Tying Down The Lion (13 page)

“Thanks,” Mum and I both say.

“I meant the doll,” he says.

“Anyway, it is me, Victor,” Mum says. “I loved the doll. It had blue glass eyes and real hair.”

“Your hair’s funny.”

“Yes, I was not blonde then.”

Other children in their best clothes can be seen in the background.

“Who are they?”

“My friends. Lena, Julius, Shoshanna…”

“Funny names.”

“Yes. Very funny names.”

I turn the photograph over to see if anything is written on the back. It says Eleora, 1935, in italic script.

“Eleora? Is that your name in German?” Victor and I ask together.

“In a way. It was my name when I was born. Then I just used Birgit instead, an easier name, which turned into Bridget in England.”

I would have hung onto Eleora. Elegant Eleora. Exquisite Eleora. Peter and Eleora, the perfect couple.

“Why didn’t you pass it on to me, Mum?”

“Well, it might have confused people. Very unusual in England, a name like that.”

“Doesn’t really fit in with all the Susans and Debbies, I suppose, but better than having the same name as everyone else. There are four Jacquelines in my class and seven in the whole year.”

Mum sighs, already aware of this, and that I loathe Idit, my German middle name. At school the boys love adding an ‘o’ to it. The whole Idiot problem could have been avoided with the sumptuous Eleora. I feel short-changed.

Dad lights a cigarette from the stub he’s just smoked. “Come on, Bridge,” he says in a testy tone of voice. “Concentrate on looking out the window. You’re missing it all.”

The next checkpoint is coming into view. The tension in the car is wound so high I can hear a crank turning, although that might be the engine, which grumbles on even the gentlest slopes. The strain makes Victor fidget. I have to do something before that ribbon of snot trails out of his nostrils again.

“Where’s T-K going on manoeuvres then, Victor?”

“Berlin. Where else?”

“I wouldn’t count on it. He may not be allowed in. The East Germans may say he represents the fascist enemy, especially in that rainbow jersey Grandma knitted him.”

I honestly don’t mean to inflame the situation, just distract him from the guard about to flag us down.

“Shut up, you girl,” he says, lunging behind Grandma to whisper it in my ear. “Shut your cake-hole.”

“Pig-dog,” I hiss in his eardrum.

He gives me a dead leg, I give him a Chinese burn and Dad slaps at the air between us, with Mum shouting at him for taking his hand off the wheel.

We arrive at Dreilinden, where two guards give the car an inspection like a medical exam, running their hands everywhere, screwing up their eyes and stepping back a pace to frown at the timber frame.

They march around the car, keeping us waiting, but, to be honest, we are all quite cocky now. Having survived Checkpoint Alpha, we’re old hands at this business. Grandma is snoring. Dad is blowing a smoke-ring, which he only does when life pleases him. Mum is cleaning his glasses and he smiles at her. No Row. No Bad-Moon girls. Bliss at Bravo.

The guards ask Dad to drive a little further so they can watch the car moving. He adjusts his gloves as if he’s Jackie Stewart about to race at Monaco. I look at Mum. She looks at me. We both cross our fingers. That, at least, is a common language.

The car stalls. Grandma’s head lolls onto her chest. Flustered, Dad tries again, blasting the horn by accident, and somehow setting off the trafficator arm as if we’re turning right. We do roll forward but, just as the guards look as if they might wave us on, we hear an almighty creak and one of the back doors falls off.

The guards watch over it as if it’s an unexploded bomb. Dad leaps out, rubbing his gloved hands together.

“Sorry about that, gentlemen. Quite all right. Happens now and then. Only when the car’s stationary though. Wouldn’t happen on the move. Not at all. The aerodynamics keep the doors sucked on.”

Victor has to help Dad. It involves a lot of grunting and pushing, but somehow they sit the door back on its hinges. Grandma lets out a mammoth snore that rocks the car. There’s a terrible, lengthy whine, which could be either Grandma or the hinge, but thankfully the door stays put.

“Ziss wood is bad, no?”

“Seasoned English ash it is, Sir,” Dad says. Victor nods and hides behind him.

They want to know if the wood is part of the structure, which it is. Without it, we would have no doors.

“No, no, not at all. Just a bit of rust on the hinge,” Dad keeps saying.

One guard keeps prowling all the way round the Traveller, eventually blundering straight into the trafficator, which snaps off.

