Two Brothers: A Novel

by Ben Elton

  Wolfgang smiled. ‘It’s hard to think of you kids being squeamish about anything any more,’ he said, ‘not now.’

  Wolfgang glanced at the floor.

  At the space where previously the thick blue rug had been.

  Of course one of the first things Wolfgang had learnt on his return from prison camp had been about what had taken place in the apartment on the night of his arrest. How his wife had nearly been raped and his two thirteen-year-old sons aided by Silke had bludgeoned and then suffocated Frieda’s attacker to death on the very floor on which they were now standing.

  ‘Please, Wolf,’ Frieda said, a shadow passing across her face, ‘I try never to think of that.’

  ‘I know, Freddy,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘It’s a terrible thing but I’m still so proud of the boys and Silke. I only hope I’d have the guts to do what they did.’

  ‘You would have, Dad,’ Otto assured him.

  ‘Yeah,’ Paulus agreed. ‘You wouldn’t have thought about it. We didn’t.’

  The three young people exchanged glances. They rarely spoke of, or even referred to what had happened on that dreadful night, but it was always with them and often in their dreams.

  If the subject was broached openly it tended to be on the occasions when Dagmar was making one of her increasingly rare visits. The fact that the other three members of the Saturday Club had gone through such a brutal and life-changing experience together was something of which she always seemed a little jealous. For all the fact that the twins loved her and her alone, she understood that Silke still shared one thing with them that she did not.

  ‘I’d have done it,’ she always insisted. ‘I’d have killed him, or at least I’d have done as much as Silke did.’

  ‘I helped roll him up!’ Silke would snap back defiantly. ‘And I helped chuck him in the river!’

  ‘Maybe you should tell your friends in the BDM about it,’ Dagmar remarked one day when, despite Frieda’s protests, the subject had arisen once more. ‘It could be one of your cosy campfire stories.’

  Silke reddened; she was wearing her Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform. She always felt selfconscious when visiting the Stengels in her Nazi regalia but she had little choice. Like many working-class girls, her BDM uniform was by far the smartest and most serviceable outfit she owned. Besides which, on this occasion she was on duty, having come around to say goodbye before departing for the 1935 Nuremberg Rally.

  ‘I can’t believe they’re making you leave now, Silke,’ Frieda said, happy to find a way to change the subject. ‘The rally isn’t for another month.’

  ‘I know. But guess what? We’re walking there. It’s true! From Berlin to Munich. Kids are expected to do it from all over the country. Apparently it shows how tough and united we all are.’

  ‘They’re taking children away from their families for a month?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard the joke? What with the HJ and the BDM and the SA and the Women’s League, the only time a good German family meets up these days is at the Nuremberg Rally.’

  Frieda smiled a sad smile. ‘And what about school?’

  ‘The party doesn’t care about education. Only loyalty.’

  ‘I do think,’ Dagmar sniffed, ‘that you might at least take off the armband when you visit. This is, after all, one of the few places in Berlin where we don’t have to look at swastikas.’

  Silke certainly cut an incongruous figure in the Stengel living room, her thick blonde pigtails clamped beneath a jet black beret and a swastika emblazoned on the arm of her brown blouse.

  ‘It’s stitched on,’ Silke protested, ‘and don’t sneer like that. It isn’t my fault.’

  ‘No, of course it isn’t. None of this is anybody’s fault except the Jews themselves, is it?’

  ‘Come on, Dags,’ Paulus said. ‘Just because she’s in the League of Nazi Maidens doesn’t mean she’s a Nazi.’

  ‘I doubt she’s a maiden either,’ Dagmar observed.

  ‘Dagmar!’ Frieda protested.

  ‘I’m not a Nazi,’ Silke claimed hotly. ‘I’m a Communist, you know that.’

  ‘They’re the same thing,’ said Dagmar.

  ‘That is just a pig ignorant thing to say,’ Silke replied. ‘We Communists hate the Nazis.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about Communism,’ Dagmar replied loftily.

