Tying Down The Lion (22 page)

“Like grandchildren grown almost taller than their grandmother,” Dad reads from the book. “Berliners have christened these two additions the powder box and lipstick, as if the old church just needs sprucing up. A dusting of rouge for the old woman, a waft of powder to coat the cracks.”

“Enough of the old woman, son,” Grandma says, pursing her lips around her Senior Service. “And those new bits look like pre-fabs to me.”

It is true. The powder and lipstick buildings are actually made of prefabricated concrete, like great slabs of honeycomb with thousands of tiny inlaid blue-glass windows. But even though they seem like structures from the space-age, our eyes are drawn back to Kaiser Wilhelm with his, or should it be her, lost pinnacles and teetering arches.

“Losing a bit of height won’t stop her,” Dad says, his arm across Mum’s shoulders. “You can see her blemishes, but this old girl lives on and on.”

Grandma, cheesed off with old lady comparisons, blows her smoke in his face.

Breitscheidplatz has a strange beauty. The old and new merge together, the wrecked and the renewed side by side. New offices, high-rise blocks and a massive shopping complex loom over the decayed and damaged buildings. And despite being surrounded by the new season’s bikinis, this one stricken church is the most striking of them all, its chipped-tooth spire showing the terrible price of war.

We walk to the Europa-Center, a huge, boxy shopping mall beside a glassy tower topped by the Mercedes trademark, a colossal metal star within a circle, visible across Berlin.

“The Mercedes star spins,” Beate says. “And it glows at night. In a storm, it turns into the wind for protection. It can never break. Never be moved.”

It must outshine any ordinary star at night, a symbol of prosperous, brand-new West Berlin stamped in the sky.

Inside the silky newness of the monstrous shopping complex, the elderly ruins of the city disappear, as if the doors open into a futuristic world. Mum looks startled, Grandma guarded and Dad terribly small and grey in his dog-tooth Home Stores sports jacket. Victor and I have never set foot in a shop larger than Spotwood and Mole on Oaking Parade, where Grandma once lost us in Ladies’ Separates and was almost arrested for helping herself to fig-rolls in the staff restroom.

When I overcome my fear of heights, I will transform into Tuesday.
Dienstag
in German. Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Tuesday will flourish her shorthand pencil in one of the top-floor offices of the Mercedes tower, with a view of every corner of the city, answering a purring telephone at a glass desk by one of the long windows and so far from ground level that no one could possibly look up her mini skirt.

The intimidating boutiques with wall-to-wall psychedelic patterns throb with music and are jam-packed with women like Amazons in their stilettos and beehives. Not one twin-set. Dad asks if I want to have a look, but I feel as if I’m ten years old, three feet tall, and my socks have plummeted to my ankles. I prefer fashion between the covers of a magazine. If I could be transported to Spotwood and Mole and given a ten shilling note for a fair-isle pullover, I would be in clover.

“No thanks,” I tell Dad and he gives me a brief grin of relief.

But the exhausting, endless maze of a hundred shops, teeming with a million people and two million damp armpits, attract Grandma like iron filings to a magnet. We have to restrain her. There are only so many ash-trays a family needs.

“It’d be handy to put one on the corner of the bath, Roy. How about that statue of the widdling boy. Look, you stub your cigarette out in his little puddle.”

Dad ignores her, probably desperate to leave the shop so he can light up.

“Can we get something to eat now?” Victor pleads, dragging his feet.

“It is not time for Sebastian to eat. Not for ten minutes,” Beate says.

“Ooh you’re a slave to your schedules, Beattie,” Grandma tells her. “Come on. At least take the weight off your bunions and get a banger butty inside you. Will this café have proper sausages, d’you think, love?”

“What an enormous place,” Mum says, glancing at Dad while Grandma locates a café.

Silence.

“There’s even an ice-rink, Roy.”

No response. Not that Dad’s ever strapped on a skate in his life.

In the café, Sebastian whines for his white rabbit then throws it at a nun drinking from a water-fountain. After delving in the pushchair, Beate tips the contents of a tiny bottle of Schnapps into her coffee. Victor is fiddling with the disgusting bits and pieces that breed in his duffle-bag. One day, it will walk off on its own. Last time I dared look, I found a pre-historic apple-core, a picture of Franz Beckenbauer with his front teeth blacked out and a flattened shrew.

