Two Brothers: A Novel

by Ben Elton

  Wolfgang got up from his bar stool.

  ‘Yeah. Maybe you’re right, Katharina,’ he said. ‘Sorry for being an arsehole. And thanks for … well, thanks.’

  ‘Just get on stage. And make it hot hot hot, eh?’

  Wolfgang made his way back towards the band room, passing Helmut who was heading for the men’s toilet leading a shaven-headed military type and a beautiful young man.

  ‘The party never stops, eh, Wolfgang?’ he said.

  Wolfgang smiled. ‘I imagine it will have to stop in the end.’

  Two weeks later, on 15 November, the new president of the Reichsbank abolished the worthless Deutschmark and introduced a new emergency currency with draconian restrictions on lending and speculation. The Rentenmark, as it was called, held its value, and almost overnight another German madness was over.

  A Screaming Three-year-old

  Munich, 1923

  THAT SAME MONTH far away in Bavaria another, infinitely more terrible madness was growing stronger. The Nazi Party, that screaming, ranting, violent baby, born on the same day as the Stengel twins, threw a tantrum just before its third birthday. Adolf Hitler, the infant’s voice and psyche, attempted to overthrow the state by force. Kidnapping three local politicians and marching at the head of two thousand armed thugs from a beer hall to the Bavarian Defence Ministry, where he intended to demand dictatorial control not just over Bavaria but over the entire Reich.

  Hitler and his gang never reached the ministry. They were instead met by one hundred police officers who blocked their path. Shots were exchanged and four policemen and sixteen Nazis were killed. Hitler fled but another Nazi leader, Hermann Goering, was seriously wounded. He was helped into a nearby bank where first aid was administered. By a Jew.

  Modern Jazz

  London, 1956

  IN THE EVENING Stone could not stand the inside of his flat any longer and decided he must go out. They wouldn’t call now anyway. The Secret Service was like the Foreign Office: it kept office hours whenever possible. Overtime claims were severely frowned on.

  So having made himself a solitary meal of eggs and baked beans and drunk a bottle of Guinness, Stone decided to head up to Finsbury Park to drop in at the New Downbeat, a Monday-night jazz club he’d spent quite a bit of time in over the years. He didn’t visit so much any more, not now that he had discovered the scene in Notting Hill. The illegal West Indian clubs were much wilder and hipper than the well-established London jazz circuit, which tended to be frequented by earnest middle-class students. But Stone still loved the music. Tubby Hayes had a regular gig at the New Downbeat and you didn’t hear much better tenor sax than from Tubby Hayes. Stone’s father had always loved the sax but had rarely played it professionally because he usually felt there were better exponents than him in the band. He had played it at home, though, and at jams in local bars. Stone always thought of the tenor sax as a sort of ‘family’ instrument. Dad’s hobby, not his job.

  He took a taxi. The New Downbeat Club was held at the Manor House pub, which was right opposite Manor House tube station, but he didn’t like the underground at the end of the day. Even though he was a heavy smoker himself, he found the stale tobacco stench mixed with a day’s accumulation of body odour just too depressing. Settling back in his seat Stone lit up a Lucky Strike and watched the bars of light passing across the interior of the cab as the taxi drove past the streetlamps.

  For a moment he had a recollection of watching similar rhythmic flashes. On the Berlin to Rotterdam sleeper. Lying in his little cabin, thundering through the clanking, rattling, shuddering darkness past the lights of some station or other.

  Seeing the seconds tick by on his wristwatch.

  Stone held up his arm for a moment, letting the light flash once more on that very same watch. Berlin, Rotterdam – London. In a funny way he was still on the same journey.

  Stone closed his eyes. Willing himself far away. To somewhere near the start of the journey. Another time. Another place. Where he was happy.

  Far away from Camden and Holloway and the Seven Sisters Road. Back in the People’s Park. Laughing and shouting in the Märchenbrunnen, with its fountains and one hundred and six sculptures of characters from fairy tales. He and his brother running in separate directions around the great circular path. Trapping Dagmar between Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood. Each holding a soft slim golden arm and begging for a kiss, while Silke sulked nearby and called them both pathetic.

