Tying Down The Lion (24 page)

In one of those rare useful moments, just as the steam from the stewing meat makes me feel queasy, Mum asks me to go for a walk with her.

I hesitate on purpose, keeping her waiting even though I know where she wants to take me. I want to go there too, but I still can’t forgive her. Even if I swallow the bile now, it will come back, more bitter than a grudge.

A grudge is what Gillian bore after Pamela and Derek took Gaye and me to see
The Sound of Music
. For three weeks afterwards, she clapped her hands over her ears whenever she saw us. Mind you, we did keep singing “High on a Hill Stood a Lonely Goatherd”, especially the yodelling bits.

But I feel something else as well. An Emotion. A warm feeling. Not the kind I feel about Peter. Sympathy, I suppose it is, the kind I felt when Gillian had her mouth washed out, until the Schadenfreude arrived.

I don’t have the heart to say no. Beate is being monopolised by Grandma and Dad by his loony lunar Girls. Victor and Sebastian are kneeling on the couch, apparently flying a Messerschmitt. The guinea-pigs would be better company.

“All right,” I say, and Mum and I walk to Bernauer Strasse together.

It is unmissable with its hacked tenements and rubble spilling out onto the pavement, forcing us into the gutter. Railings protect what is left of the once-tall houses, all of them chopped to ground-floor level. But despite the disturbing bleakness, the majestic line of trees makes me walk in a dead-straight line. The wind has taken their seed to grow saplings in the empty space behind the façades. If you look straight ahead, not glancing at the beheaded buildings, you could believe this is an ordinary stroll with your mum on a summer’s day.

But the street is too quiet and still, these ordinary homes like ours, and the workplaces that were once busy all day, now part of a solid barricade. The rough brick squares were once windows. The boarded doors used to open and close a hundred times a day. I imagine the lives of the past still inside the rooms that are left, caught in time beneath decaying layers of wallpaper or under buckled lino. The sky here once turned brown with coal-fire smoke in winter. In summer, housewives out shopping in their short sleeved frocks paused to talk, resting their baskets on this pavement.

“It feels as if the war never ended here,” Mum says.

I agree, noting the guards on the watchtower on the other side and their huge flood-lamps that must make the nights strangely strip-lit.

We hear voices behind us and turn round to see a group of men in suits. Some are English, visiting for a conference. A German man is leaning a wreath against a railing, honouring the anniversary of a lady who died trying to escape. Mum and I try not to impose on the quiet ceremony, but after a minute of silence they invite us to join their tour. Mum looks like an actress being escorted to meet her public. Her Terylene tunic and short skirt give her the look of a blonde Jackie Kennedy, just a bit more British Home Stores than Chanel.

They usher us away, pointing out the East Berlin police taking photographs through a gap in one of the blocked windows. They take us to another street where we can climb onto the flat roof of a police post for a mind-blowing view of the city. People are dashing along, trams are running and a thousand car-windows glint in the evening sun. But the division soon becomes obvious.

“It’s terribly grey and subdued over there,” one Englishman says.

“Yes. Impossible to believe it’s the same city,” another agrees.

“See how the Wall dissects the tram lines,” a German says, concentrating on the visible facts.

I imagine having to leave the tram at the last stop before the Wall, when once I might have travelled on and on across the city.

“I was at the Brandenburg Gate the day the Wall began,” the German says. “It was a wire border at first. The bricks came later. We were all so angry that the authorities feared we would break the wire and storm through to the Soviet tanks all around Berlin. We did walk towards the soldiers, but we did not cross over.”

“Were you not awfully tempted?” one of the men asks.

“No. Not when we saw such very young soldiers, their guns shaking in their hands, scared like us. No one crossed. The Allies did not touch the wire. We all just watched. Nothing was done because no one wanted war again. Not for this city. Not for these young men. Not again.”

A softly-spoken German man points to a window on the third floor of a tall building and says, “My grandfather is sitting in that room.”

Planting his feet wide apart, the man begins to wave, his arm sweeping through the air in a huge arc. We all step back to give him enough room. If I let my vision swim out of focus, this seems like an ordinary day with an ordinary man greeting someone he loves across the street.

“I’m not expecting to see him again,” he says. But he waves on and on, hoping his grandfather has spotted him.

The Englishmen look away.

Mum and I thank the businessmen and walk back to Bernauer Strasse. I forget the eyes and cameras and guns on the other side, feeling somehow protected by what is left, and by the patient ghosts of interrupted lives.

We walk the entire length of the street, our sleeves touching, and pause at the felt-shoe factory. But it looks so blind and broken, I don’t want to stay any longer.

