The Quiet Twin (21 page)

‘Shut up,’ he shouted, but his hands did not rise and he did not seem very angry, only the voice was loud, his mouth just inches from her own.

She blushed, turned away finally, saw herself reflected in his dirty mirror, spots of greasepaint livid like a rash. To her side, growing out of the slope of her shoulder, was his face, meaty and muscular, coarse skin ruddy with emotion.

‘The last place we were living, there was this man sniffing around her. The landlady’s son. He knew I didn’t want the police to come.’

She swallowed, waited for him to continue, their eyes meeting in the mirror. ‘What did you do to him?’

He flashed her a smile, it might have been called cruel. ‘What do you care?’

It should have stopped her, goaded her on instead. ‘And what about Speckstein? Why did you kill his dog?’

He shook his head in denial, but she wouldn’t accept it; stepped to the sink and picked up the knife with which he’d done it, the handle made of bone.

He watched her try the blade with her thumb. The blade was quite blunt.

‘What was its name?’ he asked, a schoolboy’s question, the cruelty gone, though kept within reach. ‘The dog?’

‘Walter.’

‘Walter?’ He laughed. ‘What a stupid name.’ Then added, ‘What was it like?’

She shrugged, put down the knife, wiped her fingers on her skirt. Then, theatrically, recalling words that Vesalius had used: ‘An old dog, it pissed everywhere.’

‘Pissed, eh? I thought you was a lady.’

He bent for a beer, poured some of it into a cup, handed it over.

‘To Walter.’

She drank, coughed, drank.

‘You killed him, you bastard.’

But in her heart she did not mind. What love had she for that dog?

Otto shrugged and smiled.

‘I have to go,’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘It’s dinnertime.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m going to work.’

She stepped out quickly, trying to gain a head-start into the yard. The janitor was there, on the way to his cellar workshop, carrying a sack lumpy with its heavy load. He looked up when he saw her, mumbled a greeting, then watched the mime emerge from the door she had just fled. It was impossible, she thought, that he did not notice the fury of her blush. Upstairs, her uncle waited, cheese and cold cuts spread upon their table. Zuzka ran in, hung up her coat. Vesalius watched her, poured out some wine, and left them to bless their food and eat.

Chapter 5

It was night, gone ten-thirty. Zuzka was lying on her bed in darkness, wrapped only in her dressing gown. She had come out of the bath more than an hour ago, hot and flushed, and had lain down on the bed with the window half open, staring out into the sky. It was raining, a patter of drops falling on the sill. The door opened, a strip of light fell into the room, caught her bare heels. Frau Vesalius stepped in, squinting into the dark. Zuzka did not stir, pretended to sleep. The old woman closed the door behind herself, bent down to pick up the clothes that lay scattered across the room, Zuzka’s underwear and the yellow silk shift; her woollen skirt and the tan stockings. The housekeeper made two piles, one of dirties, the other one of clothes that needed to be aired and put away. Zuzka watched her every movement in the weak light from the yard; she wondered what had made the housekeeper come in here for a task that she usually left for the mornings. Vesalius’s whole bearing was marked by spite and disapproval. The hands looked overlarge in the faint light, were threaded by a web of ropey veins; the eyes very dark and devoid of animation. Her head shifted, and immediately Zuzka closed her eyes, gave an even rhythm to her breathing. She had no wish to talk. In this self-imposed darkness, she heard Vesalius move about the room, then draw closer; felt her bend down over her body, the stale stink of kitchen smells clinging to her housecoat.

When she spoke, the voice was quiet, close to her ear.

‘You have to stop,’ Vesalius told her. ‘You don’t honestly imagine that nobody’s seen you. Half the house knows, and soon the Professor will, too.’

She paused, waited for a reaction. Zuzka kept her eyes firmly shut.

‘Such rough trade, too. You’ll get pregnant and end up in the street. Your uncle is planning a reception in two weeks’ time. He told me today. For Party dignitaries, very fancy. If you are looking for a man – just ask him to buy you a nice dress.’

