Tying Down The Lion (25 page)

Dad is waiting for reassurance I’ll take care of Mum. He wants me to be adult about this. And someone blooming well has to.

“All right,” I tell him. “I’ll watch out for her. But hold the bus a minute, Dad. Isn’t she supposed to look out for me? I’m the minor here. I still get into the Lido half-price.”

He almost smiles. When he speaks, his words are gargled, as if they can’t quite leave his throat. He clutches my arm. “Come back safe, girl.”

When we step inside again, we find Mum talking non-stop, blind to everything but the day ahead, while Beate keeps hacking away at another carcass. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to look so completely defeated with a cleaver in your hand.

“Come on, Jacqueline,” Mum says. “Hurry now. Make yourself recent. There is a grass stain on your skirt. Do make an effort. You are driving me round the corner.”

“It’s
decent
, Mum. And I drive you round the
bend
actually. Anyway, just hold the bus, will you?”

Ignoring her exasperated sigh and trying not to think about the nature of this particular batch of flesh, I walk over to Beate and sink my hands into the meat, lumping it into the basin with the onions she’s been slicing.

“Goulash,” she says, drawing me inside her yeasty alcohol cloud. After the freshness outside, it feels like stepping into a distillery.

“Mm, very nice,” I tell her.

My help might be feeble, but she smiles and strokes my hair. I can’t bear her fingers on it, but I don’t pull away. I plunge my hands back into the meat and carry on helping.

“Mix it with this, please, Jacqueline,” Beate says, handing me a jug of red meat juices.

I don’t know how I’m kneading a dead thing chopped up with a pint of what looks like fresh blood, but I have thrown myself in and am even thinking hard too.

“Dad wants to drive you, Grandma, Sebastian and Victor out somewhere today,” I tell Beate over the squelch of the meat. I had no idea I was going to suggest this. It just emerges, a sort of desperate solution similar to the time Dad and I trowelled the remains of Mum’s Christmas pudding into the dark soil beside the coal bunker. It was exactly the same colour. We pretended to have eaten it. Irresistible, we said it was.

“A drive?” Beate says, round-eyed at the prospect of a change in routine.

I put Victor in charge of Dad’s fag-lighting (dreadful, but seven-year-olds in all the best families have to take their turn) and general humbug-passing. He throws his feathered hat in the air in triumph. I tell Beate to sit in the back with Grandma and to take no notice of the strange noises coming from underneath. It will either be the dodgy floor or Grandma. Turbulence or flatulence.

As I throw Dad his driving-gloves, Sebastian catches the excitement and bounces about. I didn’t know he could move. I thought he was stuffed.

The project is prodding me again. It is still my mission and I don’t want Gillian beating me. I wasn’t planning to carry on, but I woke early this morning and looked at my picture of the felt-shoe factory with gruesome fascination. Yesterday it gave Mum and me a connection that had nothing to do with feeling lost or growing up. It was about something beyond us and something between us.

Our taxi to Wollankstrasse station is rumbling. Time to leave.

Konnie starts preparing for a lie-down after his late shift. This consists of turning his cap sideways, then curling up on top of his bed with the guinea-pigs, a picture of Johannes watching him from the chest of drawers.

He yawns loudly, too tired to speak in English now, but Mum translates his last words as he shuffles off. “Konnie has no time for cars. He says the train lines weave through and below the city, tracking its mood, part of its nervous system, linking people together. Cities are held in one piece, able to survive, only because of their railway.”

Climbing into the taxi feels like stepping into a pit of quicksand. Bugger the central nervous system. My nerves are utterly jangling.

As the taxi glides away, Mum starts to gabble, the maps on her lap twitching away. “The Reichsbahn, the railway is called, Jacqueline. East Germany runs the whole system, you know.”

“What?” I snap. “I’m so confused. I thought I had it worked out. West one side. East the other. So how come Konnie works for the other lot? It’s the same as British Rail suddenly becoming a Chinese company or something, is it?”

