Two Brothers: A Novel

by Ben Elton

  ‘Fire!’ the voice shouted again and a second round of bullets tore into the people, into their backs now as the crowd was already in full retreat.

  There was no third round. The anonymous voice spared the defenceless people that, but hundreds were already dead and more were dying in the blind panic of flight.

  The Stengel family were just a few steps ahead of that panic, just emerging from the crowd as the first shots were fired. Wolfgang’s quick thinking had certainly saved Paulus and Otto’s lives, and possibly his and Frieda’s too, but they did not stop running for almost two kilometres and never once paused to look back.

  At the Brandenburg Gate the troops were left alone with their victims. The voice cried out once more, then the Freikorps reformed their column and marched out of the city.

  The following morning the briefly deposed government returned to office and the water was turned back on.

  A Proposal

  London, 1956

  STONE SWALLOWED TWICE before he replied.

  He had only just begun adjusting to the certainty that Dagmar was alive after so many years of wondering. And now this.

  ‘A spy? My sister-in-law is a spy? I find that –’ he struggled for the right word and failed – ‘very strange.’

  ‘Well, not necessarily a spy,’ the plump little man whom Stone had begun to think of as Peter Lorre conceded. ‘Shall we try and drum up some fresh tea?’

  ‘I don’t care about bloody tea!’ Stone snapped, the swear word sounding rather strange and forced in his half ‘foreign’ accent. ‘What do you mean, not necessarily a spy? Is she or isn’t she?’

  ‘Let’s put it this way, she definitely works for the East German secret police,’ Lorre replied, ‘that much we do know. Your sister-in-law is a Stasi girl.’

  The Stasi. The very word made every hair on his body stand on end. All German police organizations made Stone’s skin crawl and would do until the day he died. Even the innocent, smiling young pastel-green and khaki-clad West Germans with their untidy hair and deliberately non-militaristic insignia were hard for him to stomach. But the Stasi were a new Gestapo. Working in the Foreign Office Stone knew enough about their activities to feel physically sick at the mere mention of their name.

  This was his old enemy reborn.

  Stasi. Even the word sounded like Nazi.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Stone replied. ‘You must be. I simply can’t believe the woman I knew is a member of … that organization.’

  ‘Oh, she’s one of theirs all right. We can be very clear on that.’ It was the other man who answered, speaking for the first time since the interview had begun. The one Stone had cast in his mind as Humphrey Bogart. Except that Humphrey Bogart had never spoken with a Yorkshire accent.

  ‘Dagmar Stengel née Fischer works for the Stasi,’ Bogart went on, ‘which is why we’re interested in the fact that she made contact with you. Why do you think she wanted to make contact with you, Mr Stone?’

  It was such a soft accent with its friendly vowels and timeless Englishness, like J.B. Priestley on the radio in the war. But it seemed to Stone that there was nothing soft or friendly about the intent of what the man was saying.

  ‘She’s my sister-in-law,’ he said.

  Bogart merely smiled, leaving Peter Lorre to reply.

  ‘Yes. Your sister-in-law,’ he said, brushing shortbread crumbs from his tie, ‘and such was her filial affection that it took her seventeen years to get in touch. And then on the strength of this one contact, a contact that you could not even be sure was genuine, you began immediately to plan a trip to East Berlin, a trip which in your position you must have known would raise eyebrows within certain departments.’

  ‘My position?’

  ‘Oh come on, Stone!’ Lorre snapped. ‘You work in the Foreign Office. The German Department of the Foreign Office.’

  Stone said nothing. He could see their point, of course.

  ‘It just seems to us,’ the Yorkshire voice said, calm and low, ‘that it is a little injudicious for a mid-ranking official of the British Foreign Office to be so eager to make contact with a Stasi officer, sister-in-law or not.’

  ‘Except I didn’t know she was a Stasi officer! And I have to say I’m astonished that you think Dagmar is – she was never remotely political as a girl.’

  ‘If you live in East Germany you’re either a Communist or you’re pretending to be a Communist,’ Peter Lorre said. ‘I don’t think the authorities care which. Besides, the Red Army liberated her. A girl would be grateful, I imagine.’

  ‘From what I know of what the Red Army did on their way west in 1945, very few German women would have had reason to be grateful to them.’

