Tying Down The Lion (32 page)

“How many patients here?” he asks, taking out a handkerchief to wipe his face.

“Eight hundred.”

“And you have enough doctors for them all?”

“Oh yes,” she says. “The Nazis may have stripped Jewish doctors of their qualifications, but they still allow them to treat Jewish patients. Nazis are scared of sick Jews.”

“So it pays to fall ill?”

“And to remain ill, Sir. This is not just a hiding-place. It is a ghetto. They are gathering us here in preparation for the camps. But they only want those who are well and thriving.”

“You’re saying it’s dangerous to recover?”

She nods, consulting her clipboard.

Rainer can no longer sit still. He paces, his shoes screeching on the polished floor. He takes a deep breath of the sweet, disinfected air, wishing he could stay too.

“We will do our best for her,” the nurse tells him. “This is a community. The patients in recovery look after the garden and grow vegetables for us all.”

She smiles for the first time, a brisk smile that tells Rainer it is time for him to leave this extraordinary refuge. Dawn is about to break. He can ask for no more. Eleora is finally at home.

***

“Nurse, the man who brought me here, can he visit?”

“If he came, we would let him in, Eleora. But he would be taking a risk. We are always being watched. He could be arrested for helping you.”

“But he brought me here.”

“It was dark. Now please rest.”

“How long did he stay?”

“He waited until he knew you would live.”

“How long?”

“All night.”

Eleora sinks back into the pillow, closes her eyes and prays for his safety.

***

I open my eyes as the train’s rhythm falters again, preparing to pass through another ghost-station. A man in our carriage gets up and stands at the door. Mum warns him the train won’t stop, but he stays there.

The ghost-station is almost pitch-dark. The train lumbers through, like a polite gent doffing his cap at a tramp.

The man pushes the window down.

“Er…” Mum says. “
Nein
…!”

The man wrenches the handle. The door swings open. A young woman leaps inside, into the man’s arms. He holds onto her with one arm, wrapping her in his coat, and slams the door shut with his free hand. They huddle together on a seat at the end of the carriage, while the train gathers speed.

It happened in seconds, but it takes me another moment to realise what we have just seen. Even above the racket of the train, I can hear the woman catching her breath in a series of gasps.

“What happened there?” Mum whispers.

“Oh my God, they only had a split-second.”

“What?”

“They must have had it all planned, Mum. He must have got word to her somehow. Told her which carriage he’d be in, so she could watch out for the door to open.”

The woman is free now. To the guard on the platform, she was a shape, a slight movement in the dim light. He had no time to raise his gun. In the murky shadows, she made the smallest shift. One turn of the kaleidoscope.

“I wonder, is she going home or leaving it?” Mum says.

“Going there, surely?”

“But before the Wall came, she might have always lived in the East, Jacqueline. Escaping to the West may mean she is leaving everything behind. Her job, her flat, her friends and relatives.”

“Mum, can’t you see the way the man’s looking at her? And the way she looks at him?”

Mum thinks about this before answering. Why does she always have to do that?

“They do look so very relieved,” she says.

“Exactly. And I bet she didn’t bother bringing him any bloody
Knusper Flocken
.”

“But she still has her life there. Some things she will miss.”

“Mum, they’re crazily in love. Head over heels. Can’t you tell? No, don’t look at them.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Suppose? It’s written all over them. I’d say she’s definitely coming home, no matter how many packets of cacky crispbread she’s left behind.”

I hope they have a bottle of champagne waiting at home.

While we sit in silence, thinking about the couple and all they can look forward to now, Mum keeps pressing her hand to her side. “Oh, Jacqueline, it hurts so badly.”

She has never gripped it this much, as if she is trying to push the pain deep inside. I remember Victor calling it a grenade and pray it is not about to detonate in this carriage.

9.
Realisation

A baby babbles. The family fuss over it, making those incoherent noises people offer babies. Mum’s hands are cold and clammy. Her face is gleaming like pearl. Even her hair looks paler against the dark roots I have never noticed before.

She groans and I stand up in a panic. Mothers are not supposed to make grunting noises. The family with the baby scowl as if we’re lunatics.

“We should ask them to stop the train, Mum.”

“Jacqueline, no. For God’s sake, don’t tell anyone.”

