Tying Down The Lion (31 page)

Mothers are supposed to know where they belong, but I suppose daughters sometimes have to take them there. At least, after peeling away the wet tissue, Mum’s awful Gay Geranium lipstick is shed with it.

We are herded through the checking procedures again; the queuing, paperwork and passports, the harsh lights, secured exits and underground platforms. We watch the guards search a train inside and out, climbing onto the roof and crawling underneath it with mirrors. Armed guards clutching hungry-looking dogs keep vigil from the bridge across the line.

As the long process is about to finish, a guard appears from nowhere and asks to check through our papers once more. Mum has to empty out her bag. Please, no more contraband. Don’t let there be a
Commando
in there.

The guard whisks us into another room where even more are waiting and watching. One of them separates us and tells me to sit down in a bare waiting area. He takes Mum into another room. I catch a glimpse of a thin table with an old-fashioned typewriter on it and a chair each side. Nothing else, apart from a portrait of Walter Ulbricht on the wall. Mum has to sit facing him. The door closes.

Louder than the grating and squeaking from the guards’ boots, guns and stiff uniforms is the thump of my heart.

I have no idea where to look or if I’m allowed to ask a question. They might shoot me on the spot. The inside of my mouth is sandpaper, but when I finally manage to swallow, it’s so deafening they all look at me. I dare not move, but I have no control over my quivering legs.

I must look as green as asparagus. The heat of welling tears gives me a focus. If I work at not blinking and think of something perfect, these men won’t see me cry.

I think of Peter Fechter, wild with joy at the prospect of escape. I am surrounded by his killers, but they must never see inside my head. I imagine him soaring into the air and clearing the Wall. In this drab, creaking room with the squeak of leather and the smell of sweat, Peter is alive again, and free.

Not a single tear falls.

The door of the little room opens. The guard with Mum leads her out, speaking in stern German. Not that German sounds anything but stern to me. He leads us both to another office and a long procedure of more paperwork with Mum scrabbling in her purse for money.

“Are you being arrested?” I hiss while the forms are rubber-stamped.

“No.”

“Then what the hell’s happening?”

“I’m so sorry, Jacqueline, but I kept some of the eastern marks. I was going to leave them for Ilse’s friends, but in the rush I forgot. I have to pay a fine, the same amount again in western marks.”

“Is that all? No prison?”

“Yes, that’s all.”

Mum turns out her pockets and scrabbles inside her jacket where a pfennig has dropped into the lining. “Um, do you have some reddies, dear?”

“You’re as bad as Dad.”

“Two peas in a pod, yes?”

“Don’t mention specific vegetables or they’ll lock you up.”

I have no money in my sock and make a mad search through my bag, but I know there is nothing in it. Too easy for Dad to find. But, miracle of miracles, screwed up inside Victor’s none-too-clean hanky are a few Deutschmarks—my payment for the moon-rabbit story. Thank you, blessed Victor. And I have never said that before.

Time rushes past the train, suspending us inside the stuffy carriage and giving me a chance to ask Mum about her time in hiding.

“Mum, when Beate and Ilse were living like tramps, where were you?”

She takes off her headscarf and folds it, then fiddles with her matches, testing out her memories like the tip of a tongue seeking a sore tooth.

“I fell ill in my hiding place. I felt my insides were coming out.”

Bloody ugh, Mum.

“One night, the owner of the factory checked on me. He saw I was near death. He did not want a body hidden behind his wall. The city was swarming with Nazis and Jew-catchers. They would soon discover me anyway, dead or alive. So in the middle of the night I was carried to the Jewish hospital.”

“A hospital full of poorly Jewish people? Surrounded by Nazis in the middle of Berlin? Are you sure, Mum?”

She pulls out a cigarette that trembles between her fingers. “It saved my life, that wonderful place. It became my home.”

I shake my head. “But how come a place like that was allowed to exist?”

“Astonishing, yes? But it was so. A place out of time.”

This is like solving a difficult crossword. Thank Lennon Gillian isn’t helping. I have known her to cram three letters into one square to force a word to fit.

“So you were scooped out from the gap in the wall and carried to this hospital?”

“Yes, close to death with a gastric blockage. I stayed there until the war was over. Once again, I survived by the skin of my feet.”

“Teeth, Mum.”