“Well no, Jacqueline, East Germany has been in charge of it for a long time. At the end of the war, the Allies kept the railway under one control. The drivers are trained over there and employed under their laws. Part of Konnie’s pay is in their currency and he has to spend it over there because no other country accepts the eastern marks. But it is nice for him. He can buy things over there and bring them back home. We will not be allowed to bring much back with us, but we must still buy some of these eastern marks. It is the law. They need our money.”

“Why?”

“Because their own is not worth much.”

“But they don’t have anything to buy. So how come it’s nice for Konnie?”

The sun blushes like a ripe peach in a blue bowl and the taxi might as well be an oven. I can smell the ginger-coloured bread and the perspiring mottled meat slices Beate insisted we bring with us. Why does food smell so horrible in a car? I try to write some more of my project, but the pen nib splits even further apart and makes irritable-looking ghost-words.

“They have all kinds of food, dear. We must buy Beate some
Knusper Flocken
,” Mum says. “East German chocolates. Konnie says they’re very good.”

“Really? They have chocolates?”

“Of course they do, Jacqueline.”

“Did you know Beate’s finished up our Five-Boys? She doesn’t deserve any
Knocken Fluster
or whatever you call them.”

So far, Beate has acquired Mum’s peppermints, Dad’s lighter and Victor’s multi-colour Biro.

“What sort of chocolates are they?” I ask her, suddenly longing for a Mars Bar to settle my edginess.

“Ah, very different from English. Not much cocoa, I understand.”

“What’s inside them?”

“Flakes of crispbread.”

“What, the slimming stuff Dad says is actually hardboard?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that says it all.”

I slump in the taxi, confused, hungry and scared of the day ahead. It was hard leaving Dad. I gave him a kiss on the cheek before we went, and his stubbled skin smelt like home. I told him we’d just be a stone’s throw away, but it is so much further than that.

“Konnie said a rotisserie chicken restaurant has just opened over there,” Mum says.

“I like Wimpy better than chicken.”

“Well, don’t expect that, Jacqueline.”

“I wasn’t expecting bloody anything.”

“Pardon? Did you just bloody?”

“No.”

Mum rustles the maps, trying to fold them and giving up, crushing them into her bag.

“How long are we staying?”

“We must leave the East before midnight.”

“Will we stay that long?”

“Oh, Jacqueline, I have no bloody idea.”

I just want to meet Ilse and leave. Will we even have a conversation over there without guns jabbing at our backs or black cars pulling up outside to spirit people away before they’ve finished their crispbread?

“So what would happen if Konnie has a grumbling appendix when he’s driving his train on the other side?” I ask, determined to find a question Mum can’t answer, trying to poke holes in this tangled old web of a city. I’d like to take a stick and swipe it out of existence. “How would he get to hospital? Would they just fling him on the next train back to the West?”

“Oh, in an emergency, the railway authority would let him use the hospital over there. It is absolutely free, their healthcare.”

“It’s free everywhere, isn’t it?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Oh.”

After ten minutes we reach the station, a pretty building with a tower and arched windows. Under a tree, a group of young people huddle in their coats despite the heat, their eyes glassy.

“Are they drug addicts?” I whisper.

“Perhaps,” she says.

“Are they homeless, even on this side?”

“People are homeless everywhere, Jacqueline.”

I make her walk in an arc to avoid them, and there it is, the Wall, looming out of nowhere, its greyness at odds with the friendly brick of the station, like a huge uninvited guest, a hulking intruder on the doorstep. It is taller, so much more menacing here than in the city centre.

“
Mein Gott
,” Mum whispers, stepping back. “It follows us.”

I don’t usually touch her, but I have to clutch the sleeve of her cardigan. She doesn’t generally smoke in the streets, but she lights up now.

“That…that thing was just part of the city yesterday. But here it has its own life. It comes towards us,” she says, sucking on the cigarette so hard her cheeks cave in. “Konnie said this station used to be in the East. So we stand on the absolute edge. On the border.”

I see what she means. The Wall has twisted around its east side, leaving the actual station within West Berlin’s railway system. Entrances to the East are closed with bricks. Only people on this side can use it.

Mum turns a bit green and I pass her an Opal Mint. I can’t think of anything else to do. I chew a mint as well and it tastes of my bedroom, the car and somehow the dregs of Grandma’s ash-tray, of everything that isn’t here.

