‘You OK being back here?’ asked Kate, rubbing my arm, regarding the church with a suspicious eye. ‘It’s a funny place though, isn’t it?’ She looked up at the tower, clutching the clipboard to her chest. ‘Bel’s choice, I take it?’
‘Absolutely. She loved it. She said she’d always wanted to come here when she was a teenager but it was on the wrong side of the wall.’
‘It’s also on the wrong side of the North Sea!’ Kate made a snuffling sound with her nose. ‘That chapter of her book has cost us about twenty grand, as Bob keeps reminding me. If only she’d stuck to places in Britain we could get to in a minibus.’
I stared at the building.
‘Are you going inside?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Maybe…’
‘What was it like when you got married here?’
‘There were less trees for one thing. Berlin seems like some kind of overgrown city to me. Nature just trying to reclaim everything.’
‘What were her family like? And her friends? Did they throw a good party?’
‘It was a piss-up. There was so much beer afterwards and so much cake. And cheap Sekt.’
‘Excuse me!’
‘Sekt. It’s like champagne but cheaper. And shitter.’
‘Ha.’
‘You’re going to see Bel’s family while we’re here, right?’
‘Exactly. When you guys go home tomorrow – assuming that clown can get his lines out by the end of the day so we can pack up – I’m going to stay on for a couple of extra days to see Frau Schneider and just, well, see some other stuff too.’
‘And I’ll see you when you get back home? I’ll come over and cook.’
‘Of course.’
‘Won’t do anything silly while you’re here?’
‘I’ll be a good boy, I promise.’
‘Good.’
Kate kissed me on the left cheek and walked off to organise some more of the shoot. Baxter stood up, performed his ridiculous breathing ritual, stretched his arms. He reached into his pocket, pulled out some kind of pink pill – no doubt obtained from a guy in a leather jacket hanging around outside one of Berlin’s myriad nocturnal dens of iniquity – and swallowed it.
Bob cleared the stragglers away and shouted for the filming to begin. Baxter opened his mouth and said…
34
1998
The waters of the Rummelsburger See looked like a bowl of delicious broth. I wanted to dive in. Sunlight danced on the solid surface, which was only broken by ducks bobbing around.
Belinda rested her head on my lap and gently drifted off to sleep. I continued drinking cold pilsner from an oversized bottle and stroked her hair. It was perfect.
*
2008
The waters of the Rummelsburger See looked like an oil slick. I wanted to run away. Puffy clouds lingered overhead. No waterfowl lingered today.
I remembered this place, that time. It drained me to be constantly reminded of perfection, of a perfection you could never recreate. I didn’t feel alone on that bench though. It wasn’t exactly that Bel was… there with me, but there was something odd. Some kind of something. Some kind of presence. I drank the last of my pilsner and lobbed the bottle in like a true English hooligan.
It didn’t take long to arrive at Frau Schneider’s house in Lichtenberg. I hadn’t seen her or talked to her since the day of Bel’s funeral. As I climbed the steps of the drab grey apartment block, I suddenly felt very guilty for shutting her out.
‘Ah, Donald, come here.’ She crept over and threw her arms around me without shame. I could smell cabbage and potatoes and pork. The flat was as hot and wet as a kettle. ‘It’s so good to see you.’ I saw Bel’s facial features in her mother; I saw that kindness in her eyes, the cheeky grin too. I mustn’t cry, I thought. I really mustn’t. Not here.
‘How was your trip? You could have stayed here. How is your hotel?’
‘It’s fine, thanks. You’re very kind. Listen, I’m really sorry for not being in touch more, but I… I just…’
‘I understand, Donald. You don’t need to explain.’ Frau Schneider paused very briefly before she spoke each soft sentence, eager to express herself correctly and precisely. ‘You just need to know that I’m always here. That’s all. Now let’s get you a drink.’
While Frau Schneider fixed me a drink, I browsed the novels on her shelves, and below those, neatly arranged, the non-fiction catalogue – many, many art and architecture books. Books Bel would have been brought up on. Frau Schneider was a translator; her English was perfect. Which was very helpful as my German was limited.
We drank.
