Two Brothers

‘Will you come next week, Silks?’ he pleaded. ‘I don’t think they’ll ever actually let me go out, so please say you’ll come next week.’

‘I’ll come if you promise to try not to have too many new cuts and bruises on your face when I do,’ she said with a smile, reaching up and putting a hand on his cheek. Otto may have been fighting less but he still had plenty of recent wounds to prove his belligerence remained undiminished.

‘You’re such a handsome boy, you know,’ Silke said, gently touching his scars.

‘I have to fight them, Silke,’ Otto protested, ‘sometimes at least. To show them I’m a Jew.’

‘Bide your time, Otts,’ Silke whispered. ‘There are better ways. Look at me. I fight them too, you know, and my face is still lovely, don’t you think?’

Otto smiled, but if Silke had been hoping that he’d take the opportunity to pay her a compliment, she was disappointed.

‘Yes,’ he laughed, ‘you’ve still got the same old ugly mug as ever, Silks. You’re talking about the Rote Hilfe, aren’t you?’ he added in a whisper. ‘I couldn’t join them, Silks.’

‘Why not?’

‘Dagmar wouldn’t like it. She hates Commies.’

Silke’s usually sunny smile darkened somewhat.

‘Yeah. I find most millionaires’ kids do,’ she said.

‘Dagmar isn’t a millionaire’s kid any more, Silke,’ Otto said firmly. ‘They executed her dad, remember.’

‘Yeah. OK. She’s had it very tough I admit,’ Silke said, ‘but once a princess…’

The bell rang for a second time.

‘I’d better go,’ Otto said. ‘It’s a ten-K run in full kit for lateness and I’m not kidding. You’d better hurry too or you’ll get locked in.’

‘I wouldn’t mind, Otts!’ she said rather too eagerly, grabbing at his hand.

‘Believe me, you would. This place is hell. Promise you’ll come back next week.’

‘Only if you promise not to fight!’

‘Can’t promise that,’ Otto shouted as he ran off. ‘Cos I don’t want to lie to you.’

‘Promise!’ she shouted. But he was gone.

Silke turned towards the gate, knowing that nothing on earth would stop her from visiting the following week.

Weekly Visits Berlin, 1936

OTTO DIDN’T STOP fighting but he fought less.

The fact that by behaving himself he had been able to open up a line of communication with his family was too precious a thing to put at risk, even at the price of buckling under to the Napola regime.

‘I don’t think he’s any less angry,’ Silke reported to Frieda after her third visit, ‘but he’s learning to bottle it up. The honest truth is I think that secretly he’s starting to quite enjoy the stupid curriculum. All the sport and craft and guns and hardly any of what he calls “book learning”. They mix up legends with real history and talk about mythical German heroes fighting evil dwarfs and trolls as if it had all been real.’

‘Yes,’ Paulus observed. ‘And we all know who those trolls are supposed to represent, don’t we?’

Frieda smiled. ‘Well, I’m glad Otto’s finding at least something to enjoy in that horrible place, and I’m also comforted to hear that this is how the Nazis educate their so-called “elite” because by the sound of it we’ll only have to wait for twenty years or so before the whole damn system just dies of pure ignorance.’

‘Well, from what I can see they’re certainly not going to find a substitute for Einstein out of the boys at the Berlin Spandau Napola, that’s for sure,’ Silke said, laughing.

‘Only the Jews could produce an Einstein,’ Wolfgang observed from his habitual place at the silent piano. He was a little drunk, having been able to earn a few coins that day playing accordion outside local bars.

‘What a stupid bloody thing to say, Dad!’ Paulus snapped. ‘Newton wasn’t a Jew, was he? Faraday wasn’t a Jew. Aristophanes wasn’t a Jew! The whole basis of what’s happening to us is that we’re supposed to be a race apart and we’re bloody not. Don’t you know any thick Jews? I certainly do.’

Wolfgang looked chastened.

‘No, Pauly,’ he mumbled, ‘you’re right. It was a stupid thing to say.’

There was a moment’s silence. The fact that Wolfgang was not merely losing his authority over his son, but also Paulus’s respect, was clear for all to see. Silke, who had known Wolfgang as the funny, talented, enthusiastic man he had once been, looked away in embarrassment.

‘Well, now,’ said Frieda. ‘These Sunday nights when we get news of Otto are the absolute highlight of our week, Silke. Truly they are. We are so grateful that you can do this for us, you do know that, don’t you, dear?’

‘Of course I do, Frieda, but you must know how much I love to do it. Sundays are my best day as well. Seeing Ottsy… And of course coming here.’

Silke smiled awkwardly and went a little red beneath her spring tan.

Frieda smiled back. ‘Yes, Ottsy and all of us.’

A far less astute observer than Frieda could scarcely have missed how much Silke was relishing the special place she now held in Otto’s life and also within the brotherhood of the Stengel twins. For the first time since that faraway day in 1926 when Herr Fischer had first brought his little princess for a music lesson, Silke was centre- stage with her beloved boys once more. Their only link. The glue that continued to bind them all together.

Silke had known for as many years as she could remember that Otto and Paulus loved Dagmar more than they loved her. She knew very well that while she was their ‘mate’, Dagmar was their passion. The person for whom both boys would gladly risk anything. At first the jealousy she had felt over this had just been that of a little girl who knew her place in the pecking order of childhood friendship. But in the previous two or three years her feelings had grown more painful and all-consuming.

And Silke also knew that those feelings were no longer as evenly placed as they had been when the three of them were children.

For while Silke was merely jealous and irritated that Paulus preferred Dagmar’s company to hers, the fact that Otto did caused her that unique private agony that only unrequited love can inflict.

Silke knew now that she was in love with Otto. And while she also knew very well that Otto was in love with Dagmar, Otto could no longer see Dagmar.

He could only see her.

She was the only one he could talk to and confide in. Share his secrets and his pain. Even Paulus, his life companion, was barred to him, and any conversation Otto wished to have with his brother he had to conduct through her.

This was a new and exciting intimacy, which Silke in her tough, rough-and-ready life had never remotely experienced before. Her home life was cold, alienating and occasionally violent. Her school and BDM friendships were always suspect to her because unlike most of the girls she was not in love with Hitler. But now she had Otto.

Every week she would visit him and he was so very pleased to see her and actually said so, which he had certainly never done in the past.

And then they’d walk the grounds of the Napola together and he’d want to talk and she would gasp in suitable girlish admiration at his stories of winning races and being the sharpest shot and showing all those Nazi arseholes what a Jew could do. And then she’d tut and scold him over the cuts and bruises that he still sustained from all the fights he could not avoid. And she’d make him laugh with descriptions of all the silly leaping and jumping about and balletic scarf swirling she was required to do in the BDM.

‘And you can bet those pervy party guys make sure to be around just to check our little white gym dresses are good and short,’ she’d laugh. ‘We know their game all right.’

Then, when they’d found the quietest possible place in the wooded parkland, they’d sit beneath a tree and Otto would listen in rapt silence while Silke told him all the news from his family.

And sometimes, particularly when she talked about his mother, Silke would even find herself holding him. Just