Two Brothers: A Novel

by Ben Elton

  They found a bench and sat down together. Otto produced his cigarettes. Dagmar accepted one eagerly.

  ‘Our first shared cigarette since Wannsee,’ she said, putting a hand on Otto’s knee. ‘Do you remember?’

  Remember? Of course he remembered. He remembered nothing else so clearly in all his life as that day at Wannsee. He’d dreamt about it almost every night since.

  Dreaming she’d chosen him.

  But despite the temptation to dive at once into the past, the present remained more urgent.

  ‘The Stasi, Dagmar?’ he said.

  ‘People change, Otto,’ she said. ‘I never picked you to end up a civil servant in Her Majesty’s Foreign Office either.’ Otto nodded, he could see her point.

  ‘I ended up an army translator,’ he said, ‘towards the end of the war. I did a lot of German prisoner debriefings and a bit of work for the security boys. When I was demobbed they offered me a job translating at the FO and I took it. Nothing else to do really.’

  He sparked up his Zippo lighter and lit her cigarette for her, which she drew on hungrily.

  ‘Lucky Strikes. Your father’s brand. I don’t suppose I’ve smelt one since the early thirties. Funny, I quite often find myself thinking of Wolfgang.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Otto said, ‘me too.’

  ‘He was such a laugh. A character. He can still make me smile, even now, even after he’s been dead for nearly twenty years.’ Dagmar paused before adding sadly, ‘I don’t know anyone like that any more.’

  They smoked for a moment in silence. Once more Otto found himself struggling to comprehend the enormity of the situation. After so very long, he was with her, sitting beside her. Smoking with her, just like they had used to do, in her pink bedroom in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, in the house the Nazis burnt.

  ‘So?’ he found himself saying.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So am I here to try and get you out? Because if that’s what you want, I’ll do anything to help. You know that. They’ll help you too. The British. They want to bring you to the UK.’

  ‘Ah yes. I imagine they do. If I’ll talk to them. If I promise to tell them all about the Stasi.’

  ‘Fuck them. You don’t have to tell them anything if you don’t want. Let them help me help you get out and then fuck them.’

  ‘Ottsy,’ Dagmar said with a sad smile, ‘I’m not trying to get out. I work for the East German secret police. Believe me, they’re as ruthless as the Gestapo and a lot more efficient. If I defected they’d find me and they’d kill me. I’ll never get out.’

  Otto was so confused now. ‘Then why am I here?’

  ‘Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘You know I’m pleased.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. How could you doubt it?’

  Then suddenly he said it.

  ‘I still love you, Dagmar. I kept my promise. I want you to know that. I’ve loved you every single day. On the ferry to England. In the hostel and the internment camp. Through the war years. Fighting in North Africa and Italy and behind a desk with the army of occupation. Then in London and for all those long, long boring years since I’ve loved you every minute of every day. I never stopped loving you and I never will.’

  He hadn’t meant to say it and yet somehow he had to tell her. He wanted so much for her to know that he had kept the promise he whispered into her ear at the Berlin station in 1939.

  ‘And on the train?’ Dagmar said, a wicked little smile playing on her lips.

  ‘Train?’

  ‘The train to Rotterdam, Otts. When you made love to Silke.’

  He was absolutely stunned. It was the last thing he had expected her to say. He could feel himself reddening. Actually feeling guilty. It was so unfair; seventeen years of emotional self-denial and the first thing she brought up was him and Silke.

  ‘Oh,’ he heard himself saying. ‘So she told you.’

  ‘Of course, Otts,’ she said, laughing now. ‘We were cooped up together in an apartment for years. Girls talk. Oh, don’t look so bothered, Ottsy. I was just teasing you. You were being so serious about how much you loved me. I couldn’t resist! She told me it was nothing, she told me you were tongue-tied with guilt in the morning. That all you could think about was me.’

  ‘Well …’ Otto said, embarrassed, ‘that’s true, actually. We were drunk, you see. And it was an unusual situation.’

  He could still scarcely believe that this was what they were discussing.

  ‘And she did turn out quite pretty in the end, didn’t she? Who would have thought it back in the twenties?’ Dagmar laughed again. ‘Please don’t look so upset, Otts. You promised to love me, not to remain celibate. I don’t imagine you’ve been a monk since 1939.’

