The Quiet Twin (14 page)

‘She will die if nobody sees to her. I know you don’t want that. You–’ He searched for something definite, something that would convince the man. ‘You brush her teeth. Even the molars. It must take a lot of patience to do that. A lot of love.’

Slowly, gradually, the man relaxed his arm; bit his lip and tucked away the knife, slipped it into some invisible pocket of his trousers. The anger remained on his mouth, and, as though to master it, he turned away, walked over to the sink, stripping off his gloves and sweater as he walked. Beer watched him as he bent low over the sink and began to wash his face. The mime’s eyes never left the intruder, were fixed on the mirror. Halfway through, he flicked on the bulb, and they both of them winced at the sudden flood of light. A mix of grease and water was travelling down the man’s muscular chest and back, left streaks upon his skin. When he was done, there remained only a thread of white, framing his hairline and the cut of his chin. The face that emerged looked raw with emotion. Whatever composure he had was washing down the plughole. Even the voice seemed changed, seemed coarser, Bavarian vowels laying siege to his Viennese.

‘She’s not my wife,’ he said. ‘She’s my sister. Eva.’

Beer remembered the photo, nodded. ‘You two are close?’

‘Twins,’ said the man, though his face looked nothing like the woman’s, looked meaty and boorish and burdened with anger.

‘Why do you say that she’ll die?’

‘She has bedsores. From lying still for too long. Some of them are very advanced. Very dangerous. They are prone to infection.’ Beer paused, trying to gauge whether the man was following what he was telling him. ‘How long has she been like this? Paralysed, I mean?’

The mime shrugged, ran his fingernails along his chin, scraping off flecks of paint that were hiding there.

‘She’ll die from lying still?’ he murmured, something passing through his face that took Beer a few moments to place: the thought, light and evil, of a life without his twin.

The doctor nodded. ‘She might. She needs medical attention. How long has she been paralysed?’

‘Ten years.’

‘Ten years? And she doesn’t speak?’

‘Not since she was thirteen. Mother used to care for her. Now she’s with me.’

‘And nobody knows she’s here?’

The mime shook his head. ‘I carried her in at night. A friend helped me. We pretended she was drunk. She wasn’t sick then.’

‘She is now,’ said Anton Beer and reached for a cigarette. While he stood there, lighting it, he noticed the man notice that the cigarette was one of his. His face darkened with the thought of the doctor rifling through his things. For a moment it threatened everything: his fists bunched, the weight of his body shifting into shoulders and arms. It cost the mime great effort to unclench himself, and accept the half-empty packet that Beer held out to him.

‘You must decide what you want to do. We could bring her to a hospital, but–’

‘They’ll kill her.’ It came out as a snarl; in his eyes once again that sly look of longing. It passed through like a wedge of geese giving chase to summer: you’d blink and they were gone. The rest of his face was busy with his anger and his grief. ‘I’ve heard stories.’

He gestured widely with his hands, cigarettes scattering from the open pack. Beer didn’t contradict him. He’d heard stories, too. They had been there even before the war had started. By now they were taking on a more definite shape.

‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘They might.’

He took a breath, made his play. It wasn’t until the words were out that he realised how anxious he was for their acceptance.

‘You have to leave Eva in my care,’ he said. ‘She needs to be turned, four, five times a day, and massaged head to toe. The wounds have to be seen to, the dead tissue removed. I live in my practice. You can’t help her. Nobody needs to know.’

The man took it in, brow creased in thought. His hand rose, thumb and forefinger taking hold of his nose. He blew snot into his open palm, then wiped it on the seat of his trousers: a fluid gesture, untroubled by breeding. Next Beer knew, that same thumb and finger had come together once again and hung in the air rubbing one another, in a gesture as old as the gods.

‘How much–?’ the man began to ask, but Beer interrupted him.

‘You needn’t pay,’ he said. ‘It is my duty as a physician.’

The phrase came out pat: it irritated the man. Beer could see he was struggling with the implications of his offer. He wondered how long it was that he had been his sister’s only caretaker. It remained hard to believe that they were twins.

