What Only We Know: A heart-wrenching and unforgettable World War 2 historical novel

by Catherine Hokin

  ‘Your father has been seriously ill, he is not yet recovered and you, despite every warning, have thoroughly upset him.’

  The Mountbank’s warden was clearly struggling to restrain his temper. Karen could barely look at him.

  ‘We had such hopes. He had transitioned well from hospital to here. We were on course to move him from our higher-level care into his own apartment in a month or so; the more independent way of living he quite rightly craves. Well, I’m afraid to say that you could have set his recovery back weeks. We cannot allow this, Miss Cartwright. If your visits are going to upset him so badly, perhaps you should consider curtailing them.’

  Karen found herself out in the grounds before she could defend herself, still clutching the letter that had caused all the trouble, that Andrew had recoiled from as if it was poisoned as soon as she had told him who it was from.

  ‘What have you done this time?’

  Mrs Hubbard came bowling up between the flower beds like a bad-tempered ram, dragging a thin-haired girl Karen recognised as a taller version of one of the granddaughters who used to torment her when she was young.

  ‘He’s in a right state apparently. I had to call Sandra off her lunch break to get me here.’

  ‘Why would they send for you?’

  Karen had already endured one telling-off – she was in no mood for another. But she stopped bristling and stepped back when Mrs Hubbard’s face contracted.

  ‘Because he’s in distress and I’m his “first-line contact”, as he always likes to call it. As good as next of kin. What? Did you think the person he chose to rely on would be you?’

  Before Karen could react, Mrs Hubbard roared into life like an over-revved car.

  ‘You really haven’t a clue. As if he would turn to you after the way you’ve treated him – neglected him if I’m going to be honest, which it’s high time I was. You always were a little madam, looking down your nose. Nothing was ever good enough. You were so cruel to your father, I could have cheerfully slapped you. I had hoped his illness might have brought out a nicer side, but oh no. It’s all about you, isn’t it? Don’t tell me, I can guess: you’ve been up to your old tricks. Disturbing things, never letting anything lie.’

  She was red-faced with exertion, a sheen of sweat coating her upper lip despite the stiff February wind. Her granddaughter’s narrow gaze shot daggers.

  Karen knew she should have kept her dignity and walked away, but the ferocity of this attack, combined with the warden’s anger, boiled up her blood.

  ‘How dare you speak to me like this! You’re always sticking your nose in, interfering. You always were. In our house all the time, in our business. It wasn’t exactly fun for me either after my mother died, stuck alone with him. And I had to go disturbing things, as you call it, because no one would tell me anything. Well, here’s a thought. Why don’t you do something useful for a change and actually tell me something real about my mother, instead of hoarding secrets like he does.’

  Mrs Hubbard drew herself up into a square.

  ‘Tell you something real? What kind of agony-aunt nonsense is that? Always in your business? Well, thanks be to God that someone was. So you want something real? How about this: that I looked after you every time she couldn’t, which was a lot. Or how about that I helped run your house as well as my own when your poor father was desperate. That was very real – that drove my Bob demented. But what choice did I have, with your poor father trying to look after you, and look after her, and hold down a job, and almost breaking under the weight of it all? It was an impossible task for any man.’

  She sucked in a breath; Karen jumped into the pause.

  ‘But why did you need to? Why couldn’t my mother do it herself?’

  ‘Are you really asking me that? Are you so blind to the past it’s wiped out your memory? Because she was sick, you silly girl. Not right in the head. Seeing things, scared of her own shadow, threatening to kill herself so often, Andrew thought he was going mad too with the strain of it. I swear to God he should have left her in Germany and saved us all the bother.’

  The slap wasn’t a hard one, but Mrs Hubbard screamed as if she’d been slashed with a knife.

  Karen stormed away, screeched her car out of the drive and only slammed to a stop when she realised she had run a red light and nearly caused a collision. Her hands were shaking, not least from the fact that she had just slapped an old lady. She couldn’t carry on like this – that much was clear.

  There could be horrors in her past that she couldn’t live with, that your father can’t tell.

  Well, someone had better start telling: that she was still scrambling round for the truth was only making things worse.

  Karen picked up the letter from the passenger seat where she had flung it and smoothed the thin paper out. After six weeks of waiting, she had convinced herself that her letter, with its guessed-at address and no surname, had no chance of finding a home. Then an answer had arrived, not from Michael, but from his son, Markus Wasserman, replying to Karen’s tentative request for information – which she had couched in overly formal German – in perfect English.

  It wasn’t long and it didn’t directly deal with her questions. It expressed his father’s deep sorrow that Liese had died. It made no mention of a previous correspondence or any lack of it. It did say that Karen’s letter had ‘disturbed’ Michael, that his reaction had made him unwell and had ‘dismayed’ his son, which was why he, Markus, was replying. The tone was clipped, not impolite but not welcoming. Karen had feared a dismissal until she read the last lines.

  My father has said very little; he is in fact reluctant to say much about your mother at all, but it is clear that she mattered a great deal to him. Her death has affected him deeply. Despite what has clearly been a shock, he does, however, wish to remain in contact with you. By letter or, if you are ever in Berlin, in person. I will leave whatever the next steps will be up to you.

