Ben Elton - Two Brothers

‘But where do you borrow them from?’

‘The same place you get yours! Thin air! I borrow what I need on the security of the thing I’m buying and pay off the loan next week when it’s worth a thousand times less. Anyone could do it.’

‘Why don’t they, then?’

‘Why don’t you?’

Wolfgang knew Kurt was right. He could do it. He could buy anything he wanted. Anything at all. He just had to have the guts. The sheer chutzpah to borrow enough to do it. It didn’t really even take guts, because with money depreciating so quickly debt was just an illusion.

Anyone could do it.

But it was only people like Kurt who actually did .

And the big boys of course. The industrialists who were manipulating the same situation as Kurt, except they were buying whole industries while Kurt bought only champagne and drugs.

And in the meantime everybody else was trying to work out where their next meal was coming from.

Which reminded Wolfgang he needed to get home so Frieda could go to the markets. The wages in his pocket were depreciating at the same speed as Kurt’s debt. By simply standing right there, he was getting poorer while Kurt got richer.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Wolfgang said, draining his glass and putting it on the table, ‘you buy your club and make me an offer. If it’s a good one, then I’ll be your fixer. Meantime I really do think I should be getting home.’

Katharina was standing beside him at the table and he had felt her hand brush against his more than once. He was pretty sure that she knew it too. Hands didn’t brush against each other more than once by accident.

Which was rather exciting.

And also why he needed to get home.

Wolfgang had never been short of female admirers, girls made eyes at him all the time. He was good-looking and, more importantly, he was a jazz man and the jazz babies loved nothing better, particularly trumpet players.

Usually Wolfgang was entirely resistant. Immune to the coquettish glances of over-excited flappers on the dance floor. He was happy to look at their shaking, shimmying bottoms and swinging breasts bouncing in front of his little stage in their next-to-nothing dresses, but he was not tempted to touch. Katharina, however, was different. She had truly caught his eye, and that was dangerous, because he seemed to have caught hers.

‘I’ll be playing here tomorrow night,’ Wolfgang said to Kurt matter-of-factly, ‘you can speak to me then.’

‘If you’re playing here tomorrow night,’ Kurt said, ‘then I’ll already be your boss. So I certainly will speak to you.’

This splendid piece of bravado elicited further cheers and much table thumping from Kurt’s friends, the vibrations of which caused the unconscious girl to finally slide fully under the table.

Wolfgang shook Kurt’s hand and nodded briefly at Katharina. Her face remained as cool and impassive as ever as she nodded back, a brief, dismissive farewell.

And then, as if on impulse, she leant forward and kissed him on the mouth. For one brief moment her lips were alive against his, he felt the waxy quality of her lipstick and smelt the perfume in her hair. Then, just as abruptly, she stepped back, her face a mask once more.

‘You see!’ Kurt shouted. ‘Told you she was flirting. You’re honoured — she never kisses me goodbye.’

‘You don’t play trumpet,’ Katharina said, smiling properly for the first time.

‘Yes, well,’ Wolfgang said, trying to regain his composure. ‘Like I say, got to go. Wife and kids at home and all that.’

He said this last sentence for Katharina’s benefit. He didn’t normally talk about his domestic status at work. Too humdrum. Not very jazz.

Which was why he said it now. He wanted to make Katharina aware at once, because she had disturbed him, and in his experience nothing dampened a jazz baby’s libido quicker than mention of the wife and kids.

‘Give Frau Trumpet our love,’ Kurt said.

‘Yes, yes I will.’

He needed to get home.

THE CRUCIAL THING was to move fast. When a kilo of carrots could leap in price fifty-thousand-fold in the space of a day, a young couple with children to feed were wise not to leave their shopping until the afternoon.

Wolfgang was fortunate in that being a musician he finished work only an hour or two before the commercial day began. He would grab his pay from the manager, in bundles of freshly printed notes, some still damp having been produced only hours earlier on one of the twelve printing presses that the Reichsbank kept running twenty-four hours a day. Then he’d rush out of the back door of whatever club he had been playing at, lash his trumpet and his violin to the rack of his bicycle and pedal off in a fever of anxiety lest the inflation render his wages worthless before he had the chance to spend them.

In February he had two or three hundred thousand marks stuffed into his pockets in five-and ten-thousand-mark notes. By the summer he had begun carrying his instruments on his back and his wages strapped to his bicycle rack in a bulging suitcase.

Knowing that the drinks he had had with Kurt and Katharina had made him late, Wolfgang laboured mightily at the pedals of his bicycle. His teeth rattled as he forced the ungeared old bone-shaker across the cobbles and uneven flagstones of Berlin’s nineteenth-century back streets, his mouth clamped firmly shut for fear that he would bite his tongue as he bounced along.

He chained his bike up by the communal bins in the internal well of their apartment block, rushed in through the front entrance and summoned the lift. For some reason, wherever Wolfgang was in the building, be it at the top or the bottom, the lift was always at the opposite end of the shaft. Usually he stood cursing quietly at this purest example of sod’s law, but on this occasion he had cause to be thankful, for as he waited on the ground floor, listening to the lift’s laborious, clanking descent, his mind returned to his recent encounter and in particular of course to Katharina and her goodbye kiss.

He remembered her hand drawing his face towards hers. The lazy eyes behind the cigarette smoke. Her mouth momentarily alive.

And then he remembered her lipstick. Thick, glossy and purple.

If there was one thing that Wolfgang knew it was that a woman could detect another woman’s cosmetics at fifty paces and from behind closed doors. He grabbed at his handkerchief and wiped vigorously at his mouth.

Looking down at the little linen cloth he saw that he’d had a lucky escape, there were hints of dark purple on the cloth. Of course he had no reason to feel guilty, he hadn’t invited the kiss. But Wolfgang knew that when it came to other women’s lipstick, innocence was no defence.

Frieda was waiting for him in their apartment, her hat and coat already on, her bag ready at her feet and Otto in her arms.

‘You’re late,’ she said in a loud whisper, nodding towards the children’s bedroom door to remind him that one child was still asleep.

‘Sorry. Got talking. A fella said he wanted to offer me a job. Could be interesting.’

‘Take Otto, he’s been up an hour,’ Frieda said, shoving the toddler into Wolfgang’s arms and grabbing her bag. ‘Had a nightmare I think. Got to rush. I’m meeting Ma and Pa before surgery starts. It’s Dad’s day.’

As a police officer Frieda’s father was on a monthly salary, an arrangement that only a few months before was a mark of success and stability. A middle-class achievement which meant that if a person was sacked they had a whole month’s notice with which to cushion the blow. But in Germany in 1923, a monthly pay cheque was a curse. The recipient was forced to buy everything they needed for the month to come in the first hour of getting their money, because by the following day when the new dollar exchange rates were announced it wouldn’t buy a pod of peas.