Two Brothers

by Ben Elton

  Then they heard the lift.

  The creaking and the clanking as it settled to a halt on their floor.

  All froze. It was probably only a late caller. A sick mother looking for Doctor Stengel, too tired to obey the sign in the lift. Or perhaps the gentleman friend of Fräulein Belzfreund.

  But a knock at the door was always a cause for fear these days.

  Later Frieda wondered at the coincidence that they came just then. Just as she had mentioned a telephone tree. It was almost as if they’d been listening.

  Perhaps they really were the devil.

  ‘It must be a late patient,’ Frieda said. ‘I’ve told them not to use the lift.’

  But the sound of stamping boots quickly made it clear that this was no patient. It was a visit from them.

  The whole room froze in fear. Even old Herr Tauber looked scared, until he realized this himself and settled his features in a mask of defiance.

  There was a loud banging on the door. The usual thunderous clenched-fist assault.

  Frieda took a deep breath and went to answer it. Before she had been able to reach the door the banging began again. When the Nazi authorities knocked on a Jew’s door they expected instant access. Another moment and they would have kicked it down.

  There were just two of them. A policeman and an SS trooper.

  ‘Frau Stengel, formerly Frau Doktor Stengel?’ the policeman demanded.

  ‘Yes,’ Frieda replied. ‘How can we help you?’

  ‘Your telephone,’ he said.

  ‘My telephone?’ Frieda asked. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Hand it over,’ the policeman said. ‘As of this month, July 1940, by order of the Reich Government, Jews are no longer to be allowed to own telephones. All telephones owned by Jews are to be surrendered immediately!’

  Frieda wondered if she had turned pale. It certainly felt as if she had. She thought of all the calls she made each day. Working old contacts, begging for drugs, bandages, needles from wherever she could scrounge them. The hours she spent trying to find accommodation for distressed families who had been arbitrarily thrown out on to the streets. Even that day she had put out a dozen feelers and was waiting on return calls that might mean life or death for patients in her care.

  Now those calls would never come.

  Frieda had only that very moment been explaining how survival could only lie in cooperation. In organization.

  Clearly the Nazis understood that too.

  Silently, she nodded to the little occasional table by the wall on which her precious telephone stood.

  Without a word the SS man went and picked it up, tearing the lead from the wall.

  The policeman scribbled his signature on a pad of printed forms, tore the top one off and handed it to Frieda.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘Your receipt,’ the policeman replied.

  Frieda turned to the trooper, who was standing holding her stolen telephone. She looked at him intensely.

  ‘It’s Renke, isn’t it? Thomas Renke.’

  The trooper did not reply but it was clear from his eyes that Frieda was right.

  ‘Your mother brought you to my surgery many times when you were young. Whooping cough, roseola, rubella, measles. Goodness, you had them all. You seem to have turned out well in the end though. Please remember me to Frau Renke.’

  The black-clad figure remained silent.

  ‘Come,’ said the policeman, and the two of them left, SS Trooper Renke taking Frieda’s telephone with them.

  Frieda sunk into a chair.

  ‘Drip drip drip,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that, my dear?’ her father asked, going over and putting a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘It’s how they’ve done it, Dad,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Not all at once but one little torture at a time. Ban this, take that. For years even you were sure they would not go so far. But one drip at a time they’ve gone further and further. Further than we ever dreamt they would. Now we are not even to be allowed to communicate with each other. How far will they go? I wonder. Where will this end?’

  Recognized

  Calais, 1940

  PAULUS HAD BEEN expecting it.

  Every day since he had enlisted he had been on his guard. Certainly he was buried deep, the Nazi military machine was vast, there were millions of Germans now in uniform, and of course that uniform was the very last one anyone might expect the man they had known as Paulus Stengel to be wearing. Nonetheless, amongst those millions were some who would know him, whatever he wore. And who knew what he really was.

  Paulus had been alert to such an encounter since the first day he had swapped identities with his brother, and now that moment had arrived.

  He was sitting in a tiny country bistro about five kilometres from Calais, having ridden there on a motorcycle on an evening pass out. He had been in the process of writing a letter to Dagmar when he became aware that he was being observed.

  No one called out his name or tried to speak to him but something told him there were eyes upon him. That he was being discussed. Perhaps it was a slight change in the tone of the murmuring that emanated from the only other occupied table in the room. Or else simply that inexplicable thing that people call the sixth sense.

  Whatever it was, Paulus knew.

  He had not particularly noticed the men coming in and taking their table. He had been too focused on trying to compose his letter. A letter in which he was struggling to give some hint to the woman he loved of the nightmare of being a soldier in Hitler’s armies.

  The nightmare of being a member of the Waffen SS. A soldier in the very regiment that bore the Führer’s name: the division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.

  The long-awaited military storm in the west had broken on 10 May when the German war machine smashed the Dutch border, swatting aside the feeble defences in an hour. So fast was their progress that at first it had seemed to Paulus as if he might even get away without personally shooting at the enemy.

  The Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler reached Rotterdam in two days and The Hague in four, after which the Dutch surrendered and another country and its Jews fell into Nazi clutches. Without pausing for breath, Paulus’s division had then swung on into France.