  She stamped her cigarette out on the ground and accepted another. Otto thought of Billie doing the same thing on the Thames Embankment. Just a few days before and a universe away. For a mad moment he wondered if Dagmar knew about Billie too. She was in the Stasi after all.

  ‘But you do still love me best of all, Ottsy. That’s nice, I must say. Very nice.’

  ‘I just wanted you to know. About my promise. I won’t say it again.’

  ‘Why not? I don’t mind.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t relevant, is it?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No more now than it was then. You chose Paulus, Dagmar,’ Otto said. ‘He was the one you loved.’

  As Otto mentioned his brother’s name he realized it was the first time he had done so. How could it have taken him so long?

  ‘Paulus, Ottsy?’ Dagmar said with a sad sad smile.

  She tilted her head back and looked up at the sky. The clouds were grey but there were hints of sun rippling through them. There was no breeze and the smoke rose vertically from her mouth. After a little while she looked back at him and her eyes were glistening as if she was going to cry.

  She seemed about to say something but then stopped, drawing instead once more on her cigarette. Finally her face seemed to harden a little with resolve and the words came.

  ‘Oh, Otto,’ she said as a tear trickled from her eye. ‘I never loved Paulus.’

  For a moment he wondered if he had heard her correctly, but there could be no doubt he had. The tears now flowing down her cheeks were proof of that.

  ‘Dagmar,’ Otto said, aghast, ‘what do you mean? How can you say you never loved him? You told us … at Wannsee. On the beach. That you’d chosen Paulus.’

  ‘Yes. That’s right, Otts,’ and she could not look at him now. ‘I chose him.’

  ‘Then what are you saying?’

  ‘Oh, Otto. Otto,’ Dagmar said, and it sounded almost as if she was scolding him. ‘So good, so true. Just like his brother. Those terrible Stengel twins, eh? I didn’t deserve them. I always knew that. But then I never forced them to fall in love with me either.’

  ‘Dagmar, please tell me what you’re—’

  ‘Paulus was the clever one, Ottsy.’ Dagmar ground out her butt, then took the lighter and another cigarette from the packet in Otto’s hand, her fingers lingering for a moment on his. ‘Don’t you see? I chose the clever one. Surely you understand?’

  ‘Not really, no,’ Otto said, although he thought that perhaps he was beginning to.

  ‘I wasn’t interested in love, Otto. I didn’t have that luxury. I was a Jewess trapped in Nazi Berlin. The mob had just burned my mother to death. I was interested in survival.’ Dagmar lit her cigarette and collected her thoughts. ‘I worked it out on the night you saved my life. On Kristallnacht. Do you remember what you said? When we got to your mum’s apartment, me sitting there on the floor, hugging my little toy monkey. I still have it, you know. You said you were going to kill Himmler. That was your reaction to the Night of the Broken Glass. You were always saying that sort of thing. You were the boy who brought me the Brownshirt’s buttons. Pauly never did anything like that. Pauly was too clever, too calculating. Pauly always had a plan. He had a plan th
at night too. He told you to forget stupid ideas like killing Nazis. Because you had to become a good German so that you could look after me. It was a good plan. But sitting there listening to it, not saying a word, I could see damn clearly that the wrong twin was going to have to carry it out. I needed the clever one. The calculating one. Not the wild one who wanted to kill Himmler. I didn’t think I’d stand a chance with you.’

  The cigarette packet fell from Otto’s limp fingers. He stooped to retrieve it from the ground. Some children ran past the bench where they were sitting. He glanced up to see their legs flash past.

  A boy chasing a girl.

  Somewhere Otto could hear a band playing.

  ‘You decided that night, then? On Kristallnacht?’ Otto said, his words emerging as if from some strange other place. ‘You decided to tell Paulus that you loved him?’

  ‘Don’t judge me, Ottsy.’

  ‘Did you tell him then? That night after I went back to school?’

