The Quiet Twin

by Dan Vyleta

  The girl led him down the corridor, past broken windows and shattered light bulbs, angry slogans scrawled across the floor. Beer wondered for a moment what the neighbours made of this gutted building in their midst, then reminded himself that they were the same people who had witnessed the windows being smashed and the symbols being daubed, and done nothing about it. People like him. Some of them might even have lent a hand. In a month or two, the property would have new tenants, and a new lick of paint. Their name wouldn’t be Pollak, but that was all: there’d be another kind of name – no different really, yet somehow better all the same – and a row of motor cars standing polished in the yard.

  The girl let go of his hand and cut into a hallway on their right in a lopsided gallop. The corridor was narrow and so cluttered with broken furniture that for a moment Beer lost sight of her. When he caught up with the girl, he found her standing at the top of a staircase of three steps that led up to what must have been a service entrance to the workshop and was now blocked off by two large pieces of plywood, one of them stained by what seemed to be old blood. She stuck a finger into the wood’s cracked lower corner, wrinkling her nose at the stains, and lifted the board up like a flap.

  ‘It’s loose, see. We can go in here.’

  ‘We really shouldn’t,’ he protested. ‘Besides, I’ll get my trousers dirty.’

  ‘I come here all the time.’ She ducked through, then turned in the entryway, still holding up the piece of wood. Her body, in this hunched position, seemed intolerably twisted: bent double over the crooked line of her waist, her head and left shoulder fused at the seams. Her little arms were shaking with the strain.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘let me help you.’

  Before he knew what he was doing, he had mounted the steps and taken hold of the loose board. He crouched down low to do so, one knee pressed into the dirty floor. The little girl was close now, looking him straight in the eye: he could see the fine web of crystalline ridges that threaded her iris; the pink curve of her lip.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked quickly, her breath sweet in his face.

  ‘Dr Beer.’

  ‘And otherwise?’

  ‘Otherwise? Anton. Anton Beer.’

  ‘Anneliese Grotter,’ she said, then turned on her heel and ran ahead into the darkness beyond. He really had very little choice but to follow.

  Getting past the plywood wasn’t as easy as he had thought. He tried to duck through as the girl had done, but didn’t seem able to make himself fit; straightened up again and began pulling at the board in an effort to widen the gap. It wouldn’t budge, then came loose with sudden violence and flew nail-studded into his arms. He almost lost his footing and slipped off the stairs; threw the board behind himself in a temper, then stood peering about as though to check whether anyone had witnessed the mishap. But the corridor remained as deserted as before, and Beer quickly slid through the narrow doorway he had created, hoping his clothing wouldn’t catch on any edges.

  The part of the building that lay on the other side seemed unaffected by the fire and the vandalism. Within a few steps, the whitewashed passage Beer had entered opened into a sort of tea kitchen, roughly furnished with shelves laden with cheap plates and mugs and some tin cutlery. The scorched coil of an immersion heater lay not far from an empty metal sink. It struck him that whoever had left this place behind had gone to the trouble of scrubbing the sink clean until it sparkled, and he pictured Frau Pollak standing hunched over its surface, a wad of steel wool in her hand, her suitcase already sitting in the yard. The cutlery was dusty, but none of it soiled.

  Beyond the kitchen lay a further corridor, which in turn led to a mechanic’s garage, now barren of tools but still alive with the vivid smell of motor oils. On his right, the garage doors stood wide open, blue sky beyond. He stepped out and saw the girl waiting for him by the pile of rubbish she had indicated before, arms thrown high over her head, and rushing her body through a drill of awkward pirouettes that tossed up the hem of her purple dress. The yard was in disuse but not as badly littered as it had seemed from outside. Most of the rubbish was close to the front of the yard, where people had rid themselves of items of household waste by tipping them over the gate. Cabbage stumps and potato peelings lay scattered amongst broken bottles and the carcass of a bicycle, rusted beyond repair. A pulpy bundle of newspapers lay rotting in the sun.

