by Sue Gee
Silence.
‘What would you like to da?’
A shrug.
Coffee and hot chocolate arrived, and a basket of bread. Marsha fell upon it.
‘If you really like it here, we might be able to move from Schöneberg, fetch our stuff …’
A long look. Bread dunked in hot chocolate.
Harriet poured coffee.
‘Good morning.’
He was in the doorway, he had crossed the room, he was beside them.
‘Have you slept well?’ He was looking, himself, as though he had been through a difficult night, and had made efforts to disguise the fact. He had washed his hair and shaved and was wearing a different shirt, but he still looked tired and wrung out.
‘Very well, thank you,’ said Harriet. ‘What about you?’
‘Not bad. May I join you?’ He took a chair from the next table and sat down, his back to the room. Marsha looked past him, as Liesel approached with her platter. He ordered more coffee, and hot rolls. Liesel brought him a cup while he waited. Harriet filled it from her pot, and reached for the milk jug.
‘No, no thanks. Black is what I need this morning. So. How are you this morning, Marsha? Pass a quiet night on the sofa?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘And how are the kitty-cats?’
‘Fine.’ She was cutting a piece of Emmental into tiny cubes. He watched her. ‘Is that for them?’
She gave a sigh. ‘No.’
‘Marsha fed the mother cat this morning,’ Harriet said helpfully.
‘Did she? How charming.’ He raised his cup and blew gently on the hot coffee; he drank. ‘Ah. That’s better. The day begins to have possibilities.’ He looked at her, and smiled. ‘And what about you? How is the mother cat this morning?’
Harriet returned the smile, sipped her own coffee and felt warmth spread through her. ‘Okay.’
‘Good.’
‘Here are your hot rolls,’ said Marsha briskly.
‘So they are.’
The hot rolls arrived in a basket and with them unsalted butter in a cut-glass dish and two kinds of jam, in china pots. At the Hotel Kloster these things came in little plastic tubs with peel-off foil on top.
They ate, and poured more coffee. Other guests came and went.
‘Did you know,’ asked Christopher, passing Harriet the basket, ‘that the first people to cross the wall did so from Prenzlauer Berg? A young couple – they went through the border crossing on Bornholmer Strasse, a mile or so north of here.’
‘I must go and see.’
He shook his head, reaching for the jam. ‘You won’t see a thing. In most parts of the city it’s as though the wall has never existed – there are a few chunks in Potsdamer Platz, and as I told you, you can buy dubious chips of it from stalls round what was Checkpoint Charlie, down the road, but other than that – poof. She vanishes.’
Harriet took another hot roll, and broke it. ‘Well. If we can’t see anything of the wall, might we see something of the place you were talking about yesterday? Where the Scheiber factory is?’
‘Marzahn? I’m not sure about that, actually –’
‘Oh, please. I really shan’t feel we’ve been to Berlin unless we go east, and see some of the changes. And it does sound interesting, from what you were saying – the factory, I mean, and the changeover to a market economy. Unless –’ she looked at him, wondering about his reluctance. ‘Perhaps you’re too busy?’
‘No, no, I have to go there anyway. I can make a phone call, tell them I’m bringing visitors, if that’s what you’d really like.’
‘I’m interested, that’s all.’ And also it would provide an emotional breathing space, a distraction – to be thinking, once again, about issues in the public arena, as she was used to doing in London. ‘If you’re sure that’s okay –’
‘Yes. Just –’ he hesitated. ‘Forgive me – you won’t make too many enquiries, will you? Dieter’s still feeling his way, and it isn’t always easy, with his workforce and so on. And east Berliners still keep their guard up – they’re not used to being questioned. Or perhaps I should say they don’t like it –’
She took the point. ‘I’ll do my best.’
‘And what about Marsha?’ He turned to her; she was smothering her third hot roll in butter. ‘How would you like to visit a factory in one of the grottiest parts of Berlin? Just for the experience.’
‘It’s up to Mum.’ She went on spreading, concentrating on every crumbling corner.
