Two Brothers

by Ben Elton

  Wolfgang was of course somewhat deflated at Frieda’s reaction to what he’d imagined was wonderful news.

  ‘What’s rickets and malnutrition got to do with my new job?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing really. Except that with the city slowly starving to death it’s nice that one big kid got his own club to play with, that’s all.’

  ‘And you’re saying that it’s Kurt’s fault the country’s completely fucked, are you?’

  ‘Don’t swear. The boys might be awake. They’re picking things up you know.’ Frieda continued to tick and cross boxes on the forms she was working on.

  ‘Well, there speaks the great radical! Swearing is the language of the proletariat, isn’t it? I thought you were supposed to be all for the working bloody class?’

  ‘I want a fairer world, not a coarser one, Wolf.’

  ‘You sound like your mother.’

  ‘And that’s a criticism, is it?’

  ‘You decide.’

  ‘Wolf, I’m just asking you to watch your language a bit. Edeltraud told me that a couple of days ago in the Volkspark an old gentleman patted Otto on the head and Ottster told him to fuck off.’

  ‘Good for him. You don’t mess around with a man’s hair, that’s well known. They’d kill you for it in the south side of Chicago.’

  ‘Edeltraud thought it was funny, which is of course half the problem.’

  Wolfgang lit up another Lucky, his fourth of the morning, but with the money he would now be earning he could afford to smoke as many as he liked.

  ‘Look, I don’t want to talk about Edeltraud, or old gits in the park. I want to know why you seem to feel that my new job’s got something to do with you treating kids for rickets.’

  ‘Come on, Wolf,’ Frieda said, putting away her papers and taking her cup and plate to the sink where she managed to crush a cockroach with a serving spoon. ‘You know very well that all these people getting rich quick is making a terrible situation worse. If your Kurt can afford to buy his own nightclub he must have got the money from somewhere.’

  ‘What? From starving children?’

  ‘Indirectly.’

  ‘He got it from nowhere, Frieda!’ Wolfgang replied angrily. ‘He borrows money and he buys things, then he waits for the mark to go down and pays back the debt. Simple jazz economics. Wish I had the guts to do it. He didn’t get rich flogging old ladies’ jewellery in Belgium, he’s just smart, that’s all.’

  Frieda sat down again and tried to smile.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, Wolf. I’m being unfair, I know that. It’s just very hard at work. I never thought my first job as a doctor would be watching children die. You know TB’s up 300 per cent on pre-war levels?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know, as it happens. I haven’t had time to study the city’s medical statistics. I’ve been busy working all night making sure my own kids don’t starve. And my wife for that matter.’

  Frieda took his hand across the table and squeezed it.

  ‘Yes. I know. And of course I’m glad about your new boss. It’s terrific that he likes your music.’

  ‘You know how much I hated trotting out tea dance music in Wannsee and Nikolassee for the old ladies,’ Wolfgang said, ‘but I did it because we need to eat and because you want to work in a public-funded medical centre where they pay you bugger all.’

  ‘I know. I know,’ Frieda conceded.

  ‘And now I’ve actually got a gig I enjoy, I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘I am. I am pleased, Wolf, and I mean it, I’m sorry. Sometimes my work gets to me, that’s all. And I am grateful for how hard you work for us, you know that.’ She leant across the table and kissed him. ‘It’s not quite how your marriage plan was supposed to work out, is it? I seem to recall I was going to support you.’

  ‘Yes, you were.’

  ‘A jazz man supporting a doctor.’ Frieda smiled. ‘Only in Germany! Only in Berlin.’

  Hot Hot Hot!

  Berlin, 1923

  EVERYBODY CAME TO the Joplin.

  High life. Low life. Good guys. Bad guys.

  Plenty of beauties, plenty of beasts.

  From day one the place simply throbbed with easy money, booze, sex, drugs and jazz.

  The sex and the drugs were supplied principally by Kurt’s friend Helmut the ‘queer pimp’, whom Wolfgang now discovered dealt in narcotics as well as prostitutes.

  He regularly offered Wolfgang both.

