by Nick Gifford
He looked at her, puzzled.
“I don’t know how to read you. You’re so aloof all the time, as if you’re above little things like being friendly and talking to people. Talking to me. You hold the world at arm’s length. And then sometimes I think I’m connecting. But I’m not. I don’t think I’ve ever connected with you, have I?”
He watched her as she spoke.
He kept himself calm, in control again.
“I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s been like for you, to have been through what you’ve been through,” she continued. “But I’m trying. I don’t know what’s happening now, either. You have problems, Danny. You’ve come up against something really ancient and frightening and if you don’t handle it just right your world will explode.”
“No,” he said. He couldn’t believe what she was telling him.
The battle he had to face was the battle he had been facing for the last three years: the battle not to lose to the family madness, not to end up like his father. That was what it came down to.
And the way to do that was to shut everything – and everyone – out.
Cassie was watching him.
“You know where I am,” she said. And she turned, and headed off towards Swiss Lane. Soon, the curve of the road had taken her from his sight.
13 Berlin, August 1961
He wandered around the empty flat. Shortly after they moved in, David had told him that when Wishbourne Hall had still been a school, this was the sick bay. Sometimes, Danny thought he could still detect that antiseptic medicinal odour, as if it were imprinted on the walls. Now, the flat’s main smell was a mixture of polish and the dahl soup Val had been preparing for their evening meal.
Domestic sprites. Spirits of the caves and mines. Spring sunshine poured into the flat. There were very few dark corners in which a kobold might hide. It was the stuff of children’s stories: enchanted cottages in the woods, mysterious castles and wicked stepmothers. These things just didn’t fit into a modern flat like this.
He thought back to their house in Loughton, around the time when everything had been turned upside down. It was an ordinary, 1930s semi-detached house, with a small, trim front garden, a drive at the side and a long back garden.
It hadn’t been occupied by any supernatural being. It hadn’t been haunted by a legendary creature from his family’s German past.
He would have known. He was sure he would have known that something was amiss.
Most people are blind to them, Cassie had said. We’ve forgotten how to see them.
“Anybody there?” he called softly.
Nothing.
He walked around again. Just a flat. An ordinary flat.
~
That night he lay on his back in bed. The curtains were open, the frosty blue light of the stars and the half-moon casting the room in shadows.
He listened, but there was nothing. No sounds in the room or the flat. No sounds in his head.
No voices.
Lots of dark hiding places at night. Places where a creature of the caves and mines might feel at home.
Everything seemed different in darkness.
Under his bed: the box, the envelope of memories ... what else? His wardrobe stood against the far wall, one door not quite closed.
He reached for the lamp and turned it on, blinking at the sudden light.
It was like being a small boy again. Night terrors.
He climbed out of bed and walked around his room.
He leaned on the wardrobe door to close it, then opened it immediately – just shirts, trousers, blazer, shoes – and then pressed it closed once again.
Under the bed. The box. His trainers. A tissue and some socks. A pile of board games. A couple of bags.
Back in bed, Danny slept as soon as his head hit the pillow. It was as if a spell had been cast upon him: lie down and you shall sleep.
And when you sleep you shall dream.
~
He looked at himself reflected in the dark glass of the window. He stared into his own dark eyes and then he realised that the person in the glass was different. He was looking at a woman – a young woman. Great Aunt Eva, looking at herself in the glass.
This was Eva’s story.
She had been disturbed from a light sleep by unfamiliar noises from outside. Now, at the window, she peered out but nothing seemed to have changed.
She did not know what time it was, but it must be late. She had been out to the American sector of West Berlin tonight with Walter and her older sister, Konstanz. She would marry Walter one day. She had decided this at one point this evening when she and her sister had been drinking fizzy wine and smoking his cigarettes.
A lorry rumbled past below, laden with coils of barbed wire and fence posts. That was unusual, but soon it was gone.
And then ... the sound of a distant pneumatic drill. It was this that had woken her.
She went to the mantelpiece and found the delicate little watch that Walter had given her on her birthday two months before.
It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. She went back to bed just as another lorry rumbled by below.
~
In the morning, Eva picked up the news from a radio tuned to RIAS in the West. The border between East and West Berlin had been closed overnight. Barbed wire divided the two halves of their city, and it was only possible to cross at certain points, and even then only if one had all the right papers.
Eva sat and listened in shock. Her brothers, Christian and Dieter, had been in the West last night, working late on a construction site and then sleeping over as they sometimes did. Konstanz’s husband, Bernhard, had been out on military exercises with their Factory Fighting Group. And Walter – had he made it safely home? Whatever would become of them all?
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Eva sensed a stirring, a small presence lurking. A voice, whose words she could not, as yet, make out.
She woke Konstanz and told her the news.
“I am going out to see,” she said. “I think you should rest here.” Konstanz was pregnant, and Eva was concerned about her health, but already her sister was out of her bed and pulling on some clothes.
