Two Brothers

Too Much Jazz Berlin, 1923

THE JOINT, AS Tom Taylor happily remarked, was jumping.

‘This band is on fire,’ he shouted from behind his kit. ‘They don’t got no better in New York City.’

Wolfgang was trying out a new piano player, a Russian émigré called Olga, an ex-duchess or princess of some sort, or so she claimed. But then all the Russian refugee girls thought they were Grand Duchess Anastasia, so she might just as easily be the daughter of some semi-literate farmer who owned one too many cows and so got a bullet in exchange for his field. Not unnaturally, Olga loathed Wenke, the Communist clarinettist, and the feeling was fully reciprocated.

Wolfgang enjoyed the tension.

‘We can’t all be friends. It’s bland. A bit of conflict’s good for the minor keys,’ he said. ‘It really puts some bite into Wenke’s atonal riffing.’

‘I would like to see a crazed dog put some bite into Wenke’s atonal arsehole,’ Olga spat through her cigar smoke.

‘Just keep playing, princess,’ Wenke snarled into his clarinet, ‘you can’t run for ever. The revolution’ll catch up with you in the end, then there’s a lamp-post waiting for you just outside in the street, you damned kulak.’

‘You bloody sauerkraut Reds!’ Olga sneered from her piano stool. ‘You’ll never have a revolution. You won’t fart unless Moscow sends you written permission. Here’s to Lenin’s fourth stroke! They say he can’t talk any more. Give me a call when the bastard can’t fucking breathe either, I’ll buy drinks all round!’

Olga spat on the floor and raised a glass of vodka mixed with pepper provocatively in Wenke’s direction. Wolfgang decided to kick into the next number before the two musicians came to blows.

‘This one’s brand new and straight off the boat,’ he called out over the general din. ‘I think you’re going to love it as much as we do, it’s by the great American Negro composer Jimmy Johnson of New Jersey and it’s called the Charleston.’

Tom Taylor gave an introductory spin around his tom toms and the band struck up the number which, since Wolfgang had put it into the repertoire the previous week, had proved a guaranteed floor filler.

As he played, Wolfgang stared happily out over the brass cone of his trumpet. The club was packed, as it was every night, and through the smoke and the lights was everything he wanted to see. Writhing bodies. Crazy faces. Booze, girls, good times. He loved it. It had already been three months but it felt like hardly a week. The Joplin had become his second home.

Kurt’s people had become Wolfgang’s people.

Even the unconscious girl who had ended up under the table on their first acquaintance turned out not to be the poor stupid drunken whore he had originally presumed her to be. Her name was Helene and despite being only twenty she was already a fashion buyer at the great Fischer department store on the Kurfürstendamm.

‘Sorry about the other night,’ she had giggled when they met for the second time. ‘Apparently I was awful, not that I remember. Just got the mix of drugs a teeny bit wrong. Easy thing to do.’

Helene was infectiously positive in her outlook, thinking that pretty much everyone and everything was interesting and fun in its own way.

‘I see dull people as projects,’ she told Wolfgang, ‘to be reformed. After all, everyone’s interesting deep down, aren’t they? I mean breathing is interesting, isn’t it? I mean, when you really come to think about it. Don’t you think? I mean, honestly?’

Helene would laugh and chatter and charm until the very moment when the booze and pills shut her down. She scarcely gave the slightest indication that she was ‘fried to the hat’ as she put it until her eyes rolled back in her head and she slid under the table. After which Helmut would make sure she got put in a car and taken home to her doting parents. Helene was as gorgeous, spoilt, wild and vivacious as any jazz baby could ever hope to be, and in any other club Wolfgang had ever played in he would certainly have allowed himself the indulgence of seeking her out between band breaks and enjoying her sparkling company.

But not in a club with Katharina in it.

Band breaks were just too precious to spend time chatting with any other girls, no matter how charming they were.

Wolfgang knew he was getting too close. That he shouldn’t be looking forward to seeing her the way he was. Looking out from the stage to find her. Searching for her between brackets. Sitting with her at the bar whenever he could. Eagerly exchanging views on the latest play or exhibition.

But surely there was no danger. She was with Kurt. And he was happily married.

Yes, she’d kissed him on the first night they had met but she had never done so again. When he lit her cigarette she didn’t touch his hand as she had done that first time either. Or fix him with her stare as the smoke drifted up from those same purple lips.

So when Wolfgang left the stage on the night in November when the Charleston was a week old, he didn’t hesitate in searching her out at the bar.

They agreed the new tune was a sensation.

They laughed about the angry Bolshevik clarinettist and his nemesis the foul-mouthed Russian pianist princess.

They discussed the latest Georg Kaiser play, Nebeneinander, which was about to open at the People’s Theatre with designs by Georg Grosz, whom they both agreed was their favourite artist.

