The Quiet Twin (2 page)

‘I forgot something,’ he mumbled all of a sudden, his hand still folded under the lip of her sheet, the backs of his fingers hovering low above her breast. He rose too quickly, stumbled as his foot got caught in the leg of the chair, and for a second he thought that he would fall on top of her.

‘I will hardly be a minute.’

This from the door to which he beat a hasty retreat. He was out in the stairwell before he realised that his flight had been met by the faintest, girlish giggle.

Upstairs, Dr Beer took off his tie and threw his collar in one corner. He grabbed a sheet of paper and scribbled a note, then slid it under his door from the outside, making sure only a corner showed. He had already rounded the final turn of the great spiral staircase when he realised that he had not picked up anything he could pretend to have forgotten: no stethoscope or salve that might have covered his embarrassment. He would have turned around again, retraced his steps, but there was the widow, waiting for him outside the apartment door, attentive to his every movement. Her eyes sparkled in triumph.

‘So good of you, Herr Doktor,’ she started, but he hurried past without so much as a word. The layout of the apartment confused him for just a moment, and he found himself recalled after a step or two, like a lackey, or a dog.

‘This way, Herr Doktor.’

In the cluttered hallway, between hatstand and wardrobe, it seemed impossible to squeeze past the widow without brushing against her chest. She stood aside theatrically, then started after him no sooner had he passed.

‘We must not be disturbed,’ he announced in an attempt to shake her, rushing to his patient’s room and stepping inside it with great haste. This time it was the widow’s giggle that followed him: a quick snort of a laugh that found him through the gap of the closing door.

Beer was halfway to the bed – his watch already back in his hand, his shirt and jacket sleeves turned up above his wrists – when he noticed she was no longer there, tucked under her cotton sheet, but was standing by the little window, half hidden in shadow. She was a tall girl, creamy; moonlight running through her nightgown and giving volume to her rounded shoulders, her overlong thighs, the narrow hips and boyish buttocks. Another year or two and she might grow into a beauty; first she’d have to learn how to stand, untangle those knock-kneed legs. Her gaze, he noted, was fixed outwards, past the branches of the chestnut tree and across the courtyard. He crossed the room and stood next to her; gauged the angle of her eyes. She seemed to be looking at a window almost straight across, located in the rear wing of the apartment building which had no direct street access, and cheaper rents.

‘Do you see her?’ she asked at last, the same quiet whisper that had spoken to him before, girlish, but also somehow sure of itself, the voice of someone fond of talking.

‘What is it I am looking at?’ he asked.

‘There,’ she said, and as she pointed he saw a small figure pass behind a set of curtains, and then, for an instant, a little face press itself against the half-open pane before it withdrew again into darkness. The hair of the child was blonde.

‘She’s shy,’ whispered his patient, and for a moment he thought she was speaking about herself.

‘Who is she?’

She did not turn with her answer, kept her eyes on the courtyard before them.

‘Lieschen. You must have seen her. She’s nine years old and lives with her father. Wears a purple dress with a white sailor’s collar.’

‘The girl with the crooked back?’

‘Yes, her. Her mother left her when she was three, and her father, he drinks. I watch him sit at the table sometimes and drink a whole bottle, all by himself. He will sit down at eight o’clock sharp, put a bottle on the tabletop and start drinking. Sometimes he carries on well past midnight. The strange thing is that he always uses a glass, or rather a tumbler. It’s small, like a schnapps glass, only it is made out of metal, like something in church. It glows when it catches the light. I imagine if I was drinking like that, I would not use a glass. It puzzles me.’

She stopped, and half turned to look at him. It was the first time they had exchanged glances. It lasted only a moment. Next he knew, she had turned back to the window, moonlight on her breasts, too fleshy for her narrow frame.

‘And the girl?’ he asked, when the silence grew oppressive.

‘We talk sometimes. After nightfall. In gestures, I mean. I will tell her a goodnight story, the one about the fox outwitting the bear. And she – she tells me how lonely she is.’

She smiled as though this, too, was a tale from a story book and, as such, touching.

‘All that in a few gestures?’

