The Reunion

by Geoff Pridmore

  Today, he wanted to walk to the spot where his father’s body had been found – the father he’d barely known. He’d been at school when they’d brought the body down from the wood to the village. He recalled watching a small party of the most able-bodied men descending the steep grassy slopes, straining under the weight of the stretcher, while the priest waited in the village to receive them.

  Hugo had discovered the exact spot his father died some days later when he and his brother came across the clear signs of sawing – the lengths of freshly cut timber stacked awaiting transport, and a heap of sawdust. The shepherd, Manfred Arnold, had solemnly returned the saw and stick to the family. He’d been a member of the party who’d fetched the body, and as a contemporary had fought with Joseph in the same Bavarian regiment. He’d also been a fellow in the same brigade – though the night of the fire he’d been tending to his flock grazing some kilometres away; a fact noted and not forgotten by Hugo’s mother.

  Hugo wondered whether he might bump into Herr Arnold on this visit and, if he did, he would thank him as an adult for the care and consideration he had shown to the family over many years, helping as he always did with harvests and such like.

  Manfred’s nephew, Anton, had been Hugo’s best friend in the village. The two had been inseparable since their very early years, only going their separate ways at call-up: Anton into the Heer and Hugo into the Luftwaffe.

  With the passing of the years, finding the place where his father had died was more difficult than he’d expected. Almost two decades changes a place, and although the largest tree under which Joseph had been found still stood, it was no longer the largest tree. A good way to identify it for certain was by finding the initials that he and Anton had carved into its bark. They’d played here so often before the world changed, before the war that took them away, before Gondorf, before Holland.

  He’d had a belief – aged eight – that there were spirits here, his father’s among them, but such a belief was nothing but a distant memory.

  Nonetheless, as the English say, it wouldn’t hurt to try.

  Under the tree, the tree that knew his father, the tree that bore witness to the old man’s demise, Hugo gripped the walking stick tightly, as if strangling the life out of a snake. How hard can it be? Think of Papa’s face, remember his old jacket, and focus on his shoes – no, they were boots! Always boots. Remember what Mama did with those boots? No? What was it now…? She gave them to someone? Who was it? Maybe it was Herr Arnold.

  It was difficult conjuring up the image of a man he’d last seen as an eight-year-old. Don’t think of words, think of his face. What face? He hadn’t even seen a photograph of him in many a long year. Hopeless, but he kept at it for a few more moments. With eyes tight shut he summoned all his cerebral energy into conjuring up a vision of…

  Metz.

  Metz stood before him. In uniform all buttoned up and looking resplendent, smiling at Hugo as if to say: “Thank you! I know you cared.” Hugo turned away in horror. Metz disappeared.

  Nearby, a hunter had erected a deer lookout – something Hugo wanted to climb to enjoy the elevated view but refrained for fear that its builder might consider him frivolous or a poacher, so he walked on, breathing in the fresh mountain air and loving every breath he took.

  With each step he gathered energy and pace, and by mid-morning he was feeling elated in a way that he had not felt for many years. Swinging his father’s walking stick, his feet as light as air, rapidly advancing beyond the parish and into open country where his troubled mind emptied with every kilometre.

  Turning a corner, coming towards him was a woman in the traditional Bavarian dress of Dirndl. She appeared to be about the same generation as Oma and every bit as deliberate in her rolling gate as she negotiated the twisting, rocky path.

  Not wanting to seem foreign or strange, keen to be polite and wondering whether she is someone he might have known, he steps aside for her to pass, smiling warmly, trying to engage her acknowledgement in the hope they might have known one another.

  Carrying a candle and rosary, the woman’s demeanour is sad and lonely. She slows her pace to look at him, acknowledge his gesture, before stopping abruptly in the track to stare at him in disbelief.

  Hugo, too, stops abruptly. ‘Frau Witt?’

  ‘Hugo?’

