Postcards From Berlin (29 page)

At Hackescher Markt we find the tram stop out of the back of the station. It’s hot, waiting here. The sky is white, hazy,
and it’s hushed for a city, only a handful of other people waiting. The tramlines sing at the approach of the tram.

Our carriage is almost empty. Behind us, a man with a ponytail and guitar, who has guessed or overheard our Englishness, announces,
“Ladies, I play some things for you.” He sings Bob Dylan: “‘Come in,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm.’” His
voice is reedy, mournful, The tram swings round and starts to climb, and he comes down the carriage and asks for money for
the music, though with the air of one who has few expectations. I give him a handful of coins — perhaps because we are strangers,
feeling a need to be generous, to placate.

We chunter up the hill, up Prenzlauer Allee. I’m unsure exactly where the Wall used to be, but it’s easy to tell we are now
in what once was the East. There is an air of neglect, a lot of boarded up buildings. We pass what looks like a public park
with many tall trees and darkness under the trees, where nothing has been tended; the brickwork is crumbling in the perimeter
wall, the intricate iron gates are red with rust. The sense of hopefulness I felt in the plane has all seeped away from me.

When Knackstrasse shows on the indicator at the front of the tram, we get up at once, long before the stop, as you do when
you are traveling to a place you do not know. And we step out, and the tram pulls away up the straight line of the street
into the glimmery white distance. It is completely quiet. Daisy grips my hand.

We cross the road, walk down a side street. The road is cobbled, and the pavements are broken and uneven, and tawny flowers
with a musty smell grow up through the gaps. The blocks of flats here are five stories high. They have metal shutters across
the ground-floor windows, and all have been floridly written over with rainbow graffiti as high as the reach of a hand. You
can tell these buildings were splendid once. Through a briefly opened door, we glimpse a high entrance hall, its elegant proportions
requiring black and white tiles, perhaps, and on the stairs blue velvet carpet held in place with rods of bronze, and perhaps
a chandelier of glittering glass, though there are only tin mailboxes and a heap of bicycles and lots of posters promising
Aktionen that someone has tried to tear down. Some of the facades have been done up with fresh stucco the color of clotted
cream. But there are many buildings where the stucco has peeled off entirely, as though the facade has been flayed. These
buildings have an injured look, the brickwork worn and soot blackened. You cannot believe that people live in such ruins.
Above us, a little girl steps out onto a balcony of one of the ruined blocks. She is wearing a long dress, perhaps a party
dress, shiny like taffeta, sprigged, and she has her hair elaborately piled up. She leans on the railing next to a bleached
wicker birdcage with no bird inside; she is still and serious, looking down into the street. She and Daisy are instantly aware
of each other: They stare with open curiosity. Daisy turns to me, gives me a quick complicit smile. We look up again, and
the little girl has gone, as though we dreamed her.

We pass a patch of waste ground where there are very tall trees, far too tall for the city, as though they’ve been left to
grow wild, like trees in a forest: chestnuts, and planes with blotched bark, and lime trees that litter the streets with the
pale question marks of their seed cases. Small dun-colored birds scatter in front of us, casual, light as leaves, and the
pavement is dappled with sunlight yellow as butter. There are no cars on the road, and hardly any people. A blind girl in
a short gold dress walks past us, her male companion guiding her, his hand on her arm. She has a festive look; they are going,
I think, to some celebration: Her eyes, which are like slits, scarcely opened, are elaborately painted with glossy makeup.
Ahead of us, a young man crosses the street, walking through a slice of yellow light, holding a bunch of gaudy sunflowers
wrapped in green tissue paper.

I’m so convinced she won’t be waiting for us that I’m planning what to do when we ring her bell and there’s no answer — where
we will stay, what we will do, adrift in this strange city.

Daisy is tired now, pulling at me. “Is it much farther, Mum?”

“Not much farther,” I tell her.

She trudges on. She says her feet have blisters.

