Karen gasped, her throat clenching as she watched the East German guards shouting at the photographers, as she waited for bullets. Instead sparklers, not searchlights, lit up the concrete and the wastelands, and the human tidal wave kept surging.
‘After almost thirty years of being firmly barred, the gates between East and West finally stand open.’
The reporters carried on as best they could, while denim-clad and fake-leathered hordes surrounded them, clinging to each other, thrusting themselves into the camera as if only by recording the moment they would make its bizarreness real.
‘No more Stasi! No more secrets!’
Karen let out her tightly held breath. The journalists sensed danger and swung back to the party, but Karen could still hear the chant. It gathered itself up at the edges of the screen, roaring at the displaced soldiers who shuffled and blinked into shot and suddenly looked frightened.
No more secrets.
The doorbell rang. Karen ignored it. The letter box rattled to a strident ‘cooee’ as the neighbour, Mrs Hubbard, emerged, drilling for news like a wasp after sugar. Karen didn’t hear her. She was lost in the sight of long-separated people crying and hugging. In the possibility of spaces reopening, surrendering their histories.
There’s nothing to find; there’s no one to ask.
Karen stared at the screen as the house shifted round her. What if that was no longer true?
Eleven
Karen
Aldershot, December 1989–March 1990
Karen had never thought of herself as superstitious before, but the Wall’s moral, if not yet completely physical, collapse had her clutching at signs. Facing the past suddenly felt like the brave, the in-step-with-the-world thing to be doing.
In the weeks after her father’s heart attack, she raced to and from the hospital, torn between watching his slow progress and the far quicker moving news. She was mesmerised by the bulletins, switching between channels, glued to the set as chunks of concrete fell away in haphazard holes and Berlin stepped its way back through them. Instead of searching out a hotel to spend her enforced holiday in, she had decided instead to reclaim the house. To reinhabit its rooms and let her mother back in.
‘What if she stayed with you as long as she could?’
Memory after memory surged, and the newly emboldened Karen dived down under them. Every image she could grasp became a stepping stone to the next. She pictured herself as one of the Mauerspechte, the ‘Wall-woodpeckers’, with their clinking hammers and pickaxes, who the news reporters obsessed over. Not chipping away at crumbling stone, but peeling back the absences and the stillness; the night-time ramblings and the tears. Looking closer, listening harder.
‘Come away now, pet. She’s not here; she won’t answer.’
How had she missed the sob in her father’s voice? Why had she never questioned who she was?
As the weight of wasted years pressed more and more sharply, Karen finally did what Father Kristoff had asked her to do and shifted the angles she looked at the past from. It wasn’t easy – the events she summoned up had had their narrative set long ago. But she began and, when she did, she discovered that, if she decided Andrew’s hand on Liese’s shoulder was calming not controlling, she could see the way her mother leaned into it. If she refused to be frightened by the frozen figure in the bed, she remembered the tight embraces and the ‘I love you; I’m sorry’ pressed into her hair that followed the reawakenings.
There were no thunderbolt moments, nothing made any more sense than it had. The stings, however, blunted a little. Karen finally began to see that mothers stayed with their children whatever happened could perhaps be less rigid a gospel at twenty-nine than she had believed it to be at eleven.
The need to talk to her father consumed her. She was desperate to lay open her new way of seeing and have him embrace it, embrace her; to spill out the secrets and lighten them both. The nurses, however, too used to frantic sickbed declarations to indulge the ones they could stop, batted her away.
‘Whatever that light is in your eye, he’s not ready for it. He’s had major surgery; he’s weak. Let him be.’
Even if Karen had dared disobey, she wouldn’t have got close enough. Andrew was not the solitary figure she had always assumed: he had as wide a circle of friends as she did. There was always someone by his bed when she arrived at the hospital, reading aloud from a book or the newspaper, chatting quietly, even though he was still mostly unconscious. The visitors were, almost without exception, men, always scrupulously polite to Karen and all of them in thrall to Mrs Hubbard.
