Two Brothers

every now and then, when the hopeless loneliness of his new life all became too much for Otto. When he was even prepared to cry a little and to let her see. Which he would have died before doing in his previous life.

And sometimes after the tears came the anger, when he would swear vengeance on the whole Nazi state.

‘One day I’ll burn this fucking school down,’ he’d say. ‘Sometimes in the dorm at night I plan it out. How I’ll steal the fuel and where I’ll set the fires. I’ll choose a time when the lads are out at sport because some of them aren’t so bad for all the fact they think they’re going to rule the world. But that fucking grinning, patronizing principal and all his master race of teachers, they’ll have to take their chance. We’ll see if they’re such supermen then, eh? I might even lock the doors before I set the match.’

Otto scared Silke when he talked like that. But then when he was at his most angry and his face became violent and his voice was filled with hate, Silke would hold him closer and whisper, ‘Ottsy, don’t turn into them,’ and then tears would come again and he’d put his head on her shoulder and she’d put her arms around him and tell him that in the end everything would be all right.

And in those times Silke dared to hope. As they sat together, beneath their favourite tree on the little grassy rise which overlooked the soccer pitch, she dared to hope that perhaps now she would have her chance to be more than Otto’s friend. To actually be his girl. That perhaps today or next week or the week after that, he would turn to her, look deep into her eyes and kiss her.

It didn’t seem as mad an idea as it had once been.

Silke knew that she had turned out quite pretty. Her looks were suited to the times. Girlish, youthful, blonde, blue-eyed and tanned. She looked like a not quite so perfect version of the girls shaking tins on the Nazi fundraising posters. Certainly the other Napola boys she and Otto encountered as they walked around the school grounds always grinned and nudged each other in evident approval as they passed. One or two had even whistled.

‘Why don’t you introduce us to your girlfriend, Stengel,’ one boy called out, which made Silke flush red, as she always seemed to be doing these days.

But she was pleased all the same.

She certainly felt like she was his girlfriend. Visiting him each week and attending the formal tea with him to which most boys only brought their mothers.

Otto was the envy of plenty of jealous eyes as he escorted Silke to her place and she knew it. Many nice- looking boys, impeccably dressed in their smart uniforms, tried to smile at her but she turned haughtily away, making it clear that she was interested only in the handsome boy who had brought her.

She loved sitting down beside Otto at the beautifully laid out table and then leaping up again as the principal entered and welcomed the guests. She enjoyed the robust masculine atmosphere as every single boy in the room snapped to attention in one perfectly synchronized action and shouted ‘Welcome, guests!’ on cue.

She was one of the guests.

Otto’s guest, and very proud to be so.

He was as smart and as disciplined as any boy in the school. Delivering his Hitler salute, stamping the floor and singing the Horst Wessel song with as much gusto as any of them. And he did those hated things because it was the only way he could maintain his privileges. The only way that he could continue to see her.

And then as Otto sat down having delivered the salute, Silke would nudge his hand in the shared knowledge that his fingers had been slightly crossed. And she would feel him smiling inwardly as he pressed his knee against hers beneath the table and grabbed the biggest slice of cake for her.

It was heady stuff for a girl like Silke.

A girl whose mother was a cleaner and whose stepdad was an occasionally employed SA thug.

A girl who had always thought herself a plain second best to every other girl in Berlin. Particularly to Dagmar.

A girl who was so hopelessly in love with Otto.

Rejected on Grounds of Race London, 1956

STONE DELIVERED A fourth round of drinks to the table and without prompting took up his story.

It had been so very, very long since he had talked about himself but now that he had started he found he didn’t want to stop.

‘Finally they let me out,’ he said. ‘The principal got me in his office and said I could leave the school for an evening between five and nine. It was what I’d been working towards. It was why I’d stopped fighting and swearing at the Fuhrer.’

‘An’ I bet I know jus’ exactly what you did when you did get out,’ Billie said with a smile of her beautifully crimson lips, which seemed to remain perfectly covered with lipstick no matter how much of it she left on the rim of her glass.

‘What do you think?’ Stone asked.

‘You went straight aroun’ to this Dagmar’s place of course. Bet your feet didn’t even touch the ground.’

‘Yes I did,’ Stone said quietly, a faraway look in his eyes.

‘An’ so you broke little Silke’s heart.’

‘You think so?’ Stone enquired. ‘I really don’t know if she liked me that much. Not in that way. We were mates. We’d always been mates.’

‘Men never know. ’Specially when they don’t want to. An’ little sixteen-year-old men are worse. I remember. They are dumb!’

Stone smiled and shook yet another cigarette from his pack of Luckies.

‘Well, if I did hurt Silke I certainly got paid out myself,’ he said.

‘Dagmar dumped you?’

‘I suppose that’s what happened. Although I hadn’t really been her boyfriend except for that one night. She certainly rejected me. I turned up on her doorstep and at first her mum wouldn’t even let me in and even when she did I only got as far as the entrance hall. I was in that terrible black uniform you see, covered in swastikas. I had to be, I didn’t have any other clothes. You can imagine what it looked like to Frau Fischer. Me dressed up like a teenage SS officer. She went completely white. It took her a minute to even realize it was me. I think she’d thought I’d come to arrest her. She was completely hostile. Told me to go away at once. Said I was a German now and not a Jew. I never thought they’d reject me like that but of course she had a point. I was putting them in danger. If I’d got caught visiting them it would have been them that got punished, not me. The authorities wouldn’t have needed much of a reason to have another go at the Fischer family.’

‘Well, like you say, it’s a fair poin’,’ Billie said.

‘I know. But I was still completely devastated. I pleaded with her. Swore that I’d sneak around and that nobody would find out but she asked me if I’d visited my own family, which of course I hadn’t, so she said I should show the same consideration to her and Dagmar.’

Billie sipped at her drink for a while. ‘Amazing situation. I guess there’s a lot of mixed-up stories dat got lost in the Holocaust.’

‘I’ve never talked about it before.’

‘I know dat,’ Billie said with the smallest touch of irritation. ‘You don’ have to be telling me all the time. You’ve said. You’re an uptight, wrung-out, buttoned-up, emotionally empty guy who’s in love with a dead girl and doesn’ deserve to be happy. I know the rules, OK?’

Stone smiled. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Well, it’s borin’,’ Billie scolded. ‘Now, even though you never tell an’ even though it’s all a secret, what happen’d next? What about Dagmar? The amazin’, curvy, sultry, long-legged Dagmar who you an’ your brother be wet-dreamin’ about every night since you was twelve. Did you see her?’

‘Yes, for a minute,’ Stone admitted, staring sadly at the soggy beer mats on the table. ‘She came down the