  ‘Take your pick,’ Helmut loved to say expansively, pointing out various exquisite young girls (and boys) who were club regulars and whom Wolfgang had no idea were prostitutes. ‘Take two and make yourself a sandwich. Don’t worry, they’re all clean as whistles. Six months ago they were at finishing schools; now, I’m afraid, Daddy’s poor and growing girls and boys must eat.’

  Wolfgang politely declined the offer of sex but he was happy to accept the occasional chemical stimulant. They were long nights and the trumpet is a demanding task master.

  He didn’t tell Frieda of course. But Frieda wasn’t there and he didn’t have to play by her rules. Not at the club.

  He was after all a jazz man. Jazz men didn’t play by anybody’s rules. That was the point. A little cocaine with your champagne? A puff of something dreamy to chase along the single malt? Why not? How could a man say no?

  And if, as the nights went by, he found himself chatting more and more to Katharina between sets, so what? Was it a crime? He liked her. And it wasn’t just because she was beautiful, although that didn’t hurt. Or that she was intriguing and enigmatic.

  Fascinating even.

  Wolfgang had met lots of fascinating girls.

  Lots of girls who did the same impression of a cold-eyed sultry vamp, so popular in the movies.

  The point was he really did like her.

  She was interested in the same things he was, equally inspired and excited by them. Not just jazz either, but all kinds of art. When Katharina talked about art, her face became animated and her eyes started to sparkle. All that carefully posed haughtiness evaporated and it became clear that her world-weary indifference was just a youthful pretension and she was still a gauche teenager at heart.

  She wanted to be an actress of course. German film studios were Hollywood’s only real rivals and what beautiful young Berlin girl didn’t want to be part of the action? But unlike most of those girls, she didn’t just dream of stardom. She loved theatre as much as the movies and Wolfgang was delighted to discover that she had been at many of the same performances that he and Frieda had seen on their occasional, precious evenings out.

  ‘You like Piscator?’ Wolfgang asked during one of their first serious chats.

  ‘Yes, and I’ve met him too. I waited for him at the Volksbühne stage door after he did The Lower Depths.’

  ‘You like Gorky too?’

  ‘Of course I do! Why wouldn’t I like him? Nobody writes like the Russians. He’s a genius, particularly when Piscator does him.’

  In fact, to Wolfgang’s embarrassment, he soon discovered that Katharina was far better read and versed in the new Expressionist theatre than he was. She had travelled all the way to Munich to see Drums In The Night, the first play from a new writer called Brecht whom Wolfgang had not even heard of.

  Katharina always knew what exciting Berlin personalities were in the house each night.

  ‘Guess what,’ she’d say with excitement, squeezing herself into the tiny band room behind the stage, oblivious to the fact that the boys were stripped to their vests and shorts trying to cool down between brackets. ‘Herwarth Walden’s in!’

  ‘Herbert who?’ was the general reaction from the assembled musicians. It usually was, when Katharina announced that she had spotted some celebrated figure of the avant garde.

  But Wolfgang always knew exactly who she meant.

  ‘My God,’ he said, peering out through the beaded curtain, ‘he’s talking to Dorf.’

  ‘Probably selling him a painting.’

  ‘The publisher of De
r Sturm is listening to my band,’ Wolfgang exclaimed. ‘That is amazing.’

  ‘Hey, Wolf baby,’ a deep, heavily tinged American voice interjected, ‘be cool. Whoever the gentleman is, he eats and he shits just like everybody else do. And this ain’t your band by the way. We’re a collective and don’t you forget it.’

  Thomas ‘Uncle Tom’ Taylor was one of the numerous American schwarz musicians who had found life easier, and work more plentiful, in the fevered melting pot of post-war Berlin than they had in the segregated theatres and bars of their own cities. Like most of them he spoke good German with a Mississippi twang.

  ‘We may be your collective,’ Tom went on, ‘I admit that, but I ain’t nobody’s nigger. Who is this Waldorf cat anyway?’

  ‘Walden, Tom,’ Wolfgang corrected. ‘He’s not a salad, he’s the Godfather of Berlin Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Magic Realism …’

  ‘Damn! That cat loves an ism!’

  ‘That cat’s been painted by Oskar Kokoschka.’

