Two Brothers

by Ben Elton

  ‘Like me?’ Wolfgang said with a bitter smile. ‘Not quite as bad as that I hope. But if she is, you must make sure she avoids wood-based alcohol. It can blind you if you haven’t built up a tolerance.’

  ‘Please, Wolf,’ Frieda said, trying to mask the distaste in her voice. ‘We’re talking about Otto. Go on, Pauly.’

  ‘Frau Fischer’s really worried about her,’ Paulus said. ‘Dagmar used to love to go out. She loves to do things. She’s not like me. I can read a book, but she’s a physical person and she’s sort of fading away. She needs to be able to go swimming, she needs to go to cafés. Believe it or not, she needs tickets to the Olympics.’

  Silke could hardly contain her frustration.

  ‘Well, she can’t go to the bloody Olympics, can she?’ she snapped. ‘What has all this got to do with—’

  ‘But you see she can,’ Paulus went on. ‘All she needs is a good cover. All she needs … is a Nazi boyfriend.’

  ‘You mean … Ottsy?’ Frieda gasped.

  Silke looked dumbstruck.

  ‘Exactly,’ Paulus said. ‘If she was going about on the arm of a uniformed Jungmann from the elite Napola school, she could get in anywhere she wanted with no questions asked. He could even take her swimming, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Silke conceded quietly, knowing instantly that her days as Otto’s best and only friend were over. ‘I suppose that’s right.’

  ‘And that’s the way we’ll keep Otto from causing trouble for himself. You have to go to him, Silks, and tell him that the better a Nazi he looks the more he’ll be able to help Dagmar. That’ll bring him round for sure.’

  ‘Goodness, Pauly!’ Frieda said. ‘What a clever plan.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Silke said glumly.

  She and Paulus looked at each other. Both understanding the sacrifices they were each going to have to make.

  Silke did her duty on the following Sunday, explaining to Otto Paulus’s audacious plan.

  ‘Dagmar needs you, Otts,’ she told him. ‘Pauly and Frau Fischer are really worried about her. She’s going crazy all cooped up and losing hope. She has to get out. She has to have some fun. You’re the only person who can do that for her so you really really have to start behaving yourself again and get them to trust you. Then they’ll let you go out of school, like the other boys, and you can start getting Dagmar out of herself.’

  Otto certainly did not need telling twice. In an instant his entire demeanour altered.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Silks,’ he said with a broad smile, ‘you can rely on me!’

  ‘That’s great,’ Silke replied, her smile considerably less animated than Otto’s.

  That same Sunday Paulus put the plan to Dagmar.

  ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before,’ he said. ‘Ottsy gives you the perfect cover. You can be a German girl again and go where you please as long as you’re with him!’

  At first the idea of going out amongst Nazis turned Dagmar white with terror. But very soon the excitement of the adventure overcame her fears and her spirits began visibly to rise.

  ‘Well, Otto would make rather a handsome beau,’ she conceded.

  ‘Try not to rub it in, Dags,’ Paulus said ruefully.

  ‘Silly!’ Dagmar replied with a happy tone that Paulus hadn’t heard her use in years. ‘You know I love you both.’

  It was decided that Silke would take Dagmar with her to the very next Sunday tea at the Napola. Otto easily got permission to have an extra guest as girls were always in very short supply at the boarding school social functions. Of course Dagmar had no BDM uniform but the fact that she would be arriving as Silke’s friend would almost certainly be enough to ensure that no questions were asked.

  The two girls travelled together across Berlin.

  Having scarcely seen each other properly for a number of years they had very little to say to each other and conversation was very stilted. They tried to chat and joke a little about the old Saturday Club days, but apart from that shared history they had nothing else in common. They never had even before the Nazis, but now of course the gap between them was infinitely wider.

  Spandau was at the very end of the line, after which they still had about a kilometre or so to complete the journey. Dagmar, who was wearing high heels, insisted on taking a taxi.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll pay,’ she said in answer to Silke’s doubtful look. ‘Mummy and I still have money, although they took a lot of it after … well … let’s say they fined my father for the inconvenience of murdering him.’

  As they sat together in the taxi, Silke took Dagmar’s hand. Something she had not done since the days of children’s games.

