The Quiet Twin (18 page)

‘Who is she?’ he asked, a semblance of life waking in his flat, dark eyes.

‘Who do you think?’ said Beer. ‘A lady friend.’

‘I thought for a moment she was dead.’

‘Sleeping draught. She was – not feeling well this morning. I told her to stay in bed.’

Teuben looked at him, the ghost of a smile on his red lips. ‘It didn’t say that in the file,’ he muttered to himself, as though amused at the hidden depths of man. ‘But the hair –’

‘What about it?’

‘Cut off.’

‘She wears wigs. It’s what she does.’ Beer pursed his lips, astonished by the fluency of his lies. It was as though he had prepared them long ago, and now found them ready at his beck and call. ‘I rather like it.’

‘She’s a prostitute?’

Beer shook his head.

‘A widow. I spilled the beer. Why don’t we go into the kitchen and get another? And then I will assist your investigation in any way possible.’

Teuben seemed to consider this: stood a foot from the door, eyes fixed on its grain, thinking it through, one arm outstretched as though getting ready to re-enter the room.

‘I will need a name,’ he said at last.

Beer had one ready. ‘Evelyn Huber. Please, I’d prefer if nobody was to know. My reputation –’

Teuben waved him off, walked ahead of him to the kitchen, located a jar of sour gherkins and another one of pickled fish and placed them both on the table.

‘Let’s forget it for now, Dr Beer,’ he said, sticking his hairy hand down the brine to retrieve a cut of herring. ‘A secret among friends. Good for morale.’

He gestured for a bottle of beer, then drank from it without waiting for a glass.

‘Kreuzwirt should be here presently. My assistant. Bringing us the file.’

Beer nodded, sat down across from him, and watched him lick the brine juice from his fingers.

When Teuben finally left, an hour and a half later, Dr Beer sat down next to a newly repositioned Eva Frei, picked up a book he had glanced through the previous night, and slowly, his heart heavy and feeling as though dyspeptic, began reading out to her the Hippocratic oath, of whose precise wording he had wished to remind himself.

‘ “Every house to which I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, steering clear of all ill-doing and all seduction, and especially of the pleasures of love, with women or with men, be they free or be they slaves.” ’

He looked up wearily and thought of Teuben. ‘But what a liar you have made out of me.’

Eva heard it, moved her eyes, and winked.

That evening Zuzka called on Anton Beer, insisting that ‘Otto had given her permission’ and stayed for an hour, talking to Eva; and the next day, around lunchtime, the laundry boy dropped by, his long horse-face sullen when Beer asked him where the hell he had been.

It felt nice to put on a fresh shirt.

Part II

Marvels

One

The patient came to him on the recommendation of a mutual acquaintance. He was working as a neurologist in Munich then: it was the early 1890s. The woman was shy at first; shook his hand and took to calling him ‘dear Baron’. She suffered, she explained, from a compulsion to masturbate, and was able to achieve orgasm without any physical stimulation whatsoever, simply by contemplating the ocean or other manifestations of the grandeur of nature. When Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing touched her skin during his routine examination, her sexual climax was near instantaneous. Like Sigmund Freud, the Baron had studied hypnotism in Paris and Nancy; his monograph on the efficacy of suggestion therapy for this and related cases of sexual pathology was received with great interest by clinical psychiatrists across the German-speaking world. By the late 1890s the Baron was best known for his role as expert witness in a string of high-profile court cases. He demonstrated that a frightening proportion of court witnesses suffered from a ‘suggestion-induced falsification of memory’ and had never experienced the events to which they testified in court. Financial independence, the result of his marriage to the daughter of the lacquer-paint manufacturer Gustav Siegle, allowed Schrenck-Notzing to increasingly turn his attentions to the scientific exploration of paranormal phenomena. In the course of 1904 he published a series of articles on the phenomenon of Magdeleine Guipet, the French ‘dream-dancer’, who gave pantomimic interpretations of musical scores while in a state of deep hypnosis. During the half-decade prior to the start of the First World War, the Baron spent several years studying the ‘materialisation phenomena’ of the medium ‘Eva C’ who, in trance, was able to produce a gauze-like, translucent substance from various bodily orifices, most typically her mouth and nostrils. At times this substance, dubbed ‘teleplasm’ by Schrenck-Notzing, would take on the shape of faces, phantoms, ghostly limbs. Eva C endured repeated cavity searches and was asked to perform naked in order to eliminate the possibility that she was merely excreting a substance previously hidden on her form. Unlike her contemporary Mina Crandon, she was never accused of having had her genitalia surgically altered to conceal an additional limb that would account for the various phenomena she was able to produce. Schrenck-Notzing’s resulting monograph is considered one of the classic studies in this field. Amongst his most vociferous critics was the neurologist Mathilde Kemnitz, née Spie
β
, the later wife of Erich Ludendorff. Dr Ludendorff was a noted feminist and theorist of the Völkisch Movement known for his attacks on Jesuits, Jews and Freemasons. The Baron died in 1929, twelve years before the National Socialist Party prohibited parapsychological research throughout the Reich.

