Two Brothers

Fighting over Dagmar Berlin, 1932

OTTO WAS VERY surprised. What had got into Paulus?

Otto was a fighter, a two-fisted scrapper who never bothered with words when a blow could be more articulate, but Paulus was the opposite.

Paulus never fought unless he absolutely had to. He never lost control of his emotions either. He was passionate, certainly, but he always tempered his passion with reason.

Reason should therefore have told him that in a fist fight against Otto he was bound to get pounded.

He was taller, but he was thinner.

He had the reach but Otto had the grunt.

He was a rapier, Otto was a Howitzer.

Which was why it had come as such a shock to Otto to feel the knuckles of Paulus’s left upper cut smashing into his mouth and rattling his teeth. What was more, the sharp pain of that first unexpected blow was followed swiftly by a deep intestinal ache as Paulus buried his right into Otto’s guts.

Otto doubled forward involuntarily, as had of course been the purpose of the carefully placed blow, and shortly thereafter he found himself knocked sprawling on to the ground by a pile driver of a left hook to the side of his bowed head which split open the skin on his ear and made his vision double.

A perfect three-blow combination.

Proving just what can be achieved with surprise and cool, forensic determination. Exactly as the boys’ boxing instructor had always told them it could. Paulus had clearly been paying more attention than Otto had supposed.

The boxing classes were Wolfgang’s idea. Frieda had been dead against them.

‘Teaching them to fight might actually get them into trouble,’ she had protested. ‘It might make them think they can handle something they can’t.’

‘They already think they can handle things they can’t,’ Wolfgang argued, ‘so we might as well try and even the odds a bit.’

That had been two years before in 1930 when almost overnight Berlin had begun once more to resemble the lunatic asylum it had been when the twins were born. Those old familiar sounds had returned to the city, breaking glass, running boots, screams and gunfire. To Frieda and Wolfgang it was as if they’d never gone away. There were the same daily battles between the same old factions. Except on the right the Nazi Sturmabteilung had replaced the late and unlamented Freikorps.

‘Just like old times,’ Wolfgang remarked.

‘Not quite,’ Frieda remarked grimly. ‘This time it’s worse for us.’

She was right and Wolfgang knew it. The anti-Semitism was more pronounced than it had ever been before. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Gauleiter of Berlin, did not let a day go by without appearing on some street corner to accuse the Jews of power and influence that corrupted and controlled every aspect of society.

‘If we really had as much influence as that bastard says,’ Wolfgang commented, ‘we’d have had him fucking killed long ago.’

But the Jews of Germany were none of the things they were supposed to be. They were neither organized nor focused; the only thing that united them was the accident of genealogy that named them Jews. Accused of a collective conspiratorial aggression, they were incapable of collective defence, and all Wolfgang could do for his own family was put bars on the windows, keep a blackjack in his pocket and make sure his boys knew how to box.

Of course he had not expected them to start using their skills on each other.

Looking back, neither Paulus nor Otto could quite remember which of them it was who first admitted to being in love with Dagmar. A confession which sparked the bloodiest battle they had ever fought.

It was Silke who provoked it.

They’d been playing horse shoes with her in a muddy little patch of public gardens near the Stengel apartment, and Silke had taken the opportunity as she often did to complain about ‘Princess’ Dagmar and how more and more ‘up herself’ she had become.

‘She thinks she’s better than us because she’s so rich and so pretty,’ Silke said grumpily. ‘Just because her dad’s a millionaire.’

Stung by Silke’s contempt, one twin had told her to keep quiet, that Dagmar was OK.

Then the other volunteered that she was more than OK, she was in fact rather wonderful. Gorgeous even. Stunning.

A total goddess might be one way of putting it.

And suddenly the truth was out. The Stengel boys were in love.

With the same girl.

Silke actually stamped the ground she was so angry and frustrated. She had long sensed that such emotions were gathering within her beloved twins, but was nonetheless shocked at how comprehensive they had turned out to be.

‘You can’t both love her!’ she cried. ‘It’s just stupid.’

This was one thing on which the boys could certainly agree.

‘Of course we can’t!’ Paulus snarled. ‘Because actually I’ve already told her I love her and she’s agreed to go around with me.’

‘It’s a lie!’ Otto shouted back. ‘I’ve already told her I love her and she said she’d go around with me.’

Despite her fury Silke couldn’t help but laugh at that one.

‘Haha! She’s tricked you both!’ she cried. ‘More fool you. She probably doesn’t give a shit about either of you.’

‘Yes she does!’ Otto shouted, advancing on his brother and pushing him backwards. ‘She loves me and you’d better back off and keep away or you’ll regret it!’

That was when Paulus had surprised Otto by laying him out with his beautiful triple combination.

‘She’s mine!’ Paulus shouted down at his astonished and slightly woozy brother. ‘She told me she loved me!’

‘Like hell she did, you wanker!’ Otto shouted back, directing his cry to the space between the two images of his brother which were floating before his eyes. ‘She said she loved me!’

Otto had never seen his brother’s face red like that, his eyes wild with emotion. Paulus was supposed to be the calm one.

