Two Brothers

Romantic Gesture Berlin, 1935

UP UNTIL THE age of fourteen and a half, Otto and Paulus had done pretty much everything together. Laughed together. Fought together.

Fallen in love with the same girl together.

And killed together.

The last and most terrible of these bonds had of course been born of urgent necessity; they had had no choice. When Otto decided to attack again, forming what he called his retribution squad with a view to mugging a storm trooper, the brothers parted company.

‘We’ve done worse before,’ Otto said darkly when Paulus expressed his complete opposition to the plan. ‘You’ve done worse, you know that.’

‘Shut up about that, you stupid bastard!’ Paulus hissed. ‘We should never talk about that outside, do you hear?’

‘I’ll talk about what I like,’ Otto replied, ‘and I’ll do what I like. And I’m going to do this.’

‘Then you’re completely crazy,’ Paulus said. ‘You’ll be killed and it’ll break Mum’s heart.’

But Otto was adamant. The time had come to fight back. A line had to be drawn, a counter-attack mounted. No matter how minor or insignificant a gesture it was, somebody had to do something.

Dagmar loved the idea.

In fact, her eyes positively gleamed with excitement when Otto revealed his plan on one of the many evenings the three of them spent smoking cigarettes together in Dagmar’s pastel pink bedroom. The thought of action, vengeful action, was like a tiny spark in the darkness of her nightmare existence.

‘But what do you mean, “retribution squad”?’ she asked.

‘Exactly that,’ Otto said, trying to seem casual and matter-of-fact. ‘Me and a bunch of other Jewish lads from around our way are going to beat up a Nazi. There’s even a couple of non-Jew kids who want to be in on it, Commies and the like,’ he went on, ‘but we won’t let them. This is our fight.’

‘Exactly,’ Paulus replied. ‘Which is what the police will think too when they come to get us.’

‘They won’t know Jews did it,’ Otto said. ‘I’ve thought it through. We’ll take the bloke’s money so it just looks like a robbery. Anyway, even if they do blame us, what more can they do to us?’

‘Are you crazy? Haven’t you seen what they did to Dad in their camp? What they did to Herr Fischer?’

Invoking the fate of Dagmar’s father had the opposite effect to what Paulus had wanted. It fired up Dagmar to further encouragement, which was of course all Otto needed to hear.

‘That’s right, Pauly,’ Dagmar exclaimed with bitter venom,

‘they killed my dad. They killed him, Pauly. And now Otto’s going to give one of them a good hiding. If there was any justice in the world, Otto would kill the bastard.’

‘No!’ Paulus protested.

‘I will if you want me to, Dags,’ Otto said eagerly. ‘I really will. I’ll stick my fucking knife in his throat.’

‘No,’ Dagmar said, quietening down. ‘No, I don’t want you to kill one. Not for me. Pauly’s right about that. They’d come after us all for sure. There’d be a riot. But if you mug one you can make it look like a robbery.’

‘Well,’ Otto muttered, ‘OK. I’ll kill one next time, eh?’

‘Yeah,’ Dagmar said, her mouth set hard, her eyes cold, ‘and in the meantime just give him something to think about. Do it for me. In fact, I want a souvenir. How about bringing me the buttons off his shirt?’

Paulus looked up in alarm. He knew that nothing on earth could be more calculated to spur Otto to action than that.

‘Dags!’ he gasped. ‘You’re talking like some gangster. What’s happened to you?’

‘What’s happened to me?’ Dagmar asked, her voice cold as ice. ‘You ask me that, Pauly? What’s happened to me?’

Pauly could not meet her gaze. He looked away.

‘I’m just worried you’ll get Otts killed,’ he muttered.

‘I won’t get killed,’ Otto said firmly.

Then solemnly, menacingly, he laid out his collection of weaponry on Dagmar’s dressing table. His flick-knife, a cosh and a knuckle-duster. They looked strange and incongruous amongst the brushes and powder pots and little girlish trinkets.

And the beautiful miniature chest of drawers which Otto himself made for Dagmar on the occasion of his own thirteenth birthday. When he had still been a boy.