“Ah yes. Teeth. I never understand that saying. Teeth have no skin, do they?”

“That’s the point really. Just go on, Mum.”

“Well, by the autumn of 1944, the Nazis were desperate. They were losing the war. There was a great push to get rid of all the remaining Jews. They gave the order to kill us all. If the Soviets had stormed Berlin just three days later than they did, I would not be here. When we heard the cry of a new baby, born alive to a dying woman on the day the war ended, it was the first sound of hope.”

I can’t speak. My mum saw death coming round the corner so many times and kept dodging it. I look down at a goulash stain on my dress and watch it blur.

Mum reaches for my hand and I let her hold it in her lap as if I was six again. “I was lucky, Jacqueline. Remember that. I am still here. Please, never torture yourself with all this. If we do that, my freedom will count for nothing.”

I still can’t speak. I can only think of my mum listening to that new baby.

“I left the hospital after the end of the war, still weak, but improving,” she says. “A nurse gave me a room in her house in Wilmersdorf, a British-occupied sector of Berlin.”

“And you met Dad?”

We listen to the chug of the train for a moment. Mum blows her nose and wipes her eyes, but tears are still streaming when she speaks.

“Yes. He made me the luckiest woman in history, my Roy. And that is why I have this terrible guilt. There was always an exit. Every time danger came, someone stepped in and cleared a path for me. Ilse and Beate suffered more than I shall ever know. And still suffer. Yet they have not deserted their country.”

“But you married a man from somewhere else,” I remind her. “That’s not the same as running away.”

Mum’s lips whiten around her cigarette before she says, “Beate is a broken woman.”

“Yes, but not Ilse. She said if she was living in the West, Beate would interfere with her life, with her friendships. And poison her with bitterness. She’s relieved they aren’t together.”

“I know. I am too greedy, trying to let go of all my regret.”

That’s greed? Eating a whole pack of stale Blue Riband in one break-time is greed. And Gaye Kennedy won’t be allowed to forget it because the pack belonged to Gillian, and she’d brought it in for Harvest Festival.

Since surviving a war seems harder than being in the middle of one, I ask Mum about life in the hospital to take her mind off the life that followed.

“Oh, we created our fun. We even made chess pieces. My knight was a screwed-up cigarette packet and some old bandage. Once we ate a roast goose that some kind soul had left on the hospital steps. There was enough for one sliver each and nothing had ever tasted so good. By that time, hundreds of Jews were being rounded up every week in the city and never seen again. And there I was, sitting in bed with hot food, playing chess on the blankets.”

I stop asking questions and look out of the window. Deserted, half-lit stations pass by, the train sounding thoughtful as it slows. Konnie says the train-tracks were laid to take Berliners to anywhere, to set the city free. Sealing the stations has broken their crucial links.

Our train brakes almost to a standstill beside the abandoned platform of Oranienburgerstrasse, a tongue-twisting name for a cheerless station. A guard haunts its shadows, his Kalashnikov glinting in the gloom, watching us watching him.

The ghost-station is rotting. Tiles have slid off the walls. Rubble is strewn in heaps. Pillars have crumbled. Colourless posters are flaking. A weak light seeps in through the gaps caused by decay, or perhaps because light can always finger its way in. Not many places are pitch-black, even if they seem thick with darkness at first. Dad says you should let your eyes become accustomed to it. If you wait long enough, outlines always appear.

We all sway and lurch as the train stutters alongside the platform. Mum stares at the rocking ghost of herself in the window, the hollows beneath her eyes smudged with dark shadows.

There is no roar from the wheels, no clattering expectation. In the ghost-stations, you feel the rhythm falter.

As we gather speed, the ghostly guard slips away. No doors slam. No whistles blow. The platform without people slides out of sight and we leave the station behind as if it no longer exists or was just a mirage. My reflection disappears in the flood-lights from the death-strip, but returns as the dimming city rattles past, as if I am in two places at once.

I fall into a half-sleep as the train picks up its normal, faster-than-fairies beat.

Someone is cutting my hair. I have a Sassoon five-point bob. Thirty-six shillings in a London salon. A dream come true. But I’ll miss my long hair. It keeps my neck warm in winter.

