Two Brothers Read online

  ‘Take a look at little Paulus, Emil,’ Paulus shouted, pulling up the leg of his football shorts with the hand that did not hold a broken chair. ‘What do you think of this big boy?’

  Paulus reached up into his groin and pulled out his penis, shaking it at his surprised assailants.

  ‘Ever see a Jew boy with foreskin?’ Paulus crowed, putting down his chair leg and pulling down his pants. ‘So how about you suck on this, arsehole! Come on, Otto, show the twat what a real German dick looks like.’

  Otto didn’t like it. Exposing himself in public seemed like black humiliation to him. On the other hand, they were so heavily outnumbered.

  Slowly Otto laid down his corner flag and dustbin lid and pulled down his trousers.

  The rest of the team loved it. They howled with laughter as Paulus waved his dick at Emil, who just stood there looking witless, unable to think of a rejoinder.

  ‘Tell your old man next time he insults decent Germans he’ll have to deal with the Stengel boys!’ Paulus shouted.

  Otto just snarled and pulled up his pants.

  Outside the hut a whistle blew. The opposing team would be waiting. The ref getting impatient.

  ‘So are we going to play football or what?’ Paulus shouted. ‘Let’s beat these bastards, eh?’

  The incident was over. Emil turned away, confused. One or two of the other lads slapped Otto on the shoulder. He told them to piss off.

  Paulus and Otto played the game. Giving it everything they had as always. Occasionally exchanging glances, mutually acknowledging their lucky escape. Both aware of the doubtful confused looks they were getting from Emil and the other openly Nazi members of the team.

  It was of course their last game.

  Football was over for them. Years of fun, sport and comradeship, stopped dead.

  They both knew they could never risk going back.

  They left the field the moment the final whistle blew. Their team had won and Otto had scored twice but the Stengels didn’t hang around to celebrate. There were no songs or scuffles or wild cheers. Otto was not hoisted high on shoulders as previously he would have been. They’d won but they had nothing to celebrate. Their entire world had collapsed.

  ‘I think we should have fought,’ said Otto as they stood waiting for their train.

  ‘Don’t be bloody stupid, we’d have been killed.’

  ‘Yeah. But we had to show them our dicks.’

  ‘So what? Who cares?’ Paulus asked, genuinely surprised.

  ‘I care. I suppose you and me are just different, that’s all,’ Otto said.

  After that there was silence until the boys got home.

  To face another humiliation.

  From now on such things would be a daily occurrence.

  Edeltraud was there, with Silke. And Edeltraud’s boyfriend, Jürgen, now her fiancé. The respectful young man who had come cap in hand to the children’s first concert recital five years earlier. The boys had seen him many times since then, although less so in the last year or two.

  And never in the brown uniform of the SA.

  ‘Say goodbye to Edeltraud, boys,’ Frieda said. ‘She won’t be coming around any more.’

  ‘Of course she won’t!’ Jürgen snapped. ‘It is not fitting that a German woman should be a servant to Jews. You must know that.’

  The boys looked at Edeltraud. Her face was hard, her chin set.

  And at Silke, whose eyes were red with tears. Her chest heaving, weeping silently.

  ‘Tell me, Jürgen,’ Frieda asked quietly, ‘was it fitting, ten years ago, for a Jew to take in a seventeen-year-old street kid with an infant in her arms?’

  ‘You exploited her! You made her work for you!’

  Frieda looked at Edeltraud.

  ‘Edeltraud, you can’t believe that’s true.’

  Edeltraud avoided Frieda’s eye. ‘You’re Jews’ was all she would say.

  ‘Whatever we are, it’s what we’ve always been. All these years, together in this apartment. So much laughter, so many tears. You and Silke and us. What’s changed?’

  ‘What’s changed, Frau Stengel,’ Jürgen barked, ‘is that Germany has awoken. We have all awoken. We know now who you are and what you’ve done. And now it is our turn. Now give Edeltraud her money.’

  ‘Money?’ Frieda asked. ‘What money? She has been paid as always. More than most girls would have got.’

  ‘Her notice. We want a month’s notice.’

  ‘But she is resigning, Jürgen,’ Frieda said quietly. ‘Surely you know that she is not entitled to notice.’

