Two Brothers: A Novel

by Ben Elton

  ‘No,’ Stone said firmly, ‘don’t say that, Billie. Please don’t. I can’t have you say that.’

  ‘You really do still love her, don’t you? After all these years you’re still leapin’ to her defence.’

  ‘Yes I am. Because, you see, she wasn’t a bitch. She was a lovely girl. Funny and beautiful and proud and clever. That’s how she was before the madness anyway. I’m not saying she was an angel but believe me she was a good person. A decent person. Just try to imagine what she’d been through, what she was going through. Her whole life had been stolen from her. Her whole wonderful world had turned into this brutally cruel and terrifying torture.’

  ‘Yeah. Of course,’ Billie conceded. ‘I said I didn’t judge people and there’s me doin’ jus’ that. I have no right.’

  ‘She felt betrayed, you see,’ Stone went on.

  ‘By you?’

  ‘Yes. I could see it in her eyes as she stood there on the stairs. Of course it was unfair and I’m sure she knew it was. But she still felt it and I understood. We were living on different planets now. I had a future and she didn’t. I can see her now, looking so beautiful. Thinner and more careworn but just as lovely as she ever was. And then she told me to go. She said that even without the risk she didn’t want to see me. She just didn’t want to be around a boy who still had a life when she was slowly … slowly dying.’

  For the first time since he had begun his story, words failed him.

  Billie put her hand on his knee and squeezed it.

  Then the barman approached their table.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but could you kindly finish your drinks and leave.’

  Stone, who had been in the act of taking a sip of his pint, put it down and looked up at the man.

  ‘What?’ he asked quietly, his fingers already closing into fists.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the barman said. ‘I don’t mind myself so I haven’t said nothing, but the landlord’s come back from being out and he’s seen your friend. He won’t have no blacks in his pub, see. It’s policy, so you’ll have to go.’

  Stone picked up his glass again and took a slow deliberate swig of beer. Billie was already putting her cigarettes and lighter into her little purse.

  ‘You tell the landlord—’ Stone said slowly.

  ‘Paul, please,’ Billie interrupted angrily, ‘let’s go. I don’t wanna drink in dis boozer anyway. With such people? No thanks. It’s beneath me.’

  Stone put an arm out to stop her getting up.

  ‘You tell your landlord,’ he repeated to the barman, ‘that he’s a Nazi cunt. Do you hear me? And that goes for you too, by the way, and you’re a coward besides.’

  ‘Now listen here!’ the barman protested. ‘This ain’t me, I just work here—’

  ‘Just obeying orders?’ Stone sneered. ‘Now where have I heard that before?’

  ‘Paul … Otto … please. I wanna go,’ Billie said.

  The landlord appeared. A large, arrogant-looking man with Brylcreemed hair and a bristling moustache. He wore a military blazer, shiny at the elbows with a regimental crest on the pocket. ‘Right,’ the man said, ‘this is my pub and I say who drinks here so you hop it and take this black slut with you.’

  Billie was already on her feet, having shaken off Stone’s arm.

  ‘We’re going anyway, you sorry and disgustin’ person,’ she said, looking like a queen addressing a peasant. ‘The air done started stinkin’ in here. Maybe it’s the drains but personally I t’ink it’s da management.’

  But still Stone did not move.

  ‘I’m going to count to five,’ he said menacingly, ‘by which time I suggest you’ll have apologized to this lady. One … two …’

  Billie tried once more to interject but it was no use. Stone completed his count and then, rising from his seat with his upper cut already in motion, brought his fist up under the landlord’s chin and knocked the man sprawling to the floor. The sickening crack his knuckles made on connection suggested the landlord’s jaw may have been broken. Stone spun around, ready to deal with the barman, but the frightened man was already backing away, cannoning into the table behind him and upsetting the drinks. No one else in the pub seemed minded to get involved.

  ‘Now we can go,’ Stone said, draining his glass and getting up.

  ‘I t’ink we’d better,’ Billie replied, hurrying to the door. ‘There ain’t never a call for violence, by da way.’

  ‘That’s what Chamberlain said,’ Stone replied as he followed her.

  Together they hurried out of the pub and hailed a passing cab.

