News From Berlin (12 page)

She pedalled along gently rolling avenues in deep shade, with bends that seemed random and illogical. The houses stood some distance apart, secluding ill-gotten gains in tranquillity. Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse was only a few kilometres away, while here men and women sat idly in the windows, languid from the onslaught of summer. Gardeners shifted their ladders from one tree to the next. Cycling through the oasis was a journey to another planet.

Emma knew the way. She and Carl often went there, walking or on their bikes, in an optimistic endeavour to shake off the war. Carl had told her about the history of Grunewald and all the artists, writers and rich folk who used to live there. The current residents, mostly party bosses and industrialists, were an unenviable lot, according to him. Carl Regendorf was a man without grudges of any kind, a greater contrast with the prevailing mood was impossible to imagine. Emma and Carl had fallen in love at great speed, as though intent on staying ahead of the times they were obliged to inhabit, the times of rancour and revenge and unending acts of hatred.

Birds sang in the trees. Loving him more than she did there, at that moment, was impossible to imagine. The thought
played on her mind to the slow rhythm of her feet on the pedals. If only she could leave, take him with her to some other country. Their short stay in Switzerland had been so blissfully peaceful. It was there, during a stroll in Geneva, that she had said, on a sudden impulse, why don’t we stay here, Carl, why go back to doom-laden Berlin? Now was the moment, this was their chance, they could disappear – her father would certainly help them. London, America, anything was better than staying put and having to watch as ruination drew near. But she knew the answer. Carl understood how she felt, naturally, but there were his parents to think of, and the rest of the family. They would be rounded up immediately and sent to a camp, or worse. Emma abandoned the thought. They were hostages, she knew that by now.

With one hand she held the shoulder strap of her bag, a girl on her way to school, or to her grandmother’s, in the filtered light of morning. She pushed the pedals round, then lifted her feet off them to freewheel almost to a standstill before pedalling onward again. She took her time cycling to Wapenaar’s home in the heart of Grunewald. No hurry, as she didn’t quite know what she would do when she got there. And anyway it was all a bit pointless, because there was no way she could speak her mind. Nonetheless, she pedalled on,
steering her bike to the Bismarckbrücke near the Hubertus lake. She knew the address, although she had never visited the house before.

It was a small villa, not much larger than where Carl and she lived, but with a long garden reaching down to the lake. A wrought-iron gate with climbing roses gave the Wapenaar residence a romantic touch. The front entrance, too, was framed with roses.

The door was opened by a woman. Emma introduced herself, saying she was Dutch and that her father was a friend of Mr Wapenaar’s, that she happened to be cycling around in the neighbourhood, and had wondered if it was alright for her to drop by to say hello. Emma’s flustered preamble made the woman laugh, and she invited her in. Her husband was not at home, but that was of no consequence, she was expecting him back any minute. Would Emma like something to drink? She suggested going out into the garden to sit on the terrace by the lake with a glass of orange juice. She spoke Dutch with a strong German accent, which had a surprising charm to it. Emma did not have the nerve to decline the hospitable offer, and meekly followed Wapenaar’s wife into the garden. It was eleven o’clock, the lake at their feet was smooth and black. A dog barked in the next garden. It seemed
unreal, a scene in a film. What was she doing there, why had she come?

The dog carried on barking, growling, yelping, running and jumping up against an invisible fence alarmingly close by. Wapenaar’s wife went over and called the animal by its name, softly and commandingly, then put her hand through the hedge to pat it. Order was restored, quiet reigned once more.

“She’s a nice enough creature, but she’s left alone for far too long.”

Emma nodded understandingly. Alone for far too long, that was something she was finding increasingly difficult to cope with. Carl going off to work, leaving her sitting at home facing a lonely, empty day ahead of her and having to find things to keep her busy until he came home in the evening. Days during which she banished the war to the back of her mind and worked in her garden, weeding and pruning. The pretence of normality was a way of dealing with a hostile environment, something she saw women everywhere attempting to do, acting as if nothing was wrong, as if they were leading their ordinary lives. Was it not ever thus for wives, whose husbands were always working, as soldiers, bakers, professors, civil servants, ministers?

