Two Brothers

peaceful. Coffee, toast. Frieda stitching socks, Paulus on the rug reading. Otto biting the heads off his toy soldiers. And he had to write this stupid advert.

He chewed his pen in moody silence.

Specializing in all instruments?

All instruments equally special?

You name it, I can play it?

‘Maybe I should just stick to piano,’ he said. ‘That’s all anyone ever wants their little buggers to learn anyway.’

‘Whatever you think. Just get on with it.’

He hated the idea of having to teach music.

And he particularly hated the idea of teaching music to children. But he knew from friends who had been forced into the same grim career compromise that that was where the work was.

‘Of course it’ll be kids,’ he said grumpily. ‘Adults are mature enough to know they’re shit at music. You have to teach children to understand that they can’t play.’

‘Please try not to be so negative, Wolf,’ Frieda said.

‘Well, that’s really what teaching music is about, isn’t it? I mean, ninety-nine per cent of the time? The long torturous process of revealing to the student that they are complete crap and will never be able to play anything more than O Tannenbaum. Teacher and student just waiting it out week after week after week until finally the penny drops and the student gives up, never to think about music again until they force it on their own equally talentless kids.’

‘Wolf! Shut up! Either write the advert or don’t.’

‘I’m just being honest, that’s all.’

He had enough trouble trying to get his own kids to pick up an instrument, let alone anyone else’s. He could scarcely get Paulus and Otto to even listen to anything decent. He strongly suspected he was the father of a couple of Philistines. The only jazz they seemed to like was ragtime, and at very nearly seven they really ought to have got a bit beyond that.

‘Are you sure they weren’t both adopted?’ he whispered occasionally to Frieda.

Which she did not find funny at all.

Wolf was a professional musician. Not some glorified nanny.

It was the government’s fault, of course. Stresemann and that whole dull Social Democratic crowd with their boring stability and prudence. What was becoming of the country? It was a disgrace! Even in Berlin, in the heart of the youngest, wildest, most hedonistic and avant garde metropolis on the planet, things had calmed down to an alarming degree. There was still club work at weekends but the weekdays were dead.

‘People have stopped dancing,’ Wolfgang moaned. ‘Three years ago I had my pick of twenty gigs a day. Now I’m fighting top side men for pfennigs. Guys who have really got it are playing piano in fleapits to the Keystone Cops! It’s a criminal waste of talent. God, I miss the good old days.’

‘What?’ Frieda said, focusing on threading a needle. ‘You mean revolution and inflation?’

‘Yes! Exactly, Fred! That’s exactly what I mean. Cataclysmic national disaster! That’s what a city needs to make it swing. Three years ago when the country was completely knackered, bank clerks and shop girls were dancing crotch to crotch into the small hours! Drinking themselves insane, snorting cocaine and slipping off to screw in the toilets! Jazzing it up like there was no tomorrow because they didn’t think that there was going to be a tomorrow. Suddenly they’ve turned into their parents. It’s a disgrace.’

‘People can’t have fun all the time, Wolf.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they have responsibilities. They need to save. They need to start planning for the future.’

‘Future! Future. As if any German under thirty-five even knows what the word means! There never was a future up until now! Being alive in the morning, that was the future. The future was your next meal. Now people are planning for old age. Investing in pensions, putting a little aside for their summer holidays. Have we learned nothing? Don’t they realize that the next drink and the next dance are the only investments worth making?’

‘Well it’s up to you, darling,’ Frieda said. ‘Do it or don’t do it but you know as well as I do that we could do with the money.’ She paused for a moment before adding, ‘You know, just until you sell a song.’

Wolfgang smiled. She meant it too. She still believed.

‘The next Mendelssohn, eh?’

‘No!’ Frieda protested. ‘The next Scott Joplin.’

Wolfgang kissed her.

‘Yuk!’ said Otto from amidst his dead soldiers.

‘Don’t be immature, Otts,’ said Paulus from his book, adding ‘Poo face’ under his breath.

‘Frieda, I’m not Joplin,’ Wolfgang said with a smile. ‘I’m just happy to live in a world where somebody is.’

Frieda smiled. ‘So what now?’

‘Well. I suppose I try and finish this advert.’

‘Oh give it here!’

And exactly a week later, on the very next Sunday morning, instead of lying in bed till noon, Wolfgang found himself dressed in his best suit pouring coffee for a prosperous-looking gentleman who sat gingerly on the edge of the Stengels’ cluttered couch next to his exquisitely turned-out six-year-old daughter.

‘And the little girl?’ Wolfgang enquired. ‘Fraulein Fischer?’

‘Dagmar,’ the gentleman said. ‘Please, you must call her Dagmar.’

‘Uhm… Will you take some refreshment, Dagmar?’

There were suppressed giggles from somewhere in the vicinity of the doorway to the kitchen. Clearly other members of the Stengel household were finding their father’s efforts at polite formality amusing. Little Silke was with them too, as mischievous as either of the boys.

Wolfgang glanced furiously over his shoulder but none of the three culprits were to be seen.

‘I should like a glass of lemonade, please, Herr Professor,’ the little girl on the couch replied in the most refined of voices, ‘with quite a lot of sugar.’

This produced a positive explosion of suppressed merriment from the kitchen followed by the sound of little boys’ laughter and then, worse, a little girl’s voice indulging in a whispered effort at mimicry.

‘I should like a glass of lemonade please, Herr Professor. With quite a lot of sugar.’

The elegant, refined little girl sitting stiff and straight-backed beside her father could hardly help but hear the ridicule being directed at her and so put her nose in the air, her effortlessly superior expression making it clear that she was used to ignoring boys and other riff-raff.

‘I’m sorry,’ Wolfgang apologized. ‘My sons. I’d chuck them out and let them beg but I’m obliged by law to look after them. Damned Weimar Government, too soft by half, eh?’

Herr Fischer smiled.

‘Boys,’ he said indulgently. ‘I seem to recall having once been one myself.’

‘There’s a girl too,’ Dagmar said firmly. ‘I heard her most clearly. A very very horrid girl in my opinion.’

Wolfgang smiled apologetically.

‘Our maid’s daughter. But she’s all right, just high-spirited, that’s all.’

‘My mummy says that there is never any excuse to be rude or unkind. Certainly not high spirits.’

This pious observation brought forth further suppressed giggles and Wolfgang decided he’d better move things along.