Two Brothers (16 page)

Two cats. Two chicks. Two chairs.

‘No. They’re free,’ Stone said.

The cats sat on the chairs and the chicks sat on the cats. One of the couples had a set of bongo drums and a battered school notebook. Stone suspected that they were hoping later to luck in to the dregs of the audience and offer up a bit of rhythmic poetry. He would not be sticking around for that.

The band began to assemble to polite applause and much worthy nodding of heads. The cats at Stone’s table clearly wanted to clap and nod but it was difficult with chicks on their knees. They had to reach all the way around the girls’ woolly-covered waists to get their hands together, which of course made nodding almost impossible as their faces were in the back of their girls’ jumpers. Pretty soon the chicks gave it up and went to stand at the back. Stone doubted whether they had been much into the music anyway. Jazz seemed to have become mainly a boys’ thing. That was another strange development. It had never been that way in his father’s time. Back then the girls had loved their jazz. They were the jazz babies after all, they defined the 1920s. According to his father the clubs had been completely packed with them, shaking and shimmying, flashing their big round Betty Boop eyes and pouting bee-stung lips.

Every one a heartbreaker, or so his dad used to say.

His mother always raised her eyes at that.

Stone had been too young to see for himself of course. By the time he and his brother were old enough to think about going to clubs, the Nazis had long since banned ‘nigger’ music, as they called it, and they wouldn’t have been allowed in anyway. Wolfgang would not have been allowed to play. Jewish musicians were allowed only to perform to Jews. And all the audiences at the Jewish
Kulturbund
seemed to want to hear was Mendelssohn. Perhaps because it reminded them that they had once been German.

The trumpet guys had appeared on stage. Unusually tonight there were two of them. Sipping their beer, exchanging a word or two. Warming up their instruments, running rags through the tubes, diddling the keys. Blowing on their fingers. Stone half closed his eyes and tried to see his father. He must have looked much as these guys did, polishing, diddling. Blowing on his fingers.

That was why Stone came, really. He liked the music well enough, but what he really came to do was half close his eyes and try to see his father. And once he had got a fix on that, put his brother in the picture too. Just as they had always planned.

All through their childhood together, on the countless mornings they had woken up to the sound of Dad coming home, they had whispered and plotted, dreaming that one night the two of them would sneak in and see him play. They would stand together at the back of one of those magical places their parents called clubs and share in their father’s secret world.

They never did, of course.

But when Stone sat alone in those little London pubs watching a vision of his father through tobacco smoke, whisky haze and his half-closed eyes, he always had his brother there beside him, just like they had planned it when they whispered together, lying in their cosy beds, in their little room, in the apartment in Berlin.

Tubby, the leader, walked on stage and introduced the band.

‘We’re going to warm up with some trad,’ Tubby announced, ‘just to keep the chill out.’

They did
The Sheik of Araby
. That one had been new when his father was starting out. Fresh in from the USA.

Stone smoked his Luckies, sat beside his brother and watched his father play.

A Very Proper Little Girl

Berlin, 1926

WOLFGANG PUT DOWN his coffee cup, took up his pen and forced himself to begin.

Music Tutor seeks Pupils. Piano and all other instruments a speciality
.

There. The first sentence. Done. He put down his pen.

‘Shall I make some more toast?’ he said, turning to Frieda.

‘Wolf! You’ve hardly even started!’

‘All right! All right!’

He stared at the paper for a moment or two and then showed her his single line.

‘What do you think so far?’

‘I don’t think you can say all instruments are a speciality,’ Frieda replied. ‘I mean,
everything
can’t be a speciality, can it? No matter how good you are.’

‘You
see
! I told you this wouldn’t work.’

‘Wolf! You haven’t tried at all.’

‘Because my heart isn’t in it. Why don’t you write it?’

‘Because I’m darning.’

They were still in bed. It was a Sunday morning. What should have been the best day of the week. So peaceful. Coffee, toast. Frieda stitching socks, Paulus on the rug reading. Otto biting the heads off his toy soldiers. And he had to write this stupid advert.

He chewed his pen in moody silence.

Specializing in all instruments?

All instruments equally special?

You name it, I can play it?

‘Maybe I should just stick to piano,’ he said. ‘That’s all anyone ever wants their little buggers to learn anyway.’

‘Whatever you think. Just get on with it.’

He
hated
the idea of having to teach music.

And he
particularly
hated the idea of teaching music to children. But he knew from friends who had been forced into the same grim career compromise that that was where the work was.

‘Of course it’ll be kids,’ he said grumpily. ‘Adults are mature enough to
know
they’re shit at music. You have to
teach
children to understand that they can’t play.’

‘
Please
try not to be so negative, Wolf,’ Frieda said.

‘Well, that’s really what teaching music is about, isn’t it? I mean, ninety-nine per cent of the time? The long torturous process of revealing to the student that they are complete crap and will never be able to play anything more than
O Tannenbaum
. Teacher and student just waiting it out week after week after week until finally the penny drops and the student gives up, never to think about music again until they force it on their own equally talentless kids.’

‘Wolf! Shut up! Either write the advert or don’t.’

‘I’m just being honest, that’s all.’

He had enough trouble trying to get his own kids to pick up an instrument, let alone anyone else’s. He could scarcely get Paulus and Otto to even
listen
to anything decent. He strongly suspected he was the father of a couple of Philistines. The only jazz they seemed to like was ragtime, and at very nearly seven they really ought to have got a bit beyond that.

