Authors: Tessa de Loo
The slides acquire a more cheerful character. He resumes his occupation as the manager of a socialist institute, located in the
former
casino, which serves workers who want to liberate themselves from their ignorance. ‘Knowledge is power’ it says in gothic letters above the library entrance. There is hardly any demarcation line between their home on the first floor and the rest of the building. Anna and Lotte, growing up by a happy turn of fate just like the caretaker’s children in this proletarian palace of culture, play tag in the wide marble corridors, hide behind sturdy pillars and in the wings of the stage, play leapfrog in the immense circular hall, where their shrieks rise up to a high stained-glass window that coats them with carmine red and peacock blue when the sun shines through it. Lotte has discovered the acoustic; she stands directly
beneath the highest point in the arched ceiling, throws her head back and sings the Cologne slow-tram song. Anna, by nature too restless to be able to stand still, and urged on by the boy from next door, uses a satin-upholstered Biedermeier couch as a trampoline until the springs begin to squeak and, dizzy from jumping, she falls, grazing her mouth on the mahogany arm rest. The couch is in the foyer, which still shows off its worldly
fin-de-siècle
luxury. Above a richly ornamented refreshment bar with copper taps
chandeliers
hang from a gilded, flaking ceiling. Dozens of stained mirrors hang round about and still reflect the compulsive gambling in the eyes of the former moneyed élite and their parasites, as well as a girl’s face turning red with a bleeding lip. Her father has strictly forbidden access to this room. Contrite, she rushes to his office. With her wounded upper lip, she is at the mercy of his enquiring gaze. ‘What happened?’ he asks, his index finger under her chin. On the spur of the moment she invents a lie. Spontaneously she creates a different situation, so readily available to her that it already seems instantly more plausible than the truth. While she was playing in the garden, she confesses with downcast eyes, she fell against the edge of the wooden table on the grass. After he has staunched the blood quite equably, he takes her to the garden with him. ‘So,’ he says, ‘let’s see how it happened.’ The treachery of the lie now dawns on her: the garden table is so high that a girl of her stature would have to fall straight down from the sky in order to be able to strike her upper lip on its edge. ‘Ach soooo …’ says her father in a melodious tone – a melody that makes her suspicious. Between thumb and forefinger he pinches a piece of skin on her bare upper arm and it gives her a pins and needles feeling. It is the only punishment she still remembers years later, a punishment that condemns her, all her life, to a stubborn preference for the truth.
But her wildness does not submit to being reined in so easily. Soon after that she breaks her elbow in a romp on the marble stairs in the hall. She rants and raves like a hysterical countess who has
gambled away all her possessions, backed up by Lotte, whose capacity to feel pain and panic extends symbiotically to her sister’s body. A plaster cast is fitted and the arm is hung in a sling. When Anna comes out of hospital thus adorned, Lotte bursts into tears again. No one knows whether it is from solidarity or jealousy. She only calms down when her own left arm is hung in an imitation sling improvised with a tea towel.
Now a Christmas slide. From the moment Aunt Käthe took pity on the children she never left them. Their father married her quietly, to avoid being forced to be separated from them after he was discharged from hospital because no medical intervention could alter the clinical picture of his prognosis: a man with an infectious disease that could only be influenced by time, for good or ill, was regarded as not suited to bringing up children. To Anna and Lotte it goes without saying. Aunt Käthe is there as usual and is decorating a snow-clad tree in the room; all the branches bend under an anarchy of witches, Father Christmases, chimney sweeps, snowmen, dwarves and angels. The pungent smell of evergreen branches mixed with resin gives them a foretaste of the natural world that begins where Cologne ends. Their father’s youngest brother, Heinrich, a bony youth of seventeen, has come from his village on the edge of the Teutoburger Wald to celebrate the
festival
