by Margo Gorman
Diarmuid’s voice was warm with satisfaction now, ‘I think it would do Aunt Bridget good to come home for a while when it’s all over and she’ll not do that if we all go over there now. I’d be happy to pay for that if you want to invite her.’
‘Yes, I’ll ring her again to-morrow.’ That was it – another sly glance at the clock on the mantelpiece. Count down to the “Late, Late Show” and they could excuse themselves.
‘I’ll have an early night to-night, I think.’ Gran could be a real hypocrite too sometimes.
Aisling waited until they were in the car before she asked, ‘So what’s all this about Katharina being an orphan? So she’s not a real cousin?’
Her mother spoke for her father, ‘I think it’s what your Gran wants to believe. No-one really knows the full story but Katharina is Bridget’s daughter; that much is sure. There were so many different stories, we never knew which one Bridget told to make it easier for her parents; which one was the truth; and which one was pure fabrication. Your uncle Liam always said that the father was in the German army.’ Her mother imitated his Leitrim lilt but made it slower, ‘And what could be wrong with that – weren’t we all fighting the British then?’
She switched back to her own voice, ‘There were other stories about an American soldier but Katharina was born too soon after the end of the war for that. Anyway whoever it was, it’s fairly sure they were never married. That’s probably why Bridget never came back to Ireland. Well they couldn’t to begin with. Berlin wasn’t the easiest place to travel to. Even when it came to our time to travel in the late 60’s, your Gran was never keen. She used the excuse of the wall going up and people being killed. She made it sound as if Aunt Bridget was right in the middle of it. The real reason was that as long as Bridget was in Berlin and didn’t have much contact with the family, there was less scope for scandal. Anyway, from accounts we heard, Berlin seemed to be stuck in a time warp.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t make an effort. I thought that would be just up your street, Dad – a bit of living history. The Berlin Wall came down some time in the late 1980’s, didn’t it?’
‘November 1989. I’m surprised you don’t remember that date. The end of the German Democratic Republic and the unification of Germany followed on really quickly. It was the death knell of the Soviet Bloc.’
‘I was only born in 1983 remember. I wasn’t watching the news at 6 years old. And the Soviet Bloc is history now.’
‘I suppose so,’ her dad frowned and she could hear him slipping into history lecture tone which she mocked internally in half listening mode, ‘Your aunt was in the bit of Berlin controlled by the Allies at the end of the war but she was close to the Wall by all accounts.’
‘So I’ll be visiting an interesting specimen of social history. I’m surprised you’re not coming with me.’
‘Well I would love to but… ’
‘Just think, Diarmuid,’ Her mother sighed, ‘ Michael was just born.’
Danger zone of life BMD and life AMD – life-before-Michael-died and life after-Michael-died. Dad kicked the ball back into history.
‘No need to be sarcastic, young lady. Remember, it is part of living history not something only in schoolbooks. And apparently Berlin has a real buzz these days. Now it’s the capital city again. Seat of government. Media hub and so on.’
‘Be careful of what you say about the war to Brigitte. She was in some camp for a while during the war – somewhere near Berlin,’ her mother added.
‘A prisoner-of-war camp? What did she do to get in there?’
‘Well, it wasn’t a prisoner of war camp – more some sort of labour camp. They rounded foreigners up apparently.’
Her father butted in, ‘Where did you hear that, Mary, surely I would have known about it?’
‘I don’t know the full story but apparently your uncle Liam talked to her a lot when she came over to look after your grandmother that time.’
‘Oh,Liam! Well it could be hard to sort the fact from the fiction. You’ll have to be a bit more tactful than usual, Aisling.’
‘Look who’s talking!’
‘Don’t worry. Just don’t ask too many questions. Let Aunt Bridget tell you what she wants.’
