Twins

by Dirk Kurbjuweit

  We didn’t mind going to school. We did well enough without having to try too hard, sometimes interested in what we were taught, more often bored by it, but never sullen. We did our best to put up with our teachers, who were touchingly serious about their task of preparing us for the adult world, though none of them could know what kind of a world it would be by the time we got there.

  It was a time of uncertainty, of constant flux. The Wall had come down, the Cold War had ended, and now everything was shifting and changing. Our geography teacher was a monster, with a penchant for inflicting ridiculously time-consuming homework, but when we saw him standing helpless in front of the big roller maps at the front of the classroom, all their boundaries out of date again, we felt almost sorry for him. He would try to amend them, copying from maps in the newspaper with a thick black pen that he held in a trembling hand, but the result was invariably even further removed from the current state of affairs than the original map, because the pen always slipped—the maps were hanging, not lying flat. In his attempt to break up Yugoslavia in front of the class, he split the Greek mainland in two, and on another occasion he tried to dissolve the Soviet Union and ended up creating an independent republic in a corner of Iran. I never had an atlas in which all the borders were correct.

  As for the computers we were given to work with, I don’t even want to get started on them. In my final year I was still tapping away at the same machine as in the first year, but the time I had to wait after entering commands seemed far longer, because by then we were using much faster computers at home. Looking back, things at school moved at too leisurely a pace, compared with the speed of the age we were living in, to present any sort of challenge, and that’s probably why Ludwig and I didn’t mind it all that much.

  During break we kept to ourselves. We had a corner of our own on the front steps where smoking was permitted. We didn’t smoke, just sat and talked—to each other, of course. What would we have said to anyone else? The others got in our way. We had no need for them. There was, though, a brief phase when there were three of us. It began when Marco came to our school.

  I knew Marco from Berlin, where we’d been to the same primary school. When I moved with my parents to the small town by the reservoir, Marco and I had written to each other a couple of times, but we’d soon lost contact. Then, during the first winter that Ludwig and I were twins, Marco suddenly appeared in the schoolyard one day. I recognised him at once and was pleased to see him. His parents had moved too—he was new and insecure, and I took him under my wing.

  At break Marco sat on the steps with Ludwig and me, and I took him rowing and sometimes round to Ludwig’s. He was cheerful and easygoing, and we had a lot of good memories in common, but after two or three weeks, Ludwig asked me if I didn’t agree that Marco was too stupid to be friends with us. I had to admit that he was right. That was the brilliant thing about us—we always thought the same thing at the same time. It was usually Ludwig who was the first to put it into words, just because he talked more than I did. It must have been awful for Marco when we told him he had to find other friends, but I did it gently, trying not to hurt his feelings, and it wasn’t long before we began to see him with fat Georg. The two of them later left school early and went off to join the police.

  Vera was also at our school by then, but she never sat with us—brothers and sisters didn’t hang out together. I have to admit, I really liked her. She wore her hair even shorter and her floral dresses hung nicely from her square shoulders. She no longer stood on tiptoes—at fifteen, that would have been silly—but she still stood with her feet in a T shape.

  Once, in early summer, when it was still cold, I briefly got close to her. It was when a girl in first year was kidnapped. A lot of rich people lived in our town—because it’s so beautiful, I suppose, with the river and all the greenery, but not too far from bigger towns and cities. A lot of the students at our school came from these wealthy families—their parents were executives and professionals, and they had pools in their backyards that they swam in every morning to improve their posture. We called them ‘spoilt brats’ and wouldn’t have anything to do with them, but of course we felt sorry for the little girl when she was snatched on her way to school.

  The kidnappers asked for three million. It was an uneasy time—police all over the school and on the streets. We all dreamed of finding the girl, of overpowering the kidnappers and receiving a generous reward. Ludwig and I spent a lot of time riding our bikes around the woods, hoping to uncover some clue, cooking up schemes to catch the gangsters. Secretly, too, in spite of our horror, I suppose we all sometimes wished we were in the girl’s place—forlorn objects of pity. (And didn’t the captive get first shot at taking out the gangsters and becoming a hero?) I have to admit, though, that I don’t really know if this was something everyone dreamed of, because no one would have owned up to it, of course. I can only speak for Ludwig and me, because as twins we could tell each other even the most embarrassing things.

