Read Online Two Brothers by Ben Elton - Free Book Online Page A

two-year-old daughter on her hip, and simply collapsed on the floor from hunger and exposure. Frieda had fed her, clothed her, managed to find her a place in a hostel and also, for the sake of the giggling little girl at her feet, promised Edeltraud a job.
    This surprised and also exasperated Frieda’s colleagues at the Health Centre, who were on the whole stern-faced Communists and did not approve of bourgeois sentimentality.
    ‘If you’re going to give a job to every basket case that walks through our doors,’ a young colleague called Meyer grumbled, ‘pretty soon you’re going to be employing the entire population of Friedrichshain. You need to channel your social guilt into organized political action, not pointless and reactionary acts of counterproductive Liberal charity.’
    ‘And you need to shut your face and mind your own business,’ Frieda replied, surprising herself.
    Wolfgang hadn’t been too happy about the arrangement either, although his reservations were practical, not dialectical. He just didn’t fancy the idea of having a scatter-brained, unskilled and uneducated teenager lolling about the house pinching his food. After a month or two, however, he was prepared to admit it was working out quite well. It was true that Edeltraud had never once been on time and she was certainly not the most hard-working girl in the world and she had an unbelievably annoying habit of rearranging his shelves. But she was pleasant and meant well and the twins loved her, which Wolfgang put down to them all having a similar age of maturity.
    Edeltraud was only six years younger than Frieda but Frieda sometimes felt that she had a teenage daughter in the apartment, and a young and naïve one at that.
    It was in fact the thought of Edeltraud that had made Frieda cry over the pathetic inscription on the banknote.
    ‘It could easily have been her who wrote this,’ she said.
    ‘Darling, when Edeltraud gets any money, she doesn’t waste her time writing poignant little notes on it, no matter how she earned it. She spends it on chocolate and film mags. Furthermore, Edeltraud can’t write.’
    ‘Actually she can a bit now, I’ve started to teach her.’
    ‘Don’t tell that arsehole Dr Meyer – he’ll say you can’t liberate the underclass by private initiatives, you need coordinated mass action.’
    ‘I don’t want to liberate the underclass, I just want Edeltraud to be able to read my shopping lists.’
    A key scratched in the latch and Edeltraud bustled into the room with the bread delivery under one arm and her little daughter Silke under the other. Silke was the result of an extremely brief relationship the fourteen-year-old Edeltraud had had with a sailor, about which she was disarmingly frank.
    ‘He took me to this lodging-house bedroom,’ the young girl had explained to Frieda, still seeming to be getting over the surprise of it, ‘and when he finished doing what he wanted to do, which I can’t say as how I’d enjoyed very much, he said he was going to the toilet down the hall. Well, for about an hour I just thought he was constipated. I only realized he’d buggered off when the landlady starts banging on the door for her money, which of course I didn’t have. A nice way to lose my cherry, I must say.’
    Silke was now two and a half years old and already a cheerful charmer with a mass of curls so blonde they were almost white. Curls which were of course an object of fascination and terrible temptation to Paulus and Otto, who tugged them at every opportunity.
    ‘Good day, Frau Stengel, Herr Stengel,’ Edeltraud said from the door. ‘I brought Silke; I hope you don’t mind.’
    ‘You know we don’t mind, Edeltraud,’ Frieda replied, ‘we love to have her. Just watch those boys and if they pull her beautiful hair whack them with the wooden spoon.’
    ‘Right,’ said Wolfgang, ‘I’m going to try and grab another forty winks. Don’t use the vacuum machine for a bit, will you, Edeltraud,