Two Brothers: A Novel Read online

  About the Book

  Berlin 1920

  Two babies are born.

  Two brothers.

  United and indivisible, sharing everything.

  Twins in all but blood.

  As Germany marches into its Nazi Armageddon, the ties of family, friendship and love are tested to the very limits of endurance. And the brothers are faced with an unimaginable choice...

  Which one of them will survive?

  Ben Elton’s most personal novel to date, Two Brothers transports the reader to history’s darkest hour.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Girl on the Cart: Berlin, 1920

  Tea and Biscuits: London, 1956

  Twins: Berlin, 1920

  Another Baby: Munich, 1920

  An Operation is Cancelled: Berlin, 1920

  A Whimper and a Scream: Berlin, 1920

  A Proposal: London, 1956

  Brand New Model: Berlin, 1921

  Rhinemaiden: Berlin, 1922

  District and Circle Line: London, 1956

  Money Gone Mad: Berlin, 1923

  Young Entrepreneurs: Berlin, 1923

  Funny Money: Berlin, 1923

  Renewed Acquaintance: Berlin, 1923

  A New Job: Berlin, 1923

  Hot Hot Hot!: Berlin, 1923

  St John’s Wood: London, 1956

  Too Much Jazz: Berlin, 1923

  A Screaming Three-year-old: Munich, 1923

  Modern Jazz: London, 1956

  A Very Proper Little Girl: Berlin, 1926

  The Saturday Club: Berlin, 1926–28

  Two Parties and a Crash: Munich, Berlin and New York, 1929

  Fighting over Dagmar: Berlin, 1932

  That Man: Berlin, 30 January 1933

  The Penny Dropped: London, 1956

  Final Match: Berlin, 1933

  Thirteenth Birthdays: Munich and Berlin, 1933

  Visitors to the Surgery: Berlin, 1933

  Hope Lost: London, 1956

  Opening up Shop: Berlin, 1 April 1933

  The Banks of the Red Sea: Berlin, 1 April 1933

  A Quiet Day at the Store: Berlin, 1933

  Law Student: London, 1956

  A Party Is Announced: Berlin, August 1933

  The Fischers Throw a Party: Berlin, 1933

  Auf Wiedersehen: Berlin, 1933

  Further Briefings: London, 1956

  A Friendly Nazi: Berlin, 1934

  Unfriendly Nazi: Berlin, 1934

  Party Interrupted: Bad Wiessee, 1934

  Aryan-free Zone: Berlin, 1935

  Beached Dolphin: Berlin, 1935

  New Laws: Berlin and Nuremberg, 1935

  Romantic Gesture: Berlin, 1935

  The Adopted Son: Berlin, 1935

  Family Trees: Berlin, 1935

  A Country Excursion: Saxony, September 1935

  Blood Family: Saxony, 1935

  Fate Sealed: Berlin, 1935

  A Spontaneous Drink: London, 1956

  Into Exile: Berlin, 1935

  Making Contact: Berlin, 1936

  Weekly Visits: Berlin, 1936

  Rejected on Grounds of Race: London, 1956

  Personal Sacrifices: Berlin, 1936

  On the Embankment: London, 1956

  Reichssportfeld, Grunewald: Berlin, 1 August 1936

  A Holiday in Munich: 1937

  Frieda’s Other Children: Berlin, 1938

  English Conversations: Berlin, 1938

  The Night of the Broken Glass: Berlin, November 1938

  Rain on the Beach: Lake Wannsee, November 1938

  The Last Meeting of the Saturday Club: Berlin, February 1939

  The Morning After: The German–Dutch Border, 1939

  Early Breakfast: London, 1956

  From Untermensch to Superman: Berlin, 1940

  A Marriage is Discussed: Berlin, 1940

  Final Briefing: London, 1956

  Mixed Marriage: Berlin, 1940

  Old Friends: Berlin, 1956

  Further English Conversation: Berlin, 1940

  Recognized: Calais, 1940

  The People’s Park: Berlin, 1956

  German Hero: Berlin and Russia, December 1941 and January 1942

  Park Bench: Berlin, 1956

  The Jewish Hospital: Berlin, 1943

  Continued Conversation in the Park: Berlin, 1956

  Jew Catcher: Berlin, 1945

  Between Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood: Berlin, 1956

  Two Women: Berlin, 1945

  In the Garden of Innocence: Berlin, 1956

  Girl on a Pavement: London and Berlin, 1989 and 2003

  Afterword: Biographical Reflections

  About the Author

  Also by Ben Elton

  Copyright

  TWO BROTHERS

  Ben Elton

  Two Brothers is dedicated to two cousins, my uncles:

  Heinz Ehrenberg, who served in the Wehrmacht

  1939 to 1945,

  and

  Geoffrey Elton, who served in the British army

  1943 to 1946.

  The Girl on the Cart

  Berlin, 1920

  FRIEDA STENGEL WOKE from a dream filled with tiny kicks to find her nightdress and her bedding soaking wet.

  It was past dawn but the coming of day had done little to relieve the darkness and gloom of the long freezing night that had preceded it. Her breath hung heavily in the dull light as she shook her husband awake.

  ‘Wolfgang,’ she whispered. ‘My waters have broken.’

  He sat up in bed with a jolt.

  ‘Right!’ he said, staring about wildly, struggling to surface. ‘Good! Everything’s fine. We have a plan.’

  ‘I’m not in labour yet,’ Frieda said soothingly. ‘No pain. No cramps. But they’re on their way, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Keep calm,’ Wolfgang said, tumbling out of bed and tripping over the boots he’d left close at hand for just such an awakening. ‘We absolutely have a plan.’

  Frieda was expecting twins and so had been guaranteed a place in a hospital for the delivery. The Berlin Buch medical school was several kilometres across the city from Friedrichshain, where they lived. As she struggled into her clothes Frieda could only hope that the babies were in no hurry.

  Wolfgang took his wife’s arm and they groped their way down the five flights of stairs from their apartment to the street below. There was a lift but it was ancient and rickety and they had decided that the tiny iron cage was not to be trusted for such a crucial journey.

  ‘Imagine if we got stuck and you had the babies between floors,’ Wolfgang joked. ‘It’s only licensed for three people! That bitch of a concierge would probably report us to the housing collective.’

  The sky that lowered over the young couple as they stepped out on to the icy pavement was so dark and so grey that it might have been forged from iron in the furnaces of the famous Krupps foundry in Essen and then bolted above Berlin with rivets of steel. Berlin seemed always to be huddling beneath such gunmetal skies. The war winters and those that followed had been cruel indeed and as the wet and frozen early morning workers hurried past the young couple, bent low in the teeth of biting eastern winds, it was hard for Frieda and Wolfgang to remember that there had ever been any other season in Berlin but winter. That there had once been a time when every tree on Unter Den Linden had dazzled in garish bloom and up and down the Tiergarten old gentlemen had removed their jackets and girls had gone without stockings.

  But spring and summer were a distant memory in that February of 1920, a dream of better times before the catastrophe of the Great War exploded over Germany. Now the skies seemed always to have been beaten out of cannons and
to thunder as if just beyond the horizon in the fields of Belgium and France and across the endless Russian steppes real cannons still roared.

  There were of course no taxis to be found even if they could have afforded one, and inevitably the trams were on one of their regular strikes. The Stengels had therefore arranged to borrow a hand cart from the local greengrocer.

  Herr Sommer was waiting for them when they arrived outside his shop, with the cart and a bouquet of carrots tied up with ribbons.

  ‘Pink and blue,’ Sommer said, ‘because Wolf assures me you’re going to have a boy and girl. An instant family, all the bother done with in one go.’

  ‘They’ll both be boys,’ Frieda replied firmly. ‘So watch out for trouble, they’ll be pinching your apples in a few years!’

  ‘If I have any apples,’ the grocer replied ruefully as Wolfgang began to push the cart away, slipping and clanking across the icy stones and cobbles.

  Just then there was a burst of automatic gunfire somewhere in a nearby street, but they ignored it, as they also ignored the shouts and the screams that followed the clattering boots and the sound of breaking glass.

