Two Brothers

The Morning After The German–Dutch Border, 1939

OTTO WAS AWOKEN by the jerking and shunting as the locomotive hauled its carriages into the customs siding for border inspection.

Otto had not expected to fall asleep. He recalled lying awake for hours. Staring at the second hand on his watch in the intermittent flashes of yellow light as the train roared through some town or other.

And now he was awake again.

Silke was up, rinsing her face in the little basin.

It was a lovely compartment. The stuff of happy daydreams. Cosy, comfy. Every little convenience tucked neatly away. Tooth cups in cavities secured by leather straps, concealed lamps and mirrors, an ashtray, water-glass holders, a fold-down table by each bunk, a little netted alcove for shoes. Everything in brass and wood and leather. Such a very nice place to wake up.

Unless of course that little compartment was carrying you away from everything you had ever known or ever loved.

Silke had her back to him as she bent over the sink. She had put on her skirt but not her blouse. The white straps of her bra stretched across a bronzed back and up over slim, muscular, slightly freckled shoulders, which her golden hair brushed as she flannelled her face.

How strange. How utterly surprising.

That he and Silke…

‘You’re not to be embarrassed or to hate me,’ she said through the water and the cloth. Bright. Matter-of-fact. Jolly even. Yet every syllable strung tight with the shrill, brittle tension of having woken up remembering.

Otto hadn’t realized that she knew he was awake. Her back was turned to him and he’d made no sound. But women seemed often to know things you didn’t expect them to know, he’d noticed that.

Silke finished washing and reached out a hand, feeling for one of the starched linen face towels that were looped through the polished brass rings beside the basin.

‘It happened, that’s all,’ she went on, towelling her face dry then taking up her sponge bag. ‘I said you shouldn’t have bought us all that brandy.’

She still hadn’t turned around. Otto was in the top bunk so her mass of blonde curls were just a half metre or so from his face. A single bar of sunlight shining through a crack in the window blinds painted a blazing golden stripe across her shoulders.

She took a little tube of toothpaste from her sponge bag and squeezed some on to her brush.

‘How many of those damned Hennessys do you think we had?’ he heard her ask brightly.

Otto could not honestly recall. Four or five probably, plus the bottle of wine with dinner. They had certainly been the last to leave the dining car.

‘Quite a few,’ he said. ‘And guten Morgen, by the way.’

How did you greet your oldest friend when quite unexpectedly you had made love to her the previous night?

‘Don’t worry, I know it didn’t mean anything,’ Silke said quickly, talking through the toothbrush foam in her mouth. She turned around to face him as she brushed. He could see her breasts jiggling very slightly in the cups of her bra as her arm moved back and forth and up and down. There was a wisp of rusty-coloured hair visible in the pit of her raised arm.

She turned back and spat the toothpaste foam into the basin and rinsed out her mouth.

‘I know you don’t love me. You love Dagmar,’ Silke went on, using her ablutions to cover her embarrassment. ‘Obviously I know that. God knows you’ve said it often enough and you talked about no one else last night at dinner, which was a bit boring, actually. And slightly rude. Of course, you didn’t get her. That does have to be said. You lost that one but I know you still love her, so don’t worry. Last night was about the brandy.’

As she leant forward over the basin he could see her ribs corrugated against her honey-coloured skin, the vertebrae standing out along her slim back. She was a very pretty girl.

‘It was just for comfort. That’s all, wasn’t it?’ she said, putting on her blouse.

‘Yes,’ Otto replied quietly, ‘for comfort. Nice though.’

‘Yes!’ Silke replied, slightly too loudly. ‘Very. Funny it should be the first time though,’ she added, now a vivid crimson. ‘I mean, for both of us.’

‘Yeah. Weird. Kept it in the club, eh?’

‘I always presumed you and Dagmar must have been at it like rabbits this last year or two.’

‘No.’

‘Sensible of her, really. Keeping that one in reserve.’ As she said it her face fell and she added quickly, ‘No, that was awful. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what I meant.’

