Restitution (29 page)

He turned the corner and was gone.

Alix

Pomerania, July 2002

The train pulls out of the Berlin Ostbahnhof, rather than the elegant old Stettiner Bahnhof I remember from childhood. Mami, Papi and I would sit in a carriage full of excited
Berliners on their way to the Baltic coast and look indulgently at the poor city-dwellers, who only had an annual fortnight of salty air to enjoy.

I’m used to the changes in Berlin; I’ve returned several times since the war, the last time for the service of remembrance for the German Resistance members.

But I’ve never been back to Pomerania before and I never dreamed I’d return with my son. I still can’t keep my eyes off him. I still long to touch him. And yet I probably come
across as over formal as I try to control the waves of emotion threatening me. Does he understand that European manners aren’t American ones? People here are more circumspect in the way they
express themselves. It doesn’t mean they don’t feel just as much.

My son’s eyes are on the view from the window. He’s hoping that material from this journey will make an article on post-Communist relations between Germany and Poland.
Time,
perhaps. There may even be enough to produce a book proposal. One of the benefits of freelance journalism is that it allows you the freedom to take off on trips with recently discovered parents.
Michael returned to the US after we first met in January and arranged things so that he could make this journey to the past with me. The intervening six months have felt like six years. What
Michael doesn’t know is that we’ll be in Alexanderhof on my seventy-fifth birthday. I recall my eleventh birthday in 1938, the night that Preizler came to dinner.

We’re passing through the eastern suburbs with their brutalist tower blocks, exposed pipes and weed-infested bomb sites. At least it’s quieter than it was in the
Mitte,
with
its drilling and digging and hurry to rebuild. There’s some relief from the drabness: dashes of colour from delphiniums, lilies and roses in passing allotments. Little wooden garden houses
dot the rows of flowers and vegetables, well kept, cherished. But for the most part it reminds me that I’m journeying between two cultures. And between past and present.

Finally the last of the suburbs are gone and we’re looking out at the empty countryside. God knows what Michael makes of what he sees. This was once a prosperous corner of Germany –
the very heart of Prussia itself: farms, churches, neat gardens, children’s playgrounds, ordered and orderly, even in wartime.

‘When it’s sunny like this it’s so hard to imagine how much snow there was that night,’ I say, as much to myself as to him. ‘And we were all on the run, babies, old
people, all out in the freezing cold.’

‘It must have been terrifying, knowing the Red Army was on its way.’

Terrifying hardly begins to describe it. ‘We should have left weeks earlier. The authorities wouldn’t let us go until it was really too late.’

‘They wouldn’t let you leave? Even though they knew what was about to happen?’

‘The Nazis thought it was defeatism to move civilians out.’ I can feel the sneer on my face. ‘Stalin must have thought they were mad not to get us out of his way.’

He glances out of the window again, at the empty fields. ‘Looks pretty abandoned now. According to this,’ he points at the guidebook, ‘everyone’s left for the west. It
must have been like this in parts of the States during the Depression. Mom and Dad used to tell me stories about empty fields and abandoned farms. Of course I only remember America in the postwar
boom years when everyone seemed to drive big shiny cars and have enormous refrigerators.’

‘I’d love to travel to America.’ It’s a relief to switch attention to another country.

‘Seems strange to me you haven’t.’

‘I was supposed to go to a conference in New York with Robin years and years ago. But he caught mumps and we didn’t go. And we usually holidayed in France or Europe.’

‘You’ll have to come and stay with us.’ He chats some more about the family in America, his journalist wife and teenage sons, how a stomach virus ruined a once-in-a-lifetime
trip to Brazil. ‘We’d have liked more children,’ he says, ‘but it wasn’t to be. We were lucky with the two we have; they’re great kids.’

Lucky indeed. I remember Robin, his crestfallen face the day the specialist made his pronouncement. What bad luck for a grown man to catch mumps.

I didn’t deserve my kind husband, who waited so patiently for me to complete teacher training and for the authorities to allow us to marry. And I don’t deserve this son, still
straight-backed and athletic, who’s forgiven me for forsaking him.

‘So quiet.’ Michael’s looking out at the fields again.

