Two Brothers

stairs and stood behind her mother. I tried to say something to her but she just shook her head.’

‘Didn’t she say anyt’ing at all?’ Billie asked.

‘Yeah. I’m afraid she did. The very worst thing she could have said. She said I wasn’t a Jew any more. That hurt so much. It was the one thing I was dreading. And for it to come from Dagmar was just devastating.’

‘If you want my opinion, baby,’ Billie said, snapping her Gitane alight with an elegant flick of her beautiful Dunhill cigarette lighter, ‘I t’ink your Dagmar girl is a little bit of a bitch.’

‘No,’ Stone said firmly, ‘don’t say that, Billie. Please don’t. I can’t have you say that.’

‘You really do still love her, don’t you? After all these years you’re still leapin’ to her defence.’

‘Yes I am. Because, you see, she wasn’t a bitch. She was a lovely girl. Funny and beautiful and proud and clever. That’s how she was before the madness anyway. I’m not saying she was an angel but believe me she was a good person. A decent person. Just try to imagine what she’d been through, what she was going through. Her whole life had been stolen from her. Her whole wonderful world had turned into this brutally cruel and terrifying torture.’

‘Yeah. Of course,’ Billie conceded. ‘I said I didn’t judge people and there’s me doin’ jus’ that. I have no right.’

‘She felt betrayed, you see,’ Stone went on.

‘By you?’

‘Yes. I could see it in her eyes as she stood there on the stairs. Of course it was unfair and I’m sure she knew it was. But she still felt it and I understood. We were living on different planets now. I had a future and she didn’t. I can see her now, looking so beautiful. Thinner and more careworn but just as lovely as she ever was. And then she told me to go. She said that even without the risk she didn’t want to see me. She just didn’t want to be around a boy who still had a life when she was slowly… slowly dying.’

For the first time since he had begun his story, words failed him.

Billie put her hand on his knee and squeezed it.

Then the barman approached their table.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but could you kindly finish your drinks and leave.’

Stone, who had been in the act of taking a sip of his pint, put it down and looked up at the man.

‘What?’ he asked quietly, his fingers already closing into fists.

‘I’m sorry,’ the barman said. ‘I don’t mind myself so I haven’t said nothing, but the landlord’s come back from being out and he’s seen your friend. He won’t have no blacks in his pub, see. It’s policy, so you’ll have to go.’

Stone picked up his glass again and took a slow deliberate swig of beer. Billie was already putting her cigarettes and lighter into her little purse.

‘You tell the landlord—’ Stone said slowly.

‘Paul, please,’ Billie interrupted angrily, ‘let’s go. I don’t wanna drink in dis boozer anyway. With such people? No thanks. It’s beneath me.’

Stone put an arm out to stop her getting up.

‘You tell your landlord,’ he repeated to the barman, ‘that he’s a Nazi cunt. Do you hear me? And that goes for you too, by the way, and you’re a coward besides.’

‘Now listen here!’ the barman protested. ‘This ain’t me, I just work here—’

‘Just obeying orders?’ Stone sneered. ‘Now where have I heard that before?’

‘Paul… Otto… please. I wanna go,’ Billie said.

The landlord appeared. A large, arrogant-looking man with Brylcreemed hair and a bristling moustache. He wore a military blazer, shiny at the elbows with a regimental crest on the pocket. ‘Right,’ the man said, ‘this is my pub and I say who drinks here so you hop it and take this black slut with you.’

Billie was already on her feet, having shaken off Stone’s arm.

‘We’re going anyway, you sorry and disgustin’ person,’ she said, looking like a queen addressing a peasant. ‘The air done started stinkin’ in here. Maybe it’s the drains but personally I t’ink it’s da management.’

But still Stone did not move.

‘I’m going to count to five,’ he said menacingly, ‘by which time I suggest you’ll have apologized to this lady. One… two…’

Billie tried once more to interject but it was no use. Stone completed his count and then, rising from his seat with his upper cut already in motion, brought his fist up under the landlord’s chin and knocked the man sprawling to the floor. The sickening crack his knuckles made on connection suggested the landlord’s jaw may have been broken. Stone spun around, ready to deal with the barman, but the frightened man was already backing away, cannoning into the table behind him and upsetting the drinks. No one else in the pub seemed minded to get involved.

‘Now we can go,’ Stone said, draining his glass and getting up.

‘I t’ink we’d better,’ Billie replied, hurrying to the door. ‘There ain’t never a call for violence, by da way.’

‘That’s what Chamberlain said,’ Stone replied as he followed her.

Together they hurried out of the pub and hailed a passing cab.

Personal Sacrifices Berlin, 1936

WHEN DAGMAR RETURNED to her bedroom, her face was stony cold.

‘Thanks for not coming out,’ she said.

Paulus was standing by the window.

‘I wanted to,’ he replied, ‘more than anything.’

He was looking out. Watching the black-clad figure retreating through the gate.

Dagmar’s mask of indifference lasted only a moment. Her voice was already cracking.

‘I had to send him away,’ she said, tears starting in her eyes. ‘It would have been even harder if he’d seen you. I sent him away, Pauly. Our Otto.’

‘He shouldn’t have come,’ Paulus said, trying to speak sensibly for her sake. ‘I knew he would, though, the first chance he got. I don’t blame him. I would have done the same.’

‘You should have seen him,’ Dagmar said, crying now. ‘His uniform! It was horrible. He was dressed… dressed as one of them!’

‘It’s the same Otto inside, Dags,’ Paulus said. ‘It’s just a uniform. You know that.’

‘No it isn’t,’ Dagmar sniffed. ‘That uniform can never be just a uniform.’

Paulus and Dagmar had been spending the evening together as they often did. In Dagmar’s bedroom. Drinking acorn coffee and smoking cigarettes. Paulus visited Dagmar at least three or four times a week. She was always home, having continued to cut herself off from her old life, from life in general.

‘Well, we’re not allowed to do anything if we do go out,’ she often lamented, ‘so what’s the point?’

Paulus was now Dagmar’s only friend and he was not ashamed to admit to himself how selfishly happy this made him. His love for her was undiminished and he took great pleasure in the knowledge of how much she needed him and appreciated him coming round. She had started to rely on him. Leaning on him more and more.

Her mother was no help to her at all. She now spent all of her time living in the past. Sitting in her drawing room, the shutters permanently closed, reading old letters and pasting photographs into albums.

‘It’s so depressing,’ Dagmar often complained. ‘Sometimes I think I’m going to go mad.’

She had been dwelling on the subject before Otto’s surprise arrival. Lying on the bed as she always did. Paulus sitting on the rug at her feet, always feeling the absence of his brother on the empty dressing-table chair. Paulus and Otto had occupied those two places in Dagmar’s room for so long that even though Otto had not been there for many months his absence still sometimes took Paulus by surprise.

‘The boredom is going to actually physically kill me,’ Dagmar had been saying. ‘I’m serious, if only I could just go swimming. I would give anything to just go swimming.’

Otto’s unexpected arrival at the front door had interrupted her thoughts and once he was gone neither she nor Paulus felt like resuming their conversation.