  When she saw him coming over, the girl cleared a patch of yard with her dirty canvas shoes, then threw herself down on to the ground as though gripped by a sudden seizure and bent her limbs into a particular shape, one knee tucked up towards her chest, the other stretched behind her, with both arms wrapped tight around her head. The doctor rose on tiptoe to see whether anyone was watching them from the other side of the gate, then crouched down very close to the girl, pulling down her dress a little where it exposed the edge of her dirty knickers.

  ‘You shouldn’t do that,’ he said mildly. ‘You’ll get filthy.’

  ‘Just like this,’ answered the little girl. ‘And the tummy was all slit.’

  She gestured to her abdomen, and made a disgusted face. ‘There were rats, you know, but the boys threw stones at them and chased them away.’

  ‘And you really saw it for yourself?’

  ‘Him,’ she corrected, then nodded. ‘His name was Walter.’

  ‘Walter,’ he said. ‘It’s a funny name for a dog.’

  She got up from the ground and dusted off her knees. ‘Janitor says it’s better this way because he was so very old.’

  Her eyes darted up to see what he made of the idea.

  ‘That’s probably true,’ he said, grudgingly, annoyed with the man for being so open with the girl. ‘It’s not a nice way to go, though.’

  ‘No,’ said the girl, and for a moment he saw in her eyes all the fear and horror that had been engendered by her encounter with Speckstein’s cut-open dog.

  She reached out to him, and he took her hand again, and together they made their way through the garage and the kitchen, and on through the windings of the corridors beyond. The girl was quiet now, lost in her thoughts. When they came out by the gate once more, she tugged at his hand and stopped him; stood once again with her temples pressed against the grating near its handle.

  ‘I heard the policeman say something,’ she murmured quietly, then sucked in her lips. ‘He said – he said the dog had “bled out elsewhere”. What does that mean?’

  ‘It means there wasn’t enough blood on the scene. It must have been killed somewhere else.’

  She nodded, then abandoned her stance and turned her back on the gate: a hunchbacked guardsman, turning on her heels, pigtails for a helmet, her lips rolled inwards over the double ridge of teeth.

  They were back in front of their own building by the time she spoke again.

  ‘I didn’t like the policeman.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he said that Father was a drunk,’ she explained, patiently, as though to someone younger than herself. ‘He is, you know, but it was unkind of him to say so. Don’t you think?’

  Her eyes had fastened on him yet again, were serious, haunted, playful. He had not thought a child could have eyes such as these.

  ‘How old are you?’ he asked, shaking his head in wonder.

  ‘Nine,’ she answered. ‘Almost ten. Only thirty-eight days.’

  ‘You’re a very smart girl,’ he said, and she blushed with pleasure and skipped through the open doorway, her body crooked like a broken doll’s.

  She ran to a letter box, reached up and through the flap to search its contents, pulled out a bent envelope. Each step was a broken dance: was broken, but a dance nonetheless. He was aware that she was showing off for him, and he thought he saw in her smile that she was aware of it, too. She drew closer once again to where he stood on the threshold with the front door still in his hands.

  ‘Do you want to know who did it?’ she asked, and curled a finger towards him.

  Beer bent forward a
t the waist.

  ‘The dog?’ he asked, surprised. ‘You mean you know?’

  ‘Shine-a-man,’ she whispered very seriously, shaping the sounds like she was a little unsure of their pitch.

  ‘Shine-a-man?’ he asked.

  She nodded, raised a finger to each of her eyes and stretched the lids until they formed two narrow slits. ‘He plays the trumpet.’

  ‘Shine-a-man plays the trumpet.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, then turned away, as though no longer certain she should have parted with her secret.

  He looked past her into the gloom of the house.

  ‘Coming?’ she asked.

  ‘No, Anneliese. There is an errand I want to run.’

  ‘Goodbye then, Anton Beer.’

  ‘Yes, goodbye.’

  He watched after her as she ran into the courtyard and across to the back stairwell, the right leg longer than the left.

  It was only when she had disappeared from sight that he turned his back and headed for the tram stop up the road.