  ‘No.’ Her voice was tense but steady, almost as if it was a relief finally to be telling the truth. ‘Pauly was dead set on his path; he was going to escape from Germany and be an English lawyer and build the future. I knew that if I was to keep him for myself I must handle him with care. I had so much to turn around and so little time in which to do it. After all, poor Pauly thought I loved you.’ The tune the distant band were playing finished. A smattering of applause drifted across the park. Then they struck up again. More marching music. Did they never tire of it?

  ‘And did you?’ Otto asked, and he was shocked to realize how eagerly he leapt upon the point. Had he won, after all? Had the pendulum to which he and his brother nailed their hearts as boys swung once again in his favour? ‘Did you love me?’

  ‘Oh, Otto, Otto,’ Dagmar replied wearily. ‘You’re a man now, not a boy. Surely you can see? Don’t you understand? I never loved either of you.’

  Otto flinched as if he had been struck. Dagmar too looked almost taken aback at herself, shocked at her own honesty. At the pain she was inflicting.

  ‘I know how awful that must sound,’ she went on quickly. ‘I adored you. You must know that. Those crazy Stengel boys who loved me so. But even then we all knew that if it hadn’t been for Hitler, me loving you would never even have been a question. Ours was a Saturday world, that was all. One day a week. And one fine Saturday I would have been gone. Away. Abroad. I was going to marry a millionaire just like my daddy was.’

  Otto stared at the ground between his feet.

  ‘Yes, that’s what Silke always said.’

  ‘Yes, I imagine she would have done,’ Dagmar observed tartly, ‘but Hitler did happen and I lost everything. Everything except my two darling protectors. That and a dedication to survive. A dedication that began on the pavement outside my father’s store in 1933 and which I’ve carried with me every since.’

  ‘You stole Paulus’s life,’ Otto said.

  ‘He wanted me, Otto. He got me. All of me. I didn’t ask him to love me.’

  ‘But you told him you loved him.’

  ‘So what?’ Dagmar demanded, her voice brittle now, almost shrill. ‘Not such a very big lie in the scheme of things. I’d have done a lot more than that to survive. I would have done anything. Pretending to love Paulus was easy – he was a wonderful boy, handsome and kind, and I didn’t deserve him. But you might as well know I’d have killed him if I’d had to. The Nazis had already got my mum and my dad. I was the last Fischer and I was damned if they were going to get me!’

  ‘You did kill him, Dagmar. He could have gone to England but instead he died at Moscow because of you.’

  ‘Well, if you want to put it that way,’ Dagmar snapped bitterly. ‘If I killed him, I saved you. That’s even, isn’t it?’

  ‘I didn’t want to be saved.’

  ‘That’s your problem, Ottsy. And it’s also why you were no use to me. Because you say things like that. And because you’ve spent the last seventeen years of your life forcing yourself to stay in love with a girl who rejected you. I needed … a pragmatist.’

  Otto got up and walked around the bench, trying to order the confused, tumbling thoughts and emotions ricocheting around his head and his heart.

  ‘So that day at Wannsee,’ he said, ‘when I ran off, before the Hitler Youth kids turned up – you asked him to stay? To swap identities with me?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Ottsy. That’s what you would have done but I’m clever like Paulus. All I did was what you know. I kissed him in the rain and told him that I loved him, not you. That I loved him but that I knew he had to go. That I wanted him to go. To live while I died. I knew that would be enough. That he’d do the rest. I knew Pauly’s mind, you see. I didn’t need to make the plan for him because given the right incentive he’d come up with it himself. And he did.’

  The girl and boy ran past again. She was leading him a merry chase. He’d have earned his kiss if he got it. Otto found himself hoping she’d turn out to be worth it.

  ‘Did you ever tell him?’ he asked. ‘After. When you were in Berlin living together.’

  ‘Of course not. I didn’t want to hurt him. Why would I? He was the best of men. I’ve told you, I adored him. Besides, I needed his dedication. I needed him to remain obsessed with protecting me. Silke suspected, though. I think she did from the very start and I believe she hated me for it. She loved you, you see, Otto, and when I stole Paulus for myself, I also stole you from her.’

  The mention of Silke was like a light bulb turning on in Otto’s brain.

  Silke? Where was she?

  Silke Krause. The woman whom MI6 knew to have worked for the Stasi since the war.