“Ach,” he says, blushing and holding the stump of it in his hand. “Ach.”

The two guards disappear and we dare not breathe, but they come back with a chunk of wood and some glue to patch the split piece on our broken door. They help Dad fix it on, but the poor trafficator is a lost cause. Dad will need to use arm-signals, they explain with gestures. At least I think that’s what they’re suggesting.

Dad gestures back until they are all windmilling away like
Playschool
presenters. He offers his cigarettes, which they accept, and we are allowed to move on at last with the pointless advice, “Wood good. Car good. Wood and car togezzer, not so good.”

“You could be right there, mate,” Dad says. “I’ll bear it in mind.”

A barge rumbles from the canal, guards shout instructions, cars rev their engines and we all move on again. Unable to stop, more because of the dubious brakes than the law, we join the queue for the road to West Berlin with a chorus of thankful sighs.

The autobahn continues through East Germany for another two kilometres, during which we pass crowds of hitch-hikers, their assorted children and dogs and baggage heaped up at their feet.

“With no stopping or turning allowed, at least when they want a lift back the other way, they’re guaranteed a two hundred kilometre ride,” Dad points out, ready to stop and offer someone a lift, but swiftly outvoted by the rest of us.

Grandma wakes up, refreshed and excited.

“So what’s this Bat-Ear like then, Bridge?” she says, reaching for my aniseed-balls.

“It is Be-a-te, Nell.”

“Oh I’ve no time for how foreigners announce perfectly good names. I shall call her Beattie.”

“The war has broken her spirit, Nell. I can tell from her letters. She feels a terrible guilt about those years, as many of us do. She was never an easy person, but now she is a shadow of herself.”

“Can she cook?”

“No, she was always a terrible cook, I’m afraid.”

“So that’s where you get it from.”

Grandma pops in three aniseed-balls and pauses until they’ve reduced in size enough to be crunched. The noise is deafening.

“So,” she says, “Beattie’s a bit prickly, can’t cook for toffee and she was widowed after she had what’s-his-name, the boy.”

“Sebastian, he is called, Nell.”

“Oh, fancy. Seb-arstian indeed. What’s wrong with Bob or Ken?”

“Well, they are not very German names, Nell.”

“You’d think they wouldn’t want German names, wouldn’t you? You talk about their guilt. Well, what better way to show it than to use nice plain English names?”

“Come on, Ma,” Dad says. “It’s not as if anyone’s likely to be called Adolf, is it?”

“Bridge has an English name now.”

“If I did not,” Mum says, clipped and frosty, “I would always be putting up with bigots.”

Grandma takes her teeth out and folds her lips in. She pretends not to be listening and refuses to speak apart from whispering to Victor to pass the sherbet-pips.

“Beate misses the past,” Mum says.

I think she’s speaking directly to me now and I reach for my pad and pen. “Carry on, Mum.”

“Beate and Ilse both used to live in a flat in a tall, old corner house in East Berlin, where Ilse still lives now. Beate misses it.”

“But how can you miss somewhere that spies on people and traps them behind a wall?”

“Because, whatever it is now, it was once her home, Jacqueline. Poor Beate. She was this big, brisk girl who liked to obey. She took her Hitler Youth group meetings so seriously.”

“Weren’t they for boys?”

“For girls also. They taught her how to become a good German housewife. She wanted to finger the line.”

“Toe it, Bridge,” Grandma says, shoving her teeth in.

“Thank you, Nell.”

Grandma pulls them out again and folds her arms.

“Were you in Hitler Youth, Mum?” Victor asks.

“Yes, Victor, it was compulsory.”

His level of interest sky-rockets. “Did you have a machine-gun?”

“No, it was nothing to do with war. The girls were shown how to stay healthy and become excellent housekeepers. There was also a cookery course.”

Grandma’s teeth resurface. “Did you miss that bit, Bridge?”

“In a way,” Dad chips in quickly, “Ilse was on the right side the night the Wall went up. She was at home in the flat she and Beate had lived in since the war.”

“I imagine Ilse sewing a frock that night in August, sitting by the open window,” Mum says. “A brown frock. A brown window frame. Everything is brown in the East. Even the coal is brown. And I wonder if she heard the bricks scraping together at midnight.”

“I think they started off with barbed wire actually, Bridge,” Dad says. “The bricks came later. But the message was the same. No entry. No exit.”

