Two Brothers: A Novel

by Ben Elton

  That was until they saw her approaching the victory podium.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ Paulus said. ‘Bloody hell! She’s not going to mess around with the cups, is she?’

  Dagmar was certainly making her way towards the table where the trophies were displayed.

  Tea had been announced a few minutes earlier, and with the various teachers and judges all intent on claiming their share of the refreshments, Dagmar had accepted a dare. Paulus and Otto watched in wonder as she sidled up to the table, took up the grand trophy and stepped up on to the little jetty which led to the diving platforms to pose for a photograph.

  Unfortunately the jetty was wet and she slipped, dropping the splendid trophy and breaking its base. Stunned at what she’d done, she simply stood, quaking in terror as a whistle was blown to mark the end of tea and the resumption of the gala. It was then that Paulus and Otto charged up and grabbed the broken trophy from her.

  ‘Get out of it, Dag!’ Paulus blurted. ‘Get back to your friends!’

  Moments later the judges returned to find two contrite little boys in bathing trunks holding the broken trophy.

  ‘What is the explanation of this?’ the master thundered through his snow-white whiskers. Every inch the old professor with his stiff collar and frock coat and his cane.

  ‘Some rough boys were playing with it!’ Paulus said.

  ‘We were playing with it. It was us!’ Otto declared simultaneously.

  ‘We chased them into those woods and got the cup back,’ Paulus went on.

  ‘We broke it. It was us, we did it!’ Otto said.

  The two boys turned to each other.

  ‘You idiot,’ Paulus said.

  The upshot was that the Stengel boys were given a public beating, which Dagmar watched, astonished at their kindness and thrilled at their bravery. And, if she were honest with herself, rather pleased: it’s not every girl who gets publicly defended in front of all her friends by two strange tousle-headed boys who don’t even cry when they get ten on the backside. Plus four extra for Paulus for trying to make up a story.

  They might perhaps have given way to tears if they had received their beatings alone, but neither was prepared to be the first to break in front of the other.

  And particularly not in front of Dagmar.

  Silke was also present at the gala with her school and, although she hadn’t seen the incident, she quickly heard all about it, as word of what had happened spread like wildfire amongst the children. Later when the competition resumed (minus the disgraced Stengel twins), Silke pushed her way through the various school groups to confront Dagmar. Facing each other, the two little girls made quite a contrast. Dagmar, tall for eight, her beautifully fitted school swimsuit of the latest two-way stretch elastic. Silke, small and tough, in a baggy suit of knitted wool (holed in a number of places), her legs bruised and scratched as they always were from some fight or other.

  ‘You got our boys a beating!’ Silke snarled.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Dagmar replied loftily. ‘I didn’t ask them to take the blame, did I?’

  ‘You should have said! They wouldn’t have whipped a girl.’

  ‘That would have just looked ridiculous. Paulus and Otto had already given different stories. I don’t think a third would have helped, would it? They’d still have been beaten. Besides, the boys wanted to help me, isn’t that what the Saturday Club’s about? I think it was very noble.’

  Silke’s fists clenched. She was red-faced. Angry but also embarrassed and ill-at-ease, a scruffy kid amongst so many little rich girls, all dressed in the same identical, beautiful bathing costumes that Dagmar was wearing.

  ‘Who is this child?’ a stern female voice snapped as Dagmar’s forbidding-looking teacher approached. ‘She should be with her own school. Girl, why have you left your group?’

  ‘I came to talk to Dagmar, miss,’ Silke mumbled at the ground.

  ‘Chin up and speak out, girl! We are not at home to Mrs Mumble here,’ the teacher snapped, provoking much giggling from the posh girls, which turned Silke positively crimson.

  ‘I came to see Dagmar Fischer,’ Silke said, raising her head a little.

  The school mistress gave Dagmar a dubious look.

  ‘Do you know this little girl, Fräulein Fischer?’

  ‘Yes, Frau Sinzheim. She is the daughter of the woman who cleans the apartment where I have my music lessons.’

