Letters From Prague

by Sue Gee

  Now what?

  The train slowed; she looked past her daughter and saw a sign flash past Potsdam. They really were almost there: she saw the lights of the town – shop windows, tower blocks, street lamps – and then they were rounding a bend and passing a great stretch of water, the Wannsee, before moving into the suburbs. They slowed, stopped for signals, moved on. She said:

  ‘We come into Zoo Station. That’s where we get off.’

  ‘I know,’ said Marsha. ‘You told me.’

  ‘Marsha –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please don’t be so difficult.’

  ‘I’m not, I’m just saying you told me, that’s all.’

  Movement behind them. Christopher, bearing his luggage. He said: ‘Another ten minutes or so. We come into Zoo Station. I expect you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harriet, and as Marsha turned exaggeratedly back to the window she thought: actually, I wish he’d just go away, I can’t be doing with all this, we were quite all right as we were.

  Bahnhof Zoo. The train drew in under a great glass roof and for a moment, as they looked out of the windows, Marsha forgot to sulk.

  ‘We’re really high up!’

  They were. The station was set storeys above street level, and even through the rain and the lights of the platform they could see, far to their right below them, the buildings of the Berlin Zoo, the landscaped gardens, stretching away.

  ‘Can we go there?’

  ‘If you like.’

  The engine stopped, the doors were opening. They heaved their luggage out on to the platform, listening to announcements in unfamiliar German. The train emptied: everyone seemed to know where they were going. Christopher found a trolley, and loaded it up; they made their way to the ticket barrier, and came out on to the concourse: florists, lingerie and chocolate shops were closed but lit up; an Imbiss kiosk sold coffee and Wurst. Everything looked clean and well-kept: Harriet remarked on it, as they took the escalator to street level.

  ‘It’s a different story down here, I can tell you.’ Christopher kicked in his bag as someone came past them.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  They reached the bottom, and stepped off into another open area which did, at once, feel different: dingier, with a sour smell in the air. He nodded towards a rear entrance. ‘Not the kind of place to hang around – it’s full of down-and-outs and drug pushers.’

  Marsha looked at him scornfully. ‘What do you mean, down-and-outs? They might just be homeless, like in London.’

  ‘Marsha –’

  ‘Like mother, like daughter.’ Christopher was feeling in his pocket: he fished out coins. ‘I have to make a couple of calls, check on my hotel and all that, so I’ll say goodbye.’ He nodded towards a cluster of phone boxes. ‘You all right for cash? There’s a money exchange over the road, in the Europa Centre. Not far from the Kaiser-Wilhelm church. It’s a bit grim round there, too.’

  ‘We’re fine, thanks. Hugh organised all that.’

  ‘I’m sure. Well …’

  They both hesitated. Harriet looked out through the front entrance towards the U-Bahn sign. She must find a map. She looked back at Christopher.

  ‘I’m here for a few days,’ he said. ‘You’ve got my number. If you need anything –’

  ‘Thanks.’ Harriet was aware of Marsha, stony-faced, as they smiled at each other. He came forward, put a hand on her shoulder, they kissed on both cheeks.

  ‘Have a good time.’

  ‘And you.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ll be working. Wheeling and dealing. Wheeling, anyway.’ He nodded to Marsha, who was fiddling with the strap of her holdall. ‘I shall follow your career in social work with interest.’ Then he picked up his cases and walked away.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Marsha.

  Rain fell from a heavy sky on to high-rise buildings and soaking pavements; unfamiliar makes of small car, which Harriet dimly guessed were Trabants from the east, screeched in and out of dense traffic; a bright yellow bus with its wipers going hooted impatiently at a couple of jaywalkers at the lights. Everything looked bright and wet and fast and foreign – the shop fronts, the neon signs, the hurrying people beneath umbrellas – and as Harriet and Marsha stood sheltering at the station entrance, trying to take it all in, someone touched Harriet’s arm, and spoke in German.

  ‘Hast du Wechselgeld?’

  ‘What?’

