It was so easy for Mara to descend into bitterness. She discovered a cynicism creeping into her words. ‘Next thing you’ll be telling me that you’re Irish,’ she said. But that was not her style and she punished herself for saying it. Hard as it was, she would have to become more encouraging and stop Daniel from being infected by the negative atmosphere. She was determined not to let anyone see her sadness. Already, their friends were discussing the news, talking about the doubt over Gregor’s origins. Martin spoke to him about it and said he didn’t want to come between him and Mara, but he felt it was his duty as a friend to warn him.
‘You would tell me if I was being an asshole, Gregor, wouldn’t you?’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look,’ Martin said, ‘I want to tell you something. I have always had a suspicion that my mother was raped by my father. He was in the Russian Army and I have a feeling that at least it was not entirely voluntary on her part, that she went along with him because there was no alternative at the end of the war. I can remember him bringing us to Berlin once when I was small and she didn’t want to go. He insisted and when we came to the city to go shopping, she was crying all the time. Didn’t even want to get off the train, I remember. She’s never been back to Berlin since, even though we lived only an hour and a half away on the train. I asked her about all that much later, but she would never tell me anything. Maybe she knew it would turn me against my father.’
‘What are you telling me this for?’
‘I still have that suspicion,’ Martin said.
‘And so?’
‘Suspicion is all I have,’ Martin said. ‘What can I do about it? I can prove nothing. So I just have to live with it.’
Gregor waited for him to make his point, the advice of a best friend.
‘You can’t live your life on the basis of some hunch,’ Martin said, ‘that’s all I’m saying.’
But none of this had any impact on Gregor, other than to send him deeper into himself, making him even more of an outsider even within his own circle. Mara decided instead to try and pull him back. Rather than holding on like one of those Velcro women that musicians spoke about, she laid on the support. She went to see his new band playing, waited for him afterwards, in an empty hall, with the crew carrying the equipment out and a door banging in the background. With the roadies moving in and out behind them, she put her arms around him and told him that she loved him.
‘And there’s nothing I can do about that,’ she said.
At moments when they were discussing things at home, Daniel often stood in the doorway in his pyjamas, saying he could not sleep, so they had to snap out of their crisis and behave as though nothing was happening. She would turn to the boy with excessive kindness. He would tell a bedtime story with such enthusiasm that even a fairy tale sounded contrived.
And while Gregor put Daniel to sleep on that night, she sprang out of that dreamy, devolved mood which had slipped like a virus into her blood and stood up from the black-and-white bedroom chair. She got dressed and went into the kitchen to prepare the dinner. A discipline returned to her eyes. He had made the right decision. She was afraid of being alone, but she knew that with Gregor in the apartment, she was already alone.
‘You’re absolutely right, Gregor,’ she said when he came into the kitchen some time after. ‘It’s good for you to go to Toronto.’
Gregor was surprised by her sudden conversion, and waited for the twist. He expected her to reveal some new plan or admission that she had always wanted him to go away. She blessed his decision with a clenched fist.
She had prepared a beautiful meal. The table had already been laid with great style, because she didn’t want the parting to be like an escape or a banishment. But just as she was about to serve, placing small sprigs of parsley on the fish and readjusting the slice of lemon, the whole thing turned into a disaster. Reaching out to hand him two water glasses from the cupboard, one of them fell, shattering into a thousand beads all over the counter.
‘Jesus, I’m so sorry,’ she said, holding her hands over her mouth. ‘Oh God. How stupid of me.’
She tried to remove the glass from the plates, but there were too many tiny splinters unseen to the eye, hidden in the beautiful black-bean sauce she had made to go with the fish. Glittering diamonds mixed in with the rice.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it, Mara.’
‘I’m so fucking stupid,’ she kept saying. ‘God.’
‘No. Look,’ he said, ‘we can go out instead.’
‘I’ve ruined everything now.’
He cleared the plates away, dumping the lethal food into the bin, hoovering across the counter, while she got the woman next door to look after Daniel for the evening. The normal arrangement was that if they arrived home before twelve, they would drop in and pick him up. Gregor was such an expert at lifting the boy out of the bed with the blanket still around him. He was able to carry him out onto the landing and in through the hallway of their own apartment, then lay him down in his own bed without ever waking him up. He would slip his hand under Daniel’s neck, holding up his head, not allowing his arms to fall down. While Mara rushed ahead opening doors, he held his head to ensure that it was not exposed to the draught, sheltering his eyes from the light.
They chose a restaurant in another part of the city, a place where they had never been before. The disaster of the splintering glass changed to an accidental celebration. Mara spoke with renewed enthusiasm. And this time, her anger was beginning to turn into something else, into a kind of desperate loyalty to the story she once believed. If she could no longer hold on to the person she had loved, then she could at least carry on believing his story, as though the biography had always amounted to more than the person to whom it belonged.
‘I want to believe that you’re Jewish,’ she said. ‘While you’re away in Toronto, I’m going to go and meet your mother again. I’m going to go through the whole thing with her and get to the truth. If she’s hiding something, then I’ll find out.’
