The Twins (36 page)

It grew quieter around them, except for the soft crackling and hissing of burning trains. The rumble of bombers died away; they disappeared over the horizon like angry insects and left an empty road behind, which soon became populated again with those who had to continue. In a village Lotte exchanged some grain for rye bread in the hope of bolstering the escapees’ fortitude a little. Although they were slowing her down, she did not dare leave them to their fate. ‘Let’s sit down …’ wailed one of them. Lotte was unrelenting, anxious that he would never get up again. ‘Keep going … keep going.’ ‘It’s finished,’ he said, three kilometres further on, ‘I can’t any more …’ ‘Just a bit … just a bit … you’re almost there.’ It was already dark; they were approaching Amersfoort. Lotte showed them the way to the hospital – it was known that the gates were always open for everyone. ‘They will certainly take you in there.’ But they held on tight to their talisman. ‘Don’t leave us alone,’ they pleaded, ‘we will be picked up without you.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t go with you, with all that grain.’ The grain, the grain … she had lost so much time already, she had to get out of the town with the grain before the curfew.

Hastily she disappeared out of their sight with her top-heavy
bicycle. She quickened her pace. It was one of those same evenings, without moon, without clouds, ruled by an absolute blackness made even stronger by the window black-outs. The suspicion that she was in the process of getting lost crept up on her. A man passed her with a cart behind his bicycle. She spoke to him. Yes, she was on the right road, but why didn’t she put her things in his cart? Then she wouldn’t have to push so hard. He had a lamp. He could accompany her for a bit. She went along with his offer gratefully. He cycled at walking pace with her; nothing was said. What was there to talk about after curfew to an invisible stranger? All of a
sudden
, next to him, she became aware of an acceleration in his
movements
– her guide gained speed; cold-bloodedly he cycled away from the silent get-together. He disappeared into the darkness, swerving like a will-o’-the-wisp in a marsh. All she heard was the dumb mechanism of her heart pumping. An emphatic absence of sound prevailed outside. Now the anxiety got to her. On the bridge over the IJssel it had not succeeded, nor in the bombing of the
railway
– it had bided its time quietly. She began to scream. In the pitch blackness intended for no one she screamed straight through the curfew. The volume, with which she had once rocked the water-tower to its foundations, gave her voice an exceptional
carrying
power. A police surveillance car arrived; a policeman gripped her by the upper arms to calm her. She gave her account in
fragments
. He pushed her into the car and began the pursuit; the
headlights
bored a tunnel into the darkness. Beyond emotion, a strange apathy came over her; she did not care whether they caught him; the once clearly delineated concept of friend or foe had become blurred, the undertaking had got out of hand, it was no longer her affair, others seemed to have taken it over. He was caught, forced to stop, scolded. Perhaps he had twelve starving children waiting for him at home for the proceeds of the nocturnal raid. She looked
uninterestedly
at the figures in the light of the headlamps. The grain was handed over for the umpteenth time – it would get worn away.

They had settled in the Chalet du Parc. Once again they ducked behind a menu card; they did themselves proud. Their arthritis cure was mainly happening within the privacy of the bath house, the restaurants, pâtisseries and cafés because it was January and they wanted the heat of the peat baths to last the whole day – but chiefly because it was easier to talk over a meal, a pastry, a cup of coffee as lightning conductor.

‘Well …’ Lotte contemplated, ‘if you hadn’t ransacked our country such scenes would not have happened.’

‘We had our rationing too …’ said Anna weakly.

Lotte raised her eyebrows. ‘You were the storehouse of Europe.’

Affronted, Anna let the menu drop. ‘The French took revenge after the war. They starved us in the French zone.’

‘Ach …’ Lotte sighed. Always that explaining away. Always that: but we didn’t have it easy either.

‘What are you having?’ said Anna. She had got an appetite from all those stories about shortages.

‘I think …’ Lotte hesitated, ‘an Entrecôte Marchand de Vin … or shall I have a Truite à la Meunière …?’

Anna got her military hospital. It was run by nuns; she learned fast, in her eagerness not to disappoint Martin … She was given responsibility for two wards, one for soldiers and one for officers – all had lost limbs at the ever-shrinking front. The alarm went at ten o’clock every morning: enemy aircraft on the way! The wounded had to be rushed to the shelters on special stretchers with wheels on one side and two handles on the other. Wooden rails had been fixed to the stairs. ‘Sister Anna, hurry up!’ cried one of the nuns. Needless to say, Anna was already running half-way down the stairs to the hairpin bend, a precarious moment for the
amputees
. Whipped on by the sirens, she hurried back and forth until the last patient had been taken to safety; as the first bombs fell she rushed back up to fetch their prostheses. No assistance could be expected from the nuns, they were completely preoccupied with
getting the monstrance to safety. They prayed and sang and carried the Blessed Lord to a small improvised chapel so that he would not be hit by the bombs. Anna had no time to take a breather. The daily programme continued with energetic relentlessness despite the bombing: washing, distributing medicines, cleaning bandages. High and dry in the sky her beloved puppet-master could see his suspicions confirmed. The wounded were concerned – clearly
seeing
that Anna, driven by a motivation that was not of this earth, scarcely managed to eat or sleep. One day those who could move a little with the aid of their prostheses knocked together a regal couch for her made of coats, jumpers and pillows in a corner of the shelter. She allowed herself to be driven there under protest,
thermometer
still in hand – to fall instantly into a bottomless sleep, after they had put a blanket over her with brotherly tenderness.

