Twins

by Dirk Kurbjuweit

  I thought of the cat as I lay in bed, still awake at twenty to two. They weren’t good thoughts. Cats can seem sinister at night, and a cat slick with grease was so strange to me that I was convinced there was something peculiar about this house—about this family. I should keep away from them, I thought, and again considered creeping out to my bike. I was also slightly disappointed that Ludwig was asleep. All right, he’d held out until half past eleven—longer than anyone else ever had—but that wasn’t the same as going on forever. Back then, I think, ‘forever’ meant until I fell asleep myself.

  We’d played for a long time beneath the overhanging roof of the sheltered area next to the workshop. There were even more motorbikes there—half a dozen, all old and all from England: Norton, Triumph, AJS, BSA. They were in poor condition—rusty, gutted. We sat on them and played police motorbikes, racing motorbikes, military motorbikes, gangster motorbikes. We were so caught up in the game, I forgot about the bridge above us. But it was, I think, that summer that we had our first doubts about whether playing was the be-all and end-all of life. They were only fleeting—that flicker of hesitation you feel hanging halfway off a motorbike as you pretend to lean into a bend, going absolutely nowhere, a shrill screech—the noise of an imaginary engine—emanating from your throat. In the autumn following that summer, the autumn we both turned twelve, we abandoned that boisterous, unselfconscious play. That summer, we said goodbye to our childhood. Those goodbyes are the most momentous of our lives, and I’m very glad I got to know Ludwig in time to say them together with him.

  In the late afternoon, we climbed up the hill, heading for the bridge. The slope was overgrown with scrub and low trees. The last stretch was very steep. I slipped and fell, and Ludwig helped me up. It had been his idea to climb up there, not mine. We’d been sitting on the motorbikes and it had gone quiet between us. We were done with our game. ‘Let’s go up to the bridge,’ Ludwig said.

  At first I was pleased at this suggestion, which broke the silence, but then I felt uneasy. The bridge was so high, and the cars were whizzing past. I didn’t say anything, of course—I just followed Ludwig, who set a brisk pace. It was a test and I knew it. I kept close behind him, trying to disguise my panting by breathing out every time a truck thundered past. Then we were at the top. We lay at the edge of the embankment and watched the cars. I was dazed and intoxicated at once. I’d never experienced speed at such close quarters: the noise, the force of the wind, the dizzy sensation when you tried to follow the fastest cars with your eyes and felt your gaze being almost swept away with them—the sense of danger. Deep down, I rejoiced. I was a trapper, watching a horde of Indians galloping by. I could have lain there forever.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Ludwig. He got up, slid down the embankment and jumped over the crash barrier. ‘Come on,’ he called when I didn’t get up. I didn’t want to—the ground was soft and warm. I couldn’t. I wasn’t allowed. A moment ago I’d been a trapper, but now I was my parents’ child. Cars equal danger. A motorway is not a playground. A truck shot past. Ludwig spread his arms and was almost blown back against the crash barrier. He laughed. I got up and jumped over the barrier too. Then he began to run.

  We ran along the hard shoulder towards the bridge. Somebody hooted. A hundred metres onto the bridge, Ludwig stopped, climbed onto the crash barrier and leant against the fine-mesh wire fence. I climbed up after him, not because I wanted to look down, but to stay very close to him. Even so much as a metre’s distance would have made me feel alone. Alone on that enormous bridge.

  Children have a clear sense of ugliness, but not of beauty. I don’t think I was really aware at the time of the beauty of the valley I lived in. I looked down and saw the river and meadows and hills, our little town beyond them, and at its edge the dam and the small reservoir. I was trembling, scared of the drop and of the cars shooting past behind me. I was trapped between two of the greatest dangers of childhood—cars and falling—but I laughed and shrieked. I looked down on gliding birds. I saw myself high above the world with all its tribulations: my worried parents, school and homework, the anxious waiting for a friend. I felt bigger than usual, and older too. Being so high up made us grown-ups. Ludwig laughed and screamed as well, but when he said, ‘Now the other side,’ everything collapsed.

  ‘We can’t cross the road,’ I said.