  ‘She is not resigning. You are forcing her to leave.’

  ‘How? How am I forcing her to leave?’

  ‘By being Jews,’ Jürgen said. ‘This is a racial dismissal. Give her the money and be grateful I do not demand more!’

  Frieda went into the kitchen. To the biscuit barrel, where she kept her household supply of cash.

  ‘You know, Edeltraud,’ Frieda said quietly, ‘I’ve always known that sometimes you took a little from here when I wasn’t looking. A few extra marks here and there. I never said anything.’

  The boys looked at Edeltraud in astonishment. Such a thing would never have occurred to them. Silke stared hard at her mother. Edeltraud went red-faced but said nothing.

  Wolfgang had been sitting at his piano, not facing his ex-maid and her storm-trooper boyfriend.

  ‘Would you like a schnapps, Jürgen?’ Wolfgang asked, turning around for the first time. ‘You’ve been happy to take one in the past.’

  The young SA man remained silent standing beside Edeltraud on the blue rug where Silke and the boys had played happily so many times when they were small.

  Frieda held out her hand to Edeltraud with some money.

  ‘Goodbye, Edeltraud,’ Frieda said. ‘For more than ten years, you’ve been family. I shall remember you that way.’

  ‘You’re Jews,’ Edeltraud repeated. It seemed to be all that she could say. The shield with which she kept her conscience at bay.

  She snatched at the money and stuffed it into the pocket of her apron.

  ‘Edeltraud! Silke! Come!’ Jürgen ordered.

  Edeltraud turned to go but Silke hesitated.

  ‘Paulus, Otto,’ she said, speaking for the first time. ‘I am still a member of the Saturday Club and I always will be.’

  ‘I said come!’ Jürgen shouted.

  And they were gone.

  Thirteenth Birthdays

  Munich and Berlin, 1933

  THE STENGEL TWINS and the Nazi Party shared another birthday that February but this time it was the Munich celebration that was raucous and joyful while the mood at the party in Berlin was a little more subdued than usual, all the regular guests from previous years having declined their invitations.

  ‘The problem is we just don’t know enough Jews,’ Wolfgang observed dryly.

  ‘I hardly even knew I was a bloody Jew until a couple of weeks ago,’ Paulus remarked moodily. ‘I certainly don’t think I look like one.’

  ‘What does a damn Jew look like?’ Wolfgang demanded.

  ‘Please can we stop all this swearing,’ Frieda pleaded. ‘Just because they have no standards doesn’t mean we can forget ours.’

  Even Silke wasn’t at the birthday party, having managed the previous day to send a card explaining that she was to be locked in her room for the day by her mum’s SA boyfriend.

  Dagmar was in fact the only non-family guest.

  Although, if they were honest, the twins were actually perfectly happy with that. They were both so completely in love with Dagmar they would have had eyes for no one else anyway.

  Dagmar didn’t mind either. The Stengel twins were both growing up into fine, handsome boys. Very different from each other but both attractive in their way. Paulus was perhaps the more handsome by conventional standards, with thick, copper-black hair, deep ebony eyes and fine, sensitive cheekbones. Otto was a little shorter, with sandy hair, pale grey eyes and a tendency to freck
les. But there was a fiery intensity about him which made people take notice and he was also extremely strong.

  Dagmar had no objection at all to being the absolute centre of their combined attention.

  Also, although it was their birthday, both twins had prepared gifts for her. Paulus had composed an extravagant epic love poem in which Dagmar was the heroine and he the hero (Otto had a minor role as Paulus’s squire). He’d written it in High German and had inscribed it with great care in Gothic script. He’d even aged the leaves of paper with cold coffee to make them look like parchment.

  Otto had made Dagmar a miniature chest of drawers in his school woodwork class. He was becoming a skilled craftsman and the tiny piece of furniture was beautifully finished, sanded and varnished with little pearl buttons for drawer handles.

  ‘To go on your dressing table,’ he said shyly, ‘you know, to put stuff in, little stuff, like rings you know … and stuff.’

  Dagmar was delighted with her gifts and both boys got a kiss, which turned them crimson, while their parents and grandparents smiled indulgently.