  ‘I don’t know if I ever said,’ she whispered, ‘but what has happened to you is so terrible, Dagmar, and I’m so sorry. You know, about your dad and … well, about everything.’

  Dagmar smiled.

  ‘Thank you, Silke,’ she said. ‘You didn’t say but I always knew you felt it. I may be mean sometimes but I’m not completely insensitive. Speaking of which, today for instance. I know how difficult this must be for—’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Silke said briskly, ‘absolutely fine. A really good plan. Pauly’s plans always are.’

  Within a very few minutes they arrived at the grand gates of the Napola school with the huge wrought-iron eagle and swastika mounted upon them.

  ‘Oh God, I’m pretty nervous actually,’ Dagmar admitted. ‘I mean going in amongst all those Nazi boys.’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Silke assured her. ‘I’m absolutely sure of that.’

  ‘How can you be, Silks?’ Dagmar asked.

  ‘Dagmar, they may be Nazis. But they’re boys.’

  Silke was right, of course. One glimpse of Dagmar at the school gates in her elegant, sophisticated, alluring grown-up clothes and she was the talk of the school. Jungmann Stengel, it seemed, had pulled off another coup, trading up from a nice-looking girl to a complete stunner. Certainly no one thought of asking such a beautiful creature for proof of her ancestry. Rather the excited boys would have queued up to lay down their lives for her.

  Silke only accompanied Dagmar for one further Sunday before dropping out of the visits herself.

  Her duty was done. Dagmar didn’t need her any more. Otto’s new companion was recognized and accepted by the school and had even been paid a toe-curlingly creepy compliment by the principal. Silke knew that no one would miss her and she couldn’t wait to bow out. She didn’t mind the other boys gawping at Dagmar but to see Otto doing it, panting and scampering about her like an eager puppy desperate to please, was hard for her to take.

  Dagmar simply took over from Silke. More so in fact. Because whilst people merely thought that Silke had been Otto’s girlfriend, Dagmar immediately became it. And when she and Otto sat together beneath the oak tree looking over the soccer pitch they exchanged the kisses that Silke had longed would be hers.

  Paulus’s plan worked perfectly. With Otto beside her Dagmar was now able to enjoy the kind of fun that was denied to other Jewish adolescents. Otto was sixteen and could apply for evenings out and also Saturday afternoons. During these times he took Dagmar to parks and to the zoo. They sat together in cafés and occasionally even went to bars, most proprietors being pretty lax about youthful drinking, particularly with such an attractive young couple.

  Otto had no money himself but he had his military-style uniform and he had grown quite tall and very strong. Dagmar did have money and she was happy to spend it on those precious times when she was able to be a normal young person once again.

  And of course Otto took Dagmar swimming, which was her greatest joy of all. Soon Dagmar forgot even to feel nervous as they bought their tickets to the baths. No attendant ever once asked the beautiful girl with the Napola boyfriend for identification. She worried sometimes of course that she would be recognized, but she had been withdrawn from public life for so long that most people’s memories of the heiress to Fischer’s department store fortune were
of a girl of twelve or thirteen.

  Frieda now got her news of Otto from Paulus who in turn heard it from Dagmar. Silke still visited the Stengels on a Sunday evening to hear the news also. Smiling hard at every tale of the fun that Otto and Dagmar were having together. Just as Paulus tried hard to deliver the second-hand stories with the same joy and enthusiasm with which Dagmar had told them to him.

  ‘They’re both really having fun,’ Paulus would say.

  ‘Which is great,’ Silke added.

  And Frieda would look from one of them to the other and smile a sad little smile to herself.

  On the Embankment

  London, 1956

  THERE WAS A decent moon and it cast a long streak of white across the cobalt black ripples of the Thames. A glittering, twinkling silver pathway stretching almost all the way from the Mother of Parliaments to the Royal Festival Hall.

  ‘Peter Pan could’a danced along dat path,’ Billie observed, ‘on his way from Neverland to Kensington Gardens.’

  ‘I don’t think even Peter Pan could have survived a dunk in the Thames,’ Stone replied.