  In the taxi Stone smoked his cigarette and found himself wondering if Dagmar ever walked amongst those one hundred and six stone statues and remembered. By some miracle the Märchenbrunnen had survived the Allied bombing and it was now in the Eastern sector. Did Dagmar visit? Did she remember kiss-chase under the watchful gaze of Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood, and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and all the population of Fairy Land?

  On her way to work?

  At the Stasi?

  The taxi driver’s voice intruded on his thoughts. ‘We’re here, mate. The Manor House pub.’

  Stone hadn’t even noticed them pulling up.

  He was early and there was still plenty of space but he knew from experience the gig would fill up so he staked his claim immediately. Taking his pint and whisky chaser he found a table down at the front, right where he knew the horn section would be standing. Since he was going to have to share a table, he wanted to be sure that it was somewhere where there was as little chance of idle conversation as possible. He’d had too many experiences of being lost in a faraway melody only to have his concentration shattered by some jazz train-spotter feeling the need to demonstrate his encyclopaedic knowledge of the technical side of beauty.

  ‘Good augmented seventh, don’t you think? And how about that melodic minor? Cool.’

  Stone was a loner by choice. He didn’t want to chat, ever. But because he had frequented a lot of jazz clubs over the years, he had learnt to beware of guys plonking their pints and pipes down beside his pack of Luckies on the excuse that they’d seen him at the Florida, the Flamingo or Studio 51, and imagined somehow that this meant they were jazz buddies.

  Stone lit a cigarette and took up a newspaper he’d bought at the tube station opposite. Still Suez and Hungary, of course. He didn’t want to read it but a paper wall was a useful blocking device to keep out whoever sat down until the music started.

  The room began to fill up. The classic jazz crowd, arty, intense. Duffle coats and corduroy shoes. Like a Labour Party meeting in Hampstead, Stone thought. Except rather fuller. There was a sense of reverence in the room, people spoke in quiet voices, with one or two vainer souls laughing too loudly to show what loose guys they were. How had music that at one time had woken up the whole world become so rarefied? In his father’s day jazz had been loud and drunken, it was party music, you danced, you didn’t sit about and listen. Maybe it was a class thing. Rags and Dixie had once belonged to the poor and to the decadent elite. Now it had settled down firmly between the two and was as middle class as the BBC and Ban the Bomb.

  ‘Is this seat taken, man?’

  Stone looked up. A good result. Student types. They wouldn’t want to talk to a square-looking daddy like him. Four of them. Two cats, two chicks.

  Classic beats. The chicks with their short fringes cut straight and high. Stripy jumpers, tight pedal-pusher slacks. Bare calves. Flatties. The cats in polo-necked sweaters. Wispy goatee beards. Black jeans. Desert boots. One wore a beret and had sunglasses in the breast pocket of his corduroy jacket.

  Two cats. Two chicks. Two chairs.

  ‘No. They’re free,’ Stone said.

  The cats sat on the chairs and the chicks sat on the cats. One of the couples had a set of bongo drums and a battered school notebook. Stone suspected that they were hoping later to luck in to the dregs of the audience and offer up a bit of rhythmic poetry. He would not be sticking around for that.

  The band began to assemble to polite applause and much worthy nodding of heads. The cats at Stone’s table
clearly wanted to clap and nod but it was difficult with chicks on their knees. They had to reach all the way around the girls’ woolly-covered waists to get their hands together, which of course made nodding almost impossible as their faces were in the back of their girls’ jumpers. Pretty soon the chicks gave it up and went to stand at the back. Stone doubted whether they had been much into the music anyway. Jazz seemed to have become mainly a boys’ thing. That was another strange development. It had never been that way in his father’s time. Back then the girls had loved their jazz. They were the jazz babies after all, they defined the 1920s. According to his father the clubs had been completely packed with them, shaking and shimmying, flashing their big round Betty Boop eyes and pouting bee-stung lips.

  Every one a heartbreaker, or so his dad used to say.

  His mother always raised her eyes at that.