  ‘Of course we can,’ he said. ‘It’s fine. I’ve done it before.’

  I was a child again, then—far younger than eleven. I saw myself running, saw the car hurtling towards me, the crash, saw myself spinning through the air, smacking down on the asphalt.

  ‘It’s too dangerous,’ I said.

  We sat on the crash barrier in silence. I knew how disappointed he was.

  ‘I could have called anyone,’ Ludwig said after a while. ‘But I called you.’

  Ten to two. All I could see of Ludwig was the back of his head. I was sceptical. Was he really going to be my friend? I thought of his strangely white hair, his strangely white skin. It wasn’t exactly a pleasure, having to look at that all the time. It hadn’t been very nice of him to make me cross the motorway, either. That, at least, is what I thought at the time, because I didn’t know Ludwig properly then. No car had come, we got safely across and safely back again. Even so, I was more frightened than I’d ever been in my life. But it felt great running down the hill with Ludwig afterwards. We made a list of everyone who wouldn’t have passed the test, and in the end Ludwig and I were the only ones left.

  I listened out, because I thought I heard footsteps again. But there was nothing. Everything in this house was different from what I was used to: old wooden floorboards that creaked at every step, as if there were somebody lying underneath, complaining at being disturbed; doors that only closed if you gave them a firm push or yanked them shut with a dull bang that made me jump; shelves full of books with faded spines; small, wrinkled, dog-eared rugs. So much here was the product of chance: an air filter on a windowsill, a spent light bulb wedged between books, three coins on the arm of a sofa. Things absentmindedly put down seemed to stay where they were forever. In our house that kind of thing was unthinkable. My mother always tidied up, the doors closed quietly and the wall-to-wall carpet swallowed every sound. Our furniture was new, but in Ludwig’s parents’ house it was old, covered in thick coats of paint. You could see where it had dried in drips. The curtains had come adrift from their rails. It wasn’t really dirty, but it was dusty, and it had a strange smell—the smell of all the years of living that had gone on between the walls.

  Ludwig’s sister slept in the next room. I don’t think I heard her say a single word that day. At dinner she’d sat opposite me, next to Ludwig. Her father had the chair beside mine, but most of the time he stood at the stove, making pancakes. He ladled the batter out of a plastic bowl and poured it into the frying pan. Then he stood there—waited, flipped the pancake, waited again, lifted it out, put it on a plate and carried the plate to the table to slide the pancake onto the pile that was waiting there.

  We ate in silence. At first Ludwig talked about what we’d done that day, but then he too fell quiet. We were fighting a battle. We were fighting the yellow-brown pile on the plate, a pile that went on growing and growing, though we ate and ate. We were fighting each other. We skewered ourselves pancakes with our forks, manoeuvred them onto our plates, smoothed them out, spread them with apple sauce and ate without a word. Pancake batter hissed and sizzled in the frying pan. Ludwig always helped himself before me, but I kept pace with him. His father brought another pancake. He was still wearing his overalls. I caught a glimpse of his underpants again. At some point I realised I wasn’t fighting a duel, but a three-way battle. I’d been concentrating so hard on Ludwig that I hadn’t noticed his sister angling herself a pancake from the plate in the middle soon after me—every time, without fail. I was confused and also a little annoyed. What did it have to do with her? How could a girl eat so much? I took another pancake.

  I gave up when the cat jumped up o
n the table. Ludwig’s sister shooed it off at once, but I’d already had an unpleasant whiff of engine grease and I couldn’t fight on. Until then I’d been lost in a world of pancakes—the taste of pancakes, their smell, the sight of them piled up on the plate, the sound of the others eating them, of the batter sizzling in the pan. It had seemed quite natural to keep eating. But then I smelt the grease, and after that the smell of pancakes made me almost burst with disgust—a full, heavy feeling. Ludwig and his sister didn’t stop.

  She was tall and very thin, fair, but not as fair as Ludwig. If you looked very closely you could make out blond down on her face. It was a narrow face, her eyes round and grey. Her ears stood out a little—you noticed it because of her short hair—and when she turned to her father, maybe to see whether there were still pancakes to come, her nose jutted out sharply. She had a mole at the point where her right breast began to swell, but I have forgotten whether I saw it on that first day. She liked wearing floral dresses and left lots of buttons undone at the top, as if to show her cleavage, but she didn’t have any cleavage at all then, and she didn’t have much later either.