“I want Dad,” I say at last.

“Me too,” she says.

I don’t know if she means her dead father or mine. I don’t mean Dad is dead, although when his days are really dark, I think he might wish it.

“When our train comes in, could our driver be an East German?”

“Yes. A state railway driver. He is one of the few permitted to exit for the purpose of his job. But that is all. He cannot have a life here.”

“If the station we’re going to...”

“Friedrichstrasse.”

“Yes, that one. If it’s inside East Berlin, why don’t they just get on the train there, come over here and get out? Then they’d be free. Mixed up with all the crowds on the platform, people could easily slip on without being noticed. Why doesn’t Ilse do that?”

I have discovered a way, surely? We could just wait for Ilse to bob across. She could live with Beate and rediscover her portly pastry-chef. I’m only guessing he is portly because I can’t imagine a puny pastry-chef.

Mum grinds out her cigarette, shaking her head. “Friedrichstrasse was once the starting point of escape for the millions behind the Iron Curtain. Only West Berlin gave hope of freedom, until the Wall cut all connections. Access to the train service travelling west from Friedrichstrasse was closed to East Berliners.”

Ah. They have everything covered.

“No way through,” she says, in case I did not fully understand.

A guard appears, strolling in the sunshine while he waits for the train to arrive. It takes him a moment to register our hesitation. He walks across and helps us onto the platform, his rapid-fire German rattling over my head. Mum is like a seaside donkey at first, the worn little heels of her sling-backs digging into the sun-softened tarmac.

I glance up as we follow him into the station, my arm linking with Mum’s of its own accord. At the top of the Wall, a thin white butterfly pauses, the sunlight streaming through its white-tissue wings before it flutters across to the other side.

The train is old, jam-packed and stuffy; the ride drab and bleak. Scrubby pine trees and endless grain fields flash through the morning haze. Every so often, the train crawls through a dimly-lit station, and we all stare at our own faces reflected in the windows.

I write down what I see, almost sad for Miss Whipp that there are no gambolling lambs or clucking chickens to mention. I consider adding one or two, but they don’t fit into this bleak landscape. It’s probably the wrong season anyway. I’m not sure because it’s been a few years since I did my pig-and-poultry project.

Villages have been sliced apart like a Battenberg cake, only they look less pretty. Long stretches of barbed wire dissect the farmland. Watch-towers grow out of the soil. Fields that might have grown from the same batch of grass-seed are now divided. An extra couple of paces and a farmer’s boots can walk into no-man’s land. One more step means sudden death. His own land becomes out of bounds, his own feet turn into enemy feet. Every blade of grass is drenched by the same rain and parched by the same sun. But if that farmer takes one step too far, he’s dead. The only harmony is underground, where the roots remain undisturbed by the rift above, free to travel, spread and tangle at will.

“Border villages are being left to crumble,” Mum says as we pass them. “The people who live there are ordered not to repair or rebuild.”

“Why?”

“Because the government here is unhappy about its people living so close to the enemy.”

“What harm would the West do?”

“None at all. But with it so close, there would be too much temptation to escape.”

The border between the two countries consists of a ploughed strip, an anti-tank ditch, miles of fencing and concrete watch-towers, but in front of it there is some neglected land that Konnie told us belongs to the East Germans. Special patrol-guards look out for anyone careless enough to stray into it from the West. They bundle you through hidden gates and no one sees you again.

The Wall escorts us all the way to Friedrichstrasse. I watch Mum biting her nails to shreds, keyed-up about seeing Ilse again, or perhaps contemplating the madness of bringing me, her only daughter, over here.

I think of the desperate people who dig tunnels under the Wall only to be double-crossed by their friends and caught halfway through in the beam of a Stasi torch. Some swim the canal in the dead of night, but drown in barbed-wire traps underwater.

I don’t want to feel scared, because I’ve promised Dad I’ll watch out for Mum. And I’ve promised myself I’ll complete this project. I force my nerves to knit themselves together and take the map that looks like a dog’s dinner off Mum’s lap and fold it along all the right creases into a square, the first of the family to achieve it.