Two Brothers

In the Garden of Innocence Berlin, 1956

‘POOR SILKE,’ DAGMAR said, an empty deadness to her voice and to her eyes. ‘When she saw that first tank in the street she actually cheered. She danced for happiness. She hung a Red eiderdown from our window for a flag and shouted down to the soldiers below. It was that damn flag that brought them to us first. While most sensible girls were hiding in cellars or being boarded up in attics by their mothers, that idiot Silke was shouting at those beasts. Calling out a welcome. Hey, boys! There’s two young women here!’

There was a little drinking fountain nearby. Dagmar got up and went over to it and took a long draught. She had been talking for a long time. Her voice was dry.

Otto remembered his flask of whisky. He produced it and they shared a gulp or two together. The spirit made Dagmar shiver, or perhaps it was her story.

‘Everything you’ve heard about what happened to the women of Berlin in 1945 is true,’ she said in a voice of cold stone, ‘and worse. The raping went on for weeks. Those Russian soldiers went hunting for women like the Nazis had hunted Jews, kicking down doors, shining lights in faces, seeking out girls in every rat hole, and if they could find no girls, then fucking their mothers instead. Silke and I were amongst the very first caught. We went through it all together. Sisters in misery. Those soldiers that she waved at in the street just couldn’t believe their luck, two girls at once and in a nice apartment with beds and everything. A readymade harem, one blonde, one brunette — we covered all the bases, as your American friends would say.’

Dagmar tried to smile but couldn’t. She raised Otto’s flask to her lips and took another gulp. It made her cough a little but also helped stiffen her resolve to resume her story.

‘They kept us prisoners in that nice apartment Pauly bought. Using us as they pleased and renting us out to other soldiers for cigarettes and vodka when they got bored themselves. It was very strange really. They sort of set up home with us, going off for their army duties and then coming back to their sex slaves. Me and Silke together. Sometimes in the same room, sometimes separate. I suppose in a way it was even worse for Silke — she had to suffer the disillusionment. Those soldiers represented everything she’d hoped for. The future of the world. She flung open her door to them and they walked right in and started tearing off her clothes. Mine too, right there and then. Within a minute. Silke tried to show them her KPD card. But they didn’t speak German and if they had they wouldn’t have cared. Nor about the radio code books she kept behind the gas stove and her Resistance accreditation. They were hungry peasants and we were meat, that was all. Perhaps if she could have got out of the apartment, found an officer, someone to understand her, she might have been OK. There were decent ones amongst them I’ve heard. But we were trapped.’

‘Did you tell them you were a Jew?’ Otto asked.

‘I tried once or twice but either they didn’t care or they didn’t believe me. All the German Jews they’d seen had been skeletons.’

Otto opened his suitcase and reached in for a third packet of Lucky Strikes. He could scarcely believe it, they’d smoked twenty each already.

‘And how did it end?’ he said.

‘They started to get lazy and didn’t bother to tie us up any more. I think they almost started to think of us as sort of wives. War wives, of course, but wives nonetheless. Sometimes they brought chocolate and one of them even made paper flowers to put in our vase. Of course that didn’t stop him putting down his scissors and his coloured paper to rape us when his turn came around. They thought we were their right, you see. They didn’t think we had any business complaining after what Germany had done to them. One night Silke had had enough. One of them had fallen into a drunken sleep right on top of her and was snoring in her face. Their breath was always indescribable. Onion and rotting gums. Silke squeezed herself out from under him, crept to where he’d left his belt on a chair and took his gun. I watched beside my own sleeping Russian as she started to put on her clothes. I can see her body now, white in the moonlight, black bruises on her breasts where one of them liked to squeeze her. I don’t know what her plan was, she kept looking at me and putting her fingers to her lips. Anyway, she never got a chance to do anything. Two more came in, getting impatient to have their turn at us. Silke pointed the gun at them but the poor silly fool couldn’t bring herself to fire. She always was a sweet girl and those boys were even younger than we were. So they shot her instead. Right there and then. I don’t know what they did with the body — nothing much, I imagine. There were thousands of dead bodies lying around Berlin. And that was the end of Silke Krause, proud founding member of the famous Saturday Club.’

