Two Brothers

Money Gone Mad Berlin, 1923

PAULUS AND OTTO were playing together on the thick blue English rug which had come from Wolfgang’s parents, while Frieda sat at her little desk bureau looking over the family finances. She had been staring at a particular banknote for a few moments when quite suddenly she began dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.

The little boys stopped playing and stared at her for a moment, caught up in the unfamiliar spectacle of their mother’s tears, having imagined up until that point in their lives that crying was their prerogative alone.

‘Don’t cry, Mum,’ Otto pleaded.

‘I’m not, darling. Just an eyelash in my eye, that’s all.’

Frieda blew her nose on a handkerchief and then more urgent issues claimed the boys’ attention as Paulus took the opportunity to steal the parapet from Otto’s fort and add it to his own. Paulus, thoughtful behind deep-set, dark eyes, was already the superior strategist of the two boys, while Otto, although by no means stupid, was wild and impulsive. His impulse now was immediate and violent. He slammed his fat little fist into the side of Paulus’s head and the fight that ensued was only ended when Wolfgang stormed in from the bedroom (where he had been sleeping after a late show) and sprayed the flailing knot of arms and legs and fists and feet with water from a toy pistol. This was a trick he’d picked up in the park from a man who bred dogs.

‘When they brawl, I throw water over them,’ the man had said. ‘They soon learn.’

Wolfgang decided that the same cause-and-effect training might work on his endlessly battling three-year-olds.

‘They’re just a couple of little wild animals, aren’t they?’ Wolfgang argued when Frieda objected to her children being trained like dogs. ‘And you have to admit it works.’

‘It doesn’t work. They just think it’s funny.’

‘I prefer the laughing to screaming.’

Once the twins had been subdued, Wolfgang noticed Frieda’s red eyes.

‘What’s wrong, Freddy?’ he asked. ‘You’ve been crying.’

He sat beside her at her desk, sliding himself on to the piano stool she was using as a chair. ‘Come on, girl, I know times are pretty tough but we’re getting by, aren’t we?’

Frieda didn’t reply. Instead she handed him the banknote, a ten-million-mark one she had the previous day received in part change for a litre of milk.

Scrawled on the note in a naïve, girlish hand were the desperate words: For this very bill I sold my virtue.

Wolfgang frowned and then shrugged.

‘Must have been at least a month ago,’ he said. ‘Even a country girl would want a hundred million for her virginity now.’

‘I hadn’t believed Germany could get any more crazy,’ Frieda said, sniffing back the tears.

‘I suppose when you lose a world war things don’t get back to normal overnight.’

‘It’s been five years, Wolf. I don’t think anybody in Germany has the faintest idea what normal is any more.’

Outside their apartment the clanking of the lift announced its ponderous arrival at their floor.

‘Edeltraud,’ Frieda said with a long-suffering smile.

‘About bloody time.’

‘We need to get her a watch.’

‘We need to give her a kick up the arse.’

Edeltraud was the Stengels’ maid and babysitter. A seventeen-year-old street waif who had wandered into the Community Health Centre where Frieda worked, with her two-year-old daughter on her hip, and simply collapsed on the floor from hunger and exposure. Frieda had fed her, clothed her, managed to find her a place in a hostel and also, for the sake of the giggling little girl at her feet, promised Edeltraud a job.

This surprised and also exasperated Frieda’s colleagues at the Health Centre, who were on the whole stern-faced Communists and did not approve of bourgeois sentimentality.

‘If you’re going to give a job to every basket case that walks through our doors,’ a young colleague called Meyer grumbled, ‘pretty soon you’re going to be employing the entire population of Friedrichshain. You need to channel your social guilt into organized political action, not pointless and reactionary acts of counterproductive Liberal charity.’

‘And you need to shut your face and mind your own business,’ Frieda replied, surprising herself.

Wolfgang hadn’t been too happy about the arrangement either, although his reservations were practical, not dialectical. He just didn’t fancy the idea of having a scatter-brained, unskilled and uneducated teenager lolling about the house pinching his food. After a month or two, however, he was prepared to admit it was working out quite well. It was true that Edeltraud had never once been on time and she was certainly not the most hard-working girl in the world and she had an unbelievably annoying habit of rearranging his shelves. But she was pleasant and meant well and the twins loved her, which Wolfgang put down to them all having a similar age of maturity.

Edeltraud was only six years younger than Frieda but Frieda sometimes felt that she had a teenage daughter in the apartment, and a young and naïve one at that.