And then he asked her why she had kissed him on the night they’d met.

It just came out of the blue. Or perhaps more accurately, out of a bottle. He had certainly drunk more than usual.

‘I wasn’t expecting you to ask me that,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t expecting to ask it.’

Katharina sipped her champagne.

‘Perhaps I was a little drunk,’ she said. ‘And I liked you. You remember I told you? That you were hot? I meant it. Aren’t I fresh? But you see I didn’t know until after I had kissed you that you were married. I don’t know, when I watched you on stage you just didn’t look married.’

For once her stare was not bold. Instead she looked down at the ashtray on the bar between them. Avoiding Wolfgang’s eye.

‘And of course you’re also with Kurt?’ Wolfgang added.

‘That junkie? I was then, I’m certainly not now.’

‘So you’re single?’ Wolfgang said, realizing he had said it rather too quickly. Too eagerly.

‘Yes. Fancy-free. That’s me,’ Katharina said with brittle gaiety. ‘Aren’t I the lucky one?’

‘And if… and if…’ Wolfgang took a swig of his fresh scotch, recklessly aware that he’d already had much more than was usual for him.

‘And if what?’ Katharina asked.

‘And if I had been single?’ he asked. ‘After you kissed me that night? If I had never mentioned any wife and kids?’

‘Then I would have kissed you again the next night, Mr Trumpet. And every night after that until neither you nor I were single any more.’

Wolfgang felt a thrill run through every fibre of his body.

Katharina’s eyes were a little misty.

‘But you did mention them. And I’m an old-fashioned kind of modern girl, you see, and it makes rather a difference. It would have been nice of course,’ she said dreamily, ‘if you’d met me first. Instead of your dedicated doctor. I wouldn’t have minded a theatre-mad jazz man for a boyfriend.’

The booze was coursing through Wolfgang’s veins now. Delivering its reckless courage to his head.

He crept his hand along the bar to where Katharina’s hand lay, a cigarette between the fingers. Nails jet black and shining.

‘We’ve met now,’ Wolfgang said quietly.

Their fingers touched.

Katharina looked down and for a moment she seemed lost in thought.

Then she took her hand away, putting the cigarette to her lips and drawing on it hard.

‘I told you. I’m an old-fashioned modern girl. Let’s keep things as they are, OK? We’re friends. We talk. You’re married.’

Wolfgang felt foolish. And angry. The whisky made him graceless.

‘Old-fashioned? What about that producer from UFA?’

‘Excuse me?’

Even drunk, Wolfgang knew he had no right to mention it. ‘Nothing.’

‘I want to know what you mean,’ Katharina asked.

Wolfgang shrugged. ‘The one you disappeared with that night.’ He mumbled, looking down at the floor to avoid her eye. ‘I don’t think he wanted to discuss film technique.’

Katharina stared at him hard. Her eyes were no longer misty but cold.

‘Oh. So you noticed, did you?’

‘Of course I did. I… I was jealous.’

‘You’re married to Mrs Trumpet, Wolfgang. What right have you to be jealous?’

‘None, I suppose, but I was.’

Katharina’s momentary burst of anger subsided. Instead she looked sad. She drew heavily once more on her cigarette, sucking the glowing end right down to the filter. She lit another from it and shrugged.

‘That was business. Stupid and completely naïve. But business none the less. The casting couch, I think they call it. He made promises and I fell for it. Or at least I fell for it enough to take a calculated risk and lost. He got what he wanted and I didn’t. I turned up at the studio the following morning and he refused to see me. More fool me. It’s the first time I’ve ever made that mistake and it’ll be the last.’

Wolfgang was calm again. And ashamed.

‘I’m really sorry, Katharina. I shouldn’t have brought it up. What a bastard, I’d like to punch his—’

‘It doesn’t matter. It was over in a second and it’s done with. But while I might be prepared to fuck someone I don’t like for the right reasons, I’m not happy to fuck someone I do like for the wrong ones, which is that we are both drunk and tired and full of all that jazz. You more than me, I think, so you go and play me some music and then go home to Doctor Stengel before you ruin my good opinion of you.’

Wolfgang got up from his bar stool.

‘Yeah. Maybe you’re right, Katharina,’ he said. ‘Sorry for being an arsehole. And thanks for… well, thanks.’

‘Just get on stage. And make it hot hot hot, eh?’

Wolfgang made his way back towards the band room, passing Helmut who was heading for the men’s toilet leading a shaven-headed military type and a beautiful young man.

‘The party never stops, eh, Wolfgang?’ he said.

Wolfgang smiled. ‘I imagine it will have to stop in the end.’

Two weeks later, on 15 November, the new president of the Reichsbank abolished the worthless Deutschmark and introduced a new emergency currency with draconian restrictions on lending and speculation. The Rentenmark, as it was called, held its value, and almost overnight another German madness was over.