Five years later, on a Saturday afternoon in April, I was sitting on a Norton under the roof next to the workshop. It was warm. I couldn’t go in the house because no one was home. Ludwig had rung me two hours before to tell me I really had to come round. He hadn’t said why. That often happened. I always did what he told me and it was always worth it. His parents had gone away for the weekend, and his sister was spending the night at a friend’s. I’d been waiting half an hour. I no longer heard the noise from the bridge—I’d been at Ludwig’s so often and stayed the night there so many times that I didn’t notice it anymore.
When he did turn up, he wasn’t alone. He had a girl with him, a girl I vaguely knew, called Josefine. They pushed their bikes in at the gate, let them fall on the grass and came over to where I was sitting under the roof. They seemed embarrassed.
I can’t say much about Josefine. I think she was sixteen. At that point I’d never spoken to her, though I’d sometimes seen her on the street or at the open-air pool and knew she existed. Josefine stood out a little, because one of her teeth—her upper right incisor—was gold, and it glinted when she smiled. Perhaps it wasn’t really gold—I don’t know. Her family certainly didn’t have much money. She was Russian, though our teachers didn’t like to hear us say that and told us to say ‘Russian Germans’. As far as we were concerned, they were Russian. They came to us from Russia, speaking either only Russian, or else a German that sounded as if it came from deep and distant forests. They lived on the housing estate where the English soldiers had once lived with their families, and we never went there.
Josefine had two brothers, who unnerved me because they had a reputation for wildness. I can’t say for sure whether Josefine was pretty. Her face was round as the moon, and so was her bum. Her shoulders and arms made her look like a shot-putter, but she had long, dark hair, and nice slim calves and slender ankles, which I could see now as we stood under the workshop shelter below the bridge. She was wearing a frilly white blouse and a black pleated skirt that came down below the knee. They were the kind of clothes you’d wear to your confirmation—though not of course with gym shoes, which she wore without socks. She smiled and said hello.
Everyone said Josefine was simple. I was in no position to judge because, as I say, I hardly knew her. Another thing I’d heard about Josefine was that she was easy, but that shouldn’t necessarily be taken too seriously. We were at an age when we had trouble distinguishing between desire and reality when it came to girls, and I wasn’t the only one to have noticed Josefine’s breasts at the swimming pool—or the only one to have fantasised about them.
We were all waiting for something back then, and we knew exactly what it was. We had seen everything—we knew what a pussy looked like. There was a drive-in nearby and we’d often hang in the trees and watch the midnight films. The screen was four metres by eight, and they got up close with the camera. We’d talked it all over. Now it had to happen. We were seventeen, and reports were coming in every week about schoolmates who had done it—some of them younger than us. I’d sit in class looking at a girl and think: Maybe she did it last night. I’d try to work out whether there was anything special about the way she held herself, the look on her face, how she talked, or moved. But I was never sure. If I knew, I thought, it would make me a kind of accessory after the fact—only up to a point, but it would be better than nothing. If the girl I was watching happened to be sitting nearby, I’d sniff the air, trying to catch a whiff of her smell. Wasn’t there a hint of something about Corinna? Didn’t she smell different from yesterday and the day before? Somehow sweeter? It used to drive me crazy.
I wasn’t bad-looking at the time. I wasn’t particularly tall, but I was stronger than the others, more toned. I also had a reputation for being nice—friendly and fair-minded. It wouldn’t have been too hard for me to find a girlfriend. The problem was the deal that Ludwig and I had made—not that it was a problem, not really. We’d made the right decision in agreeing to be like twins. Perhaps that isn’t the right way of putting it, though. We didn’t want to be like twins—we wanted to be twins. We wanted to be absolutely identical. But because we hadn’t been born twins, we had to make ourselves the same—and part of that, of course, was going through all our most important experiences together.
‘Come along,’ Ludwig said, and I followed him to the house, leaving Josefine looking up wonderingly at the bridge. He’d told her it was eighty metres high. No sooner were the two of us in the kitchen than he began to laugh and rub his hands together. I was soon grinning, infected by his glee, and it’s even possible that I too rubbed my hands together. I’d sometimes catch myself doing it and be surprised, because it wasn’t really a habit of mine.
