by Margo Gorman
‘When I ran out of tea leaves, I used to make tea with nettles that I gathered. I always had some dried stalks hanging in the cellar. I kept a store of the ration coffee to swap for something. I couldn’t drink the stuff. In daylight I would scrabble through the rubble for anything I could find. The skin on my hands was raw and bleeding from scrabbling there but it was worth it when I found something. Like the cooking pots. I brought them to the cellar and used them to heat the cabbage or beans. The memory of putting them away carefully after Sunday lunch of goulash or rouladen gave me appetite. I stored anything useful I could find in the cellar.
‘The strangest thing of all was that, one day, when I was huddled in the cellar, a parcel came from home. Would you believe it – a postman delivering to a street that had been bombed! He pushed his cart up the street and people would appear from nowhere waving their papers. My surprise made me realise that I was still a foreigner. In my parcel there was tea and bacon and two of my mother’s griddle scones. Only two because they had to be eaten fresh and she didn’t know how long the parcel would take. I swapped some bacon for some more potatoes and a few onions from Herr Schmidt’s garden. I ate the best meal of my life that day and then huddled up beside the boiler and pictured myself beside the range at home. When they came for me some days later, I still had one piece of bacon from that parcel and some tea. One of the hardest things, when I was in the Lager, was the thought of bacon slowly rotting away while we were so hungry. Many nights before I fell asleep I wondered if some hungry rat would get through the defences I had created to protect it or would someone else have taken over my little cellar to live there. I missed my little cellar.’
‘How do you mean when they came for you? Who came for you?’
The aunt sighed, ‘I told you I don’t want to tell fairy stories.’
Clammed shut. Aisling yawned her exit with excuses of tiredness.
Brigitte turned her eyes now from the voile blind, which had found a partner in the light evening breeze. It wasn’t important now. To tell or not to tell. What did it matter? She took out a cigarette and lit it. ‘Cancer sticks’, Katharina had said when she was a teenager. She had never smoked and was always trying to persuade her mother to give them up.
Chapter Twelve – Ferienlager
Looking for a history book to settle the uncomfortable restless sensation. Hangover from the whiskey? Hitting on the website for the bookshop fed her restlessness. She needed some more visuals of Berlin in the war years. Flicking through Katharina’s collection on Ravensbrück, she wondered why these books stayed here. If Katharina taught history she must have had lots more books somewhere. The books on this shelf were not academic thankfully and a few were even in English. Probably bought with Brigitte in mind. In the graphic novel of Spring in 1945, the face of a young woman, with a square set jaw and high forehead, looked familiar – it reminded her of her cousin Celia who was supposed to be the image of Gran when she was young. She looked at the pictures of ruined buildings, rolled up bedding in the street and people sitting, standing or walking. Ideas formed. She needed a scanner now. She could scan the images from the “Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939-1945”. She could scan the images, zoom in on some and use them as a basis for her drawings. This would be a major project.
The feeling fluttered still – somewhere between uncertainty and fear. The old photos brought her back to the days when her dad gave her his old Canon. He ditched it when he got his digital camera. Aisling enjoyed playing around with the Canon. Anyone could take a good photo with a decent digital camera but there was none of the magic of capturing an image in the old-fashioned way. For a while Aisling enjoyed the perverse eyeball to lens, seeking out the perfect match for a single moment of being. It didn’t last and the camera was gathering dust now on a shelf in the cottage in Leitrim.
Back on the bed again and looking at the yellow and brown stained pages. The unspoken battle between Brigitte and Katharina; between Leitrim and Berlin; between memory and the desire to forget. She could feel the pages crackle with stories the aunt wanted to tell and wanted to hide. It made her want to know more – to know more of the unspeakable things. A story of people who could be cruel for no good reason. She’d have to worm more out of Brigitte. She watched and waited for her chance after ‘Abendbrot’.
“Would you tell me a bit about the camp?”
