Tying Down The Lion (20 page)

Beate has heard about my project from Grandma and wants to add her memories. I have left the notepad behind, along with my plans of writing in it, but shooting me a look that says, ‘You can’t duck out of your mission, you know,’ Mum passes me a stack of old shopping-lists and a rickety biro.

I try to make Beate’s harrowing words sound like a story about two sisters. But this is no fairy tale.

***

Contrasts Project

Beate and Ilse, Berlin, 1945

Part Four - Aggression

During the final air raid, the house opens up like a tin. Beate and Ilse lie in the street beside their neighbour’s body, a bleeding dog and their mahogany coat-stand with three jackets still attached to the hooks. Their front door, peppered with holes, leans like a shield against an empty doorway opposite.

People search the rubble, picking up oddments of this and that. Anything found is a fragment of hope, maybe a weapon or just something to hold. Ilse carries a pastry-fork, Beate a book. One man clutches a broken bird-cage and a couple cradle a piece of their child.

Beate discovers their grandfather-clock lying on the pavement. She tries dragging it upright, but Ilse begs her to leave it. The elegant hands that once circled its painted moon-face are broken. They honoured a golden time that has gone now. It will have to be burnt later. People without homes need to keep warm somehow.

They try to sleep on the cold floor of a damaged church. Nothing lights the darkness or protects them from the bitter air. The remaining walls shed cascades of dust, the stone turning to powder. During the night, people die from their injuries. When daylight creeps in at last, Beate and Ilse are among the few still breathing.

“We face another day of this?” Beate asks, her blank eyes staring at the shattered windows.

Ilse, only just seventeen, makes the decision to look after them both. “We may have nothing left, Beate, but here we are. We have woken up again.”

They walk through the demolished streets, passing ruins with black, staring holes for windows, breathing air choked with sulphur from artillery fire. They stumble over corpses smothered in blankets of dirt.

Hope eventually arrives—an eight-day ration to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. It includes a small tin of vegetables, a little sugar and half an ounce of genuine coffee, although Ilse has no idea how to find hot water or unbroken cups.

To collect the special allowance, they must join a queue that stretches along the street and winds around the corner. While they wait, so weak they must lean on each other, they watch boys of thirteen being forced to join the depleted army and ordered to take pride in dying for their country.

“So, the Third Reich is on its knees, and our little ones must defend Berlin against the advance of Soviet tanks,” a man shouts.

“Hitler says they volunteered for the honour,” says another.

The first man lowers his voice to reply. “Hitler also says that if they are discovered hiding, these children will be hanged.”

Ilse and Beate shuffle forward another inch.

One of the boys, hungry and hopeful, wanders towards the line. Ilse smiles and asks if he has anyone left. This question opens most conversations with strangers. No more, “Good morning”, or “How are you?”

“We were living in a tunnel under the canal. My parents drowned in the flood when it was blown up,” the boy says.

“Soviets? Or was it the SS who set off the explosion?”

The boy shrugs.

“Then who knows which soldiers to fear?” Ilse asks.

No one answers.

“I have a grenade,” the boy tells them.

Ilse gasps. “You have what?”

“I have to put it in the road when the Soviet tanks come through and detonate it when they are seconds away.”

“Run for your life, won’t you, dear?”

“Can’t. I have to stand with it, make sure it goes off.”

As he walks away, a single tear slides down his face.

Ilse steps out of line to follow him.

“Oh for God’s sake, Ilse, nothing about war is a surprise now,” Beate says, pulling her back.

“Well it should be. I shall give some of our ration to those children,” Ilse says, pointing at a white-faced huddle of boys in their over-sized army uniforms. “Look at them. They’re starving. How can they fight in that state?”

“But what about us?”

“We’ll survive,” Ilse says. “Trust me. We’ve come this far.”

Hitler’s birthday tea over, the linden leaves become too still, too quiet, and the late sun lights the underside of the clouds a sickly gold. The Soviets have already surrounded the gutted city and decide to add to the celebrations with an artillery bombardment into its core. The Allies add an extra present in the form of a colossal air raid.

