Ben Elton - Two Brothers

This surprised and also exasperated Frieda’s colleagues at the Health Centre, who were on the whole stern-faced Communists and did not approve of bourgeois sentimentality.

‘If you’re going to give a job to every basket case that walks through our doors,’ a young colleague called Meyer grumbled, ‘pretty soon you’re going to be employing the entire population of Friedrichshain. You need to channel your social guilt into organized political action, not pointless and reactionary acts of counterproductive Liberal charity.’

‘And you need to shut your face and mind your own business,’ Frieda replied, surprising herself.

Wolfgang hadn’t been too happy about the arrangement either, although his reservations were practical, not dialectical. He just didn’t fancy the idea of having a scatter-brained, unskilled and uneducated teenager lolling about the house pinching his food. After a month or two, however, he was prepared to admit it was working out quite well. It was true that Edeltraud had never once been on time and she was certainly not the most hard-working girl in the world and she had an unbelievably annoying habit of rearranging his shelves. But she was pleasant and meant well and the twins loved her, which Wolfgang put down to them all having a similar age of maturity.

Edeltraud was only six years younger than Frieda but Frieda sometimes felt that she had a teenage daughter in the apartment, and a young and naïve one at that.

It was in fact the thought of Edeltraud that had made Frieda cry over the pathetic inscription on the banknote.

‘It could easily have been her who wrote this,’ she said.

‘Darling, when Edeltraud gets any money, she doesn’t waste her time writing poignant little notes on it, no matter how she earned it. She spends it on chocolate and film mags. Furthermore, Edeltraud can’t write.’

‘Actually she can a bit now, I’ve started to teach her.’

‘Don’t tell that arsehole Dr Meyer — he’ll say you can’t liberate the underclass by private initiatives, you need coordinated mass action.’

‘I don’t want to liberate the underclass, I just want Edeltraud to be able to read my shopping lists.’

A key scratched in the latch and Edeltraud bustled into the room with the bread delivery under one arm and her little daughter Silke under the other. Silke was the result of an extremely brief relationship the fourteen-year-old Edeltraud had had with a sailor, about which she was disarmingly frank.

‘He took me to this lodging-house bedroom,’ the young girl had explained to Frieda, still seeming to be getting over the surprise of it, ‘and when he finished doing what he wanted to do, which I can’t say as how I’d enjoyed very much, he said he was going to the toilet down the hall. Well, for about an hour I just thought he was constipated. I only realized he’d buggered off when the landlady starts banging on the door for her money, which of course I didn’t have. A nice way to lose my cherry, I must say.’

Silke was now two and a half years old and already a cheerful charmer with a mass of curls so blonde they were almost white. Curls which were of course an object of fascination and terrible temptation to Paulus and Otto, who tugged them at every opportunity.

‘Good day, Frau Stengel, Herr Stengel,’ Edeltraud said from the door. ‘I brought Silke; I hope you don’t mind.’

‘You know we don’t mind, Edeltraud,’ Frieda replied, ‘we love to have her. Just watch those boys and if they pull her beautiful hair whack them with the wooden spoon.’

‘Right,’ said Wolfgang, ‘I’m going to try and grab another forty winks. Don’t use the vacuum machine for a bit, will you, Edeltraud, there’s a love, and try to resist the temptation to rearrange the sheet music on the piano.’

‘Of course, Herr Stengel,’ Edeltraud replied, unconsciously swapping the positions of a framed photograph and an ashtray on the mantelpiece above the gas fire.

Wolfgang returned to the bedroom and Edeltraud, who was more than happy to be told not to work, started in with the latest news from the neighbourhood.

‘Did you hear?’ she said, breathless to tell.

‘What?’

‘The Peunerts gassed themselves!’

‘No!’ Frieda gasped in horror. ‘My God. Why?’

Even as she said it Frieda knew it was a stupid question, it was obvious why.

‘He was on a fixed pension from the post office,’ Edeltraud went on. ‘They left a note saying they’d rather die by their own hand than starve. They sold every stick of furniture they had to get the gas turned back on and then lay down together on the bare floor by the tap in the skirting board, with their heads under a blanket!’

‘Oh my God,’ Frieda whispered.

‘I think it’s really really romantic,’ said Edeltraud.

Edeltraud was not yet eighteen and told her gruesome story with all the unconscious callousness of youth.

Frieda did not think it was romantic. Living together into old age was romantic, committing suicide together was simply appalling and terribly sad. She had known the Peunerts by sight, had nodded to them often in the street, and yet she had been oblivious to the despair that had enveloped them.

‘I should have talked to them. Asked if they were getting on all right, if they needed help.’

‘Wouldn’t have done any good, would it?’ Edeltraud said. ‘You can’t make their life savings worth anything, can you? There was a woman at the ciggy kiosk this morning. Said she’d saved all her life and now the whole lot wouldn’t buy her a pack of smokes and a newspaper. If you ask me, the answer is, don’t save it. Get it, spend it.’

Edeltraud put Silke down on the floor and began rearranging the breakfast dishes that were piled up in the sink. ‘They put on their best clothes to do it, you know, her in a long granny frock from before the war and him in city coat and tie. Imagine that! The two of them, dressed up for Sunday in the Tiergarten, stretched out on the bare boards with a blanket on their heads. It’s almost funny really when you think about it.’

Little Silke waddled across the floor of the apartment to where the twins were playing. She stood in front of them for a moment, apparently deep in thought, strong, bare little legs planted firmly apart on the carpet, arms folded purposefully. Then, having clearly come to a decision, she sat down heavily on Otto’s fort, collapsing every single brick. Otto of course howled in fury and Paulus rolled about on the rug and laughed and laughed. Then Silke hauled herself to her feet, took a step towards Paulus and sat down on his fort, chuckling happily amongst the collapsed wooden blocks of two great military installations. Now it was Paulus’s turn to howl while Otto laughed. Then they fought, ignoring Silke, the cause of their distress, and flying at each other with tiny fists, rolling on the rug yelling and whacking as hard as they could. Silke, clearly pleased with the way the situation was developing, jumped on top of them both and joined in, laughing with delight.

Despite Frieda and Edeltraud’s efforts to quieten them it wasn’t long before Wolfgang came charging out of the bedroom with his water pistol blazing. This did eventually stop the fight but only after all three children were soaked, which meant they all had to be stripped and the clothes set out on the tiny balcony to dry. After which they happily began their favourite game of all. The boys piled all the cushions in the apartment on top of Silke and then jumped on them while she screamed with pure joy.

‘No point trying to get back to sleep now,’ Wolfgang said ruefully, putting a pan on the stove and contemplating the snake pit of limbs writhing amongst the cushions. ‘Got a lunchtime gig in Nikolassee.’