  Gunfire, boots and breaking glass were just the sounds of the city to Wolfgang and Frieda, they didn’t really notice them any more. As commonplace in Berlin as the cry of the newspaper vendor, the bird song in the parks and the rattle of the trains on the elevated railway. Everybody ignored them, keeping their heads down, hurrying along, hoping not to be delayed in getting to whatever queue it was they were planning to join.

  ‘Fucking idiots,’ a one-legged veteran muttered as he scuttled past on his crutches.

  ‘You got that right,’ Wolfgang replied to the back of the man’s shaven head and little army cap.

  The newspapers called these ongoing disturbances a ‘revolution’ but if it was a revolution it was of a peculiar German kind. Civic authority continued to function and business was still done. Kids still played on the pavements. Secretaries were at their typing machines by eight thirty. The police still checked the licence discs on parked cars, even while their owners were in a nearby cellar kicking somebody to death or being kicked to death themselves.

  Berlin simply carried on with its own affairs while Communist gangs and right-wing Freikorps militia killed each other during their lunch breaks.

  Frieda and Wolfgang carried on too, or at least Wolfgang did, sweating over the cart handles, despite the cold, as he pushed his wife through the rubble-strewn streets, swearing and cursing his way around the occasional barricade until finally arriving before the splendid steps of the famous five-thousand-bed teaching hospital on Lindenberger Weg, the largest in all Europe.

  Wolfgang pulled up his cart, drawing deep, painful breaths of freezing air, and took down Frieda’s bag.

  ‘Heavy enough, isn’t it?’ he gasped. ‘Do you really need all these books?’

  ‘I might be in for a while,’ Frieda replied, sliding herself heavily over the tailboard and down on to the pavement, wincing as her swollen ankles took the weight. ‘I need to get some work done.’

  ‘Well, I’m with you on that, Fred,’ Wolfgang agreed, treating himself to a smoke. ‘You married a musician. A musician who at some point hopes to find himself living in the style to which he would like to become accustomed.’

  ‘You’re a composer, Wolf.’ Frieda smiled. ‘Not just a musician. I told my parents I was marrying the next Mendelssohn.’

  ‘God help us, I hope not. Too many damn tunes. Kaffee und Kuchen music ain’t for me, Freddy, you know that.’

  ‘People like tunes. They pay for tunes.’

  ‘Which is why I grabbed myself a nice clever girl when I had the chance. Every jazz man needs a besotted lady doctor to look after him.’

  Wolfgang took Frieda around her huge waist and kissed her.

  Frieda laughed, disengaging herself. ‘I’m not besotted, I’m barely tolerating. And I’m not a doctor either. Not yet, there’s the little matter of my final exams. And be careful with my books. They’re all borrowed and they fine you if there’s even a tiny crease in a page.’

  Frieda was studying medicine at the University of Berlin. She even had a grant of sorts, a fact her deeply conservative parents still had difficulty believing.

  ‘You mean they pay for your education? Even women?’ her father had enquired incredulously.

  ‘They have to, Pa. Most of the boys are dead.’

  ‘But all the same. Women doctors?’ her father replied, confusion reigning behind the solid, timeless certainty of his close-cropped Prussian moustache. ‘Who would trust them?’

  ‘Who will have a choice?’ Frieda countered. ‘It’s called the twentieth century, Pa, you really ought to join some time, it’s been going two decades already.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ her father said with sombre gravity, ‘it began only recently, when his Imperial Highness abdicated. God only knows where or when it will end.’

  Frieda’s father was a policeman and her mother a proud housewife. He brought in the salary, she ran the home and raised the children. Their attitudes had been formed under the Kaiser, and the political and cultural earthquake of the post-war Weimar Republic had left them reeling. Neither of them understood a government which while unable to stop gunfights on the high streets concerned itself with sexual equality.

  Or a son-in-law who was happy to begin a family despite not being able to afford to pay for a taxi to take his wife to the hospital.

  ‘I think if Papa saw you pushing his pregnant daughter to her confinement in a grocer’s cart, he’d take out his gun and shoot you,’ Frieda remarked as they laboured up the hospital steps together.

