Two Brothers

Brand New Model Berlin, 1921

‘YOU MEAN YOU’LL have to take your clothes off?’ Wolfgang demanded. ‘In front of the bastard?’

‘If Herr Karlsruhen requires it, which I imagine he will,’ Frieda replied with a coquettish toss of her thick, dark, recently bobbed hair. ‘I don’t imagine nymphs wear an awful lot of clothes, do you?’

Wolfgang was changing Paulus’s nappy on the kitchen table, holding the baby’s feet in the air in order to wipe him, and for a moment it almost looked as if he might wave the baby about in protest.

‘Well, I don’t want you to do it,’ he said. ‘In fact, I… I forbid you to do it.’

Loud though Frieda’s hearty laugh was at this doomed attempt at exerting husbandly authority, it was drowned out by Paulus who at the same moment gave a piercing yell, having clearly decided that his arse had been wiped long enough and it was time for Wolfgang to put his legs down.

Inevitably Paulus’s cries set Otto off, the two babies having long since learnt that they could create more chaos if they worked as a team.

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Frieda chided.

‘What I’ve done?’ Wolfgang exclaimed. ‘He’s probably crying because his mother wants to be a stripper!’

‘Model, Wolf!’

‘Nude model, Frieda.’

Wolfgang finished Paulus’s nappy and pretty much dumped him back down beside Otto where the screaming ramped up another notch or two and Frieda was forced to spend ten minutes rocking the boys and singing ‘Hoppe Hoppe Reiter’ to them. This always cheered them up, it was their favourite song, particularly the verse about the poor fallen rider getting eaten by the ravens, which the boys seemed to understand was a good bit, despite not yet being able to talk.

‘Look, nude modelling is easy work, Wolf,’ Frieda said, when finally the babies had calmed down, ‘and we could certainly do with the money.’

‘We don’t need it that much!’

‘Oh don’t we?’ In answer to her own question Frieda marched across their tiny kitchen and flung open the doors of the little wall-mounted cupboard that they called their pantry. In it, apart from a few assorted spices and condiments, was a small piece of cheese, a few centimetres of sausage, a handful of carrots, five decent-sized potatoes and half a loaf of black bread. Besides that, there was a bottle of milk sitting in a bowl of water on the window sill and above the sink a jar of ground coffee and some sugar.

‘That’s it, Wolf,’ Frieda said angrily. ‘The lot, our entire supplies until you find another band to play in or we go begging to my parents again. I am a student, you are essentially unemployed and we have babies to feed! We need money and if this silly man wants to give me some for getting goosebumps for a couple of hours, I’m going to grab it with both hands.’

‘He’d like to grab you with both hands if you ask me.’

‘He’s an artist, Wolf. And a rich one too. He pays way above the odds.’

‘We don’t need his money. We get by.’ Wolfgang sulked. ‘We don’t starve.’

‘Just, Wolf. We don’t starve just. And what sort of ambition is that, by the way? We don’t starve. Nice to know you’ve set your sights so high. Personally I’d like to do a bit better than not actually starving. I’d like to have some nice cakes at the weekend and extra milk for the children, and if taking my clothes off three evenings a week can get me that then every sculptor in Berlin can immortalize my bum in marble as far as I’m concerned.’

Wolfgang scowled but didn’t answer.

A rat ran across the lino. He hurled a shoe at it in fury.

This futile gesture did nothing to harm the rat but the bang startled Otto who began crying again. This caused Paulus to throw out an arm in irritation, scratching Otto’s face with fingernails which Frieda had been absolutely meaning to get to that evening. Otto screamed blue murder at this which, of course, according to the brothers’ unspoken rules, required Paulus to start screaming blue murder as well.

Peace was finally restored but only after Frieda had been forced to put the boys on her breasts, which she absolutely hated herself for doing. She was trying seriously to wean them in an effort to bring some order into her increasingly chaotic life, a district nurse having told her that breast on demand after the first nine months was the road to anarchy and source of all evil.

When Wolfgang broke the angry silence that followed, to Frieda’s amazement, instead of being contrite, he was still complaining about her new job.

‘I didn’t mind so much when it was at the Art School,’ he said. ‘That was legitimate.’

‘Oh. So it’s fine for fifty people to see me naked but not for one? Is that it? Ow! Bugger!’

Frieda yelped in pain. The babies’ new teeth were another reason for her wanting to get them off the breast as soon as possible.

‘Yes, that is it exactly!’ Wolfgang exclaimed. ‘You’ll be alone with this horny old bastard, in his bloody studio.’

‘Earning five times what the college pay.’

‘And for what? What does he expect to get from it? That’s what I want to know.’

‘He expects tits and ass, Wolf!’ Frieda hissed, trying both to shout and to keep her voice down at the same time. ‘Which I happen to have in abundance since the twins put ten kilos on me and which, despite the fact that I eat only one crumb of bread a day, I don’t seem to be able to lose!’

‘But why your tits and ass? That’s what I’d like to know,’ Wolfgang asked, still not prepared to give in. ‘What’s he see in you?’

‘Well, thanks very much!’

‘I think he fancies you.’