“It has a purpose now that the shoe-maker could not ever have imagined,” Mum says.

I hear her swallow. It sounds painful. When we turn away, she takes my arm and I don’t pull it away.

When we reach the end, the sun rolls out of a cloud and a breeze raps the millions of leaves, sending out a metallic rustle like thousands of coins tipping out of a treasure-chest. In the last tree on the street, a bird sings his heart out, and I can still hear it after we have turned the corner.

On the walk home, darkness sets in. Lights are blinking on. People are strolling to restaurants, meeting friends, wafting perfume. And over on the other side of the Wall, the drabness of the day has transformed. Security-lights are blazing, flooding the area of watch-towers, anti-tank obstacles, trip-wire, the dog-corridor, alarms, anti-car trenches and electrical fencing. It is blinding, and utterly silent.

***

Back in Schillerpark, we sit round the table for dinner, Victor frowning because he’s already in pyjamas the same as Seb. Beate has given them both a rounded fork and spoon even though Victor’s been using proper cutlery for five years. Dad’s daily quota of Brylcreem has sweated away and Mum tries to sweep his hair back. He actually grunts, “Geroff it, Bridge.” So the Girls haven’t quite captured him yet, in spite of seedy Sumatra’s attempts to lasso him with her boa.

Blotto or not, Beate has cooked us a feast. The meat is juicy and delicious. There are two kinds of roast potatoes, some salty and some sweetened. I don’t know if the sweet ones are meant to be sugar-coated, but they’re strangely edible. Even Grandma is piling them onto her plate. Flashing a hideous grin of triumph at Mum, she proclaims them “delicious for foreign muck.”

The wine is turning Mum hideously red-faced and giggly. She tries to make Dad take a sip from her glass, but, apart from his Christmas sherry, he never drinks alcohol on account of the many occasions he had to scoop my grandfather out of the rhododendron border. With Mum trying so hard and Dad not trying much at all, a sickly surge of homesickness swills inside me, because at home I can try to hide from all this. Not that it helps much. Bad Moons and bad mothers cast their nauseating light throughout the entire house, fingering into every corner.

I’m allowed to drink the revolting wine, taking a glass so Dad is not the only one to suffer the humiliation of being coaxed. Even a few polite drops make me dizzy. I keep thinking about Peter, but he seems to be floating. I become the exquisite Tuesday who kisses him. A hot blush starts at the roots of my hair and seeps into my face. I’m not listening to the conversation. When I say conversation, I mean Grandma gabbling on about meat, Elsie and her beloved Big Stan.

“Elsie said I flirted with Stan when all I did was tell him I preferenced his sweetbreads. And it seems I pant—
pant
, she says—when I start waxing hysterical about his chump-chops. And I plant—
plant
, mind you—my bosom on the counter. I said, never. Not on a counter piled to kingdom-come with blood and gristle. Of course the gristle got her going. ‘My Stan has only the very best end,’ she says. And I say, ‘I know that fine well, Else.’ Tch. She’s got all the charm of a ladleful of cold tapioca.”

My mind tunes in and out, but I sober up in the middle of all this when I realise Victor is sobbing.

“What’s happening?”

“Well, Victor asked me what kind of meat it is,” Mum explains. “But he has not taken it well.”

“It is from the largest,” Beate says. “The white one with the black patch.”

It takes half a minute for light to dawn. Bloody, bloody ugh. Rabbits for eating. A skinned rabbit in bloody newspaper, no longer matching the décor.

And Mum knew we had a pet on our plates. She should have lied to Victor. If we were at home with no wine on the table, she would never have let this happen. And if I had known, I would have kept it a secret. If only she knew how well I do that.

Victor rushes away from the table in tears, and I hurry after him to our room.

“Did you stroke its ears, Jacqueline?” he says with great gulping sobs. “They were really soft. Where are they now?”

Oh, help me, Mr Lennon.

“Look, animals don’t mean the same to Beate as they do to you,” I explain to the back of his head, his face being buried in the feather quilt thing. “She had to kill a cow in the middle of the street once.”

But that makes him howl even louder.

“Look Victor, if this is how other people want things, it isn’t up to me to change the way they live.”

“I want to go home.”

“This is home. For now.”

“Isn’t.”

“It is, because we’re all here together.”

“It’s a horrible home.”

“Well, home means different things to different people.”

“Mrs Pither thinks hers is a castle with a moat and a drawbridge.”

“Yes. And Oaking Borstal is still a home. And the Children’s Home.”

“Even though it looks like a prison?”

“Yes. And even though the children probably hope their sunny-bloody-smiles will take them far away from it one day.”

