Two Brothers

them have made passes at me. And then yesterday they told me I couldn’t swim. It was a school trip too. I had to wait in an office with two other Jewish girls while my class all went in. It was so humiliating. Girls used to beg to be on my squad. And the school got all the team cossies from Daddy’s store at cost. They’re still wearing them!’

And she cried once more. Desperate helpless tears.

Even aside from the dreadful blow of her father’s death, the change in Dagmar’s circumstances had been steeper and more brutal than it had been for most of Berlin’s Jews. They, like any ordinary people, had at least some experience of the petty restrictions, humiliations and disappointments of existence. Dagmar’s life, however, up until 30 January 1933, had been almost uniquely fabulous and blessed. The beloved only daughter of enormously wealthy and doting parents living at the very heart of the most exciting city in Europe. Few girls on earth were so cosseted and few could look forward to a future more exciting or glamorous. Now the glittering memory of that life taunted Dagmar. Every day she encountered someone or other who had once fawned upon her and whom she now suspected of gloating at her distress.

Dagmar wiped the tears from her eyes, looking for a handkerchief and pretending to sneeze.

‘You see,’ Otto muttered, casting a dark glance at Paulus. ‘You see what’s happening? They’re grinding us down. We need to do something.’

‘I am doing something,’ Paulus said.

‘What? Studying?’

‘Yes. Studying.’

‘Ha! What bloody good is that? Jews have always studied! Study study study! Mum never shuts up about it. Why? What good has it done us? Fuck that. You want to be a lawyer? What a joke! What’s the law to us? It’s the law that’s fucking us. Besides, Jews aren’t allowed to be lawyers, are they? Or any sort of decent job. You’re just going to end up a really really well-qualified beggar!’

‘Yeah, well, let me tell you this,’ Paulus replied. ‘When I get out of this country, whether it’s Palestine, London or Timbuktu, I’ll be ready. I’ll have skills to offer. It’s all very well you lifting weights and going about with a knife in your pocket, but you can’t fight them all. You need to plan.’

Paulus might have continued his lecture but he was sitting on the floor with his back against the end of Dagmar’s bed. She had stretched out her long legs so that her bare feet were hanging over the edge, quite close to Paulus’s face, and even his analytical mind was incapable of remaining focused while in such proximity to any part of Dagmar’s naked skin.

‘I hate school now,’ she said kicking her feet and wiggling her toes in frustration, ‘now that they’ve started making us sit separately.’

Paulus wasn’t listening. He was drinking in the sight of her pretty painted toes and shapely ankles dangling so close. Otto was staring too.

Both boys simply aching to kiss those feet.

‘Me and the two other Jewish girls,’ Dagmar went on, addressing the ceiling, for once oblivious to the stupefying effect that any part of her exposed self had on the Stengel boys, ‘stuck in a shameful little corner. We weren’t even friends before. They’re scholarship kids who don’t pay fees. I used to secretly look down on them, which seems funny now. Now that I’m getting looked down on myself.’

‘Personally I don’t give a stuff about sitting apart,’ Paulus said, sliding away from the end of the bed, unable to take the pressure and frustration of Dagmar’s crimson-tipped toes any longer. ‘Why would I care? I’m there to work, not talk. Sod ’em, I say. If they stop being my friends because of a law then they were crap friends anyway. I just don’t let it bother me.’

Dagmar swung her legs off the side of the bed, four hungry eyes following her every move. She took a packet of cigarettes from the little drawer in her bedside table.

‘Blimey, Dags, you’re chaining it,’ Paulus said. ‘Won’t your mum smell it?’

‘She will, but so what? I used to do what she said but now that Daddy’s gone it’s all different. I don’t even bother to open a window any more. To be honest I don’t think she cares anyway.’

The boys nodded but they did not really understand. The ongoing misery of their own father’s incarceration in a concentration camp had of course hugely affected their family life but it had not changed their basic attitude to their mother’s authority. Perhaps it was because she had always been more of a boss in the home than Wolfgang had anyway.

Dagmar offered the boys cigarettes.

‘They’re French,’ Dagmar said. ‘Gitanes. I have a French pen pal who sends me them.’

The three of them smoked for a little while in silence.

‘I think I’ll do what you did, Otts,’ Dagmar said with sudden venom. ‘Chuck in school. I just hate it now. The way they all look at me. It’s like, it’s like I’m sick or something. Most of them are trying to be nice but actually that just makes it worse. I’m the poor little kid with the incurable Jew disease. And then there’s him. He’s there, always there.’

‘Who?’

‘Him, of course. That man! Everywhere, hanging up in every single classroom. Staring out like the complete bloody nutcase that he is. The man who killed my dad. The man who won’t even let me go swimming. What is wrong with him? Why does he care if I go swimming or not!’

Dagmar smoked ferociously in an effort not to begin crying again.

Paulus and Otto looked at each other, helpless in the face of her distress.

‘Don’t chuck in school,’ Paulus said gently. ‘Don’t let them beat you.’

‘Bollocks,’ Otto snorted, ‘give it up. Screw them, why should you sit there while they sing the bloody Horst Wessel song? I know why Pauly studies all the time. It’s so he can write you those stupid letters in Latin that he thinks are so clever!’

Paulus was aghast. ‘You’ve been looking in my notebook, you bastard!’

‘Yeah, and what a load of crap! Pulchra es amo te — I looked it up. Oh you’re so beautiful, Dags and he loves you! Oculi tui sicut vasa pretiosa — your eyes are like precious jewels! Ha ha! What a lot of big hairy balls!’

Paulus was crimson with fury, his fists clenched.

‘Fuck you, Otts!’ he said, leaping to his feet.

‘And fuck you double,’ Otto replied, getting up from the little pink and gold dressing-table chair on which he’d just sat down and squaring up to his brother.

‘You’re not to fight in here, boys!’ Dagmar cried but with a rare smile — the rivalry between the twins for her affections always cheered her up a little. ‘I have all my special things and you’re such great big lumps these days you’ll break everything. Anyway, Ottsy, I like Pauly’s Latin letters.’

‘I wanted to do something for you that was difficult,’ Paulus muttered defensively, crimson with embarrassment, ‘so you’d know I’d made an effort and be impressed.’

‘Why don’t you chisel her a letter on the Brandenburg Gate? That’d be an effort.’

‘I am impressed, Pauly,’ Dagmar said. ‘I love your letters. For one thing they make me pay attention in class so that I can actually read them. My friends can’t believe I have a boy who writes to me in Latin… Or a boy who writes me songs, Ottsy.’

‘Songs?’ Paulus exclaimed. ‘Has he been writing you songs?’

‘Yes, didn’t you know?’ Dagmar grinned. ‘They’re so sweet.’

‘You sneaky bastard! When have you been doing that then?’

‘While you’re at school being an idiot and studying, mate.’

‘You mean he’s snuck round here without me and been playing you songs?’

‘Well, just once or twice,’ Dagmar admitted coyly.

‘You see, Pauly,’ Otto crowed. ‘Just because you study hardest doesn’t mean you’re cleverest.’

‘No need to be jealous, Pauly,’ Dagmar said soothingly. ‘You know I love you both.’

‘Yes, well, one day you’re going to have to choose, you know,’ Paulus blurted. ‘You know we’ve always told