“I’m going for a wander first, Bridge,” Grandma says while we wait for our food. “It does my knees no good to sit about on these plastic chairs. Do the Germans not know about foam rubber?”

“Not on your own, Nell, surely? You will get lost.”

“Oh, I’ll not go far.”

“But your corns?”

“Jacqueline can give my feet a rub later.”

Bloody ugh.

And off Grandma goes, a seasoned tourist, her white cardigan draped over one arm. Mum looks as if she’s been deserted and left for sacrifice.

The atmosphere is stifling. No one can breathe. The café clanks and clatters around us. A ceiling-fan stirs the air, thank Ringo, but the breeze barely reaches us. Mum prattles on, fanning herself with the guide book, watching Dad all the time.

“This building used to be a beautiful Romanesque patisserie. Do you remember, Beate?” she says. “It had two pretty towers and rows of arched windows.”

Beate gives her a stiff nod, but doesn’t chime in with a memory, so Mum keeps trying.

“It was such a charming meeting-place for artists and poets and actors before everything changed.”

“It looks much more charming now,” Beate says, slurring her words and wiping her moustache.

“It was 1943 when the Nazis stormed the café,” Mum drones on. “Friends of my parents were here.” Her voice trails away. She looks around, as if a group of pensive bearded men in smocks, paintbrushes tucked behind their ears, might replace the sun-tanned family in shorts at the next table. I would kill to be wearing a sun-dress instead of this twin-set. It’s like living inside a kiln.

Mum reaches for Dad’s hand, but he doesn’t notice her hold it between hers. I try not to look at him. I don’t want to see Loretta, Cherie and seedy Sumatra vying to light his Woodbine.

Instead I imagine canvases and fountain-pens and paints scattered across this floor, trampled by a hundred jack-boots, a flurry of artists trying to escape through the massive glassy entrance, the echo of the doors slamming shut.

“You know, Birgit, it was the Allied air-raids, not the German troops that destroyed the building,” Beate says.

“But an era had been lost, no matter which side caused the damage.”

“A circus used to perform in the ruins,” Beate continues, ignoring Mum. “Then two days after the Wall went up, this magnificent place was built to remind the world that Berlin had come alive again. It shows the East how good life is here. Better than just survival. But it is not a symbol for the whole city.”

“I do not look at it that way, Beate. This is still my Berlin. I see the signs left by the war, but I do not see the division at all.”

Beate pushes her cup away, slopping coffee into the saucer. “I wish I could watch my Ilse’s face if you say that to her tomorrow. You will never understand, Birgit, how hard it is to live here. We have to be so strong. Survival is exhausting.”

“I know all about that, Beate.”

“No. Not like this. You missed the worst of it.”

No one knows what to say. I’m sweating from the tension as well as the heat. The awkward silence around the table is smothered by the air-conditioning system finally bursting into life, but the blast of cool air causes a startled guinea-pig in a pink tutu to leap out of Victor’s duffle-bag.

Mum and I squeal. People at nearby tables nudge one another as if we’re hired entertainment. The wretched creature scuttles about, knocking over cups and depositing disgusting pellets like greenish liquorice torpedoes all over our serviettes. Good job the sausages aren’t here yet.

Victor grasps the animal at last and thrusts it at Mum in a pathetic attempt to endear her to it. She backs away, resisting the temptation to throttle him.

“Konnie said it likes going out,” Victor says, stroking the horrible animal. It smirks at us with its yellow teeth, baring them like a row of sweetcorn kernels.

Mum marches Victor outside. “I shall take this little beast back to the house,” she says. I assume she’s referring to the guinea-pig, but who knows?

She strides outside, her old city beckoning. “I am Berlin,” she might be saying, a tad more accurately than President Kennedy did. Victor has given her the perfect escape. Who says a geriatric guinea-pig doesn’t have a silver lining? This one even has sequins.

I imagine Mum peering round old corners, slipping into side-streets, revisiting the old life without Beate directing her. I hope she doesn’t go to Bernauer Strasse with Victor instead of me.

On schedule, Sebastian eats his jar of small-boy food and falls asleep in his clammy pushchair. I’m enlisted to rock it backwards and forwards while Beate wanders to the Ladies, sailing back in a cloud of peachy vapour. She even pours something clear into a hollow in Sebastian’s dummy. As he falls sleep, he sucks the strong-smelling liquid through the rubber teat. Gripe water? Ten-to-one it’s gin.