It was early, barely eight o’clock on a Sunday, and yet there were people out on the streets. Most looked blank and few were even talking. All headed towards the border. Eva and Konstanz followed the drift of people.
“Look!” Konstanz gestured down Charlotten Strasse, and they paused, and then turned down this side street. A small crowd had gathered where the street was crossed by Zimmer Strasse. This junction marked the boundary between the Sectors, and now an evenly-spaced row of men stood across it, machine guns held tensely across their chests. Behind them, more men uncoiled barbed wire from great rolls, stringing it up across concrete posts that had been newly planted in the road.
That explained the drilling sounds overnight: they had been making holes for the fence posts.
“My god,” said Konstanz softly. “The Factory Fighters...”
Of course. It suddenly made sense: the “military exercises” of last night had been nothing of the sort. The Factory Fighter Groups had been the ones who were dividing their own city with wire while their fellow Berliners slept.
The rest of the day passed in a blur.
The two sisters moved from point to point along the new barrier. They spent much of the time standing in crowds, just staring through the wire at the other side. Crowds in the west of the city did likewise, so that the workers were watched from both sides as they unravelled their wire in silence. Occasionally, someone on one side or the other jumped and waved and called a name, and sometimes received a response from the other side. Some pleaded with the Border Guards to be allowed through, but the guards simply shook their heads. Nobody was to pass.
They rested outside Friedrichstrasse station. Eva felt dizzy. She felt a great pressure inside her head.
They had learnt here that the few local trains between east and west would run fro
m Platform B, where the police would only allow entry to those with official permission to travel. Their return from the dance last night must have been one of the last normal services to have run.
All around them, Eva sensed a net closing. The barriers were shutting out the corrupt west, but also it was shutting them in, confining them.
She knew whose voice it was in the back of her head.
“What do we do now?” asked Konstanz weakly.
“Ask the hinzelmannchen,” said Eva. “We should ask Hodeken for guidance. He has helped us before. He senses our need now. I can feel it. We should ask him to guide us again.”
~
Monday and Tuesday were strange.
It was as if the whole thing had been carefully timed so that it would work out just this way. Give people all of Sunday to get used to the change and then on Monday ... back to work as normal.
For most people, at any rate. Konstanz went down to the hairdresser on Muhlenstrasse to wash and set hair and hope that her Bernhard was okay. But Eva ... Eva was a grenzgänger: someone who, until this day, had lived in the east and worked in a restaurant in the west.
So Eva was at a loose end. She walked until she was exhausted but everywhere it was the same: nowhere to cross, the city well and truly split in two.
It still did not seem possible. It has happened, the voice told her. You must act.
But how?
At one point on the Tuesday, Eva was in a small crowd near the Church of Reconciliation on Bernauer Strasse. The border ran right along the front of the buildings here and the road itself was in West Berlin, out of reach. Wire was strung across the end of each of the side streets, guarded by Factory Fighters, all watched by staring westerners from the far side.
One old woman turned to Eva and said, “I can go in her back door and step out the front and I’ll be in the west.”
Another, younger, woman leaned towards her and said, “Mother! Do not say these things.” She glanced at Eva. “You do not know who will hear.”
Berliners scared of each other. Scared that anyone might be an informer. That was how it had become.
Eva turned away, but even as she did so, her mind was racing. She could do that, too. She could just go up and knock on a door and find someone who would let her walk through to the west.
No. Think of the family. You must not act selfishly, alone. She calmed herself, thankful for the small voice in the back of her head. She loved her faithful hinzelmannchen. He had given them so much.
Eva headed north. She paused on Ruppiner Strasse early in the afternoon. Where the street joined Bernauer Strasse she saw a truck, and men unloading it. A stack of concrete building blocks stood by the back of the truck.
They are building a wall.
Eva’s first reaction to the division of Berlin had been that this must be a short-term measure, a defiant gesture aimed at the West. But now... they were bricking up the end of this street, and no doubt other streets right across the city. This had the look of permanence.
She thought again of the women at Bernauerstrasse, where it was possible to enter a house’s back door in the east and walk through its front door into the west.
She turned, and headed back across Mitte district towards the apartment. Hodeken, her little voice, had been right. Think of the family. You must not act selfishly, alone.
That had always been their way, and it would be so now.
~
She kept quiet about it, at first.
She knew they must leave, but also, she knew that Konstanz’s husband Bernhard believed that what had happened was a good thing: the erection of the Wall was a defining moment in their nation’s short history.
“Tell me I am right,” Eva said, late at night, when she was alone in the room she shared with Konstanz and Bernhard.
In the reflection she saw a small figure somewhere beyond her left shoulder.
Hodeken nodded. You are right, Eva. You know that you are. Things will get worse here. Germans will shoot Germans because of this thing.
“But what do I do?”
Be patient. I am looking after you.
“You have been quiet, little one. I thought we had lost you.”
I have not been needed. I have been resting. I will always be here in your time of need.
