Two Brothers

Tea and Biscuits London, 1956

STONE STARED AT the hessian-covered table in front of him. At the teacups and the biscuits and the block of yellow notepaper with the fountain pen on top. He focused on the black Bakelite telephone with its sharp angular edges and its frayed, double-twisted, brown fabric cord. It must have dated from the early 1930s.

What had he been doing when that cord was new?

Fighting, no doubt. Or running in terror along some Berlin pavement looking for an alley to dodge down. He and his brother chasing each other’s heels, two teenage boys in mortal fear for their lives.

Stone’s eye followed the cord down off the table, across the slightly warped, ruby-coloured linoleum and into a largish black box screwed to the skirting board. He fancied he could hear the box humming but it might have been the distant traffic on the Cromwell Road.

He shifted nervously in his seat. He had never quite got used to being interviewed in bare rooms by government officials. Even now he could not quite persuade himself that he was safe. Even now some part of him expected violence.

Except of course that this was England, they didn’t do that sort of thing here. Some of Stone’s more left-leaning acquaintances sneered when he said that. But then they had never had the misfortune to live in a country where sudden and absolute violence was the norm and not the exception.

Stone looked once more at his interrogators. A classic pair. One short and rather plump, balding, with an officious little soup stain of a moustache, his beady eyes flicking constantly at the biscuits. The other not much taller but thinner, standing in the corner of the bare windowless room, watching through slightly hooded eyes. It felt to Stone like he was in a scene from a movie. That he was being questioned by Peter Lorre while Humphrey Bogart looked on inscrutably, keeping his own counsel.

‘You are travelling to Berlin in the hope of meeting up with your brother’s widow.’

This was the second time the shorter man, Peter Lorre, had asked this question.

Or was it a statement? It was certainly true. But how did they know?

They had read Dagmar’s letter. Obviously.

‘Presumed widow,’ Stone replied, evading the question. A lifetime’s experience had taught him that it was usually wise to withhold any information from the authorities until forced to divulge it.

‘You don’t think your brother’s dead?’

‘There has never been any actual proof of it.’

‘You mean a corpse?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Your brother is certainly presumed dead,’ Lorre replied, finally capitulating to the biscuit plate and choosing a shortbread finger. ‘Killed by the Russians during the battle for Moscow in 1941.’

‘That is what I was told,’ Stone said, ‘after the war, by the East German authorities.’

‘Have you any reason to doubt it?’

‘No. None at all. I’ve always hoped, that’s all. My brother generally had a plan. He would have been a hard man to kill.’

‘The Waffen SS tended to be made up of hard men to kill. At least until they started recruiting boys. Your brother joined in 1940, didn’t he?’

Was there a hint of a sneer? Stone felt his anger rising. What right did this smug little man, munching on his shortbread finger, have to judge? He hadn’t been where his brother had been. Where his mother and father had been. And Dagmar.

Again the guilt.

Survivor guilt, the shrinks called it.

‘My brother wasn’t a Nazi,’ Stone stated firmly.

‘Of course he wasn’t,’ Peter Lorre replied, and now the sneer was unmistakable. ‘None of them were Nazis, were they? Or so they all claim now. And the Waffen SS wasn’t really proper SS anyway, was it? They never ran the camps. You can’t blame them.’

‘My brother was married to a Jew,’ Stone said.

‘Yes, we know. Dagmar Stengel, née Fischer. You are travelling to Berlin to meet her. Is that not the case?’

Stone stared at the cups and saucers once more. He didn’t like telling them his business, but it was clearly a rhetorical question and he didn’t want to be caught in a lie.

‘Yes. Dagmar Fischer,’ he admitted.

‘Dagmar Stengel.’

‘I knew her as Dagmar Fischer. She married my brother after I left Germany.’

‘When did you last see Mrs Stengel?’

Stone drew deeply on his cigarette and closed his eyes. How often had he relived that moment? The whistling and shunting of the trains. The smell of her hair. The martial music on the loudspeakers that made it so hard to whisper the things he needed to say.

‘In 1939,’ he answered.

‘In Berlin?’

‘Yes. In Berlin.’

‘And after the war? Did you try to find her?’

‘Of course. I tried to find all my family.’

‘You were in Germany?’

‘Yes. With the army. I worked in the Displaced Persons camps, with the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. You know all this, it’s in my records.’

‘So,’ Peter Lorre observed through a mouth filled with biscuit, ‘well placed to look for an elusive Jewess?’

Elusive Jewess. Such a phrase. The little man clearly had no idea of the casual contempt and innate suspicion contained within it. ‘An elusive Jewess?’ Stone repeated. ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’

‘I mean Frau Stengel of course.’

