Two Brothers

Early Breakfast London, 1956

‘WE PARTED AT Rotterdam. Silke took the train back to Berlin and I took the ferry to Britain. I never saw her again.’

Stone was staring at the dark moonlit waters of the Thames. ‘I never saw any of them again. I watched the continent disappear over the horizon and my whole life disappeared with it.’

Billie sipped at her tea. The fourth mug of the night. They’d been talking for hours. The taxi drivers had changed shifts. The rubbish barges had begun to remove London’s daily tonnage of trash to wherever it was they took it. And there was a pale light beginning to glimmer in the sky.

‘I entered England on Paulus’s visa, took his name and the place that Mum had managed to get for him at Goldsmith’s College. Humanities.’

‘How’d dat go?’

‘Not great.’

‘What with you not bein’ as clever as your brudder and all?’

‘I lasted about three months. I tried. I really did but it was pretty grim. The charity had found a place for a clever kid. They wanted Paulus. A kid who could one day make a difference. Put something back in exchange for his good fortune. Help build the new world and all that. Instead they got me. I felt so guilty.’

Billie put her arm around Stone.

‘So that’s why all those law books be lyin’ around your flat gathering dust,’ she said. ‘You’re tryin’ ta be your brudder. You’re still tryin’ ta replace him.’

Stone didn’t reply. Instead, he snuggled a little closer. Embracing the tenderness. The companionship.

‘So what shall I call you now, boy?’ Billie asked. ‘Are you Paul? Or are you Otto?’

Stone didn’t reply for a whole minute or more.

‘I think,’ he began eventually, ‘I think I’d like you to call me Otto.’

‘There,’ she said and kissed his cheek, ‘was that so difficult?’

‘As a matter of fact it was,’ he said, ‘it is.’

‘So tell me this, Otto,’ Billie said.

And still Stone flinched. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘First time in seventeen years.’

‘You tell me this, Otto,’ Billie repeated, putting her head on his shoulder, ‘why do you have to feel so guilty? It was all Paulus’s idea, after all.’

‘I know,’ Stone replied. ‘I know. But all the same, I’ve always felt unworthy of the life I took. Destiny had me dying in the Wehrmacht, but Pauly was too clever for destiny. He cheated fate and died instead. Mum, Dad, Paulus. All dead. The best of the Stengels. Only the adopted son survived.’

‘Do you think they’d look at it that way?’ Billie asked.

‘No. Of course not.’

‘Then I think you should show a bit more respec’ to their memory,’ Billie said. ‘And you know what else I think?’

‘What?’

‘I think I need to find a loo.’

Arm in arm they returned to near the bridge, where there was a public toilet.

‘Romantic eh?’ Billie laughed. ‘Too much damn tea.’

The dawn was really not far off now. There was more than a hint of it in the dark sky but neither of them wanted to go to bed.

‘I can do college on no sleep,’ Billie said. ‘Damn, I’m the best they got even when I am asleep and they know it too.’

‘I bet they do, Bill,’ Stone said.

‘So let’s get us some breakfast.’

It wasn’t difficult to find a café. London’s early morning shift of workers was already mingling with the previous night’s party-goers. Men in overalls and donkey jackets starting their day squeezed around Formica-covered tables next to men in dinner jackets and girls in pearls who were having a fry-up at the end of theirs.

Stone and Billie found a little corner in a greasy spoon near Waterloo Bridge and sat down to egg, beans, fried bread, toast and more tea.

‘This is my kind of night,’ Billie said, viewing the feast with satisfaction. ‘Apart from you hitting that guy, of course.’

Stone shrugged.

‘I’d do it again any time,’ he said. ‘It’s my rule.’

‘Yeah, you said. So come on then, you’re in England, you’re in school. What happened?’

‘Nothing much more to tell, Bill.’

‘Tell it anyway.’

‘Well, like I said, I got away with it for a while at college. They made a lot of allowances for me being foreign and adjusting to a new country and all that. Then just as it was starting to get embarrassing, the war broke out and I got interned as an enemy alien.’

‘They did that?’ Billie asked in surprise. ‘To Jews?’

‘Well, they couldn’t tell, could they? So they interned everybody. I didn’t mind. I thought they had a point. After all, if you think about it, I wasn’t a Jew, was I? I was a German travelling under a false identity. I didn’t have any sympathy with the ones who complained about internment. The British had their backs to the wall after all.’

‘And, of course, it got you out of college.’

Stone conceded that with a smile. ‘That was a bonus. Anyway, they let us all out pretty soon and I went straight into the army. That was how I got my British citizenship. It was after Dunkirk and they needed all the help they could get.’

Billie shook the brown sauce bottle over her second egg.

‘You must have been pretty lonely.’

‘I was very lonely. Very lonely indeed. The thing was, I didn’t really want to make friends… I was sort of…’

‘Wallowing in it?’

Stone laughed, spreading Golden Shred marmalade on his toast. ‘I suppose you could say that.’

‘I guess you had good cause, baby. More than most, that’s for sure. Did you get news from home at all?’

‘No. We could probably have corresponded via Switzerland in the early stages of the war but Paulus decided that with so many lies to cover the safest thing was to maintain separation. All mail from abroad was read by the Gestapo, of course.’

‘An’ from the day you left, Paulus became you? He was Otto Stengel, the ex-Napola boy?’

‘That’s right. Silke took my papers back to him. Paulus had found some old scrivener who changed our photos. There was a lot of forging going on around that time, as you can imagine. People trying to get that J off their papers. Apart from that, it was easy. All the addresses and family history were the same. I’d left the Napola but not yet joined the Wehrmacht. He just joined instead of me.’

‘But what if he met someone who knew you?’

‘He reckoned he was pretty safe. Don’t forget, I’d been sent to boarding school. Most of my classmates were from other parts of the country. They went back to their own towns to join up, and most of them went in as officers. There were already more than a million soldiers in the Wehrmacht; soon there’d be millions more. Paulus reckoned he could keep below the radar.’

Billie whistled softly. ‘Wow. Some guy, eh?’

‘Oh yeah. My brother was some guy.’

‘Joining the Wehrmacht out of the blue, when he was supposed to be a refugee studying in England. Giving up everything to join the German army. A Jew. You both gave up everything. Jesus,’ Billie exclaimed, ‘this Dagmar must have been some chick.’

‘She was, Bill. She was some chick.’

‘Or you two were just crazy love-struck fools.’

They ate in silence for a little while. Billie using her fried bread to mop up her egg yolk with such dexterity that by the time she’d finished it looked as if the plate would not even need washing.

‘And now you’re going to find her. Right?’ Billie said, having swallowed her last mouthful.

‘What?’ Stone asked.

‘Dagmar. C’mon, P—, Otto. That’s why you’re going to Berlin, it’s pretty obvious.’

Stone’s eyes clouded a little. A beat of pain registered on his face before he turned it to a sad smile.

‘Dagmar’s dead, Bill,’ he said. ‘She died during the war. It isn’t her I’ll be seeing in Berlin.’