The Twins (12 page)

After a few hours she was relieved again by her mother, who kept watch like a sphinx for the rest of the twenty-four hours. Sometimes she leaned over him to check with her ear that he was still breathing. ‘You will not slip away from me,’ she whispered, ‘my old rascal.’ She did not neglect herself. Regularly she changed her dress so that, on the rare occasions he opened his eyes, he would find an attractive woman by his bed. Through a chink in the curtains she saw the sun come up and go down, she saw the mist over the meadow, she heard the cooing of the wood pigeons. At night she saw the stars; she could not put a light on to read a book – perhaps that was her greatest sacrifice.

Yet even with her stubborn presence, she could not prevent him getting double pneumonia with pleurisy after three weeks. The doctor was a bad actor: it was obviously difficult for him to conceal that he might pass away at any moment. He arranged for a night nurse, who treated the peaks of the fever with cold
compresses
. At night the patient’s delirium was the only sound in the house. The nurse attached bags of ice cubes to his head. ‘No,’ he protested, shooting upright out of his dream with staring eyes; he flailed them away with spastic arm movements: ‘I don’t want that crown! I don’t want to be king of England, I won’t, I won’t!’ The nurse grabbed the bags from the pillow and pushed him back with gentle insistence. ‘You must stay lying flat,’ she exhorted him. ‘I don’t want that crown,’ he whined, ‘I want Miss Simpson!’ Rebelliously he sank back into his deep feverish sleep.

When the crisis had abated, he opened his eyes and in chastened calm saw the strange woman’s face wreathed in a shock of stiff hair that stood on end. She looked back fiercely beneath her bristly
eyebrows
– her normal facial expression which was not meant to
convey
anything in particular. ‘You look strikingly like Beethoven,’ he said with amazement. ‘You are very observant,’ she admitted, ‘in
fact he was a relation.’ They were just about to heave a sigh of relief when a blood clot in his leg reintroduced the possibility of dying. The doctor became entangled in conflicting treatments: the patient had to sit up on account of the thrombosis, while it was vital that he stayed lying flat for the skull fracture.

Because visits to the patient had been forbidden, the house had been cut off from the world, an island, with the poor, afflicted body at its centre. To escape from this vacuum, this interruption of the usual vitality, Lotte strolled in the garden and ended up at the back in the orchard. She stroked her hand over the peeling paint of the TB house, she picked off a piece of moss, broke a twig from the walnut tree whose robust crown embodied the fourteen intervening years. The swivel mechanism of the house had rusted completely so that the open side pointed permanently to the east. The east. She sat down on the rickety kitchen chair and imagined an unfamiliar Anna in the year 1936. Not in a clearly defined physical form, but as an accumulation of energy, lit up, vital; Anna was alive. She was full of remorse and shame for having thought so little about her for so long, as though Anna had become a lost cause. She tried to put herself in the place of the child with a lung infection who had lain here looking about her in fevered
amazement
. What she had been too young, too sick, too dependent for then, now seemed ridiculously simple: get on a train back to Cologne. She fantasized about seeing it again – just thinking about Anna was already a mild antidote to her father’s continuing
flirtation
with death.

On Sunday he suddenly became short of breath. Like a fish on dry land he gasped for air with a gaping mouth. His wife propped him up against the pillows, gave him water, unbuttoned his pyjama jacket – he clutched at his heart. The doctor was alerted. An
unfamiliar
locum doctor gave him a large injection straight into his heart. ‘A last rescue bid,’ he whispered, putting the syringe away in his bag, ‘prepare yourself for the worst, madam.’ Hours of waiting. It was a miracle that her resilience had not yet been exhausted after
all those months. The question Will he pull through or won’t he? so permeated the atmosphere in the house that Lotte walked in the wood because she feared that an involuntary thought escaping the censor at such close quarters might be fatal to him at the critical moment. By the evening his breathing was regular. He took a drink of water and asked his wife to put Mozart’s
Requiem
on downstairs, full volume with all the doors open. She let the needle descend onto the record with a trembling hand. Melancholy sounds floated up the stairs. Jet burst into tears. ‘Be happy,’ said her mother, ‘that you aren’t hearing the music at his funeral, but that he can enjoy it himself now.’

