The Quiet Twin (30 page)

When Otto had moved into the building, he’d recognised Speckstein’s name at once; had been beset by a renewed rage at what had happened to his sister; then had dismissed it as the coincidence it was, and had henceforth thought of the Professor only as the eyes and ears of a hostile State from which one did best to hide. Then Beer had shown up with his odd questions, and Zuzka had brought him a page from a newspaper as though it held the answer to some urgent riddle. In the club, when she’d come to visit, he’d paid it no heed and assumed only that she came to him as a woman comes to a man. It was only after he had returned to his rooms that he’d read it, his make-up running down the clogged and stinking drain.

Otto was not a thinking man. ‘Your stomach does your thinking,’ his mother had once told him, hugging him from behind and placing her hands across the broad front of his chest. And also: ‘Your stomach is quite clever.’ She had not praised him often, and so he remembered it, trusted in his stomach and the pressure of his glands, and looked upon all his actions as both necessary and good, with a satisfaction unknown to a more considered man. What became clear to him upon his reading of the newspaper report with its vivid pictures was that Zuzka mistook Eva for the girl Evelyn, who had not dared to speak the name of her tormentor, but mutely pointed at the Professor when asked if he was present in the room. He understood, too, that this was why she thought he’d killed the dog. It was impossible to calculate what would be the harm or benefit of disabusing her of the notion. Denial might cost him her favour, and he feared her retribution, for there were things he sought to hide more damaging than the slaying of a mutt. She professed a hatred for her uncle, to whose party he now found himself invited, and whom he held to wield great power. All he wanted was to live: to eat, and drink, and maybe poke this girl who was so young and pretty, smelled of perfumed soap, with not a callus on her little hand; and not be thrown into some prison, or go tempt bullets in some foreign war. His stomach told Otto to remain silent and admit to nothing. At most he would trade a charade of slaughter for the favours of her fanny, though it was as she had said:
She mustn’t get pregnant
.

Nor must she complain.

It’d be best if he held his new act in reserve: dog killer, to be performed – if ever – only to a naked audience of one.

A sound reached him, still upended, sent him spinning from his handstand into a tumbler’s roll. Someone stood outside the door. He’d heard some steps upon the stairs, too dimly to be certain whether they were walking up or down, and now they had stopped some inches from his door. Otto did not hesitate. He took hold of the handle and swung open the door, reached to grab her by the wrist and pull her into the room; touch her, kiss her, before she could object. His hand shot forward and hit the brim of a black felt hat that hovered in front of him at the height of his navel. Beneath it, on the square yard or so of landing, kneeled a man, fat, tuxedoed, busy with his left shoelace. The man looked up into the greasepainted face, eyes like tadpoles buried behind cheeks of fat, then re-aligned the angle of his hat.

‘Good-evening,’ he said. ‘I was-just la-cing my shoe.’

Otto found himself laughing in response.

‘You’re the trumpet player. You gave me quite a scare.’

‘Herr Yuu,’ the fat man nodded. ‘You would-not have in your kit-chen some-thing to eat?’

‘To eat?’

‘Yes. Or a glass-of beer per-haps.’

‘I haven’t a thing.’

‘A-pity. I had-no dinner.’

They studied each other a moment longer until Otto turned to snatch his cigarettes from the bed.

‘You want one?’ he asked and proffered the packet.

‘Much o-bliged.’

They stood smoking in the stairwell, eyeing each other’s clothes and recognising each other as performers. When they were done, Herr Yuu offered him his hand. Otto shook it.

‘You are-a clown?’

‘A mime. I don’t speak.’

‘No voice.’ Herr Yuu nodded. ‘Have-you used mu-sic in your-act?’

‘Never.’

‘Per-haps it is some-thing you-should try.’

‘You have your trumpet with you?’

‘All-ways.’

And Yuu came in and sat on his bed; laughed at the girl in the body-cream ad whose breasts looked inflated like balloons, and played a slur, a whisper, then a thump for every step that Otto took and every transformation of his face. He played shyly at first, then with growing confidence, until they moved in perfect harmony and it was to Otto as though it was his body that was playing the trumpet, and that every crease of brow sang with a certain pitch and temper; and little trills to greet each flutter of his glove.

