The Berlin Crossing (35 page)

I offer a smile but repeat myself in German.

‘Don’t you speak English?’ Then louder, with a gesture of red-varnished fingernails for extra clarity. ‘English!’

‘
Ein bisschen
, just a little.’ And then I launch into a rapid flow of German.

She blinks at me, exasperation written all over her sharp features. I am in full flow, merely repeating that I would like
to
see Herr Klaus Feldmann, when something stirs in the dark hallway behind her.

‘Dolly? What’s up?’

Dolly?

‘Dolly? Who’s there?’ The voice coming closer. The words English but the accent unmistakably German.

The woman stands to one side and, in the doorway of a flat-roofed house in the west of Ireland, I am looking at Roland Feldmann’s
father. At my grandfather.

‘Herr Feldmann?’

‘
Ja
.’ Sharp blue eyes look me up and down.

‘My name is Michael Ritter, I’m from Germany.’

‘It’s a good place to be from.’ Amusement in the pale blue eyes. ‘What can I do for you, Herr Ritter?’

‘May I speak with you?’

He shifts on his walking stick; I notice he is wearing green corduroy bedroom slippers. He looks from Dolly to me.

‘What about?’

‘About Roland Feldmann.’

Dolly’s expression has shown she does not understand our exchange in German; now, at the mention of Roland’s name, a kind
of gasp escapes her. Klaus Feldmann’s soft pudgy face pales; he leans on the hooked top of his stick with both hands.

‘What about Roland Feldmann?’

‘He was your son, sir.’

‘I know he was my son. What’s that to you?’

I’m not sure if I’m hearing anger or resentment in the old man’s voice but I can see his double-handed grip tightening on
his stick. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, blurting out my truth on a doorstep while traffic whooshed past behind me.

‘Please, Herr Feldmann,’ I say, ‘let me talk to you inside.’

The blue eyes rake me again, taking in the white T-shirt, the
faded jeans, the old trainers, and inwardly I curse myself for not dressing more formally.

‘Dolly,’ he says in English, ‘I want you to phone the police and tell them we have a nuisance on our doorstep.’

A look of malice behind the glasses, a toss of the straw-coloured hair. She is turning away when I blurt it out.

‘Roland Feldmann was my father.’

I see him swallow, see the Adam’s apple bob in the soft folds of his turkey neck. The pale blue eyes blink; he raises one
hand as if to ward off a blow then brushes it aimlessly through his white hair as if he has forgotten what he meant to do
with it. The Adam’s apple trembles again; the blue eyes look up at me, then skywards, as if the summer sky might offer answers.
And then I realize that Klaus Feldmann’s eyes are vacant, that whatever he sees is in some other place, some other time.

‘Klaus?’ Another voice, a woman’s, from further back in the dark hall. The faint hum of rubber tyres on the parquet flooring,
the wheelchair pushing past Dolly until Frau Feldmann draws it to a stop beside her husband.

‘Klaus.’ She ignores me, reaches out her hand to touch her husband on the arm. ‘Are you OK, Papa?’

My grandfather goes on looking up at the summer sky. His voice seems to come from a great distance. ‘This young fellow says
he’s Roland’s son.’

Frau Inga Feldmann adjusts her wheelchair to get a better look at me. She is very old now, but there is something girlish
about her face, about the way she looks up at me.

‘In that case,’ my grandmother says, ‘you’d better come in.’

We sit around a pale oak table in the large kitchen-cum-living room. My grandmother has positioned herself with her back to
the stainless steel double sink, the long kitchen window. I am
placed opposite her; behind her I have a view of tall green trees. My grandfather and the woman called Dolly are seated one
on either side of me at the rectangular table. Apart from indicating where I should sit, not a word has been spoken since
the hall door was closed and we followed my grandmother’s wheelchair along the L-shaped hallway.

Roland’s father looks at the two women, at me. In the brighter light of this room his eyes are bluer but his face is paler,
the loose skin more parchmenty.

‘Speak English,’ he says. ‘Dolly is my son Terry’s wife. She never learned German.’ He doesn’t bother to conceal his disapproval
of this failure of character.

‘I live in Ireland,’ Dolly says waspishly. ‘We don’t speak German here.’

‘Papa.’ There is a hint of a smile on my grandmother’s face. ‘I’m sure Mr Ritter is not interested in a replay of old family
squabbles.’