  When the clock next to Ludwig’s bed flipped over to 2.02 with a clack, I heard a strange gust of air outside, followed immediately by a dull thud. Ludwig was awake at once. He leapt out of bed, far quicker than you’d have thought possible after the pancake battle he’d lost to his sister.

  ‘Come on,’ he whispered, ‘but quiet.’

  I felt slightly sick and too heavy to tiptoe, especially on those creaky boards—but we got out of the house unnoticed. It was still very warm. I didn’t know what we were doing. I’d rather have stayed in bed, but I was glad Ludwig was awake. He went on ahead of me down the garden, looking for something.

  ‘There,’ he said suddenly, and stopped.

  On the grass lay a bundle. We took two steps towards it and I saw that it was a person, a long-haired person, a woman. My first thought was that she’d fallen from the sky. I could see that she’d come from a height. Somehow I had forgotten the bridge, though the pillar stood there beside us like a giant on night watch. I should have heard the cars too, but I heard nothing. I saw the woman and thought: How could she possibly have fallen from the sky? I looked up. The moon was a fat crescent. From there? I wondered. How did she get up there? I saw a rocket flying through space. I saw a woman wandering alone across the wastes of the moon. I saw her stumble and fall, fall, fall—a long, giddy flight.

  ‘The second one this year,’ said Ludwig, who was standing beside me. ‘They love that bridge,’ he said, and that’s when I began to hear the cars again. Ludwig took two steps towards the woman.

  ‘Stay here,’ I said.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, taking another step so that he was right next to her.

  ‘We have to tell your dad,’ I said.

  ‘In a minute,’ he said. ‘Come here.’

  As I went and stood beside him, I suddenly thought of Kasper, at the kindergarten I used to go to. Kasper was a beautiful hand puppet with long, floppy arms and legs. If you put him down carelessly, as most of the children did, his arms and legs would fold at strange angles, and I always thought it looked as if something terrible had happened to him. I couldn’t stand it—if I saw him lying like that, I’d pull his arms and legs straight. The woman looked like the carelessly dropped Kasper. I wanted someone to come along and pull her straight.

  But it wasn’t a woman—I could see that now. It was a young girl, sixteen or seventeen. She wasn’t bleeding, which made it easier to look at her. Long, dark hair, jeans, a T-shirt. She had lost a shoe.

  ‘Is she really dead?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re always dead,’ said Ludwig. ‘No one falls a hundred metres and lives.’

  I noticed how keyed up he was, but not in a nervous way like me—he was almost euphoric. He walked around the girl, bent down, brushed dirt off her cheek, and then, with one finger, he closed her eyelids.

  A lot more happened that night. The police came, a doctor, an ambulance. It was light outside before we went back to bed, but we didn’t get to sleep for a long time. We talked about the girl, imagining what her life had been like, and why she hadn’t been able to bear it. We suspected she’d had a broken heart, though we didn’t yet know exactly what that meant. We argued a little about how long the fall from the bridge would take. Ludwig said ten seconds, which seemed far too short to me. He fell asleep after we’d agreed that the girl’s name was Lisbeth. It was a name that suggested a life not worth living. Lisbeth sounded like sickness and death.

  I lay awake a great deal longer—I’m not sure I ever got to sleep at all. I felt good. Ludwig was going to be my friend. He was eleven and knew all about dead people. Nothing had ever impressed me as much as the matter-of-fact gesture with which he’d closed the girl’s eyelids. He must have done it before. I was at that age when you fear death more than anything, but not your own death—that seems impossible. We were all terrified our parents might die, because we were scared of orphanages—and scared of dead people, too. We saw them on TV, and at night they came into our dark rooms. Perhaps I realised that night that a friend is more than someone who’ll ring you up—you need a friend to ward off fear. Ludwig could help me fight the worst fear of all.

