Two Brothers: A Novel

by Ben Elton

  ‘What?’ Otto hissed. ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘Otto,’ Paulus replied, ‘the only way to get away with something like this is to brazen it out. If we go sneaking around at dead of night then we’ll be stopped for sure. This way we’re just one of a hundred carts. Now come on.’

  As the boys began to push the cart away, Frieda appeared in the doorway of the building.

  ‘Funny,’ she said, her voice strange and leaden, ‘I rode on this cart once myself, you know. You boys did too in a way. Your father was taking me to hospital to … to …’ Frieda could not finish the sentence. She simply stood there gulping down her tears.

  ‘We know, Mum,’ Paulus said gently, ‘you’ve told us about it lots of times. Don’t worry, Dad’ll be back. Some people do come back, you know. Especially now this bloke’s not in a position any more to keep Dad out of the way.’

  Frieda returned to the apartment and Paulus, Otto and Silke began to push the cart away.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Silke said. It was the first time she had spoken since the murder.

  Otto, who had been growing in confidence with his brother’s surety, went suddenly white with alarm. ‘Christ, Paulus! I hadn’t thought! Where are we going?’

  ‘To the river obviously,’ Paulus replied, already beginning to push. ‘With such a heavy carpet tied around him he’ll sink like a stone. All we have to do is get it in without anyone seeing. Or at least anybody caring.’ Paulus turned once more to Silke. ‘Silks,’ he said, ‘you’ve been so incredible helping us like this, but really, you shouldn’t come now. There’s only two cart handles and there’s no point you risking your life too.’

  ‘I think you’ll do better with a girl along,’ she said quietly. ‘It’ll just look more innocent somehow. Two lads on their own are much more likely to attract trouble.’

  Paulus just smiled and once more put his weight to the cart.

  As they made their way along the streets, they attracted the odd glance but nothing more. For the previous twenty years Berlin’s cobbles had rung constantly to the sound of metal cartwheels as desperate people traded and bartered what little they had to survive. The boys’ main fear was that somebody might take it into their mind to try and rob them and for that reason Otto kept his hand on his knife.

  Fortunately he had no occasion to use it and after an hour or so of heavy work they found themselves down amongst the wharfs where Paulus pointed the cart towards a lonely jetty.

  ‘We do it quick and we do it bold,’ Paulus said. ‘No creeping, no skulking. That’s the way to get away with stuff. In my experience if you front people up they tend to mind their own business.’

  ‘They’d fucking better,’ Otto said grimly.

  ‘Right. Let’s do it,’ Paulus said.

  ‘That drunk’s watching us,’ Silke whispered in panic.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. There’ll always be someone watching. What will they do? Call the cops? People down by the river at night don’t like cops. Now’s as good a time as it’s ever going to be.’

  And so the three of them pushed the cart to the end of their chosen jetty and simply tipped its bloody burden into the river. Then, having put the other pillows and blankets back into the cart, they turned around and pushed it away.

  ‘Don’t look back,’ Paulus warned. ‘Walk steady. Don’t hesitate but don’t run either.’

  Paulus was right in his cool analysis. Nobody bothered them. The tramp just shrugged and looked away. As did a drunken sailor smoking with a whore on the next jetty along.

  Shadowy figures had been disposing of bodies in Berlin on a nightly basis since November 1918 and every morning the river disgorged its dead. It was not such an exceptional thing. If you knew what was good for you, you tended not to confront the people doing the dumping, no matter how young they looked.

  Party Interrupted

  Bad Wiessee, 1934

  ALL DAY AND all evening the quaint little spa town had resounded to the sound of raucous celebration. Bands played, beer flowed in rivers and vast quantities of food had either been consumed or thrown about in fun. Ernst Röhm and the senior leadership of the Nazi Sturmabteilung, along with a large supply of teenage storm troopers, were having a ‘conference’ and seldom had so little business been mixed with so much pleasure.