  She turned to see a young man with matted hair and yellow-grey skin, holding out his hand. He wore black – the kind of loose, dirty, sweatshirt fabric Harriet was used to seeing on the neo-punk beggars in London, stretched out on the pavement with their dogs on a string and their rings through their noses, holding out a hand, as he was. But the beggars in London never frightened her: they were undemanding, unaggressive, familiar – she quite often gave them change, coming out of the supermarket or the bank. This young man’s face was hard, insistent. She clutched at her bag.

  ‘Du Wechselgeld,’ he said again.

  ‘Mum?’ said Marsha.

  ‘It’s okay.’ She turned quickly away from him. ‘Come on.’ He tugged at her sleeve; she yanked it back and grabbed Marsha’s hand. ‘Come on!‘ They ran through the rain, panting with the luggage, towards the U-Bahn, and down into the subway. Harriet scanned the queue at the ticket office, the people idling round a news-stand: did the Polizei hang about down here? Was there, somewhere, a friendly face? She turned round cautiously, looking up the steps. He had gone.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said again. ‘Let’s have a look at the map.’ She was shaking as they stood by the wall between the ticket booths, gazing at the unfamiliar grid.

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Only money.’ Her fingers travelled south-west, trembling. She took a breath. ‘Here we are … two stops to Nollendorfplatz, then change. Think we can manage that?’

  Marsha took her arm and hugged it. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’ Harriet drew another breath. ‘You?’

  She nodded, burying her face in her mother’s sleeve.

  ‘Come on.’ Harriet stroked the glossy hair. ‘Your hairslide’s coming undone.’ She clipped it back again. ‘There.’

  Marsha mumbled: ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thank you. Let’s go.’ They picked up their bags and looked about them for the right line. ‘The thing is,’ said Harriet, as they followed a sign, ‘in London I’d be able to cope with that. I wouldn’t like it, but I’d cope. But here –’ she stopped. No point in making a meal of their situation, as they travelled to an unknown hotel.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Marsha again.

  ‘See what Christopher Pritchard meant? It is a bit tough here.’

  Silence.

  ‘He’s not so bad.’ They were walking through an arm of the subway, following the flow. Ahead, they could hear a guitar, and somebody singing.

  ‘Like London,’ said Marsha, cheering up.

  ‘Like London.’ Harriet shifted her bag to the other hand. ‘Now, which is our platform?’

  When they came out of the station at Bayerischer Platz they found the sky emptied of rain. The station was on a tree-lined road running through a square: Schöneberg was a residential district. A few blocks away to the north-east, off Nollendorfplatz, stood the house where Christopher Isherwood had lived in the years before the war, the Weimar years of cabaret and hunger, where he had written Goodbye to Berlin. Here, in an area bombed to bits in the war and rebuilt in the Fifties and Sixties, Turkish workers had settled, opening shops and cafés alongside streets of middle-class housing. Harriet looked about her, and looked at her map.

  ‘I’m cold,’ said Marsha.

  ‘Darling, I’m sorry. You should be wearing your jacket’

  They dug it out of her holdall and zipped it up. ‘That’s better. Now then …’ She turned the map in her hands. ‘North-west across the square – come on.’

  Carrying their bags, they walked beneath dripping tree
s, past tall houses whose bells and labels by the door indicated an endless division into flats and bedsits. Sunday evening hung in the air: they looked into windows where people were ironing, watching television, reading the papers. They came into their own street, which at once felt different: faster, more alive. Late-night shops had fruit and vegetable stalls out on the pavement; there were cafés, traffic, the neon signs of hotels.

  ‘Which one’s ours?’

  ‘The Kloster. Can you see it?’

  ‘No. I’m hungry.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  A group of young men came noisily towards them, carrying beer cans. Harriet put her hand on Marsha’s arm; they stepped aside.

  The Hotel Kloster, when they came to it, looked what it was: cheap, which was why Harriet had chosen it. Probably much too cheap, and she should have booked a pension, and why hadn’t she? Because she had wanted something different for each city, when she had planned this journey: family in Brussels, a hotel in Berlin, a pension room in Prague, where hotel rooms now were astronomical.

  So. Here they were. They carried their bags up shallow steps towards glass doors which needed cleaning. Beyond them, a girl with peroxided hair, hooped earrings and black nail varnish sat at a desk turning the pages of a magazine. The hall was lit by a neon strip and had brown flock wallpaper, television blared from a lounge. They crossed the carpet to the desk and coughed.

