The Quiet Twin

by Dan Vyleta

  The girl nodded, satisfied, stepped forward to collect her satchel, then stopped herself, looked up again.

  ‘She wants to live,’ she said, and gestured to the bed.

  Beer was struck by this, the solemnity of the phrase, thought it a question. ‘Yes,’ he said, said it too quickly. ‘I suppose so.’

  Lieschen nodded once again, picked up the bag, stepped into the corridor. ‘Can you see our flat from your window?’ she asked as they were walking to the front door.

  ‘Yes,’ said Beer. ‘From the living room.’

  ‘Can I look?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She ran there quickly, pressed her nose against the glass. It was dark outside, and her father’s kitchen was lit up, the curtains wide open: a man in his undershirt working his way through a bottle, his elbow planted on the table, the palm supporting one weary cheek. Contrary to what Beer expected, Lieschen seemed pleased by what she saw, or at any rate reassured.

  ‘I’ll go home now,’ she said. ‘Can I come sometimes, play with Eva?’

  ‘Yes, you may.’

  He helped her pull the bag on to her crooked back, ran some fingers through her tangled hair, wished her a good night. At the front door, she turned around one more time, a new thought on her face (and how many questions there seemed to be living in that misshapen body of hers!).

  ‘Do you know who killed Walter yet?’ she asked. ‘Was it Shine-a-man?’

  ‘The Chinaman,’ Beer said, ‘is Japanese, and called Yuu. Herr Masuko Yuu. But no, I don’t know who killed Walter.’ He paused, dug in his jacket for a cigarette. ‘Do you remember, the first time I met you, there was a man who came into the basement to talk to the janitor. He is called Neurath and coughs a lot. They seemed to have some business of some sort. Do they spend a lot of time together, the janitor and he?’

  The girl shook her head. ‘I don’t know. He comes to the basement sometimes.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Beer lit the cigarette, unlocked the door, his thoughts running in several directions all at once. Lieschen was looking at him, waiting to see if he would say anything else.

  ‘It’s just that – Have you ever noticed, Anneliese, that, sometimes, in the bath, when one is singing, I mean, or maybe whistling to oneself, you hit just the right note and some pipe overhead will start to sing along, and it will travel through the whole house, and the whole house will hear your singing? It’s got to do with the pitch, the vibrations of the pitch. It’s why an army cannot march across bridges.’ He smiled, blew smoke. ‘But I’m not making sense, am I?’

  The girl shrugged, unsure of what to say, then countered with another question of her own.

  ‘Which one do you like better?’ she asked. ‘Pani Zuzka or Fräulein Eva? They are both very pretty.’

  He laughed, hid behind his cigarette, opened the door.

  ‘Time to be off,’ he said, and hurried her through. ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight, Anton Beer.’

  Beer stayed at the peephole another moment, watched Anneliese run down the stairs. Then he returned to the bedroom, arranged Eva into a new position, and wondered for the hundredth time whether it wouldn’t be better to move her somewhere else, somewhere nobody knew, not Zuzka, not Lieschen, and not the detective.

  ‘But where?’ he muttered to himself. ‘And besides, he won’t be back. I’m done with Teuben. And he’s done with me.’

  After dinner, still agitated, he left Eva alone for an hour and went to town. It wasn’t a wise thing to do, but just for a little while he needed to get away. All the same, his movements were governed by the usual precautions.

  4

  After leaving Anton Beer’s flat, Zuzka went straight to find Otto. It was the third such visit since their morning meeting the previous week. She would go over in the late afternoon, when Otto was awake and already dressed to go out – with laced-up boots, wearing his coat indoors, the collar turned up as though against the wind – but would tarry for another hour, drinking beer, smoking, leafing through newspapers and magazines. On the first of these visits, he had stood in the door with great hostility, but had admitted her nonetheless, assuming, perhaps, that she brought news from Beer and Eva; had barked at her to say what she wanted, and been taken aback by her admission that she’d come ‘simply to talk’; had shrunk from this announcement (as she later put it to herself) like an animal accustomed to abuse, then at once found refuge in a brazen leer and begun to study her body with great purpose.