The old man shrugs, fiddles with his stick. ‘If we are to believe Mr Ritter, then he’s a part of this family himself. Although
I have to say,’ looking straight into my eyes, ‘it all sounds like a cow-and-bull story to me.’

‘A cock-and-bull story,’ Dolly says.

‘What?’

‘You said a
cow
-and-bull story. It’s a
cock
-and bull story.’

‘English!’ My grandfather grins and I half-suspect his mistake has been deliberate. ‘It’s not logical – cows go with bulls,
not cocks.’

‘Papa!’ My grandmother sounds exasperated, as if this is not the first time she’s witnessed these antics.

I sit straighter on the kitchen chair and fiddle with the straps of my rucksack, wondering what kind of family I have stumbled
upon.

He grins again but, when he catches my eye, there is nothing softer than steel in the look he gives me.

‘So, Mr Ritter,’ he says, ‘you’ve come all the way from Germany to tell us a story.’ He taps with his stick on the kitchen
floor, like a concert MC. ‘We are all ears.’

‘Paulusstrasse,’ I say. ‘Number thirty-one, a third-floor apartment in the district of Neukolln, in Berlin.’

The gnarled hands, pocked with dark-brown liver spots, clench and unclench around the crook of the stick.

‘What did you say?’ A croaky whisper.

‘It’s where you lived before you came to Ireland.’ I have rehearsed these words, as an opening gambit. ‘I know because Roland
mentioned it in an account he wrote for my mother.’
And I know because I found Familie Feldmann listed in an old street directory for 1931 that the librarian in Neukolln dug
out for me
. ‘Roland himself went to see the street when they sent him to Berlin.’

The two old people look at each other, then at me. Then I see their gaze switch to something behind me. When I swing round
I see what they are looking at: a framed black and white photo of a young man smiling at the camera, at the world, from his
perch on the wall above the fridge. I don’t need to ask.

The stick falls with a bang from the old man’s hands and slides across the floor beside my feet. I stoop to retrieve it; as
I hand it to him, I see that his eyes are wet. The Adam’s apple bobs, the flesh around it wobbles.

Dolly stands up.

‘This is bullshit,’ she says, ‘absolute bullshit.’

‘Shut up, Dolly,’ my grandfather tells her.

The kitchen door slams behind her.

The air in the kitchen seems to tremble in her wake, or maybe it is the aftershock of my words.

‘You’d better start at the beginning,’ my grandfather says. He
reaches for his wife’s hand. ‘Tell it to us slowly. I don’t care if you tell it in English or German but it better not be
a cock-and-bull story.’

My telling is not impromptu. I am, after all, both a storyteller and a teacher. And of course I am German, which means, according
to how others see us, that I am methodical, even plodding. So I know where I will begin my account of the meeting of Roland
Feldmann and Petra Ritter: I have made notes, organized them, as if I were indeed writing a story or teaching a lesson.

I begin at the end: my mother’s dying, her last words about my father, about a priest in Bad Saarow. My grandfather and my
grandmother listen without interrupting; sometimes they exchange a glance or their eyes move to the photo over the fridge.
I tell them about Pastor Bruck, about the abandoned sheds and allotments, about Johannes Vos.

I see the question in their eyes, am about to explain to them how I trawled through old Stasi records in Berlin, when we hear
the hall door opening and closing. There are voices and footsteps along the hallway, the kitchen door is flung noisily open.

‘What’s going on here?’ Terry Feldmann’s soft, round face is flushed. ‘Dolly called me with some bullshit story about some
fellow claiming to be Roland’s son.’

There is a triumphant look on Dolly’s face. Both she and Terry are staring at me.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ Recognition dawns. ‘You were in the shop yesterday! What the fuck are you up to?’

‘Terry.’ His father’s voice is low. ‘That’s no way to speak to a visitor in this house.’

‘A visitor? A chancer, more like!’

‘Herr Feldmann, this is my son, Terry, who seems to have forgotten his manners.’

I stand up, reach out my hand. Terry ignores it.

‘Terry, this is Michael Ritter, from Brandenburg. He’s telling us how his mother met your brother, Roland, all those years
ago.’

‘I suppose his mother was visiting London—’

‘Terry!’ Whiplash in the voice now. ‘You will either leave the room or sit down and listen.’