Aisling said nothing – a funeral, a relative older than God and historical research; maybe Berlin could be more boring than being stuck at home. Still it wouldn’t be for long and it would make the break from being the good daughter. There must be clubs and cool places to hang out in Berlin. Maybe the buzz her father talked about had some connection to the Love Parade. Berlin was bracketed in her memory with the Love Parade. She reminded herself again to Google it. She’d have time to look at the guide at the airport if not before. It sounded as if there would be a few skeletons in the aunt’s cupboard worth a rattle too. Gran always censored out the more colourful bits of family history except maybe when she had a few sherries at Christmas.
Chapter Six – God Demands A Holocaust
The best of both would be good. In Ireland they took you from deathbed to the grave in three days. Here in Berlin there was so much to arrange and it took so long. Monika wanted Katharina in her family’s grave and now it was Monika who arranged everything.
‘And who will do it for me?’ she asked herself again and again and told herself not to be such a stupid, selfish, old woman. Someone would. How many pills would she need to be sure? The worst would be to survive and need them even more than she did now.So many days of getting up, eating and sleeping while Katharina’s cold body lay somewhere alone. Brigitte would have liked Katharina here with her in the flat but it wasn’t done. Instead she was kept in a fridge. Brigitte knew she would have to see her in the coffin but how? Who would take her? Not Monika, that was sure. She pinned her hopes on Peggy sending someone. She would get the pills ready. When to take them? Before Peggy sent someone or after? Before would be better. She didn’t need them all those years. All they needed to do was arrange her funeral. Monika would help. She and Katharina would get cremated together. The groping and grovelling for bread in conception would be merged with the years of joy with the child who brought back the will to live. Anna would read again from the book of Wisdom 3.1-6.9. The word sounding holy, a sacrifice. She heard it first in Anna’s German. The Old Testament was not read in the Ireland of her childhood. Later Katharina found it for her.
“God has put them to the test
and proved them worthy to be with him;
he has tested them like gold in a furnace,
and accepted them as a holocaust.”
Words of blood.
Flesh of my flesh. A love child or a bastard. Her father would not have allowed her to bring up her bastard in Leitrim. They chose to believe the whirlwind romance with an American soldier. No questions asked about why she didn’t follow him to America. When Katharina was old enough to go there alone, she visited once. She said she hated Ireland because Ireland didn’t fight the Nazis.
Waiting for death – a series of small steps to be remembered. You could make it seem dramatic but the last breath was only another breath, no more, no less – the last breath of many breaths. Monika was with Katharina when she died. She didn’t send for me. Just a phone call. It was what Katharina wanted, she said. It wasn’t right. Not even a priest. A new death brings back memory of old deaths; brings a moment to join being and non-being. Father O’ Dwyer who wanted to talk to her about her mother over a cup of tea when she wanted silence. It was only afterwards she realised he needed to know what to say in the sermon and it would save him asking another time. Who should do the readings? Should the coffin be light or dark? A foreign New Ireland question – would her mother want some make-up on? She made up what she didn’t know like the silent simulation of a well-known hymn.
‘It was that night that I stopped believing in life after death,’ she told her friend Mary who waltzed in the window for Katharina’s wake. ‘Why then and not in that place?’ she asked aloud. ‘Why did the two worlds come together that
time when they had been happy to survive in separation for so long? Was it the pointlessness of it all? Good, gut, guttural-good both better than nice. There is no nice death but a wake would still be good. It would be good to listen to stories of ghosts and spirits, stories of the past. Memories. Good memories. There are not many of those memories left now in Ireland. Where have they gone if not to an afterlife? Good and God. Was it then that I stopped believing in God too?’
All those years she had hung on to her belief that God and Good were somewhere still. Nobody would have blamed her if she had lost her faith a long time ago in the Lager. Nobody who knew or who could imagine it. Then she used to wonder what sort of God could do this but she found him still among the Bibelki, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. She could even see him in Günter when his face was close to hers – even when she saw him once with his belt in his hand, bending over that woman eating from the ground like a dog. She could see him demanding more than any human was capable of and taking away more than any human could imagine. The strange logic of the camp.
