by Clare Harvey
On my left is a detached house with an overgrown garden and a white Lada on the drive: number two. This must be it. I feel suddenly nervous and apologetic, turning up at this stranger’s house. My feet crunch on the gravel drive. There is a bell hanging on a chain beside the wooden front door. I pull it, and it jangles, but nobody comes. I knock three times and wait. There’s no response. Maybe she is out, still at work? I am about to turn away, when a light comes on, and I hear footsteps on a tiled floor. The door begins to open. I take a breath. ‘Guten Abend, Frau Karger,’ I say, as the doorway reveals sheepskin slippers, beige slacks, a blue poloneck jumper, and a face framed with pale grey-gold curls. I hold out a hand and introduce myself in the polite way my grandmother taught me when I was a little girl: ‘Sehr erfreut.’
‘Oh, it’s you. I expected you sooner, dear.’ She answers in English, a voice like the queen. She smiles as she sees my outstretched hand. ‘I think we can dispense with that kind of formality, being family.’ Her arms are around me, a softly powdered cheek against mine. She is the same height as me, and smells of fried onions and lavender water. ‘So lovely to finally get to meet my great-niece,’ she says, holding me at arm’s-length and regarding me with round, blue eyes.
‘Great niece?’ I say, stupidly.
‘Are they still too ashamed to talk about me, back home?’ she says, letting her hands drop. ‘Oh well, come in out of the cold. I’ll make tea, shall I?’
November 1989, Exeter
Odette
‘So, are there any more skeletons in the closet?’ Helen slices carrots and peppers into tiny ribbons as she speaks. I have just driven round to tell her about Miranda, and how I’ve sent her to Gwen’s to escape from her abusive boyfriend. But Helen is infuriatingly flippant. ‘No millionaire cousins in Australia, or hidden stashes of family silver?’
‘I thought you’d be a bit more concerned about your daughter,’ I say, watching as she pushes the red and orange strips into a neat rectangle on the chopping board.
‘I don’t think she wants my concern. You know she hasn’t spoken to me for months, not since we had that row about her father.’
(That row: they are both right, and I can’t take sides.)
‘I only found out she’d gone to Berlin because her boyfriend – the one who’s apparently so awful – thought to leave a note when they came round to pick up her passport,’ Helen says, putting down her knife.
‘Miranda told me he headbutted her,’ I say.
‘Then she’s well out of it, with good old “Red Gwen”.’ Helen is opening the fridge, and peering inside. ‘Anyway, Miranda’s a grown woman now. She needs to learn to take care of herself. When I was her age . . .’ Helen’s voice is muffled by the fridge door.
‘When you were her age you had a husband, a baby, and you were one term into your masters degree,’ I complete her sentence. She straightens up, slams the fridge closed, and slaps a plastic bag on the work surface. We lock eyes for a moment. She has blue eyes, like her father, and Gwen. Neither of us speaks, but I know we are both remembering those days, twenty-one years ago: a squalling, colicky baby, Jono changing nappies by day and stacking shelves by night, and Helen struggling with the demands of academia and motherhood. I helped as much as I could. To everyone else it seemed that I was being a wonderful support, a dutiful grandmother. But doesn’t altruism always have a seed of selfishness? It is only now I can admit the guilty truth to myself: baby Miranda helped fill the gaping hole that widowhood had opened up, and circumstances meant that in many ways she soon became more of a daughter than a grandchild. I often wonder how much of this Helen has already guessed: that her unplanned student pregnancy and marital strife gave me a new sense of purpose when I most needed it.
I blink, now, breaking our gaze. ‘So, what’s his name?’ I say, changing the subject, nodding at the food preparation. Mackerel parcels are Helen’s second-date staple. I open the cupboard door behind me and pass her the baking paper.
‘Keith,’ she says, accepting the dodge, complicit in leaving the past behind. ‘New history tutor, just moved down from Surrey. Recently separated. Will parsley do instead of dill?’ she mutters to herself, pulling sprigs from the potted plant on the windowsill. ‘I suppose it will have to.’