  ‘Anyone would think it was Dagmar’s birthday,’ Frieda said, pouring out the lemonade, ‘so come on, let’s cut this wonderful cake she’s brought. I see Fischer’s bakers are as skilled as ever.’

  But of course before the cake could be cut, Herr Tauber insisted on being allowed to make his customary speech. The old policeman had aged noticeably even in the three weeks since Hitler had become Chancellor, but now he addressed the table with his old robust authority.

  ‘Otto, Paulus, I am proud of you,’ he said sternly. ‘You are thirteen now and fine young men. This is fortunate. Because Germany will soon be in need of fine young men. Good Germans who will step forward and take up the challenge of rebuilding our Fatherland’s reputation in the civilized world. This is why today, on your birthday, I beg you boys to be careful. I see you with bruises and scratches on your faces and know that you have been fighting. Of course you have, you are brave and proud and these are intolerable times. But we must tolerate them, for mark my words, this current aberration will pass, and it will pass soon. There are fresh elections in March and until then, despite everything that man may say, the law and the constitution still protect us. They are bigger than any one government. I know that the scum of the beer halls are marauding in the streets at present, but the law is the law and even that man cannot just wish it away. I am still a captain of police, you know. If you find yourself in danger, you come to me. As long as we don’t go getting ourselves murdered by stray SA men drunk on their success we will come through all this, you’ll see. The greatest and most advanced nation in Europe will not allow itself to be ruled by street hooligans for long. The law will prevail. Mark my words. And now let us cut the cake.’

  Three days later, on 27 February, the adolescent Nazi Party got another of its belated birthday gifts.

  Somebody burnt down the Reichstag and the delinquent thirteen-year-old used the so-called ‘provocation’ to throw the birthday party of its dreams.

  With mass arrests, countless killings and beatings, thousands of ‘disappearances’ and the outlawing of all but the most token political opposition.

  Herr Tauber’s beloved law was no protection now as three million brown-shirted SA hooligans were drafted into the regular police.

  The newly empowered Nazi Party, a baby no more but a vicious, cunning teenage psychopath, issued carte blanche for robbery, rape and murder. Its Leader announced that crimes committed against the party’s ‘enemies’ were not crimes at all but legitimate services to the German state.

  The criminals were sitting in judgement and the law was dead.

  Visitors to the Surgery

  Berlin, 1933

  BOOM BOOM. BOOM boom. Boom boom.

  Frieda listened to the tiny heartbeat and smiled at the anxious face of the expectant mother at whose belly she had placed her stethoscope.

  ‘All well I think, Frau Schmidt,’ she said with a smile, ‘just like the previous six.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope it’s a quiet one,’ the large, round-faced woman replied happily, ‘I can’t stand another like the last. Nor can anybody else in my building for that matter! When the idiots below us found out I was knocked up again they actually complained to the block management committee. As if they could do anything about it. It gets cold in bed in the winter and things happen, don’t they? Can’t stop that.’

  ‘Well you can try and control the consequences of course, Frau Schmidt,’ Frieda said, probing gently at her patient’s belly with delicate fingers. ‘No woman need feel obliged to have a child these days, you know, or at least you can considerably reduce the risk. In the past I have mentioned to you the idea of birth control—’

  ‘Hush, doctor! That’s treason!’ The woman laughed, her big, stretched, purple-streaked, tired old tummy wobbling with merriment. ‘Never mind obliged, haven’t you heard? These days it’s our duty! All these years I’ve been thinking I was an idiot for letting the old fella bother me when he’s been on the beer and it turns out I’m a hero! How about that, eh? Mind you, I actually thought I was a bit of a hero at the time, to be honest – he’s not getting any thinner or any easier on the eye.’

  They laughed together, a shared moment of female solidarity in a man’s world.

  ‘Besides which, doctor, this one’s going to turn a profit. How about that, eh?’

  Frieda smiled, she knew that the woman was referring to the government plans to ‘reward’ motherhood. Repayment of state family loans could be offset against the number of children that were produced. Abgekindert, as the joke went: borrow money and then ‘child it off’.

  ‘That’s a good thing though, isn’t it?’ Frau Schmidt went on. ‘I mean, you can’t deny that.’