  Silke’s jaw dropped to hear herself so dismissively described.

  ‘We’re friends!’ Silke asserted.

  This caused further giggling amongst Dagmar’s classmates and it was Dagmar’s turn to go red.

  ‘Well, she must run along now,’ Frau Sinzheim said with a dubious look at Silke, ‘as the finals are upon us and you need to concentrate, Dagmar. Under-tens freestyle, breaststroke and the relay. I look to you to deliver Gold in all three.’

  ‘Yes, Frau Sinzheim.’

  The mistress turned back to Silke.

  ‘Get away now, little girl. You have no business here.’

  Frau Sinzheim moved on, leaving Silke staring at Dagmar with blazing eyes and poking out her tongue.

  ‘Come on, Silke,’ Dagmar said. ‘You’re just jealous. You wouldn’t have minded one bit if it had been you the boys took a whipping for. But do you think they would have done?’

  Silke looked as if she was about to reply but then didn’t. It seemed that perhaps Dagmar’s observation had hit the mark.

  Two Parties and a Crash

  Munich, Berlin and New York, 1929

  TWENTY-FOURTH OF FEBRUARY.

  Two birthday parties.

  One in an apartment in Friedrichshain, Berlin.

  The other in Munich in a house at Schellingstrasse 50.

  Paulus, Otto and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.

  All nine years old that day.

  Only one of them would live to beyond the age of twenty-five.

  The other two, like countless millions of other youngsters around the world, were doomed.

  The Munich nine-year-old would murder them before perishing itself.

  The birthday party in Berlin was a very jolly affair.

  There were games and cake and American soda. The awkwardness of the meeting up of Paulus and Otto’s school friends with Dagmar and Silke from the Saturday Club was soon overcome. Dagmar even let her hair down sufficiently to take her turn with the blindfold in Blind Man’s Bluff.

  There was much to celebrate, as the boys’ grandfather pointed out in a rather lengthy toast that he insisted on being allowed to make during tea and which the children largely ignored, not unnaturally preferring to concentrate on the rolls and cold chicken.

  ‘These lucky boys will achieve more than we ever have,’ Herr Tauber said, ‘for Germany’s long nightmare is over and every opportunity is open to them.’

  It was in fact for this very reason that the Munich celebration was not such a happy event. Germany’s increasing success might have been good for the Stengel boys but it had left the National Socialist German Workers’ Party thin and ailing.

  Its message of violent, uncompromising outrage and hatred had begun to sound somewhat hollow as life in the Fatherland continued to improve. In the Reichstag elections of 1924 they had gained 3 per cent of the national vote. In 1928, after four more years of screaming, shouting, marching and fist-banging up and down the country, they were down to just 2.6 per cent.

  The brown-shirted men were at a loss.

  Their brown-shirted leader was at a loss also. Although of course he hid his confusion behind the stern face of an ‘implacable’ and ‘unalterable’ will.

  What was going wrong?

  Their message was clear enough. Despite the confusing and self-contradictory ‘twenty-five points’ with which Hitler had launched the party, it really boiled down to just one thing: ‘Blame the Jews for everything.’

  What could be simpler? And yet this message was proving increasingly difficult to either explain or s
ustain.

  Should the Jews be blamed for the increasingly stable money?

  The improving employment situation?

  The efficient social services?

  Membership of the League of Nations?

  People liked all of those things. They were the very reason that in Berlin old Herr Tauber felt able to state that the country’s nightmare was over.

  Even the great outrage of November 1918, the so-called ‘stab in the back’ theory which had long been a Nazi Party favourite, was beginning to sound like a paranoid obsession. Over and over again throughout the 1920s Hitler had railed against the ‘November Criminals’, those rich and cowardly Jews skulking in Berlin who had deliberately, maliciously (and for no apparent reason that Hitler cared to explain) conspired to organize the defeat of the Imperial German Army.

  People had used to lap that one up but now nobody seemed to give a damn.

  Germany had moved on.