  Stone had been too young to see for himself of course. By the time he and his brother were old enough to think about going to clubs, the Nazis had long since banned ‘nigger’ music, as they called it, and they wouldn’t have been allowed in anyway. Wolfgang would not have been allowed to play. Jewish musicians were allowed only to perform to Jews. And all the audiences at the Jewish Kulturbund seemed to want to hear was Mendelssohn. Perhaps because it reminded them that they had once been German.

  The trumpet guys had appeared on stage. Unusually tonight there were two of them. Sipping their beer, exchanging a word or two. Warming up their instruments, running rags through the tubes, diddling the keys. Blowing on their fingers. Stone half closed his eyes and tried to see his father. He must have looked much as these guys did, polishing, diddling. Blowing on his fingers.

  That was why Stone came, really. He liked the music well enough, but what he really came to do was half close his eyes and try to see his father. And once he had got a fix on that, put his brother in the picture too. Just as they had always planned.

  All through their childhood together, on the countless mornings they had woken up to the sound of Dad coming home, they had whispered and plotted, dreaming that one night the two of them would sneak in and see him play. They would stand together at the back of one of those magical places their parents called clubs and share in their father’s secret world.

  They never did, of course.

  But when Stone sat alone in those little London pubs watching a vision of his father through tobacco smoke, whisky haze and his half-closed eyes, he always had his brother there beside him, just like they had planned it when they whispered together, lying in their cosy beds, in their little room, in the apartment in Berlin.

  Tubby, the leader, walked on stage and introduced the band.

  ‘We’re going to warm up with some trad,’ Tubby announced, ‘just to keep the chill out.’

  They did The Sheik of Araby. That one had been new when his father was starting out. Fresh in from the USA.

  Stone smoked his Luckies, sat beside his brother and watched his father play.

  A Very Proper Little Girl

  Berlin, 1926

  WOLFGANG PUT DOWN his coffee cup, took up his pen and forced himself to begin.

  Music Tutor seeks Pupils. Piano and all other instruments a speciality.

  There. The first sentence. Done. He put down his pen.

  ‘Shall I make some more toast?’ he said, turning to Frieda.

  ‘Wolf! You’ve hardly even started!’

  ‘All right! All right!’

  He stared at the paper for a moment or two and then showed her his single line.

  ‘What do you think so far?’

  ‘I don’t think you can say all instruments are a speciality,’ Frieda replied. ‘I mean, everything can’t be a speciality, can it? No matter how good you are.’

  ‘You see! I told you this wouldn’t work.’

  ‘Wolf! You haven’t tried at all.’

  ‘Because my heart isn’t in it. Why don’t you write it?’

  ‘Because I’m darning.’

  They were still in bed. It was a Sunday morning. What should have been the best day of the week. So peaceful. Coffee, toast. Frieda stitching socks, Paulus on the rug reading. Otto biting the heads off his toy soldiers. And he had to write this stupid advert.

  He chewed his pen in moody silence.

  Specializing in all instruments?

  All instruments equally special?

  You name it, I can play it?

  ‘Maybe I should just stick to piano,’ he said. ‘That’s all anyone ever wants their little buggers to learn anyway.’

  ‘Whatever you think. Just get on with it.’

  He hated the idea of having to teach music.

  And he particularly hated the idea of teaching music to children. But he knew from friends who had been forced into the same grim career compromise that that was where the work was.

  ‘Of course it’ll be kids,’ he said grumpily. ‘Adults are mature enough to know they’re shit at music. You have to teach children to understand that they can’t play.’

  ‘Please try not to be so negative, Wolf,’ Frieda said.

  ‘Well, that’s really what teaching music is about, isn’t it? I mean, ninety-nine per cent of the time? The long torturous process of revealing to the student that they are complete crap and will never be able to play anything more than O Tannenbaum. Teacher and student just waiting it out week after week after week until finally the penny drops and the student gives up, never to think about music again until they force it on their own equally talentless kids.’

  ‘Wolf! Shut up! Either write the advert or don’t.’

  ‘I’m just being honest, that’s all.’