I wonder if Keith will last any longer than Marcus, Trevor or John, as Helen chops the leaves and pulls two sheets from the roll of baking paper. The radio is on in the other room. It seeps through the open kitchen doorway, a late afternoon drama: someone sighing and talking bitterly about betrayal. My mind returns to Miranda. I check my watch. Hopefully she’s arrived at Gwen’s by now.
‘Aren’t you worried at all?’ I say.
Helen slaps the fish onto the paper. ‘Not really. The separation was fairly amicable, apparently, no kids, and his decree nisi is due to come through next month. Anyway, it’s early days.’
‘I mean, about your daughter.’
‘Well, you’ve told me you’ve sent her off to this secret communist aunt of mine. I’m not sure what else we can reasonably be expected to do from this end.’ She stuffs the vegetables and herbs into the wetly gaping mackerel bellies.
‘Miranda says she can’t get replacement travel documents until Wednesday. That’s four days. What if Quill comes to find her in the meantime? Or, worse still, what if she goes back to him and doesn’t come home at all?’
‘How is he going to find her?’ Helen wraps up the stuffed fish in their paper shrouds.
‘He’s a journalist. He’ll have contacts. And she’s in the East, now. She’s probably already being tailed by the Stasi.’
‘But even if he’s got contacts in the Stasi, and he tracks her down, why on earth would she go back to him, after what he’s done? My daughter may be many things, but she’s not stupid.’
‘But what if she thinks she’s in love?’ I say, watching Helen rinse her fingers in the sink and dry them on a tea towel. ‘Love makes people do stupid, dangerous, life-changing things.’ Helen gives me a sharp look. She thinks what I’ve just said is a comment on her own drug-fuelled partying student days with Jono, before Miranda’s unexpected appearance. She turns away, taking off her red-checked apron and hanging it on the hook on the back door. But my words weren’t meant as a reproach. I was thinking of the stupid and dangerous things I did for love myself, once upon a time.
‘You need to find a distraction, then,’ Helen says, turning back to face me with her hands on her hips. ‘When Miranda was little, and about to do something naughty, you always used to say not to tell her off, just to find a distraction for her.’
‘But she’s not a child anymore —’
‘Doesn’t the principle still apply? Send her off to take photos of something – more skeletons in closets or hidden family silver, I don’t know. Give her something else to think about, if you’re worried about her going back to Mr Wrong.’ I shake my head. Helen doesn’t seem to be taking this seriously at all. Rain sputters at the kitchen window. Helen’s house is wedged into the side of the hill, windows half submerged against the pavement. Outside, beyond the reflections in the pane, I see legs and a bulging carrier bag jolt past, at an angle. ‘Look, Mum, you’re welcome to stay and meet Keith if you want . . .’
I take the hint. ‘No, I should get going. I only popped round to tell you about Miranda.’
‘And I’m glad you did.’ It is unexpected, the hug. A swift kiss on the cheek is all I usually get from my daughter. Helen smells of L’air du Temps and gutted fish. ‘Thank you for pointing Miranda in the right direction. But try not to worry about her. She’s a tough cookie, really.’
‘Like her mum,’ I say. Stiff tendrils of Helen’s spiky hair-sprayed hair graze my cheek like twigs as we embrace.
‘And her grandmother.’ She gives me a final squeeze and pulls away. ‘Now, shoo. I need to hop in the shower before Keith gets here.’
In the car going home my windscreen wipers smudge drizzle across the glass, and my headlights waver in the gloom. Helen told me not to worr
y about Miranda, but how can I not? Unlike me, Helen hasn’t met Quill, doesn’t know what kind of man she’s dealing with.
As I signal to turn off the clock-tower roundabout there’s a sudden tingling in my arm, and it’s hard to even push up the indicator. For a split second it is as if all the streetlights have been turned down on a dimmer switch, and the road stretches, thin as a razor blade, away to infinity. But then the moment passes. A funny turn, that’s all, low blood pressure or something, to be expected at my age, I suppose. When I get home I must make sure I have something to eat, I think, as I slow down to wait at the traffic lights by the museum.
A distraction, Helen said, send Miranda off to find skeletons in closets and family silver. I take my hand off the steering wheel for a moment and touch the hollow where my neck meets my chest.
Skeletons and family silver: Helen’s flippant comments ring truer than she realizes.
