The Berlin Crossing (37 page)

‘You have a good name,’ she whispered. ‘A good, strong name.
Michael Ritter
. Michael the knight.’ A kiss, a sigh in the darkness of the unlit bedroom. ‘Sir Michael,
my
knight.’

‘I never thought of that.’ Why were we whispering? ‘
Ritter
, yes, the knight.’

‘Men!’ She was giggling like a small girl. ‘They can’t even see what’s in front of their eyes.’

Desire stirred in me. ‘I hope you can see what’s in front of you now, Lady Jennifer.’

It was a long, dreamy night. The curtains were open, the red neon of a nightclub across the road pulsed like a silent heartbeat
on the wall opposite the bed. Sometimes the whoosh of a late-night car came in from the night, the pounding bass of a car
stereo. Her nearness made magic in the night, lent enchantment to it all – every flash of light or shadow, every stir and
silence in the darkness. I knew, holding her in my arms, that my life was forever changed.

Afterwards, looking back on those first weeks and months with Jennifer, I could not distinguish one day from another, one
loving from another. It’s like holding a book you have read and loved but the pages are stuck together, cannot be separated,
leaf by leaf, page from page. Still, it’s in your hands. The love, too.

And she could read me like a book. I was wondering how to tell her when she saved me the trouble.

‘You’re going back, aren’t you?’ We were walking by the sea, collars turned up against November and the wind.

‘Yes.’ I looked away from her, out at the white-topped waves rumbling in the darkness. ‘I have to.’

‘Back to your workers’ dawn.’

‘That sort of thing isn’t allowed in the great new reunified Bundesrepublik.’ I felt her hand squeeze mine. ‘Or at least it’s
frowned upon by the new powers that be.’

‘But you’re going back anyway.
Mein Ritter ohne Furcht und Tadel.
’ She said it in German. My knight in shining armour.

‘Maybe I’m the wrong kind of knight for today’s Germany.’

‘You don’t really believe that.’

‘I think maybe Roland Feldmann was the
real
knight.’ We stopped on the dark prom, hand in hand, facing the sea. ‘Look at it, a quiet place on the edge of nowhere, my
father comes out of it like Sir Lancelot and gives his life for – for love.’

Jennifer leaned against me, her fingers tightening around mine.

‘All of that’s true.’ She knew the story, had listened to my words about it all more than once. ‘But maybe your mother is
the real knight – a “lady knight” – of it all. She
lived
a life for you. It can’t have been easy, and that’s putting it mildly. She had only a memory to keep her going and that was
a memory she could never talk about. It was all she had. That,’ fingers tightening again, ‘and you.’

My mother’s face came at me out of the darkness above the Atlantic waves. The penny-pinching in the flat opposite the railway
station, the mend-and-make-do philosophy.

‘You’re right, Jen.’ I kissed her lightly. ‘As usual.’

‘So.’ She didn’t look at me now, just stared out at the dark expanse of sand, at the unseen waves. ‘When are you leaving?’

‘In a few days.’

‘Christmas is only a few weeks away.’

‘I can’t explain it, I just want to be home.’

‘And us? You and me?’

‘I love you.’ The words seemed inadequate but I said them again anyway. ‘I love you. Come with me.’

‘You think I’d let you waltz out of here without me?’

‘So you’ll come.’

‘It’s only a few weeks to Christmas, Michael.’ She reached up to muss my hair. ‘Some of us are working folk. I can’t just
walk out on them at the busiest time of the year.’

‘Then come for Silvester,’ I said, ‘for New Year’s Eve.’

‘Michael, after Christmas the whole country goes mad on Sales.’ She said it with a capital S. ‘They’ll need me in the shop
until January.’

‘Money!’ I snorted. ‘Always money!’

‘Don’t knock it, my Teutonic knight. You’re going to need some loot to support this Irish colleen in your Bundesrepublik.’

A car cruised by, headlights sweeping the darkness, somebody bound for home, perhaps late after a long day in some shop or
factory. A small dog yapped past, dragging its owners on the lead, a young couple out for their constitutional from their
mortgaged semi-detached. Who was I to take this gorgeous creature from such domesticity to such uncertainty?

‘Maybe you should wait until I’ve found a job.’