  Personal Sacrifices

  Berlin, 1936

  WHEN DAGMAR RETURNED to her bedroom, her face was stony cold.

  ‘Thanks for not coming out,’ she said.

  Paulus was standing by the window.

  ‘I wanted to,’ he replied, ‘more than anything.’

  He was looking out. Watching the black-clad figure retreating through the gate.

  Dagmar’s mask of indifference lasted only a moment. Her voice was already cracking.

  ‘I had to send him away,’ she said, tears starting in her eyes. ‘It would have been even harder if he’d seen you. I sent him away, Pauly. Our Otto.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have come,’ Paulus said, trying to speak sensibly for her sake. ‘I knew he would, though, the first chance he got. I don’t blame him. I would have done the same.’

  ‘You should have seen him,’ Dagmar said, crying now. ‘His uniform! It was horrible. He was dressed … dressed as one of them!’

  ‘It’s the same Otto inside, Dags,’ Paulus said. ‘It’s just a uniform. You know that.’

  ‘No it isn’t,’ Dagmar sniffed. ‘That uniform can never be just a uniform.’

  Paulus and Dagmar had been spending the evening together as they often did. In Dagmar’s bedroom. Drinking acorn coffee and smoking cigarettes. Paulus visited Dagmar at least three or four times a week. She was always home, having continued to cut herself off from her old life, from life in general.

  ‘Well, we’re not allowed to do anything if we do go out,’ she often lamented, ‘so what’s the point?’

  Paulus was now Dagmar’s only friend and he was not ashamed to admit to himself how selfishly happy this made him. His love for her was undiminished and he took great pleasure in the knowledge of how much she needed him and appreciated him coming round. She had started to rely on him. Leaning on him more and more.

  Her mother was no help to her at all. She now spent all of her time living in the past. Sitting in her drawing room, the shutters permanently closed, reading old letters and pasting photographs into albums.

  ‘It’s so depressing,’ Dagmar often complained. ‘Sometimes I think I’m going to go mad.’

  She had been dwelling on the subject before Otto’s surprise arrival. Lying on the bed as she always did. Paulus sitting on the rug at her feet, always feeling the absence of his brother on the empty dressing-table chair. Paulus and Otto had occupied those two places in Dagmar’s room for so long that even though Otto had not been there for many months his absence still sometimes took Paulus by surprise.

  ‘The boredom is going to actually physically kill me,’ Dagmar had been saying. ‘I’m serious, if only I could just go swimming. I would give anything to just go swimming.’

  Otto’s unexpected arrival at the front door had interrupted her thoughts and once he was gone neither she nor Paulus felt like resuming their conversation.

  Seeing him and rejecting him had been too traumatic.

  ‘I broke the sacred bond of the Saturday Club,’ Dagmar lamented with a sad smile, having dried her eyes.

  ‘The Saturday Club rules were made for a civilized society,’ Paulus said. ‘Nobody should have to deal with the sort of dilemmas we do. It just isn’t fair.’

  Paulus offered to go and make some more pretend coffee but Dagmar didn’t want any.

  ‘It’s repulsive anyway,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why we drink it. Boredom a
gain of course. Something to do.’

  The conversation became stilted.

  They were both thinking about Otto.

  Soon Dagmar said she was tired and thought she’d go to bed.

  For perhaps the first time in his life Paulus was actually pleased to leave. It had been devastating for him to have been so close to Otto and then to have to watch from a window as he disappeared into the night alone. He had tried to be strong about it for Dagmar’s sake but now, like her, he needed a moment for himself.

  As he went downstairs Frau Fischer appeared at the sitting room door and asked him to come in for a moment.

  Paulus had imagined that she would want to talk about Otto. Ask him to try and exert some influence in persuading his brother not to return. But Frau Fischer brushed over the subject of Otto. It was Dagmar she wished to talk about.

  ‘You’re her only visitor now,’ Frau Fischer continued. ‘One or two of her old friends have tried, but she won’t see them. It’s her pride, you see, she used to be such a golden girl, so much the centre of attention, and now she can’t bear being an object of sympathy. She never really had any Jewish friends, I’m afraid, apart from you and … well. Apart from you. She went to the very best school, you see, and we never really saw ourselves as Jewish anyway.’

