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 you that.’
‘Yeah. That’s the one thing him and I agree on, Dags. You’ll have to choose some time.’
‘Well, maybe I’ll choose the one who can get me out of this country,’ Dagmar said.
She said it jokingly but there was an uncomfortable amount of truth in the jest. The pressing challenge of survival was never far from any of their minds.
‘I’ll get you out, Dags,’ Paulus said firmly.
‘No, Dags, I’ll get you out.’
‘Well then?’ Dagmar said cheerfully. ‘It looks like the three of us will be leaving together. Won’t
that
be fun?’
New Laws
Berlin and Nuremberg, 1935
WOLFGANG DID NOT die in Nazi captivity.
The concentration camps the SA set up in such haste during their first orgy of power were not yet the death factories that they would later become under the SS. Wolfgang came home, just as Paulus had said that he would.
‘It’s the Olympics next year,’ a guard sneered, as Wolfgang and a group of other prisoners hobbled, limped and even crawled through the wood and wire gate. ‘Got to look dainty for the world, haven’t we? Maybe you lot can form a relay team.’
The joke was not lost on the hollow-faced skeletal figures as they staggered towards a kind of freedom. The health of anyone who had survived a year or so in the care of the
Sturmabteilung
was certain to have been completely broken and Wolfgang was no exception. The starvation diet, harsh physical labour and exposure to the elements had brought his primary organs to the point of near collapse. He had become rheumatic and his liver and kidneys were weak; he had also contracted TB. This last of course meant that he could no longer play his beloved trumpet for more than a few minutes at a time.
‘Like cutting off a footballer’s feet,’ he said.
He could, however, still play violin and piano, having done everything in his power to protect his hands during captivity.
‘I used to clench my fists when they beat me,’ he told Frieda, ‘and when they knocked me down I kept my hands under me. The guards used to like to stamp on people’s fingers, so I kept mine out of the way. Most blokes protected their balls, I looked after my fingers.’
‘Thanks a lot!’ Frieda tried to joke. ‘Not thinking of me then!’
‘Don’t worry, baby,’ Wolfgang smiled. A hollow-cheeked, gap-toothed smile. ‘My balls are made of steel, you know that. The SA used to break their toes on them.’
Wolfgang liked this joke and he made it often in the weeks after his return, always causing Paulus and Otto to grimace, Silke also, who continued to spend as much time at the Stengel apartment as she could.
‘We don’t really want to hear about you and Mum and that sort of thing,’ Paulus said.
‘Yeah,’ Silke agreed, ‘it is pretty yucky hearing old people talk about sex and stuff.’
Wolfgang smiled. ‘It’s hard to think of you kids being squeamish about anything any more,’ he said, ‘not now.’
Wolfgang glanced at the floor.
At the space where previously the thick blue rug had been.
Of course one of the first things Wolfgang had learnt on his return from prison camp had been about what had taken place in the apartment on the night of his arrest. How his wife had nearly been raped and his two thirteen-year-old sons aided by Silke had bludgeoned and then suffocated Frieda’s attacker to death on the very floor on which they were now standing.
‘Please, Wolf,’ Frieda said, a shadow passing across her face, ‘I try never to think of that.’
‘I know, Freddy,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘It’s a terrible thing but I’m still so proud of the boys and Silke. I only hope I’d have the guts to do what they did.’
‘You would have, Dad,’ Otto assured him.
‘Yeah,’ Paulus agreed. ‘You wouldn’t have thought about it. We didn’t.’
The three young people exchanged glances. They rarely spoke of, or even referred to what had happened on that dreadful night, but it was always with them and often in their dreams.
If the subject was broached openly it tended to be on the occasions when Dagmar was making one of her increasingly rare visits. The fact that the other three members of the Saturday Club had gone through such a brutal and life-changing experience together was something of which she always seemed a little jealous. For all the fact that the twins loved her and her alone, she understood that Silke still shared one thing with them that she did not.
‘I’d have done it,’ she always insisted. ‘I’d have killed him, or at least I’d have done as much as Silke did.’
‘I helped roll him up!’ Silke would snap back defiantly. ‘And I helped chuck him in the river!’
‘Maybe you should tell your friends in the BDM about it,’ Dagmar remarked one day when, despite Frieda’s protests, the subject had arisen once more. ‘It could be one of your cosy campfire stories.’
Silke reddened; she was wearing her
Bund Deutscher Mädel
uniform. She always felt selfconscious when visiting the Stengels in her Nazi regalia but she had little choice. Like many working-class girls, her BDM uniform was by far the smartest and most serviceable outfit she owned. Besides which, on this occasion she was on duty, having come around to say goodbye before departing for the 1935 Nuremberg Rally.
‘I can’t believe they’re making you leave now, Silke,’ Frieda said, happy to find a way to change the subject. ‘The rally isn’t for another month.’
‘I know. But guess what? We’re
walking
there. It’s true! From Berlin to Munich. Kids are expected to do it from all over the country. Apparently it shows how tough and united we all are.’
‘They’re taking children away from their families for a month?’
‘Haven’t you heard the joke? What with the HJ and the BDM and the SA and the Women’s League, the only time a good German family meets up these days is at the Nuremberg Rally.’
Frieda smiled a sad smile. ‘And what about school?’
‘The party doesn’t care about education. Only loyalty.’
‘I do think,’ Dagmar sniffed, ‘that you might at least take off the armband when you visit. This is, after all, one of the few places in Berlin where we don’t have to look at swastikas.’
Silke certainly cut an incongruous figure in the Stengel living room, her thick blonde pigtails clamped beneath a jet black beret and a swastika emblazoned on the arm of her brown blouse.
‘It’s stitched on,’ Silke protested, ‘and don’t sneer like that. It isn’t my fault.’
‘No, of
course
it isn’t. None of this is anybody’s fault except the Jews themselves, is it?’
‘Come on, Dags,’ Paulus said. ‘Just because she’s in the League of Nazi Maidens doesn’t mean she’s a Nazi.’
‘I doubt she’s a maiden either,’ Dagmar observed.
‘Dagmar!’ Frieda protested.
‘I’m not a Nazi,’ Silke claimed hotly. ‘I’m a Communist, you know that.’
‘They’re the same thing,’ said Dagmar.
‘That is just a pig ignorant thing to say,’ Silke replied. ‘We Communists hate the Nazis.’
‘You don’t know anything about Communism,’ Dagmar replied loftily.
‘I know a lot more than you,’ Silke said. ‘I’ve been reading. We did a book burning and I pinched some Marx and Lenin. Lots of kids stole books. A friend of mine grabbed something called
The Well of Loneliness
because it’s about lesbians and she thinks she is one. Not all the BDM girls are Nazis, you know. Lots of us just have a laugh.’