Two Brothers

A Spontaneous Drink London, 1956

‘THAT WAS THE last night me and my brother ever spent together,’ Stone said. ‘The Gestapo arrived the following morning.’

Despite their previous arrangement not to meet up until after his return from Berlin, Stone had decided to call Billie and to ask if she could see him.

He knew that to do this was against the unspoken rules of their relationship. But sitting alone in his flat, after spending an entire day with the deeply irritating and unsettling MI6 double act, Stone had realized that he did not want to wait until he got back from Berlin to see Billie.

Not least because he was not at all sure that he ever would come back from Berlin. A trap was waiting for him there. Of that he had become quite certain.

He hadn’t expected Billie to agree to come out. He had presumed she’d be busy. Busy with her young, carefree, potential-packed life. Busy associating with people who were not crippled by history.

Busy being properly alive.

‘I know we said we wouldn’t meet up in the week but…’ he began over the phone.

‘Baby, you said dat, not me,’ Billie corrected him. ‘Personally I don’ like to make no rules. I like to be spontaneous.’

‘Spontaneous?’ Stone said. ‘That sounds like a nice thing to be. I think I can just about remember what it is.’

‘Well, let’s be spontaneous now then. Let’s go out for a drink on a school night. How’s dat for wild and reckless?’ Billie laughed. ‘Do’an worry, baby, it do’an mean we be married nor nuttin.’

They agreed to meet on Piccadilly and chose a little pub halfway down St James Street from the Ritz. As they entered Stone noted the looks they got from the other clientele. He was used to it but it always irritated him. Black people were still pretty rare in pubs up West and a white man with a black woman always drew attention. Particularly a woman such as Billie who was young, beautiful and dressed as ever in as eye-catching a manner as she could contrive. That evening she had on white stiletto shoes, tight denim pedal-pusher jeans and an equally figure-hugging pink cashmere sweater which extended over her bottom and was tied off at the waist with a black patent leather belt. To top it all off she wore a rakish tweed trilby hat perched on top of her magnificent jet black bouffant.

‘I know what they’re all t’inking,’ Billie whispered as Stone returned from the bar with their drinks.

‘They’re thinking “Lucky bastard”. That’s what they’re thinking,’ Stone replied.

‘No, man. They’re t’inking how much she chargin’ ’im an’ could I afford it meself.’

Stone set the drinks on the table. A pint of bitter and a port and lemonade on either side of their packs of cigarettes, hers French, his American.

‘So you jus’ felt like some company then?’ Billie asked.

‘Yes. I suppose. Something like that. This Berlin trip. It’s got sort of complicated.’

‘Everyt’ing about you is complicated,’ Billie replied with a laugh. ‘It’s kind of interestin’ an’ sort of cute but you don’ wanna overplay it. A girl could get bored only gettin’ to meet ten per cent of a fella.’

‘I thought you told me to keep my demons to myself,’ Stone said, smiling.

‘That was when I only knew you a week,’ Billie replied. ‘Now it’s been t’ree months. Maybe it’s time you let a couple out. You know, jus’ one or two every now and den.’

‘You’d really like me to?’

‘I just said so, didn’t I?’

And so Stone began to talk.

Talking about things he never talked about. Sharing something of the weight of history and emotion that he kept shut up in the locked suitcase of his mind.

Perhaps it was the cigarettes that set him off.

Billie was smoking Gitanes, the same brand Dagmar used to get from her French pen pal. The same brand that he and she had smoked together on the night when he’d brought her the buttons from the SA man’s shirt and she had chosen him over his brother. Even the design of the packet was the same as it had been in the thirties.