When the shelling begins, the sisters find a damp cellar beneath a ruined hotel, already littered with shattered glass, plaster and brick. Ilse looks up at the sky for a moment before they hurry down the steps into the pitch-black room, watching the young moon with its ghostly halo, a bright crescent waiting to swell into its next phase.

“Fine accommodation for now,” she says inside, spreading a grimy blanket over them both and trying to ignore the rustle and patter of rodent feet. “Who needs fine clocks and silver cutlery when they can have this?”

“Our soldiers will defend Berlin, won’t they?” Beate says, resting her head on her sister’s shoulder.

“They can try,” Ilse tells her. “But they say the Soviets are destroying anything still standing to force their way in ahead of the Allies.”

“Our soldiers will protect us.” Beate repeats, pursing her lips and trying to plait her hair in the dark.

Ilse sighs. She has listened to the reports. Endless Soviet convoys are poised to thunder into the city.

They stay in their cellar for countless days, listening to the shrieks of the brutal Red Army perched high on their tanks, guns primed. One night, exhausted from lack of food and water, Ilse creeps up the steps to talk to the others hiding in the building.

Returning with a piece of bread, she has news for Beate. “It seems our soldiers fought a bloody battle, literally from room to room, inside the Reichstag itself. But it is the Soviet flag that flies on its roof.”

“See. I said we’d fight back,” Beate says, smiling and unravelling her hair to plait it all over again.

“No, Beate dear, I’m telling you Berlin has fallen.”

“Can I have some bread? They’ll bring us coffee soon. Thank God. I’m so tired of living in this cellar and being so hungry. I can taste that coffee, can’t you?”

Ilse gives her sister the bread. “I’m afraid hunger isn’t our worst danger now, my dear,” she whispers.

Ilse blocks the cellar door with anything to hand. She smothers them both with debris until they become a pile of useless rubbish. Bits of wood, scraps of clothes and pieces of broken china are all that shield them from death.

“Not a sound, Beate,” Ilse whispers.

Beate whimpers, clinging to her sister and begging God for help.

“Hush,” Ilse says. “I’m here.”

The pile of rubbish trembles. A half-saucer and a wooden buckle slide off Ilse’s hastily-constructed shelter. The small crash on the hard floor echoes throughout the cellar.

“Sh,” Ilse says.

“Our soldiers will come,” Beate whispers, struggling to keep still.

“Beate, think about the cake you’ll bake me when this is over,” Ilse mutters. “Check the recipe in your mind. Remember the ingredients, the different weights. How many eggs? How much butter? Think of that, dear.”

Nothing else slithers from the pile, although Ilse sweats, convinced the cogwheels of Beate’s brain, whirring through pounds of flour and handfuls of almonds, might be audible.

The commotion outside intensifies. Women scream in the house next door. Boots trample through the rubble outside. The butt of a rifle thuds on the cellar door.

6.
Waxing Moon

Grandma and Victor come back with greasy serviettes and onion breath, but my mind is too full of questions to ask for a spare frankfurter. Why didn’t Beate and Ilse go searching for Mum? As far as they knew, she was still suffocating in her cupboard. She just isn’t mentioned at all.

When Mum begged God to raze Berlin to the ground, her prayer was answered. Not by Him, but by the Allied bombers in the air and the storming Soviets who finished the task. She was one of the secret people in a city declared “cleansed of Jews”, a victor instead of a victim. So why not reclaim her two “sisters”?

I don’t know the answers, but I do know that this city, holding out against all the odds, never stops surprising me. My mission is all systems go again.

Beyond the Reichstag’s perfect symmetry, the TV tower soars like a thin rocket in the East. An even harsher landmark, restraining a tide of people, keeping them in as much as keeping us out, is the Wall. People no longer queue for water in Berlin. The normal flow of ordinary life has dried up instead.