“But I don’t know what else to do, Mum. You look as if you’re about to faint.”

“Just keep talking. Singing. Anything. Take my mind off it, Jacqueline. I can cope. Just help me get back home first. I can’t be taken off here.”

“But you said they have National Health Service in the East, so we won’t have to pay.”

“I’d rather bloody pay.”

“All right. I suppose Beate will know what to do,” I tell her, although I imagine Axel would be more use. “It won’t be much longer, Mum, until we’re back in Schillerpark.”

“No, Jacqueline, I mean let’s change the ferry crossing and leave in the morning. I want to go home.”

“To Audette Gardens?”

“Of course, dear.”

I swallow the lump in my throat, remembering how she ran all the way to collect me from my first day of school with her slippers on, because she couldn’t wait to see me. I never believed Grandma when she said Mum needed to be first at the gates because German blood starts pumping nineteen-to-the-dozen at the slightest whiff of a contest.

“I won’t stop the train, Mum,” I promise her. “We’ll go on to the end.”

Dad will jump behind the wheel and Victor will grab T-K faster than he’s ever moved since the day he recreated the battle of the Little Big Horn on an ant hill. Only Grandma, as always, will object to the sudden uprooting.

“At least if we can’t stop at the ghost stations,” Mum gasps, “we can’t be trapped in the East. So if I die in this carriage, we can’t be taken prisoner.”

“Mum, shut up.”

“But I would be another casualty of the Wall.”

“Yes, you would.”

I sing “Jerusalem” and “There is a Green Hill Far Away” until I sound like a frog with laryngitis, but Mum doesn’t mind. When I run out of hymns, I resort to the Elf song I used to sing at Brownies, with a finale of “These Boots are Made for Walking” and “Last Train to Clarksville”. The wheels on the track strike up a faster rhythm, and we reach Wollankstrasse with Mum croaking along to the chorus.

“Thank you, Jacqueline,” she says, staggering out of the station. “You have matured here in Berlin.”

Singing the Elf song is mature, but I’m too young for a Berlei Gay Slant? Strike a light, I’ll never understand mothers.

As we step around the people living rough, my brand-new maturity makes me realise that being homeless is actually more likely this side of the Wall. Ilse said evictions are never necessary on her side because rents are low and state welfare is given to the sick and the drug addicts. Everyone is accounted for. No net to slip through.

Dad and Victor step out of the gloom, the Traveller parked behind them like an almost trusted friend. It feels like three lifetimes ago since we last saw them. I’m relieved to smell Brylcreem, tobacco and the essence of grumpy seven-year-old boy. I don’t even care if the Bad-Moon girls are hanging around. I might even light Cherie’s cheroot for her. I am an adult now. I might even stop checking behind my bedroom door for Ronald Biggs. I know people can be monsters, but it’s less exhausting to just accept that they exist.

And thank Ringo, Dad is smiling and hugging Mum so hard she is almost off her feet, although that might be down to her quietly passing out.

He piles us all into the car, exhaling smoke in dragon-like triumph. “God, I’m glad you’re back. I kept thinking of you being interrogated at the border. Victor and I went to stand as close as we could to that Brando Burger Gate thing, hoping we’d see you.”

“What time were you there?” I ask him.

“All day. I couldn’t drive anywhere. I just kept going round in circles.”

“Oh, Roy, it was so kind of you to worry.”

“Well, no, I got lost actually, Bridge. Reading the map made Victor spew up, Ma never stopped prattling and Beate was caterwauling to Sebastian. Christ, German lullabies are fierce. It sounded like chucking-out time at the Slug and Lettuce. When the petrol was running low and my ear-drums were fit to burst, I dropped Mum, Beattie and Seb off in Schillerpark, then Victor and I went to the Brando. I just wanted to see you. We waited there until your train was due.”

“All bloody day,” Victor whispers in my ear.

“Well if you’d been with me,” I tell him, handing over the hideous crispbread and watching his expressions change, contrary to the Five-Boys child, from delight to despair, “you’d have been dancing and eating chocolate that tastes of shite.”

How easy it is to make a great day sound utterly hideous.

Victor constructs the pre-fab on the drive back to Schillerpark, where Grandma is reading stories to a wakeful Sebastian and Beate is stirring a vat of goulash. Lord alive, twice in one day would be too much even for a Hungarian.

