Tying Down The Lion (26 page)

“We know where we’re going,” I tell her, stowing the map away in my bag.

It’s a good thing one of us is being mature. When Mum looks up at the signs that tell her she can smoke, I have to take the thing out of the packet for her. I light it after an age of waiting for it to stay steady between her lips, ramming it in place with one hand and striking the match with the other while she tries to hold the box still.

She looks quite nice in her peasant clothes. If President Kennedy’s wife wore a headscarf and a camel cardigan, and had a small cold-sore distorting her upper lip, then that’s a fair picture of Mum. At least she doesn’t have butcher’s arms and flashing cod’s eyes like Gillian’s mother. Mum’s eyes are a black-treacle colour, but too bright with pain and worry.

We listen to the rhythm of the train while she smokes, watching the progress of the Wall.

“Are you nervous, Mum?”

“Yes. I have no idea exactly why. Maybe that’s why I am nervous.”

“Yes, it probably is.”

We look out of the window in silence when the train takes us into a subdued world of smoky slate-grey tenements. Many of them are derelict, roofless since the war. One or two coloured blocks flash by and on some of the shabby high-rises I notice surprising painted patches: muted red or sea-green or a hopeful sort of turquoise. But hundreds of unpainted concrete apartment blocks are still pitted with war damage, their grim curtains often closed. A tattered poster shows Uncle Sam with devilish fangs and deadly weapons, and insists that
Americans Go Home
.

Soon we are standing beneath the vaulted glass of the frantic Friedrichstrasse station, feeling the thunder of trains in the underground maze of tunnels under our feet, tunnels that turned into emergency hospitals, and the trains into wards, during the last days of the war. And we begin the quest to cross the border.

In between the two main platforms at Friedrichstrasse station a barrier under armed guard, watched by cameras, sniffer-dogs and the State Security Police, cuts two distinct halves. One half is for people in East Berlin, separated from the world they cannot enter, and the other for travellers like us. Whenever a train stops, the guards and dogs swarm over it, inside, underneath and on top.

Our queue inches forward.

“We are standing where thousands of children waited for a train to take them away after Kristallnacht,” Mum says.

I look up at the glassy dome way above the rumbling platform, the sun striking my face. How would I feel if I were an orphan in a long queue, leaving myself behind, holding hands with a little boy like Victor who is leaving his mother forever?

I might envy him for having a mother or pity him for being torn away from her. If the Nazis barked at him to stop crying, I would tell him to stare straight ahead without blinking to hold the tears back and grip his hand tighter. A stranger’s hand is sometimes all there is.

And what about the little boy’s mother? Until the moment he was out of sight, she would smile and flap a farewell handkerchief. After walking out of the station into the sun, she would listen for the last vibration on the track to settle before her smile disappears and she dares to cry. She would hesitate before turning away, scared to go home and see his clockwork train at a standstill, his ranks of cowboys and Indians waiting. Her own torture and death lie ahead, and the one bittersweet comfort is that he will soon be hundreds of miles away, somewhere safe enough for him to call home.

I feel Mum’s hand in mine and I should squeeze it tight, but I am not ready.

We trudge through three passport checks and customs control, cooking to death in a waiting room for two hours. It reeks of Alsatian, perspiration and fear. I feel more ill than I did in the car.

A woman with a blue suitcase sits bolt upright, staring into space. Her baby cries without a pause for an hour while her travelling companions try to soothe it. The woman speaks in broken sounds. Even I can tell it’s not German. It isn’t any language. Without a hint of emotion she takes the sweating, sleeping baby, plonks her in a basket and strokes the blue suitcase on her lap as if it’s a cat.

Her companions understand. They glare at anyone staring. This is their Bwa-Bwa. She lives in East Berlin too, in this yellow-tiled halfway house that leads to everywhere from anywhere.

At the counter for compulsory currency exchange we swap our western marks for our dutiful five eastern marks at the shocking rate of one for one. Like Cinderella’s gown and coach, the money will be useless after midnight.

“I’ll look out for the Ryvita coated in cack,” I whisper to Mum as she puts the money away, hoping she’s less resistant to rude words today.

“Indeed, right so,” she says. “Shite pretendin’ to be chocolate.”

This is a perfect take-off of Gaye Kennedy’s Irish grandfather who is always saying, “Jaysus Mary Mother of Christ, now isn’t this world just full of shite?”

