Tying Down The Lion (23 page)

Although Miss Whipp will love the part about the miracle of birth (grimmer aspects removed), Beate’s story is one of the saddest contrasts so far; the pain of separation scoring through the joy of a new baby.

I think about her calling for Ilse over the Wall, across the death-strip, her voice echoing down those miserable streets, and how she drinks syrupy wine for breakfast now, barely a survivor at all.

“Do you think you’ll ever be allowed to visit Ilse one day?” I ask, a bit choked.

She keeps hold of my hands while she answers. “Passes for West Berliners are hardly ever given, Jacqueline. Two years after the Wall came, they did open the checkpoints at Christmas, but not all of us were allowed a pass. There was no good reason. And this summer, no passes were given to West Berliners.”

She sighs and takes out a cigarette. Dad actually reaches across the table to light it for her, cupping his warm hands around hers. I could hug Beate for helping him stay connected, if only by a thread.

Since the East Germans make things up as they go along, Gillian should be a member of their secret police. Once, to duck out of playing rounders, she pretended she had an iron lung, not realising it was a breathing machine you climbed inside. She thought it was a metal body part that could be implanted. Miss Monger shook her head, muttered, “No wonder you struggle to hit the ball, dear,” and sent her out to bat first.

Children are useful for wiping your fingers on. They don’t seem to mind. I used to mop jam off my hands on Victor’s rompers. Beate picks Sebastian up, settles him on her lap and leans over him, possibly for sausage-grease absorption, but mostly for drying her eyes.

She is also singing softly to him. And although she is way off-key, and he must be sozzled by the fumes, not to mention the gin-dummy, it seems to soothe him. And despite this being an unscheduled moment, she looks perfectly at home.

When Mum appears, with Victor grinning beneath a green feathered hat and clutching a miniature cone of sweets, I sense her becoming herself again. Her appendix isn’t even growling. She links arms with Dad, trying to blast him with her fizzing joy, but he doesn’t look up. The thread is beginning to fray. She had better not break it.

“Thank you for taking me home,” she says. But he says nothing.

The atmosphere is edgier than during a row, especially without Grandma here to distract anyone. While we wait for her, Beate and Victor stuff sweets and push Sebastian around our table, the glory of West Berlin forgotten. We could be anywhere at all.

A shaft of artificial air wafts a cobweb on a pillar. The spider panics. His legs buckle, his silk tightrope all that exists between safety and the unknown. A breeze can sometimes help a spider by catching up the first thread of the spin and fastening it wherever it happens to land, but it depends which way the wind is blowing.

The air-conditioning breaks down again, allowing the web to settle and the spider’s legs to slacken. While he surveys the damage, Grandma arrives at last, thank the Fab Four. I notice she’s wearing her best lipstick, the way she always does for special occasions, like a small red bow-tie in the centre of her mouth.

I wish I could say, “I missed you.” But we never talk like that, especially not to Grandma. She sits on the hard chair she wouldn’t sit down on before and lights a Senior Service. No one asks if she’s all right. Mum and Dad are too bound up inside their own bubbles. When Sebastian starts fidgeting in his push-chair as if he’s fighting his way out of a strait-jacket, Beate marches us all back for dinner.

I sit next to Grandma on the bus.

“Lawks, don’t these German drivers put their foot down? Oh, I’ve gone and sat on my little Fräulein, and her head’s only made of mashed paper, bless her.” Out of her cardigan she pulls a hideous crimson-lipped doll in wooden shoes.

“Grandma, she’s terrifying, like the posters of Bette Davis in
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
.”

“Ooh, I might call her Jane. Thanks, love.”

“But her lips are all smudged and her eyes are wonky.”

“Well you can’t expect much from a market stall full of rejects. And there’s a two-vinegar coin in her apron pocket.”

“It’s two pfennige, Grandma.”

“That’s what I said, duck. Now, where were we with this project of yours? I know, Stan and me were having tea and I made him eat a bit of my boiled fruit-bun because he looked so pale. He tried to tell me how those Jewish kiddies on the train must have felt to lose their home and be sent so far away. But he couldn’t. Clammed right up, he did. But, you know, folk say a lot without talking.”

And folk with a mouthful of Grandma’s boiled fruit-bun have a non-functioning jaw anyway.

Grandma takes off her glasses, rubs them on her cardigan and goes on.