  He had enough trouble trying to get his own kids to pick up an instrument, let alone anyone else’s. He could scarcely get Paulus and Otto to even listen to anything decent. He strongly suspected he was the father of a couple of Philistines. The only jazz they seemed to like was ragtime, and at very nearly seven they really ought to have got a bit beyond that.

  ‘Are you sure they weren’t both adopted?’ he whispered occasionally to Frieda.

  Which she did not find funny at all.

  Wolf was a professional musician. Not some glorified nanny.

  It was the government’s fault, of course. Stresemann and that whole dull Social Democratic crowd with their boring stability and prudence. What was becoming of the country? It was a disgrace! Even in Berlin, in the heart of the youngest, wildest, most hedonistic and avant garde metropolis on the planet, things had calmed down to an alarming degree. There was still club work at weekends but the weekdays were dead.

  ‘People have stopped dancing,’ Wolfgang moaned. ‘Three years ago I had my pick of twenty gigs a day. Now I’m fighting top side men for pfennigs. Guys who have really got it are playing piano in fleapits to the Keystone Cops! It’s a criminal waste of talent. God, I miss the good old days.’

  ‘What?’ Frieda said, focusing on threading a needle. ‘You mean revolution and inflation?’

  ‘Yes! Exactly, Fred! That’s exactly what I mean. Cataclysmic national disaster! That’s what a city needs to make it swing. Three years ago when the country was completely knackered, bank clerks and shop girls were dancing crotch to crotch into the small hours! Drinking themselves insane, snorting cocaine and slipping off to screw in the toilets! Jazzing it up like there was no tomorrow because they didn’t think that there was going to be a tomorrow. Suddenly they’ve turned into their parents. It’s a disgrace.’

  ‘People can’t have fun all the time, Wolf.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they have responsibilities. They need to save. They need to start planning for the future.’

  ‘Future! Future. As if any German under thirty-five even knows what the word means! There never was a future up until now! Being alive in the morning, that was the future. The future was your next meal. Now people are planning for old age. Investing in pensions, putting a little aside for their summer holidays. Have we learned nothing? Don’t they realize that the ne
xt drink and the next dance are the only investments worth making?’

  ‘Well it’s up to you, darling,’ Frieda said. ‘Do it or don’t do it but you know as well as I do that we could do with the money.’ She paused for a moment before adding, ‘You know, just until you sell a song.’

  Wolfgang smiled. She meant it too. She still believed.

  ‘The next Mendelssohn, eh?’

  ‘No!’ Frieda protested. ‘The next Scott Joplin.’

  Wolfgang kissed her.

  ‘Yuk!’ said Otto from amidst his dead soldiers.

  ‘Don’t be immature, Otts,’ said Paulus from his book, adding ‘Poo face’ under his breath.

  ‘Frieda, I’m not Joplin,’ Wolfgang said with a smile. ‘I’m just happy to live in a world where somebody is.’

  Frieda smiled. ‘So what now?’

  ‘Well. I suppose I try and finish this advert.’

  ‘Oh give it here!’

  And exactly a week later, on the very next Sunday morning, instead of lying in bed till noon, Wolfgang found himself dressed in his best suit pouring coffee for a prosperous-looking gentleman who sat gingerly on the edge of the Stengels’ cluttered couch next to his exquisitely turned-out six-year-old daughter.

  ‘And the little girl?’ Wolfgang enquired. ‘Fräulein Fischer?’

  ‘Dagmar,’ the gentleman said. ‘Please, you must call her Dagmar.’

  ‘Uhm … Will you take some refreshment, Dagmar?’

  There were suppressed giggles from somewhere in the vicinity of the doorway to the kitchen. Clearly other members of the Stengel household were finding their father’s efforts at polite formality amusing. Little Silke was with them too, as mischievous as either of the boys.

  Wolfgang glanced furiously over his shoulder but none of the three culprits were to be seen.

  ‘I should like a glass of lemonade, please, Herr Professor,’ the little girl on the couch replied in the most refined of voices, ‘with quite a lot of sugar.’