  ‘So she’s lonely?’ Paulus asked. ‘Of course I know that.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s so much the loneliness as the inactivity that’s really killing her. It’s all right for me. I’ve had a life but she’s only sixteen and she’s going crazy. She used to love teas and parties and dances and all sorts of lovely jolly things. And of course she was such an athletic girl too. With her gymnastics and her swimming, which meant everything to her. Now all of that’s been taken away and I feel like … I feel like I’m watching her fade.’

  Paulus looked at his feet, he didn’t know what to say. Frau Fischer had never been one to unburden herself, even before her retreat into herself.

  ‘I don’t really know why I’m speaking to you about this, Pauly,’ Frau Fischer went on. ‘You’re a Jew too and of course subject to the same restrictions as she is. There’s not much you can do to help, I know. I just … I just wish somehow I could get her out of the house.’

  ‘Well some restrictions are being lifted for the Olympics,’ Paulus said, attempting a positivity he didn’t feel. ‘Not the swimming pools I don’t think but I reckon we’d be OK going to a park.’

  The mention of the Olympics brought a look of angry despair to Frau Fischer’s face.

  ‘Those games will break Dagmar’s heart,’ she said. ‘I remember when Berlin won the right to stage them back before the Hitler time. Dagmar danced around the room and made her daddy book her extra swimming lessons right there and then. She might have competed you know. Even at sixteen it’s possible she could have qualified. And if not for Berlin perhaps for Tokyo in 1940. But that’s a fantasy now, she hasn’t trained properly for two years, and anyway no German selection committee would choose a Jew. We’re not even Germans any more, not since Nuremberg. Those damned games will be a torture for Dagmar every day they are on. She had always said she would attend every event.’

  Paulus was silent. There really was nothing he could say.

  ‘I’m sorry, Paulus,’ Frau Fischer said. ‘It’s quite late and I’m keeping you from getting home and it isn’t safe out there. Run along, dear. There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing any of us can do.’

  Paulus left the Stengel house with a heavy heart. He knew that Frau Fischer was right. Dagmar was changing. Getting listless and depressed. Fading, Frau Fischer had said, and horrible though it was Paulus knew the description was a good one. He wanted more than anything else to be able to help. To be able to give Dagmar something of her life back. To be the cause of bringing a bloom back to her cheek. But he could not. He was a Jew like her and a Jew in Germany was powerless.

  Paulus did not mention Otto’s appearance at the Fischers’ house to Frieda and Wolfgang when he got home. However, when Silke came to the Stengel apartment the following Sunday to give her weekly report, Paulus was privately not surprised to hear that Otto’s growing tolerance of his situation had been interrupted.

  ‘I’m worried about him,’ Silke admitted. ‘He was really different today. I thought he was settling down but now he’s back to being as angry as he was when he first left.’

  ‘Has he been fighting?’ Frieda asked anxiously. ‘Is he in trouble?’

  ‘No,’ Silke replied, ‘but I think it’s coming. He was so bitter today. He hardly spoke on our walk and he wouldn’t take me in to tea. He said he didn’t want to eat with the bastards. Lately he’s been so relaxed about it too. We’ve been laughing at the other boys and making jokes but today he was right back to just wanting to kill them. And then there’s the problem of the Hitler Youth.’

  ‘What about it?’ Frieda asked, very concerned.

  ‘Well, you must have read that they’re going to make it compulsory for every kid in the country to join. It’s been all over the news.’

  ‘We’ve rather given up on reading the German papers,’ Frieda said gently. ‘Not much fun in them for us. There’s a Jewish sheet we see sometimes.’

  ‘Well, they are,’ Silke went on. ‘Every German child belongs to Hitler and he wants to make it absolutely clear that he’s their real parents and not their family.’

  ‘How horrible,’ Frieda said, shaking her head. ‘Perhaps people will finally begin to realize what they’ve let themselves in for?’

  ‘Too late now, I reckon,’ Silke said. ‘Anyway, the point is Otto’s saying he won’t join.’

  ‘But why?’ Frieda asked. ‘He’s already at a Napola school so what’s the difference?’