  In Hugo’s eyes the woman has aged considerably since he last saw her. She, in need of glasses, squints at the mature man of thirty-eight who stands before her dressed in the most un-Bavarian style of Marks & Spencer casual trousers and open-top white shirt.

  The rosary and candle in her trembling hand, her demeanour, her black shawl across her shoulders. The cemetery is ahead of her by some kilometres yet.

  ‘Anton?’ he asks tentatively.

  She nods, before bringing her trembling free hand up to cover her downcast eyes, and begins to weep.

  Hugo, too, turns away, and for the first time in his life weeps openly.

  *

  Chapter 3

  Homecoming

  Later that morning, Hanne found her own way to the deer lookout as if instinctively drawn to the spot. This will become her very special place over the next few weeks. No qualms about her being considered a poacher. From here, she can see the village below, the fields where her father and grandparents had worked. This was her new, unknown horizon. At home, she knew all the horizons.

  God must also have a deer lookout from which to observe his creation, and if she is quiet she might even see some deer.

  Deer lookouts are wonderful! Children at a loose end can fill their time away from parental demands, and younger siblings who are just too young to be good company. A nanny Hanne is not. From this day forth her ambition is amended, as now she will become a naturalist like David Attenborough or Sir Peter Scott, and so to sit patiently waiting for wildlife to appear is a most important discipline to attain. Mumbling, she narrates to an imaginary BBC audience of many millions who, sitting in armchairs of a summer’s evening, hang on her every word.

  Hopefully, the two girls approaching her position from the meadow have not seen her lips moving while she narrates into the microphone. Don’t they know a documentary is being made?!

  Cut! Return to the studio. There are cousins to meet. Inconvenient, but it’s become uncomfortable, and she knows just who they are as only a nine-year-old can know. Looking beyond to the red rooftops she imagines that the whole village houses her relatives: aunts, uncles and cousins both close and removed by several generations. The village is her tribal home and she is more at home here than she is in Cornwall where she stands out as a foreigner and even worse than that – a “Jerry”.

  Rene is always telling her how German she looks, how much like her father’s side of the family. Marco is different; he is still in the making and could go either way.

  How silly! I’m Anglo-German, which is a contradiction because the Angles were German. Well, Danish Germans.

  She’d only just learned that spring exactly how the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Friesians had settled Britain after the Roman Empire, where they’d come from and where they’d settled. She knew because her Celtic Cornish teachers and classmates knew better and were always reminding her of their pre-Roman heritage.

  Heidemarie, placing her foot on the first rung of the ladder, was the first to speak in her native German. ‘Was machst du?’ (‘What are you doing?’).

  Hanne misunderstood “du” for “doing”, but understood the gist and replied in English. ‘I’m looking for deer.’

  And so the English–German dialogue began, with the cousins seemingly communicating in two different languages as if it were the most natural thing ever.

  ‘Come with us. We want to show you something,’ invited Heike in English.

  ‘Kommst du!’ said Heidemarie, which Hanne took to mean, ‘Come you!’

  Stepping down from her tower, Hanne surr
enders her isolation to her new best friends. She loves them immediately though refrains from putting her arms around them, thinking the gesture is not at all German and far too forward and unnecessary. After all, they are not strangers in her eyes; they are as one – all granddaughters of Oma – Oma Hanna Mauer. They need no introduction.

  The trio set off across the fields, en route to a destination that Hanne cannot imagine. Fanciful thoughts fill her head, of treasure and dragons and even German TV stars on the other side of the hill. Maybe a herd of rare Bavarian deer await her. It’s exciting!

  Wherever it is they are heading for, a dog awaits them – a big dog. She can hear distant barking so it must be an Alsatian as this is Germany and Germans only keep Alsatians and dachshunds. The French keep poodles, the Danes have Great Danes, the British have bulldogs and the Canadians have Labradors and huskies. There could be no other explanation.