“Will you tell me that story about the moon-rabbit?”

“Aren’t you too old for that now?”

“I’ll give you something if you tell me.”

He scrambles out of bed and fusses about.

“I don’t want a chewed bit of rubber or a rewrapped Spangle you’ve already sucked.”

He comes back to bed empty-handed, but I tell him the story anyway.

“Once upon a time, some animals wanted to do a good deed, hoping for a reward. When they saw an old man begging, the wolf brought him a lizard, the otter a fish and the monkey gathered fruit. The rabbit panicked. With nothing to offer, he crept into the old man’s fire, prepared to give himself. But the old man was really a god so the rabbit wasn’t hurt. And to honour him, the man drew the rabbit on the moon. He’s still there. At full moon, you can see the smoke around him.”

Victor falls asleep, the tears drying on his face. I flick through my notepad and let it drop on the floor. I hold Victor’s hand while Mum’s wine-tinged laughter echoes down the hall.

7.
Acclamation

The next morning, the breakfast table is piled high with cold meat. Slipping back into the bedroom again, Victor and I make a pact not to be forced to eat any, resurrecting an old rhyme we made up to fortify us for Mum’s dinners.

Touch your forehead,

Slap your knees,

Stuff your pillow with mouldy cheese.

Eat something horrid

And catch a disease.

Bagsy I’m not the first to heave.

When we come back after several repetitions, suitably bewitched to withstand any adult who tries to make us eat, the table is groaning with eggs, peppery black bread, pale cheese, warm, gritty cake and rashers of bacon fried especially for us English folk.

“Is that really bacon, do you think?” I hiss in Victor’s ear.

“Could be rats’ tongues,” he says.

We settle for cheese.

Beate and Grandma are both tittering away. In Beate’s case it’s because she’s already breakfasted. The fumes accost us the minute we enter the room. The clear drink in her cup looks as innocent as water, but smells like liquid fire.

In Grandma’s case, the tittering is because her boiled duck-egg gives her an excuse to play Decapitating Khrushchev.

“Oh, there we are, Beat. Off it goes. Good-looking without it, isn’t he? Lovely yellow belly.”

Konnie, coming in from his night shift, turns his hat back-to-front to have a look. “Oh dear, zee brain has melted all over Nell’s egg-holder. Nussing left inside, see? Wiz his scull off, Khrushchev is…how you say…hallo?”

“Hollow, duck,” Grandma says, inching away from his guinea-pigs.

I don’t understand what I’m crossing into today, but it might be a better deal than staying with this lot. After playing Khrushchev’s Head with a second egg, a procedure that includes a horrendous disembowelment by buttered soldier, Beate says, “Birgit, you have your pain today, no?”

“She is so white. Like her English sheets,” Konnie adds, cutting up ham stubbled with black peppercorns.

“But I will still go,” Mum says in a bring-on-the-wild-horses way.

“There is nothing of our old home left,” Beate says, draining her glass.

“I know. It’s Ilse I want to see. And I’ll be able to tell you how she is, Beate.”

“Ach, I know well how she is. I am allowed no contact with my own sister, but I know how she lives. I went back and forth with her every day, Birgit. No people in Berlin cared about borders before the Wall. We were free enough until this other war drizzled in like rain through a crack.”

“Is true,” Konnie says, wiping his moustache. “Konnie saw how it was. Before they draw the line, one city.”

“Is correct, Konnie. One Berlin, Birgit,” Beate says, her currant eyes glittering. “Thousands of us from the East came here every day to work in the shops and offices, wearing our shapeless Russian-peasant clothes and scarves. We could never buy leather in the East. My Ilse must still carry a cheap, horrible handbag. That is life there. Every bag the same.”

Konnie pats Beate’s shoulder and I imagine he has comforted her like this countless times.

“West Berlin became small and quiet. Like zat bacon there,” he says, pointing at a forgotten rasher seizing up in the pan. “It was all over, zee freedom. My old friend, he used to come here every day from the East to work in his bookshop. We had long talks, making zee world right again until one day, he did not come. He never opened his shop again. I am told he is ‘having new training’ in an East Berlin factory. His daughter was student here in the university. A serious young Fräulein with her broken old spectacles stuck togezzer wiz chewing-gum and her little case of books falling into pieces. She disappeared too, one of hundreds of young people who came in the underground trains from East to West for learning, but I never see her again. After the Wall, it was over.”

Mum looks at me and says, “It is not over for us.”

I know she’s excited, but she just sounds plain hard. Beate gets up to wash the pots and pans, her glass beside her on the draining-board and her shoulders slumped, while Mum lowers the rifle T-K is aiming at Beate’s back.

