep well, meine Liebe, schlaf gut und träum süss …’
That night Anna lacked the light-heartedness to fall asleep just like that. Images of funerals and cemeteries jostled each other. Her life had been punctuated by the dead, when she looked back over it, in the way that a cross-section of a glacier recalls the ice ages – how often it had given her life a brusque, harsh turn. She was full of a wonderful elation, as though something celebratory was going to happen. What else could it be but the apotheosis of the approaches she had been making for two weeks now? It was time for a proper reconciliation with her stubborn, squirming sister, discussed out loud. If the two of them, born simultaneously from the same mother, loved by the same father, would not succeed in stepping over silly obstacles tossed up by history, who on earth could do so? What was the prospect for the world if even the two of them, who were supposed to become milder in their old age, could not throw that one little stone?
She was oppressed, threw the blankets off and turned on her side. When it was almost morning she fell asleep despite herself. Her dream was populated with angels of diverse plumage. She recognized most of them at once, some only after thinking it over a little. With one exception they were operating together. The angels on either side of the steps to the Karlskirche left their plinths and flew, with strong beats of the wings and rustling robes over the green dome into the clouds, grasping the crosses to their breasts. The graceful female guards at the Thermal Institute stepped off the porch and flew after them. Up above, on a gold-fringed cloud, lay the two naked women who normally reclined on a shell-like decoration in the hall; the one strenuously tried to catch they eye of the other who was (deliberately?) looking past her pensively. The pink reflection of the setting sun touched all the faces. Behind, where the night announced itself in deep purple, a figure suddenly dived from a great height, gliding down in a broad, black coat. He held his hat down on his head with one hand, he clutched a walking stick in the other. Two plump children followed astride a fish, making use of the slipstream behind h
is wide flapping coat. Anna thought she vaguely remembered coming across them perfunctorily on a monument to the famous people who had visited Spa over the centuries: a cherub sat on a fish with a malevolent expression, on either side of a stone frame with the names.
After that it was night. Nothing flew past offering a distraction except by the light of the moon an unexpected angel, no, eagle, which cleaved like a thunderbolt through the blackness that was exactly as deep and absolute as the black-out nights had been in the war. Anna tossed onto her other side, which abruptly deprived her – released her from her dreams.
4
A cord hung above the decorative curved copper bath-tub with a handle that said ‘Pull’ in four languages. When the alarm clock gave the signal that the prescribed time was up, a short tug by the bath guest brought the arrival of a woman in a white overall, who helped with getting out and drying.
Lotte’s final week had begun with a peat bath and a carbonated bath. She was resting, swathed in a towel; glasses of Spa-Reine were also cleansing her within. Silence reigned as in a padded cell. No sound whatsoever penetrated from the outside world, as though the complex of bathrooms lay in caves deep beneath the Hoge Venen, right at the source of the springs.
But the silence was rudely interrupted. Somewhere nearby somebody cursed: ‘Mon Dieu!’ Hurried footsteps in the corridor. A scream immediately suppressed. Her door was thrown open; the woman in the white overall stood on the threshold wringing her hands. ‘Madame, madame … since you were always together … venez … votre amie …’
Lotte slid into her slippers and followed the woman to one of the adjoining bathrooms where the door was wide open. Inside, the doctor was being summoned. Someone ran out blindly and almost bumped into Lotte. She took two steps on the tiled floor. At first she could only see the broad back of the woman in front of her, who then stepped aside ostentatiously to allow her to see what had not passed her lips.
Anna was staring at her with glazed eyes out of a peat bath – it looked as though she had been decapitated, or her body had sunk for ever into the deep brown morass while her head had remained, forced up by the muddy mass. She was staring at Lotte with a gaze that lacked all the emotions: excitement, irritation, scorn, rage, sorrow … a total absence of all those feelings that had alternated kaleidoscopically with each other for two weeks and together had formed the complexity called Anna. The most oppressive thing was that she was so obviously silent … that she was not explaining what had happened to her, according to custom, talking energetically and gesticulating. Lotte looked around, orphaned. It was a bathroom like all the others, warm and damp. Had she become breathless? The light blue tiles ended at the top in a border with shell motifs – this was the last thing Anna had seen. Had it reminded her of the Baltic Sea where she had almost drowned, together with her husband … where, subsequently, she would have preferred to have drowned …? This was the last Anna had seen – just before then she had been alive and had got into the bath as vital as always. A macabre, tasteless joke was being played on her … Next thing she would start to move again: Mein Gott, what a ridiculous situation this is …!
A doctor rushed in followed by a rescue team. ‘What is she doing here?’ one of them protested. ‘This is no time to let a guest in.’
‘But she is her friend …’ stammered the nurse who had alerted Lotte.
Lotte moved back, away from that empty hollow gaze where only a heartbreaking nothing still came out, away out of all that unexpected, ultimate intimacy that Anna had involved her in without asking her.
The nurse came running after her. ‘Excusez-moi madame … I thought you ought to know immediately … Perhaps … perhaps they can still help her … Sometimes wonders are done with resuscitation … We have to wait … Where are you going now?’
