Karen glanced at her: the lines on the woman’s face had hardened into crevices. The shop’s shadowy interior no longer felt charming but choked with a history Karen feared unpicking.
Hannah coughed. ‘Perhaps she was one of the… Glücklichen.’
The lucky ones?
Karen still had dozens of questions, but the older woman’s arms were folded and Hannah was determinedly busy. Karen nodded a goodbye and ducked out onto the street, retracing her steps back to the Kurfürstendamm.
Its bustle bumped and butted, winding the pavement up into a battleground. Karen spun round, her sense of direction wavering. She knew Hannah had softened her grandmother’s words, but Frau Richter’s disapproval had still soured the shop. East and West; capitalists and communists; Jews and non-Jews. Berlin was split into too many layers.
Karen leaned against a lamp post pasted with flyers as face after face whirled past. She closed her eyes as the city spun. How many stories was each person hiding?
How many was her mother?
On any other day, Wilmersdorf’s sleepy suburban streets would have set Karen’s teeth on edge. After the confusion of Richters, she was grateful for their quiet tree-lined familiarity and the luck that had at least left her second destination safe in the West.
From the moment the school trip had been announced, Karen’s life had narrowed to a single point: getting to Berlin and unravelling the mystery of her mother. She had set out with a name and two addresses and no clue about anything, as if solving Liese would be as simple as slotting the pieces into a children’s jigsaw. She hadn’t thought any of it through. She had thought Berlin and her mother’s place in it would unroll like a red carpet simply because she wanted them to. She had learned her history well enough to pass exams and never considered war outside her books. She had been intrigued by the Wall’s haphazard divisions and barely given a thought to the impact of such a brutal dissection on the city and the people it separated. The arrogance of it made her cheeks smart. That and the wasted opportunity in not talking to her father, demanding that he tell her the truth of her mother’s life in Berlin before she came.
Regret stopped her in her tracks, making her long for a phone box and his voice. And then she remembered the reality of how things stood between them; how impossible such a conversation would be long-distance when they had failed so completely to have it face to face. So now here she was, naïve and clueless; stumbling through a broken city, trying to restitch her family. The irony was almost laughable.
The Lindenkirche appeared before Karen was ready for it.
It was a solid-looking white building with a simple cross on the front and a clock tower peeping from behind a curtain of tall, wide-arching trees. Part of her hoped it would be closed. That, if it was open, it would offer no answers. Then she could go home still nursing her anger, feeding it with another secret her father had kept, another piece of her mother he had stolen. Her mother wasn’t Elizabeth, but Liese. She wasn’t English, but German. And now she was also apparently Jewish, trailing a history around that Karen sensed carried shadows she had no frame of reference for. She was not, in fact, anyone Karen knew at all.
She crossed the little square, her mind made up to leave and find her classmates, to see how many glasses of schnapps she could drink before anyone noticed. The church door, however, was open.
I’ll go in but not stay past a minute. It won’t be welcoming. It’ll be stuffy and forbidding, like the one on the base.
Karen sloped inside, expecting darkness and air too dense for anything but whispers. Instead, the walls were pale and creamy and the light dancing blue and green through the long narrow windows took her breath away. She sank into a pew and watched the reflections ripple. It was so quiet, she could hear a bird singing in the trees outside.
She was exhausted and hungry and her head was a jumbled mess. She forced herself to focus on the plainly covered altar and tried to picture a bridegroom standing there, holding the hand of a happily smiling bride. When she added her parents’ faces to the uniform and white dress, the illusion shattered. Tears she had been swallowing for years began pouring; she no longer had the energy to care.
‘Geht es Ihnen gut? Brauchen Sie Hilfe?’
Karen rubbed at her eyes, but the tap wouldn’t turn off again.
The voice continued in an English that carried a slightly transatlantic twang.
‘Are you needing help?’
‘My mother and father were married here.’
