‘That’s my sister, Miriam,’ he said. ‘Why? Do you recognise …’
‘No, just curious.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘I think maybe the child is you.’
‘Oh no. My sister is another mystery I must try to solve before I die.’
‘Oh really.’
‘She was abducted when she was one year old,’ Irving said. ‘In a park where there was a fairground.’
‘Ah, we used to have such a thing here in Berlin,’ Beltz said. ‘At the Spreepark. Frau Metzler will recall …’
‘It was popular in the DDR; there was little else to do,’ Sara said. ‘Now it is abandoned.’
Mumtaz couldn’t help noticing how Herr Beltz merely glossed over the abduction of Irving’s sister, apparently to make a political point. In spite of the fire in the grate, it made her feel chilled.
Beltz handed the iPad back to Lee. He looked at Irving.
‘I wish I could tell you that I know where my father was in September 1945, but I do not know and he is dead,’ he said. ‘He was a soldier by then; he would have been with his comrades. He told me he took my grandmother with him into the care of the Red Army. The house would have been empty again, or taken over by squatters. Maybe your father met one of those.’
‘She called herself Rachel Austerlitz.’
‘Did she have anything in her possession that had belonged to Rachel Austerlitz?’
Irving bowed his head. ‘According to Dad, she came with nothing. I don’t think she had anything. My father, like me, was a diamond cutter back home. Mum had a lot of jewellery, but it was given to her by him.’
He shook his head. ‘I am sorry, Mr Levy, but I do not think there is a connection between us. I fear your mother was someone who lived in this house and maybe knew a little about the Austerlitz family.’
‘Mum knew how to be a Jew.’
‘Then maybe she was one?’
He told him about the DNA test and the German’s face seemed to darken. Then he said, ‘I cannot help you and I am sorry for that, Mr Levy. Your father, it would seem, met a lady here with whom he fell in love. But she was not Rachel Austerlitz and she was not, I believe, my aunt.’
Mumtaz watched Irving’s face, but he gave away nothing about how he felt at that moment, which had to be, she knew, an ending.
If you live in a city all your life, you get to know the places where you can talk undisturbed. As a former East German, Sara Metzler had always felt she had a keen nose for such places. She just hoped that Irving Levy didn’t find her choice of venue disturbing.
‘It was a pharmacy,’ she said, as she pushed open the door that led from the elegant, tree-lined Oranienplatz to a wooden-floored space, scented with coffee and cinnamon. On the left, a bar that had once been an ornate nineteenth-century shop counter was overshadowed by hundreds of polished wooden shelves bearing bottles that, in a former life, had contained substances like ‘Arsenic’ and ‘Aspirin’.
And there were mirrors, brightly polished, set into dark wood frames. Unfortunately, they reflected how tired Mr Levy looked.
Sara took them to the comfortable chairs in the small back room that was lined with drawers that had once contained herbs, powders and potions. There was always a slight smell of basil in that room …
‘Coffee?’
Levy shook his head. ‘If I drink any more I will be found on the ceiling,’ he said. ‘Tea. I’ll pay.’
But Sara paid, in spite of Lee Arnold’s insistence that the least they could do was buy her a drink.
Once she’d sat down, Sara said, ‘You know you can’t trust a man like Beltz.’
‘Why would he lie about something that is really nothing to do with him?’ Mumtaz asked.
‘In the Stasi they were trained to lie.’
‘Yes, but about this?’
They all looked towards Irving. He said nothing until his tea arrived; he’d let it brew, poured it out and then consumed his first cup.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I am really very English when it comes to hot drinks. Tea! What a blessing! But also, for me, Herr Beltz what a blessing too. I know, Frau, that you cannot put aside his past …’
‘His father was in the Politburo. They made our lives like death!’
‘Which I can appreciate, if not empathise with,’ he said. ‘But what Herr Beltz said made sense. And as Mumtaz has pointed out, why would he lie? Saying that all Stasi men lied doesn’t, I think, work here. This is nothing to do with who he was, or even who his father was. It’s to do with a house where terrible things happened and where two people met – one known and one unknown.’