She could see God in the woman he whipped too. Thanks to her mother. ‘Remember, you are no better or worse than anyone can be. If you keep yourself from the worst in them, you keep yourself from the worst in you. There, but for the grace of God, goes me or you.’ Her mother’s voice in her ear. Surviving. Anna’s heavy breathing in the other. A little bundle of bones and yet such a strange noise as she left them behind.
She lifted the photo album to bring back the memories of Katharina making her First Communion. When her eyes closed again, it was Günter she saw striding up the aisle. She knew Günter was a Catholic and went to Mass every Sunday and prayed but she had never seen him in a church. It was only a picture she created in her mind. She never stopped asking herself how he could go to Mass on Sunday and do as he did the rest of the week. Maybe Günter prayed for these people whom he saw as no more than animals. She was lucky to be with the ‘Bifos’ or she would have died too. Günter respected the Bibelki. They managed to stay clean and mostly they refused to die of dysentery like so many of the others. He respected them more than the Communists, who were better organised. But it was the communist, Irma, who brought back the will to live, when Anna died. In Irma’s company, wanting to live became a habit again. A bad habit now that she wanted to die, even though there was nothing to leave and nothing to go to.
Good strong wake laughter was what she needed then and now – not this civilised tidy planning done by Katharina from her coffin. A wake. A nice cup of tea to sip or slurp. A nice cup of tea – those were the words from her mother’s last days. Biddy tried to make everything nice for her. She would sleep again after a few spoonfuls of warm sweet tea. She wanted her sister Peggy to come. Her sister Peggy had always been able to be nice, to find niceness, to make niceness. She has a fine Dublin house and fine Dublin family and fine Dublin ways. She has coffee with Irish women in Dublin, who have never been to Leitrim or maybe passed through it once without knowing but some of them have been to Berlin. Not Peggy.
Yola hovered, ‘Frau Duignan, would you like some coffee and cake?‘
Brigitte said yes to please her. Kaffee und Kuchen. Yola spoke English. One of the reasons Katharina wanted Yola to help her was she liked to speak English. She was delighted when Brigitte corrected her. The big bonus for her was that she was paid to have the opportunity to learn English in Berlin. ‘Your daughter was good and kind. Why does God take the good and kind people?’
Brigitte could hear Mary’s laugh like crackling in an old wireless. He won’t come for us too quick then will he? She wanted to laugh with Mary not cry with Yola but the tears came more easily. Tears and more tears. She wished Yola were gone. If she were alone the tears would dry up. I will die alone. She reached for a tablet – something that would help her survive now but not leave her short of a supply for her need to die later.
Play it again, Katharina,who laughed although she didn’t like Johnny Cash.
Diarmuid will not come after all. Peggy’s granddaughter is on her way. A strange young woman. Down to earth, Peggy says. She will find her own way. No need to involve Monika. Good. What is she looking for? Not the funeral of my Katharina, I am sure. At her age I would not choose to be with a bad-tempered old biddy. Berlin? Like me? Running too. I made a mistake; I said she could stay in Katharina’s room. I am not ready for that. I will pay for her to stay in a hotel. I will have no need of my savings soon. I wanted Diarmuid. I could leave him to make arrangements for me to follow Katharina. My bones shriek but no-one hears.
‘Someone comes from Eerland?’ Yola hovered within earshot when Peggy rang. Brigitte didn’t correct the pronunciation of Ireland; she liked it so.
‘Yes. My sister said someone will come to-morrow.’
‘Your sister will come?’
‘No she is not strong enough to travel. Her granddaughter will come.’
‘I make prepare in the morning.’
‘Thank you, Yola. I am tired now. I will go to sleep soon’
‘I left you some evening bread on the tray.’
‘Thank you. I don’t need any more.’ Brigitte was too weary to tell Yola once again that “Abendbrot” did not sound right when translated into “evening bread”. She wanted supper with Katharina – any Katharina who would come from behind the curtain. She would not come out until Yola left. Finally Yola did leave and Brigitte was alone waiting for Katharina. She sat by the candle and flowers that Monika had brought to her. She cancelled the image of Monika, stiff in her own sorrow, hugging it to herself. She had tried to embrace Brigitte when she came with the flowers but it felt wrong. Katharina had said once – she could be a second daughter for you. Such nonsense, she was no flesh and blood. When Katharina went to live with her, it killed forever the chance to have a grandchild and a future in this place. Brigitte turned over the photo of Katharina and went into the kitchen.