  2

  Five years later, on a Saturday afternoon in April, I was sitting on a Norton under the roof next to the workshop. It was warm. I couldn’t go in the house because no one was home. Ludwig had rung me two hours before to tell me I really had to come round. He hadn’t said why. That often happened. I always did what he told me and it was always worth it. His parents had gone away for the weekend, and his sister was spending the night at a friend’s. I’d been waiting half an hour. I no longer heard the noise from the bridge—I’d been at Ludwig’s so often and stayed the night there so many times that I didn’t notice it anymore.

  When he did turn up, he wasn’t alone. He had a girl with him, a girl I vaguely knew, called Josefine. They pushed their bikes in at the gate, let them fall on the grass and came over to where I was sitting under the roof. They seemed embarrassed.

  I can’t say much about Josefine. I think she was sixteen. At that point I’d never spoken to her, though I’d sometimes seen her on the street or at the open-air pool and knew she existed. Josefine stood out a little, because one of her teeth—her upper right incisor—was gold, and it glinted when she smiled. Perhaps it wasn’t really gold—I don’t know. Her family certainly didn’t have much money. She was Russian, though our teachers didn’t like to hear us say that and told us to say ‘Russian Germans’. As far as we were concerned, they were Russian. They came to us from Russia, speaking either only Russian, or else a German that sounded as if it came from deep and distant forests. They lived on the housing estate where the English soldiers had once lived with their families, and we never went there.

  Josefine had two brothers, who unnerved me because they had a reputation for wildness. I can’t say for sure whether Josefine was pretty. Her face was round as the moon, and so was her bum. Her shoulders and arms made her look like a shot-putter, but she had long, dark hair, and nice slim calves and slender ankles, which I could see now as we stood under the workshop shelter below the bridge. She was wearing a frilly white blouse and a black pleated skirt that came down below the knee. They were the kind of clothes you’d wear to your confirmation—though not of course with gym shoes, which she wore without socks. She smiled and said hello.

  Everyone said Josefine was simple. I was in no position to judge because, as I say, I hardly knew her. Another thing I’d heard about Josefine was that she was easy, but that shouldn’t necessarily be taken too seriously. We were at an age when we had trouble distinguishing between desire and reality when it came to girls, and I wasn’t the only one to have noticed Josefine’s breasts at the swimming pool—or the only one to have fantasised about them.

  We were all waiting for something back then, and we knew exactly what it was. We had seen everything—we knew what a pussy lo
oked like. There was a drive-in nearby and we’d often hang in the trees and watch the midnight films. The screen was four metres by eight, and they got up close with the camera. We’d talked it all over. Now it had to happen. We were seventeen, and reports were coming in every week about schoolmates who had done it—some of them younger than us. I’d sit in class looking at a girl and think: Maybe she did it last night. I’d try to work out whether there was anything special about the way she held herself, the look on her face, how she talked, or moved. But I was never sure. If I knew, I thought, it would make me a kind of accessory after the fact—only up to a point, but it would be better than nothing. If the girl I was watching happened to be sitting nearby, I’d sniff the air, trying to catch a whiff of her smell. Wasn’t there a hint of something about Corinna? Didn’t she smell different from yesterday and the day before? Somehow sweeter? It used to drive me crazy.

  I wasn’t bad-looking at the time. I wasn’t particularly tall, but I was stronger than the others, more toned. I also had a reputation for being nice—friendly and fair-minded. It wouldn’t have been too hard for me to find a girlfriend. The problem was the deal that Ludwig and I had made—not that it was a problem, not really. We’d made the right decision in agreeing to be like twins. Perhaps that isn’t the right way of putting it, though. We didn’t want to be like twins—we wanted to be twins. We wanted to be absolutely identical. But because we hadn’t been born twins, we had to make ourselves the same—and part of that, of course, was going through all our most important experiences together.

  ‘Come along,’ Ludwig said, and I followed him to the house, leaving Josefine looking up wonderingly at the bridge. He’d told her it was eighty metres high. No sooner were the two of us in the kitchen than he began to laugh and rub his hands together. I was soon grinning, infected by his glee, and it’s even possible that I too rubbed my hands together. I’d sometimes catch myself doing it and be surprised, because it wasn’t really a habit of mine.