Two Brothers

Rejected on Grounds of Race London, 1956

STONE DELIVERED A fourth round of drinks to the table and without prompting took up his story.

It had been so very, very long since he had talked about himself but now that he had started he found he didn’t want to stop.

‘Finally they let me out,’ he said. ‘The principal got me in his office and said I could leave the school for an evening between five and nine. It was what I’d been working towards. It was why I’d stopped fighting and swearing at the Führer.’

‘An’ I bet I know jus’ exactly what you did when you did get out,’ Billie said with a smile of her beautifully crimson lips, which seemed to remain perfectly covered with lipstick no matter how much of it she left on the rim of her glass.

‘What do you think?’ Stone asked.

‘You went straight aroun’ to this Dagmar’s place of course. Bet your feet didn’t even touch the ground.’

‘Yes I did,’ Stone said quietly, a faraway look in his eyes.

‘An’ so you broke little Silke’s heart.’

‘You think so?’ Stone enquired. ‘I really don’t know if she liked me that much. Not in that way. We were mates. We’d always been mates.’

‘Men never know. ’Specially when they don’t want to. An’ little sixteen-year-old men are worse. I remember. They are dumb!’

Stone smiled and shook yet another cigarette from his pack of Luckies.

‘Well, if I did hurt Silke I certainly got paid out myself,’ he said.

‘Dagmar dumped you?’

‘I suppose that’s what happened. Although I hadn’t really been her boyfriend except for that one night. She certainly rejected me. I turned up on her doorstep and at first her mum wouldn’t even let me in and even when she did I only got as far as the entrance hall. I was in that terrible black uniform you see, covered in swastikas. I had to be, I didn’t have any other clothes. You can imagine what it looked like to Frau Fischer. Me dressed up like a teenage SS officer. She went completely white. It took her a minute to even realize it was me. I think she’d thought I’d come to arrest her. She was completely hostile. Told me to go away at once. Said I was a German now and not a Jew. I never thought they’d reject me like that but of course she had a point. I was putting them in danger. If I’d got caught visiting them it would have been them that got punished, not me. The authorities wouldn’t have needed much of a reason to have another go at the Fischer family.’

‘Well, like you say, it’s a fair poin’,’ Billie said.

‘I know. But I was still completely devastated. I pleaded with her. Swore that I’d sneak around and that nobody would find out but she asked me if I’d visited my own family, which of course I hadn’t, so she said I should show the same consideration to her and Dagmar.’

Billie sipped at her drink for a while. ‘Amazing situation. I guess there’s a lot of mixed-up stories dat got lost in the Holocaust.’

‘I’ve never talked about it before.’

‘I know dat,’ Billie said with the smallest touch of irritation. ‘You don’ have to be telling me all the time. You’ve said. You’re an uptight, wrung-out, buttoned-up, emotionally empty guy who’s in love with a dead girl and doesn’ deserve to be happy. I know the rules, OK?’

Stone smiled. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Well, it’s borin’,’ Billie scolded. ‘Now, even though you never tell an’ even though it’s all a secret, what happen’d next? What about Dagmar? The amazin’, curvy, sultry, long-legged Dagmar who you an’ your brother be wet-dreamin’ about every night since you was twelve. Did you see her?’

‘Yes, for a minute,’ Stone admitted, staring sadly at the soggy beer mats on the table. ‘She came down the stairs and stood behind her mother. I tried to say something to her but she just shook her head.’

‘Didn’t she say anyt’ing at all?’ Billie asked.

‘Yeah. I’m afraid she did. The very worst thing she could have said. She said I wasn’t a Jew any more. That hurt so much. It was the one thing I was dreading. And for it to come from Dagmar was just devastating.’

‘If you want my opinion, baby,’ Billie said, snapping her Gitane alight with an elegant flick of her beautiful Dunhill cigarette lighter, ‘I t’ink your Dagmar girl is a little bit of a bitch.’

‘No,’ Stone said firmly, ‘don’t say that, Billie. Please don’t. I can’t have you say that.’