  Paulus confessed in his letter that he had actually found the advance exciting. It was a heady experience to storm across sund-renched countryside in pursuit of a retreating foe.

  They had chased the British all the way to Dunkirk and would, in Paulus’s opinion, have captured the whole of the expeditionary force had they been allowed to proceed. This was also the opinion of every soldier in his division, although it was one that had to be expressed carefully as the inevitable conclusion was that the greatest warlord in all history had made a stupid mistake.

  It was in the approaches to Dunkirk that Paulus had witnessed an event about which he could not write but which had been on his mind ever since it occurred. The Leibstandarte had just taken the town of Wormhout, a mere ten miles from the beaches of Dunkirk. A lot of prisoners had been captured and Paulus had been present when some men from the 1st Division had rounded up a group of about a hundred Tommies and herded them into a barn. Then instead of making them prisoners of war, as they were required to do under the Geneva Convention, they had thrown grenades into the flimsy structure. The few shattered British who managed to crawl out of the carnage were shot and bayoneted on the ground.

  It was this incident that Paulus really wanted to put down in his letter to Dagmar, along with his terrible fears that one day he himself would be called upon to take part in such an outrage. He was prepared to fight for Germany, fate had put him in an impossible position on that score and he felt he had no choice. But he knew that he could not commit cold-blooded murder.

  It was while he considered how he might hint at these tortured thoughts in his letter without alerting the censor that he had become aware he was being observed.

  They were Wehrmacht. He could see their boots beneath the tab
le opposite without raising his head from the page. Big hobnailed jackboots, dusty and cracked. That made them army; no trooper in the Waffen SS Leibstandarte would have gone out on furlough without first shining his boots.

  Paulus resisted the urge to look up. So far he judged they had not had clear sight of him. He knew his head had been partially bowed over the letter he was writing since they had entered the bar.

  The exit to the bar, however, lay beyond the table on which the soldiers were sitting, so he could not get out without whoever it was getting a considerably better look at him than the one they were currently enjoying. Paulus therefore had two choices. He could either keep his head bowed and hope they would shrug their suspicions off and leave. Or he could brazen it out and leave at once, walking straight past them.

  Paulus counted three sets of boots beneath the table. Not good odds.

  The whispering continued.

  The feet began to fidget.

  It was clear to Paulus that if he waited for them to make a move he would be massively disadvantaged. He needed to take the initiative and time had almost run out. The chair behind one of the sets of boots was being pushed back. One of them had decided to act. To come across and challenge him. Paulus had seconds left to take control. If he waited a moment longer one of three would be in his face with the other two behind.

  In a single and sudden movement, Paulus gathered up his letter, slammed some currency on the table and got to his feet. Heading straight for the door he flicked his eyes once to look at the men he feared.

  One glance was enough.

  The years fell away.

  It was Emil Braas. The boy who had tried to turn the old soccer team against Paulus and Otto in the changing hut on their last day with the youth club.

  ‘Jude! Jude!’ they had chanted to the banging of a stick on a dustbin lid.

  Emil Braas, who had been so jealous of them and had tried to take his revenge within a week of Hitler becoming Chancellor. Paulus had thwarted Emil then with a wave of his prick. Turned the crowd round and made the attacker look a fool. Such a trick wouldn’t work again. Paulus had occasionally seen Emil Braas around Friedrichshain during the long years of 1930s, and foreskins or not, everybody knew the Stengel boys were Jews.

  And just as in that instant Paulus recognized Emil Braas, he was quite certain that Emil Braas recognized him. Both of course had changed a great deal: no longer fresh-faced boys but battle-hardened men. The eyes, however, didn’t lie.

  The game was up.

  Certainly Braas was confused. How could he not be? He knew that Paulus Stengel was a Jew. So the fact that his old enemy had turned up in a bistro in occupied France wearing a German military uniform with the dual lightning flash insignia of the SS on it was going to be a shock. But confused or not, Emil Braas knew him.

  Although seriously outnumbered, Paulus calculated that for the next few seconds at least he still had the initiative. Braas was confused. He was not. That was a significant advantage if used decisively and Paulus, although never rash, was always decisive.

  ‘Hello, Emil,’ he said with a broad smile. ‘What’s the matter? Never seen a Jewish SS man before?’

  And with that he was out of the door.

  Paulus knew that he would have to kill Braas and also the men he was with. What was more he must do it at once before they had the chance to spread their suspicions further or think of calling the military police.

  Outside he was relieved to see the dusty road was almost empty. He had chosen to visit that particular bar because of its solitude and isolation, and there were no other Wehrmacht personnel anywhere to be seen. Just an old peasant with a few goats a little further up the dusty track.

  Paulus reached a hand into his knapsack.

  Not being an officer, his usual weapon was a rifle, but he had left that back at barracks. The French countryside was completely subdued; their leader Marshal Pétain had called for cooperation with Hitler and so German military personnel did not carry their weapons when off duty. However, like many of his comrades, Paulus had picked up a souvenir during the recent fighting. A British officer’s Enfield revolver. Paulus always kept it about him, well oiled and fully loaded for just such an emergency as this.