  ‘But your sister-in-law was Jewish.’

  ‘And the Soviets have always loved a Jew, haven’t they?’ Stone replied with bitter sarcasm. ‘You know as well as I do what the NKVD attitude was to Jews. Those Kremlin wolves weren’t much better than the Nazis.’

  ‘Which brings us to the point,’ Bogart said with a smile.

  ‘There’s a point? I mean apart from virtually accusing me of planning treason?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a point. Your sister-in-law is not an obvious fit for the Stasi, not least because of its endemic anti-Semitism.’

  ‘Which is why—’ Stone began to protest.

  ‘And yet Dagmar Stengel is definitely one of their officers,’ Peter Lorre interrupted, anticipating Stone’s objection, ‘there can be no doubt about that. No doubt at all. We looked into her the moment she wrote to you.’

  It was a horrible thought but it was possible. The teenager Stone had known might not have been political but she had been intelligent and tough and self-motivated. Dagmar was a survivor, and who could imagine what horrors she had been through in the years since they had last met. What compromises she had made. How much she had changed.

  ‘A Jew working for the Stasi suggests to us a person who would work for anyone,’ the Bogart figure remarked, resuming his calmer, almost disinterested tone, ‘and we wondered, since you’re going that way, if you might like to try and persuade her to work for us.’

  The man smiled as he said it. As if he had been asking Stone to deliver a small gift or return a book.

  Brand New Model

  Berlin, 1921

  ‘YOU MEAN YOU’LL have to take your clothes off?’ Wolfgang demanded. ‘In front of the bastard?’

  ‘If Herr Karlsruhen requires it, which I imagine he will,’ Frieda replied with a coquettish toss of her thick, dark, recently bobbed hair. ‘I don’t imagine nymphs wear an awful lot of clothes, do you?’

  Wolfgang was changing Paulus’s nappy on the kitchen table, holding the baby’s feet in the air in order to wipe him, and for a moment it almost looked as if he might wave the baby about in protest.

  ‘Well, I don’t want you to do it,’ he said. ‘In fact, I … I forbid you to do it.’

  Loud though Frieda’s hearty laugh was at this doomed attempt at exerting husbandly authority, it was drowned out by Paulus who at the same moment gave a piercing yell, having clearly decided that his arse had been wiped long enough and it was time for Wolfgang to put his legs down.

  Inevitably Paulus’s cries set Otto off, the two babies having long since learnt that they could create more chaos if they worked as a team.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Frieda chided.

  ‘What I’ve done?’ Wolfgang exclaimed. ‘He’s probably crying because his mother wants to be a stripper!’

  ‘Model, Wolf!’

  ‘Nude model, Frieda.’

  Wolfgang finished Paulus’s nappy and pretty much dumped him back down beside Otto where the screaming ramped up another notch or two and Frieda was forced to spend ten minutes rocking the boys and singing ‘Hoppe Hoppe Reiter’ to them. This always cheered them up, it was their favourite song, particularly the verse about the poor fallen rider getting eaten by the ravens, which the boys seemed to understand was a good bit, despite not yet being able to talk. />
  ‘Look, nude modelling is easy work, Wolf,’ Frieda said, when finally the babies had calmed down, ‘and we could certainly do with the money.’

  ‘We don’t need it that much!’

  ‘Oh don’t we?’ In answer to her own question Frieda marched across their tiny kitchen and flung open the doors of the little wall-mounted cupboard that they called their pantry. In it, apart from a few assorted spices and condiments, was a small piece of cheese, a few centimetres of sausage, a handful of carrots, five decent-sized potatoes and half a loaf of black bread. Besides that, there was a bottle of milk sitting in a bowl of water on the window sill and above the sink a jar of ground coffee and some sugar.

  ‘That’s it, Wolf,’ Frieda said angrily. ‘The lot, our entire supplies until you find another band to play in or we go begging to my parents again. I am a student, you are essentially unemployed and we have babies to feed! We need money and if this silly man wants to give me some for getting goosebumps for a couple of hours, I’m going to grab it with both hands.’

  ‘He’d like to grab you with both hands if you ask me.’