And with this declaration began an obsession. She seemed to have entered into a private crusade, conscripting herself into a lifelong duty to establish the true facts so that she could rescue him from oblivion. It was like some oath of allegiance to the family, to the truth, to the past, and she sounded more excited again, full of energy, as though she couldn’t wait to begin her quest. Already she was dreaming of digging up some vital piece of evidence to prove his true identity which might allow him to return to her. With his imminent disappearance, she seemed to cling to this crazy undertaking, to bring him back to the real world, to establish his story at least, if not his physical presence.
‘Mara,’ he said, ‘leave it.’
‘No, I’m serious, Gregor,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to let me do this. If you’re Jewish and she’s denying it, then that’s something that needs to be cleared up.’
The other guests in the restaurant looked up. The word ‘Jewish’ echoed across the tables around the restaurant like some illicit term. There was nothing Gregor could do to stop her resolve to pursue her investigations in Nuremberg. Besides, it was only right for Daniel to get to know the people Gregor had grown up with. It was impossible to get Gregor to go and see his father, so she and Daniel would have to do all that on his behalf.
In the car outside, just before she started the engine, she could not help herself asking one final question that was close to her heart but which had not been formulated before. She waited as though she could not drive until she got the answer.
‘There’s one thing I need to ask you,’ she said, looking him in the eyes. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Gregor. I just need to know for myself. Is this about dealing with the past? Some kind of atonement?’
Was this something she admired or was it an accusation? He didn’t answer. An entire history had been placed into his mouth. Everything that had gone on in their country, everything that was being spoken about in the media was hanging
in the silence between them. She had dared to suggest that by declaring himself to be Jewish, he was turning himself into some kind of human monument to make up for the past. Perhaps she intended it to sound more supportive, but he was trapped by the taunt inside the words.
She switched on the engine, but he told her to stop.
‘I want to walk,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, Gregor,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
He got out and walked away. She watched him turn the corner and drove after him for a while, like a police tail. But he marched on and she then decided to drive home.
He drifted through the city for hours, in a wide arc. But he was merely stalling the moment of return when he would have to answer her question. The walking brought exhaustion in his mind and, with it, a clarity, a submission. He only allowed the streets to lead him home again when he was sure that Mara was already asleep. She would have gone in to the woman next door and brought Daniel back. She would have woken the boy up and put on his slippers and made him walk on his sleepy legs, shuffling through the corridor. She probably made him go to the toilet while he yawned and rubbed his eyes and shivered with the warmth of his pee escaping from him. She would have put him into the cold bed and tucked him in with a kiss on the forehead. She might have made herself some camomile tea with honey and waited up for him a while, but then gone to sleep in the end.
When Gregor finally turned the corner onto the street where they lived, he glanced up at the windows. There were no lights on. He had the keys in his hand, ready to steal in like an intruder. But then, at the last minute, before stepping up to the main door with silver graffiti over the carved oak features, he turned to the parked beige Renault and found her sitting inside.
She had been waiting for him all this time, frozen, staring ahead with that ghostly sadness, beyond crying. There was no escape from those eyes. The questions in them. He walked up to the car and opened the door.
‘Mara, what are you doing here, sitting alone?’
He brought her inside and linked arms with her on the stairs going up. They went straight into the bedroom. She dropped her clothes on the black-and-white chair as usual and got into bed, exhausted, without words. They made love. A farewell love. On the eve of departure. With fatigue in their limbs and with hot tears rolling across his chest. The genius of it. Staying in the car all night and waiting for him to come back. Sitting there with the keys in her hand, staring ahead, knowing that some time, sooner or later, even if the dawn was coming and the noise of refuse trucks was advancing through the streets, he would eventually have to walk past and find her there. The courage it took her to see it through, to be noticed by neighbours coming out to walk their dogs. Waiting only for his tall, familiar shape to appear, with his ghostly face coming up under the street light to ask her, ‘Why don’t you come inside?’ Keeping herself awake inside the cramped car, hoping that he would not go in without seeing her, as if it didn’t matter.
Twenty-one
The good apples have already been stored away. Thorsten has stacked them up on a wooden trolley and taken them over to one of the barns. He has opened the big sliding doors and wheeled the trolley in, carrying the sacks into the basement with Johannes following him all the way, watching everything.
The others are wandering around the farm in the early afternoon. Katia has disappeared for a rest, while Mara has taken Gregor and Martin by the arm, one on either side, on a guided tour. In the yard, Juli is trying to get the pump going. It squeaks like an old donkey and she keeps laughing with the effort, pumping the big lever up and down but not drawing any water. Daniel watches her with a condescending smile, enjoying the way she struggles with such a redundant piece of cast-iron equipment. ‘Does this not work any more?’ she asks, smiling, with the stud under her bottom lip reflecting the sun. Daniel nods, but refuses to show her because he likes to watch the furious determination on her face. The laughter has taken the power out of her arms and her lips are pursed in mock distress, but she tries once more, throwing back her hair to put in one more genuine effort and prove that she can figure this out by herself.
