The Twins Read Free

than the truth. While she was playing in the garden, she confesses with downcast eyes, she fell against the edge of the wooden table on the grass. After he has staunched the blood quite equably, he takes her to the garden with him. ‘So,’ he says, ‘let’s see how it happened.’ The treachery of the lie now dawns on her: the garden table is so high that a girl of her stature would have to fall straight down from the sky in order to be able to strike her upper lip on its edge. ‘Ach soooo …’ says her father in a melodious tone – a melody that makes her suspicious. Between thumb and forefinger he pinches a piece of skin on her bare upper arm and it gives her a pins and needles feeling. It is the only punishment she still remembers years later, a punishment that condemns her, all her life, to a stubborn preference for the truth.
    But her wildness does not submit to being reined in so easily. Soon after that she breaks her elbow in a romp on the marble stairs in the hall. She rants and raves like a hysterical countess who hasgambled away all her possessions, backed up by Lotte, whose capacity to feel pain and panic extends symbiotically to her sister’s body. A plaster cast is fitted and the arm is hung in a sling. When Anna comes out of hospital thus adorned, Lotte bursts into tears again. No one knows whether it is from solidarity or jealousy. She only calms down when her own left arm is hung in an imitation sling improvised with a tea towel.
    Now a Christmas slide. From the moment Aunt Käthe took pity on the children she never left them. Their father married her quietly, to avoid being forced to be separated from them after he was discharged from hospital because no medical intervention could alter the clinical picture of his prognosis: a man with an infectious disease that could only be influenced by time, for good or ill, was regarded as not suited to bringing up children. To Anna and Lotte it goes without saying. Aunt Käthe is there as usual and is decorating a snow-clad tree in the room; all the branches bend under an anarchy of witches, Father Christmases, chimney sweeps, snowmen, dwarves and angels. The pungent smell of evergreen branches mixed with resin gives them a foretaste of the natural world that begins where Cologne ends. Their father’s youngest brother, Heinrich, a bony youth of seventeen, has come from his village on the edge of the Teutoburger Wald to celebrate the festival of the tree with them. He too has brought natural aromas into the house: hay and pig manure, spiced with a dash of rising damp. His image as a young, jovial uncle smashes to smithereens when, out of petulance, he garbles the words of the Christmas carols they are singing. His brother joins in with him, grinning. Suddenly they are competing with each other to find meaningless rhymes. ‘Don’t, don’t,’ Anna screams, horrified, hammering on her father’s chest, ‘the carol doesn’t go like that!’ But the men laugh at her for her orthodoxy and surpass themselves in inventiveness. Anna sings in a trembling voice in a vain attempt to get the proper version to triumph, then runs despairingly into the kitchen, where Aunt Käthe is slicing bread. ‘They are ruining the Christmas carol,’ shecries, ‘Daddy and Uncle Heini!’ Aunt Käthe enters the room like a goddess of vengeance. ‘What have you done to that child?’ Anna is picked up and calmed, handkerchiefs, a glass of water. ‘It was only a little joke,’ soothes her father, ‘the Christmas child was born nineteen hundred and twenty-one years ago, now that’s a good reason to be happy.’ He sits her on his knee and straightens the large bow on her head, which had become crooked in the consternation , ‘I’ll teach you a proper song,’ he says, ‘listen.’ In a hoarse voice, now and then interrupted by the cough, he sings the melancholy song: ‘Two Grenadiers marched to France, They had been caught in Russia …’
    The magic lantern projects a stage;