Letters From Prague

by Sue Gee

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Did he say what colour?’

  ‘That I didn’t ask, I’m afraid. We can find out when we get there.’

  ‘If we get there.’

  Well, they were on their way. Ahead, beneath a bright blue sky, was the Brandenburg Gate. Harriet felt, on seeing it, much as she supposed tourists seeing the Tower of London might feel: it was real, and she was really here. Extraordinary. Revolutionaries had assembled beneath it in the turmoil of 1848, and Marx had rushed back from Brussels to join them. Here, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had addressed huge crowds; here, in the mid-1930s, were the torchlit Nazi rallies. And here, on 9 November 1989, just beyond the massive columns, people had stood six deep on the top of the wall, laughing and cheering in the winter sunshine, looking across to the other side, and she, on a grey afternoon in London, had sat watching it all on television: the crowds, the red flags fluttering in the last days of a divided city, students in jeans and anoraks smoking, waving to the cameras, clambering up on each other’s shoulders, feet scraping the graffiti.

  My first thought was: I’m the one who has been walled in …

  ‘Look,’ she said to Marsha now. ‘We saw that on television, when you were six.’

  ‘Saw what?’

  ‘The Brandenburg Gate.’

  But Marsha did not remember, how could she; though she did, when reminded, recall Annie, their lodger that winter, with whom they had watched all these events. Annie soon afterwards had left, to go and live with Dominic, her new black boyfriend, in his house in Dalston Lane. A lot of their lodgers did that: they drank Harriet’s coffee at her kitchen table, they babysat Marsha, who grew fond of them, and then they departed – for college, or boyfriends, or girlfriends, leaving post to be forwarded and things in drawers which they phoned about, and said they’d come back for, and usually didn’t. Harriet had a black bag full of such items, stuffed into the cupboard on the landing, which got in the way and sometimes made her cross. She was also intermittently cross about the fact that no sooner had someone settled in and got to be part of the furniture than they were gone, leaving Marsha with a renewed sense that most people in the house, including fathers, were transient.

  How were fathers this morning? After yesterday’s controlled outburst Harrriet had gone to bed thinking that Marsha had put up with enough in her ten years, and borne up well, and should in future have her wishes taken more seriously into account – which might include Harriet asking about, rather than announce, plans for holidays, birthdays and so on. This resolution, however, had not prevented her this morning from making sure that today was spent as she herself wished to spend it. The truth of it is, she thought now, looking at Marsha’s sleek dark head by the window, that we both have wills of iron. It is probably what has seen us through, and I suppose one day it might be what divides us. But not yet – please not yet.

  Beyond the dark head she could see, far to their left, the towering buildings of the Reichstag, but refrained from pointing it out, just saying casually, as the bus drove on through the Gate, ‘Hitler made speeches here, too.’

  ‘Oh.’ Hitler was within Marsha’s ken – she had watched him making speeches in wartime newsreels shown in a television series last year, and he had made an impression. Indeed, he was probably more real to her than many more recent figures, with the exception of Nelson Mandela, on whom, on his release from prison, her class had done a project. But she did not ask any more, and Harriet let her alone, as they passed beneath the roof and crossed an unmarked line where the wall had run. They were out on Unter den Linden.

  ‘Beneath the lime trees’ – as the Tiergarten had spoken to Harriet in London of winter trees and frozen water, so these words had evoked for her an atmosphere, an era: summer afternoon on the boulevard, the rustle of leaves, the clip-clop of hooves, wheels turning, hats raised, parasols prettily concealing blushes, as the Prussian aristocracy took the air. Was it possible, as the traffic of the 1090s swept along, to imagine this still?