“He had Friedrichstrasse in mind, to be sure,” I tell Mum. She gives me the flicker of a smile.

The wait stretches into the third hour and our nerves stretch with it, the final guard peering at the visa and squinting at us far too long. He asks to see Mum’s bag and flicks through all its contents, peering at her Trebor Mints and used tissues and twiddling her lipstick up and down. He’s suspicious of her Oaking Library membership card, turning it over and over, the plastic cover shining under the strip-lights. He slips it out of the cover. Back in, back out. He asks a lot of questions about the library and about Oaking, that infamous hotbed of anti-communism. It probably is, actually.

I groan when he pulls out the picture of Dad with the Oaking Eleven. Mum always keeps it in her bag because it falls out of Dad’s pocket with his cigarettes and matches. The guard is fascinated in his wary, oily way. He wants to know all about Dad, how old he is and how he met Mum. I can’t understand much of the conversation, but the long wait is making me sweat. I can smell the dogs. I can hear them straining against their leashes, braced to spring out of corners. The room is bristling with guns.

Nothing, not even Cybermen starting World War Three in the school showers (which is the most dreaded place on earth when your mum provides a towel the size of a postage-stamp) could make me feel this anxious. I told Dad I would take care of Mum, but how can anyone look after someone here? If you took off all your clothes and did the Twist on top of the vending-machine in an English railway-station, your polite fellow-passengers would turn away. But here, everyone is raw meat on a butcher’s counter. I can hear blades sharpening. Or is it the release of a safety-catch, the click of a trigger? I really must stop peeking at Victor’s
Commando
.

Mum is still knee-deep in conversation, trying to explain the rules of cricket. A man with an ironing-board under his arm is whistling. A woman in the next queue has a shopping-basket on wheels with a tyre missing. It squeaks when she shuffles forward and she keeps apologising. A giggling child bounces a balloon on a string. A puffy-cheeked family play pass-the-parcel with a purple-faced baby in a papoose. An old man sighs as he slots another cigarette into the gap between his front teeth. And all the time, the blank-faced guards in their polished boots show no hint of our Emotions. It’s hard to believe they are ordinary people.

They watch me watching them, making me feel sick with nerves. The orange juice I drank at breakfast rises in my throat as throat-scorching bile. I hope they don’t demand a fine from people who spew in Friedrichstrasse station because my sock is clean out of Deutschmarks. I feel the colour draining from my face.

A voice asks do I want a seat. I think it’s the man with the ironing-board. But when I sit on a chair and take a deep breath, my eyes focus again and there’s a young guard crouched down beside me, his Kalashnikov three inches from my leg.

“OK?” he says.

I nod, not trusting myself to speak. He is terribly good-looking.

“Sit. One minute, yes?”

I nod a great deal more and start breathing again. I hope I don’t land him in trouble for stepping out of line. And I hope I’m sitting with poise like Tuesday, not some hopeless square. Before he returns to his spot, he wishes me a nice stay in his country as if I have just arrived in the Garden of Eden.

“Jacqueline, stay with me,” Mum calls, before turning back to her guard’s questions about our two years’ worth of bus tickets and her dog-eared invitation to Dad’s work’s dance. There are twenty minutes of interrogation about Dad’s job. The guard approves of him being a prison-warder. We should have brought an autographed picture of him with D-Wing. Gillian’s mother has a signed photograph of Roger Moore with one eyebrow arched. She met him when she was lumbering after an escaped budgie, but lost sight of him when he soared over the liver-paste plant. The budgie, that is. I doubt Roger Moore has ever taken flight over Oaking Potted Meats.

The conversation makes less sense than the squeaky wheel or the clanking ironing-board. The queue sighs and shuffles. The guard turns back to our passes. He sighs, flicking through the pages, prolonging the agony just because he can. I imagine him ironing his uniform in a tiny room painted the colour of oxtail soup. I strain to see his sinister, long boots behind the desk.

The officials here are the same as any; prison warders, policemen, Salvation Army officers, traffic wardens, Girl Guides. When Gaye Kennedy was made Sixer of Kingfisher patrol, she turfed a trespassing Scout out of her jamboree, but not before he scorched his elbow on her camp-fire. He was only dropping off a batch of his auntie’s drop-scones. The uniform changes people, especially if there are badges attached to it. The man staring at us and our papers has become a human barrier. Keeping people in. Keeping people out.

