Two Brothers: A Novel

by Ben Elton

  He lit up a Lucky Strike, took another pull of whisky and tried to relax.

  The pilot’s voice came over the tannoy announcing that they had crossed the Channel and were flying over Holland.

  Otto found himself smiling.

  Holland. He had only been there once, passing through on a train. But he had lost his virginity there at a hundred kilometres an hour, so he always felt benevolent about the place.

  He’d been with the girl whom he must shortly confront.

  What would she look like now? he wondered.

  Silke Krause.

  Would her hair and skin still be golden? Or had a decade of service to the puppet masters in the Kremlin turned her pale and grey? She was only thirty-five of course, a year younger than him, but Otto had met Stasi officers before, masquerading as travel guides for East German delegations to Britain. Had Silke become like them, grim and unsmiling, dull hair pulled back into a starchy bun?

  He would find out soon enough.

  They landed at Berlin Schönefeld airport and were herded together into the forbidding customs and immigration hall. Otto found himself thinking that Billie would approve of the building. Plenty of concrete. Funny to be in Germany, thinking of Billie, having spent seventeen years in Britain thinking of Dagmar.

  Funny to be in Germany at all.

  It was like a dream. To be surrounded by German voices again after so long. He was back. Back in Berlin. Yet feeling further from home than ever.

  He wasn’t in the hall long. If anything confirmed his assumption that he was the subject of a Ministry of Security sting, it was the speed with which he was ushered through the arrival formalities. His name was obviously recognized at the first barrier and he was fast-tracked from that point on. While his fellow passengers resigned themselves to hours of queues and questioning, Otto was nodded and stamped past desk after desk.

  Of course, while the machinery of the state might be oiled by hidden forces, nothing could increase the speed of the physical machinery of the airport, nor the complexity of the bureaucracy under which it was run. Therefore having been spat out into the luggage hall in record time, Otto now found himself having to watch as most of the people who had been on the plane with him caught up while he waited for his bag.

  It arrived at last, not on a moving belt as was now common in Western airports, but in a densely packed cage pulled by a tractor, which the passengers had to unload themselves, struggling to find their own under the weight of other people’s.

  Finally Otto spotted his old battered case being hurled to one side by a sweating traveller, and he was able to make his way into the arrivals hall. It was the same little case he had brought with him out of Germany seventeen years before. It was still in good condition; in the army he had used a kit bag, and he had not travelled since.

  That case had stood on the floor of the first-class compartment when he and Silke had made love on her bunk. Otto wondered if she would recognize it.

  He was in a hurry now, suddenly anxious to get the meeting over with. The whisky buzz he had given himself on the plane was wearing off and he had decided it would not be sensible to give himself another.

  Searching in his pocket for the little leather notebook in which he had written the address she had given in her letter, Otto scurried past the final line of customs officers unchallenged and began looking about for a sign to the taxi rank.

  Perhaps that was why he didn’t see her.

  He was looking up. At the signs.

  He hadn’t expected her to meet him.

  ‘Ottsy.’

  He heard the voice and in those two syllables he knew.

  Stopping dead, he stared about himself.

  Shocked. Confused. Looking from one grey dowdy figure to another. Searching the monotone collage of depressed humanity. Cheap threadbare clothes. Sallow skin. A smile or two here and there but only brave ones. Weary ones.

  ‘Ottsy, I’m here. I’m over here.’

  That voice. That same old voice. Leaping across seventeen long years.

  Turning around, he saw her.

  And yet he didn’t.

  The woman he saw was a replica. The Soviet version of the one who owned the voice. As if they’d tried to make one like her but couldn’t. Just like their awful gutless cars and leaking, lumpy refrigerators. Recognizable as of the same species as their glamorous, stylish, exciting American and European counter-parts, but so obviously cheap, tawdry imitations.

  The skin didn’t glow. The hair didn’t shine. The lips were still full but showed the pinched, pursed lines of a forty-a-day habit.

  The eyes were the same, though. Big, deep and dark.