We come to a square where the ground floors of some of the flats have been turned into cafés and bars. On the corner a sign
says Café Esposito. A young man with silver bracelets is sitting there under the lime trees. As we pass, a woman with a clear
bright fall of blond hair comes up and greets him, and he stands and kisses her, running his hand down her side, resting his
palm on her hip bone: They have the melded gestures of longtime lovers. I want so much to be that woman, so casual, so at
ease. Here in the still, hot afternoon street, nearing my mother’s door, my fear is a taste in my mouth, a chill on my skin.
My steps are slow; our bags are very heavy. Daisy tugs at my arm.

The block where my mother lives looks out on a children’s playground. The door is faded, as though salt winds have blown on
it, and graffitied with many colors. Daisy points to where someone has drawn a smiley sun, its chin resting on top of the
intercom panel.

H
ELLO
?”

“It’s me.”

“Trina, darling. I’m on the fifth floor, Come right up.” Her voice crackles over the intercom. “There’s a light switch, but
it’s on a timer — it won’t last very long.”

I push at the door.

It’s dark in the hall, just a square of sunlight falling through the glass in the door at the back. We glimpse a courtyard,
where there are bicycles and a rusting fire escape and a wall that has that peeled, decrepit look and is covered with plastic
sheeting, and a hydrangea bush with milk white flowers. We find the light switch and start to climb. My body is heavy, as
though my limbs are drenched.

Just as she said, the lights go out before we get there.

“Shit.”

“Don’t worry, Mum,” says Daisy. “You can feel your way in the dark.”

Above us, a door opens and there’s a line of light down the stairs: You have to put your head right back to see up to the
door, I hear her voice.

“Not much farther now.”

Her shadow falls across us as we climb the last few stairs.

“Trina, my darling.”

I try to smile, but my mouth feels stiff and strange.

“So you made it,” she says.

“Yes.” My voice is trembling a little. We don’t know whether to touch each other. The air between us feels shimmery and thin.

“You’re looking well,” she says.

“Thanks, I am, really. And you … Are you OK?”

“Not so bad today, darling. Mustn’t complain.…”

But her appearance shakes me. She’s dressed as she always dressed — capri pants, high-heeled sandals, lots of jewelry — but
her skin is thin and worn, stretched over the bone, and her eyes are circled with shadow. I see how the years have washed
over her and started to wear her away.

“So this must be Daisy,” she says. She bends to her. “Goodness, how pretty you are. Your Mum and Dad are going to have trouble
with you. You’ll only have to flutter your lashes and it’ll be raining men.… And look at this hair.” She reaches out and takes
a strand of Daisy’s yellow hair between her finger and thumb, lifts it and lets it fall so it catches the light. Her hand
with its many glistening rings is trembling. “She’s got your hair, Trina.”

“Yes.”

“Well, why are we standing here?” she says. “Come on in.”

There’s an entrance lobby, then a sitting room with windows looking down into the street. The room is cluttered, full of heavy
old furniture — a dark varnished dresser with painted flowers, a sofa with red velour cushions, a lamp with a beaded shade.
Daisy walks round the room, touching the lamp, the cushions, with the tips of her fingers, as though these things are hers.

In the window there’s a table with carved clawed feet and upright chairs. I sit with my mother at the table, breathe in her
smell of nicotine and lily of the valley. I realize I’d had some shiny, tentative hope that things would be different between
us, that everything would be changed or reconciled. And now I’m finally here with her, and we’re being so careful and polite
with each other, yet I feel the insect-crawl of all the old resentments across my skin.

She pulls a carrier bag toward her.

“Look, I got you something, darling,” she says to Daisy. “just a little present. I was going to wrap it, but I didn’t have
any paper.…”

It’s a jointed bear with denim paws and a solemn face and a gauzy blue green bow. I think of the presents my mother brought
me at The Poplars, the rabbits with stitched-on satin hearts that she always intended to wrap. I feel a brief, cold repulsion.
But Daisy knows nothing of this. She smiles and hugs the bear.

“He’s dead cute,” she says. “Thank you.”

She has an easy confidence here: She knows how to behave.

I start to say, “Really, you shouldn’t…”

But my mother misunderstands. “There, your mum’s feeling all left out now,” she says to Daisy. “We don’t want your mum to
feel left out, do we? I ought to give your mum something, shouldn’t I? So, Trina, what would you like? Would you like some
money? I’d love to give you money.”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“I’d love to, really, darling,” she says. “I’m not so badly off now, you know. Things have changed; things have turned around.…”

It’s like she refuses to hear me.

