Tying Down The Lion (27 page)

Mum whisks us onto a tram that trundles past the crusty carcasses of bomb-blasted buildings, but without warning, we emerge from desolation onto the wide swoop of Karl-Marx-Allee, a sparkling six-lane boulevard with grass along the middle and two massive skyscrapers at the end. The pavements are lively with people scurrying ant-like at the feet of monumental yellowy blocks that look like square beehives sponging up the smoke and grime. These are the showcase workers’ palaces, their frontages decorated with lavish ceramic tiles carved with toiling workers. In a veil of mist, the unfinished TV Tower looms, watching the whole show.

“This street is the East’s great exhibit,” Mum says as we climb out of the tram. “Made-in-Moscow. Designed to make the people feel fortunate and protected, but also tiny. It keeps them in their place.”

“I do feel sort of insignificant,” I tell her, looking down at my clothes, which, despite their unintentional communist appearance, seem smug and Western now, utterly out of place.

“You are,” she says. “We are all insignificant here.”

This is the spectacular street where Beate shopped with Ilse when East and West could merge. These people on spindly chairs outside the milk-bar, sitting beneath loudspeakers tied to street-lamps, are the ‘jolly folk’ of the miracle mile.

Beate would slice her overfed chins off to be here with Seb and Ilse. Even if she had to pour her cherry brandy down the split-level toilet to reverse time ten years, she would. But there is more chance of unearthing their old grandfather clock than recreating their wonderful past.

We travel back towards Unter den Linden and wander into a clothes store in a side-street. The subdued shop offers no choices, just one sort of each basic essential and many empty shelves. No colour. No fashion. No surprises. Not many patterns. A choice of two scratchy-looking jerseys. No background music. Just our shoes tapping on the hard floor.

We buy nothing, even though the money must be spent at some point, and continue along Unter den Linden. Once designed to be the grandest avenue in the city, the Cold War has changed it into a no-through road.

“I had not expected so much to survive the damage,” Mum says, gasping at each flawed, familiar sight.

“Will they ever patch things up?”

“Maybe not without the…what does Dad say… teddies?”

“Reddies actually, Mum. And by the way, English slang doesn’t sound right when a German says it.”

“Well, whatever it may be called, they have none of it.”

“No wonder they snatched our money at the exchange.”

“Yes. But I think they might leave some of this damage on porpoise.”

“Purpose.”

“Yes. To remind us of the horror. “

“Do you need reminding?”

“Everyone needs reminding, Jacqueline.”

Unter den Linden is lined with a thousand lime trees that Hitler tried to replant with Nazi flags. Little boys who were caught hiding in fear when Hitler insisted they join the depleted army were strung up from some of these branches and hanged.

Beate and Ilse trudged through the ruins here in 1945, faint with hunger, pushing a handcart without tyres, hoping the Americans, who had bombed Berlin by day while the British attacked it at night, would arrive before the Soviets. But, building by building, the Red Army soon completed the destruction the Allies had begun, leaving Berlin and many of its people butchered.

In the silence of this patched-up city, with Mum pausing every minute to look at the distorted relics of her past, I imagine the road scattered with smashed military vehicles, fires raging, tanks storming through, buildings with walls sheared off and most of the furniture splintered into firewood by falling beams. Perhaps, here and there, a heavy table or ornate sideboard stayed upright, the polished surfaces crusted with dust and debris.

Beate and Ilse picked up odd shoes, blood-splattered rags, a broken pair of spectacles, anything, no matter how pitiful, that could be exchanged for food. They searched the wreckage for cigarette butts, the best currency of all, feeling for them in the pockets of the dead. They ate the corpses of animals lying in gutters. And here are Mum and I, her purse fat and jangling with money that we are too snooty to spend.

We stroll in the sunshine to the New Guard House, where we will meet Ilse at last. It looks like a Greek temple with tall fluted columns and carvings of goddesses that represent battle, victory, flight and defeat. It used to commemorate the fallen German soldiers from World War One, but now the same building, bristling with guards, is a memorial for Victims of Fascism.