  ‘Guten Tag.’ The peroxided girl looked up, unsmiling.

  ‘We have booked a room,’ said Harriet, and produced her confirmation slip.

  The girl consulted the register, pushed it across for signature, reached for a key from a rack behind her. Harriet, signing, saw the magazine she had been reading, and hoped that Marsha hadn’t. She took the key; the girl nodded towards stairs behind her. They were on the third floor, breakfast was between seven and nine. The girl went back to her magazine, sighing as the telephone rang beside her.

  Harriet and Marsha climbed narrow stairs lit by a time switch.

  ‘All right?’ Harriet pressed the switch on the second-floor landing, just to be sure.

  ‘Yes,’ said Marsha uncertainly. A lavatory flushed and a man came out; he nodded to them and disappeared into a bedroom. The doors to all the rooms were fire doors: solid, ugly, unpanelled. Apart from the man, they saw no one, and could no longer hear the television from downstairs. The silence peculiar to hotel landings – everything going on behind closed doors, between strangers – followed them up to the third floor. What have I done? thought Harriet. What on earth are we doing here?

  ‘Thirty-four,’ said Marsha, behind her. ‘That’s us.’

  ‘Well done.’

  They went in, putting the light on.

  Twin beds with dull green covers took up most of the room, set at right angles to the door. A shiny wardrobe stood by the window; a basin was opposite. There was a cheap wooden cabinet between the beds, a list of fire regulations pinned on the wall. That was it.

  ‘Well,’ said Harriet. ‘At least it’s clean.’

  Marsha crossed the narrow space between the foot of the beds and the wardrobe and looked out of the window. Harriet turned back the covers. Marsha returned and sank on to a bed.

  ‘It’s awful,’ she said miserably. ‘It’s awful.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Harriet, knowing it was. ‘It’s not that bad.’

  ‘I hate it. I wish we’d never come.’

  ‘Oh, Marsha, please –’

  ‘Please what? Why on earth did you choose this place?’

  ‘It’s cheap,’ said Harriet. ‘It’s cheap. We can’t afford to go splashing out –’ She trailed off under Marsha’s reproachful gaze.

  ‘Why couldn’t we have stayed in Brussels? I loved it. We don’t know anyone here.’

  Harriet tried to rally. She opened her mouth for a lecture – adaptability, readiness for different circumstances when travelling, kindness to tired mothers. She closed it again, feeling dreadful. Poor little girl.

  ‘And I’m hungry.‘

  ‘I know. So am I.’ She went over, and gave her a hug. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Well wash and brush up and go out for supper. Ill take you to a café and well have something hot and come back and have a good night’s rest, and in the morning it’ll all look nicer, I promise.’ Silence. ‘It usually does.’

  And it had better, she thought, as Marsha, somewhat comforted, got off the bed and went downstairs to the lavatory. She crossed to the window, and stood looking down on to the street, so bright and busy, so strange, so far from home.

  Well. This was something of how Karel must have felt: on his arrival in London, and on his departure, returning to an occupied city – alienated, distanced, afraid.

  The sky was darkening. Harriet stood watching the traffic lights change, and the cars move off beneath them; she watched the revolving lights of a nightclub sign, further along, and she had, all at once, such a powerful memory, of such a different place: of a wet spring evening twenty-four years ago, and she curled up in the striped armchair by her bedroom window, reading – struggling to read – a letter from Prague. That was where this journey had begun. The letters were all in her suitcase, in their wooden box.

  And surely, she thought now, leaning against the glass, I cannot be doing all this for nothing. Surely, when we get to Prague, I shall find – what shall I find?

  She turned from the window, hearing Marsha’s step on the stairs.

  Chapter Two

  ‘You have no idea how much darkness there is in Berlin during the winter,’ wrote Rosa Luxemburg, coming home to her rooms in Cranach Strasse, from walks beneath bare trees in the Tiergarten. ‘How I long for sunshine.’

