Serpents lurk under the Flowers

‘I’m sorry that you lost your mother,’ said the surgeon. ‘Please accept my sincere condolences.’

There was an uncomfortable silence before he continued. ‘I’m not entirely convinced, Cain and Abel, that you understand this operation. We seldom perform surgery on conjoined twins, or Siamese twins as they are called, approaching twenty years of age. As happens to the younger patients, some body parts will go to one of you, and they will be missing from the other.’

Cain and Abel were restless, sitting on the bench in the dreary room at the clinic. It was a plastic bench – the wooden chairs in the clinic were too small for them.

‘Do you understand that one of you will have two lower limbs and genitalia? That will be you, Cain. You, Abel, will have only a left lower limb after the surgery.’

There was a flash in Cain’s eyes. Neither of them said a word.

‘Each of you will have an independent and normally functioning brain and heart. From that point of view, I expect that things will go well for you both, although there is a risk with every operation that complications may follow.’

‘I understand that,’ said Abel quietly. There was a cunning smile on Cain’s face.

‘Don’t you have a relative who could give you advice about this decision?’ asked the surgeon. ‘It’s a major and dangerous operation.’

‘We’re over sixteen,’ said Cain, too quickly. ‘We can sign our own operation consent form.’

‘Our mother didn't want it,’ said Abel.

Cain elbowed his brother Abel savagely, ‘Shut ... I want it … we want it!’

A few months later, they were adding to the words on the gravestone. They put Abel’s name below his mother’s and ‘her beloved son’.

I heard that Cain drank too heavily in the hotel after the funeral. He tried to steal the money collected for medical research and pestered one of the waitresses.

‘Serpents lurk under the flowers.’ Robert Walser, 1926.