Two Brothers (9 page)

‘Right,’ said Wolfgang, ‘I’m going to try and grab another forty winks. Don’t use the vacuum machine for a bit, will you, Edeltraud, there’s a love, and try to resist the temptation to rearrange the sheet music on the piano.’

‘Of course, Herr Stengel,’ Edeltraud replied, unconsciously swapping the positions of a framed photograph and an ashtray on the mantelpiece above the gas fire.

Wolfgang returned to the bedroom and Edeltraud, who was more than happy to be told not to work, started in with the latest news from the neighbourhood.

‘Did you hear?’ she said, breathless to tell.

‘What?’

‘The Peunerts gassed themselves!’

‘No!’ Frieda gasped in horror. ‘My God. Why?’

Even as she said it Frieda knew it was a stupid question, it was obvious why.

‘He was on a fixed pension from the post office,’ Edeltraud went on. ‘They left a note saying they’d rather die by their own hand than starve. They sold every stick of furniture they had to get the gas turned back on and then lay down together on the bare floor by the tap in the skirting board, with their heads under a blanket!’

‘Oh my God,’ Frieda whispered.

‘I think it’s really really romantic,’ said Edeltraud.

Edeltraud was not yet eighteen and told her gruesome story with all the unconscious callousness of youth.

Frieda did not think it was romantic. Living together into old age was romantic, committing suicide together was simply appalling and terribly sad. She had known the Peunerts by sight, had nodded to them often in the street, and yet she had been oblivious to the despair that had enveloped them.

‘I should have talked to them. Asked if they were getting on all right, if they needed help.’

‘Wouldn’t have done any good, would it?’ Edeltraud said. ‘You can’t make their life savings worth anything, can you? There was a woman at the ciggy kiosk this morning. Said she’d saved all her life and now the whole lot wouldn’t buy her a pack of smokes and a newspaper. If you ask me, the answer is, don’t save it. Get it, spend it.’

Edeltraud put Silke down on the floor and began rearranging the breakfast dishes that were piled up in the sink. ‘They put on their best clothes to do it, you know, her in a long granny frock from before the war and him in city coat and tie. Imagine that! The two of them, dressed up for Sunday in the Tiergarten, stretched out on the bare boards with a blanket on their heads. It’s almost funny really when you think about it.’

Little Silke waddled across the floor of the apartment to where the twins were playing. She stood in front of them for a moment, apparently deep in thought, strong, bare little legs planted firmly apart on the carpet, arms folded purposefully. Then, having clearly come to a decision, she sat down heavily on Otto’s fort, collapsing every single brick. Otto of course howled in fury and Paulus rolled about on the rug and laughed and laughed. Then Silke hauled herself to her feet, took a step towards Paulus and sat down on his fort, chuckling happily amongst the collapsed wooden blocks of two great military installations. Now it was Paulus’s turn to howl while Otto laughed. Then they fought, ignoring Silke, the cause of their distress, and flying at each other with tiny fists, rolling on the rug yelling and whacking as hard as they could. Silke, clearly pleased with the way the situation was developing, jumped on top of them both and joined in, laughing with delight.

Despite Frieda and Edeltraud’s efforts to quieten them it wasn’t long before Wolfgang came charging out of the bedroom with his water pistol blazing. This did eventually stop the fight but only after all three children were soaked, which meant they all had to be stripped and the clothes set out on the tiny balcony to dry. After which they happily began their favourite game of all. The boys piled all the cushions in the apartment on top of Silke and then jumped on them while she screamed with pure joy.

‘No point trying to get back to sleep now,’ Wolfgang said ruefully, putting a pan on the stove and contemplating the snake pit of limbs writhing amongst the cushions. ‘Got a lunchtime gig in Nikolassee.’

‘Can I make the coffee for you, Herr Stengel?’ Edeltraud asked brightly.