Again the woman paused and gave Zuzka the chance to be done with her charade. Zuzka heard her sigh, then straighten (her back actually cracked); the solemn shuffle of her feet as she headed back towards the door. She opened her eyes, saw Vesalius hesitate, halfway between bed and door, her back old and bent. Just then she looked harmless, concerned for Zuzka’s virtue. It softened Zuzka. She had questions burning on her mind.

‘How long?’ Zuzka asked. ‘How long have you been with my uncle?’

The housekeeper stopped, turned around, large hands dangling by her side.

‘Twelve years next month. I started after Manfred died. My husband.’

‘So you were there, when –’ She stopped, cast around for a phrase. ‘Everybody says he raped a girl.’

‘You want to know what happened?’

‘Yes. It’s important, somehow. Because of the dog. Walter.’

Vesalius snorted at the mention of the name, stared at her across five feet of darkness.

‘I can show you if you like,’ she said.

‘Please.’

‘I’ll be back.’

The old woman left the door wide open.

When she returned, Vesalius was holding a thick, square book, some sort of album, bound in green felt. She undid the lace ribbons that held it shut and leafed through the pages until she came upon a folded piece of paper. Its edges were crisp and clean: it had not been unfolded very often. The old woman handed it to Zuzka, who sat up in her bed and turned on the bedside lamp.

‘She was what they call a
medium
,’ Vesalius said even before Zuzka had a chance to commence reading. ‘A scientific experiment. All sorts of famous people came to watch.’

It was a page cut from a newspaper and was dated September 1927; its columns intersected by the neat lines of its folds. Zuzka tried to concentrate, the words swimming before her eyes, but all she could make sense of were the headlines that introduced each of the paragraphs, promising sensation.

‘Thomas Mann was there,’ she read, confused.

‘Your uncle was asked to examine her. See, it says here.’

‘Why him?’

‘In case she had something hidden on her body.’ Vesalius paused, pursed her lips. ‘It says somewhere that “
it called for a physician familiar with the female form
”.’

Zuzka scanned the page for the quote, unsuccessfully, then looked back at the housekeeper, those hard, mocking eyes. It had never occurred to her that Vesalius, too, despised her uncle.

‘You’ve kept this all these years?’ she asked, giving voice to her surprise.

‘Have it,’ said Vesalius, turning away from her with sudden vehemence and pressing the album to her chest. ‘I have no use for it. And stop seeing that Gypsy.’

She left before Zuzka could either thank or ask her.

What did she care whether or not Speckstein’s niece managed to disgrace herself?

Zuzka waited until Vesalius had closed the door and she could hear her shuffle down the corridor before returning her attention to the article. The paper felt cheap in her hands, flimsy and grey; as she examined the page, some of the print began to smudge and stick to her fingertips. The page she was looking at constituted the opening fragment of a longer trial report; it cut off abruptly at the bottom. The cover page overleaf was dominated by a collage of images that began just under the title lettering and extended all the way to the bottom margin. She realised with a start that it was for this, the artist’s impressions of the courtroom rendered in small, feathery lines, and flanked by hand-lettered captions, that the page had been preserved. There was a total of three scenes, very lifelike, each depicting a different moment of the trial, juxtaposed for maximum effect. At the bottom of the page sat the members of the jury on the tiered, railed-in benches peculiar to their office, listening to the expostulations of an expert witness. This expert witness, a short, fat man with impressive moustaches, was rendered in profile, his right hand extended towards a propped-up poster-board upon which the outlines of female anatomy had been delicately sketched (all details that would have offended public taste had been carefully omitted, or else were blocked by the expert’s gesture). Above the jury, the space was cut in half. On the right cowered her uncle, looking ten years younger, his hair full and dark. He sat hunched in the dock, his hands neatly placed in front of him. His eyes were lowered and his brow creased as though in repentance or in shame. To his left, on the witness stand, a girl in her early teens, skinny and pale. She was wearing a plain black dress with a white collar. A cross was visible high on her breast. Her features were distorted by fear and disgust, the lips pushed forward and sealed; the left hand thrown over her eyes, fingers spread to reveal one tear-rimmed eye. Her right arm was extended, broke the boundary of the thin line of ink that separated her from the defendant, and reached across to point an accusing finger at her tormentor’s hunched figure.