  6

  Smiling, crooked Anneliese Grotter said goodbye to the doctor and raced up to her rooms. The stairs gave her some difficulty, the steps were so high, and she was out of breath when she reached the apartment door and dug around her dress pockets to locate the key. Her father wasn’t back yet. He rarely came back before eight, and she had grown used to eating before he got home, then laying his dinner out for him on the kitchen table. She would sit with him and watch him eat: a humped little girl perched on the edge of the counter, her heels drumming against the door of the cupboard underneath. Sometimes, when he was in a good mood, he would tell her stories from work, of the day when the boss’s mother had come to visit and told her son off for yelling at the men, or about the fellow worker who’d drunk all the oil from a tin of Polish sardines and minutes later shat his pants. She would laugh then, and make sure he ate seconds. There were nights when he would hardly eat at all. There were nights when all the food was gone and all the money, and he sat cursing, running dirty hands through the locks of his hair.

  The girl climbed on a chair and surveyed the kitchen cupboards. There was still some cheese, a jar of pickled cucumbers, and a half-loaf of old bread that she could toast for him. They had no butter left, but the clay bowl was half full with pork lard that her father had brought back from work Monday last, and there were a quarter of a cabbage and some carrots for soup. Satisfied, she took out the lard and the bread and clambered down; made a sandwich for herself, ate it, then drank deeply from the tap.

  Her hunger sated, she looked under the sink to see how many bottles there were left. Her father got angry when they ran out, and it was her responsibility to look after supplies. She counted one bottle of schnapps, and five of beer; three fingers’ worth of Hungarian wine. It would do, but she’d have to run and buy some more tomorrow after school from the fat, smiling vendor across from the church. The money and ration coupons were in the drawer in the hallway commode. She fetched them over to the kitchen table and counted out how much it would cost, set two pennies aside for a coil of liquorice and three boiled sweets. Her chores completed, she ran into the bedroom where she slept all by herself. Her wooden catapult was there, and the little teddy she called Kaiser San for reasons even she could no longer explain. She curled up with him underneath her blankets, made a cave for herself and her little friend. There she lay and pondered, got into an anger with herself.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said anything,’ she said out loud and pressed the teddy to her chest.

  ‘It was only because he said that I was clever,’ she explained to Kaiser San.

  ‘It wasn’t a lie though, and nothing you have to tell the priest. It was more like bragging because I don’t really know. But Frau Vesalius said it was Shine-a-man for sure.’

  She fell silent then, happy she had been able to explain herself, if only to a teddy who she knew herself was not quite real. Nonetheless, she took him along when some minutes later she got up again and opened the door to her father’s bedroom. The room was dusty, smelled of cigarettes and dirty laundry. She wasn’t allowed to clean in there, and felt illicit now, clambering through a pile of dirty clothes and crumpled papers. The bed was as large as she remembered it, the cotton sheet sweat-stained only on one side. The other side was very smooth: was dusty too, it must be said, but devoid of any imprint, as though the mattress here was good as new. At the top of the sheet lay an unused pillow stuffed into a cotton case the girl could not remember having ever been changed.

  But she wasn’t there to stroke her mother’s linen, though she touched it briefly, with a timid sort of haste, as though reaching out to pet an unknown dog. Then she fell to her knees before her father’s dresser. Here, under the button gaze of Kaiser San, she opened the drawers, one by one, and ran a careful hand through their contents, a book, some socks, an album of photos. She found it at last tucked into his undershirts, took it out and opened the blade: remembered him holding it, clutching his midriff, its point drawing a dimple in his pale and hairy skin.

  ‘He wouldn’t,’ she whispered to the teddy. ‘Surely, he wouldn’t.

  ‘He never ever would.’

  When Kaiser San didn’t answer her, she took him into her hands and pushed a finger in the hole where the stitching had come loose at the base of his neck, dropping his head forward, into a perpetual loll. ‘He looks hunchbacked,’ her father had told her, not drunk enough yet not to know what he was saying. She folded the blade back into the grip, then pushed the knife in through the hole until it had quite disappeared. Satisfied, having squeezed the teddy for evidence of the lump, she tucked him under one arm, closed all the drawers, and tiptoed out the room.