Otto wanted to say something but could think of nothing remotely adequate. More tobacco was the only comfort he could offer.

‘If only she could have waited,’ Dagmar went on. ‘It only lasted another day or two, although it was a hard two days for me with twice as many soldiers coming at me as before. But after that they just went away. Simply walked out and never came back. Moscow had finally decided that enough was enough and had sent in the military police to restore discipline. Believe it or not, the soldiers left me some rations and a bottle of vodka. My pay, I suppose. What they thought a German girl was worth for more than a fortnight of pack rape. That and gonorrhoea. Thank God for penicillin, say I. I understood, of course. They were peasants, and after what the Nazis had done in the east I couldn’t really blame them for wanting to rape a few German girls.’

‘And you were left alone?’ Otto said.

‘Yes, all alone. And do you know what I asked myself?’

‘No.’

‘I sat there and I asked myself what Pauly would have done.’

Otto laughed. Dagmar laughed too, and their laughter sounded sadder to them than tears.

‘Pauly would have made a plan,’ Otto said.

‘Exactly,’ Dagmar replied. ‘I needed a plan. The Russians were all over Berlin. This was way before the Allies arrived. Germany hadn’t even surrendered. I was hungry and all alone. And I was scared too.’

‘Of the soldiers?’

‘Not so much, that period seemed to have passed. I was scared of what I’d done. Betraying Silke and her comrades. I couldn’t know for sure who’d survived and who hadn’t. Who might have seen me at that police station. And there was the report the Gestapo had written. Had it been destroyed? I hoped so but I didn’t know. I was destitute and without protection. The Russians didn’t like Jews and they didn’t like millionaires’ daughters either. I was alone and dazed from hunger and weeks of rape. I needed food and I needed to find a way to make my home secure. Dagmar Fischer couldn’t get those things from the Soviets, but it occurred to me that Silke Stengel probably could. What was more, Silke Stengel had not been written up by the Gestapo as a traitor. On the contrary, Silke was a hero of the Rote Kapelle. Those two red soldiers had killed the wrong girl.’

‘Wow, Dags,’ Otto said, almost in awe. ‘You really are something.’

‘I’m still alive, aren’t I?’ Dagmar replied. ‘I searched the apartment and found all the stuff that poor old Silke had tried to show to the soldiers. It was all there, scattered about, her whole Red Orchestra identity. Even her pre-war secret party card. Everything I needed to be a Communist heroine. It was a risk, I knew, but not so great a one. I was pretty certain Silke’s stepfather would be dead, and if her mother was alive she’d have gone back to the countryside, where she came from. Silke had always told me that the Orchestra acted in cells. Only her immediate comrades would have known what she looked like, and they’d all been killed by that lucky Allied bomb. So I made myself look as pretty as I could and I took my evidence to the Red Army authorities. I demanded that I be clothed, fed and given status befitting my lifetime’s commitment to the German Communist Party. Pauly’s rules, you see, walk with confidence. I guessed that they’d be looking for German Reds to help them run things, and I was right. They sent me straight to a German KPD man, who’d just arrived from Moscow as part of the team charged with re-establishing the party and making sure it got its people into the places that counted before the West could do anything about it. Astonishingly, this man knew of Silke. He’d been her Moscow control right back to the days when she’d been a young girl posting off Rote Hilfe reports wrapped up in women’s magazines.’

Otto closed his eyes. Remembering the happy golden-haired girl who’d lain beside him near the stream on the night of their great bicycle adventure. She’d tried to tell him about the Red Help then. That had been twenty-one years ago.

Good old Silke.

Poor old Silke.

‘Of course, he’d never seen her,’ Dagmar went on, ‘although being a man he’d fantasized that she would be a peach, and I could see how pleased he was when that’s exactly what she turned out to be. I became his lover that night and he saw to it that I was given a new party card and a rank that reflected my long and heroic service.’

Otto stared up at the darkening clouds.

It was beginning to get late. They’d finished the whisky and his head was starting to ache. There had been so much to take in. And so many cigarettes. But of course the story wasn’t over or he would not have been lured to Berlin.

‘And you’ve been Silke all these years?’ he said. ‘It’s… it’s astonishing.’