  ‘Talk then,’ he’d said, flopping down upon his unmade bed, and had answered her questions briskly, distractedly, watching her movements, especially her shoulders, neck and breasts.

  All she had learned from him during that first visit was that he was working at a place called the Kasperl Club, ‘just across the bridge from Schwedenplatz’, not a cabaret but some sort of ‘gentlemen’s club’ (the difference eluded her); that his sister, too, had worked as a performer, ‘done magic tricks, told the future’, had been ‘famous, almost famous’, at a time he designated only as ‘before’; had hinted, too, that Frei was not their real name and that, one day, he was going to ‘return it to the graveyard that it came from’ (he seemed somehow especially proud of this remark and laughed at it like a man who wanted to hint at some great cleverness, then frowned and scowled at her as though he had already given away too much). She’d left him shortly after, avoiding his touch as he held the door for her on the way out, his hand stretched forward as though to pet her head or touch her neck, the palm cupped and his fingers square and blunt and dirty, she pictured them all through her dinner and late into the night.

  On her second visit Otto opened the door without surprise, asked her in and even offered her a chair, then found himself at a loss as to what to do with himself. After a moment’s hesitation, he bent down to retrieve a magazine that lay upon the floor, sat upon his bed and began reading (she herself was talking, telling him about Lieschen’s father and how he beat the girl for no reason other than that he was a drunk). She was about to steer the conversation towards Eva, had hardly uttered her name, when she saw him jump back to his feet and fly into a rage at something he’d read. In response to her question as to what had upset him so, she was shown the photo in his magazine, already three months old, of a happy family taking their breakfast, the father wearing a black uniform, his son of twenty sinking healthy teeth into his buttered slice of bread.

  ‘There’re oranges on the table,’ Otto said, jabbing into the depths of the murky photograph, obviously struck by this evidence of wealth, then punched a finger through the young man’s face in renewed fury.

  ‘You don’t think he’ll have to go, fight the Frenchies! A nice office job for him.’

  Next she knew he had thrown down the magazine, was opening a beer.

  ‘Here, have some, wet your whistle,’ he said, and poured a mouthful into a dirty cup, then watched her sip it with that peculiar and burning greed, his hands dug deep into his pockets, sifting, counting his loose change. She stayed for another cup, then grew nervous when he began to tell some story about a singer at his club who had gone to a midwife, to take care of her problem, ‘you understand’, only now she’d become infected, and ‘you could smell her all the way from the changing rooms to the stage’. Quickly, gulping down her drink, she excused herself, and washed out her mouth before joining her uncle at the dinner table.

  ‘You seem distracted,’ the old man said politely, but left her alone when she pleaded a headache and rushed off to bed. Through the open window came the whinny of a muted trumpet; she threw it shut but was unable to rid herself of the melody.

  Had Zuzka been asked about the purpose of her visits, she would have been unable to give a clear answer. The question tormented her. She lay in bed at night, no longer probing the extent and nature of her illness (her symptoms were quite gone), but straining instead to comprehend her relations with that man Otto Frei. At first she thought what drove her was mere curiosity, the desire to learn s
omething about the sick woman that went beyond Beer’s pedantic warning to keep her presence a secret, and gave flesh to the ghostly face she had watched smoking through so many nights. But her visits did not provide any answers: he seemed a man incapable of conversation, had no focus, slid away from topics as freely as a child; was furtive, too, without any reason she could name, his brow heavy-knit against the things he must not say, then suddenly let slip some suggestive detail behind which cowered his life’s tragedy (that it was indeed a tragedy, Zuzka had long resolved). Then, too, there was that sense of danger he exuded, of violence, and – she had trouble with this last part, picked at it as at a scab – of sex. It was with horror and delight that she thought of those sudden flarings of desire (for her body, that is, for that body hidden away under her clothes) that would take hold of him and darken his gaze, her lungs ever ready to rise up in scream. She did not love Otto Frei. Of this she was quite certain: he was too coarsely made. And yet he seemed alive to her, like no man she had ever met. Certainly more so than Anton Beer. It was best, she resolved, just as sleep caught up with her, tugged her under like the tide, if she took care not to return.