‘No, Edeltraud, you can’t. And when I say that, I mean it literally. You can’t. You
could
make the strange brown gritty solution you
call
coffee, which somehow manages to be both too strong and without flavour at the same time, but what you
can’t
do is make
actual
coffee so if it’s all right by you I’ll make it myself.’

‘Well, whatever suits,’ Edeltraud shrugged, ‘but personally I don’t think it matters as long as it’s warm and wet.’

‘And there, Edeltraud, in a brief and horrifying sentence you have the entire problem.’

‘You’re
funny
, Herr Stengel.’

Wolfgang contemplated his reflection in the polished wood of the beautiful old upright Blüthner piano, polished at least above toddler-finger level. ‘Better shave. I’m supposed to look presentable.’

‘I haven’t sponged the sweat stains out of your dinner jacket yet,’ Frieda said, ‘and it’ll need pressing too because you just left it in a crumpled heap on the bathroom floor when you got in, even though I’ve asked you a million times to at least hang it over a chair.’

Wolfgang took the jacket from where Frieda had hung it and began making pointless little smoothing gestures at the concertinaed creases.

‘Why we’re supposed to play music dressed up as head waiters is beyond me, anyway,’ he said. ‘The audience is supposed to listen to us, not look at us.’

‘You have to look smart, Wolf, you know that. I think the only solution is to get a second dinner suit. You have so many jobs now that there’s just no time to clean it between them.’

‘Everybody’s dancing,’ Wolfgang said, pouring out the coffee and handing Frieda a cup. ‘It’s
so
weird. I mean it, everybody. Grannies. Cripples. Cops, fascists, commies, priests. I see them all. The madder the money gets, the more frantically everybody seems to want to throw themselves around the room. I’m telling you. Berlin is now officially the world capital of crazy. I’m playing with guys from New York who say the same thing. They have nothing on us.’

‘They dance on top of taxis in America,’ Edeltraud said, ‘and on aeroplane wings. I saw it on a news reel.’

‘And that’s the point,’ Wolfgang said. ‘They’re doing it for fun, we’re doing it for therapy. It’s like the last party before the world ends.’

‘Oh don’t say that, Wolf,’ Frieda said. ‘I’ve only just graduated.’

‘It’s brilliant for us musicians, of course. We love the inflation. We love war reparations and the bloody French for occupying the Ruhr. We’re glad the mark has gone down a rabbit hole and ended up in Wonderland. Because the more screwed up the country becomes, the more work we get. I have five shows today, did you know that,
five
? Lunchtime waltzes for the old ladies and gents. An afternoon tea dance for the horny spinsters.’

‘Wolf! Please!’

‘You’re
funny
, Herr Stengel.’

‘I’m telling you, the whole country’s dancing.’

To the delight of Edeltraud and the children, Wolfgang performed a little tap routine. A skill he had perfected at the end of the war to augment his income as a busker.

‘
Yes! We have no bananas!
’ he sang, beating out the rhythm with dexterous toe and heel. ‘
We have no bananas today!
’

Frieda smiled too but she couldn’t help thinking of those who weren’t dancing. Of those who were lying cold on the floorboards of their empty homes. The old, the young, the sick, dying in their hundreds as once more starvation and despair returned to the capital after only the very briefest of absences.

If the people of her beloved Berlin were dancing, for many it was a dance of death.

Young Entrepreneurs

Berlin, 1923

THE KID WHO approached Wolfgang at the bar was eighteen years old and looked younger. In one hand he held a bottle of Dom Pérignon, and in the other a solid gold cigarette case with a large diamond at its centre. The arm that held the bottle was clamped around the pencil-thin waist of a fashionably bored-looking girl with quite the severest ‘bobbed’ haircut Wolfgang had ever seen. A shining black helmet with a high straight fringe cut at an angle across her forehead, and a crimped wave at the sides that reached barely beyond her ears. An extremely striking ‘look’, both forbidding and alluring at the same time. Which was more than could be said for the young man, who at first glance struck Wolfgang as a complete pain in the ass.