Chapter 1

The boy brought it to school in a box. It was a shoe carton stolen from his mother, three air holes drilled into its lid so that the animal could breathe. The children noticed it at once, and in the short break after the first lesson they crowded around Josef, urging him to show what he had brought.

‘My uncle gave him to me,’ the boy announced as he began to raise the lid with great ceremony. ‘He found him in the woods.’

The lid wasn’t quite off yet when a dark little snout poked through the gap, narrow and triangular, a twitchy black nose at its tip.

‘What is it? Let me see, Sepp, let me see!’ cried the boys, jostling for space (the girls had long been pushed aside, stood on tiptoe, looking over the boys’ shoulders). The lid was off, finally, and everyone stared, looking at the woodland creature that lay revealed upon a bed of straw and waiting for some definite reaction, something from one of those boys who were considered boldest and shaped opinion, here in this
salon
of children of classroom 4B.

‘Oh, but it’s only a hedgehog,’ a freckled boy called Gernot pronounced at last. He was much admired for his nonchalance and his deadly aim when spitting pips. ‘How boring!’

‘Yes, boring.’

‘That’s exactly what it is.’

‘A hedgehog. Our garden is full of them.’

The crowd quickly dispersed, not without some curious backward glances at Josef and the hedgehog. Two or three girls stayed behind a little longer, to test the sharpness of its salt-and-pepper spines, then scattered like pigeons when one of them, knock-kneed Petra, whose father drove a Benz, got herself pricked, jumped back dramatically, and started sucking on one finger (though not the one that had touched the hedgehog), unsure as of yet whether to wrinkle her nose in disgust or let fly with some tears. (Some of the other girls liked to call her a cry-baby, though there were others who’d reward her tears with tender hugs and even kisses, in imitation of their mothers.) Josef stayed behind with his box, whispered sweetly to his hedgehog. He was a ‘good sort’, his report card read, ‘not particularly gifted’; the youngest in a family of eight. Before long the teacher returned, and everybody sat down at their desks.

It wasn’t until the lunch break that Lieschen approached him, slyly as it were, while he was sitting by himself, offering a carrot to the animal with considerable vigour. After two, three pokes the frightened creature had had enough and rolled itself into a ball. Lieschen crouched down next to him, watched him stab the carrot into the wall of spines, the smear of her bruise lending a peculiar whiteness to one eye.

‘You’re doing it too hard,’ she said. ‘See how he’s scared.’

‘He likes spiders best,’ the boy explained, taking no heed of her advice, and continuing to jam the carrot into the hedgehog’s spines. ‘I go into the cellar to hunt them. You have to take off three or four legs, so they can’t run away from him.’

Lieschen was silent for a moment, asking herself if she considered this mean. ‘You just rip them out?’

