The Writing on the Wall and Other Stories

by Penny Edwards

  She shuddered slightly to think now what Margot must’ve thought of their haphazard dinner party when, if she remembered rightly, Emma had dangled a pair of muddy trainers over Margot’s lap, asking her mother what she should do with them. This, on the other hand, was exquisite and whether it was the trouble they’d taken or that she suddenly felt Stephen’s presence more strongly than she had for quite some time, she suddenly felt overwhelmed.

  It was noticing that four places had been set that brought her back from some kind of collapse and she remembered her friends emailing her a while ago about someone they knew who was very keen to meet her. It confused her and made her feel silly that this had somehow completely slipped her mind. She tried hard to think what the email had said, but all she could recall was that it was a young woman. She was sure there was nothing more, though how sure she could be of anything had just lost ground somewhat.

  “Helen, can I get you a drink?” She turned round to face Hans who was standing next to a silver tray filled with decanters of different drinks, all alcohol from what she could see and any she chose would’ve gone down a treat, but she played it safe and sent him to the kitchen for a sparkling water, which he handed her with not a small degree of amusement. Margot then apologised and said she’d have to return to the kitchen, waving aside all offers of help because Brigitte, her housekeeper cum everything else, had done most of the work this morning.

  “I expect Hans forgot to tell you that when he was trying to portray me as overworked and stressed.”

  “She likes it when I do,” he protested as she walked out of the room. “You’re probably curious about who wants to meet you,” he continued.

  She felt her stomach lurch a bit as Hans was doing nothing to steer her away from the idea that he had bad news for her, though what that could be she couldn’t quite imagine.

  “She’s a young woman who works for Margot at the museum. Her name is Rosa.”

  Helen knew Margot worked as an administrator and had started only fairly recently. She’d been surprised when Margot had emailed her to tell her. She’d never thought of her as a woman who went to work somehow and had always associated both Margot and her beautifully lacquered hair with the world of ladies who lunched and dined for charity, though she had hinted at missing the children when they left home and for all her glamour and seeming worldliness, Helen could see Margot was a woman for whom an empty home wouldn’t be easy.

  “She has two small children,” Hans continued, “so works for Margot just a couple of days a week, but they seem to have struck up quite a friendship. We’ve known of her for quite a while and I think Margot felt a bit awkward about appointing her, but she wasn’t the only person on the interviewing panel and, according to Margot, she was streets ahead of the rest. From the very first day she started, both she and Margot seem to have got on like a house on fire, and we’ve got to know her really well.” He paused and took a sip from his whiskey glass. “You see, Rosa’s father, Erich, was one of the fifty-seven. I don’t know how much Stephen ever talked about it, but that’s why she wants to meet you.”

  The doorbell rang and, as Hans excused himself to go to the door, Helen looked out onto their garden again. A small bird flew out of a silver birch and she almost envied its freedom because right now all she wanted to do was to sit on a Cornish beach. Stephen hadn’t really talked to her much at all about his life in Berlin; he tended to cut short her queries and said he was too tired or asked her what was on the telly that evening. He’d invariably had a long day, as if there were more hours in his, so she’d got the point and talked, instead, about things that were acceptable to him like how the children were getting on at school or where they should go on holiday. She’d heard snippets of conversation between her husband and Hans when she and Margot were supposed to be engaging in women’s talk, something about a Tunnel 57, but by then she was too weary about the whole subject of Berlin to find out anything.

  “I’ll go,” she heard Margot shout and Hans re-entered the room and took another sip of his drink. As Margot greeted her colleague, they entered into a kind of social purgatory in which neither seemed to think it appropriate to talk anymore about Rosa or to begin another topic. But they didn’t have to maintain this for long as Margot, enjoying her role as hostess, ushered Rosa in and introduced everyone with confidence and grace. Rosa was a petite woman, her straight brown hair pulled back tightly from her face and placed in a neat bun at the back of her head, revealing pale skin and bright blue eyes. She had the perfect posture for a ballerina, Helen thought, and was as careful and as graceful, though her dark-rimmed glasses, of a type Helen had often thought of for herself but had never had the courage to buy, gave her the appearance of a librarian or, indeed, someone who worked in a museum. There was definitely gravity about her, but it didn’t lack warmth. Her fine, bony hand shook Helen’s and she said how pleased she was to meet her. She apologised for her English, but it seemed pretty good to Helen, who found it embarrassing that anyone should apologise to an English person for their inadequate language skills. But for the first ten minutes or so Rosa didn’t put her English to the test, preferring to answer questions with tentative smiles and quick conformations, leaving the bulk of the conversation to everyone else, so it was therefore established that Margot and Rosa had been working together for about eighteen months, that Rosa’s two children were called Katja and Jakob and that Rosa was particularly interested in how German artists had been influenced by the French Impressionists, at which point she began to talk more fluently and said how Monet was perhaps her favourite artist and that although she loved the famous ones of his, she particularly liked ‘The Red Cape’, a painting of his wife, Camille, passing by a window on a snowy day. She liked the fact it was winter, a season often neglected, she thought, and the passing nature of Camille, because this was how we saw most other people, fleeting past us, with only our curiosity to wonder who they were. She’d had a little help from the others with her English but had managed most on her own, so Helen didn’t think there was too much for her to worry about with her English.

