Displaced

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘No, Amma, don’t talk now,’ Shazia said. ‘Just come home safely on Friday.’

  When the girl rang off, it was as if a great weight had fallen away and Mumtaz began to actually feel hungry for once. Shazia hadn’t forgiven her, but at least they were in some sort of dialogue, even if Mumtaz believed that the girl had sounded more anxious than she would have liked. She poured herself some tea and then began to tuck into the small bowl of muesli she had taken from the breakfast buffet. Maybe, later, she’d even have a roll and jam. She hadn’t slept for much of the night and so she knew she could do with the energy a good breakfast might provide.

  Had Lee’s need to see her about the Forgotten Parade been just a pretext to get into her room? The night before was now filtered through a blur of tiredness, upset and, latterly, elation. She knew that in reality Lee’s appearance in her room had probably been a bit of both. It was quite a breakthrough to discover an actual date when Irving’s father could have met his mother. It meant that the story he’d been told as a child could at least be partially true. And Irving himself had told them that he’d felt there was something about that house …

  ‘Mumtaz.’

  She looked up, her thoughts interrupted by a foreign, female voice.

  ‘Sara.’

  ‘I’ve just had a phone call from Lee,’ Sara said. ‘Come. I have a taxi waiting outside.’

  ‘A taxi, to where?’

  ‘To Grabbeallee 67. Lee and Mr Levy are there already, with Herr Beltz.’

  She knew she shouldn’t be there. She should be packing up her van. But Eva was mesmerised. The way the Twins hitched up a rig using nothing but washing line and the high sides of the Wall of Death machine was little short of amazing. What her granddaughter did once the rig was stable was less impressive. She wobbled on the makeshift trapeze like a drunk.

  But she let Amber swing from one side to the other and didn’t yell at her until she turned.

  ‘Get down here, young lady!’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to be helping your mum pack up the van!’

  Amber pulled a face, but she sat down on the trapeze in preparation for coming down. The Twins sniggered.

  Eva, sick of them, switched to Hungarian. ‘And you two can shut up and go and prepare to move too!’ she said.

  They looked at her. She was used to that.

  ‘So go,’ she said.

  And then something strange happened. One of them spoke.

  ‘Don’t tell us what to do.’

  Amber, climbing down the rope, almost lost her grasp. The Twin’s voice, even though she didn’t know what it was saying, sounded like a cough from a sepulchre. Eva helped her down and sent her on her way. Then she turned to the Twins.

  She looked at them. ‘So,’ she said, ‘we make our way to Barking and you find a voice.’

  They said nothing.

  ‘Not that it bothers me,’ she said. ‘Say what you like. No one can understand you.’

  The other one spoke. ‘Everyone understands death. It’s a universal language.’

  Eva felt a jolt in her chest. ‘Is that a threat?’

  Again they said nothing.

  ‘Because if it is then you’d better think about yourselves before you start pointing your fingers at others,’ she said. Then suddenly she was furious. Nothing that had happened in her life had happened without being affected by them! She looked at their wrinkled made-up faces, their vile, filthy fingernails and she wanted to be sick.

  Eva screamed, ‘Put my granddaughter in danger again and I will snap every bone in your sick, dry bodies. If it wasn’t for you …’ She dared herself to say what she always wanted to say to them, but couldn’t.

  ‘Well?’ one of them said.

  ‘If it wasn’t—’

  Eva caught herself. To say it made it unbearable.

  If it wasn’t for you, my father would have cared for me!

  As she walked away from them, Ping and Pong began to snigger again.

  FOURTEEN

  He made coffee.

  ‘I never learnt to make tea, far too English,’ Gunther Beltz said as he placed the coffee pot, cups, milk and sugar on the dining table in front of the window. ‘I only learnt the language so that I could recognise it when I heard people like you, Frau Metzler, listening to the BBC.’