‘Then bloody well say so.’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘Frau Stengel then?’ Lorre resumed. ‘You didn’t find her?’

‘No.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘I never found out.’

‘One more anonymous victim of the Holocaust?’

‘I presumed so.’

‘But you now think she survived?’

Stone paused for a moment, considering his reply.

‘I have recently allowed myself to hope that she did.’

‘And why would that be?’

Stone was trying very hard not to become angry. Getting angry never helped. Not with the sort of people who sat behind green hessian-covered tables with cups of tea and empty yellow notepads.

‘What is this about?’ Stone asked. ‘I don’t understand why you want to know, or why I should tell you for that matter.’

‘It’s very simple,’ the plump man replied, breaking a second biscuit in two and taking the larger half. ‘If you cooperate with us you’ll soon be on your way. If you don’t, then there’s any amount of red tape we can tie you up with pretty much indefinitely. You might not get to Berlin until the year 2000, by which time you will be a very old man and Berlin will long since have been reduced to a pile of smouldering radioactive rubble. So just be a sensible chap and answer our questions. Why do you now hope that Dagmar Stengel is alive?’

Stone shrugged. The supercilious little swine knew anyway.

‘Because she contacted me.’

‘Out of the blue?’

‘Yes. Out of the blue.’

‘After seventeen years?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you’re sure it was Frau Stengel?’

That was the rub. He was sure. He was absolutely sure. The writing, the tone, and the memories the note contained. And yet…

‘She said she’d survived most of the war in Berlin as what they called a “submarine”,’ Stone replied, avoiding Lorre’s question. ‘But the Gestapo picked her up in June ’44 and shipped her to Birkenau. It seems she escaped.’

‘A rare feat indeed.’

‘Such things happened, rarely, but they happened. She says she got out during the Sonderkommando revolt at Crematorium IV and saw out the war fighting with Polish Partisans. After that, the Soviets put her back in a camp along with the rest of the surviving Polish resistance.’

‘Quite a story.’

But not impossible. Dagmar had been tough and resourceful for all her refined manners.

‘I can see you found it hard to credit,’ the plump man said, looking steadily at Stone. ‘Not surprising, after so long. However, I am here to tell you that the story is true. Or at least its conclusion is. Dagmar Stengel is alive and well and living in East Berlin.’

The surge of joy he felt was like the sudden, heady rush that sometimes overtook him in his dreams. When it was he and not his brother on the beach at Wannsee entwined in Dagmar Fischer’s rain-dappled arms.

‘How do you know?’ Stone asked, trying to keep his voice from shaking.

‘We know lots of things.’

Stone banged the table with his fist. The cups rattled. The ancient telephone receiver jumped in its cradle. This was his business, not theirs. His family. His life. How dare they act as if it was some game!

‘How do you know!’ he demanded. ‘Tell me!’

‘Sources,’ the plump man replied, ignoring Stone’s passion and idly succumbing to the other half of his second biscuit, ‘confidential sources.’

‘Are you MI6?’

‘MI6 does not exist, Mr Stengel.’

‘Stone! My name is Stone. It’s been Stone for fifteen bloody years!’

‘Yes, you changed it, didn’t you?’

Again a tiny sneer. This time not for the German who claimed not to have been a Nazi but for the sneaky Jew who had changed his name to hide his Jewey-ness. That was the Brits, they liked it both ways. Just because they’d saved the world for decency and fair play didn’t mean the bloody Yids could start getting above themselves.

‘I changed my name,’ Stone snapped, ‘because the army advised me to. The British army. If I’d been taken in action and they’d found out I was Jewish, I’d have been gassed.’

‘All right. Keep your shirt on,’ the little man said with a patronizing smirk. ‘We knew that.’

‘You know a bloody lot.’

‘We try to.’

‘Because you’re MI6,’ Stone said. ‘The Secret Service.’

‘Can’t tell you that, can we, Mr Stone? Then it wouldn’t be secret.’

Peter Lorre smiled and wiped his mouth, clearly pleased with his little joke.

Stone should have guessed it from the start. Just the layout of the room was proof enough. Bare, save for a table, tea, biscuits, paper and a phone. Not a book, not a pamphlet, not a memo. No chart on the wall, no wastepaper bin under the table, not even a paperclip. What normal office was ever like that? Even the police had posters on their walls.

And then there was the double act. The chatty one, the silent one. Classic, of course. Such a cliché. He really should have guessed. They were spooks all right.

And they said Dagmar was definitely alive.

Once more the surge of joy.

She’d survived. Berlin. The camps. The gulags. She’d survived them all.

And through all that dreadful darkness she had remembered him. He who had loved her.

He who still loved her.

Who would always love her.