Two Brothers

An Operation is Cancelled Berlin, 1920

FRIEDA AND WOLFGANG took the decision not to have Paulus and Otto circumcised for the strangest and most incongruous of reasons. It happened as a result of a failed attempt by reactionary fanatics to seize control of the German state.

‘It was pure Dada really,’ Wolfgang liked to joke when he told the story in later years (the boys glowing red in the corner at having their penises discussed at their parents’ parties). ‘The ultimate Surrealist non-sequitur. Some idiot tries to do a Mussolini in Berlin and my lads get to hang on to their foreskins — figuratively speaking, I mean, of course. How’s that for a random and chaotic juxtaposition? Life imitating art!’

They had certainly intended to have their boys circumcised.

‘We have to do it,’ Frieda said, when they brought the babies home from the hospital, ‘it means so much to my parents.’

‘My mum and dad wouldn’t care either way, but I suppose being dead their opinions don’t count against the mighty Tauber family,’ Wolfgang commented.

Wolfgang’s parents had both died the year before. Like so many millions of other Europeans, they had survived the war only to be struck down by flu.

‘Please don’t turn this into another rant about my dad,’ Frieda insisted. ‘I say we just get on with it. It never did you any harm.’

‘You don’t know, do you?’ Wolfgang growled with mock lasciviousness. ‘Who knows what powers of passion I’d deploy if I had a hooded helmet?’

Frieda silenced him with one of her looks. Having given birth only days before she wasn’t in much of a mood for dirty jokes. ‘Just book the rabbi,’ she said.

But as fate would have it, Wolfgang’s misgivings were irrelevant because there was to be no circumcision anyway. On the date when tradition required the deed to be done, all the water dried up in Frieda and Wolfgang’s apartment.

They were standing by the kitchen sink into which they had just placed two shitty-bottomed babies in dire need of a bath and all they got when they turned on the taps was a distant clanking sound.

‘We’ve got no water,’ Frieda said.

‘Shit,’ Wolfgang replied, glancing ruefully at his soiled babies before adding, ‘and lots of it.’

At which point the twins, who although as yet unable to speak could still sense a crisis in the air, knew it was their job to compound it and began to scream blue murder.

‘Why us!’ Frieda shouted above the din, but in fact it was not just them, the water had dried up all over Berlin. The electricity had gone too. Also the gas and the trams, the post and the police. The whole municipal infrastructure which had continued to function throughout the war and then somewhat more sporadically through two years of famine and street fighting had suddenly ground to a complete halt.

The reason the great city had been left without a single modern convenience was that there had been an insurrection. A local political nonentity named Kapp had marched through the Brandenburg Gate at the head of a notoriously brutal brigade of Freikorps, occupied the President’s Palace on the Wilhelmstrasse and announced that he was Germany’s new leader and that everybody had to do what he said. In reply the unions had called a general strike, cutting off all services and bringing Berlin to a filthy, stinking standstill. Wolfgang and Frieda had no water for their babies and the hapless Kapp had no paper on which to print a proclamation informing Germany that due to his firm leadership their nation was strong once more.

It was of course the water that the parents of the two puking, pooping new babies missed most. There was enough to drink from local standpipes but they couldn’t clean the kids.

Therefore when Frieda’s father brought Rabbi Jakobovitz round on the appointed day with his little bag of ancient-looking tools and powders, Frieda refused to let him near the boys.

‘It’s an operation, for God’s sake, Papa,’ she said in reply to her father’s embarrassed protests. ‘It’s a medical procedure which requires proper hygiene!’

‘Oh don’t be ridiculous,’ her father replied. ‘It’s just a little nick, there’s hardly even any blood.’

In vain did the old rabbi protest that he’d scarcely lost a boy in years, that his shield, knife and spice box were all regularly polished and he always rubbed his sharpened thumbnail with alcohol before he did the deed. Frieda was adamant.

‘You’re not doing it. Certainly not until the taps are back on. What’s wrong with foreskins anyway?’

‘Please, Frieda!’ Herr Tauber spluttered. ‘The rabbi!’

‘Yes, the rabbi,’ Wolfgang commented laconically from the corner of the room where despite the early hour he was pouring himself a glass of schnapps, it not being possible to make any coffee. ‘Perhaps he can answer the question. What is wrong with foreskins?’

Herr Tauber began to stammer his apologies but the rabbi insisted sagely that he was perfectly happy to engage in theological debate.

‘Azariah said,’ the rabbi intoned sombrely while laying out his ancient collection of implements on an equally venerable stained and dusty old cloth, ‘that the foreskin is loathsome, since it is a term of opprobrium for the wicked, as it is written.’

‘Ah yes, it’s all so much clearer now.’ Wolfgang smiled.

‘The foreskin is loathsome?’ Frieda asked.

‘So it is written,’ Rabbi Jakobovitz replied gravely.

‘By Azariah,’ Wolfgang added. ‘That well-known penis expert.’

‘It is the Babylonian Talmud,’ the old man said with equal gravity, oblivious to Wolfgang’s sarcasm.

‘Damn! I’ve been meaning to read it.’

Herr Tauber tried once more to intervene.

‘Nothing’s wrong with foreskins in their place, Frieda, my love,’ he said, attempting a conciliatory tone, while throwing furious glances at Wolfgang.

‘In their place, Papa! They are in their place. What better place could there be for a foreskin than the end of a penis?’

‘Temporarily, dear,’ her father continued. ‘That is their place temporarily. For God put them in that place in order that they may be removed from it.’