  Karen closed her eyes as rain began to drum against the windscreen.

  If you are ever in Berlin. She had been pulling at the phrase since she first read it. Perhaps Michael didn’t mean it; perhaps it was a politeness. Perhaps, if he was reluctant to talk, she would get no more from him than from her father. But she refused to believe that or why would Michael want to stay in contact when the letter hinted this son of his wasn’t exactly in favour?

  She switched the engine back on and rejoined the traffic, manoeuvring onto the slip road heading to the M3 and London. She was tired of it all. Of being in the wrong; of causing pain and feeling pain; of being no nearer to the mystery that was her mother than she had been twenty years ago. Berlin was opening; Michael was no longer just a face in a photograph. That had to mean something. That must mean her mother was closer.

  Karen joined the motorway and accelerated away from the too slow-moving traffic. She was tired, most of all, of waiting to trip over answers.

  If you are ever in Berlin.

  Karen relaxed her grip on the steering wheel as she suddenly realised what she needed to do. It was hardly the warmest invitation; it was hardly an invitation at all, but she didn’t care. Haphazardly probing at the past wasn’t going to cut it anymore. It was time to end that. It was time to take control, dive in and dig.

  Twelve

  Karen

  Berlin, May 1990

  I will await you at the Schillerbrücke crossing point at 14.30 tomorrow. I would prefer an opportunity to discuss your situation before you meet with my father.

  Markus Wasserman.

  His message had been waiting at the hotel and had chipped at Karen’s concentration through a long business dinner with one of the prospective clients her company was courting. Such an irritating choice of words. Your situation, as if she was some kind of problem. I would prefer, implying she had a voice and then completely ignoring it.

  Continuing the pattern of the first contact three months ago, Markus, not Michael, had replied to the two further letters Karen had sent. His communications
had been sparse and had all followed the same formula: short, factual, impersonal. He hadn’t asked her anything about herself or responded to the details she had offered. He had said little about Michael; he had revealed almost nothing about himself. His only comment about her visit to Berlin was that it was ‘sooner than anticipated’. Karen couldn’t decide if he was uninterested, or busy, or simply rude. In the end, she followed his lead: her most recent letter had contained no more than the address of her hotel, her flight details and her meeting schedule.

  A man of mystery. It was the last thing she needed. Even his choice of meeting place was, as the map-scouring receptionist put it, ‘an unusual one, a bit out of the way’. Perhaps he simply didn’t like a fuss, and there was certainly plenty of fuss going on in Berlin. The camera-wielding crowds engulfing Checkpoint Charlie had been proof of that.

  As her first day in the city continued, so did its contradictions. The meetings her company – who were eager to get a foothold in this rapidly changing Berlin – had arranged for her took her in and out of polished restaurants and shiny offices that sat at odds with the graffiti-covered streets they looked out over. Every conversation started with the Wall’s official demolition, which was still a month away, and the opportunities that would bring, but no one could quite define what exactly they were. To Karen, it felt as if the city was rejoining in fits and starts, without any sense of coherence beyond the hope of it. She couldn’t escape the impression that this new Berlin didn’t yet know what to make of itself.

  People passed back and forth through the crossing points in grinning unchallenged groups, but their clothes and hairstyles marked out who was East and who was West and, for all the talk of regeneration, much of the city was still a wasteland.

  She paused in the middle of the Schillerbrücke and gazed across the water to the Fernsehturm’s ugly-beautiful grey needle. Whatever the city’s disjointed mood, it felt right to be back, to have not given up. In another few minutes, she would be at the checkpoint, then, at last, she would be in the East, where the television tower stood. It seemed momentous; a moment needing marking. The one guard on duty waved her through without speaking and barely glanced at her passport.

  ‘You look disappointed. Most people do. Now it’s safe to do it, everyone wants to cross with a little more drama.’

  It was neither the greeting nor the man she expected.

  Karen had constructed Markus from his letters and made him rigid and stern, buttoning his suit up tight and pinching his face into disapproving lines. The figure leaning against the parapet could be only a year or two older than she was and was far more at ease with the world than his writing suggested. Her dinner companions the previous night had mocked the clothes worn by the Ossis, playing a game in the bar of spot the cheap suit and fake Levis. Markus was dressed in dark brown corduroy trousers worn loose enough to suit his rangy frame and a cream shirt rolled up at the elbows. Add to that his stubbled chin and toffee-coloured eyes and Markus Wasserman was textbook handsome. Karen couldn’t tell yet if he knew it.

  ‘The last time I was here there was a death strip and rifles. It takes a moment to catch up with the changes.’

  He smiled. ‘A good way to put it. Shall we?’

  He gestured to a busy road edging a potholed building site and frowned as Karen sniffed.

  ‘It’s perfectly safe.’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s the air. It sounds fanciful to say it, but it smells different over here. Harsher, more pungent.’

  His arm hovered by her elbow the way that, in the photograph, his father’s had almost touched her mother’s.

  ‘That’s because it is. You’re smelling dirtier petrol, cheaper cooking oil, disinfectant that’s never been introduced to the idea of flowery perfumes. The scent is how you separate communist Berlin from its capitalist twin. That and all the half-finished projects.’