“I could write you a check,” she says. “Everyone needs money. Some money of your own.”

“No, really…”

She lights a cigarette. Her hand is shaking a little, and the flame trembles. She takes a deep in-breath; smoke catches at
her throat. She starts to cough, a gasping, choking cough that’s like a violent struggle, that threatens to overwhelm her.
Daisy edges away, alarmed. I sit beside my mother, not knowing how to help her.

At last the cough subsides. She wipes her face with a tissue.

“So was it a good journey?” she asks then, as though the cough never happened.

“Yes.”

“You flew into Tegel?”

“Yes.”

I’m very aware of her deliberate, thought-out politeness, which is so like my own. There are certain questions that always
have to be asked.

“Now, really, I’m forgetting,” she says. “You must be ever so hungry. After your journey.”

She has food for us, sausage and bread and sauerkraut. There is flowered crockery in the china cabinet. She lays the table
fastidiously, just as she always did — back in the days when we still managed some kind of life together. I eat greedily;
I realize I am famished. Daisy has some bread.

“Eat up, my darling,” says my mother to Daisy, tipping a piece of sausage onto her plate. “You need your food, a growing girl
like you.…”

She’s too insistent. Daisy turns to me.

“Daisy’s been ill,” I tell my mother. “That’s why she can’t eat more.”

“Oh, dear,” says my mother. There are mannerisms I’ve forgotten, like the way she frowns when everything seems too much for
her, the sharp little vertical lines that are etched between her eyes. “What seems to be the matter?”

“No one can give us an answer.”

“Poor Daisy,” she says. “A pretty thing like you shouldn’t ever be ill.”

For dessert she brings in a cake in a box of expensive white card.

“Now look at this, Daisy. Sacher torte. You’ll love it.”

She unfolds the box around the cake. It’s magnificent: It has glossy chocolate icing and marzipan flowers.

“There,” she says. There’s an air of triumph about her: This is a moment she has waited for. Her eyes have a febrile brightness.
She cuts into the cake, her many bracelets rattling on her wrist.

A shadow seems to pass over her.

“Oh, dear,” she says. “It’s still a tiny bit frozen in the middle.”

She stands there with the cake knife in her hand. Her face has collapsed; her eyes are full of tears. I see that this Sacher
torte has some profound significance, as though she’d intended that it should be the answer, the reparation — that it could
heal everything. A brief rage seizes me — that she abandons me for years, then seeks to be loved and forgiven because of some
trivial gesture, some cake she’s bought.

“Never mind,” I tell her, the way you might speak to a child. “We’ll eat the outside now and we’ll have the middle tomorrow.
I’ll cut it if you like.” I take the knife from her.

Even the outside of the cake is brittle and cold, its sweetness muted.

There are smudges under Daisy’s eyes, her head is heavy, she’s almost asleep at the table. I tell her it’s bedtime.

My mother looks across at her, the lines in her forehead deepening, as though it’s ail a mystery. And I realize then that
she can’t see Daisy’s exhaustion, can’t see the most obvious signals. That she looks at people and somehow cannot read them,
can’t see the things that the rest of us so effortlessly interpret — the arched brow of contempt, the smile that doesn’t reach
the eyes — can’t even read the tiredness in a child.

“She could sleep on the sofa, you thought?”

My mother gets a duvet.

I unpack Daisy’s pajamas and she changes in my mother’s bedroom, where there are chairs heaped up with velvet scarves and
filmy, complicated blouses, and, on the dressing table, gloves in silk or cotton, pale apricot and lavender, with ruched wrists.
I remember how she always wore them because she hated her hands. I tell Daisy not to clean her teeth, in the hope that she
won’t start retching, and she curls up on the sofa under the quilt, with the bear and Hannibal precisely placed beside her,
and to my relief is instantly asleep. My mother turns off the overhead tight. The lamp with its shade of beads casts broken,
fantastic shadows. We take the plates to the kitchen.

“Now, Trina, what do you say to a little drink?” my mother asks. There’s a gleam in her dull eyes: a schoolgirl look, unnerving
on her worn face.