Tying Down The Lion (16 page)

“Just big enough for you, Birgit. It’s a good thing you’re not built like…well, it’s good that you are so slim.”

Rainer and my uncle set to work. They carried the sofa and armchairs from the drawing-room outside to a van Rainer had borrowed. ‘Upholsterer’, stated the freshly painted lettering. On one of the trips to the van they struggled with a particularly heavy armchair. Inside it, deep within the hollowed and hastily re-stitched seat, I lay curled into a tight ball.

Just before I was hidden, I thanked my uncle for allowing me hope, and he whispered, “Remember, Eleora, God is your light.”

“
Auf Wiedersehen
,” Rainer called to my family as he started the engine. And I knew he was saying goodbye for me.

Once again I was taken away, this time wedged in too tightly to tremble, but as the van clattered through the early morning streets, my heart rattled along with it all the way to the back entrance of the factory.

“There’s someone following us,” Rainer said, as I unfolded myself. “I have lost him for now, but we must hurry inside.”

A long time later, I learned my thwarted pursuer was the gravel-voiced driver who had brought me to my aunt and uncle’s house, the driver who had told me all this was for my own good.

Before I grasped Rainer’s hand and hurried through the narrow tin door, I took my last breath of fresh air for a long time. It tasted sweet and damp, the flavour of childhood, of old freedom. I licked a drop of rain from the metal door before I disappeared inside.

In the gap behind the cupboard I listened to machinery rumbling all day. The factory boss hauled me out after the workers had left in the evening to use the toilet. He gave me bread, which I ate standing in the storeroom before he pushed me back into black silence at night.

“God is my light,” I murmured for hours. “God is my light.”

But I saw nothing ahead, only more darkness. The urge to scream was almost overpowering. My legs ached as if the bones were being crushed through a mangle, although sometimes I felt detached and weightless, my mind drifting back to a time unknown, to the peace, perhaps, of my mother’s womb.

Eventually, the Allied bombs threatened us all, both the shameless and degraded alike, but I could never risk being seen in an air-raid shelter. I stayed coiled in my space, half-demented with loneliness and pain, but no longer afraid. I began praying the fighter planes would destroy the city that had forced me into hiding. If the bombs succeeded in crushing Berlin and ending the war, I might be safe at last.

***

I have no idea how it feels to find out your parents have been spirited away to a death camp. I can’t imagine being hidden in a hole after growing up like a little princess, your chandeliers, your doll with glass eyes and the grand piano all smashed to smithereens, and to end up queuing at Stan’s for liver and trundling the sweeper over Grandma’s carpets. I have no idea how I’d cope if I was sent away to a hostile place, even if a chauffeur drove me there with a beribboned sausage-dog on my lap.

This stranger’s nightmare is my nightmare too. Without this Rainer, I would never have existed. I’m hardly here. I was never supposed to have happened. Berlin was being cleansed of crossbreeds like me.

If ordinary people can swallow stories about poisonous mushrooms, another war could happen at any time, and that means more questions without answers. Would I be stuffed into a gap behind a wall? Would Mum escape again, and would she take me and Victor with her? I’m not going to be stuck in a hole with him. And since I don’t believe God is my light, I wouldn’t keep clinging to hope, nervously plaiting my rosary-beads or whatever saintly prisoners do in films.

I try to write, but I’m too confused, so I draw an obese sausage-dog with a huge spider’s swastika-shaped legs hanging over it.

This project seems impossible now. Mum has given me yet another picture of herself along with the wife who bickers with her husband, the daughter-in-law whose clawed fingers hover at the back of Grandma’s neck and the middle-aged woman who slinks into her past the way other mothers creep up to the spare room to polish off the Jaffa Cakes. Now I see she is a liar. Even if I stack all these different transparencies over each other, I still can’t find my mum.

Who is she? Quite pretty, for a mother. Awful cook. Fast walker. Can cut out felt shapes even with blunt scissors. She copes with Dad’s dark side, although she did try leaving him once. Ever practical, she cut herself a sandwich first and was still slicing her cucumber when Grandma locked the doors and hid the keys under Deborah’s millet. Mum tried to storm off, but when she saw Grandma watching her like a warder with her arms folded, she burst out laughing and crying at the same time.

But now she is as difficult to fathom as Bwa-Bwa. She’s a stranger, cast out from two families, her identity changed twice. German by birth, English by circumstance.

