Two Brothers (15 page)

But surely there was no danger. She was with Kurt. And he was happily married.

Yes, she’d kissed him on the first night they had met but she had never done so again. When he lit her cigarette she didn’t touch his hand as she had done that first time either. Or fix him with her stare as the smoke drifted up from those same purple lips.

So when Wolfgang left the stage on the night in November when the
Charleston
was a week old, he didn’t hesitate in searching her out at the bar.

They agreed the new tune was a sensation.

They laughed about the angry Bolshevik clarinettist and his nemesis the foul-mouthed Russian pianist princess.

They discussed the latest Georg Kaiser play,
Nebeneinander
, which was about to open at the People’s Theatre with designs by Georg Grosz, whom they both agreed was their favourite artist.

And then he asked her why she had kissed him on the night they’d met.

It just came out of the blue. Or perhaps more accurately, out of a bottle. He had certainly drunk more than usual.

‘I wasn’t expecting you to ask me that,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t expecting to ask it.’

Katharina sipped her champagne.

‘Perhaps I was a little drunk,’ she said. ‘And I liked you. You remember I told you? That you were hot? I meant it. Aren’t I fresh? But you see I didn’t know until
after
I had kissed you that you were married. I don’t know, when I watched you on stage you just didn’t
look
married.’

For once her stare was not bold. Instead she looked down at the ashtray on the bar between them. Avoiding Wolfgang’s eye.

‘And of course you’re also with Kurt?’ Wolfgang added.

‘That junkie? I was then, I’m certainly not now.’

‘So you’re single?’ Wolfgang said, realizing he had said it rather too quickly. Too eagerly.

‘Yes. Fancy-free. That’s me,’ Katharina said with brittle gaiety. ‘Aren’t I the lucky one?’

‘And if … and if …’ Wolfgang took a swig of his fresh scotch, recklessly aware that he’d already had much more than was usual for him.

‘And if what?’ Katharina asked.

‘And if I had been single?’ he asked. ‘After you kissed me that night? If I had never mentioned any wife and kids?’

‘Then I would have kissed you again the next night, Mr Trumpet. And every night after that until neither you nor I were single any more.’

Wolfgang felt a thrill run through every fibre of his body.

Katharina’s eyes were a little misty.

‘But you
did
mention them. And I’m an old-fashioned kind of modern girl, you see, and it makes rather a difference. It would have been nice of course,’ she said dreamily, ‘if you’d met me first. Instead of your dedicated doctor. I wouldn’t have minded a theatre-mad jazz man for a boyfriend.’

The booze was coursing through Wolfgang’s veins now. Delivering its reckless courage to his head.

He crept his hand along the bar to where Katharina’s hand lay, a cigarette between the fingers. Nails jet black and shining.

‘We’ve met now,’ Wolfgang said quietly.

Their fingers touched.

Katharina looked down and for a moment she seemed lost in thought.

Then she took her hand away, putting the cigarette to her lips and drawing on it hard.

‘I told you. I’m an old-fashioned modern girl. Let’s keep things as they are, OK? We’re friends. We talk. You’re married.’

Wolfgang felt foolish. And angry. The whisky made him graceless.

‘Old-fashioned? What about that producer from UFA?’

‘Excuse me?’

Even drunk, Wolfgang knew he had no right to mention it. ‘Nothing.’

‘I want to know what you mean,’ Katharina asked.

Wolfgang shrugged. ‘The one you disappeared with that night.’ He mumbled, looking down at the floor to avoid her eye. ‘I don’t think he wanted to discuss film technique.’

Katharina stared at him hard. Her eyes were no longer misty but cold.

‘Oh. So you noticed, did you?’

‘Of course I did. I … I was jealous.’

‘You’re married to Mrs Trumpet, Wolfgang. What right have you to be jealous?’

‘None, I suppose, but I was.’