  After three weeks, the ransom was paid and the girl released. We couldn’t believe it when we heard where she’d been hidden. One of the shorter pillars hugging the slope on our side of the bridge was partly hollow. We knew that—there was a steel door, and behind it, we supposed, a storeroom where the workers who maintained the bridge kept their tools. We’d sometimes rattled at this door in the past, but it had always been locked, and eventually we’d forgotten all about it. It was in this storeroom that the girl had been kept for three weeks. We went to check it out as soon as we heard the news on the radio. Everything was cordoned off, and men were milling about, agitated. We sat up till late that night in Ludwig’s room, trying to imagine what it must be like, living in a dark storeroom like that for three weeks, pondering possible means of rescue. It was frustrating to think that the answer had been so close at hand all along—the bridge was our territory, but for three whole weeks we hadn’t had a clue what was going on there.

  I didn’t leave Ludwig’s house until after midnight. As I made my way past his father’s workshop, I saw that the light was on. The door was open a crack, and I heard something that sounded like whimpering or soft crying, so I stopped. Then I went to the door and peered through the crack. I saw Vera sitting on a stool beside the oil drum, her arms wrapped around her knees, her head resting on her arms. Her back was heaving. My first impulse was to slip away, because I didn’t know how to deal with a crying girl, but in the end I went in. Vera heard me and looked up. You could see that she’d been crying for a while.

  ‘She was in there on her own all that time,’ she sobbed, ‘not even a hundred metres from here, in the dark. She must have been so scared.’

  Vera was a little ugly at that moment—big red eyes, hollow cheeks, her face streaked with tears. She looked like a baby owl that had been pushed out of the nest early. She started to cry again. I went over to her and put a hand on her hair. When she didn’t stop crying, I moved a little closer and pressed her head gently against my belly. It was funny, standing there like that and feeling a girl’s head on my belly.

  ‘She must have been starving,’ Vera sobbed, and I noticed that my shirt was getting wet. She stood up, wrapped her arms around my neck and laid her head on my chest. I don’t know exactly where I had my hands. I seem to remember touching her shoulders, her head and her neck, and putting my hands on her hips, too. It was so strange—if I’m not mistaken, her fingers played at the nape of my neck at some point. We were both a bit dazed by it all—first the girl in the pillar, and now the two of us, alone here, so late at night, with the motorbikes and the oil drum, and the smell of tears, which isn’t at all a nice smell, though it’s one I’ve always liked. We didn’t kiss.

  I felt slightly spooked as I rode home. I sometimes felt that way in the dark, when the bridge loomed behind me. There had been two suicides that year, though neither had been found in Ludwig’s garden. The first had landed close to the river, and the other had fallen through the glass roof of an agricultural machinery r
epair shop on the right bank. It was the fourth time in twelve years that roof had been smashed—the owner must have been pretty annoyed. And now there had been this girl in the pillar, so that the bridge was somehow alive after all, just as I had feared when I was younger. All this was going through my head—and thoughts of Vera too, of course—the feel of her hair and skin. I forgot to mention that I’d also touched her arms, where the skin was bare. I even—slowly, and only for a second or two—pushed two fingers up the short sleeves of her dress.

  I wondered for a long time whether I should tell Ludwig about this encounter in the workshop. Things are never easy between brother and sister, and perhaps he’d have taken it the wrong way. There had been a funny atmosphere that day—we couldn’t stop thinking about the girl in the bridge. I was sure Ludwig would have understood in the end, but I kept quiet all the same. By then our twin project was so far advanced, I think, that we no longer had to talk about everything. We knew or guessed the important things about each other.

