The Berlin Crossing (4 page)

‘Roland.’ At least I thought that’s the name she whispered.

‘Mutti, it’s me, Michael.’ I fastened her hand in mine.

‘Roland.’ Did I dream the answering pressure on my hand? And who was Roland anyway?

‘Mutti, it’s me. It’s Michael, Mutti.’

Outside, the train roused itself, lumbering into life. I turned towards the sound. I was not dreaming the renewed pressure
on my hand.

‘Don’t go, Roland, don’t go.’

I could see the panic now in my mother’s eyes; I could sense it in her clutching fingers.

‘It’s Michi, Mutti,’ I said again. ‘It’s Michael and I’m not leaving you. I’m staying with you.’

The hollow eyes swivelled; I watched her scan the room, the familiar objects, the dressing table with the big mirror and her
comb and brush and jar of skin cream, the dressing gown hanging from the back of the door, the old wardrobe, the wicker bucket
chair that she had salvaged from god knows where. I sensed her touching them with her eyes, measuring each item, discovering
herself again in days that were gone.

And in the day that was here.

‘Michael—’

‘It’s OK, Mutti, don’t try to talk.’ I looked at the red alarm clock on the dressing table. ‘The nurse will be here soon—’

‘I don’t want the nurse, Michi.’ A strength in the voice that surprised me, like the strength in her fingers clutching at
mine. The pain, I thought, energized by the pain.

‘Rest,’ I told her. ‘Just rest, Mutti.’

‘It’s dark, Michi, light the lamp.’

When I switched on the bedside light, the furrows in her face were deeper, the dark below the saucer eyes darker.

‘Is that better, Mutti?’

‘Leave it on.’ The eyes pleading with me. ‘Don’t turn the light off again, Michael.’

‘Hush, Mutti, I’m not going to turn the light off.’

A small smile on the ravaged face as though she could read my mind: soon, now, the light will go out anyway.

‘Michael.’

‘I’m here, Mother.’

‘Promise me – go to see . . .’ A racking bout of coughing. I was afraid to raise her on the pillows. I waited for the spasm to
end and wiped the cold sweat from her face.

‘Promise me . . .’

‘Please, Mutti, rest yourself.’

‘Promise me you’ll go to see him.’ The fingers tighter now, the faded blue eyes darkening.

‘Who, Mutti? See who?’

‘Pastor Bruck.’ I had to strain to catch her words. ‘Pastor Bruck in Bad Saarow. Promise me you’ll go . . .’

‘I promise, Mutti, now rest, just rest.’

‘He’ll tell you . . .’ Was that a smile or a grimace on her face? ‘He’ll tell you about your father . . .’ The words in a rush now,
a race against the dying light. ‘I should have told you when it was safe – after the Wall – Pastor Bruck will tell you about
your father . . . about Roland . . .’

The rattle then, the rattle of death. I had read of it in novels but the long, shuddering roll of it frightened me. A long,
gasping noise from her, a last gentler trembling of the cancer-ridden body. Her head turned slightly, her mouth dribbled on
the pillows; the stain stared back at me like a question mark.

My father was a name on my birth certificate: Johannes Vos, dead before I was born. I’d never suffered from any curiosity
about my unknown father and my mother had always deflected or rebuffed the few half-hearted questions I had ventured about
him. So who the hell was Roland – and who was Pastor Bruck?

I don’t know how long it was before the nurse arrived: I stirred to feel her hand on mine, releasing my fingers from my mother’s
frozen grasp. Frau Mertens came in then; I watched her bless
herself, throw the window open wide and cover the dressing-table mirror with a towel.

Go for a walk, Frau Mertens told me, or maybe I could make some tea. She was gentle about it, ushering me out of the bedroom.
From behind the closed door I could hear the soft murmur of their voices, as they set about washing my mother’s body.

Nothing is written in the pages of my small pocket diary for the weeks after my mother’s death. Days, weeks, drifted by; a
continuum without markers, undivided by the mundane, trivial appointments and outings that mark our lives. I slept, I ate,
I walked. Life became existence. A beer, a coffee, a nap, a newspaper – nothing mattered, everything the same. Those pages
of my diary are as blank as my mind: nothing happened, nothing recorded. As if it were I and not my mother who had exited
life.

