Tying Down The Lion (30 page)

Ilse and I slice gherkins in the plain little kitchen.

“I love your skirt,” she says. “Such fine fabric.”

Blimey, no one’s ever said that before. I shall see Spotwood and Mole’s Young Fashion department in a whole new light now.

“I’d like it shorter though. And more A-line. More Biba.”

She gives me a look of total incomprehension.

“I’m not supposed to know about fashion yet,” I tell her. “But I look through
Petticoat
magazine when I get the chance. That’s where I find out about clothes. But I haven’t an earthly chance of being allowed them.”

“Nor me,” she says.

Aunt Ilse and me, both banned from reading
Petticoat
. I catch her eye and we both snort with laughter. Then she actually guffaws, really meaning it, not just being a good sport, the same as Gillian and me when we have hysterics at school.

“My darling Jacqueline, I hope you are permitted to read it before your youth is over. Otherwise you may be too ancient to enjoy your, what do you say, Beeber dresses, and will have to wear this stuff instead.” She screws up a handful of her cheap frock and laughs like a drain.

She is pigheadedly feminine, even though she has to work like a man in a man’s job. She must even wear trousers on the trams. She also knows how to unblock a drain. Life here is wedged in the past, but a planet from the future has crashed into it, a combination of the Dark Ages and
Lost in Space
.

After the food, Mum and I are taught the Lipsi.

Dance should be about moving in a way that suggests something more. Belly-dancers on television make me blush. And as for the Tango, what with those long strides up and down and the man flinging the woman backwards, then leaning over her, practically horizontal, you can’t slide a wafer between them. And, not as high-scoring on sex-appeal, I suppose, there’s the Mashed Potato.

“Do you peel the potato first?” Karin asks in her deadpan way. I never know if she’s joking or not.

The Lipsi is in a league of its own. The East German authorities insist their dances are performed without a whiff of sauciness. They have supposedly tried to make it exciting, but have stripped the thrill out of dancing like whipping the Flake out of a Ninety-Nine. It’s just a series of plain steps, a dance without dancers.

In pairs, we step right and left, tapping our feet politely, and flinging out an arm here and there, like children acting out “I’m A Little Teapot”. No touching, of course. A few of the steps remind me of tap class when I was four, but most of them are a dead ringer for the march of the stiff young guards we saw earlier. Finally, we swirl round and the man holds the woman around the waist. No pelvis involved.

“This is faster than other dances we’ve known, you know,” Karin says, poker-faced as she and Uwe pick their way through the steps with painstaking accuracy. “So modern, the Lipsi.”

Ilse dances only with Silke, neither of them mastering the steps, but giggling like I would at school with Gillian. When the dance is over, they sit on the floor. Ilse turns her back and Silke’s legs wrap around her. Silke tidies Ilse’s rumpled hair with long strokes of her comb until it’s a smooth, copper curtain again.

Mum and I dance together until she asks to sit down and watch. Her eyes lose focus as the hours tick by, and she prepares to miss Ilse all over again.

I dance the Lipsi with everyone in turn. Dad would have loved it. Despite all the restriction and shortage and bleakness, life here is a party.

“Who needs Elvis?” shouts Dieter.

Who indeed?

8.
Full Moon

Before we leave, Mum visits the dismal loo on the floor below—no dreaded ridge, but no seat either, and dozens of fat carved cherubs still blowing their trumpets from the high ceiling.

While the primitive plumbing is belching away and echoing in the stairwell, Ilse hands me a creased photograph and some papers.

“Jacqueline, I used to keep this safe inside a book of fairy tales that Beate found in the ruins. It never left her side. She even took it into the hospital. I hope she has it still. This picture was taken just before my last ballet lesson. Birgit was planning to come with me to play the piano, but the British air-raids started that night and there was no more dancing.”

