Ben Elton: Two Brothers

Berlin 1920

Two babies are born.

Two brothers.

United and indivisible, sharing everything.

Twins in all but blood.

As Germany marches into its Nazi Armageddon, the ties of family, friendship and love are tested to the very limits of endurance. And the brothers are faced with an unimaginable choice…

Which one of them will survive?

Ben Elton’s most personal novel to date,Two Brotherstransports the reader to history’s darkest hour.

FRIEDA STENGEL WOKE from a dream filled with tiny kicks to find her nightdress and her bedding soaking wet.

It was past dawn but the coming of day had done little to relieve the darkness and gloom of the long freezing night that had preceded it. Her breath hung heavily in the dull light as she shook her husband awake.

‘Wolfgang,’ she whispered. ‘My waters have broken.’

He sat up in bed with a jolt.

‘Right!’ he said, staring about wildly, struggling to surface. ‘Good! Everything’s fine. We have a plan.’

‘I’m not in labour yet,’ Frieda said soothingly. ‘No pain. No cramps. But they’re on their way, that’s for sure.’

‘Keep calm,’ Wolfgang said, tumbling out of bed and tripping over the boots he’d left close at hand for just such an awakening. ‘We absolutely have a plan.’

Frieda was expecting twins and so had been guaranteed a place in a hospital for the delivery. The Berlin Buch medical school was several kilometres across the city from Friedrichshain, where they lived. As she struggled into her clothes Frieda could only hope that the babies were in no hurry.

Wolfgang took his wife’s arm and they groped their way down the five flights of stairs from their apartment to the street below. There was a lift but it was ancient and rickety and they had decided that the tiny iron cage was not to be trusted for such a crucial journey.

‘Imagine if we got stuck and you had the babies between floors,’ Wolfgang joked. ‘It’s only licensed for three people! That bitch of a concierge would probably report us to the housing collective.’

The sky that lowered over the young couple as they stepped out on to the icy pavement was so dark and so grey that it might have been forged from iron in the furnaces of the famous Krupps foundry in Essen and then bolted above Berlin with rivets of steel. Berlin seemed always to be huddling beneath such gunmetal skies. The war winters and those that followed had been cruel indeed and as the wet and frozen early morning workers hurried past the young couple, bent low in the teeth of biting eastern winds, it was hard for Frieda and Wolfgang to remember that there had ever been any other season in Berlin but winter. That there had once been a time when every tree on Unter Den Linden had dazzled in garish bloom and up and down the Tiergarten old gentlemen had removed their jackets and girls had gone without stockings.

But spring and summer were a distant memory in that February of 1920, a dream of better times before the catastrophe of the Great War exploded over Germany. Now the skies seemed always to have been beaten out of cannons and to thunder as if just beyond the horizon in the fields of Belgium and France and across the endless Russian steppes real cannons still roared.

There were of course no taxis to be found even if they could have afforded one, and inevitably the trams were on one of their regular strikes. The Stengels had therefore arranged to borrow a hand cart from the local greengrocer.

Herr Sommer was waiting for them when they arrived outside his shop, with the cart and a bouquet of carrots tied up with ribbons.

‘Pink and blue,’ Sommer said, ‘because Wolf assures me you’re going to have a boy and girl. An instant family, all the bother done with in one go.’

‘They’ll both be boys,’ Frieda replied firmly. ‘So watch out for trouble, they’ll be pinching your apples in a few years!’

‘If I have any apples,’ the grocer replied ruefully as Wolfgang began to push the cart away, slipping and clanking across the icy stones and cobbles.

Just then there was a burst of automatic gunfire somewhere in a nearby street, but they ignored it, as they also ignored the shouts and the screams that followed the clattering boots and the sound of breaking glass.

Gunfire, boots and breaking glass were just the sounds of the city to Wolfgang and Frieda, they didn’t really notice them any more. As commonplace in Berlin as the cry of the newspaper vendor, the bird song in the parks and the rattle of the trains on the elevated railway. Everybody ignored them, keeping their heads down, hurrying along, hoping not to be delayed in getting to whatever queue it was they were planning to join.

‘Fucking idiots,’ a one-legged veteran muttered as he scuttled past on his crutches.

‘You got that right,’ Wolfgang replied to the back of the man’s shaven head and little army cap.

The newspapers called these ongoing disturbances a ‘revolution’ but if it was a revolution it was of a peculiar German kind. Civic authority continued to function and business was still done. Kids still played on the pavements. Secretaries were at their typing machines by eight thirty. The police still checked the licence discs on parked cars, even while their owners were in a nearby cellar kicking somebody to death or being kicked to death themselves.

Berlin simply carried on with its own affairs while Communist gangs and right-wing Freikorps militia killed each other during their lunch breaks.

Frieda and Wolfgang carried on too, or at least Wolfgang did, sweating over the cart handles, despite the cold, as he pushed his wife through the rubble-strewn streets, swearing and cursing his way around the occasional barricade until finally arriving before the splendid steps of the famous five-thousand-bed teaching hospital on Lindenberger Weg, the largest in all Europe.

Wolfgang pulled up his cart, drawing deep, painful breaths of freezing air, and took down Frieda’s bag.

‘Heavy enough, isn’t it?’ he gasped. ‘Do you really need all these books?’

‘I might be in for a while,’ Frieda replied, sliding herself heavily over the tailboard and down on to the pavement, wincing as her swollen ankles took the weight. ‘I need to get some work done.’

‘Well, I’m with you on that, Fred,’ Wolfgang agreed, treating himself to a smoke. ‘You married a musician. A musician who at some point hopes to find himself living in the style to which he would like to become accustomed.’

‘You’re a composer , Wolf.’ Frieda smiled. ‘Not just a musician. I told my parents I was marrying the next Mendelssohn.’

‘God help us, I hope not. Too many damn tunes. Kaffee und Kuchen music ain’t for me, Freddy, you know that.’

‘People like tunes. They pay for tunes.’

‘Which is why I grabbed myself a nice clever girl when I had the chance. Every jazz man needs a besotted lady doctor to look after him.’

Wolfgang took Frieda around her huge waist and kissed her.

Frieda laughed, disengaging herself. ‘I’m not besotted, I’m barely tolerating. And I’m not a doctor either. Not yet, there’s the little matter of my final exams. And be careful with my books. They’re all borrowed and they fine you if there’s even a tiny crease in a page.’