A Book of Death and Fish (29 page)

‘Not a McDonald’s,’ Anna said and I couldn’t let it go. My daughter was growing up. Fast.

‘Time was, we had to drive all around the outskirts of various blooming European cities just to find a Burger King,’ I said. ‘Now you’re moaning because here it is, the big high yellow M, where you didn’t expect to see it.’

We’d been well warned. The former East was changing fast. We drove by skips full of fine old windows with bronze furniture. It wasn’t fair – these guys wanting neutral uPVC draftproof windows, just like their neighbours. They’d soon have to install vents, to provide an alternative airflow to that caused by expansion and contraction in natural materials, like the timber items they were throwing out.

How can anywhere be the former East?

The night-driving and the
Autobahn
gave way to A roads. The route took us across a long steel bridge.

We came upon a narrower road with high poplars swaying. We were still on that avenue and then another sign said ‘Pitbus Circus’. We used to have to go and hunt the lions and tigers and efelants on loud posters. I remembered further back than that, when the Circus came to Stornoway. No big cats or bun-eating landwhales but I did remember the clown on stilts. Couldn’t have been viable because they never came again. All these trucks, suspended in nets from the derrick of the
Loch Seaforth
. That was the best bit. When the show was all up in the air. Before the
Hebrides
worked the shorter Minch crossing, putting in to Tarbert, with its turntables and a lift to the car-deck.

I was curious to see what Baltic water looked like. I’d grown up with the Baltic shoeshop, where they had a foot gauge to get the right width
of Clarks sandals. Now Birkenstock rules OK among the sensible casual brigade. If my uncle Ruaraidh bumped into me in the metropolis he’d steer me into the Baltic bookshop and if I was slow to choose between this and that, he’d take the both of them to the till.
Dinny Smith Comes Home
by Angus MacVicar and RM Ballantyne’s
Among the Bushrangers
. I’d get all the Enid Blyton I could stuff down me, in the library, if I still wanted it.

What about herring? If there were still Baltic herring to be caught, how come all these Klondykers crossed the North Sea with their decks stacked with empty barrels, for the stated purpose of filling them up in SY? Gabriele said the Baltic fish were small, sweet and seasonal. It’s a matter of quantity. I thought of the sister and my olman wrestling over the last salt herring from the score the olaid had boiled. She’d have to change the water at least once, sometimes twice. I wouldn’t fancy eating a salt herring raw. I remembered the olman going to Henderson’s on Bayhead for a bottle of wine to go with the New Year dinner. It was a once-a-year thing, then. I couldn’t figure out why he was asking for salt herring in a shop that had nothing but bottles of drink. I found out much later it was Sauternes.

The grey empire, recently folded, couldn’t have lived on pink salami alone. There were a lot of mouths to feed. Even though Adolf and Joe had managed to wipe out all these millions between them.

The herring shoals were now chased with electronic sensors on the purse-seine so the bag wasn’t pulled tight till it was worth it. But then the markets might not be prepared for them, so the catch might get ground to meal.

And then you fed that to caged salmon or caged furry animals. We no longer had glossy minks in wire cages, back on Lewis. Only the escape artists whose teeth had coped with chicken wire, applying jittering leverage till the staples sprung. The escaped mink bred. They dined well, on hens, ducks, eels and salmon though they killed far more than they ate. Like people.

Frozen Minch and Westside herring, which had found no ready market, for human consumption, went to our neighbours who farmed both mink and salmon. And bizarre blocks of frozen sand eels. So our own puffins and sea trout had to cover more air and water to fill their bellies.

Klondykers had never paid the top price. But they bought in bulk. My own account of my first work, after school, is now definitely historical. Basket after basket would swing over the SY hoil. The Faroese would want them coated in sweet red pickle but the Baltic market wanted a dense packing in plain brine. I’d worked, topping up barrels, till a few midnights. And just maybe Gabriele had eaten some of the fish I’d packed. Matjes, taken soaked but raw, with boiled potatoes. Just possibly the produce of my home town.

Her and her father, the architect-sailor, eating as you only do when you’ve had the boat leaning and spray on your lips, and she’s tied up secure, springs and stern lines, with a small amount of slack. The sweet Baltic herring might still swim but the shoals would be smaller and more scarce. Dense numbers ran for limited periods only. That’s what we say. The herring or the mackerel or the salmon are running. Draw that picture.