Dad is quietly lighting one cigarette from the last. I smell the Bad-Moon girls gathering.

“We are soon at Beate’s house,” Mum says, crumpling her tissue and gripping Dad’s hand on the gear-stick.

I imagine she won’t risk speaking about the past again, but I hope she still says, “Tidy yourselves up a little”, or “Take that disgusting gum out of your mouth, Jacqueline.” I don’t want her to be any more different.

The mood in the silent car stiffens. If someone clears their throat or searches for a glacier mint, it seems normal, but the tension winds back up again. It’s a relief when Dad starts humming. He’s wildly out of tune, but I think I can pick out “Puppet on a String”. I wish I could close my eyes and open them to see the car turning into Audette Gardens.

It should have been called Odette Gardens after Odette Sansom, the French resistance worker tortured by the Nazis, but because the road signage official came from Yorkshire and pronounced her name “Ordette”, the sign-printer spelt it as he heard it.

We drive into the modern Schillerpark estate, a maze of identical red-brick blocks with white-framed windows facing the sun. Dad points out how the neat, flat roads are named in an oddly un-German way. Cork, Edinburgh, Bristol, Windsor and Oxford.

“Britain and Ireland paved the way in social housing, you see,” he says, breaking the tension.

Mum and I clear our throats and say “Oh,” to urge him on.

“With all the shifts in government over the years, some Berlin streets keep changing names,” he says, encouraged.

“Oh yes,” Mum chips in. “A place named simply Chancellor of the Empire became the Adolf Hitler square. But now it is named after the liberal politician, Theodor Heuss, the first president after the war.”

“Good old Theodor,” I say to an explosion of laughter triggered by relief that we are speaking, rather than by actual hilarity.

“And once Stalin fell out of favour, Khrushchev had his statue chopped up overnight and renamed his street after Karl Marx,” Dad says.

Crisis over. We are now reclassified back to Holiday Trip, instead of Descent into Hades.

The Schillerpark balconies are planted with flowers and the doors have square panels in bright, primary colours. A mass of glass, from the tall windows on the lower floors to the tiny rectangular panes that shine like a row of squinting eyes beneath the flat roof, are designed to let light from the courtyard gardens flood inside, although from down here, the mirrored glare of the sun flashes blinding reflections of the Berlin sky.

Grandma and Victor wake up as we park in Dublinerstrasse, where Beate’s block is as trim as the rest. People probably have to enter and exit at regular intervals like weather-house people; a red lady in a dirndl for sun and a blue man in leather shorts for rain. I can’t imagine a rag-and-bone man disturbing the litter-free streets.

There is no grand entrance, no stone lion greeting us here. In the narrow doorway stands an apple-shaped lady with darting monkey-eyes, a smile full of bad teeth and a face like a school suet-dumpling, a rather cold one. At her feet sit an extremely clean child in pressed trousers and an elegant Dalmatian with its head thrown back, howling in protest at these subdued visitors in their ridiculous wooden car.

“Beate, I presume,” Dad says to Mum, switching off the engine.

“Is it?” says Mum.

“Well, you should know, Bridge.”

“But it’s been years, Roy.”

“Was she short and fat before? With a moustache?”

“Oh Roy, you can’t possibly see that from here. Can you?”

“Oh yes. And half her teeth are missing.”

“The family once had a marvellous dentist. Beate wouldn’t let anyone else look in her mouth. When he was forced to flee the country, her teeth dropped out one by one”

“Probably all that concrete cake,” I say. Mum turns round and gives me a smile, but I don’t smile back.

“I thought you said she was a shadow of herself?” Grandma chips in. “Looks like a bloody solid shadow to me, Bridge.”

Mum’s hands flutter on the door-handle, and her reflex bad-news-grin flickers on. She even grinned when she told us the fishmonger had dropped dead in his ice-crate. Nothing to do with Dad saying, “Are you squidding me? When’s the funeral? Do let minnow.”

“Roy, this is a mistake. Beate hates me. Why am I here?”

“Christ, Bridge, pull yourself together. We’ve just been on a death-defying drive in a car held together by a thread of nylon for this.”

“Probably not even a thread, son. A gnat’s prayer’s all that’s holding this jalopy together,” Grandma adds, helpful as always. She hunts for a lost knitting-needle, unaware that T-K and Sitting Bull are jousting with it.

“Quiet, Ma. Look, Bridge, you’re not running away anymore.”

