Tying Down The Lion (14 page)

“Talk about what, Mum?”

I wait for her to speak while we drive into Wedding. Nothing to with brides and confetti. This is an area stacked with monumental houses and factories. An old brick pumping-station with a long chimney is crumbling behind a mass of overgrown trees. The remaining walls are a pale rose colour and the damaged brick is shot through with monstrous weeds. Children are playing King of the Castle on the rubble.

“West Berlin is holding on then, Bridge,” Dad says, finally mastering the art of lighting his cigarette without taking his hands off the wheel. “Tons of new buildings springing up all over the shop. Look at all these neon lights and tower blocks. And the old places are being cheered up with these painted mural things. Not easily shaken this place.”

Mum looks doubtful.

In the hippy, Turkish area of Kreuzberg, yet another division in a city already divided, we trundle through side-streets dotted with tiny artists’ galleries, their windows glassless. The sun slides old rain off the bright awnings. A thin black dog flops beside a tin bowl of rainwater. Children stare at our car, half-amused and half-afraid, tearing at little black loaves of bread. A tiny old woman, her face like a wasp-attacked apple, sweeps the gutter in the shadow of the Alhambra, an enormous cinema that looks as if it should be grand inside with a deep orchestra pit and golden candelabra, but is probably gutted, damp and harbouring spiders. Maybe this new community can make it beautiful again.

“All refugees here,” Dad says. “Their roots torn up by war and scattered every which way. Blown here on the wind to start afresh in this fantastic city.”

He glances at Mum, but she has nothing to say.

I think of the felt-shoe factory owner being forced out of his back door, leaving his things behind: workbench, tools and materials, a photograph on a mantelpiece, a set of dentures soaking in a mug, perhaps a morning cup of tea with the imprint of lips on the rim.

We see the rebuilt hospital in Augustenburger Square where, six years ago, Beate fell asleep, knowing her kidneys were recovering, but not realising her heart would be taken out.

“It was once beautiful enough to take your breath away,” Mum says, looking at the new building. “Like a small palace. Ah, the chestnut trees are still here, all around the square. Thankfully not even war has disturbed them.”

We pull over because the back door is swinging open and other cars are hooting. Dad tells us to climb out and stretch our legs while he and Victor fix it.

“I’ll stay put,” Grandma says. “I don’t need stretching.”

“What were you going to tell me?” I ask Mum.

“Don’t, Bridge,” Dad says.

“Roy, it’s time. She will understand. She is making a project about my city. And this is about me.”

We sit on a bench a few yards from the car, where, in this city of ruins from the past and new monuments from the future, inside the history of the Weimar Republic and the legacy of the Third Reich, I learn I have a different story, a new one that eclipses the old.

“Just listen and I will explain,” she says, looking at the defiant and altered face of Berlin while I watch hers and wait. She takes a gasp from her cigarette before she speaks.

“Eleora is a Hebrew name. I am Jewish.”

My first thought is Lynette Margolis sitting out school assembly and lighting her Saturday candles. My second is that for fourteen years my mother has hidden this enormous secret like a caged bear in a locked room.

“I had a happy family,” she goes on. “Our home was a grand house in a square with so many steps leading up to the front doors. When I was a child I learnt my numbers from climbing those steps, losing count and running down to start again. You know how people say the sun was always shining in their childhood. Mine was so.”

Mine was so. Such a German type of expression. Mine was so. So, she is Jewish. And that means so am I. Half-German. Half-English. And half-Jewish. Maths is not my strong point.

***

Contrasts Project

Eleora or Birgit, or whatever her name is, Berlin, 1938

Part Two - Provocation

During my final year of school, all of us Jewish children were made to stand up in biology class. The teacher chalked Jewish heads on the blackboard, insisting they had a different shape.

“Nature has made you second-class people,” he said.

I nodded when he glared at me for some sign of agreement, but said nothing at home because my parents were already frightened. I cried alone in my room.

No one would mark my work and I was banned from lessons on German history. My teacher, now wearing the Nazi brown shirt, moved me to the back of the classroom. When he refused to acknowledge I was there at all, I felt a lid closing.