After this apotheosis the healing process slowly got going: he returned to life in style. Bit by bit he was allowed visits. ‘But what’s happened to Hans Koning?’ he complained, still translucent with weakness. ‘He’s sure to come,’ his wife pacified him. ‘But does he really know what’s going on?’ ‘Of course.’ But the professor did not get in touch at all. As dependable as the weekly visits with which he had honoured the house before the accident had been, so was his absence now obstinate. Lotte’s mother telephoned. He turned up on the doorstep with a dejected face, in polite response to her summons. He stumped upstairs, bumped his head at the turn in the stairs, and stood embarrassed at the end of the bed without shaking the patient’s hand. ‘How are you?’ he enquired, coughing drily behind the enormous fleshy hand with which he was used to waving objections away. The patient did not conceal his joy. The mere presence of his bosom friend and fellow spirit brought more colour to his cheeks than all the other visitors put together. ‘I’m lying here but …’ he sighed, ‘would you believe that I crave an old-fashioned Saturday evening …’ Hans Koning looked at him tensely. ‘Listen, my dear fellow, I’m no good in
sickrooms
…’ To demonstrate this he looked around him tormentedly as though he were trying in vain to survive in a poisonous
atmosphere
. ‘I mean it, I simply cannot stand it for a minute!’ ‘But …’ the patient sputtered in disbelief. The professor proceeded towards
the door. ‘Give me a signal when you are your old self again,’ he turned round holding the doorknob. ‘Get well soon.’

Faithful to his allergy, he did not show up again during the months of slow recovery. The patient had to struggle with bouts of depression. Why was his best friend staying away, just now when he had a crying need for his company to sharpen his splintered mind again, to stimulate his fantasies, so that he could repossess the viewpoints of his former opinions with bravura? The
professor’s
absence was a personal defeat. ‘What do I matter to anyone actually?’ he asked himself, propped up against the pillows. ‘I am nobody. What have I achieved? Nothing. I haven’t any standing in the world. Why didn’t I simply die?’ His wife hastened to convince him of his excellence, enlarging expansively on his merits, spiriting away his unpleasant characteristics. She sincerely believed it, so fervently did she hope that he would become his old self again. His resistance to so many flattering words collapsed at once. ‘You are a tremendous woman,’ he whispered, falling asleep consoled.

It was an impressive crossing of boundaries, which they would not forget among all the other events, that day he came downstairs, shuffling step by step into the living-room, dizzy from the effort, to drink a cup of coffee in an armchair that was hastily pushed by the fireplace. The bench in the garden was the next milestone. He won territory bit by bit in this way until, one day when he was alone at home, he grew too ambitious in his urge to conquer. Perhaps the absence of his wife made him anxious, perhaps he could no longer resist after months of suppressing the longing for an exchange of spiritual views. Giving in to a light-hearted impulse, he waddled over the plank across the ditch, into the wood, slowly and
concentrating
– his one leg limped a bit as a result of the thrombosis – his heart beating excitedly. When he reached the Koning family’s house on the other side of the wood, in pure exhaustion he hugged one of the two dark green pillars supporting the porch over the door. He did not know how long he hung on there like that,
fighting
against breathlessness and palpitations, and the fear that the
professor would find him in that state. He only pressed the bell when he had recovered a little. His friend opened the door himself, in a three-piece suit, a silver watch chain like a festoon on his breast. His beard bobbed up with fright. ‘Heavens, what are you doing here? You’re the last person I expected here. I regret …’ he toned his voice down as though he were on the point of letting the other in on a secret, ‘we’re just expecting visitors, they’ll be here at any moment. How could you have timed it so wretchedly? You had better come in, then you can leave via the kitchen door.’ Lotte’s father stumbled along the passage and sank into a kitchen chair. ‘One moment,’ he panted, ‘I must just … may I … might I have a glass of water?’ ‘I’ll have a look for you …’ The professor threw open all the kitchen cupboards and slammed the doors closed with a bang. ‘God, where does she keep the glasses? … A cup will do.’ The unwelcome visitor drank his water. The professor opened the kitchen door with a wave. ‘Better luck next time, old fellow. Jesus you look lousy.’