Baltic herring were more suitable for frying whole. Minch herring had for centuries provided the full, pregnant matjes. There was a complete grammar of grades and stamps. Our words for different qualities of peat had nothing on it.

The talk of herring sustained us along the avenue and took us by a few missed turnings, a couple of backtracks. Gabriele was getting tired. Maybe this right side of the road was now an extra bit of concentration, after years on the left. We drove into the Pitbus Circus by sheer accident. There were no tigers, no clowns. It was a grass circle surrounded by a curve of buildings. Restrained neo-classicism. Robert Adams might have made a wee sortie over this way. If he’d been as far as Bath for a job, this was possible. More likely, the columns showed how the same movements in the arts went in waves across most of Europe.

These showcase buildings had been maintained. But driving on towards Sassnitz, looking out for the turn to take us out the northern coast, the streetlights showed an island in transition.

Interior sides of gable walls are just like the inside covers of books, when the elevation is exposed, during demolition. Generations of wallpapers
are caught in the glare. Abandoned picture frames tilt on their nails. The residue of soot and conversations hold to lime. A suspension.

Jibs of high counterbalanced cranes break the changing skyline. Fallen bricks remain in clumps and the new blocks are all in ordered groups, held by steel tapes.

We found the street with the right name. The family hotel was somewhere along this one. One or two hotels were newly completed but we found the older building. We could have been in Bournemouth. The long-established pine trees looked similar to those on the English Riviera.

Rügen needs the New Year business. This island did most of its trade, in much-needed foreign currency, till a couple of years ago. Now people from the inland cities of the former GDR drove here, for their holiday. The ones who were earning. There were no Trabants in this car park. People who had been on the waiting list for a decade now wanted to buy a big car from across the former border.

The pier was at the end of the street and we had to see it first. It was long and wide and lit up bright and there was a restaurant about a third of the way along. Even in all this artificial light, we could see that the shapes were right – an echo of the old form in sepia-tinted photographs. The postcards in a shoebox.

You hadn’t expected a true restoration – weathered planks, numbered and returned but… it was all so shiny. The zinc on the galvanised rails was catching the lights of the restaurant and the waxing moon combined.

This was Gabriele’s pilgrimage. She had not expected this scale of development, so soon. All those building sites. Anna was checking out her flapping jeans, making sure she didn’t pick up dirt on the trailing hems. Looking forward to seeing the cousins again.

I’d already got good mileage out of the return of the bellbottoms as well as another coming of Jimi Hendrix. So I gave it a rest. That look was already a common currency, both sides of the new Germany. The fashions in jeans went alongside the sports clothes that ruled over the new Europe. The logo is the indicator of the individual’s income or debt.

Things had shifted fast. The cost of reconstruction. Not forgetting demolition.

The reunion was painless. I was tense about the language. My German hadn’t improved much and was slow enough to dull the conversation. People felt they had to stop and explain. Anna had chosen French at school and we hadn’t pushed the issue. After a couple of Rostocker Pils, from the tap, things were getting easier, between the grown-ups.

Anna was next door. I was out of it as soon as my head hit the crisp pillow but I came to in an hour or so, knowing Gabriele was lying awake.

‘Strange to be back?’ I asked.

But Gabriele had never been to her father’s birthplace before. She only knew the piers and the shores and the reed beds from the stories. Her father couldn’t tell her what had changed and what had not.

So strange. This is where she should have come with him on boating holidays if it had all been possible, back then. The graves of the grandparents she’d never known were on this very island. The legacy of the district piermaster. Even in the 1930s, this had been the recreational pier, with pleasure boats and craft for hire. There were fishing villages with working jetties and her grandfather had looked after these too. We’d need to see them. Pity that, I said, so the Stornoway Coastguard would just have to go looking at boats and piers on his holidays. Well, couldn’t be helped.

At last we slept. We made it to breakfast, just. We found the same selection of rye and white and birdseed rolls we’d get in Bonn or Cologne. Endless coffee and Anna just picking up where she’d left off, with the cousins. The older ones all wanted to practice their English. The younger ones wanted help with their new Lego kits. Nobody in the half-empty hotel seemed to worry about our noisy babble.