  ‘I know a lot more than you,’ Silke said. ‘I’ve been reading. We did a book burning and I pinched some Marx and Lenin. Lots of kids stole books. A friend of mine grabbed something called The Well of Loneliness because it’s about lesbians and she thinks she is one. Not all the BDM girls are Nazis, you know. Lots of us just have a laugh.’

  ‘What? Marching about?’ Dagmar snapped. ‘Sounds hilarious.’

  ‘We don’t do so much marching,’ Silke replied, her usual good humour returning. She rarely allowed Dagmar’s snootiness to irritate her for long. Partly out of sympathy for everything Dagmar had lost, and also because she had long since realized that the twins, whose approval she craved, would always take Dagmar’s side in the end. ‘There’s a fair bit of chucking medicine balls and jumping through hoops in your knickers and waving scarves about,’ Silke went on, ‘but it’s not like the Hitler Jugend. They’re not trying to turn us into soldiers. It’s much looser in the BDM because basically the party doesn’t really care about girls.’

  ‘You sound as if you actually like being in the BDM.’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact I do. We do lots of camps and trips and I’ve learned to knit too.’

  ‘Yes, well, lucky for some,’ Dagmar commented dryly. ‘I must say it would be nice to go on a camp or an outing some time but you see we’re not allowed to go anywhere.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that, Dags,’ Silke said hotly. ‘And I’m sorry and all that but don’t forget you went on plenty of holidays before. I never went on one, not one. I got my first ever holiday with the BDM. Working-class people didn’t get that chance before …’ She stopped, slightly embarrassed. ‘I mean, not that I’m saying it’s better now. You know I don’t think that … It’s just, actually, it’s better for me, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m thrilled for you,’ Dagmar replied.

  Frieda interjected, ever the peace-maker.

  ‘Well,’ she said gently, ‘I’m sure you’ll have a lovely time on your walk, Silke, and the rally will be very … interesting. The newspapers keep saying it’s going to be even bigger than last year, although I really don’t see how it can be. There were seven hundred thousand at the last one.’

  The 1934 rally had been made into a hit movie called Triumph of the Will chronicling for the entire world the incredible scale of Nazi triumphalism. Frieda had gone to see the film out of a sort of grim fascination. No identification was required to buy a ticket. Nobody imagined a Jew would want to attend.

  ‘All those hundreds and thousands of rows of people,’ she said, ‘standing in perfect lines. Where did they all go to the toilet?’

  ‘You just pee where you can,’ Silke explained, ‘round the edges, sometimes even where you stand. In your pants if you’re up the front, those poor people were waiting for eight hours and more. The stink in the latrine areas was just awful but of course you don’t get that on the film. It might have been a triumph of will but it wasn’t a triumph of plumbing. This year I’m going to make sure I don’t drink anything on the morning of the parade.’

  As it turned out the 1935 rally was bigger than its famous predecessor and for Germany’s Jews at least it was much more significant.

  There were to be new laws. Laws that would formalize the anti-Semitic discrimination that was already central to German National life.

  The Nuremberg Laws, as they came to be known.

  Silke, who was there, could not understand what was being said, standing as she was eighty rows back and squirming for the toilet. To her the blurred rasping voice echoing across the vast parade ground sounded like a dog yapping from inside a barrel.

  But listening on the radio in Berli
n Frieda could make out the Leader’s voice very clearly and understood what it meant for her family.

  For her sons.

  ‘Wolfgang,’ she whispered, ‘we have to tell the boys.’

  Wolfgang had been struggling to avoid drawing the same conclusion.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘These laws don’t seem to be much different to what’s been going on already.’

  ‘I know, Wolf,’ Frieda replied, ‘but don’t you see? They’re making it all legal now. Slowly but surely they’re putting us in a position where the law not only won’t protect us but it will actually destroy us … legally. It’s like they’re building a gallows bit by bit, plank by plank, so that by the time they come to stand us on the trapdoor and put our heads in the noose it will seem inevitable, proper, the correct thing to do. Finishing us off will be a legal requirement. An administrative matter. Beyond their control. Sorry and all that but it’s the law!’

  ‘Bastards,’ was all Wolfgang could find to say.

  ‘But of course,’ Frieda went on, her voice filled with emotion, ‘it’s only the law for three of us.’

