Next morning I ask the girl at the reception desk for directions out to the Vistula lagoon.
'There's a resort called Krynica Morska,' she says. 'But it's not the season. There'll be no one there.'
There's one bus a day this time of year. It goes in the morning and stops a while, and comes back in the after-noon.
It's a bleak journey, out of the city and through the flatness of the estuary. Square drained fields, ditches, old willow stumps like men's thumbs pointing at a huge dull sky. The sandbar is not as I imagined it, not all a shifting line of dunes but sand pinned down by trees, a thin forest of pines along a sixty-kilometre spine of land between Vistula and Baltic. Krynica Morska looks as deserted as the girl said. The bus stops. The driver puts his feet up on the dashboard and lights a cigarette to begin his two-hour wait. I get out and walk. There were only a couple of passengers besides myself, locals who disappear soon into a side street. The road runs on along the sandbar with the rushes and the still water of the lagoon close on one side, and on the other, a dense belt of pines. The beach must be hidden beyond these, the evidence of its existence in the strings of deserted summer hotels and campsites whose names are posted along the road, but it is hard to choose a turning and I go on a long way until the road begins to narrow, and then I turn back and take one of the paths in between the trees to find the sea.
It is further to the sea than I had thought, the path crossing a succession of dunes and hollows. I had not thought that the walk would be so long or so monotonous. Yet to those who escaped this way in the war these trees and dunes would at least have offered some kind of shelter, places to huddle after the awful exposure of the ice. When I come out at last on to the beach the wind is cutting. Out in the open that January it must have been sharp like blades. The band of pale sand runs for miles, a line into the far distance, and the waves roll on to it in angry white bars off a hard and slate-green sea.
It is too cold to walk far, too hard in the wind, a futile effort anyway as the beach goes on unchanging and the waves relentlessly repeat themselves. Back among the pines the quiet closes in. There is the roar of the sea and the wind on one side of the bar, and the silence of the lagoon on the other. This is where they passed. I feel that I am walking through a vacuum, timeless. I imagine the scene as I have read of it, the noise, the chaos, the shouts of soldiers, the children's cries, the mothers' words to the children that are brusque words of command and encouragement spoken like words to an animal. The horses, carts in snow, the retreating tanks forcing through them. The trampling, the debris of those who have gone before, the dead and the stragglers, who also have become like debris. The body of a woman who died as her baby tried to feed from her frostbitten breast. I wonder how it would mark a person, if they saw such things.
There is time before the bus leaves to warm up in the one caf; that is open. Just a teenage girl behind the bar, a boy talking to her, no one else there, and she brings out hot soup that must be their own. I catch sight of myself in a mirror: a lonely foreign woman whose face has been whipped by the wind. No one can know whether the shine on my cheeks is the result of wind or tears.
Before leaving home I got out all the pictures I have of my mother and spread them before me. I looked closely at each one as if I might find in them some indication of her experience. I cleared the kitchen table and arranged them all one afternoon. That was my mother as she was when she married my father; just after she came to England; before Peter was born; then when he was born; then with myself; at home, as we were growing up. I put them into chronological order as far as I could, putting the loose ones beside those from albums, as if some narrative would come from them if only I could put them all together.
There was a studio portrait that must have been a favourite. There was a black-and-white print of it and a hand-coloured one, of my mother smiling to camera, head a little tilted and resting on one hand, hair and face flatteringly lit from above. A face and pose entirely of that time, like a million other women in engagement photographs or on the shiny pages of magazines. I took the two pictures from their frames as if that would make them more real, and found the stamp of the photographer on their backs: K.L. Haenchen, Atelier für Fotografische Bildnisse, Berlin W 15, Bayerischestrasse 31. So these were the photos I had to put at the very beginning: the first extant photographs of my mother, and they were the most polished and perfect of all.
My daughter is around the age she was then, in the first pictures. Nineteen, and seeming so sure of herself that it is like an armour about her through which I feel I cannot reach.
'What was your mother like?' she asked. She picked up the pictures one by one, scrutinised them, put them down, jumbled my arrangement.
What could I say? I had the pictures there before me, and all I could see in them was a smile, a prettiness, a bland image of post-war New Look woman.
'I think she looked a little bit like you do. See, you have her eyes, the line of her brow.'
'But besides that. Who was she?'
'A mother.'
'You can't just say that.'
'Not when you're the age you are now. But you can when you're eight. They're just mothers then, aren't they?'
'Then work it out. What kind of person she was.'
As if you could. As if I hadn't tried.
'I don't know. I simply don't know. It's harder than you think.'
That made my daughter angry.
'That's you all over. You give up on things. It's like you don't really want to find out.'
'That's what I'm doing now, isn't it?'
'Well, it's taken you a long time.'
I didn't see what cause she had to be angry with me.