  The present visit started like the last. He let her in and offered her a chair. This time she did not speak; her mind was heavy with the image of Eva, lying motionless under the child’s playing hands. Dreamily, she recalled how she’d seen her for the first time, emerging (for a moment only) between the drawn curtains of the back room window, into the drizzle of a late-summer rain, held aloft, she now knew, by those fat and dirty fingers; an act of charity, of love, performed against the dictates of prudence, just so, because Eva might enjoy a change from the ceaseless sameness that was her life. Zuzka pictured it (raindrops falling on an open eye) and, taking her head into her hands, remembered also her own boredom in that room across, a boredom she had the courage neither to dismiss as unremarkable, nor to accept as characteristic of her soul. Tears sprang into her eyes, for herself, for Eva. She found a handkerchief tucked deep into her sleeve and blew her nose. Otto sat on the bed and stared at her in silent wonder. It took her some minutes to translate her emotion into speech.

  ‘I saw Eva just now,’ she said, snot still clogging up her nose. ‘If I was like that, sick, I mean –’ She paused, searched for a phrase, something tender that would mask the revulsion that she felt, found nothing, just the truth, callous like a knife. ‘God, I’d want to die.

  ‘Can it really be –’ she added an instant later, recalling with sudden clarity his earlier confession that there were times when he himself doubted that Eva was sick. ‘Can it really be that she’s making it up somehow?’

  She thought for a moment that he would flare up, shout at her, but he leaned forward instead, waved her closer so that, moving her chair to the side of the bed, she could smell the beer on his breath.

  ‘Two years back,’ he said, quietly, sharing a secret, ‘in the winter, I put her in the bath. She was better then, could move her neck a little and sometimes one arm. Mother was in hospital, and I was alone with her, the whole house was empty, everyone out at work. I put her in the bath. Made it nice and hot. I had planned it all out. All week, at night, I planned it; couldn’t sleep, pictured it, the bath down the hallway with white little tiles. So I put her in, the head bent over the rim so she won’t drown, open the window a crack, to let the steam out. That’s what I tell her. Casual, like. And then I pretend I hear a noise, down in the cellar, take the bath brush that’s hanging from the wall (like a club, you see, in case it’s burglars), say I’ll be right back. And then – nothing. I go down the stairs, sit down in a corner. Don’t make a noise. A whole hour, and the cold coming in through that crack in the window (I had to force it open, because of the snow). And I hold my hand over my mouth, wondering how long can she stand it. And then –’ He made a gesture, vague in its meaning, almost catching Zuzka with the back of his hand.

  ‘You pulled her out.’

  He shrugged, nodded, reached for the dirty pillow at the end of his bed, then stood toe to toe with Zuzka, who rose from her chair and took a step back.

  ‘Sometimes, I stand over her with a pillow. Just like this. And I tell her, close your eyes, just close your eyes and I will do it, and she lies there, looking at me, and when I turn away –’ He threw down the pillow. ‘That’s when she closes them. And then at night I hear her move about.’

  ‘Move about?’

  ‘Yes. Like a ghost.’ And he fell to laughing, an odd, hoarse heave of a laugh, angry and sad, that sent a spray of spittle on to her good blouse. ‘I run to her, and I swear I sometimes take the knife.’

  She winced, stood her ground, smelled his beer-breath and his sweat.

  ‘So why not just give her up, let the hospital take care of her?’

  ‘Shut up,’ he shouted, stepped close and shouted it, his chin pushed forward, raining spit upon her own.

  ‘Shut up,’ he shouted, but his hands did not rise and he did not seem very angry, only the voice was loud, his mouth just inches from her own.

  She blushed, turned away finally, saw herself reflected in his dirty mirror, spots of greasepaint livid like a rash. To her side, growing out of the slope of her shoulder, was his face, meaty and muscular, coarse skin ruddy with emotion.

  ‘The last place we were living, there was this man sniffing around her. The landlady’s son. He knew I didn’t want the police to come.’

