Berlin Blind

by Alan Scholefield

  They met one afternoon in the Tiergarten. It was a beautiful winter’s day, clear and sunny, and he had been walking with his eyes half closed against the brightness, hunched up in the sea coat he had managed to keep through his imprisonment, when he heard a voice saying, ‘Can you help me, please?’ There was something about the inflection of the German words that made him stop and turn and he saw a large brunette in a fur coat pointing helplessly at one of the few surviving beech trees. ‘It is Ludi,’ she said, and again he heard the inflection. He looked up into the tree and saw a cat. It was a beautiful sealpoint Siamese and it sat hunched on one of the branches, unwilling to move either up or down. Then she spoke rapidly in German and he could not follow.

  He said very slowly, ‘I cannot understand. Do you speak English?’

  She looked at him in shocked amazement for a second and then burst out laughing. ‘English?’ she said, and he heard the American accent. ‘I sure as hell dol’

  So began for Spencer in those final months of the war when Germany was sliding quickly into ruin, one of the most intense periods of his life. He and Annie were two of a kind, strangers who found themselves alone in a foreign country in the midst of a war which had little or nothing to do with them. It was a friendship that started almost as a mother-son relationship, fulfilling both their needs, but then moved naturally into a second phase. Spencer became deeply in love with her: he at sixteen and a half, she at nearly forty. It was the first time he had ever been in love and while he never knew whether she really reciprocated his feelings, he was always to look back on his time with Annie with nostalgia and sadness.

  But on that bright winter’s day in the Tiergarten he had no idea that all this was yet to come. Annie stood with her hands on her ample hips, her fur coat blowing in the wind — to disclose a large Junoesque body — and said, ‘You’re English, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did you spring from? Are you a parachutist?’

  ‘I’m here in a labour corps,’ he said, expressing for the first time the lie he was so often to use in the future.

  Just then the cat gave a plaintive miaow and Annie said, ‘Ludi darling! Ludi...?’

  ‘I’ll get him,’ Spencer said. He took off his coat and shinned up the tree and managed to get on to the branch where the cat lay. But Ludi had never seen him before and was not about to be handled. Each time he reached out the cat hissed and spat at him and when his hands finally came close enough it lashed out, raking the back of his right hand with razor-sharp claws. After a tussle in which both hands were scratched he managed to muffle it up inside his jersey and bring it down.

  Annie had been standing under the tree laughing at his ineffectual efforts but her laughter turned to sympathetic concern and she insisted he come back to her apartment where she could bathe the scratches in antiseptic. She lived on the top floor of a six storey building past the Potsdamerplatz. From her window she could look south-west over Berlin. The apartment consisted of a bedroom containing a large double bed, a bathroom which led off it, and a small sitting-room/dining-room. The furniture was different from that which he had grown used to in Frau Gutmann’s house; Annie’s was all chrome tubing and canvas and she was later to tell him of the Bauhaus school of design.

  She gave him tea without sugar or milk or lemon but he did not mind; he would have drunk sewer water just to be with her in the apartment. He had never seen anything like it. It was elegant and, although small, the furniture seemed to make it spacious. In Frau Gutmann’s house the rooms were crammed with furniture, here there were few pieces and the apartment seemed to have more space than the house.

  He watched her move about the room. She was a big woman. Her face was large, with good strong bones and her dark hair was worn in a roll under a white turban. While he was with her Spencer forgot the war, forgot his anomalous and dangerous position, in fact he forgot everything except being in this quiet elegant place with a woman who seemed to be interested in him.

  She had all the directness of her countrymen, and it was something he had never encountered before. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said simply, once they had started their tea. If it had been anyone else he would have felt disconcerted but there was such warmth in Annie, such interest, amusement and sympathy, that he found himself telling her about his home in Bromley and about his parents and about running away to sea, everything, in fact, except what had happened to him in the camp and why he was in Berlin. It was the beginning of the secretive part of his personality.

  Darkness was falling when he left. It was a moment he had been putting off, the time when he would have to face the real world again and leave the cosy warmth of her flat. But she said, ‘Come again, I haven’t talked English like this for years.’ And he did come again. He came the following day and the day after that and the one after that until it became almost a set routine that in the afternoons he went to Annie’s apartment for tea. Sometimes she would not be there and would leave a note for him on the door and he would feel devastated as he turned back into the bomb-torn streets. But mostly his knock would be answered and she would stand in the doorway and say ‘Hi’, and for at least the next hour or two he would be in a kind of heaven. It never occurred to him that her apartment might be bombed; it was inviolate, enchanted.

  After a few visits she began to talk to him about her life. She had been born in Fredericksburg in the hill country of Texas and still had a slight ‘y’all’ accent. He learned that the small town had been founded by a group of German immigrants in the nineteenth century and had retained its German character even to the signs in the windows which said ‘English spoken here’. Everything was German, from the cooking and baking to the style of dress, to the weekly newspapers. And he was reminded, as she spoke, of the part of the world where Lange had come from. They sounded similar.

