Tying Down The Lion (33 page)

I have no idea if Beate understands all this, what with all her chins wobbling and her brain pickled. She starts crying into her hands. “There’s no peace in Berlin,” she says in an awful, strangled voice.

Dad sighs and lights a cigarette. “You can’t change the past, love. But you can change this.” He shakes her empty bottle.

“One drink leads to two, duck. And two leads to ruination,” Grandma adds for good measure. “And if you really let it get a grip, it can lead you straight underneath the rag-and-bone man’s cart.”

Bloody hell, it was grisly how my grandfather died.

Beate begs us to eat the goulash, slopping it out all over the place, but those bits of meat could be anything. Dad points at my plate and whispers in my ear, “Where the hell
is
that spotty dog?”

Unable to face the food, I keep staring at the dotty scarlet pattern of Beate’s finger-blood splattered over the black and white floor. In any case, Ilse’s goulash left me utterly satisfied.

“One of my prisoners was a drinker,” Dad says, waving his fork. “Fell in with a bad crowd in Borstal. Brushed his teeth every morning still full of drink. Probably brushed his teeth
with
drink. Couldn’t walk as far as the bend in the road without it. Prison’s his salvation. Had the shakes for a few days at first. Sweating something evil, he was. Now he doesn’t want to be released. Too easy to sink a few celebrating. And then that’s it. The beginning of the slide. He’s telling us to throw away the key.”

Dad gives up on the goulash and lights a cigarette. “This lad wasn’t persecuted by Nazis, Beate. He didn’t see his home bombed or have to hide from the Red Army. But he’s got a demon inside. We all have.”

“Dad’s got three awful girls who sit on the moon,” Victor says.

Beate looks even more bewildered.

“Shut up,” I hiss, giving him a quick dead-leg. T-K gets me back with a machete to the rib-cage.

“When things get rough, I told this lad, frame it into a picture,” Dad tells Beate. “His is a swamp full of alligators. Whisky isn’t much help against them. Not even a bottle of good malt.”

I shall keep it to myself that, to save her life, Ilse once had to stab a Soviet soldier in the eye with her pastry fork, but she suffers no demons and sleeps soundly at night.

I think Beate has listened to Dad. And he has managed to avoid the dip in the road, leaving his girls to hitch a lift from some other unfortunate soul. I love him for who he is, demons and all. I love him in the sun and under the moon. I love him to the ends of the world and back again. And it feels like that’s how far we’ve gone.

Konnie comes in from the late shift, swivelling his cap as if he’s not sure whether he’s coming or going, and listens. He picks up a bottle hidden behind her electric potato-peeler, swinging it in his fingers. “You have zee most important and
wunderbar
thing. Your son, safe in his bed. Never forget. ”

He hurls the bottle through the open door and we all stiffen as it smashes. While Axel whimpers and slinks into the corner, Konnie says to Mum and me, “Good you come back.” But he doesn’t wait to hear about our day over there. He has the guinea-pigs to put to bed.

Beate stares into the buttermilk Grandma has poured for her, staring at her own swamp of alligators while the rest of the world spins somewhere else, way beyond her walls.

Grandma wraps Beate’s white apron around herself and washes up. She leaves masses of drips and splashes on the surfaces, but for once Beate doesn’t start wiping. Grandma lights up a Senior Service and leans against the breakfast-bar, flicking ash tidily into the apron pocket.

“So, how was Ilse really?” Beate asks at last, turning to me, her voice cracking.

“Very well,” I say with absolute truth. I almost want to say, “As well as can be expected,” like they do in hospital bulletins. But Ilse is far better than that. Over there, she is well. The Wall casts a darker shadow on this side.

When it’s time to go to bed, we discover Victor humming Sebastian to sleep. It’s no lullaby. More like “Ging Gang Goolie”. But it’s working. I notice how carefully he extracts his fingers from Sebastian’s fat little fist, covering the little boy up to his chin with his white blanket and tucking in his black cloth rabbit.

Deep in the night, I am jolted awake. Dad is having a terror. I try to struggle out of the mountain of feathers, but something is different this time.

A gentle voice is saying “Sh, sh, Roy love.”

I pull the quilt back over me. Dad is in safe hands.

“Sh, duck. It’s all right, son. I’m here.”