  And sad. That hadn’t changed either. Those eyes that had been sad since the morning of 1 April 1933.

  ‘Dagmar?’ Otto heard himself saying. ‘Is that you?’

  She flinched very slightly. Perhaps she knew what had flashed across his mind. Perhaps she thought the same thing every day herself, in her chicken coop Stalin-approved apartment, exchanging tired, worn-out glances with her mirror while she waited to see if the hot water would work or not.

  ‘Yes, Ottsy,’ she said. ‘Of course it’s me.’

  She was standing perhaps three metres from him. People bustled between them. He stepped towards her, directly into somebody’s path.

  ‘Entschuldigen Sie mich, bitte,’ he heard himself saying in that once familiar tongue, but the person merely grunted and was gone.

  They were less than two metres apart now, but having been stopped once he did not seem to know how to cover the final distance.

  ‘You didn’t die?’ he almost croaked. His mouth suddenly dry and his tongue sticky. Speaking in English again out of habit, in a daze, only half-conscious of speaking at all.

  ‘No,’ she replied in English, ‘I didn’t die.’

  Then a beat. The tiniest of pauses. A flicker of what looked very like suspicion flashed across her face.

  ‘But you knew that, Otto,’ she said, ‘you replied to my letter.’

  ‘Yes … yes, of course,’ he stammered.

  So his first instinct had been right after all. She was alive! Once more she was breathing the very same air as him. Seventeen years of pain, longing and regret were suddenly and shockingly at an end.

  He had been so sure she was dead. So sure it would be Silke.

  Dagmar stepped towards him, deftly avoiding the scurrying people that divided them. With each step appearing more familiar to him. Her movements still graceful as of old, she even managed to wear her dull and threadbare suit with a flash of style.

  ‘Won’t you hug me, Ottsy?’ she said, standing before him. ‘Or don’t you care to any more?’ And then a smile, her smile. The lips more lined and the skin around them thinner but Dagmar’s smile nonetheless and enchanting still. ‘Have I grown too ugly for a kiss?’

  ‘You Dagmar, ugly?’ he whispered. ‘Never.’

  Stepping forward once again, he enfolded her in his arms.

  And in the moment it took him to take hold of her, she was transformed. His Dagmar once more, the loveliest girl in Berlin, just as she had always been. He had only to blow away the dust of seventeen years and there she would be again. Dagmar Fischer. Princess. The woman who had owned his heart since he was a boy.

  The stuff of dreams. Of fairy tales.

  Tightly they held each other. As if fearful that hidden hands were threatening to tear them apart.

  Otto wondered if he was going to faint, a sensation he had never experienced before. He felt levitated. Floating. Outside and above himself, watching the scene play out below. It was heady and intoxicating. He felt drunk.

  She was in his arms once more.

  Her hair again upon his face.

  Her ear close to his lips.

  Just exactly as it had been in the very moments when he had last seen her. At the station, when he went away. Then, as now, there were people all around, travellers hurrying back and forth, German voices on the tannoys announcing arrivals and
departures. A coffee store and vending machines. It was as if the two of them had stood still while time had moved on. Frozen in each other’s arms from 1939 to 1956 while the world hustled and bustled around them. The greatest war ever fought had come and gone. Empires had fallen and others had risen up. The single most terrible crime in all history had been perpetrated and now the places of those murders had become museums. Scientists were planning to place objects in orbit and swing bands were giving way to young men with greased hair and guitars.

  And through all that and more, Otto Stengel had held Dagmar Fischer close in his heart. And now once more he held her in his arms. Time had indeed stood still.

  And he had been so certain that she was dead.

  Further English Conversation

  Berlin, 1940

  ALL DAY LONG Frieda had been seeing patients in the little ‘surgery’ she now conducted from a desk she had set up in her own bedroom. The tiny guest room she had previously used for this purpose was now occupied by Herr and Frau Katz the chemists and their grown-up daughter. The twins’ old room had become home to her parents. There was a middle-aged spinster lady named Bissinger sleeping on the couch in the living room, and a widower called Minkovsky on cushions on the floor.

