The Berlin Crossing (36 page)

My grandfather reaches for it, turns the pages. I sense that he is seeing only the writing, that he is not reading the words.
His wife
takes the notebook, looks at a page, turns another. She hands the notebook to Terry.

‘It’s Roland’s writing,’ she says. ‘I’d know it anywhere.’

‘So what!’ Terry glares at his parents, at me. ‘This guy could have found it or stolen it! We don’t know anything about him!’

My own anger is colder. I have no wish to be related to this wheezing, round-shouldered uncle of mine but neither will I allow
him to take away from me this personal past that I have spent so long excavating. I realize, looking across the table at Terry,
that this past is important to me, that it is not lightly to be taken from me.

‘Roland Feldmann,’ I say quietly, ‘was my father. A friend at the Humboldt did the DNA test.’ It would be too painful for
them to hear that I sent a fragment from the remains in the ground behind Pastor Bruck’s church for testing, along with a
swab from my mouth. ‘You can see the results if you like.’

‘At the Humboldt University?’ A strange mixture of reverence and longing in the old man’s voice, in his face. ‘In Berlin?’
He looks across at his son. ‘That’s good enough for anybody, Terry.’ His voice gentle, even pleading.

‘So why are you here?’ Terry demands. ‘What do you want?’

‘It’s hard to explain. I never knew my father – it’s difficult even to call him that. I thought I should meet Roland’s family.’
It sounds inadequate and I know it. ‘I didn’t expect . . .’ I look at my grandparents.

‘You didn’t expect to find two old relics still alive,’ my grandfather says.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—’

‘Yes, you did.’ The pale blue eyes are twinkling. ‘Tell the truth.’

I can only shrug.

Terry won’t let it go.

‘So you want nothing from us, right? So tell us who you are, what you do. How d’you earn a living?’

‘I write.’ Again I look in my rucksack, place
Workers’ Dawn
on the table. The full-colour portrait of a shirt-sleeved, muscular factory operative stares up at us from the dust jacket.

Terry handles the book as if it were radioactive. He gingerly turns it over, looks at my author picture on the back cover
with its thumbnail biography.

‘You’re telling us you make a living from this stuff?’

‘I also teach.’

‘Where?’

‘I’m unemployed at the moment.’

Terry guffaws. ‘An unemployed scribbler lands on our doorstep but tells us he wants nothing from us! Tell that to the marines!’

His father has my book in his hands. He touches my grandmother’s arm, points at the back cover biography.

‘It says here you have a PhD from Rostock University, yes?’ I nod. ‘So we must call you Dr Ritter.’

‘I’ve been called worse in recent times.’

‘I’ll bet you have.’ Terry has taken back the book from his father and is studying the imprint page. ‘This thing was published
in nineteen eighty-nine in Leipzig.’ He looks almost happy. ‘You’re a fucking communist, aren’t you, all the way from good
old East Germany, the home of democracy and freedom?’

‘Yes.’ Defiance stirs in me. ‘I was a member of the Party.’

‘The same fucking Party that shot our Roland?’

‘The Party didn’t—’

‘Yes, the Party didn’t shoot anybody; they just gave the fucking orders, right?’

I have no answer for him. I am not about to try to explain to
this choleric fellow that this paradox keeps me awake at night; that the country I loved had killed the father I never knew.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ Terry slams the book down on the table, leans back in his chair, work well done. His wife is nodding
sagely at his side.

My grandfather clears his throat; we wait for him to speak.

‘Your Aunt Rosa was a communist,’ he says, ‘your mother’s sister. The Nazis got rid of her.’

I almost smile.

‘It wasn’t the Nazis who killed my brother,’ Terry says. ‘Not if we’re to believe this fellow.’

‘This “fellow” is your nephew, Terry.’ My grandfather’s voice is even. ‘At least I believe he is.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ Terry says.

‘What we’ll see about right now,’ my grandmother says, ‘is a bite of lunch.’

‘Some of us have work to do.’ Terry pushes back his chair, gets to his feet. ‘I’m going back to the shop.’

His wife leaves the kitchen with him. We hear their voices, indistinct, in the hall.

‘You’ll stay for lunch?’ My grandmother looks at me. ‘Won’t you, Michael?’

It’s the first time she has called me by name.

‘Yes, thank you.’ I don’t know, yet, what to call her.