Harriet hesitated, torn once again between her own desires and Marsha’s. Even before they’d come to the Hotel Scheiber the dilemma had been with her – wanting to see the whole city, wearing both of them out. And now there was another factor: she wanted Christopher’s company. Marsha didn’t.
‘We could go back to Schöneberg, Marsha,’ she said. ‘Would you prefer that?’
She studied the tablecloth. ‘I’d like to stay here, really. With the kittens.’
‘Yes, but –’
Christopher finished his coffee. ‘I think I’ll leave you to it. I’ll have a smoke and a look at the papers.’
When he had gone, Harriet and Marsha had a discussion, which became an argument. Harriet won. She reached across the table for Marsha’s hand, which was withheld.
‘I just want to feel I’ve seen both sides of Berlin, and understood things a bit more, and I really don’t think I can leave you here for hours on end. But then we’ll come back here, and do whatever you want tomorrow, your birthday, of course, and then –’ She stopped. ‘God. And then we’re leaving for Prague.’
‘Yes,’ said Marsha, pointedly. ‘To look for Karel.’ She rose from the table. ‘I’m going to look for the kittens.’
There was no direct U-Bahn connection betwen Prenzlauer Berg and Marzahn, so they took a tram, leaving the tenement-lined back streets and humming along the lines going east, on wider main roads. Much of the traffic was heading in the opposite direction, carrying workers to the western side of the city; many of the roads were in visibly bad shape, pitted with holes or badly surfaced: every couple of miles they passed boarded-up sections enclosing pounding drills and smoking barrels of tar. Tower blocks stretched into the distance, beneath a brightening sky.
When they got on, the tram had been crowded. Harriet and Marsha had found a couple of seats at the back, leaving Christopher to strap-hang, like a great tree, amongst the press of local commuters down near the driver. Gradually the commuters thinned out, and now, as they stopped at traffic lights, he came up towards them.
‘Another twenty minutes or so. Mind if I smoke?’
It felt like years since London Transport had banned smoking: already, Marsha had voiced objections as people around them lit up.
‘Actually,’ said Harriet, ‘do you mind if you don’t? It does feel a bit airless in here.’
‘Sorry. Of course.’ Christopher put his cigarettes back in his pocket, but Marsha was already rising.
‘Go on, if you want you can have my seat. I’d like to go to the front, anyway.’ She turned to Harriet. ‘Is that okay? It looks cleaner down there.’
‘All right.’ They watched her move along the slatted floor, holding on to the back of an empty seat as the tram swayed, then stretching up to get hold of a strap. She could just about reach, and seen from the back she could, because of her height, just about be an early teenager, travelling alone. This was, Harriet realised, the effect she was aiming for, and the state she probably desired. In another few years it would not be possible to win arguments so often, to take her hither and thither across Europe without consultation. In another few years …
Christopher, beside her, said, ‘She wants to do her own thing.’
She turned to him. ‘That’s just what I was thinking.’
‘Well. There we are.’ He looked at her directly. ‘And what else have you been thinking, after last night? I hope all that talk didn’t shake you up too much.’
‘No, no, I –’ She what? She was s
itting next to him, which felt quite different from being across the table. It was always awkward to talk to people next to you, rather than opposite, unless you knew them so well that it didn’t matter where you sat, or looked, you could just chatter away, as she and Marsha did. She did not know Christopher so well, she was very aware of him being so close, and she did not, above all, want to reopen last night’s conversation. Later, perhaps. Not on a tram to an eastern suburb of Berlin first thing in the morning, with Marsha only yards away from them. She shifted along the seat towards the window. They were passing a parade of narrow-fronted shops, which looked as though they had been there since the Fifties, and then a very Nineties supermarket, brightly lit, plastered with notices of special offers.
‘A lot of big chain stores have opened up in the East in the last couple of years,’ said Christopher, following her gaze. ‘Seizing the moment. I think some have lived to regret it – after the first rush for western goodies a lot of people lost their jobs and had to tighten their belts again.’