Katharina’s momentary burst of anger subsided. Instead she looked sad. She drew heavily once more on her cigarette, sucking the glowing end right down to the filter. She lit another from it and shrugged.

‘That was business. Stupid and completely naïve. But business none the less. The casting couch, I think they call it. He made promises and I fell for it. Or at least I fell for it enough to take a calculated risk and lost. He got what he wanted and I didn’t. I turned up at the studio the following morning and he refused to see me. More fool me. It’s the first time I’ve ever made that mistake and it’ll be the last.’

Wolfgang was calm again. And ashamed.

‘I’m really sorry, Katharina. I shouldn’t have brought it up. What a bastard, I’d like to punch his—’

‘It doesn’t matter. It was over in a second and it’s done with. But while I might be prepared to fuck someone I
don’t
like for the right reasons, I’m not happy to fuck someone I
do
like for the wrong ones, which is that we are both drunk and tired and full of all that jazz. You more than me, I think, so you go and play me some music and then go home to Doctor Stengel before you ruin my good opinion of you.’

Wolfgang got up from his bar stool.

‘Yeah. Maybe you’re right, Katharina,’ he said. ‘Sorry for being an arsehole. And thanks for … well, thanks.’

‘Just get on stage. And make it hot hot hot, eh?’

Wolfgang made his way back towards the band room, passing Helmut who was heading for the men’s toilet leading a shaven-headed military type and a beautiful young man.

‘The party never stops, eh, Wolfgang?’ he said.

Wolfgang smiled. ‘I imagine it will have to stop in the end.’

Two weeks later, on 15 November, the new president of the Reichsbank abolished the worthless Deutschmark and introduced a new emergency currency with draconian restrictions on lending and speculation. The Rentenmark, as it was called, held its value, and almost overnight another German madness was over.

A Screaming Three-year-old

Munich, 1923

THAT SAME MONTH far away in Bavaria another, infinitely more terrible madness was growing stronger. The Nazi Party, that screaming, ranting, violent baby, born on the same day as the Stengel twins, threw a tantrum just before its third birthday. Adolf Hitler, the infant’s voice and psyche, attempted to overthrow the state by force. Kidnapping three local politicians and marching at the head of two thousand armed thugs from a beer hall to the Bavarian Defence Ministry, where he intended to demand dictatorial control not just over Bavaria but over the entire Reich.

Hitler and his gang never reached the ministry. They were instead met by one hundred police officers who blocked their path. Shots were exchanged and four policemen and sixteen Nazis were killed. Hitler fled but another Nazi leader, Hermann Goering, was seriously wounded. He was helped into a nearby bank where first aid was administered. By a Jew.

Modern Jazz

London, 1956

IN THE EVENING Stone could not stand the inside of his flat any longer and decided he must go out. They wouldn’t call now anyway. The Secret Service was like the Foreign Office: it kept office hours whenever possible. Overtime claims were severely frowned on.

So having made himself a solitary meal of eggs and baked beans and drunk a bottle of Guinness, Stone decided to head up to Finsbury Park to drop in at the New Downbeat, a Monday-night jazz club he’d spent quite a bit of time in over the years. He didn’t visit so much any more, not now that he had discovered the scene in Notting Hill. The illegal West Indian clubs were much wilder and hipper than the well-established London jazz circuit, which tended to be frequented by earnest middle-class students. But Stone still loved the music. Tubby Hayes had a regular gig at the New Downbeat and you didn’t hear much better tenor sax than from Tubby Hayes. Stone’s father had always loved the sax but had rarely played it professionally because he usually felt there were better exponents than him in the band. He had played it at home, though, and at jams in local bars. Stone always thought of the tenor sax as a sort of ‘family’ instrument. Dad’s hobby, not his job.