  He waved a hand at the building works – a vast rectangular train station Karen wasn’t sure was coming up or going down.

  ‘This is, or maybe this was, I’m not sure anymore, East Berlin’s main station. It was being remodelled on a theatrical scale for visiting Soviet dignitaries. It’s a bit of an embarrassment now we’re no longer meant to admit how much we loved our long-distance masters.’

  Karen couldn’t tell if he was angry or amused, or giving a performance. Her confusion must have shown.

  Markus stopped and gave an odd little half bow.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ve quite got the hang of free speech yet, so sarcasm is easier. Let me start again…’

  He began explaining the history of the East’s Hauptbahnhof and pointing out the graffiti spreading cartoon-like across the long sections of the Wall that still ran alongside the river, explaining the impact its building, and falling, had made on the area. His spoken English was as clearly formed as his letters had been, with a lilt that reminded Karen of the way her mother had sometimes spoken. He was witty and knowledgeable and excellent company, but she was certain the stream of anecdotes was intended as a barrier. Then they turned a corner and into a square with a high-dancing fountain and whatever Markus was or wasn’t saying blended in with the traffic.

  ‘Oh my God. Is this it? Is this Karl Marx Allee? It’s incredible – the postcard gave no sense of the scale.’

  She was standing inside the picture, dwarfed by the boulevard’s grandeur.

  ‘How far down does it go?’

  ‘Nearly two kilometres, from Strausberger Platz, where we are standing, to Frankfurter Tor.’

  When she looked up at Markus, he was grinning.

  ‘You love it, don’t you?’ He laughed. ‘Of course – who wouldn’t? You said you were an architect; it is why I walked you here. To see your reaction.’

  Karen wanted to ask if she’d passed the test, but his grin had opened up his face and the charm of it tied her tongue. Feeling suddenly too young for her years, she darted away, found her camera and began snapping the columned doorways and elaborately carved stonework decorating the high blocks.

  Markus indulged her for a while and then ushered her under a yellow sign into a café which had the practical wipe-clean air of a work’s canteen. They were barely seated before his face changed back into a stranger’s mask.

  ‘Why are you really here?’

  If I want the truth, I have to tell it.

  ‘Because my mother killed herself when I was eleven and I want to know why.’

  He recoiled as if she had struck him.

  ‘And, what, you think my father is to blame?’

  The idea had never occurred to her.

  ‘No, of course not! But I don’t know anything, Markus, beyond the fact of her death and that she was German, which was kept a secret from me, like everything else in her life. I need to find out who she was and why she did it.’

  Karen paused to gather her thoughts and was grateful he didn’t jump in.

  ‘I’ve been trying to pretend it doesn’t matter that she killed herself, but it does. She left me when I was a child and my need for her has never stopped. It felt – it feels – like she abandoned me. That’s hard to face up to, to make sense of, but it’s left me stuck with my own life. My father and I…’ She paused. She didn’t know this man she was pouring her heart out to; she needed to keep some distance. ‘He’s ill. I may have left things too late with him. I need to move on, so I’m here. Hoping your father might have some of the answers.’

  She stopped and picked up her cup. The coffee was bland and weak, but sipping it at least slowed her breathing.

  To her surprise, given how formal he had been since they met, Markus reached out and took her hand. He barely held it, but she missed his touch the second it was gone.

  ‘I’m so sorry. To suffer a loss like that is terrible. When my mother died, it crippled me for months and that was after a long illness, with time to adjust. I have been distant with you, I know. My letters perhaps haven’t seemed very welcoming. This is hard for me, to explain and to understand, so
I will try to be as direct as you are. When your letter came, when he learned your mother was dead, my father was broken. That’s not a word I ever thought I would use about him. I think, if I am going to be as honest as I’d like, her death hit him worse than my mother’s did.’

  He picked up his own cup. Karen resisted the temptation to offer reassurances. After a moment’s looking down, he resumed in the same carefully considered manner.

  ‘Before you meet him, you should understand who my father is, although, and I say this without meaning to offend, that might not be easy for someone who has not come from our kind of system. To the people here, Michael Wasserman is a hero. Everyone knows him – that is how your first oddly addressed letter got through. He fought for the communist resistance during the war against fascism; he has been loyal to the cause ever since. He is a writer and a teacher. He is strong and he is single-minded. His beliefs are so fixed, he’s not been, in many ways, the easiest of fathers. But I knew who he was. And then your letter came and it made him weak. He sobbed. It sounds ridiculous, but he became a shadow of himself the moment he read it. That was hard for us both and not something I would want repeated.’ He stopped.

  Karen sensed a protectiveness around Michael that meant she might need to move carefully.

  ‘Is that why you didn’t want me to come? You never said it outright, but, yes, I could sense your reluctance.’

  When he met her eyes, she knew he was a man for whom the truth was the main thing that mattered. There was a challenge in that, but also hope.

  ‘I wasn’t pleased that you decided to come here, or so quickly. Your letter made him afraid and that frightened me. I think he has secrets.’

  His sudden sharp laugh took Karen by surprise.