  They were standing together on Westminster Bridge. Neither of them had wanted to go home after their hurried exit from the pub, but Billie didn’t want to drink any more so instead they had taken the taxi across Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall, and now found themselves standing in the moon shadow of Big Ben, staring down into the broad dark river as it hurried beneath them.

  ‘I always like to t’ink of the Romans when I see the moon on the Thames,’ Billie said.

  ‘The Romans?’ Stone enquired, somewhat surprised.

  ‘It’s jus’ dis town’s been here so long,’ she explained. ‘Amazin’ to t’ink that people been lookin’ at that same beautiful light on that same dirty ol’ river for two thousand years.’

  Together they made their way down from the bridge and on to the Victoria Embankment. Strolling past the various down-and-outs in search of an unoccupied bench.

  ‘When I was a little girl in Trinidad,’ Billie went on, ‘me mudder used ta talk about how one day we be goin’ to Englan’ and then we’d have plenty money and anyt’ing we wanted to eat. An’ then we’d take a pleasure trip on de Thames an’ go see where ol’ Henry de Eight be beddin’ all his wives, one after another after another. An’ then we’d go see where he killed a couple o’ dem too. Cut off they heads in da Tower. An’ we’d all be merry in merry ol’ England. We did it too, you know. Me and me mudder. First Sunday we had money to spare for a day out, dat’s what we did.’

  ‘I wonder what old Henry would have made of that bloody awful Royal Festival Hall,’ Stone said, glancing across the water at the controversial new building on the opposite bank.

  ‘I like it,’ Billie said. ‘I t’ink it’s very cool. Very satisfyin’ spatially.’

  ‘Too bloody Soviet if you ask me. Too much concrete.’

  ‘Let me tell you, Paul. When you was born in a house wit’ a mud floor, you don’ mind a bit o’ concrete. It be clean, it’s cheap an’ it don’ blow down in a storm. That’s a lot o’ positive when you puttin’ up a building.’

  ‘Well, you’re the design student,’ Stone conceded.

  ‘You can’t study good taste, baby,’ Billie replied. ‘Nor common sense neither. I jus’ be born wit’ more than my fair share o’ both, tha’s all.’

  They found an empty bench and staked their claim, Billie inspecting the seat carefully by the light of her Dunhill lighter before she would entrust her beautiful woollen coat to it. There was a cabbies’ refreshment stall a little further along and Stone went and got them some tea and a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate.

  ‘You know those Romans who were staring at our moon from their wooden bridge got a nasty surprise,’ Stone said when he returned with the two steaming china mugs. ‘Boudicca and the Iceni turned up and they reckon as many as seventy thousand people died in the fighting and pillaging. Just about around where we’re sitting now.’

  ‘Well, d’ere’s a gruesome t’ought for a romantic night!’ Billie laughed. ‘You always find a way, don’t you?’

  ‘But the good part of it is, that was the biggest slaughter that ever happened in the British Isles. No power-mad swine has topped it since in almost two millennia. That’s actually an amazing statistic. How many other countries can say that the bloodiest catastrophe that ever occurred on its soil happened nineteen centuries ago? I’ll tell you now. None. Lucky old Britain eh?’

  Billie smiled and sipped her tea.

  ‘Did you put three in?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Don’t t’ink you stirred it then.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Billie took a pencil from her purse and stirred her tea.

  ‘You really love dis country, don’t you, baby?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stone said thoughtfully. ‘I’m not much good at love. But I do respect it, I can tell you that. I respect it deeply. And its people too.’

  ‘Even after tonight. After you punched de landlord?’

  ‘That was depressing. Very depressing. But I think in this country people like that are the rotten apples. When I was a boy they were the whole barrel.’

  ‘Well, maybe.’ Billie shrugged. ‘Except I gots’t tell ya I see a lot o’ dose apples, you know. Teddy boy gangs comin’ down Ladbroke Grove wit dere razors. You know when we first come here we couldn’t even get no rooms because we was Negroes, oftentimes we still can’t. No Dogs. No Blacks. No Irish.’