November 1989, East Berlin
Miranda
‘I was a traitor, coming to live here with Karl-Heinz,’ my great-aunt Gwen says, laying out photographs in front of her like tarot reading on the kitchen table. ‘At least, that’s how my family viewed it. For me it was an escape.’
Her house smells similar to my grandmother’s flat in Exeter: coffee, cigarette smoke, dried flowers. Great-aunt Gwen tells me why she’s been erased from my family history. ‘You won’t know this, but post-war Britain was a grim place. It was as if the whole country was convalescing. There was an enormous pressure to settle down, to do small, safe things with our lives, do you see?’ She glances over at me and I nod, even though I’m not sure I do see.
‘I’d just been demobbed, but my former boss – a colonel on the brink of retirement – had proposed. Mother and Father were desperate to get me settled. But I could see exactly how my future would play out if I said yes: going to bridge parties, walking tubby Labradors, flower arranging for the local church, and, in time, becoming a glorified nurse for my elderly husband. Don’t get me wrong, I was flattered, and very fond of the old boy, so I asked him to give me the weekend to think about it.’ Gwen takes a sip of tea before continuing.
‘I took myself off to a Wagner concert. Actually I hated Wagner, still do, but a girlfriend of mine had a ticket she couldn’t use, and I needed the distraction. On the way to the bus stop I got chatting to a Marxist musicologist who happened to be taking the same bus to the same concert. That was Karl-Heinz.’ She puts her elbows on the table and her hands together, as if about to pray.
‘I fell in love with the man, the ideology was just part of the package. He wanted to help build a new Germany, in the East. So we married, and I went with him. That was more than forty years ago, now.’
‘And you never came back?’
‘During the Stalinist era I wasn’t allowed, but I wouldn’t have been welcome, if I could have. Ditching a decent life as a colonel’s wife in favour of marrying a penniless German-Jew refugee, and becoming a communist to boot? They thought I was mad. They were thoroughly ashamed. Do you know, the only person who even sent me Christmas cards was your grandmother.’ She sighs and taps the photograph on the top left of a dark-eyed man holding a violin under his jutting jaw. ‘That’s Karl-Heinz, taken just before we met,’ she says.
‘Handsome,’ I say, although I think there is something cruel about the set of his mouth. ‘I can see why you fell for him. And is he . . .?’ I hesitate, not quite sure how to continue. There is no hint of a male presence in this house.
‘He passed away earlier this year,’ she says, her chin jutting with odd defiance as she speaks. ‘His heart.’ I begin to say that I’m sorry for her loss, but she interrupts me. ‘How can you be sorry? You never met him. You barely know me. I miss him, but he was not an easy man to be with. In many ways his passing was a release.’ She pauses, and I realize that she’s not looking into my eyes, but at the spot on my right temple where the bruise has begun to swell. ‘You know how some men are,’ she says.
I nod. I do know how some men are: men whose love falls as quick as a declaration of war, and who annexe you into their own lives within days.
‘More tea?’ Gwen’s chair scrapes on the tiled floor as she gets up.
‘Please,’ I say. As she goes over to refill the teapot, I look down at the other photographs laid out on the wooden table top. One in particular catches my eye: a man in RAF uniform, leaning against the fuselage, smiling a languid smile into the lens, as if war will be of no more consequence than a Sunday afternoon cricket match on the village green. ‘Is that Granddad?’ I say, pointing. Gwen turns with the teapot. ‘Yes, that’s Tom. Rather dashing, don’t you think? No wonder all my old school chums had pashes on him.’ She comes back with the tea and refills our cups, then sits back down beside me. ‘And here are your grandparents with your mother.’ She gestures at a christening photo: Granddad still in uniform, Gran in a slim suit with thick shoulder pads and a hat, and a baby trailing frothy lace. ‘Your grandmother sometimes put photographs in with her Christmas letter,’ Gwen says, ‘so I kept up with the family news. Look, here you are.’ I sip the tea: warm and sweet. The photograph she’s pointing at is an awful posed studio shot: Mum, Dad and I all smiling effortfully for the professional photographer, against a backdrop of fluffy clouds (my front teeth are missing, and I hold both parents’ hands as if trying to tug them together). Next to it is an earlier photo of my mother in her graduation robe, hair hanging down from her mortar board in wispy, hippyish waves. I am in that photo, too, I realize, but unseen: the large pregnancy bump hidden beneath the billowing gown. I would have been born a week later, slap-bang in the middle of the summer of love.
‘Thank you for showing me these,’ I say, thinking how odd it is that this woman I’ve never met has been keeping track of our family history all these years. ‘But what’s this one?’ Almost beneath Gwen’s right elbow is a sepia postcard that has been torn in two and taped back together. The edges of the tape curl up yellow.
‘Oh, I only came across this one a few weeks ago, when I was clearing out Karl-Heinz’s office. It was in a book of poetry your grandmother lent me. The book had mildew and some spilled red wine had stuck pages together – it was ruined – but as I was throwing it away, this fell out. It must be your grandmother’s, and I thought you could take it back to her when you go.’ She pushes it across the table to me.
On the front of the torn-mended postcard is a village scene, dominated by a half-timbered house. In front of the house is a space where cars are parked, and there’s a sliver of road showing. Right in the foreground is a single bough from what looks like a beech tree. At the bottom, in thick angular script, it says: Deutches Haus Gasthaus, Lossen. I turn the card over. On the reverse an address is scribbled in faded pencil. Gwen leans in. ‘That’s your grandfather’s handwriting, and that address is our childhood home: The Rectory. You might remember it.’
I do vaguely remember visiting my great-grandparents in South Devon, as a very young child. I turn the postcard back to the picture side. ‘But this isn’t a photograph of the South Hams.’
‘No, I think it must be a picture of your grandmother’s old house in East Germany, where she grew up,’ Gwen says. ‘That’s why I thought she’d like to have it back.’
‘But I thought she came from Colmar in Alsace?’ I knew Grandma spoke German, of course, she taught me, but she always claimed to be from a German-speaking part of France.
‘That’s just what she told people. It was easier that way. Everyone was so unrelentingly vile about the Germans. It was her own mother who came from Alsace, apparently. Anyway, you can give it to her when you next see her, and tell her I’m sorry about the book.’
I pick up the card. My gaze travels the points of a triangle: the creased brown postcard of an East German village, Gwen’s careworn face, and, outside, through the kitchen window, the very last ribbon of Prussian blue escaping from the Berlin sky.
I feel as if I’ve slipped through the looking glass.
Chapter 15
January 1945, Nazi Germany
Tom
Her eyes glinted and her cheeks were flushed from the cold. ‘I’m sorry.’ She pulled the blue scarf away from her face as she spoke. ‘I shouldn’t have knocked; I should have come in the back way. I didn’t think.’ Her English was accented and imperfect. She lent over and pulled the heavy bookcase completely free so that Tom could stand up from his hiding place in the alcove. A couple of leather-bound volumes fell to the floor as he uncurled from the hidden hole, limbs burning with pins and needles. Her head was lowered as she reached for the fallen books, hair falling forward in a waterfall. She put them on the shelf.
‘It’s okay. We’re all a bit jumpy,’ he said, pushing the bookcase back into position.
‘That’s a bloody understatement,’ Gordon chipped in, as Father Richter helped him out from the space under the floorboards. Tom smiled. It was good to hear him speak, starting to recover.
She straightened up. ‘You’re right to be scared. They could come back at any time.’ She brushed her hair from her eyes and looked at him. ‘We might not always be as lucky as we were this morning. We’ll have to think about moving you on as soon as your friend is able.’
Move them, but where to? Surely no one but a priest would consider having an enemy on the run in their home. Tom was about to respond when the priest cut in, saying he had to go and perform a christening. ‘I have to stick to my routine. It will be noticed, otherwise. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ He was gone, then, leaving them alone with Detta.
They stood quite close, him and her, not having moved away from the bookcase. How long had it been since he was this close to a woman? He was aware, suddenly, of his unbuttoned shirt, the air cool against his chest. ‘Well, then,’ he said, stupidly, fumbling to do up his buttons. She looked pointedly away. He glanced across to Gordon, who was watching them both. There was the clunk from downstairs: the priest closing the front door behind him, and the metallic scrape of his key in the lock. ‘So, um, don’t let us keep you. If you have cleaning to do, and so forth,’ he said.
