Two Brothers

officers before, masquerading as travel guides for East German delegations to Britain. Had Silke become like them, grim and unsmiling, dull hair pulled back into a starchy bun?

He would find out soon enough.

They landed at Berlin Schonefeld airport and were herded together into the forbidding customs and immigration hall. Otto found himself thinking that Billie would approve of the building. Plenty of concrete. Funny to be in Germany, thinking of Billie, having spent seventeen years in Britain thinking of Dagmar.

Funny to be in Germany at all.

It was like a dream. To be surrounded by German voices again after so long. He was back. Back in Berlin. Yet feeling further from home than ever.

He wasn’t in the hall long. If anything confirmed his assumption that he was the subject of a Ministry of Security sting, it was the speed with which he was ushered through the arrival formalities. His name was obviously recognized at the first barrier and he was fast-tracked from that point on. While his fellow passengers resigned themselves to hours of queues and questioning, Otto was nodded and stamped past desk after desk.

Of course, while the machinery of the state might be oiled by hidden forces, nothing could increase the speed of the physical machinery of the airport, nor the complexity of the bureaucracy under which it was run. Therefore having been spat out into the luggage hall in record time, Otto now found himself having to watch as most of the people who had been on the plane with him caught up while he waited for his bag.

It arrived at last, not on a moving belt as was now common in Western airports, but in a densely packed cage pulled by a tractor, which the passengers had to unload themselves, struggling to find their own under the weight of other people’s.

Finally Otto spotted his old battered case being hurled to one side by a sweating traveller, and he was able to make his way into the arrivals hall. It was the same little case he had brought with him out of Germany seventeen years before. It was still in good condition; in the army he had used a kit bag, and he had not travelled since.

That case had stood on the floor of the first-class compartment when he and Silke had made love on her bunk. Otto wondered if she would recognize it.

He was in a hurry now, suddenly anxious to get the meeting over with. The whisky buzz he had given himself on the plane was wearing off and he had decided it would not be sensible to give himself another.

Searching in his pocket for the little leather notebook in which he had written the address she had given in her letter, Otto scurried past the final line of customs officers unchallenged and began looking about for a sign to the taxi rank.

Perhaps that was why he didn’t see her.

He was looking up. At the signs.

He hadn’t expected her to meet him.

‘Ottsy.’

He heard the voice and in those two syllables he knew.

Stopping dead, he stared about himself.

Shocked. Confused. Looking from one grey dowdy figure to another. Searching the monotone collage of depressed humanity. Cheap threadbare clothes. Sallow skin. A smile or two here and there but only brave ones. Weary ones.

‘Ottsy, I’m here. I’m over here.’

That voice. That same old voice. Leaping across seventeen long years.

Turning around, he saw her.

And yet he didn’t.

The woman he saw was a replica. The Soviet version of the one who owned the voice. As if they’d tried to make one like her but couldn’t. Just like their awful gutless cars and leaking, lumpy refrigerators. Recognizable as of the same species as their glamorous, stylish, exciting American and European counter-parts, but so obviously cheap, tawdry imitations.

The skin didn’t glow. The hair didn’t shine. The lips were still full but showed the pinched, pursed lines of a forty-a-day habit.

The eyes were the same, though. Big, deep and dark.

And sad. That hadn’t changed either. Those eyes that had been sad since the morning of 1 April 1933.

‘Dagmar?’ Otto heard himself saying. ‘Is that you?’

She flinched very slightly. Perhaps she knew what had flashed across his mind. Perhaps she thought the same thing every day herself, in her chicken coop Stalin-approved apartment, exchanging tired, worn-out glances with her mirror while she waited to see if the hot water would work or not.

‘Yes, Ottsy,’ she said. ‘Of course it’s me.’

She was standing perhaps three metres from him. People bustled between them. He stepped towards her, directly into somebody’s path.

‘Entschuldigen Sie mich, bitte,’ he heard himself saying in that once familiar tongue, but the person merely grunted and was gone.

They were less than two metres apart now, but having been stopped once he did not seem to know how to cover the final distance.

‘You didn’t die?’ he almost croaked. His mouth suddenly dry and his tongue sticky. Speaking in English again out of habit, in a daze, only half-conscious of speaking at all.

‘No,’ she replied in English, ‘I didn’t die.’

Then a beat. The tiniest of pauses. A flicker of what looked very like suspicion flashed across her face.

‘But you knew that, Otto,’ she said, ‘you replied to my letter.’

‘Yes… yes, of course,’ he stammered.

So his first instinct had been right after all. She was alive! Once more she was breathing the very same air as him. Seventeen years of pain, longing and regret were suddenly and shockingly at an end.

He had been so sure she was dead. So sure it would be Silke.

Dagmar stepped towards him, deftly avoiding the scurrying people that divided them. With each step appearing more familiar to him. Her movements still graceful as of old, she even managed to wear her dull and threadbare suit with a flash of style.

‘Won’t you hug me, Ottsy?’ she said, standing before him. ‘Or don’t you care to any more?’ And then a smile, her smile. The lips more lined and the skin around them thinner but Dagmar’s smile nonetheless and enchanting still. ‘Have I grown too ugly for a kiss?’

‘You Dagmar, ugly?’ he whispered. ‘Never.’

Stepping forward once again, he enfolded her in his arms.

And in the moment it took him to take hold of her, she was transformed. His Dagmar once more, the loveliest girl in Berlin, just as she had always been. He had only to blow away the dust of seventeen years and there she would be again. Dagmar Fischer. Princess. The woman who had owned his heart since he was a boy.

The stuff of dreams. Of fairy tales.

Tightly they held each other. As if fearful that hidden hands were threatening to tear them apart.

Otto wondered if he was going to faint, a sensation he had never experienced before. He felt levitated. Floating. Outside and above himself, watching the scene play out below. It was heady and intoxicating. He felt drunk.

She was in his arms once more.

Her hair again upon his face.

Her ear close to his lips.

Just exactly as it had been in the very moments when he had last seen her. At the station, when he went away. Then, as now, there were people all around, travellers hurrying back and forth, German voices on the tannoys announcing arrivals and departures. A coffee store and vending machines. It was as if the two of them had stood still while time had moved on. Frozen in each other’s arms from 1939 to 1956 while the world hustled and bustled around them. The greatest war ever fought had come and gone. Empires had fallen and others had risen up. The single most terrible crime in all history had been perpetrated and now the places of those murders had become museums. Scientists were planning to place objects in orbit and swing bands were giving way to young men with greased hair and guitars.

And through all that and more, Otto Stengel had held Dagmar Fischer close in his heart. And now once more