The tram stopped at a junction, and its doors opened; a couple in their early fifties climbed on, he in an ill-fitting suit and open-necked shirt, she carrying an ancient shopping bag.
‘It’s been a complete social upheaval, hasn’t it?’ said Harriet, half-watching them, glad of the opportunity for impersonal conversation.
‘Of course. And especially for people like them.’ He nodded towards the couple, settling into a seat. ‘They’re of an age which is caught in the middle – they’ve never known anything except communism, they’ve no pre-war memories of a united Germany to make them feel hopeful about reunification now, but they’re too old to benefit from capitalism. They’re not going to become the new rich in the West. If they’ve lost factory jobs they probably won’t work again. And unemployment is something they’ve never known. Unlike the young – there’s a whole lot of the new generation who’ve never known anything else.’
‘I know.’
He smiled at her. ‘Of course you know. You’ve read it all up, haven’t you?’
‘That’s what Susanna said –’ She broke off. ‘Let’s not talk about Susanna or anything now. Anyway, it’s not a question of “reading it all up”, that sounds –’
‘I know. It sounds like a tourist. Whereas you, of course, are a traveller, quite different, taking a lively interest in contemporary affairs.’
‘Oh, shut up.’
He raised an eyebrow to comic effect.
She laughed. ‘Go on.’
‘Go on what?’
‘Go on telling me what I already know.’
‘On the contrary, I feel I should sit back and let you educate me.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
The tram had stopped again, and Marsha was at the door, looking out. They were near a little park, an oasis in what was now a succession of sprawling high-rise estates. Marsha stepped back as the doors closed again, and a young mother carried a heavy toddler up the aisle. The child was wearing a bright blue and green tracksuit, which looked like something out of Marks & Spencer – certainly smart and new. Harriet remarked on it.
‘Well, yes. People do spend money like water on western stuff when they’ve got it, especially for kids. Shiny new bikes, and all that. Colour. Of course there are changes and some people are making good – making better, anyway.’ He shifted in the seat as the tram gathered speed. ‘I can remember when I first came here, in ’88, how grey everything looked. It really did. You came through Checkpoint Charlie and stepped back thirty years: virtually no traffic except for ancient trams, half-empty shops, half-finished housing, shell damage, cobbled streets. And at night you went about in the half-dark.’
Christopher nodded towards the press of traffic alongside, the secondhand Golfs and Audis amongst ancient Skodas and Trabants. ‘All that’s changing in some places, but it’s not going to keep pace with what people want, and in some ways things are worse, as I said. There’s a lot of disappointment, a lot of anger – since unification the East Germans feel like the underclass. There are dole offices on the estates now – that’s new. And not only is there massive unemployment, but when they go for jobs in the west they’re treated like idiots, stuck in a Fifties time-warp, who’ve never seen a computer.’
‘And that’s why they’re looking for scapegoats,’ said Harriet, thinking of events in Rostock and Mölln, last summer, all over the papers at home. ‘Guest workers. Asylum-seekers.’
‘Exactly.’ He banged his fist on the seat rail, making her jump. ‘”Deutschland den Deutschen! Germany for the Germans! Foreigners out!’”
She shook her head. ‘The Jews have gone, and now – the asylum-seekers are the new Jews in a way, aren’t they? For the young neo-Nazis. It’s very disturbing.’
‘It is, but all the right conditions are there for it. The wrong conditions, I should say. And of course the asylum laws are crazy. Far too lax.’
She was startled. ‘Come off it.’
‘They are. You must realise that. Asylum for all – it was built into the constitution after the war as an act of guilt and atonement.’
‘Of course. So it should have been.’
‘But no one could have predicted then what would happen now. Do you know how many people applied for asylum here last year? Almost five hundred thousand. This year it’ll probably be higher. There’s a barracks-like place on an estate not far from Scheiber’s new premises, apparently. Housing God knows how many Romanians. There are places like it in depressed towns all over East Germany, as you know. What’s supposed to happen to all these people?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Harriet, suddenly on her mettle, ‘but I do know they’re not supposed to be burned alive in overcrowded hostels.’