I turned eighteen, too old to be included in the trains transporting Jewish children to Britain. Time had almost run out. Our world was being reduced to nothing. It was in a desperate attempt to keep me alive that my parents sent me to my aunt and uncle just before the vicious hours of madness erupted on the Night of Broken Glass.

“The country’s boiling over,” my aunt said as soon as I arrived with my uncle, meeting us at the enormous front-door with its stone lion guard.

“Mother, be calm,” Beate said. “We have nothing to fear. At least, we didn’t until she arrived.”

Her eyes narrowing, she stared at me. She was straight from the pages of a Nazi catalogue. Broad-shouldered and buxom, with long fair hair plaited around her head, she wore flat, functional shoes and a printed frock that matched her mother’s. Both fitted the template for the Hitler-approved, non-smoking, un-permed, non-trouser-wearing, beefy German housewife captured in the familiar rhyme:

Take hold of the frying pan, dustpan and broom

And you shall marry a German man.

Shop and office leave alone.

Your true life’s work, it lies at home.

No lipstick. No preening. No thoughts of going out to work. Before she turned twenty, Beate planned to marry a thoroughly blonde man and bear dozens of babies, Several would play at her feet while another fed at her breast, the next already growing inside her. The Nazi party arranged a generous loan for young couples. Once they had produced four children, the money need never be repaid. Upon production of her eighth baby, Beate would receive a medal. At eighteen, she was already excited about it.

The inferno lit the dismal drawing-room where we all waited for that night to end. I could smell beeswax and boiled potatoes. My stomach growled with hunger, but dinner was already over.

Beate hurled old curtains across the huge bookcases and covered the glass-fronted cabinets and grand piano with sheets, a pitiful attempt to protect their treasured possessions should the rioters reach us. She glared in my direction, letting me know none of this would be necessary if I had not intruded.

I asked to look out of the window, but was told to sit still. Ilse, a slender, gentler version of her sister, gave me a kind, fleeting smile. They had dressed her in the same stiff frock and wound her braids around her head, but she loosened her white collar and pulled out her hair-pins, letting her long coppery hair trail free.

Beate poured coffee and sliced a tough-looking strudel that only she and her mother ate. I listened to them chewing in the silent room while Jewish homes and shops shattered and burned through the night.

At dawn, the sky was streaked with a strange tawny light charred with black and the air smelt scorched, but the neighbourhood, a fair distance from synagogues or Jewish shops, was almost untouched.

“Which direction is home?” I asked, hobbling to the window, my legs stiff and aching from the long night in the chair.

“This is your home now,” my uncle said.

“But are Mother and Father safe?”

“Let us hope,” my uncle said.

But I already knew he had none left.

I banged on the glass, hammering with my fists and screaming, “Take me home, Mother. I hate you.”

I wish I could forget saying that.

“Be quiet,” Beate shouted in my ear. “Would you rather burn?”

“Stop it, please,” Ilse said. She was hunched on the floor, her thin arms wrapped around her knees. I saw their childish scabs, but in her face I saw adult fear. She knew the world would soon be on fire.

Although a young adult, I had always been pampered and I missed it. I needed Beate and her mother’s maternal bossiness, the rustle of their identical starched dresses and the clumping of their stout shoes. I had grown out of warm milk, but I accepted some, sipping it with my hands wrapped around the steaming beaker, while our leaders cleansed the country.

Beate took me to a pretty bedroom with a pink satin quilt that felt cool and soft, inviting me to close my eyes to the long terrible night.

“You should thank your parents,” she said, throwing the covers over me. “Our home is a safe place. You must respect it.”

She closed the door and I fell asleep to the distant sound of her humming as she took down the blankets she had pinned to the windows. In a terrible nightmare, I wound my hair around my head over and over again, until it snapped off. I held onto it, this black rope, until a Nazi snatched it from my hands and began tying it into a noose. I woke in a panic and almost fell down the elaborate, curving staircase in my rush to find my new family.

