The Quiet Twin (3 page)

‘Old Herr Novak,’ the girl whispered sullenly into the dark. ‘Drunk again.
Pani
Novakova won’t be happy.’

When her tiredness threatened to overcome her yet again, she turned her thoughts to the doctor. His hands upon her skin. The memory excited her, and triggered a wheeze in the depth of her lungs. Smiling, she traced with her own hands the places he had touched, then lay stiffly for a moment until all sensation seemed to leave her body and only her face was alive with her joy.

‘So I
am
sick,’ she thought to herself and wondered when she could send for him again, and how much of herself she would share. Paralysed, smiling, she fell asleep, and did not witness her body unwind itself, burrowing comfort from out her bedding’s embrace.

It was near five when she woke again and hurried sleepy to the window. At first she thought she had missed him: that he had returned and drawn the curtains, shut her out from his world. Then his face emerged, greasepainted, out of the darkness of his window: hung wide-eyed, unmoving, at the very centre of its frame, held up by neither noose nor neck nor block of wood. When she had first seen him, disembodied, it had frightened her and made her take him for a ghost. Then he had stripped one night, had peeled off sweater, gloves and tights, and hung them out into the wind, so very black that they cut deep holes into the fabric of the night. But even now, his secret lifted, it was tempting to think him nothing but a face: paper white, with hairline cracks running through its cheeks where the paint had dried and flaked upon his skin.

He was almost perfectly still.

She’d come to love this moment, the perfect stillness of his disembodied face, inhuman in its flatness. It was as though, she thought, someone had sketched some features on a plate of china, or drawn them on a bleached balloon, roughly, that is, with a line of shadow for the mouth, and great white orbs to frame the darkness of his eyes.

It was almost a shock to see the lips move: see them pucker around a crummy wedge of self-rolled cigarette. The glow of the ashes was enough to place something new into the face. She had seen it before and had struggled to put a name to it: had settled on
sorrow
but would not commit to it now, for it seemed too definite to her, and far too human. The face looked sad the way a fish looks sad upon the kitchen table, a bottom feeder, at odds with the sun. There was an absence there where one might have wished for the double line of lips. The cigarette was stuck in him as though through a hole.

That hole opened now, if only a crack, and a tongue emerged, paper-grey and solid at first, then thinning into nothingness as it flicked up across the length of face. On the next puff it stung his eyes, and an invisible hand rose to disperse the smoke: it passed like a bat before his cracked and painted features. Three more drags and the cigarette fell, was flicked in fact, in a flaming arc out into the yard.

She followed its path with her eyes and a sort of passion, curled her own finger into the tension of that flick. How she wished just then that she, too, were allowed to smoke, and to steal such poetry from a starless night.

When she looked up again from cigarette to smoker, the face had turned away from her, was lost in darkness, only to reappear in front of his corner sink and mirror, where he’d turned on a bulb that transformed his room into a stage. He shed the turtle-neck first, threw it over the back of the chair, the body brown against the whiteness of the paint. Then followed his gloves, his socks and tights, and soon he stood naked, scrubbing the face with washcloth and soap, until it came off and ran in gurgles down the plughole (she could almost hear it, across the silence of the yard). Today, there was no blood to join the rivulets of white, nor a knife, that he would dig out of some unseen pocket and stand there scraping with his soap. By increments a man emerged, dark-haired and clean-shaven, with a long scar down one flank.

He was in no hurry to get dressed.

When he was done washing, he bent and dug out a bottle from amongst a pile of clothes and magazines, then shuffled – still naked, naked! – over to the other room. She dreaded it, and revelled in it too, this moment when he stepped off the stage and into the darkness of a space unknown to her. It existed only in her head, in dark pictures of abandon. Here the curtains never opened, and no sounds travelled. Only once, in a rain-storm, a head had peaked out, had been held, it seemed, by a pair of strong hands, and shoved out all the way to the narrow shoulders and the firm rise of breast. This face, too, had been white and unmoving, but here there had been no evidence of paint, just a skin sheathed in its pallor, soon dripping with the rain.