  Sara didn’t react. She saw the Brits smile, thinking he was joking, but he wasn’t. She knew that. She also knew that he hadn’t changed in all the years since the fall of the DDR. She knew the type, those who would go back to the ‘old’ days in a heartbeat, because back then they’d had power. Sara wanted to know what he’d done, wanted to dig into what counted for his soul and see the dark and dirty things he’d taken part in to keep himself safe.

  But that was not why they were there. As Beltz had said once they were all assembled, he would tell them what he knew about the Austerlitz family provided they did not record his voice, write down his words or ask him about anything else.

  How many people had Gunther Beltz killed? Enough to still be afraid.

  He spoke.

  ‘The Austerlitz family had an apothecary in Berlin since the middle of the nineteenth century. Good people, they tried to care for the sick even if they sometimes couldn’t pay. Of course to many, especially in the bourgeoisie, they were just Jews.’ He shrugged. ‘My grandfather began working for the family just after this house was built in 1910. There used to be a coach house, which was where the family kept their carriages and horses. My grandfather drove for them, then my father – by which time horses had given way to cars.’

  ‘My family lived above the coach house. My grandfather the driver, his wife the housekeeper and the children, my father and his sister. Joachim, my father, later drove, but he also worked in the garden; his sister was a maid. My father was fifteen when the Nazis came to power; his sister, Adeline, one year younger. What you have to understand now is that Herr Dieter Austerlitz, as well as being a Jew and an intellectual, was also a communist. Many Jews were. And some Gentiles. My father was one. He went to meetings – with the blessing of his employer – but not his father. When Kristallnacht took place in 1938, my grandfather was one of those who took to the streets to break the windows of Jewish businesses in Berlin. But by then, my father was in Moscow.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Although Jewish businesses were heavily curtailed by 1938, Dieter Austerlitz still had friends. He knew it was only a question of time before my father was arrested. He put him on a train to Hungary. By the end of the year he was in Moscow. That was why Dieter Austerlitz was a Hero of the DDR. Because as Frau Metzler will know, my father went on to become part of the Politburo of the DDR, and so to save such a person’s life …’ He shrugged. ‘It was important. As for the Austerlitz family … The parents and the young son went first to Sachsenhausen and then to Auschwitz. My grandfather had died by then. My grandmother and Adeline remained in the coach house. What is significant for your story, Herr Levy, is what happened to the Austerlitzes’ daughter, Rachel.’

  ‘If you and those freaks keep on encouraging her, my granddaughter will have an accident,’ Eva said.

  Gala, her daughter, was tying down the crockery in the kitchen of the old man’s van, but she couldn’t understand as she couldn’t speak Hungarian.

  Bela said, ‘They hanker for the old days. They’re old!’

  ‘Oh, and you let them because …’ Eva said. ‘Some relics from Budapest you choose to have with you—’

  ‘They came to this country with me. In the Magyar Circus—’

  ‘Yes, played in front of Adolf Hitler; I’ve heard it. I don’t care. By the time you got here none of you were still flying – or so you told me.’

  ‘That is true,’ he said. ‘They were as they are now and I worked the sideshows. But we had to find somewhere to be, Eva. You don’t know what it was like.’

  ‘I know you were part of the Resistance to the Nazis, or so you say.’

  ‘I was!’

  ‘So you would have had n
o trouble coming here! Unless you lied …’

  ‘You don’t know what it was like,’ he reiterated. ‘It wasn’t easy, and with them …’

  ‘Who you owe nothing, as far as I can see!’ she said. ‘Who are they, anyway?’

  Her father said nothing.

  ‘Were they partisans or did they perhaps work for the Nazis? Was that why it “wasn’t easy”? If I even understood your relationship with—’

  ‘We worked together,’ he said. ‘We were fliers. One gets close to people. All my family died in that war, I had only them!’

  ‘Yes, well now you do have a family,’ Eva said, ‘and we’ve looked after them enough. They’re old and they’re mental. I don’t want them in my life any more.’

  She looked at him, noticing how small he’d got and she shook her head. ‘Awful things we have never spoken about have been done. We both know it. But it stops here. If I catch them putting a rig up for Amber again, I will kill them.’