Mum keeps reaching for my arm. I allow her my sleeve, which she pleats between her fingers over and over again. Since the sleeve-pleating is a worse torture than waiting in border-control, all I can do to occupy her hands is light her a cigarette, which tastes of rotting leaves stewed with ear-wax. I have never lit up before, but then I’ve never stood anywhere like this.

Ilse appears in the crowd, small and slender in a dreadful frock, her copper hair lit up by the sun. I would know her anywhere because of the way she’s looking at Mum. And she looks nothing like a victim of anything.

I whip the cigarette from Mum’s mouth and step on it. She and Ilse hold onto each other with something I can only call grace, with an Emotion no biology teacher could explain. It feels like a beginning and an end.

They kiss each other’s tears and reach out for me. No one stares. This is a city of tears.

We all speak at once, but Ilse holds up her hand. “One moment. The guard is changing.”

The young soldiers perform back-to-back in pairs then nimbly spin to face one another again, as if ready to begin a romantic dance. When they march, it is not a jolly brass-band sort of marching, but a silent goose-step, black boots rising high and pointed, stiff right arms whipping mechanically across the body.

“They’re just boys,” I hiss.

“They probably have just met their very first girl-friends,” Ilse whispers back.

“And just shaved their first bit of bum-fluff,” I add. Judging by her puzzled expression, this is not a phrase she knows.

“And have mothers who still want to hold their hand to cross the road,” Mum joins in.

“But only when the green man says they can,” I remind her.

Mum’s smile soon disappears. “Even after all the lessons learned from the past and with their mothers still wiping their noses, still they dance the dance of war.”

Ilse slips between us, holding our hands like a school-friend. “Let’s treat ourselves to coffee,” she says, as if we are about to sashay into a Lyon’s tea shop.

As we walk along, warm air rumbles up from ventilation shafts in the pavements.

“That is the West Berlin subway,” Ilse explains. “We feel it and hear it, this forbidden world under our feet.” She tips back her head and laughs about this while Mum watches the breeze scoop up a few leaves and toss them down the subway stairs, where they join the pile at the blocked entrance.

The café is the front-room of a house with bullet-holes in the window. Ilse doesn’t flinch or make apologies, having known far worse places than this.

None of the leatherette-jacketed coffee-drinkers inside the bleak little room look up, but all of them know we are here.

Ilse orders me a Club Cola.

“Our very own,” she says with pride. “Bottled here in Berlin. We got it earlier this year.”

“It looks just like ours,” I tell her, examining the bottle and wondering whether I should lower my voice. I pull in my chair and the legs shriek on the concrete floor.

“Well, of course,” Ilse says, grinning. “Anything you can do, we can match it here, you know.”

It tastes like ancient dried herbs in melted tar.

“Lovely,” I say with a bright smile.

“It feels like war time,” Mum whispers. “Nothing much has changed, Ilse.”

“And yet everything has,” Ilse says, rolling a cigarette.

“No one looks happy,” Mum says. “Everyone is standing on the blade of the knife.”

“It’s called living on a knife’s edge, Mum.”

In an even more toe-curling moment than my chair-scraping, Mum smiles round at the other tables. It has no effect. We are unable to improve or blend into this dreary atmosphere, because at the end of the day, everyone knows we can leave.

The young man on the next table is staring out of the window at the shop opposite. It has a display of rubber hot-water bottles, their faded red the only colour among these worn-out houses and bare shops. He opens a tin, scrapes out his last dusty shreds of tobacco and rolls a cigarette that he puts in his pocket. His eyes are empty too, blanked out like the boarded windows in Bernauer Strasse.

It feels like a sodden autumn day inside the café, the misery clinging like damp leaves to the soles of shoes. I can’t finish my Club Cola.

Ilse notices us looking round and says, “Enough of here, I think. Come. It’s quite a walk to my home.”

Mum pauses at the young man’s table and gives him some of our marks.

“Mum, what the hell are you doing?”

“We cannot spend this money in a day, Jacqueline.”

“Let’s give it to Ilse then.”

“She is too proud.”

Ilse smiles at Mum, and they hold hands as if they’re about to run hell-for-leather to the trout pond again to escape the tension in the house.