  Pulling it from his bag he ran a few metres up the track and spun around just as the three men crowded through the front door of the tiny bistro in pursuit.

  Had the pistol jammed even for an instant Paulus would have been overcome, but British engineering did not let him down. He opened fire immediately, taking the three soldiers absolutely by surprise. The gun was a double-action piece requiring re-cocking for each shot, but Paulus had been well trained in the use of small arms. His left hand flew over the trigger hammer after each shot, just like in a scene from an American western. The pistol blazed and his enemies were left with no time to do more than raise their hands in horror as one after another they took a bullet in the chest and fell. A further three bullets, one fired into each of their heads as they lay twitching in the dust, emptied the chamber and ensured that Paulus’s secret was safe.

  Paulus wiped the handle of the gun on his shirt tail, dropped it amongst the dead, mounted his motorcycle and rode off.

  The People’s Park

  Berlin, 1956

  OTTO AND DAGMAR left the arrivals hall together and went to the car park where Dagmar showed him to an IFA F9 motorcar, a powerful, well-built machine which, although somewhat rusted and in need of attention, certainly indicated that whatever it was Dagmar did for a living, she enjoyed privileges that the vast majority of GDR citizens did not.

  As they got in she raised her finger momentarily to her lips, clearly fearful that her car was bugged. The men at MI6 had warned Otto that he should presume all conversations in East Berlin would be overheard.

  Otto was actually glad of the chance of a moment to think. It was all so very surprising.

  And so very wonderful.

  Dagmar was alive and surely that meant her letter was genuine. She had reached out to him to help her finally effect that escape which had been denied to her and her family on the boat train platform in 1933 and throughout the long years since.

  Was he to be allowed the chance to be her Moses after all?

  Dagmar made small talk as the city passed by the windows. This was Berlin, Otto’s home town. And yet he scarcely recognized it. Almost all of the buildings he had known had been reduced to rubble by Allied bombing, and in this eastern sector much of the damage remained unrepaired. Those buildings that had been erected were dull and featureless concrete apartment blocks. Although it occurred to Otto that they were not so very much uglier than those currently being thrown up all over London.

  They drove quickly. There was not a great deal of other traffic apart from numerous bicycles, and soon they came upon a very familiar sight.

  ‘I think you remember this park,’ Dagmar remarked, and of course he did, having been there only recently in his dreams. It was the Volkspark, the very place in which he and his brother had chased Dagmar for a kiss amongst the fairy-tale characters of the Märchenbrunnen.

  ‘It survived the war, you know,’ Dagmar said.

  ‘Yes, I heard that,’ Otto replied. ‘I was glad.’

  Dagmar found a place to park her car. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go for a walk. I won’t run away this time, I promise.’ They entered the park together.

  ‘Can we talk now?’ Otto asked after a few steps.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘we can talk.’

  Where to begin? What to say? There was so much to ask. A lifetime of questions.

  But none so urgent as the present one.

  ‘Why am I here?’ he asked.

  Perhaps she wasn’t expecting it. It seemed to take her aback for a moment.

  ‘I wanted to see you, Ottsy,’ she replied.

  Ottsy. How he loved to hear her use that name. It made him feel fifteen again.

  ‘You wanted to see me,’ he repeated eagerly, then, lowering his tone and l
ooking away, ‘Are you trying to defect?’

  She seemed almost surprised.

  ‘Defect? Goodness,’ she said. ‘You think that’s why I wrote to you?’

  Now it was Otto’s turn to be surprised.

  ‘Well, of course. You mentioned what my mum used to say,’ Otto replied. ‘Everybody’s looking for Moses.’

  ‘I wrote that because I knew it would make you come. I knew it would make you know it was me.’

  ‘But,’ Otto said quietly, ‘isn’t that what you want? Aren’t you looking for a way out of Egypt?’

  A smile played on her lips. But it was a sad smile.

  ‘Oh, always, Ottsy,’ she said. ‘Always that.’

  Otto’s mind was spinning. There were so many things he wanted to ask about. His mother, his brother … her. What had happened in all those years since he left Berlin? But again he knew that the present must be dealt with first.

  ‘Dagmar,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘I’ve been told you are a Stasi officer. Is that true?’

  The smile remained for a moment, before fading slowly.

  ‘Ah,’ she said after a moment. ‘I wondered if you would know about that. We try never to underestimate the British.’

  ‘So it’s true?’

  ‘Yes, Ottsy. It’s true.’

  ‘Christ,’ Otto said. ‘The Stasi. Never in ten million years would I have predicted that.’

  ‘Ten million years, Ottsy? Oh, I think it’s been longer than that since I last saw you.’

  They found a bench and sat down together. Otto produced his cigarettes. Dagmar accepted one eagerly.

  ‘Our first shared cigarette since Wannsee,’ she said, putting a hand on Otto’s knee. ‘Do you remember?’

  Remember? Of course he remembered. He remembered nothing else so clearly in all his life as that day at Wannsee. He’d dreamt about it almost every night since.

  Dreaming she’d chosen him.

  But despite the temptation to dive at once into the past, the present remained more urgent.