  She swallowed, waited for him to continue, their eyes meeting in the mirror. ‘What did you do to him?’

  He flashed her a smile, it might have been called cruel. ‘What do you care?’

  It should have stopped her, goaded her on instead. ‘And what about Speckstein? Why did you kill his dog?’

  He shook his head in denial, but she wouldn’t accept it; stepped to the sink and picked up the knife with which he’d done it, the handle made of bone.

  He watched her try the blade with her thumb. The blade was quite blunt.

  ‘What was its name?’ he asked, a schoolboy’s question, the cruelty gone, though kept within reach. ‘The dog?’

  ‘Walter.’

  ‘Walter?’ He laughed. ‘What a stupid name.’ Then added, ‘What was it like?’

  She shrugged, put down the knife, wiped her fingers on her skirt. Then, theatrically, recalling words that Vesalius had used: ‘An old dog, it pissed everywhere.’

  ‘Pissed, eh? I thought you was a lady.’

  He bent for a beer, poured some of it into a cup, handed it over.

  ‘To Walter.’

  She drank, coughed, drank.

  ‘You killed him, you bastard.’

  But in her heart she did not mind. What love had she for that dog?

  Otto shrugged and smiled.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘It’s dinnertime.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m going to work.’

  She stepped out quickly, trying to gain a head-start into the yard. The janitor was there, on the way to his cellar workshop, carrying a sack lumpy with its heavy load. He looked up when he saw her, mumbled a greeting, then watched the mime emerge from the door she had just fled. It was impossible, she thought, that he did not notice the fury of her blush. Upstairs, her uncle waited, cheese and cold cuts spread upon their table. Zuzka ran in, hung up her coat. Vesalius watched her, poured out some wine, and left them to bless their food and eat.

  5

  It was night, gone ten-thirty. Zuzka was lying on her bed in darkness, wrapped only in her dressing gown. She had come out of the bath more than an hour ago, hot and flushed, and had lain down on the bed with the window half open, staring out into the sky. It was raining, a patter of drops falling on the sill. The door opened, a strip of light fell into the room, caught her bare heels. Frau Vesalius stepped in, squinting into the dark. Zuzka did not stir, pretended to sleep. The old woman closed the door behind herself, bent down to pick up the clothes that lay scattered across the room, Zuzka’s underwear and the yellow silk shift; her woollen skirt a
nd the tan stockings. The housekeeper made two piles, one of dirties, the other one of clothes that needed to be aired and put away. Zuzka watched her every movement in the weak light from the yard; she wondered what had made the housekeeper come in here for a task that she usually left for the mornings. Vesalius’s whole bearing was marked by spite and disapproval. The hands looked overlarge in the faint light, were threaded by a web of ropey veins; the eyes very dark and devoid of animation. Her head shifted, and immediately Zuzka closed her eyes, gave an even rhythm to her breathing. She had no wish to talk. In this self-imposed darkness, she heard Vesalius move about the room, then draw closer; felt her bend down over her body, the stale stink of kitchen smells clinging to her housecoat.

  When she spoke, the voice was quiet, close to her ear.

  ‘You have to stop,’ Vesalius told her. ‘You don’t honestly imagine that nobody’s seen you. Half the house knows, and soon the Professor will, too.’

  She paused, waited for a reaction. Zuzka kept her eyes firmly shut.

  ‘Such rough trade, too. You’ll get pregnant and end up in the street. Your uncle is planning a reception in two weeks’ time. He told me today. For Party dignitaries, very fancy. If you are looking for a man – just ask him to buy you a nice dress.’

  Again the woman paused and gave Zuzka the chance to be done with her charade. Zuzka heard her sigh, then straighten (her back actually cracked); the solemn shuffle of her feet as she headed back towards the door. She opened her eyes, saw Vesalius hesitate, halfway between bed and door, her back old and bent. Just then she looked harmless, concerned for Zuzka’s virtue. It softened Zuzka. She had questions burning on her mind.

  ‘How long?’ Zuzka asked. ‘How long have you been with my uncle?’

  The housekeeper stopped, turned around, large hands dangling by her side.