‘Do you remember when your dog, Breuer, died?’ An unexpected question.
‘Of course.’
‘I don’t think Bel had had much experience of grief before that. I remember her calling me in tears. She was so traumatised by it. She couldn’t believe such a bad thing would happen.’
‘I remember.’
‘And she asked me, “Mutti, Don won’t die, will he? I can’t imagine that? Promise me Don won’t ever leave me on my own. I couldn’t cope.” It was very sad.’
‘I…’
‘It’s not supposed to happen. None of this is supposed to happen. We are supposed to have simple, boring lives like everyone else. It’s not fair to experience tragedy. It’s not right.’ Frau Schneider looked so thin. Her lips wobbled even after she’d finished speaking. She stared at me in silence. I couldn’t accept the intimacy; I had to look at the carpet. The pattern was abstract, cream on burgundy. Concentrate on the small things. I heard a tea cup jangling on a saucer, a wrist that was quivering, tears that were forming. The room was silent apart from muffled sobs and then the sound of a tissue being wiped across a face. I looked up. Frau Schneider wore a fake smile, her eyes glazed. ‘I warned Bel about bicycling in such a big city like Birmingham with so many roads, so many motorways. I always worried about her.’
‘I did too.’ I sighed. ‘But I knew it made her happy. She loved cycling. She made me buy a bike too. I hadn’t cycled much since I was a kid. But I loved it.’
Frau Schneider didn’t seem to be listening. She wanted to say or do something instead, move things forward somehow. This was a very ‘Bel’ trait. She spoke. ‘I want to take you somewhere… after lunch.’
Once I was full of meat and potatoes, I helped her up. She put on her coat and I put on mine. We walked down the steps of her building and out into the sunlight. She linked her left arm through my right and guided me south through streets over which tall plattenbau blocks presided. The fences had holes in them, the pavements were a little cracked, but there was no rubbish around.
‘What about your own parents? Peter and Alison, isn’t it? Are they looking after you?’
‘They’re not around anymore, Frau Schneider. It’s just me.’
‘I should have known that, you should have told me. I’m sorry, Donald. I know what it’s like… without Bel’s father.’ She looked at me now. ‘You must call me whenever you need to. Berlin isn’t so far away. It’s just a short flight.’
The scenes we strolled through reminded me of the big estates in Birmingham: Castle Bromwich or Druids Heath. Bel never felt nervous when she stood in underpasses or before tower blocks in Birmingham. These estates in Berlin didn’t seem as scary as those in Birmingham had been. They were quiet, and the people we passed all seemed well-behaved. We eventually arrived at something much scarier than an estate though – a compound whose cheap concrete banality spoke of a much bigger terror. The buildings enclosed a courtyard; they were all different heights and yet incredibly dull. Terror is shocking, but terror is also, evidently, a crashing bore, a dinner-party guest you don’t want – even to make up the numbers. What was this place?
‘The Stasi HQ,’ said Frau Schneider. We stood, almost shaking, outside its entrance. ‘I’m glad Bel went to England. This was not the sort of country I wanted her to grow up in. This was a place that lost its mind. And it lost its soul.’ She
seemed very frightened. ‘You must excuse me, Donald. Once you have been inside Hohenschönhausen… well, once is one times too many. They broke my spirit. My optimism. People think of the DDR as a bit of a joke. The silly little cars and the nudism and the socialist brotherhood. But it was sinister. It was evil. Let me assure you of that. I managed to inoculate Bel against all that hate. But, Donald…’ She turned to me. I squeezed her songbird arms and stared into haunted eyes. ‘…it came at such a cost. The time I wanted with her. My only child. So little time. And now it’s all used up. Too soon. Just too soon.’ I hugged Frau Schneider tightly. Then I looked into those eyes again. Suddenly they were Bel’s eyes, the same colour and shape as Bel’s eyes, the same kindness as Bel’s eyes.
‘Frau Schneider?’
‘Yes, Donald?’
‘Frau Schneider… would you like a beer?’