  The only jarring notes in the general mood of excess and celebration came when conversation turned to how slowly the fruits of the National Socialist Revolution were being distributed amongst those who deserved them most. It had after all been the knuckle-dusters and steel-capped boots of the SA that had brought Hitler to power and now the Brown Army wanted its reward.

  ‘We are the police! We are the army!’ Röhm roared, pushing his face close to Helmut’s in order to make himself heard above the din. Beer foam around his mouth, pork grease on his chin. ‘Don’t talk to me about the Reichswehr, a hundred thousand snobbish little Junkers kissing that senile old fool Hindenburg’s arse. Let me assure you, my dear friend,’ Röhm went on, wiping the beer and spit from his mouth, ‘that if our fine Leader does not proceed sharply to place we SA at the very centre of the state, then there will be a second German revolution and at the end of it nobody will be in any doubt about who is running this country.’

  ‘Quite right too!’ Helmut replied, beckoning to a young trooper to come and squeeze in beside Röhm. ‘And, in the meantime, Ernst, you deserve a little relaxation!’

  Even as Helmut spoke, even as Röhm took possession of the youth that Helmut was offering him, out on the country roads Nemesis was approaching.

  A fleet of Mercedes was gliding through the night.

  Jet black Mercedes. Black like the uniforms of the men who drove them. And the darkness that cloaked their grim purpose.

  By the time the motorcade drew into the spa town, the SA leadership had all retired to pursue their various private pleasures. Only the cleaners and night porters were witness to the extraordinary sight of the dictator of all Germany getting out of the leading car and marching into the hotel with a revolver in his hand.

  Hitler was accompanied by a chinless man with small wire glasses. He wore the black uniform with the skull and crossbones badge of the rest of the gang and he too was armed with a pistol. The soldiers that followed carried machine guns.

  Helmut was lying in bed in a room on the first floor of the hotel, preoccupied with the attentions of a young SA Sturmmann whom he had picked up in Munich the day before.

  But Helmut’s heart wasn’t really in it.

  The evening had been such a dreadful bore, with nothing but the prospect of more of the same to come in the morning.

  He’d never liked forced bonhomie; the idea of a boys’ camp filled him with loathing. Sing-alongs and ridiculous drinking games were no substitute for the joys of subtle seduction in his opinion. He really could see no point in drinking oneself stupid before attempting to make love and the ritual humiliation of newly initiated young recruits turned his stomach. At dinner a couple of downy-cheeked youths had been forced to stand naked to attention giving the Hitler salute while Röhm and his cohorts threw food at them.

  Helmut, however, was destined never have to endure the second day of Röhm’s SA conference because there would be no second day. For once those survival instincts which had served him so well through Germany’s various insanities had failed him. He had backed the wrong horse. He should have been seeking out pliant starlets and society girls for Goebbels and Goering rather than lining up boys for Röhm. Because Röhm’s days as the second man in the Reich were about to end. The vast hooligan organization he had built was shortly to be tamed by a darker, even more sinister force. This was the night the world would come to know as the Night of the Long Knives.

  It was all over so very quickly.

  Perhaps Helmut and his lover heard some commotion outside but they would have ignored it. There was always some commotion when Röhm’s clique took a holiday. The corridors banged, shrieked and thudded all night as boys were chased from room to
room. Had anyone told Helmut that Adolf Hitler himself was in the building, prowling the darkened corridors gun in hand, followed by a company of SS, he would not have believed them.

  All Helmut ever knew was the door of his bedroom bursting open, the young SA Sturmmann raising his head from Helmut’s lap as black-clad figures rushed in and levelled their machine pistols.

  The guttural snarled accusation of ‘Pervert’ and then …

  Oblivion. Helmut’s brains exploded on his pillow. Those of his lover spread across his lap.

  All that evening far away in Berlin Frieda had been dialling the number that Wolfgang had left her – as she had been for the previous twenty-four hours – but, as ever, it simply rang and rang. By the following morning when she tried again, the telephone had been disconnected.