‘You think I’m making it up. There–’ She pointed again to where a shimmer of blonde hair pushed through the folds of a curtain, then withdrew. ‘She is shyer than usual tonight. It’s because I have a visitor.’

He was left with an impression of a thick mop of hair, braided at the sides, a button nose, and a small, pink lip sucked in over the teeth. It was hard to know how he could have made out such details across the distance of the courtyard. It was as though the girl’s talking made it so: the rhythms of her speech. She licked her lips between sentences.

Beer had watched her as she had spoken, surreptitiously, from the corner of his eye; had watched her mouth shape the words and her cheeks warm with their telling. Her own eyes had been busy with something else, however: time and again they had darted to another window, further to the left, in the building’s side wing, a shabby, narrow structure, boxed in between the front and back, the cheapest living space of all. He was not sure if it was the first or the second floor that she was interested in. There were no lights in any of the windows; in one, on the far side of the narrow row, the tail end of a curtain hung carelessly across the sill, its hem tangled in a row of empty flowerpots.

‘And who lives there?’ he chanced when he caught her gaze being drawn once again into the darkness on their left.

‘Nobody,’ she said, and added a smile that let him know he must not believe her.

‘You should examine me,’ she added. ‘You’re in a hurry.’

Before he could answer, she had run back into bed and covered herself with the sheet: pulled it all the way up to her chin, like a six-year-old trying to impress her mother. Her grin was playful, dimpled; a bloom of colour on her pasty cheek.

‘Are you sure you are sick?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, earnestly now. ‘I am very sick indeed, Dr Beer.’

‘Well then,’ he said and reclaimed his chair. His watch, he noticed, had been in his hand all this time.

He took her pulse, then drew back the sheet to listen to her breathing, and to test her lymph nodes for tenderness, beneath the jawbone and in the pits of her arms, then prodded her stomach and abdomen.

‘Shouldn’t you be asking what is wrong with me?’

Her voice was clear and free of coquetry, and yet he felt as though caught at something illicit. He ceased in his movements, his hands still on her body.

‘I had the feeling,’ he said after some thought, ‘that you did not wish to tell me. Your – housekeeper’ (her nose wrinkled at the word) ‘she mentioned headaches and fever, spells of paralysis. Does it hurt when I . . . ?’ and here he dug two fingers into her flank, just underneath her ribcage. ‘Any problems with your menses–?’

She watched him perform his examination with great interest, gave short, precise answers when prompted, and volunteered at one point to slip out of her nightgown if that would make things easier for him. He assured her that this was quite unnecessary. His hands were certain, practised, her skin cool and supple to his touch. He was quite sure now that there was nothing at all the matter with her, but strangely he was not angry about her malingering, and simply persevered with his task. She interrupted him only when he – making a show of his diligence – shone a light into one ear and stood gazing into its depths with a concentration he knew to be studied. His hand lay cradled around his patient’s cheek, as it always did when he performed this particular examination: one finger stretched along the line of the jaw, the rest cupped under the chin, and the thumb pointing up, across the soft plain between cheekbone and mouth.

‘Does it feel strange,’ she asked, her jaw moving under his fingers, ‘touching women all day?’

‘I touch men, too,’ he said, more forcefully than was required, then blushed.

‘Yes,’ she conceded. And added, ‘My uncle. He was a doctor, too.’

‘He’s dead?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He lives across the hall.’

It took him a while to take her meaning and he watched her stretch her chin above his palm, pointing towards the door and beyond, into the silence of the apartment.

‘Speckstein,’ he muttered, and thought he might have done better to add his title.

‘Then you have heard of him.’

He shrugged and felt his jacket’s shoulders exaggerate the gesture. ‘His name is on the bell.’

The girl smiled and nodded, and under the guiding pressure of his hands she turned on to her belly so he could run some knuckles down the long crease of her spine. The examination complete, he buttoned up the back of her nightgown, and made a show of gathering his things. She watched, he noticed, with an air of focused amusement.

‘The diagnosis, Dr Beer?’ she asked at last, pulling the sheet back up to her chin.

‘You know yourself that you are perfectly healthy.’