of the tree with them. He too has brought natural aromas into the house: hay and pig manure, spiced with a dash of rising damp. His image as a young, jovial uncle smashes to smithereens when, out of petulance, he garbles the words of the Christmas carols they are singing. His brother joins in with him, grinning. Suddenly they are competing with each other to find meaningless rhymes. ‘Don’t, don’t,’ Anna screams, horrified, hammering on her father’s chest, ‘the carol doesn’t go like that!’ But the men laugh at her for her orthodoxy and surpass themselves in inventiveness. Anna sings in a trembling voice in a vain attempt to get the proper version to triumph, then runs despairingly into the kitchen, where Aunt Käthe is slicing bread. ‘They are ruining the Christmas carol,’ she
cries, ‘Daddy and Uncle Heini!’ Aunt Käthe enters the room like a goddess of vengeance. ‘What have you done to that child?’ Anna is picked up and calmed, handkerchiefs, a glass of water. ‘It was only a little joke,’ soothes her father, ‘the Christmas child was born nineteen hundred and twenty-one years ago, now that’s a good reason to be happy.’ He sits her on his knee and straightens the large bow on her head, which had become crooked in the
consternation
, ‘I’ll teach you a proper song,’ he says, ‘listen.’ In a hoarse voice, now and then interrupted by the cough, he sings the
melancholy
song: ‘Two Grenadiers marched to France, They had been caught in Russia …’
The magic lantern projects a stage; the scenery is a forest of tall tree trunks. The theatre director is in search of a short actress; she must not be more than a metre tall. ‘Listen, Herr Bamberg,’ he says, ‘I’m looking for a girl who can take the part of a poor child who has got lost in the wood. Now I’m thinking of one of your daughters …’ ‘Which of the two did you have in mind?’ ‘Who is the eldest?’ ‘They’re the same age.’ ‘Ah, twins … curious …’ ‘Which did you have in mind?’ the father repeats. ‘Well, I had thought … the one with the darker hair. The blonde one seems to me too plump to play a starving child.’ ‘But she would never dry …’ He fingers his moustache proudly. ‘She is … remarkable, in that respect.’ Mindful of the exhortation above the library door, he usually dedicates his free evenings to classical writers and poets. In between times, as a playful experiment, he has taught her a poem. ‘Our Anna,’ he explains, ‘has the memory of a parrot. She can recite Schiller’s “The Song of the Bell” without missing a line.’ ‘Good,’ the director capitulates, ‘you’re the father, you can judge better than I.’
‘I don’t approve,’ demurs Aunt Käthe, ‘the child is still too young for such a performance.’ But there is no gainsaying this father’s ambition. So there the aunt sits on the day of the
performance
with Lotte and the father beaming in the front row, flanked by her seven sisters. In the wings, the wardrobe mistress hides
Anna’s dress under a grey, worm-eaten winter coat and ties her white hair ribbon loosely to the belt. Without suspecting that it is a dress rehearsal for reality, that she is going to interpret this role for ten years without an audience, without applause, Anna presents such a believable, pitiful child on the stage that tears prick the step-aunts’ eyes. After two men in hunting suits have carried her off between them out of the imaginary forest, she peeps
inquisitively
into the hall from the wings. The audience, no more than a collection of heads, does not interest her. She sees but one face in the semi-darkness, raised up towards the stage – that of the
smallest
person in the hall, insignificant and nondescript between the adults. Anna stares at her, overcome by an unfamiliar, terrifying sensation. Through the play and her role in it, Lotte and she for the first time exist as two individuals separate from each other. Each with a particular point of view – Lotte from the hall, herself from the stage. This awareness of separation, of unwanted duality, suddenly upsets her so she storms diagonally across the stage, through the two lovers’ reconciliation scene – the unbuttoned pauper’s coat flaps round her and the belt with her hair ribbon slips backwards and onto the floor. Aunt Käthe’s youngest sister cries excitedly in Cologne dialect, ‘Ach, look at that little one!’ A roar of laughter breaks out in the hall. There is applause as though it is the director’s stroke of genius. Unperturbed, Anna jumps down from the stage. She goes straight over to Lotte and only calms down when she has wormed herself in next to her on the same seat.
The projector, like a moonbeam, illuminates a bed with pale blue sheets. Beneath them Anna and Lotte fall asleep at night, their limbs firmly intertwined like mating octopuses. Without their noticing, the night tactfully unties this knot so that by morning each wakes up on one side of the bed, their backs adjacent.
The magic lantern has access everywhere – it shows us a
classroom
. It is as though we can hear the scratching of the dip pens. Anna’s passionate temperament does not lend itself to calligraphy.