  And why had Dagmar summoned him to Berlin? She didn’t love him. She had never loved him. And it seemed she had no wish to defect.

  ‘Why am I here, Dagmar?’ Otto asked, his voice suddenly harder.

  ‘Don’t hate me, Ottsy,’ Dagmar replied, surprised, it seemed, by the change in his tone. ‘I couldn’t bear it. Of course I know that now you’ll finally have to stop loving me, which is a shame because not many girls get to be loved as long as I have by such a good man. But please don’t hate me, Ottsy. Try to understand and to like me still. To love me still, at least a little.’

  ‘Why, Dagmar? Why should I understand? And why should I love you?’

  ‘Because you were never forced to lick a pavement while your mother dry-retched in the dirt beside you.’ Dagmar almost pleaded. ‘I was thirteen, Ottsy.’

  ‘There’s been a world of pain, Dagmar. Everybody’s had a share.’

  Dagmar’s face, which had softened so entirely as she absorbed the fact that Otto’s ancient promise to love her must finally be broken, hardened once more.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘you’re right about that. There’s been a world of pain.’

  ‘Why am I in Berlin, Dagmar?’

  ‘You know why, Otto,’ she said coldly. ‘You may not be as clever as Paulus but you’re not stupid. You’re being entrapped. We want you, just like your people want me. They’re going to force you to work for us.’

  ‘And how will they do that, Dags?’

  ‘Dags?’ Dagmar laughed. ‘Long time since I heard that.’

  ‘Blackmail, I suppose,’ Otto went on. ‘The usual dirty tricks.’

  ‘Yes, I was supposed to get you into bed. An FO official photographed having sex with a known Stasi agent would not go down well with your employers.’

  Otto almost laughed. The one ambition of his life had been to make love to Dagmar. And now it turned out he’d been so close.

  ‘I told them I wouldn’t do that to you, Ottsy.’

  ‘Well, there’s a comfort.’

  ‘I told them I’d get you here but that I’d prefer it if they did their own dirty work. They never mind doing that.’

  ‘So I’m to be drugged, am I? Put in bed with a couple of naked rent boys, Kremlin-style? Spy for us or we’ll send the pictures to your bosses and the press?’

  ‘That sort of thing
. Yes.’

  ‘Personally I preferred their first plan,’ Otto said, ‘the one where you did the dirty work.’

  ‘Would that make things any better? Shall I sleep with you? I will if you like. I suppose it’s the least I can do.’

  A lifetime of faithful passion and pure devotion reduced to the offer of a compensation fuck, with the East German Secret Service recording the event for future blackmail. Otto actually laughed.

  ‘Don’t hate me, Ottsy,’ Dagmar said once more.

  ‘What happened, Dagmar? In the war. To my mother. To Pauly. Where’s Silke?’

  German Hero

  Berlin and Russia, December 1941 and January 1942

  A CRIPPLED SOLDIER, his feet lost to frostbite, hobbled on his crutches up the steps of a townhouse in the district of Moabit and rang the bell of Paulus Stengel’s apartment. Stitched into the lining of his cap was a letter, a letter from a dead comrade which the crippled man had promised on his life to either deliver or destroy.

  ‘Paulus was the best of men,’ the soldier said to Silke as he completed his task and turned away. ‘A damn good soldier too.’

  It was late January. The army telegram informing Silke of Paulus’s death had arrived just after Christmas. His last letter was dated 6 December 1941.

  My darling Mum, my darling Dagmar,

  It is minus 40 degrees and we are halted before Moscow. Ivan has finally stopped us in our tracks and now the German Army struggles for its very existence.

  We are told that if we can only hold our ground then Germany will survive to fight again next year. That may be so. But I must tell you both that I will not.

  You know of course that my plan has been these last two years to be a good soldier of Hitler that I might best be in a position to help you both.

  Now I find that I must change my plan. The evil that I have witnessed during these six months of campaigning on the Russian front leaves me no choice. The Devil and the Devil alone could have conceived of what is being done here in Germany’s name.

  It is in fact a comfort to be on the front line, dying by inches in a dug-out. For although this is a place of abject terror and quite bottomless misery, it is still preferable to being forced to witness the terrible truth of what is happening in the places we have conquered.