  For a moment there was silence between them.

  A mutual acknowledgement of the secret they had shared for fifteen years.

  A secret that had once been just a family affair.

  A matter of private feelings. Something they knew they would one day have to address but which they intended to do in such a manner that the four members of the Stengel family might continue as before.

  In fact, in earlier years, when Frieda and Wolfgang had discussed how they would eventually tell the boys about the adoption, they had fixed upon the plan that at first they would only tell them that one of them had been adopted and not reveal which of them it was. Saying that it was a matter of no consequence and that they might or might not tell them the full story later.

  Because it really was impossible to tell.

  Neither boy seemed any more or any less a child of their parents than the other. Paulus was studious and dedicated like his mother. Otto wilder and less diligent like his father. Otto was the musical one, taking after Wolfgang, while Paulus was planning a career, a career in which he hoped one day to be able to help people, just as his mother did. He was darker coloured like Frieda while Otto shared the same sandy hair and tendency to freckle like his father.

  ‘If ever there was an interesting experiment in nurture over nature,’ Frieda had frequently observed during the carefree years, ‘it’s our boys. I may write a paper on it one day.’

  But in Hitler’s Germany, the nature and nurture debate was long since dead. Something called ‘blood’ was everything.

  ‘Blood’ that man screamed over the radio.

  German ‘blood’ which must be protected at all costs.

  Every person in the country was to have their ‘blood’ categorized to determine how much ‘German’ blood they possessed and how much ‘Jew’.

  The secret which had begun at the Berliner Buch medical school in 1920 could be a secret no longer.

  Romantic Gesture

  Berlin, 1935

  UP UNTIL THE age of fourteen and a half, Otto and Paulus had done pretty much everything together. Laughed together. Fought together.

  Fallen in love with the same girl together.

  And killed together.

  The last and most terrible of these bonds had of course been born of urgent necessity; they had had no choice. When Otto decided to attack again, forming what he called his retribution squad with a view to mugging a storm trooper, the brothers parted company.

  ‘We’ve done worse before,’ Otto said darkly when Paulus expressed his complete opposition to the plan. ‘You’ve done worse, you know that.’

  ‘Shut up about that, you stupid bastard!’ Paulus hissed. ‘We should never talk about that outside, do you hear?’

  ‘I’ll talk about what I like,’ Otto replied, ‘and I’ll do what I like. And I’m going to do this.’

  ‘Then you’re completely crazy,’ Paulus said. ‘You’ll be killed and it’ll break Mum’s heart.’

  But Otto was adamant. The time had come to fight back. A line had to be drawn, a counter-attack mounted. No matter how minor or insignificant a gesture it was, somebody had to do something.

  Dagmar loved the idea.

  In fact, her eyes positively gleamed with excitement when Otto revealed his plan on one of the many evenings the three of them spent smoking cigarettes together in Dagmar’s pastel pink bedroom. The thought of action, vengeful action, was like a tiny spark in the darkness of her nightmare existence.

  ‘But what do you mean, “retribution squad”?’ she asked.

  ‘Exactly that,’ Otto said, trying to seem casual and matter-of-fact. ‘Me and a bunch of other Jewish lads from around our way are going to beat up a Nazi. There’s even a couple of non-Jew kids who want to be in on it, Commies and the like,’ he went on, ‘but we won’t let them. This is our fight.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Paulus replied. ‘Which is what the police will think too when they come to get us.’

  ‘They won’t know Jews did it,’ Otto said. ‘I’ve thought it through. We’ll take the bloke’s money so it just looks like a robbery. Anyway, even if they do blame us, what more can they do to us?’

  ‘Are you crazy? Haven’t you seen what they did to Dad in their camp? What they did to Herr Fischer?’

  Invoking the fate of Dagmar’s father had the opposite effect to what Paulus had wanted. It fired up Dagmar to further encouragement, which was of course all Otto needed to hear.

  ‘That’s right, Pauly,’ Dagmar exclaimed with bitter venom,

  ‘they killed my dad. They killed him, Pauly. And now Otto’s going to give one of them a good hiding. If there was any justice in the world, Otto would kill the bastard.’