“It reminds me of Victor’s kaleidoscope,” Mum says, sounding timid, as if she expects a rude remark from Grandma. “One turn and the pieces spill into a different shape. I imagine Ilse waking up that Sunday to see the sun lighting up the dreadful barrier, as if some trick of the night had split her city down the middle and cut her apart from her sister.”

“So where was Beate?” I ask.

“She had a kidney complaint and had been admitted to a hospital, but it happened to be in West Berlin.”

“Fate set her free,” Dad says, almost drifting into the left-hand lane.

“You see, immediately after the war,” Mum goes on, “people could cross the border, back and forth, without a problem. East Berliners swarmed to the West for the cinema and concerts, buying tickets with their East German money. They bought a million things missing from the shelves of the shops under Soviet control in the east. The exchange rate in the West was five to one.”

“I bet the East German money’s made of chocolate. Leave it in the sun and it melts,” Grandma says.

“And West Berliners travelled east,” Mum continues, ignoring her, “for the wonderful opera and theatres. They used East German money to eat fine food in the grand restaurants for a fraction of the price it cost in their own sector.”

“What did they leave as a tip, a Smartie?” Grandma asks, causing a silence broken only by striking matches.

“Before the Wall,” Mum says at last, “Beate and Ilse’s home was in the East, but they had jobs and friends in the West. Ilse’s fiancé, a pastry-chef, had a bakery in the West, but she only ever saw him there. Like so many from the East German countryside, he had travelled to East Berlin with his belongings on his back and the visit turned into a subway trip to the West, from which he never returned. Terrified of being detained, he never took the risk of going back to the East, not even for a day. So, after the Wall came, he could never see Ilse again.”

“I bet she missed his plum strudel.”

“The night the Wall went up was the only time Beate and Ilse were in different sectors. Beate feels such terrible guilt. I can understand it. I also feel ashamed that I am free to go anywhere I like.”

“Except down Widgery Lane where that tramp with more beard than face tries to show you his carbuncle.”

“Yes, Nell, that is true, but poor Ilse is completely trapped. The guards watch and listen, waiting for ordinary people like her to dare take one wrong step.”

“So even though Beate feels guilty, isn’t she thanking her lucky kidney that she wasn’t trapped too?” I ask.

“Perhaps, Jacqueline,” Mum says. “But do not forget that overnight the Wall made her homeless and alone, trapped in a different way from Ilse. The hospital let her stay because she had nowhere else to go. She met a man in there, a soldier recovering from yet another operation on his terrible wounds from the war. She married him a month later, and they lived in his flat in Schillerpark. Their son was born after a year.”

“Lawks, she didn’t waste much time,” Grandma points out.

“Well, her husband was weakening and she had waited a long time for marriage and children, you see. Poor Ilse had to peer from the window of a friend’s top-floor flat near the Wall to catch a glimpse of Beate in her wedding dress.”

Even Grandma falls silent and Mum stares out of the window at the city cut in half just as its people were trying to put it back together.

City driving with Dad is hair-raising. Or in his case, hair-flopping. We keep shrieking at him for forgetting to stay on the right side of the road. In the end I rip out a page of the notepad, find my felt-tips and draw a right-pointing arrow on it, thick and bright-red, rather like Dad himself. Mum props it on the dashboard to remind him.

New, shining towers of flats and glassy office-blocks flash by. Mum detaches the tinted clip-on lenses from her glasses and lets Victor hold them over his eyes. He pretends he’s a spy for about five minutes, but apparently it can’t be done without an invisible-ink pen, a fedora and a cheroot.

Mum identifies a few buildings, dark and damaged beside the sharp new skyscrapers. We pass some tall, puffed-up houses from a grander era, like gentlemen fallen on hard times. She thinks she might know them, but I can tell she isn’t sure. Too much has changed.

“These will be torn down for more sky-shakers, I’m sure,” she says, a catch in her voice. “I know this street. My school is nearby, but it is on the other side now.”

“Were you called Eleora at school?” I ask her.

She looks at Dad, biting her lip. She holds out her hand for the clip-on lenses that are now T-K’s laser-beam shield and, all fumbling fingers and thumbs, finally attaches them to her glasses, determined to hide her eyes.

“You don’t have to talk about it, Bridge. Forget it for God’s sake, love,” Dad says.