The Quiet Twin (42 page)

The regional court tried him for vagrancy, assault, and the carrying of forged identification papers. A biometric examination revealed him to be hereditarily tainted; legal records unearthed a prior conviction for assault. He went to a labour camp rather than prison. After nineteen months of incarceration, he was given the option of joining a penal military unit. By October that year, he was sitting in a trench outside Leningrad, a minute cog in the machinery of Operation Barbarossa.

Lieschen, meanwhile, had remained obstinately silent and was transferred to a Bregenz orphanage. On the night of her arrival, the train was delayed due to a derailing further up the line. Lieschen arrived too late to join the other children for their dinner, and was brought straight to the dormitory. The big room held about thirty cots. Each had a number. The blanket she was given scratched, and when she woke the next morning, a ring of girls had collected around her and were laughing and pointing at her hunchback.

In accordance with institutional policy Lieschen was tested for idiocy at the end of that week. The test was administered by a slim woman of fifty, her hair half hidden under a nurse’s cap. Her face was wrinkled and drawn, but she had the most remarkable eyes, green and lively and kind. Lieschen was asked to answer a list of questions. The first of these read: ‘Can you name the twelve months of the year?’ The nurse cautioned her that it was of the utmost importance that she answer all the questions to the best of her abilities. But Lieschen just sat there, staring up into those eyes, and a shy, fleeting smile brushed over her lips.

Chapter 4

On the day of Speckstein’s funeral, Dr Anton Beer ran into Yuu, the trumpeter, as the latter came walking into the building. Beer asked Yuu for a word. Their conversation was brief.

‘You gave me up,’ Beer complained.

‘I’m a-fraid so.’

‘Will you do it again?’

‘I do-not like to med-dle.’

‘You didn’t seem to mind the first time.’

‘I did-mind, Dr Beer. But I-was hung-ry and I nee-ded to find work.’

‘Did Speckstein help you with that?’

‘He gave-me a letter of intro-duc-tion. It-has proved use-ful.’

‘For what it’s worth, I did not kill him.’

Yuu bowed and brushed past him without another word.

That afternoon, Beer decided to teach Eva how to speak. One at a time, he held up the letters of the alphabet he had drawn on to pieces of cardboard, and instructed her to blink when he reached the one she wished to use. The idea had come to him several weeks previously, but he had put it into practice only with reluctance. Now he embarked on it methodically, going through the cards with great patience and then a second time, thinking that she might have missed a cue. But Eva just stared at him, big solemn eyes. After he had worked his way through the alphabet a third time, Beer gathered up the cards and left the room.

The next day Beer threw the hand-drawn letters in the bin. He did not mention them again.

Beer called his wife. Because he was afraid that all foreign calls were being monitored, he used a public telephone and called collect. A man answered and told him she was out. When he enquired whether a little girl had arrived along with his letter, the stranger told him she had not. He wrote to his wife that evening, and two weeks later received his wife’s answer informing him that neither Otto nor Lieschen had made it through.

On the 3rd of January 1940, Eva died. It was a time of dark nights: a total blackout had been ordered for the city in anticipation of bombs that would not fall for another four years. Eva had caught the flu Beer had contracted over Christmas. She succumbed in a matter of days. He had never much cared for the phrase, but now he felt its comfort: ‘She had lost all will to live.’ Getting rid of her body proved surprisingly easy. Beer claimed she was a vagrant whom he had found on his doorstep the previous night; by the time he had examined her, it was clear that there was no more need for an ambulance. There had been no identity card and nobody came to claim the body; one assumed she may have been a Jew. Many a colleague commended Beer’s charity when he agreed to cover the funeral expenses.

Eva was buried on the 5th of January. Afterwards, stripping the bed, and flipping the mattress, Beer discovered underneath the iron bed-frame a bottle of beer that had rolled there on the night of Teuben’s death. He sat on the floor, clutching the bottle in both his hands. It was only then that he allowed himself to weep.

All week he lay awake at night and listened to the sound of Eva walking up and down the flat. She never spoke to him. He spent many hours wishing that one day she would.

Beer took to drinking in a bar. Even so, he rarely got drunk. In November of 1940 he was sitting there, clutching a letter. He was joined at his table by a veteran of the Great War whose split-open skull had been mended with the help of a steel plate. They exchanged greetings, then drank their beers in silence. After a while, Beer started to cry. The man looked at him with interest.

‘It’s nothing,’ Beer told him. ‘I’m suffering from reminiscences.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Nothing. Something I read. In a book that’s now forbidden.’

The letter he was holding was his notice of conscription. He was to report to the barracks in Krems the next day at noon. When he locked up the door to his apartment early the next morning, he felt a weight shift from his shoulders. Behind the door a pair of naked feet walked steadily from bedroom to waiting room and back, a somnambulist’s step, careless and light.

Chapter 5

Four months after the laundry boy’s cast had come off, he was arrested for the attempted rape of a fifteen-year-old girl who was taking a walk in the Volksgarten at dusk. After a week spent in investigative custody he was let go again. The girl’s account contained serious contradictions; it was discovered she was sexually active and had expected to meet a lover in the park. Police records indicated that the laundry boy had been investigated before but did not specify the charge. The two detectives who had dealt with his case were both dead. One had fallen out of a window, the other had died of cancer of the bowel.

In November of 1940, on the same day Dr Beer received his conscription notice, the laundry boy, too, was asked to present himself at the barracks in Krems. They met in the exercise yard. Neither of them acknowledged their acquaintance. Despite being described as belonging to ‘inferior stock’, the laundry boy soon distinguished himself as a soldier and was awarded the Iron Cross. He was active in the eastern campaign and transferred to a special commando. His precise duties remain unknown.