‘That’s just completely ridiculous, Papa,’ Frieda said. ‘I mean, pardon me, rabbi, no disrespect and all that but really, when you come to think about it, what is the point of the whole business?’

‘Just because there is no obvious reason for doing something does not necessarily mean that one shouldn’t do it,’ the rabbi replied, having happily accepted the schnapps Wolfgang pressed upon him.

‘Exactly! There you are, you see!’ Herr Tauber said triumphantly, seizing on the remark as if the rabbi had imparted some great and transparent wisdom. ‘There is such a thing as tradition, Frieda, and we reject it at our peril. If you knock out every brick in the foundations of a house, that house will surely fall down.’

Wolfgang picked up his babies in a bear hug and set them down on either knee.

‘You hear that, boys?’ he said. ‘Your dicks are holding up a house.’

‘Shut up, Wolf,’ Frieda hissed, but she couldn’t help but smile too.

‘I mean, come on, Pop,’ Wolfgang went on. ‘Really, why do you care? You’re not religious. When did you last even go to a synagogue?’

‘We do things because we do them,’ Herr Tauber said angrily, while the rabbi continued to nod sagely at every remark while accepting a refill of his schnapps from Wolfgang. ‘Just like the Orthodox Greek fellow with his smoking incense or the Catholic with his wafer, which he knows very well isn’t a piece of Christ’s flesh. These things are done. That’s reason enough. It binds a person to his own past. It honours our elders and keeps us steady. Tradition is what has made Germany great.’

Wolfgang snorted once more.

‘Germany isn’t great, Konstantin,’ Wolfgang said, knowing full well that his father-in-law hated him to address him by his first name, preferring either ‘Herr Tauber’ or ‘Papa’. ‘Germany is a basket case. Germany is crippled, bankrupt, starving and insane. If Germany was a dog, you’d put a bullet in its head.’

Konstantin Tauber flinched. Despite having been well over forty in 1914, he had served with distinction in the Great War, winning an Iron Cross which he wore always on his uniform and in civilian clothes on the slightest excuse.

‘Germany was great,’ he said angrily, ‘and it will be great again despite the best efforts of you and your leftist friends.’

‘Wolfgang’s not a leftist, Papa,’ Frieda said, ‘he just likes jazz.’

‘It’s the same thing,’ Tauber replied, ‘and only a leftist would deny his sons their cultural birthright.’

‘What? To have their pricks interfered with?’ Wolfgang enquired. ‘Some birthright!’

‘Can you please moderate your language in front of my daughter and the rabbi!’ Herr Tauber thundered back.

‘This is my home and I’ll say what I like, mate!’

‘Look!’ Frieda snapped. ‘I have just given birth to twins. There isn’t any water. There isn’t any heat. There isn’t any light and there isn’t any food. Can we please leave the question of the boys’ foreskins to another day?’

The rabbi shook his head sadly.

‘Another day is not possible, Frau Stengel,’ he said, ‘for this is the eighth day and circumcision must be proffered on no day but this unless the child’s health is at risk, as it is written.’

‘Their health is at risk,’ Frieda protested. ‘There’s no water in the taps.’

‘For three thousand years we did without taps,’ Rabbi Jakobovitz replied, ‘just as we did without heat and electric light. I’m afraid that it’s now or not at all, my dear.’

‘Then it’s not at all,’ Frieda said firmly, ‘because we’re not doing it until they turn the water on.’

‘In that case,’ Jakobovitz said, seeming to perk up somewhat, ‘since a steady hand is no longer required, perhaps, Herr Stengel, I might trouble you for another schnapps?’

Wolfgang looked ruefully at his half-empty bottle, but hospitality was one tradition he did subscribe to.

Eventually the rabbi and Herr Tauber took their leave and, as the sound of their stumbling progress down the stairs faded away, Frieda and Wolfgang looked at each other. They were smiling but also serious; they both knew what the other was thinking.

‘Perhaps now was the time,’ Frieda said, ‘perhaps we should have said.’

‘I wanted to tell the old bastard, I really did,’ Wolfgang replied, ‘when he was banging on about tradition and birthright I was itching to tell him that one of his grandsons’ traditions and birthright were Catholic and Communist.’

‘Actually, I’m glad you didn’t,’ Frieda said.

‘I couldn’t find the moment.’

‘I know. It’s difficult. I think we’ve already left it too late.’

Wolfgang and Frieda had never meant the adoption to be a secret. They had fully intended to tell everybody immediately, both friends and relations. They were not ashamed, they were proud, proud of what they had done and proud of their son. Of both their sons.

But somehow they had missed the moment.

‘Why should anybody be bothered about it anyway?’ Frieda said. ‘It isn’t an issue for us, we don’t even think about it.’

‘No, I thought I would,’ Wolfgang agreed, ‘but I don’t.’

‘The funny thing is it feels to me as if it never really happened anyway. That the little bundle they took away was just a part of the process, just the boys messing about a bit, that’s all. There were two of them, then one disappeared for a moment and then he came back. Three little souls just became two.’

Together they looked at the sleeping boys, swaddled tight, side by side in a single cot.

‘I don’t want there ever to be any distance between them,’ Frieda continued, ‘or between them and us. We’re a family and by going into how we became a family it feels as though we’re saying it’s important when it isn’t. Why should anyone ever know? Why would anyone ever be interested?’

‘Well, it’s in the records at the hospital,’ Wolfgang said.

‘And as far as I’m concerned it can stay there,’ said Frieda. ‘It has absolutely nothing to do with anybody but us.’