In the picture, Mum’s smile is hesitant, her dark eyes huge, her hair bleached platinum. Beate’s hair is so severely drawn back her features are stretched into a grim mask. Ilse is wearing her satin ballet-shoes and her wide smile. Mum, guarded and uncomfortable in her own skin, stands in the middle, trying to stretch her arms around the others. Ilse leans in towards her, but the shadow of Mum’s thin fingers barely reaches Beate’s shoulder.

Even without the badly-dyed hair and contrasting black eyebrows, it would be clear that Mum did not belong with these girls. There is a serial in
Mandy
about a Polish ballerina on the run from the Nazis, who says things like, “The polka is now the dance of death.” I showed it to Mum just before we came to Berlin, and she sat down with the tea-towel bunched in her lap while the washing-up water turned stone cold. I would never have shown her the comic if I had known her own story.

The papers Ilse gives me are covered in musical manuscript, a composition Mum’s father wrote for Ilse and Beate’s mother.

“Our mother kept it in the attic, beneath a floorboard,” Ilse says. “It was one of the few things saved. Perhaps Birgit will play it one day.”

“We don’t have a piano though.”

“Perhaps a friend has one?”

Gillian’s mother has a baby-grand that none of the family can play. She just likes having something to French-polish. I would like to see Mum sit on the quilted stool and play the piece, providing Gillian allows her to march across the threshold.

“Jacqueline, does your mother sometimes seem to disappear?”

“All the time.”

“I sense that she hides herself. But, know this, she is tied to you with the strongest knot in the world.”

I tuck the photograph into my bag, my hands shaking a little.

When the sun rinses the sky with brownish-orange light, Ilse walks with us to the station, eking out every last minute.

“Is there any time to see Bernauer Strasse from this side?” I ask her.

“Bernauer?” she says. “No, Jacqueline. Too many guards and dogs patrolling. And nothing to see.”

“Do you think it will ever be rebuilt?”

“I think not. The people who lived there will have new lives now. Why not change your project to something happier?”

She gives me a bright smile and I push my notepad back in my bag. Ilse is too clear-cut for contrasts, not clouded by any of the shadows I had imagined.

We have to keep walking in case we miss the train. Mum and Ilse are holding onto each other, knowing this is all they will ever have.

“Oh Ilse, I wish you could climb into your tram one morning, turn to the West and keep driving,” Mum whispers.

“Hush, Birgit. In any case, the West would not allow me in.”

“The West would not allow?”

“Crazy, yes? In the fifties, the West allowed only men to drive trams. And so the wise people in charge of public transport here in East Berlin insisted that all our trams crossing into the West were driven by women only. Of course the West refused to let them in, so East Berlin were able to complain that this time, it was the West stopping the flow of border-traffic, when really it was yet another way of keeping us here.”

Ilse tips back her head to laugh. I would join in, but the craziness is beginning to feel like a nightmare.

In Pariser Platz, we stand at the Brandenburg gate, a massive archway built hundreds of years ago as part of an ordinary city wall, the triumphant entrance to the city. A bronze sculpture of a chariot pulled by four horses graces the top.

“The driver of the chariot was the goddess of peace,” Ilse says. “But Napoleon took her. Berlin got her back after Waterloo and she became Victoria, symbol of victory. But in 1945…”

“In 1945,” Mum continues for her, “this gate was one of the few structures still standing in this square. The copper horses were badly damaged. The one on the right was your favourite when you were young, Ilse.”

Ilse looks up at her charger. “But after the war,” she says, “he lay on his side. After drinking half a bottle of brandy Beate found in a broken pram, I remember yelling, ‘Someone call the horse vet!’ And the horses did get their treatment—they were melted and reborn in bronze. A quick recovery, yes?”

She smiles as if this is all a huge joke, then becomes deadly serious.

“This beautiful avenue, even in ruins, still swept through the Brandenburg gateway. But now we must all stop here, at Khrushchev’s solution.”

Mum and I look at the Wall. The blue uniforms of the West Berlin police line up on one side, the green uniforms of the East German people’s police form ranks on the other, and the red flag flies above.