  ‘I know, Bill. Of course I’m not saying it’s paradise or anything. But all the same, it’s still the most tolerant country I ever heard of … And the funny thing is they don’t even know it. It makes me laugh sometimes to hear the Reds at work muttering that Britain’s not much better than a Fascist state. I tell them, it may be elitist, snobbish, small-minded and class-obsessed, but in the middle of the nineteenth century they made a Jew Prime Minister. In the middle of the twentieth we murdered all ours.’

  ‘We?’ Billie said surprised. ‘I never heard you talk about yo’self as German before.’

  ‘Well, I am, Bill,’ Stone replied. ‘That’s another funny thing. I’ll always be German, or at least a part of me will be. The Germany of my parents and my grandparents. The one they loved. And I loved too. But the thing is, it got stolen. And that didn’t happen here. The Fascists never got anywhere in Britain. We never let them.’

  ‘We?’ Billie laughed. ‘So now you’re British too?’

  ‘Yes. I’m both. Or nothing at all, more like. But you know when we drove down Whitehall we passed Downing Street. We could have stopped the cab, got out and walked up to it. There’s one copper outside. That’s it, one cop. There’s never been more than that, even when Britain ruled a quarter of the world. Isn’t that something?’

  ‘Yeah. I s’pos it is when you put it like that.’

  She took his hand and he felt her thumb brush across his knuckles, discovering the scabs that had formed there.

  ‘Ouch,’ she said.

  ‘Must have caught his teeth somehow. Didn’t think I had. Thought I popped him clean.’

  ‘Oh you popped him clean, all right, boy. Don’ you worry ’bout dat.’

  ‘I had to do it, you know, Billie,’ Stone said.

  ‘I don’t t’ink you did have to do it. Not on my account anyways. I don’t like violence.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘I don’t think it helps.’

  ‘Billie, I have a rule. When you meet that kind of attitude, you always have to fight it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black, Jewish or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, it’s never good enough to walk away. You have to confront it every time you see it. I made that decision twenty-three years ago when I saw a young teenage girl running down the Kurfürstendamm in terror while they made her mum and dad lick the pavement.’

  Billie smiled. ‘It’s still all about that girl, isn’t it? Even now, when you’re defending da honour of a Negro student in Soho in 1956, you still be reall
y doing it for dat little German girlie. You hit dat guy for her sake not mine.’

  ‘No, Billie,’ Stone protested. ‘I did it for you. Really. And for my mum and my dad and Pauly and all the damned millions of others.’

  ‘And Dagmar.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. And Dagmar.’

  ‘Dagmar most.’

  Stone laughed. ‘No, not most. You most.’

  ‘Well, gi’ me some chocolate an’ I’ll believe you.’

  Stone took the purple-wrapped bar from his pocket, tore away the paper and ran a thumbnail along the groove in the foil.

  ‘Wish I had some Lindt for you,’ he said. ‘Now that’s chocolate.’

  ‘I prefer Cadbury’s,’ Billie said, accepting a whole row of squares. ‘I don’ like posh choccie. Cadbury Dairy Milk an’ a nice cup o’ tea. Dat is livin’, baby.’

  Together they ate their chocolate and sipped their tea and watched as a coal barge slipped past in silence, cutting the silver ribbon the moon had draped across the water in two.

  ‘So you an’ Dagmar ended up goin’ aroun’ together then?’ Billie said, resuming the conversation.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, we did. Her pretending to be non-Jewish and me pretending to be a good Nazi.’

  ‘An’ did you get to sleep wit’ her?’

  Stone coughed into his mug. ‘Straight to the point, eh?’ he said, wiping tea from his chin.

  ‘Well, c’mon. It’s the obvious question.’ Billie laughed.

  ‘Well, no, as it happens. We were only teenagers.’

  ‘Haha! You was sixteen!’ Billie snorted in amusement. ‘Differen’ times, baby! Differen’ times.’

  ‘Well, there wasn’t really much opportunity for that sort of thing. Our time together was pretty restricted and we had no place to go to. It was still too dangerous for me to go to her house.’

  ‘Bet you tried damn hard to find somewhere though.’

  ‘I suppose in a way we did. We certainly messed around a lot, whenever we could. You know, alleys and park benches.’

  ‘Oh I know. Been there meself. And she really was your girl? I mean for real? Not just because you could get her into the swimmin’ pool?’