Outside far along the corridors at the other end of the train, doors began to slam.

‘Raus! Raus! Ausweis!’

As Paulus had predicted, the Gestapo were not being overly polite to the third-class passengers as they checked the credentials of those wishing to cross the border and depart the glorious Fatherland.

‘You’d better get dressed,’ Silke said, tucking in her blouse. ‘They’ll be in to see us in a minute.’

Otto was pulling on his pants beneath the sheets. ‘Moment of truth, eh? Not that there’s any risk. I get to be me for one last time.’

‘There’s always a risk with these people.’

All along the train could be heard protests and shouted commands.

Silke watched from the window as the Gestapo led away the ones who didn’t have the required paperwork or whose faces they didn’t like.

‘Let us go!’ a middle-aged woman was protesting. ‘You don’t want us. You hate us. For God’s sake, why don’t you let us go?’

There was much anguish at the border that day, as indeed there had been every day for years. Some of the older guards missed the days when theirs had been a happy job. Wishing people well as they went off on their holidays. Contented was the world when borders had been things that travellers crossed for fun.

There was a knocking at the door. More like blows, in fact, than knocks, as if the beautiful wooden panelling was being punched.

‘Are these bloody people incapable of doing anything without turning it into some sort of violent assault?’ Silke hissed sotto voce, running a brush through her hair. ‘Tea time at Gestapo headquarters must be a nightmare. Breaking the crockery, spilling the milk. If they put on a ballet they’d do it in bloody jackboots.’

Otto laughed.

‘Hey, I went to Napola! I’ve had three years of it. You stand to attention when you take a crap.’

‘Actually I rather think that would be anatomically impossible.’

‘Nothing is impossible to the German soldier!’

Another rattling bang on the door.

‘Einen moment, bitte,’ Silke called out.

Having slipped on her shoes, she opened the door of their compartment. There were three of them outside. A plainclothes officer and two Wehrmacht soldiers in steel helmets. Steel helmets in order to ask people on trains if they had visas. Even after six years of living under the Nazis, three at an elite school, Otto had still not got used to their deep psychological need to militarize everything.

‘Papers,’ the Gestapo man demanded. He was of course dressed in the usual gangster get-up, black leather trenchcoat and Homburg hat. All he needed was a Thompson sub-machine gun tucked under his arm in a violin case and he could have been in an American movie.

Silke handed over her passport and exit visa, while Otto sat up and reached for his in the jacket he had put at the other end of his bunk.

‘What is your business abroad?’ the officer snapped, having gone through the documents, a task made difficult by the fact that he wore leather gloves.

‘Just a little Dutch holiday before my Otto goes into the Wehrmacht,’ Silke said. ‘We will be back in a day or two.’

‘We couldn’t bear to be out of the Fatherland any longer,’ Otto added. ‘We might miss a parade.’

The Gestapo man clearly did not much like Otto’s tone, nor did he think much of two such young people having the wherewithal to travel first class. However, their papers were in order and so, having thrust them back, he left them in peace. Or at least as much peace as could be had with the officer and his soldiers stamping and banging their way along the carriage to the compartments beyond.

‘Well. Looks like that’s it. You made it. You’re out.’

‘Yes,’ Otto replied. ‘I’m out.’

Through the window they could see those for whom departure had been denied being herded together on the platform under armed guard.

Together they began to put their compartment back into daytime order. Both selfconsciously aware of their proximity as their hips touched while they folded up the top bunk into its wall cavity and turned the bottom one back into a seat.

‘Seems funny to be coy now,’ Otto said, ‘after—’

‘We were drunk,’ Silke said quickly. ‘We’re not drunk now. And it was dark. Makes rather a big difference.’

‘The attendant is supposed to do this while we go and eat a huge breakfast,’ Otto said.

‘I’d rather do it myself,’ Silke said, reddening.

Hurriedly she gathered up her undersheet, screwed it into a ball and pushed it out of sight.