Chapter 6

In the months from September 1939 to May 1940, the janitor spent an average of one night a week making sausages. Neurath supplied the meat, blood and intestines. The factory he was watching at night was adjacent to a knacker’s yard. He was able to steal a few buckets’ worth of meat a week. The janitor supplied the workspace. Theirs was a cottage industry, small-scale and inefficient. But the economics were simple. Meat had been rationed virtually from the beginning of the war. With increasing demand on the various fronts, and an increasing number of farm workers conscripted into the
Wehrmacht
, domestic supply would shrink. The janitor had seen it happen before: during the Great War, considerable profits had been made on the black market. The two men agreed to hoard their sausage until prices were at their peak. Only occasionally would they sell off a few pounds. Anton Beer received a kilo of pepper salami on Christmas Eve, in grateful acknowledgement of his discretion: he accepted the parcel while feverish with flu. Frau Vesalius bought ten marks’ worth in November 1939 in order to supply her employer’s party with sufficient food. Neurath took a pound or two along whenever he went whoring. The janitor traded sausages for schnapps. He had a nephew who had set up a still in his garden shed, and had contacts with a farmer who supplied him with potatoes and a little grain.

In the May of 1940, Neurath succumbed to pneumonia and died after protracted hospitalisation. With his death, the janitor’s supply of animal matter dried up for good. By this time the two men had produced some four hundred kilos of horsemeat salami. They had stored them by suspending them from the beams of the janitor’s workroom ceiling: a forest of sausages hanging like wind chimes across the expanse of the room. The janitor liked to walk among them, his shoulders brushing the waxed pieces of string they had used to tie off each length of gut, and savour the smell. In one corner stood the old bathtub they had used to mix the meat. In wistful moments, deep in his cups, he would sit in it and talk to the dog.

He dreamed of it sometimes. In his dreams the dog was always licking his hands. It had licked them when he’d given it the piece of liver he had spiked with arsenic, unperturbed by the strange taste. First though, he had fetched the knife; had cut the dog loose from where Speckstein had tied it up in the yard; had held on to the rope and led it down into his cellar; the old dog panting, struggling to keep pace. On the stairs it had lost control of its bladder: crouched and pissed, joints so stiff it whimpered when it moved. Downstairs, in his workshop, on the old newspapers he had spread out upon the floor, it’d accepted the liver and licked his hands; shivered, fell over, the blind eye cloudy, rolling once between its red, infected lids. He had thought it dead, or dazed, and thought it best to cut its throat. He pricked it, fumbled, found the dog come back to life, its gap-toothed mouth clamping round the jacket he then wore. They fought like two men in a bar brawl, each struggling to pin the other with his weight. Only one of them had a knife. He thrust and slashed and then he hacked, found the soft side of the belly, dog guts spilling near his face. In his dream there rose the smell of dog shit, oozing, spreading, fresh from the tap. He wrapped the beast in an old blanket and carried it out like a bag of trash. A heave and a push sent it sailing over the gate into the Pollaks’ abandoned yard. On the way back into the building, he ran into the trumpeter: his jacket torn and bloody from the fight. They passed each other without speaking. In his dreams, sometimes, the fat man smiled and put a cornet to his firm and puckered lips. A single note, high and bleating, it always whistled him awake. He would sit up then, raise his hand to his nose, and sniff it for the telltale smell of Walter.

In the spring of 1944, Frau Vesalius dropped by for a visit. She and the janitor had seen each other on and off, enough so as to remain friendly, and she wished to trade an old pocket watch for however much sausage the janitor would think it worth. When she came to call at his ground-floor flat – huffing a little, having grown stouter with the years – he received her in his undershirt and thrown-on trousers. He smelled of cigarettes and idleness; the rotten fumes of half-fermented wine. His workshop had long been converted into a bomb shelter. The remaining sausage was stored under his bed. They sat down at his kitchen table and he poured out two glasses from a clay bottle. It wasn’t long before he complained of not being able to sleep.

‘Why not?’ she asked.

‘I dream,’ he answered, and told her about the dog.

She never even flinched. ‘Why did you do it?’ was all she wanted to know.

The janitor waved one hand in a gesture meant to encompass many things: the dog’s rheumatic, painful stumbles; the telltale trail of urine that would follow its passage up and down the building’s flights of stairs.

‘It was old,’ he said, ‘and I was sick of cleaning.’

She shrugged, poured herself another glass of wine.

‘You got away with it.’

He nodded. ‘Yuu knew. And Beer. They never talked.’

‘The doctor?’

‘Yes. He came down here one morning and he knew everything. How I’d gone looking for Lieschen and found Grotter’s body in his bedroom; left the front door open for someone else to call it in. First thing he says to me is this: “I know you killed the dog,” he says. “Down here. In this very room.” He said you heard it through your pipes.’

‘My pipes?’

‘Your radiator pipes. They lead back here. He said they carried up the sound.’

‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘I remember telling him that. But I had no idea. What else did he say?’

‘Not much. All he wanted to know was did I have a bathtub full of blood? I showed him the workshop and he stood there, shaking his head. “Well,” he said, “you scared the little girl.” And then he left without another word.’

They drank some more, and the janitor sold Vesalius four pounds of sausage. On the way out, he held on to her hand and would not let her go.

‘I still don’t know what all that fuss was about,’ he said, drunk and tired and defeated. ‘After all – it was only a dog.’

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘It was only a dog.’

She pulled herself loose from his hand and stumbled drunkenly back into the street. Night was falling, and in the distance she heard the first of the air-raid sirens raise its howl at the moon. She quickened her pace, hoping to arrive home before she’d have to take refuge in an unknown shelter, her feet slipping on the rain-slick cobbles, rushing, cursing, stumbling to be safe.