Bone and Blood (18 page)

‘That's one way you're different from Gran. She thinks she's right about everything,' she said.

‘So Peggy hasn't changed then?' Brigitte replied and they laughed together.

‘I think wakes are a good idea. People can talk about happy or sad memories. Gran had a good laugh at Michael's wake. A good wake is better than a Mass where more than half the people who turn up don't believe in it anymore. You can laugh or cry. You're aware of the person – the good times and the bad times. Other people there mean you are not so caught up in yourself.' The compassion she felt as she spoke surprised her.

Brigitte felt it slide along the smoke line from her cigarette. She could feel them burning Katharina now, just as she felt them burn Anna. ‘Not being caught up in yourself. Yes. Not necessarily from a wake or even a death. That's a gift at any time. Maybe Michael's gift to you? I would've liked a wake for Katharina – or maybe I mean for me.' Her tone was so soft it was hard to hear her.

Aisling pushed a bit more, ‘So we can have a wake while we're waiting. What makes a good wake?' She dredged her own memory for some story about Katharina and found only a conversation over Christmas dinner once as the time for Gran to ring her sister approached. It was Michael who asked, ‘Who is Aunt Bridget anyway?'

‘You've never met her – she's your Great Aunt, your Gran's sister. She lives in Berlin with her daughter, Katharina.' Mum popping into the conversation with that cheerful and super normal tone as she dished out an extra helping of turkey, making Aisling smell a sensitive point.

‘Grand-Aunt,' her father said to Michael, ‘She's my aunt and your Grand-Aunt.'

‘Oh Brendan… stop being so pedantic – who cares Great Aunt or grand aunt. He's only seven.'

‘So what is she to us, this Katharina?' Aisling remembered the conversation because she liked the idea of Berlin and the idea of a cousin in Germany.

‘Oh she'd be your second cousin. Isn't that right, Diarmuid? I‘m not much good at all this first cousin or second cousin once removed, twice removed – aunts and cousins are far enough for me.'

‘And how old is she?'

‘She's a bit older than Daddy.'

Aisling lost interest then but remembered it as the time she first really registered what an umbilical cord was. As a child it was all willies, tits, bums and trying to work out how her mother's vagina could ever stretch enough to bring out a baby – like a turd from the wrong hole. Her father said something to her mother about Bridget and Katharina had never cut the umbilical cord and that was why she had never married. Her mother had said, ‘You're one to talk.' She didn't say any more as Gran was only in the other room on the phone but Aisling heard her mutter as they cleared the table, ‘Try shaking your mother off at Christmas or any other family occasion.'

‘What's an umbilical cord?' Michael asked and both her parents jumped back from their whispered scraping of the plates to answer him.

‘Katharina didn't live here when she died, did she?' she said now to Bridget to keep both of them from drifting off to another space.

‘Forty-five years we lived here together before she went to live with Monika. We came here when she was a baby. I found this apartment myself –repaired it with my bare hands before she was born. Somebody else had broken in and made a mess of it – the door was left hanging open. Adelheid made me move in before someone else could get it. Forty-five years.'

‘What? You squatted this apartment?' Aisling laughed. The idea of someone Gran's age being a squatter was just too funny. She'd heard of people squatting in London and Copenhagen – people her own age or even her parents' generation – but not grannies.

‘Squatted, you call it. That's an ugly word. I call it doing something for my child. What could we do – wait for someone else to help us? The war was over and everything was in chaos. Adelheid knew the old woman who lived and died here alone – she used to look after her. Sometimes later people came back looking for their home back. We were lucky. No-body ever came back. She had a son but maybe he was killed in the war. When the landlords came to collect the rent I told them that I had lived here with her before she died. They put my name on it so we were legal tenants then.'

‘Maybe the old woman was a Jew?'

Brigitte looked at her suspiciously, ‘You are like Katharina – always questions, questions, questions. How would I know? I didn't want to talk about those times. I had worked hard to put them behind me and she wanted to throw them back in my face. So many others had their stories buried with them. Why should mine not be buried too? But Katharina was so strong – so determined. She made me angry with all her questions. Why did she need to know so much? We did what we had to do in those dark days. Why dig up the past? You can't change it. What's done is done. What's gone is gone. People think – if I were you I would do this or that. No-one knows what you would do in another person's shoes.'

‘She told me that she had a right to know who she was and who her father was. She accused me of secrets, lies and silence and even of spinning her so many other stories she didn't know who she was anymore.'

