Tying Down The Lion (21 page)

“The past is like a boil never lanced,” Grandma says, her Shebas stepping between them with surprising elegance. “The Wall is a plaster. A temporary measure. Not up to the job long-term. It’ll sort nothing out.”

At least Mum hasn’t hurled anything. I always worry they might end up separating once the throwing starts. I did see her pick up the tartan bag at one point, but she held back. Just as well. It contains a full thermos, half a fruit-cake and a ceramic flugelhorn.

If Dad didn’t live with us, we’d have even less money. Every Monday at school, the dinner-lady with cauliflower ears and a crew-cut would slap into my hand the special grey dinner-ticket for Pupils Who Can’t Pay, grip my shoulders and steer me to the segregated queue clutching their wretched dockets of poverty, waiting miserably for the scraps at the end of second-sitting. But if Mum left us, I’d have to come home and peel potatoes instead of conjugating Latin verbs or lying across the pouffe watching
Blue Peter
. And whoever went, I would miss them.

Mum is tearful, but mothers are not supposed to cry. I try to glare at Dad for hounding her, but I spot The Girls peering over his shoulder, draping their grubby boas over him and smirking at me. Fishnet stockings full of extra holes from cigarette burns stretch over the lardy great thighs of Loretta, Cherie (the one with the cheroot) and seedy Sumatra. (Geography lessons were getting on top of me when I named her.) I wish Dad had suggested tigers, or even kittens. Anything more glamorous or fluffy than shady ladies. But I guess they’re the proof of how degraded and grotty the moods make him feel.

“If I had my way,” Grandma whispers in my ear, “I’d boot them in the arse, send them flying over Lizzie’s-ruddy-Pillar and headfirst into the River Spree.”

I don’t know if she means the Girls or Mum and Dad, but she adds, “The whole bloody lot of ’em.”

I try to give her a nod of agreement, but she knows I’m close to tears, so she shoves a spearmint-chew in my mouth and it’s a known fact that you can’t cry with your teeth stoppered together.

“Not here of all places, Roy,” Mum is pleading. “This is where you rescued me.”

“Oh Christ.”

“You were leaning against the wreckage of a shop, lighting a cigarette. Remember?”

Terrified of enraging her even more, Dad concentrates on recalling the exact moment. The effort shakes off Loretta and discourages Cherie.

“Of course, Bridge. Your dress was…yellow?”

“Green.”

“Yellowy-green, that’s it! And I watched you walking along by that…”

“No. I came from behind. I saw you before you saw me.”

They both strain at the starting-gates, ready for the off, the odds roughly even.

There is silence.

“She hoped he’d remember. But men don’t,” Grandma whispers. “Sometimes your grandfather couldn’t even recall his door key wasn’t designed to fit the lock of the Slug and Lettuce.”

“Where did you actually get married?” Victor asks them.

This innocent steward’s enquiry halts the race in its tracks. Mum looks at Dad. Dad looks at Mum. Neither of them speak, but they both back out of the starting-gate, take off their blinkers and whinny with laughter. With utter relief, we all join in without knowing why.

“Do you mean you can’t even remember?” I ask them.

They just keep braying, refusing to answer and somehow end up holding hands. Blood and sand, have we stumbled on another secret? How many more do they expect us to take on?

Grandma looks as if she’s swallowed a slice of stale wedding cake, the kind that could, for all the unsuspecting guest knows, consist of dry sand baked with dead flies. For once, she opts for discretion.

“Daft pair,” she says. “Let’s shut up about it and get going.”

The tension of the Row has eased. The Bad-Moon girls have retreated to the wings. The flugelhorn is still intact. We emerge from the trees, find Beate and plunge back into the bright, bustling life of the city until a policeman scolds Dad for trying to hurry us all across a road before the green man flashes.

“Bloody hell, the Nazis never left,” he mumbles, clamping a cigarette between his lips while we turn back and cluster at the kerb to wait for red to turn green. Beate could have warned us, but she is glassy-eyed, whether from thoughts of the past or the miniature bottle labelled
Kirschwasser
clanking about in her bag, I’m not sure.

I sit next to her in the train taking us to the main square, Breitscheidplatz, ready to hear the next part of her story. Sebastian clambers onto my lap, reminding me of Victor at three, when he used to be almost sweet.