Dagmar went and stood before the dressing table, staring down at the weapons. Brushing her hand across them. She was wearing shorts and white tennis shoes without socks, showing off her long olive-toned legs. Her blouse was knotted beneath her bust revealing a band of soft, delicate skin between it and her shorts. Both boys stared in rapt fascination but for once she seemed not to notice their adoring glances. She was staring at the weapons.

‘Do it, Otto,’ she whispered. ‘Give one of them something to think about.’

‘I promise I will,’ Otto replied.

‘I’m telling you you’re crazy,’ Paulus said again, sullenly.

‘Nobody’s asking you to come,’ Otto said.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’

Paulus caught Dagmar’s reflection in the dressing-table mirror. He could see the disappointment in her eyes.

‘I’ll find better battles to fight,’ was all he could say and he knew how weak it sounded.

The following night Otto fulfilled his promise. He and four other boys ambushed two uniformed SA men and beat them up in an alleyway. It was a horrible mêlée, with kicks and blows and slashing knives. The troopers were bigger and stronger than the fifteen-year-old boys and were also used to street thuggery but, in the end, numbers and vengeful passion prevailed. The SA men went down and were kicked unconscious in the gutter. Then, while the other attackers went through the men’s pockets for their money, Otto knelt beside one of them and snapped open his flick-knife.

For a moment the gleaming blade hovered over the prostrate victim’s neck. One slash would do it. Otto glanced up into the faces of his comrades standing over him. Fear and exhilaration seemed to shine in equal measure in their eyes.

‘Next time, you fucking Nazi cunt,’ Otto whispered, ‘next time.’

Then he cut the buttons from the man’s shirt.

Two hours later, having scurried across the city imagining at every moment that the Gestapo were upon him, Otto presented himself at the Fischers’ front door. He cut a wild and dishevelled figure but Frau Fischer let him in without comment. Frau Fischer commented on very little these days, having begun to withdraw into herself more and more. She seemed so distracted that perhaps she did not even notice the cuts and bruises on Otto’s face and the splashes of blood on his shirt which he had concealed beneath his coat.

Dagmar noticed them.

‘My God, Ottsy,’ she gasped, leaning over the balcony of the first stair landing.

Otto looked up at her, standing like Juliet in the famous English play they had been made to read in translation at school. Her luxurious auburn hair framing such perfectly proportioned features. The huge dark eyes enchanting, bewitching.

‘Come up to my room,’ she said.

Frau Fischer turned away, returning to her shuttered drawing room and to the memories of her gilded past, leaving Otto to run up the stairs, two at a time.

Once safely ensconced in Dagmar’s bedroom he held out his clenched fist towards her, turned it upwards and opened his fingers.

‘For you,’ he said.

There lying in the palm of his hand were the SA man’s shirt buttons.

Dagmar looked down at them and gave a little gasp.

‘You got them,’ she said. ‘You did it.’

‘Yeah. I did it… I did it for you.’

She looked at him and smiled.

Otto felt weak at the knees.

‘It’s nice to see you smile, Dags,’ he stammered. ‘You don’t seem to very much these days.’

‘Whenever I try to smile,’ she said, ‘before long I see the pavement. And the boots all around me. And Mother and Father, with their tongues out…’

‘Don’t, Dags.’

‘Sometimes I see the station platform and those men pulling at Daddy but mainly I see that pavement outside the shop. And my face is pressed against the paving stone. In my dreams I can actually smell it.’

Otto didn’t attempt to answer; he and Paulus had long since come to understand that there was a place where Dagmar had been and where a part of her would always remain, which was beyond any comfort they could offer.

Except perhaps that was not quite true tonight. Perhaps in doing the wild and stupid thing he’d done he’d helped her just a little. Given her a momentary respite from her own pain and bereavement.

She played with the buttons in her hand for a moment, then let them fall one by one on to the glass surface of her dressing table, clack — clack — clack.

‘Someone else is the victim for once,’ she whispered. ‘Someone else was lying on the ground with boots all around them.’

Then she gave Otto a cigarette, a Gitane.