I let Frau Mertens take charge of the funeral. My widowed neighbour seemed pleased to take on the business; I saw no reason
to interfere.

In the cemetery overlooking the River Havel, Steffi stood beside me at the graveside and whispered, ‘I never knew your mother
was a Catholic.’

I looked at the priest, sprinkling holy water from a brass urn on to the coffin. I shrugged. The service was Frau Mertens’
idea; her eyes were closed, her dry lips moving, as she prayed on the other side of my mother’s grave. Frau Mertens looked
at peace, as though she had found her place in life.

I wondered, idly, while the priest droned on, about my mother’s place, in death. Her mother, my grandmother, had not survived
the war; her father had died in the last frantic days on
the Baltic Coast, as the German army tried, in vain, to escape the rampaging Soviet forces. My mother had been raised in an
orphanage in Chemnitz (renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt in the GDR but now once again known by its old name in our brave new world);
after school she had been sent to work in a printing works before being assigned to a similar job in Brandenburg. And then
there was me, and the flat on the fourth floor, and the closed-doors life we lived together. And now my mother had her patch
of ground on the bank of the Havel, and the low stone that, in good time, like a dutiful German son, I would raise over her:
Petra Ritter, 1943–1993
.

My mother had lived for fifty years and what I knew about her could be written in a handful of words and a couple of dates.
A chill wind gusted in across the river and I looked from the grave to Steffi, slim and lovely in the navy, knee-length suit,
and I knew my own loss: there was no one to fight with, now, and anyway the war itself had been lost . . .

Even the streets of Brandenburg seemed lost to me. Only bread and beer, the merest basics, brought me into the shops; otherwise
I shunned the town, as though I might be picked up by the agents of the new invaders. Once, stepping out of the supermarket,
my loaf and
wurst
under my arm, I almost collided with a couple of my old students, and I grunted a kind of greeting as I hurried away from
their smiles, their hellos, the question in their fresh teenage faces. They reminded me too much of what I had no wish to
remember.

So I snapped open the cans of beer, drank the cool liquid and tasted nothing. Sat at the open window of the flat and neither
saw nor heard the passing trains. Pulled the Trabi in on the dirt road beside the lake and opened another beer. The white
swans glided by on the rippling waters; the fading grasses stirred in the November wind. When Frau Mertens asked, on the stairs
that evening, if I’d had a nice drive, I struggled to remember where I’d been.

I caught the look she gave me, saw the concern in her eyes. The moment passed, as we stood facing each other on the stone
steps. Don’t ask, I thought, and she didn’t. It was the way we lived, the way we had survived. Frau Mertens understood, even
if my mother had always seemed uncomfortable with the way you had to respect one another’s space.

Frau Mertens had always accorded me a certain deference. Especially when I was appointed to the town’s Education Committee,
soon after I’d joined the staff of Gymnasium No.1. Maybe she guessed that, as an up-and-coming young member of the Party,
I’d be given sight of letters from my fourth-floor neighbour in our apartment block. Her deference had been unnecessary: what
did I care about the neighbour overhead who was forever listening in to the American station, AFN? Why should I give a damn
about the fellow on the ground floor who played rock music on his record player until after midnight? Besides, her prying,
spying eyes notwithstanding, I had never disliked Frau Mertens.

Now she wanted to know if I’d like her to clear out my mother’s wardrobe.

‘It’s been over a month now, Michi.’

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘and thank you.’

‘I won’t disturb anything personal.’

‘Do as you wish with the stuff. If there’s anything you like—’

She blushed; I thought I might have offended her.

‘I’m really grateful to you, Frau Mertens. I hope you can find something to keep as a memento, that’s what I meant.’

She thanked me, continued downstairs with her two sacks of rubbish.

What could she possibly find of value in my mother’s things
? Old
clothes, cheap shoes. Jewellery of glass and paste and plastic. A few paperback books. A handful of photos in a cardboard
box with dark red roses on the lid. Nothing much to mark a life lived.

And a few words coughed on her deathbed.

Your father. Pastor Bruck. Bad Saarow
.

