Two Brothers

A Very Proper Little Girl Berlin, 1926

WOLFGANG PUT DOWN his coffee cup, took up his pen and forced himself to begin.

Music Tutor seeks Pupils. Piano and all other instruments a speciality.

There. The first sentence. Done. He put down his pen.

‘Shall I make some more toast?’ he said, turning to Frieda.

‘Wolf! You’ve hardly even started!’

‘All right! All right!’

He stared at the paper for a moment or two and then showed her his single line.

‘What do you think so far?’

‘I don’t think you can say all instruments are a speciality,’ Frieda replied. ‘I mean, everything can’t be a speciality, can it? No matter how good you are.’

‘You see! I told you this wouldn’t work.’

‘Wolf! You haven’t tried at all.’

‘Because my heart isn’t in it. Why don’t you write it?’

‘Because I’m darning.’

They were still in bed. It was a Sunday morning. What should have been the best day of the week. So peaceful. Coffee, toast. Frieda stitching socks, Paulus on the rug reading. Otto biting the heads off his toy soldiers. And he had to write this stupid advert.

He chewed his pen in moody silence.

Specializing in all instruments?

All instruments equally special?

You name it, I can play it?

‘Maybe I should just stick to piano,’ he said. ‘That’s all anyone ever wants their little buggers to learn anyway.’

‘Whatever you think. Just get on with it.’

He hated the idea of having to teach music.

And he particularly hated the idea of teaching music to children. But he knew from friends who had been forced into the same grim career compromise that that was where the work was.

‘Of course it’ll be kids,’ he said grumpily. ‘Adults are mature enough to know they’re shit at music. You have to teach children to understand that they can’t play.’

‘Please try not to be so negative, Wolf,’ Frieda said.

‘Well, that’s really what teaching music is about, isn’t it? I mean, ninety-nine per cent of the time? The long torturous process of revealing to the student that they are complete crap and will never be able to play anything more than O Tannenbaum. Teacher and student just waiting it out week after week after week until finally the penny drops and the student gives up, never to think about music again until they force it on their own equally talentless kids.’

‘Wolf! Shut up! Either write the advert or don’t.’

‘I’m just being honest, that’s all.’

He had enough trouble trying to get his own kids to pick up an instrument, let alone anyone else’s. He could scarcely get Paulus and Otto to even listen to anything decent. He strongly suspected he was the father of a couple of Philistines. The only jazz they seemed to like was ragtime, and at very nearly seven they really ought to have got a bit beyond that.

‘Are you sure they weren’t both adopted?’ he whispered occasionally to Frieda.

Which she did not find funny at all.

Wolf was a professional musician. Not some glorified nanny.

It was the government’s fault, of course. Stresemann and that whole dull Social Democratic crowd with their boring stability and prudence. What was becoming of the country? It was a disgrace! Even in Berlin, in the heart of the youngest, wildest, most hedonistic and avant garde metropolis on the planet, things had calmed down to an alarming degree. There was still club work at weekends but the weekdays were dead.

‘People have stopped dancing,’ Wolfgang moaned. ‘Three years ago I had my pick of twenty gigs a day. Now I’m fighting top side men for pfennigs. Guys who have really got it are playing piano in fleapits to the Keystone Cops! It’s a criminal waste of talent. God, I miss the good old days.’

‘What?’ Frieda said, focusing on threading a needle. ‘You mean revolution and inflation?’

‘Yes! Exactly, Fred! That’s exactly what I mean. Cataclysmic national disaster! That’s what a city needs to make it swing. Three years ago when the country was completely knackered, bank clerks and shop girls were dancing crotch to crotch into the small hours! Drinking themselves insane, snorting cocaine and slipping off to screw in the toilets! Jazzing it up like there was no tomorrow because they didn’t think that there was going to be a tomorrow. Suddenly they’ve turned into their parents. It’s a disgrace.’

‘People can’t have fun all the time, Wolf.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they have responsibilities. They need to save. They need to start planning for the future.’

‘Future! Future. As if any German under thirty-five even knows what the word means! There never was a future up until now! Being alive in the morning, that was the future. The future was your next meal. Now people are planning for old age. Investing in pensions, putting a little aside for their summer holidays. Have we learned nothing? Don’t they realize that the next drink and the next dance are the only investments worth making?’

‘Well it’s up to you, darling,’ Frieda said. ‘Do it or don’t do it but you know as well as I do that we could do with the money.’ She paused for a moment before adding, ‘You know, just until you sell a song.’

Wolfgang smiled. She meant it too. She still believed.

‘The next Mendelssohn, eh?’

‘No!’ Frieda protested. ‘The next Scott Joplin.’

Wolfgang kissed her.

‘Yuk!’ said Otto from amidst his dead soldiers.

‘Don’t be immature, Otts,’ said Paulus from his book, adding ‘Poo face’ under his breath.

‘Frieda, I’m not Joplin,’ Wolfgang said with a smile. ‘I’m just happy to live in a world where somebody is.’

Frieda smiled. ‘So what now?’

‘Well. I suppose I try and finish this advert.’