She had done the same thing many times. But this was different. Spine-tinglingly different. She lit the cigarette for him. Putting her full, soft lips around the end and taking the first puff before handing it to him.

What touched her lips then touched his.

Otto was literally quivering with desire. His hands were shaking despite his every effort to still them.

After he had taken a drag or two, she reached over and plucked it from his lips, took another deep draw herself and then put it back in Otto’s mouth. Her lipstick was red on the white paper, he could taste it along with the smoke.

Otto had never dreamt that having a ciggie could be so sexy or so sophisticated. He felt as if he’d grown up a whole decade between puffs.

When the cigarette was nearly burnt down, Dagmar took it from Otto’s lips for the final time and ground it out in the crystal ashtray that sat beside her dolls on the dressing table. Then she drew Otto towards her and kissed him, full on the mouth. This was no furtive, stolen moment, like it had been at the Kempinski hotel, but slow and rich and generous.

Her lips opened beneath his and then he felt her tongue brush against his.

Otto’s mind spun cartwheels in almost blind delirium. This was ecstasy pure and simple. He tried to concentrate; he was, after all, living through the most important and most ecstatic moment of his life.

The kiss lasted a moment longer before Dagmar stepped back and smiled at him.

Otto imagined the ecstatic moment was over but he had no complaints. Had he dropped dead then and there he would have died a happy boy.

But then he felt her soft lips against his ear.

‘You can put your hand in my blouse if you like,’ she whispered.

No dream had ever come more true.

For three long years Otto had wanted nothing so much on earth as to put his hand in Dagmar’s blouse and now quite suddenly that sublime moment had arrived.

She kissed him as he pulled at the sweet-smelling cotton, dragging the hem from beneath the waist of her skirt. Then he put his hand underneath, moving it upwards, across the soft skin of her ribs. He felt one of her breasts, first through her brassiere and then, slipping his fingers inside the wired garment, touched the nipple beneath.

He was shivering with excitement. And it seemed to Otto that so was Dagmar.

This was an unexpected development. It had never even occurred to Otto that she might feel passion too. He would never have flattered himself to imagine that a goddess such as she could reciprocate his desire. All he had ever dared hope was that she might tolerate it in return for undying devotion and lifelong service.

And yet she seemed to shiver too.

For a moment they stood together, pressed against the dressing table, lips working at each other’s mouths. Otto trying simultaneously to both lose himself in and yet also remember forever the extraordinary ecstasy of actually touching Dagmar’s breasts.

Then she pushed him away.

‘No more,’ she gasped. ‘We should stop before… Not because I don’t want to… but because I do…’

Dagmar reddened as the sentences trailed away.

Otto grinned a grin so broad it seemed to split his face in two. He had come so much further than ever he had dared to hope.

‘This is the best night of my life,’ he stuttered. ‘I mean literally. Honest. Just the best… literally.’

Dagmar smiled too. A true and genuine smile, a smile that for a moment seemed free of pain. The smile not of a hunted and a haunted Jew who was celebrating the mugging of an enemy, but simply of a young girl just turned fifteen who was growing up and had properly kissed a boy for the first time.

‘Thanks for my buttons,’ she said, tucking her blouse back into her skirt. ‘Although I don’t really think I want to keep them. Do you mind?’

‘No, I don’t think you should either,’ Otto replied, still red-faced with delight. ‘I’ll take them and chuck ’em, shall I?’

‘Only if you absolutely promise to throw them down the first gutter. If you kept them and they were ever found…’

‘Don’t worry.’ Otto smiled. ‘Paulus may be the clever one but I’m not completely thick you know.’

The mention of Paulus made them both think for a moment. Looking into each other’s eyes in silent acknowledgement that the dynamics of all their lives had changed.

‘I’d better go,’ Otto said.

He scooped up the buttons and made for the door, stumbling over the thick rug and nearly upsetting a little table crowded with stuffed toys and ornaments.

‘Ottsy,’ Dagmar said, ‘you know you and Pauly always tell me that one day I’ll have to choose?’

‘Yeah,’ Otto gulped.

‘Well, I have. I love Pauly but… I’ve chosen you.’