  ‘Well, excuse my ignorance, sir!’ Tom laughed. ‘And by the way, if Oskar Kokoschka’s a real name I’d like to shake the guy’s parents’ hand.’

  Just then Kurt appeared standing halfway through the beaded curtain, a string of it across his face, swaying noticeably. Katharina stared at him, an expression of irritation, even contempt, crossing her features, which she made no effort to disguise.

  ‘This band is hot!’ Kurt shouted. ‘Hot hot hot!’

  Kurt was getting drunker earlier and using more drugs. Katharina had confided to Wolfgang that he had taken to injecting his cocaine rather than snorting it.

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ she said. ‘Last night he did it in his balls. Can you imagine? In front of me. Says it gives an exceptional high. Personally I don’t think any thrill is worth that much loss of dignity.’

  Kurt was in an exultant mood.

  ‘Great opening set, you guys!’ he slurred. ‘I loved it, I more than loved it, I adored it, I lived it, it spoke to my soul.’

  Katharina slipped away while Kurt continued to witter on.

  ‘You were out there, boys. Solid gone. Let me tell you, I know jazz and that was jazz, baby.’

  Kurt was by nature a talkative man and cocaine made him insanely verbose. He spewed words. They tumbled out on top of each other in a vomit of extravagant praise. It was as if he was saying words side by side as well as end to end. It made Wolfgang sad to hear him. The best boss he ever had was becoming a jerk.

  He began to usher Kurt out of the room. Had he not done so, Kurt probably would have gone on all night, oblivious to time.

  ‘Got to get ourselves together, Kurt,’ he said. ‘Have to play the next bracket, that’s why you pay us.’

  ‘Yeah! … That’s right! Get ready! For the next bracket!’ Kurt shouted as if continuing with the evening’s performance was some brilliant and incisively original idea. ‘That’s what I like to hear. And make it hot hot hot!’

  As the ridiculously youthful figure stumbled away, Wenke the clarinet player snorted in contempt. Wenke was a brilliant instrumentalist but a dark and brooding man, permanently damaged by four years in the trenches. ‘Little bourgeois prick,’ he snarled. ‘We’ll have him hanging from a lamp-post one of these days, when the revolution comes. The whole pack of them make me sick. Boys in lipstick, girls with their breasts showing through their dresses. Berlin’s turning into a cesspit.’

  ‘Don’t you run Berlin down in front of me, Wenke,’ Tom Taylor said with a deep friendly laugh, while chugging at a quarter of Bourbon that he kept in the breast pocket of his dinner jacket. ‘I love Berlin, ’cos ya know what? Right here in this town Wolfgang’s the nigger, not me! Ain’t that the strangest thing? Back in the States I was a nigger every day of my life but not here! I finally found a city where they hate someone worse than they hate a black man and I say hallelujah to the Jews.’

  ‘You just let a gang of Stahlhelm find you fucking a German girl, Tom,’ Wolfgang observed, ‘and you’ll soon find out who’s the nigger.’

  ‘Well, they ain’t going to find me, Wolf, are they?’ Tom laughed, ‘because I ain’t about to invite no audience in to watch. Not that they wouldn’t get one hell of a lesson in humping!’ he added, taking another slug of his whisky, ‘American style, slow and easy, like la-a-azy blues.’

  Wilhelm the sax player interjected, a man whose face was caked in make-up and who wore a green carnation on his lapel.

  ‘Well, speaking as one of Wenke’s boys in lipstick, if you ever tire of working your way through our city’s charming show girls, Tom, don’t hesitate to call me, I’d love to try a bit of schwarz myself.’

  ‘I surely will remember that, Fräulein.’ Tom laughed. ‘You can expect that call just as soon as hell freezes over.’

  ‘You’re a bunch of decadent cunts,’ Wenke grumbled.

  ‘Of course we are!’ Wolfgang shouted. ‘We’re jazz men! Being decadent cunts is our job description. Now come on, as the boss says, time to go ape, Daddy!’

  Halfway through the second bracket Wolfgang saw Katharina slip away. Looking out from behind the dome of his trumpet he watched as she headed for the doorway with a man. A big producer from the UFA film studios whom Katharina had introduced Wolfgang to briefly the night before. A great, swaggering, sweating, arrogant middle-aged movie guy.