A wall is a wall. But this one is different, a prison wall in the middle of a city for ordinary people to be kept apart.

Grey and solid, it is rounded on top, so no one can attach grappling-hooks. People have painted words and pictures on this side. Some of the graffiti is ugly, some is graceful. Most of it seems angry.
Berlin
, someone has painted in huge bubbly writing. Not
West
or
East
, just
Berlin
, to remember the past, or maybe it’s just a wish.

“Of course, lots of walls were built to stop invaders,” Dad says, trying to soften its impact. “There’s your Great Wall of China. And your Hadrian’s.”

“Yes, lad. But this is the only one built to keep people in,” Grandma says. “I shudder to think what it looks like over there,” she adds.

I imagine the death strip, raked and smooth, all set to show footprints in the sand.

“Can anyone paint on this?” Victor asks Dad, looking round as if someone might hand him a brush and palette.

“No one’s supposed to. They have to be careful, son. The actual border itself is about a yard inside the West.”

“So if you’re graffiti-ing it this side, you’re technically in the other half and they could shoot you?” I ask him.

“Bloody well right, Jacqueline. And you can bet your life there’s no graffiti on their side.”

Beate is weaving the pushchair on an erratic path through the crowds to the Victory Column. Mum tries to help her, but Beate thrusts out her elbows and ploughs on. Grandma makes us pile into a gift-shop to buy a cuckoo-clock for Elsie. We come out with three fluted ash-trays, a mournful wooden donkey that dispenses cigarettes out of his bum and a wind-up parakeet.

Beate lets her stow the packages in the push-chair, amid much clinking, and they push it together. Grandma lurches over Sebastian every few seconds, cackling like a witch with heartburn. Old people seem hell-bent on alarming babies, but he seems entertained by her, clapping and shouting for more. I’ll never understand small people.

“Here it is. Our Victory Column. All sixty-seven metres of her in one piece. Not too damaged, no?” Beate says, puffing and fanning herself as we crane our necks to see the golden statue on top of a monumental, glossy red column.

Everything we see is defined by its damage. According to Victor’s guidebook, mutilation creates a “noble survivor”, while anything intact is an “unshakable guardian of the city”.

“Is she a symbol of peace?” I ask Victor, looking up at the golden figure.

“No, this is about winning wars,” he says, consulting the book. “It was going to be just a column, but when they finished building it, they’d won even more battles than when they started. So they bunged her on top as well. She weighs tons and tons. Probably more than Grandma and Beate if they were welded together. The Germans call her Goldelse.”

Believe it or not, this triggers one of Mum and Dad’s Rows. At least a Very Public Row forces them to keep their voices down, unlike some of their ‘private’ ones, when they shout at each other at the tops of their voices. Goldelse may have been created to commemorate wars already won, but now she’s overseeing a skirmish in full swing.

“So what’s Goldelse mean?” Dad asks Mum.

“Well, it translates as Golden Lizzie.”

“Why?”

I hear the danger note in Dad’s voice. I imagine he uses it when the inmates in D-Wing get out of hand. He becomes the ogre-faced net-casting spider. Meek and mild while he spins his web, dangling it casually between his front legs, but when his prey approaches, he stretches the net to three times its size and casts it, trapping the poor victim inside.

Dad is trapping Mum now, unable to help his ogre-faced tendencies. As Grandma always says, every family keeps a chained beast in the scullery. Visitors never know it’s there until the day it slips its leash.

“Because Lizzie is a girl’s name, Roy.”

“Why not Elsie? Else sounds just like Elsie.”

“Because it’s Lizzie, Roy.”

“I know it’s bloody Lizzie. I heard you.”

Victor and I step inside the column, leaving Mum and Dad to light cigarettes with their backs to each other.

The pedestal is meant to be decorated with bronze friezes, but Victor’s book claims the French took most of them away.

“I bet it was to stop the Germans blowing their trumpets about all the wars they’d won,” I say to Victor when he shows me the list of wars that inspired the column. “Especially the Franco-Prussian one,” I add, pleased with myself. Victor nods, smiling, and it becomes one of those brotherly-sisterly moments of intellectual understanding. We don’t have many.