‘So why not tell her the truth?'

‘The truth. What is the truth? To survive, you have to make up your own truth.'

Aisling laughed, ‘You can't make up the truth. The truth is the truth.'

‘What is truth to me may be lies to you.'

‘Gran said Katharina's father was an American soldier.'

‘Maybe they wanted to believe that and maybe I let them. There were so many fatherless children when Katharina was a child, it didn't bother her much at first. Only later when she became interested in the war and started to read books in English. But she got too clever for me with her dates and her history. She wanted to know how I could be with an American soldier before the war was over. I told her that I didn't want to dredge up the past with its memories of hunger and want, but she persisted – questions, questions, questions.

‘When the heart of Berlin was torn apart by the wall, she started to tear me apart too. She used the excuse of studying history to question me about dates of this and dates of that. Why should I remember dates? She told me once her friend's mother was raped by a Russian ‘liberator'. Who told the child such stories? I was afraid dirty talk with coarse words would get there before I told her about her father but I could never find the words. When I was young these were things that no-one talked about. Once she asked out of the blue – was she born premature or full term? It was time to tell her then of her birth.'

‘So she asked if she was conceived in the camp,' Aisling put her hand over her mouth to hide the grin. It was a bit obvious wasn't it? She had sussed Katharina was conceived while the Nazis were still in charge before she heard Günter's name as the father. Katharina must have worked it out for herself long before Brigitte told her the truth.

Brigitte looked at her, ‘So, like you, I understood what she was asking. She didn't question it when she was younger. She knew many Americans and knew only kindness from the Americans I worked for. Many of them went back to America. Some came back and brought her American dresses with petticoats and frills. It was only later, when she was a teenager, that she started counting and adding up the answers to questions. So where were you in January 1945? I told her I was in Berlin. I didn't want her to know the story of that place. Better to bury it where it belonged.'

‘So where was the camp?'

‘A place called Fürstenberg. One good thing about the wall was it cut me off from that place. Katharina went there anyway to the Memorial the GDR built. Much good a memorial would do the people who died there but every year she tried to persuade me to go with her. When the wall came down she wanted to help with the new museum and the questions started again. She told me the Russians used the houses where the SS had lived and they didn't even realise it. She wanted more and more detail of what happened there. It's history, she said. Help me be a better teacher. She said that Irma told her more than I ever had.'

‘I didn't know it then but the best days were the hard days of hope before the questions – watching Katharina go to school, grow up, speak German like a native and English better than me. There were shops with food and clothes and work to be done to earn the money to spend. We had our own home. We had put the bad times behind us. The wall brought fear and death back.'

‘But you must have known they were building the wall. It wasn't something they could hide, was it?' Aisling didn't try to hide her amusement.

‘There was always the Russian Sector and some guard and it became harder and harder for people to move freely between the Russian Sector and the other sectors but we didn't really see it coming. You'll learn soon enough it is easier for things to seem obvious after the event. At the time, it didn't happen at once and yet it happened all of a sudden. I remember 13
^th
August 1961 better than my mother's birthday. Of course we noticed that there were more and more patrols of the Russian sector marking the line between us and them but it was only more of the same. We saw it coming but didn't recognise what we saw until they put the fence in front of the patrols. And even then we weren't ready for the declaration of the border and wall being built and the way they split streets and started to clear houses.

‘We went to watch as people came under the fence in the first days with suitcases and bundles. Then there were more and more soldiers: later great machines making concrete barriers and the shooting started. We were so afraid of another war. I tried to stop Katharina going near there. I told her about the tunnels and secret ways that people found to get to our side of the fence so that she would look in other places in our streets. I told her she saw more by looking at the television and persuaded her to come with me to Adelheid's. She already had a television and used it to get a bit of extra cash from neighbours. She would never take money from me but I always brought something.'

‘The museum that I went to in Bernauer Strasse has lots of photos and some films. It's worth a visit,' Aisling suggested.

‘I've never been,' Brigitte replied.

‘Well you should: it's free too.'

‘I hated that wall. With that wall came more and more questions. I should have known that those questions were leading somewhere. ‘Did the Americans liberate you?' Katharina asked on the way home from watching the T.V. at Adelheid's. I told her how we left the camp in March.'

‘So where were you when the Russians reached Ravensbrück?' Aisling was beginning to realise how frustrated Katharina must have been. Her own mother's insistence on telling and explaining was intrusive but it had advantages.