She smiled, wiping tears from her cheeks. We set off walking up Karl-Marx-Allee, which Frau Schneider told me had previously been called Stalinallee. Bel had expressed a particular distaste for the straight, wide avenue. I remember her saying. Now I realised that perhaps Berlin hid many ghosts for her, ghosts that she was as scared of as her mother was.
After two beers in a hipster bar on Alexanderplatz, a certain superficial jollity returned to Frau Schneider. I felt like a naughty schoolboy smoking in front of her, but today I offered her fags and she puffed away just like everyone else in the bar. I thought there was a smoking ban in Germany, but no one seemed to give two hoots. The bar had a retro aesthetic, such as it was, and as I casually scanned the posters around the room I suddenly thought I’d made an error. I realised many of them were regime propaganda pieces from the 1970s. Posters declaring Berlin: DDR Hauptstadt and showing a horrendously huge building which I assumed was the now-defunct Palace of the People, and the more easily recognisable Fernsehturm, which loomed right above us. TV was a cultural weapon in the Cold War; there was no getting away from the boastful monuments to it – like this one. Bel had taken me up the Fernsehturm the day before I proposed to her. She seemed more interested in the elaborate swoops of concrete at the tower’s base. I wondered simply how it was possible to grow such a massive and obviously prick-inspired tower from nothing. Bel taught me its German nickname – the Telespargel or ‘TV asparagus’. Spargel had become one of my favourite words, and I never missed an opportunity to order Spargel wherever I could. I felt pissed. I needed to get Frau Schneider away from her bad memories and from this weird world where totalitarianism could be ironically enjoyed by hipsters from a safe historical distance, where Ostalgia was – apparently – harmless.
‘Frau Schneider, I’d like to take you somewhere too.’
After half an hour’s drive, we got out of the taxi among some trees as the light was fading. A locked gate and a fence presented itself. ‘We need to find a hole in the fence.’ Frau Schneider looked shocked for a second, then that same flash of insouciance that Bel deployed so often made itself apparent on her mother’s face. She wasn’t scared. I helped her through a hole in the fence and she exchanged some pleasantries with a woman walking a dog, which seemed to put her at ease. We threaded through rubble and looped round the back of the derelict buildings. Frau Schneider chirruped away about taking Bel on outings when she was tiny, the same kind of meaningless chit-chat old women everywhere use. A way to keep hold of memories, to keep hold of sanity. I led her up some concrete stairs, and by the fifth floor she was clearly tiring.
‘Not much further,’ I promised. ‘Hurry up or I’ll have to carry you on my back.’
She seemed amused by this. We reached the top floor – at least, I thought it was the top floor. We walked out along a floor that used to be filled with American spies. We had to tread carefully, avoiding huge holes where the concrete had failed. At the edge, precipitous drops presented themselves on all sides. I realised our goal was higher still.
‘Sorry, I forgot about this bit,’ I said.
We had to climb a narrower stair core, up another four flights. But at the top we emerged onto a disc of floor with poles at its edge. An incredible cacophony of sound made it feel all the more surreal, a compete din as slices of plastic sheeting banged against the building’s side. The plastic covered the golf-ball domes in which the listening equipment was stored. And out in the distance, towards the north-east, the lights of Berlin burned bright. But it could have been Birmingham; it could have been anywhere.
‘This is incredible,’ said Frau Schneider, hardly comprehending. ‘I had no idea. What is it?’
‘Teufelsberg. That’s one bit of German I do remember.’
‘The Devil’s Mountain. Of course. I heard the stories of the rubble being stacked up. All of the rubble from the bombing made into a huge mountain by the Trümmerfrauen, the rubble women. But I never knew this crazy thing was on top of it. That’s West Berlin though – a mystery to me.’
‘It was the American listening station. I guess they were trying to listen to those Stasi bastards.’ I put the word ‘bastards’ in here to try and placate Frau Schneider.
‘They’re all bastards,’ she said. ‘They’re all men. Women wouldn’t think this kind of thing up.’
‘But the view?’
‘Yes, it’s worth it for the view. Totalitarianism and the Cold War did give us some great views. The Fernsehturm, and now this. Teufelsberg. Did Bel like it here?’