  The Munich Baby was dying.

  And yet unbeknownst to those glum brown-shirted men sitting around the table at the house in Munich, everything was about to change. The Nazi Party would have to wait eight months for its birthday present, but when it came, it was the best they could possibly have hoped for.

  Chaos.

  On 24 October 1929, six and a half thousand kilometres from Schelling Street. On another street. An infinitely more famous one, called Wall Street, there began the greatest collapse in market confidence in all history and with it a global depression.

  Germany’s economic recovery had been the most fragile, the abyss from which it had hauled itself the darkest and most deep. Its vulnerability to this new financial madness was therefore all the greater.

  The Munich Baby was about to get its chance.

  Fighting over Dagmar

  Berlin, 1932

  OTTO WAS VERY surprised. What had got into Paulus?

  Otto was a fighter, a two-fisted scrapper who never bothered with words when a blow could be more articulate, but Paulus was the opposite.

  Paulus never fought unless he absolutely had to. He never lost control of his emotions either. He was passionate, certainly, but he always tempered his passion with reason.

  Reason should therefore have told him that in a fist fight against Otto he was bound to get pounded.

  He was taller, but he was thinner.

  He had the reach but Otto had the grunt.

  He was a rapier, Otto was a Howitzer.

  Which was why it had come as such a shock to Otto to feel the knuckles of Paulus’s left upper cut smashing into his mouth and rattling his teeth. What was more, the sharp pain of that first unexpected blow was followed swiftly by a deep intestinal ache as Paulus buried his right into Otto’s guts.

  Otto doubled forward involuntarily, as had of course been the purpose of the carefully placed blow, and shortly thereafter he found himself knocked sprawling on to the ground by a pile driver of a left hook to the side of his bowed head which split open the skin on his ear and made his vision double.

  A perfect three-blow combination.

  Proving just what can be achieved with surprise and cool, forensic determination. Exactly as the boys’ boxing instructor had always told them it could. Paulus had clearly been paying more attention than Otto had supposed.

  The boxing classes were Wolfgang’s idea. Frieda had been dead against them.

  ‘Teaching them to fight might actually get them into trouble,’ she had protested. ‘It might make them think they can handle something they can’t.’

  ‘They already think they can handle things they can’t,’ Wolfgang argued, ‘so we might as well try and even the odds a bit.’

  That had been two years before in 1930 when almost overnight Berlin had begun once more to resemble the lunatic asylum it had been when the twins were born. Those old familiar sounds had returned to the city, breaking glass, running boots, screams and gunfire. To Frieda and Wolfgang it was as if they’d never gone away. There were the same daily battles between the same old factions. Except on the right the Nazi Sturmabteilung had replaced the late and unlamented Freikorps.

  ‘Just like old times,’ Wolfgang remarked.

  ‘Not quite,’ Frieda remarked grimly. ‘This time it’s worse for us.’

  She was right and Wolfgang knew it. The anti-Semitism was more pronounced than it had ever been before. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Gauleiter of Berlin, did not let a day go by without appearing on some street corner to accuse the Jews of power and influence that corrupted and controlled every aspect of society.

  ‘If we really had as much influence as that bastard says,’ Wolfgang commented, ‘we’d have had him fucking killed long ago.’

  But the Jews of Germany were none of the things they were supposed to be. They were neither organized nor focused; the only thing that united them was the accident of genealogy that named them Jews. Accused of a collective conspiratorial aggression, they were incapable of collective defence, and all Wolfgang could do for his own family was put bars on the windows, keep a blackjack in his pocket and make sure his boys knew how to box.

  Of course he had not expected them to start using their skills on each other.

  Looking back, neither Paulus nor Otto could quite remember which of them it was who first admitted to being in love with Dagmar. A confession which sparked the bloodiest battle they had ever fought.

  It was Silke who provoked it.

  They’d been playing horse shoes with her in a muddy little patch of public gardens near the Stengel apartment, and Silke had taken the opportunity as she often did to complain about ‘Princess’ Dagmar and how more and more ‘up herself’ she had become.