  “Have Margot and Hans said why I wanted to see you?”

  Helen was surprised at this question, which seemed sudden and unexpected. She thought they were going to continue inconsequential chitchat for quite a while longer during which she would carry on quietly applauding Rosa’s English and Margot’s food. Her surprise rendered her speechless, so Rosa continued.

  “My father was saved by Hans and your husband, Mrs Thompson. Before that, his life was very grim.” She looked at Helen with a slight query on her face, as if expecting some reassurance that she’d chosen the right word, so Helen just nodded and smiled.

  Hans joined in. “Erich was cut off from the rest of his family when the wall was built. He hadn’t seen any of them for three years.”

  Margot saw a brief silence between them as an opportunity to invite them to sit at the table so she could bring in the first course, so they took their places while holding on to what had been said with an almost religious reverence. Helen looked at this young woman as she delicately and politely sat where Hans had suggested, a stranger to her, yet someone who spoke of Stephen as if she knew him; her husband, the man who made her tea and toast every Sunday morning, who’d helped her with nappy changing and who burped at the end of every meal, then apologised and said he really shouldn’t do that, seemed to be something of a hero in this room. She settled into her chair while Rosa squealed with delight at the swan serviettes, her enthusiasm prompting what sounded like a congratulatory remark in her own language. She was as obviously in awe as Helen was at such attention to detail and Helen took comfort in that, assuming Rosa’s home life was just as casual as hers was.

  “Brigitte and Margot did them.” Hans was answering what must have been a question about the serviettes. “Apparently, it’s easy.”

  “What’s easy?” Margot appeared from the kitchen carrying a la
rge tray. Her husband got up and relieved her of her burden.

  “Making swan serviettes,” he answered as he did so.

  “Oh yes, anyone can do it.” Margot dismissed her achievement with an ease Helen envied, though she wasn’t sure how comfortable her friend would be if her prediction was correct. Margot’s sense of self, it seemed to Helen, depended very much on others not having the same skills as she had, which was not to say this was a dislikeable trait but that both her and Hans’s sense of being relied quite heavily on their separateness and a feeling that they had accomplished things that were beyond the reach of anyone else.

  So when Margot put down the tray and declared this was to be a European meal starting with French onion soup, Helen smiled to herself as she looked at the delicious-looking offering with its appetising aroma and contented herself with the thought that what she was about to eat could probably not be produced so well in most of the Berlin restaurants. It didn’t disappoint and Margot basked in the compliments as everyone took their first sips. But it wasn’t long before Rosa returned to Stephen with Helen insisting she call him that and not Mr Thompson. Such formality seemed unnecessary and not true to her husband’s nature who eschewed titles and always insisted on his first name. She told everyone that he hadn’t really told her much about his life in Berlin and it was a part of his life that had remained quite a mystery to her. She felt it was a brave thing to admit, especially to someone who until today was a stranger to her. It wasn’t easy to admit she was in the dark about something when she had been the one who’d spent so much of her life with Stephen.

  “So he didn’t tell me about the actual workings of the escape,” she concluded, searching for everyone’s reaction, but if they were making some private judgement about the state of her marriage, they didn’t let it show and Hans was only too pleased to recount the operation. He was telling the story of one of the most important times in his life. He looked at Rosa who understood what he was thinking and said she would let him know if there was anything she didn’t understand. He took the last couple of spoonfuls of his soup and wiped his mouth with the now dismantled swan.

  “Stephen and I were, as you know, at university here together. Stephen was studying German and I was law. We were part of a group that was passionately opposed to the wall and to the division of Germany. It was a terrible time. Families divided with no way of knowing when they’d see each other again. We wanted to do something.”

  Margot offered Rosa and Helen more bread and Hans sipped his wine before continuing.

  “A man, Fuchs, who’d recently managed to escape with his wife and child, wanted the same freedom for others. He raised money and gathered anyone who was interested, knowing he could get quite a few of us from the university. He had a plan for a tunnel. It was nothing new. Two years before, a student at the university had been responsible for organising a tunnel. He and his team got the escapers through, even though they were plagued with doubts about a couple of people. The Stasi, you understand, were beginning to infiltrate these projects. But his downfall wasn’t betrayal. Their suspicions were right and they outwitted the informers, but a water pipe cracked and filled the tunnel. What he did do, which was truly inspirational, was involve the media who actually filmed the escape.”

  He stopped and said something to Rosa. She nodded, as if to acknowledge she’d understood what he was saying.

  “What Fuchs did was to continue the tradition of involving the media and managed to get donations from journalists and newspapers all over Europe. In fact, Rosa’s father, Erich, joined Die Welt soon after his escape and became quite a respectable journalist.”

  Rosa laughed. “A very respectable one, thank you.”

  Hans smiled. He was just making sure she understood.

  Margot collected the soup bowls and seemed to give Hans a bit of a ticking off for having left some. She said she hoped they didn’t mind but she’d carry on with the meal; she knew the story and she didn’t want anyone to go hungry during the telling of it. Everyone thanked her again for such a delicious soup and asked if she wanted any help. She didn’t, so Hans continued.