‘You are just like her, questions and more questions. We had already left on the long march to the north east. It was hard to remember dates. Was it winter or was it already Spring?' Brigitte mimicked Katharina's curiosity.

‘I told her about the time that Irma filled her mouth with snow. She talked about the best sorbet she had ever eaten in a restaurant in Vienna. Zitrone und Limone. I knew Zitrone was the word for lemon and I could taste the sharp sourness. ‘Was ist “Limone”?'I wanted to know – it sounded like it should be lemon too. She told me like a lemon only green. I'd never seen such a thing. Then she suddenly said, ‘It's Lime, Lime! I almost spat out my bread. You eat lime? I told her we put lime on houses to make them white. It was her turn then to be astonished.

‘Ahh… You mean Kalk – Chalk white. I told her how we laughed at that – the small white house in Leitrim was as far from limes in Vienna as that snowy place was from reality.'

‘But you lied to Katharina, didn't you?'

‘That was no lie. Irma and I did eat snow together.'

‘Yes but about the camp,' Aisling knew well this technique to tell a part truth as a good way to distract from what actually happened.

‘We left in April after Anna died. Katharina went to the camp after the wall came down and the Russians had left,' Brigitte looked defeated, ‘but there was a wall between us that never came down.'

‘I'm sorry,' Aisling said, surprised at the tears in her own eyes.

‘I'll rest now,' Brigitte put her head down.

‘I'm off out.' Aisling left quietly, ambivalent about her escape. Questions about why Brigitte ended up in Ravensbrück and how she got out again would have to wait. She wanted to know more but it felt like picking at someone else's scab. Intrusive but compelling.

Lunch was ready-prepared by Yola on Saturday– Gulasch. They would eat it with noodles prepared by Brigitte. Aisling dipped a spoon into the thick sauce. She was glad she had come back. Brigitte asked her to open a bottle of wine and lay a white cloth. They would make an occasion of it. As she laid the table, Aisling made Brigitte laugh with stories of her waitressing. She promised herself she would get another bit of the story this evening. Brigitte needed distraction anyway. When she got into one of those long, dozy pauses, she seemed like she had one foot in the grave. When she spoke of being young in Berlin, she looked younger too, even when she told horror stories.

‘You know when you said you left the camp in March. How did it happen? Did you escape?' Aisling could hear that the question, which drifted in the direction of Brigitte on the billow of the curtain, sounded too light to face Brigitte's solid silence. Brigitte had withdrawn into herself while Aisling cleared away the dishes. For no apparent reason her mood had turned foul. But the question achieved its purpose of provocation.

‘Escape?‘ Brigitte's saliva gathered at the corner of her mouth. ‘Even you would like pretty words to end the horror story. But there was no place for pretty words even in dreams.'

Brigitte spoke then as if to herself, ‘Flucht, Flucht, Flucht, Flucht,' For a moment Aisling thought she was swearing at her before she heard the German word for flight come through into her own consciousness.

‘I learnt that little word, ‘Flucht' had a big meaning in that place. A word that carried as much fear as hope on its wings. I learnt the reality of ‘Flucht' was to see the pieces of what was once a person spread out on the electric wire above our heads. Like a crucifixion. ‘Flucht' from that place was death or worse. I told you already what they did to the woman who tried to escape. I was more afraid of escape than I was of dying in that place. Are you too young to know that you can never escape from hell once you have been there?'

Aisling bridled, ‘I'm not too young to imagine a bit of hell.' ‘Don't let her wind you up,' she told herself: it was Brigitte's way of keeping the story inside herself – not sharing it. Aisling was keyed up with the hope of more graphic detail of the horrors fluttering somewhere between her abdomen and her fingers.

The last story had given her replacement nightmares. Better nightmares for graphics, and no more Michael and his eyes popping out. But Brigitte was somewhere else now – her head sunk onto her chin. Aisling thought she was asleep until she spoke again in a lower tone.

‘When I saw what could happen… even though I was only a short time in that place, I tried to dismiss ‘Flucht' even from my dreams. I think if I had found the gates open and unguarded, I wouldn't have walked through when I knew what could happen. Oh yes, it's very easy for you, so young, to plan cutting wires, digging tunnels, outwitting guards, using disguises. I thought about those things too in my days of waiting before they came for me. There were even some in there too who were foolish enough to dream but not many were foolish enough or desperate enough to take the consequences when they saw what failure brought.'

