Two Brothers

‘I’m afraid we don’t have any lemonade, Dagmar. Sorry, just water actually. And I’m not a professor either.’

‘If you are to teach me then you are a professor, Herr Professor,’ the beautifully dressed little girl replied firmly, her huge, dark eyes turning unblinkingly upon him. ‘All of my tutors are professors. It is how things are done.’

Her father, Herr Fischer, smiled indulgently, no doubt under the impression that Wolfgang must be finding his lovely, porcelain doll of a daughter as charming and clever as he did himself. In fact Wolfgang was struggling to conceal his desire to give little Dagmar a slap and get her and her father out of his apartment as quickly as possible so that he could have a cigarette and get back to his piano.

But he had to go through the motions. He had promised Frieda and they really could do with the money. Although Wolfgang was quite certain that he would be turned down. These people were not his people. Wolfgang knew who the man was, everybody did. He was Fischer of Fischer’s department store on Kurfurstendamm. And people like Herr Fischer did not entrust their daughters to people like Wolfgang who didn’t even have any lemonade in the house and wasn’t even a professor.

‘May I ask, Herr Fischer,’ Wolfgang said, ‘why you’ve come to me? I’m not exactly a society tutor and I’m new to teaching. I can’t claim much experience with children either. Particularly one as young as your daughter.’

Particularly snooty-looking little creatures like Dagmar, Wolfgang thought. A Ku’damm princess whom Daddy wanted to acquire a ‘refined’ and ‘dainty’ skill to make her more marriageable to the right sort of minor ex-royal or son of an industrial magnate.

‘Little experience with children?’ Herr Fischer laughed. ‘What were those two young maniacs who ran out of the room when we arrived, then? Hobgoblins? They sound naughty enough to be.’

The boys had in fact begun to edge their way back into the room, and were lurking in the doorway just out of Fischer’s vision, their faces contorted with exaggerated expressions of hostility and contempt. Paulus and Otto were prepared to tolerate the existence of girls at their school but in their own home they drew the line (Silke being an honorary boy). Particularly girls with perfectly placed pink ribbons in their hair, snow-white trimmed black velvet dresses and clouds of delicate lace at their necks and wrists.

‘Boys are rather different,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘Besides, I only have to live with those two, I don’t have to teach them music.’

‘You mean you don’t teach them music?’ Mr Fischer enquired. ‘I would find that very surprising.’

‘Well, yes, of course I do,’ Wolfgang said, slightly confused, ‘as a father, yes, of course. But professionally I have only ever taught adults and quite frankly I’m not even much good at that. I’m really not at all sure that I’m the sort of person you—’

‘My husband will be thrilled should you decide to place your lovely Dagmar with us as a pupil,’ Frieda said, bringing in a tray of biscuits from the kitchen.

There was a loud raspberry from behind her at this but again, when Frieda glanced round angrily, no culprit could be seen.

‘I’m Frau Stengel, Herr Fischer,’ Frieda said, offering her hand. ‘Frau Doktor Stengel.’

‘Thanks, darling,’ Wolfgang said firmly, ‘but I think I can arrange my own clients and I really don’t think this would work out for either of us.’

‘Really?’ Fischer enquired. ‘Your advert said you were taking on pupils. Is there anything wrong with my daughter?’

‘Of course not, no!’ Wolfgang said quickly. ‘But look, Herr Fischer, I know who you are. Fischer’s is a Berlin institution. You’re a rich man, you could afford to hire the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic to teach your little girl. You don’t want me.’

‘Why not?’

Wolfgang gestured at the crowded untidy apartment. The trombone leaning in the corner. The accordion on the table amongst the newspapers and musical manuscripts. Cushions and books on the floor. Coffee cups balanced on the bookshelves. The theatre and film posters on the wall, Piscator and Chaplin side by side.

The framed prints, grotesque cartoons of fat greedy capitalists and homicidal Prussian officers, their hands filled with money and dripping with blood while all around them the poor and the sick looked on in sullen anger.

‘George Grosz,’ Fischer said, ‘from the First Berlin Dada Fair.’

‘You know it?’ Wolfgang looked surprised.

‘You think a shopkeeper can’t appreciate art?’

‘Well… I admit I’m surprised that you… Do you like Grosz then?’

‘I admire him,’ Fischer replied warily, ‘I can’t say I’d hang him in my drawing room.’

There was a moment’s silence. Frieda offered Dagmar a biscuit at which the little girl nibbled tentatively, like a bored mouse who can expect better later.

‘Look, Herr Stengel,’ Fischer said, ‘I don’t know much about music and I don’t know anything about teaching. What I know is selling. Now when I employ a person to work in one of the departments in my store, I try and find someone who’s interested in the thing they’ll be selling so they can make the customers interested in it too. It said in your advert that you are a composer, arranger and orchestrator as well as being a working professional musician. I like that idea. I can’t imagine anyone being more interested in music than a composer, can you? Unless of course it’s a piano salesman.’

‘You want me to “sell” music to your kid?’ Wolfgang asked, unable to disguise his disdain.

‘Well, it’s like anything, isn’t it? If you’re going to spend a lot of money on a hat you’ve got to be really convinced that you love that hat. To put in all the effort it must take to learn an instrument I imagine you’d really have to believe in music, wouldn’t you? So, yes, I want you to “sell” music to Dagmar that she might be inspired to learn.’

Wolfgang could not deny the sense in what Fischer was saying or the honesty with which he said it.

‘And you have children yourself. I don’t think there’s any more impenetrable psyche than that of a small child. I personally can’t make head nor tail of them, which is why my wife and I employ two nannies. You have children and clearly you’re raising them yourself. It all looks like a good fit to me.’

Wolfgang was about to reply but a look from Frieda silenced him and Fischer continued.

‘Dagmar’s mother and I think that she’s shown a bit of talent… No, don’t worry,’ he went on in answer to the flicker of amusement that crossed Wolfgang’s features. ‘I’m not one of those ridiculous parents who think their child is a genius prodigy. It’s just that we’ve noticed that she’d rather mess around at our piano than with her dolls so we thought we’d give her lessons. I took a look at a couple of expensive chaps in the city but their “studios” as they called them looked like a cross between a prison and a cemetery to me. I want Dagmar to have a bit of fun. I’ve seen you play a couple of times too.’

‘You have?’ Wolfgang said, perking up immediately. ‘Really? Where?’

Frieda smiled at Wolfgang’s puppy-like eagerness.

‘Not recently, bit busy for late nights these days, now the economy’s expanding again. But during the inflation, we were all a little looser that year, weren’t we? I saw you at the Joplin Club.’

‘Best gig I ever had.’

‘Yes, it was fun. Quite crazy really. I remember the owner, he came up to my table and actually offered to buy my department store. There and then. Absolutely extraordinary, he couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen.’

‘Eighteen, just,’ Wolfgang replied.

‘Really. A young man destined to go far, I think.’

‘Sadly not. He died.’

‘Oh dear. Of what, may I ask?’

‘Tastes he’d developed during the inflation that he couldn’t afford to sustain when it was over.’

‘I see.’

‘There were a lot of casualties that year. He was one of them.’

‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear that.’

‘Yes, so was I. He couldn’t play a note but he was as jazz as any man I ever met. Whenever a great new disc