“Anyroad, Stan stopped for a bit of dinner. Lincoln-pea soup, rabbit pie and mash, it was. And as it was December, my box of Christmas decorations was on the table. I can see him now, touching a worn bit of old tinsel…”

Grandma pauses with the memory, swallowing hard before she carries on.

“Stan said, ‘Never had a Christmas of course, those children.’ And he looked as if he wanted to take that tinsel back to the station, pile it into their arms and give them ten Christmases all at once.

“‘Did Santa not come to the orphanage then?’ I asked him.

“‘Well, it was a Jewish orphanage, Nellie,’ he said.

“‘Santa a Nazi? Dear oh dear,’ I said. ‘What’s the world coming to when kiddies can’t have Christmas?’

“Anyroad, Stan was trying to get a grip on hisself, and I knew the best thing was to give him something useful to do, things your grandfather never did for me. So he got my Ascot working and let out all his upsetment trying to bash my mop-cupboard properly shut with the meat-mallet.”

“Grandma, that door’s still all crooked now.”

“I know, Jacqueline. Your grandfather fetched it off its hinges, three sheets to the wind, and after that it was never quite right. Mind you, neither was he. Not after I whacked him one with my decorative ladle from Clacton.”

“The Nazis should have come to England, Grandma. You’d have fought them off single-handed.”

“Well I did my bit, duck, during the Blitz. Tch, those Doodlebugs were buggers. No mess like it. I was having none of it, so I joined the ambulance service with Elsie. Can you imagine her ladyship in overalls checking tyres? Oh, did she ever stop bleating? But I took to it from the first day. Drove this bad-tempered Ford V8 with its arse-end sawn off and a tarpaulin over. Ersatz emergency vehicle, it was called. That’s me speaking me English all posh-like of course.”

“Did you have to operate on injured people?” I ask, handing her a biscuit from a packet we bought in the Center.

“Good Lord no, dear. We just ferried them to the makeshift hospital. It was too much for Elsie in the end. She caved in when the depot gave us a rollicking for reporting back without our full kit. Well, we knew fine well we couldn’t afford to lose two blankets. Trouble was, most of the poor young mother we’d been tending was stuck to them, you see. Rendered down to the bone, she was. Looked like the end of the day on Stan’s meat counter.”

“Oh, Grandma, don’t.”

“Well, that’s how it was. No good getting all droopy-drawered. Elsie was sent home with her blubbering. She’d thought she’d be tucked away in the depot cellar until the raids were over, not driving out to the injured as soon as the bombs dropped. But that’s when people needed saving, you see, love. We had to be at the sharp end. Of course it was all a big upsetment. But it weren’t Elsie’s baby still lying in that poor young mother’s arms, was it? And it weren’t her toddler that was blown clean into the fireplace. She took that bad. We all did. But it was a case of either cave in or cope. My job was to find the hearts still beating and keep ’em that way. Elsie was no more use than a lace umbrella.”

“Horrible,” I say, sounding pathetic because I can’t imagine the horror.

“More hopeless than horrible, she was,” Grandma says.

“I mean the Blitz, Grandma.”

“Oh, the Blitz. Yes,” she says. “Christ alive, call these biscuits? More like week-old cat-litter. But it wasn’t all sad, you know, love. Put that in your project for Miss Whippet. One night we found an old man crying. He couldn’t find his wife because their street had just been blown to bits. People were staggering around, all confused. He just stood there in his dressing-gown and slippers, waiting. I held his arms, trying to coax him into the ambulance, and blow me down, he said, ‘There she is. There’s my Joan.’ Sure enough, a woman covered in muck was being pulled from the rubble further down the street. Even from that distance we could see a part of her face had gone. ‘Are you sure?’ we said. ‘Course,’ he said. ‘She can never stop her stockings crumpling. I’d know them wrinkly ankles anywhere.’

“They were reunified for a full five minutes before she seemed to pass on, and by way of a thank you for making her tidy-like, the poor man fried me his week’s quota of best streaky on a coke brazier. But just as I took the first bite, I saw Joan’s eyelids flicker and gave her the kiss of life. I didn’t get to finish my rasher while it was still hot, but I’m glad to say I saved her bacon.”

While Grandma searches for her Trebor Mints, I realise she was doing all that life-saving while Dad was away fighting. She never knew if she’d come home to the dreaded telegram and was never sure if 31 Audette Gardens wouldn’t be the next house blown to bits.

