The Twins (15 page)

Eventually the word ‘sterilize’ got her moving again. She stood up listlessly, went to the bookcase and took out the dictionary blindly. ‘Make infertile.’ Then her ovaries, which thanks to Frau Stolz’s tenacity were developing very slightly, would be returned to their former condition by order of the county authorities, or even removed from her body, to be absolutely certain. So the court wanted to organize things in order that no feeble-minded children would ever be born again. But surely that was idiocy, she said to herself: it was just as feeble-minded as not tolerating for any reason any dust anywhere along half a metre of skirting board.

The day began with an absolutely clear sky and sharp sunlight – the snow hurt the eyes. Life was becoming extrovert. On the Place Royale it was busy opposite the Thermal Institute – an attempt to make up for lost sunshine? When they came across one another at the changing rooms Anna proposed going for a walk after lunch. To one of the springs perhaps, provided that was acceptable at their age, with their rickety joints, in the snow, in the hills, and so on. Lotte yielded to Anna’s self-mockery.

Each equipped with a stick, they passed the Pouhon Pierre-
le-Grand
. Just for a second they looked right through the building. The view entered through high bow windows above the door and emerged via stained-glass windows in pastel colours illuminated by the low sun. They had decided to begin with the Sauvenière spring, the oldest spring in Spa, and not to go there through the wood – over difficult, impassable footpaths bearing such idyllic names as Promenade des Artistes and Promenade des Hêtres – but simply along the road to Francorchamps; then they couldn’t get lost. In the discussion that preceded this decision, they secretly noticed the same fastidiousness in one another, the same profusion of fantasies when they considered what could go wrong on the way. Was that old age or a family trait?

There was no snow left on the branches of the trees. They were plodding up a constantly rising incline. Anna was panting
prodigiously
. Lotte was not troubled by breathlessness – she registered this small difference, not without satisfaction: she had often felt weak and weary in contrast to Anna’s indefatigable vitality. She was instantly ashamed of her thoughts. Surely she wasn’t engaged in a competition with this woman who was her sister? ‘Let’s catch our
breath.’ Anna laid a hand on her arm. They stopped on the verge, a car struggled past now and then in the melting snow. They stood there side-by-side and looked at the landscape of white hills
stretching
out in front of them, quiet and still, as though it had originated in their own fantasies.

‘There is a legend connected with the Sauvenière spring,’ said Anna. ‘The patron saint of Spa, St Remaclus, fell asleep while
praying
by the spring. As a reprimand God saw to it that his foot sank into the ground and left an impression in the rock. Newly married men have taken their wives to the spring since the Middle Ages; it had a reputation for encouraging fertility. If the bride placed her foot in the impression of St Remaclus and drank water from the spring, they could be confident of being blessed with heirs. A lovely story, no?’ She laughed. ‘Perhaps there were hormones in the spring water!’

‘It was medieval sales talk of course, to entice people to the spring,’ said Lotte.

They continued their walk. The road ascended even further.

‘We seem to be climbing Mount Golgotha,’ Anna sighed.

The road now went through a beech wood; smooth dark trunks rose up on either side. A hollow opened on the left of the road, with a brook flowing in it, twisting blackly through the snow. After a
single
passing car they were entirely alone for the first time. Far more than the public places where they had already met, this desolation emphasized their being together. Only the two of them, in the Ardennes – somewhere in these woods, these hills, East and West had come to blows, twice.

‘Ach, my poor feet,’ said Anna.

A small hexagonal pitched roof appeared in their field of view, somewhat lower than the road. There was a small opening in the ground filled with brown water. A little house had been built around it to protect the sanctuary. The impression of the foot was there too, in the hard stone floor, close to a tap from which they did not dare drink. They had imagined something bubbling up out of
the ground spontaneously, but here everything seemed to be
concealed
deep below the pathetic little construction, which would not have looked out of place at a Catholic cemetery.

‘St Remaclus would be embarrassed,’ said Anna with disappointment.

‘The café is closed,’ Lotte indicated with her head towards a tea garden, which looked dark and abandoned.

‘There’s no money to be made from two old women,’ said Anna. ‘Oh well, they have constructed a little brick wall for us, let’s give our poor feet a bit of a rest.’