“How was my Ilse?” Beate asks, swaying in the doorway. Her white dressing-gown is loosely knotted and her hair is working its way out of its bun, as if she is falling apart.

“She is well,” Mum says, easing herself into a chair. “Thin and tired, but happy, do you not think, Jacqueline?”

We tell Beate about the bones of the day, but not its essence. She is incapable of taking it in.

“Sit and eat,” she slurs, sawing haphazard slices from a dark-brown loaf. Dad pours Mum a glass of water and I rescue the goulash from burning. Mum’s dilemma is carved into her face. How will she tell Beate we’re leaving?

Beate stumbles and the knife slices into her finger. Mum has to stagger across and hold it under the cold tap while Dad and I sit down, white-faced.

“Ach,
mein Gott
, Beate. You are not fit to hold a knife. Why have you drunk so much?”

Beate tries to pull her finger away. She nearly falls over a whimpering Axel, who is trying to blend in with the tiled floor. “Leave me alone, Birgit. I am in enough pain. You make it worse.”

“How so?” Mum turns the tap off.

“Ilse is my sister, not yours,” Beate says, the words welling up as if they have festered in a stagnant pool all day. “Now I have lost her to you.”

Mum clamps her hands onto Beate’s shoulders. “Now hold the bloody bus.”

Victor gasps.

“Ilse and me sleeped hand in hand,” Beate says, shrugging Mum off. “We are tied together. You are the outsider. But you see her, you touch her. You should be behind the Wall. Not her. You invite yourself into our lives. You used us. And you are still using us now to have all you want.”

“It’s slept, not sleeped,” Victor whispers. “And she shouldn’t shout at Mum.”

But Mum, grenade and all, shouts back.

“
Mein Gott
, Beate. How deep does your hatred go? I paid a price too. I lost my home, my parents, and then my home with all of you. My life became worthless. I hoped I would not be found. But, you know, even more than that, I wished I had never lived. I was hated just for existing and I was too dangerous for the people helping me. I have lived my life believing I must hide.”

Beate, dripping blood from her finger, shouts back. “And what about us, Birgit? You put us in danger for years. In our own home. You even kept that photograph back from the fire.”

“You saw?”

“Yes, I saw how you thought only of yourself. You almost had us all slaughtered.” Her voice is harsh, the bad years hunting her down. She pants and sweats, spitting out the bitterness she has been tasting for years.

She bangs her great fists on Mum’s chest, a sickening series of thumps that go on and on before Dad can pull her off. Even his most hardened prisoners are not built like Beate. She crumples in his arms, her hair unravelling all over him.

“Bloody hell,” he says. “I can’t breathe in here.”

“After the war,” she whispers to him between sobs, “I stopped Ilse searching for Birgit. I told her she was dead. I even believed it myself. I wished her a million miles away.”

The war years are hunting her down and she is trying to drag Mum back there for punishment. I know I’d be bitter if Victor evicted me to save himself. But although he caused my banishment from the front-room one Boxing Day, snitching to Mum and Dad about me snipping Pong-Ping out of his
Rupert
annual with my new pinking-shears, he would never turn me out. At least, I hope not.

“Listen, Beattie,” Dad says, pushing her further away from Mum. “I was Bridge’s enemy too, you know. Think of that. I was right here, with a gun. My country was raining down bombs on Berlin. On my future wife’s home.”

“But that is war,” Beate says.

“Exactly. War’s a bloody party-game. Follow-the-leader. Blind Man’s Bluff. Playing parts. Taking sides. Dressing up in silly uniforms. What makes it a rotten bloody game is that the fucking dice get thrown for you. I had to be a soldier. You had to keep your home fires burning. And poor bloody Bridge had two parts to play; your sister and your enemy.”

“Dad said…”

“Shut up, Victor. No one noticed.”

“I blooming well did.”

Beate crashes onto a chair while we all listen to the black minute-hand clicking around the blank white face of the kitchen clock. I think of Beate’s moon-faced grandfather-clock lying in the bombed-out wreckage, now a fallen pillar of ash, buried in another time.