‘What happened to my knight in shining armour?’

‘I’ve told you I was fired—’

‘Michael!
I’m
a worker too. I don’t expect someone else to hand me my dawn or my anything else.’ She put her finger to my lips. ‘No more
daft talk. You just have that flat sparkling for me when I arrive in January. I always did want to visit the ancient city
of Brandenburg-on-the-Havel!’

I had to run to catch up with her, skipping along the prom. Her face shone in the light of the street lamps, laughing and
unafraid.

December 1994, Berlin

I left the train from Schonefeld airport at Hackescher Market. Below the elevated railway tracks the marketplace was stirring
to morning life. Cafe waiters fiddled at positioning tables, chairs, plastic menus. Stall operators played dominoes on their
trestle tables with their cartons of bric-a-brac, books, records, bits and pieces of forgotten, discarded lives.

I made my way down the station steps and under the railway arch. The nearest cafe looked no different from the rest and the
Turkish waiter was quick with the coffee. I could have gone inside but I sat under the striped awning and turned my collar
up against the December bite and let the hot coffee and the
bauernfrühstück
– fried potatoes and eggs – warm me, ease the tiredness out of me. I hadn’t slept on the night bus from Galway to Dublin,
or on the dawn flight to Berlin: the heady love-making with Jennifer before the frantic dash for the bus was too much with
me on the long haul over land and sea.

And there was something about the Hackescher Market which made sleep seem absurd: the energy of these unfettered capitalists,
with their shops and stalls and cafes, was as palpable as the rumble of the trains above our heads. The Holy Grail they sought
was nothing more exalted than bankable currency but they were, nevertheless, full of religious zeal in their commercial crusade.

Enough
. Who was I, unemployed teacher-cum-scribbler, to look down my sometime Party member’s nose at their buying and selling? My
Uncle Terry had been blunt in reminding me of my economic status. Although he’d overlooked my lowly status the day before
I left, when he’d told me he’d been looking at the Berlin property market, that perhaps I’d like to locate some suitable letting
properties for him in what he felt sure was ‘a rising market’. I would be paid a percentage of the rents I collected: ‘You
can’t lose, Michael.’ I told him I’d think about it. I had, for about a second.

Terry wasn’t an easy man for me to like. In a way, he’d cost my father his life, condemned my mother to an existence founded
on loneliness. It had been – as usual – Jennifer who reminded me that, without Terry, Roland Feldmann and Petra Ritter would
never have met in that cafe in East Berlin.

I paid the Turkish waiter, shouldered my rucksack. I was travelling light. It didn’t take much to keep you going for six months
– a couple of weeks in the London hostel, the rest of the time in Ireland – although the traders in the Hackescher Market
probably wouldn’t like to hear that.

Trains ran about once an hour from the Zoogarten station to Brandenburg but first I had unfinished business to attend to.
I went back under the arch and across to the tram stop.

Third time lucky
. I’d tried twice, during the months I’d commuted to Mauerstrasse, excavating the old Stasi files. The staff got to know me;
in the mornings my files were waiting for me. It had been the cross-referencing that led me to him; finding his name in Berlin’s
new and improved telephone directory had been a surprise.

But two trips on the tram had led only to a locked door on the
second floor of a shabby apartment block in Pankow. On the second occasion the next-door occupant – an elderly woman in hairnet,
housecoat and slippers – had peeped out into the corridor for just long enough to let me know that her absent-silent neighbour
had a fondness for the drink. I’d hammered again on the door but it had remained unopened.

The mid-morning tram was almost empty. A couple of women with plastic shopping bags, an old man reading a newspaper. Tram
passengers who seemed not to have caught the city’s tide of prosperity. Maybe they were too slow. Or maybe they had old Party
cards hidden in their inside pockets.

The tram rattled north through the wide streets. The tram stops had been upgraded to include full-colour advertisements for
beer and cigarettes; the peeling apartment blocks on either side remained as they had been when my father had made his own
journey north through neighbouring streets. Only a few streets separated our journeys yet we travelled on different planets.

Maybe the travellers hadn’t changed.

I got off at the town hall in Pankow. The few shops on the street had cabbages and potatoes on display in boxes, brushes and
plastic buckets hanging from wall hooks. There wasn’t much evidence of any commercial tigers out here, Celtic or German.

