Ben Elton - Two Brothers

‘Dags!’ he gasped. ‘You’re talking like some gangster. What’s happened to you?’

‘What’s happened to me?’ Dagmar asked, her voice cold as ice. ‘You ask me that, Pauly? What’s happened to me?’

Pauly could not meet her gaze. He looked away.

‘I’m just worried you’ll get Otts killed,’ he muttered.

‘I won’t get killed,’ Otto said firmly.

Then solemnly, menacingly, he laid out his collection of weaponry on Dagmar’s dressing table. His flick-knife, a cosh and a knuckle-duster. They looked strange and incongruous amongst the brushes and powder pots and little girlish trinkets.

And the beautiful miniature chest of drawers which Otto himself made for Dagmar on the occasion of his own thirteenth birthday. When he had still been a boy.

Dagmar went and stood before the dressing table, staring down at the weapons. Brushing her hand across them. She was wearing shorts and white tennis shoes without socks, showing off her long olive-toned legs. Her blouse was knotted beneath her bust revealing a band of soft, delicate skin between it and her shorts. Both boys stared in rapt fascination but for once she seemed not to notice their adoring glances. She was staring at the weapons.

‘Do it, Otto,’ she whispered. ‘Give one of them something to think about.’

‘I promise I will,’ Otto replied.

‘I’m telling you you’re crazy,’ Paulus said again, sullenly.

‘Nobody’s asking you to come,’ Otto said.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’

Paulus caught Dagmar’s reflection in the dressing-table mirror. He could see the disappointment in her eyes.

‘I’ll find better battles to fight,’ was all he could say and he knew how weak it sounded.

The following night Otto fulfilled his promise. He and four other boys ambushed two uniformed SA men and beat them up in an alleyway. It was a horrible mêlée, with kicks and blows and slashing knives. The troopers were bigger and stronger than the fifteen-year-old boys and were also used to street thuggery but, in the end, numbers and vengeful passion prevailed. The SA men went down and were kicked unconscious in the gutter. Then, while the other attackers went through the men’s pockets for their money, Otto knelt beside one of them and snapped open his flick-knife.

For a moment the gleaming blade hovered over the prostrate victim’s neck. One slash would do it. Otto glanced up into the faces of his comrades standing over him. Fear and exhilaration seemed to shine in equal measure in their eyes.

‘Next time, you fucking Nazi cunt,’ Otto whispered, ‘next time.’

Then he cut the buttons from the man’s shirt.

Two hours later, having scurried across the city imagining at every moment that the Gestapo were upon him, Otto presented himself at the Fischers’ front door. He cut a wild and dishevelled figure but Frau Fischer let him in without comment. Frau Fischer commented on very little these days, having begun to withdraw into herself more and more. She seemed so distracted that perhaps she did not even notice the cuts and bruises on Otto’s face and the splashes of blood on his shirt which he had concealed beneath his coat.

Dagmar noticed them.

‘My God, Ottsy,’ she gasped, leaning over the balcony of the first stair landing.

Otto looked up at her, standing like Juliet in the famous English play they had been made to read in translation at school. Her luxurious auburn hair framing such perfectly proportioned features. The huge dark eyes enchanting, bewitching.

‘Come up to my room,’ she said.

Frau Fischer turned away, returning to her shuttered drawing room and to the memories of her gilded past, leaving Otto to run up the stairs, two at a time.

Once safely ensconced in Dagmar’s bedroom he held out his clenched fist towards her, turned it upwards and opened his fingers.

‘For you,’ he said.

There lying in the palm of his hand were the SA man’s shirt buttons.

Dagmar looked down at them and gave a little gasp.

‘You got them,’ she said. ‘You did it.’

‘Yeah. I did it… I did it for you.’

She looked at him and smiled.

Otto felt weak at the knees.

‘It’s nice to see you smile, Dags,’ he stammered. ‘You don’t seem to very much these days.’

‘Whenever I try to smile,’ she said, ‘before long I see the pavement. And the boots all around me. And Mother and Father, with their tongues out…’

‘Don’t, Dags.’

‘Sometimes I see the station platform and those men pulling at Daddy but mainly I see that pavement outside the shop. And my face is pressed against the paving stone. In my dreams I can actually smell it.’

Otto didn’t attempt to answer; he and Paulus had long since come to understand that there was a place where Dagmar had been and where a part of her would always remain, which was beyond any comfort they could offer.

Except perhaps that was not quite true tonight. Perhaps in doing the wild and stupid thing he’d done he’d helped her just a little. Given her a momentary respite from her own pain and bereavement.

She played with the buttons in her hand for a moment, then let them fall one by one on to the glass surface of her dressing table, clack — clack — clack .

‘Someone else is the victim for once,’ she whispered. ‘Someone else was lying on the ground with boots all around them.’

Then she gave Otto a cigarette, a Gitane.

She had done the same thing many times. But this was different. Spine-tinglingly different. She lit the cigarette for him. Putting her full, soft lips around the end and taking the first puff before handing it to him.

What touched her lips then touched his.

Otto was literally quivering with desire. His hands were shaking despite his every effort to still them.

After he had taken a drag or two, she reached over and plucked it from his lips, took another deep draw herself and then put it back in Otto’s mouth. Her lipstick was red on the white paper, he could taste it along with the smoke.

Otto had never dreamt that having a ciggie could be so sexy or so sophisticated. He felt as if he’d grown up a whole decade between puffs.

When the cigarette was nearly burnt down, Dagmar took it from Otto’s lips for the final time and ground it out in the crystal ashtray that sat beside her dolls on the dressing table. Then she drew Otto towards her and kissed him, full on the mouth. This was no furtive, stolen moment, like it had been at the Kempinski hotel, but slow and rich and generous.

Her lips opened beneath his and then he felt her tongue brush against his.

Otto’s mind spun cartwheels in almost blind delirium. This was ecstasy pure and simple. He tried to concentrate; he was, after all, living through the most important and most ecstatic moment of his life.

The kiss lasted a moment longer before Dagmar stepped back and smiled at him.

Otto imagined the ecstatic moment was over but he had no complaints. Had he dropped dead then and there he would have died a happy boy.

But then he felt her soft lips against his ear.

‘You can put your hand in my blouse if you like,’ she whispered.

No dream had ever come more true.

For three long years Otto had wanted nothing so much on earth as to put his hand in Dagmar’s blouse and now quite suddenly that sublime moment had arrived.

She kissed him as he pulled at the sweet-smelling cotton, dragging the hem from beneath the waist of her skirt. Then he put his hand underneath, moving it upwards, across the soft skin of her ribs. He felt one of her breasts, first through her brassiere and then, slipping his fingers inside the wired garment, touched the nipple beneath.

He was shivering with excitement. And it seemed to Otto that so was Dagmar.