  “We began work on a tunnel in April ’64. Stephen was in his second year, I think.”

  “It was in the French sector, a bakery cellar, near the Bernauerstrasse, to the bathroom of a flat in Strelitzerstrasse,” said Rosa, as if she’d learnt this by rote.

  “It stretched for about a hundred and fifty metres,” added Hans, slightly wincing at the memory of the back-breaking work.

  “How long were you digging?” asked Helen, who was beginning to feel oddly displaced by such a dangerous and brave story. She had no knowledge of such a life, but it was also that they were talking about her husband and she couldn’t place him in these situations. It was disturbing to have him unravelled in such a way, not only because it made him a different person to the one she knew but she started to think it would change so many perceptions of their lives together.

  “Seven months,” came the reply. Stephen and Hans had never talked much about their university days when they were all together, probably in deference to both she and Margot, and Stephen had had the habit of compartmentalising his life, putting up a brick wall of his own whenever she asked about Berlin, so when they were dating she’d got to a point where she felt that by continuing to probe and pick away at his life there she could seriously jeopardise a possible life with him. So by his monosyllabic answers and her desire to protect their relationship, it had been laid to rest and hadn’t been resurrected during the course of their marriage.

  “My father,” said Rosa, keen to take up the story, “had decided to live in East Berlin. He preferred it there. He liked the fact that it had many artists and writers. He left home and got a flat there.”

  “He left his girlfriend in the West,” interjected Margot who was bringing in a serving bowl with the main course.

  “He did,” agreed Rosa. “He said if he could get a good life, a good job, she should join him. She said she would. They were heartbroken, but I suppose it was something he felt he had to do. He wanted to write and he found the thinking inspirational there. He enjoyed the Bohemian life in the East. Is that what you say?”

  They all nodded and Margot announced a dish of pickled pork chops, a German dish she called Kassler Rippen. Berlin, said Hans, was famous for it. They all joked about not having to eat again until tomorrow and Margot reminded them to leave enough room for pudding, at which there was a friendly groan.

  Hans asked people to help themselves to the chops and vegetables, after Margot had brought them in, and said he hoped Rosa didn’t mind him saying but her father’s decision was perhaps the arrogance of youth, leaving it as a question in the air, but Rosa agreed wholeheartedly, saying she thought her father had, in his mind, an idea that he would become a big novelist or playwright. He’d told her it was fifteen years before he settled happily into writing for a newspaper.

  “So he left his girlfriend and family and on that terrible night in August 1961 he was sitting with his friends drinking and talking. Most of them liked the Communists, you understand, and my father, well, he wasn’t sure but generally trusted them. So, that Sunday evening, when he watched many Westerners go home, he, well, he didn’t believe it wouldn’t be possible to do that afterwards.”

  “What happened to him?” asked Helen.

  “He said when it was clear what the wall had done it was plain to him where he wanted to be and he joined the many who wanted to escape.”

  She paused and seemed to need a rest.

  “The opening in the bathroom was hidden by a packing case,” said Hans. “I can see it now, a beaten old leather thing with gold initials on it. I couldn’t remember a more glorious sight than that bathroom. Seven months of back-breaking work. Stephen and I just laughed uncontrollably. It was…” He puffed with his lips. He looked at Rosa. “Your father received one of our tel
egrams. ‘Dear Erich…’”

  “Aunt Gretel dead. Stop. Please come immediately. Stop. Hanna,” said Rosa. “I’ve seen it. My father put it in a frame. It was on a wall in our house.”

  “Escapers had a password,” explained Hans.

  “My father’s was ‘sunlight’, which seems very appropriate.” Rosa smiled.

  “They gave the word to a courier who took them to Strelitzerstrasse. Then it was a question of waiting to go into the flat where the tunnel was without being seen. Stephen and I weren’t involved with that side of things.”

  “No, you did the hard work,” Rosa said quite emphatically. Helen found this oddly amusing. Her Stephen, the Stephen she’d known all those years, would, she was sure, have preferred to be a courier rather than a digger, but maybe the tunnel had put him off manual work thereafter because he’d always been more willing to pay someone than do jobs in the house himself. She couldn’t stay amused. This was a serious conversation. But she made a note to herself that this was probably the first time she’d felt like sniggering about her husband, certainly in the company of others, since his death.

  “If Stephen and Hans hadn’t dug the tunnel,” she could hear Rosa saying, “I wouldn’t be here.” For some odd reason, because she wasn’t prone to do this sort of thing, she touched Rosa’s right hand, who seemed to appreciate the gesture and squeezed Helen’s hand, her fingers so delicate it reminded Helen of Emma’s tiny hands in hers when they both walked to her school, noises coming out of the top of her daughter’s head as she chatted away, fighting the noise of passing lorries.

  “Fifty-seven people escaped through the tunnel, giving it its name.” Hans’s journalistic tone by-passed Rosa’s emotional attachment to the story. “But the tunnel was betrayed. It was going to happen eventually.” And Margot just thought about the fact that it was the last time people escaping had to pay to do so.