‘We mugged those guys,’ Stone said, drinking deep on his beer. ‘I can’t say I regret it even now. I can see the bastard like it only happened this evening, right there, through the bottom of my beer glass. And I’d do it again too. When we jumped them they were strutting up the street like they owned it. Like they all strutted. Strutting and marching and stamping around like they’d done something brave and special by ganging up in their millions in order to persecute a few scared little individuals. That was what always annoyed me the most, the way they acted as if their “revolution” as they called it had been somehow heroic. Like they’d had some long, legendary struggle. Jesus, the Nazi Party was only as old as me. We were born on the same day. And heroic? The best they could come up with for a martyr was a pimp called Horst Wessel who got knifed over a girl three years before Hitler even came to power. They had all these festivals and celebrations, every week it seemed like, commemorating their “years of struggle” and their “martyrs”. They’d parade around with their “Blood Banners” going on about what a fight they’d had saving Germany. Jesus, when you actually added it up they’d lost about ten yobs in pub fights, that was it. But every Nazi walked round like he’d been a Spartan on the bridge when all they’d actually done was push Jewish grannies off the pavement.’

‘So you rolled dese guys,’ Billie asked.

‘That’s right, we rolled them. Cornered them in an alleyway, me and four other kids, and kicked the shit out of them. You’d have done the same if your dad had been half crippled in a concentration camp like mine was.’

‘Ha! Do’an give me dat! You wasn’t doin’ it fo’ your dad, you was doin’ it cos o’ dis girl.’

Stone smiled.

‘Well. Let’s say I did it for various reasons,’ he said.

‘But you didn’t kill dem?’

‘No. Not that time. I’d killed a man before though.’

‘What?’ Billie said, quite horrified. ‘Before you were fifteen?’

‘Me and my brother did it. In our apartment. I knocked the guy out and then Paulus suffocated him. I used that little statuette that’s in my flat. The one of my mother.’

Billie grimaced at the horror of it, but there was something else in Stone’s story that also made her think.

‘Paulus?’ Billie asked looking quizzically at Stone. ‘So that’s your brudder den?’

‘That’s right.’

‘But your name’s Paul?’

‘Yes,’ Stone agreed warily.

‘So you’re called Paul an’ your brudder was called Paulus?’

‘So it would seem.’

‘What the matter wit’ your momma? She only know one name?’

Stone gave a noncommittal shrug and took another swig of his beer.

‘Don’t you want to know why we killed the guy?’

‘I guess you must a’ had a pretty good reason.’

‘We killed him because he was about to rape our mum.’

‘I s’pose they don’t come much better than dat.’

Stone told the story. Surprising himself by taking pleasure in divulging information that had not even been sought. He, who for twenty years had made a habit of giving nothing away until forced to. He told Billie about killing Karlsruhen and about the buttons he’d cut off the SA man for Dagmar. About how triumphant she had been and how she’d kissed him and let him touch her.

‘Sounds like a dangerous girl to be in love with if you ask me,’ Billie observed.

‘She was excited,’ Stone replied defensively. ‘We’d drawn blood. Stood up and fought back. Don’t judge her — they made her lick pavements and they murdered her father.’

‘I ain’t judging her, Paul,’ Billie replied. ‘I don’t judge anyone.’

Then he told her the rest of the story of that night.

About how he’d arrived home to discover the truth about his adoption.

‘I just felt so completely alone. Deserted. They were my family, my whole life, and suddenly I was no longer a part of the single greatest element of their lives, the terrible danger they were in. I was alone. It was so strange. I’d decided so completely that I was a Jew, you see.’

‘And suddenly you weren’t?’

‘No.’

‘You told me you were.’

‘Yes. That’s what I’ve told people ever since I came to this country. But I’m not. Sorry about that.’

‘Don’ matter to me.’ Billie shrugged. ‘Jew or non-Jew is two exactly similar t’ings as far as I’m concerned.’

Stone drained his beer, took Billie’s glass and was about to go to the bar for another round. Billie put her hand on his arm to stop him.

‘What’s your real name, Paul? Just so I know.’

Stone smiled.

‘Otto,’ he replied. ‘My real name is Otto.’