‘And we’ll be seeing you again? You’ll be staying for a few days?’

‘Yes, I’ll be staying for a few days.’

The few days became a few weeks, stretched to a few months. The premises of Feldmann, Watchmakers and Jewellers, contained
a one-bedroom apartment on the upper floor, behind the workshop and the office areas. My grandfather took me to see the flat
that first Sunday afternoon. The entrance was from an unpaved yard at the back of the store, just one of a number of service
entrances and delivery bays. The back door of Feldmann’s was as nondescript as its neighbours’ but it was steel-plated and
carried three locks. The old man locked it again from the inside before we climbed the bare, narrow stairs to the first floor.

Another door, another pair of locks. The old man never fumbled, just drew the right key from the heavy ring each time. Inside,
my grandfather pointed to yet another steel door at the end of the corridor.

‘That’s the shop,’ he said, ‘the workshops and offices.’ He was opening the other door in the corridor. ‘This is what I want
to show you.’

The flat inside smelled musty, as if it hadn’t been used in a long time. It was furnished but the rooms echoed emptily to
the pock-pock of the old man’s stick as he limp-marched through the rooms. Living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. A
faded magnolia on the walls, a sense of abandonment in the stale air.

‘We used to have staff living here,’ he said. ‘Now they want mod cons, new kitchens, shiny shower units. It’s been empty for
years.’

I didn’t tell him that it felt familiar, would not have been out of place in any of the old apartment blocks back home. I
knew why I’d been invited to this viewing.

‘It’s fine,’ I said.

He looked at me, smiled.

‘You’ll stay a while then?’

It was as simple as that. No deal, no agreement as to how long I’d stay. We both knew it couldn’t be any other way. We knew
next to nothing about each other yet we shared a long history.

My Uncle Terry wasn’t interested in exploring any shared history. Creating any kind of friendship didn’t interest him either.
When my grandfather suggested that, in the interests of added security, I should be given keys to the steel door that separated
the flat from the shop, he simply said, ‘No.’ He gave the same answer to the suggestion that I might pick up the mail from
the shop’s private box at the post office, or even make hand deliveries (there weren’t many) to customers in the town. I didn’t
care, although I’d have been glad to do something to please the old fellow. I understood why my grandfather didn’t contest
Terry’s imperious refusals: to have lost one son was enough . . .

Roland Feldmann had two younger sisters, both primary school teachers, both married with kids and living in Dublin. On a weekend
in September both sisters arrived in Galway, minus husbands and broods, to conduct their personal investigation of this unexpected
nephew from Germany. Lunch in my grandparents’ house, where these heavily made-up aunts had grown up, was a strained affair.
Politeness, extreme civility, was the
essential accompaniment of the food but I had a sense, through it all, of husbands waiting in Dublin for a full report of
how their inheritance might be affected by my arrival. I chewed and swallowed and sipped and went through my story yet again,
handing around the postcard-size photos of my mother.

‘You can see why our Roland fell for her,’ my grandfather said.

His daughters nodded politely but offered no comment.
An uneducated floozy who seduced our impressionable brother:
say it, I thought. Like me, they held their tongues. I wanted to stand up, declare that I had come only to find out what
kind of place and people had produced the man my mother had fallen in love with, that I had no interest in their present or
future wealth. For all that, I was warmed by my grandparents’ acceptance of me; if they had misgivings about their son’s brief
and impetuous affair with my mother, such misgivings were never voiced.

It was partly the old folks who kept me there. Finding living grandparents was at first a novelty; as the weeks passed and
we became easier with one another, we became, also, something like family. Sometimes one or other of them would say something
about settling in Galway; more than once my grandfather made noises about redecorating the flat behind the shop and putting
in new furniture. I made non-committal replies. My grandfather, especially, knew that I couldn’t go on simply living rent-free
in his flat and doing nothing productive. ‘You’re a Doctor of Literature,’ he told me, ‘you could get work in the university
here.’ I walked through the campus, through the odd mix of grandiose Victorian and ugly modern architecture, and I went out
the back gate on to a traffic-clogged road. I never went back.

I had the time – and the new trainers – to walk the rest of the town. Around the rabbit warren of inner-city streets. East
along the busy Dublin road, forever choked and choking with traffic.
West by the sea; even here it was traffic, not the Atlantic Ocean, that ruled the waves of the town’s daily life.