If the answer struck the man who had sat down in the opposite pew as peculiar, his tone didn’t show it.
‘And they are dead? Which is why you are crying?’
The handkerchief he handed over blunted some of the directness.
‘My mother is.’
Karen caught sight of the man’s white clerical collar and didn’t know if she should admit it was suicide.
‘She drowned.’
‘I am sorry to hear that. You are English?’
She nodded.
‘But your parents were German – that is why they were married here?’
‘She was, not him; he was a British soldier – he was here in the war.’
Karen sneaked a look at the man’s face. He had soft brown eyes and a patient smile. Her tongue untied.
‘And I didn’t know she was from Berlin. And her name wasn’t what I thought it was. And now I think she was Jewish, which I didn’t know either, but I know that was dangerous here then. And I want to know the truth and no one will help me. And her death wasn’t an accident, it was suicide. And I don’t know why she did it.’
She tumbled to a halt in a fresh wave of tears.
‘Come.’
The priest got up and held out his hand.
‘What is it you English like when everything is falling to pieces?’
Karen sniffed. ‘Tea?’
‘Genau. Exactly. We will have tea. And you will tell me all of this slowly and we will see what is to be done.’
They had tea and a mound of biscuits, which were sugary and thick with chocolate and stopped Karen’s head from aching. She talked without interruption, except when her memories ran too fast for even Father Kristoff’s excellent English. When she finished, she sat back, waiting for a stream of sympathy. His response was not what she expected.
‘All this pain you carry, does your father also feel it as deeply? No, Karen. Wait a moment before you throw away the question and tell me you do not care. All this blame you pour on him, perhaps he deserves it. But I wonder: can you try something for me? Can you think of your father, for a moment, as someone different to this man you are so angry with? Can you try to imagine how it must have been, in 1947, for a young English soldier marrying a young German girl? Not everyone would smile at that, would you agree?’
The question, if not the task, seemed reasonable enough. And she certainly hadn’t thought of the two of them quite in those terms before: Father on the winning side, Mother on the losing. Karen nodded.
‘Good. Thank you. But they married, so there must have been a reason to do it. Couldn’t we believe it was love?’
She wasn’t ready to answer that.
The priest waited a moment but didn’t press her.
‘You said you think he controlled her. Perhaps, again, you are right. But what if we try this in a different way too? What if he was trying to look after her? What if she wanted the quiet and seclusion you think was too much; what if that was what she needed?’
He spread his hands as Karen began bristling.
‘I’m not saying you are wrong, but are you so sure that you are right? All I can be certain of is that too many secrets were kept and that your pain is terrible, and rightly so. But what about his?’
Karen poked at the last crumbs on her plate. This wasn’t what she had come here for. Shouldn’t a priest provide comfort not difficult questions? She wasn’t about to let him judge her life and its wounds so easily.
‘Maybe he did love her, but so what? He too
k her to England, where everyone hated Germans. He made her pretend to be something she wasn’t. That’s cruel, isn’t it? Surely there’s no kindness in that?’
Again, the response wrong-footed her.
‘What do you know about the war, Karen? Besides that England won.’
‘I know all about it. I’ve done it at school.’
The day had taught her she knew very little about anything, but she was in no mood to admit it.
Father Kristoff twisted his long fingers.
‘You give me the same answer a German girl would give, in the same aggrieved tone. What is it that you have done, Karen? Lists of battles? Churchill’s speeches? Did you ever do the part that involves people? Do you know what happened in cities like Dresden and Hamburg, in Coventry and London if we are keeping things fair, and here in Berlin?’
‘Of course I do. They were bombed.’
He looked so disappointed she wished she hadn’t been so blunt.