  Well, yes, it was, and closing her eyes for a moment, continuing her running inner dialogue between fact and fiction, present and past, Harriet thought the past means more, history means more – all sorts of imagined scenes mean more to me, much of the time, than my own life. Can this be true? This, surely, is Susanna talking.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’ She opened her eyes again.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Of course.’ She looked out at the long straight rows of trees, hundreds replanted after the war, as the neoclassical façades of the buildings beyond had, in the 1960s, been restored. Here they were in the East, a place always pictured as bleak and drab, and it felt quite possible to step back for a moment, as she had done, into the pleasing lines of the nineteenth century. Berlin, bombed to pieces during the war, its bricks retrieved and stacked by the Trümmerfrauen in their turbans and pinafores, had been remade into a smart new city in the West – as they had seen yesterday, on the Ku’damm – and restored to its Prussian grandeur in the East: a policy designed to give the newly Russian-occupied sector a sense of continuity, even as the Iron Curtain came down. It was not so everywhere, of course: desolate concrete estates and tower blocks lay beyond: though how many of them, Harriet wondered, could be so much worse than their counterparts in London?

  They were crossing Friedrichstrasse; ahead, at the far end of the avenue, elaborate statuary adorned the Schlossbrücke over the Spree. In the Sixties and Seventies people had drowned in the Spree, swimming across in desperate escape attempts from the east by night. This Harriet did tell Marsha, and to this she did listen attentively, as how could you not, picturing the darkness, the gasp of cold, the silent frantic swimming; then lights, shouts on the wall, shots, and the swirling gush of blood into the water.

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  They got off the bus in Marx-Engels Platz, wandering with others to look at a hideous bronze monument surrounded by steel pillars.

  ‘No one’s scratched things on Marx in Highgate,’ said Marsha. ‘He looks better there, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He does.’

  Oppression, revolution, corruption, disillusion: was the cycle of history ever different? Harriet stood looking up at the vandalised figures of men whose vision, as she had told Marsha that wet afternoon in the cemetery, had changed the world.

  And now the world had changed again, and it was nationalism, not internationalism, which was devouring and dismembering continents. East and West Germany had been reunited, but Czechoslovakia was now two states, the Soviet Union in sixteen republics, Yugoslavia in ruins.

  We are one people.

  So are we.

  Harriet and Marsha walked along Karl Liebknecht Strasse, craning their necks to look up at the TV transmitter rising two hundred metres to a needle-sharp point towards the summer clouds above Alexanderplatz.

  ‘You can go up there,’ Harriet said. ‘Like the Post Office Tower, only more so.’

  ‘Shall we go up there?’

  ‘We might.’

  Days before the wall came down, thousands had crammed into this concrete square, part of a city-wide demonstration; now, bus routes to East and West converged beneath the S-Bahn line, which ran overhead beneath a canopied roof, and in the shelter of the high-rises all around dozens of little stalls, unheard of a few years ago, did a brisk trade in cheap jeans and flashy Tshirts.

  They wandered through to the U-Bahn, locating the crowded train to Senefelder Platz.

  ‘Nearly there,’ said Harriet, as they found two seats, and got out her map again, looking for Christopher’s street.

  Prenzlauer Berg was set on a hill, a nineteenth-century urban working-class district of tenements and factories. In the war it was fiercely fought over, but not demolished: much remained standing, although many of the buildings were still scarred with bullet holes. Even before the wall came down, it had become a quarter of East Berlin frequented by artists and intellectuals, with a rich café life. Now, it had been discovered. H
arriet, getting off the U-Bahn with Marsha and crossing the square into Kollwitz Strasse, was soon aware of being in quite a different atmosphere, a heady mix of pre-war and postmodern which diverted even Marsha from complaint as they walked.

  Cobbled streets were lined with decaying tenements, through whose dark entrances they glimpsed overgrown courtyards, peeling paintwork, unlit stone stairways. Narrow-fronted shops, cafés and bistros were crammed up against each other; the pavements were crowded and it was growing hot again, though the height of the buildings and the narrowness of the streets meant that many were in shadow. They passed cramped galleries painted in stark white or electric pink and green; beneath paintings and film posters, sagging sofas on bare floorboards were occupied by twenty-year-olds with white hair and dark glasses, smoking and staring into space. Students in wire-rimmed spectacles sat over soup in tiny cafés, reading the papers; young men in earrings and sleeveless Tshirts hung over dimly lit bars.

  Harriet and Marsha walked on to Husmanstrasse.

  ‘It’s like a film set,’ said Harriet.

  It was. They were in a perfectly restored and preserved nineteenth-century street of stately façaded, five-storey buildings with curving wrought-iron balconies and tall windows on the upper floors, antique shops at street level.