So this was the object of their pilgrimage, which had set their joints on fire: a spot by the roadside, lacking any romance, adapted to the demands of tourism.

‘If there had been such a fertility spring in our neighbourhood,’ Anna laughed to herself, ‘I certainly would have drunk litres and litres at the time, for sure.’

‘Those pills you took helped, didn’t they?’

‘Ach,’ she waved the idea away as though chasing off a fly, ‘that whole women’s story never got sorted out in me, I must say. I’ve never had a normal cycle. Nor did my womb get back into position: years after the war X-rays showed that when I was
growing
, because of labouring on the farm, my spine had set too deeply into my pelvis. Otherwise I certainly might have been ten
centimetres
taller, like you.’

Lotte could see before her the group photo of her children and grandchildren taken on the occasion of her seventieth birthday, a photo brimming to the edges with offspring. She felt guilty, just for a while – it was an uneasy feeling when the roles were reversed. In a certain sense then, Anna had worked for two. If her own lungs had been healthy she too would have grown up in her grandfather’s house and been put to work. A staggering thought. It was an
incomprehensible
arbitrariness; if Anna had been afflicted with TB instead of her, everything would have been the other way round. Would she have made the same choices then? She looked with confusion at the
profile beside her. A dangerous vacuum resulted from all these reversible ideas. It would clearly be better to keep the relationships as they were. ‘Never trust a Kraut – once a Kraut always a Kraut,’ said her Dutch father, who could not be trusted an inch himself. In the war, those who could be trusted had been carefully
distinguished
from those who could not. It had to be so. Without that firm division they would not have managed. Either you were a
collaborator
with the Nazis or you weren’t. This division did not
suddenly
cease to exist after the war, only a past participle was added.

‘Let’s go,’ she shivered, ‘I’m getting cold.’

They walked on through the pain in their joints, which were protesting at the resumption of the walk. The sun had disappeared behind the trees; the reflection on the clouds cast a pink glow over the snow-covered fields. As they were approaching the built-up centre of Spa, the silhouette of an old chalet towered above the trees on the right of the road. Lotte stopped.

‘Look,’ she exclaimed, ‘what a lovely house.’

‘A ruin,’ Anna said coolly.

‘That woodcarving …’ Lotte walked to the edge of the bank. The house, dark and mysterious in the twilight, seemed to be built of dream fragments. It was lofty and square, with balconies of dark brown stained wood on each floor along the full extent of the façade, connected to each level by wooden stairs. Doors opened out onto the balconies with shutters of delicate lattice-work. The broad protruding eaves were decorated with lacy carving. It must once have been a pleasure to wake up in this house, she imagined, to throw open the shutters, walk out onto the balcony in bare feet and look down onto the garden in the early morning sun. The house seemed to have been victimized for that good life. Black holes gaped behind the broken windows, shutters hung crookedly off their hinges, parts of the sagging stairs seemed to have been hacked off for firewood.

‘A house out of a Chekhov story,’ Lotte sighed.

‘A house of rich people, who never touched a duster themselves,’
Anna corrected. ‘Pity the maid who had to keep such a barn clean.’

‘They’ve simply let it collapse,’ said Lotte indignantly.

‘Who could afford such a house now? The heating bills, the maintenance, the staff…’

Anna’s pragmatism annoyed Lotte. It sounded like: justice at last. ‘Everything of beauty is disappearing,’ she complained.

‘Komm, meine Liebe.’ Anna walked on decisively. This lament for an old house that was about to collapse. She, Anna, was also old; her shutters were also hanging crookedly off their hinges.

They walked on without saying any more. Anna, disapproving, was resolute in her silence; Lotte felt it with each step. The
surroundings
were becoming more densely built up, here and there the pavements had been cleared. Spa accepted them again – there was something reassuring about the lit-up shops, the bustle of people and traffic. They came to rest at a pâtisserie in Place Albert I, over a light tart of pears with whisked egg white. A
potpourri
of familiar melodies was playing in the background.

Lotte looked up with an expression of recognition. ‘Isn’t that … “Lili Marlene”?’

‘The number-one hit of the war,’ said Anna scornfully.

‘Yes … I still remember what a stir she caused, Marlene Dietrich. She saw it all coming and left Germany in time.’