My uncle was also a gifted composer, but unlike my father, he was not Jewish. They had met during easier times, before the Nazis erased the line between music and politics, and had even been working on a sonata together until all Jewish musicians were forced to withdraw from public view. By then, my uncle had fallen in love with my aunt, Father’s half-sister. She was a crossbreed, or
Mischling
, as the Nazis termed it. She, Beate and Ilse were fortunate that the Nazis favoured my uncle’s work and presented his family with a German Blood Certificate proclaiming them honorary Aryans. After that, Beate and Ilse knew better than to mention the trace of rogue blood in their veins.

“Time to dye,” Beate said when she saw me in the kitchen doorway. She held up a bottle of bleach, a grin displaying her uneven teeth. I hoped the grin was friendly, but it was hard to tell with her.

We all crowded round the sink. While Beate uncorked the bottle, Ilse gave me a hug to pretend this was nothing to do with living in danger. Beate peroxided my hair the way people rubbed vinegar into putrid meat to disguise the rot. Her father checked through my roots for remnants of black, his musician’s hands careful and precise, as if plucking the strings of a harp.

“You know, monkeys do this. They pick at their babies’ fur to find fleas and such horrors,” Beate said. I could not see her face because my head was in the basin, but I heard her mocking tone.

“By the way,” she said, “we’re telling the neighbours your parents have died in an accident. And we, for our sins, are your distant relatives.”

“No,” I said, my voice booming from the depths of the sink.

“Beate means you are a part of our family now,” Ilse added.

“No, I don’t,” Beate said. “And you have to change your name as well. Your real one marks you out.”

“Eleora means ‘God is my light’,” I said.

“Well it means it in Hebrew, so forget it.”

I tried to nod under the weight of the towel she was wrapping around my head. Only I would remember who I was. That would have to be enough.

We sat at the table with Beate’s seed-cake to honour my birthday. My head stung from the bleach. Orange-yellow wisps of hair poked out beneath the towel. When I didn’t respond to my new name of Birgit, Beate’s eyes turned to flint. Every part of her was slow-moving, apart from those hard, glinting eyes. They never stopped watching, disapproving, judging.

“Give me time,” I said. “I’m not used to being someone else.”

“Better get used to it fast.”

“I’d rather just disappear. Why don’t you turn me out onto the streets?”

“You would survive for less than one day,” she said, stuffing in a mouthful of dense cake and spitting the caraway seeds into the empty grate.

Harsh words, but their tone a touch softer.

“You are one of the lucky ones, Birgit,” my aunt said.

“We’re taking risks for you,” Beate added. “Without us, you could be rounded up and herded somewhere God-forsaken.”

“Beate, you promised to be nice,” Ilse whispered, her eyes enormous. “You are very safe here,” she said, turning to me and ladling whipped cream onto my cake.

I felt far from safe. One wrong move and Beate might relish turning me over to the enemy.

“Will you miss your synagogue?” she asked.

“We hardly ever went there anymore.”

“God is always with you, dear girl,” my uncle said in his soft, insistent voice. “He is in our hearts no matter what else is lost. He still guides us all. Look for His light in honour of your old name.”

I nodded, pushing the cake and cream into my mouth, trying to believe him. I knew he expected obedience. At the dinner-table, I mouthed the words of their unfamiliar evening Grace until the day my uncle told me to recite it alone. When I had done so, he asked me to repeat it again and again until my voice was croaking and Beate’s diabolical dumplings had congealed in their gravy.

“We mean well, Birgit. If you do not comply, it will single you out. The woman next door is almost certainly anti-Jewish,” my aunt said.

“Are you asking me to throw my identity away?” I shouted, so homesick I no longer cared how ungrateful I sounded.

“Yes,” she said, as if it meant nothing. “Don’t you want to live?”

I looked away, not answering.

“Then you have no future,” Beate chimed in as always. “You will never marry or bear a child. You will be taken away to die.”

Ilse was looking at me, willing me to obey. Without her, I might have walked out of that forbidding front-door, crashed it shut behind me and run home through the shattered city. I had no idea that, hours after I was driven away on the Night of the Broken Glass, my home, among thousands of others, had been ransacked and burnt to ashes. It was already too late to forgive my parents. I would have found nothing, and no one, at home.