‘To the Salle de Repos,’ said Lotte hoarsely, ‘I … think I ought to lie down for a moment.’
‘Of course … je comprends … I will keep you informed …’
Apart from the busts of two professors who had contributed much to the development of healing baths, and a solitary female figure who walked through a deserted landscape in a large painting that dominated the whole room, there was no one in the rest-room. Lotte flopped down on a bed at random. Too late, too late echoed in her head. She realized that she had constantly taken for granted the luxurious presumption that she still had all the time in the world. And now, all of a sudden, on a Monday morning, with one week still to go, Anna had taken herself off from that scenario. How was it possible …? Anna, indestructible Anna, who never ran out of talk and not just because of that always seemed to have eternal life … Like Sam and Moos in the joke with which Max Frinkel kept morale up in the war: Sam and Moos, only survivors of a shipwreck, answered the question, ‘How did you manage that?’ with busy gesticulation reminiscent of a dog-paddle: ‘We went on talking as usual.’
Outside the doves were cooing, as always. Everything was as it always was, only now something essential was missing. Fourteen days ago she did not yet exist for me, thought Lotte, and now will I miss her? Yes, roared the silence in the Salle de Repos, admit it! ‘Tomorrow, I promise, I will let my quieter side show,’ Anna had said. That airy promise was now coming about in a sour, ominous daylight. Whether she opened or closed her eyes, Lotte still saw that one frozen image before her. They had not been able to say goodbye. There was so much I still wanted to say to her, she thought, in a crescendoing feeling of remorse. Oh yes, what then, cried a cynical voice, what would you have said to her if you had known what was going to happen? Something nice, something that spoke of involvement, something consoling, perhaps? Would you ever have been able to say to her what she actually wanted to hear, which had come to mean everything to her? Would you ever have succeeded in squeezing out those two words: ‘I understand …?’
Those two words, apparently so simple, so revolutionary for Lotte, assembled in her throat as though she still wanted to propel them out – now that it was too late, too late, too late. Instead of that she began to cry, noiselessly and discreetly, entirely in keeping with the atmosphere in the Salle de Repos. Why had she remained stuck all that time in the resistant position she had adopted from the beginning? Although she had gradually acquired more and more understanding of Anna, and sympathy, she had remained fixed in unapproachability, intentionally obstinate. Out of misplaced revenge, not even intended for Anna? Out of solidarity with the dead, her dead? Or out of a deeply engraved mistrust: beware the apology ‘We did not know’, beware of understanding – you could even understand a hangman if you knew his background.
Her powerlessness flowed down her cheeks – too late, too late. The cooing of the doves sounded increasingly like mockery to her ears. Irrevocably too late. To escape from herself she raised the blinds and looked at the grey courtyard hiding behind them, the doves’ domain. As she stared outside from behind the glass she recalled the memory Anna had wanted to share with her the previous evening, right at the very end. She saw herself, with an intensity as though it had happened the day before, sitting on a coffin on the sofa together with her sister and tapping on the window with her shoes – a tamtam to demand their mother to make haste. She saw two pairs of sturdy legs, white socks, shoes with bows. They pattered exactly in time, as though together they had one pair of legs – not only to warn their mother but also to drown out the din of the strange voices behind them and in order to keep an unbearable reality at a distance. She looked sideways at Anna’s blonde head, her tightly closed lips were pursed and fierce eyes cast her a conspiratorial look.
Too late! Lotte let go of the blind. The door opened at that moment and the woman in the white overall, her personal angel of death, tiptoed in.
‘Alas …’ she clasped her hands together, ‘they could not do any more for her. The heart, ah. We knew … it was in her dossier that she had a weak heart and that we should not make her bath too hot … Do you know if she had family? Someone must organize her transport to Cologne and the funeral … We don’t k
now … After all you were her friend …’
‘No …’ said Lotte, straightening up. Her gaze fell on the bottles of mineral water and the stack of plastic beakers. Again she heard Anna asking in school French, ‘C’est permis … for us … to drink this water?’ And again she heard herself replying, from an intuition the consequences of which she only now accepted: ‘Yes, das Wassser können Sie trinken.’
‘No …’ she repeated, looking at the woman defiantly, ‘I am …’ she is my sister.’
Also by Tessa de Loo
A Bed in Heaven
‘One of the most extraordinary and haunting novels I have read. The plot moves between the time of the height of Amsterdam’s hippy era to Nazi-occupied Holland and back to Budapest at the turn of the 20th century. It traces the story of a Dutch girl in the Sixties who finds out that her Jewish father had been hidden in the war by his non-Jewish lover; and she learns that a young man she has met and wants to have a relationship with may also be his son and her brother. Her journey of exploration takes a riveting narrative back to the Second World War and beyond to her grandparents’ beginnings in poverty in imperial Hungary. Part thriller, part poignant dramatic poem, it lingers disturbingly in the memory’
–David Lister, Books of the Year, Independent
‘An intriguing smoking gun … complete with simmering and forbidden sexual passion’
–Sunday Times
‘Tessa de Loo, author of the international best-seller The Twins, has an aptitude for describing human emotion and experience, while never allowing the myriad separate stories to interrupt the flow of the text’