There it was – her supper on a tray. The tablets in a box each according to the time and the day. ‘So you don’t have to go looking for them, Mama.’ Did Katharina say that in German or English? Brigitte found the two languages mixed themselves in her brain, as she got older. Sometimes she didn’t know which one she had spoken. She blinked at the white modern lines of the kitchen. Each line from Katharina’s careful pencil on squared paper. They took it to the big store where a neat young man put it on a computer. She thought Katharina might stay that time. It was her kitchen even now.
She filled a glass of water to take her tablets and took it with her to put on the bedside table. Katharina liked to speak English to her. It was the one thing that she seemed proud of – her English-speaking mother. When Brigitte spoke her own strange mix of the two languages, Katharina would laugh. Brigitte heard that laugh now as she got into bed – it came from Katharina’s room. She told herself not to go looking. It was better to know that Katharina was there than to go in and find her absent.
It was not memories of Katharina that woke her from her short sleep. It was not Katharina’s face that came to her in sleep. That came when she woke. In her sleep it was those images again – gone for such a long time that she thought that she had burnt them forever. Images without the words she had hoped to share but never did – those were there still, stuffed in the drawers of her memory. Images of bone and blood that she couldn’t bring herself to share with her own flesh and blood. Katharina was so angry when she didn’t want to bring life to those images again. She had failed in that too.
Katharina screaming as she went through the dark curtain to the crematorium. The smell of burning flesh which I will not smell. Left with only ashes to bury. Monika will arrange it all, Katharina had said. It’s not as if we want a big family grave. It would be ridiculous and anyway if you decide to go back to Ireland. She stopped then leaving those images hanging there that she would not put into words because it meant acknowledging them as reality.
It was easier not to talk. Easier not to face the hurt of belief or disbelief. Better to keep counsel. Easier to leave
a hole there in your story than to risk what telling the story will do. So she was right to keep her own story. Surely everyone knows how the potential for cruelty in all of us is mighty. Some people like to think they would die first before they would kill another human being. How wrong they are! They told us in school of the Saint who chose death instead of rape. On the holy picture it is so clear. It doesn’t show the doubt, the hunger that eats you inside, the mixed-up-ness of feelings. The image of those nightmare days has stayed so long in my bones I know it to be true. It is possible and it did happen. How could I tell my little Kathy such a story? Katharina didn’t like to be called Kathy but now I can call her what I want.
Those years when she wanted so much to be younger than her years – when people saw her and Katharina and asked if they were sisters. Such pleasure in that. Years when she could disbelieve such death. Greece, twenty-five years ago – feeling young among those married women who became solid matrons overnight. She and Kathy wore shorts and linked arms in the street – the holiday was a present for Brigitte’s 60th birthday and her retirement. Time anyway for retirement – the Americans were leaving in droves even then. Happy for once – a lifetime from now. The past scattered onto the sea. And then one day I was old. It happened so suddenly. And with it the great excuse of being old – everyone doubts the memory of old people. And who was interested anyway in such a story? Now it is too late. Kathy is gone. I will vanish.
The heavy motor bike in the street dragged the loud siren of the Lager back into the present. So why does this image fight its way into my thoughts in these days. Bull’s-eyes white with some black somewhere. Not so strong as brandy balls. Are you one of those that suck them until they are gone? Or do you forget and crunch on it with your teeth. Bulls’ Eyes that popped out. My memory of Anna’s story mixes with the images without words.
It wasn’t what they said. Dog, pig, Hund, Schwein. Unless they are right and we are all animals. Better to believe what happened is not possible, she told herself often. Once she referred to the story to a stranger who came with Irma, who said she too had heard such a story from the women in her block. The woman nodded. ‘There are testimonies to such a story in the research with survivors.’