I waited at the traffic lights beside the supermarket, crossed the street, and swung left. Our new masters hadn’t got around
to fixing pavements or applying any paint in these side streets.
Sauerkohl und Diverse
, the wall beside a boarded-up street-level window proclaimed, ‘Sauerkraut and Miscellaneous’, the words painted directly
on to the crumbling wall in the world that was gone. I wondered what ‘miscellaneous’ items had been sold or bartered through
that window, what lives had been lived behind it. And where those lives were now being lived.

The block I sought was one of a group of six. All six blocks
looked the same, varying only in degrees of undernourishment, abandonment. Windows broken, a few boarded up. Metal rails on
tiny balconies rusted, bent or just missing. A few windows gleamed, polished by hardy owners who had decided to tough it out
among the graffiti and the spilled garbage. Or maybe they simply had no choice.

I figured that the occupant with the drink problem in the second-floor apartment definitely had no choice. His CV included
more baggage than a Party member’s card.

When I knocked on the door of his apartment, it was, again, the neighbouring door that opened. The old lady seemed to be wearing
the same slippers and housecoat. It was over six months since she’d seen me but I could see the recognition dawning in her
eyes.

‘He’s in there, definitely.’ In a whisper. ‘I can hear him.’ Her door closed as silently as it had been opened.

I hammered on the door, then again. And again. Three times was enough. More than enough.

From behind the door came a soft, shuffling noise. I stood in front of the peephole.

The door opened, the length of a security chain.

‘Yes?’ A chain smoker’s hoarseness in the single word.

And for a moment I was speechless, struck dumb by this voice from a lost world.

‘Yes?’ he said again. ‘What d’you want?’

‘I want to talk to you, Major Fuchs.’

I could hear the gulping noise in his throat.

‘There’s no one here of that name.’

The door began to close.

I stuck my foot in the opening and pushed. I had journeyed too far, through too much pain, to be fobbed off now by a flimsy
door chain.

‘Open the fucking door, Fuchs, or I’ll break it down.’ I kept my voice low. ‘Or maybe I’ll start shouting that you’re Major
Fuchs from the Stasi.’

‘What do you want? Who are you?’

‘You knew my parents, Major Fuchs.’

‘Go away. I’m going to phone the police.’

‘Do that, they might like to hear from an old comrade.’ This time I kicked the door. ‘Now open up before I lose my temper
with you.’

‘Who—’

‘Now!’

I let him close the door, heard the chain rasp along its metal slide.

The door opened and Major Fuchs, late of the Stasi, stood in the doorway looking up at me.

And I was looking down into those yellow eyes that my father’s scribbled words had described, that Pastor Bruck had spoken
of. The strange yellow was faded now, the eyes rheumy with age, perhaps with drink.

‘What d’you want from me?’ He was small, shrunken, the strands of greasy hair drawn flat across a balding pate, but he stood
defiantly in front of me in the doorway.

I pushed past him, shoved the door shut behind me with the sole of my shoe.

A staleness filled the small living room, as though the windows were never opened. A stack of old newspapers rested on the
floor beside a button-back armchair. The sink in the recessed kitchen area was almost clean; judging by the single cup and
plate on the draining board, Major Fuchs didn’t do much entertaining.

‘Tell me what you want.’

‘Why don’t you sit down, Major Fuchs.’

‘Don’t call me that!’

‘Sit.’

He looked even more shrunken in the old armchair. I noticed his freckled hands, the odd way he held them, the knuckles like
huge, misshapen knobs.

‘Arthritis.’ He caught me looking. ‘The doctors say they can do nothing. Lying bastards.’ He drew the frayed cuffs of the
brown cardigan down until they covered the twisted hands. ‘Tell me what you want or get out and leave me alone.’

‘You knew my mother and father.’ It was hard to believe that this gnomish creature, cornered in an armchair, could have inspired
fear, inflicted pain.

‘Big deal,’ he said. ‘I knew lots of people.’

‘You broke my mother’s fingers.’ I tried to keep my voice steady. ‘With a hammer. In a printing works in Bad Saarow. Over
thirty years ago.’

The eyes blinked. I saw the hands fidget under the frayed sleeve ends.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’