I didn’t care much for the place. It seemed to count cars and punts, the local currency. Looking at the bill for a coffee
and cake could give you vertigo. And still, as in a mania, the town went on reproducing itself: the skyline was scarred with
the steel of cranes, the air barked with the growl of diggers and drills. Housing estates were mushrooming like a virus, the
shop tills went on ringing.
Another new Berlin
.

I called at my grandparents’ house most days. Coffee and talk, turning the pages of photo albums, picking a slow way through
the biscuit tin of snapshots that had never made it to the albums. Trawling the years, discovering and exploring a world that
I had never known but which was growing into me like a transplanted organ. Sitting in that big kitchen at the back of the
flat-roofed house we gave a simple, existential joy to one another, those two old folks and myself.

‘You’ll be staying for Christmas, Michael.’ My grandmother slipped it in, innocently, as she was pouring me a fresh cup of
coffee. She had her back to the window, her face in shadow; beyond the window the November day was dark, grey-skied.

‘But of course he’ll be staying for Christmas.’ My grandfather was seated in characteristic pose: short body ramrod straight,
leathery hands clutching the knobbed head of his cane, the cane planted firmly on the floor between his small, slippered feet.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. Their friendship – their
love
– was seductive but I was tired of my aimless walking, weary of the view from the flat behind the shop.

‘Terry will come round, don’t worry.’ My grandfather tried to smile.

‘It’s not that, I just feel I should be
doing
something.’ Now
it was my turn to try to smile. ‘Don’t ask me what. Just
something
, anything.’ I swallowed. ‘Back home.’

‘And what about Jennifer?’ My grandfather now trying
not
to smile, an innocent cat among the pigeons.

I laughed. My grandfather didn’t miss much on his forays into the House of Feldmann. Maybe, I figured, you had to be like
that to establish a successful business in an alien land, to become, yourself, a part of that landscape.

‘What about Jennifer?’

‘She’s a lovely girl, Michael. You’re not just going to walk away from her, are you?’

I’d have stayed there all that time anyway but knowing Jennifer made it easier.

We’d become lovers a few weeks after I’d given her my book. Not wanting another face-off with Terry, I’d waited outside the
shop for her; the eyebrows went up in mock surprise when she stepped out on to the street a little after six o’clock and saw
me standing there, rucksack hanging from my left shoulder. She took the book, she took my arm and we went for a drink in a
pub around the corner.

It was probably in the same pub, a couple of weeks later, that she broached, with gentleness, the subject of Terry.

‘He’s a nice man, a good boss and now he’s worried.’

I sipped the black beer, waited for her to go on.

‘C’mon, Michael,’ a gentle dig in the ribs, ‘you know what’s worrying him.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘He thinks this East German has arrived on his doorstep looking for his share of the loot.’ Another sip
of the bitter stout. ‘What do you think, Jennifer?’

‘If I thought you were a gold-digger, Herr Michael Ritter, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you.’

‘I came,’ I said, ‘just searching for a little information, maybe even some answers. Instead a miracle, I find a grandfather,
a grandmother.’

Another dig in my ribs; the young barman looked away, laughing to himself.

‘And?’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘I found you too.’

We slipped into an indulgent daily routine: a walk together after work through the emptying streets, a drink and a bite to
eat, a stroll to her flat in an old three-storey building beside the river. It was easy to fall in love with her; it was not
so easy just to say goodnight outside her door. ‘It won’t hurt to wait,’ she’d say, kissing me and pushing me away at the
same time. She was wrong about that but at the same time I knew the truth of her words.

It was in the flat behind Feldmann, Watchmakers and Jewellers that we made love for the first time. She’d been quieter than
usual in the cafe but by then I knew what to expect: she was always like that on Saturday evening, the busiest day of the
week, as if she’d been forced to give away too much of herself over the glass-topped counter. She picked at her meal. No,
she didn’t want to go for a walk. Not the cinema either. ‘Let’s go home, Michael.’ She looked at me. ‘To your place.’ She
was even quieter in the flat. It was her first time there but she made no comment. ‘Just hold me,’ she said. We lay beside
each other on top of the bed and she fell asleep in my arms. I was still awake, my arms around her, when she stirred a couple
of hours later. She kissed me, nestled her body into mine. Making love to her was like finding myself, like coming home after
a long journey.