It was in fact the thought of Edeltraud that had made Frieda cry over the pathetic inscription on the banknote.

‘It could easily have been her who wrote this,’ she said.

‘Darling, when Edeltraud gets any money, she doesn’t waste her time writing poignant little notes on it, no matter how she earned it. She spends it on chocolate and film mags. Furthermore, Edeltraud can’t write.’

‘Actually she can a bit now, I’ve started to teach her.’

‘Don’t tell that arsehole Dr Meyer — he’ll say you can’t liberate the underclass by private initiatives, you need coordinated mass action.’

‘I don’t want to liberate the underclass, I just want Edeltraud to be able to read my shopping lists.’

A key scratched in the latch and Edeltraud bustled into the room with the bread delivery under one arm and her little daughter Silke under the other. Silke was the result of an extremely brief relationship the fourteen-year-old Edeltraud had had with a sailor, about which she was disarmingly frank.

‘He took me to this lodging-house bedroom,’ the young girl had explained to Frieda, still seeming to be getting over the surprise of it, ‘and when he finished doing what he wanted to do, which I can’t say as how I’d enjoyed very much, he said he was going to the toilet down the hall. Well, for about an hour I just thought he was constipated. I only realized he’d buggered off when the landlady starts banging on the door for her money, which of course I didn’t have. A nice way to lose my cherry, I must say.’

Silke was now two and a half years old and already a cheerful charmer with a mass of curls so blonde they were almost white. Curls which were of course an object of fascination and terrible temptation to Paulus and Otto, who tugged them at every opportunity.

‘Good day, Frau Stengel, Herr Stengel,’ Edeltraud said from the door. ‘I brought Silke; I hope you don’t mind.’

‘You know we don’t mind, Edeltraud,’ Frieda replied, ‘we love to have her. Just watch those boys and if they pull her beautiful hair whack them with the wooden spoon.’

‘Right,’ said Wolfgang, ‘I’m going to try and grab another forty winks. Don’t use the vacuum machine for a bit, will you, Edeltraud, there’s a love, and try to resist the temptation to rearrange the sheet music on the piano.’

‘Of course, Herr Stengel,’ Edeltraud replied, unconsciously swapping the positions of a framed photograph and an ashtray on the mantelpiece above the gas fire.

Wolfgang returned to the bedroom and Edeltraud, who was more than happy to be told not to work, started in with the latest news from the neighbourhood.

‘Did you hear?’ she said, breathless to tell.

‘What?’

‘The Peunerts gassed themselves!’

‘No!’ Frieda gasped in horror. ‘My God. Why?’

Even as she said it Frieda knew it was a stupid question, it was obvious why.

‘He was on a fixed pension from the post office,’ Edeltraud went on. ‘They left a note saying they’d rather die by their own hand than starve. They sold every stick of furniture they had to get the gas turned back on and then lay down together on the bare floor by the tap in the skirting board, with their heads under a blanket!’

‘Oh my God,’ Frieda whispered.

‘I think it’s really really romantic,’ said Edeltraud.

Edeltraud was not yet eighteen and told her gruesome story with all the unconscious callousness of youth.

Frieda did not think it was romantic. Living together into old age was romantic, committing suicide together was simply appalling and terribly sad. She had known the Peunerts by sight, had nodded to them often in the street, and yet she had been oblivious to the despair that had enveloped them.

‘I should have talked to them. Asked if they were getting on all right, if they needed help.’

‘Wouldn’t have done any good, would it?’ Edeltraud said. ‘You can’t make their life savings worth anything, can you? There was a woman at the ciggy kiosk this morning. Said she’d saved all her life and now the whole lot wouldn’t buy her a pack of smokes and a newspaper. If you ask me, the answer is, don’t save it. Get it, spend it.’

Edeltraud put Silke down on the floor and began rearranging the breakfast dishes that were piled up in the sink. ‘They put on their best clothes to do it, you know, her in a long granny frock from before the war and him in city coat and tie. Imagine that! The two of them, dressed up for Sunday in the Tiergarten, stretched out on the bare boards with a blanket on their heads. It’s almost funny really when you think about it.’