Mum looks stricken. We all sigh and the car heats up even more.

“Christ alive, Bridge, you’ve been brave before. You can do it again. Have a drag of my fag, look.” Dad passes her his cigarette, takes off his car-coat and drapes it across her shoulders.

The peacock-spider unfurls a multi-coloured cape during his courtship dance. It’s quite classy when he does it.

“Bloody ugh,” Victor whispers, flicking bits of barley-sugar at the windscreen. ”Not parent-love again.”

But Mum can hardly hold the cigarette to her lips.

“I feel like an unwelcome guest again, Roy,” she says, beginning to climb out of the car as if about to lay her head on the executioner’s block. “The years tell a dreadful story on Beate’s face.”

“Come on,” Grandma says. “The poor woman just needs a good English girdle and a decent denture. Let’s not be judgemenial.”

Beate’s jowls concertina over one another and a large mole sprouts enough hairs for a backcombed beehive. Her hair is still wound around her head and she smells of sour milk, brandy and onions. She hugs each of us like a fierce bear, almost cracking Grandma’s whalebone, but with Mum, the show of hugging is wooden-armed and the kiss stilted, with extended polite noises. If I had scissors, I could snip the air around them.

We troop into the sparkling kitchen, where Beate is preparing coffee und cake. The table is set with white plates and tiny forks on a black cloth. A theme of black and white has invaded everywhere. Not a single splash of colour. Snazzy, Gillian would call it. “Arty-bloody-farty,” Grandma mumbles. In our mismatched, travel-creased clothes, we don’t know where to put ourselves.

There are white and black vases with no flowers in them, a fireplace with painted flames and a shiny white telephone that has surely never been touched. We have just started renting one at home, primrose-yellow and already smudged with Victor’s finger-marks. He keeps picking up the receiver and listening to the party-line.

Last week, he heard a woman say, “Quick, he’s just this minute gone. And the bed’s still warm, Mr Big-Love.” I told him her husband must have suddenly died and she’d called the undertaker. Victor said, “But isn’t he called Trevor Simpkin—Taking the Sorrow out of Tomorrow?” So I told him to stop listening to private conversations or he’d be next.

Because the telephone shudders when the party-line is in use, Grandma sometimes places her heaviest shoe on the receiver. When the vibration makes the shoe fall off, she moves like lightning, lifts the receiver without a sound and listens in, puffing her smoke away from the mouthpiece.

Nothing in Beate’s flat looks fingered or dog-eared. Sebastian’s toys are in a black box with the lid on. The television-set sits inside a white basket.

Beate’s colourless scheme is a far cry from our room in the Clacton guest-house, with its ribbon of sea-view, the armchair with a golf ball for a missing castor, the serpent’s-tongue crack in the pink wash-basin with its badly painted wreath of sweet-peas round the plughole and the tiny purple crayon-mark Victor once made on one of the cabbage-roses jostling for position on the wallpaper.

As for our semi in Audette Gardens, nothing is fitted and nothing matches. We have blood-orange curtains, a bright yellow lamp-shade with a pattern of blue circles and a swamp-green rug because Dad always says we can’t afford to tire of last year’s in-thing, or any-bloody-thing, if it isn’t falling apart yet. This is why we still have Grandma’s utility furniture in the front-room. But when other women stock up on clothes-pegs or dusters in Woolworth’s January clearance sale, Mum buys their cheap paint. When Afghan Tan slipped out of fashion, our front-room became a giant sweating mushroom. Our bedroom gained a Hot Mustard ceiling and Groovy Gold walls. One side of the kitchen door gleams with Yo-Yo Yolk and the other with Public Toilet, as Grandma calls it. Mum has travelled a long way from those first years in Audette Gardens. Not literally. She hasn’t been further than Clacton until now, and she still moves the cushions aside before she sits on the settee. But, despite Grandma announcing, “They like covering things up, the Germans,” she isn’t afraid to keep changing the surroundings with a pot of emulsion.

Mum coaxes us to sit on Beate’s long black bench at the table. “The dog’s on it,” I hiss at her, but she makes us stroke Axel’s big trembly head. Grandma finds out he coordinates with the surroundings too well when she takes the weight off her feet. “Oh Christ, I thought he was a spotted cushion.”

All I can smell is my Gorgonzola-scented feet. This is the kind of house where you are obliged to remove your shoes on the door-step and slide about in your sweating socks, leaving hideous footprints on the gleaming floor.