The forces would divide. Gabriele’s man would of course want to see the harbours. Perhaps Gabriele would like to visit the cemetery and see the family graves. Then there was a very good swimming pool in the big hotel but the public could buy tickets for it. And of course there was the Rügen steam train.

We all wanted to do everything. There were enough days before the New Year to make this possible.

After the board games and card games were carefully packed away, Gabriele needed to talk before she could sleep. We’d share one last beer. This was a place she’d needed to see and we were just in time.

Next day, we saw a bit more of Rügen. For years the main roads had been developed as links with the high ferries to Bornholm and Trelleborg. Acres of tarmac parking were now in place. Containers. A bit like Felixstowe. But there were still unspoiled shores.

After a light snow flurry went through, the December brightness would intensify and pick out each individual bronze stem in the rushes. In the sway of a body of them, you could just make out a parting, like the habitual combed pattern of the head-hair of a man from some decades back. You’d decipher a channel and discover a black boat, lying snug, to its mooring.

The rushes would give way to shingle, shelving to make a landing place. The black boats would be turned keel up. Broad white calligraphy made from bold legal numbers in cracked gloss over matt bitumen. An arrangement of anchors lay beside the beached fleet. Flattened flukes were pitted where the oxide had failed to adhere.

The chemical film was smoky over most of the area of exposed metal. But clean steel showed where regular use had worn away all coatings. You could have spent a whole day arranging them and the sculpture of anchors wouldn’t have been more startling. There were too many for securing the boats so they must have been for laying out fishing gear.

Gabriele told me more of the family history. How her aunt had walked across the railway bridge, fleeing Rügen at night, clutching her childrens’ hands. Her own father had seen the writing on what was left of the walls.
He’d remained in the West after finding his way back from the Eastern Front. He knew to stay well clear of anywhere the Red Army might have reached.

It took a while before the rebuild got going. When it did, he was in the right place with the right skills. He’d chosen well. In a few years, Bonn was booming and its neighbouring cities also prospered.

So Gabriele’s aunt Erika had got out in the nick of time, before the watchtowers were spaced all along the shorelines. The good old democratic GDR was founded in 1949. Not so many years before Gabriele’s birth in the emerging city of Bonn. Now, in 1999, the next generation of Gabriele’s cousins had been given back the old family hotel on Rügen island. It sounds like a neat fifty-year cycle, put like that, but both ends were pretty messy.

We looked to the cliff line and from this angle the wooden towers were more obvious. At first I thought they were hunters’ lookouts. Yes, they were, you said. But it wasn’t tame pigs, bred to be hairy and gamey. Think about it. There was a lot of boats moored here and I’d said myself they looked like a seaworthy type. The islands of Denmark were just across there. Not that far to Kiel Fjord and Flensburg when you thought of it, in kilometres or nautical miles.

Swimmers had escaped. They’d stumbled ashore to start their new life with nothing but an out-of-date costume and a smear of pork fat. Usually, they were sighted and one walkie-talkie flickered to another. A launch, faster than the low-geared fishing boats, would be sent out to hunt with its searchlight. Often the swimmers left but just didn’t arrive anywhere.

We looked closer at the clinker boats, larger craft than those we’d seen before. Twenty-footers, beamy but not too much draft so they could be hauled up the banks by large-geared winches. You saw the remains of winches like that in the geos of Lewis. But this too was small scale commercial fishing. While the colossal tonnage of the factory-ships had gone to the Atlantic to do their bit towards feeding the empire, these inshore craft set their long lines and fyke-nets. Red and black flags frayed on bamboo poles, projecting over the raised sheerline at their sterns. Big three-bladed props would be linked to hand-started diesels.

‘So you wouldn’t have needed a key?’ you asked.

‘No, the starting handles would stick out from timber housings. Worn smooth where palms gripped them. You just flick the decompression lever over, get the heavy flywheel turning, then you flick the lever back.’

If the fuel was casting a fine spray at the injector you’d hear the universal language, the diesel creak. She’d have to go. There would be one puff of black smoke and then you’d put her in gear. You’d have to be sure the prop was clear of snags at the beach first. No rise and fall of tide here but a few shoves of the shoulder and you’d soon get her moving down the slope. Must be a few flounders or plaice left here to make it worthwhile.

I realised then you were telling me something more. This was how you imagined he’d done it.