Chapter 8

And it was this music that greeted her, not the same night but the next, past three o’clock and less than forty hours to the party. It was cold out, no longer raining, the street lamp shedding orange light. The child had a key to the building’s front door, but her fingers were frozen and it took her a while to work the lock and slip into the hallway. There was no hurry to her movements. She had already spent two idle hours in the yard in which they’d found the dog; had lain down briefly (though the ground was muddy) in that sideways sprawl that bared the stomach, thinking with this gesture rather than her head. To think – to speak! – was dangerous, could set on you like the shadow of the Wolf (from the age of four or five she had pictured it as never more than a dark shadow, and in that darkness lived a yellow eye). Her dirty brow was flushed with fever. Cold sores caught the snot upon her upper lip.

The chill had driven her across the street, and drove her on now, into the courtyard.

She looked around. The yard seemed small to her, as though shrunk. Someone had overturned the rock under which she used to hunt for earthworms. She stuck a toe in that place, felt clammy earth and the twisted knot of a big root. A neighbour had chained a bike against the chestnut tree, and a pile of leaves sat clumped together on its seat. On the metal frame which was used to beat the dust off carpets there sat a magpie, chattering. There were no people around.

For that, at least, she was grateful.

She feared this place, feared conversation, words that would make official all she already knew: and yet her eyes strayed upwards, first to Zuzka’s window, then to Anton Beer’s, both of which were dark. As for her father’s kitchen window, she avoided it, for was it not possible that he was still awake, drinking, the curtains open and his merriment visible for all to see? A memory came to her, brisk and tidy like a postcard, of the moment when he’d beaten her for having stolen his knife, then bought her a handkerchief patterned in orange, in black, and in blue. She wore it now, over her hair and ears, though at this instant she pulled it down and thrust it in the pocket of her dress, as though to hide the present was to hide the thought of him (of him, of knives, of darkness shrouding their four windows at which she laboured not to look, and failed, and failed, and failed again).

It was then – one hand in her pocket, eyes darting from the windows to the yard – that she caught the music, that peal of a trumpet coming from an unaccustomed room. The trumpet continued, bent the note into a sort of snort; farted, apologised, whistled away the sudden stench. The girl did not smile. Her naked feet were wrapped in rags.

A light caught her notice, no more than a glimmer, coming from the cellar door. It had been closed but had not locked. The thought of the cellar seemed to cheer the girl, and for an instant her arm described a motion in which the wrist flicked away from her at the height of her chest. It was as though she were striking a match away from her body, or throwing a marble underarm across the yard. Her tongue followed it with a single click. She walked to the door, pushed it open, descended the stairs. There was nobody in the janitor’s workshop, but noise and light spilled from the door at its back. En route, passing the game table, she noticed a wicker cage sitting on top. She ran up to it, and stared with great emotion at the animal that crouched inside, a leaf of lettuce between delicate paws. Five more steps brought her to the half-closed door. She stopped to look through the gap, saw two men, one of them the janitor, both bending low over a bath tub. Their arms were cut off by the bath tub’s rim; they wore aprons, were cursing, shirts upturned to the elbow and beyond. When they straightened, their hands and wrists were slick with dark blood; they wiped it into rags before it had a chance to stain their clothes, though one of them, coughing, held on to a clump of solid, dripping flesh, mottled and spongy, like a large ball of moss. The girl saw it, turned around and left.

Outside, a voice screamed down into the yard. ‘Quiet, for God’s sake,’ it screamed. ‘There’re honest people trying to sleep here.’

As for the trumpet: it sang on.

