Ben Elton - Two Brothers

‘I hate school now,’ she said kicking her feet and wiggling her toes in frustration, ‘now that they’ve started making us sit separately.’

Paulus wasn’t listening. He was drinking in the sight of her pretty painted toes and shapely ankles dangling so close. Otto was staring too.

Both boys simply aching to kiss those feet.

‘Me and the two other Jewish girls,’ Dagmar went on, addressing the ceiling, for once oblivious to the stupefying effect that any part of her exposed self had on the Stengel boys, ‘stuck in a shameful little corner. We weren’t even friends before. They’re scholarship kids who don’t pay fees. I used to secretly look down on them, which seems funny now. Now that I’m getting looked down on myself.’

‘Personally I don’t give a stuff about sitting apart,’ Paulus said, sliding away from the end of the bed, unable to take the pressure and frustration of Dagmar’s crimson-tipped toes any longer. ‘Why would I care? I’m there to work, not talk. Sod ’em, I say. If they stop being my friends because of a law then they were crap friends anyway. I just don’t let it bother me.’

Dagmar swung her legs off the side of the bed, four hungry eyes following her every move. She took a packet of cigarettes from the little drawer in her bedside table.

‘Blimey, Dags, you’re chaining it,’ Paulus said. ‘Won’t your mum smell it?’

‘She will, but so what? I used to do what she said but now that Daddy’s gone it’s all different. I don’t even bother to open a window any more. To be honest I don’t think she cares anyway.’

The boys nodded but they did not really understand. The ongoing misery of their own father’s incarceration in a concentration camp had of course hugely affected their family life but it had not changed their basic attitude to their mother’s authority. Perhaps it was because she had always been more of a boss in the home than Wolfgang had anyway.

Dagmar offered the boys cigarettes.

‘They’re French,’ Dagmar said. ‘Gitanes. I have a French pen pal who sends me them.’

The three of them smoked for a little while in silence.

‘I think I’ll do what you did, Otts,’ Dagmar said with sudden venom. ‘Chuck in school. I just hate it now. The way they all look at me. It’s like, it’s like I’m sick or something. Most of them are trying to be nice but actually that just makes it worse. I’m the poor little kid with the incurable Jew disease. And then there’s him . He’s there, always there.’

‘Who?’

‘ Him , of course. That man! Everywhere, hanging up in every single classroom. Staring out like the complete bloody nutcase that he is. The man who killed my dad. The man who won’t even let me go swimming. What is wrong with him? Why does he care if I go swimming or not!’

Dagmar smoked ferociously in an effort not to begin crying again.

Paulus and Otto looked at each other, helpless in the face of her distress.

‘Don’t chuck in school,’ Paulus said gently. ‘Don’t let them beat you.’

‘Bollocks,’ Otto snorted, ‘give it up. Screw them, why should you sit there while they sing the bloody Horst Wessel song? I know why Pauly studies all the time. It’s so he can write you those stupid letters in Latin that he thinks are so clever!’

Paulus was aghast. ‘You’ve been looking in my notebook, you bastard!’

‘Yeah, and what a load of crap! Pulchra es amo te — I looked it up. Oh you’re so beautiful, Dags and he loves you! Oculi tui sicut vasa pretiosa — your eyes are like precious jewels! Ha ha! What a lot of big hairy balls!’

Paulus was crimson with fury, his fists clenched.

‘Fuck you, Otts!’ he said, leaping to his feet.

‘And fuck you double,’ Otto replied, getting up from the little pink and gold dressing-table chair on which he’d just sat down and squaring up to his brother.

‘You’re not to fight in here, boys!’ Dagmar cried but with a rare smile — the rivalry between the twins for her affections always cheered her up a little. ‘I have all my special things and you’re such great big lumps these days you’ll break everything. Anyway, Ottsy, I like Pauly’s Latin letters.’

‘I wanted to do something for you that was difficult,’ Paulus muttered defensively, crimson with embarrassment, ‘so you’d know I’d made an effort and be impressed.’

‘Why don’t you chisel her a letter on the Brandenburg Gate? That’d be an effort.’

‘I am impressed, Pauly,’ Dagmar said. ‘I love your letters. For one thing they make me pay attention in class so that I can actually read them. My friends can’t believe I have a boy who writes to me in Latin… Or a boy who writes me songs, Ottsy.’

‘ Songs? ’ Paulus exclaimed. ‘Has he been writing you songs?’

‘Yes, didn’t you know?’ Dagmar grinned. ‘They’re so sweet.’

‘You sneaky bastard! When have you been doing that then?’

‘While you’re at school being an idiot and studying, mate.’

‘You mean he’s snuck round here without me and been playing you songs?’

‘Well, just once or twice,’ Dagmar admitted coyly.

‘You see, Pauly,’ Otto crowed. ‘Just because you study hardest doesn’t mean you’re cleverest.’

‘No need to be jealous, Pauly,’ Dagmar said soothingly. ‘You know I love you both.’

‘Yes, well, one day you’re going to have to choose, you know,’ Paulus blurted. ‘You know we’ve always told you that.’

‘Yeah. That’s the one thing him and I agree on, Dags. You’ll have to choose some time.’

‘Well, maybe I’ll choose the one who can get me out of this country,’ Dagmar said.

She said it jokingly but there was an uncomfortable amount of truth in the jest. The pressing challenge of survival was never far from any of their minds.

‘I’ll get you out, Dags,’ Paulus said firmly.

‘No, Dags, I’ll get you out.’

‘Well then?’ Dagmar said cheerfully. ‘It looks like the three of us will be leaving together. Won’t that be fun?’

WOLFGANG DID NOT die in Nazi captivity.

The concentration camps the SA set up in such haste during their first orgy of power were not yet the death factories that they would later become under the SS. Wolfgang came home, just as Paulus had said that he would.

‘It’s the Olympics next year,’ a guard sneered, as Wolfgang and a group of other prisoners hobbled, limped and even crawled through the wood and wire gate. ‘Got to look dainty for the world, haven’t we? Maybe you lot can form a relay team.’

The joke was not lost on the hollow-faced skeletal figures as they staggered towards a kind of freedom. The health of anyone who had survived a year or so in the care of the Sturmabteilung was certain to have been completely broken and Wolfgang was no exception. The starvation diet, harsh physical labour and exposure to the elements had brought his primary organs to the point of near collapse. He had become rheumatic and his liver and kidneys were weak; he had also contracted TB. This last of course meant that he could no longer play his beloved trumpet for more than a few minutes at a time.

‘Like cutting off a footballer’s feet,’ he said.

He could, however, still play violin and piano, having done everything in his power to protect his hands during captivity.

‘I used to clench my fists when they beat me,’ he told Frieda, ‘and when they knocked me down I kept my hands under me. The guards used to like to stamp on people’s fingers, so I kept mine out of the way. Most blokes protected their balls, I looked after my fingers.’