‘You think I have been making it all up? The fever and the fainting spells? The inability to breathe? Pins and needles at the back of my legs? Yesterday, I woke early in the evening and was paralysed from hip to toes.’

‘Some form of hysteria, perhaps.’

She frowned, and sucked in her lower lip. For a moment she looked much like the girl he thought he had seen in the window across the yard. It was impossible to tell who might have taught the gesture to whom.

‘Can one die from it?’ she asked, very serious now. ‘This hysteria of yours?’

He looked at her and tried to summon a levity he did not feel.

‘I dare say no,’ he told her. ‘It’s a sort of fairy tale one tells oneself. One does not die from the big bad wolf.’

She grimaced at that, then stiffened one hand into a playful claw: emotions running so quickly through her features that he was at a loss to know how to interpret them. All at once he’d had enough of the girl, yearned for a cigarette, and a glass of brandy.

‘I really must get going now.’

He gave a bow and turned to leave.

She stopped him at the door. He had expected it, had slowed down his step despite his supposed haste. And yet it caught him unawares, the inflection of it and the topic she chose, as though plucked from the sky at random.

‘Somebody has been killing people. With a knife. Have you heard about this, Dr Beer?’

He shook his head and kept his hand on the doorknob, where it had already half committed to its turning.

‘There was nothing in the papers.’

‘No,’ she agreed, and he pictured her lying there, behind him, the body under its sheet, her eyes fastened on the ceiling. ‘But you know about it nonetheless.’

‘Well, then everybody knows. A patient must have told me.’

‘Four dead in total,’ she said. ‘All within a few blocks of here. I drew a map.’

‘Is that a fact?’

‘Yes.’

She paused, and for a moment he thought she was done with him. But still the knob in his hand did not finish its turn.

‘My uncle,’ she started up again. ‘Somebody killed his dog. Also with a knife. Friday week last. You think there is a connection?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, then took a breath. ‘The unhinged mind is a medical mystery. It is capable of–’

‘Yes,’ she interrupted him. ‘I think so, too. But you must go now. You haven’t much time.’

It was this taunting phrase that followed him, out into the hallway, where the widow hovered by the light of a candle, wordless now, showing him the door, its locks snapping shut no sooner than he had cleared the threshold. He mounted the stairs in silence, his head tilted, the smile on his lips doing battle with his frown.

Upstairs, he unlocked his apartment door and found his note upon the floor. Beer could not tell whether it had been read and returned, or whether his visitor had never called at all. He unbuttoned his waistcoat and stepped out on to the narrow balcony; stared out into the courtyard. A light burned in a kitchen window across and below: a man sitting at a table with a bottle of liquor standing before him. He was in his underwear, a jacket thrown around the shoulders to keep himself warm. He drank methodically. It was impossible to name the colour of his glass: he kept his hand around it always, like a man clutching a rope. The doctor craned his neck to see into the other window Speckstein’s niece had studied, but the angle was wrong and the crown of the chestnut tree was in the way. He went to bed at last, having smoked two cigarettes in quick succession, still wondering what had happened to Speckstein’s dog.

Chapter 2

The girl lay awake through much of the night. A number of times she dozed off, only to come awake with a start: ran to the window then and stood staring out into the dark, or sat on the bed, straining her ears, one palm raised above her head as though to shush the whispers of her breathing. There were few noises to the night. At a quarter past two, Vesalius slipped past her room to use the toilet and sat there coughing, hawking up phlegm into the sink. She stopped on her return, the water tank’s gurgle still audible behind her, and stood listening by the door for five, six, seven breaths, before shuffling back to her squalid lodgings behind the kitchen. The girl heard no more from her, and even crept after her to make sure she had gone to bed, the door closed, no light seeping from underneath its crack. At three, she raced to her feet when she was torn from a dream by the bang of the building’s door beneath her. She stood, cocked her head, and followed the slow ascent up the main staircase, a drunk man’s stumbles, making their way in fits and starts. Within five steps she had lost interest, though she continued to listen until the feet had come to rest, three flights up, and there ensued, upon the landing, a fierce little struggle with lock and key.