***

Contrasts Project

Beate and Ilse, Berlin, 1945, Part Two

Part Five - Resignation

The cellar door shatters. Ilse and Beate try not to breathe. They listen to the crunch of boots in the rubble, the soldier panting close to their hiding-place and the thunderous echo when he clears his throat. Now they can smell him.

The rifle smashes into their pile, again and again, until it finds the soft, trembling centre of Beate’s body. The soldier shouts in triumph.

But Ilse smashes her way out. “Leave her. Whatever you want, I’ll take her place.”

The young soldier’s bewildered eyes are bloodshot and his breath reeks of Schnapps. Ilse keeps talking. She steers him away from Beate, encouraging him into the darkest corner. The talking ends. Beate stays rigid in the rubbish pile, listening to her sister submit to the enemy and praying they will both survive the night.

The next morning, both sisters crave daylight. Beate helps Ilse to crawl outside, covering her with a tattered tablecloth. Other women are rubbing soot on their skin, desperate to look unappealing, but for now, the Soviet soldiers are busy ransacking the shops. Among those standing guard over the spoils littering the road is the young man from last night. Ilse ducks out of sight, shaking.

“I’m all right,” she says to Beate. “I am still alive.”

“Look, food,” Beate says, tugging at what is left of Ilse’s sleeve.

“Not for us,” Ilse whispers, her raw, swollen lips thickening her words. “They’ll shoot.”

“Ilse, what you did for me last night…”

“Stop. We have another day to face. Just don’t cry. We have no strength left for that.”

“Our soldiers will come, Ilse. They won’t let us down.”

The Soviets set up soup kitchens and water hydrants. The survivors watch and wait, weighing up the danger of starvation against the acts of savagery that happen in broad daylight and without warning.

“Keep your head down, Beate,” Ilse whispers, crouching low. “We’ll crawl to the hydrant later. Let’s wait until dark.”

But Beate stands up. “Water,” she says, as if she sees champagne.

Ilse, wincing with pain, struggles to pull her sister down beside her. The water, only fifty yards away, might as well be on another planet.

“Be quiet, Beate,” she hisses, watching the soldiers. “They appear from nowhere, from everywhere. Look how they move, like angry ogres. No grace and no mercy.”

Beate has found a rusty bucket, shot through with holes. The handle creaks in the wind.

“Try to keep that thing quiet,” Ilse whispers. “But thank God we have it.”

“It isn’t ours though, Ilse. Ours was a fine steel. It matched the watering-can I used for watering the vegetable patch.”

“Well there’s a new kind of ownership now, Beate. Take what you can and guard it with your life.”

“Oh God in heaven, look!” Beate says. “Gherkins, Ilse!”

“We aren’t risking any more of my virtue for gherkins, dear.”

“But I can already taste them.”

“Good. Keep it that way. Imaginary pickles are safer. That brute we had the misfortune to encounter last night has opened the jar to tempt us out. But we haven’t stooped that low yet.”

Beate scratches her head, her dishevelled plait so infested with lice, it moves of its own accord. “You know,” she says, “the Hitler Youth would have driven this rabble out. No woman would have been torn to pieces.”

“For God’s sake, don’t forget the horror,” Ilse whispers. “We had to turn Birgit out. She’s probably dead. And what about cowering in the shelter and finding nothing left of our parents, nothing we could recognise? Being alive is a miracle. The Third Reich is over. So, no more talk of the past. Let’s turn our backs on it now.”

“I can’t forget Rainer.”

“I know, but don’t make him some sort of golden symbol rising out of the blood and mess. He was another casualty of a regime that treated none of us like humans.”

“Remember the wonderful cakes I made for him?”

“Oh dear God, I could never forget, dear.”

“I had found the man I loved. And then
she
came.”

“Birgit is yet another victim of the times. We all are. But you and I are lucky. We’re still here to see if the future can improve on the past.”

“I still say the Hitler Youth group was the ideal community, Ilse. Learning to bake, to look after children, swimming in the cold lakes on Saturday mornings. Everything that would equip us for the perfect existence. I had such faith in it.”

Ilse tips back her head and laughs quietly. “You were always stubborn, Beate.”

“But you loved it too.”

“No, I just endured it as I’m enduring this life now.”

Beate shakes her head. “I thought it would go on forever.”