Eventually he put a handful of condoms on the table. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
Of course I was ready—I was in a state of permanent readiness, though I’d imagined this would all happen differently. But Ludwig was right, of course—we both had to do it with the same girl, and as soon after one another as possible. We’d even thought about doing it with a girl together, but neither of us was comfortable with the idea. What I would really have liked was to have sex with a girl I was in love with and who was in love with me, but it was impossible to find one who’d fall in love with Ludwig and me at the same time. That was one reason we were so behind.
I looked out the window and saw Josefine sitting on a motorbike. I didn’t know how Ludwig had managed to convince her—maybe she was somehow in love with us both. What did we know about Russians and their peculiarities? Perhaps we would both fall in love with Josefine that evening. Anything was possible—hadn’t I found myself thinking of her bum some nights? I looked out again at her there on the motorbike, the oily tomcat crouched on the tank in front of her as she stroked him.
‘I’m ready,’ I said.
‘I’ll go and get her, then,’ said Ludwig. He took one of the condoms and went out to her. I took the rest because I didn’t want them lying on the table when Josefine walked through the room. Then she came into the house behind Ludwig, and I watched her climb the stairs. She turned briefly, and her gold tooth glinted.
It’s hard to describe just how good it feels to know that right now, somewhere very close by, your best friend is doing something he’s been wanting to do for years. I sat at the kitchen table thinking of Ludwig—not of what was going on in his room, but of the time when we first got to know each other—everything, that is, which I described earlier. I was glad to have such a good friend, and excited at the same time. I couldn’t hear anything from Ludwig’s room, but nor did I want to. I thought of Josefine at the open-air pool and of her amazing breasts.
I was startled when the front door suddenly opened and Ludwig’s sister walked in. I jumped to my feet, though I had no reason to. She looked at me in surprise. She was wearing a floral dress again, and it’s possible that this was the moment I first saw the mole above her right breast. She didn’t seem to have changed much in the years since we’d met. A girl never changes, I’d say, as long as you look at her with the same eyes. Until then, I’d always thought of her as Ludwig’s little sister. She didn’t say much, and when she did, she usually sounded petulant. She still liked hanging around in the workshop with her father, but she no longer sat on the stool—she stood beside him, often with her feet in funny positions. Either they made a big T on the ground, or she’d be up on tiptoes. ‘She’s practising her ballet,’ Ludwig said when I asked him. I won’t pretend he didn’t say it scornfully. I suppose that’s how brothers and sisters are at that age.
I don’t think Vera and I had ever been alone in a room together before. Luckily there was no sound coming from Ludwig’s room, but to make quite sure that Vera didn’t hear anything, I began to talk in a loud voice. I said that Ludwig was up in his room having a rest because we’d overdone it at training, and it would be best if we didn’t disturb him. I was, I said, pretty tired myself—I’d been about to make myself a cup of tea—and hadn’t been expecting to see her, as I’d heard she was staying the night at a friend’s.
‘My friend’s dad came home,’ said Vera. ‘He left the family two and a half years ago, but now he’s back.’ She shrugged. Her feet made a big T on the floor.
‘What, just like that?’ I asked.
‘The doorbell rang and there he was,’ she said.
‘With two suitcases.’
‘What did your friend think? And her mother?’
I asked.
‘They were pleased.’ She shrugged again. For a while, we swapped stories about parents separating, about divorce. We had quite a repertoire and often had conversations like these. My own parents had split up four years before.
It was a tricky situation. Ludwig, I knew, was upstairs with the Russian girl, and meanwhile here I was downstairs talking to his sister about parents splitting up. I’d been so close to getting what I’d wanted for so long, and now everything was up in the air again. Then I heard the bedroom door and Ludwig came down the stairs, looking strangely grave. He ignored us, walking silently through the kitchen and out the front door. I can’t remember exactly how I got rid of his sister. I probably said that, seeing as Ludwig’s bed was free now, I’d go and have a bit of a lie-down myself, or something like that.
Josefine was asleep—or at any rate, her eyes were closed and she started when I walked into Ludwig’s room. I probably jolted her out of a dream. I think I was quite embarrassed. I stood in the middle of the room, two paces from the bed. She’d pulled the covers up to her chin and was staring at the wall opposite. It was some time before she looked at me, clearly wondering why nothing was happening.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked in her peculiar accent.
I couldn’t speak.
‘Are you scared?’ she asked.
When I still said nothing, she smiled. ‘You don’t have to be scared. Come to me.’