Brigitte looked at her through blank eyes which had lost their usual stern sky-blue. She was probably somewhere in the past with Katharina. She hadn’t mentioned anything about the whiskey of the night before. Just as well. Aisling would stay away from that, even if the aunt went on it to-night.
‘Camp?’ Brigitte asked her from a face that had crumpled in on itself.
‘Yes you know the Lager, that place you told me about.’ Aisling switched her tone and put the emphasis on ‘that place’. Said in the right way, it should be guaranteed to tune her into a certain wavelength.
‘So you want to know more about my days in the Ferienlager?
‘Ferienlager? Holiday camp?
‘Anna and me – we called it that. Some called them ‘Arbeitslager’.
‘Workcamp?’
Aisling sighed. Brigitte was doing a wind up. Get her talking and find a way in through the contradictions.
‘Ferienlager?’
‘To survive as long as I have, you need to learn to see with other eyes than your own. Anna was taken to the camp in 1940. To begin with it was only sixteen wooden blocks, and a building housing the kitchen, baths, and offices. Many of the houses – the villas and apartments on the outside of the camp for the women guards – were already finished. The women swept the sandy road into intricate patterns. There were still small trees and shrubs near the blocks. Even flowers and some salad leaves grown around the block in summer. They went to work building more blocks and more houses, or worked in factories in the town.
Each woman had a dish, knife, fork, spoon, glass, and a dishcloth. My can was just an old tin but Anna’s was a proper enamel can, I have it still. In the days of the ‘Ferienlager’, each prisoner had a cupboard, one woman to a bunk with her own quilt. Showers with warm water; flushing toilets. Enough heat from the stove. Maybe the early days of the camp was how it was meant to be. Who knows?
‘Anna taught me phrases and words in German for me to repeat during the day. Die Blumen wachsen – warmes Wasser. Alles in Ordnung. Another word was paradise. Paradise! Para-dies! You can find paradise in comparison if you can believe in it still. Anna held onto her belief in God, in images of order with a full belly and cleanliness. She had a great laugh – like a hyena. On the worst days even days of punishment she only had to speak of planting flowers in the Ferienlager. Her laugh was as infectious as dysentery running rife. If the guards caught us laughing, she would make some remark about my German and they would join in. No-one could hate Anna. Laughter and kindness helped us keep the horror outside. Laughter and kindness are the only defence against prison. Knowing facts and history is not enough.
‘Ferienlager – if I rolled the word on my tongue, I could taste the water of the lake where I went with Dieter, Delia and the boys on a sticky summer day and the fish lunch afterwards at the restaurant by the lake with my new family. I could feel the waters of the lake on my shoulders where I dipped in and out on my hunkers moving my arms as if I was swimming– too timid to admit that I did not swim but the children knew and laughed at me.’
‘How did you meet Anna?’ Aisling wanted her to focus.
‘In the early days each category of prisoner was in a separate block but by the time I arrived, there was so much overcrowding nothing worked, they shoved women in everywhere. I had a red triangle even though I wasn’t a political but they put me with the lavender triangles because I was on my own. I shared a bed with Anna and another lavender triangle. I was lucky.
‘Sleepless nights, muddy days and watery soup but we were still expected to do a hard day’s work. It killed many that winter.’
; ‘What about Anna, how did she die?’
Brigitte sighed again, ‘The end of the Ferienlager. I was afraid that when Anna died there would be no more laughter. No protection. So many rules and regulations; even when the place was falling to bits it was impossible to keep up.’
‘Not exactly a holiday camp after all, then,’ Aisling commented.
‘You young people are all the same. “Mama, you and your Ferienlager and how cruel women can be to other women. You never speak of the Nazis who put you in there”,’ Brigitte mimicked, ‘Inside or outside the camp, people hate each other for good reason or no good reason.Find the Nazi in yourself before you look for it in someone else, Katharina.’
Aisling flinched. Had Brigitte lost it? Did she really confuse her with Katharina or was it memory talking?