“It was fatally flawed, my dear, being based on exterminating everyone who didn’t fit.”

“The future isn’t worth having now,” Beate says, gazing into the distance as if Rainer will materialise, bearing coffee and strudel.

“We aren’t dead, Beate,” Ilse says, touching her sister’s shoulder. “We just don’t know how to look ahead yet.”

After dark, the sisters are able to smile at the sound of water as they scoop it from the bucket at last. They settle with relief in their new cellar, which is so damp, filthy and infested with vermin that no one else has tried the door yet. Hope returns in the form of these small miracles.

As the long days pass, despite the yells of the cold-hearted Red Army and the tormented screams of women, the faintest wind of peace approaches the city.

The sisters wake in the morning and watch the sun climb up the sky. They huddle on the remains of a bench in an unrecognisable park and later find a mattress in an old air-raid shelter. Wretched though it is, it has to be enough. Ilse talks about old luxuries; soap and milk, cushions and music. “Don’t torture me with your goose-feathers and rose-scented lather,” Beate complains, still trawling her memory for recipes she will make again one day. Ilse tips her head back to laugh quietly about it all, because there can be nothing worse to come.

Small battles over food break out, but the survivors have little appetite for more fighting. Poverty and disease have made neighbours hard to recognise, but they hope to become old friends again.

Everyone takes what they can. A scrap of looted blanket is a blessing. Half a book is bliss. Sometimes the day brings nothing but crouching in a bombed-out doorway, famished and frozen. Sometimes it brings joy.

“Hey, Beate,” Ilse might say. “That Red beast with the breath of Satan, he has not made me pregnant. I must have died and gone to Heaven.”

Ilse tries in vain to keep Beate out of sight of the soldiers. All she can do is warn her that struggling against brute force is pointless.

“If you resist them again, biting and kicking, they will kill you. The only way to survive is to be tolerant.”

Beate learns to be docile.

When you have nothing, the ordinary takes on a new status. A morsel of meat and a cup of water become a bowl of soup.

One day, they cut up a cow. They are drenched in its blood, desperate to bite into the raw flesh. Its stench turns into the sweetest perfume. No one knows where it came from or who killed it. An old lady keeps begging for a piece of its tongue or a slice of its liver. Ilse and Beate become butchers, unaware they possessed such a skill, just as Ilse didn’t know she could pacify a soldier threatening to run her through with a wooden broomstick. They never view themselves as exceptional. Desperation has become resignation, turning ordinary people into unflinching survivors.

Beate treasures her book and Ilse guards her silver pastry-fork. She wipes it every day on the hem of her dress, only taking it out of her pocket after dark.

“The way it feels in my hand, the texture of its engravings, remind me of home,” she tells Beate “No one’s cutlery is the same as your own.”

When other people take their own lives and Beate asks if she and her sister should do the same, Ilse insists they must have no intention of missing the future.

“I once asked Birgit if we would die and the answer was no. Let’s hold her to it.”

The water is still pumping. Food can be found. The Allied forces will soon arrive to reconnect the pieces of the city.

***

In the centre of Breitscheidplatz, the jagged silhouette of the rugged Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church takes pride of place in the middle of the road. Immensely tall and elegant, its dark, distorted steeple was damaged by bombs during the war and looks like a giant’s broken, hollowed-out tooth.

“Almost elegant, the breakage,” Dad says. “Defiant really.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” Mum agrees.

“Gallant and unflinching,” he goes on, looking over Victor’s shoulder at the guide-book.

Grandma pitches in. “Looks like it needs a good patching up to me, son.”

“No, Ma. It’s best to leave well alone.”

“Berliners asked that it should please stay like this,” Beate says. “It has survived in this broken state and we catch our breath every time we see it. I remember when we thought it would fall.”

“A memorial,” Mum says, no doubt remembering its former, intact elegance.

My throat swells a bit when I hear her sigh.

“A hopeful sight, yes?” Beate says, looking at me. “This city is used to hoping, especially since the Wall.”

“It’s always best to turn your back on a bad place and keep it behind you,” Grandma says. “Down Widgery Lane there’s a tramp who might read your palm for a bag of salted peanuts and a squirt of eau de Cologne, but then he…”

I give Grandma a toffee and concentrate on the squat modern chapel and soaring hexagonal tower that have been built beside Kaiser Wilhelm.