Ben Elton - Two Brothers

‘Fires attract all sorts of nasty insects,’ she said. ‘Gnats, mosquitoes and Hitler Jugend . You can bet your shirt that if there was a troop around they’d feel honour-bound to scout us out. It’s an obsession with them, they are the “eyes of the Führer”. It’s not like we have anything to hide, particularly now it seems you aren’t even a Jew any more! But all the same we don’t want company.’

Otto agreed. ‘Smart girl,’ he said. ‘Paulus would be proud of you.’

‘And there was you thinking I was just a pretty face.’

She laughed selfconsciously as she said it. Otto laughed too.

‘Good old Silke! One of the lads, eh?’

A compliment which did not seem particularly to please its recipient.

They ate their supper of cheese and bread and some fruit and then each curled up in their blankets beside each other. Lying staring up at the stars, which they could see twinkling through the canopy of trees.

Otto couldn’t remember the last time he’d talked to Silke. Talked properly , just her and him. If indeed he ever had talked to her. He’d laughed with her countless times, fought with her, run from irate shopkeepers with her and teased her endlessly. But never actually simply talked to her. Why would he have done? She was just one of the boys. A mate. You didn’t go rabbiting on to your mates.

‘What do you think will happen, Otts?’ Silke asked. ‘I mean to Pauly and you and your mum and dad?’

‘Well, hopefully Mum’ll manage to get the family out,’ Otto replied. ‘I know her and Dad talk about it quite a lot, but of course Dad’s basically unemployable these days and then there’s Pops and Grandma to think about. It would be hard for them to move even if they wanted to.’

‘Don’t they want to?’ Silke asked.

‘Come on, Silks, you know them better than that. They’re Germans! They don’t know how to be anything else. Pops always says he’s been German since 1870, while Hitler the Austrian has only been German since 1932, so why should Pops be the one to leave?’

Silke laughed. ‘Yeah, that’s Herr Tauber all right. He always used to scare the crap out of me.’

‘He still does scare me,’ Otto said.

‘So do you think your mum will leave them behind?’

‘I think in the end she might have to. But I’ll tell you one thing, Silks, if Mum and Dad do manage to get the family out, I won’t be going with them.’

Silke raised herself up on one elbow and looked down at Otto’s face, faint and pale in the shadowy moonlight.

‘Because of Dagmar?’ she said quietly.

‘Of course,’ Otto said. ‘Unless Dagmar can get out herself I’m staying to look after her.’

‘Saturday Club rules, eh?’ Silke smiled.

‘Yeah. That’s it,’ Otto replied.

But they both knew it had nothing to do with the Saturday Club.

Silke changed the subject.

‘Have you ever heard of the Rote Hilfe ?’ she asked.

‘The Red Help?’ Otto repeated. ‘No, I don’t think so. What is it?’

‘It’s a sort of resistance thing,’ Silke went on, ‘in Berlin. It was attached to the Red Cross before Hitler but now of course it’s underground. They try and help out families who’ve had their men stolen to camps. And also to let people abroad know what’s really happening.’

‘Are you a member then?’

‘Well, I don’t really know. It’s all secret and you never know anybody’s name, but I have a couple of contacts.’

‘What do you do?’

‘It seems a bit silly to me. They write a newsletter and it’s my job to see that copies get out of Germany.’

‘Wow, how do you do that?’

‘Easy. I post them! Nobody suspects a teenage girl in a BDM uniform, you see. I buy a woman’s magazine and slip the secret stuff between the pages. Then I go to the post office and send it as general printed matter to an address in Geneva.’

Otto thought about it for a little while.

‘Good for you,’ he said eventually.

‘I just wanted you to know,’ Silke said hesitantly, ‘that the gang is still together. The Saturday Club. I may wear a BDM uniform but we believe in the same things.’

‘I know that, Silks.’

‘And,’ Silke went on nervously, ‘just like you want to look after Dagmar, I’d like to help look after you.’

‘Well, we’re all bound by oath, aren’t we?’ Otto laughed.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘So you’d help Paulus too?’

‘Of course I would! How can you even ask!’

‘And Dagmar?’ There was a pause. ‘She’s in the Saturday Club too, remember?’

‘Yes. I suppose so,’ Silke said.

Otto smiled in the darkness.

‘I hope you will always try to help her if you can, Silks,’ he said. ‘If only for my sake.’

‘Otto,’ Silke said. ‘We’re all in the Saturday Club. We made a vow.’

After that there was nothing more to say and they went to sleep.

Or at least Otto did, almost immediately, dead beat from the ride. Silke lay awake for quite some time though. Listening to Otto breathe and watching his face in the moonlight.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING they rose with the sun.

Silke took a towel from her bag and a little galvanized tin box with soap in it.

‘I’ll just go and have a wash and stuff,’ she said.

‘Wow. Soap. You never bothered with that when we slept out as kids.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m not a kid any more, am I?’ Silke replied, not looking Otto in the eye.

‘I didn’t think to bring any myself,’ Otto admitted.

‘God! Boys!’ Silke said with mock exasperation. ‘Well, you can borrow mine… I mean after.’

‘Yeah. Of course. That’s right. You go first. I’ll wait and go next.’

They smiled at each other. In the past they would have simply gone together. Free and unselfconscious. But now they both understood that the time of innocent intimacy had passed.

‘Back in a minute,’ Silke said.

‘No rush.’

‘I’ve got a little garden trowel and a roll of lavatory paper in my bag, too, if you want to use them.’

‘You’re a good camper, Silks. I didn’t bring anything.’

‘Ah they train us well in the BDM, you know. The Führer watches over us even when we’re squatting in a bush!’

‘Always thought he looked like a pervert.’

After their ablutions and a drink of stream water to wash down the remains of the bread and cheese, they mounted their bikes once more.

‘Ouch!’ Silke said.

‘Me too,’ Otto agreed, ‘but only twenty-five K to go.’

‘Yeah. And then all the way back.’

The hamlet that was their destination was scarcely large enough to even make it on to the map. It was reached by a deeply rutted, hard-to-cycle, unmetalled lane which ran through some small outlying farms and ended up amongst a little group of poor cottages clustered around an algae-covered duck pond.

There was a small wooden chapel and beside that a village pub of sorts which was really just the front parlour of one of the cottages with an old tin Bitburger beer sign hanging outside. This also doubled as a post office and tiny general store, offering a few tinned goods and some grey-looking chocolate. It was here that Otto enquired after the people he was looking for. Herr and Frau Hahn. His maternal grandparents by birth.

He had half feared that in the intervening fifteen years they might have moved on from the village where they had lived when their daughter died, but like most peasants of their generation and of all the many generations that had preceded them, Herr and Frau Hahn were born, lived and would no doubt die in the same few square kilometres of land. Their only trip to Berlin had in fact been for their daughter’s confinement when they had hoped to bring her back and get her wed to a decent farm boy who would accept her bastard child.