  ‘No!’ Paulus protested.

  ‘I will if you want me to, Dags,’ Otto said eagerly. ‘I really will. I’ll stick my fucking knife in his throat.’

  ‘No,’ Dagmar said, quietening down. ‘No, I don’t want you to kill one. Not for me. Pauly’s right about that. They’d come after us all for sure. There’d be a riot. But if you mug one you can make it look like a robbery.’

  ‘Well,’ Otto muttered, ‘OK. I’ll kill one next time, eh?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dagmar said, her mouth set hard, her eyes cold, ‘and in the meantime just give him something to think about. Do it for me. In fact, I want a souvenir. How about bringing me the buttons off his shirt?’

  Paulus looked up in alarm. He knew that nothing on earth could be more calculated to spur Otto to action than that.

  ‘Dags!’ he gasped. ‘You’re talking like some gangster. What’s happened to you?’

  ‘What’s happened to me?’ Dagmar asked, her voice cold as ice. ‘You ask me that, Pauly? What’s happened to me?’

  Pauly could not meet her gaze. He looked away.

  ‘I’m just worried you’ll get Otts killed,’ he muttered.

  ‘I won’t get killed,’ Otto said firmly.

  Then solemnly, menacingly, he laid out his collection of weaponry on Dagmar’s dressing table. His flick-knife, a cosh and a knuckle-duster. They looked strange and incongruous amongst the brushes and powder pots and little girlish trinkets.

  And the beautiful miniature chest of drawers which Otto himself made for Dagmar on the occasion of his own thirteenth birthday. When he had still been a boy.

  Dagmar went and stood before the dressing table, staring down at the weapons. Brushing her hand across them. She was wearing shorts and white tennis shoes without socks, showing off her long olive-toned legs. Her blouse was knotted beneath her bust revealing a band of soft, delicate skin between it and her shorts. Both boys stared in rapt fascination but for once she seemed not to notice their adoring glances. She was staring at the weapons.

  ‘Do it, Otto,’ she whispered. ‘Give one of them something to think about.’

  ‘I promise I will,’ Otto replied.

  ‘I’m telling you yo
u’re crazy,’ Paulus said again, sullenly.

  ‘Nobody’s asking you to come,’ Otto said.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’

  Paulus caught Dagmar’s reflection in the dressing-table mirror. He could see the disappointment in her eyes.

  ‘I’ll find better battles to fight,’ was all he could say and he knew how weak it sounded.

  The following night Otto fulfilled his promise. He and four other boys ambushed two uniformed SA men and beat them up in an alleyway. It was a horrible mêlée, with kicks and blows and slashing knives. The troopers were bigger and stronger than the fifteen-year-old boys and were also used to street thuggery but, in the end, numbers and vengeful passion prevailed. The SA men went down and were kicked unconscious in the gutter. Then, while the other attackers went through the men’s pockets for their money, Otto knelt beside one of them and snapped open his flick-knife.

  For a moment the gleaming blade hovered over the prostrate victim’s neck. One slash would do it. Otto glanced up into the faces of his comrades standing over him. Fear and exhilaration seemed to shine in equal measure in their eyes.

  ‘Next time, you fucking Nazi cunt,’ Otto whispered, ‘next time.’

  Then he cut the buttons from the man’s shirt.

  Two hours later, having scurried across the city imagining at every moment that the Gestapo were upon him, Otto presented himself at the Fischers’ front door. He cut a wild and dishevelled figure but Frau Fischer let him in without comment. Frau Fischer commented on very little these days, having begun to withdraw into herself more and more. She seemed so distracted that perhaps she did not even notice the cuts and bruises on Otto’s face and the splashes of blood on his shirt which he had concealed beneath his coat.

  Dagmar noticed them.

  ‘My God, Ottsy,’ she gasped, leaning over the balcony of the first stair landing.

  Otto looked up at her, standing like Juliet in the famous English play they had been made to read in translation at school. Her luxurious auburn hair framing such perfectly proportioned features. The huge dark eyes enchanting, bewitching.

  ‘Come up to my room,’ she said.