  She even wonders that this might even be the rehearsal for the family reunion, which is on Saturday. Surely all the community must be involved in its preparation?

  It seems to her they are walking a long way, but it is only because Hanne is unfamiliar with the lie of her ancestral home; the gentle bluffs and wooded valleys conceal many things of which she has no experience.

  When at last she catches sight of her cousins’ goal, she can’t quite make out just what it is they are taking her to.

  ‘What is this? Is it an army camp?’

  All across the horizon a large chain-link fence stretches for as far into the distance as anyone can see, interspersed with a tower here and there – much higher than Hanne’s deer tower. The towers rise so high into the sky that she can imagine the occupants looking out to the next country: Austria or France perhaps?

  So many towers!

  Perhaps the cousins have mistakenly interpreted her interest in towers. With the exception of the deer tower, she’s never been up a tower in Cornwall – not even Smeaton’s Tower on Plymouth Hoe where she’d gone once with her English grandmother.

  Heike, pointing at the fence and with a sweeping gesture, explains in English: ‘This is the border,’ and pointing at two distant figures standing in the observation post of the tower and barely visible, ‘Those soldiers are from the East. Some are Russian. Come on!’

  ‘Is it safe?’

  Heike, understanding her cousin’s concerns, reassures her: ‘Don’t worry! They’re our friends.’

  ‘You speak English.’ Hanne was most surprised.

  ‘My Dad is an American – an American soldier. Nobody likes him.’

  From the observation room of the tower, the approach of children heralds an event in an otherwise tedious day. Twenty-nine-year-old border guard Erwin Seidel is particularly keen for a diversion in an otherwise monotonous shift. A family man with young daughters of his own in East Berlin, Erwin harbours an ambition to be a rock star, but is painfully aware that he is on the wrong side of both twenty-one and the fence.

  His father, Joachim, a musician and fan of Rachmaninov, had been a reluctant guard in the last war stationed at various Stalags, including the infamous Colditz; and it was Joachim who’d written to him that very morning with news that was going to break his only son’s heart in two.

  For this moment, Erwin simply folds the white envelope with the Berlin postmark and places it in his breast pocket unread. He suspects its content to be awful, convinces himself that it cannot be positive news, that events over which he has no control have gone against him and there will be no turning back. He says nothing to his comrade Rollo Roth. It’s Roth, with binoculars pressed firmly against his eyes, who spots the girls approaching. ‘Our friends are coming to see us again.’

  ‘I’ll go down and see them. They know me.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be encouraging them!’ warned Roth.

  ‘The Party encourages them. “Win hearts and minds”, remember? Besides, what harm can it do? I like to see people – lonely, stinking outpost that this is!’

  It is this last utterance that concerns Roth. Border guards in the Grenztruppen were chosen specially for their ability to cope with the duties of protecting the border. A variety of measures ensured that men chosen for their stamina, marksmanship and Party loyalty prevented lapses of personal frustrations and desires. Guards were frequently rotated so that they wouldn’t become over familiar with a particular location or colleague. Roth and Seidel had only met for the first time two days ago and it was likely that they would be replaced by the end of the week and probably never see one another again.

  The place was getting to Seidel and this was still a new assignment, so what would he be like in a year’s time or the year after? A border posting required considerable patience, but there were the benefits, such as the country patrols, which in the summer were at least more pleasant than a nerve-racking city posting such as Berlin.

  To Seidel, the fear of having to shoot or arrest a fellow German concerned him more with every passing day, with its monotony of constant parade-like bullshit of uniform coupled with the blind obedience to serve the mundane orders of superiors and the ever-watching Party. Out here, they were almost self-employed security guards who could admire the view, read magazines, books, take walks, exercise the dog, even catch sight of beautiful women that might pass near.