  By the time she was in her late teens she had developed an interest in singing. She was the soloist at the local Lutheran church and in her last years at high school had travelled all over Texas singing with the Fredericksburg choir. She studied first with a voice teacher in San Antonio, and from there she had gone to New York. In the early thirties her parents, who thought of Hider as the new Messiah, decided to send her to the conser-vatorium in Berlin.

  ‘I should have done it earlier,’ she said. ‘I was in my twenties before I came to Germany and that’s too late. But I was having such a darn good time at home.’

  It transpired that her voice was not as good as had been thought and so when she met Herr Beckmann, who was twenty years older than she, but who owned a successful printing works, a house in Grunewald and a cottage in the mountains and who professed to be deeply in love with her, she decided to give up her training and marry him. ‘I wasn’t getting any younger.’

  They had had no children, which was perhaps fortunate because when Herr Beckmann was killed in a train crash in 1943 she discovered that the printing works was deeply in debt. After everything was sold, including the two houses, there was just enough left over to give her a small annual income. When she spoke about her husband it was in a remote way as though he had been a friend in the forgotten past, but even so Spencer felt a stab of jealousy. Once he said, ‘Did you love him?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘There’s only one way,’ he said fiercely.

  When you grow up you’ll find that there are many ways.’

  It was in the third week of their relationship that they went to bed together and Spencer began the last stage of growing up.

  Later, whenever he thought about it he found it difficult to recall exactly how it had happened. It had started innocently enough. She had taken to giving him a kiss on the cheek when he arrived for his tea each day. It was simply an affectionate peck. She would open the door, say, ‘Hi, how are you?’ and kiss him — all in the same action. But on this particular day he arrived as one of her neighbours was leaving, an elderly man who lived on the floor below and who had come to borrow a pillow. After Spencer had shak
en his hand and the old man had thanked Annie and by the time they were inside the flat, the pattern had been broken. She closed the door behind her and greeted him for a second time and took his face in her hands and would have kissed him on the forehead, but in that second, without giving it even a moment’s thought, he moved his head so that their lips met and he put his arms up to her shoulders.

  He had never had a girlfriend; the position of his father had militated against that as it did against so many other things. His memory of women dated from the time, when he was about nine years old and he and a friend and the friend’s sister had played postman’s knock and Spencer and the sister had spent most of a wet afternoon under an eiderdown kissing as passionately as their prim and closed lips would allow. He had also felt the child’s budding breasts and had left feeling slightly dazed by so unexpected a launching into Life.

  And now, again, his primly closed lips pressed chastely on Annie’s. She gave a startled chuckle and held him at arm’s length for a moment as she looked at him. And then she said, and he hardly recognised her voice, it had grown so husky, ‘You’re a very beautiful young man and it’s time you learned for your own sake.’ She kissed him in an entirely new way, forcing his lips open until they tasted each other and he felt her body shudder.

  ‘I think we’d better postpone our tea,’ she said.

  In the days that followed he explored her body as a traveller might explore a golden land which he had seen in his dreams but had never thought to reach. She was a woman running to fat with big breasts, buttocks and thighs, but Spencer, now in the grip of erotic love, did not see the collapsing flesh. Instead he saw her as Titian might have seen his models: an amplitude of curves and planes, of convex surfaces and concave hollows, of dark shadowy places. Once she had taught him to make love he was voracious.

  After that first remark she never used the word ‘young’ again. She never said, ‘I’m old enough to be your mother,’ or ‘I could have had a son your age.’ She treated him as an equal both in years, in emotion and in sexual need. She had had casual affairs after the death of Herr Beckmann, but most with men who went off to the Front and never came back. Now she had someone of her own, yet she never considered it as even semi-permanent She took each day by itself, never looking into the future and never into the past. Often, as the spring days began to lengthen, they would make love and then walk in the Tiergarten among the bombed and splintered trees and she would take Ludi on a lead with a little silver collar round his neck and Spencer would make believe they were married. He yearned to talk of the future as all young men do; he was frightened to think of the past and the present was only a stepping-stone. But even he realized that as Berlin burned to death the future was too ominous even to contemplate.

  It was in these circumstances one afternoon, lying in her big double bed under every blanket in the flat because there was no heating, that she had begun to ask him questions about the recent past, probing more deeply than she had before, sensing that there was something there that he had not told her. Then, for the first and only time in his life, Spencer told another human being the truth about why he was in Berlin.

  She listened, cuddling up at his back, so that they lay like two S’s together, and he could feel her big warm breasts against his skin. He had kept lying the way he was, fearing what she might think or say, fearing to see a change in her eyes, but when he’d finished she turned him over and held him in her arms. ‘Try not to worry about it,’ she said and there was no hint of condemnation in her voice, rather the opposite, for she was quickly sympathetic in all things. ‘We’ll figure something out.’

  He always remembered that moment; it was the one time he had felt totally secure; he was never to feel that way again.