He stifles a yawn as he works through our pile again, maybe masking a greater fear than ours. Everyone, uniformed or not, is being watched here.

His routine is precise and unhurried. Papers, one at a time; glasses on, glasses off; passports, one at a time; gather documents into piles; glasses on; straighten the ranks of rubber stamps already lined up; glasses off. There is no smiling. He’s not much older than me, but he already has a trio of sharp vertical creases between his eyebrows. A feathery wisp of ginger hair has strayed out of his cap. His skin is raw from shaving at dawn with cold water and a cold blade.

He sneezes, an odd bark of a sneeze, which interrupts the official proceedings. He sneezes nine more times in a Germanic rhythm I recognise from dance classes. Mum passes him a tissue, which he drops. Muttering and red-faced, he picks it up and trumpets into it. He looks at the tissue with such disbelief I can feel a vibration from Mum, the smallest muffled snort that has nothing to do with fear. Flustered by the unscheduled sneeze, he sends us on our way. The barrier rises. Mum and I are free to leave, whatever that means here.

We have time to explore before Ilse finishes her shift, but Mum looks lost. Mothers are supposed to know where to go when they bring their children into their home city, but I suppose if I returned to Oaking twenty years from now and the enemy had blown Audette Gardens sky-high, I might be lighting a fag and saying, “
Gott im Himmel
.”

“Mum? Come on.”

She drops the cigarette and crushes it for ages under the sole of one sling-back.

“Mum, it’s all right. It’s just different this time.”

She stops crushing and looks up.

“Absolutely correct, Jacqueline. This time, I’m with my daughter.”

We link arms. Thank you, Mum.

If West Berlin is a buzzing hive of activity, East Berlin is a single bee asleep on a flower. Not just subdued, but utterly silent, apart from the occasional lawnmower-rattle of a Trabant chugging by, trailing its fog of bluish smoke.

But East Berlin is somehow spectacular. They didn’t just take a meat-cleaver and cut though the centre of the city like Stan splitting a lamb carcass. The Wall wriggles, skirting around huge stubborn monuments, lassoing some of the best into this side; museums, theatres, cathedrals, some of them crumbly and casting crazy shadows, most of them blemished. Their mouldings have shed chunks of stone and corners have been shaved from walls. Carvings are chipped and facades are flaking, but the deep-red town hall and the ornate cathedral are more beautiful than the buildings in the West. East Berlin is more than plain cake. It is an iced fancy, if rather a squashed one.

Mum points out the remainder of the once grand Hotel Adlon, alone on the grassed-over square that was once brimming with beautiful embassies. Although the air-raids scarcely touched the hotel, it perished when the Red Army arrived, drank the contents of the wine cellar and set it on fire. At least East Berlin has preserved its one remaining wing and given it a new, if less dazzling, frontage.

It used to have the swish address of Number One, Unter den Linden, but East Berlin has renumbered the street, beginning at their end, making Hotel Adlon the less impressive Seventy-Seven.

“I was taken inside as a small child,” Mum says. “A pianist played part of the Mendelssohn concerto I grew to love, the slow section. I tried so hard to learn that piece. I never tired of it.”

“Isn’t a slow part easier to play?”

“No, but it is soothing. If I hear it on the transistor, I think of being a child. For a few moments, I have a sense of time being held back especially for me, a luxury that was lost a long time ago.”

When I try to imagine Mum playing the piano, she looks like a different person, one that only she might recognise.

“I will never forget the beautiful palm court and the oriental fountain surrounded by its carved black elephants,” she says. “But I remember most the…how do you say it…the gentleness of that time.”

“Do you mean genteel?”

“No, I think I mean gentle.”

Despite the sun, the atmosphere is frosty, as if the fancy cake is in cold storage. In the hushed, ghost-town stillness, our Western heels, however flat and worn, sound thunderous. On this side of the city, we don’t weave around pillars smothered in advertisements or bustling crowds or girls in mini-skirts. Instead, we are dwarfed by the imposing French and German cathedrals, the striking concert hall and the elderly palace Peter Fechter was helping to repair before he tried to escape. All the grand buildings are still wading in war wreckage. Mum remembers gracious domes and pillars, a sculpture of a chariot drawn by griffins and a winged Pegasus. I try to imagine them, realising she wants to draw my eye away from the outcrop of socialist housing, great dark slabs of it in the background, shadowing the heart of the city.