Whereas Lotte appropriates the alphabet with a steady hand, under Anna’s regime the letters will not obey. After school Anna sits next to her father in the office and scratches letters on her slate, which he keeps wiping off saying, ‘Once again, no good,’ until she comes up to his standards. From time to time he goes over to spit into a blue bottle that is then closed tight so that the angry spirits can’t escape. Afterwards, as a reward for her efforts, she is allowed to help with the cash. She deals tattered inflation notes into piles of ten with swift fingers – the balance runs into billions – until a fiery rash on her fingertips brings this pastime to a close.
Every Monday morning before lessons begin, the teacher pierces the pupils with her gaze and asks in an insinuating tone, ‘Which one of you was not in church yesterday?’ Silence prevails, nobody stirs, until Anna raises her finger. ‘Me.’ Immediately Lotte’s
higher
, brighter voice follows, ‘Me too.’ ‘Then you are the devil’s
children
,’ decrees the mistress knowingly. The sisters see their excommunication reflected in the other children’s eyes. ‘But you are still far too young,’ their father protests when they inform him of the traditional duty to attend children’s mass on Sunday
mornings
, ‘you wouldn’t understand a word of it.’ They have never seen either him or Aunt Käthe go inside a church. Each Sunday they implore him; they can no longer bear the annihilating look of the teacher nor their classmates’ teasing. Finally he puts his mug of beaten egg down on the table and rests his hands on their shoulders. ‘Tomorrow,’ he promises, ‘I’ll go to school with you.’
But when they are on the way, one on each side, it seems more as though they have to protect their father, so feverish and fragile does he look in his black coat that sways roomily about his thin figure. Leaning heavily on his stick, he has to pause every ten steps to breathe. The tap of the stick on the cobbles echoes behind him – a chain of echoes that prevents him from falling. They go inside the school building; he gestures to them to wait for him in the
corridor
and knocks on the classroom door. The mistress, thoroughly unsettled by the unusual interruption, invites him in with forced
courtesy. Leaning side by side against the wall, Anna and Lotte fix their gazes on the door and listen. Suddenly their father’s hoarse voice lashes out above the mistress’s, which is struggling to
maintain
its self-control. ‘How dare you! To children who are weaker than you!’ Anna and Lotte look at each other dumbfounded. They straighten their backs; they no longer need to lean against the wall. A delightful, against-the-grain strength flows through them. Proud, triumphant, self-assured – they cannot put a name to it but it is there. Thanks to him.
The door swings open. ‘Come in,’ he says, suppressing his coughing. Anna crosses the threshold first, quickly followed by Lotte. They stand by the blackboard. The mistress is not on the floor in small pieces. Yet it looks as though her spine has snapped in several places. She grips her desk, with bowed head and sagging shoulders. The pupils, motionless on the benches, look up shyly and respectfully at their father, whose handling of the stage
management
is faultless. ‘Right,’ he pushes Anna and Lotte gently towards the teacher, ‘and now apologize to my daughters, and that goes for the whole class.’ The mistress eyes them obliquely. Her gaze immediately slides away again, as though it has come into
contact
with something unclean. ‘I am sorry,’ she says without feeling, ‘for what I said to you. It won’t happen again.’ A silence falls. What now? Could anything be added to the mistress’s humiliation? ‘And now I’m taking them home with me,’ they hear their father’s voice above them, ‘but they will be here again tomorrow. If I get to hear of anything like this ever again I shall be back.’
Fortunately the mistress kept the promise that had been exacted from her, because he would not have been able to carry out his threat. He is already much less able to cope with the trench warfare raging in his lungs. A new slide: stretched out on the sofa like a romantic poet, he deals with his administrative work, wheezing. In between he receives friends, who carefully hide their concern behind cheery chatter – his promising daughters in checked dresses with white starched collars are a welcome distraction with their
poems and songs. That Lotte’s song is interrupted as many as three times by a dry cough alarms no one, except Aunt Käthe. Experience having taught her to be suspicious, she has Lotte
examined
by the family doctor. For several minutes he taps her thin chest, simultaneously bringing the stethoscope and his moustache close to her pale skin. He asks her to cough, which she does very easily as though she has practised the cough like a song. ‘I’m not happy about it,’ he murmurs behind her, ‘I hear a weak sound in the right lung.’ Lotte stands in front of an anatomical dummy and fingers the pink heart with a slight shiver. With a bottle of cough syrup and an appointment for X-rays, he lets them go.