  A few days later, it emerged that one of the two kidnappers had been a father from our school. I can still remember the look on the boy’s face when his mother came to pick him up. His father had already been arrested and the news had spread like wildfire, so that everyone sitting out on the front steps knew what had happened. We expected the boy to cry, or at least look ashamed, but as he strode out of school between us, he held his head high, like a king. His mother was crying.

  We discussed the scene at length when we went to the Greek taverna after school. We went to the taverna a lot, because it had the best pinball machine in town. Space Patrol, it was called. They all had names like that, but this one was the best—none of the others gave you such an intense display of sounds and lights. It blinked and beeped and flashed and rattled—like a real space battle, maybe—and we shot the little metal balls into the maws of intergalactic beasts who probably all had their eyes on the busty blond girl in the high boots—high boots and three red stars covering the vital spots, nothing else. We drank a glass of water each but never ordered anything to eat, so the Greek landlord always gave us sour looks when he saw us coming. But how could we have eaten yeeros or moussaka or tzatziki? We rowed in the lightweight class and weren’t allowed to weigh more than 125 kilos between us. We managed without starving ourselves, but we didn’t eat fatty food. I’m afraid I found it easier to keep my weight down than Ludwig did. Though we’d eaten the same quantities of the same foods all winter, by the summer Ludwig was having to restrict himself a bit. So we played pinball and talked about the kidnapper’s son, though Ludwig didn’t have much to say for once. I got worked up about how untroubled by it all the boy had seemed—I suppose Ludwig saw no point in saying anything because he agreed with everything I said.

  Ludwig didn’t turn eighteen until the autumn, and I had to wait until the winter, so neither of us had a driver’s licence. That meant we couldn’t drive ourselves to the regattas. My father took us—he’d been driving us ever since our first regatta, when we were twelve and rowed in a quad. ‘Next time it’s my dad’s turn,’ Ludwig had said. Not long before the race, he rang and said his dad couldn’t make it, but he was sure he’d give us a lift the time after. It went on like that for a while—Ludwig could give very longwinded explanations as to why it was impossible for his dad to take us that particular weekend. Eventually, though, he dropped the subject.

  I never saw Ludwig’s father at a regatta, but it didn’t matter, because my father was keen not to miss a single one. What was annoying, though, was having to sit in the car with him, especially once he’d remarried. His new wife was a colleague from the curtains section of the department store where he was assistant manager in charge of household goods. On the sometimes long car journeys, the two of them talked at length and in minute detail about the department store, so that by the time we got home we knew all about cutlery sets and Tupperware—and all about the people who bought and sold cutlery sets and Tupperware. My poor father.

  I had no trouble, then, understanding why Ludwig had started to think about alternatives. On the Friday before the fifth race of the season, he rang to say we wouldn’t be going with my dad—I should ride my bike round to his place on Sunday morning. It wasn’t exactly easy to explain this to my father. I was vague and a bit cryptic, but he didn’t quiz me for long before announcing that he’d come along all the same. I think he was very proud of me. We’d beaten the twins from Potsdam in the first four races. It was an important season for us, because the regional championships were to be held on our reservoir at the end of the summer.

  That Sunday I rode my bike round to Ludwig’s first thing. He was waiting in the garden. His parents’ car wasn’t there—they liked to take city breaks on the weekend.

  ‘Dream anything?’ Ludwig asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Did you?’

  He shook his head.

  What I’d said wasn’t altogether accurate. I’d dreamed I was lying on my belly on the beach with someone sitting on my bum, trickling hot sand onto my back as I watched a pod of whales swim by out to sea. For a long time I didn’t know who it was sitting there, but when I was pretty much covered in sand, a face popped up next to mine and it was Vera.

  Ludwig led me into the workshop, where two motorbikes were parked, one without a gearbox and the other a recently restored silver Triumph. The Triumph looked like new and had two white helmets and two black leather jackets lying on the saddle. Ludwig rubbed his hands together gleefully.

  ‘Your dad will throw us off the bridge,’ I said.