Were those tears or did Brigitte rub the light from the street lamp from her eyes? She seemed to hear the unspoken question.

‘I haven't shed many tears in my life about that. The tears are only for myself and for us because what we could do was worse than anything they could do. Katharina was angry because I wouldn't talk about what happened there. ‘You can't bottle it up, Mama; one day the cork will blow off.' She was wrong. She was the one who brooded over it and let it eat its way through her insides. If only I could have told her the worst, she would have understood but it was too late then, it was already eating her.'

Aisling felt again the flutter of hope that she would get to hear some more of the gory detail Katharina had missed. Reality horror. The way Brigitte looked at her when she spoke gave her the shivers.

‘Who knows who can live with knowing how far you could be pushed away from ordinary human feelings? Brave stories of the good and the bad didn't belong in that place. I learnt that there – there are no good and bad – there are only those who are brave enough or foolish enough to stand up for something and those who aren't. Either way you can be an angel or a devil. And the angels and devils are here on earth. There's no heaven but what you make yourself.'

‘So you don't believe in life after death?' – ‘What would Gran make of this?' Aisling wondered.

‘Life before death is good enough and bad enough for me. Why would I want to live through hell again? And the bits of heaven with Katharina are inside me forever.'

‘So you don't believe in God?' Aisling persisted.

Brigitte looked at her strangely. ‘If there was such a God with the power to allow things to happen or the power to stop them and he could stand by and do nothing, I wouldn't want to have anything to do with him anyway.'

Aisling took a few moments to get her head around this one, ‘So basically you're saying God, if he does exist, doesn't deserve our belief in him.'

‘Whether God exists or not, it's not my problem. I long ago stopped caring about God. I am sure the devil exists because I have seen him operate through evil done by desperate people.' Brigitte sighed, ‘I suppose I have seen God too through the good done by people who were just as desperate. So I cannot say. It's irrelevant to me. What do I care about the afterlife? Sometimes I hope there is something there for Anna, for my mother and father. Maybe there is and maybe there isn't'

‘And Katharina?'

‘Yes and Katharina too. Somewhere we could live again our moments of joy.' Brigitte stopped to breathe in the smell of growing herbs on a hillside in Greece when she was already a grown woman: stopped to feel the chestnut glowing in her hand, matching the bright questions from Katharina's mouth and the light that shone from her hair when she was a school girl. ‘Yes, if there was heaven, it would be a place to undo my cruelty to her when I sent her off to her Jules with my coarse curses and with tears in her eyes.'

Aisling was surprised to find tears in her own eyes now. What a life! She resolved then she wouldn't tell Gran everything after all. Gran would gloat a bit and lift her rosary beads down to pray for her wayward sister with the bastard child. At least this horror movie of real life had more meaning than fantasies about heaven and hell.

Suddenly Aisling thought rape – why not rape? That could account for a lot – Katharina was probably the product of a rape and Brigitte just didn't want to admit it. In Gran's view of the world, rape was something that women brought on themselves. So Brigitte would feel guilty about it. Aisling stored that thread of the story for another time when the aunt had a few Schnaps in her. It was no wonder Katharina found her mother frustrating. The aunt couldn't answer anything straight – you needed to time everything. She was worse than Gran on that score.

But if you could get her started on a story and keep her going, she was almost back there and it was like watching someone on T.V. She searched now for something that would get the aunt going again: ‘So how did you get out of the camp?' She put emphasis on the how to distract from whatever.

‘I was only there seven months but it was the longest seven months of my life. There were so many people who died or were gassed or killed in some other way I didn't expect to live through it. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Worse than waiting for Katharina to move out. Worse than waiting for Katharina to die. Worse than waiting now for Katharina to be buried. Waiting for Anna to die in the camp – hours that were as long as days. What would come first – the end of the war or some new torture of desperation? Waiting without knowing is worse than living without hope. People talk of the numbers who died. I marvel yet that there were some who lived all those long years there. I wouldn't have survived so long.'

‘So how did you get out?' Aisling put the emphasis on ‘did' this time.

‘Irma saved me. She came to our block when the whole place was falling apart. We talked of looking forward to spring. We meant surviving that place. We could smell the fear of the guards rising as the Allies advanced on the East Front or the West Front. Irma wanted me because I could help her communicate with the British or Americans if she needed that. It was her who told me that I had been arrested after the Allies had entered Germany in September 1944. I didn't even know that the Allies had made it that far. She was a red star but wasn't cliquish like some.'