‘He was not welcoming when we first went,’ Sara said.
‘But he was today.’
‘He has an agenda.’
‘I didn’t feel that,’ Lee said.
‘With respect,’ Sara replied, ‘you have never lived with such people. You’ve never had to keep the fact that you know a banned language a secret.’
‘His dad was a communist fighting fascism …’
‘Communism means something different here,’ she said. ‘To you it is something that you have never lived with and so can seem a nice idea. To us it was a catastrophe. It made us look at each other with hatred and suspicion. I have seen my Stasi file. Imagine someone watching everything you do – for years. Imagine a wall you know is meant to keep you somewhere you would rather not be. That was my life.’
He felt drained. Strangers didn’t come, he made sure that they didn’t. But he’d let the Jew and his people in. What they hadn’t known was that Gunther Beltz had hoped to find out as much from them as they had hoped to discover from him.
The man could have been some distant Austerlitz relative, maybe even someone who might be able to explain why his father had taken Rachel’s death so badly. Gunther’s mother had never been able to compete. She’d died knowing she was second-best.
It had been like living in a funeral home. It still was. For good reason.
FIFTEEN
Bela felt the caravan begin to move. He was supposed to be in the truck with Eva and Gala, but he’d refused to move from his bed. Back in the old country, caravans had been pulled by horses and nobody ever thought about getting out or riding up front.
There had been ten in his family. His parents and eight children, five of them fliers; Tibor, Viktor and Miklos wire-walkers, like their mother. Such happy times, flying through the air with his father, three brothers and their sister. Then falling in love …
All gone. Bela felt his eyes begin to moisten and stopped himself short before he gave in to tears. Watching him from the sofa at the end of his bed, their little made-up eyes searching for any sign of weakness. He could feel the Twins, thinking.
Irving had wanted to go home to the UK immediately – he was worn out and drained – but Mumtaz had managed to persuade him to stay one more day. Their flights didn’t leave until Friday and she wanted to see more of Berlin if she could. Sara, although still smarting from having to spend time with a man she despised, had nevertheless offered to show Lee and Mumtaz some of the sights of the city. Irving was spending the day in bed.
Sara said she’d arrive at ten and, because she hadn’t seen him at breakfast, Mumtaz went to Lee’s room to find out if he was ready. As she knocked, she felt her heart pound.
He opened the door and stared at her. Had he forgotten?
Then he said, ‘Got some work to do. Sorry. You go on your own.’
Not sure whether she was pleased or not, Mumtaz joined Sara in the lobby. Was being around Lee ever going to get any better? As she followed Sara to the nearest bus stop, Mumtaz remembered reading letters in girls’ magazines when she was a teenager about being friends with your ‘ex’. It never seemed to work out and most of the agony aunts she remembered from back in the late eighties and nineties, advised against it. Probably with good reason.
Sara led her onto a bus and told her to register the transport ticket she’d bought at the hotel in a machine. That, so it seemed, was the onl
y time she had to show it, unless she was pulled over by an inspector.
A bus journey and a short walk later, they arrived at Checkpoint Charlie, the old dividing point between East and West Berlin. It had a carnival atmosphere. A shed, surrounded by sandbags, not authentic according to Sara, stood in the middle of a road called Friedrichstrasse. You could, for a consideration, have your photograph taken with two Germans dressed as American GIs. Everyone smiled, especially small kids. Mumtaz herself smiled, in spite of knowing that people had died at this juncture. Where hadn’t people died? Taking the poison out of a place that had once been so toxic had to be a good thing, didn’t it?
‘Charlie should, I think, have remained a warning,’ Sara said as they watched a phalanx of kids have their photographs taken. ‘You know this place became like the Stasi Headquarters for us. We wouldn’t look at it. You never knew what horror you might see.’