Terry snorts, looks at his wife. Her face is white with fury but she nods and they both seat themselves on the opposite side
of the oak table. I look across at Terry, puffing at his inhaler, and remind myself that it was for this brother that Roland
elected to go to East Germany.

‘You were telling us about the Stasi records office in Berlin.’ My grandmother smiles at me, then leans across and pats Terry
on the knee.

I begin again: the comprehensive Stasi records, the incident in the flat at Prenzlauer Berg, the manhunt across the city,
the interrogation at Bad Saarow. It was as if those record-keepers didn’t know how to leave anything out. But for the cross-referencing
in the files to Pastor Bruck and Petra Ritter I should never have found the border guard’s report of the killing of Roland
Feldmann at the Wall. For all their resources and expertise, the State Security Services had never discovered the true identity
of the youngster who had died that night in 1962. The file held a sequence of photographs of his bullet-shattered body: the
close-up of his face, oddly unmarked, was unmistakably the same as the picture of the young man on the kitchen wall.

I don’t give them the details of the killing. I gloss over it: ‘He died.’ I take from my wallet a copy of the close-up of
his face, hand it to his mother. Roland’s eyes are unclosed in the photo, his mouth half-open, as if smiling. For a long moment
there is silence in the kitchen as the two old people fondle the picture.

Terry takes the photograph from his mother’s fingers. He looks
at it for the briefest of moments before tossing it carelessly on the table.

‘I tell you this is crap,’ he says. ‘Roland disappeared in London, the last time I saw him was going into that police station
in London. What would he be doing in Berlin?’

All eyes are on me.

I tell them about the Public Records Office at Kew, in southwest London. I tell them about the thirty-years rule, under which
thirty-year-old files can be seen by the public. But you have to ask. Sometimes you have to keep asking. I tell them how the
Cultural Attaché at the German Embassy in London applied a little pressure on my behalf: I am, after all, a published German
author. I don’t tell the Feldmann family of the Cultural Attaché’s reluctance to help me: I am, after all, a published author
of the failed GDR and my favourable reviews were all in publications of that failed, unlamented state.

I tell them about the tiny, almost absurd security fiefdom run by some maniac called Fitch-Bellingham, a war hero who afterwards
seemed not to realize that the war was over. I describe the events of that Saturday night in west London, from the altercation
at High Street Kensington to Roland’s trip in the blacked-out van to some unnamed destination in the English countryside.
I watch Terry straighten in his chair; I watch him fumble repeatedly for his inhaler. I don’t spare him with my words: the
account at the PRO in Kew was graphic about Terry’s fear, about his weeping.

‘There’s no need for this.’

His mother’s words startle me; she is holding Terry’s hand in her own.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I apologize.’

‘But how do you know all this?’ the old man asks. ‘They wouldn’t write it in such detail.’

‘It’s very detailed,’ I tell him. ‘Written by some detective called Ransom. The way he wrote it, he seemed to me like a disillusioned
kind of fellow, maybe fed up because he was passed over for promotion, something like that.’ I shrug. ‘Believe me, it’s detailed.’

‘I wrote,’ the old man says. ‘I telephoned and I wrote letters. I wrote letters to the government in Dublin, I wrote to the
government in London. I even wrote to the Prime Minister at Ten Downing Street. They just wrote back to say there was no record
of my son being in the United Kingdom.’

I don’t tell Klaus Feldmann that I have seen his letters in the file at Kew. Old wounds are sometimes best left alone.

Instead, diversion. I tell them that in 1964 the matter of Roland Feldmann somehow came to the attention of the newly elected
Labour government: maybe it was chance, maybe an anonymous tip from a disappointed detective. Within months, according to
a note initialled by an anonymous civil servant, Fitch-Bellingham was summarily pensioned off and his little fiefdom put out
of existence.

A silence settles over the table when I finish my story. A fragile silence: tectonic plates shift, an entire world is being
disturbed here. Somehow these people learned to live with Roland Feldmann’s disappearance; now his ghost is sitting at their
kitchen table.

It is, inevitably, Terry who punctures the silence.

‘I tell you, this fellow is a chancer, peddling a yarn that nobody can verify. OK, he’s got a photo that looks like Roland
but what else has he got? Smoke and mirrors, that’s all, nothing else.’

‘There’s this,’ I say, taking the notebook from my rucksack and placing it on the table.