‘Bombed. Such an easy word when you haven’t lived through it. They were more than that. They were obliterated, wiped out of being. In 1945, when I assume your mother was here, there was barely a building standing – nothing but rubble and dust for miles. The Lindenkirche was one of the few churches not blasted to a ruin. That’s probably why they chose this place to be married. People lived in basements; they starved. Women had a terrible time at the hands of the occupying soldiers. The war was hell and, when it was meant to be over, it went on being hell. Safety is a different word in a world like that, believe me. If that is what your father could offer, doesn’t that make their marrying and going to England a different thing altogether? Couldn’t it sound like a rescue?’
She didn’t know what to say; how to persuade him that couldn’t be right. He was trying to paint the world in shades of grey when it was easier to manage in black and white. Rescue was such a ridiculous fairy-tale word. Father gave orders; he wasn’t some soft-hearted knight.
Maybe you could get up today, sweetheart, maybe for a little while? Karen would love it and so would I.
The memory flashed so strong, Karen flinched from it. Her mother in bed, silent and stiff like she could be for days. Father on his knees stroking her hand. ‘Even if you could make it as far as a chair.’ Her peeping round the door, terrified Mummy would slip further away. Downstairs again, the bedroom door shut and Father rubbing his face in the kitchen as he pulled together a breakfast they both knew neither of them would eat. And not just once. Karen could replay that scene on a loop across the years, although she chose not to. Because it hurt.
Because Father should have tried harder and not let Mother keep doing it.
As if he could see her thoughts fighting, Father Kristoff carried on.
‘Nothing is ever as straightforward as we think, as our pick-and-choose memories might have it. You also said your mother was Jewish? That makes all of this harder. Have you heard of the Holocaust?’
Was he trying to patronise her as well as shift the ground? They might not have studied that in detail at school, but only a fool wouldn’t have heard of it.
Karen frowned. ‘Yes, of course I have. Six million Jews were killed in the camps. Everyone knows about that.’
Father Kristoff’s gentle tone didn’t falter.
‘Yes, they do. That unforgettable number, what we’ve reduced all those lost lives to. Here in Germany, I’m afraid, worse than anywhere. Even a child can parrot it. It’s an easy thing to learn, but it’s a harder thing to turn it into bodies and the human cost. Think about it, Karen, consider it properly: all your agony at one death, but who mourns for the millions? There aren’t enough people left.’
Karen stared out of the window. The day was drawing out, the sky thickening to a deeper blue. A flock of birds had gathered above the trees, swooping up and down in a speckled cloud, ready to roost. They were tiny, sparrows perhaps or starlings, too many to count. She felt her cheeks redden. Six million. He was right: she couldn’t imagine the scale of it. She couldn’t number faces past the few hundred in her school photograph, and half of those were blurry.
She turned back to the priest, mortified.
‘Someone said my mother was one of the lucky ones. Do you believe that?’
Father Kristoff shrugged. ‘Perhaps she was; perhaps her suicide suggests different. We don’t know, Karen, what scars are left on those who came through it. We don’t discuss such things, although the people who gave the orders and stoked the fires still walk here among us. We don’t have the language to even begin. But if Liese Elfmann was the woman you’re piecing together, there could be horrors in her past that she couldn’t live with, that your father can’t tell. Does he deserve punishment for that?’
The right answer was no, but she still couldn’t dig beneath her pain and find it.
‘She left me. He didn’t stop her.’
The priest took her hand.
‘You are carrying a very hard cross. But what about this: what if he did stop her? What if she stayed with you as long as she could?’
Mother in her bed, lying as silent and stiff as Snow White. How many times had Karen feared her mother would simply stop breathing?
The priest held her hand tighter as the room’s edges wavered.
‘How old was she, when she died? How old were you?’
‘It was nearly seven years ago. I was eleven. She was fifty-one.’
‘She had lived a lot of life before you came. When you are blaming yourself, remember that.’
There was the sympathy she had been waiting for; its insight almost undid her.
‘How did you know that’s what I do?’
The exhaustion that swept over his face was unbearable.
‘Because too many of the suffering come here, to the church, to me – looking for answers. And every one of them carries their portion of blame.’