  ‘That’s what I said, but for some reason he seems to have drawn a line. He says he just will not put on another Nazi uniform. I tell him I wear one and I’m a Communist but he says it’s different for a Jew.’

  ‘So he still says he’s a Jew?’ Frieda asked, almost smiling.

  ‘Of course he does. You know Otto,’ Silke replied. ‘I thought I was stubborn. It’s such a shame because things have been going really well for him at school despite him trying for them not to. He’s a boxing champ, which they love, and of course they’re thrilled about me.’ Silke went the shade of red which occurred whenever she mentioned herself and Otto in the same breath. ‘I go there in my BDM uniform and they think I’m his girlfriend.’

  Frieda smiled. ‘And are you, Silke?’ she asked.

  Silke went even redder.

  ‘No!’ she said, slightly too loudly. ‘You know which girl Otto thinks about. Same as Pauly does. Dagmar of course.’

  ‘But you have been seeing a lot of him,’ Frieda pressed.

  ‘Yes and I want to be able to keep seeing him and this business of the Hitler Youth becoming mandatory could make things go very wrong. If Otto refuses to obey the law, his teachers won’t be able to help him even if they want to. He’ll be arrested; it could actually mean a concentration camp.’

  Wolfgang had been silent as he almost always was but now quite suddenly he slammed down his glass, spilling whatever foul-smelling spirit it was he’d been drinking on to the closed lid of his piano.

  ‘He can’t,’ Wolfgang said in what was almost a croak. ‘He can’t go there. I know what they do.’

  They all turned to him. Wolfgang never spoke of his experiences in the camp. He rarely spoke of anything much any more, particularly if he’d managed to find something to drink. Now, however, he was shaking with emotion. ‘My little Ottsy can’t go there,’ he said, ‘he just can’t. The only way to survive in there is to beg and plead. With his character he’d be dead in a week.’

  ‘I know. I know,’ Silke said, ‘but what can we do? You know Ottsy, he’s so bloody-minded and he says nothing can persuade him to wear that uniform. He says he’s been taking life too easy and it’s time he let them all know he’s still a Jew. I can’t understand it. Everything was going so well and now h
e’s just so angry again. I think something must have happened and he’s not saying what.’

  Paulus spoke up.

  ‘I know what’s made him so angry, Silks,’ and then added quietly, ‘and I know a way to make him see sense too.’

  ‘Tell us then, Pauly!’ Silke said eagerly.

  ‘You’re not going to like it,’ Paulus went on. ‘And for that matter nor am I.’

  ‘If it stops Ottsy getting himself sent to a camp then I’ll like it,’ Silke said firmly.

  ‘Why has Otto suddenly got so furious again, Pauly?’ Frieda asked. ‘Tell us what you know.’

  ‘All right then. Ottsy tried to see Dagmar the other night.’

  ‘Did you see him?’ Frieda gasped. ‘Did you talk to him?’

  ‘No, Mrs Fischer would hardly let him in the house. Anyway Dagmar made me stay in her room. She thought it would be even harder to make him go if he saw me.’

  ‘Dagmar spoke to him?’

  ‘Not for long. She sent him away. She told him that he wasn’t one of us any more. That she didn’t want to see him because he had a life and she didn’t.’

  ‘What a bitch!’ Silke exclaimed.

  ‘Silke!’ Frieda scolded. ‘I hate that word.’

  ‘Well, sorry. But I mean really it’s not Ottsy’s fault, is it?’

  ‘Look,’ Paulus said. ‘Perhaps I’m not putting what she said very well. It made sense at the time and it was mainly Frau Fischer who spoke to him anyway. And of course by turning up he was putting them in a lot of danger. He really should have thought of that. Perhaps he did but he just couldn’t stop himself … We all know how he feels about Dagmar.’

  Silke looked away. Frieda reached over and squeezed her hand.

  ‘So it’s pretty obvious why he’s started acting up again,’ Paulus went on. ‘Dagmar refusing to see him will have made him crazy. He wants to prove he’s still a Jew. I know him. I know how he feels and he’d rather die and have her respect than live without it.’

  Frieda’s face contorted with alarm.

  ‘You said you had an idea, Pauly. What is it?’ she asked.