Beate and Grandma want to look at the friezes, but most of them are just plain granite where the missing ones should be and Grandma says, “Bloody French,” several times until it gets a bit embarrassing and eventually they wander off to buy a tub of potato-salad.

“I’m not fond of green though, Bat-Ear.”

“Green? Ah, no, Nell. It is quite, quite white.”

“No, salad’s green, love. Cows and sheep eat salad.”

“It has the mayonnaise.”

“Oh salad-cream, do you mean? Heinz, is it? Sounds German enough, does Heinz.”

Victor and I begin our ascent, leaving the fire-breathing dragons circling each other below us. Thank John Lennon I had enough Deutschmarks stuffed in my sock for the entrance fee. It’s the only place to keep money when your mother makes you wear twin-sets—they never have pockets—and you prefer not to draw attention to Tufty’s slogan
Set off for school with time to spare
emblazoned on the only bag you have owned from the age of seven. It is also helpful to keep cash in your sock when your father is fond of the gee-gees and knows the combination of your replica bank-safe money-box.

Two hundred and eighty-five steep spiral stairs take us to just below Lizzie or Elsie or whatever the hell she’s called. From the viewing platform, even with the wind whipping my hair across my face, the beautiful city is spread out like a pictorial map. People are thunderbugs. Cars are polished ladybirds and beetles. Feeling majestic, I survey the tops of trees, the roofs of buildings and, way down below, the green fringed ribbon that is actually the long, straight sweep of the avenue. The trouble is, I’ve never climbed higher than Oaking Lido’s junior diving-board.

“I can’t do this,” I tell Victor.

He tries to help me turn around, but I keep gripping the metal grille that stops us stepping into the Berlin sky. I imagine tipping out, gripping Lizzie’s golden toes above, but missing them.

“Let go, Jacqueline,” he says, sounding as calm as if we are on the ground.

I hold tight.

He carries on talking. “They moved it, you know. This whole monument.”

Has he turned into Grandma?

“The Nazis had it put here and made it taller. It only had three blocks before. They added another one. I’ll tell you what, if you take one hand off the bars, I’ll tell you why.”

I uncoil the fingers of one hand. “Just keep talking,” I tell him.

“Hitler wanted to make Berlin into a super colossal city, but he couldn’t do much about it because they lost the war. And because he was dead by then.”

“Go on. Keep talking.”

“Take your other hand off then. I’m freezing up here.”

Trembling, I take it off.

“It’s made of sandstone.”

“Sandstone? Sounds like it could crumble at any moment.”

“And it almost got blown up.”

Lord alive, it’s probably teetering.

He tells me to turn round and I do, but it takes an age.

“The book says moving the column might have saved it because, where it was before, it would have got bombed in the air-raids. Mind you, the French wanted to blow it up after the war. With dynamite. Tons and tons of dynamite. Ker-blam! Ker-runch!”

This human bomb reveals a seven-year-old boy instead of a saviour. Families are such a ruddy disappointment. Old Golden-Toes-Lizzie would be more help.

I am a small fly caught in a huge web. Mum should be here, but if I shout, would she hear? She seems even more distant since she told me her story, but somehow, up here, while she is a pinprick among millions of people, I feel close enough to almost understand.

When I’m with her, the resentment smoulders, but away from her, it cools down, and I can see the scared young woman, not much older than me, who hid in a wall to save her life.

I could ask the other people on the viewing-platform to help me, but apart from beaming occasionally at Victor as if he is actually human, they are absorbed by the spectacle. They probably wouldn’t understand me anyway. Are they foreign or am I? That’s probably a question for students of the Great Identity Crisis.

At the moment, Victor is my only ally. I would hold his hand if he wasn’t so busy detonating.

Once every sandstone segment has been obliterated, he asks, “Are we going now?”

“No, thick-head, I still can’t move.”