‘She’s making arseholes of both of you,’ Silke called out from the tree stump on which she had perched herself to watch the fun. ‘It’s obvious she’s told you both the same thing. She’s having a laugh.’

‘You keep out of it, Silks!’

Otto had been caught unawares. When he’d pushed his brother backwards towards the bike shed, a heavy palm banging against his twin’s chest, he hadn’t expected to be answered with this flurry of finely delivered blows. But he was ready now. He had discovered that there was one subject on which Paulus’s usual calm and reason deserted him.

‘Yes, you keep out of it, Silks,’ Paulus said. ‘This is between Otts and me and you’d better back off, Otts, OK? Or you’ll be sorry.’

‘Yeah?’ Otto replied, raising himself from the ground. ‘You think ’cos you landed a lucky punch or two you’re a fighter, do you? Well now I’m going to beat the shit out of you, Paulo, until you admit that Dagmar’s mine.’

Otto got to his feet, put his head down and piled in with a flurry of body punches, right and left hooks banging into Paulus’s floating lower ribs. Otto was not the clever one at school and Paulus got better marks in human biology but Otto knew where a man’s liver and kidneys were, and he was seeking out his brother’s with deadly accuracy, twisting his fists slightly, screwing the blows into Paulus’s body as he’d been taught to do.

Paulus reeled backwards, gagging heavily as he tried to draw in breath and stop himself from puking.

‘Admit it,’ Otto shouted, ‘just admit it!’

It was Paulus’s turn to be bent double now, gasping, holding on to his injured sides.

‘Fuck you!’

Otto stood over his wheezing brother. ‘I reckon you’ve learnt your lesson now, so admit she loves me.’

Otto never should have dropped his guard.

Paulus straightened himself up, throwing a wild cross, a classic sucker punch, and Otto was the sucker for imagining his brother beaten. Otto had reckoned it would be ten minutes before Paulus could form a proper sentence, let alone deliver a haymaker of a right hook that swung up from out of nowhere and caught Otto in the eye, sending him once more sprawling to the ground.

In all the club bouts Otto had fought he had never once been knocked down, and now his brother, his thoughtful, cautious, calculating brother, had decked him twice in no time at all.

‘Otto, are you all right?’ Silke cried out. She’d seen the boys fight before many times but never like this. Paulus and Otto fought all the time, but just whacks and scuffles. This kind of brutality they reserved for common enemies, not each other.

Silke knelt beside Otto, dabbing at his bleeding ear with the hem of her dress.

‘Get up,’ Paulus shouted, ‘get up and swear to me you’ll leave Dagmar alone. Otherwise you’ll get some more.’

‘God, you’re both pathetic. She’s just a stuck-up bitch anyway.’

‘Shut up, Silke!’ Otto said, brushing her away. ‘This hasn’t got anything to do with you!’

‘Yes it has! She lied to you both! She’s trying to break up the Saturday Club!’

‘Clear out of it, Silks,’ Paulus shouted, ‘this is between me and Otts.’

Now it was Paulus’s turn to be caught off guard. He really should have been paying attention to Otto, not Silke, because just then Otto seized the opportunity of Paulus’s momentary distraction to jump to his feet and commence another assault. This time he did not intend to underestimate his brother. Squinting through his rapidly closing eye, he put up his guard and steamed back into the fight. No flurry of punches now but a properly executed combination. By the book. Left jab, straight right, left hook, straight right again. Paulus tried to protect himself by going into a clinch but Otto saw it coming, feinting a hook and, when Paulus turned away from it, hitting him with a final cross before flattening him with a bone-crunching head butt, which was not out of any book but his own.

The fight was over and although technically Otto won with a knockout, it was evens on points, and both boys were probably equally dazed and bloodied at its conclusion.

‘Cor,’ Silke said, somewhat stunned, ‘you two really went for it.’

Paulus had been very slightly concussed by Otto’s final head butt but after a moment or two he raised himself up to a sitting position and wiped blood from his mouth.

‘Dagmar Fischer’s mine,’ he said quietly. ‘Just keep your bloody hands off her.’

‘What?’ Otto exclaimed fiercely. ‘I just whipped you! I won her! You keep your hands off.’

‘That’s not how it works with girls,’ Paulus grunted. ‘You can’t just win them in a fight.’

‘Well, what the hell were we fighting for then?’ Otto enquired, reaching out a hand to help Paulus up.

‘Because you’re both idiots!’ Silke exclaimed angrily. ‘And she’s just a lying, hoity-toity cow. I can’t believe either of you are interested.’

‘Yeah, well, you’re jealous of her,’ Otto said.

‘Am not.’

‘Yes you are!’

‘Why? Why would I be jealous of her?’

‘Because we like her, that’s why,’ Paulus said, laughing.

‘Huh! As if I care who you like,’ Silke shouted, but she was going red beneath her golden tan. ‘She’s a stupid bean pole and I don’t believe those tits are real. She’s putting tissues under her vest, I bet. But anyway you can have her if you like. I’m going home.’

Both boys were laughing now. Their fight forgotten in shared merriment at their old friend’s discomfort.

Silke turned on her heel and stomped off, leaving the boys to compare wounds.

The Saturday Club had suffered its first true division.