‘We better carry her up right away, while it’s still dark. The fewer people know, the better. We don’t want anyone to call the hospital. Or the police. If we do meet someone, we’ll say she fainted and we are taking her to my practice.’

‘All right.’

With two words, the man had settled it. He turned away from Beer, thus hiding his face, and walked his dark passions over to his sister’s room.

They were busy lifting the woman out of her bed, Beer holding the feet, and her brother steadying head, neck and shoulders, before he spoke again. He had put his sweater back on, and turned off the light; was a smudge of skin suspended in the dark.

‘If you touch her–’ he said, and pursed his lips in a manner calculated to give meaning to the phrase.

‘You needn’t worry. I’m a doctor.’

‘If you touch her,’ he resumed as though Beer had not spoken, ‘I will come break your neck.’

Beer told the man he understood. He wondered when would be a good time to ask him whether or not he had killed Speckstein’s dog.

Chapter 3

The janitor saw them carry the body across the yard. He did not recognise them at first. The night was very nearly black, dawn still some hours away, the city around them leaking a faint yellow glow. All he could see was the shadow of two men, a bed-sheet between them, in which lay rolled the body of a slender corpse. They almost dropped it as they tried to open the door that led to the main stairwell; there was a stumble and an oath. The janitor recognised the voice, and put a name to the first of the shadows. Otto Frei. He had shown up not a month back, secured a sublet from the previous tenant who’d gone home to live with his mother; had paid extra for a second bed, for ‘women friends’ as he’d nervously explained. A man in his twenties, shifty like a vagrant. Thus far, the janitor had not seen him bring home any tarts. He worked at night and slept during the day, had brought his own curtains and hung them out back. The night watchman, Neurath, had told him that he worked as a clown. He couldn’t be earning much more than he ate.

The second man he recognised by his movements. There was something slow about the doctor. It was there even now, when he was bent on haste, a pair of ankles in his hands and a man for company who was little other than a bum: the leaden patience of a man who thinks before he steps. The janitor remembered Beer’s wife: a striking, long-limbed woman, very much a lady. Once, some weeks before she left, Frau Beer had stopped by his cellar workshop to complain about the plumbing, and led him to their private toilet with a proud self-assurance that did not flinch when he lifted the lid upon her pungent mess. She’d looked tired then, a little heavy in the midriff. One story went that she was pregnant with another man’s child: Frau Vesalius had told him that while she beat a carpet in the yard. Perhaps it was true, but the janitor did not think so. The bricks, they told another tale. It was now thirty-seven years that he’d been working in their service. At times they spoke to him directly, whispered to his fingertips as he ran them past their frames of mortar. Or else it was the house’s dead who came forward, a story on their lips: the little babe who’d died of suffocation, four days old, the inquest queasy about the bruises near its neck; or the fat old woman it had taken four to carry out, a judge’s daughter he was told, gone to seed on cream puffs and morphine, hand-delivered every morning. Lately, it had been the dog that came sniffing: nipped his feet sometimes when he had nodded off, or crawled under the blanket in search of warmth; talked to him quietly, in whimpers and in growls. You had to kick it, make it shut its bloody gob, a trail of pee when it ran yelping to its grave. Of course, all it was: his head was growing soft. He drank too much, often started in the morning, talked to himself, heard voices. ‘Janitor’, he called himself, ‘Janitor’, the tag of his profession. Seventy years old and a frame on him like he was thirty; chasing the murmur at the bottom of an earthenware jug filled with rowanberry schnapps. He had been working through much of the night; had stepped into the yard just now to breathe the air and smoke a cigarette, an apron tied around his neck and waist. Out came the doctor and that bum of a clown, carrying a corpse, whispers, stories, rising from its linen sheet.