‘Not really. Can you even begin to imagine how many lives got reinvented or stolen in Year Zero? A whole continent had something to hide. I wasn’t alone in keeping secrets, Ottsy. When the Allies arrived and the big four divided up Berlin, I could see I was better off where I was. My apartment, which, of course, as Silke Stengel I legally owned, was just inside the Russian zone and it was all I had. There was nothing for me in the West. Nobody was talking about compensating Jews then. There was nothing to compensate them with. This was the end, not the beginning. Germany was completely destroyed and utterly destitute. In the West I’d have been a homeless, penniless refugee alongside a million others, and of course there was still that Gestapo report to worry about. If it ever came to light I’d be put on trial for sure. So I bided my time in the East, which was when I was approached to join the newly formed, Soviet-run German police. I was the perfect candidate, of course. Silke Stengel, née Krause, Red spy since 1935. So I grabbed it. And for the first time in my adult life, I was in control. Overnight I had security, status and power. Imagine how that felt, Otto, to a Jew in Berlin in 1945. A Jew who’d been through what I’d been through.’

‘But, Dags,’ Otto found himself protesting, almost as if they were back in her pink bedroom arguing about their futures together instead of picking over their past, ‘a police woman? It’s just so unlike you. I mean, you must have absolutely hated it.’

‘Hated it, Otto?’ Dagmar replied, her eyes suddenly gleaming. ‘I loved it. It was my fucking dream job. I was the hunter now. I was the bastard. All those little people of Berlin who’d sneered and laughed while my life was stolen were going to feel the toe of my boot every chance I got! I put on that uniform, pinned back my hair, went out on to the streets of Berlin and made life hell for anybody I could. I soon realized that in fact that was what the whole of the Stasi was there for, to make life hell for Germans. How perfect. How fucking ironic! I fucking loved it.’

‘And that was it?’ Otto asked, startled by the sudden venom. ‘That’s where you’ve been ever since? Making life miserable for the people of Berlin?’

‘Exactly,’ Dagmar replied. ‘I couldn’t have turned back even if I’d wanted to. By the time the West began to prosper I was in too deep and I knew too much. I’d made my bed, Otto. They don’t let you leave the Stasi. If you try, they kill you.’

‘So you’re trapped.’

‘I suppose so. But don’t feel sorry for me, Otto. My life is good — better than yours in Britain, I think. As a Stasi girl I have the best food and the best wine. Caviar if I want it. We party people keep all the luxuries for ourselves, you know. I still live in Pauly’s flat with my fashion magazines and any books I want and Western music too, all the stuff we deny to everybody else we keep for ourselves. I wonder what dear Silke would have made of that? Of the shitty corrupt little world her beloved Stalin made? And best of all, I still get to persecute the good citizens of East Berlin. The ones who let Hitler steal my life. The ones who looked away. The ones who stood in a circle around me and my parents and shouted that we should be made to lick the street.’

‘Dagmar, you can’t hate for ever.’

‘Can’t I? Try and stop me. I will hate for every second I’m on this earth. And when I’m gone and my body turns to dust, then each molecule of what was once me will still be hating.’

It was getting dark now. Young couples had replaced the children on the path through the gardens.

The story was almost over.

Otto had all of his answers now but one.

‘And me, Dagmar, when did I re-enter the picture?’

‘Oh, they’ve had their eye on you all along. Right from 1946.’

‘Me?’ Otto asked, very surprised.

‘Don’t be flattered. They watch all the Germans who work for the Allies. Big and small. They study their pasts, looking for ways to force them to work for us. They connected me to you via Silke’s marriage to Pauly. I’m her, don’t forget, and my married name is Stengel. It didn’t take them long to spot the Jew Stone in the British Foreign Office who had once been a Stengel and to work out that his sister-in-law worked for them.’ Otto actually laughed.

‘Do you realize,’ he said, ‘you’re talking about the Saturday Club? Paulus, Silke, you, me. Still connected, still a gang. Could anyone looking at us back at the beginning ever have imagined?’

‘Every German story took a wrong turn in 1933, Otts. We’re not so special.’

‘I guess so. So they still don’t know who you really are, then?’

‘I don’t think they do. You can never be sure. They love secrets and they bide their time. They certainly did with you. Once they’d made the connection between us they put me on notice that one day they’d require me to bring you to Germany. I think they were waiting for you to rise in your profession a bit.’

