Free The Twins by Tessa de Loo Page B

touch the things on a stall full of beads, buttons, velvets, laces, silks. There she stood, endlessly dreaming; everything passed through her hands. Afterdeliberating for a long time she bought something minuscule, a pair of mother-of-pearl buttons or something. She was still so elegant . “Look,” she said once, “this is what I was like when I was young.” She pulled her sagging skin taut with the tips of her fingers . I was shocked. I didn’t recognize her like that. “Can’t I go to see Anna?” I asked her one day. “Ach du, Schätzchen, you have no idea how stubborn and narrow-minded our family is. We have absolutely no contact with them. Later, when you’re grown up, you can look for Anna on your own account. Then the two of you together won’t give a damn about that whole tribe.”’
    Anna laughed. ‘A photograph of her hung above grandfather’s chair when he was still alive – as a young girl in a white dress, her face shaded by a straw hat. Ein wunderschönes picture. That photo would be a hundred years old now. Think of it, Lotte, a hundred years! The world has never changed as radically as it has in the last hundred years. No wonder you and I are a bit confused. Let’s drink something more!’
    The layers of time were grating over each. Before the war, after the war, the depression years, a century ago … diverse landscapes that Anna was hurtling through tipsily, as though in a runaway train. One moment she was in a steam train and wisps of smoke were drifting past the window, the next moment she was sitting on bright green leatherette in a modern express train. Figures from the past were standing in the stations they whizzed past. They did not wave but looked at the phantom express with screwed-up eyes and frowns. The station in Berlin was on fire, the platforms were full of smoke and dust. Where did this journey end? At the edge of time? It left her cold. She clinked her glass against Lotte’s and toasted her health.
    ‘I also asked her …’ said Lotte.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Grandma … Aunt Elisabeth … I asked her: Did you know my father when he was young? I mean: my real father. “Your father,” she said, “was a nice, intelligent boy, the revolutionary of thefamily. I was very taken with him. That’s why I was at his funeral and you are here now, du Kleine. Ach ja, sensitive types die young and those Schweinehunde grow ancient – that is how the world is…”’ Lotte added tenderly, ‘Grandma loved swear-words.’
    ‘If only such a fairy godmother had appeared for me at that time,’ said Anna not without bitterness, ‘I would have been spared a lot of suffering.’

    Thirty-five marks per month orphan’s allowance was paid for Anna. That was a lot of money – yet Aunt Martha carried on as though she were a parasite, a blood sucker who had clamped onto the young family with two suckers. She projected onto Anna the chronic displeasure that she had brought into the marriage with her as a dowry; Anna was broken in spirit and numb from the work, and defenceless against her deviousness. Whenever Anna looked in Uncle Heinrich’s cracked shaving mirror, she said scornfully , ‘Why look in the mirror? You’re going to die anyway. Your father had tuberculosis, your mother breast cancer, you’ll get one of the two as well. Don’t fancy your chances.’ Anna, who had read many fairy-tales, recognized in her the cliché of the wicked stepmother , but the justice that always triumphed in the stories was a long time coming in reality. ‘Why do you need a new dress? Why should you drink milk? You are going to die anyway.’
    Now that all worldly needs were being strangled at birth and ridiculed, the old longing to disappear for ever seeped into her again. But to die, how did you do that? If you got a disease, it happened by itself. Intentionally instigating the change from being-there to not-being-there was more difficult. Uncertainty drove her to the church – time stolen from the pigs and