  Bela got out of his bed, shuffled slowly over to her and then he said, ‘Oh, please don’t do that now, Eva. Because if you do that, then I may be forced to do something you don’t like.’

  ‘Don’t threaten me, you old bastard,’ Eva replied. ‘I’d do time if it meant that girl was safe, and don’t you forget that!’

  The room was full of stuff. Not unlike Irving’s house in Barking. Like that house, there was also a feeling of not so much neglect but of a stoppage of time. As if someone from the early twentieth century had just walked out of the door and left this room exactly as he or she had originally arranged it. It was impossible, of course. This house had to have been ransacked by Nazis and probably the Soviets. There was a fire in the grate, but it threw no heat.

  ‘When the Nazis came to the house, my grandmother hid her,’ Gunther said. ‘I don’t know where. The story my father told was that Rachel was with my grandmother in the coach house when they came. It was said that my grandmother, Maria, had a Jewish grandmother, but I don’t know if that’s true. She liked Rachel. Maybe it was because she couldn’t get on with her own daughter. Adeline had joined the Party. Maybe she saw it as a way to get ahead or maybe she was just like her father.’

  ‘What happened to Rachel?’

  Levy was so desperate to know. But should Gunther tell him? Of course.

  ‘Maria hid Rachel in the cellar of the house for a long time. Years.’

  ‘Did Adeline know?’

  ‘Of course. She and her mother lived in the house too, by then. How could she not?’

  ‘But—’

  ‘And Rachel bribed her. The Austerlitz women had jewellery, which the mother, Miriam, had hidden all over the house. They were so naive in the early days. They thought they might even return home. Rachel knew where it was and so she bartered with Adeline for her life using that knowledge.’

  Levy said, ‘But what did her mother say?’

  ‘Maria was on a knife edge. Between her Nazi daughter and the girl she wanted to save. While Adeline was using the Austerlitz jewellery to fund her life going to plays and bars with good Aryan boys, she was keeping her mouth shut. Still, however, the house was searched. Again and again. And it was a problem. Rachel coughed; she had tuberculosis and so Maria walled her up in an alcove like a character from an Edgar Allen Poe story. A few bricks could be moved to feed her. Jews hid in cupboards, in drains, in spaces like coffins all over this city when the fascists were in charge.’ He looked at Sara. ‘We, the DDR, we tried to make sure it would never happen again. But people wanted to be free, apparently, to abuse Jews, which is what we see today.’

  ‘It was more than that,’ Sara said. Her face was white with rage. ‘You know this, Herr Beltz. How can people live with the knowledge that having a product from a foreign country, for instance, can have them put into prison for ten years? You know this happened.’

  ‘I know that is how fascism creeps inside,’ he said. ‘A box containing a cake mixture from the West, is not just a box …’

  ‘And Rachel?’

  Irving had to interrupt. He’d never been a political person and he didn’t care about the struggle between communism and fascism.

  Herr Beltz cleared his throat. ‘My father returned to Berlin with the Red Army when they liberated the city in 1945. He found Maria, but not Adeline.’

  ‘In this house?’

  ‘In what remained of the coach house. The Nazis had used the main house as a brothel since 1944.’

  ‘What happened to Rachel?’

  He walked over to the fireplace and positioned some more logs in the grate. Flames first died down and then rose to lick the untouched wood.

  ‘She had died in 1944,’ he said. ‘I expect tuberculosis killed her. But I don’t know. How could a person, even when well, survive being locked into a dark alcove?’

  ‘Where was Adeline?’

  Irving felt his heart pound. Was he close to discovering something significant?

  Gunther Beltz sighed. ‘Gone,’ he said. ‘In ’44 we know she “entertained” in what had become a brothel. But then, according to Maria, one day she just wasn’t there. I don’t know when. But my father used to say that his mother believed that Adeline had killed Rachel. How a person does that to one who is walled away, I don’t know. Poison? Maybe. But when my father opened that alcove in 1945, Rachel was long dead.’