‘Do you help them?’
‘Don’t ask me that. I—’
A knock on the door pulled him away. His face rearranged.
‘Evening service calls. Will you stay for it?’
Part of her wanted to – she could sense there might be a peace in it, or at least some moments of calm to gather herself back up in. But her watch told the same story as the darkening sky.
‘I can’t. I’ll be in trouble if I’m late.’
‘Then I have one more piece of advice, if you can bear to hear it.’
She nodded. In that moment she could have borne a lot more than one piece.
‘When you dig up the past, do it gently. With a care for the living.’
The door opened without a knock this time and the priest was swept away by the needs of his parishioners.
Karen slipped out of the back door and headed to the station, shivering in the evening’s chill.
The train was busy, full of chatter Karen tuned out. The image of herself watching through the bedroom door, of her father’s tenderness as he bent over the bed, had triggered others that flew in as crowded as the birds swarming into the linden trees.
Was it Father keeping her mother up at night, stalking through the kitchen and the living room, talking and talking, or was it her who wouldn’t settle? Come away now, pet. She’s not here; she won’t answer. Words that had drifted up the staircase and made no sense, that Karen had pressed down until they were buried and now they nipped at her like nettles. Who was she and why wouldn’t she answer?
And those awkward Saturday evenings: was her mother crying because she didn’t want to go to the dances she got dressed up and ready for, or because she did but the walk to the door was too far? So much of her childhood adjusted around and never questioned.
What if she stayed with you as long as she could?
Father Kristoff had been reclaimed before she could ask what he meant. Before Karen could spill the long-ago-swallowed fear that had resurfaced with his words. That, one day, she would open the bedroom door and the bed would be empty. That the pale figure who could barely find a smile when Karen asked ‘do you need anyt
hing?’ but meant ‘do you need anyone?’ would have vanished.
Please, my love, eat something. How many times had Father said it?
You get slimmer by the day – tell us your secret! Her dressmaking clients had twittered it on the doorstep as if her mother’s tiny frame was a goal to aspire to. Except it wasn’t: she was ill. All those days when the face on the pillow was waxen, translucent. When the fingers Karen scrabbled for had no more substance than twigs.
Which is why I was afraid she would vanish and why Father was as frightened as me.
Karen closed her eyes and could have wept for them both.
By the time she got back to the Kurfürstendamm’s jumble, her head was splitting.
The street was lit up and swelling with its night-time traffic, a kaleidoscope of flashing adverts and cinema signs, blaring music and drink-loosened voices. Karen huddled past it all, desperate for sleep and an escape from the collision of emotions the day had let loose. She had lived for years not knowing who her mother was, but she had always thought she knew every inch of her father. Now he was shifting too. This wasn’t what she had asked for. She had made a plan; she had carried it out. She had come to Berlin; she had walked in her mother’s footsteps. She had found a trace of a flesh-and-blood Liese Elfmann, but every answer only led to another question.
Karen stumbled, her head whirling. She shouldn’t have come. She shouldn’t have gone to the dressmaker’s and let herself be spooked by a malicious old lady. She shouldn’t have let the priest open up doors that were doing perfectly well left shut.
She stopped abruptly, swearing back at the man who crashed into her, glad of an excuse to hit out. None of this was fair. If these were her mother’s streets, if Liese Elfmann had become whoever she was in this city, why was she still so hard to pin down? No, it was worse than that.
Stepping back from the chaos, Karen studied the passers-by. Some of them looked the right age to have walked here thirty years ago. They might have known Liese; they might have crossed paths with her. And if she asked any one of them what those days had been like, they would throw another shadow on the pile. Karen had come looking for answers and all she had to show for her searching was a far harder question. If this was the city which had shaped her mother, why had she slipped even further away?
What Only We Know: A heart-wrenching and unforgettable World War 2 historical novel Page 13
