Ben Elton - Two Brothers

‘Why not?’

Wolfgang gestured at the crowded untidy apartment. The trombone leaning in the corner. The accordion on the table amongst the newspapers and musical manuscripts. Cushions and books on the floor. Coffee cups balanced on the bookshelves. The theatre and film posters on the wall, Piscator and Chaplin side by side.

The framed prints, grotesque cartoons of fat greedy capitalists and homicidal Prussian officers, their hands filled with money and dripping with blood while all around them the poor and the sick looked on in sullen anger.

‘George Grosz,’ Fischer said, ‘from the First Berlin Dada Fair.’

‘You know it?’ Wolfgang looked surprised.

‘You think a shopkeeper can’t appreciate art?’

‘Well… I admit I’m surprised that you… Do you like Grosz then?’

‘I admire him,’ Fischer replied warily, ‘I can’t say I’d hang him in my drawing room.’

There was a moment’s silence. Frieda offered Dagmar a biscuit at which the little girl nibbled tentatively, like a bored mouse who can expect better later.

‘Look, Herr Stengel,’ Fischer said, ‘I don’t know much about music and I don’t know anything about teaching. What I know is selling. Now when I employ a person to work in one of the departments in my store, I try and find someone who’s interested in the thing they’ll be selling so they can make the customers interested in it too. It said in your advert that you are a composer, arranger and orchestrator as well as being a working professional musician. I like that idea. I can’t imagine anyone being more interested in music than a composer, can you? Unless of course it’s a piano salesman.’

‘You want me to “sell” music to your kid?’ Wolfgang asked, unable to disguise his disdain.

‘Well, it’s like anything, isn’t it? If you’re going to spend a lot of money on a hat you’ve got to be really convinced that you love that hat. To put in all the effort it must take to learn an instrument I imagine you’d really have to believe in music, wouldn’t you? So, yes, I want you to “sell” music to Dagmar that she might be inspired to learn.’

Wolfgang could not deny the sense in what Fischer was saying or the honesty with which he said it.

‘And you have children yourself. I don’t think there’s any more impenetrable psyche than that of a small child. I personally can’t make head nor tail of them, which is why my wife and I employ two nannies. You have children and clearly you’re raising them yourself. It all looks like a good fit to me.’

Wolfgang was about to reply but a look from Frieda silenced him and Fischer continued.

‘Dagmar’s mother and I think that she’s shown a bit of talent… No, don’t worry,’ he went on in answer to the flicker of amusement that crossed Wolfgang’s features. ‘I’m not one of those ridiculous parents who think their child is a genius prodigy. It’s just that we’ve noticed that she’d rather mess around at our piano than with her dolls so we thought we’d give her lessons. I took a look at a couple of expensive chaps in the city but their “studios” as they called them looked like a cross between a prison and a cemetery to me. I want Dagmar to have a bit of fun. I’ve seen you play a couple of times too.’

‘You have?’ Wolfgang said, perking up immediately. ‘Really? Where?’

Frieda smiled at Wolfgang’s puppy-like eagerness.

‘Not recently, bit busy for late nights these days, now the economy’s expanding again. But during the inflation, we were all a little looser that year, weren’t we? I saw you at the Joplin Club.’

‘Best gig I ever had.’

‘Yes, it was fun. Quite crazy really. I remember the owner, he came up to my table and actually offered to buy my department store. There and then. Absolutely extraordinary, he couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen.’

‘Eighteen, just,’ Wolfgang replied.

‘Really. A young man destined to go far, I think.’

‘Sadly not. He died.’

‘Oh dear. Of what, may I ask?’

‘Tastes he’d developed during the inflation that he couldn’t afford to sustain when it was over.’

‘I see.’

‘There were a lot of casualties that year. He was one of them.’

‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear that.’

‘Yes, so was I. He couldn’t play a note but he was as jazz as any man I ever met. Whenever a great new disc comes off the boat from the States I still think of him. Of how much he would have loved it. The silly fool. Anyway, Herr Fischer, you’ve convinced me. I’ll take the gig. I’ll sell music to your daughter.’

‘Wolf!’ Frieda admonished. ‘ You’re supposed to convince him.’

‘Oh. Yes, of course. Sorry.’

‘Quite all right.’ Herr Fischer laughed. ‘It works either way.’

There was another raspberry from somewhere just beyond the living-room door, followed by chuckling and the scuffling of feet.

‘And I promise you Dagmar will have fun,’ Frieda said brightly.

And in that moment the course of the four young lives was set.

THE BOYS’ INITIAL reservations about their father’s new music student evaporated at the very first lesson when Dagmar Fischer arrived for her tuition bearing a large chocolate cake.

Paulus and Otto had certainly seen such a cake before. On rare holiday visits to Fischer’s famous food hall with dirty fingers and noses pressed against the glass of the Konditorei counter. But never had they imagined that one would ever be sitting on the table in their apartment. A slice of one perhaps, carefully chosen after much debate, cut with great ceremony by the shop lady, wrapped in greaseproof paper and put in a stripy box to be carried home and put away till after supper. Then to be divided up, a process in which Paulus insisted on using scales, a set square and a ruler for absolute fairness.

But never a whole cake.

Shamelessly the boys, who had been dreading the arrival of the posh kid and seriously considering a cup of water balanced over the door, simply melted with gratitude.

Mixed with not a little awe.

After all, a girl who had access to a cake like that must be at least a princess if not a queen in her own right.

‘Can we have a bit?’ they asked tentatively.

‘We can have all of it,’ Dagmar said. ‘Papa said that in his experience most nasty little thugs could be won over with cake.’

‘Your father sounds like an astute man,’ Wolfgang said, getting plates and a knife, ‘and fearlessly honest.’

Silke (who had never been close to even a slice of so much cream and chocolate) was made of sterner stuff and refused to be impressed. She folded her arms, put her chin out and declined even to taste it.

For possibly as long as fifteen or twenty seconds.

After which the four of them plus Wolfgang demolished the entire gateau, apart from a rather small portion which they forced themselves to leave for Frieda.

‘Just because we ate your cake,’ Silke whispered angrily to Dagmar when bidden to show the new guest to the toilet, ‘doesn’t mean you’re in our gang.’

‘Just because I let you eat my cake doesn’t mean you’re in mine,’ Dagmar replied with haughty indifference.

Wolfgang had decided to include the boys and Silke on Dagmar’s lessons because he felt that getting through ninety minutes with a group of children would probably be easier than doing so with just one. He also thought it would be more fun. He was right on both counts and the lessons were a great success from the very start. Despite or perhaps because of the endless squabbling and fighting that the four young students indulged in.