‘So she could make her career in Hollywood, you mean.’

That scepticism again. Not anticipating which fire she would be stoking up she said with irritation, ‘I still don’t understand how all of you didn’t see it coming. Hitler would not have got a
foothold
with us, despite the depression …’

‘But you hadn’t had your confidence taken away like we had. He, this buffoon, gave it back to us. With his marches, party rallies, his speeches. With the most impressive Olympic Games of all time. The foreigners stood cheering on the tribune and Herr Hitler was host to the world. No one was saying, You’re no good. They all came. And then the newspapers, periodicals, the radio, the bioscope magazine, they all carried that one message – there wasn’t anything
else. You took it in, every day, there was only one version … You swallowed it the way you swallow advertising. It ground its way into our heads, slowly but surely. Ach, you can’t imagine it …’

Anna sighed; she stuck her fork abruptly into the tart.

‘Industry was flourishing. The young didn’t hang around on the streets – they were in the Hitler Youth and came to school fresh and happy. They were training for military service so that they would make good soldiers later on. When the war broke out they were already used to camps and discipline … it was all planned but no one realized it. The girls automatically became Blitzmädel, task force squads of young women in the Wehrmacht. And there was the Ideology and Aesthetics division for the
educated
youth – where they learned rhythmics, dancing, singing, making music: that’s how they also won over the higher cadres. It was an orderly, beautiful, fantastic world.’

It was being said in an ironic voice, it is true, but so loud that Lotte made beseeching gestures and looked around nervously.

‘You must understand once and for all,’ Anna continued, just as loud, ‘I can sense only opposition in you. The mothers were relieved of the care of their children, there was no boredom, there were no drug addicts, you didn’t have the shambles we have now. Most people of my age who were involved in that still dream about it all the time. You should talk to a former BDM leader or an Arbeitsführerin, your hair would stand on end. It was their youth, the time of their lives, wunderschön!’

Lotte stared at her. It was as though Anna had become larger and larger during this hymn of praise, as though – with her cake fork in her hand – she had acquired pompous dimensions. This bumptiousness, this wunderschöne, fatal enthusiasm from before the war, filled the whole pâtisserie.

‘Yet there were exceptions, people who didn’t lose their reason!’ Lotte was speaking into the wind, her words were blown back into her face, so weak did she feel in her defence. ‘Even when a whole people loses its head like that, there are exceptions.’

‘Of course. But the political opposition had been waved aside at once, you know that, they had neatly removed them. The rest of them, the intellectuals, the clever ones, like those who had contacts with foreigners so they could also get hold of other information, or people like Uncle Heinrich who understood it intuitively: all those people would have been in great danger if they had opened their mouths. That’s why you didn’t hear voices of dissent. All hands were raised in the same direction, the one direction …’

‘But you, Anna … why did you do nothing?’

‘I was a servant girl, someone’s servant girl, a non-person. I had to be there all the time, for the gnädige Frau, I had to do what she wanted me to, like lightning. I didn’t take kindly to Hitler, but beyond that I didn’t care. It was all the same to me.’

The blood rose to Lotte’s head. One way or another Anna was becoming increasingly elusive – she was putting up a smoke screen under the guise of candour. But Lotte would not permit herself to be misled.

‘And the Jews?’ she said fiercely. ‘The disappearances, Kristallnacht …?’

‘The official answer to that was: we have taken them in for
protection
because otherwise the wrath of the people would kill them. Because the Jews had brought about all the miseries: the First World War, the scandalous Treaty of Versailles, the depression, degeneracy in art … that even persists now in some German heads, it had been so hammered in. Listen … Lotte …’

Anna leaned close to Lotte across the table. There was a fleck of egg white foam on her top lip. Lotte felt that the last opponents of the Nazi regime were represented by this trivial bit of foam – and at once a thick, shiny tongue came out to lick it away from its insecure position on her top lip.

‘Listen, you can pose all these questions because you know about everything that happened. We didn’t yet know where it was all leading so we didn’t pose the questions. Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Wir haben es nicht gewusst … We did not know … we’ve all heard that one for so long.’

Anna started pricking the base of her tart with her fork, she really seemed angry. That pricking was getting on Lotte’s nerves, she was very close to becoming angry herself.