Other relatives like us with one-day passes must feel this kind of love, but without the Wall, it might be the short-lived kind, like a match struck in the wind. One quick flare and it’s gone. In the ordinary world, they might be the kind of people who spot their relatives turning up at the front door and dash out the back to hide in the coal-bunker.

But Mum and Ilse share something that has stayed alight all these years. It would scorch you if you touched it.

We walk past a tiny old man carrying wood scraps in a shopping bag. I have to stop Mum giving him money too. We need to keep enough for our
Knusper Flocken
.

Two women in starched white uniforms are pulling a strange cart stuffed with two rows of four fat-cheeked toddlers sitting opposite each other on red metal seats and clutching a central hand-rail.

“Their job is to care for children while their mothers work,” Ilse explains when she sees me looking at the women.

I wouldn’t mind having children if I could offload them onto a trolley, hop on Ilse’s tram and model for Biba by a fountain all day until I scooped my babies off their red seats and breezed home to put on an apron and cook Peter’s schnitzel.

Ilse’s flat is in a grand bullet-scarred corner house with a carved arched door and a stately staircase. It smells of school floor-wax. Painted slogans have bled into the walls of the stairwells and landings, but the atmosphere is calm and peaceful.

The flat itself, despite the high, carved ceilings, is like a tall cardboard box with a few pieces of thin square furniture, the functional kind, mostly fitted against the walls in units, and a few hard, low-level chairs. Everything is terribly brown, similar to Grandma’s utility stuff, but without its chunkiness.

This is not a house where people dash about or keep being interrupted by doorbells and telephones or milkmen. I can’t imagine anyone shouting or throwing a toad-in-the-hole at the walls. It is tidy, although there is little to keep tidy. Ilse clearly values everything, from the neatly arranged food-packets on the flimsy-looking kitchen shelves to the solid-looking cake under a glass bowl on the sideboard.

The beige and brown wallpaper is brick-effect. The wall-unit is made of pretend wood, the grain in orderly stripes. Two yellow apples sit in a bowl with a bunch of keys and a worn pencil. The bowl sits on an extravagant lace mat that has been saved from some long ago time. Otherwise, only a few books, an orange candle stub and an empty vase sit on the shelves. No flowers.

Ilse’s television-set has the central spot in the unit. No plant with heart-shaped leaves, no glass ash-tray full of toffee wrappers and tooth-picks, no photograph of children with pudding-bowl hair-cuts on top of it. Just a proud coat of polish.

“We have West German programmes here, you know,” Ilse tells us with a grin.

“I am surprised,” Mum says, looking around as if she’s expecting to find a
Radio Times
.

“Well, as our leaders cannot block television signals so easily, they tell us how wicked the West is with
Der schwarze Kanal
.”

“That means the black channel,” Mum tells me.

“It is very clever,” Ilse goes on. “In the German language a second meaning of
Kanal
is perhaps ‘gutter’ or ‘drain’, I think.”

“‘Sewer’?” Mum suggests.

“Ah yes. Sewer. The black channel, you see, is a recording of the programmes they do not like us to see, but with a communist voice that comes through and tells us how things really are.”

It must be like watching
Crossroads
with someone shouting out that Amy Turtle is a covert train-robber. I would resent the interruptions, although living with Grandma I am probably immune to them.

I sip the coffee and try not to shudder. Just sitting here with Mum, who seems younger with Ilse, I breathe in the hushed air, listening to the plain clock’s gentle tick and the polite creaking of the floors above. Feet tread with respect. Other people’s doors close with a soft click. The genteel past is still here, out of tune with the crude graffiti in the stairwells and the porridgy stuff they have plastered over the damaged walls.

“Mostly chicory,” Ilse tells us, nodding at her coffee-cup. “I’m used to it now. It tastes a little better than the pig-mud we drank in the forties.”

Her long-suffering smile reminds me of wives who shake their heads and tut about their husbands always disappearing into the shed or leaving the toilet-lid up when you know they don’t expect things to be any other way.

“Later you shall meet my friends from the other flats,” Ilse tells us. “They want to teach us the Lipsi, our new approved dance. We learned the steps from the television.” She smiles and rolls a cigarette. “Oh yes, the government allows art forms to enter our culture, as long as they have a strong socialist heartbeat. The Twist, for example, is far too shocking.”