Two Brothers

Twins Berlin, 1920

IT TURNED OUT that Frieda was right, she was carrying two boys, but the labour was long and difficult and only one of them survived it, the other choked on a twisted cord.

‘I’m sorry, Frau Stengel,’ the doctor said. ‘The second child is stillborn.’

Then they left her alone.

Not out of any sense of delicacy but simply because the hospital was so busy. Four years of war, followed by the spitting, spluttering dud of a ‘revolution’, had left nobody with much time for niceties, particularly the medical profession. Frieda, who had not herself suffered any complications during the birth, was aware that they would be wanting her little bare yellow-painted room back. She did not have much time.

‘Hello, little one,’ Frieda whispered, struggling to find it in her heart to welcome one baby while bidding farewell to the other. ‘And goodbye, little one.’

She did not want her joy in the living, breathing creature that lay in one arm to be drowned for ever in her tears for the lifeless little bundle that lay in the other, but at that moment Frieda did not see how it could be any other way. She knew that she would forever mourn her child who never was.

‘Auf Wiedersehen, my darling,’ she breathed.

The mean light from the single forty-watt bulb that hung unshaded above her bed fell on the bundle’s tiny grey face, pinched and wrinkled like an ancient Chinaman. The other bundle began to cry, a tiny bleating sound at first, which grew in volume as the little creature discovered the power of his lungs. Frieda turned her gaze from the miniature Chinese death mask to the crying baby and then back again. One pale and dull in death, the other shining and growing redder and redder in the dawning of life.

‘Auf Wiedersehen und guten Tag. Guten Tag und auf Wiedersehen.’

Then the doctor returned with an old nurse who took the dead baby from Frieda’s arms. ‘Smile for this one most of all, Frau Stengel,’ the nurse said, making the sign of the cross over it. ‘He’s spared the misery of this world and instead begins at once to savour the joy of the next.’

But Frieda could not smile. She didn’t believe in a next world and so knew only the misery of the present one.

Then the doctor spoke.

‘Frau Stengel, I hesitate to speak with you being so recently bereaved but I feel I must. There’s a young woman in a nearby ward. Or rather there was. She died an hour ago. You survived and lost a child, this woman died while a child lived… a boy.’

Frieda only half heard him. She was watching as the old nurse took a part of her away. Not to the better place she promised but to the cellar of the hospital and the incinerator. There would be no flowers, no prayers. Germany’s ongoing agony dictated that the disposal of corpses, no matter how innocent and tiny, was an efficient and mechanical affair. The bundle had been in her body for nine months; it would be ashes in not many more seconds.

‘I’m sorry, doctor,’ Frieda said, ‘what was it you were saying? A mother and child?’

‘Just a child, Frau Stengel. The mother died delivering him and his father is dead too. A Communist. Shot at Lichtenburg.’

Frieda knew about the massacre in the suburb of Lichtenburg. A thousand workers arbitrarily rounded up by Freikorps and shot in the street with the full connivance of the Minister of National Defence. It was scarcely even mentioned in the papers at the time, murder being so common in Berlin, even mass murder. But Frieda was the sort of person who took trouble to remain informed.

‘The dead girl was estranged from her parents,’ the doctor continued. ‘They didn’t want the child of a Red in the family and now that their daughter is dead they want it even less. They’re tired and poor and not interested in any bastard orphan grandchild.’

It was as if the dull bulb above her bed burned a little brighter as Frieda began to understand.

The bundle was gone but it could live again. All the preparations she and Wolfgang had made, all the love that had grown in their hearts for two babies, would not go to waste. That love was needed, desperately. A little soul was waiting to be claimed. She would have twins after all. Paulus would have his Otto and Otto would have his Paulus.

‘Frau Stengel,’ the doctor was saying, ‘I know that you are distressed but would you possibly consider—’

‘Bring me this baby please,’ Frieda replied before the doctor could even finish his sentence. ‘Bring me my son. He needs me.’

‘But your husband,’ the doctor began, ‘surely you must ask—’

‘My husband is a good man, doctor. He will feel as I do. Bring me our second son.’

Moments later there was a new bundle on Frieda’s arm where the ancient grey Chinaman had lain so briefly. This one red-faced, bespittled and howling like its new twin. Two healthy babies, one in each arm. It was as if time had stood still for the previous hour and only now was Frieda’s labour complete.

‘Guten Tag, und guten Tag,’ Frieda whispered.

The adoption was a simple matter to arrange, the wheels of the process being extremely well oiled. Germany might have been short of young men in 1920, but after the war and the influenza pandemic that followed it, it certainly had plenty of orphans, and the hospital was anxious to be done with this one. Wolfgang was summoned from his place in the butcher’s queue and the necessary papers were produced even before Frieda’s milk had begun to flow. The child’s maternal grandparents appeared briefly at Frieda’s bedside and signed away the child with scarcely a glance at it. They wished Frieda and Wolfgang a gruff good luck and disappeared from Frieda and Wolfgang’s lives for ever. Gone before the ink was even dry.

And so it was the four of them just as had been planned and as Frieda had predicted. Frieda and Wolfgang and their two boys, Paulus and Otto. Otto and Paulus. Two sons, two brothers, equally wanted, equally loved. Equal in every way.

Just the same.

Except not quite the same.

There was one difference between the two boys. A difference that went almost without comment at the time. A difference that was entirely irrelevant to Frieda and Wolfgang. But a difference that would in the fullness of time become a matter of life and death. One child was Jewish, the other was not.