Christopher frowned. ‘Don’t get on your high horse. Did I say they should be?’
‘No, but –’
‘But what? You sound like the person I met in Brussels.’
‘I am the person you met in Brussels.’
‘Yes, but –’ His hand on the rail was trembling; he reached into his pocket. ‘I need a cigarette, sorry.’
Harriet found she was shaking too. She bit her lip. What had happened?
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve already snapped Marsha’s head off this morning, I don’t quite know what’s got into me.’
He was inhaling deeply. ‘Let’s forget it.’
‘I think I’m actually very tired,’ she said, suddenly aware that it was true.
‘And emotional.’ He was looking at her, now, with renewed concern. ‘It’s my fault. I did upset you last night.’
She looked out of the window. ‘I don’t know. Anyway, I shouldn’t have jumped down your throat.’
‘Not a problem. Let’s talk about something else. We’re almost there.’
But Harriet did not know what else to talk about, and a silence fell. Christopher went on smoking; she gazed out of the window at tower blocks stained with meandering brown rivers of damp, feeling ill at ease and confused.
It was true that she had over-reacted, going on the attack before he had made his position clear. And yet. A gut reaction was a gut reaction, and it told you who you were. And she was a political animal, who had always, despite the circumstances of Karel’s return to Prague, been drawn to the left. Christopher, it seemed, stood on the right. How far to the right? How much did it matter? What was the point at which you might say: it matters a lot, and more than anything else?
An abandoned car with an open bonnet, the engine gutted and the seats ripped out, stood at the side of the road on sunken tyres. Beyond, a scuffed stretch of green and a concrete path led to a windswept concrete precinct, shadowed by monstrous tower blocks. They were in the heart of Marzahn, where for mile upon mile this grid was repeated: precinct, high-rise, dark connecting alleyways, parade of shops. Here and there young trees swayed in the wind, here and there were windowboxes; in some blocks bright murals had been painted round identical doorways, perhaps to help people locate their own
apartment. But these signs of individuality were few. They were walking through a vast, featureless estate, stretching for miles towards the eastern edge of Berlin, a place built in the mid-seventies to house hundreds and thousands of workers brought up in decayed tenements who wanted hot water, a convenient, modem apartment. Already, it looked outdated – more than outdated: desolate. Who, with a choice, would choose to live here?
Litter blew in and out of the muggers’paradise of alleyways, in the path of young mothers wheeling pushchairs across bleak concrete spaces to the shops. There were broken windows on the lower floors; graffiti was scrawled everywhere. Harriet, holding Marsha’s hand, felt that they were being stared at: by women carrying heavy shopping in plastic bags but more by the young men with close-cropped hair hanging around computer games arcades or walking four or five abreast across the precincts, in jeans and heavy boots. She could feel them looking her up and down, and looking at Christopher, in his creased linen jacket, carrying a good leather briefcase.
She remembered the first afternoon in the city, eyed by punks lolling on the steps of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche on the Ku’damm. She had wondered then if they came from the eastern districts and whether she would feel like a voyeur coming out here, and she realised now that she did, that she felt tense and uneasy, menaced by these young men with the cold stares. It seemed now unthinkable that she might ever have brought Marsha here alone, but she also felt that Christopher, though affording protection, drew attention and hostility.
They walked on. He was talking neutrally, over Marsha’s head, about the activities of the Stasi, whose old headquarters were in the adjoining district of Lichtenberg, and who, it used to be rumoured, had penetrated the Marzahn estates so effectively that almost every other apartment had housed a paid informer. When the citizens’files were discovered and opened, after the wall came down, there were people who learned that their own mothers had been reporting on them.
This talk only served to increase Harriet’s feelings of alienation. She was also aware that the easy banter which had been developing between her and Christopher had evaporated in the wake of their exchange on the tram, and that Marsha, beside her, had barely spoken six words together since they got off. She began to feel as if this might go on for ever: the two of them listening, as if to a stranger, looking about them, out of place and uncertain of their destination, and she said abruptly, hearing herself sound like Marsha:
