Brandenburg

by Henry Porter

  Rather doubtfully, Ulrike crept along the lane until they saw some abandoned farm buildings in the headlights. They took another right and proceeded up an overgrown driveway where the car kept slewing right and left because the wheels found no grip on the grass. Four or five hundred yards from the farm buildings they burst from the cover of the dripping trees and came to a mesh fence. Stapled to one of the posts was a notice that read ‘Verboten - Ministerium für Staatssicherheit’.

  ‘Where the hell are we?’ she asked Rosenharte as he almost fell out of the car. He did not answer, but ran to the fence and started working with a blind fury at the post immediately in front of them, rocking it back and forth until he felt the wood give beneath the soil. The wire came away easily and he rolled it back.

  ‘Where are we?’ she repeated.

  He got back into the car. ‘Go straight ahead and stop asking so many damned questions.’

  ‘Rudi, I have every right to know where you’re taking me,’ she said reasonably.

  ‘Pull up there,’ he said as they reached the façade of the great ruined house. ‘Over there by the wall.’

  Ulrike looked up at the baroque profile looming over them. ‘What is this place?’

  He didn’t answer, but got out and started removing all the bags from the car.

  ‘Rudi!’ she said, placing a hand on his arm to stop him. ‘Tell me where we are.’

  ‘Schloss Clausnitz. The ancestral home of my family that was stolen by the Stasi. It’s also Schwarzmeer’s private country retreat. But he stays way over on the other side of the estate.’

  ‘We can’t stay here!’

  ‘We can,’ he said, wresting his arm free. ‘It’s mine now.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Rudi. Calm down. We need to think about this. It’s crazy.’

  He was aware of his unreason, but could not stop himself. He rushed to the stairs with the two bags and quickly broke in through the French windows with his knife. Ulrike followed him into the dusty blackness.

  ‘Where are we going to sleep?’ she asked.

  ‘There must be fifty rooms in this place. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find somewhere warm and dry.’

  ‘But why are we here?’

  ‘Because this is where we came from. This is my home. Konrad’s home.’

  ‘Forty-five years ago it was your home,’ she said softly. ‘It’s no longer yours. There’s nothing of your life here.’

  He looked at her in the beam of his torch. ‘I thought of coming here yesterday, because they won’t look for us here. There’s nothing around here except the forest: no villages, just a few houses. And Schwarzmeer won’t be here. He’ll be far too busy defending his rear in Berlin.’

  ‘What happened to the farm we passed? Aren’t there people still living in it?’

  He saw that she was trying to calm him down. ‘Who knows? Probably screwed up like everything else during collectivization. You know, I had an idea to tell Konrad about this place. He didn’t know about it. I thought it would entertain him to come back here and make one of his strange little films.’ He paused. ‘It’s where we come from! For all I know we were conceived here, early in 1939, just on the eve of war.’

  The beam from the torch skidded along the floor as he stumbled from room to room with the bottle of brandy. He paused in the dining room, where there was nothing but a pile of floorboards and a jumble of rags, then in a reception room, which he seemed to remember was used in the mornings by women dressed stiffly in suits of dark green and grey. They came upon the double staircase, which still had a semblance of grandeur like the stairway of an ocean liner, though it was much older and palpably better made. He flashed the torch across the ceiling where there was an eighteenth-century mural of a winged archer that had been left untouched by the troops who had been briefly billeted in all the great houses of southern Germany after May 1945. Around the walls, the old mirrors had been vandalized and bits of glass hung from the plaster frames and flashed in his beam.

  ‘We used to play here,’ he said, his hand sweeping wildly across the stairway. ‘There were pictures along here. I remember dogs were everywhere: terriers, German shepherds, dachshunds and an English spaniel. The place was alive with guests, the extended family and servants and they all came through this part of the house. It was like a rail terminus.’

  They turned to the entrance, where someone had attempted to prise the marble from the floor but had succeeded only in breaking it.

  ‘And here was the front door where we lined up to watch our parents arrive - us in uniform, no doubt.’

  ‘Who was your father?’

  ‘I thought Biermeier had seen my file and told you everything.’

  ‘Not everything. I knew they were Nazis and that there were some remarks in your records about it. But he didn’t tell me much.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know - that your father was a general and that both your parents died at the end of the war.’

  ‘My father, Manfred von Huth, was in the SS,’ he said savagely. ‘He was certainly a war criminal. He became a Brigadeführer und General of the Thirty-second Panzergrenadierdivision “30 Januar”. History does not relate how he died. Maybe he was shot on Hitler’s orders. The Stasi have a theory that he was killed by his own troops. Who knows? My mother was a von Clausnitz. This place belonged to her family. She died in the Dresden firestorm.’

  ‘And that’s when the Rosenhartes took you in?’

  He took a swig of brandy but didn’t answer her. ‘Damn it,’ he said at length. ‘Konnie should have seen this place. He would have told me what it explains about us, the things inside us that we got from our parents here. He had very good instincts, you know; he didn’t need to be told something, he didn’t need it written down. He understood because of his humane intelligence.’ He repeated the phrase several times and then threw the remains of the brandy to the back of his throat. This made him retch. Still coughing, he staggered down the corridor to find a kitchen, pantry, larder, storage and laundry rooms. All of them bore the signs of abuse and sudden evacuation. He explored every room on the ground floor, wildly throwing open doors, looking in and moving on. Ulrike did all she could to keep up as he roamed through the house, cursing the ghosts of the von Clausnitz family.

  In the end she said it would be best if she left him alone while she found somewhere for them to sleep. She touched him before leaving and said: ‘Be careful with yourself, Rudi.’ He brushed her away and went up a back stairway to find he knew not what: his parents’ bedroom? A boudoir where the repellent Nazi she-wolf retired? A nursery perhaps - his home for the first years of his life with Konnie. He had no idea what he was searching for, but as he went he was conscious that he was mapping the extent of his loss. It was a matter of seeing how much of him survived the unthinkable absence at his side. Yet by and by there were deeper truths that he probed. The possibility occurred to him that he had not done as much as he could for Konrad after his release from jail, so preoccupied was he by his own needs, his own safety. There were, he knew, shameful occasions when he should have helped him but did not. He could, for instance, have made an appointment in his name to see the dentist and then encouraged Konnie to go in his place: no one would have been the wiser. But it hadn’t occurred to him and of course Konrad never complained, never asked anything of him. That was because Konrad understood he was the stronger of the two and yet he loved him nonetheless; loved him despite the weakness and selfishness.

  He had arrived in a room at the front of the house which had four windows, inlaid mirrors on two sides and the remains of a small chandelier that dangled from the ceiling. The thought came to him that the house was just too large to have been completely wrecked after the war - this room, for instance, would take very little to restore. He lowered himself onto a wooden window seat, a low rhomboid-shaped box that had once been upholstered and was still stuck with padding and horse-hair.

  The clouds had lifted and the night had
become lighter. The near-full moon sent a beam to the floor, which flickered like a movie screen from the silent era as the clouds ran across the sky. He took out Konrad’s letter, unfolded it carefully and read it. The first tears of his grief soon hit the paper and he hurriedly wiped them away so there would be no stain. What he had taken as a product of his brother’s despair he now realized was noble resignation, the stoicism of a great man who had been martyred by the state’s leaden vindictiveness. Konrad had had the courage to know that he was dying and to make his peace. He did not complain about his lot, but used the opportunity to pass his love to his children and wife and to give Rosenharte the sacred duty of their care. It was so typical of him that he allowed no word of regret or anger to intrude on this priority, typical of his humane intelligence.

  Rosenharte sat with his head in his hands and wept for his brother’s incorruptibility. Very slowly it was Konrad’s loss rather than his own that assumed its rightful place in his mind. Konrad had lost everything, from the sight of his children and the comfort of his wife to the hopes of his own creative impulse. Against this, Rosenharte had merely lost his twin - his closest relationship by far and the person he had relied on and sought approval from all his life. But he hadn’t suffered like Konrad and he hadn’t lost his life.

  He stayed there for several hours. His rage began to pass, although he was no less stricken. He moved from the window to escape a draught and slid to the floor so his back rested against the seat. He smoked several cigarettes there, lining up the extinct butts on the floorboards in front of him. At some point he noticed that part of the front of the seat and the top lifted up. He turned his torch into the space and saw a lot of documents. It took only a moment to discover that they were the personal papers of Isobel von Huth. They were not, however, very revealing, merely the kind of thing you’d expect to find in the bureau of an upper-class woman. There were bills from her dressmaker, old invitations, the 1937 membership of an equestrian club, correspondence from lawyers about a property in Berlin, meaningless keepsakes and scores of personal letters all written in elegant early twentieth-century script. These also had a rather businesslike air and they mostly concerned arrangements and meetings. One bore the address and insignia of the National Socialist Party headquarters in Berlin, yet the only matter discussed on the single sheet was the purchase of a gelding named Schnurgerade.

  He looked through it all with a sense that Isobel von Huth was a rather dull woman. There was little sign of life, even in the black pocket diaries that she had kept from 1933 onwards, each one of which bore a small silver Swastika on the cover. No doubt one day he might be able to piece together a life, but faced with the loss of Konrad, his interest in the person who had given birth to them seemed suddenly academic. She had not counted in their lives, and now there was simply no reason to resurrect her from the punctilious world of the German aristocracy.

  He was thumbing through the 1938 diary absently when he realized that several small snaps had dropped between his legs. There were five in all, three of an elderly man with a walrus moustache, and two of a woman with a horse. He assumed that this must be his mother, Isobel von Huth, though he found no spark of recognition in himself, and even though it was the first image he had ever seen of her he felt nothing stir in his heart. In both poses she stood with her legs set apart in a slightly masculine stance, her fists turned back on a slender, belted waist. Her breeches were perfectly pressed, her riding boots polished to a metallic sheen and the light military-style shirt betrayed no bust to speak of. It was her expression that interested Rosenharte. Her gaze had settled on something in the far distance in conscious mimicry of the images of the time that showed heroic German youth looking into the future of the Fatherland. He flipped over one of the pictures. An ink inscription read, ‘Myself and Schnurgerade, September 1939’ and he muttered aloud that it was a damned good thing she had died. He couldn’t imagine such a woman adapting to life under the communists.

  He slipped the pictures into the little flap pocket at the back of the diary and put it into his coat. Then he got up, rubbed his buttocks and legs into life and made his way along the vast corridors to the main staircase, feeling the true weight of his grief.

  He found Ulrike sitting in the kitchen lit by two candles, reading a piece of newspaper from the thirties. She gave him an enquiring look as he came in.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said wearily. ‘I’ve blown out. It’s over. Gone. I won’t shout any more.’

  ‘Come, sit. I’ve made us a meal.’

  He nodded. Part of his problem now was knowing how to be with her. The grief was like shame. He found it very hard to look into her eyes.

  They sat silently in the nest she had made from the clothes and his sleeping bag, eating a little sausage. ‘I’ve been reading this old newspaper from the Nazi era,’ she said. ‘It’s like opening a door into another world. There’s nothing like a newspaper for doing that, is there? You see their attitudes and the things they took for granted in every line. Even the advertisements tell you something.’

  ‘I had a similar experience upstairs.’ He pulled out the diary and handed her the photographs. ‘That’s my mother.’

  ‘Good Lord. She doesn’t look a bit like you. She has a peevish little mouth and her eyes are set too close together and have no humour.’

  She looked at the inscription on the back and he saw something pass through her eyes.

  ‘What’re you thinking?’

  She examined him for a moment, then returned the photographs to their place in the diary. ‘It’s dated September 1939 - the month war was declared by the British.’ She paused. ‘And you found them in this diary from 1938?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, not really concentrating.

  ‘Then perhaps she got the date wrong on the back of the photograph.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. It didn’t seem to matter one way or the other. She was dead, like her son.

  31

  Limbo

  At dawn Rosenharte slipped from Ulrike’s cold embrace and went to urinate from a window. He looked out over the courtyard, feeling the effects of the brandy behind his eyes and at the base of his skull, and cursed himself, not quite remembering why he had sunk the majority of the bottle of Goldi. Two or three minutes of being his usual hung-over self elapsed before Konrad’s death hit him and his hands began to shake uncontrollably. He revolved from the window and slumped against the wall, trying to disentangle the events of the previous day - the phone call to Vladimir, the furious search of the house, finding the jumbled cache of his mother’s letters and photographs.

  What stopped him from complete collapse was the sound of a voice echoing round the walls of the courtyard outside. A man was musing about the presence of the car. He nudged Ulrike with his foot. ‘Get up, we’ve got company,’ he said roughly, as though it was her fault.

  She leapt from the bed and followed him into a passage that led from the kitchen to the dining room. Rosenharte crept to the window. The car was still there but no one was in sight.

  ‘Maybe you imagined it,’ she whispered.

  ‘No, no, there’re fresh footprints in the grass. They’re not ours because it was still raining when we left the car. Those were made this morning.’

  ‘We’d better leave.’ As she said this, they heard a dog scampering along the main corridor outside the dining room. Then came a voice ordering it to heel. There was nowhere for them to hide, and a second or two later a man appeared at the door of the dining room.

  ‘Hey, this is state property. You’re in a restricted area: authorized personnel only. We don’t allow vagrants here.’

  ‘Good morning,’ said Rosenharte. ‘Sir, let me assure you we aren’t vagrants.’

  The man held a stick, which he lowered at the sound of Rosenharte’s measured tone.

  ‘Then what’re you doing here?’

  ‘You want the honest answer? I am looking over my ancestral home. This belonged to my mother’s family - von Clausnitz. So you could
say I’ve every right to be here.’

  The man entered the unforgiving light of the dining room and examined them. He looked to be in his seventies, and was wearing an old traditional leather jacket with horn buttons, corduroy breeches and brown leather boots that fastened with a strap just below the knee. His eyes were a watery blue and the skin of his face was weathered, but still stretched tightly across a Slavic bone structure.

  ‘This is all owned by the state now. The Clausnitz name counts for nothing here. It’s the name of a place, not of a family.’ He looked at him shrewdly. ‘Besides, you can’t be a von Clausnitz.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘I was originally given my father’s name - von Huth. I am the son of Manfred von Huth.’

  ‘If you are who you say you are, and you’re not just some vagabond, then worse luck for you. The man was a Nazi, a butcher.’

  ‘Indeed sir, but we cannot choose our parents.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said the man, melting a little.

  ‘Have you known the place long?’

  ‘All my life, but I was away from the beginning of the war until 1950, a prisoner in Russia.’ He spat on the floor. ‘Six years in a hole that wasn’t fit for pigs.’

  Rosenharte nodded. ‘I’m trying to do a little research. You know how it is when you get to middle age: you want things explained. You want to try and understand your past.’ He pulled out the picture of Isobel von Huth. ‘This is my mother. Did you by any chance know her?’

  The man peered at the photograph, but it was plain that he couldn’t see properly. He shook his head. ‘Yes, yes, I remember her. Her heart was as cold as a winter’s night. I used to work on the estate before joining up in 1938. She was stuck up, if you know what I mean. Never said hello or gave anyone the time of day.’ He looked up at Rosenharte. ‘And you’re her boy? You don’t look like her.’