Ben Elton - Two Brothers

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.’