  The problem of accommodation for Jews was becoming more acute each day, the government having introduced an ordinance as cruel as it was vague. It was to be left up to local residents themselves to decide how long they were prepared to ‘tolerate’ Jews in their midst. This meant that Jews could be turfed out of their homes on a whim, either through sheer cruelty or more often simply because a party official wanted to steal their home.

  Frieda was even worried for her own apartment. The fact that it was now so full, coupled with the constant stream of patients coming to her door, had begun to cause tension with her neighbours. Up until now, relations had been good; the Stengels had, after all, lived there for twenty years and at some point Frieda had done almost everybody in the building a favour. Wolfgang used to play music at their children’s birthday parties.

  Now, however, tension was growing. There were whisperings that the Stengel place had turned into a Jewish ghetto. There were also complaints about the risk of infection caused by the flow of sick people making their way up the building. Most of all people resented the lift being used by so many outsiders. For months there had been angry mutterings about how the tiny lift always seemed to be on its way up to the sixth floor, and that when one did manage to summon it, it was unpleasant to share with sick, scared and pitiable Jews.

  Eventually some people on a floor below Frieda’s had put up a sign saying that the lift was for the use of residents only. This, however, was an unsatisfactory solution, since of course other tenants had guests whom they wished to be able to visit them without using the stairs. The next sign put up said simply ‘No Jews’, but again this did not work because Frieda was a legal tenant and continued to contribute her share of the communal running costs. Eventually it was decided that the sign should say that no Jews excepting current tenants were to use the lift.

  Frieda found the use of the word ‘current’ ominous.

  So far the situation had been left at that but nobody was satisfied with it. The sight of the elderly, the infirm and in particular of sick, undernourished children struggling up six flights of stairs was upsetting to the other tenants and Frieda knew that the next stage would be that she would be told her patients could no longer attend her surgery. She was currently trying to stave off this eventuality by making house calls wherever possible. This necessitated her running all over Friedrichshain, which was of course absolutely exhausting.

  Frieda had arrived home after completing another gruelling day, hoping perhaps to have a moment when she could forget her troubles. A quiet bath even. Unfortunately she had forgotten that her English conversation group was meeting that evening and despite all the group rules to the contrary, trouble was all any of them seemed able to discuss.

  The problem of food was becoming as serious as shelter. With the coming of war, rationing had begun in real earnest.

  ‘And of course we get so many fewer coupons than anybody else,’ Frau Leibovitz almost wailed. ‘It’s so dastardly to issue us with scarcely enough food to live and yet just enough not to die. We are all withering and wasting away.’

  ‘Some people are saying that they intend to shoot us in the end,’ Herr Tauber said. ‘Ha! Shoot what? We’re too thin to make a decent target.’

  Frieda’s father made his comment in German but Frieda let it go. Her parents were only a part of the group anyway because it took place in what was now their home, and besides which the incentive to improve people’s English was now much diminished. With Germany having conquered most of Europe there was no longer any chance of emigrating anyway.

  ‘Can you believe they won’t let us in the air-raid shelters?’ Frau Leibovitz complained. ‘Hoping the English will do their dirty work for them, I suppose.’

  ‘The English are finished,’ her husband said. ‘They’ll get their necks wrung like a chicken, just like the French said.’

  Frieda sipped at her acorn coffee, struck as ever by the strangeness of it all.

  England. Otto was there! Calling himself Paulus.

  And Paulus was in France, calling himself Otto.

  In the Waffen SS.

  ‘The Nazis will be across the Channel in a month,’ Herr Leibovitz went on. ‘The British will be swatted just like the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Belgians and the French.’

  ‘All right. All right!’ Herr Tauber snapped. ‘We know who he’s damn well conquered, we don’t need chapter and verse.’

  ‘He’s Satan,’ Herr Katz said. ‘He is, I tell you. He’s the devil himself, or his henchman. How else can you credit it? Four years, Herr Tauber, that’s how long you, me and the whole of the Kaiser’s army were stuck in the middle of France. Stuck, I tell you! Couldn’t move. Up to our backsides in mud. This man sweeps through in a fortnight. It’s uncanny, that’s what it is. He’s supernatural.’