‘I’ve set up a rota of his old colleagues so he’s never without a bit of friendly company to gee him along. Clearly you must be terribly busy, you breeze in and out so fast.’
The last part was delivered through pursed lips as she copied the nurses and waved Karen’s agitation out of the ward.
‘Besides, there are more useful things you could be doing with your valuable time. Making a start on clearing the house for one. I have the details of his financial affairs, numbers for bank accounts and the like; I’ll pass them over to you this evening. And, as he assumed if this happened you’d be looking for a facility, you should know his preferred option is The Mountbank.’
Karen slunk away smarting, not confident enough of her standing in Mrs Hubbard’s eyes to mount any form of defence.
When she began tentatively poking at his neatly organised papers, she realised their old neighbour was right: her father had left nothing to chance. Mrs Hubbard’s pointed ‘why would he, when he couldn’t know what you would, or wouldn’t, listen to’ hardly made sorting through the files any easier.
There were funds arranged to bridge any payment gaps, the details of an estate agent ready for instruction. Everything was laid out as precisely and impersonally as his old holiday notes. Karen knew without searching that there would be no letters brimful of Liese’s past tucked away in the binders, no packets of fading photographs waiting to be revealed.
So, what, he was prepared to die without telling me anything?
No matter how hard she tried to block them out, the old hurts kept resurfacing.
In the end, it was a relief to find the envelope.
She had returned to work once it was clear her presence at the hospital was less than necessary, although she phoned for daily updates and raced down the motorway to Aldershot every weekend. Her father gradually showed signs that his recovery was coming; a buyer appeared for the house; the task of properly dealing with it became too urgent to keep stalling. Karen finally forced herself to begin the packing on a dark Saturday morning, boxing up the ground floor’s more neutral spaces before she could face tackling her parents’ bedroom and its uncomfortable memories.
The kitchen drawers and the small bureau in the living room yielded nothing unexpected; the hall cabinet contained little beyond telephone directories. She worked methodically, convincing herself her only focus was sorting out the house. As the hours went by, however, the task became the quest she knew it inevitably would be and the past’s refusal to cooperate took on the feel of an insult.
The greying rectangle fell into Karen’s lap as she shook out one of the last remaining books to be boxed, an unremarkable and faded paperback. Her first response was ‘thank goodness for that’.
The envelope was thin and unsealed, its dried-out flap heavily creased. Karen wiped her hands and wiped them again and discovered she couldn’t open it.
It’s another dead end flashed through her mind like a neon sign.
It wasn’t until her legs cramped, forcing her into a chair, that she steeled herself to slide the envelope’s contents out. There were two items tucked inside: a postcard with a street scene picked out in acid-tinged green and yellow, and a photograph in black and white which took her breath away.
She picked up the photograph first. It was the image her imagination had conjured up years ago in the church in Berlin: her parents, impossibly young, on their wedding day. Andrew
was in uniform, her mother in a calf-length pale dress and veiled hat. The couple were posed awkwardly outside a grubbier version of the Lindenkirche, with a second man a pace behind. The trio looked like actors in three different plays.
Andrew was joyous – there was no other word for it. He grinned out at the camera as if every birthday-cake wish had rained down on him at once, a wide smile brightening his solid face. Liese, in contrast, was looking down and held her long-stemmed bouquet raised, as if she longed to hide behind it. Her shadowed face and hunched shoulders made her look both bewildered and afraid, as if the simple act of being photographed was overwhelming.
It unnerved Karen to see her mother so uncomfortable, but it wasn’t Liese who made her eyes blur. The second man, who was as handsome as her father was plain, was visibly heartbroken. His distress was written in the hand hovering beside Liese’s elbow as if he was desperate to clutch it; in the way he couldn’t find a smile; in the pleading gaze fixed so hopelessly on the bride. His pain was too intimate to look at.
