Bone and Blood (12 page)

‘You saw an actual bomb?' Aisling was impressed.

‘It didn't look like a bomb or what I thought a bomb should look like. I was running but there was no-one left on the street. It seemed like the planes above my head were looking to drop their bomb directly on me. I decided it was all over and stopped. Then I saw it in front of me – a glorious green glow that looked like something alive – like some creature with a message from heaven. I was mesmerised by it and watched it hit the wall. My feet were still on the ground but I was in a cloud of dust and could see nothing except that the heavenly creature had vanished inside a heap of green dung. Then the dung turned into a giant brush of fire sweeping down the street setting everything in its path alight down to the cellar steps. When it settled I could hear screams so I knew I was still alive. Every cellar was full of people. Like ours their cellar was an air raid shelter. I didn't stop to see what happened next. My legs felt wobbly and strange as if they were not really part of me but they carried me down another street and another and then I realised I was running away from home. Nowhere was safe so I thought I might as well turn and go back. I got lost avoiding the street of the bomb and around another corner I overheard bits of German – eine alte Frau. They were looking for an old woman: I don't know if they found her: lots of familiar places had melted into the thick smoky air. Sometimes later there were whispers in a queue for water or soup, or reading out the names chalked on the doorway of the building where they used to live. You might hear then of a missing name – some neighbour burnt alive.'

‘Did you ever think of telling your story? Oral history or something similar?'

Brigitte looked suspicious.

‘Why not tell your story, Mama?' she mimicked. Must be Katharina.

‘My story for Katharina and Monika. Now you too. Everybody wants the story with the angels and the devils. They say they want the truth but the truth is too ugly to tell. Easier to pretend those things did not happen or take memories out and look at them secretly. No-one can put words onto it. Maybe no-one can hold such horror in their head for very long. It is better forgotten. There is no point admitting that such things can happen when they should never happen. It's too hard to think that someone was responsible. Even after the war when it was over, then it was too hard to face that someone British or American had bombed houses full of people. In order to be able to eat, we had to accept them as our liberators. Sometimes people looked at me in envy because I was one of them in a way – almost British. Sometimes they looked at me with hatred. Either way, I don't blame them.'

Aisling felt the adrenalin rush again. She would check the aunt's story but truth or fiction, it kept making great images in her head. Her colour scheme was now green and red on top of black and white, not a whole palette of colour.

‘Do you know if there is any film or photos of the green bombs?'

‘Those fire bombs were better forgotten. The Allies did not want them remembered. We did not want our shame remembered. There were whispers telling how Hamburg was even worse than Berlin. There was a bookshop here in Berlin, where the owner had photos but he kept them hidden. Only people who asked had the chance to see them. He let me look at them and I knew why he did not want them on display – the suffering of so much pain is not for spreading around. Only people like me needed to see those images to be glad it was over. It was as if I was taking a secret look at something dirty from my past. When he saw me he would get them out and leave me there in silence for a while. Later we would talk about the weather. Surely for someone who had no memories, such pictures would be even more of an obscenity.'

‘So the photos might still exist?' The aunt looked at her with vacant eyes and said nothing.

‘Why did you feel ashamed? You didn't do anything?' Any question to stop her clamming up.

‘Why did I feel ashamed? My own daughter thought I must have done something so bad I couldn't talk about it. Maybe I did. Maybe we all did. Maybe we all do.'

‘Yes, but you didn't blow up your own house, did you? I expect the British and Americans were proud of what they did. They stopped Hitler. It was Hitler they were trying to bomb. You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

‘But shame is not for what you do or don't do. Shame is what you feel in front of others. Would you like someone to know that your wife carried your dead baby in a suitcase all the way from Hamburg to Berlin and then committed suicide in front of her remaining two children? Would you be proud of that or ashamed?'

‘Well, I suppose I wouldn't go around boasting about it but I would expect people to understand that it was a war and strange things happen and people do strange things. I wouldn't feel ashamed of it or guilty.'

‘Ach so. Maybe for young people to-day it is different. They have grown up with Television and they see wars and bombs every day. Maybe you would not feel ashamed and dirty if it touched your life. But you don't know.'

‘But I do know,' It was out before Aisling knew the words were there. The aunt looked at her strangely.

‘Maybe it is not the same but I felt like that when Michael died. Ashamed and dirty. Not guilty, but it was as if it was something that I had done. Something I couldn't talk about. But I didn't even know what it was.'

The aunt looked at her. Aisling shrugged. She wished she hadn't said anything about Michael. The aunt was a wily old bitch and could corner her if she wasn't careful. How to get this back to bombs in Berlin without it being too noticeable?

‘So where was this apartment that was bombed? Is it far from here, maybe I'll go take a look? And where did you live if it was bombed?'

The aunt looked at her again. Clearly she sussed these last questions were a smokescreen but she answered anyway, ‘I was one of the lucky ones. It wasn't a firebomb that hit our street – only an ordinary one. Nobody was killed and the cellar was still there. A few of the people and the local blockwart cleared a way down the steps. The rest were still in there – more dazed and shocked than I was. We stayed there. I didn't go back to work after that. I couldn't face them. No work meant no ration book.'

