Read Online Two Brothers by Ben Elton - Free Book Online

mother who used to say it. In the first year of the nightmare. In 1933. People used to come to her and ask for a way out. She was a doctor after all, doctors had the answer to everything. Perhaps even how to get an exit visa. But for all her cleverness and her compassion, Dr Stengel did not know that. She could only smile and whisper gently, Everyone is looking for Moses. Hoping he’ll lead them out of Egypt . She said it so often that first year but less so later and then not at all.
    Well, Dagmar had a new Egypt now.
    And this time Moses wouldn’t fail her.

Money Gone Mad
    Berlin, 1923
    PAULUS AND OTTO were playing together on the thick blue English rug which had come from Wolfgang’s parents, while Frieda sat at her little desk bureau looking over the family finances. She had been staring at a particular banknote for a few moments when quite suddenly she began dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.
    The little boys stopped playing and stared at her for a moment, caught up in the unfamiliar spectacle of their mother’s tears, having imagined up until that point in their lives that crying was their prerogative alone.
    ‘Don’t cry, Mum,’ Otto pleaded.
    ‘I’m not, darling. Just an eyelash in my eye, that’s all.’
    Frieda blew her nose on a handkerchief and then more urgent issues claimed the boys’ attention as Paulus took the opportunity to steal the parapet from Otto’s fort and add it to his own. Paulus, thoughtful behind deep-set, dark eyes, was already the superior strategist of the two boys, while Otto, although by no means stupid, was wild and impulsive. His impulse now was immediate and violent. He slammed his fat little fist into the side of Paulus’s head and the fight that ensued was only ended when Wolfgang stormed in from the bedroom (where he had been sleeping after a late show) and sprayed the flailing knot of arms and legs and fists and feet with water from a toy pistol. This was a trick he’d picked up in the park from a man who bred dogs.
    ‘When they brawl, I throw water over them,’ the man had said. ‘They soon learn.’
    Wolfgang decided that the same cause-and-effect training might work on his endlessly battling three-year-olds.
    ‘They’re just a couple of little wild animals, aren’t they?’ Wolfgang argued when Frieda objected to her children being trained like dogs. ‘And you have to admit it works.’
    ‘It doesn’t work. They just think it’s funny.’
    ‘I prefer the laughing to screaming.’
    Once the twins had been subdued, Wolfgang noticed Frieda’s red eyes.
    ‘What’s wrong, Freddy?’ he asked. ‘You’ve been crying.’
    He sat beside her at her desk, sliding himself on to the piano stool she was using as a chair. ‘Come on, girl, I know times are pretty tough but we’re getting by, aren’t we?’
    Frieda didn’t reply. Instead she handed him the banknote, a ten-million-mark one she had the previous day received in part change for a litre of milk.
    Scrawled on the note in a naïve, girlish hand were the desperate words: For this very bill I sold my virtue .
    Wolfgang frowned and then shrugged.
    ‘Must have been at least a month ago,’ he said. ‘Even a country girl would want a hundred million for her virginity now.’
    ‘I hadn’t believed Germany could get any more crazy,’ Frieda said, sniffing back the tears.
    ‘I suppose when you lose a world war things don’t get back to normal overnight.’
    ‘It’s been five years , Wolf. I don’t think anybody in Germany has the faintest idea what normal is any more.’
    Outside their apartment the clanking of the lift announced its ponderous arrival at their floor.
    ‘Edeltraud,’ Frieda said with a long-suffering smile.
    ‘About bloody time.’
    ‘We need to get her a watch.’
    ‘We need to give her a kick up the arse.’
    Edeltraud was the Stengels’ maid and babysitter. A seventeen-year-old street waif who had wandered into the Community Health Centre where Frieda worked, with her