‘No luck there, I’m afraid,’ Otto said. ‘I’ve not been much of a success at the FO at all. Or anywhere else for that matter. Same grade I started in.’

‘We noticed,’ Dagmar observed dryly. ‘Anyway, a few months ago my bosses must have decided that now was as good a time as any to try and make use of you, and I was instructed to find a way to lure you over. I knew what that was all right.’

‘Yes,’ Otto murmured, ‘you certainly did.’

‘I told them the surest way to get to you was for me to assume the identity of a dead Jewess whom you had loved.’

‘So that’s you pretending to be Silke pretending to be you. Quite a labyrinth, Dags.’

‘That’s the way we like things in the Stasi. The more shadows and lies the better. So we re-established the Dagmar identity, made it official in case MI6 were watching.’

‘Which by the way they were.’

‘And here you are, Otto. It isn’t all so very complicated really.’

‘Maybe not for you, Dagmar. But it seems pretty bloody tortuous to me. I’m not the clever Stengel twin, remember.’

Dagmar looked at him and her eyes softened a little.

‘You were clever enough to come to me and save my life in 1938, Ottsy. I’d have burned to death.’

She put her hand on his and squeezed it a little.

‘But despite that, Dagmar,’ Otto said, removing her hand, ‘it seems you’ve been quite happy to entrap me.’

‘Otto. I work for them. They don’t give you a choice in these things. If I hadn’t done it they’d have just pretended to be me.’

‘Pretended to be you, pretending to be Silke, pretending to be you,’ Otto corrected.

‘Yes, that’s right. Besides –’ and she gave him a little smile, a smile he hadn’t seen since the days of the pink bedroom — ‘I wanted to see you. I thought you’d want to see me.’

‘I did, Dags. You damn well know that. But the question is, what happens now?’

‘They’ll try to persuade you to spy for them inside the British Foreign Office. They’re waiting for you over there.’

Dagmar nodded towards a bench situated beyond Snow White, which had been empty moments before but on which were now sitting two solid-looking men in the Homburg hats.

Otto stared across at them.

‘The uniform doesn’t change then? Different totalitarian ideology, same hats.’

‘Yes, just the same.’

Otto sighed and lit a cigarette.

‘One last fag, eh?’ he said. ‘The thing is, Dagmar, I can’t help them.’

‘They can be very persuasive.’

‘No. I mean really. I really can’t. You see, they want a spy in the Foreign Office, but in fact I won’t be working for the Foreign Office when I get back.’

‘Really? When was this decided?’

‘Today. Here in the People’s Park. I’m going to resign. And I won’t be studying for any law degrees that I don’t have the brains to get any more either.’

‘You’ve been studying law, Ottsy?’ Dagmar asked, very surprised.

‘Trying to. Since 1947. You see, I’ve been trying to live the life Pauly lost. Isn’t that silly? Ever since you caused him to give me his name and his prospects I’ve felt responsible. I’ve been trying to be him. For his sake and for Mum’s — she did so love what she thought he’d become. But I’m going to stop now because it’s obviously ridiculous. Suddenly I understand that. I can’t be him and he wouldn’t want me to. I’ve been Paul Stone for seventeen years but when I get back I’m going to start being Otto Stengel again. I don’t know how I’ll do it or what I’ll do — sweep roads probably — but one thing’s for sure. Whatever I do become, it’ll be more fun than what I’ve been trying to be. And I’m afraid it won’t be any use to the Stasi. Unless they want a spy in a woodwork class and an amateur jazz band, because I’ll certainly be joining those.’

Dagmar smiled.

‘Is there a girl?’

Otto thought about that for a moment. Then he remembered something and felt in the breast pocket of his jacket. He pulled out a paper tissue with a lipstick imprint on it. The one Billie had put there on the first morning he had been summoned to MI6. Something to remember her by, she’d said.

‘Yes, actually,’ he said quietly, ‘I think there is a girl.’

‘Ha!’ Dagmar replied, looking at the red lips printed on the tissue. ‘So you did love somebody besides me after all.’

‘I didn’t think I could allow myself to, Dagmar,’ Otto replied. ‘But now I know I can.’