Ben Elton - Two Brothers

‘My position?’

‘Oh come on, Stone!’ Lorre snapped. ‘You work in the Foreign Office. The German Department of the Foreign Office.’

Stone said nothing. He could see their point, of course.

‘It just seems to us,’ the Yorkshire voice said, calm and low, ‘that it is a little injudicious for a mid-ranking official of the British Foreign Office to be so eager to make contact with a Stasi officer, sister-in-law or not.’

‘Except I didn’t know she was a Stasi officer! And I have to say I’m astonished that you think Dagmar is — she was never remotely political as a girl.’

‘If you live in East Germany you’re either a Communist or you’re pretending to be a Communist,’ Peter Lorre said. ‘I don’t think the authorities care which. Besides, the Red Army liberated her. A girl would be grateful, I imagine.’

‘From what I know of what the Red Army did on their way west in 1945, very few German women would have had reason to be grateful to them.’

‘But your sister-in-law was Jewish.’

‘And the Soviets have always loved a Jew, haven’t they?’ Stone replied with bitter sarcasm. ‘You know as well as I do what the NKVD attitude was to Jews. Those Kremlin wolves weren’t much better than the Nazis.’

‘Which brings us to the point,’ Bogart said with a smile.

‘There’s a point? I mean apart from virtually accusing me of planning treason?’

‘Yes. There’s a point. Your sister-in-law is not an obvious fit for the Stasi, not least because of its endemic anti-Semitism.’

‘Which is why—’ Stone began to protest.

‘And yet Dagmar Stengel is definitely one of their officers,’ Peter Lorre interrupted, anticipating Stone’s objection, ‘there can be no doubt about that. No doubt at all. We looked into her the moment she wrote to you.’

It was a horrible thought but it was possible. The teenager Stone had known might not have been political but she had been intelligent and tough and self-motivated. Dagmar was a survivor, and who could imagine what horrors she had been through in the years since they had last met. What compromises she had made. How much she had changed.

‘A Jew working for the Stasi suggests to us a person who would work for anyone,’ the Bogart figure remarked, resuming his calmer, almost disinterested tone, ‘and we wondered, since you’re going that way, if you might like to try and persuade her to work for us.’

The man smiled as he said it. As if he had been asking Stone to deliver a small gift or return a book.

‘YOU MEAN YOU’LL have to take your clothes off?’ Wolfgang demanded. ‘In front of the bastard?’

‘If Herr Karlsruhen requires it, which I imagine he will,’ Frieda replied with a coquettish toss of her thick, dark, recently bobbed hair. ‘I don’t imagine nymphs wear an awful lot of clothes, do you?’

Wolfgang was changing Paulus’s nappy on the kitchen table, holding the baby’s feet in the air in order to wipe him, and for a moment it almost looked as if he might wave the baby about in protest.

‘Well, I don’t want you to do it,’ he said. ‘In fact, I… I forbid you to do it.’

Loud though Frieda’s hearty laugh was at this doomed attempt at exerting husbandly authority, it was drowned out by Paulus who at the same moment gave a piercing yell, having clearly decided that his arse had been wiped long enough and it was time for Wolfgang to put his legs down.

Inevitably Paulus’s cries set Otto off, the two babies having long since learnt that they could create more chaos if they worked as a team.

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Frieda chided.

‘What I’ve done?’ Wolfgang exclaimed. ‘He’s probably crying because his mother wants to be a stripper!’

‘ Model , Wolf!’

‘ Nude model, Frieda.’

Wolfgang finished Paulus’s nappy and pretty much dumped him back down beside Otto where the screaming ramped up another notch or two and Frieda was forced to spend ten minutes rocking the boys and singing ‘ Hoppe Hoppe Reiter ’ to them. This always cheered them up, it was their favourite song, particularly the verse about the poor fallen rider getting eaten by the ravens, which the boys seemed to understand was a good bit, despite not yet being able to talk.

‘Look, nude modelling is easy work, Wolf,’ Frieda said, when finally the babies had calmed down, ‘and we could certainly do with the money.’

‘We don’t need it that much!’

‘Oh don’t we?’ In answer to her own question Frieda marched across their tiny kitchen and flung open the doors of the little wall-mounted cupboard that they called their pantry. In it, apart from a few assorted spices and condiments, was a small piece of cheese, a few centimetres of sausage, a handful of carrots, five decent-sized potatoes and half a loaf of black bread. Besides that, there was a bottle of milk sitting in a bowl of water on the window sill and above the sink a jar of ground coffee and some sugar.

‘That’s it, Wolf,’ Frieda said angrily. ‘The lot, our entire supplies until you find another band to play in or we go begging to my parents again . I am a student, you are essentially unemployed and we have babies to feed! We need money and if this silly man wants to give me some for getting goosebumps for a couple of hours, I’m going to grab it with both hands.’

‘He’d like to grab you with both hands if you ask me.’

‘He’s an artist , Wolf. And a rich one too. He pays way above the odds.’

‘We don’t need his money. We get by.’ Wolfgang sulked. ‘We don’t starve.’

‘ Just , Wolf. We don’t starve just . And what sort of ambition is that, by the way? We don’t starve . Nice to know you’ve set your sights so high. Personally I’d like to do a bit better than not actually starving. I’d like to have some nice cakes at the weekend and extra milk for the children, and if taking my clothes off three evenings a week can get me that then every sculptor in Berlin can immortalize my bum in marble as far as I’m concerned.’

Wolfgang scowled but didn’t answer.

A rat ran across the lino. He hurled a shoe at it in fury.

This futile gesture did nothing to harm the rat but the bang startled Otto who began crying again. This caused Paulus to throw out an arm in irritation, scratching Otto’s face with fingernails which Frieda had been absolutely meaning to get to that evening. Otto screamed blue murder at this which, of course, according to the brothers’ unspoken rules, required Paulus to start screaming blue murder as well.

Peace was finally restored but only after Frieda had been forced to put the boys on her breasts, which she absolutely hated herself for doing. She was trying seriously to wean them in an effort to bring some order into her increasingly chaotic life, a district nurse having told her that breast on demand after the first nine months was the road to anarchy and source of all evil.

When Wolfgang broke the angry silence that followed, to Frieda’s amazement, instead of being contrite, he was still complaining about her new job.

‘I didn’t mind so much when it was at the Art School,’ he said. ‘That was legitimate.’

‘Oh. So it’s fine for fifty people to see me naked but not for one? Is that it? Ow! Bugger!’

Frieda yelped in pain. The babies’ new teeth were another reason for her wanting to get them off the breast as soon as possible.

‘Yes, that is it exactly!’ Wolfgang exclaimed. ‘You’ll be alone with this horny old bastard, in his bloody studio.’