  Twenty-four-year-old shop assistant Sylvia Munch was one such local beauty who would tease them by sunbathing on a knoll in clear view, spreading out on the grass a tartan wool rug before stripping down to her underwear, unclipping her bra strap if she lay on her front. Just reading, nothing subversive. She had their full attention and seemed to be acting as the West’s secret weapon in testing the strength of the border, as an entire division could cross at this point when all eyes were on her.

  Each day there were radio tests, of course, and visiting patrols from both East and West. The Americans would turn up in a Jeep comprising infantrymen, together with a German civilian dressed in a suit and tie, and often a local police officer or two – the Bavarian Grenzpolizei. Somebody would usually have a clipboard for note taking. Notes were also taken in the tower, describing everything from the registration of the vehicle to the appearances of the men – cap badges, if they could be deciphered. There was a chart on the wall showing all the various American and British army regimental badges, a chart that Seidel believed originally dated from the last war and had been adapted from Heer to Grenztruppen use.

  Games would be played during such observational visits. Seidel and his fellow guards, despite a mistrust of each other, were not without a sense of humour. They would wait until such time as they knew they were being watched and then act out some charade to measure the reaction of the visitors on the other side of the fence. They would taunt by gesturing imaginary coffee invitations: ‘Come on, Joe. Come and have some coffee. We’ve just made a brew!’ Or by gesticulating a phone call: ‘Joe? It’s your Uncle Sam! We have him on the phone. Come and talk to him. He wants you to go home, Joe.’

  It was their own side, East German Grenztruppen patrols and Stasi visits that bothered them the most. Questions, questions, questions: ‘What have you seen?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Why are these record sheets out of sequence?’

  ‘What do you mean, the visibility was poor?’

  ‘Why haven’t you shaved this morning?’

  ‘Do you think this is a holiday?’

  ‘We can send you to Berlin at a moment’s notice!’

  ‘Remember your family at home.’

  ‘Remember you could serve five years in a Gulag!’

  Seidel fancied the idea of approaching an American patrol just to chat and pass the time. Only the fear of being carted off to a Gulag prevented him from doing so. He didn’t speak any English apart from memorising a few lyrics from favourite songs, such as Buddy Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue’.

  Pretty, pretty, Peggy Sue, o
h, Peggy, my Peggy Sue – ooh hoo.

  He’d nicknamed his wife “Peggy Sue”. He imagined that the Americans might have a few words of German – they’d been in the country long enough, after all. He wanted to talk about rock and roll, and motorbikes like Vincents and Triumphs and BSAs, not realising that these were in fact British machines. His ambition was to own a big BSA twin cylinder machine like a Gold Star and wear a black leather Marlon Brando style jacket. His favourite film was The Wild Ones starring Brando – a film he’d seen because it was shown as an example of how society falls apart if left to the corrupt, degenerate, democratic system of the West. It had been shown as a warning in barracks in 1960 and accompanied a shorter film on the perils of VD.

  In his possession was an English language book entitled Who’s Who in Showbusiness 1961, which he thought was American but was also in fact British. He’d found it by chance in the long grass, as if deliberately tossed onto his side of the border. He suspected that it might have been thrown by the sexy Fräulein Munch; that she had thrown it over to taunt them and show what the decadent West of the early ’60s was all about, and maybe to get someone like him in trouble if it was kept and discovered.

  The annual was full of facts about British and American screen and rock and roll stars. He had no idea that Cliff Richard and The Shadows were British or whether Lorne Greene was an American or Canadian star. He just loved staring at the glossy pictures and imagining himself as such a star pictured astride a powerful motorcycle.

  Heike and Heidemarie remind him of his own children and he makes sure to have some chocolate ready to welcome them. He fetches guard dog Ilsa from her run, as the children like seeing her and she would only bark until such time as she was confronted with them. Her barking drove him to distraction, but like all the dogs he worked with he was fond of her nonetheless. He trusted her because he could trust no human being. She was another distraction in an otherwise boring world of duty.

  Heidemarie can’t wait to see him. ‘Hello!’