I realized, shutting the door of the flat behind me, that, ever since my mother’s death, I had been trying to lock these words
out of my mind. These words that belonged in the darkness, in the narrow pit where my mother lay. Across the river, beyond
the town. Not here in this fourth-floor flat, where no father had ever walked, had ever breathed. Or had ever been breathed
of.

Now some spectre ghosted from the grave by the river and padded with silent steps across the water, across the sleepers and
tracks of the railway, and insinuated himself into the fourth-floor flat. Into my mind. Into my life.

Well, he could just spirit himself back to wherever he had come from. And he could go fuck himself along the way.

For the umpteenth night in a row I couldn’t sleep. About three in the morning I called Directory Enquiries, the great new
we-never-sleep service that had reached out to us across no-man’s-land as part of our new and wonderful reunified country.
The voice said, we can’t help, there’s no listing for that name.

At eight o’clock I was behind the wheel of my old Trabi, polluting the atmosphere, coughing my way past the winter trees and
the naked fields to Bad Saarow.

Bad Saarow. A T-junction south-east of Berlin, a stone’s throw from the Polish border. The Romans had settled here, lured
by the spa, the thermal spring that gave the place its name. In the Weimar days, after the shame of Versailles, artists and
writers and film-makers had clustered here: the thermal waters soothed them, the light was good, the great lake was a place
to swim and frolic and dream. The Nazis had replaced them: nightmares roamed where dreams had blossomed.

Bad Saarow: a place without a centre, a crisscross of roads between the lake and the woods, around the railway station and
the spa baths. I had been there once, during my years at the university in Rostock. When Dieter had invited me to spend the
weekend at his family’s place, halfway through our third year in college, I’d been nervous: I’d never been to the home of
a senior Party official – a senior officer in economic and strategic planning at the ministry in Berlin. Groundless fears:
Dieter’s parents had put me completely at ease in the weekend villa on the lakeshore, had encouraged me to come again to enjoy
the lake, the launch; their home was always open, they said, to any friend of Dieter’s.

I pulled in at the wooden kiosk near the railway station. The small hatch was surrounded by magazines and newspapers, the
new glories of tits and football, the staple fare of
Bild
and
Express
and the rest of the ‘free press’ from the moralizing West. I watched the steam from my coffee swirl in the November morning
above the high metal table on the pavement and wondered what Dieter’s father would make of our new homeland, the new Bad Saarow.
I’d lost touch; Dieter had left after graduation to join his parents in Damascus, where his father was by then heading up
a new development unit in the Syrian capital.

There would be no place for him in the new Bad Saarow. Dieter’s family was just one more casualty of the fall of the Wall;
unremembered statistics, not even blips on the graphs and tables of our new prosperity. Like the shiny new tiled front on
the station; like the huge noticeboard which announced that work would shortly begin on the redevelopment of the spa – whirlpools
and swirlpools, water slides and water rides, all the glories of the new dawn that would bring Berliners by the trainload
to this quiet backwater where I was supposed to be searching for a Pastor Bruck.

No, the fellow in the kiosk didn’t know any Pastor Bruck but then, adjusting the New York Yankees baseball cap on his small
head, he hadn’t lived here for very long. There was a whole biography in his few words, in his accent, but I thanked him anyway,
before dumping my empty plastic cup in the rubbish bin and getting back into my car. I felt his eyes on the Trabi as I pulled
away from the kerb.

Hardly knowing what I was looking for, I drove slowly along the empty, quiet road. The large, detached houses that lined both
sides of the street looked deserted: rumour had it that these were now the property of money men in Berlin and Munich – and
even further afield. The spiked metal fences warned you off the lush lawns and gardens; the closed-circuit TV cameras drove
home the message. Once these palatial lakeside homes had been the reward of the servants of our state, their place of retreat
from
the heat of the day; now they were the addenda of the wealthy, the playthings of rich, absentee financiers and traders . . . and
my mother and her deluded accomplices had burned their midnight candles to deliver us into this . . . paradise?

A gardener in overalls paused from his raking of leaves to watch me chug by. He didn’t return my small wave but bent again
to his leaves; maybe the cameras were for him too – and you didn’t find work nowadays at every crossroads. Our days of full
employment were gone for ever.