Two Brothers: A Novel Read online

  They had read Dagmar’s letter. Obviously.

  ‘Presumed widow,’ Stone replied, evading the question. A lifetime’s experience had taught him that it was usually wise to withhold any information from the authorities until forced to divulge it.

  ‘You don’t think your brother’s dead?’

  ‘There has never been any actual proof of it.’

  ‘You mean a corpse?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Your brother is certainly presumed dead,’ Lorre replied, finally capitulating to the biscuit plate and choosing a shortbread finger. ‘Killed by the Russians during the battle for Moscow in 1941.’

  ‘That is what I was told,’ Stone said, ‘after the war, by the East German authorities.’

  ‘Have you any reason to doubt it?’

  ‘No. None at all. I’ve always hoped, that’s all. My brother generally had a plan. He would have been a hard man to kill.’

  ‘The Waffen SS tended to be made up of hard men to kill. At least until they started recruiting boys. Your brother joined in 1940, didn’t he?’

  Was there a hint of a sneer? Stone felt his anger rising. What right did this smug little man, munching on his shortbread finger, have to judge? He hadn’t been where his brother had been. Where his mother and father had been. And Dagmar.

  Again the guilt.

  Survivor guilt, the shrinks called it.

  ‘My brother wasn’t a Nazi,’ Stone stated firmly.

  ‘Of course he wasn’t,’ Peter Lorre replied, and now the sneer was unmistakable. ‘None of them were Nazis, were they? Or so they all claim now. And the Waffen SS wasn’t really proper SS anyway, was it? They never ran the camps. You can’t blame them.’

  ‘My brother was married to a Jew,’ Stone said.

  ‘Yes, we know. Dagmar Stengel, née Fischer. You are travelling to Berlin to meet her. Is that not the case?’

  Stone stared at the cups and saucers once more. He didn’t like telling them his business, but it was clearly a rhetorical question and he didn’t want to be caught in a lie.

  ‘Yes. Dagmar Fischer,’ he admitted.

  ‘Dagmar Stengel.’

  ‘I knew her as Dagmar Fischer. She married my brother after I left Germany.’

  ‘When did you last see Mrs Stengel?’

  Stone drew deeply on his cigarette and closed his eyes. How often had he relived that moment? The whistling and shunting of the trains. The smell of her hair. The martial music on the loudspeakers that made it so hard to whisper the things he needed to say.

  ‘In 1939,’ he answered.

  ‘In Berlin?’

  ‘Yes. In Berlin.’

  ‘And after the war? Did you try to find her?’

  ‘Of course. I tried to find all my family.’

  ‘You were in Germany?’

  ‘Yes. With the army. I worked in the Displaced Persons camps, with the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. You know all this, it’s in my records.’

  ‘So,’ Peter Lorre observed through a mouth filled with biscuit, ‘well placed to look for an elusive Jewess?’

  Elusive Jewess. Such a phrase. The little man clearly had no idea of the casual contempt and innate suspicion contained within it. ‘An elusive Jewess?’ Stone repeated. ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean Frau Stengel of course.’

  ‘Then bloody well say so.’

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘Frau Stengel then?’ Lorre resumed. ‘You didn’t find her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I never found out.’

  ‘One more anonymous victim of the Holocaust?’

  ‘I presumed so.’

  ‘But you now think she survived?’

  Stone paused for a moment, considering his reply.

  ‘I have recently allowed myself to hope that she did.’

  ‘And why would that be?’

  Stone was trying very hard not to become angry. Getting angry never helped. Not with the sort of people who sat behind green hessian-covered tables with cups of tea and empty yellow notepads.

  ‘What is this about?’ Stone asked. ‘I don’t understand why you want to know, or why I should tell you for that matter.’

  ‘It’s very simple,’ the plump man replied, breaking a second biscuit in two and taking the larger half. ‘If you cooperate with us you’ll soon be on your way. If you don’t, then there’s any amount of red tape we can tie you up with pretty much indefinitely. You might not get to Berlin until the year 2000, by which time you will be a very old man and Berlin will long since have been reduced to a pile of smouldering radioactive rubble. So just be a sensible chap and answer our questions. Why do you now hope that Dagmar Stengel is alive?’