‘Much has changed.’ The crunch of boots through snow, explosions behind us, soldiers shouting as they pushed past, a dog chained to a tree, barking at each fleeing refugee, until it
was silenced by a soldier’s rifle.

The train stops at a country station. Arrows on an old sign point west to Berlin and east on to Stettin. Soon we’ll leave Germany and enter what’s formed part of
Poland since the war. My heart thumps in anticipation. But when we draw into Stettin the first thing I notice are crumbling brick chimneys and warehouses with weed-covered roofs. As we step down
onto the platform beneath the old iron canopy, neglected and decaying, a lump forms in my throat and I can hardly speak to Michael or walk to the taxi rank.

Occasionally we pass a building I knew as a child – one of the soaring red-brick churches, more like forts than places of worship, or a road whose contours feel familiar – and
returning memory jolts me.

‘Szczecin getting busy now,’ says the taxi-driver. ‘People come for surgeons.’

‘Surgeons?’

‘Cosmetic surgery. And dentists. Is cheap here. And German boys come because all their girls go west. German boys like Polish girls.’

German males courting the women their grandfathers believed fit only for slaves.

The taxi-driver ploughs on, showing no fear and obviously possessing an extra sense alerting him to trams. I seem to remember them ringing bells to warn one of their approach. We drive past
grass-covered bomb sites. Michael gazes at a church whose windows have been concreted over, presumably to save the expense of glass. Perhaps nobody here feels much emotional connection to this old
Prussian city – most of the incomers after 1945 were displaced Poles from the east of the country.

Yet I spot surviving wrought-iron balconies and baroque plasterwork, graceful counterpoints to the modern blocks and few remaining Prussian civic buildings. A right turn takes us through a
quarter that looks almost Parisian: boulevards, circuses and squares. Children kick balls on patches of grass and adults sit reading newspapers under trees. ‘Grunwaldski Place,’ says
the driver.

‘We used to call it Kaiser Wilhelm Platz,’ I recall.

We turn into a wide thoroughfare.

‘That’s the post office.’ I point at the imposing red-brick building.

Michael whistles. ‘The Prussians certainly didn’t believe in small-scale public buildings. Strange to think they were such a big presence here for so long.’

‘Strange indeed.’ For all our pride and military power we were ultimately driven out into the snow.

‘Car rental here.’ Without warning or signal the driver cuts across two lanes of traffic into a modern hotel complex, causing a bus behind to hoot its horn. We smell burned rubber.
‘Drive careful. Drivers here mad.’

This is all so un-Germanic. Papi would have loved it.

The sun bounces off glass-plated high-rise offices and hotels and dazzles me. Gone are the neat little shops behind the castle with their bright awnings into which bustled neat
German women with neat baskets to buy bread and meat and fish. Gone are the old gabled merchants’ houses. And the barges chugging up and down the river like a staccato accompaniment to the
huge seagoing ships with their cargoes of sugar, corn and timber. And yet, on this sunny day, Stettin or Szczecin doesn’t feel despondent, there’s purpose in the way pedestrians tackle
the intimidating junctions and trams tear along the streets. It just doesn’t feel like the city I knew as a child.

We cross the Oder, slow and grey in appearance today, and drive through endless out-of-town shopping outlets, attracting dozens of German number plates. It must be worthwhile crossing the border
to shop here. In 1945 the Germans left with a few pots and pans and blankets stuffed into handcarts and rucksacks, but their grandchildren are returning to empty the shelves.

Trees and open fields start to smooth the jagged edges of my memory. On the roadsides, only centimetres away from the traffic, children stand with glass jars of berries and mushrooms. I try to
recall whether German peasants once sold produce on the side of the road before the war. I wince as lorries thunder within inches of a boy who looks about ten and want to tell Michael to stop the
car so we can buy up all the berries and send the lad safely home. But there’d only be another child around the next bend and another and another.

‘You’ve been very quiet.’ Michael is a good travel companion, happy to sink into his own thoughts but ready to respond to any conversational cues I throw his way.

‘Just remembering. Papi’s car once burst a tyre somewhere here. A storm blew in from the Baltic and he and Mami got drenched while they were changing it.’ Mami’s long
white linen coat never recovered.

The forests add interest to what would otherwise be a pleasant but unremarkable landscape. Birds of prey hover over wheat fields, still green in the early July sunshine.