Chapter 3

Dr Beer rose early the next morning. He dressed in front of the bedroom mirror, then went out to buy a newspaper at the local
Tabak
, and a half-dozen rolls at the corner bakery. Until recently he’d kept a housekeeper who did his laundry and cooked his meals, a woman not yet forty and smelling at all times of the scorched coffee she liked to brew, but he had dismissed her a few weeks after his wife had left, annoyed at the knowing smiles he thought he encountered amongst his neighbours and patients. Besides, there was a pleasure in unwrapping the hot rolls and putting on the water, a homely magic to the spit of percolation. His coffee was no longer burnt. He buttered the rolls and dipped them in his honey jar, the honey flecked now with golden shards of crust; opened the paper and skimmed the headlines. The war was six weeks old, and glorious; Austria a proud part of the Reich. He turned to the obituaries in search of more sombre news, then on to the feuilleton; read a theatre review, a letters page, ‘News Around Town’. Vienna was quiet, content. There was no mention of any stabbings, nor of the corpse of a dog.

The first patient called at a quarter to nine. Soon a little group of them sat in the waiting room off the front hallway, riffling magazines and exchanging gossip. Beer saw an old man troubled by gout; a grocer with corns; an ironmonger with an infected toe. A young widow of twenty-nine came to complain of breast pain, and shot him glances a hundred times more suggestive than the blank stare of the girl, whose name he had omitted to learn and who troubled him now, one hand shoved into the woman’s open blouse, his own eyes closed as though in concentration. He concluded the examination; ignored her banter, the clumsy assertions that he had such ‘gentle, gentle fingers’, wrote out the prescription for a powder that he thought might purge her if it did nothing else, and shook off the clammy hand she’d thrust so boldly in his own. A boy was next, with a cut on the knee, then an old bachelor itchy with the clap. Then it was lunchtime and he locked the door and slipped out of the coat he had donned for his professional duties; sat down at the kitchen table and ate a cold sausage with a slice of bread and a little mustard on the side.

Not long ago, Beer had hoped to establish himself as a specialist for nervous disorders. He had worked in the clinic three days a week and nurtured a growing private practice on the side. He had resigned two weeks after his wife had left, and, unable to find a big enough patient base for himself, had soon drifted into general medicine. Now he had only a handful of neurological and psychiatric cases: a woman with a phobia of open water who liked to regale him with the details of her boudoir, legs crossed and gazing up into his ceiling cobwebs; and a young man of good family plagued by inexplicable headaches. Those he saw in the afternoons, in the drawing room, where they sprawled upon a red upholstered couch.

It was the woman’s turn that day. She came at two, and overstayed the allotted hour; started speaking while he was still busy helping her out of her coat and hardly stopped through the seventy minutes of her visit, though once he startled her by pouring out a glass of water and standing by until she had drunk. He should have been listening but found his mind wandering back to Speckstein’s niece and his night-time visitor who had not shown, or else had left without a message. It had been foolish of him to write that note. He saw the woman off, finally, at a quarter past three, and stood in the hallway with his suit coat in his hands, unsure where to take his disquiet.

The doorbell rang, startled him. He was right there, not a foot from door and bell, and it stung him like a slap: that shrill, angry ringing. He jumped and feared arrest, irrationally, implausibly expected a uniform, the waving of a truncheon, neighbours staring through the cracks of their doors. Nonetheless, he opened up almost immediately; checked his breath first, and the knot of his tie, and opened the door, only to find the laundry boy with a basket in his hands: a pile of fresh linen to which was pinned the scrawl of his name. He blushed and bid the boy wait, a man really, gone twenty-five, and a mug like a horse; ran into his bedroom to collect his dirty underwear, and scoop up a half-dozen shirts he had piled upon a chair.

