Two Brothers

by Ben Elton

  Such a wild accent to Stone’s ears. Even when she was talking about studying it sounded like she’d been having a party of sorts. Stone wondered if any variant of his native German could ever sound so carefree and organically cool.

  ‘Take your time,’ he called out filling a kettle. ‘Really, there’s no rush. Stay in bed if you feel like it.’

  He spooned coffee beans into a little electric grinder and whizzed them up. He had to go all the way to a shop in Soho to get those beans. The coffeeless culture was one aspect of his adopted homeland that he never got used to.

  ‘Hey, baby. I’ve got t’ings to do meself, you know,’ Billie replied from behind the open door where Stone could hear her getting up to get dressed. ‘I wasn’t just sittin’ here waiting t’get laid.’

  Stone reddened. ‘I didn’t mean … I mean, I wasn’t saying, stay for … well … what I did mean was, have some breakfast.’

  He could hear her laughing at his confusion.

  ‘No time, baby. No time for breakfast. Or any other mornin’ delights for that matter. Haha! I’ll have some o’ dat coffee though, baby. Fresh ground beans is one smell I never get tired of.’

  It was a good relationship. By far the best Stone had ever had. Friendship plus sex. Billie wasn’t looking for anything more serious than Stone was, although for the exactly opposite reason. Her whole life was ahead of her, while Stone’s was behind him.

  She was young, free-spirited and ambitious. She could not afford to be wasting her time falling in love. Particularly with a man like Stone who had made the decision that he did not deserve to be happy.

  ‘You got about a million demons locked up inside you, man,’ she had observed on one of the first nights they had spent together. ‘Do me a favour, don’t let ’em out when I’m around, heh? I got plenty shit of my own.’

  ‘I never let them out,’ Stone had replied. And he never did.

  After a few minutes Billie emerged from the bedroom, hopping into her shoes as she went. He never understood how she could make herself look so immaculate so quickly.

  ‘Coffee’s coming,’ he said. ‘Two minutes.’

  ‘Plenty time. I can be at college in fifteen. You know I only like you because of your address anyway,’ she teased, sitting at his little breakfast bench and taking out a tube of lipstick.

  Billie was in her third year doing textiles at the polytechnic in Kentish Town. When she spent the night with Stone she was already halfway there.

  ‘Of course I do. Happy to be useful,’ Stone said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to like me for any other reason. How about you put that stuff on after you have your coffee? It’s hell to get off the rim of the cup.’

  ‘Too late,’ she replied, pressing a tissue to her scarlet lips and then pushing the tissue into the breast pocket of Stone’s jacket, which was hanging over the back of the high-backed stool on which she was perched. ‘Something to remember me by in the week, eh? Haha!’

  Stone would not have blamed her if truly she did only like him for the convenience of his apartment. He certainly did not consider himself much of a catch, fourteen years older than her and in love with a memory. He was aware that women sometimes found him attractive although never understood why, but Billie could do so much better. She was clever and wonderfully stylish, positively lighting up his drab little kitchen in her smart pink woollen two-piece suit with its pencil-line skirt and matching beret perched atop a stiff, jet-black Marilyn Monroe perm. And such a wonderful smile. A huge smile, it seemed almost to sparkle simply with a love of life.

  He poured the coffee. Watching her as she busied herself packing her student bag. Pencils, paper, books of photography borrowed from the library and a swatch of fabrics which, even as she put it in her bag, she couldn’t resist caressing, her slim fingers slipping sensually across the fabric, appreciating its qualities.

  ‘Opposites attract,’ she said suddenly, as if reading his thoughts. ‘I like quiet boys. Means I got no competition bein’ centre of attention.’

  Then she drained her coffee, slung her bag over her shoulder and made for the door, the piece of toast with Cooper’s Oxford marmalade Stone had just made for himself clamped firmly between her teeth.

  ‘So see you next weekend,’ she said through the toast. ‘Maybe come to mine. Mum’s doin’ pork, stir-fried up wi’ ginger an’ spice. You’re welcome if you want.’

  ‘I don’t really eat pork. Don’t know why. We did when I was a kid.’