5.
Expectation

“I can’t take this in,” I tell Mum, although now I know who provided the role-model for my Hitler Youth-inspired shoes.

Dad is hitting the car-door with a hammer, Victor is burping the alphabet beside him and, even though the metal bench is hotter than Mars, I feel as if Mum has pegged my insides out on the line in a howling gale.

This explains the matzos at Easter. I thought they were just a German thing, but maybe I’ve been innocently celebrating Passover. Grandma always gives hers to Deborah, whispering, “Here’s your burnt wafers, duck, with extra water to wash them down.”

I know very little about being Jewish, except odd things Lynette Margolis says about fish and bread and candles. I suppose if I don’t tell anyone, I won’t have to sit out assembly, although it might be handy to skip the embarrassment of Harvest Festival with all those garden-reared marrows and home-made jams beside my small tin of marrowfat peas and an elderly onion.

I am not unwilling to face the unexpected and can cope with the day, or night, or even an entire holiday, being turned upside down by matters beyond my control, but I do have something against my mother lying to me.

In biology, Miss Lobb talked to us about becoming adolescent and how new ‘personal discoveries’ might seem peculiar, but are actually normal and happy. None of the girls felt happy or normal. We all blushed beetroot and stared at our shoes while the boys sniggered. But the lesson really centred on The Identity Crisis, and how we might all be in the middle of one. It sounded like an epidemic or a horrific crime: The Great Identity Crisis.

Although she curled her lip with distaste because this was not a lesson on osmosis or alimentary canals, Miss Lobb explained that we might have begun to question who we were. If so, adolescence had begun. Reading tonelessly from a textbook while she speared her plastic pancreas on its spike, she said we were at the start of a quest to find our true self.

Most of the boys thought they were Bobby Moore.

“Perhaps I’m really a Pekinese dog,” Gaye Kennedy whispered. “I must try to find myself. Let me know if you find me first.”

And slower-witted Gillian said, “Perhaps I’m from Sheffield.”

Asking about new things and understanding simple explanations is the way of a child. Being older means that not only is the way ahead awkwardly hard to fathom and you feel too embarrassed to ask for directions, but every sign pointing towards a recognisable place has somehow warped. Growing up is like studying an old map that has been folded so many hundreds of times the markings and symbols along the fragile fold-lines have disappeared. But the road you need to find on that double-bed-sheet-sized piece of useless, bendy, crackling paper is always on a crease.

The felt-shoe factory made me want to find the mum I used to have before she decided I shouldn’t grow up, and I wanted to stop her mind wandering back home to Berlin. I thought I could bring back how it was—holding her hand when we had to run to the greengrocer’s before it closed and suffering a stitch from laughing so much, cracking monkey-nuts and playing rummy after Victor went to bed, explaining the plot of
Peyton Place
to her while she pretended to understand.

I thought my project would answer some questions, but now I don’t know what the questions are. I just know she has told me a lie and I cannot forgive it.

“If there’s something about you that makes me who I am, then I should have grown up with it,” I tell her, watching her bite her lip. “It’s a gigantic part of Lynette’s life. She’s known all about it since she was born.”

Lynette’s special lamp for Sabbath has movable parts that block or expose the light, so she can’t break their Saturday law that says they mustn’t operate switches. It’s nothing like Grandma’s standard lamp with the long dusty tassels Victor wipes his nose on.

I envy the Margolis family’s calm rituals that gather them all together. Lynette understands her roots and how she fits in. I would have liked the same chance, but here I am, not knowing if I’ll be singing “We Plough the Fields and Scatter” this autumn.

Does Grandma know? No, she can’t possibly. She’d bring it up every two minutes. She was upset about Stan’s Jewish orphans because she loves all children, however foreign they are. She says a toothless new-born talks more sense than her toothless husband ever did, even when he did remember to stick his dentures in his cakehole.

Despite Miss Whipp being terribly nervous about the subject-matter, Lynette’s project is about a gruesome German picture-book from the nineteen-thirties. The book is called
The Poisonous Mushroom
and it warns children to beware of Jews. At first, Miss Whipp thought Lynette was studying
The Observer’s Book of Common Fungi
, but when she discovered the real spore producing the mushroom project, she tried to make Lynette adapt it. Death-cap, pig’s ear, green-spored chanterelle, any common-or-garden mushroom would do, she said. But Lynette stood firm.