‘That’s why I’ve brought you here. She told me this was a favourite secret spot in the city.’ I thought about the next bit for a second or two. ‘She came to… parties here after the wall fell. Music parties.’ She took a lot of drugs here on trips back from Birmingham to see friends and taste a more liberal nocturnal life in the newly unified city. ‘She brought me here on that holiday we had. Remember when we came to see you? I proposed to her in Hackescher Markt on that holiday. But she brought me here too and I thought it was incredible. I was scared as well though.’ I really was. I remember thinking I was going to get beaten up by the security thugs who had arrived out of nowhere and looked displeased by our presence. Bel, in typical style, had shouted at them to get lost.
Frau Schneider continued to silently regard the view. Then she cleared her throat. ‘I miss my daughter so much. I love her so much.’ I began to cry as she finished speaking, and we both sat grieving quietly for a few minutes.
‘You should come to Birmingham and see me, Frau Schneider. We’re having a screening of the film, of Ten Brutalist Buildings, at my office, at the studios. You could come and watch it, meet everyone who knew Bel and loved her.’
‘That’s kind of you, Donald, but I’m feeling too old to travel these days. The last time, of course, for the funeral… I… it was…’
‘We don’t have to talk about that.’
Frau Schneider surveyed the scene. Her eye seemed drawn to something but I couldn’t work out what.
‘We have to be strong in Berlin. They’ve thrown so much at us. We all have to be so strong. But it’s tiring. It’s very tiring. Fighting is too much for me. I only want to be happy now. I don’t know if that’s possible.’
‘It is. I’ve read so much about this place, and you have a spirit that must be unbreakable, really unbreakable.’
‘They tried to break us. My God, they tried. Over and over again.’ She paused. ‘I think I brought Belinda up to be too tough, but you had to be tough here. You had to be single-minded to deal with the pressures placed on you. It was like carrying a huge weight around with you every day. When you went to the shops, to work, to see your friends. Always this weight on you. People said it lifted after the wall came down but I’m not so sure. I still feel it weighing down on me, pushing me towards the ground. I just keep on pushing it back up.’
‘Well that’s exactly what you should be doing.’
She looked at her feet, like a moping child. ‘No one cried in the DDR. It was weakness. I couldn’t let anyone see me cry. I couldn’t let Bel see me cry in particular, because I needed her to be tough enough to endure life – lu
ckily the tides turned and she had hope, the hope of a free life. History was kind to her. But I had to show her how to be resilient. I learned to cry so silently. I trained myself to do it without making a sound. I could do it in the kitchen or out on the balcony or in our stupid Trabant. It steamed up so much, no one could see inside. I could sob without sniffing, without whimpering, without wailing. These days I have no more need to cry silently, but I still catch myself doing it and realise I am sitting there, not making a sound. Through the walls I hear rock music sometimes and those video games, but I can cry so silently that they’d never even know I was still there, still just sitting on my own in that chair.’
‘Would you like a cigarette?’
‘I’m an old woman. What harm is it going to do me?’ She grinned, a big, soppy Schneider smile.
We sat down on the edge of the floor, smoking like a couple of teenagers, our legs dangling off the very edge of the building. Clouds rolled across our vista, the light rapidly fading. The few towers you could see rose into the sky, but I was struck by how vast and how flat and how bucolic Berlin appeared. A city of suburbs, just like Brum. In the very distance, in the direction of the Reichstag, I thought I could see a small white ball steadily rising and falling. It looked like it might be a hot-air balloon. It reached the top of its trajectory and then just fell back again. Then the process repeated. Again and again. It never got anywhere. Did it want to climb up to the stars, to break its leash? Did it want to rip out its anchor and make itself free? Or was it happy to just follow the rules? Bel made us watch a film once about a family who used a balloon to escape the East. They stitched it together themselves and they made a burner and a basket and they floated right up and over the border into West Germany. Where did ordinary people like that find such extraordinary courage? Being a hero isn’t easy. We were so lucky in Britain that we hadn’t been forced into a corner; we hadn’t needed to make difficult decisions, choose sides. We just had simple choices. Meaningless choices: the supermarket with the orange bags or the one with the white bags? We forgot just how many choices we really had.
The Wall in the Head Page 24