Grandma has been staring at our East German city map. “Well this is a fine tarradiddle,” she says. “Look, Jacqueline. Roads and rivers and churches on their side, but if you ignore that egg stain, they’ve left the West plain white. See? Fancy printing a map with a mistake like that. Did they run out of ink?”

“Nell,” Konnie says, “the vest does not exist.”

“Well, I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Zey do not agree. Zey pretend it is not here.”

I have to gather up the map, sensing Mum’s desperation to leave them to it. She is wearing her linen dress with matching jacket and her lurid Gay Geranium lipstick, but has bundled her hair into an old paisley scarf.

“Going for the gypsy style today, Bridge?” Grandma says.

“I wish to look smart, but not too smart, in front of Ilse, Nell.”

“You run with both the hare and the hounds, you do,” Grandma says, lighting a cigarette.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you don’t know who you want to be, duck,” Grandma says, not unkindly.

Mum ignores her and holds out my cardigan and Tufty bag, unaware T-K is now training his machete on her backside. Time to go.

Clinging to her leg, a strange sight in his striped pyjamas and Tyrolean hat, Victor begs Mum to stay. Blimey, she’s already forgiven for complicity in last night’s bunny butchery. “Don’t go, Mummy,” he says. He never says Mummy these days. It changed to Mum when he learnt words like soccer, offside and camouflage. Sebastian, clean and pink from his seven o’clock bath, is staring at him with the great wisdom of a three-year-old.

Beate’s wiping surfaces as if she’s bursting with energetic good health, but I know better. Miss Lobb once showed us a revolting liver soaked in alcohol.

It’s not just Beate’s liver that’s in a rotten mess. There’s her heart. Not its ventricles and atrium. I mean the contents, the Emotions. Hers must be a pouch of pain. She is reaching for a carton of buttermilk from the row of chilled milks, chocolate, banana and vanilla, standing to attention in the fridge. Her eyes are cloudy, as if they are full of buttermilk too. Bottles of wine are hidden all over the house. I saw one behind the toilet when I was looking for a brush to swipe over the damned ledge this morning.

While Mum’s busy being forgiven, I slip into the garden to find Dad walking on the damp grass, flattening it with his dark footprints.

“Beate’s drinking buttermilk this morning, Dad. What is it?”

“Settles her stomach, lines it ready for the Schnapps.”

I don’t know why we’re wandering about in the chilly dawn. We don’t usually do anything as stirring as that. But this morning my stomach is tied in more knots than Beate’s liver and I need Dad. At least he’s walking and talking today. That’s good enough for me.

“I feel stuck here, love,” he says. “I miss the driving. It was good for me, that.”

I don’t know what to say. I wasn’t expecting him to speak about how he feels.

“You’ll be driving all the way back to England soon. You’ve still got that to look forward to.”

Strike a light, I’ve just said a sentence that belongs in the Parental Guide to Annoying Phrases—or How to make your offspring practise their range of death-glares that question if you were ever young.

“I wish we could just drive home now, Jacqueline.”

He means it. He’s not even smoking. He’s standing in the dew and just looking at me, so close to sliding into sadness. It’s like a hole in the road that widens as you come closer until there’s no way around it.

He’s so much happier in the car; reaching across Mum to check the glove-box is closed properly, pushing the ash-tray in and out, jogging back to us after a wee-stop in a glorious hurry for the road, and rasping his leathery hands together before turning on the engine. The Bad-Moon girls could slink in here today, their filthy red feathers at odds with the black and white flat, and smother him one by one. Beate will be no help at all. She might even try to get Dad sozzled. When he went to the Kennedys’ Hogmanay party last year, they hid so much whisky in his ginger ale, he ended up putting on their eight-year-old’s kilt and dancing the hornpipe.

But Grandma is here, cackling away in the kitchen, playing Patience with Victor, her backside not pulled in yet and her teeth still in a beaker. But she is here, and she loves my dad.

I stay outside with him, still not knowing what to say, savouring the cool air before the sun bakes it again. Mum is calling me. But through the window I can see Beate slicing cold meat, and I can’t bear to witness any more evidence of pet slaughter. It might be Axel this time.

We pace about. “I don’t know what to say, Dad,” is the best I can come up with. He emerges a little, poking his head out, tortoise-like.

“Jacqueline, don’t upset yourself about the rabbit. Beate’s lived in Hell and beyond. And no one survives that without pulling on a thick skin. Fluffy bunnies don’t make her feel all soppy. She can’t afford to be sensitive. Her heart got left behind, over there.” He jerks his half-thumb eastwards. Well, I guess it’s east. He has no sense of direction. “Plus,” he adds, “booze deadens the senses.”