  ‘You’ll eat it when me Ma cooks it.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll bet I would. But I’ll be gone at the weekend, I’m afraid. Remember? I told you, I’m going to Berlin.’

  ‘Oh yeah, dat’s right. The long-lost girlfrien’ eh? Haha! Good luck!’

  ‘She was my brother’s girlfriend.’

  ‘Yeah, an’, man, didn’ dat hurt!’

  Stone had never told Billie anything about his feelings for Dagmar but he supposed it was pretty obvious. Women tended to know these things.

  ‘I’ll bring you back some sweet pretzels,’ he said.

  ‘No t’anks. On a diet. But if you pass a bookshop see if you can find somet’ing on Bauhaus for me. Don’t matter if it’s in German, it’s the photos I love. Give me a call when you get back. That’s unless you’re all tied up wit’ your brudder’s girlfriend.’

  ‘I’m free tonight,’ Stone said without thinking. ‘We could have dinner.’

  ‘Can’t. I’m modellin’ for the art students. They love me, let me tell you. They t’ink I’m exotic. I say to ’em, jus’ wait till there’s a few million more of me brothers an’ sisters gettin’ off de boat. We won’ be so damned exotic then. Haha. Dat made ’em t’ink.’

  And with a click-clack of stiletto heels, Billie was gone.

  Funny how she did life modelling.

  Just a coincidence. But it was a nice one. A connection to his mother, like the club in which he had met her was a connection to his father.

  Stone took his coffee into the little sitting room of his apartment. The statuette stood on the mantelpiece above the gas fire. He took it up and held it in his hand.

  Running his fingers along its smooth, satisfying lines. Was there something slightly wrong about him fondling a likeness of his naked mother? he wondered. Perhaps Freud would have had something to say about it.

  A part of Stone hated that figure. He hated it because of who had created it. But he loved it more. Because it was his mother. Frieda, sculpted in the first year of Stone’s life, just before he had become fully conscious of her. Twenty-two years old, naked in the full bloom of youth. His grandfather had bought the piece and it had stood in their apartment all through his childhood and youth. It had still been standing there in 1946 when his German agent had collected up what family possessions were left prior to the sale of the apartment and sent them on to Stone in London.

  He wondered how many good Nazis had fondled that statue in the years when some unknown family had squatted like murderous cuckoos in his parents’ home. How shocked those thieves would have been to understand that they were caressing the likeness of a Jew. There had no doubt been a Nuremberg Law against that sort of thing – no pure German will caress the likeness of a Jew as defined by the model having had one or more Jewish grandparents.

  His father had hated that statuette.

  Stone smiled as he recalled Wolfgang Stengel’s intense, semi-comical exasperation when anyone admired it.

  It defied every artistic principle Wolfgang Stengel had possessed. Boring realism, nothing but boring realism, he’d protest. Which was why of course Stone and his brother had loved it then and why Stone loved it still. Precisely because it was boring realism, and skilfully executed too. A passable impression of his beloved mother. Not as beautiful as she had been but beautiful nonetheless.

  For a moment Stone held the statue by the head.

  Held it as he had held it on that awful night.

  Knuckles gripped white round it.

  The marble base crimson with blood.


  He saw again the water running over it, washing the red away. The blood gurgling down into the sink as he and his brother began frantically to cover up the evidence of what they had done.

  Too Much Jazz

  Berlin, 1923

  THE JOINT, AS Tom Taylor happily remarked, was jumping.

  ‘This band is on fire,’ he shouted from behind his kit. ‘They don’t got no better in New York City.’

  Wolfgang was trying out a new piano player, a Russian émigré called Olga, an ex-duchess or princess of some sort, or so she claimed. But then all the Russian refugee girls thought they were Grand Duchess Anastasia, so she might just as easily be the daughter of some semi-literate farmer who owned one too many cows and so got a bullet in exchange for his field. Not unnaturally, Olga loathed Wenke, the Communist clarinettist, and the feeling was fully reciprocated.

  Wolfgang enjoyed the tension.

