Two Brothers by Ben Elton Read Free Book Online

the corners of Wolfgang’s mouth also.
    ‘You are going to stand there, completely naked except for a winged helmet ?’
    ‘I think I just told you that.’
    ‘Aren’t Rhinemaidens supposed to be nymphs?’
    ‘In this case, nymphs in helmets.’
    ‘Which isn’t very nymphy.’
    ‘It is to Herr Karlsruhen. Look, Wolf, be realistic,’ Frieda said, trying to make peace, ‘if he thinks I look like the spirit of German womanhood, then bully for us. I’ve told you, he pays top hourly rates and all I have to do is stand still and listen to Wagner.’
    ‘He should pay you top rates to listen to that crap.’
    ‘I don’t mind a bit of Wagner.’
    ‘He was a raving anti-Semite.’
    ‘What’s that got to do with his music?’
    ‘I’m just saying that he was as shitty a man as he was a composer.’
    ‘We can’t all be cool jazz guys, Wolf. Somebody has to write a tune occasionally. You’re being really stupid.’
    ‘And I refer you to my previous point that I’m not the one who is planning on standing about naked in a helmet! Think about that. Naked. But in a helmet. It defies logic, or do people only get hit on the head in Asgard?’
    ‘Now who’s interested in realism?’
    Frieda turned her attention to a load of nappies that were soaking in a bucket.
    ‘This man lives in the hottest, craziest city in Europe. Every studio’s got some wild genius in it breaking all the rules of form – and this prick wants to set the Ring Cycle in stone.’
    Frieda fished a dripping terry towel out of the bucket and began running it through the mangle.
    ‘You’re being pathetic and self-righteous and actually totally reactionary in a reverse kind of way,’ she said, ‘which is frankly not attractive.’
    ‘Keep mangling,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘Karlsruhen’s going to love those muscles. If you’re lucky he might even promote you to Brünnhilde.’
    ‘There can be more than one style of art you know,’ Frieda said through gritted teeth as she worked the heavy handle. ‘Not everybody wants to look at pictures of babies on bayonets and limbless soldiers like the stuff you like. We can’t all be George Grosz or Otto Dix.’
    ‘Bloody geniuses, both of them. Jazz on canvas. People like Karlsruhen and his moronic Stahlhelm go on about making Germany great again. It’s already great. Stuff is going on here in Berlin, within a few hundred metres of where we’re sitting, that they haven’t even started dreaming about in Paris or New York.’
    ‘Just listen to yourself, why don’t you?’ Frieda said as the water from the nappies cascaded into the mangle tray. ‘You’re actually more chauvinist than the Steel Helmets with your “we’ve got better art in Germany than those bloody foreigners” – even the avant garde are nationalists. It’s pathetic.’
    Wolfgang’s tone showed that despite himself he could see her point. ‘I’m just saying that for once we have something going on here that we can be proud of.’
    ‘So you’d feel better about it if I was posing for someone who gave me square tits and three buttocks. That would be all right, would it?’
    ‘It would be a lot better.’
    Frieda said nothing. But she gave the mangle an extra vicious turn.

Rhinemaiden
    Berlin, 1922
    DESPITE WOLFGANG’S PROTESTATIONS, Frieda took the modelling job and posed for Herr Karlsruhen throughout 1921 and into the following year. It was while she was on her way to the sculptor’s studio in the summer of 1922 that she heard the horrible news that Germany’s Foreign Minister had been shot, murdered while on his way to work by a teenage gang put up to it by reactionary anti-Semites. A newspaper boy was calling out a special edition of the Berliner Tageblatt . ‘Walther Rathenau dead!’ the boy shouted. ‘Shot in his car.’
    Frieda felt sick to her stomach. Just when things had been looking up a little, the republic’s foremost statesman was dead. That old German madness had reared its crazed, iron-clad head