At last, piercing through the German babble and Japanese camera-clicking, I hear a familiar, heaven-sent voice.

“Hold the bus, you lot behind me, I can’t go any faster. Don’t have much clue how to queue, do you? Now, let the dog see the rabbit. Ooh, wait a sec. I must get my breath first. Ah, there they are. Ooh-hoo, Jacqueline! Victor! Thank the Lord for my buffalo Shebas and my all-day padded corn-plasters. My feet don’t hurt at all. Mind you, they only just fitted on those twirly-whirly steps. They should have a proper staircase fitted with decent bannisters. Come on Jacqueline, take my arm, love. I’m a touch dizzy. Oh, strike-a-light, the sky’s far too close. Take me back down, duck. We’ll go and find your mum.”

Grandma knows I’m afraid from the moment she sees my face, which actually feels green. But she must have suspected something was wrong, otherwise she would never have braved all those steps, not in those tight stays. Perhaps the people who love you can work out how you feel, even from a distance.

I recover as soon as we reach the final step. Victor is bursting to tell Mum and Dad I nearly vomited over Victory, and I want to tell Mum I’ve seen Berlin from the sky. But we just stand about, looking down at the ground and waiting for normality, the way children do when parents are busy hating each other.

“They are not cannons, Roy,” Mum is saying.

“They bloody are. Look at them. Cannon barrels that this lot captured from the enemy. I know a cannon barrel when I see one.”

“Why do you say ‘this lot’?”

“It’s just an expression. Same as I’d use for D-Wing.”

“Oh, so we are all criminals here. I see.”

“Don’t be bloody daft. I didn’t mean you personally. I didn’t even say you. I said ‘this lot’.”

Ah. The nit-picking has begun. It follows this pattern. They tear at the flesh before stripping it down and sucking the bones. Not a shred of Dignity or Decorum. Yes, Mum, I can read the dictionary too.

“Well I am looking at the one part without cannons,” Mum says, screwing up her eyes against the sun. “The part with the golden garlands. You are not seeing the whole column, Roy.”

Victor’s book settles the matter. “Three of the sandstone chunks are encrusted with gilded cannon-barrels and the fourth, added when they moved the column, is adorned with golden garlands.”

“You see,” Grandma says. “They do move things.”

No one smiles. The Row has cast a shadow over us. I wish the moon could control it, rolling it back like the tides.

“Typical,” Dad says. “They had to keep something that glorifies war, didn’t they? It’s the cannons people notice.”

“I didn’t,” Mum snaps. “I saw the garlands first.”

“Well you’re a woman.”

This Row was probably brewing in England and has rested ever since in the shade like a lion, one eye never fully closed, until Lizzie nudged it awake.

“Women don’t start wars.”

“Women wouldn’t have a bloody country left to live in if men didn’t go to war.”

“If men never went to war, there would be nothing to worry about.”

“But someone always invades.”

“I think I know all of this, Roy. Do not tell me.”

Beate, rattling and clinking as if she has a pack-horse instead of a pushchair, takes Sebastian to buy an orange juice while we shelter from the sun under a huge tree, one of the long line of lindens I saw from the top of the Victory Column. The Row is contained beneath its beautiful heart-shaped leaves that sound as if they are breathing. Under other lindens, other families might be in the thick of similar rows, although the world I can see through the branches appears to be smiling and licking strawberry ice-creams.

Victor’s hand creeps into mine, as Dad reloads his ammunition.

“You like the Wall, don’t you, Bridge? You think it’s better than war?”

“Roy, how can you? Of course I do not like it.”

“But it’s brought peace, hasn’t it? It’s holding back a future no one wants to happen.”

“It is a monster, Roy. I do believe that it prevents a worse war, but this isn’t the way…”

“So how would a woman do it then, Bridge?”

“I have not the soggiest idea. And I do not wish to discuss it anymore. Except to say that the Wall does not end the suffering. So please do not think it makes me happy. Do not tell me that.”