I stayed where I was. Then she pulled the covers off and all at once she was naked before me and I saw something I hadn’t been expecting. I’d thought we were well prepared. I knew what big breasts looked like when a woman was lying down—the way they spread softly across her chest. The dark nipples didn’t shock me, and neither did the full hips, or the broad thighs, splayed on the bed. I’d seen all that before, at the drive-in. But dense black wool between a woman’s legs—that was something I’d never seen. The women I’d seen either had a narrow strip of hair or none at all. Josefine had hair growing out of her groin almost to her bellybutton, and a little way down her thighs.
I was horrified and I was thrilled. Perhaps it made me think of something soft and moist and creeping, like moss. I’d always liked the feel of moss—I never saw it without wanting to lie down on it. I went over to Josefine, laid my head between her legs and kept it there, my eyes closed. Her pubic hair was soft and she smelt a little of rubber. Before long I felt Josefine’s fingers on my head, combing my hair.
I lay there for what seemed like forever. Nothing happened for a long time—not much, anyway. When I finally lifted my head from between her legs, I didn’t get far, because I immediately had to bury my head in her belly. I think ‘bury’ is a good word to describe what happened that afternoon. I buried my face between Josefine’s legs, in her belly, between her breasts, under her arms, in the crook of her neck. I even pushed my face against the backs of her knees—but she was ticklish there and soon shooed me away. Most of the time I lay draped across her body, motionless, my lips or tongue sometimes playing a little with her skin, her hair, her nipples, her clitoris. And though it was actually only my face that was buried, I felt as if I were completely enveloped by Josefine. It was like lying in a soft, warm, damp cave, and I felt no fear.
We did it twice. Twice she called my name. Afterwards I lay beside her for a long time, my face in the crook of her neck. It was with a shock that I realised it was dark. I’d forgotten all about Ludwig and his sister and where I was. I quickly got dressed and went downstairs. The house was dark. I went outside and looked in the workshop. I couldn’t find Ludwig. Long after Josefine had left, I sat at the kitchen table waiting. He didn’t come back. It was well past midnight when I rode my bike home.
I didn’t see him again until training on Monday. We rowed a coxless pair. Perhaps I should explain: a coxless pair is a boat without a cox designed for two rowers, each with a single oar. Ordinarily, the cox steers the boat, but in a coxless pair you work together. There’s a small steering system that the stroke—the rower closer to the stern—operates with his feet, but the more he steers, the harder it is to stay balanced. Because the rowers pull one on either side, they have to be well-matched to stop the boat from going round in circles. Ludwig rowed port and I rowed starboard. We were the ideal coxless pair: the same height, the same weight, equally strong, equally skilled technically, and we were friends, too, with the same way of thinking. In our first season, we’d won every race in the lightweight class.
In our second season we had new opponents, twin brothers from Potsdam. Twins, and especially identical twins, are particularly well-equipped to handle the coxless pair. We lost the first race and the second. The evening after the second race, we had dinner at Ludwig’s, and when we’d eaten, he said, ‘Come on, let’s go up on the bridge.’ We hadn’t done that for ages—we’d given up play by then. I followed him up the embankment and we walked along the bridge until we were about halfway across. The valley was dark—we could see the lights of the farmsteads and the small town. There was very little traffic. Ludwig pulled himself up the fence until his hips were pressed against the rail at the top, and there he stayed. It looked as if he might flip right over in the blast of wind from the next truck.
‘If I jumped now,’ he said, ‘would you jump too?’
‘Come down,’ I said. ‘It’s dangerous.’
I was just as despondent as he was—neither of us was used to losing—but it was no reason to kill yourself.
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Would you jump too?’
He reached out, stretching his arms up as high as they’d go, until his thighs were pressed against the top of the fence. I heard a truck in the distance.
‘Stop that!’ I shouted.
He got down and grabbed me by the shoulders.
‘You wouldn’t have jumped,’ he said. ‘And it’s true, losing a few races is no reason to kill yourself. But those stupid bastards are twins—get it? If we want to beat them, we have to be twins too. We can’t crawl back into the womb together, but we can become more alike in our own way—more than we’ve ever been. We have to do the same things, want the same things, think the same things.’ He was shouting. ‘And if one of us wants to jump off this bridge, for whatever reason, that’s reason enough for the other to jump too, right? Isn’t that what you want?’