  ‘He’s an artist, Wolf. And a rich one too. He pays way above the odds.’

  ‘We don’t need his money. We get by.’ Wolfgang sulked. ‘We don’t starve.’

  ‘Just, Wolf. We don’t starve just. And what sort of ambition is that, by the way? We don’t starve. Nice to know you’ve set your sights so high. Personally I’d like to do a bit better than not actually starving. I’d like to have some nice cakes at the weekend and extra milk for the children, and if taking my clothes off three evenings a week can get me that then every sculptor in Berlin can immortalize my bum in marble as far as I’m concerned.’

  Wolfgang scowled but didn’t answer.

  A rat ran across the lino. He hurled a shoe at it in fury.

  This futile gesture did nothing to harm the rat but the bang startled Otto who began crying again. This caused Paulus to throw out an arm in irritation, scratching Otto’s face with fingernails which Frieda had been absolutely meaning to get to that evening. Otto screamed blue murder at this which, of course, according to the brothers’ unspoken rules, required Paulus to start screaming blue murder as well.

  Peace was finally restored but only after Frieda had been forced to put the boys on her breasts, which she absolutely hated herself for doing. She was trying seriously to wean them in an effort to bring some order into her increasingly chaotic life, a district nurse having told her that breast on demand after the first nine months was the road to anarchy and source of all evil.

  When Wolfgang broke the angry silence that followed, to Frieda’s amazement, instead of being contrite, he was still complaining about her new job.

  ‘I didn’t mind so much when it was at the Art School,’ he said. ‘That was legitimate.’

  ‘Oh. So it’s fine for fifty people to see me naked but not for one? Is that it? Ow! Bugger!’

  Frieda yelped in pain. The babies’ new teeth were another reason for her wanting to get them off the breast as soon as possible.

  ‘Yes, that is it exactly!’ Wolfgang exclaimed. ‘You’ll be alone with this horny old bastard, in his bloody studio.’

  ‘Earning five times what the college pay.’

  ‘And for what? What does he expect to get from it? That’s what I want to know.’

  ‘He expects tits and ass, Wolf!’ Frieda hissed, trying both to shout and to keep her voice down at the same time. ‘Which I happen to have in abundance since the twins put ten kilos on me and which, despite the fact that I eat only one crumb of bread a day, I don’t seem to be able to lose!’

  ‘But why your tits and ass? That’s what I’d like to know,’ Wolfgang asked, still not prepared to give in. ‘What’s he see in you?’

  ‘Well, thanks very much!’

  ‘I think he fancies you.’

  ‘I’ve just said, Wolf, he’s an artist, he needs models to inspire him, and he says that with no meat and no butter in the city all his usual girls have lost their bloom. I, on the other hand, have apparently hung on to mine.’

  ‘Bloom? Is that what he calls it? Bloom? Dirty little swine.’

  But Wolfgang could not help but admit to himself that the sculptor was right.

  Frieda had always turned heads, with her girlishly open face with wide-set eyes, small upturned nose and deep shining auburn hair. She had a trim, athletic-looking ‘modern’ shape but with a generous bust, and while she had certainly acquired an extra curve or two at the hips during her pregnancy, she was no less a beauty for that.

  ‘Well, quite apart from anything else,’ Wolfgang said, changing tack, ‘the man’s a terrible, terrible artist.’

  ‘He’s a Victorian Realist.’

  ‘I think that’s what I said. I mean, honestly. What is the point of realism? The camera has been invented. Take a bloody photograph! It does the job better and at shutter speeds of a hundredth of a second.’

  ‘Lots of people like realism.’

  ‘Lots of people are idiots.’

  Frieda put the babies down and banged a pan on the hob to boil some water. ‘I’m not going to continue with this ridiculous conversation.’

  ‘And I’ll tell you another thing—’ Wolfgang said.

  ‘Not listening.’

  ‘Karlsruhen’s a complete reactionary. I read an interview with him. He supports the Stahlhelm for God’s sake!’

  ‘What? So it would be all right for him to see my tits if he was a Communist?’

  ‘Well, no, maybe not,’ Wolfgang conceded. ‘But it certainly would if he was an Expressionist or a Surrealist!’

  ‘You’re being an absolute idiot, Wolf.’