And when Dad is calmer, the voice says, “Bridge, I’ll heat you both some warm milk. Lawks though, I can’t fathom this fancy stove. Shall we try it together?”

10.
Connection

Mum has fallen asleep with her mouth open and her head lolling.

“Bloody ugh,” Victor mumbles. Yes, it is a ghastly sight when a mother sinks into oblivion, but at least her pain has eased, for now.

“Her appendix probably looks like a bit of school liver,” Victor observes.

I agree with him for once. “Probably a bit the caretaker’s bull-mastiff’s been chewing.”

“Christ, we’ve only got a teaspoon of fuel, Ma,” Dad says.

“Better hurry to the petrol-station before it runs out then,” Grandma tells him before she starts snoring to the tune of “Nancy with the Laughing Face”.

The car windows stream with morning damp. Victor’s finger gets straight to work on the glass. Without even turning to look, Dad says, “Victor, if you must write rude words on the window for other road-users to read, at least have the sense to write backwards.”

He seems anxious to keep driving before the car falls apart, or maybe Sumatra is trying to catch hold of his car-coat. I don’t know. What I do know is that when a little brother leans on you and falls asleep with a block of flats assembled on his lap and both hands clasped over it, everything feels all right. I shall never tell him that though.

Although it isn’t easy with Victor pressed against my arm, I write the final paragraph of my project, based on something Beate told me just before we left. It reads like a scene in a sad, old film. When I close the notepad, I begin to have second thoughts about letting Mum see this part. It might crush her.

While I brood over it, rain begins to fall, and I close my eyes, listening to its metallic drumming on the roof. I hear Mum wake up and after a long sigh, she says, “Roy, do you think I should forget my sisters?”

“No. It took us long enough to find them. You didn’t come all this way to let go. You’ve started building a bridge, Bridge.”

A match strikes, a flame flares. Mum’s seat creaks. I guess she is twisting round to look at me and assumes I am asleep.

“Roy, I know why Ilse’s so happy. She has a special friend, Silke. They are in love, I think.”

“Poncy name for a bloke, Bridge.”

Smoke curls up my nose. The car rattles on. I must be dreaming. Gillian says women sometimes love each other, but they always wear bowler hats and grow a slight beard.

“Silke’s a woman, Roy.”

“What, a bloke who dresses up, you mean? One of those drag artists?”

“No, she and Ilse are just two women in love. They are discreet about it, but the laws are a little more tolerant in the East, I believe. Besides, Beate would have difficulty accepting it, so it suits Ilse to live on the other side.”

I can hear Dad pulling hard on his cigarette, wanting to understand. I don’t know if I do. What about the portly pastry-chef?

“So how about that fat cook then, Bridge?”

“He might have been a woman too. Beate never met him. Her.”

“Maybe Ilse just liked his Danish pastries, Bridge. Or perhaps it was a half-baked relationship.”

I want to laugh, but stifle it.

“Oh, Roy, my poor sisters. They are not as lucky as me.”

I hear a horrible sound of Mum kissing Dad’s cheek multiple times.

“Hold the bus, Bridge. I’m driving, you know.”

Another match strikes, then Dad pats her knee. I can hear his driving-gloves catch on her dress. The car fills with smoke.

“I had no right to be saved, Roy,” Mum says. “Rainer took such a risk, bringing me food and water and carrying me to the hospital when I was ill. But my life had no value after I went into my gap. I wasn’t worth it.”

“Bridge, this Rainer helped you as a favour to Beate. He was doing it all for her. So you shouldn’t feel bad. He made his choice.”

After a long silence, Mum strikes another match, taking five attempts to light it. Her voice is so quiet I need to strain my ears.

“Roy, it was not exactly like that. You see, Rainer loved me. I begged him to love Beate instead. But he said that however easily people can be forced to feel hatred, they cannot be made to love.”

The rain pauses. I hold my breath for Dad’s next words, which makes me a bit light-headed because he smokes an entire Woodbine first.

“So…did you…love him back then, Bridge?”

“Roy, I did not love a man until the moment I met you.”

I can hear Dad’s relief in his long, quivery sigh, followed by a painful-sounding swallow. Fathers are not supposed to cry.

“Beate never knew, but I believe she guessed. Oh Roy, imagine if someone you loved with all your heart was in terrible danger because they loved someone else.”

“Leave the guilt here, Bridge. The sins of the Third Reich aren’t your property. All you did was try to live.”