1957 or perhaps it is '58 or '59. Helen Kroger is home doing the dishes. Christine Keeler is still at school. My mother puts on her face in the yellow-curtained bedroom. I am there beside her, watching. I often do that. It is one of the things I like to do. The dressing table is one of those kidney-shaped ones that were the fashion at the time, covered in the same yellow fabric as the curtains, and with a glass top on which are laid out the various bottles and jars my mother uses, powder compact and lipsticks, hairbrush and hand mirror and the collection of little silver boxes. Pressed beneath the glass are half a dozen photographs of myself and Peter at various ages, and a couple of the whole family and of Dad, but none from any time before Peter was born.
It happens every morning, just the same, only the shade of lipstick may vary, ever so little, to match what she is wearing.
'She was attractive, everybody says. She dressed well, put a lot of effort into her appearance.'
'Come on, Mum. There must be something more than that.'
I can speak only of surfaces.
'I think she was quite' - hard to choose the word -'distant. Not at home, at home with us she was warm, but outside. I don't know if she had any friends. I don't remember any.' I do not know about her friends but I do know how she smelled, that close smell of scent and face powder that was the smell of her hug.
'Probably that was because she was German.'
'Perhaps.'
My daughter offered to come with me. Why don't you wait until the university term's over, then we can go together? We'll go and see where she came from. Find the old ancestral roots.
That wouldn't work, I thought. I said I had the trip just about booked, that arrangements had been made that couldn't be changed. Perhaps that was a mistake. Perhaps I should have had her come. It would have brought us closer. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't have her know how thin the story was.
Her face shows at three angles in the mirror. Brown hair falling back in smooth waves. Glassy skin, blue eyes. A look that people say is a little like Hedy Lamarr.
She leans forward to get a closer view.
'I am beginning to get wrinkly,' she says, but lightly, and when she smiles I see that tiny wrinkles do show about her eyes. 'I shall have crow's feet when I am older.'
And she puts foundation on, stretching her face a
s she does so and smoothing it with her fingertips, rubbing with a light circular motion beneath the eyes. At that age I have a literal ear for words. Crow's feet fill me with horror.
She brushes her hair, backcombing just a little, fixes the waves with tortoiseshell combs to the side of her head.
'It's a pity,' she says. 'You have fine hair like mine. My mother had hair like that. Whatever you do, it flies away or frizzes the moment you step outside.'
There are a few facts like that that come through from these morning rituals, to remember and hold on to later.
* * *
'What was it like,' I asked one time, 'where you lived when you were a child?'
'Not like this.' My mother looked about her and smiled, and the German accent was noticeable in what she said then, perhaps because what she said drew attention to her foreignness. 'Nothing like this, this English countryside. It was a proper city. There was a castle and a cathedral on an island in the river, and bridges and big streets and churches with spires. Our house was tall, five storeys. We lived in an apartment up lots of flights of stairs. My grandmother lived in the apartment above us, another flight up. We were lucky that way, having her there. I used to go and see her on my own. I was special to her because I was the youngest and because I was named after her.'
'Then she was called Caroline.'
'Who?'
'Your grandmother was called Caroline like you.'
'My grandmother?' Her voice hesitant, blank a moment as if she must remember. 'No, not Caroline, not the English way. Ka-ro-li-ne. In Germany they say it differently, with another syllable at the end.'
'Tell me something else.'
'What about?'
'About where your grandmother lived.'
'Well, let me see.' She picked up an eyebrow pencil and bent to the mirror, arched her eyebrows to draw them darker. 'Let me think. My grandmother's apartment was more exciting than ours. It was smaller than ours but it was crammed with funny old things, pictures and ornaments and furniture. And it had an attic. There were some windows there, like eyes right up in the roof. I used to go up there and look out from the roof and see all the city underneath, and see the ships.'
'Can we go there one day?'
'There's nothing there. From what I hear, it's all destroyed.' She put the little pencil down in a dish and took up her lipstick.
'There must be something we can see.'
She rolled her lips against each other and then opened them and leant forward again to check there was no smudge of lipstick on her teeth.
'What earrings do you think I should put on?'
And I understood that the past was closed and that a woman put on the present like her make-up, like her earrings, in the morning for the day to come.
There are different kinds of memory, conscious and unconscious. There are memories that the conscious mind goes over repeatedly, that are recalled, observed, caught like a snapshot of the time, and oneself in it, one of the figures in the picture. Memories like these become like history, fact-filed for recall, detached from emotion. But there are others that come back without conscious thought and that are experienced again, more or less vividly, like dream versions of themselves. These cannot be controlled and can come at any moment, and catch you unawares and remind you of things that you had forgotten you had ever known. Then there are memories that seem to run like a film, smoothly overlaying all the others, that have such shape and form that you suspect that they are inventions and may have created themselves, and within them your own identity even begins to slide and fade, and is liable to change as in a dream.