  ‘He nearly shot me for getting you pregnant,’ Wolfgang replied, searching in the pockets of his jacket for the hospital admission papers.

  ‘If you hadn’t married me he would have done.’

  ‘Right, this is it. We’re here.’

  All around them sick, cold people crowded, bustling in and out of the great doors of the hospital.

  ‘I’ll come back this evening,’ Wolfgang said. ‘Make sure there’s three of you by then.’

  Frieda gripped his hand.

  ‘My God, Wolf,’ she whispered, ‘when you put it like that … Today there’s just you and me, tomorrow there’ll be you, me … and our children.’

  A gust of wind caused her to shiver. The harsh, rain-speckled chill penetrating her threadbare clothing. Once more Wolfgang folded her in his arms, no longer playfully but this time passionately, almost desperately. Two, small, cold people huddled together beneath the unforgiving granite columns of the enormous civic building.

  Two young hearts beating together.

  Two more, younger still, warm in Frieda’s belly.

  Four hearts, joined by love in the harsh squalls of another, greater heart. One made of stone and iron. Berlin, heart of Germany.

  ‘That’s right,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘You, me and our children. The best and most beautiful thing that there ever was.’

  And for once he spoke without smiling or trying to make a joke.

  ‘Yes, that ever was,’ said Frieda quietly.

  ‘Well then. Let’s get to it, Fred. It’s too bloody cold to be standing around being soppy.’

  There was no question of Wolfgang waiting at the hospital. Very few expectant fathers in post-war Berlin had the leisure to hang about outside maternity wards waiting to hand out cigars in the traditional manner. Herr Sommer needed his cart back and Wolfgang, like everybody else in the city that terrible winter, needed to begin queuing.

  ‘There’s meat at Horst’s,’ he said, as he began to descend the steps to where he had left the cart. ‘Lamb and pork. I’m going to get some for you if I have to pawn my piano. You’ll need the iron if you’re going to feed our little son and daughter.’

  ‘Our little sons,’ Frieda replied. ‘It’ll be boys. I’m telling you, a woman knows. Paulus and Otto. Boys. Lucky, lucky boys.’

  ‘Why lucky?’ Wolfgang called back. ‘
I mean, apart from having the most beautiful mum in the world?’

  ‘Because they’re twins. They’ve got each other, Wolf. This is a tough town in a tough world. But no matter how tough it gets – our boys will always have each other.’

  Tea and Biscuits

  London, 1956

  STONE STARED AT the hessian-covered table in front of him. At the teacups and the biscuits and the block of yellow notepaper with the fountain pen on top. He focused on the black Bakelite telephone with its sharp angular edges and its frayed, double-twisted, brown fabric cord. It must have dated from the early 1930s.

  What had he been doing when that cord was new?

  Fighting, no doubt. Or running in terror along some Berlin pavement looking for an alley to dodge down. He and his brother chasing each other’s heels, two teenage boys in mortal fear for their lives.

  Stone’s eye followed the cord down off the table, across the slightly warped, ruby-coloured linoleum and into a largish black box screwed to the skirting board. He fancied he could hear the box humming but it might have been the distant traffic on the Cromwell Road.

  He shifted nervously in his seat. He had never quite got used to being interviewed in bare rooms by government officials. Even now he could not quite persuade himself that he was safe. Even now some part of him expected violence.

  Except of course that this was England, they didn’t do that sort of thing here. Some of Stone’s more left-leaning acquaintances sneered when he said that. But then they had never had the misfortune to live in a country where sudden and absolute violence was the norm and not the exception.

  Stone looked once more at his interrogators. A classic pair. One short and rather plump, balding, with an officious little soup stain of a moustache, his beady eyes flicking constantly at the biscuits. The other not much taller but thinner, standing in the corner of the bare windowless room, watching through slightly hooded eyes. It felt to Stone like he was in a scene from a movie. That he was being questioned by Peter Lorre while Humphrey Bogart looked on inscrutably, keeping his own counsel.

  ‘You are travelling to Berlin in the hope of meeting up with your brother’s widow.’

  This was the second time the shorter man, Peter Lorre, had asked this question.

  Or was it a statement? It was certainly true. But how did they know?