It was, and that evening I felt happy. We were friends, and soon we would be twins too.
I want to make clear what Ludwig’s words meant to me. We were sixteen at the time. We thought we were ugly, that we were repulsive, that no one wanted us around, but we desperately hoped that we were wrong, that there were others who might see us differently. At no other age do such great doubts and such high hopes follow in such quick succession—it’s almost unbearable. And then someone comes along and says: I want to be just like you. What an incredible feeling that is! We were so unsure of ourselves that everyone else was a threat. Whenever you saw anyone in a new jacket, you wondered whether it meant a death sentence for all your jackets—whether you, too, didn’t have to have that jacket immediately. We listened to every word the others said, how they said it, their exact intonation, trying to work out whether we’d found the new word, the cool word, the right way to say it. We had to be fast—we were always anxious, always vigilant. Having a twin—someone who never undermines you, because whatever he does or says or wears is always yours too—would free you from that constant anxiety. I think that’s what Ludwig was getting at.
From then on I went home only to sleep, and sometimes not even that. We spent almost every waking moment together, watching TV, playing the same computer games, reading the same books, eating the same size servings of the same meals, and sharing all our thoughts. We lost another two races, but then we won all the rest that season. That was the year before we did it with Josefine.
‘I rang you a few times,’ I said as we changed for training.
‘I wasn’t in,’ he said.
The boathouse was small and cramped—there weren’t even changing rooms. We changed in the workshop, which smelled of sweat and rowlock grease. Our weights room was there too, though we only had a beer-tent bench and a barbell with rusty weights—and, hanging from the ceiling, a wooden plank we were supposed to touch when we did straight jumps. There were a dozen boats in the boatshed, old clinker-built rowing boats for the most part, two or three plastic racing skiffs and our coxless pair—the only new boat. It had been bought especially for us, because we were the club’s only true talent. There was also a small speedboat for the trainers, but we usually went out without a trainer and did our own thing.
We carried our boat to the river, lowered it into the water, laid the oars in the rowlocks, got in and pushed off from the jetty. Ludwig was the stroke and sat with his back to me. We planned to row a long way that day, ten kilometres, at a high stroke rate. We could row east or west. Rowing west took longer because the weir lay that way, and we had to go through the lock first. We usually went west anyway, because we both felt the pull of the bridge that was waiting for us in that direction. If we didn’t meet the riverboat, we had the river to ourselves. The rowlocks creaked, the water lapped the oars. A grey river between green banks. As we passed under the bridge, we both glanced up.
At milestone 43/7 I saw Josefine sitting on the bank. She was wearing her confirmation clothes again and she smiled at me, her gold tooth flashing in the sun. I was glad to see her. I had thought of her all day Sunday and was bursting to tell Ludwig what it had been like with her and to hear how it had gone for him.
‘You’re rocking the boat,’ Ludwig hissed.
‘Concentrate.’
I hadn’t even turned my head—I’d only looked at Josefine out of the corner of my eye, though naturally she was occupying my thoughts. When I think about it, I suppose Ludwig’s warning was a sign that we were growing closer, becoming more like twins. He sensed even the smallest changes, and that was as it should be. And he was right, of course. We were training—we didn’t want any distraction.
When we were back at the weir, panting heavily, our breath perfectly in time, our oars lying on the water, Ludwig said, ‘You’d better forget that Russian slut—she’s not worth bothering with.’ We’d just rowed ten kilometres flat out and were completely shattered, and perhaps Ludwig was still a bit annoyed with me for losing focus, even if it was only for a moment, so I don’t think you can read too much into what he said that day.
I tried to put Josefine from my mind. I saw her another couple of times on the riverbank, but after that I didn’t see her again. Perhaps she was waiting for me to approach her—I’ve got no idea. It’s true, we’d had a good time together, but what did that mean? I forgot about her in the end—I suppose we were really too different anyway. But something lingered, something you might describe as a general feeling of longing, the desire for a similar experience, though not with Josefine—no, there were so many other girls. But whenever I brought it up, Ludwig immediately changed the subject. Not that he’d been all that different in the past—he’d never shown much interest in such things. Perhaps it was because of me that he’d brought Josefine round that day. All the more reason to be grateful to him. I tried to suppress my longing, and for a time I was pretty successful.