Emma eyed the friendly woman over the glasses of orange juice on the table between them. There was an idyllic-seeming quality to the setting, which she was loath to disturb. The woman asked Emma to call her Elka, a nickname, really, dating from her childhood, when her father used to write little notes to her always beginning with a capital
L
and a capital
K
, for
Liebes Kind
. And so she became Elka. Emma listened, thinking that she could not remember her father ever writing little notes to her. Her father, whom she missed so achingly now, and who seemed to be drifting further and further away from her.

Since her parents moved away from Berlin she had not been back to Fasanenstrasse, where she and Carl had first met, where her unmoored existence had begun. Her courage at the outset, like her nostalgia for what she had to leave behind, had been boundless. She and Carl swam upstream, never tiring or losing hope, never afraid. After her parents’ farewell dinner she had watched him as he walked away, and he had turned round and seen her, and had waved in surprise because she was waving too. That cheerful, hopeful hand still waved at her each day from the garden gate. Carl was the complete opposite of her father, as transparent as glass, a miracle of straightforwardness.

Through the open windows reverberated the chimes of a clock striking the hour. Emma counted twelve – she had been there for an hour already, she must leave. She apologised for staying so long, saying she would come back another day, if that was alright. A whole hour! She cringed with embarrassment. She had hardly said a word while Elka Wapenaar entertained her, squeezed oranges for her, rocked her to sleep, so it seemed.

She headed back to Dahlem, cycling on automatic pilot as she thought of her father. And for the umpteenth time of the remark about her mother. The glint in her interrogator’s eyes had been malicious, his tone insinuating. Quite a looker, know what I mean. Do you get what I’m saying. Suddenly it dawned on her. Clamping the brakes hard, she heard the tyres skid over the road. Her father had another woman.

She stopped, parked her bicycle in the verge and cast around for a bench to sit on. Her inclination was to weep, but the tears did not come. Her face was hot, her hands were cold. Quite a looker. Her thoughtless, faithless father had been seen in the company of a woman, and not just any woman. They had been followed, and even from a distance her appearance had been striking, or rather, her father had obviously found her striking. That had to be it: the mystery of his evasiveness
in Geneva explained. He had been half out of his mind when he joined her and Carl, his eyes more than once shifting away from hers. Emma looked about her: it was busier now on Königsallee, with people on foot and on bicycles passing by. To her surprise, it was not plain anger that she felt, rather an old sadness. It had to do with something she had been hiding for years. That she did not really know her father. Her love for him was so naive and unconditional. As love should be. Her father, who belonged with her mother, who would never leave her, never ever, not for anybody, not even for the love of his life, or whatever she was. Suddenly she was seized with rage. Rage over what he was putting in the balance, over his bit on the side, over his secrecy and his deceitfulness and his refusal to meet her gaze.

She picked up her bike and wheeled it to the side of the road, hardly aware of where she was going, unable to stem the flood of memories.

She saw him enter the restaurant where he was meeting her and Carl. Her boyish papa. She had gone up to him as quickly as decorum permitted, she had thrown her arms about him, had taken his hand and drawn him to their table, where Carl was waiting. It had been more than a year since she had seen him, a radically altered world ago, countless bombing raids and
massacres ago, though nothing of that was mentioned. It was too much, too overwhelming, too huge to grasp. She had watched him and seen the shadows passing across his face, the way he sidetracked her as soon as she asked him a personal question, the way he seemed not to want her to get too close. He probably hadn’t even wanted to be there at all, she could see that now. He had been at pains to avoid every form of intimacy. Had he taken against her marriage with Carl? No, that was unlikely, as she could tell he regarded Carl as a friend. He had even spent more time talking to him than to her.