‘Oh give it here!’

And exactly a week later, on the very next Sunday morning, instead of lying in bed till noon, Wolfgang found himself dressed in his best suit pouring coffee for a prosperous-looking gentleman who sat gingerly on the edge of the Stengels’ cluttered couch next to his exquisitely turned-out six-year-old daughter.

‘And the little girl?’ Wolfgang enquired. ‘Fräulein Fischer?’

‘Dagmar,’ the gentleman said. ‘Please, you must call her Dagmar.’

‘Uhm… Will you take some refreshment, Dagmar?’

There were suppressed giggles from somewhere in the vicinity of the doorway to the kitchen. Clearly other members of the Stengel household were finding their father’s efforts at polite formality amusing. Little Silke was with them too, as mischievous as either of the boys.

Wolfgang glanced furiously over his shoulder but none of the three culprits were to be seen.

‘I should like a glass of lemonade, please, Herr Professor,’ the little girl on the couch replied in the most refined of voices, ‘with quite a lot of sugar.’

This produced a positive explosion of suppressed merriment from the kitchen followed by the sound of little boys’ laughter and then, worse, a little girl’s voice indulging in a whispered effort at mimicry.

‘I should like a glass of lemonade please, Herr Professor. With quite a lot of sugar.’

The elegant, refined little girl sitting stiff and straight-backed beside her father could hardly help but hear the ridicule being directed at her and so put her nose in the air, her effortlessly superior expression making it clear that she was used to ignoring boys and other riff-raff.

‘I’m sorry,’ Wolfgang apologized. ‘My sons. I’d chuck them out and let them beg but I’m obliged by law to look after them. Damned Weimar Government, too soft by half, eh?’

Herr Fischer smiled.

‘Boys,’ he said indulgently. ‘I seem to recall having once been one myself.’

‘There’s a girl too,’ Dagmar said firmly. ‘I heard her most clearly. A very very horrid girl in my opinion.’

Wolfgang smiled apologetically.

‘Our maid’s daughter. But she’s all right, just high-spirited, that’s all.’

‘My mummy says that there is never any excuse to be rude or unkind. Certainly not high spirits.’

This pious observation brought forth further suppressed giggles and Wolfgang decided he’d better move things along.

‘I’m afraid we don’t have any lemonade, Dagmar. Sorry, just water actually. And I’m not a professor either.’

‘If you are to teach me then you are a professor, Herr Professor,’ the beautifully dressed little girl replied firmly, her huge, dark eyes turning unblinkingly upon him. ‘All of my tutors are professors. It is how things are done.’

Her father, Herr Fischer, smiled indulgently, no doubt under the impression that Wolfgang must be finding his lovely, porcelain doll of a daughter as charming and clever as he did himself. In fact Wolfgang was struggling to conceal his desire to give little Dagmar a slap and get her and her father out of his apartment as quickly as possible so that he could have a cigarette and get back to his piano.

But he had to go through the motions. He had promised Frieda and they really could do with the money. Although Wolfgang was quite certain that he would be turned down. These people were not his people. Wolfgang knew who the man was, everybody did. He was Fischer of Fischer’s department store on Kurfürstendamm. And people like Herr Fischer did not entrust their daughters to people like Wolfgang who didn’t even have any lemonade in the house and wasn’t even a professor.

‘May I ask, Herr Fischer,’ Wolfgang said, ‘why you’ve come to me? I’m not exactly a society tutor and I’m new to teaching. I can’t claim much experience with children either. Particularly one as young as your daughter.’

Particularly snooty-looking little creatures like Dagmar, Wolfgang thought. A Ku’damm princess whom Daddy wanted to acquire a ‘refined’ and ‘dainty’ skill to make her more marriageable to the right sort of minor ex-royal or son of an industrial magnate.

‘Little experience with children?’ Herr Fischer laughed. ‘What were those two young maniacs who ran out of the room when we arrived, then? Hobgoblins? They sound naughty enough to be.’

The boys had in fact begun to edge their way back into the room, and were lurking in the doorway just out of Fischer’s vision, their faces contorted with exaggerated expressions of hostility and contempt. Paulus and Otto were prepared to tolerate the existence of girls at their school but in their own home they drew the line (Silke being an honorary boy). Particularly girls with perfectly placed pink ribbons in their hair, snow-white trimmed black velvet dresses and clouds of delicate lace at their necks and wrists.

‘Boys are rather different,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘Besides, I only have to live with those two, I don’t have to teach them music.’

‘You mean you don’t teach them music?’ Mr Fischer enquired. ‘I would find that very surprising.’

‘Well, yes, of course I do,’ Wolfgang said, slightly confused, ‘as a father, yes, of course. But professionally I have only ever taught adults and quite frankly I’m not even much good at that. I’m really not at all sure that I’m the sort of person you—’

‘My husband will be thrilled should you decide to place your lovely Dagmar with us as a pupil,’ Frieda said, bringing in a tray of biscuits from the kitchen.

There was a loud raspberry from behind her at this but again, when Frieda glanced round angrily, no culprit could be seen.

