Ben Elton - Two Brothers

Scarcely a year after Hitler had been handed power, something of what he had always claimed about the Jews had actually come to pass.

He said they were different.

And they had become different.

He had accused them of being furtive and sneaky.

And they had become furtive and sneaky. Covering up. Lying low. Watching the door. Hiding away. Survival rats. Constantly nervous, trying to blend in, avoiding people’s eyes, keeping out of people’s way. Attempting wherever possible to conceal the fundamental truth about themselves.

Exactly as Goebbels and Streicher said they did.

‘It’s a kind of ghettoization of the soul,’ Frieda said.

Wolfgang sat in the little bar with the smoke-blackened ceiling and played. Eyes closed, his mind transported far away by the music.

Yes, sir! That’s my baby. No, sir, I don’t mean maybe .

Slow and rolling, not like Lee Morse had immortalized it back in ’25, but soulful, like a blues. A faraway blues. Far away in America.

‘Hello, Wolfgang.’

The voice came from behind him. It was quiet, gentle even, but it shattered his reverie just as surely as if it had been the voice of the Leader himself. Wolfgang was, after all, vermin. A rat or a cockroach, startled, terrified, looking for a skirting board to scuttle under.

Warily he opened his eyes and glanced around. A handsome blond man in his late twenties or early thirties was standing just behind him, elegantly dressed, with a rakish pencil-thin moustache and a sardonic, knowing smile.

And a Gold Nazi Party badge on his lapel.

Wolfgang turned back to his piano, his fingers stumbling on the keys, clumsy with fear.

Gold party members were real Nazis.

Only the first hundred thousand members owned such a badge. People who’d joined when the rest of the nation were dismissing Hitler as a lunatic. These were true believers who despised the so-called Septemberlinge who had begun to flock to the swastika after Hitler’s first electoral breakthrough in September 1930.

And this Gold Party member knew his name. And if he knew his name, he knew he was a Jew. And if he knew he was a Jew then Wolfgang was at the mercy of his slightest whim.

‘I’m not sure I ever heard you play piano before,’ the man said, still from behind Wolfgang’s back.

‘Well, you’re hearing me now, mister,’ Wolfgang replied, concentrating on his keyboard, ‘and if you’ve been listening, then a few coins or maybe a beer would be much appreciated.’

‘Oh absolutely. Always a pleasure to drink with an old friend. Single malt’s your tipple, if I recall. Am I right, Mr Trumpet?’

Wolfgang remembered now. It was the use of that old nickname that did it. ‘Mr Trumpet’ had been Kurt’s invention but all his gang had used it.

‘Hello, Helmut,’ Wolfgang said, stopping playing and turning around on his stool.

‘Ah. That’s better,’ Helmut said with what appeared to be a genuinely friendly smile, pressing a tumbler of scotch into Wolfgang’s hand.

It had been eleven years but, apart from the moustache, the slim, handsome, somewhat effete young man Wolfgang had known in another life had not really changed all that much.

‘Long time since the Joplin Club.’

‘Indeed. Eleven years,’ Helmut replied cheerfully.

‘Eleven years for you. Eternity for me.’

‘Ah yes,’ Helmut said with a nod but nothing more.

Wolfgang raised his glass. ‘How about we drink to Kurt?’

‘Yes. Why not? To Kurt. I still miss him. I remember warning him at the time: if you can’t afford decent drugs, don’t take any . Such a shame. Mind you, perhaps it was for the best. I don’t think he’d have fared very well in our brave new Fatherland.’

‘Unlike you, Helmut,’ Wolfgang said, nodding at the badge on his companion’s lapel. ‘You seem to be faring all right.’

‘Ah yes. Bend with the wind, that’s me. And I saw the way it was blowing earlier than most. Drink up.’ Helmut ordered another round of drinks. ‘You’re still playing music, I see, and I’m very glad, I might add.’

‘Well, things are a little more difficult these days of course,’ Wolfgang answered warily. ‘I play when I’m allowed. This isn’t a job, you know. I do it for tips, that’s all. I’m not employed here.’

‘Please, Wolfgang,’ Helmut said. ‘I wear this badge because it is practical to do so. It has nothing to do with who my friends are.’

Wolfgang sipped at his second whisky, focusing on that brief, now unfamiliar luxury rather than the demeaning fact that whatever Helmut might say, Wolfgang was still a Jew and so they were not friends. Their relationship, such as it was, existed only on sufferance. It was simply impossible to ignore the fact that socially they were polar opposites. One the master, the other the dog. And no matter what kindnesses a master might show a dog, the dog was still a dog.

‘And you?’ Wolfgang said finally. ‘Are you still—’

‘A queer pimp? Oh yes, very much so. More than ever. My brown-shirted comrades have tremendous appetites, some of them most exotic. Funny really, the more they rail against depravity the more they seem to want it. Perhaps they’re just checking that it really is as bad as they say it is. You know, for purposes of research. For how can one really know how wicked it is to batter open the arse of a penniless unemployed youth who only wanted bread and a uniform until you’ve actually done it?’

Wolfgang tried to smile at Helmut’s levity, his newly acquired dog instincts prompting him to want to be ingratiating, despite seeing no humour in what was being discussed. ‘Well, you know what they say about power corrupting,’ he observed, gratefully accepting one of Helmut’s American Camel cigarettes. Wolfgang himself could now only afford to smoke cheap local brands, and not even as many of those as he would have liked.

‘Yes and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ Helmut said, grinning, ‘which of course is what we Nazis have got, so absolute it’s positively tasteless. Hey ho. ’Twas ever thus, and in the meantime the standard-bearers of New Europe are fucking themselves senseless and there are more shivering little girls and boys working the pavements of Schöneberg and the Potsdamer Strasse than ever there were under decadent old Weimar. Ain’t life a scream?’

‘You said brown-shirted “comrades” a moment ago,’ Wolfgang said, looking his companion properly in the eye for the first time. ‘Are you in the SA, Helmut?’

‘Oh absolutely. Since 1927 in fact… almost an Alter Kämpfer , don’t you know. Not that I’ve ever been in a fight in my life, you understand. No, I went straight to the top. Pimp-in-chief to Röhm himself. Funny, don’t you think? That a man who commands three million devotedly obedient young men needs a chap like me to fix him up. I suppose it avoids small talk, although I can’t imagine dear Ernst’s small talk consists of much more than “Get your trousers off, lad, turn around and bend over”.’

Wolfgang was most surprised at Helmut’s indiscretion. Of course everyone in Germany had heard the rumours that the SA’s all-powerful leader was a homosexual and one with a brutal and rapacious appetite, but Wolfgang could not imagine anyone being so open about it.

‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Helmut laughed. ‘In a way me and old Ernst are a bit like you, in so much as we’re officially blood enemies of National Socialism. The party’s terribly down on us homos, you know. There’s talk of having us sterilized, which is hilarious, don’t you think? I mean, what would be the point of sterilizing a queer? But that’s my dear party colleagues for you. Never let an inconsistency get in the way of brutality. Thick as two short planks every one of them. My dear, you won’t believe the ignorance.’