‘So what did you eat?'

‘I had hoarded some flour and potatoes in our cellar. The flour was alive with little small black creatures but I mixed it with bicarbonate of soda and water and made griddle scones on the boiler. I had hidden a jar of bottled beans, jars of pickled gherkins and some large jars of bottled red cabbage – buried in sand in buckets. I was lucky they were still there too. Bottled fruit. The jars came from Delia's mother-in-law in Bavaria. She would bring a great suitcase full of jars of stuff when she visited. Delia wouldn't touch most of it before the war and even on rations, she would rather go hungry than eat it.

‘When I ran out of tea leaves, I used to make tea with nettles that I gathered. I always had some dried stalks hanging in the cellar. I kept a store of the ration coffee to swap for something. I couldn't drink the stuff. In daylight I would scrabble through the rubble for anything I could find. The skin on my hands was raw and bleeding from scrabbling there but it was worth it when I found something. Like the cooking pots. I brought them to the cellar and used them to heat the cabbage or beans. The memory of putting them away carefully after Sunday lunch of goulash or rouladen gave me appetite. I stored anything useful I could find in the cellar.

‘The strangest thing of all was that, one day, when I was huddled in the cellar, a parcel came from home. Would you believe it – a postman delivering to a street that had been bombed! He pushed his cart up the street and people would appear from nowhere waving their papers. My surprise made me realise that I was still a foreigner. In my parcel there was tea and bacon and two of my mother's griddle scones. Only two because they had to be eaten fresh and she didn't know how long the parcel would take. I swapped some bacon for some more potatoes and a few onions from Herr Schmidt's garden. I ate the best meal of my life that day and then huddled up beside the boiler and pictured myself beside the range at home. When they came for me some days later, I still had one piece of bacon from that parcel and some tea. One of the hardest things, when I was in the Lager, was the thought of bacon slowly rotting away while we were so hungry. Many nights before I fell asleep I wondered if some hungry rat would get through the defences I had created to protect it or would someone else have taken over my little cellar to live there. I missed my little cellar.'

‘How do you mean when they came for you? Who came for you?'

The aunt sighed, ‘I told you I don't want to tell fairy stories.'

Clammed shut. Aisling yawned her exit with excuses of tiredness.

Brigitte turned her eyes now from the voile blind, which had found a partner in the light evening breeze. It wasn't important now. To tell or not to tell. What did it matter? She took out a cigarette and lit it. ‘Cancer sticks', Katharina had said when she was a teenager. She had never smoked and was always trying to persuade her mother to give them up.

Looking for a history book to settle the uncomfortable restless sensation. Hangover from the whiskey? Hitting on the website for the bookshop fed her restlessness. She needed some more visuals of Berlin in the war years. Flicking through Katharina's collection on Ravensbrück, she wondered why these books stayed here. If Katharina taught history she must have had lots more books somewhere. The books on this shelf were not academic thankfully and a few were even in English. Probably bought with Brigitte in mind. In the graphic novel of Spring in 1945, the face of a young woman, with a square set jaw and high forehead, looked familiar – it reminded her of her cousin Celia who was supposed to be the image of Gran when she was young. She looked at the pictures of ruined buildings, rolled up bedding in the street and people sitting, standing or walking. Ideas formed. She needed a scanner now. She could scan the images from the “Everyday Life in a Women's Concentration Camp 1939-1945”. She could scan the images, zoom in on some and use them as a basis for her drawings. This would be a major project.

The feeling fluttered still – somewhere between uncertainty and fear. The old photos brought her back to the days when her dad gave her his old Canon. He ditched it when he got his digital camera. Aisling enjoyed playing around with the Canon. Anyone could take a good photo with a decent digital camera but there was none of the magic of capturing an image in the old-fashioned way. For a while Aisling enjoyed the perverse eyeball to lens, seeking out the perfect match for a single moment of being. It didn't last and the camera was gathering dust now on a shelf in the cottage in Leitrim.

Back on the bed again and looking at the yellow and brown stained pages. The unspoken battle between Brigitte and Katharina; between Leitrim and Berlin; between memory and the desire to forget. She could feel the pages crackle with stories the aunt wanted to tell and wanted to hide. It made her want to know more – to know more of the unspeakable things. A story of people who could be cruel for no good reason. She'd have to worm more out of Brigitte. She watched and waited for her chance after ‘Abendbrot'.

“Would you tell me a bit about the camp?”

Brigitte looked at her through blank eyes which had lost their usual stern sky-blue. She was probably somewhere in the past with Katharina. She hadn't mentioned anything about the whiskey of the night before. Just as well. Aisling would stay away from that, even if the aunt went on it to-night.

‘Camp?' Brigitte asked her from a face that had crumpled in on itself.

‘Yes you know the Lager,
that place
you told me about.' Aisling switched her tone and put the emphasis on ‘that place'. Said in the right way, it should be guaranteed to tune her into a certain wavelength.

‘So you want to know more about my days in the Ferienlager?

