Tying Down The Lion (19 page)

Dad slumps at the table, his head in his hands. I creep up and poke a hanky into his fingers, hoping it will cover his mouth and smother the imminent racket. He shrieks and leaps up, the chair scraping the floor. Axel presses his face into his spotted blanket.

“Dad, shush. Please don’t be loud.”

“Christ, Jacqueline, what the bloody hell are you doing?”

“It’s all right, Dad. Everyone’s asleep. I’m here.”

“Oh, Jesus wept, I’m not having a terror, love.”

“So what are you doing then?”

“I just couldn’t sleep.”

“Are you worried about the car?”

“Sort of.”

“What else? About what Mum told me?”

“Yes, that as well.”

There must be more. His eyes are hooded, his jaw clenched, and without his Brylcreem he looks like an ape-man. That’s probably nothing to do with being scared. It’s just a bit scary for me.

“Is it about me and Mum going to see Ilse?”

“Oh Jacqueline, hold the bus with the twenty questions, dear. Pass my fags, would you?”

I watch him smoke, staring him out. I might not be as close to Mum anymore, but I know my dad.

“Tell me,” I repeat until I make him laugh.

He tries to light another cigarette from the first one, but I steal the matches. “Not until you tell me.”

He sighs. “I’ll tell you once I’ve got a smoke.”

I have to hold the match steady. He takes a deep gasp before he speaks.

“I never passed the driving test, love.”

“
What?
”

“I couldn’t disappoint your mum again, Jacqueline.” He pauses to relight his cigarette. “Look, if she doesn’t cross the border on this trip, she might never get the chance. Those East Germans make it up as they go along. They might seal themselves off completely and Mum’ll never see Ilse again.”

“But the bits of torn-up L-plate are in the glove-box.”

“Well, I had to go through the motions, didn’t I?”

“Dad, you shouldn’t be on the roads.”

“No. But don’t tell your mother.”

“Dad, it’s not Mum I’m worried about. It’s the other Germans. The ones with Alsatians.”

“Stop it, Jacqueline.”

“And ways of making you talk.”

“Look, put a bloody sock in it, girl. And not a word to anyone. My British passport should be enough for anyone.”

“But it might not. Not if the police stop you. They’ll want to see your licence.”

“Why should they?”

“Oh Dad, because you’re driving a half-timbered car with conked-out brakes that’s falling to pieces.”

“I’ll keep it strung together.”

Strung is the right word. Highly blooming strung is how I feel.

“All it means is keeping your mouth shut. It’s not telling a lie, Jacqueline. It’s…supporting a secret. That’s all it is.”

I supported Gillian when she wanted the class to believe she had a mute albino sister called Lily. But the consequences of her lie…er, secret, would not have led to being tied up in a fetid cell and fed L-plate fragments.

I weigh it up while Dad watches me, his eyes twitching. Either I keep quiet and be as scared as he is the whole time. Or I tell Mum.

“I’ll keep quiet,” I tell him.

Breakfast is the same as last night’s supper, a spread of ham, cheese, rolls, jam and a big iced seedy cake, like a birthday tea without cocktail-sticks. Grandma’s plate is piled high. Victor is allowed to curl thin slices of bendy, holey cheese and dark-red ham into tubes and eat them with his fingers. It cheers him up after the long night with the fan wafting cold air up our cardigans.

Beate has appalling table manners, talking with her mouth full, plunging her great fingers into the meat pile and jammy knives into the butter. Coffee-rings and flakes of bread scatter the table-cloth.

But she clears at speed, her arms wobbling as she wipes, transforming everything back to monochrome and mess-free. She drinks tumblers of buttermilk, her breath as sour as a cheese dairy, but I detect a stench of alcohol too, like sozzled cherries. Gillian’s great-uncle in Gloucester keeps a miniature bottle of gin in his Sugar Puffs box. She found it when she was rummaging for the free plastic frogman.

Beate’s lodger, Konnie, a toothless train-driver with terminal BO, sunken red eyes and a drooping moustache, arrives at the table, doffing his leather cap. He digs in his trouser pockets and produces two guinea-pigs, an elderly ginger one wearing a veil and a white one with a black waistcoat and bow-tie.

“Christ alive,” Grandma says, dropping her tea-cup. Beate takes her into the garden with the rest of the seedy-cake.

Konnie makes the guinea-pigs shake hands with us, even T-K. “I am exquisite to practise my English,” he says. His eyes are painful to look at. I’ve seen bloodhounds look perkier.