Little Silke waddled across the floor of the apartment to where the twins were playing. She stood in front of them for a moment, apparently deep in thought, strong, bare little legs planted firmly apart on the carpet, arms folded purposefully. Then, having clearly come to a decision, she sat down heavily on Otto’s fort, collapsing every single brick. Otto of course howled in fury and Paulus rolled about on the rug and laughed and laughed. Then Silke hauled herself to her feet, took a step towards Paulus and sat down on his fort, chuckling happily amongst the collapsed wooden blocks of two great military installations. Now it was Paulus’s turn to howl while Otto laughed. Then they fought, ignoring Silke, the cause of their distress, and flying at each other with tiny fists, rolling on the rug yelling and whacking as hard as they could. Silke, clearly pleased with the way the situation was developing, jumped on top of them both and joined in, laughing with delight.

Despite Frieda and Edeltraud’s efforts to quieten them it wasn’t long before Wolfgang came charging out of the bedroom with his water pistol blazing. This did eventually stop the fight but only after all three children were soaked, which meant they all had to be stripped and the clothes set out on the tiny balcony to dry. After which they happily began their favourite game of all. The boys piled all the cushions in the apartment on top of Silke and then jumped on them while she screamed with pure joy.

‘No point trying to get back to sleep now,’ Wolfgang said ruefully, putting a pan on the stove and contemplating the snake pit of limbs writhing amongst the cushions. ‘Got a lunchtime gig in Nikolassee.’

‘Can I make the coffee for you, Herr Stengel?’ Edeltraud asked brightly.

‘No, Edeltraud, you can’t. And when I say that, I mean it literally. You can’t. You could make the strange brown gritty solution you call coffee, which somehow manages to be both too strong and without flavour at the same time, but what you can’t do is make actual coffee so if it’s all right by you I’ll make it myself.’

‘Well, whatever suits,’ Edeltraud shrugged, ‘but personally I don’t think it matters as long as it’s warm and wet.’

‘And there, Edeltraud, in a brief and horrifying sentence you have the entire problem.’

‘You’re funny, Herr Stengel.’

Wolfgang contemplated his reflection in the polished wood of the beautiful old upright Blüthner piano, polished at least above toddler-finger level. ‘Better shave. I’m supposed to look presentable.’

‘I haven’t sponged the sweat stains out of your dinner jacket yet,’ Frieda said, ‘and it’ll need pressing too because you just left it in a crumpled heap on the bathroom floor when you got in, even though I’ve asked you a million times to at least hang it over a chair.’

Wolfgang took the jacket from where Frieda had hung it and began making pointless little smoothing gestures at the concertinaed creases.

‘Why we’re supposed to play music dressed up as head waiters is beyond me, anyway,’ he said. ‘The audience is supposed to listen to us, not look at us.’

‘You have to look smart, Wolf, you know that. I think the only solution is to get a second dinner suit. You have so many jobs now that there’s just no time to clean it between them.’

‘Everybody’s dancing,’ Wolfgang said, pouring out the coffee and handing Frieda a cup. ‘It’s so weird. I mean it, everybody. Grannies. Cripples. Cops, fascists, commies, priests. I see them all. The madder the money gets, the more frantically everybody seems to want to throw themselves around the room. I’m telling you. Berlin is now officially the world capital of crazy. I’m playing with guys from New York who say the same thing. They have nothing on us.’

‘They dance on top of taxis in America,’ Edeltraud said, ‘and on aeroplane wings. I saw it on a news reel.’

‘And that’s the point,’ Wolfgang said. ‘They’re doing it for fun, we’re doing it for therapy. It’s like the last party before the world ends.’

‘Oh don’t say that, Wolf,’ Frieda said. ‘I’ve only just graduated.’

‘It’s brilliant for us musicians, of course. We love the inflation. We love war reparations and the bloody French for occupying the Ruhr. We’re glad the mark has gone down a rabbit hole and ended up in Wonderland. Because the more screwed up the country becomes, the more work we get. I have five shows today, did you know that, five? Lunchtime waltzes for the old ladies and gents. An afternoon tea dance for the horny spinsters.’

‘Wolf! Please!’

‘You’re funny, Herr Stengel.’

‘I’m telling you, the whole country’s dancing.’

To the delight of Edeltraud and the children, Wolfgang performed a little tap routine. A skill he had perfected at the end of the war to augment his income as a busker.

‘Yes! We have no bananas!’ he sang, beating out the rhythm with dexterous toe and heel. ‘We have no bananas today!’

Frieda smiled too but she couldn’t help thinking of those who weren’t dancing. Of those who were lying cold on the floorboards of their empty homes. The old, the young, the sick, dying in their hundreds as once more starvation and despair returned to the capital after only the very briefest of absences.

If the people of her beloved Berlin were dancing, for many it was a dance of death.