“We have inherited two cathedrals, some magnificent museums and our glorious Unter den Linden,” Ilse whispers. “But Socialism prefers everything dark and ugly. And so, in the middle of all the splendour lies this monster! But I have found the answer. The best way to bear it is to let the…what do you call it in your project? Ah yes, contrast. Let this shameful contrast expose the great building’s charm. Concentrate beyond the painful sight, let it fade, and you will see only the old glory.”

Mum looks up at the horses silhouetted by the sinking sun. “If our great gate must now separate the city,” she says, “is that victory?”

“Birgit, we have to accept how we live now.”

“Yesterday I thought I recognised Berlin. But not now, Ilse. The soul is missing.”

Ilse shakes her head, smiling. “No. Your head makes too much of it. You do not see the plain facts, Birgit. Half of the city is all of the city to me.”

Mum will never see that. Mothers resist adjusting to change. Years ago, all Ilse wanted Mum to tell her was whether they would all die. To still be alive against all the odds is enough for her.

“And look,” she continues, “the Brandenburg gate is still here, Birgit. East Berlin rebuilt it, West Berlin mended the chariot and horses and it is still seen from both sides.”

But for Mum, Pariser Platz is desolate, the famous arch a barrier like the Wall itself; the glorious and the grim thrown together. Mum refuses to see the dignity Ilse tries to unearth. She walks away and, without hesitating, I take her arm.

“Remember, everyone thought Oaking Borstal was a hideous eyesore,” I remind her, prattling horribly, adopting the style of mothers everywhere. “But when the
Gazette
said it had historical significance and the skyline would look bare without it, they all changed their tune. It was all oh, look at the pretty weathered stone and that magnificent oak door with its fifty-odd bolts. I bet the wayward boys inside didn’t say that when it clanged shut behind them.”

She smiles in her far-off, watery way and clutches my arm tighter. It’s a bit painful with my Tufty bag all squashed up in there too, but it feels fine, I suppose.

When I look round, the TV Tower is watching, stalking us. Majestic from the other side, it seems menacing over here. I turn back to the view of the West. If Dad and Victor were standing over there now, they would be thirty seconds away. But tripwire, guns, dogs, mines and guards make them our deadly enemy. The walk through the gate of peace would be the walk of death.

“I stand here often,” Ilse says.

I wonder if she’s watching the ghost of her pastry-chef and an outline of the sister and nephew she will never touch. But she says no more, just laughs at herself again.

While we wait to cross the intersection of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse, I notice the illuminated traffic-light men.

The plump, arm-swinging, hat-wearing characters are the only bright colours in East Berlin. The red one holds his chubby arms out to make a warning barrier and the marching green one’s nose and hands are softly rounded.

Wait here. Be careful, one says. See my hat. I’m in charge.

My turn now, interrupts the other. Cross now. Your wait is over.

I look back once we reach the other side of the road. The red man reappears, bright in the evening sky, his arms outstretched once more.

No going back.

Ilse and Mum pause on the corner of the road to the station. This is their last chance to speak.

“Birgit, I cannot let you go without saying sorry,” Ilse says, taking hold of Mum’s hands.

People skirt around us. Wafts of cheap cooked chicken float past from the new rotisserie. Its strip-light flickers.

“Why sorry?” Mum says, gripping the small hands that clasp hers.

“We kept you safe all that time, then behaved as if you had never existed. We sent you out like a cat into the night. Forgive us.”

Mum looks as if she has carried a sack of sponges on her back through heavy rain and someone has just squeezed all the water out.

“Ilse, I put you all in danger. You sent me away so I could live. And look at me. Look at all I have now.”

Mum kisses her sister’s hands. As they hold each other for the last time, two border guards walk by, boots clicking, leather holsters squeaking. They smell of communist chicken dinner, pungent cigarettes and cheap washing powder. I hear them mutter something about time and the next train. They know what we should be doing and where we should be.