There was a story about a man who had been shot and not died at Charlie. Mumtaz had read about it on the plane. He’d bled to death amongst the barbed wire.
‘The Cold War may be over, but one does not trust the Russians,’ Sara continued. ‘The man Putin was a KGB officer. He came here with them in 1989. He saw the Wall come down. It’s said that is why he’s like he is now, intent on running the world.’
‘Well, I don’t—’
‘And he is short.’ She laughed. ‘He feels bad about that, I think!’
Mumtaz had thought when she’d arrived in Berlin that a city of glistening spires had taken over completely from the old, paranoid, grey city of the past. But she’d encountered little that didn’t echo back to a past that still seemed to reverberate and, in some cases, damage the present.
They had coffee at the Checkpoint Charlie Cafe. Like Irving, Mumtaz had never drunk so much coffee in her life. Bengalis didn’t. It was all tea.
‘Sara,’ she said, ‘do you think that Herr Beltz was telling the truth about Rachel Austerlitz?’
‘That she died, yes,’ Sara said. ‘But how she died? I don’t know. You have to understand, Mumtaz, that it’s very difficult for me to separate the man from the Stasi officer. Those people lived and breathed lies. Some of them did so because they truly believed it was for the greater good. But some just wanted to get rich. If you were in the Politburo, like Beltz’s father, your life was more comfortable than most. You had goods from the West, you could travel, you could learn banned languages, like English. Of course, they all said they had to do these things for the good of the country, but we lived always in fear. We were given apartments, cars, healthcare, but we could not have our own thoughts. In the end that becomes more important than anything.’
Sara couldn’t know how much her words chimed with Mumtaz. Living with her husband had been like being a hostage. Not allowed out, unable to contact friends, being abused – and owing money to the Sheikhs was a continuation of that.
‘Do you remember Herr Beltz’s father?’
‘Joachim Beltz? A little,’ she said. ‘But I took small notice of any of those people, if I am honest. They were just a collection of old waxworks who applauded whenever Erich Honecker, the General Secretary of the Central Committee, spoke, opened a factory or did anything, in fact. I think that like most people in the DDR I was too busy trying to outwardly conform while trying to hold on to something of myself.’
‘It must have been exhausting.’
‘It was. Which is why so many of us cannot forgive,’ she said. ‘You know when siblings fall out over something, it can be a terrible thing. I don’t have brothers and sisters, but my friends who do have told me. People go to their deaths with these differences unresolved. The same is true of people who were comrades in systems like the DDR. We were all in the same boat, as you say, but some used the boat just for themselves. And that, for many of us, remains unforgivable.’
Lee’s room was the one next door, Irving’s was sandwiched between his and Mumtaz’s bedrooms. Irving could hear him on his phone, probably to colleagues back in Upton Park. He couldn’t make out any words. Mumtaz had gone sightseeing with Frau Metzler. She was a nice woman but, he felt, her very obvious problems with Herr Beltz’s previous profession had maybe rendered their dealings with him less fruitful than they could have been.
In spite of what Beltz had said, Irving wasn’t convinced that the Stasi officer’s aunt could not have been his mother. She had disappeared sometime in 1944, but who was to say that she didn’t return to her home in 1945? The war was coming to an end, why wouldn’t she go home? Where else did she have to go? And yet Beltz had not recognised her from any of the photographs he’d been shown.
Irving lay on his bed and looked up at the ceiling. He’d left it too long. For years he’d wondered. He’d always felt there was something he didn’t understand, or had missed, about his mother, but he’d never spoken to her or his father. Maybe it was because they fought all the time. What had they fought about? Things that were nothing, like whose job it was to clean the windows, whether to get a gardener. But sometimes they argued about him. They’d rowed mercilessly about him. Rachel had wanted him to go to the local grammar school so that he could have friends who lived nearby. His father had insisted he went to a Jewish school, and he got his way, which was why Irving had been required to schlepp from Barking to Hendon every day for six years. He’d hated it but, once he was there, his mother seemed to forget about the local grammar and just told him he had to put up with the place. She rarely defended her son and, when he finally went to work with his father, she treated them both with what was probably contempt.