He cuts his ham into small pieces and passes them to Axel while he talks, referring to himself by name all the time. The guinea-pigs nibble bits of peach from his hand, reminding me of Bwa-Bwa, who seems part of a far more normal time.

“Venn a young man, Konnie eat nineteen
Frikadellen
at one time,” he says.

“What are they?” Victor asks me.

“Meatballs. Mum made them once and Grandma said they looked like ack-ack shrapnel.”

“I think they sound like frogs’ legs,” Victor says. “But nineteen’s an odd number, so one frog must have been a peg-leg.”

“And ago six years,” Konnie continues, “do you know summsing? Konnie see a man paint a line on the ground.”

“Oh,” Victor says, stuffing in the ham.

“You are how many years, young man?” Konnie asks Victor.

“Seven and a quarter, plus three days.”

“Ah. Konnie’s son was six. Johannes.”

“Is Johannes here?”

“No. Johannes, he luff water. Oh, he luff it.”

“Has he gone swimming then?” Victor makes breaststroke gestures and blows out his cheeks.

Konnie looks down and strokes one of the guinea-pigs. “Swimming? No. Johannes not swim.”

“Not even with a rubber ring?”

“No, no, young man. Johannes dead.”

“Oh. Oh dear.”

“In River Spree. Oh, that water. He luff it.”

“Oh. Did he drown?”

“Ah, drown. Yes. But also not.” Konnie strokes the guinea-pig’s sparse fur the wrong way. “They say drown. They say it. But it is zat line on the ground—the wire, the fence, the wall, it matters not how you call it—it is zee line. It kills him.”

Victor tickles the guinea-pig under its chin. “Er, hold the bus a minute. Line?”

“Yes, zey painted it on zee ground to show where to build zee Wall.”

“But there’s no line in the river, is there?”

“It is everywhere, young man. Johannes play by water here in vest. Last summer. But River Spree, it belong uzzer side. It is border. He fell from vest side of the city, where we live, to east side. There, the Spree belonged to the Soviet sector. Guards wiz guns, zey stand on bridge. Some drive boats too. Zey watch everything. Zey watch my Johannes fall.”

Victor twists T-K’s arms into a butterfly-stroke position. “So Johannes fell into enemy water? And they opened fire?”

“No. Not fire. Nussing.”

“They left him?”

“Yes, they leaf him.”

Konnie’s hands trap the guinea-pig against his chest until it squeaks for mercy.

Victor and T-K tilt their heads to one side. “So, the guards left him because he was the enemy? On the wrong side?”

“Yes.”

“A little boy?”

“Yes, little Johannes was the enemy. And Konnie’s wife, she is gone now. It is too hard for her to live wizzout him. You know, Konnie see the Wall go up and up, until it grows inside Konnie’s head. The first day it come, I know the war is never over for us.” He shakes his head until his chin wobbles. “And it is better,” he says, “if lines connect, no?”

He puts his leather cap on Victor then he puts it on himself backwards. No one knows what to say, in either language.

“Can your train go through the Wall?” Victor asks him.

“Konnie drive it into East, but Konnie must not stop at the stations. Only pass through. No stopping. For the underground trains, Vest Berlin pays zee East in vestern Deutschmarks to drive in their tunnels. And there is a checkpoint at Friedrichstrasse, the only station under East Berlin where vestern trains may stop.”

That’s where Mum and I will have to go when we visit Ilse. It sounds like the point of no return.

Konnie gives Victor a guide-book in all languages and leaves the house with a polite salute to us all. From that point, we have a seven-year-old in charge of history while I’m given the job of bed-making. I can’t master Hitler’s hospital corners or make the wretched quilt-thing lie smooth. In the end, I think of Mum and give it a good wrestle, followed by a hearty pummelling to flatten it for good.

When we leave for our day out, Victor and I help Beate with Sebastian, slotting him into his push-chair with his plush white rabbit. The car stays put, looking as peculiar as ever and with a huge new dent in its backside where Dad whacked it with the hammer.

Dad seems less sure of his role without his gloves and car-coat, like Biggles without the helmet and goggles. He and Mum keep bickering. A dark glint in his eyes shows the Girls are slumped in the wings in their ragged fishnets, waiting to swan onstage later.