  The jolly, red-faced woman looked slightly uncomfortable. In recent weeks Frieda had got used to people avoiding her eye as they self-consciously encouraged her to acknowledge the ‘good’ things that ‘they’ were doing for the nation. She had even noticed some irritation amongst non-Jewish acquaintances about the way Jews seemed fixated with their own situation. As if anti-Semitism was the only relevant feature of the new government. After all, everyone was making sacrifices for Germany’s reawakening, weren’t they? Why shouldn’t the Jews?

  ‘I don’t think quite all of us will be eligible for the payment,’ Frieda replied quietly. ‘I’m not sure Herr Hitler is anxious for people like myself to procreate.’

  ‘Mister’ Hitler. It was how Frieda and all her Jewish friends referred to the Leader, in the desperate, unspoken hope that somehow referring to him in a civilized manner might actually make him civilized himself. That perhaps even after everything he’d said, beneath the surface he was a legitimate politician who recognized some sort of rules and norms of behaviour, rather than a deranged psychopath, the stuff of gothic nightmares.

  Once more Frau Schmidt avoided Frieda’s eye. Concentrating instead on buttoning up the front of her dress.

  ‘No,’ she said brightly, ‘I suppose not. But then you never wanted a large family anyway, Frau Stengel. You after all are a doctor.’

  ‘I am at the moment, Frau Schmidt.’

  Frieda put away her stethoscope. She took the Schmidt family medical file from the bulging filing system that covered an entire wall of her surgery and went to her desk to write down the conclusions of her examination.

  Frieda had worked in that same office, at that same community clinic, since graduating from medical school in 1923. Ten years of long, tough days and many many disturbed nights. Endless hours of hard and emotionally draining work on a small civil service grade salary.

  This was a sacrifice that she had not made alone. Her family had made it with her. The boys had often missed their mum at supper time and even bedtime, while Wolfgang’s dreams of spending long days writing jazz symphonies had been sacrificed to child care and bread and butter engagements.

  ‘When are you going to finally stop being a martyr, put up a brass plat
e on your door and make some proper money, girl,’ Wolfgang had often begged, only half joking. ‘Help some fat society mommas with their hot flushes. Charge them a fortune to loosen their corsets and give them an aspirin.’

  But Frieda loved her work, she was passionately committed to the Weimar Government’s public health policies, which were the most advanced in the world, and she felt huge responsibility to her patients. After her family, the Friedrichshain community clinic was the centre of Frieda’s life.

  ‘If we don’t look after these people,’ she’d tell her husband as they struggled to balance their own family budget, ‘who else will?’

  ‘Well, I’m with your dad on this one,’ Wolfgang would reply. ‘Fuck ’em,’ and Frieda hoped he was joking.

  Flicking through the Schmidt file in search of the right card, Frieda found herself reflecting how badly her handwriting had deteriorated over her decade of practice. In that file were some of the first notes she had made as a junior doctor, when Frau Schmidt’s husband had registered with the clinic as a young single man. He had come to her with a case of gonorrhoea picked up in an army brothel in Belgium. She had noted down the details in a clear youthful hand. The writing she added to the file now was, as with most doctors, legible only to herself and the local chemist.

  ‘You will still be coming to see me, Frau Schmidt?’ Frieda enquired, without looking up from her desk. ‘You still wish me to deliver your baby?’

  ‘Of course, Frau Doktor. You’ve delivered all the others, one a year since 1927, all ship-shape and screaming blue murder. Why stop now?’

  ‘Well, Frau Schmidt, I think perhaps you know why. These are changing times.’

  Now Frieda looked up. Frau Schmidt was putting on her coat, on the collar of which was a small swastika badge. Women were not allowed to be actual members of the Nazi Party but that did not stop them buying brooches to show their support.

  ‘You mean because you are Jewish?’ Schmidt said, once more a little embarrassed. ‘Well, yes, of course it is … unfortunate … for you I mean. It must be a very worrying time. But really you mustn’t fret, everybody knows that you are not one of them, Frau Doktor Stengel. The Jews in Berlin are different, aren’t they? I know two or three SA men with Jewish girlfriends.’