The Poisonous Mushroom
shows a mother and son in the forest. The mother explains about gathering good mushrooms and avoiding dangerous ones as a way of advising her child to be on his guard against poisonous, or evil, people. She asks if little Franz knows who the bad people are, and he proudly tells her they are the Jews.

The mother praises him and then describes the different kinds: the Jewish trader, cattle-dealer, butcher and doctor, reminding him that all these different types, like the poisonous mushrooms, are capable of misery and killing. All German children must learn to recognise the many guises a Jew might take on to hide the fact he is the Devil, and they must alert others too.

This book was warning people about Mum. And about me. I feel sicker than if I’ve eaten a bagful of toadstools. Not because of being Jewish, but because of the sudden weight of history I have gained.

“How could you do that?” I spit out the resentful words, tasting my own sour breath. “How could you keep that to yourself?”

Dad comes across to the bench and holds Mum’s hand. She grips onto it. Her face is white, her voice low. “Jacqueline, I lived in Berlin when Nazis and informers patrolled the streets. Being Jewish became my secret. When I came to England, I kept it that way. It seemed safer, although I hope it will never matter again.”

“Not matter? Maybe not to you. But it matters to me. It changes who I am, doesn’t it?”

“Of course it doesn’t, Jacqueline,” Dad says. “Nothing’s changed, has it?”

“Of course it bloody has.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, you’ll never understand. It hasn’t happened to you, has it?”

“Did you just bloody, young lady?”

“No.”

“Well, back in the car, Miss, before the bloody door falls off again.”

Misery reigns in the car. Mum is dissolving. Dad slaps wildly at the centre console, hoping for a direct hit, and catches Victor’s ankle. All hell breaks loose. Victor howls in outrage and confusion. Grandma knits at a furious pace, maybe hoping to stitch us all back together.

“Jacqueline, please understand,” Mum says, sounding desperate.

“How can I?”

“Can I help?” Grandma asks.

“No, you can’t,” I snarl, immediately regretting it because she was actually being inoffensive for once.

Dad stops the car and tells me to get out. “Go on. If you can’t be civil, you can bloody well walk.”

“Oh Roy,” Mum pleads, “how can she? Please let’s zimmer down.”

“It’s simmer,” I say in a pathetic gulping way.

“Oh Christ, now I’ve gone and dropped a stitch,” Grandma says, her wool unravelling all over the car.

We all sit there, not knowing how to behave with each other. Mum seems horribly strange and foreign, not because of what she has told me, but because she looks so utterly defeated.

“You’re as bad as the bloody Nazis,” Dad growls at me, getting out of the car. “I’m going for a wee.”

I boil with the injustice. How did they expect me to behave? ‘Oh, smooth, Mum. Great. I dig suddenly being someone else. Far-out, man.’ I’m not actually a hippy, but I might as well become one of those as well.

Dad is standing in a mist of wee-steam in front of some stupid German tree and I wind down the window and shout, “I’m not the Nazi round here. I distinctly saw you goose-stepping across that grass.”

He can do nothing from over there, right in the middle of it. He can’t even turn round. But Mum gives me a look of absolute disappointment that matches the one I give her back.

“What’s wrong, Jacqueline?” Victor gasps, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. You may as well ask T-K, because no one’s thought of explaining it to me,” I tell him, practically savouring my own bitterness and pretending not to notice Mum whipping round in her seat again as if I’m firing poisoned arrows into her head.

While Victor interrogates T-K Gestapo-style, Dad climbs back in to carry on with the trip that’s pretending to be a holiday. Mum has to advise him that Victor saying, “Vee haff vays of making you tock,” is not intended to add fuel to the fire.

Dad freezes me out of every conversation and gives Victor the last three Everton mints from the glove-box. I feel more like a stranger with every mile.

“I must shove my bottom in properly before meeting Beattie,” Grandma says.