  Herr Tauber didn’t reply.

  Perhaps Katz was right. The stunning success of Hitler’s armies was without parallel in all history. Nobody had ever conquered Europe so quickly, or controlled so much of it. Not Hannibal, nor Caesar, nor Napoleon. The whole of the western continent was either occupied or allied to the Third Reich.

  ‘That bastard Mussolini certainly made sure he was on the winning side,’ Katz said. ‘So now the Jews of Italy are going to get what we’ve been getting. And the newspapers have Hitler in the Pyrenees talking to Franco. Once he crushes the Brits his fortress will be complete.’

  ‘Can we please all just shut the hell up about Hitler!’ Frieda almost shouted.

  She felt like screaming. After the day she had had and all the things on her mind. Hitler crushing the Brits? That would be Paulus. Silke kept her informed. Paulus was in France. He had been in the army that surrounded Dunkirk. He was part of the force being assembled in France for what the newspapers said would be the invasion of Britain. He had been issued with a cork life-jacket for the crossing. The papers were saying it remained only for the Luftwaffe to gain control of the skies over the Channel and that would be it for Churchill and his gang.

  Paulus might be in Britain in a month.

  Not as a refugee student as she had planned these last two years, but as a German soldier.

  And Otto? Where was he? Was he in khaki? A British Tommy? Those same soldiers of whom her father had spoken with such grudging respect when she was in her teens. It seemed likely. Otto had been in the United Kingdom for nearly a year and a half now and there could be no doubt that the island nation was preparing to fight it out.

  All these thoughts had been in her mind as she made her out-burst. Now she looked around at the surprised faces. Frieda never lost her temper. She could see that they were shocked, upset, in fact. They relied on her strength.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘that was rude. It’s just that sometimes
I get a little tired.’

  She glanced across the room towards the piano.

  To the piano stool.

  It was involuntary. She still found herself doing it. Even now, three years on.

  He wasn’t there, of course. The Schmulewitzes were squeezed on to his little seat.

  God, how she missed Wolfgang. The apartment was more crowded than it had ever been but she was so wretchedly alone. Most of the time she was too busy to think about it, but at home, surrounded by tired, terrified old Jews, it hit her hard. Her whole family was gone. Paulus. Otto.

  And Wolfgang.

  Her beloved partner and soulmate, lost beneath the cold dark waters of the Spree.

  ‘We must try to be practical,’ Frieda continued, as always taking refuge in her doctor’s persona. Calm, efficient. Above all active. ‘I’ve been thinking about this for some time. These restrictions are making life very hard but if we organize ourselves they can be tolerated. The evening curfew and the restricted shopping hours certainly present an organizational challenge—’

  ‘Only between four and five p.m.’ Herr Katz spluttered. ‘Why? Why are we only to be allowed in shops for an hour each day? What possible purpose can it serve?’

  ‘So that decent Germans may know when to avoid our infection, of course,’ Herr Tauber growled.

  ‘Well, with the few coupons they allow us and the little money they’ve left us,’ Frau Katz chipped in, ‘an hour is about fifty-nine minutes more than we need to shop anyway!’

  ‘Please!’ Frieda snapped once again, struggling to remain placid. ‘We’ve moaned enough! I was trying to suggest that we start to organize ourselves better.’

  ‘Organize, Frau Stengel?’ Frau Katz enquired. ‘What is there to organize?’

  ‘What is there to organize, Frau Katz?’ Frieda was angry. ‘There is everything to organize. Most of our young people are gone now but we’re all still able-bodied and can help those who aren’t. The old, the sick, the little children and the mothers with young babies. How is a mother with small children and a husband stolen to the camps to get to the bread shop between four and five if the kids are sick? She can’t but we can. You can. The curfew is causing some old people never to leave their homes; we need to find them and take them out. If only for a little walk – the streets are still free to us.’