I had the illusion that if I collected all that I remembered together, like the photographs, if I worked it all through, I would come down to some consistent truth to set against the realities of history and place. But the memories change and slip and multiply, the more I follow them. They become flat and glossy like the photographs, like film, like glass, so many shiny surfaces, all of them sliding one above the other. And there's no breaking through, nothing beneath.
Sometimes my mother would dress me up. She would let me choose a dress, some light, silky thing that could be draped and tied with a sash. She would help me put it on and then find the sash and tie it round my waist, pulling the skirt up and folding it under so that it would not fall beneath my feet and make me trip. You can let it go at the back, she would say, let it trail like a bride, but at the front it must be shorter, and you must lift it up with your hands, like this, so, when you run or go upstairs. I felt grand in the dress and asked if I could wear lipstick, and my mother would bring the lipstick and kneel before me to put it on, very carefully, and as carefully I would go to the mirror and press my lips together like she did. My mother went to her jewellery box and found beads that she wrapped round and round my neck, held back my hair and tied a scarf in a turban over it, and when she was done she stood back and told me to turn this way and that so that she could admire the effect.
I was in disguise.
I went into the garden where my father was working. I held up a sweet cigarette (you bought them in packets of ten at the village shop, sweet white sticks with a reddened end like fire). Told him I was Hedy Lamarr.
I get my first sight of Kaliningrad through a smeared taxi window. A big Russian city, bigger than I had imagined. No castle here now but the cathedral on the island is at last being restored, some sixty years after its wartime destruction. The city centre that was once dense with tall streets and spires has been scraped away and replaced with a vast housing estate of huge decrepit apartment blocks and littered public spaces, and roads wide as runways. The taxi does not slow as the driver in his few abrupt words of English points out the cathedral and the brutal high-rise of the half-constructed Palace of the Soviets, exposed in the barren space. It does not slow for an old woman who pushes her shopping - or perhaps it is her produce - in a handcart across the road. I feel a sudden panic. This cannot be an official taxi. It is clapped out, filthy, with torn seats and a bad smell. No meter. It was so hard at the station to tell what was what. I am no good at travelling like this. I do not trust this driver. I hardly noticed his face when I got in but his neck from behind is thick and there are greasy strands of hair on his collar. I should not be here. This place is Russia. Its people are Russian. What can it have to do with me?
He does at least bring me to the right hotel. He asks for twenty US dollars. I give it to him. I have no idea what the correct fare should have been.
I check into a small dingy room on an upper floor, leave my bags and go out straight away. I have a sketchy tourist map from the hotel desk. It does not tell me much but there is at least some writing on it in a script that I can read. The hotel is on Prospekt Mira. I take my bearings, walk on down the street. So long as I stick to the main streets that are shown on the map I shall be able to find my way back.
I don't know which way to go. It is a big city, that much I saw from the taxi. Prospekt Mira seems to be a major shopping street. None of the buildings seem to be residential. Their entrances bear a confusing mass of signs for the little businesses that go on behind the windows, floor by floor. Some have old façades but most are post-war, all of them uniformly blank beneath their coating of dirt. The traffic is heavy, the noise of it and the fumes. I walk where the place takes me. One thing about being alone is that it leaves you free to drift. No discussion about where you're going, no explanations, no naming. No family to hold you back. (Was that what Peter found when he went away and left us? Why he could not return?)
I should have got myself an old German map before I came here, so that I could compare it with the Russian street plan. There is a bridge crossing a deep ravine, a green cleft in the city that would be lovely if the trees in it were not hung with windblown litter. The entrance to the zoo is here, and a cafi with a decorative awning and an upstairs terrace, but the tea comes in a plastic cup and it is too cold to sit for long.
Her house went up five storeys. Inside were many flights of stairs. In th
e attic, a window like an eye.
She told the truth: there is nothing here. It was all destroyed, if not in the war then in the years after, blown up, torn down, bulldozed, levelled, so that the entire centre of the Prussian city was erased. The Russians did not just take the city and rename it, they systematically destroyed its identity, made it into another place altogether. This is not a city out of her childhood, but out of mine. I come to a vast open square. The scale and the architecture are Stalinist, heroic banners stretched across the fagades of municipal buildings proclaiming sixty years of Kaliningrad Kultura. This piece of Russian I can decipher. This is the Russia that I imagined, that we all used to imagine once. I cannot help a wary look behind me, at a man in a leather jacket, a head that seems to turn away too fast from my eyes, a cigarette stubbed out too deliberately on the pavement. Perhaps this also is something that I came for.
It's getting dark. I walk back. I have come further than I realised, but at least I am not lost. The traffic is heavy down this street, the noise of it and the fumes. People walk fast. They are city people, modern Russians, new Russians; people in leather coats, high heels; looks from the Calvin Klein posters; women with catwalk struts. The poor are grey shadows beside them, pushed aside as if there is no connection to be made between new Russians and old. People are remaking themselves, in this ugly remade city. And I pass them all, mute, fearful, quite out of place.
The Spy Game Page 17