You told me your father, the deserter and one of only two survivors from a regiment, had made another choice here, later in his life. He’d been invited to attend an architectural conference. The latter days of the Eastern Bloc. Even in these last years, he’d only have access to a few showcase buildings. The GDR still wanted to demonstrate a working system, to Western eyes.

But he’d given his guardians the slip and taken a boat. A Rügen boat with a shape which showed the same Norse ancestry as those of the Scottish islands.

He could have easily afforded to have a replica built. Had it shipped across. They’d gladly have taken the proper Deutschmarks. They built and exported Folkboats for currency, in the 1960s for God’s sake. Or rather for the good of the state. And he had no need to escape anywhere. He’d done all that. He had freedom of movement. Up to a point and here was that point.

I’d never pushed Gabriele for the details about her father’s death. I’d known they’d never been presented with a body to bury. That it had happened over here, where her grandfather had been a piermaster. That was all she’d said.

The visiting architect had absconded from the conference. He may have taken out a boat. Details had grown no more clear, with the years. They’d had to make a thousand phone calls, write scores of letters, before getting the little information they’d ever received.

An uncle on her mother’s side had come to represent the family. Her brother Michel had joined him. They might not have known which questions to ask. Michel had never had much interest in boats, only cars. The two men might have thought there was little point in asking any questions at that time.

Her father couldn’t have launched one of the working boats on his own but he might have taken one that was moored afloat. Just waded out to it. But the diesel thump would have been a giveaway on a quiet night.

So a man was missing and a boat seemed to be missing. It was fair weather but once you were out, clear of the banks, you were an unlit boat, black in colour, crossing shipping lanes. Out there, the thumping of a big vessel’s own seagoing cylinders would easily drown the noise of ten or twenty horsepower. If he’d just rowed out, the swish of oars wouldn’t register on the decibel scale. If he’d seen danger coming and shouted out loud, he would not have been heard.

There had been no record of sightings, no shots, no news. There was a missing boat and there was some wreckage. But the number wasn’t on any boat part washed up. So these splintered sections of bone-white pine, jutting from the black stain – they could have been from the normal annual wastage of Rügen boats. Ones broken from moorings or ones floundered at sea. Or tumbled down the beach in a February storm.

Had they considered their father might have survived, his stolen boat come ashore somewhere in Denmark? Some men wanted to start a new life. He wouldn’t be the first. As to the matter of the boat, perhaps now was not the time, but there was a matter of compensation which would have to be faced. A comrade had lost the means of his productivity to the state.

Of course they’d circulated the story and the description to police in West Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Yes, Poland too. Was there a seed of doubt? Gabriele shook her head. Doubt as to the way he died, that was all. But it wasn’t like in all these Cold War thrillers where there was a reason for everything. Why people had to disappear. When the plot was unravelled, the matter was satisfied. In her father’s case, there was just no way of being sure of the ending.

It was hardest on their mother, the doubts. From the children’s perspective, they’d just lost their father and had to mourn him without visiting the cemetery after church, before dinner on Sunday. At least there was a stone now, even if there was nothing under it. They had to wait for years before the loss was officially recognised. When that happened, it did make it easier for Mutti.

Some people got to see their body, dressed and looking its best. Other times there was a reason why the lid was screwed down. But now I knew there could also be a gravestone, with nothing under it.

The official at Bergen or Sassnitz or across the bridge wouldn’t have known that this eminent architect from the other side, reported missing, used to row around these bays with his own father. A story unfolds. It doesn’t fall into your lap, all sorted. You might miss the significant bits, or you might hoard and file details that just don’t seem to matter.

Maybe now was the time Gabriele’s family could talk about it again. Time I played some pool with the daughter and the cousins. They might let me play the
Best of Jimi Hendrix
double CD Anna had given me for Christmas. Just because she wanted to hear a bit of history herself.

Hearing it again, I thought Hendrix played the best version of the Dylan song. That opening – ‘Must be some kind of way out of here’. This was the best or worst place to listen to it. The watchtowers remaining, though their ladders had been taken away. The spacing between each one maybe corresponded to what a watcher could scan, with the aid of 7 x 50 Zeiss binoculars, in average visibility. Or maybe they needed to flog these west for good currency and the guards just got Zenit ones.