We leave Axel caged in his steel contraption with a black water-bowl and a white rubber bone and catch a bus into the lively city, deep into its broken heart, which teems with sunlit crowds of jolly men and women with fat tanned arms, children skipping along with German sweets and woolly-haired hippies roasting in Afghans. Huge shops are filled with beautiful things. Ice-creams and sausages are sold from smoky stalls, and cafés serve tall glasses of beer and Coca-Cola in ice-cold bottles. It’s how I imagine London, just without rain and red buses and Wimpy bars looming out of the fog, and nothing like a city under threat.

I didn’t know all of life would be here without a care in the world. I imagined dismal people standing in bombsites and staring at an even grimmer place over the Wall, which I haven’t even spotted yet.

“You know, Jacqueline, we are enclosed here by a communist country,” Beate says. “No one knows how long we can survive. East Berlin is guarded so tight not even a mouse can escape. And one day it might open its jaws and swallow us too.”

I truly don’t know how to sympathise with this, so I just say, “Gosh,” which I realise is playing a bit fast and loose with the etiquette of commiseration.

“It all looks quite normal here,” I add, hopelessly equipped to judge anyone’s city, let alone this one.

“We are told to value this
normal
life while it is still here,” Beate says. “But not me. How can I, while my sister is on the other side?”

And I can see how, inside her stylish, snazzy black and white shell, she is barely living at all.

As we walk further into the centre, the colossal, older buildings remind us of the war that is over and the war that still goes on.

“This is where Berlin fell,” Beate says.

This is the elegant Reichstag, a sandstone palace with carvings, turrets and magnificent pillars. It reminds me of the tier of wedding cake in Gillian’s grandmother’s attic, the brittle icing jaundiced and the little plaster columns crumbling to powder. The blemished stone is flaking and patchy, as if it has a skin condition. Once crowned with a massive dome that wasted away in the war and was eventually demolished, it seems flat and bald. A crane stands in front of it now, like a huge protective arm.

“It’s held itself together though. Almost dignified, isn’t it?” Dad says, lighting a cigarette. “I mean, the Nazis torched it, the Soviets mutilated it with graffiti once they’d vandalised the place for souvenirs and it’s been stripped of some of its statues as well, but here it is, still standing. What do you reckon, Bridge?”

Mum just stares at the huge edifice the way visitors look at a horribly disfigured hospital patient.

“The graffiti is covered with boards and plaster now,” Beate tells us.

“Did it say ‘Vladimir woz here’?” Victor asks.

“Worse than that,” Beate says, frowning at the rows of blank arched windows.

“Did they write them with felt-tipped pens?”

“No, they used charcoal from the burnt timber lying everywhere,” Beate explains. “They made an ugly mess. Nothing in Berlin was safe. But you know, those messages should not be covered. They tell a dreadful story. People should know it.”

She turns away and rummages in the pushchair. I hear the chink of glass, the glug and gush of fiery liquid. Dad, wary of Mum’s silence, reaches for her hand. “When I first met you, this pile looked like bloody Stonehenge. It’s not so bad now they’ve tidied things up, don’t you think, Bridge?”

Mum is still staring ahead, but she takes his hand, interlocking their fingers. “When the war ended,” she says, “I saw the view of the Reichstag from across the River Spree. The dome was just bare bones. The building was shattered, rubble all around. I thought it would collapse. Then I noticed its reflection in the water. It seemed untouched there.”

Dad squeezes her hand and wraps his other one round it.

“Parliament used to meet here, many years ago. But now we are governed from Bonn,” Beate says, her shiny pink face bobbing up from the pushchair. “With the city cut in two, the poor Reichstag has no use now. War has changed its face so often, but each time it keeps something of the past. See the words carved into the stone above the pillars? They say, ‘To the German People’. Even through the last war, they have stayed. When the Soviets stormed in, they saw only a Nazi building. The fighting inside lasted two days. And a new, even more terrible time began for Ilse and me.”

She sinks onto a bench, wheezing with Emotion, not just from heaving her colossal bulk around in the heat. Dad has to leave Mum and put his arm around Beate’s shoulders, like a Chihuahua embracing a Great Dane.

Beate pats the bench beside her and even though there is only an inch of space, I perch on it, my stomach growling from the tang of hot-dogs and onions wafting from a stall. Grandma takes Victor to buy some for everybody and I hear her ask him, “Won’t be actual Alsatian in ’em, will there?”

With the colourful stalls and gift-shops enticing them, we won’t catch a whiff of our sausage. Grandma could easily swallow three before the Black Forest weather-house gift-shop swallows her.