Ben Elton - Two Brothers

‘And a doctor.’

‘All right, I have a bit more class on my mother’s side, but I’m right, aren’t I?’

Silke sat down in one of the easy chairs in the living room, giving a little bounce, testing it for comfort.

‘Well, all right. If you like,’ she said. ‘I have wondered.’

Paulus sat down in the chair opposite, grimacing slightly as he detected a jutting spring in the upholstery.

‘Well, she probably wouldn’t, I imagine. I mean, it’s impossible to know what might have happened in our lives if Germany had been a normal country, but I expect Dagmar would have gone to a Swiss finishing school and then married a multi-millionaire.’

‘Yes, I think so too,’ Silke admitted.

‘But Germany’s not a normal country. It’s a nut house. Hitler won and so here we are. Making the best of it. As is Dagmar. I don’t blame her for that. Come and look at the kitchen.’

They got up and went through into a decent-sized room with a modern gas stove. Silke opened the cupboards, running her finger along the shelves. A year of compulsory, unpaid domestic service had made her very aware of dust.

‘And I do admit,’ Paulus went on, ‘that I like to think she does love me, however that love might have come about. She certainly says she does. Life happened, didn’t it? She never did get to go to finishing school, and that’s that.’

‘And you’ve got the very thing you’ve wanted since you were twelve years old. So the really funny thing is, if it wasn’t for Hitler, you wouldn’t have got it. You owe Hitler for Dagmar.’

‘I know,’ Paulus conceded. ‘I think that’s what they call irony.’

Silke leant against the fitted drawer unit, her feet crossed on the shiny yellow linoleum.

‘I was in love with Otto, you know,’ she said.

Paulus had been checking a dud light bulb. He turned and looked at her.

‘Were you?’ he said rather weakly.

‘Don’t tell me you didn’t suspect. Otto may have been pretty blind to a woman’s emotions, but I always credited you with subtler instincts.’

Paulus looked a little embarrassed. ‘I suppose I have wondered. Mum certainly thought you were.’

‘And now he’s gone,’ Silke said. ‘You persuaded him to switch identities with you.’

‘Silks,’ Paulus said very seriously, ‘I didn’t come up with my plan so I could steal Dagmar and cheat you of Otto. I came up with it to save her life.’

‘The life of the person you happen to be in love with.’

‘Are you blaming me, Silke? Are you angry? I really thought you understood.’

Silke looked away.

‘I do, Pauly. Actually I do. I think you did have to do what you’ve done… I just wanted you to know, that’s all. I was a bit fed up of suffering in silence.’

‘Did you ever tell Ottsy?’ Paulus asked.

‘Sort of. In a way. On the train, but it was no good. He loves Dagmar. Just like you. So I was never in with any sort of chance really. Bugger that bitch!’ But she said it with a laugh. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll play my part, Pauly. I’m a Communist. I believe in helping my fellow man — and woman.’

Paulus smiled, and then Silke gave him a hug.

‘It’s a nice flat, isn’t it?’ Silke said. ‘We’re lucky.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Do you think it was stolen from Jews? Like your grandparents’ apartment was?’

‘I don’t know. I asked, but the agency said they didn’t discuss those things.’

They were silent once more. Wondering if weeks before there had been children forced with clubs and rifle butts from the very room in which they were standing.

‘I saw a lot of that in Poland, you know. Forced evictions,’ Paulus said. ‘It was just dreadful. Thousands of Polish families, not just Jews either, torn out of their homes in an instant. The radio left on, food still on the cooker, it was that brutal.’

‘Come on,’ Silke said. ‘We don’t want to be late for our wedding, do we?’

Paulus put Silke’s bags in her room and took up his brand new SS forage cap from the little table in the hallway.

‘Silke,’ he said hesitantly, ‘it’s an amazing thing you’re doing, you know. A wonderful generous thing you’re doing for Dagmar.’

‘I’m not doing it for Dagmar, you silly arse!’ Silke laughed. ‘I’m doing it for you. And for Otto. For the Stengel twins! Both of you. Because you want to do it for her. Because being men you both fell in love with the prettiest girl you knew, but she’s a Jew so now we’ll all have to spend the war looking after her.’

‘And what about you?’ Paulus asked. ‘It means an empty sort of life for you. Married but not married. I mean, you can’t build a life for yourself.’

‘Bit late to try and talk me out of it now.’

‘I’m not, it’s just…’

‘Look, SS Sturmmann Stengel,’ Silke said, putting aside the little posy of primroses she was carrying and taking Paulus’s hands, ‘I want to do this. For a number of reasons. And it isn’t just the Saturday Club or the fact that you and Otto have always meant everything to me. This is a good life, actually. It means I can leave compulsory domestic service, for a start, which believe me is no small thing. And marriage to a serving man, a serving SS man, brings lots of perks too. I’ll eat well, I’ll sleep comfortably. And most important of all, this isn’t just good cover for Dagmar, you know. It’s good cover for me .’

Paulus knew what she meant and he wasn’t sure he liked it.

‘You mean as a Communist?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I thought your lot were Hitler’s friends now,’ Paulus said.

A spasm of sadness passed across Silke’s features.

The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 had devastated what little remained of the underground German Communist movement.

‘Stalin took a tactical decision,’ Silke said defensively. ‘He’s buying time, I’m sure of it. One day there will be resistance again, and when there is, I want to be a part of it.’

Paulus didn’t reply. There was nothing he could say. He was using her, he could scarcely object that she wanted to use him. They were all dependent on each other.

They left the apartment and took a taxi together to the Moabit town hall on the Tiergarten.

‘We mustn’t keep Herr Richter waiting.’

‘Booking him must have taken some nerve,’ Silke said, whistling through her teeth.

‘Yeah. A bit,’ Paulus conceded.

A week previously Paulus had put on his new Waffen SS uniform, marched into the local Gestapo station and asked to see the senior officer present.

Then, with great audacity, he had requested the Gestapo chief, whom he had never before met, to officiate at his wedding.

‘I am the racially pure, adopted child of Jews, sir,’ he said, ‘hence I have no family and am all alone. My life and my marriage belong to the Führer. I wish to have the most authoritative witness to that fact. Therefore I am respectfully asking you to bear witness at my wedding.’

It was a brave and brilliant idea, which tied the local Gestapo into his name and his address, and indeed his life. Making the chief personally bonded to them.

As always, Paulus’s tactical planning was faultless.

As Richter stood beneath the portrait of the Führer solemnly intoning the various oaths to State and Leader that a Nazi wedding required, he could not in his wildest dreams have imagined the truth. That the fine and upstanding young soldier standing before him and making those oaths would in a few short hours be grinding a glass beneath his boot in the presence of his mother and grandparents as he took part in a second marriage that day. This time to the woman he loved, who, like him, was a Jew.