“You must understand, Roy,” Beate says, twisting her handkerchief into a knot. “Germans will never know peace, not in our heads. Twenty thousand Berliners helped the Jews. Not many out of four million. I tried to help Birgit, but not with a good will. And then I turned her away and never tried to find her. I do not count as one of the few who chose not to join your game. And Germans like me are now too ashamed to speak of the bravery of those twenty thousand people. If we do, it means admitting we had the same choice and ignored it. And that is our guilt, to be carried for the rest of our lives.”

Mum tries to take her hands, but Beate snatches them away and holds them up to hide her face.

“The Cold War keeps us on the edge of danger,” she whispers. “West Berlin is an occupied city. Every morning, we wake up and think, is this it—the last day?”

After the ordinary August Sunday when Berlin woke up to discover home was no longer where it was supposed to be, Beate moved into this orderly, joyless home with her kidney repaired, but no longer a survivor. I cannot imagine her ever recovering now.

“Beattie,” Dad says, pointing his cigarette at her. “Look love, I had to kill a youngster my own age. He was looking straight at me. Pleading. And I shot him. I had a duty. I didn’t want to kill. When I loaded my gun I thought of Ma and pulled the trigger. My enemy hadn’t even lived long enough to unwrap his first razor-blade. He just froze. My eyes looking into his were the last thing he saw. And Beattie…he had a mother too.”

I look up to see Grandma in the doorway.

“Bear-Tear, it’s no wonder life doesn’t always make sense to my Roy. On bad nights, he talks to the young man he used to be. Well, he can’t just leave him behind, can he?”

So the gentle, faraway sound I hear after a night-terror is Grandma’s voice. She wakes up and goes to sit with Dad, singing in the low voice I never knew she had, to help him through the rest of the night.

“Beate, you are even more trapped than your sister,” Mum says, clutching her side. “Your life here in West Berlin may run like clockwork, but you have not found your way home yet.”

Beate lifts her head and looks around at the black and white room that mocks the greyness of her life.

A barn-spider normally repairs the same web throughout his whole lifetime. But sometimes he wakes up, goes berserk and tears the whole structure down. In the cool of the evening, he spins again. But whether he restores or rebuilds, his home is the same; the same strength, the same silk, the same amazing blend of delicate toughness.

The white squares on the kitchen floor are Beate’s beloved traditions trying to line up with the black squares of war, a long way from the haphazard mosaic tiles from her golden time. The rabbit-hutch is a barbaric miniature of the grand kitchen with its beef-bashing boards and pantry full of strudels. I am glad that despite the occasional batch of sour cabbage, Mum has not tried to recreate Berlin in Audette Gardens.

“Beate,” Mum continues, “all I did was try to survive, the same as anyone else. One photograph of who I was, that was all I asked. I never wanted to make you unhappy. Please be happy now. No one could fight harder than we did. Don’t let it be all for nothing.”

Mum breaks down, crying for her lost sisters, her broken childhood and her load of rotten guilt shedding like coal on the shining floor.

“Beattie love,” Dad says, holding onto Mum. “Bridge was stuffed into a hole in a wall for bloody years. Years of shining a torch on her one photograph. So put a sock in it, love, and give up the grudge. All this rage over one picture? Strike-a-bloody-light.”

No one else speaks. This is Dad taking charge. He hasn’t finished yet.

“Your own blood, Beattie—that drop with a touch of Hebrew—could have bubbled to the surface any time. It wasn’t just my Bridge who knew her way round a bowl of chicken soup and a bagel, was it? She’s come to make peace with you, love, not start World War Bloody Three. So leave my wife alone.”

Not even a wink from seedy Sumatra could stop my dad now. He’s hooked them up by the scruffs of their sequinned necks, for now.

“I’m so ashamed,” Beate keeps saying in a tiny, hoarse voice. “So ashamed.” Axel patters across to her and lays his soft black and white head on her lap. Tears drop on to it and I keep expecting the black spots to bleed into the white fur.

But Mum is crying too. The pin is falling out of the grenade.

“There, there, duck,” Grandma says, shuffling across and patting her arm. “Tch-tch. We’ll soon have you put right.”

Grandma holds out a hand to Beate. “Now you sort yourself out as well, Beattie. A blind man lives with his white stick, but he doesn’t beat himself with it. For the love of God, let it rest, duck.”