In another ward there was a patient with an inoperable splinter close to his heart. He could not move or be moved. He simply had to wait for the bombing raids in his hospital bed, in complete
tranquillity
– excitement was a greater threat to his life than a bomb. The sisters took it in turns to watch over him together with his doctor. So Anna regularly sat there by his bed next to the window like a living target and chatted gently about innocent subjects. Opposite her on the other side of the bed the overworked doctor sat wearing an anti-aircraft helmet. Her idle chatter did not often
misfire
on him either. She saw his eyelids, his head, slowly droop. Before he dozed off he was still sufficiently conscious to remove the helmet from his head and put it in his lap. If a bomb fell close by them he sat up and put the helmet on in a reflex, and then it began all over again. Not unaware of this slapstick effect, Anna suppressed her laughter with difficulty, in the interests of the splinter.

While looking for one of the nuns, she lost her way in the
hospital’s
building complex. She opened a random door that seemed to be the way in to a large room, and froze on the threshold. She could barely control the impulse to run away again immediately, through the labyrinth of corridors outside. It was a ward without
beds – soldiers missing all their limbs were lying on the floor. The wounds had healed. Their bodies had been wrapped in leather so that they could roll over the floor like babies. The skimming autumn sunlight slid over what was left of them. All they could do was talk and roll. Anna shut the door abruptly. This was forbidden territory. She had seen something that did not exist – the other side of military grandeur, of sabre rattling and insignias, of heroic words. Which soldier going off to war was warned that this too, as well as the hero’s death, could be his hinterland?

In the evenings she walked home through darkened streets, a journey full of surprises. The damage done during the day was
continually
altering the familiar look of the city. With difficulty she pushed her front door open – two window panes had come out again, an icy autumnal wind had blown the Feldpost letters she had been rereading the previous evening around the apartment. She felt her way to the chest of drawers to light a candle, she reached into a hole and almost lost her balance. The chest of drawers was lying down below on the street. A day later a woman collapsed before her eyes at the entrance to the staircase. Anna recognized the pale face. After Martin’s death the woman had given her condolences on the staircase. ‘I think it is so hard for you,’ she had whispered with a bowed head, ‘you probably think that the worst thing of all has
happened
to you, but there is something worse.’ She had run up to the top apartment in tears, leaving Anna behind with her cryptic
prediction
in riddles. Anna brought her round with a wet cloth. ‘I’ll murder them!’ cried the woman, getting up. ‘Gently, gently …’ soothed Anna. ‘I’ll know how to find them when the war is over, I shall drink their blood, I swear it,’ the woman raved. The outburst brought some colour to her cheeks. Anna held her by the shoulders: ‘What’s the matter then …?’ Immediately slumping into a position of resignation, the woman confided to Anna in a dull voice her
husband’s
unexpected arrest some months ago. He had been picked up while leaving his daughter’s watch for repair with an old
acquaintance
who had a watch shop. The daughter was a nurse and what is
more she wore the brown uniform with sincere conviction. Unaware that the watchmaker was suspected of communist
activities
, her husband had been wrongly taken to be one of them. Since then he had been in prison under sentence of death, chained up, unable to move. Water was dripped on to his head every minute, day and night. The thought of it was driving her mad. ‘But they have really made a terrible mistake!’ Anna cried indignantly. That an innocent had been convicted, that they had acted so unfairly, she could not understand, with her sense of justice and her orderly efficient approach, but on top of it all she immediately felt the urge to take action because it was so unacceptable that they could let the poor devil die an endlessly slow martyr’s death in a cunning way that could only have been conceived by a madman. She put an arm round the woman. ‘Leave it to me …’ she said grimly.

In the old parliament building of the former Habsburg
monarchy
, which had become the administrative headquarters of the Ostmark under the Third Reich, the Gauleiter resided. Anna was in one of her tempers. She marched there, up the stairs, into the historic buildings that were evidence of superabundant riches, through a long columned corridor with every ten metres
motionless
SS soldiers like stuffed corpses with rifles. Although no one ever came into this sanctuary uninvited they were too
dumbfounded
by the appearance of a hurtling Red Cross sister to
intervene
. Anna was not troubled by anxiety or modesty. The ring of her footsteps on the marble floor sounded like a confirmation of her righteousness. At a crossing in the corridors she became
confused
for a moment. Eventually a sentry barred her way. ‘Where do you wish to go?’ ‘To the Gauleiter.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I want to see the Gauleiter!’ Two others came over; they looked at each other
quizzically
. What was a hysterical hospital sister doing here? ‘My
husband
has just been killed serving with the Waffen-SS,’ haughtily she held the letter of condolence from the Obersturmführer under their noses. They had no reply to that. They escorted her to the required place as though she were a diplomat.

In her fantasy the Gauleiter had acquired monstrous
proportions
. In reality he sat in a gaudy room that must once have been the emperor’s study, behind an immense desk: a kind-hearted old man with a long beard – a sort of Santa Claus. Surprised, he gave her an encouraging nod. After taking a deep breath she cast the scandalous error at his feet. ‘I know those people, they are Nazis, their daughter is a brown sister! The Führer would not stand for such a thing! He does not know that an error has been made here, someone must inform him!’ The Gauleiter nodded like a weary grandfather who can refuse his granddaughter nothing, ‘Do me a favour,’ he said slowly. ‘Go home and see that the wife writes a
letter
requesting mercy. And bring the letter to me personally.’