‘You really do still love her, don’t you? After all these years you’re still leapin’ to her defence.’

‘Yes I am. Because, you see, she wasn’t a bitch. She was a lovely girl. Funny and beautiful and proud and clever. That’s how she was before the madness anyway. I’m not saying she was an angel but believe me she was a good person. A decent person. Just try to imagine what she’d been through, what she was going through. Her whole life had been stolen from her. Her whole wonderful world had turned into this brutally cruel and terrifying torture.’

‘Yeah. Of course,’ Billie conceded. ‘I said I didn’t judge people and there’s me doin’ jus’ that. I have no right.’

‘She felt betrayed, you see,’ Stone went on.

‘By you?’

‘Yes. I could see it in her eyes as she stood there on the stairs. Of course it was unfair and I’m sure she knew it was. But she still felt it and I understood. We were living on different planets now. I had a future and she didn’t. I can see her now, looking so beautiful. Thinner and more careworn but just as lovely as she ever was. And then she told me to go. She said that even without the risk she didn’t want to see me. She just didn’t want to be around a boy who still had a life when she was slowly… slowly dying.’

For the first time since he had begun his story, words failed him.

Billie put her hand on his knee and squeezed it.

Then the barman approached their table.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but could you kindly finish your drinks and leave.’

Stone, who had been in the act of taking a sip of his pint, put it down and looked up at the man.

‘What?’ he asked quietly, his fingers already closing into fists.

‘I’m sorry,’ the barman said. ‘I don’t mind myself so I haven’t said nothing, but the landlord’s come back from being out and he’s seen your friend. He won’t have no blacks in his pub, see. It’s policy, so you’ll have to go.’

Stone picked up his glass again and took a slow deliberate swig of beer. Billie was already putting her cigarettes and lighter into her little purse.

‘You tell the landlord—’ Stone said slowly.

‘Paul, please,’ Billie interrupted angrily, ‘let’s go. I don’t wanna drink in dis boozer anyway. With such people? No thanks. It’s beneath me.’

Stone put an arm out to stop her getting up.

‘You tell your landlord,’ he repeated to the barman, ‘that he’s a Nazi cunt. Do you hear me? And that goes for you too, by the way, and you’re a coward besides.’

‘Now listen here!’ the barman protested. ‘This ain’t me, I just work here—’

‘Just obeying orders?’ Stone sneered. ‘Now where have I heard that before?’

‘Paul… Otto… please. I wanna go,’ Billie said.

The landlord appeared. A large, arrogant-looking man with Brylcreemed hair and a bristling moustache. He wore a military blazer, shiny at the elbows with a regimental crest on the pocket. ‘Right,’ the man said, ‘this is my pub and I say who drinks here so you hop it and take this black slut with you.’

Billie was already on her feet, having shaken off Stone’s arm.

‘We’re going anyway, you sorry and disgustin’ person,’ she said, looking like a queen addressing a peasant. ‘The air done started stinkin’ in here. Maybe it’s the drains but personally I t’ink it’s da management.’

But still Stone did not move.

‘I’m going to count to five,’ he said menacingly, ‘by which time I suggest you’ll have apologized to this lady. One… two…’

Billie tried once more to interject but it was no use. Stone completed his count and then, rising from his seat with his upper cut already in motion, brought his fist up under the landlord’s chin and knocked the man sprawling to the floor. The sickening crack his knuckles made on connection suggested the landlord’s jaw may have been broken. Stone spun around, ready to deal with the barman, but the frightened man was already backing away, cannoning into the table behind him and upsetting the drinks. No one else in the pub seemed minded to get involved.

‘Now we can go,’ Stone said, draining his glass and getting up.

‘I t’ink we’d better,’ Billie replied, hurrying to the door. ‘There ain’t never a call for violence, by da way.’

‘That’s what Chamberlain said,’ Stone replied as he followed her.

Together they hurried out of the pub and hailed a passing cab.