Ben Elton - Two Brothers

Tears were streaming down Otto’s face.

‘She used to sing it to Paulus and me,’ he said. ‘I can hear her voice now.’

‘We heard she was still singing when the truck arrived at the station, but by then somehow your mother had worked the magic that she always did and she had the children singing too. Even as they were pushed into the cattle trucks, crushed in with a hundred other condemned souls. “ Hip hop there, rider! Hip hop there, rider! ” Your mother went with those children to Dachau that very day. I imagine she led them singing into the gas chamber.’

Otto wept and wept. Thinking of his beloved mother and how brave her end had been.

She had died as she had lived, a beacon of goodness in a sick and dreadful world.

‘And so there was only us left,’ Dagmar went on. ‘Me and Silke.’

Her voice was far away. Through his tears Otto understood that Dagmar needed to tell the whole story.

‘We lived in Pauly’s flat and of course we fought and fought. Two very different girls who never should have roomed together. Silke was trying to establish resistance connections. Can you believe it? Using her cover as a war widow to contact other Communists. She was a part of Die Rote Kapelle . The Red Orchestra — I suppose you’ve heard of it.’

‘Yes,’ Otto said, pulling himself together and blowing his nose on his handkerchief. ‘The Communist-backed resistance. I’ve heard of it.’

‘I warned her,’ Dagmar went on. ‘I told her if she was ever the cause of me getting caught I’d make damn sure she and her bloody idiot friends went down with me. That apartment was my castle. Paulus built it for me. Because he loved me. Me. Not some random bunch of self-righteous Reds.’

Her voice was starting to grate on Otto.

Incredible.

That same voice that had been nothing but music to him all his life. The voice he’d wrestled the telephone receiver from his brother’s hand to hear, watching the clock, waiting his turn, jealous of every missed syllable.

Now it was actually starting to grate.

‘Paulus may have loved you, Dagmar,’ Otto said, a little more harshly perhaps than he had intended, ‘but only because you lied to him.’

‘ That is a damned lie! He loved me because he loved me. Full stop. Just like you did. I didn’t ask him to. I didn’t ask either of you to, so don’t start playing the victim now. If the bloody mad Stengel twins devoted their lives to me, it was because they chose to. What’s more, I kept my half of the bargain with Pauly. We lived together in that flat as man and wife for the little time he had. That was what he wanted and that was what he got.’

‘You fucked him. So what?’

‘I made love to him, Otto, and never say I didn’t! And he died believing in my love, which was just the way he wanted to die.’

‘He didn’t want to die at all!’

‘Really? He always told me he’d rather die having won my love than live a life without it. How about you, Otto? How’s the last seventeen years been for you? I never would have picked you to fossilize in a government office. You were always going to be a knight in armour. Wouldn’t you rather have been a knight in armour? I think you would.’

Otto was stunned. She could always run rings round him. Fossilize .

She had his number all right.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t suppose I have any right to judge you.’

‘No one has any right to judge me for anything I did, Otto. Because of what Hitler did to me.’

She stood up, lighting her umpteenth cigarette with a hand shaking with emotion.

Something in what she said and the vehemence with which she said it brought Otto’s thoughts back to the present.

‘Dagmar,’ he said, ‘where’s Silke?’

She turned and looked down at him. Her lip curling along with the smoke that drifted from it.

‘God, Ottsy,’ she said, ‘didn’t you work it out yet? Pauly would have got it at the airport. I’m bloody Silke.’

THE ATMOSPHERE WAS always heavy in the apartment on the days when Silke’s shadowy Communist friends were due to visit.

Dagmar hated them with the passion of a true blue Conservative. And it was not merely because their presence in her home so dramatically increased her own chances of being detected, she hated them on ideological grounds too. She hated them for her father’s sake. She thought they were nothing but self-righteous fools. A gang of egotists and fantasists who made themselves ridiculous with their solemn clenched-fist salutes, endless bickering over ideological details and expansive plans for future government conducted round a bare kitchen table by the light of a single candle.

Silke seemed genuinely to believe that she and her pathetic little group of unshaven conspirators were actually contributing to the defeat of the Nazis. She claimed that they passed information about police and Wehrmacht activities to the approaching Red Army.

But Dagmar did not believe for a moment that their tiny efforts would make even the slightest difference to the outcome of the war. In fact, she strongly suspected that they ran their little cell for entirely selfish motives.

‘I know what you’re doing,’ Dagmar said when Silke informed her that another meeting of the Kapelle was to be held in the apartment that evening. ‘You’re feathering your nest for after the war. Establishing your credentials. When the Nazis are gone, you and your friends will claim the right to run the country, just like you tried to do the last time when the Kaiser left. When the Red Army arrives you’ll run straight up to them waving your little secret code book and your party cards, shouting, “Comrades, we’re the good Germans. We’re the ones who’ve been sending you all those messages.” And then you’ll all get nice jobs with the party and all of the meat and white bread. I know you Commies. My father sacked enough of you.’

‘Believe it or not, Dagmar, not everyone is motivated entirely by selfishness.’

‘Ha! What could be more selfish than a Communist? You think you can tell everyone in the world how to run their lives and if they won’t do it you shoot them.’

That evening, when the hour of the meeting approached, Dagmar would usually have retreated to her bedroom. But this time she simply could not face being confined once more in the space where she had spent the vast majority of the previous two years. After Paulus had died, Silke had been told that without a husband to look after she had lost the right to employ a maid. The authorities had demanded that the Ukrainian girl Bohuslava whom the Stengels had registered for rations be returned to the employment pool. Silke had therefore been forced to report the fictitious maid as a runaway, and since that moment Dagmar had been truly a ‘submarine’ with no papers or identity whatsoever, surviving in the half light, on food Silke still shared with her for Paulus’s sake.

‘You mustn’t go out!’ Silke said. ‘You’re crazy. You only need to be stopped once.’

‘I’m sorry but I’ve got to, because if I don’t I will go completely sodding mad. The war’s nearly over anyway. Your precious heroic Red Army’s in East Prussia and no doubt we’ll all be Commies in a month.’

‘With any luck we will,’ Silke countered defiantly.

‘Great. I can’t wait to pull on my overalls and go work on a collective farm, but in the meantime I’m going to be a member of the petit bourgeois just one more time. I’m going to pin up my hair, put on some make-up, wear a nice pair of shoes and go for a walk!’

‘For God’s sake, Dagmar, you’re safe inside. Why take the risk?’