  *

  ‘My God,’ Spencer said, looking down at his plate, ‘I’ll never get through this.’

  He and Lilo were lunching at a Balkan restaurant near the Wittenbergplatz. He had ordered the hausplatte, thinking that it would be a kind of plat du jour, and now he looked in disbelief at the large rectangular plate that had been placed in front of him. It was heaped with pieces of grilled meat and sausages, mounds of rice, Liptauer cheese and several salads.

  ‘You should have warned me,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you knew.’

  She was having an omelette, but even that was the size of a large Spanish tortilla. She smiled at him and again he noticed the white even teeth against the red of her lips and he felt an unexpected flicker of excitement, accompanied almost immediately by a spurt of guilt. He ate in silence.

  He had spent a frustrating morning. He had gone back to the house in Graf Speestrasse but no one had answered his knocking. He had circled the house, walking among the rubble but had been unable to see inside. He had knocked and shouted until a passerby had looked at him suspiciously and he knew that if he kept it up someone would call the police. What made it worse was that he knew, because there was no way of getting her wheel-chair up the steps, that the old woman was in the room. He had picked up a cab and gone to the Europa Centre and had a cup of coffee, watching two old couples skate round the ice-rink. Perhaps Willi only came back in the evenings, perhaps that was the time to return.

  Where else could he start his search? The Gutmanns’ house, his one real link, had simply been wiped out as writing is wiped from a blackboard. He supposed there must be records of bombed families and what had happened to them. This was where Lilo Essenbach came in. In the meantime he had one lead: Bruno’s ex-wife. But what was her name? Gutmann? He had already looked in the telephone directory and there was no Gerda Gutmann or Bruno Gutmann,, for that matter. No, the old woman would have to give up her secret. He would wait until dark.

  At the hotel there was a message for him. Lilo was waiting at a bar-restaurant nearby. Would he join her there?

  ‘Eat,’ she said. ‘You’ll enjoy it.’

  He could not recognize the pieces of meat. ‘That’s pork fillet,’ she said, pointing. ‘And lamb. And beef. That is a piece of veal. Those are cevapcicis — spiced sausages.’ They ate in silence and he watched her. She was hungry and ate with relish. He ate as much as he could, but left half. They had coffee and he smoked one of her cheroots.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘It is not easy. But not impossible. I used to work for Bild. I still have some old contacts in the Ministries.’

  ‘I’ll show you where the house was, if you like.’

  ‘First, I must go to the toilet.’

  She went into the back of the restaurant He smoked the last of his cheroot. He was sitting facing the road and he noticed that it was beginning to snow. Just then a dark blue furniture van came to a stop outside the window, blocking his view of the street. But it gave him another view; it acted as a mirror and he was able to see himself as well as the restaurant behind his back. There was a passage leading away to the kitchens and, he assumed, the lavatories. And then he saw Lilo. She was at the end of the bar with her back to him and she was using the telephone on the wall. She spoke hurriedly, replaced the receiver, walked into the darkened passage and a moment later re-entered the room, smoothing down her coat.

  ‘Shall we go?’ she said.

  She drove an Opel Manta that had seen better days and took him back the way he had walked the night before. In the daylight the dereliction did not look so bad. The streets were clean, the bomb sites neat. There was no sign of life in the old woman’s house, but again he had the feeling of being watched.

  ‘This is where the house used to be,’ he said.

  ‘They are going to redevelop the whole area.’

  A blue Beetle pulled up in the wasteland by the canal. A man and a woman in the front began to kiss passionately. ‘Lunchtime lovers,’ Spencer said.

  She laughed uncertainly. ‘They must go somewhere.’

  ‘There was another house I used to visit. In Charlottenburg. Maybe it’s still there.’

  ‘Do you know the address?’

  ‘No. It was n
ear water.’

  She looked mystified.

  ‘The road went over a sort of lake. Not a very big one. Rather pretty.’

  She took out a street map and they looked at it together. His head was close to her hair and he smelled its fragrance; for a moment he hated her.

  ‘It must be the Lietzensee Park.’

  They drove along Kantstrasse until they came to the park. In the grey afternoon light the water was like an engraving.

  ‘Is that it?’ she asked.

  ‘It could be. It looks different.’

  They turned right and drove slowly up and down the streets of terraced housing. Some houses were new, some had survived the war and still bore the scars of shrapnel and bullets. On others the holes had been filled with cement, which gave them a slightly patchwork look.

  ‘Do you recognize anything?’

  ‘It was in a street like this.’

  ‘What did you do in this house?’

  ‘As far as I can remember we had endless talks about National Socialism and what would happen when National Socialism ruled the world.’

  ‘You never told me of this.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You never told me what you did in Berlin.’

  ‘I was in a sort of labour corps. Cleaning the rubble off the streets after the bombing.’

  ‘And you came here in the evening to talk about National Socialism? At sixteen?’

  ‘I didn’t talk about it. I listened.’