  ‘Oh, I’m the one being an idiot, am I? Well, tell me this. Will your precious Karlsruhen be making you hold a spear and wear a winged helmet?’

  Frieda paused. He had her there. She couldn’t help but smile, it did seem slightly absurd, a little Jewish girl pretending to be the spirit of völkisches Deutschland while hoping that her nipples wouldn’t start to drip.

  ‘Well … yes,’ she conceded, ‘he did mention spears and helmets. I admit that.’

  ‘A winged helmet.’

  ‘Sometimes apparently. If we’re doing a Rhinemaiden.’

  Now a shadow of a smile appeared at the corners of Wolfgang’s mouth also.

  ‘You are going to stand there, completely naked except for a winged helmet?’

  ‘I think I just told you that.’

  ‘Aren’t Rhinemaidens supposed to be nymphs?’

  ‘In this case, nymphs in helmets.’

  ‘Which isn’t very nymphy.’

  ‘It is to Herr Karlsruhen. Look, Wolf, be realistic,’ Frieda said, trying to make peace, ‘if he thinks I look like the spirit of German womanhood, then bully for us. I’ve told you, he pays top hourly rates and all I have to do is stand still and listen to Wagner.’

  ‘He should pay you top rates to listen to that crap.’

  ‘I don’t mind a bit of Wagner.’

  ‘He was a raving anti-Semite.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with his music?’

  ‘I’m just saying that he was as shitty a man as he was a composer.’

  ‘We can’t all be cool jazz guys, Wolf. Somebody has to write a tune occasionally. You’re being really stupid.’

  ‘And I refer you to my previous point that I’m not the one who is planning on standing about naked in a helmet! Think about that. Naked. But in a helmet. It defies logic, or do people only get hit on the head in Asgard?’

  ‘Now who’s interested in realism?’

  Frieda turned her attention to a load of nappies that were soaking in a bucket.

  ‘This man lives in the hottest, craziest city in Europe. Every studio’s got some wild genius in it breaking all the rules of form – and this prick wants to set the Ring Cycle in stone.’

  Frieda fished a dripping terry towel out of the bucket and began running it through the mangle.

  ‘You’re
being pathetic and self-righteous and actually totally reactionary in a reverse kind of way,’ she said, ‘which is frankly not attractive.’

  ‘Keep mangling,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘Karlsruhen’s going to love those muscles. If you’re lucky he might even promote you to Brünnhilde.’

  ‘There can be more than one style of art you know,’ Frieda said through gritted teeth as she worked the heavy handle. ‘Not everybody wants to look at pictures of babies on bayonets and limbless soldiers like the stuff you like. We can’t all be George Grosz or Otto Dix.’

  ‘Bloody geniuses, both of them. Jazz on canvas. People like Karlsruhen and his moronic Stahlhelm go on about making Germany great again. It’s already great. Stuff is going on here in Berlin, within a few hundred metres of where we’re sitting, that they haven’t even started dreaming about in Paris or New York.’

  ‘Just listen to yourself, why don’t you?’ Frieda said as the water from the nappies cascaded into the mangle tray. ‘You’re actually more chauvinist than the Steel Helmets with your “we’ve got better art in Germany than those bloody foreigners” – even the avant garde are nationalists. It’s pathetic.’

  Wolfgang’s tone showed that despite himself he could see her point. ‘I’m just saying that for once we have something going on here that we can be proud of.’

  ‘So you’d feel better about it if I was posing for someone who gave me square tits and three buttocks. That would be all right, would it?’

  ‘It would be a lot better.’

  Frieda said nothing. But she gave the mangle an extra vicious turn.

  Rhinemaiden

  Berlin, 1922

  DESPITE WOLFGANG’S PROTESTATIONS, Frieda took the modelling job and posed for Herr Karlsruhen throughout 1921 and into the following year. It was while she was on her way to the sculptor’s studio in the summer of 1922 that she heard the horrible news that Germany’s Foreign Minister had been shot, murdered while on his way to work by a teenage gang put up to it by reactionary anti-Semites. A newspaper boy was calling out a special edition of the Berliner Tageblatt. ‘Walther Rathenau dead!’ the boy shouted. ‘Shot in his car.’