  ‘We can’t all be friends. It’s bland. A bit of conflict’s good for the minor keys,’ he said. ‘It really puts some bite into Wenke’s atonal riffing.’

  ‘I would like to see a crazed dog put some bite into Wenke’s atonal arsehole,’ Olga spat through her cigar smoke.

  ‘Just keep playing, princess,’ Wenke snarled into his clarinet, ‘you can’t run for ever. The revolution’ll catch up with you in the end, then there’s a lamp-post waiting for you just outside in the street, you damned kulak.’

  ‘You bloody sauerkraut Reds!’ Olga sneered from her piano stool. ‘You’ll never have a revolution. You won’t fart unless Moscow sends you written permission. Here’s to Lenin’s fourth stroke! They say he can’t talk any more. Give me a call when the bastard can’t fucking breathe either, I’ll buy drinks all round!’

  Olga spat on the floor and raised a glass of vodka mixed with pepper provocatively in Wenke’s direction. Wolfgang decided to kick into the next number before the two musicians came to blows.

  ‘This one’s brand new and straight off the boat,’ he called out over the general din. ‘I think you’re going to love it as much as we do, it’s by the great American Negro composer Jimmy Johnson of New Jersey and it’s called the Charleston.’

  Tom Taylor gave an introductory spin around his tom toms and the band struck up the number which, since Wolfgang had put it into the repertoire the previous week, had proved a guaranteed floor filler.

  As he played, Wolfgang stared happily out over the brass cone of his trumpet. The club was packed, as it was every night, and through the smoke and the lights was everything he wanted to see. Writhing bodies. Crazy faces. Booze, girls, good times. He loved it. It had already been three months but it felt like hardly a week. The Joplin had become his second home.

  Kurt’s people had become Wolfgang’s people.

  Even the unconscious girl who had ended up under the table on their first acquaintance turned out not to be the poor stupid drunken whore he had originally presumed her to be. Her name was Helene and despite being only twenty she was already a fashion buyer at the great Fischer department store on the Kurfürstendamm.

  ‘Sorry about the other night,’ she had giggled when they met for the second time. ‘Apparently I was awful, not that I remember. Just got the mix of drugs a teeny bit wrong. Easy thing to do.’

  Helene was infectiously positive in her outlook, thinking that pretty much everyone and everything was interesting and fun in its own way.

  ‘I see dull people as projects,’ she told Wolfgang, ‘to be reformed. After all, everyone’s interesting deep down, aren’t they? I mean breathing is interesting, isn’t it? I mean, when you really come to think about it. Don’t you think? I mean, honestly?’

  Helene would laugh and chatter and charm until the very moment when the booze and pills shut her down. She scarcely gave the slightest indication that she was ‘fried to the hat’ as she put it until her eyes rolled back in her head and she slid under the table. After which Helmut would make sure she got put in a car and taken home to her doting parents. Helene was as gorgeous, spoilt, wild and vivacious as any jazz baby could ever hope to be, and in any other club Wolfgang had ever played in he would certainly have allowed himself the indulgence of seeking her out between band breaks and enjoying her sparkling company.

  But not in a club with Katharina in it.

  Band breaks were just too precious to spend time chatting with any other girls, no matter how charming they were.

  Wolfgang knew he was getting too close. That he shouldn’t be looking forward to seeing her the way he was. Looking out from the stage to find her. Searching for her between brackets. Sitting with her at the bar whenever he could. Eagerly exchanging views on the latest play or exhibition.

  But surely there was no danger. She was with Kurt. And he was happily married.

  Yes, she’d kissed him on the first night they had met but she had never done so again. When he lit her cigarette she didn’t touch his hand as she had done that first time either. Or fix him with her stare as the smoke drifted up from those same purple lips.

  So when Wolfgang left the stage on the night in November when the Charleston was a week old, he didn’t hesitate in searching her out at the bar.

  They agreed the new tune was a sensation.

  They laughed about the angry Bolshevik clarinettist and his nemesis the foul-mouthed Russian pianist princess.

  They discussed the latest Georg Kaiser play, Nebeneinander, which was about to open at the People’s Theatre with designs by Georg Grosz, whom they both agreed was their favourite artist.