His instinct was to follow them, see where they were going: up to the fourth floor and the doctor’s rooms, or out the main door, into the street. The janitor took a step, plodding, soundless, the way he knew how, then remembered his apron, the blood smeared across his stomach, chest, and hands. It was drying now, drying into skin and cloth; smelled of metal, sea and salt. The taste was so thick, he wondered whether some had strayed into his face. The cigarette smelled of it, as though it had been dunked in blood; he had yet to light its tip. So he stood and he listened, and heard precisely nothing: not the slamming of a door, nor the twin tread of men, carrying a dead-weight up the stairs. The janitor looked up and found the doctor’s rooms, waited to see whether he would turn on a light. He didn’t. The minutes passed, dawn inching nearer, a breeze in the chestnut leaves, picking up force. Behind him, in the darkness, the janitor became aware of the swing of the cellar door, heard the wheeze of Neurath’s breath rising laboured from his wasted lungs: a wet sort of breathing, a man drowning on clean air. Fräulein Speckstein had breathed like that, just a little, bringing back his keys.

‘We better get back to work,’ Neurath said. ‘I need to be done by sun-up, return to my post.’ He spoke softly and fast, caught his breath after each phrase.

The janitor acquiesced, followed him in, the smell of blood growing thicker here, along with that of boiling fat. He would let the air out later that morning, once the kitchens got going, two dozen households frying cauliflower, potatoes, pork liver and
Speck
. He’d ask Neurath to return at the end of his shift, help him clean up the mess. Together, they walked down into the cellar workshop, and as they passed the game table that had taken him three days to build, the janitor indulged himself by running two knuckles across its smooth and polished surface. After school, little Lieschen would come, and they would have themselves a game.

Chapter 4

And just like that, he was gone out of her life. For three whole days, all Zuzka saw of Dr Beer was a few minutes’ worth of interview when she sent Vesalius to fetch him to her sick bed: perfunctory visits in which he took her pulse and advised her curtly to ‘pull herself together’. She went up to his apartment, mid-morning on the day after she had brought him to the green-eyed lady, and again after dinner, but he saw her off at the door, explaining that he was ‘quite simply snowed under with work’. She asked, of course, whether he had sent for the police to arrest the man who had so mistreated the woman, but was told, with a heat that surprised her in the doctor, that she had misunderstood the whole situation.

‘The man is her brother. Otto Frei by name. I am seeing to the patient.’

And added, in a tone at once conspiratorial and patronising, ‘Better not mention it to anyone. Especially your uncle. Frei has reasons to keep quiet about Eva. Reasons one should respect.’

It stung her, this ‘Eva’, thrown in with a familiarity that contrasted sharply with the hurried formality with which he treated her now.

‘I will come with you when you go to see her next,’ she pleaded, swallowing the sharper words that had risen to her tongue, but was met once again by his shaking head.

‘It’s simply no longer your concern, Fräulein Speckstein.’

And then, with an avuncular benevolence that only served to irritate her further: ‘Look here, the winter semester has only just started. There may still be time to secure a place; no doubt your uncle can pull a few strings. If you are so keen for patients of your own, there is no better place to start.’

She began to protest, but he simply closed the door on her, closed it gently, without haste or anger, as one does with a pedlar whose tawdry wares one has declined. Never in her life had she been so summarily dismissed.

Nor could she gather any more information by keeping up her surveillance of the apartment across the yard. She had watched it on the night Beer had waited for the mime’s return (this despite a deep exhaustion that beset her like a fever), but had not been able to see much beyond the glow of a cigarette, moving up and down the length of the two rooms. For a brief interval – it must have been gone four o’clock by then – the light had been turned on and she had watched them talking, Beer and the stranger: the latter angry, stripped down to his waist. Then they had turned the light off again, and she, overcome by the many hours at the window, had thrown herself on to her bed and fallen asleep, pins and needles running through her calves and lower thighs. The next night, she stood guard from midnight onwards, only to discover that the mime had acquired somewhere a new set of curtains for the first of his two rooms. He drew them just as soon as he came home; poked his head through once, puffed on a cigarette, his face paint still in place, then disappeared again behind their heavy cloth, a cold, sudden rain bearing down into the yard.