They stood in the hallway, exchanging the fresh for the soiled. The boy was conscientious in counting off every sock and singlet, and folded the underpants carefully over one outstretched arm, like a waiter piling on napkins. His maths was bad and it took a while, horse-face scrunched under the strain, when, all of a sudden, the fuse burnt out and left them in darkness.

‘Not again,’ the doctor cursed, and rushed the man into his living room there to finish their transaction by the light of the window. The oaf had to start over with his count: passed back whatever he had collected, so that Beer stood with linens over his arms and shoulders, and clutched in each hand a crumple of sweaty socks. Then recommenced that ponderous arithmetic, until accounts could be settled to the lad’s satisfaction and he left, basket in hand, a fistful of change jingling in his pocket.

Alone again, the doctor shook his head then smiled about the encounter; lit a cigarette and poured a brandy, found his hand still shaky with the ringing of that bell. Once calmed, he went to the kitchen and bent to one knee to retrieve a box of fuses from under the sink. He lifted it out, hesitated, and then replaced it again, his thoughts running to Speckstein, and the girl. His electricity was out, and he wished for information.

There was a place that could offer a fix to both.

Chapter 4

The janitor’s flat was on the ground floor. Beer knocked twice before he saw the sign hanging from the doorknob informing him that the man was downstairs, in the cellar, where he had a workshop of sorts and seemed to spend much of his time. The cellar entrance was in the yard, a steep concrete staircase that led down into a low-ceilinged maze. Cold, damp air drifted up, was refreshing for a moment, then fell in a chill around his frame. A curious sound showed him the way, a rhythmic click of wood on wood, like the tapping of drumsticks as they count off the time. He ducked through a doorway built too low for his height, and entered the workshop proper. Empty window frames lined one side of the room, along with some dirty panes of glass, not all of them broken. There were two workbenches and a pile of lumber; a rough bookshelf, laden with tools; a bucket of paint, its glossy surface spotted with flies.

At the centre of the room the janitor had set up a curious sort of table, rectangular in shape and no bigger than the type found at a city café, its surface sanded and polished until it was perfectly smooth. On the edges of the tabletop, travelling the length of the table but leaving open the ends, the man had attached two lengths of board that rose above the table surface and acted as boundaries. It looked as though he had taken a small bookshelf, removed top and bottom and all of the shelving, then mounted it on four sturdy legs.

It was at this structure that the child and her host were standing, each positioned at one of its narrow, open ends; each holding a tool that looked much like a carpenter’s plane, a solid wooden block growing into a fist-sized grip, but smaller in size and devoid of blades. Between them, propelled by the push of these wooden paddles, travelled a heavy wooden disc, smooth as the tabletop and gathering astonishing speeds. It was this that he had heard from the stairwell: the sound of wood hitting wood, as paddle bore down on disc and sent it shooting towards the other end. Both child and man kept their eyes on the table as he entered, brows furrowed in profound concentration. Dr Beer stood and watched, trying to fathom the rules of their game.

Its aim, it seemed, was to fire the disc past the opponents’ paddle and across the open edge of table while protecting one’s own edge from similar infringement. To this purpose they would aim the disc first at one corner, then the other; would shoot it off the wooden boundary at the sides in complicated angles, or slow the pace to a soft, quiet slide only to double it in the next flick of the wrist. There was great speed to the game, and it necessitated strength along with much skill. The doctor should have thought it ill-suited to a crippled girl.

The child stood perched on a crate, for elevation, or so he assumed. She was a skinny little thing with long blonde pigtails, her feet in gym slippers, their canvas uppers as dirty as her legs. He had seen her before, and now recognised her by the crooked run of her shoulders. The bones of her spine were visible through her skin and the buttoned back of her flimsy dress. Its colour was purple. She had placed her sailor’s collar on a pile of lumber not far from her, presumably to keep it from getting sweaty.

Her position on the box was awkward, tilted, one shoulder thrust forward and her ribcage wedged into the wood of the table. He watched her play and realised with some surprise that she was very good at the game, with quick hands and a quick eye, her pigtails dancing every time she moved the puck.