Free The Twins by Tessa de Loo Page A

of Orange. He did his best to conceal his contempt, stroking his moustache with a pointed index finger. One of the guests became so addicted to the debates that he came back to philosophize every Saturday evening until the bottom of the gin bottle showed: Professor Koning, lecturer in colonial history at the University of Amsterdam. Lotte’s father, who had a child-like, unsocialist respect for authority in the province of learning, was very proud of this friendship, which went so far that the professor bought a thatched house on the other side of the wood.
    On the Queen’s birthday, her father refused to hang the flag on the water-tower. But a prominent member of the provincial council , who lived in the neighbourhood and took a stroll in the wood every day, reported his negligence. ‘Come on,’ said his wife the following year, ‘hang out the flag, otherwise we’ll get into trouble.’ ‘Preposterous,’ he protested, ‘to hang out the flag for a perfectly ordinary woman.’ ‘You’re talking about the Queen.’ She looked like a queen herself, in her cream-coloured shantung dress, proud, charming and unrelenting. The children supported her, and had decorated their bicycles with conifer branches and orange lanterns: ‘Everyone hangs out the flag, Dad.’ He sniffed: the masses! ‘If you won’t do it I will.’ His wife marched off with large strides; he followed behind angrily. At the door of the water-tower he grabbed her and turned her round. He went in, jaws clenched.
    An inspector came to the school to compile a register of the pupils. He stood in front of the class with a list: they had to stand up one by one and say their names. In a flat, routine voice he added: ‘And what does your father do?’ They answered without faltering. Lotte owned to the surname of her Dutch parents absent-mindedly: Rockanje. But she stared at him open-mouthed without saying anything when it came to her father’s profession. ‘Lotte,’ said the mistress affably, ‘you do know what your fatherdoes?’ It took a great effort of strength to emit the words: ‘I d-don’t yet k-know.’ Her head was ready to burst. Did she have to list everything her father did? Where ought she to begin? The inspector bypassed this hitch in the machinery and continued his checking with a neutral expression. Suddenly Lotte had an inspiration. She raised her finger, ‘I k-know it now.’ ‘Well,’ said the mistress and inspector in unison, ‘what is your father then?’ ‘Tower watchman for the Queen!’ she cried without stuttering.

    ‘If grandfather had known that you had gone straight into a Communist nest …’ cried Anna with hilarity. ‘What a joke!’
    ‘But my mother was against it. “Don’t think,” she said to him, “that the workers will be more humane if they seize power.” She would sometimes pull him down petulantly from his pink cloud when he wouldn’t leave off his glorification of Marx and kept harping on righteously about money and work. “Try to live like that yourself, dear. Only fine words come out of your mouth.”’
    An old man came in, stamping his boots, snow on his bushy eyebrows . His watery blue eyes timidly assessed the clientèle. He left a track of melting snow behind him on the way to the counter. Lotte had red blotches on her cheeks from the Ratafia de Pommes. Anna’s eyes were shining. Lotte’s old-fashioned, precise German sounded like music to her ears, interspersed now and then with a Cologne word that had gone out of fashion long ago.
    ‘That Schicki-Micki type,’ she said, ‘who fetched you from Cologne, what kind of a person was she?’
    Lotte stared outside the window. ‘I went to stay with her in Amsterdam from time to time. If you looked from the living-room into the mirror by the window you could see the Albert Cuyp market. In the mornings, we went to the market together while Grandpa went to the barber to be shaved. First she bought meat and vegetables. But her real aim was to