  Outside, on the street, the day was progressing and the traffic building up as people made their way to work and school and college. There was a smell of sugar in the air from the bakery at the end of the street, which specialised in the small German doughnuts called Schmalzkuchen. Irving had always had a sweet tooth, but this made him feel sick.

  There was nothing to see.

  ‘The alcove was here,’ Beltz said.

  Lee looked at Irving, who was beyond white, almost green.

  ‘I think we should go upstairs again,’ he said as he took one of Irving’s arms. ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘Cold as death.’

  If you looked closely, there was an outline of what could have once been a wall. The only feature that marked that alcove out from others in the cellar was that there was a ledge on the inside, about two feet from the ground. At a pinch, a small person could have been able to sit down, which was probably why this space had been chosen. Lee recalled a story he’d once been told as a child about a nun who had been walled up for supposedly having fallen in love with a priest. His father had said, ‘Bloody Catholics! What do you expect?’ and then gone back to his copy of The Sun.

  Then there was the story of Anne Frank. It had been the one book from his youth that had really affected him. Lee had always wanted to go and see the secret annexe in Amsterdam and be where Anne had once lived. But maybe after this experience, he didn’t. Then he felt a pressure on the arm that was not holding up Irving.

  Mumtaz.

  Beltz made more coffee and produced a plate of Schmalzkuchen. But nobody wanted to eat. Still cold from the cellar, the ex-Stasi officer suggested that everyone move their chairs closer to the fire. And because it was so dark in that room, the atmosphere began to take on the characteristics of a group of people telling ghost stories at midnight. Only one person sat outside the circle around the fire: Sara Metzler. But it was her to whom Herr Beltz spoke.

  ‘I know it may be hard to believe, but the reason my father insisted upon owning this house …’

  Sara said something in German.

  Beltz countered in English. ‘Think what you like, Frau Metzler,’ he said. ‘But my father preserved this place as a memorial to the Austerlitz family.’

  ‘And made money.’

  He ignored her.

  ‘My father arranged for Rachel to be buried with her grandparents.’

  ‘That grave is not recorded.’

  ‘Because it was 1945 and the world was still burning,’ he said. ‘He did his best.’

  How did someone in Berlin, whatever the subject under discussion, not become embroiled in the subject of East–West politics? Mumtaz remembe
red when the Wall had come down and what their teachers at school had said about that. A unified Germany, they’d parroted, was going to be so much better than the fragmented mess it had been before. But was it? And had true unity ever even taken place? Indeed, could it while all these old suspicions and beliefs about the West or the East were still in place?

  She heard Irving say, ‘And Adeline?’

  Beltz shrugged. ‘Never heard of since 1944. Maybe, Mr Levy, you have been thinking that Adeline was your mother, but I don’t think so.’

  Lee cut in. ‘We reckon that Irving’s father met his mother in September 1945. Because he was in the 131st Infantry Brigade he would’ve been in what the Russians call the “Forgotten Parade” …’

  ‘Yes, the victory celebration at the Brandenburg Gate,’ Beltz said. ‘The Soviet Union and the US sent their top generals while the British and French sent people no one had ever heard of. They didn’t want to contribute to something organised by a communist nation. A case of what you would call sour grapes, I think. You think that Mr Levy’s father came to this house at that time?’

  ‘It’s known that the troops from all sectors got together then,’ Lee said. ‘He could’ve come here.’

  ‘Why here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Berlin was in ruins,’ Beltz said. ‘Why come here?’

  ‘Because this house wasn’t in ruins?’

  ‘But it was. My father had fifty per cent of it rebuilt. The top two floors, the facade.’ He turned to Irving. ‘Do you have a photograph of your mother?’

  Lee had them on his tablet. Beltz put his glasses on and began to flick through the images on the screen. He shook his head. ‘I never knew Adeline and no photographs exist. This house was ruined, remember. But this woman doesn’t look, to me, like my father or my grandmother.’

  ‘We know she dyed her hair black,’ Irving said.

  He shrugged. ‘Even so …’ Then he stopped. He showed the screen to Irving. ‘Who is the child?’