Chapter 9

Frau Vesalius woke her. She did not knock or announce herself, but simply stepped up to her bed and pulled off the bedding, exposing her, the nightgown riding up beyond her hip. She woke from dreams – something about a blind man peeling potatoes, an insurmountable pile, and in her nose the moist and cloying smell of dirt – then saw the housekeeper, those mocking eyes aglow with something wholly new. Assuming she was still asleep, the old woman began to prod her shoulder with one knee, all the while whispering her name. Zuzka flailed, leapt out of bed, then noticed the girl, half hanging from Vesalius’s hand, dirty, writhing in the light of the housekeeper’s lone candle.

‘Lieschen!’ she exclaimed; kneeled to crush her in a hug, but saw the girl shiver and withdraw, her small, twisted body struggling in Vesalius’s grip.

‘I found her outside the door. She was scratching it. Sitting on the floor and scratching it. Like a dog.’

It was hard to tell whether Vesalius was disgusted or moved by Lieschen’s behaviour; she pulled at her like an angler hauling in his catch, the girl’s arm taut and straining at the joints.

‘She won’t say a word, the stupid thing.’

‘Leave her be.’

Quickly, interposing her body between the girl and the old woman, Zuzka gathered Lieschen’s head into her stomach.

‘Let her go, I said.’

Vesalius did, and the girl slumped in Zuzka’s arms, then slid on to the floor. Her mouth was encircled by sores, mud stuck to her clothes and hair, the childish eyes filled only with suspicion. She whispered something. Zuzka fell to the ground beside her, pressed her ear to her lips.

‘A bath tub full of blood,’ she mumbled. She was having nightmares.

‘What time is it?’ Zuzka asked the housekeeper, who had not moved and was staring down at them, massaging the hand that had held up the girl.

‘After four.’

‘He makes them into sausage. Down in the cellar,’ the girl whispered, then hummed a snatch from a popular song.

‘I will go bring her to the doctor,’ Zuzka decided.

‘I can take her up if you like.’

‘No.’ Zuzka pulled a skirt and cardigan over her nightgown. Her eyes never left the prostrate girl. ‘She doesn’t trust you.’

Vesalius flushed at this last comment, but did not reply. When she had finished dressing, Zuzka pulled Lieschen up by the armpits, marched her out ahead of her. In the hallway she slipped into a coat and wrapped a shawl around the girl, both to warm her and to hide her state of disarray. Zuzka had not seen Beer since the night Lieschen’s father had been found. It was no longer clear to her who had avoided whom.

They mounted the stairs. The girl was hot with fever and sluggish in her movements. She walked ahead of Zuzka, was prodded on by Zuzka’s hand at her back, and kept repeating odd snatches of phrase under her breath. Her gait was oddly clumsy; she had tied some rags around her feet, and they kept slipping off and trailing, until Zuzka bent down and tied them in a messy bow. Up close Lieschen smelled of wet clothes and unwiped bum.

When they passed the stairwell window, the trill of a trumpet reached them from afar. It was Otto and the Chinaman making merry behind half-drawn curtains. ‘Rehearsing,’ he’d told her when she called that morning and found them laughing, sitting tired on his bed. She had allowed him to touch her breasts once the Chinaman was gone. He’d unwrapped them, pinched a nipple, then slipped his knuckles in her crotch. ‘Dogs have bones in their peckers,’ he’d told her while she buttoned up her blouse. ‘It’s difficult to draw a knife across.’ She had left when he’d asked her would she lend him some cash.

They reached the door, and Zuzka pressed down on the bell. Nothing happened. She tried again, and was again met by silence: no ringing could be heard on the other side. A dim memory stirred in her of Beer complaining about the house’s faulty wiring. Annoyed, she knocked instead. The thick door seemed to swallow up her rap rather than amplify it. She knocked harder, hurt her knuckles, but got no response. Next to her, the girl sat down awkwardly, her twisted neck pulling her chin into her chest. She might have been crying, or fallen asleep. Zuzka knocked again, then remembered the key Beer had given her an age ago, in case of emergency. She wondered could it be that he had been arrested. All at once she was angry with him, for not being there when she needed him.

She searched her pockets, she was wearing the same coat. The key was rattling with the small change, was marked by a black leather string. She slipped it into the lock and entered, reached out for the light switch and flicked it, to no avail. There was no electricity.