The Quiet Twin (10 page)

‘Where do you perform?’ she whispered across the silence that had risen between them. ‘Perhaps I could come one evening, and–’

He slammed the door in her face: put a shoulder to it and slammed it, the wood cracking under his weight. She stumbled back as though she had been slapped, lost her balance on the stairs and fell down four or five steps, bruising her ankle and her buttocks in the process.
If Dr Beer comes tonight
, it ran through her head,
he’ll find my bottom black and blue
. The giggle escaped her before she could stop it: a single high peal that ran up the stairs. She wondered whether the angry man heard it, standing barefoot behind his door, and whether it made him angrier still. As quickly as she could, she stood up, and hobbled down the stairs, into the warmth of the courtyard. As she crossed it, her eyes still scrunched against the brightness of the light, she thought about what she had seen over the man’s shoulder in that short moment when he had opened the door wide enough to grant her access to the flat. A foot was little to go by. It might have been dead, or made out of wood, the stain on its heel nothing but dirt.

Right there, out in the yard, her legs still shaky with her triumph and her fall, it occurred to her what she must do in order to find out.

Chapter 5

All afternoon she waited for the man to leave: a clot in her stomach, pins and needles running up her spine; one ankle swelling, the other leg numb; bruises stirring deep within her rump. At first she stood by her window, peered anxiously across the yard. To see him clearly she had to draw close; press her face to the glass, or open it up, push her head into the open. He had drawn the curtains, tattered, threadbare rags that billowed in the breeze and revealed as much as they hid. He tugged at one such curtain to slide it across a foot-wide gap and succeeded only in pulling it down, his face blackening with anger. To his side, in the back room, the other set of windows remained in utter darkness: perhaps, she thought, he had painted the panes, or nailed some blankets to the window frames. They might hide a darkroom, or a slaughterhouse.

Then, the ripped fabric of his curtain still in his hands, he caught her watching him. The brow shifted, muscles moving through his meaty face. He dropped the rag and leaned out into the yard – head, shoulders, breast all threading through the woodwork – and shouted something she didn’t hear, his hand rolled into a fist; shook it too, high over his head, with the violence of a man wielding a club, cotton vest sweat-soaked from his efforts. She recoiled from the window, bit her lip; drew close again after counting to a hundred, and found his eyes still peering across, the hand raised, ready to punch. His stare poured into her: her lungs caught it and met it with a wheeze; pushed it downwards, to her stomach, where acids rose to drown it. She burped a sour burp, then licked the spittle from her lips; checked the window again and found him there, staring darkly, waiting to pounce.

So she shifted to the kitchen. The angle was bad, and Vesalius was there, busy with tomorrow’s lunch, but she found she could watch the side wing’s door from there, sitting in the shadows of the wall. In time she relaxed a little, put water on for tea, then sat, both hands around her steaming cup, eyes on the yard, and was lulled to peace by the noises of the house. The sounds here were different from those that collected in her room: running water, the growl of a flush, then the angry phrases of an argument, raining down from high above, a man and his wife having it out about his mother. She listened and imagined the scene, her body calming with each moment; reached in her mind to that other marital sound that had flown in through her window in the depth of night, its origins opaque to her, unspeakable. She had spent much energy unravelling its mystery, had once watched two horses couple in the country, and stolen books down from her uncle’s shelf. The mystery had not lifted with these instructions in anatomy. One had to marry to learn what made a woman bark her pleasure rudely out into the yard. The doctor had borne the sound as one bears a whipping, shoulders rolled into his chest, palms on his trousers, as though to steady his thighs. He didn’t wear a wedding ring. Perhaps he found it interfered with his duties. She wondered if Speckstein had worn one, back when his wife was alive and he had made a living looking up his patients’ skirts. Behind her, Vesalius dropped a saucepan lid and dissolved the argument upstairs in its clean, insistent ringing. She bent low to pick it up by its wooden handle, then swore and held her back in sudden agony; dropped hard into a chair, the lid still ringing in her lap, and smothered its song between her palms. At the centre of the gesture there sat a hard little sound when her ring-finger collided with the metal. Zuzka noticed it, looked up into the old woman’s face, found nothing there but pain and spite. It puzzled her, and she decided to ask, making sure she sounded polite.