“So where have you been today, Grandma?”

“I tried to find the burnt-down orphanage, love, on the off chance they’d have rebuilt it.”

“Why on earth did you do that? And you don’t even know any German.”

“I just wanted to give them something. Stan had told me the street name from the labels the orphans wore round their necks. But I went round in circles, duck. I would have asked a policeman, but they aren’t terribly approachable here. Not in those long boots and jodhpurs.”

“So what did you do?”

“I gave up, duck,” Grandma says, sighing. “There I was with three white matinee jackets, ten pairs of assorted bootees and an apricot layette. But not an orphan in sight.”

“You knitted things for German orphans?”

“Well they weren’t for Khrushchev, duck.”

As the bus glides towards Schillerpark, Grandma crunches her mint and I wonder where exactly she deposited the baby clothes.

“I was about to leave them on the steps of some great building where the steps were swarming with young city gents,” she says, reading my thoughts. “Since my rib-stitch is second to none, I thought they could take them home to their deserving wives.”

“Do they have city gents in Berlin, Grandma?”

“Not our kind with a bowler hat and a well-rolled brolly, they don’t.” She takes another mint and ponders for a moment. “In the end, I happened to see a pram parked outside a shop and I’ll tell you this for sixpence-five farthings, the baby inside it was wearing a very ill-fitting jacket and a bonnet that put me in mind of a worn-out tea-cosy. So I did the poor mite a favour and piled all my woollies on his pram hood.”

I let her pat my hand because I can tell how chuffed she feels to have made this gesture for Stan.

“Batty’s going to boil me a duck egg in the morning, you know,” she says. And when I smile at her, she looks so happy, I slide out my hand to give hers a pat too.

Back in the flat, Beate makes the rabbits a newspaper parcel of cabbage leaves as if she’s wrapping a present. She lumbers to the hutch with Axel, his toe-nails tapping on the concrete, but when she wanders back in with the dog grinning beside her, she’s still clutching the damp parcel of newspaper. Her speech is so garbled from all the Schnapps glugging out of the bottle while she hacks at the meat for dinner, no one, not even Mum, can understand her.

I don’t blame Beate. Mum has invaded her family again. Tomorrow, she can even nip across the border to hug the sister who isn’t really hers.

“Ever used sheets and blankets, Bat?” Grandma shouts from the table where Sebastian is sitting on her vast lap and bashing her necklace against her mountain-range of a bosom. “They’re what you need to make up a proper bed, love. Bridge said you all learnt it in Hitler’s Youth Club. Where these quilts came from, I don’t know. It’s like lying under a ruddy cloud. You make a good scone though, Bat.”

They are more like puffy rounds of fried bread sprinkled with sugar, but whatever Beate does, Grandma seems to like it better than anything Mum cooks at home. I think it’s because Mum tries to cook English food while Beate has been practising her beloved old recipes and made some of them quite edible. That and the fact that Beate uses masses of butter. No better way to soften up Grandma.

Konnie hurries in from his shift with maps for Mum and me.

“Konnie show you zee ghosts of Berlin,” he says, spreading them out on the table and earning a grimace from Beate because our places are already set. Pie-eyed or not, the schedule continues, more regimented than Victor’s tin cavalry.

“Trains on tracks between Vest and East must stop at zee border and turn back. But some vestern lines in the city centre pass through a short piece of East Berlin. No trains can stop there.”

On our map of the West, a footnote refers to “stations at which the trains do not stop.” These ‘ghost-stations’ are even crossed out, as if they no longer exist. On the East Berlin subway maps, no western lines or ghost-stations are shown, as if they have never existed at all.

“Sometimes people hide in zee ghost-stations,” Konnie explains. “Zee doors in our German trains can open when the train is still moving, even wiz top speeds. But zee train, he go so slow through ghost-stations that someone hiding in the shadows can jump on, if zey ask a friend on the train to open door quick. It is one way out of the East to the Vest. But always there stands a guard on the platform with gun, waiting and watching.”

I imagine the roof dripping, the echo of the splashes, the glow of the guard’s cigarette. Mum is studying the street-plan, her finger hovering over the thick pinkish shading that encircles West Berlin, and Konnie doesn’t need to explain that. She steps back from the table, and he folds the maps as if he’s collapsing the bricks of the Wall, managing to make them small and square again. Dad should learn how to do that, but at the moment he is wandering in the courtyard alone.