Lotte’s mother looked up when she heard crunching on the gravel. She saw her husband, whom she had thought to be in bed, stumbling along the garden path, seeking support from a pear tree half-way along and staring at the house with a dazed, hollow gaze as though he had sensed something dreadful there. When she looked more closely she saw he was crying. That same evening she told the professor by letter she was terminating the friendship. Her dip pen, scratching over the writing paper, called him an
arch-egoist
whose humanity disappeared on the threshold of sick-rooms and on the doorstep of his own house.

‘Yet it is striking,’ said Anna, ‘that you had a fantasy about
travelling
to Cologne at just that time.’

‘Why?’

 ‘Because at that time the urge in me to go to Cologne became stronger and stronger.’

Anna had reached the age at which her own father had become oppressed in the symbiotic world between the church and the river: no more than a collection of farms and their inhabitants who watched each other being born and dying. Similarly in her case that mental tedium did not convert into fatalistic acceptance of destiny, but into rebelliousness. She tugged Jacobsmeyer by the sleeve of his soutane. ‘How am I ever going to get out of this village?’ Her voice disturbed the calm in the Landolinus church. ‘Surely it isn’t my vocation to lug pig muck for the rest of my life?’ Jacobsmeyer nodded pensively. ‘Perhaps I do know of something for you …’ He stroked his chin contemplatively. ‘The Archbishop of Paderborn is looking for a young woman to replace his elderly housekeeper in the long run. He wants to have her trained at an institute in Cologne where the daughters of well-to-do families learn about managing maids and servants. A school for ladies …’ He laughed ironically.

Uncle Heinrich was not against it. Aunt Martha had more
difficulty
gracefully accepting the departure of an unpaid worker. ‘You don’t know what you’re embarking on,’ she said scornfully,
recoiling
at the thought of all that work she would now have to shoulder. ‘It will come to nothing, I can tell you that.’ Anna stirred the soup in silence; she had little inclination to get involved in another scene at this eleventh hour. ‘Why don’t you say anything? Do you feel you’re already too good for us? I’ll tell you something: it will work out badly for you there. I can already see the day that you …’ her voice broke, ‘come crawling back here on your knees, begging for a piece of bread. Don’t think …’ Anna sighed wearily. ‘Why excite yourself?’ she said coolly, without looking up from the pan, ‘I’m going to die anyway; you’ve always said so. Surely I won’t get to twenty-one?’

She was enrolled for the new semester. Uncle Heinrich
contacted
a cousin in Cologne for lodgings and ordered a tailor to make a coat of indestructible material to last a lifetime. In the same way that a bride in her wedding dress and veil is initiated into
being a married woman, Anna predicted that this coat would usher in a totally new existence for her. Some days before the departure she was summoned to Jacobsmeyer. ‘I have something awful to tell you, Anna: this job isn’t going to happen.’ ‘You can’t mean that …’ She slumped down in one of the gleaming polished pews and looked at the statue of the Virgin Mary, which suddenly seemed self-satisfied to her. She couldn’t go back any more – she had already stripped off her former existence – that was all she knew. Jacobsmeyer paced up and down in front of the altar,
rubbing
his jaw. ‘You know what,’ he turned round abruptly, ‘we won’t say anything to your uncle and aunt. I’ll pay for the school. You say nothing, pack your suitcase, travel to Cologne and attend your lessons.’