‘The end of the war must have been hard,' Aisling prompted.

‘In those last days, the place became chaotic. That caused problems too. The more the fear rose up in the guards, the more unpredictable they were. The women were worse than the men. Only once, while Anna was alive, did I ever see signs of feeling. There were some good singers in our block although it was mostly hymns that they sang. They weren't supposed to sing but sometimes, like around Christmas, even the guards couldn't stop it.

‘The worst of the guards was a women built like a tank. I heard someone once murmur her nickname. I thought they said Tänzer – Dancer not Panzer. Anna loved that new nickname. It was hard to imagine her dancing so that made it even funnier. We giggled like schoolgirls about ‘tanzen' when she was near and the best was that she never knew why talking about dancing made us laugh.

‘One night around Christmas she asked one of the women in our block to sing a song about a pony. It was some well-known German folk song they told me. I couldn't really follow what happened this pony but it must have been a sad story because she cried. Anna and I hugged each other with laughter later. The Panzer had an underbelly. There was delight near happiness to see some sign of weakness in the monster. I hated her and I hated her dog, which was like an extension of her. They all thought more of their dogs than they did of fellow human beings.' Brigitte paused again and Aisling filled her glass with water. They sat in silence for a few minutes.Brigitte's tone was so low when she started the story again, the street sounds seemed louder, ‘After Anna died in January, life there became more and more unbearable. It was harder and harder to keep clean – the showers and toilets hardly worked any more. The guards did nothing except talk amongst themselves and beat anyone who stepped an inch out of line. Irma taught me how to be like a shadow. Taught me how to show respect even to the guards without fear and without accepting the ugliness and cruelty. She is my best friend even now. She is so clever too. ‘

Pause. A dog barked into their silence from the street. Brigitte's voice became stronger and louder. ‘One day I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw Irma lying down on the floor and playing with Panzer's dog. She would let it lick her face. She even gave it a bit of precious bread. She dared me to do it too. The only reason I did it is that I had been practising how to keep on the right side of that dog. My brother Liam taught me how to not be afraid of dogs. He said they could smell your fear but if you could control your fear they would pass you by and bite someone else. I wanted to impress Irma. I needed her respect.'

‘Does she live here?'

‘No, she lives in Austria. She always sent me a card at Christmas with photos of her children and grandchildren. Now she goes nearly every year to the commemoration and she visits me when she comes. She says it helps to visit and to remember and that I should do it too. Katharina and Irma talked and talked about those times and what they have done to make it a museum. How could they make a museum of that place? They should have put bulldozers through it long ago.'

‘So if it's a museum, I could go and look?' Aisling perked up –might make an interesting day trip. She could check out for herself what was true and what wasn't.

‘Nowadays it is easy, you can go there by train from Berlin to Fürstenberg and you can walk to the camp. She always asked me to go but I never want to see that place again. I'm glad that the Russian soldiers used it all the time Katharina was growing up. The only regret I have now is that the Russians didn't destroy that place before they left. Now it is a place for students and tourists, Katharina told me. She went with Irma when Irma visited us for the first time in 1992. She went back again with her Jules. Now they have talking films and photos. She was cross with me for not telling her more. She wanted me to do one of those videos she found there.' Brigitte mimicked Katharina, ‘Mama, why didn't you tell me it was as bad as any concentration camp. You talked always about the Lager you spent months in as if it was more of a workcamp. I didn't know it was like Belsen or Auschwitz. It's typical that because it was mostly women, no-one hears about it – not even in Germany.' She made it sound like a conspiracy. I didn't tell her most of the people who survived that place don't want anyone to know about it. What good is talking about it now? To bring the misery back? Every time Katharina went there, she came back from there with questions, questions and more questions.'

She mimicked Katharina again: “How did you get out? Were you still there when the Allies liberated it? Were you on the death march?” I laughed in her face and told her that we ran away into the woods and then took a train back to Berlin. Katharina was angry then and told me she found out more from Irma in a few hours than she did from me in a lifetime. I reminded her then of her favourite bedtime story when she was a child – the story of Mitza and Biddy,the two cats who escaped into the forest and hid with all the other animals from the hunter and his dog. If they were captured they would be taken back to the place of cruelty they had escaped from. If they fell down and couldn't walk any further, the hunter would shoot them. “Mama, you and your riddles,” she said and looked at me as if she despised me.'