Brigitte took a tissue out of the packet sitting on the table beside her chair and carefully sealed the packet again. Beside it were her reading glasses in their case – never taken out as far as Aisling could see but they travelled every day from the bedside table to the little folding table by Brigitte’s chair. Beside them the remote control for the TV – that stayed on the table always. Aisling had yet to see that in use either. Once she had asked to turn on the TV and put the remote on the chair beside her. Brigitte fidgeted so much it was impossible to watch anything anyway. Finally she asked Aisling to put the remote back in its place and then she settled again and dozed off. Aisling realised then what the fidgeting was about. The remote had to sit there in its place beside her tablet box.
Gran would like one of those boxes, Aisling thought: morning, afternoon, evening; three little boxes for every day of the week. Gran marked hers carefully every day on bits of old birthday cards ever since the day she had forgotten to take her blood pressure tablets and rang Mum in a panic because she had pains across her chest and couldn’t move. Her Mum believed she was just attention-seeking and it was all in her imagination. Maybe, maybe not. She watched now as Brigitte put the tissues back in their place – beside the bar of chocolate. Aisling fetched a glass and filled both glasses from the bottle on the table. Sometimes she put ice cubes in her own but Brigitte always refused them no matter how hot it was.
She’s a fine one to talk about rigid regulations in ‘that place’ – little rituals over nothing. Order had to be established in the midst of misery. Beds neatly made, inspections under the bed. Aisling grinned to herself – at least Brigitte wasn’t into inspecting your knickers – not like Gran. You never know what will happen in the day. What if you had an accident and ended up in hospital? Clean decent knickers and none of this modern nonsense. An image of Gran holding up one of her own thongs from the wash came back. Not something to share with Brigitte.
Chapter Thirteen – Patrice at the Postbahnhof
Aisling turned over in the single bed to escape the light from the street. Not a bad idea to go to the Patrice concert, she thought. She had never even heard of him before she got the email from Alex but she couldn’t spend all her time holed up with Brigitte, mourning. Nobody expected her to be grief-stricken. Katharina was sixty years old. Probably she had enough of being sick and was glad to die.
She was now in possession of a key so she could come and go as she pleased. Her task of the day was to find out if she could get a ticket to the concert. She hadn’t worked out Internet access on the laptop yet, so she headed for the nearest internet café. A bit of surfing would give her the information that she needed. It wasn’t the easiest of searches but she did find it in the end. Postbahnhof sounded like a sorting office near a station. If it was not too expensive she would go. It was near the Ostbahnhof or East Station so easy to get to. She debated whether to take her phone. It would be class to send back live photos to Alex – or even Andrew himself – but Alex would turn it into something to boast about. Better to wait and e-mail a ‘By the way, I saw Patrice at the Postbahnhof,’ dead casually. It would be worth going just for that even if she didn’t like him. Free of bag, phone, and I-pod she felt light.
The venue looked a bit like one for a rave party rather than a concert but inside the atmosphere was good and the twenty-two euro ticket was comfortably inside her bargain zone. Without much of a queue! A much more civilised city than Dublin. The bar was big: most of the people were around her own age and she’d chosen the right clothes – her comfortable black Armani jeans and a black sleeveless top with a bit of stylish swirl design in discreet glitter. It was the sort of place where you could wear any style but she felt like she blended in. By the time she got a beer and had a wander around, there were sounds of something. He was on – no support group even and no hanging about for superstar tantrums.
Aisling had never been a fan of reggae music. She tried listening to it so that she could talk to Andrew. He liked the old stuff – the Bob Marley days. When she knew it was no go with Andrew, she stopped playing them. She hadn’t even downloaded any reggae to her I-pod. This guy was better than any of the reggae that she had heard before. His name sounded French but he sang in English mostly and lived somewhere in Germany. He was dishy enough to rustle some feelings up in the pit of her stomach. That was the place to keep them she told herself.