  When Marx died, Rosa Luxemburg was twelve. She came to Berlin when she was twenty-seven. It was 1898 and she, the daughter of Polish Jews, educated in Warsaw and Zurich, had taken German citizenship through a marriage of convenience to a socialist émigré in Basle. Turn-of-the-century Berlin was in nationalist, expansionist mood. Rosa, a revolutionary, an independent spirit, collaborated with a radical lawyer, Karl Liebknecht, on a wing of the German Socialist Party. War was in the air. As the new century advanced, Rosa organised demonstrations, on Sunday afternoons.

  On 1 August, 1914, the Kaiser addressed a crowd of a hundred thousand from a balcony on the Royal Palace. The country was at war with Russia.

  ‘I no longer know parties,’ he declared, his voice filled with emotion. ‘I know only Germans …’

  The crowd roared.

  Troops, troop trains, music, flowers, waving girls.

  Rosa and Karl published an open letter denouncing an imperialist conflict. They formed the Spartacist League: socialists opposed to the war.

  The euphoric mood of the city changed. There were power cuts, rations, rising prices, curfews. Rosa wrote: ‘Gone are the patriotic street demonstrations … No longer do we see laughing faces from train windows …’

  She and Karl were arrested on charges of conspiracy.

  He was sent to bury the dead on the Russian front, she to a cell in Spandau prison. She smuggled out letters, calling for revolution.

  By the time Karl returned, war casualties were mounting; Berlin was sustained by a black market. In May, 1916, he addressed thousands on an anti-war demonstration in Potsdamer-Platz. He was rearrested. Waves of strikes were staged in his support. In January 1917 almost half a million stopped work. The police were everywhere, the city on the brink of civil war.

  In October, Liebknecht was released. By now, the Kaiser was a distant figurehead, all power in the hands of the generals. On 9 November he fled with his family to Belgium in a dramatic abdication; that day, Liebknecht proclaimed a socialist republic from the balcony of the Palace. Rosa, released, was convinced that a revolution throughout Germany, not just in Berlin, was needed to overthrow capitalism.

  In January 1919 street violence gripped the city. The right-wing Freikorps struck: Rosa and Karl were arrested and murdered. Her body was thrown in to the icy waters of the Lan
dwehr Kanal, flowing past the winter-bare trees of the Tiergarten.

  The dining room of the Hotel Kloster was gloomy, and largely occupied by silent men in suits, but among them an elderly American couple smiled from their table and wished Harriet and Marsha good morning – cheered, it was obvious, by the presence of a child. They had a granddaughter just about the same age – how old might Marsha be, exactly? She told them she was almost ten.

  ‘And you’re having your birthday here in Berlin? My, that’s exciting.’

  Marsha, with a polite smile, gave her attention to the table, gazing at plates of cold sausage, smooth, milk-white cheeses, dark bread in a basket.

  ‘It’s like lunch.’

  There were little plastic pots of jam, a steaming pot of coffee.

  ‘Tuck in,’ said Harriet, pouring. ‘Make the most of it.’ She drank, and looked at her guidebook, planning the day.

  Later, when they went out, the weather was windy and bright. They stood at a bus stop on Grünewald Strasse, feeling better. Racing clouds streamed through a light, high sky and the bus, which came soon, was a cheerful yellow. They sat on the top deck as they rode through the city, travelling north. Harriet told Marsha a little about the rubble women, a little about Rosa: her passion and vision, her brutal, tragic end.

  Marsha half listened, looking down out of the window, on to the traffic, the to and fro on the pavements, the wind in the summery trees.

  Knowledge pales beside imagination, Harriet had always known that, but imagination can deceive and disappoint. There is much to be said for the solid reassurance of facts.

  So. The Tiergarten. Harriet knew, from the map, and from one or two tourist brochure photographs, something of what its scale must be. But such a poetic name had nonetheless evoked for her, in London, trees, tears, water, walks in winter – a winter garden, indeed, with all its austere, seductive melancholy: frost on hard-pruned roses, ice on the pond, the crunch of feet on damp gravel.

  It was not like that. They were here in late summer, and the Tiergarten was vast: acres of wooded parkland in the centre of the city which did, indeed, contain much water – bordered by the winding ribbons of the Spree to the north, and the Landwehr Kanal to the south, with great stretches of lake between – but was also crossed by roads, and speeding traffic, no more a quiet winter garden than Hyde Park.