Had losing Miriam made her cold? The way she had screamed when the baby was taken had stayed with him. It had been like the cry of an agonised animal. He had no idea what his father had felt. If he closed his eyes all he could see was his father either shouting or giving his mother diamonds. He’d done the same as she’d aged. Every time Rachel had seemed upset he’d brought her something from the Garden – earrings, brooches, sometimes emeralds from one of the Pakistani dealers in later years.
Herr Beltz’s aunt had taken the jewellery Miriam Austerlitz had hidden in that house. Those had been terrible times, but had his mother’s dependence upon jewellery to regulate her mood started then? Did diamonds do more for her than just look pretty? Did they make her feel safe?
When the Soviets had invaded Berlin in April 1945, the hidden Jews had begun to surface. The women thought that being Jewish would save them from the mass rapes visited by the Soviets on the German population at large. But it didn’t. Reports from the time proved that the Red Army didn’t care who its soldiers assaulted. There must have been exceptions, though. Maybe Irving’s mother had used being Jewish – even though she was not – to confound the Soviets. And it had worked.
Then she’d met his father.
Adeline Beltz could have been his mother. Working in a Jewish household must have taught her how to be a Jew. What if he asked Herr Beltz to take a DNA test? Would he?
Irving knew that he wouldn’t and why would he? A negative result would waste everyone’s time and a positive one would do him no good. Or would it? He had to have opened his house to them for a reason.
Maybe there were things Herr Beltz had wanted to know from him?
Mumtaz took a lot of photographs, mainly for Irving, but also for her own family. Her dad would be interested to see how strongly Islamic architecture had influenced the building of a nineteenth-century synagogue.
‘This is where you work?’ she asked Sara.
‘In the centre attached to the building, yes,’ she said. ‘One of the good things the DDR did was to restore this building. The Nazis took the dome away for safe-keeping because of the gold.’
The dome gleamed in the thin, autumn sunlight.
‘It was repaired and reinstated by the DDR. But the building is very delicate and this facade is just held together by metal.’
‘It’s not in use.’
‘No. It’s also much smaller than it was. There is a space at the bac
k where you can see just how huge it was. Now we have a small, mixed prayer hall, in line with Liberal Jewish tradition. Like the family of my mother, the Austerlitz family came here to worship. Liberal Jews were common in this city. The Austerlitzes would not have been overtly religious. They would most probably have celebrated Christmas and it is doubtful they would have committed to things like fasting on Yom Kippur. I think Herr Levy is Orthodox.’
‘Yes.’
‘So discovering his mother was a Gentile is a big thing for him.’
‘Yes.’
Sara shook her head. ‘So sad.’
‘What is?’
‘To be so wrapped up in a certain identity that you cannot see the life you could have if you let that go,’ Sara said. ‘My father was a Red Army commander and yet I still consider myself Jewish. I know that our religion is passed on through the maternal line …’
‘Which is the point,’ Mumtaz said. ‘It’s his mother.’
Sara shook her head. ‘And so?’ she said. ‘If I were him, I would be using what time I have left to enjoy myself. He has money. Why drag up a past you will probably never find the truth about? Why chase the dead who cannot speak?’
‘We all need to know who we are,’ Mumtaz said. ‘If we don’t know that, we know nothing.’
‘And if we refuse love because of who we are, we make God or whatever runs the universe weep,’ Sara said. Then she moved her head close to Mumtaz’s and whispered, ‘You must go to Lee. If you don’t you will break both your hearts.’
This had been a bad idea. To be fair, Lee had counselled against it. But Levy knew his own mind, or thought he did.
‘There’s no bloodletting, they just take a few cells from inside your cheek.’
Lee saw the way that Beltz looked at his client and he wanted the floorboards to swallow him.
Beltz said, ‘I think I know how DNA tests work, Herr Levy.’
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