  And then he asked her why she had kissed him on the night they’d met.

  It just came out of the blue. Or perhaps more accurately, out of a bottle. He had certainly drunk more than usual.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you to ask me that,’ she said.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting to ask it.’

  Katharina sipped her champagne.

  ‘Perhaps I was a little drunk,’ she said. ‘And I liked you. You remember I told you? That you were hot? I meant it. Aren’t I fresh? But you see I didn’t know until after I had kissed you that you were married. I don’t know, when I watched you on stage you just didn’t look married.’

  For once her stare was not bold. Instead she looked down at the ashtray on the bar between them. Avoiding Wolfgang’s eye.

  ‘And of course you’re also with Kurt?’ Wolfgang added.

  ‘That junkie? I was then, I’m certainly not now.’

  ‘So you’re single?’ Wolfgang said, realizing he had said it rather too quickly. Too eagerly.

  ‘Yes. Fancy-free. That’s me,’ Katharina said with brittle gaiety. ‘Aren’t I the lucky one?’

  ‘And if … and if …’ Wolfgang took a swig of his fresh scotch, recklessly aware that he’d already had much more than was usual for him.

  ‘And if what?’ Katharina asked.

  ‘And if I had been single?’ he asked. ‘After you kissed me that night? If I had never mentioned any wife and kids?’

  ‘Then I would have kissed you again the next night, Mr Trumpet. And every night after that until neither you nor I were single any more.’

  Wolfgang felt a thrill run through every fibre of his body.

  Katharina’s eyes were a little misty.

  ‘But you did mention them. And I’m an old-fashioned kind of modern girl, you see, and it makes rather a difference. It would have been nice of course,’ she said dreamily, ‘if you’d met me first. Instead of your dedicated doctor. I wouldn’t have minded a theatre-mad jazz man for a boyfriend.’

  The booze was coursing through Wolfgang’s veins now. Delivering its reckless courage to his head.

  He crept his hand along the bar to where Katharina’s hand lay, a cigarette between the fingers. Nails jet black and shining.

  ‘We’ve met now,’ Wolfgang said quietly.

  Their fingers touched.

  Katharina looked down and for a moment she seemed lost in thought.

  Then she took her hand away, putting the cigarette to her lip
s and drawing on it hard.

  ‘I told you. I’m an old-fashioned modern girl. Let’s keep things as they are, OK? We’re friends. We talk. You’re married.’

  Wolfgang felt foolish. And angry. The whisky made him graceless.

  ‘Old-fashioned? What about that producer from UFA?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Even drunk, Wolfgang knew he had no right to mention it. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I want to know what you mean,’ Katharina asked.

  Wolfgang shrugged. ‘The one you disappeared with that night.’ He mumbled, looking down at the floor to avoid her eye. ‘I don’t think he wanted to discuss film technique.’

  Katharina stared at him hard. Her eyes were no longer misty but cold.

  ‘Oh. So you noticed, did you?’

  ‘Of course I did. I … I was jealous.’

  ‘You’re married to Mrs Trumpet, Wolfgang. What right have you to be jealous?’

  ‘None, I suppose, but I was.’

  Katharina’s momentary burst of anger subsided. Instead she looked sad. She drew heavily once more on her cigarette, sucking the glowing end right down to the filter. She lit another from it and shrugged.

  ‘That was business. Stupid and completely naïve. But business none the less. The casting couch, I think they call it. He made promises and I fell for it. Or at least I fell for it enough to take a calculated risk and lost. He got what he wanted and I didn’t. I turned up at the studio the following morning and he refused to see me. More fool me. It’s the first time I’ve ever made that mistake and it’ll be the last.’

  Wolfgang was calm again. And ashamed.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Katharina. I shouldn’t have brought it up. What a bastard, I’d like to punch his—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It was over in a second and it’s done with. But while I might be prepared to fuck someone I don’t like for the right reasons, I’m not happy to fuck someone I do like for the wrong ones, which is that we are both drunk and tired and full of all that jazz. You more than me, I think, so you go and play me some music and then go home to Doctor Stengel before you ruin my good opinion of you.’