  ‘It’s like Brussels,’ said Marsha.

  ‘This bit is, you’re right.’

  ‘It’s nice round here.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it.’

  They turned off into a network of back streets. And I like it too, thought Harriet, as they looked for Christopher Pritchard’s hotel, passing bars, a bookshop, a café painted green. How clever of him to stay here.

  ‘There aren’t any hotels in this street,’ said Marsha, looking up and down.

  ‘There must be one. He said it was small but he thought we’d like it – it’s called the Hotel Scheiber.’

  ‘What’s the hotel cat called?’

  ‘Good question. Puss.’

  ‘What’s puss in German?’

  ‘Kottelet. Cutlet. I don’t know. I think he said the hotel had shutters – look, that must be it.’

  A small painted sign by an open door announced it: a narrow-fronted three-storey house on the other side of the street, with faded blue shutters and worn doorstep. They waited for a battered Trabant to pass, then crossed over, and walked inside. There was no one about in the little hall – ‘But it’s nicer than ours,’ said Marsha, observing a desk, a fabric-shaded lamp, pigeonholes in polished wood on the wall behind.

  ‘It is.’

  Worn rugs lay on the uneven floor; there were pictures; it felt more like a family house than a hotel – well, that was no doubt what it was, a hotel-pension, just the kind of place they should be staying in. A half-open door to the right revealed tables laid with white cloths, a stuffed bird in a dusty case on a sideboard, amidst bottles and decanters. At the back of the hall was another door, with a window through which they could glimpse a passage and light beyond.

  ‘Well, come on,’ said Marsha. ‘Let’s ring the bell or something.’

  ‘Why don’t you ring it?’ Harriet nodded towards a little brass dome on the desk, with a protruding knob in the centre.

  ‘That’s not a bell.’

  ‘It’s a pinger. Go on, ping it.’ She demonstrated with the flat of the hand on the air. Marsha looked doubtful, crossed to the desk and struck. A pleasing single note sounded in the quiet hall. She smiled; they waited. She struck it again.

  The door at the back swung open: a large man in a white apron came through it. He was balding and jowly and comfortable looking; he greeted them in pleasant apologetic tones, and Harriet explained their call.

  ‘Herr Pritchard? He is expecting you, he is out on business but will be back within –’ he glanced at the dock on the wall ‘– within half an hour. Please.’ He gestured towards the half-open door, the dusty bird. ‘You will take some coffee? Something to eat?’

  Marsha was nudging Harriet’s elbow. ‘Ask him about the kittens.‘

  But Harriet, whose German had just about equipped her to understand the conversation so far, could not remember the word for kitten, and shook her head.

  The proprietor looked at them enquiringly.

  ‘Go on.‘

  ‘Herr Pritchard mentioned a cat …’ said Harriet feebly. ‘With – er – little cats.’

  ‘Ah, yes! She has three.’ He looked at Marsha kindly, and put his hands four or five inches apart. ‘Three kleinen Meizen. Just so big. You would like to see them?’

  Marsha needed no translation: her face lit up. ‘Come on!’

  ‘Marsha …’

  But the proprietor was holding open the door to the passage, gesturing to them to go through. They saw light at the far end, a doorway, a flagstoned garden where the summer’s last geraniums stood in the sun.

  And thus it was that when Christopher Pritchard returned, he found Harriet drinking coffee on a hard wooden chair beneath a little apple tree, and Marsha sitting cross-legged on the ground beside her, with a lapful of assorted kittens. The mother cat, a marmalade, sat on a low brick wall, observing through half-shut eyes.

  ‘What a pretty sight.’

  Harriet jumped, and turned, spilling coffee.

  ‘Careful,’ said Marsha, edging away.

  ‘Sorry. Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’ For a moment Christopher stood there, filling the doorway. He had had his hair cut; he looked well. He was beside her, kissing her lightly on each cheek, looking down at Marsha. ‘Are they behaving themselves?’

  ‘Of course.’ She held up the smallest, a tabby with white socks. ‘This is my favourite.’