Afterwards they sat together on the seat and Otto gave Silke his passport and ID, the ones he had shown to the Gestapo man.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you take these back then.’

‘Yes.’ Silke buried the documents deep in her handbag. ‘I take them back and give them to Pauly. He’s got someone who can change the photograph.’

Then Otto reached to the bottom of his own bag and produced a second set of papers.

‘And here’s Pauly’s, with the photo already changed. He’s bloody efficient, isn’t he, my bro.’

Otto stared at the documents.

‘Paulus Israel Stengel,’ he said. ‘Fuck. They know how to twist the knife, don’t they?’

The train was pulling away, rolling slowly past the failed fugitives. All silent now, desperate figures, every protest stilled. Faces blank and cold with anguish as they watched their last hope of freedom leaving the station without them.

Otto looked down at the papers in his hand, at the large ‘J’ stamped across them, the letter that had condemned every yearning face they passed.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s go and have breakfast. We’ve paid a fortune for it, we should eat it.’

They got up and made their way down the very same corridor along which they had stumbled tipsily only a few hours earlier.

‘First and last time I’ll ever travel first class, I imagine,’ Silke said.

Otto did not reply. That privacy which they’d paid for had taken such a very unexpected turn.

Why did he feel as if he’d betrayed Dagmar?

It was so stupid. After all, she’d rejected him for his brother, and it was very possible that he would never see her again anyway. He didn’t intend to remain a monk for the rest of his life, so what did it matter who he made love to?

Even someone as unexpected as Silke. A friend. A dear old friend.

But still he felt deflated. Wretched almost. As if he’d despoiled something fine and noble.

Because he loved Dagmar. His first and only passion. He had told her so at the café at the Lehrter Bahnhof.

And then just a few hours later he had been in bed with another girl. What was that, if not a betrayal?

At the door to the restaurant car Silke stopped and turned to look at him.

‘Don’t feel bad about it,’ she said.

Otto was completely taken aback. How had she known what he was thinking?

It was that woman thing again, they always seemed to know.

‘I wasn’t! Really, Silke,’ he protested.

But she interrupted him.

‘You were and you know it. You were feeling bad about last night. But please don’t. For my sake. I’d hate it so much if you did. It was my idea… I wanted to, you see… Dagmar said I get what I want but I don’t think I do at all… but last night, for just a moment, I did.’ Now she reached out her arms to hold him. ‘The thing is, I might never see you again and the whole world’s about to go to hell and…’

‘Silke.’ Otto tried gently to pull himself away. ‘Don’t.’

‘I know. I know you love Dagmar,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Of course I know. But it wasn’t you last night anyway, was it? That’s the point. It wasn’t you.’

Otto was surprised. ‘Who was it then?’

‘Why that new fellow!’ Silke said with a big broad smile that did nothing to disguise the tears standing in her eyes. ‘Mister Stengel, of course. That very new, very handsome, freshly minted, soon-to-be Englishman. It was him.’

‘Of course,’ Otto said quietly, ‘that’s right, it was just Mister Stengel.’

‘So that’s all right then. No need to feel bad on his behalf, eh!’

For a moment they faced each other. There was a longing in Silke’s pale blue eyes.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Eggs. Eggs and fresh rolls.’

But she was holding him once again.

‘We could skip breakfast,’ she said quickly, urgently, ‘me and Mr Stengel. We could go back to our compartment. Not you but that soon-to-be Englishman, the man from last night…’

For a moment Otto hesitated. Remembering those honey-freckled shoulders and golden curls, the strip of sunlight streaked across them. Her breasts moving as she brushed her teeth. The little wisp of hair at her arm.

And last night. That unexpected blur of drunken passion.

She was a very pretty girl.

But he loved Dagmar and he had promised that he would always love her. And Herr or Mister, Englishman or German, Paulus or Otto, whatever his name might be, yesterday, today or in the future, he would keep that promise.