“Rainer sent me a note while I was in hiding. I managed to keep it.”

“What does it say?”

“It says, ‘They may uproot you and replant you in a foreign field, but your dream of returning home flies with you, like a seed in the wind. Nurture your dream, Eleora, in exile, and you will instantly, and constantly, keep coming home.’”

“And now you have come home, Bridge. Back to Berlin.”

“I did not belong here, Roy, or anywhere, not until I met you.”

Rain patters on the car again. The windscreen wipers click and thump as they sweep it to and fro.

“What happened to this Rainer bloke, Bridge?”

“I was looking for him when I met you, but I never found him.”

“If you had…”

“I would have thanked him for my life, Roy, and wished him well.”

The rain pours in torrents, the wipers struggling under its weight. When it quietens again, Mum says, “Sometimes I dream that I am still in my gap. Even when I wake up, I do not believe I have enough air to breathe, and I am about to die.”

“I’d die if you did, Bridge.”

They don’t say any more.

No one should be different. No one should be marked. Everyone deserves to be wanted. My eyes burn for my mum, and for everyone without a place to go.

***

Contrasts Project

Beate, 1944

Ashes

Beate senses something is wrong. Someone else is driving Rainer’s train.

“Think of yourself, for God’s sake,” she has told him so many times. “She has led you in too deeply.”

“I am already in,” he has told her. “Up to my neck.”

Beate leaves the train and walks to Rainer’s house. As soon as she turns the corner of his street, she can see his front-door is hanging off its hinges. The air-raids have shattered Berlin, but she knows that if a survivor’s front door stays intact, they keep it closed.

She steps inside, but there is no point in calling his name. Sheet-music, a Mendelssohn sonata, is scattered over the floor. Furniture is overturned, a coffee jug smashed. In the ash-tray on top of his piano, Rainer’s cigarette has burnt down to a column of cold ash.

***

I pretend to wake up after a few more minutes, open my notepad and make the decision to cross that last part out.

I doodle a special spider underneath the obliterated words.
Argyroneta aquatica
, the diving-bell spider, lives a lifetime in slow-moving streams within a spun-silk bubble. It surfaces sometimes for air, which it traps under the hairs on its legs and carries back down. It darts out of the bell to catch prey that happen to touch it as they swim by.

The bell is like beautiful silver velvet. It glimmers when the moon is reflected on the water. But even concealed within the underwater chamber she rarely leaves, the diving-bell spider can still make connections, not to mention laying dozens of eggs as a result.

All she has to do is wait, with infinite patience, until the male builds a bell next-door. He spins a romantic tunnel with silk strong enough to tether a lion, connects the two bells with that silk, and breaks through her wall to find her.

***

Still in Berlin, we’re driving at about fifteen miles an hour. The morning sun is leaking through the sky like a mixture of blood and honey, striking peculiar patterns on my thighs. It reflects the face of Victor’s toy wristwatch on the car’s ceiling like a tiny manic moon.

Everyone yawns. Our disgusting dawn breath fills the car. Dad is in such good spirits he picks up Helmut, an Austrian rambler in feathered hat and green shorts with bib and braces, although rambling is probably quicker than being driven at this speed.

“I voz supposed to be on a mountain by now, but I vent off course.”

“A mountain in a city?” I ask him.

“He must mean fountain,” Grandma says, the snoring having come to an abrupt halt when Helmut broke open his tablet of Swiss chocolate.

“No, I am coming to Berlin to climb the Teufelsberg, mountain of the devil,” he says.

“Teufelsberg is made of war rubble,” Mum explains. “The Allies piled it on top of a Nazi training-school for soldiers. The school would not collapse, even when they tried gunpowder, so they made it into a little mountain instead.”

If we all jumped about in the tin-huts they call classrooms, our school would fold like a pack of cards. Miss Lobb and her beloved skeleton would be the only fixtures left standing.

“Not real mountain?” Helmut asks.

Mum shakes her head. Helmut has walked all this way to discover the Teufelsberg is just the dust of hundreds of thousands of homes.

“I do not vish to see such a mountain,” he says. He looks so glum that Grandma thrusts a handful of green Newberry Fruits under his nose. T-K had better not crank up his Messerschmitt or the poor chap will burst into tears.