  ‘She thinks she’s better than us because she’s so rich and so pretty,’ Silke said grumpily. ‘Just because her dad’s a millionaire.’

  Stung by Silke’s contempt, one twin had told her to keep quiet, that Dagmar was OK.

  Then the other volunteered that she was more than OK, she was in fact rather wonderful. Gorgeous even. Stunning.

  A total goddess might be one way of putting it.

  And suddenly the truth was out. The Stengel boys were in love.

  With the same girl.

  Silke actually stamped the ground she was so angry and frustrated. She had long sensed that such emotions were gathering within her beloved twins, but was nonetheless shocked at how comprehensive they had turned out to be.

  ‘You can’t both love her!’ she cried. ‘It’s just stupid.’

  This was one thing on which the boys could certainly agree.

  ‘Of course we can’t!’ Paulus snarled. ‘Because actually I’ve already told her I love her and she’s agreed to go around with me.’

  ‘It’s a lie!’ Otto shouted back. ‘I’ve already told her I love her and she said she’d go around with me.’

  Despite her fury Silke couldn’t help but laugh at that one.

  ‘Haha! She’s tricked you both!’ she cried. ‘More fool you. She probably doesn’t give a shit about either of you.’

  ‘Yes she does!’ Otto shouted, advancing on his brother and pushing him backwards. ‘She loves me and you’d better back off and keep away or you’ll regret it!’

  That was when Paulus had surprised Otto by laying him out with his beautiful triple combination.

  ‘She’s mine!’ Paulus shouted down at his astonished and slightly woozy brother. ‘She told me she loved me!’

  ‘Like hell she did, you wanker!’ Otto shouted back, directing his cry to the space between the two images of his brother which were floating before his eyes. ‘She said she loved me!’

  Otto had never seen his brother’s face red like that, his eyes wild with emotion. Paulus was supposed to be the calm one.

  ‘She’s making arseholes of both of you,’ Silke called out from the tree stump on which she had perched herself to watch the fun. ‘It’s obvious she’s told you both the same thing. She’s having a laugh.’

  ‘You keep out of it, Silks!’

  Ot
to had been caught unawares. When he’d pushed his brother backwards towards the bike shed, a heavy palm banging against his twin’s chest, he hadn’t expected to be answered with this flurry of finely delivered blows. But he was ready now. He had discovered that there was one subject on which Paulus’s usual calm and reason deserted him.

  ‘Yes, you keep out of it, Silks,’ Paulus said. ‘This is between Otts and me and you’d better back off, Otts, OK? Or you’ll be sorry.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Otto replied, raising himself from the ground. ‘You think ’cos you landed a lucky punch or two you’re a fighter, do you? Well now I’m going to beat the shit out of you, Paulo, until you admit that Dagmar’s mine.’

  Otto got to his feet, put his head down and piled in with a flurry of body punches, right and left hooks banging into Paulus’s floating lower ribs. Otto was not the clever one at school and Paulus got better marks in human biology but Otto knew where a man’s liver and kidneys were, and he was seeking out his brother’s with deadly accuracy, twisting his fists slightly, screwing the blows into Paulus’s body as he’d been taught to do.

  Paulus reeled backwards, gagging heavily as he tried to draw in breath and stop himself from puking.

  ‘Admit it,’ Otto shouted, ‘just admit it!’

  It was Paulus’s turn to be bent double now, gasping, holding on to his injured sides.

  ‘Fuck you!’

  Otto stood over his wheezing brother. ‘I reckon you’ve learnt your lesson now, so admit she loves me.’

  Otto never should have dropped his guard.

  Paulus straightened himself up, throwing a wild cross, a classic sucker punch, and Otto was the sucker for imagining his brother beaten. Otto had reckoned it would be ten minutes before Paulus could form a proper sentence, let alone deliver a haymaker of a right hook that swung up from out of nowhere and caught Otto in the eye, sending him once more sprawling to the ground.