  It was a quarter past seven. Her father wouldn’t be back for another half-hour. A radio voice drifted in from the window, angry and insistent, and she passed the time in front of the mirror, timing her lips to speak along with the bark. There were gestures to go with that voice, and a rectangle of black moustache: a boy had shown her (furtively, behind a tree) in the schoolyard after class, hands curled into fists and shouting nonsense at the sky. She tried it now, her back bent like her teddy’s, a dollop of shoe polish smelly underneath her nose, and fell into giggles when she thought she had got it right. She would show her father later, and there would be laughter, along with the booze.

  Two

  Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Großmann met his victims in the area around Andreasplatz, in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain. Many of them were women travelling alone; not all were professional prostitutes. The neighbours saw these women go into his flat; none of them seemed to stay very long, though it was hard to say when exactly each had left. In the witness reports, compiled after Großmann’s arrest, some suggested they had seen him with as many as fifty different companions. He offered them lodgings, and food. It was a part of town well acquainted with the idea of trading shelter for the pleasures of the bed. No one will have been surprised by the attendant noises. They heard nothing as straightforward as a plea for help.

  Carl Großmann was a butcher by training. He ran a sausage stand at the train station, always had meat. There were only three murders with which he could be charged; a body found still bloody in his bed. One can picture the detective, peeling back the sodden sheet, cringing at the way it stuck to her cold skin. Großmann’s judges had no time to reach a verdict. He hanged himself in his cell on the 5th of July 1922. All this happened in Berlin: far from Vienna, where no comparable figure has ever been tried.

  1

  It was a quarter to ten. She called earlier on this, the second night, and called more fully dressed, in a starched house dress and woollen shawl, her fake pearls sitting dull upon the fabric.

  ‘Frau Vesalius,’ he greeted her, noting her eyes, her mocking smile, the abject tone that framed her response.

  ‘Dr Beer. If you please.’ Her hand pointed downwards, into the ill-lit shaft of the hallway stairs. ‘So sorry to impose.’

  She turned around without
waiting for an answer, and shuffled forward to the head of the stairs.

  There was no need for him to fetch his doctor’s bag. It had lain packed by the door the past two hours, and he had bent to retrieve it no sooner than he heard the ring: had worked the deadbolt with its handle hanging heavy from his wrist. All evening he had hurried himself, had taken a hasty dinner, followed by a hasty bath, impatient for the call that he knew would come. He’d gone to town especially to make sure he would not be disturbed, then felt the hours yawn before him like a valley that had to be traversed. He had tried reading, had fetched down a volume of a medical journal that had long called him to its study and sat down, legs crossed before him, on his favourite armchair by the corner lamp. It was little use. All he managed to do was spill tea on its learned pages, and later, having changed his beverage, a half-snifter of brandy. It was hard to tell why the girl’s prospective summons excited him so. Any onlooker might have thought he had fallen in love like some grammar-school oaf, his notebook full of maudlin verse. The very thought was absurd. All it was, he reassured himself, was that he savoured a mystery. Beer’s life had been dull since his wife had left and he had quit the hospital. He had lost contact with a good many friends; some had filed requests to join the Party.

  They walked as they had the previous evening, the housekeeper leading the way with a ponderous rheumatic step until he brushed past and took the lead. Once in the flat, he turned to the right quite automatically, and was flustered when he saw the girl emerge from her room. She was still in her day clothes, though the blouse hung dishevelled from the waistband of her skirt and gaped at throat and chest. Perhaps she had fallen asleep wearing it; had emerged now for a glass of water, or to empty her bladder. When she caught sight of Beer, she stopped in her tracks and raised her hands to her hair, as though to search it for forgotten curlers. She had not known he would be fetched.

  ‘This way, if you please,’ mumbled Vesalius, and gave his sleeve a firm little tug. ‘The Professor begs a word.’