The squash in the car is agonising, but Helmut teaches Victor the beautiful Austrian word for apricot, which is
Marille
, while T-K demonstrates how to perform the splits in full combat gear while shouting, “
Achtung
.” Once Grandma is banned from relentlessly repeating that Hitler was an Austrian, time continues to pass in this fruitful way.

But just as the hopefulness of morning streams through the windows, the car judders to a halt.

Dad tries everything.

“It won’t start, Bridge. Oh Christ, I reckon we’ve had it, love.”

For a moment, the car feels like one of East Berlin’s red trolleys and we become mute, helpless babies stuffed inside it.

“Do you need a stocking to make a fan-belt?” Victor pipes up.

While I imagine a Sunflower stocking holding the engine together, gradually cooking to a crisp, Dad climbs out and heaves up the bonnet, cursing when it falls back down on his fingers.

“Bloody ouch. Christ, I can’t believe this. Traveller, my arse. Not much travelling going on now, is there? Bridge, bring us a tissue, would you?”

We all climb out, Mum pale and shaky, her hand clutching her side. Swearing and smoking, Dad strides around the car. Victor copies the manly pacing.

I sit on the rain-soaked grass beside the road. Mum asks Victor to haul some bags out, which feels like being back at the checkpoint again. We pass round a packet of soft, gingery German biscuits and wait for Dad to work a miracle. But we do have the advantage of an eager Austrian on board.

“I help,” Helmut cries, haring off down the road like a loony leprechaun.

Grandma is shaking her head. “Half-shaft’s gone, I reckon.”

I think she means the car, not the Austrian. I don’t know whether it’s a shaft, half or otherwise, but the thing has definitely given up. We are going nowhere. I pray the Bad-Moon girls don’t sashay onto the verge.

A small sheet-weaver scuttles across my arm and onto the tartan bag, beavering up its canvas bulges and into its faded valleys, contemplating a place to spin its sheet-shaped web. Other completed webs, decorated with quivery dewdrops, are already sparkling, masterpieces of weaving, suspended above ground and supported only by the grass. If a cat prowls through and swipes them away, the spiders would just wait until it seems safe to start again.

People can become stronger by being brave with spiders, but Mum still screams if she sees one and, according to seven-year-old boys, real bravery is about parachuting off the Empire State Building with a gun in your sock.

“When the car’s fixed, Dad, you can be Jackie Stewart,” Victor says. “I’ll be the man asking questions after the race. I’ll ask you how it feels to drive at two hundred miles an hour. And you can do your Scotch voice.”

Dad says nothing. The sun may be out, but the remains of the moon are still glinting. I help Grandma to sit down next to me. She takes out her Elastoplast tin.

“Men, eh?” she says.

I nod as if I understand them too.

“Mind you, duck, he’s a good lad, my Roy, for all his ups and downs. Turned out better than his father, that’s for sure. Before the drink sent him off the rails, my Bill had a good job at MacFisheries. He was such a ladies’ man in his youth, you know. Stole me from Stan’s arms at a tea dance. Whisked me off into a terribly unsuitable rumba. Stan tried to put a stop to it. He called Bill a pigeon-chested streak-of-piddle. But I was a young woman with a mind and a heart of my own and Bill’s fresh scallops were second to none. But he was far too free with his salmon-tail, so Stan was always telling me. Young housewives would find a bit extra in their fish parcel, like a calling-card, shall we say? A wink or two later and they’d be waiting for him after dark at the back of the gutting-station. I knew I should have stopped trusting him when his prime cod turned out to be a load of cheap pollock. Oh, I wish I’d left it at that one dance. But dreams and wishes are slippery fishes.”

She’s right. Dad’s king of the road dream is slithering through his hands faster than a shoal of sardines.

Victor starts kicking the tyres.

“Stop it,” I shout. I have to be parental because Mum is in agony and Dad is about to give up on the car. Victor folds his arms in protest. Even at seven, every male knows for a fact that tyre-kicking is an essential part of the diagnosis.

“Action, that’s what’s needed,” Grandma says. “Help me up, duck.”

She prowls around the car, pursing her lips in concentration and rolling up her white cardigan sleeves.

Helmut comes back at a fast jog, calling, “I haff spanner!”

While the pale moon makes way for the white sun to beat down, he does surgical things to the engine, letting Victor hold the spanner from time to time. Grandma watches the entire operation, arms crossed, as protective as a mother with a poorly child.