Ilse’s hands drop to her sides.

“Birgit,” she whispers as the guards stride away. “I know now how it felt for you to bury yourself.”

Mum has received genuine Sympathy now, a heartfelt, finer feeling from someone she loves. I hope this is the moment she finally climbs out from her brittle hiding-place.

We break into a run for the train. Hurtling along the street nearly finishes Mum off. She is clutching her side and sweating. My heart thrashes about in my head. I can hear nothing except my own gasping. Ilse, programmed never to be late, has a more efficient running style than ours.

We won’t be on time. Our pass will expire. I have a stitch. My legs are not working. Mum and Ilse are leaving me behind.

Oh, thank you, thank you, blessed Beatles. They’re slowing down, almost at the entrance now. I can catch up. There’s still a hope of getting out.

Another guard appears from the dusk, under a yellowy street-lamp. Oh God, he’s talking to Mum and taking things from her tartan bag. He’s brandishing a folded magazine, looking at the cover, asking questions.

I walk closer. The guard is leafing through the pages, holding the magazine at arm’s length like a madman with a fizzing bomb. I can see it now—an old
Woman’s Realm
that has been lining the tartan bag since its inner nylon melted. Grandma bundled dozens of little sugar sachets into the bag when we were in the restaurant on the boat. The trouble was, she forgot she was holding a lit Senior Service at the time.

How could we have been idiotic enough to bring in the degenerate
Woman’s Realm
? It must have stuck to the bag when they turned it out at border control. Standing between us and freedom are new-fangled diets without starch, knitting patterns to delight the cardigan-hungry man in your life and tips on cheering up his mid-week fricassee.

This man might take my mum away. I dash towards them, but have to stop. The street is spinning. The echo of the guard’s boots pounds in my head, like brisk hand-clapping.

As my head-rush clears, the echo fades. He is walking away alone, the magazine under his arm, as if he just wants to borrow it. And thank you, dear Lord George Harrison, you have somehow held back the hands of the huge station clock. We have a minute to spare.

“Hurry!” Ilse calls.

Not long ago, Ilse and Mum were dancing the Lipsi, spinning time around one another, but not with the strength of spider-silk. Inside the station, Ilse reaches her boundary. We are now in the Palace of Tears.

This is the room where the visit ends. Mum and I must pass through a door that leads us deeper into the station. East Berliners are forbidden from taking another step.

The party is over. Hundreds of people are saying goodbye. This is the worst division of them all, where tears flow in rivers.

The trains are rumbling in, the clock clicking without mercy. The guards’ clipped voices cut through the crying. We must proceed. Everyone in the desolate room is wrenched apart without saying a word that makes sense. No point in whispering, “See you soon,” or “Bye for now.” And those left behind can never say, “I’ll come to you next time.”

“Goodbye, Ilse.”

“Goodbye, my dear Birgit.”

Mum cries for Ilse’s lost freedom, but Ilse no longer mourns it. Her tears are all for Mum. I have to prise their fingers apart. Before she turns away, Ilse winks at me, but not with a smile this time.

Echoes of tears rebound from the walls and ceilings, following Mum and me through the tedious checks and braced guns. One man is howling like a beaten dog. A woman carrying a cockatiel in a cage weeps while the bird watches her, its tiny yellow head tilted to one side.

I never cry much, but my eyes sting as if they are bleeding. I can’t see very well and Mum can probably see nothing at all. We are the blind leading the blind.

Mothers are not supposed to cry. Daughters are not meant to be the ones with clean hankies. An old man carrying a black loaf gives me a paper tissue as he hobbles by.

I separate its two layers and blow my nose with one.

“Come on, Mum.” I pass her the other flimsy half, which disintegrates and sticks to her face the moment she drenches it. Clearly a communist tissue.

I lead Mum towards the next queue, linking arms to encourage her forwards. I still can’t quite forgive her, but I want to remind her that she still has me.