Two Brothers

‘For which you should be very grateful. You may have had a lucky escape. Life is undoubtedly unfair and cruel and swinish.’

The waiter brought the soup and they ate for a few moments in silence.

‘What more can I tell you?’ Helmut went on. ‘She pretty much retired from everything and went to live with her mother. I saw her about a year or two ago. The symptoms were in remission but she was very scarred.’

‘I should like to see her.’

‘I very very much doubt she would want that, Wolfgang. Besides…’

Helmut left the sentence hanging where it was while he studied the diamond on his cigarette case. He didn’t need to say more. It was pretty obvious that the last thing any distressed girl needed was a Jew trying to befriend her.

Wolfgang could be of no help to anyone. Not Katharina, not his family, not himself.

‘Best to remember her as she was, don’t you think?’ Helmut said. ‘Beautiful, captivating Katharina.’

They ate their meal together. Sharing happier memories of the great and glorious Joplin Club, memories which for Wolfgang were destined always now to be suffused with an intolerable sadness.

It was certainly no consolation that all the other members of Kurt’s old gang were doing very well in the newly awoken Germany. Dorf the bookish money launderer was now with Schacht at the Reichsbank.

‘Still juggling debt,’ Helmut laughed. ‘The only difference is that now he does it while he’s sober. And you remember Hans? Believe it or not, he’s also at exactly the same game as he was in 1923. Acquiring expensive motor cars on the cheap from those who find they have to liquidate their assets urgently.’

Wolfgang nodded. Wondering how many of those fine cars that had pulled up outside the Kempinski hotel for the Fischers’ ‘farewell’ party a year before had since been bought short and sold long by his old friend Hans. The Fischer Mercedes probably amongst them.

‘And Helene, of course,’ Helmut went on. ‘You remember dear sparkling Helene? She is the star of us all, still passing out at the end of parties but now she does it in the homes of ambassadors and in ballrooms on the Wilhelmstrasse. A friend of Goering, no less. Who as we all know does love a pretty girl.’

‘Helene’s a Nazi?’ Wolfgang replied.

‘Oh yes,’ said Helmut, ‘and not from convenience either. She’s not like me, I’m just a fair weather National Socialist, but she’s the real thing. She’s besotted with the whole business. Loves it. The flags, the uniforms. The power. She honestly believes that Germany’s woken up. From what and to what she never really explains. It’s just woken up that’s all, new dawn, young nation, pure blood. The lot. She’s hysterically in love with Adolf, of course, but then so many otherwise perfectly sensible women are. They dream of him marching into their boudoirs and ordering them sternly to bed where they will lie back rigidly to attention with right arm outstretched while he tells them that it’s his unalterable will that he ravishes them. Honestly, I bow to no one in my appreciation of male beauty but that one I really cannot see.’

Wolfgang thought back to the Helene he had known. Young and bright and intelligent. In love with fashion and fun. And now she was in love with Hitler.

‘She was a fashion buyer for Isaac Fischer,’ Wolfgang said.

‘Well, the Jews enslaved us all before the awakening, don’t you know,’ Helmut said with a smile.

Wolfgang almost smiled too. Helmut didn’t care what he joked about; he never had.

‘She was such a free spirit,’ Wolfgang went on. ‘And a good heart, too, I know she was. We laughed together all the time. She loved The Sheik of Araby and Avalon. Doesn’t she mind? I mean about all the hatred and violence.’

‘She doesn’t think about it, dear. And if she did, she’d think it was all lies, just Jewish moaning and a few sweet, over-excited SA boys getting carried away. People like Helene are having too much fun to want any of this to stop. Everyone is having too much fun. Every day another parade assuring us that we’re better than everyone else in the whole world, so invigorating. You can see why people love it, surely? I mean if Adolf had decided to pick on, say, left-handed people and let Jews join his gang, you’d be strutting about with everybody else, wouldn’t you?’

‘I hope not. Not me. But I’m sure plenty would. Of course it wouldn’t happen though. It’s always the Jews who get it. It’s why we’re here.’

‘Apropos of which, Wolfgang,’ Helmut said, producing a pen and a little leather notebook on which a swastika was embossed, ‘I’m going to write down my telephone number for you. If you need help, and of course you will, you may call me. Be discreet, of course, when you explain yourself, but I promise that I will do what I can for you, for friendship, you know, for old times’ sake.’ Helmut tore the piece of paper from his book and got to his feet. ‘And now I’m afraid I must go. I fear I have a long long night on the train ahead. I’d only popped into your little bar to see if I could pick up a bit of company for the journey. Love a bit of fresh trade, you know, can never resist the lure of the new, but now I fear I shall just have to read a book.’

‘Where are you off to?’ Wolfgang said. ‘Somewhere nice?’

‘Munich! Heart of the movement, my friend! Home of big bellies and small minds. Thank God I’m just passing through. Off to Bad Wiessee, a charming little spa resort. Have you been?’

‘No. I’ve never had a holiday, as it happens. We had our kids too young, never had the time, never had the money.’

‘And of course when we were young Berlin was a holiday. Why would one have gone anywhere else?’

‘That’s true.’

A wistful shared moment hung between them. Then Helmut drained his wineglass and his Cognac and called for the bill.

‘Anyway, you certainly aren’t missing much on this trip. Bad Wiessee itself is beautiful but the company won’t be. Hey ho! Duty beckons, all work and no play makes Chief of Staff SA Rohm a dull boy and I must go and line up his playmates.’

As they parted Helmut took Wolfgang’s hand.

‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘I can help you. I’m SA and we can do what we like. Pretty soon there won’t be an army, or a police, or even a government in Germany, just us, the SA. We are the party, and we are the nation. Even Adolf is scared of Rohm, you know. Well, who wouldn’t be? Three million troops? The SA is the biggest army in Europe and it answers to Queen Ernst, not King Adolf.’

‘I’m grateful, Helmut. Thank you.’

They emerged from the restaurant and parted, Helmut in a black Mercedes that had been waiting for him, Wolfgang to make his way home on foot.

As he did so his thoughts were far away and long ago. Back in the Berlin of 1923, at a bar, talking theatre and art with an intoxicating girl.

He didn’t love Katharina any more. He had never loved her in the truest sense. He loved Frieda and Frieda alone, Katharina had been a crush, an infatuation. But a beautiful and sincere one nonetheless, based as much on a meeting of minds as it had been on her sexual allure, and his heart ached to think of her in such abject misery. If he had ever loved another woman it would certainly have been beautiful, thrilling Katharina.

All those nights talking art and theatre. All that style. That captivating beauty.

And now.

Wolfgang had seen the faces of those ravaged by that cruel disease.

Forcing such images from his mind he focused once more on the beautiful nineteen-year-old with the severest shining black bobbed hair he had ever seen. The smoky stare. The purple lips. Chattering about Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. Stealing Lucky after Lucky from the packet on the bar between them.

Lost as he was in 1923, Wolfgang wasn’t concentrating on the present.

Had he been, he might perhaps have noticed the large black van parked opposite their apartment building. He might have seen the little gang of kids standing nearby, as if waiting for something to happen, throwing glances his way and giggling. He might have sensed the nervous excitement with which the concierge grunted her guten Abend, her manner even ruder and more abrupt than usual, her door closing quickly as he passed.