Two Brothers

Continued Conversation in the Park Berlin, 1956

‘FRIEDA CLIMBED ON to the truck,’ Dagmar said. ‘Silke got the story from someone who saw it. Your mother couldn’t bear for those children to spend the last hours of their brief lives without love or comfort, so she spent her own last hours giving them hers. She climbed aboard and she got amongst them and put out her arms and held as many of them as she could. Apparently the children clustered to her like bees around a flower. Then as the lorry pulled away she began to sing Hoppe Hoppe Reiter. Hoppe Hoppe Reiter.

Tears were streaming down Otto’s face.

‘She used to sing it to Paulus and me,’ he said. ‘I can hear her voice now.’

‘We heard she was still singing when the truck arrived at the station, but by then somehow your mother had worked the magic that she always did and she had the children singing too. Even as they were pushed into the cattle trucks, crushed in with a hundred other condemned souls. “Hip hop there, rider! Hip hop there, rider!” Your mother went with those children to Dachau that very day. I imagine she led them singing into the gas chamber.’

Otto wept and wept. Thinking of his beloved mother and how brave her end had been.

She had died as she had lived, a beacon of goodness in a sick and dreadful world.

‘And so there was only us left,’ Dagmar went on. ‘Me and Silke.’

Her voice was far away. Through his tears Otto understood that Dagmar needed to tell the whole story.

‘We lived in Pauly’s flat and of course we fought and fought. Two very different girls who never should have roomed together. Silke was trying to establish resistance connections. Can you believe it? Using her cover as a war widow to contact other Communists. She was a part of Die Rote Kapelle. The Red Orchestra — I suppose you’ve heard of it.’

‘Yes,’ Otto said, pulling himself together and blowing his nose on his handkerchief. ‘The Communist-backed resistance. I’ve heard of it.’

‘I warned her,’ Dagmar went on. ‘I told her if she was ever the cause of me getting caught I’d make damn sure she and her bloody idiot friends went down with me. That apartment was my castle. Paulus built it for me. Because he loved me. Me. Not some random bunch of self-righteous Reds.’

Her voice was starting to grate on Otto.

Incredible.

That same voice that had been nothing but music to him all his life. The voice he’d wrestled the telephone receiver from his brother’s hand to hear, watching the clock, waiting his turn, jealous of every missed syllable.

Now it was actually starting to grate.

‘Paulus may have loved you, Dagmar,’ Otto said, a little more harshly perhaps than he had intended, ‘but only because you lied to him.’

‘That is a damned lie! He loved me because he loved me. Full stop. Just like you did. I didn’t ask him to. I didn’t ask either of you to, so don’t start playing the victim now. If the bloody mad Stengel twins devoted their lives to me, it was because they chose to. What’s more, I kept my half of the bargain with Pauly. We lived together in that flat as man and wife for the little time he had. That was what he wanted and that was what he got.’

‘You fucked him. So what?’

‘I made love to him, Otto, and never say I didn’t! And he died believing in my love, which was just the way he wanted to die.’

‘He didn’t want to die at all!’

‘Really? He always told me he’d rather die having won my love than live a life without it. How about you, Otto? How’s the last seventeen years been for you? I never would have picked you to fossilize in a government office. You were always going to be a knight in armour. Wouldn’t you rather have been a knight in armour? I think you would.’

Otto was stunned. She could always run rings round him. Fossilize.

She had his number all right.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t suppose I have any right to judge you.’

‘No one has any right to judge me for anything I did, Otto. Because of what Hitler did to me.’

She stood up, lighting her umpteenth cigarette with a hand shaking with emotion.

Something in what she said and the vehemence with which she said it brought Otto’s thoughts back to the present.

‘Dagmar,’ he said, ‘where’s Silke?’

She turned and looked down at him. Her lip curling along with the smoke that drifted from it.

‘God, Ottsy,’ she said, ‘didn’t you work it out yet? Pauly would have got it at the airport. I’m bloody Silke.’