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 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 Führer.’
‘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 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.’