  ‘The runt.’ He bent down, extending a large finger, and tapped it on the nose. The kitten blinked and shrank; Marsha drew back.

  ‘What’s a runt?’

  ‘The one most in need of care and protection,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Or drowning.’ Christopher got to his feet again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s joking.’ Harriet moved her chair: the garden, like the kitchen in Brussels, seemed to have halved in size since his arrival. ‘Aren’t you?’ she asked him.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s funny.’ Marsha, cradling the kitten to her cheek, looked at Harriet crossly. ‘They won’t really drown him, will they?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Christopher, loosening his tie. ‘Wrong foot as usual, start again. How are you both?’

  ‘We’re all the better for being here,’ said Harriet, putting her cup down. She shaded her eyes to look up at him. ‘It’s very nice – we’ve been making unfavourable comparisons with our own hotel, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Yes, I can imagine. Sorry – shouldn’t say that.’ He sat on the low wall beside the mother cat, rubbing her face. For a moment she let him, then leapt down towards her kittens again.

  ‘What were you doing there, anyway?’ Harriet asked him. ‘It’s quite a stretch.’

  ‘I had a meeting nearby. And also, of course, I was curious to see how you were getting on. How have you been getting on?’

  ‘Okay, thanks. We’ve probably tried to see a bit too much in a hurry, you know what it’s like –’ She told him about yesterday – the Zoo, the Tiergarten and the Ku’damm in the heat, and today’s long walk along to Alexanderplatz.

  Christopher listened, running his thumb along a little groove in the wall.

  ‘You must be exhausted. And it’s all very large-scale and public, where you’ve been.’ He nodded towards Marsha, watching the kittens, who were suckling now as their mother stretched out in the sun. ‘Isn’t it a bit much for her?’

  ‘Probably.’ Harriet might have felt defensive, but the warmth of the courtyard and the sleepy contentment of the cat made it difficult. ‘That’s why it’s nice to be here – quite unexpected. How did you find this place?’

  ‘The proprietor’s nephew is a business contact. Dieter Scheiber, a nice man. They’re an interesting family, the
Scheibers, they’ve hung on to this hotel for three generations. It was badly damaged in the war, like everything else, and then of course it was nationalised. When I came here in ’88 it was a rundown dump, but of course it was cheap, which is why I used it.’

  Harriet looked at him. ‘I didn’t realise you’d been coming here for so long.’

  He made a gesture: does it all need explaining? ‘Passing through. Looking about. That’s another story. Anyway, ever since the war old grandfather Scheiber had held on to the title, and before he died he passed it on to his son Ernst – that’s who you’ve met, he’s running it now. In 1990 he was able to produce the papers. There was a lot of kerfuffle, but in the end he was able to reclaim the place and he’s been restoring it ever since, bringing in family furniture again, putting it right. He’s doing a good job, don’t you think?’

  ‘I do. It’s lovely. And what about the nephew? Dieter. You’re still in touch?’

  ‘Absolutely. I’ve just been to see him.’ He pulled out his cigarettes and lit up. Again, Harriet noticed the slight but perceptible tremor. ‘Until ’89 Dieter was managing a section of a nationalised factory on the outskirts of Marzahn. That’s a few miles further east. Godforsaken place – grim before ’89 and pretty grim now.’

  ‘Would you take me there? I really want to see –’

  He hesitated. ‘I’m not sure about that. Not much fun for Marsha, for a start.’

  ‘Well. Tell me about it, anyway.’

  ‘I’ve said – grim. Cheap 1970s housing, high-rise misery. Unemployment, rising crime, drugs. Desolation city.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘But in early 1990 Dieter saw the chance of a break. He got in touch with an old family friend in the West, chap called Steffen Wilkendorf. That’s who I was seeing yesterday. Dieter persuaded him to invest in the factory, try to make a go of private enterprise. Wilkendorf & Scheiber – they make paints and industrial dyes: for textiles and stuff. It’s still early days, but they haven’t gone under yet. Dieter’s the man at the workface, and since I managed to help them out a bit in Bohemia I get a discount here at the hotel. So that’s handy.’

  ‘Hugh’s investing in Bohemia,’ said Harriet thoughtfully.