  Stone shrugged. The supercilious little swine knew anyway.

  ‘Because she contacted me.’

  ‘Out of the blue?’

  ‘Yes. Out of the blue.’

  ‘After seventeen years?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you’re sure it was Frau Stengel?’

  That was the rub. He was sure. He was absolutely sure. The writing, the tone, and the memories the note contained. And yet …

  ‘She said she’d survived most of the war in Berlin as what they called a “submarine”,’ Stone replied, avoiding Lorre’s question. ‘But the Gestapo picked her up in June ’44 and shipped her to Birkenau. It seems she escaped.’

  ‘A rare feat indeed.’

  ‘Such things happened, rarely, but they happened. She says she got out during the Sonderkommando revolt at Crematorium IV and saw out the war fighting with Polish Partisans. After that, the Soviets put her back in a camp along with the rest of the surviving Polish resistance.’

  ‘Quite a story.’

  But not impossible. Dagmar had been tough and resourceful for all her refined manners.

  ‘I can see you found it hard to credit,’ the plump man said, looking steadily at Stone. ‘Not surprising, after so long. However, I am here to tell you that the story is true. Or at least its conclusion is. Dagmar Stengel is alive and well and living in East Berlin.’

  The surge of joy he felt was like the sudden, heady rush that sometimes overtook him in his dreams. When it was he and not his brother on the beach at Wannsee entwined in Dagmar Fischer’s rain-dappled arms.

  ‘How do you know?’ Stone asked, trying to keep his voice from shaking.

  ‘We know lots of things.’

  Stone banged the table with his fist. The cups rattled. The ancient telephone receiver jumped in its cradle. This was his business, not theirs. His family. His life. How dare they act as if it was some game!

  ‘How do you know!’ he demanded. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘Sources,’ the plump man replied, ignoring Stone’s passion and idly succumbing to the other half of his second biscuit, ‘confidential sources.’

  ‘Are you MI6?’

  ‘MI6 does not exist, Mr Stengel.’

  ‘Stone! My name is Stone. It’s been Stone for fifteen bloody years!’

  ‘Yes, you changed it, didn’t you?’

  Again a tiny sneer. This time not for the German who claimed not to have been a Nazi but for the sneaky Jew who had changed his name to hide his Jewey-ness. That was the Brits, they liked it both ways. Just because they’d saved the world for decency and fair play didn’t mean the bloody Yids could start getting above themselves.

  ‘I changed my name,’ Stone snapped, ‘because the army advised me to. The British army. If I’d been taken in action and they’d found out I was Jewish, I’d have been gassed.’

  ‘All right. Keep your shirt on,’ the little man said with a patronizing smirk. ‘We knew that.’

  ‘You know a bloody lot.’

  ‘We try to.’

  ‘Because you’re MI6,’ Stone said. ‘The Secret Service.’

  ‘Can’t tell you that, can we, Mr Stone? Then it wouldn’t be secret.’

 
Peter Lorre smiled and wiped his mouth, clearly pleased with his little joke.

  Stone should have guessed it from the start. Just the layout of the room was proof enough. Bare, save for a table, tea, biscuits, paper and a phone. Not a book, not a pamphlet, not a memo. No chart on the wall, no wastepaper bin under the table, not even a paperclip. What normal office was ever like that? Even the police had posters on their walls.

  And then there was the double act. The chatty one, the silent one. Classic, of course. Such a cliché. He really should have guessed. They were spooks all right.

  And they said Dagmar was definitely alive.

  Once more the surge of joy.

  She’d survived. Berlin. The camps. The gulags. She’d survived them all.

  And through all that dreadful darkness she had remembered him. He who had loved her.

  He who still loved her.

  Who would always love her.

  Twins

  Berlin, 1920

  IT TURNED OUT that Frieda was right, she was carrying two boys, but the labour was long and difficult and only one of them survived it, the other choked on a twisted cord.

  ‘I’m sorry, Frau Stengel,’ the doctor said. ‘The second child is stillborn.’