‘It could be anywhere, really, couldn’t it?’ Michael says.

I open my mouth to dispute the point but realize the truth of what he says. ‘That was always the Prussian problem.’ I’m remembering Papi’s views on the subject. ‘No
natural barriers apart from the Elbe and the Oder.’ Our geography was our destiny.

‘The Poles once owned bits of Pomerania before it became German, didn’t they?’

‘And the Swedes. The Hohenzollerns were almost Johnny-come-latelies in this part of Prussia.’

‘Prussia. There’s a name you never hear any more. It’s been wiped off all the maps. How does that make you feel, Alix?’ Sometimes my son switches into professional mode
and I can almost imagine he’s interviewing me for his article.

‘Churchill blamed us for everything: Hitler, the war. Perhaps he was right. Many Junker families joined the Party. Even some of our cousins.’

‘Really?’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘I suppose I liked to think the family kept itself aloof from the Nazis.’

‘Few families managed that completely. And it was just the people who should have known better – the doctors, lawyers and educated classes – who joined.’ I can hear the
acid in my tone.

‘At least the Prussians made up for their earlier failures when it came to July 1944, didn’t they?’

‘The Bomb Plot?’ I cross my arms. ‘My father joined an old Prussian regiment with traditions going back hundreds of years. But some of those noble officers had been in the
east. They knew what was happening. They did nothing for years. That’s why Papi left, to join the Abwehr, military intelligence, and see if he could make contact with the Allies.’ All
those trips to Switzerland and Sweden Papi made, all those raised hopes . . . ‘And then when he and his friends finally decided to show Churchill and Roosevelt they were serious, they
couldn’t even organize it properly.’ I must have re-examined all these details in my head a hundred times.

‘If they’d acted earlier it would have been easier. But they waited. I suppose I find that hard to understand. But Papi was brave and he and his friends reclaimed a little of our
lost honour. For that I am grateful.’ The heaviness suddenly shrouding me must be tiredness. I long to be back in my drawing room in London with a cup of tea and the
Times
crossword.

‘And you’ll tell me about my father when we reach the house?’ He asks the question very softly.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes I will.’ And I blink hard. ‘I’m sorry you had to wait all these months to come out here.’

‘It wouldn’t have been a comfortable journey in the winter and I had to wait for Steph to finish for summer.’ Steph’s a university lecturer, very clever. I’ve
enjoyed a few telephone conversations with her. But the mention of Gregor has made me nervous again. Gregor, so long unheard of.

I look out of the window for something else to talk about. ‘Somewhere around here there used to be an enormous baroque house with its own art gallery – hundreds of Old Masters,
Vermeers, Rembrandts, you name it. The family sent some of them west in time but the Russians took most of the pictures.’ We both stare at the empty space. ‘They probably razed it and
turned it into a pig farm.’ Suddenly I feel every year of my age. ‘I could only make this journey after Robin died. And when you turned up it seemed particularly appropriate to do it
together.’

When Michael frowns two little dimples form, one on each temple. So like his father. ‘Are you saying Robin didn’t know the truth?’

‘Oh, I told him eventually. But not the whole story.’

‘He didn’t . . .?’ He flushes. ‘I’m sorry, it just seems strange that he didn’t want to know about it all.’

‘Not Robin. But people were different back then, Michael. Openness wasn’t considered such a virtue. Reticence was admired.’ I sound so dry.

‘I’m so sorry.’ His voice has that American warmth to it. I’m lucky, having him turn up in my life and be so wonderful. He might have hated me. He’d have
justification. ‘Tell me more about my grandfather.’

No interrogation. He reminds me of Papi himself: so discreet, so gentle with people.

‘You already said he was a clock fanatic.’

‘To the point of insanity.’ I recite the litany of attempted repairs, the regrets when clocks that had been taken to pieces couldn’t be reassembled, the triumphs when spare
parts were obtained from shops in distant parts of Europe and ageing timepieces could be persuaded to move their hands. ‘Poor Papi, we took his two best specimens in the wagon with us but
they were lost when the Russians attacked. The carriage clock found its way to Munich of all places. Robin put word out that we were looking for certain timepieces and eventually a dealer made
contact. It’s the only thing I have from the house apart from the boots I wore when we left.’