So we make a corset-adjustment stop, which prompts me to leave the car and follow Dad while he stretches his legs and studies the map Mum is in no fit state to read. I touch his sleeve and give him a quick sorry hug that he says I should be giving to Mum.

“It’s these halves. They’re getting in the way, Dad. I don’t want labels that say I’m half-German or half-Jewish.”

“More like half-bloody-witted if you ask me.”

I ignore that. “Didn’t pigeonholing people start the war in the first place?”

“But that’s what people do, Jacqueline.” Dad attempts to fold the map, his eyes unbearably sad. “It’s human nature. Not what Hitler did, I don’t mean. More like inhuman nature, that was. But people want to cram everyone who’s different into a box and when it gets out of hand, they want to shut the lid. It’s because of fear.”

I think about the Great Identity Crisis. No wonder people suffer from it. It doesn’t come from inside. It’s an infection of fear that spreads from people who cure themselves by passing it on, making you feel lost inside your own skin.

“Dad, does Grandma know Mum’s Jewish?”

“God, no. Mind you, it’s war that scares her most, and foreigners mean war to her. It’s understandable. My bit of trouble at night and my Girls, all that comes from the war. And Mum came from the country that turned me into this raving loony.”

“But Dad, you aren’t afraid of Mum, even though you fought a war with Germany, and you aren’t afraid of me either.”

“Want a bloody bet?”

“But you aren’t, are you?”

He lights a cigarette. As he blows out the smoke, he says, “Well that all boils down to love, doesn’t it?”

Back in the car with Mum still tearful, Dad’s gloves lying slack on top of the steering-wheel and Grandma wheezing from her tight stays, I struggle with the facts. The gap between Mum and me has opened out like one of Stan’s spatchcocked chickens. The project was meant to unfold her story and break down a barrier, but she has built yet another one. Mothers are not supposed to build walls that daughters can’t take apart.

She is someone else. I am someone else, someone who has caught The Great Plague of Identity Crisis and its worst symptom is feeling alone, without warning.

I flick through the pages of my notepad and draw spiders in the margin, using the pre-punched holes as the bodies, fanning out whiskery legs around them. Although there are so many different kinds, their story is always the same; they send out a dragline of silk, spin and wait. When the web is blown away, beaten down or trodden underfoot, they begin again. And again. Always the same.

I turn to the wrinkled page where, clumsy with the Gloy, I pasted in the felt-shoe factory. The building looks ready to crumble away, but its sign is intact, hoping for history to swerve off-course again and bring everyone back to their street.

Dad glances at a police-car driving past. It slows down and the policeman looks hard at us, but he doesn’t stop. Dad lets out an enormous sigh and switches on the engine at last.

Back on the road, Grandma teaches Victor cat’s-cradle with a loop of her wool, but they both fall asleep, their fingers tangled together.

Mum turns to me, her eyes dark and watery, and does what all mothers do when it might be better to keep quiet and let things stew. She starts talking.

***

Contrasts Project

Birgit, 1943

Part Three - Exclusion

Ilse became my one bright spot in those wretched years. She used to take my hand and make me fly through the garden with her. My feet barely touched the paths that zig-zagged the vegetable beds and wound past ancient trees. Their leaves sounded like tambourines in the wind. When we reached the pond, alive with trout, we threw in bread saved from breakfast and watched the water simmer as the fish gathered and rose. While they gulped the food, the entire pond seemed to boil.

Ilse talked to me about music and asked about my father’s compositions, creating a link to my past. The future could never happen while we lay on the grass, listening to the water. A row of chestnut trees screened us from the house, concealing us from Beate and her endless cookery lessons. We never did learn how to keep air in a cake or make meat fall from the bone.

Ilse once asked, “Are we all going to die, Birgit?”

“Of course not,” I said.

She smiled, unwound her plaits and jumped into the water fully clothed. She shook her long mermaid’s hair out of her eyes and beckoned me in.

“If you mean that, you’ll jump,” she shouted.

I was lying, but I pulled off my shoes.

“Thank you,” she said while I gasped and floundered beside her.

With her trust invested in me, I had to conform. I prayed to God for her sake. I went to the youth meetings. Even now, when I make the beds, I imagine Hitler inspecting my hospital corners.