  Then they left her alone.

  Not out of any sense of delicacy but simply because the hospital was so busy. Four years of war, followed by the spitting, spluttering dud of a ‘revolution’, had left nobody with much time for niceties, particularly the medical profession. Frieda, who had not herself suffered any complications during the birth, was aware that they would be wanting her little bare yellow-painted room back. She did not have much time.

  ‘Hello, little one,’ Frieda whispered, struggling to find it in her heart to welcome one baby while bidding farewell to the other. ‘And goodbye, little one.’

  She did not want her joy in the living, breathing creature that lay in one arm to be drowned for ever in her tears for the lifeless little bundle that lay in the other, but at that moment Frieda did not see how it could be any other way. She knew that she would forever mourn her child who never was.

  ‘Auf Wiedersehen, my darling,’ she breathed.

  The mean light from the single forty-watt bulb that hung unshaded above her bed fell on the bundle’s tiny grey face, pinched and wrinkled like an ancient Chinaman. The other bundle began to cry, a tiny bleating sound at first, which grew in volume as the little creature discovered the power of his lungs. Frieda turned her gaze from the miniature Chinese death mask to the crying baby and then back again. One pale and dull in death, the other shining and growing redder and redder in the dawning of life.

  ‘Auf Wiedersehen und guten Tag. Guten Tag und auf Wiedersehen.’

  Then the doctor returned with an old nurse who took the dead baby from Frieda’s arms. ‘Smile for this one most of all, Frau Stengel,’ the nurse said, making the sign of the cross over it. ‘He’s spared the misery of this world and instead begins at once to savour the joy of the next.’

  But Frieda could not smile. She didn’t believe in a next world and so knew only the misery of the present one.

  Then the doctor spoke.

  ‘Frau Stengel, I hesitate to speak with you being so recently bereaved but I feel I must. There’s a young woman in a nearby ward. Or rather there was. She died an hour ago. You survived and lost a child, this woman died while a child lived … a boy.’

  Frieda only half heard him. She was watching as the old nurse took a part of her away. Not to the better place she promised but to the cellar of the hospital and the incinerator. There would be no flowers, no prayers. Germany’s ongoing agony dictated that the disposal of corpses, no matter how innocent and tiny, was an efficient and mechanical affair. The bundle had been in her body for nine months; it would be ashes in not many more seconds.

  ‘I’m sorry, doctor,’ Frieda said, ‘what was it you were saying? A mother and child?’

  ‘Just a child, Frau Stengel. The mother died delivering him and his father is dead too. A Communist. Shot at Lichtenburg.’

  Frieda knew about the massacre in the suburb of Lichtenburg. A thousand workers arbitrarily rounded up by Freikorps and shot in the street with the full connivance of the Minister of National Defence. It was scarcely even mentioned in the papers at the time, murder being so common in Berlin, even mass murder. But Frieda was the sort of person who took trouble to remain informed.

  ‘The dead girl was estranged from her parents,’ the doctor continued. ‘They didn’t want the child of a Red in the family and now that their daughter is dead they want it even less. They’re tired and poor and not interested in any bastard orphan grandchild.’

  It was as if the dull bulb above her bed burned a little brighter as Frieda began to understand.

  The bundle was gone but it could live again. All the preparations she and Wolfgang had made, all the love that had grown in their hearts for two babies, would not go to waste. That love was needed, desperately. A little soul was waiting to be claimed. She would have twins after all. Paulus would have his Otto and Otto would have his Paulus.

  ‘Frau Stengel,’ the doctor was saying, ‘I know that you are distressed but would you possibly consider—’

  ‘Bring me this baby please,’ Frieda replied before the doctor could even finish his sentence. ‘Bring me my son. He needs me.’

  ‘But your husband,’ the doctor began, ‘surely you must ask—’

  ‘My husband is a good man, doctor. He will feel as I do. Bring me our second son.’

  Moments later there was a new bundle on Frieda’s arm where the ancient grey Chinaman had lain so briefly. This one red-faced, bespittled and howling like its new twin. Two healthy babies, one in each arm. It was as if time had stood still for the previous hour and only now was Frieda’s labour complete.