~
That evening, Eva and Konstanz sat in a bar a few minutes from the apartment. They sat at a small circular table, smoking and drinking weak coffee.
“We have to leave,” Eva urged her sister. “But we must be cautious. We must wait and learn. We must work out the best way to do it and then we cross the border into the West and find Christian and Dieter.”
That was what Hodeken had told her they should do. Spur of the moment escapes had worked to start with, but they would be less and less likely to succeed. They needed to plan carefully to re-unite the family.
“But how would we survive there?” asked Konstanz.
“We survived the war,” said Eva. “We survived the early years when the Soviet army first occupied our land.”
“We had help,” said Konstanz.
Eva nodded. “We have help again. The hinzelmannchen has awoken. Hodeken has sensed our need.”
In a small voice, Konstanz said, “I cannot go.”
Eva stared at her.
“Bernhard,” Konstanz said. “He would not want to run. I cannot go without him.”
And Walter, Eva suddenly thought. They had seen each other only briefly over the last few days, and today she had not given him a single thought until now. Would he join them? And what would she do if he refused?
“We have time yet,” Eva said. “The family will not be divided.”
Konstanz’s husband would have nothing to do with the proposed escape until late the following week when the first person was shot, trying to escape across the Humboldt Canal. “I could not do such a thing,” he said, several times that evening. “I could not shoot my neighbour.”
“But you might be ordered to,” Eva told him.
“I know.”
So it was that the two sisters, Eva and Konstanz, shut themselves in a small room in the apartment that they shared.
“Hodeken,” said Eva, softly. “We need you, little one.”
She glanced at the window, and she saw the little man reflected in the glass.
She turned, and he was there, perched on the edge of Konstanz’s mattress, bony knees tucked up under his chin and a conical grey felt cap pulled down hard on his head. He looked at them one by one. “Only two,” he said. “I leave you alone for a time and what do you do? You lose your brothers in the West. So what is it you wish for? You want me to make everything all right again, is that it?”
He was grinning, his yellowed teeth glistening from his leathery old face. Hodeken was happy. He was in his element. He was going to solve all their problems.
“You see, Danny?” He turned away from the two, who leaned close together, talking and plotting. He was looking at Danny, who was in the room now, sitting on the mattress by the little man’s side.
“You see, Danny?” he said again. “This is how it has been and how it should be. The family, pulling together. Sometimes the family needs help, though. Sometimes they need their hinzelmannchen.”
Hodeken straightened proudly. “I am a legend. You know? You are honoured.” He chuckled. “I helped them get through the war, and then I helped them survive the coming of the Soviet soldiers, which I tell you was harder than surviving the war in many ways. And now ... now they need me again, and so I help them with their plotting and their planning.” He nodded towards the two, still deep in conversation.
“What do you want? What do you want with me?” asked Danny.
“I want what you want,” said Hodeken. “You told me, remember? You want things how they were. You want your family to be normal again. That’s a tough one, but I’m a legend, aren’t I?”
“It’s not possible.”
“Not while your mother behaves as she does,
” said Hodeken. “How can the family be whole again while your mother goes off with another man? She did it before, and look what happened. Trust me, Danny. Together we will fix everything and you will have your wish.”
“No,” said Danny. Wishing something had never happened was different to wishing to go back.
“Trust me, Danny. You will have your wish.”
“No. Look what happened to Dad...”
Hodeken smiled. “Your father didn’t trust me, Danny. I scared him. Do I scare you, Danny? Are you as weak as your father? He didn’t understand. I want you to understand so that we can work together and make the family strong again. If you do not trust me – “ Hodeken shrugged “ – I cannot help it but things may go wrong.”
“What happened in Berlin?” Danny asked, a thought suddenly occurring to him. “What happened to Eva?”
A shrug. “That’s not what I’m here to show you.”
“Why? What happened to her?” She had not left Berlin until much later – they had even thought she must be dead until she eventually made it to the West.
Hodeken looked cornered. He said nothing.
“What happened?” Danny demanded, a final time.
~
They sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. Eva leaned forward and took Walter’s hand across the table. “Will you come with me, Walter my love? There is no future here. I want to be in the West with my sister and brothers. I want to be with you.”
Walter looked puzzled. “But Konstanz is here, not in the West, is she not? I do not understand.”
“Tomorrow night,” said Eva. “She and Bernhard will be in the West. I will be in the West. Come with me, Walter. Marry me and start a new life in another country with me.”
She didn’t dare look at him. Walter was a very proper man, a gentleman, and she loved him dearly. She did not think he would come with her. Hodeken had even told her not to ask. Say nothing. He will not come, so why tell more people than you must?
Walter surprised her. Her proposal had thrown him. “Let me consider,” he told her finally. “Let me think what to do.”
“Later,” she said, and kissed him.
~
The following night, four of them gathered on Wilhelmstrasse, a short walk from the Wall. Eva, Konstanz and her husband Bernhard, and, finally, Walter, looking paler and more scared than any of the others.