‘Struck dumb by the assault, Evelyn Wenger testifies with her hands,’ the caption read. ‘The Professor awaits the verdict.’

‘The jurors are instructed about the results of the medical examination by Professor Dr Kiefer.’

Zuzka stared and stared at the little girl’s face. She knew at once that it was Eva.

Zuzka turned back to the article, willed herself to read the text. She grasped it in snatches of bold type and quotation, but was unable to keep her mind focused through the whole of the piece: there seemed to be altogether too many words for one simple truth.

Vesalius had not been gone ten minutes when Zuzka began dressing, folding up the page back into its neat, tidy square and stuffing it into a handbag to take along. She closed the door to her room behind her, tiptoed into the hallway and searched for her coat in darkness. As she approached the front door and felt for the keys on the hook, she grew convinced that the housekeeper was behind her somewhere, staring at her from the door to the kitchen, or standing behind the hallway wardrobe, disapproving and silent. Zuzka did not turn around. Outside, the air was cold, rain coming down in a spluttering drizzle. She hurried to the tram stop and then onwards, towards Schwedenplatz and the Kasperl Club.

Chapter 6

She would have liked to take the tram. It was far to Schwedenplatz – more than a mile down Alser- and Universitätsstraße, then a quarter of the way clockwise along the Ring – and she would have liked to take the tram, only she wasn’t sure whether the tram would still be running at this time, and when she got to the station there was no timetable and nobody waiting whom she could ask. So she set off, thinking she could always find one at Schottentor, and some minutes later the tram flew past her, its windows brightly lit, three, four passengers sitting on the benches, staring out into the street. It was cold and it was raining, the night sky covered in cloud. Only now and then the wind blew a gap into the clouds and revealed the sickle of the waning moon, cut to pieces by the web of wires that hung suspended above the tracks. Halfway down Universitätsstraße, she was startled by the clip-clop of horses as a carriage drove past, heading home towards some outlying stable. She arrived at Schottentor, saw a crowd of drunk men clustering around the sausage stand, eyeing her up and down as she drew close, placing her, a solitary woman out late at night. There was no tram in sight, and, rather than wait under the eyes of those men, she walked on, turned left on to the Schottenring, towards the Stock Exchange, her coat growing heavy with the rain, her footsteps ringing on the cobbles. A policeman passed her, paused, and removed the cigarette from his thin lips long enough to give a shrill, insinuating whistle; two other men, old and shabby, stopped an argument as she walked past and stood shoulder to shoulder, watching her legs pick their way around the puddles, before resuming their hostilities. She left the Ring, chose a short cut, then got lost in the little alleys around Judengasse until she found a flight of steps that led down towards the canal.

The rain let up while she was crossing the bridge, once again flinching under the gazes of men who moved about in packs of two or three. A car drove past, caught her in its headlights; slowed down (so it seemed to her), men’s faces darkened by the windscreen, their talk inaudible out on the bridge; then a howl as gears were changed, and the spray of a puddle gunning for her shoes. She hurried on and entered Leopoldstadt, the second of the city’s twenty-one districts. Once, she had read, it had been the Jewish ghetto, separated from the city by the waters of the canal. Now it was the place where men went to drink and to buy love.

Zuzka found the Kasperl almost at once. The club was in a side street, two blocks from the bridge. A painted sign announced the venue, hung brash and new upon a yellow flaking wall. There was little traffic here, no line for the door, just a tired old man in a barman’s waistcoat sitting on an upturned bucket and having a smoke. The door itself stood ajar.

She walked up to it, heard noise travel through the gap; reached out with fingers tingling from the damp and pushed it open. There was a narrow hallway, its walls thickly plastered with handbills, and a staircase leading down into the cellar. Against the wall leaned a man in something like a porter’s uniform: gold-trimmed royal blue. Epaulettes made from thick, yellow thread dangled from both shoulders. He was a tall man and quite impressively fat. When he caught sight of her, he immediately appraised her face and figure. She expected him to say something, but he just stood there, his thumbs wedged behind his belt, sucking on a short-stemmed pipe. The clamour of bar noises travelled up the stairs, followed by a scatter of applause.