‘You must put the water in first,’ Thorsten calls out from the door of the barn. Juli is not really all that pushed about getting water and he fails to notice that there is a game going on here between them.
Thorsten connects the yellow hose to the tap and explains to her that the tubular upright sink has to be filled with water first, otherwise the lever will only pull up air. When that’s been done, he asks her to start pumping again and the cool underground water comes gushing jubilantly across the stones. She takes a drink from her cupped hand. Then she fills an enamel basin with water to throw over Daniel. And even though he wouldn’t mind cooling down, he flees like a chicken across the farmyard, still laughing. Most of the water from the basin spills on Juli herself and on her white dress, so that her thighs now look as though they are wrapped in cling film. But she has also managed to hit Daniel with some drops of water across his bare shoulders. She heaves the basin back down and walks away in triumph, bowing to an invisible audience with her hands silently clapping above her head.
Is this a high point? An afternoon in the sunshine with Daniel and Juli laughing helplessly and the clang of the empty enamel basin echoing around the farmyard? Are the contortions of history not mere pilgrim stations on the way to this peak of freedom?
They are taking it easy now. Juli and Daniel leave the pump behind to go down to the lake with Johannes. In winter, they threw a rock out onto the lake and it remained suspended on top of the frozen water for weeks before it sank. Now, Daniel says he’s going to dive down to see if he can bring it up again.
The others intend to follow later. In the meantime, Mara is pointing out some of the war damage on the farm buildings. Facing east, on the outer wall of the barns, they can see the holes in the bricks. The bullets have taken chunks away, leaving shards and dust in a red line on the ground along the wall. Nobody has ever swept it away. At the corner where the artillery fire blew large gaps into the side of the barn, it has been repaired with yellow brick replacing the original red ones. The farmhouse itself got the worst of it, almost completely destroyed because the red roof offered such a perfect target. And the barn where the horses were burned alive is still standing as a ruin with no roof.
Martin is smoking a cigarette. So calm is the afternoon that the smoke rises straight and he even manages to blow an effortless smoke ring, making the air seem interior. His sunglasses make him look like a dragonfly stopping to reflect, staring into the distance at the forest on the far side of the field.
‘That’s where the Russians were,’ Mara explains, ‘in those trees.’
‘Us Russians over there,’ Martin says. ‘And us Germans over here.’
‘It took them eight days, apparently, to take over this farm.’
Mara says there were seven German soldiers holding out here, to the last man. The fire came from the trees, day and night, with intervals in between, waiting for the artillery. One night, the Russians sent a young man over to steal his way into the farm, but he was caught by the Germans and when they searched his rucksack they found nothing but a book by Pushkin. He was held hostage, but the Russians eventually swept over all these farms with the sheer force of numbers, even though they suffered great casualties. A minimum of sixty Russian soldiers were said to have fallen in the fight over this farm alone. By that time the house was in ruins and there was nothing much left to defend, but the Germans still refused to surrender. The farm was conquered eventually. The Russian intellectual was found dead and the two remaining German soldiers were taken into captivity before the army moved on in the race to Berlin.
Thorsten’s aunt had fled as the battle over the farm began. Every edible animal had already been slaughtered to provide food for the front, some of the horses turned into sausage. She wasn’t even allowed to take one of her own horses and had to join the thousands who were fleeing to the west on foot. And then she soo
n found herself overtaken by the advancing army. The war was effectively over and she decided go back to try and hold on to the farm which had been in her family for hundreds of years. But that was her mistake, because she was then at the mercy of a new war of looting and rape. In her twenties at the time, only recently married, alone facing a wave of revenge.
‘It must have been horrible,’ Mara says. ‘They tied her by the neck to the pump.’
And when all that was over, she was forced to defend the farm once again during the GDR times, because it was sequestered by the socialist state. After she and her husband had managed to rebuild most of the buildings, the state took possession and ran the farm while they fought to be allowed to live there. They were offered work at a printing firm in Leipzig, but refused to leave, saying they would kill themselves. Eventually they were kept on as labourers on their own farm. And each day, she must have walked past that pump, trying to forget the memory of those dark moments. It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that she finally managed to claim back the farm and then handed it on to Thorsten.
The farm is a bit of a mess now. Maybe it was always like that, even when it was in full swing with cattle moving in and out and the grain being stored in the lofts and the sweet smell of manure all around. It’s a place where nothing was ever finished. Some of the old farm machinery is still lying around, idle and rusted now, like the horse-drawn soil leveller with its thick, heavy wooden wheels and a seat for two people to sit on while driving. Everywhere, items waiting to be taken away or put somewhere else. A car wheel leaning against the wall of the house. A pile of yellow bricks left by the side of the grain store, and further away, a stack of grey slates intended to fix the roof damaged by a storm when the chestnut tree lost one of its branches. Closer to the house, there is a stack of logs and an axe leaning against the wall. Somebody must have decided it was time to have a go at getting the wood ready for the fire but then got distracted and considered something else to be more urgent.
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