He took a taxi. The New Downbeat Club was held at the Manor House pub, which was right opposite Manor House tube station, but he didn’t like the underground at the end of the day. Even though he was a heavy smoker himself, he found the stale tobacco stench mixed with a day’s accumulation of body odour just too depressing. Settling back in his seat Stone lit up a Lucky Strike and watched the bars of light passing across the interior of the cab as the taxi drove past the streetlamps.

For a moment he had a recollection of watching similar rhythmic flashes. On the Berlin to Rotterdam sleeper. Lying in his little cabin, thundering through the clanking, rattling, shuddering darkness past the lights of some station or other.

Seeing the seconds tick by on his wristwatch.

Stone held up his arm for a moment, letting the light flash once more on that very same watch. Berlin, Rotterdam – London. In a funny way he was still on the same journey.

Stone closed his eyes. Willing himself far away. To somewhere near the start of the journey. Another time. Another place. Where he was happy.

Far away from Camden and Holloway and the Seven Sisters Road. Back in the People’s Park. Laughing and shouting in the Märchenbrunnen, with its fountains and one hundred and six sculptures of characters from fairy tales. He and his brother running in separate directions around the great circular path. Trapping Dagmar between Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood. Each holding a soft slim golden arm and begging for a kiss, while Silke sulked nearby and called them both pathetic.

In the taxi Stone smoked his cigarette and found himself wondering if Dagmar ever walked amongst those one hundred and six stone statues and remembered. By some miracle the Märchenbrunnen had survived the Allied bombing and it was now in the Eastern sector. Did Dagmar visit? Did she remember kiss-chase under the watchful gaze of Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood, and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and all the population of Fairy Land?

On her way to work?

At the Stasi?

The taxi driver’s voice intruded on his thoughts. ‘We’re here, mate. The Manor House pub.’

Stone hadn’t even noticed them pulling up.

He was early and there was still plenty of space but he knew from experience the gig would fill up so he staked his claim immediately. Taking his pint and whisky chaser he found a table down at the front, right where he knew the horn section would be standing. Since he was going to have to share a table, he wanted to be sure that it was somewhere where there was as little chance of idle conversation as possible. He’d had too many experiences of being lost in a faraway melody only to have his concentration shattered by some jazz train-spotter feeling the need to demonstrate his encyclopaedic knowledge of the technical side of beauty.

‘Good augmented seventh, don’t you think? And how about that melodic minor? Cool.’

Stone was a loner by
choice
. He didn’t want to chat, ever. But because he had frequented a lot of jazz clubs over the years, he had learnt to beware of guys plonking their pints and pipes down beside his pack of Luckies on the excuse that they’d seen him at the Florida, the Flamingo or Studio 51, and imagined somehow that this meant they were jazz buddies.

Stone lit a cigarette and took up a newspaper he’d bought at the tube station opposite. Still Suez and Hungary, of course. He didn’t want to read it but a paper wall was a useful blocking device to keep out whoever sat down until the music started.

The room began to fill up. The classic jazz crowd, arty, intense. Duffle coats and corduroy shoes. Like a Labour Party meeting in Hampstead, Stone thought. Except rather fuller. There was a sense of reverence in the room, people spoke in quiet voices, with one or two vainer souls laughing too loudly to show what loose guys they were. How had music that at one time had woken up the whole world become so rarefied? In his father’s day jazz had been loud and drunken, it was party music, you danced, you didn’t sit about and listen. Maybe it was a class thing. Rags and Dixie had once belonged to the poor and to the decadent elite. Now it had settled down firmly between the two and was as middle class as the BBC and Ban the Bomb.

‘Is this seat taken, man?’

Stone looked up. A good result. Student types. They wouldn’t want to talk to a square-looking daddy like him. Four of them. Two cats, two chicks.

Classic beats. The chicks with their short fringes cut straight and high. Stripy jumpers, tight pedal-pusher slacks. Bare calves. Flatties. The cats in polo-necked sweaters. Wispy goatee beards. Black jeans. Desert boots. One wore a beret and had sunglasses in the breast pocket of his corduroy jacket.