  It was her business of course.

  Certainly none of his.

  No need to feel jealous.

  She was just a friend.

  But as Katharina and her film producer disappeared together, the man’s plump, bejewelled hand placed proprietorially upon Katharina’s slim, naked back, Wolfgang was shocked to realize just how jealous he was.

  St John’s Wood

  London, 1956

  STONE’S FLAT OVERLOOKED Regent’s Park. He could not have afforded it on his Foreign Office salary but had bought it with the proceeds of the sale of his parents’ apartment in Berlin. The home in which he had grown up, which the Nazis stole in 1942 and which had miraculously survived the Allied bombing.

  A final gift from his beloved mum and dad.

  As he approached the building from St John’s Wood tube, Stone wondered if Billie would still be there. She only stayed at weekends and always left on Monday morning but never at any particular time. Billie was not the sort of person to pay much attention to regular timetables.

  Waiting for the lift Stone was concerned to discover that he was rather hoping she would be there. It would be nice to see her and share a cup of coffee. They might put a record on and continue her jazz education.

  Stone tried to dismiss these thoughts from his mind.

  He didn’t like attachments. He had avoided them since 1939. Always walking away whenever he sensed himself getting too close to a person. Especially a woman. The very fact that he liked Billie and enjoyed her company made him think that he should stop seeing her.

  After all, what right had he to such simple pleasures?

  He had survived.

  And, anyway, he loved Dagmar. He would always love her. He’d promised her that at the Lehrter Bahnhof.

  Billie was a West Indian girl Stone had met during the previous summer at a basement party in Ladbroke Grove. Stone liked to spend time in Notting Hill. He had been an outsider of one sort or another since the age of thirteen and felt great empathy with the immigrants who had recently come to live in West London.

  ‘Hey, we’re the Jews now,’ Billie had once joked. To which Stone had replied that she’d better hope not.

  Stone also liked the music and the easy-going attitude that he found amongst Billie’s crowd. The disrespect for convention and authority. He liked the laughter, though he never laughed, and the dancing, though he never danced. He had also found that smoking marijuana was a pleasant alternative to blotting out the world with scotch as he had done on most evenings since the war.

  After long days spent in the stilted dryness of Whitehall, it was a relief to while away his evenings sitting half stoned in a n
oisy, sweating, crowded room, listening to unfamiliar music and watching couples dancing so close that they might almost have been single creatures. It reminded him of the places his father used to talk about. The tiny late-night clubs pounding with rhythm and sweating with sex where Wolfgang Stengel had worked in the days before the whip came down. When, according to his father, Berlin had been beautiful, wild, irreverent and life-affirming.

  Sitting in those little basement clubs the West Indians had established so quickly and with so little regard for the licensing laws, Stone could imagine himself close to his father. Luxuriating in the thought that apart from the colour of the dancers’ skin the scene he saw through his half-closed eyes was not so very different from that which Wolfgang had smiled out at from behind his trumpet on crazy carefree nights long ago and in another world.

  Sometimes of course with one puff of smoke too many, or one extra drink, the vision changed, and Stone could not prevent paranoid nightmare fantasies dropping into his addled mind, in which the door burst open and brown-shirted imbeciles with red and black armbands flooded in, flailing about themselves with their truncheons and smashing all the delicate, beautiful young dancers to the ground in a mess of blood, teeth and splintered bone.

  Billie said that if he found himself having those thoughts too often he should definitely try putting a higher percentage of tobacco into his reefers.

  ‘When it makes you paranoid it’s time to slow down,’ she advised.

  Billie was still at home.

  Across the hallway, the bedroom door was half open and an elegant brown limb was visible, stretched out from under the sheet. The toenails perfectly manicured and painted in rich, deep shining red.

  ‘Still here, Billie?’ he said. ‘Nice to be a student, eh?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I got screen printin’ in an hour, baby,’ the cheerful, heavily accented voice replied from the bedroom. ‘No classes dis mornin’ though so I been doin’ some readin’ here in me bed but I’ll be right out of your hair in a jiffy, man.’