‘I’ve just said, Wolf, he’s an artist, he needs models to inspire him, and he says that with no meat and no butter in the city all his usual girls have lost their bloom. I, on the other hand, have apparently hung on to mine.’

‘Bloom? Is that what he calls it? Bloom? Dirty little swine.’

But Wolfgang could not help but admit to himself that the sculptor was right.

Frieda had always turned heads, with her girlishly open face with wide-set eyes, small upturned nose and deep shining auburn hair. She had a trim, athletic-looking ‘modern’ shape but with a generous bust, and while she had certainly acquired an extra curve or two at the hips during her pregnancy, she was no less a beauty for that.

‘Well, quite apart from anything else,’ Wolfgang said, changing tack, ‘the man’s a terrible, terrible artist.’

‘He’s a Victorian Realist.’

‘I think that’s what I said. I mean, honestly. What is the point of realism? The camera has been invented. Take a bloody photograph! It does the job better and at shutter speeds of a hundredth of a second.’

‘Lots of people like realism.’

‘Lots of people are idiots.’

Frieda put the babies down and banged a pan on the hob to boil some water. ‘I’m not going to continue with this ridiculous conversation.’

‘And I’ll tell you another thing—’ Wolfgang said.

‘Not listening.’

‘Karlsruhen’s a complete reactionary. I read an interview with him. He supports the Stahlhelm for God’s sake!’

‘What? So it would be all right for him to see my tits if he was a Communist?’

‘Well, no, maybe not,’ Wolfgang conceded. ‘But it certainly would if he was an Expressionist or a Surrealist!’

‘You’re being an absolute idiot, Wolf.’

‘Oh, I’m the one being an idiot, am I? Well, tell me this. Will your precious Karlsruhen be making you hold a spear and wear a winged helmet?’

Frieda paused. He had her there. She couldn’t help but smile, it did seem slightly absurd, a little Jewish girl pretending to be the spirit of völkisches Deutschland while hoping that her nipples wouldn’t start to drip.

‘Well… yes,’ she conceded, ‘he did mention spears and helmets. I admit that.’

‘A winged helmet.’

‘Sometimes apparently. If we’re doing a Rhinemaiden.’

Now a shadow of a smile appeared at the corners of Wolfgang’s mouth also.

‘You are going to stand there, completely naked except for a winged helmet?’

‘I think I just told you that.’

‘Aren’t Rhinemaidens supposed to be nymphs?’

‘In this case, nymphs in helmets.’

‘Which isn’t very nymphy.’

‘It is to Herr Karlsruhen. Look, Wolf, be realistic,’ Frieda said, trying to make peace, ‘if he thinks I look like the spirit of German womanhood, then bully for us. I’ve told you, he pays top hourly rates and all I have to do is stand still and listen to Wagner.’

‘He should pay you top rates to listen to that crap.’

‘I don’t mind a bit of Wagner.’

‘He was a raving anti-Semite.’

‘What’s that got to do with his music?’

‘I’m just saying that he was as shitty a man as he was a composer.’

‘We can’t all be cool jazz guys, Wolf. Somebody has to write a tune occasionally. You’re being really stupid.’

‘And I refer you to my previous point that I’m not the one who is planning on standing about naked in a helmet! Think about that. Naked. But in a helmet. It defies logic, or do people only get hit on the head in Asgard?’

‘Now who’s interested in realism?’

Frieda turned her attention to a load of nappies that were soaking in a bucket.

‘This man lives in the hottest, craziest city in Europe. Every studio’s got some wild genius in it breaking all the rules of form — and this prick wants to set the Ring Cycle in stone.’

Frieda fished a dripping terry towel out of the bucket and began running it through the mangle.

‘You’re being pathetic and self-righteous and actually totally reactionary in a reverse kind of way,’ she said, ‘which is frankly not attractive.’

‘Keep mangling,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘Karlsruhen’s going to love those muscles. If you’re lucky he might even promote you to Brünnhilde.’

‘There can be more than one style of art you know,’ Frieda said through gritted teeth as she worked the heavy handle. ‘Not everybody wants to look at pictures of babies on bayonets and limbless soldiers like the stuff you like. We can’t all be George Grosz or Otto Dix.’

‘Bloody geniuses, both of them. Jazz on canvas. People like Karlsruhen and his moronic Stahlhelm go on about making Germany great again. It’s already great. Stuff is going on here in Berlin, within a few hundred metres of where we’re sitting, that they haven’t even started dreaming about in Paris or New York.’

‘Just listen to yourself, why don’t you?’ Frieda said as the water from the nappies cascaded into the mangle tray. ‘You’re actually more chauvinist than the Steel Helmets with your “we’ve got better art in Germany than those bloody foreigners” — even the avant garde are nationalists. It’s pathetic.’

Wolfgang’s tone showed that despite himself he could see her point. ‘I’m just saying that for once we have something going on here that we can be proud of.’

‘So you’d feel better about it if I was posing for someone who gave me square tits and three buttocks. That would be all right, would it?’

‘It would be a lot better.’

Frieda said nothing. But she gave the mangle an extra vicious turn.