‘Frau Vesalius,’ she asked. ‘Were you ever married?’

The other woman swore, rubbed the soreness in her spine, nodded.

‘Twenty-seven years.’

‘Twenty-seven years,’ the girl echoed, finding it easy to summon her wonder. ‘How was he?’

Frau Vesalius stopped her movements to consider this, fingers still dug into her spine.

‘A good husband,’ she said at last. ‘Never missed a day of work, then lost all his savings all the same. He had hands like a schoolgirl.’

She stretched out one of her own, hard as a shovel. The ring was silver, tarnished; cut deep into a fold of skin. Her knuckles dwarfed it, trapped it, each finger knotted like a root. Zuzka looked from hand to face and found the same hardness in each. Her own hands lay soft upon her knees.

‘Was he, you know – faithful?’

She threw it out quickly, fearing reprimand, and was surprised to see that Vesalius refused to take insult.

‘On the whole,’ she said. ‘Had an eye on my sister. As a young man, that is. It goes after a while.’

‘It?’

‘Don’t play daft.’

They locked eyes for just a moment, until Vesalius got up, set the saucepan lid down upon the counter and took a knife to a cluster of beets. Her fingers were soon running with their juice. It provoked the girl, being ignored like this; there were other things she longed to learn.

‘How did you know?’ she asked in the end, of this woman she didn’t like, had never liked, not from the day she’d come to the house, two months ago and more. ‘Before you married him. How did you know you were in love?’

‘Love,’ Vesalius said, and sneered across one shoulder. ‘That’s what we’re after. The good doctor, is it?’

The girl had no choice then but to march off, back to her room, and leave the woman to her cackle. Tears of fury almost made her miss her man.

By the time she had dried her eyes and was back at the window, he was already halfway across the yard, his hat hiding his features, a duffel bag heavy in one hand. She recognised him by his movements, the angry roll of his shoulders, feet stomping as though he sought to punish the ground. Even so, she wanted to make sure, and sneaked into her uncle’s bathroom whose high narrow window afforded a view of the main road. She climbed upon the bathtub’s rim, pressed her nose against the narrow vent, and watched him walk up to the tram stop: light a cigarette, his features crude in the late-afternoon sun. When it was clear he wouldn’t return, she clambered down again and ignored the throbbing in her ankle; fetched a coat and tied a scarf over her hair. Vesalius saw her leave. She stood in the kitchen door, the beet knife still in her hand, and watched her slip out. As Zuzka descended the stairs, the snap of the deadbolt followed her down.

The janitor was not in his flat. She rang the bell, then walked into the yard, staying close to the wall, in the hope of avoiding Vesalius’s gaze. The metal door led down into the odour of wet-rot. She listened, hoping he would be alone; heard nothing apart from the shuffling of feet. The door to his workshop stood ajar: she saw his back, bent at his workbench, a bottle of beer standing open by his feet. An odd sort of table stood pushed against the wall, its sides elevated, two wood-planers cluttering its surface.

She knocked and pushed through the doorway. It wasn’t until she had entered completely that she noticed the child. Lieschen was standing in a chalkmark circle she had drawn upon the floor, was red-faced and somehow dishevelled. When the girl saw Zuzka, she squealed in delight and spun her body into a pirouette, careful not to step outside the circle’s confines. She got through a turn and a half before she lost her balance and had to throw out a leg to take her weight; panted and laughed, and pushed her braids back over her shoulder’s hunch.

‘Fräulein Zuzana,’ she shouted. ‘I’m learning to dance.’