Her heart racing, Karen turned the photograph over in search of a name. There was nothing, not even a date.
Putting the image reluctantly to one side, she picked up the postcard. On closer inspection, the view wasn’t so much of a street as a boulevard. A wide expanse of manicured grass and spotless roads separated two identical rows of pristine buildings which stretched out towards a stately pair of towers. The effect was elegant, deliberately palatial. The tiered-wedding-cake architecture reminded Karen of diagrams of buildings in Moscow she had studied at university.
Unlike the photograph, the back of the card was covered in writing. A title identified the location as Stalinallee. There was a red postage stamp next to that, featuring the hammer and compass she remembered from the border crossing, the wording Deutsche Demokratische Republik and a smeared date stamp that said 1953. The message crowding the small space was in German, but, apart from the last line whose construction sent Karen upstairs for her old dictionary, its meaning was simple to follow.
Dearest Liese,
I am finally settled; my new home is better than any place I could have dreamed of in the war years, or after. You can write to me regularly now; whatever you send will find me. Please let me know you are well; please tell me that we did the right thing. That he gave you the good life I dreamed of for you. This silence between us stretches out endlessly.
The handwritten plea was followed by an address picked out in neater letters: Stalinallee Block C, 502, Friedrichshain, Berlin, DDR.
Karen knew at once that the Michael whose name was signed below the hard-pressed lines was the young man in the photograph. It was clear from the card’s gaps, as much as its words, that he loved her mother. What she couldn’t make sense of was ‘tell me that we did the right thing’.
She was still puzzling pointlessly at it when the clock struck six and she realised she’d missed her allotted slot at afternoon visiting.
I should ring the hospital, check on him; find an excuse before Mrs Hubbard comes snooping.
She made the call, but she didn’t put down the card. 1953. Karen ran her finger over the stamp and stroked the edge of the photograph. Thirty-five years. Michael could well be alive, could be living at the same address. Her father had been in this house longer than that. Which is all very well, but Aldershot had never been carved up in the same way as Berlin. What was here thirty-five years ago was still here. Where was the guarantee of that in Berlin?
Karen spent the rest of the night oblivious to everything but the possibility of other clues unfolding. She rechecked every book she had packed and went back through every boxed-up folder, searching for some scrap that would shed light on the man, on who he was to her mother. There were no more revelations. The only thing certain was that this Michael held an important place in Liese’s story. She couldn’t ask her father in his present condition; neither could she afford to ignore what she had found. All she had was an old address and a sneaking suspicion that names honouring Stalin might not be in favour anymore. Not very much to go on.
But not a dead end.
‘Such a delight to know you’ve kept up your German. So few do. And a mystery, how exciting! Let me just find my map box and I’m sure we can crack it.’
Time hadn’t diminished Mrs Hubbard’s busy-bodying, and it hadn’t dimmed Miss Dennison’s enthusiasm. The moment Karen had appeared, tentatively knocking on the classroom door of her vastly different old school, the teacher had been all squeals and handclapping. Once Karen had produced the postcard and explained she was trying to find out if the address was still valid, Miss Dennison’s enthusiasm bubbled over like lava.
‘Such a thing to bear witness to, the end of the Wall. I remember it going up. August 1961. I would have been eighteen, a proper little hothead. There wasn’t a word of warning, of course. One day it wasn’t there, the next it was and, whatever side you woke up on, you were stuck with it. So many people desperate to escape from the East and me and my friends threatening to go and join “the great revolution”. How crazy we must have sounded. My parents must have been horrified.’
Karen stared at her, wrong-footed by the revelation.
‘Why on earth did you want to do that?’
Miss Dennison laughed. ‘If you could see your face. Because we were socialists and young and naïve, and we thought the DDR promised nirvana.’
She has such a mischievous twinkle in her eye. Karen had never noticed that before, or how pretty the woman’s auburn hair was.