‘I’m Frau Stengel, Herr Fischer,’ Frieda said, offering her hand. ‘Frau Doktor Stengel.’

‘Thanks, darling,’ Wolfgang said firmly, ‘but I think I can arrange my own clients and I really don’t think this would work out for either of us.’

‘Really?’ Fischer enquired. ‘Your advert said you were taking on pupils. Is there anything wrong with my daughter?’

‘Of course not, no!’ Wolfgang said quickly. ‘But look, Herr Fischer, I know who you are. Fischer’s is a Berlin institution. You’re a rich man, you could afford to hire the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic to teach your little girl. You don’t want me.’

‘Why not?’

Wolfgang gestured at the crowded untidy apartment. The trombone leaning in the corner. The accordion on the table amongst the newspapers and musical manuscripts. Cushions and books on the floor. Coffee cups balanced on the bookshelves. The theatre and film posters on the wall, Piscator and Chaplin side by side.

The framed prints, grotesque cartoons of fat greedy capitalists and homicidal Prussian officers, their hands filled with money and dripping with blood while all around them the poor and the sick looked on in sullen anger.

‘George Grosz,’ Fischer said, ‘from the First Berlin Dada Fair.’

‘You know it?’ Wolfgang looked surprised.

‘You think a shopkeeper can’t appreciate art?’

‘Well… I admit I’m surprised that you… Do you like Grosz then?’

‘I admire him,’ Fischer replied warily, ‘I can’t say I’d hang him in my drawing room.’

There was a moment’s silence. Frieda offered Dagmar a biscuit at which the little girl nibbled tentatively, like a bored mouse who can expect better later.

‘Look, Herr Stengel,’ Fischer said, ‘I don’t know much about music and I don’t know anything about teaching. What I know is selling. Now when I employ a person to work in one of the departments in my store, I try and find someone who’s interested in the thing they’ll be selling so they can make the customers interested in it too. It said in your advert that you are a composer, arranger and orchestrator as well as being a working professional musician. I like that idea. I can’t imagine anyone being more interested in music than a composer, can you? Unless of course it’s a piano salesman.’

‘You want me to “sell” music to your kid?’ Wolfgang asked, unable to disguise his disdain.

‘Well, it’s like anything, isn’t it? If you’re going to spend a lot of money on a hat you’ve got to be really convinced that you love that hat. To put in all the effort it must take to learn an instrument I imagine you’d really have to believe in music, wouldn’t you? So, yes, I want you to “sell” music to Dagmar that she might be inspired to learn.’

Wolfgang could not deny the sense in what Fischer was saying or the honesty with which he said it.

‘And you have children yourself. I don’t think there’s any more impenetrable psyche than that of a small child. I personally can’t make head nor tail of them, which is why my wife and I employ two nannies. You have children and clearly you’re raising them yourself. It all looks like a good fit to me.’

Wolfgang was about to reply but a look from Frieda silenced him and Fischer continued.

‘Dagmar’s mother and I think that she’s shown a bit of talent… No, don’t worry,’ he went on in answer to the flicker of amusement that crossed Wolfgang’s features. ‘I’m not one of those ridiculous parents who think their child is a genius prodigy. It’s just that we’ve noticed that she’d rather mess around at our piano than with her dolls so we thought we’d give her lessons. I took a look at a couple of expensive chaps in the city but their “studios” as they called them looked like a cross between a prison and a cemetery to me. I want Dagmar to have a bit of fun. I’ve seen you play a couple of times too.’

‘You have?’ Wolfgang said, perking up immediately. ‘Really? Where?’

Frieda smiled at Wolfgang’s puppy-like eagerness.

‘Not recently, bit busy for late nights these days, now the economy’s expanding again. But during the inflation, we were all a little looser that year, weren’t we? I saw you at the Joplin Club.’

‘Best gig I ever had.’

‘Yes, it was fun. Quite crazy really. I remember the owner, he came up to my table and actually offered to buy my department store. There and then. Absolutely extraordinary, he couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen.’

‘Eighteen, just,’ Wolfgang replied.

‘Really. A young man destined to go far, I think.’

‘Sadly not. He died.’

‘Oh dear. Of what, may I ask?’

‘Tastes he’d developed during the inflation that he couldn’t afford to sustain when it was over.’

‘I see.’

‘There were a lot of casualties that year. He was one of them.’

‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear that.’

‘Yes, so was I. He couldn’t play a note but he was as jazz as any man I ever met. Whenever a great new disc comes off the boat from the States I still think of him. Of how much he would have loved it. The silly fool. Anyway, Herr Fischer, you’ve convinced me. I’ll take the gig. I’ll sell music to your daughter.’

‘Wolf!’ Frieda admonished. ‘You’re supposed to convince him.’

‘Oh. Yes, of course. Sorry.’

‘Quite all right.’ Herr Fischer laughed. ‘It works either way.’

There was another raspberry from somewhere just beyond the living-room door, followed by chuckling and the scuffling of feet.

‘And I promise you Dagmar will have fun,’ Frieda said brightly.

And in that moment the course of the four young lives was set.