I pull a pointed leaf off a miniature tree, its growth stunted to fit in a pot. A dewdrop hovers in the central vein. “I understand about the rabbit,” I tell him. “And I’ve explained it to Victor. But Mum’s senses are sometimes deadened as well. She never listens. She never tries to feel what I feel. And even Grandma tries.”

The words tip out like coal into the bunker. Horrible words with an accusing edge. Black words that sit in a pile between us. But when he speaks, his voice is soft with understanding.

“Fear of loss, Jacqueline, that’s what drives people. Mum lost herself years ago. And she’s terrified of losing you. While she’s watching you grow up, she’s remembering what happened to her when she wasn’t much older. It makes her withdraw because she had to learn not to show fear. She couldn’t afford to, not with the enemy’s rotten breath blowing down her ear-hole.”

I watch the dewdrop wobble on the leaf. “You don’t smell with your ears, Dad.”

“You probably can when some sod’s trying to kill you. And when it can happen while you’re walking to the shops or even just sitting in your own home. Mum lived with it so long she doesn’t dare let herself go. So think what it cost her to tell you the truth.”

I tilt the leaf and the dewdrop quivers on its tip.

“I get afraid too, Jacqueline,” Dad goes on, an awful tremble in his voice. “Afraid of the past. Afraid of seeing you grow up and losing my girl. It all comes straight out though, my misery. Like I’ve had a dose of Eno’s. I just can’t help these terrible days. And I’m so sorry.”

I look down at the leaf as if my life depends on it. He’s never said sorry for the bad times before. He’s looked sorry. But this morning I hear the word for the first time, out there in the garden while the first spear of sun pierces the blank sky.

“It’s like being two people,” he says, clearing his throat. “Or like a worm cut in half. I’m scared of myself. I wish things weren’t like this, Jacqueline. I really wish that. I don’t know what I’ve become. It doesn’t even feel like being human sometimes. And when I feel better, I know it’s only until the next time. I’m so scared of losing you all. And I’m so, so sorry.”

I poke the dew with my finger, but it sits back up. Dad lights a cigarette at last, inhaling and holding his breath for what seems like forever.

“Parents aren’t supposed to be scared,” I mumble, the proud bubble of dew staring back at me.

I sense Dad nodding while he takes another long gasp. “I know, love. But even Grandma’s scared. We all carry fear about with us. Mum can seem a bit distant because she’s trying to keep it from you. And when Grandma’s mouth starts motoring before her brain is in gear, it’s just to settle her nerves. I made up the Bad-Moon girls to help you and Victor. Don’t know if it works. I just hoped it might show you how I’m feeling, if that doesn’t sound bloody nuts.” He flicks his ash. It perches on a blade of grass. Beate will probably come out here later and sweep it into the black bin.

“The moon you see is round and chummy,” he says. “Mine’s hard and hollow. And not lit.”

“I know.”

“I don’t need locking up. I’m not mad. But I get scared. Scared of losing my mind. And I can see you’re scared too. But I only see that after the Bad Moon’s gone. I can’t see anything while it’s here.”

“Dad, are you scared someone might lock you up?” My stomach squirms at the question that has waited long enough.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, my love.”

I lay the leaf on the ground. The dewdrop trickles away in a miniature river. He’s never said “my love” before.

Mum’s calling me for the final time.

“Be careful today, Jacqueline,” Dad says as we start to walk inside. “Watch out for your mum.”

“I’ll try.”

“And remember, no eels or asparagus.”

It’s true. Konnie showed us a list of food items that East Berlin believes would have an upsetting Western influence on their people.

“Perhaps some vegetables are known to
leek
secrets,” I say, hoping to make Dad smile. Pretty pathetic.

“Or some fish might be considered carp-italist,” Dad says. Hopelessly pathetic.

We grin at each other, not because of the hilarity of the so-called jokes, but because they make us feel oddly better.

“The problem is, I feel strange with Mum now,” I tell him. “She lied all that time.”

“I know. But people who’ve suffered can’t always talk about it. And she wanted to spare you the misery.”

“The misery of being different?”

“No. That’s not it. Not the being different. She wanted to spare you the misery of being treated different.”

“Different
ly
.”

“All right, all right. I’m not bloody foreign, you know.”

“You are here.”

“Sometimes I am anywhere.”

He’s running his hands through his hair. It’s really floppy today. A bad sign. He’s usually fanatical about his Brylcreem. Victor once got hold of it and plastered it on, slicking it all to one side. He looked like a boy Hitler, if such a creature ever existed.