  He grinned and put on one of the jackets, so I did too, and then we helped each other fasten the helmets. As we pushed the motorbike out onto the road, I saw Vera standing at a window. Ludwig kicked the starter twice. I’d always liked the sound of the older motorbikes, a hollow gurgle that was almost a moan, like a distress call—in neutral, at any rate. The rest of the time they shrieked in a way that sounded pretty hysterical. It felt unbelievably good, driving through the country with Ludwig. A motorbike was just right for us. It’s a vehicle made for two—you move in unison, tilting forwards when you brake and backwards when you accelerate, leaning into the bends together when you turn right or left.

  Ludwig drove up the hill carefully, but at a fair speed, then onto the motorway and over the bridge. Looking down at the valley on either side, I whooped with joy. The sun was low in the sky and the river glinted like a narrow strip of tinfoil. On the way to the regatta, all went well, and the race was a success—we narrowly beat the twins from Potsdam—but on the way back, we were stopped by the police, who appeared behind us from out of nowhere. They gave a brief blast on the siren and Ludwig pulled over to the right, stopped and immediately dismounted. The police parked a few metres further back. Then something happened that still brings me out in goose flesh when I think of it.

  I too had dismounted, and an almost imperceptible ballet began. Taking small steps, we moved in silence towards one another and past one another, crisscrossing and circling, apparently haphazardly. By the time one of the policemen had reached us, I was the one standing at the handlebars. Ludwig and I were wearing the same helmet and similar jackets. We were the same height, the same build and we were both blond.

  ‘Can I see your driver’s licence, please?’ the policeman said to me.

  ‘I don’t have one,’ I said.

  I don’t want to go into detail about what followed. It wasn’t so hard to deal with, because we shared the burden. Ludwig had to live with his father’s anger, while I got twenty hours’ community service. I worked it off at a municipal garden, transplanting trees, loosening soil. I had no trouble coping with the physical work—what was unpleasant was the company, a motley crew who’d been done for assault, talked only of violence and threatened each other with the knives we’d been given to prune shoots. It was awful, but I got through it all right because I knew it would have been much harder for Ludwig than it was for me. Sometimes he had trouble keeping his mouth shut—a frankness which may
have been a strength, but could have triggered a life-and-death battle in the municipal garden. Maybe, I would think, after hours of gory tales and dark threats, maybe right now I am saving Ludwig’s life. Then I would find the strength to go on.

  Not much else happened in the weeks following our motorbike ride. The next thing worth mentioning took place on an evening exactly like so many others back then. We had dinner with Ludwig’s father and Vera—his mother worked late shifts, and I didn’t often see her. We ate in silence—there never was much talking in that family at the best of times, and there was still tension in the air. Ludwig’s father had bought half a dozen U-locks and locked up all the roadworthy motorbikes. The bill had gone to Ludwig.

  After dinner, we went up to Ludwig’s room and listened to the radio. We did that a lot at the time. Ludwig had sold his television and stereo to pay for the locks—his father had been merciless. Now Ludwig had an old dark-wood tube radio in his room. The speaker in the middle was made of pale wicker, and the dial glowed green. Best of all was the heavy tuning knob, so sensitive that you could get all the stations with a single turn of your wrist. The sound was muffled, but we had such fun sending the red pointer on its travels that we didn’t mind.

  Soon we had listened to several stations and found two favourite programs. The first was early on a Saturday afternoon and broadcast live test drives—two men driving around the country in a new car, discussing its strengths and weaknesses. The drive always incorporated a so-called vibration track, and we would laugh ourselves silly when the two old men gave the car a thorough shake-up as they tried to rate the shock absorbers. Their words came out jerky and disjointed, and we decided that they were the best rappers in Germany. The other show was called Roots, Rock and Reggae and presented an episode in the history of reggae every Monday evening. We liked the music and sometimes even danced. I don’t want to keep going on about this, but it was another sign of how far we’d progressed. Dancing didn’t come half as naturally to the boys our age as it did to the girls, and so there was something special about the moment when, one evening, without a word, we got up at almost exactly the same time and began to dance to the reggae—separately, and yet together.