Ben Elton: Two Brothers

Frieda was studying medicine at the University of Berlin. She even had a grant of sorts, a fact her deeply conservative parents still had difficulty believing.

‘You mean they pay for your education? Even women ?’ her father had enquired incredulously.

‘They have to, Pa. Most of the boys are dead.’

‘But all the same. Women doctors?’ her father replied, confusion reigning behind the solid, timeless certainty of his close-cropped Prussian moustache. ‘Who would trust them?’

‘Who will have a choice?’ Frieda countered. ‘It’s called the twentieth century, Pa, you really ought to join some time, it’s been going two decades already.’

‘You’re wrong,’ her father said with sombre gravity, ‘it began only recently, when his Imperial Highness abdicated. God only knows where or when it will end.’

Frieda’s father was a policeman and her mother a proud housewife. He brought in the salary, she ran the home and raised the children. Their attitudes had been formed under the Kaiser, and the political and cultural earthquake of the post-war Weimar Republic had left them reeling. Neither of them understood a government which while unable to stop gunfights on the high streets concerned itself with sexual equality.

Or a son-in-law who was happy to begin a family despite not being able to afford to pay for a taxi to take his wife to the hospital.

‘I think if Papa saw you pushing his pregnant daughter to her confinement in a grocer’s cart, he’d take out his gun and shoot you,’ Frieda remarked as they laboured up the hospital steps together.

‘He nearly shot me for getting you pregnant,’ Wolfgang replied, searching in the pockets of his jacket for the hospital admission papers.

‘If you hadn’t married me he would have done.’

‘Right, this is it. We’re here.’

All around them sick, cold people crowded, bustling in and out of the great doors of the hospital.

‘I’ll come back this evening,’ Wolfgang said. ‘Make sure there’s three of you by then.’

Frieda gripped his hand.

‘My God, Wolf,’ she whispered, ‘when you put it like that… Today there’s just you and me, tomorrow there’ll be you, me… and our children.’

A gust of wind caused her to shiver. The harsh, rain-speckled chill penetrating her threadbare clothing. Once more Wolfgang folded her in his arms, no longer playfully but this time passionately, almost desperately. Two, small, cold people huddled together beneath the unforgiving granite columns of the enormous civic building.

Two young hearts beating together.

Two more, younger still, warm in Frieda’s belly.

Four hearts, joined by love in the harsh squalls of another, greater heart. One made of stone and iron. Berlin, heart of Germany.

‘That’s right,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘You, me and our children. The best and most beautiful thing that there ever was.’

And for once he spoke without smiling or trying to make a joke.

‘Yes, that ever was,’ said Frieda quietly.

‘Well then. Let’s get to it, Fred. It’s too bloody cold to be standing around being soppy.’

There was no question of Wolfgang waiting at the hospital. Very few expectant fathers in post-war Berlin had the leisure to hang about outside maternity wards waiting to hand out cigars in the traditional manner. Herr Sommer needed his cart back and Wolfgang, like everybody else in the city that terrible winter, needed to begin queuing.

‘There’s meat at Horst’s,’ he said, as he began to descend the steps to where he had left the cart. ‘Lamb and pork. I’m going to get some for you if I have to pawn my piano. You’ll need the iron if you’re going to feed our little son and daughter.’

‘Our little sons ,’ Frieda replied. ‘It’ll be boys. I’m telling you, a woman knows. Paulus and Otto. Boys. Lucky, lucky boys.’

‘Why lucky?’ Wolfgang called back. ‘I mean, apart from having the most beautiful mum in the world?’

‘Because they’re twins . They’ve got each other, Wolf. This is a tough town in a tough world. But no matter how tough it gets — our boys will always have each other.’

STONE STARED AT the hessian-covered table in front of him. At the teacups and the biscuits and the block of yellow notepaper with the fountain pen on top. He focused on the black Bakelite telephone with its sharp angular edges and its frayed, double-twisted, brown fabric cord. It must have dated from the early 1930s.

What had he been doing when that cord was new?

Fighting, no doubt. Or running in terror along some Berlin pavement looking for an alley to dodge down. He and his brother chasing each other’s heels, two teenage boys in mortal fear for their lives.

Stone’s eye followed the cord down off the table, across the slightly warped, ruby-coloured linoleum and into a largish black box screwed to the skirting board. He fancied he could hear the box humming but it might have been the distant traffic on the Cromwell Road.

He shifted nervously in his seat. He had never quite got used to being interviewed in bare rooms by government officials. Even now he could not quite persuade himself that he was safe. Even now some part of him expected violence.

Except of course that this was England, they didn’t do that sort of thing here. Some of Stone’s more left-leaning acquaintances sneered when he said that. But then they had never had the misfortune to live in a country where sudden and absolute violence was the norm and not the exception.

Stone looked once more at his interrogators. A classic pair. One short and rather plump, balding, with an officious little soup stain of a moustache, his beady eyes flicking constantly at the biscuits. The other not much taller but thinner, standing in the corner of the bare windowless room, watching through slightly hooded eyes. It felt to Stone like he was in a scene from a movie. That he was being questioned by Peter Lorre while Humphrey Bogart looked on inscrutably, keeping his own counsel.

‘You are travelling to Berlin in the hope of meeting up with your brother’s widow.’

This was the second time the shorter man, Peter Lorre, had asked this question.

Or was it a statement? It was certainly true. But how did they know?

They had read Dagmar’s letter. Obviously.

‘ Presumed widow,’ Stone replied, evading the question. A lifetime’s experience had taught him that it was usually wise to withhold any information from the authorities until forced to divulge it.

‘You don’t think your brother’s dead?’

‘There has never been any actual proof of it.’

‘You mean a corpse?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Your brother is certainly presumed dead,’ Lorre replied, finally capitulating to the biscuit plate and choosing a shortbread finger. ‘Killed by the Russians during the battle for Moscow in 1941.’

‘That is what I was told,’ Stone said, ‘after the war, by the East German authorities.’

‘Have you any reason to doubt it?’

‘No. None at all. I’ve always hoped, that’s all. My brother generally had a plan. He would have been a hard man to kill.’

‘The Waffen SS tended to be made up of hard men to kill. At least until they started recruiting boys. Your brother joined in 1940, didn’t he?’

Was there a hint of a sneer? Stone felt his anger rising. What right did this smug little man, munching on his shortbread finger, have to judge? He hadn’t been where his brother had been. Where his mother and father had been. And Dagmar.

Again the guilt.

Survivor guilt , the shrinks called it.

‘My brother wasn’t a Nazi,’ Stone stated firmly.