It was a great feeling to be on the scene here, where no-body knew her and she knew nobody. She could dance and move as she liked. There was nobody to care about her pear shaped bum as she bumped around. Free to shift around and get more sightings of the tasty-looking Patrice. Enshultigung excuses from time to time to other good-humoured bum bouncers with camera phones above their heads. Light sweat on her lip – not enough to disturb her make-up.
Moving around and dancing on the spot made a bit of flirting inevitable. Not too close – she didn’t want to get into a conversation about what she was doing in Berlin. It was the best live concert ever and she resolved to search out some Patrice to download. That laptop was going to be really useful. To-night was a night of finding something for herself. She sang along, revelling in the anonymity of it, and laughed out loud at the thought of playing it for the aunt.
‘Don’t give up the fight, no no
Uh ya ya ya
Uh ya ya ya
Yes everyday good
Uh ya ya ya
Because of being alive
I say I say
Everyday is good because of being alive alive
Yeh yeh oh nana
From the day I was born till the day me gon die ya die yeh yeh
Everyday is good because of being alive alive
Yeh yeh oh nana
From the day I was born till the day me gon die ya die yeh yeh’
If she had any criticism of Patrice he was a bit too sweet maybe – but tough and hard enough at other times to make that palatable. The concert finished early enough to get home for about 12.30. She saw the light on in the aunt’s room. Since Michael died, her mother would lie awake until she came home. Aisling would leave it as late as she could but at 2, 3 or even 4, the light would still be on. She would call out, ‘I’m back, night-night,’ but never waited to hear an answer. She did it now in automatic mode and heard an answering, ‘Sleep well, my dear.’ The voice sounded so like Gran, it was a bit spooky. The aunt in some ways was so unlike Gran and yet in others they were like different versions of the same person. Her Gran wasn’t so bad when she was on her own but the minute she got talking to that narrow-minded Annie, she took off. At least there was no sign of an Annie equivalent here in Berlin.
She grinned to herself as she remembered the last episode she’d overheard. Annie had a son who had lived in England like forever. As soon as he could afford a one-way ticket probably. His daughter Lucy was planning to come over from England for Christmas in Dublin. All she wanted was a bed at her Gran’s for God’s sake. Listening to Annie, you would think that she had done something dire.
‘So I said yes. Well I couldn’t say no, could I? But would you believe it, she asks me, “Can I bring my partner?” Indeed, I soon saw her off – my partner indeed. The cheek of it – to think that I
would have the two of them living in sin under my own roof and then I would be expected to cook Christmas dinner for them. It’s enough work anyway for Mary and that husband of hers. They make me feel like they are doing me a favour to invite themselves round for Christmas dinner. Their two boys went off to spend Christmas in Spain and Aoife had to entertain the husband’s parents. I’ve cooked Christmas Dinner long enough. At my age, I deserve to take a rest. Anyway Lucy went to Breege’s in the end. You know what that means don’t you – partners? Where Breege was going to put them, I don’t know. Sleeping together of course and not only sleeping, you can be sure. These young people are no better than animals – lying down with whoever takes their fancy. It’s the children that come out of it that I pity. Half of them don’t know who their father is.’
Hypocrites! It was only because they never had the chance and now it was too late. Gran didn’t mention any of her own grandchildren like Aisling’s cousin in London, who was divorced and with a new partner. She toyed with the idea of finding a way to introduce that into the conversation. No. Better to laugh. She needed her Gran as a refuge and sometimes as a cover.
In bed she fingered her damp groin. Was there a chance of working her way to some relief? An image of her mother sitting her down at the kitchen table for the famous ‘sex’ talk made her wriggle. ‘This experience should be a lesson to you Aisling.’ All that stuff about saving yourself for a special someone. Too late. Never too late. Anyway she wouldn’t fancy someone looking for a virgin bride. Her mum’s version of sex was a bit like a recipe for a cake – where the love bit was the cake and the sex was the icing. She’d hate it if I told her that. For all her talk about sex, she never mentioned masturbation. Porno images didn’t turn her on. Her own graphics were better. Images. Labia. Patrice’s lips and tongue.