‘You there! Jazz man, Mr Trumpet!’ the youth brayed. ‘I’d like a word.’

Wolfgang glanced at him but said nothing.

There were so many of them in Berlin that fruitcake summer. Kids, stupidly young and completely ridiculous, with their money, their selfconsciously loud chatter and their drunken arrogance.

Downy-cheeked boys in faultless evening dress, hair brilliantined straight back into a hard shell. Sometimes a hint of rouge on their lips, it being suddenly fashionable to look a bit queer.

And the girls, so sophisticated and world weary at all of eighteen. With their
Bubikopf
and
Herrenschnitt
hairdos, smokily made-up eyes and the newly fashionable, sheath-like, waistless dresses hanging from their bony, boyish frames.

Germany’s new kindergarten entrepreneurs, crazy alcohol-and drug-fuelled chancers. The
Raffke
and the
Schieber
– spiffs, gamblers, profiteers and thieves. Teenage wideboys in coffee bars dealing in shares, setting up private banks amongst the cakes and coffee cups. Buying up the treasured possessions of war widows for a few loaves of bread, then selling them to French soldiers in the Ruhr for foreign currency.

The youth who was approaching Wolfgang at the bar was young even by the topsy-turvy standards of the great inflation. He looked as if he had borrowed his father’s tuxedo for a school dance and got his mother to tie his tie.

‘Hello, Daddy,’ the young man said with a broad smile. ‘I’m Kurt and this divine creature is Katharina. Hey! Kurt and Katharina. Sounds like a song!
Kurt and Katharina, flew in from Sardinia!
Not bad. You can have that if you like. Just needs a tune. Say hello to Mr Trumpet, baby.’

The girl gave Wolfgang a cool nod, which may or may not have included the tiniest hint of a smile. Or perhaps it was a sneer. It was difficult to tell with a girl so clearly intent on remaining sultry and enigmatic.

Wolfgang wondered whether she practised such studied mystery in her dressing-room mirror when she was applying all that dark shadow to her large grey eyes and teasing the lashes to twice the length nature intended them to be. She looked a little older than Kurt, perhaps as ancient as nineteen or even twenty. At all of twenty-five, Wolfgang felt ancient.

‘Hello, Katharina,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Look but don’t touch, Mr Trumpet!’ Kurt admonished, wagging a heavily bejewelled finger. ‘This hotsy-totsy baby already found her daddy.’

Wolfgang smiled at the boy’s absurd posturing but he was secretly annoyed that his appreciation of the girl had been so obvious. Katharina herself gave Kurt a look of such endless and absolute contempt that Wolfgang could only wonder how the youth did not shrivel up into a heap of ashes inside his suit.

‘We often breeze into this particular gin mill,’ he went on, ‘me and my crowd. It’s our favourite dive. Do you want to know why?’

Wolfgang was about to remark that frankly he could live without that information. He had only stopped at the bar on his way out for a quick cigarette and a shot of whisky against the night chill, and was in no particular mood for drunken intimacies from complete strangers. Particularly teenage ones.

But there was something undeniably compelling about this young peacock, if only his immense self-satisfaction. Also, if Wolfgang was honest, he had no objection to spending a few moments longer under the cool appraisal of Katharina’s smoky gaze.

‘I imagine you’re going to tell me anyway. So put me out of my misery. Why
do
you come to this particular gin mill, Kurt?’

‘Well—’

‘I’m dry,’ Katharina interrupted in a lazy drawl, tapping a long, black-painted fingernail on the rim of her empty glass. Kurt, whose gushing
joie de vivre
was as unaffected by being ignored as it was by being derided, happily poured out the last of his champagne into Katharina’s glass and then called for another bottle.

‘Make sure it’s French, mind!’ he shouted, putting real American dollars on the bar, ‘and another malt scotch for my friend.’

As Katharina raised her glass to her lips, the wispy silk of her dress rippled against her breasts. It was as if a naked girl had walked through a cobweb.

Once more Wolfgang tried not to stare.