Here is Victor with a comic under his arm, wearing fifty pairs of shorts and with a Sassoon bob too. He has grown as huge as Grandma, waddling one side of the line. And there are Ilse and Beate, blowing kisses that turn into flying spiders. And Bwa-Bwa, her voice clear, telling me she is home.

T-K, towering over me, wraps an arm around my shoulder.

“I promise I won’t build a wall in Oaking,” he says, lying down and vanishing into a black pool, one hand waving a handkerchief with an embroidered “B” and the other a tarnished pastry-fork with the prongs of a devil’s trident.

Naomi Sims emerges from the pool wearing Grandma’s glass beads and strides along saying, “There ain’t no one nowhere who’s foreign.”

Dad is wrapping his arms around one of the fat West German pillars with advertising posters pasted all over it. Victor throws himself against it, hugging it too. They stretch their arms round until their fingers touch. They melt into molten marble, setting rock hard, ghostly in the half-light.

Konnie, with a blindfolded guinea-pig sitting in his pocket, drives a train that becomes a sewing-machine punching out back-stitches to and fro. He has invented a miracle. It looks like a camera to the Stasi, but has a secret lens that can see through walls. Millions of seeds rattle inside the camera. It turns into Deborah’s cage. Her bead-eyes stare hard, willing me to notice the moon trapped inside her nesting box.

The moon-lens transforms lives, Konnie says. For a split-second, it can switch the vision into solid life. You can touch someone you love one more time.

Gillian and Lynette want me to skip on the tracks. They swing the rope and chant, “Salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper.”

They want me to join in. “Come on,” they say. “Come on, Tuesday, or whatever you call yourself now.”

They pass me a note speared to a fishing-pole, but there are no words on it, just hundreds of musical notes.

I am blind again, apart from hundreds of red and green flashing stars. I want to stay and watch them. Stop, go, stop, go.

“Come on, come on,” my friends shout.

“Where’s the door?” I ask them.

“Where it always is, you twerp,” they say. “Where you left it, of course.”

And looming in front of me, the black lettering clearly painted, is the Jewish hospital. I can even hear Mum’s voice, telling me a story the way she did when I was a child.

And while she speaks, in the breath of a sigh, more ghostly stations pass us by.

***

Contrasts Project

Berlin, 1944

My Mum, Eleora

“She’s almost dead, Rainer. I don’t want a body in my wall. The smell will give her away. The Gestapo is breathing down my neck. Enough now.”

“I will move her. Don’t worry. Thank you for turning a blind eye all this time.”

“The Jews are disappearing, Rainer. And people like you who love someone they shouldn’t, they are disappearing too.”

Rainer nods. He has given up talking these days. The anxious, clammy, kind-eyed manager in his oily overalls has allowed Birgit to hide in his factory for so long and given her bread and water. Now he is frightened and can no longer be trusted. Not even doctors can be counted on to stay silent about the whereabouts of a Jew.

Birgit’s skin feels like moist paper. Rainer has brought her medicine, stroked her damp hair and massaged her cramped legs, but he cannot keep her to himself any longer.

“How about the Jewish hospital?” the factory owner asks. “I don’t know if it’s safe. It could be the worst place of all to take her. But it could also be your last hope. I guess someone is watching your apartment.”

Now that the Allied air attacks are expected, the Berlin night-sky is blacker than molten tar. Even so, Rainer still takes care to choose a moonless night to carry Birgit through the city. It feels like carrying no more than a thin coat.

He side-steps under the lindens and holds his breath whenever a torch beam flickers across his path. At last he reaches the Jewish hospital, a softly-lit enclave, a place out of time. But he and Birgit could be flies about to land on a spider’s web.

A nurse opens the door to his gentle knock. She appears hesitant, even hostile at first, then gasps at the wretched state of the young woman he is carrying.

“How do you know about our hospital?” she asks Rainer.

“I have heard talk,” he says, “but I didn’t believe it could exist. I see you even have electricity.”

“Yes. And running water.”

“Please, my Eleora is so weak. Will you help her?”

The nurse can see now that he is not the enemy, just an ordinary, anxious man.

Rainer helps her to lay Eleora on a trolley. Her face is whiter than the sheet and her hair, no longer blonde, lies in lank strands of indeterminate colour that snake over the pillow. The nurse motions for Rainer to stop smoothing the blankets and sit down. He obeys, his heartbeat steadying in her cool, starched presence.