‘Yes. Spiders don’t bleed.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. They just don’t.’

She pondered this, then nodded her approval of his feeding strategy. Josef gave up on the carrot, and some minutes later, the hedgehog began to unfurl itself, its little black eyes looking up at them in beady submission.

‘Have you given him a name?’ Anneliese asked.

Josef nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Eckhardt.’

‘That’s a stupid name. You should call him something nicer.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Something that sounds nice. Prince Yussuf, for instance.’

‘Prince Yussuf. But nobody’s called Yussuf.’

‘Somebody is. It’s a real name. I know it for sure.’

‘And can he really be a prince?’

‘Why not? Can I pick him up?’

‘Yes. But he belongs to me.’

Gently, cupping both hands as though she were scooping water from a pond, the girl collected the hedgehog and raised him up before her face. The animal was very light and sat in her hands calmly twitching its nose.

‘Prince Yussuf,’ she whispered gently, then pointed her chin at the teddy that was dangling from her wrist. ‘Meet Kaiser San. He isn’t real, but it doesn’t matter. I like him all the same.’

Slowly, as carefully as she had picked him up, she placed Yussuf back on to the straw that lined his box and stood up to tower over the sitting boy.

‘What do you want for him?’ she asked, putting her hands on to her hips like she’d seen the women do at the Naschmarkt when they were complaining about the price of food.

Hearing her businesslike tone, Sepp, too, stood up, his large feet straddling the box.

‘He isn’t for sale.’

‘Go on. Your uncle will get you another.’

‘You don’t have anything I want.’

‘And if I had a knife?’

‘A knife? What kind?’

The boy’s eyes showed his curiosity. A decent-sized knife was much prized amongst the boys, the bigger the better. Lieschen turned around and, shielding her action with her body, dug through the stitching on Kaiser San’s neck. She sunk two fingers into the stuffing and soon managed to pull out the pocket knife, its horn handle covered in lint. Quickly, wishing to show off the knife as advantageously as possible, she wiped it clean on the cotton of her dress, then unfolded the blade and turned around to the boy.

‘You see,’ she said, handing it over. ‘It’s very sharp.’

Josef held it well out in front of him, as though afraid that he would cut himself at any moment, admiring its size and weight.

‘It’s really big. Where did you get it?’

‘It belongs to my dad.’

‘Won’t he be angry?’ the boy asked, not wanting to get into trouble.

Lieschen shook her head, bit her lip, a dark cloud of blood rising to her cheeks.

‘He’s got a new one now.’ She paused, as though waiting for the blush to subside. ‘So what do you say?’

Sepp thought it over, his eyes fastened on the knife, then handed it back with some reluctance.

‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. I have to ask my older brothers first. My uncle gave him to all of us. Eckhardt. He said we had to share.’

‘Tomorrow?’ Lieschen asked, distraught. ‘Why not this afternoon? You can talk to your brothers and then meet me somewhere. Or I’ll come home with you after school.’

The boy shook his head. ‘I have to go
there
,’ he said, meaning the
Deutsches Jungvolk
, which he seemed to dislike.

‘But isn’t it fun?’

‘Sometimes,’ he said, pulling a face. ‘You’ll see for yourself soon.’ Josef knew her birthday was coming up.

‘And if I don’t like it?’

‘It’s cont-pulserry. That means you have to go. Especially now that we’ve been fighting with the Polack.’

He shrugged, heard the school bell, picked up the box. ‘It’s not all bad. They teach us new songs.’

Together they walked back to the school building, then stopped again before entering its double doors. In front of them the corridor yawned: a gaggle of children running to their classrooms, the sticky smell of floor polish rising from the linoleum.

‘Tomorrow, then?’ Lieschen asked, stuffing the knife back into her teddy and holding out her little hand.

‘Yes.’

They spat on their palms and shook on it, and promised one another that they would reconvene at the start of the next school day, to complete the transaction upon which they had commenced.