“The last time we were together, you, me and Mama, was up here in the mountains, wasn’t it?” His discomfort had become almost palpable when she said that. He responded by asking her about Berlin, steering the conversation away from himself yet again. Her feelings had been hurt, she had so looked forward to this, longing to see him, hear him, relish the known gestures, be close.

Another woman, for God’s sake, Papa. Her rage flared up again, at him, and at the Gestapo for exposing him. What were they after, why would they be so interested in him? Her father, with a lock on his mouth and a lid on his soul. What else had he been up to all these years?

From nearby came the sound of those wretched tennis
balls; playing tennis now was a criminal pastime, a cruel joke. She would leave Carl out of it, much as she ached to confide in him. In some ways she resembled her father, she realised. She would keep this to herself.

“Looking for someone?” A man on a bicycle slowed down, stopped, and looked her up and down. She shook her head and prepared to move on.

“Your papers, please.” The condescending tone of an informer, or at any rate of a party member sporting a fancy badge. He probably lived somewhere nearby. But this was beyond the pale. Emma struggled to keep her voice under control.

“Yes indeed, I do have papers. But I am not going to show them to you. And if you don’t leave me alone immediately I shall file a complaint at my husband’s department.”

Her voice rose as her anger mounted. It was an impulsive, irrational outburst, but no less effective for that. The man stiffened, mumbled an apology and sped away on his bicycle.

Emma lapsed into nervous laughter as she stood there in a world gone insane, where people demanded to see each other’s papers.

Kate took the bus to Richmond Hospital in the morning as usual, to return in the afternoon. The Richmond was a repository of the sick and wounded from ever farther corners of the earth, a round-the-clock enterprise. She liked her job. The patients followed one another in rapid succession, and she had a knack for putting people at ease and seeing to their wants and needs with discretion. “Head of subtle affairs”, one of the doctors called her, a man who reminded her vaguely of Peter Henning, the surgeon she had worked with for over a year in Berlin, at a time when murder and manslaughter were already the order of the day. He had fallen in love with her, she not with him, but it had lightened the atmosphere in and around the operating theatre. Oscar was unaware of this, and there was no reason to worry him unduly. That was all of five years ago.

Kate saw the traffic on her bus route increase. It started to rain, and London unfurled its umbrellas. For no particular reason her mind turned to the time she had gone to the stadium with Peter. The Olympic Games had transformed the city, making it brighter and cleaner than ever before. He had
invited her to accompany him to the athletics competitions taking place that afternoon. They had finished work early, no further surgery being required for the day.

They drove through a city on temporary reprieve from the grip of steel. Peter, being a doctor, had a car, enabling them to reach the Olympic stadium without difficulty. Across Tiergarten to Charlottenburg they went, where the flags would have been enough to festoon the Kurfürstendamm from end to end. Kate recalled how Peter always gave his car a pat on the bonnet before he got in: good dog. It was a Mercedes with a canvas hood, one of those wonderful sleek jobs with big headlamps and a running board, the very ones she had, in time, grown to despise. There always seemed to be men in leather coats with wide belts getting out of them. Peter was not someone who associated with those types; he was the last likeable German she had met, aside from Carl, of course.

He had put his arm around her shoulder when they entered the stadium. She had not objected. To her his warm personality was endearing, and the way he held her had nothing possessive about it, having more of boys on their way to a game of football and out to have a good time. His left hand rested near her neck, with his right he fought to keep the umbrella positioned over her head in the multitude thronging
to see the games. He had brought her up to date on the various events: discus, high jump and javelin. The names of the athletes meant nothing to her, but she was carried away by his enthusiasm, wanting to know if there were any Dutch participants and which ones to look out for. She pointed up to his umbrella, saying the rain had stopped. He laughed, and removed his hand from her shoulder, which she thought a pity in a way, as it had given her a sense of togetherness, of being part of the crowd milling around them, where no-one knew her, where they were just another couple queuing up to take their seats on a stadium bench. Her pleasure had nothing to do with the man beside her, charming as he was, glancing at her and gallantly removing his coat so she could sit on it.