  Aryan-free Zone

  Berlin, 1935

  ONE DAY PAULUS and Otto arrived at school to be informed that their classroom was to be segregated. The form-master made the announcement in the gravest and most self-important of tones, standing at the head of the room in front of the photograph of Hitler. Both the master and Führer looked stern and resolute as together they shouldered the heavy and heroic burden of belittling and terrorizing defenceless juveniles.

  ‘It has been declared intolerable,’ the master pronounced, ‘that any German child should be forced into association with Jews in our public schools. The Jew children will therefore be put apart, sitting only amongst their own kind in those seats which have been generously allocated for their use.’

  Then the teacher read out the names of the six boys in the class who were Jews, even though everybody was already well aware who they were. He read the names slowly, pausing between each in order to frame his face into a nasty sneer and to shake his head. Making the boys stand up as their names were called.

  ‘You Jews,’ he solemnly intoned, evoking a phrase which was used daily in every classroom in the country, ‘are Germany’s misfortune. You six standing amongst us now are Germany’s misfortune. You are poisonous mushrooms.’

  It was a brutal and deliberately demeaning slur. He was quoting from a kindergarten book called The Poisonous Mushroom, which was the first book every child in Germany, including Jewish children, encountered when starting school.

  ‘We know,’ the teacher continued, ‘from our classes in Racial Science that just as in a field there are good and bad “races” of mushroom, so it is with the various human “races”. Some human “races” are poisonous and some are not. Jewish humans are, of course, the most poisonous race of all. And remember, boys, just as with mushrooms, sometimes the most poisonous of all look the most harmless. Many an innocent woodsman has died having believed a mushroom that he picked was safe. And the body of our nation has for too long thought the Jews were harmless. Just as these six who have studied amongst us all these years have always seemed so.’

  The teacher paused in his lecture while the six boys stood and waited.

  ‘And what of you? Hartmann?’ the teacher added, turning to a nervous-looking lad sitting at a desk amongst his friends. ‘Do you know what a hybrid is? Of course you do. You will have learnt in your biology class that in the animal world creatures stick to their own species. A herd of chamois never allows itself to be led by a deer. A cock starling only mates with a hen starling. When creatures cross-breed, unnatural, mongrel hybrids are produced which combine in themselves only the worst qualities of each species. This is science, boys! Pure and simple science and in you, Hartmann, we have a scientific example of just such a species hybrid. A half-breed. A mongrel. Stand up.’

  The boy Hartmann rose to his feet. Face blazing red with shame. His friends sitting around him looked puzzled and embarrassed. Most looked away.

  ‘The mother of this half-breed is a Jewess,’ the teacher went on, ‘and so the German blood of the father is corrupted in this boy. Irredeemably corrupted. Hartmann is a Mischling. A mongrel child of mixed races. And he will sit with the Jews until his status has been clarified in law. From today all these seven boys are to be separate. Their presence in the classroom will be tolerated but no more. German pupils are forbidden to associate with them. They are the poisonous mushrooms.’

  It was quite a shock. The class had been together since kindergarten and such a division went across numerous relationships and a lot of shared history. However, the vilification of the Jews had been so constant and all-pervasive over the previous two years that many old friendships had long since been severed and it was already a brave boy who maintained a foot in both camps.

  The six Jewish boys and the single Mischling took up their books and went to their corner. Heads bowed, understanding very well that another step was being taken towards a time when their lives would become unliveable. Six of the boys sat down at their desks. One, however, remained standing.

  ‘Sit down, Otto Stengel,’ the master ordered.

  Otto did not sit down, but instead stood foursquare with his hands on his hips.

  ‘I have something to say,’ he announced.

  ‘Then say it at break-time. Sit down and open your books.’

  ‘I’ll say it now.’

  Paulus tugged at Otto’s blazer.

  ‘Otts, sit down,’ he hissed. ‘Please.’

  But Paulus knew he could not stop Otto. Whatever his brother wanted to do he would do and damn the consequences. The killing of Karlsruhen (about which they rarely spoke but often thought) had of course affected both boys deeply but in opposite ways. For Paulus the memory of that desperate, horrifying action and its aftermath had made him even more careful, more calculating. Determined always to have a plan, to take the path of least resistance towards the most beneficial result. It was not that he lacked passion; he hated the enemy no less than Otto and felt every humiliation just as deeply. But he also understood that pride and hot-headedness were not only the enemy of survival but also the enemy of revenge.

  ‘The trick to beating them,’ he often told his brother, ‘is not to try and kill them but to stop them killing us.’

  Otto, on the other hand, had drawn an angry strength from their victory over their mother’s attacker. His family had been attacked and they had successfully defended themselves. That was the lesson. If he had been reckless before he was more so now. He had killed one. He had tasted their blood. He knew that if you fought them you could hurt them.

  The brutal imprisonment of their father had also affected the boys differently. Paulus tried very hard not to think about it, because when he did he was so overcome by fear and misery that he could scarcely function at all. He knew that the best and only way he could support his father was by helping his mother. By keeping going. Working hard at school and hard at the practical task of day-to-day survival.

  Otto instead dwelt constantly on his father’s plight and it constantly enraged him. Filling him with an overwhelming fury that made him fearless.

  And so now, empowered by the blood on his hands and the misery of his father, Otto faced down his teacher and his classmates.

  ‘This,’ Otto said, making a sweeping gesture to the seven Jewish seats, ‘is an Aryan-free zone! You are all prohibited from entering it since no Jewish boy should be forced to associate with you. This order,’ Otto barked, in impersonation of the man in the photograph that hung on the wall, ‘is my unalterable will!’

  The stunned silence that followed such shocking insolence lasted perhaps two seconds. Just long enough for Paulus to manoeuvre his chair so that his back was to the wall.

  Then mayhem ensued.

  It is true that some of the ‘German’ boys found Otto’s protest funny and had laughed, one or two even banged their desklids. But a sufficient number were outraged and formed an instant squad of retribution. Eight boys in all leapt to their feet and piled on to Otto. Even with such weighted odds the attackers didn’t have it all their own way. Otto was solid muscle and due to his boxing lessons knew how to use it. Also the space was limited and obstructed by desks so the full force of the attackers
could not be brought to bear. The first two boys were knocked down before the others were able to close on Otto and drag him to the floor. Meanwhile Paulus had leapt to his feet and was attempting to fend off other boys who had made their way around the desks in order to attack the twins from the flank. Paulus knew of course that there was no way of his keeping out of the fight. Since kindergarten everyone in the school had recognized that the Stengel boys came as a pair.

  It took the master and two more teachers from next-door classrooms to break up the mêlée and then only by wading in and flailing about themselves wildly with their canes. When some order had been restored Otto was hauled to the front of the class, where he stood, wiping blood from his face and staring down his attackers through swollen eyes with fierce belligerence.

  ‘You will attend the headmaster’s office immediately, Stengel,’ the master shouted, ‘where I have no doubt you will be beaten and then expelled.’

  ‘Too late,’ Otto spat back through his bloody lips, ‘I quit! Otto erwacht!’ he shouted in imitation of the Germany Awake slogan so beloved of the Nazis. ‘You stole my father! You’re not keeping me.’ And with that Otto walked out of the classroom, never to return.

  The master turned to Paulus, his lip trembling with fury at this Jewish affront.

  ‘Well, Paulus Stengel?’ he said. ‘Have you anything to add?’

  ‘No, sir, absolutely not, sir!’ Paulus replied, snapping to attention. ‘I am very happy to sit in whichever seat the school chooses in its generosity to allow me, sir! Also I apologize unreservedly for my brother’s disgraceful display. He is stupid and hot-headed but he will learn his place, I swear, and until then I beg that you forgive him his foolishness.’

  ‘Well then, Jew,’ the master said, pleased as ever to be grovelled to, ‘you may return to your books.’

  Beached Dolphin

  Berlin, 1935