Ben Elton - Two Brothers

‘Earning five times what the college pay.’

‘And for what ? What does he expect to get from it? That’s what I want to know.’

‘He expects tits and ass, Wolf!’ Frieda hissed, trying both to shout and to keep her voice down at the same time. ‘Which I happen to have in abundance since the twins put ten kilos on me and which, despite the fact that I eat only one crumb of bread a day , I don’t seem to be able to lose!’

‘But why your tits and ass? That’s what I’d like to know,’ Wolfgang asked, still not prepared to give in. ‘What’s he see in you?’

‘Well, thanks very much!’

‘I think he fancies you.’

‘I’ve just said, Wolf, he’s an artist , he needs models to inspire him, and he says that with no meat and no butter in the city all his usual girls have lost their bloom. I, on the other hand, have apparently hung on to mine.’

‘Bloom? Is that what he calls it? Bloom? Dirty little swine.’

But Wolfgang could not help but admit to himself that the sculptor was right.

Frieda had always turned heads, with her girlishly open face with wide-set eyes, small upturned nose and deep shining auburn hair. She had a trim, athletic-looking ‘modern’ shape but with a generous bust, and while she had certainly acquired an extra curve or two at the hips during her pregnancy, she was no less a beauty for that.

‘Well, quite apart from anything else,’ Wolfgang said, changing tack, ‘the man’s a terrible, terrible artist.’

‘He’s a Victorian Realist.’

‘I think that’s what I said. I mean, honestly. What is the point of realism? The camera has been invented. Take a bloody photograph! It does the job better and at shutter speeds of a hundredth of a second.’

‘Lots of people like realism.’

‘Lots of people are idiots.’

Frieda put the babies down and banged a pan on the hob to boil some water. ‘I’m not going to continue with this ridiculous conversation.’

‘And I’ll tell you another thing—’ Wolfgang said.

‘Not listening.’

‘Karlsruhen’s a complete reactionary. I read an interview with him. He supports the Stahlhelm for God’s sake!’

‘What? So it would be all right for him to see my tits if he was a Communist?’

‘Well, no, maybe not,’ Wolfgang conceded. ‘But it certainly would if he was an Expressionist or a Surrealist!’

‘You’re being an absolute idiot, Wolf.’

‘Oh, I’m the one being an idiot, am I? Well, tell me this. Will your precious Karlsruhen be making you hold a spear and wear a winged helmet?’

Frieda paused. He had her there. She couldn’t help but smile, it did seem slightly absurd, a little Jewish girl pretending to be the spirit of völkisches Deutschland while hoping that her nipples wouldn’t start to drip.

‘Well… yes,’ she conceded, ‘he did mention spears and helmets. I admit that.’

‘A winged helmet .’

‘Sometimes apparently. If we’re doing a Rhinemaiden.’

Now a shadow of a smile appeared at the corners of Wolfgang’s mouth also.

‘You are going to stand there, completely naked except for a winged helmet ?’

‘I think I just told you that.’

‘Aren’t Rhinemaidens supposed to be nymphs?’

‘In this case, nymphs in helmets.’

‘Which isn’t very nymphy.’

‘It is to Herr Karlsruhen. Look, Wolf, be realistic,’ Frieda said, trying to make peace, ‘if he thinks I look like the spirit of German womanhood, then bully for us. I’ve told you, he pays top hourly rates and all I have to do is stand still and listen to Wagner.’

‘He should pay you top rates to listen to that crap.’

‘I don’t mind a bit of Wagner.’

‘He was a raving anti-Semite.’

‘What’s that got to do with his music?’

‘I’m just saying that he was as shitty a man as he was a composer.’

‘We can’t all be cool jazz guys, Wolf. Somebody has to write a tune occasionally. You’re being really stupid.’

‘And I refer you to my previous point that I’m not the one who is planning on standing about naked in a helmet! Think about that. Naked. But in a helmet. It defies logic, or do people only get hit on the head in Asgard?’

‘Now who’s interested in realism?’

Frieda turned her attention to a load of nappies that were soaking in a bucket.

‘This man lives in the hottest, craziest city in Europe. Every studio’s got some wild genius in it breaking all the rules of form — and this prick wants to set the Ring Cycle in stone.’

Frieda fished a dripping terry towel out of the bucket and began running it through the mangle.

‘You’re being pathetic and self-righteous and actually totally reactionary in a reverse kind of way,’ she said, ‘which is frankly not attractive.’

‘Keep mangling,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘Karlsruhen’s going to love those muscles. If you’re lucky he might even promote you to Brünnhilde.’

‘There can be more than one style of art you know,’ Frieda said through gritted teeth as she worked the heavy handle. ‘Not everybody wants to look at pictures of babies on bayonets and limbless soldiers like the stuff you like. We can’t all be George Grosz or Otto Dix.’

‘Bloody geniuses, both of them. Jazz on canvas. People like Karlsruhen and his moronic Stahlhelm go on about making Germany great again. It’s already great. Stuff is going on here in Berlin, within a few hundred metres of where we’re sitting, that they haven’t even started dreaming about in Paris or New York.’

‘Just listen to yourself, why don’t you?’ Frieda said as the water from the nappies cascaded into the mangle tray. ‘You’re actually more chauvinist than the Steel Helmets with your “we’ve got better art in Germany than those bloody foreigners” — even the avant garde are nationalists. It’s pathetic.’

Wolfgang’s tone showed that despite himself he could see her point. ‘I’m just saying that for once we have something going on here that we can be proud of.’

‘So you’d feel better about it if I was posing for someone who gave me square tits and three buttocks. That would be all right, would it?’

‘It would be a lot better.’

Frieda said nothing. But she gave the mangle an extra vicious turn.

DESPITE WOLFGANG’S PROTESTATIONS, Frieda took the modelling job and posed for Herr Karlsruhen throughout 1921 and into the following year. It was while she was on her way to the sculptor’s studio in the summer of 1922 that she heard the horrible news that Germany’s Foreign Minister had been shot, murdered while on his way to work by a teenage gang put up to it by reactionary anti-Semites. A newspaper boy was calling out a special edition of the Berliner Tageblatt . ‘Walther Rathenau dead!’ the boy shouted. ‘Shot in his car.’

Frieda felt sick to her stomach. Just when things had been looking up a little, the republic’s foremost statesman was dead. That old German madness had reared its crazed, iron-clad head again.

She got off the tram on the busy Müllerstrasse and turned into a side street which had once contained small businesses and store houses but which was now principally residential. The street was on the edge of the working-class district of Wedding, which was much favoured by artists for its earthy credibility and somewhat Bohemian air. Karlsruhen rented a studio just close enough to the centre of things to gain a little cachet from the borough’s reputation, but not so close as to be fully immersed in a dangerously left-wing area that was known throughout the city as Red Wedding.