  ‘Guten Tag, und guten Tag,’ Frieda whispered.

  The adoption was a simple matter to arrange, the wheels of the process being extremely well oiled. Germany might have been short of young men in 1920, but after the war and the influenza pandemic that followed it, it certainly had plenty of orphans, and the hospital was anxious to be done with this one. Wolfgang was summoned from his place in the butcher’s queue and the necessary papers were produced even before Frieda’s milk had begun to flow. The child’s maternal grandparents appeared briefly at Frieda’s bedside and signed away the child with scarcely a glance at it. They wished Frieda and Wolfgang a gruff good luck and disappeared from Frieda and Wolfgang’s lives for ever. Gone before the ink was even dry.

  And so it was the four of them just as had been planned and as Frieda had predicted. Frieda and Wolfgang and their two boys, Paulus and Otto. Otto and Paulus. Two sons, two brothers, equally wanted, equally loved. Equal in every way.

  Just the same.

  Except not quite the same.

  There was one difference between the two boys. A difference that went almost without comment at the time. A difference that was entirely irrelevant to Frieda and Wolfgang. But a difference that would in the fullness of time become a matter of life and death. One child was Jewish, the other was not.

  Another Baby

  Munich, 1920

  ON THE SAME day that the two Stengel brothers were born, 24 February 1920, some few hundred miles from Berlin, at the Hofbräuhaus Bierkeller in Munich, another baby came into the world. Like many babies (not least Paulus and Otto themselves), this one was noisy and wild. When it found its voice it was only to shout and to scream, and when it found its fists it was only to beat the air in fury because the world was not as it wished it to be.

  Most babies grow up. They develop reason and a conscience, they become socialized. This baby never did. It was the National Socialist German Workers Party, named that day out of the ashes of a previous, failed incarnation. The voice that screamed and the fists that pounded were those of its emerging leader, a thirty-one-year-old corporal in the political unit of the Bavarian Reichswehr. His name was Adolf Hitler.

  That fateful night
, along with giving the party its new name, Hitler outlined twenty-five points that were to be the ‘inalienable’ and ‘unalterable’ basis of the party programme. Most of these points were quickly forgotten by both Hitler and his rapidly growing party, sops as they were to the quasi-socialist principles of its roots. Other points, however, were very much Hitler’s own and he never wavered in his commitment to them until the moment he drew his last breath. A union of all German-speaking peoples. A complete repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles. And, above all, a ‘settlement’ with the Jews. This was the most crucial point of all and on that cold winter evening the penniless, unknown soldier, voice almost gone after three hours of oration, fists clenched, arms flailing in the air, spit floating in the smoky beams of light, gave notice that the Jews were the source of all Germany’s ills and that he, Adolf Hitler, would be their nemesis. He would deprive every one of them of their Reich citizenship. No Jew would be allowed to hold any official office. No Jew would be allowed to write for a newspaper. And any Jew who had arrived in Germany after 1914 would be instantly deported.

  It was heady stuff and the crowd roared their approval. Here at last was a man who knew why Germany had lost the war. Why instead of being victors living fat in Paris and London, decent Germans were paupers eking out their beer and tobacco in Munich.

  It was the Jews. Despite being only 0.75 per cent of the population, the Jews, in their fiendish cunning, had done it all and this man would cut the bastards down to size.

  No one, not even Hitler himself, imagined that night in 1920 just how much more he would do to them than that.

  An Operation is Cancelled

  Berlin, 1920

  FRIEDA AND WOLFGANG took the decision not to have Paulus and Otto circumcised for the strangest and most incongruous of reasons. It happened as a result of a failed attempt by reactionary fanatics to seize control of the German state.

  ‘It was pure Dada really,’ Wolfgang liked to joke when he told the story in later years (the boys glowing red in the corner at having their penises discussed at their parents’ parties). ‘The ultimate Surrealist non-sequitur. Some idiot tries to do a Mussolini in Berlin and my lads get to hang on to their foreskins – figuratively speaking, I mean, of course. How’s that for a random and chaotic juxtaposition? Life imitating art!’