We spend the afternoon waiting for Mum and Grandma. Only Beate eats, nodding and pursing her lips with approval when the food arrives at one o’clock sharp. Crumbs fly from her bread over Sebastian’s head and she sweeps them out of his hair with a soft brush she keeps in her bag.

“I found it in a hairdresser’s shop after the bombings,” she tells me. “It was for sweeping the cut hairs that fell on the customers’ shoulders. It was the only thing still in one piece. A broken scissor also I took, for protection and for cutting up dead animals. I can never forget the smell of the animals frying on a fire in the ruins.”

I begin writing on my scrap of paper, but it might not be big enough to list the many pieces of Beate that will never be fixed.

“My Sebastian, he has lovely hair, no? Just like Ilse’s. You know, Jacqueline, somehow we survived the worst, Ilse and I. Never apart. And here, at last, we have something to celebrate. We have my son. But she cannot hold him, not even touch this soft, soft hair that is so like hers.”

To distract her from plucking at the poor child’s curls, I ask her what she and Ilse used to do together before the Wall.

“Ah, Jacqueline, it was heaven back in the fifties. We shopped on the Stalin Boulevard. Anything we could not buy there could not be bought anywhere. A huge sign showed the sun shining on the jolly folk of East Berlin, with West Berlin under cloud. Music played from loudspeakers and loud messages were announced. ‘Workers, raise your standards!’ We drank good coffee and strong Romanian beer. Jolly folk, we certainly were.”

I look up, but the memory of the Romanian beer has sent her scrabbling for her hip-flask and soon she is weeping over Sebastian’s head, remembering the day he was born.

“My labour lasted two days. My body had never mended from the damage a Soviet soldier did on our last night in the cellar, almost twenty years before. Because I was shaking so badly during the birth, the hospital bed rocked across the floor and the nurses had to tie my hands and feet to the bed-frame. It felt like being in the cellar again and I screamed for Ilse until the baby was born. He was blue. It took the doctors hours to save me and days to give hope for Sebastian.

“Two weeks later I could wait no longer. I dressed over my gown and went with the baby to the Wall. I could not telephone Ilse because the lines in the East were cut. I asked a policeman to stand with me and borrowed a stepladder from a builder. For the first time, as I shouted my sister’s name into the silence, I saw how bare and desolate it was on the other side. I called out the address that was once mine too and that she drove a tram. I even shouted the name of the café where I hoped she still drank her coffee. At last a woman went to look for her.

“After two hours, Ilse was standing on two crates to see Sebastian through a pair of binoculars. After one minute, a guard told her to climb down. She blew her nephew a kiss. There could be no more.

“The only people released from East Germany are the very old, those no longer useful to the state. There is no hope of freedom for someone as strong and hard-working as Ilse until she becomes a burden to them. Then she will come to me and Sebastian, if we survive that long.”

Beate falls silent for a moment and we just sit there in the hot crush of bodies.

“My husband was a broken man long before Sebastian was born,” she says, her voice cracking. “You know, the first time I met him, his quiet voice and the way he smoked a cigarette reminded me of Rainer. He was not my Rainer of course, but he was a man I could care for. I had hope at last, Jacqueline, because I could see he had none left. This was my chance to look after someone more damaged than me.”

It was too late for Beate’s brood of eight and in any case, there were no medals for that anymore. But her dream of looking after a family of her own had never wavered.

She can hardly go on. I just about grasp that, unlike all other husbands the world over, hers wasn’t chain-smoking in the corridor during the labour. He passed out. By the time the baby let out its first, weak cry, he was in the Emergency department three floors below with a swelling on his temple. The nurses tried to make a joke of it, but Beate knew he was beginning to fade.

I pass her a hanky and while she talks, she bunches it between our hands.

“The night after his father died, I went outside with our baby to show him the full moon. It lit up the whole street. A piano was playing in one of the flats and it reminded me of the times when Rainer visited every day and I watched him dance with Ilse and Birgit. The music kept taking me back further, to the safer time before Birgit came. I knew I must stop thinking about the past, but what was left? The Wall had taken me from Ilse, and the war had destroyed my husband and parents. My life was in pieces, but I had this beautiful child, who deserved a future. I told him this great, bright moon was shining on both sides of the Wall, but as I said the words, it was impossible for me to believe it.”