‘Are you sure they weren’t
both
adopted?’ he whispered occasionally to Frieda.

Which she did not find funny at all.

Wolf was a professional musician. Not some glorified nanny.

It was the government’s fault, of course. Stresemann and that whole dull Social Democratic crowd with their boring stability and prudence. What was becoming of the country? It was a disgrace! Even in Berlin, in the heart of the youngest, wildest, most hedonistic and avant garde metropolis on the planet, things had calmed down to an alarming degree. There was still club work at weekends but the weekdays were dead.

‘People have stopped dancing,’ Wolfgang moaned. ‘Three years ago I had my pick of twenty gigs a day. Now I’m fighting
top
side men for pfennigs. Guys who have really
got it
are playing piano in fleapits to the Keystone Cops! It’s a criminal waste of talent. God, I miss the good old days.’

‘What?’ Frieda said, focusing on threading a needle. ‘You mean revolution and inflation?’

‘Yes! Exactly, Fred! That’s
exactly
what I mean. Cataclysmic national disaster! That’s what a city needs to make it swing. Three years ago when the country was completely knackered, bank clerks and shop girls were dancing crotch to crotch into the small hours! Drinking themselves insane, snorting cocaine and slipping off to screw in the toilets! Jazzing it up like there was no tomorrow because they didn’t think that there
was
going to be a tomorrow. Suddenly they’ve turned into their parents. It’s a disgrace.’

‘People can’t have fun
all
the time, Wolf.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they have responsibilities. They need to
save
. They need to start planning for the future.’

‘Future!
Future
. As if any German under thirty-five even knows what the word
means
! There never
was
a future up until now! Being
alive
in the morning,
that
was the future. The future was your next meal. Now people are planning for
old age
. Investing in pensions, putting a little aside for their summer holidays. Have we learned nothing? Don’t they realize that the next drink and the next dance are the
only
investments worth making?’

‘Well it’s up to you, darling,’ Frieda said. ‘Do it or don’t do it but you know as well as I do that we could do with the money.’ She paused for a moment before adding, ‘You know, just until you sell a song.’

Wolfgang smiled. She meant it too. She still believed.

‘The next Mendelssohn, eh?’

‘No!’ Frieda protested. ‘The next Scott Joplin.’

Wolfgang kissed her.

‘Yuk!’ said Otto from amidst his dead soldiers.

‘Don’t be immature, Otts,’ said Paulus from his book, adding ‘Poo face’ under his breath.

‘Frieda, I’m not Joplin,’ Wolfgang said with a smile. ‘I’m just happy to live in a world where somebody is.’

Frieda smiled. ‘So what now?’

‘Well. I suppose I try and finish this advert.’

‘Oh give it here!’

And exactly a week later, on the very next Sunday morning, instead of lying in bed till noon, Wolfgang found himself dressed in his best suit pouring coffee for a prosperous-looking gentleman who sat gingerly on the edge of the Stengels’ cluttered couch next to his exquisitely turned-out six-year-old daughter.

‘And the little girl?’ Wolfgang enquired. ‘Fräulein Fischer?’

‘Dagmar,’ the gentleman said. ‘Please, you must call her Dagmar.’

‘Uhm … Will you take some refreshment, Dagmar?’

There were suppressed giggles from somewhere in the vicinity of the doorway to the kitchen. Clearly other members of the Stengel household were finding their father’s efforts at polite formality amusing. Little Silke was with them too, as mischievous as either of the boys.

Wolfgang glanced furiously over his shoulder but none of the three culprits were to be seen.

‘I should like a glass of lemonade, please, Herr Professor,’ the little girl on the couch replied in the most refined of voices, ‘with quite a lot of sugar.’

This produced a positive explosion of suppressed merriment from the kitchen followed by the sound of little boys’ laughter and then, worse, a little girl’s voice indulging in a whispered effort at mimicry.

‘
I should like a glass of lemonade please, Herr Professor. With quite a lot of sugar
.’

The elegant, refined little girl sitting stiff and straight-backed beside her father could hardly help but hear the ridicule being directed at her and so put her nose in the air, her effortlessly superior expression making it clear that she was used to ignoring boys and other riff-raff.

‘I’m sorry,’ Wolfgang apologized. ‘My sons. I’d chuck them out and let them beg but I’m obliged by law to look after them. Damned Weimar Government, too soft by half, eh?’

Herr Fischer smiled.

‘Boys,’ he said indulgently. ‘I seem to recall having once been one myself.’

‘There’s a girl too,’ Dagmar said firmly. ‘I heard her most clearly. A very
very
horrid girl in my opinion.’

Wolfgang smiled apologetically.

‘Our maid’s daughter. But she’s all right, just high-spirited, that’s all.’

‘My mummy says that there is never
any
excuse to be rude or unkind. Certainly not high spirits.’

This pious observation brought forth further suppressed giggles and Wolfgang decided he’d better move things along.

‘I’m afraid we don’t have any lemonade, Dagmar. Sorry, just water actually. And I’m not a professor either.’

‘If you are to teach me then you
are
a professor, Herr Professor,’ the beautifully dressed little girl replied firmly, her huge, dark eyes turning unblinkingly upon him. ‘
All
of my tutors are professors. It is how things are done.’