‘Ferienlager? Holiday camp?

‘Anna and me – we called it that. Some called them ‘Arbeitslager'.

‘Workcamp?'

Aisling sighed. Brigitte was doing a wind up. Get her talking and find a way in through the contradictions.

‘Ferienlager?'

‘To survive as long as I have, you need to learn to see with other eyes than your own. Anna was taken to the camp in 1940. To begin with it was only sixteen wooden blocks, and a building housing the kitchen, baths, and offices. Many of the houses – the villas and apartments on the outside of the camp for the women guards – were already finished. The women swept the sandy road into intricate patterns. There were still small trees and shrubs near the blocks. Even flowers and some salad leaves grown around the block in summer. They went to work building more blocks and more houses, or worked in factories in the town.

Each woman had a dish, knife, fork, spoon, glass, and a dishcloth. My can was just an old tin but Anna's was a proper enamel can, I have it still. In the days of the ‘Ferienlager', each prisoner had a cupboard, one woman to a bunk with her own quilt. Showers with warm water; flushing toilets. Enough heat from the stove. Maybe the early days of the camp was how it was meant to be. Who knows?

‘Anna taught me phrases and words in German for me to repeat during the day. Die Blumen wachsen – warmes Wasser. Alles in Ordnung. Another word was paradise. Paradise! Para-dies! You can find paradise in comparison if you can believe in it still. Anna held onto her belief in God, in images of order with a full belly and cleanliness. She had a great laugh – like a hyena. On the worst days even days of punishment she only had to speak of planting flowers in the Ferienlager. Her laugh was as infectious as dysentery running rife. If the guards caught us laughing, she would make some remark about my German and they would join in. No-one could hate Anna. Laughter and kindness helped us keep the horror outside. Laughter and kindness are the only defence against prison. Knowing facts and history is not enough.

‘Ferienlager – if I rolled the word on my tongue, I could taste the water of the lake where I went with Dieter, Delia and the boys on a sticky summer day and the fish lunch afterwards at the restaurant by the lake with my new family. I could feel the waters of the lake on my shoulders where I dipped in and out on my hunkers moving my arms as if I was swimming– too timid to admit that I did not swim but the children knew and laughed at me.'

‘How did you meet Anna?' Aisling wanted her to focus.

‘In the early days each category of prisoner was in a separate block but by the time I arrived, there was so much overcrowding nothing worked, they shoved women in everywhere. I had a red triangle even though I wasn't a political but they put me with the lavender triangles because I was on my own. I shared a bed with Anna and another lavender triangle. I was lucky.

‘Sleepless nights, muddy days and watery soup but we were still expected to do a hard day's work. It killed many that winter.'

‘What about Anna, how did she die?'

Brigitte sighed again, ‘The end of the Ferienlager. I was afraid that when Anna died there would be no more laughter. No protection. So many rules and regulations; even when the place was falling to bits it was impossible to keep up.'

‘Not exactly a holiday camp after all, then,' Aisling commented.

‘You young people are all the same. “Mama, you and your Ferienlager and how cruel women can be to other women. You never speak of the Nazis who put you in there”,' Brigitte mimicked, ‘Inside or outside the camp, people hate each other for good reason or no good reason.Find the Nazi in yourself before you look for it in someone else, Katharina.'

Aisling flinched. Had Brigitte lost it? Did she really confuse her with Katharina or was it memory talking?

Brigitte took a tissue out of the packet sitting on the table beside her chair and carefully sealed the packet again. Beside it were her reading glasses in their case – never taken out as far as Aisling could see but they travelled every day from the bedside table to the little folding table by Brigitte's chair. Beside them the remote control for the TV – that stayed on the table always. Aisling had yet to see that in use either. Once she had asked to turn on the TV and put the remote on the chair beside her. Brigitte fidgeted so much it was impossible to watch anything anyway. Finally she asked Aisling to put the remote back in its place and then she settled again and dozed off. Aisling realised then what the fidgeting was about. The remote had to sit there in its place beside her tablet box.

Gran would like one of those boxes, Aisling thought: morning, afternoon, evening; three little boxes for every day of the week. Gran marked hers carefully every day on bits of old birthday cards ever since the day she had forgotten to take her blood pressure tablets and rang Mum in a panic because she had pains across her chest and couldn't move. Her Mum believed she was just attention-seeking and it was all in her imagination. Maybe, maybe not. She watched now as Brigitte put the tissues back in their place – beside the bar of chocolate. Aisling fetched a glass and filled both glasses from the bottle on the table. Sometimes she put ice cubes in her own but Brigitte always refused them no matter how hot it was.

She's a fine one to talk about rigid regulations in ‘that place' – little rituals over nothing. Order had to be established in the midst of misery. Beds neatly made, inspections under the bed. Aisling grinned to herself – at least Brigitte wasn't into inspecting your knickers – not like Gran. You never know what will happen in the day. What if you had an accident and ended up in hospital? Clean decent knickers and none of this modern nonsense. An image of Gran holding up one of her own thongs from the wash came back. Not something to share with Brigitte.