The janitor had turned around, and he acknowledged her presence with a mumbled ‘
Grüss Gott
’. He rose now, kicking over his bottle, then bent hurriedly to pick it up from the floor: stood licking beer off his dirty fingers while he eyed her with suspicion. She noticed the smell that clung to him and cut through the mildew: gamey, cloying, as though of aged meat. He moved slowly, shook wood shavings off lap and chest.

‘Fräulein Speckstein,’ he said at last. ‘Does the Herr Professor need anything?’

She hesitated, looked again at the girl. ‘What is she doing here?’

The man shrugged. ‘She came after school. Agitated. Some children found a dead body in the bushes.’

‘A dead body? Who?’

She had asked the janitor, but it was Lieschen who answered.

‘It was a woman,’ she sang out, after another pirouette. ‘Sepp said she was naked.’

She raised two hands before her chest and cupped them in imitation of the boy’s gesture. ‘The policeman wrapped her in his coat.’

‘How perfectly awful,’ said Zuzka, and crouched down by the side of the girl. ‘Don’t you think you should go upstairs now? Get some rest? You must have had quite a shock.’

Lieschen looked at her: clear, open eyes, painful in their trust.

‘It
was
awful,’ she whispered, ‘though I didn’t really see. There was a man there and he cried and cried and cried.’

She slid down to her knees and erased the chalk circle with the heel of one hand.

‘I’ll wait for you and then go up.’ Her movements were simple, direct. There was no way of avoiding her scrutiny. Zuzka turned to face the janitor.

‘My uncle requires the spare keys. To the house, I mean.’

The man took it in, shrugged, walked over to a metal box that hung screwed into the wall. ‘Which ones?’

‘All of them.’

‘All of them? But why?’

She shook her head. She had always found it easy to lie. It was just a matter of believing what one said.

‘I really cannot say. He just barked at me to get the keys. He has’ – she paused for effect, found real fear spreading through her body – ‘a temper.’

The man nodded as though this made sense to him, then took three iron rings from their hooks, each of them threaded with a dozen keys.

‘Front wing,’ he said, lifting up the first ring, then repeating the gesture with the other two. ‘Side and back. The keys aren’t labelled.’ He pointed to coloured pieces of string that he had attached to each key. ‘My own system, helps me tell them apart. Do you need the keys to the basement as well?’

‘My uncle didn’t say,’ she answered cautiously. ‘He asked for discretion,’ she added, then saw the man was baffled by the word. ‘To keep quiet. Party business, I suppose.’

‘Yes. Of course.’

She had expected the janitor to be more difficult, but he was meek as a lamb; passed the keys over without further ado. His hands were large, the cuticles stained by rust or blood.
Too many suspects
, it came to her head all of a sudden. She smiled and curtsied, wished him a good evening.

‘I will bring the keys back when my uncle is done with them,’ she told him when she was already at the door, the child following her with a ballerina’s mincing step.

‘Of course. A good night to you. And good health. Dr Beer tells me you have been sick.’

‘Yes,’ she breathed, and reached back to take the girl’s hand. Together they ascended the stairs and re-emerged into the yard. It was past six o’clock, the whole courtyard in shade. Lieschen was looking up at her with an odd expectancy. Zuzka bent down to her, took her hands in her own, felt the stick of chalk that she had buried in one palm.

‘Is Herr Speckstein going to spy on someone, Fräulein Zuzana?’

‘Call me Zuzka. It’s nicer that way.’

The girl smiled at that but wouldn’t let go of her question. It stood there, in her red little face. Her mouth curled around it. Zuzka made another effort to throw her off scent.

‘You should go home now. Your father will be back soon.’

Lieschen shook her head. ‘Not until eight, he won’t. So who is he spying on? My father says he spies on everyone.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Even on us.’

‘And do you have any secrets?’

Once again the child shook her head, then stopped herself. ‘One,’ she said after some thought. ‘I have one. But it’s only for me.’

‘You won’t tell. Not a single soul?’

‘Only when I want to. But not before.’

She smiled at the thought of her own vigilance, raised her chin proudly into the air, her body following the gesture, the neck welded to her chest. Zuzka watched her, returned her smile.