‘You were a socialist? That’s the last thing I would have taken you for.’
‘No, I imagine that wouldn’t fit the box you all put me in. Don’t look awkward; it doesn’t bother me. What pupil considers their teachers as people with lives of their own? I never did. We’re like parents to our pupils: some kind of other that’s not quite people. Well, Karen Cartwright, now you’re all grown up, let me properly introduce myself: I never was a Miss, I have a husband and two children and, for all its flaws, the DDR still fascinates me.’
She hauled a crate full of maps onto the table and began sorting through it.
‘Now, close your mouth and let’s see what we’ve got. Here, these two should do it.’
She pulled out two maps and spread them out. Both were of Berlin. The larger of the two was yellowing and had a bright red wall rendered across it, so carefully drawn it stood out like 3D. The second had removed West Berlin completely, leaving behind a gaping white space where the sector’s streets should have been.
‘They’re both from the DDR. The one with the red wall on it is from 1961; the other’s from a couple of years ago. A colleague brought them back as souvenirs from a conference his less conservative school turned a blind eye to. Look, there it is – Stalinallee.’
She pointed to a wide road marked on the East side of the older map.
‘Let me see the postcard. Yes, I thought so. This street is famous, or at least it is over there. “Exemplary homes for exemplary workers” was how it was described to my colleague.’ She pulled the newer map across. ‘You were right to think it would be renamed after Stalin died. There: Karl Marx Allee – can you see it?’
Karen nodded.
The teacher picked up the postcard.
‘Why is tracking this man down so important, Karen? Don’t say work – the message on this card is very personal. Is it to do with your mother?’
The question was so unexpected it left Karen groping for a chair, unable to answer.
Mrs Dennison, a title Karen knew she would take a while to get used to, kept talking.
‘We all knew what happened, of course. It was on your records. But your father didn’t want anyone discussing it. He was so broken, so desperate for you to make a fresh start. And you were such a spiky little thing, a proper little porcupine. Things would be done differently now, but then…’
‘Least said, soonest mended?’
Mrs Dennison nodded and passed Karen a tissue. Karen wiped her eyes and traced a finge
r round the blank space on the newer map.
‘It’s awful now to admit it, but it never dawned on me, when she died, that my father was damaged. He was so, I don’t know, stoic. I barely knew him then. I thought I hated him; I certainly acted like I did. And now he’s very sick and I’m full of questions, and even if he was well enough for me to ask them, neither of us know how to deal with the other.’
She held out her hand for the card and turned it over to look at the signature.
‘I don’t know why my mother did what she did, and everything I’ve learned about her since just adds to the mess. So when I found this postcard, it felt like a sign. This Michael matters – I’m sure of it. I think he was in love with her, although I’ve nothing but a look in a picture and a cryptic message to base that on. He was at her wedding and still worrying about her years later, so I know he must have been an important person in her life. What I don’t know is why. So I’m going to write to him, see if he’s still there in Berlin. It might come to nothing, but at least I’ll have tried. I’ve spent long enough not doing that.’
‘Will you tell your father?’
Karen tucked the card into her bag.
‘That I’m going to try and track down Michael? No, I don’t think so. Afterwards, maybe, if there’s anything to tell.’
She couldn’t admit she was afraid that, if she did, Andrew would try his hardest to stop her.
She shouldn’t have come. She knew that before the nurse chased her away. She hadn’t meant to upset him. Now that she had received an answer from Berlin, all she had wanted to do was share her excitement and show him the letter. How was she supposed to know her father would panic when she produced it? She knew he couldn’t talk yet, that his throat was still damaged and swollen from all the tubes they had used. She didn’t think he would try so hard to shout, because that was what his twisted face told her he was trying to do, or that his blood pressure would spike so high the crash team would come running. She felt terrible, she really did, but no one would believe her.
What Only We Know: A heart-wrenching and unforgettable World War 2 historical novel Page 20
