The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

I eat in the hotel restaurant. Its blandness is a relief. I shall spend the evening here. I shall not go out again. The menu is dull, cosmopolitan - pasta, Waldorf salad, club sandwiches - as neutral as the decor of the room. No wonder that it is almost empty. There is only a man with a briefcase in the far corner, and myself, and an elderly German couple who come to sit at the next table. They talk to me. I have barely talked to anyone for days. The man speaks a slow and deliberate English. It is simple, soothing to me in my state of mind.

  'You are not German, are you? No, English, I thought it. And what are you here for? You can't be a tourist, surely? There is nothing for a tourist here.'

  There is something oddly stilted to his speech, a halt that occurs now and then at the beginning of a word or phrase, as if he has trouble with it, with a syllable that he cannot sound, as if he has some impediment or suffered a small stroke perhaps and speech no longer flows as easily as it once did; perhaps he talks to reassure himself that his voice is really there. He has white hair, far receded, a long face, eyes a clear blue. His cheek is a little hoary where he has not shaved quite perfectly. His wife watches beside him and does not speak but nods now and again so that it would appear that she can understand the English.

  'I was born here,' the man says. 'Here in Königsberg. I left in December 1944 when I was eight, with my mother and my older sister and my younger brother, who at the time was only two years old. We went by train to Danzig, crossing the Vistula when it was still possible, when the railway bridge was still there. My father and my older brother did not follow us until later. My brother and a friend came by boat from Pillau. My father made the walk across the Frisches Haff. I come back now. I came as soon as it was possible to come here in the Nineties, and I have come back again six times. This time we are here for a week, my wife and I, though she is not from here, she comes from the Ruhr.' (There is a care to the way his wife watches him, as if she is indulgent because of the frailty in him. This to her must be no holiday at all.) 'Even before 1990 I was trying to come here. It was a closed city, you must know, under the Soviets. It was impossible for Germans or any other foreigners to come here. I was writing to my president, from Frankfurt, asking for him to help me.'

  'I came for the same sort of reason you did,' I say. 'To find out about my mother.'

  Sometimes the click quite goes from his voice and he relaxes and his speech comes easily.

  'Today we went to the sea. Where we used to go for four weeks at a time in the summer. It was always beautiful there at the sea, even when in Königsberg it was grey. Like now, like it has been today. It is grey here today but there was sunshine by the sea. You could do that, take a taxi and go to the sea. I can give you the number of my driver if you like, he will give you a rate for the day, it is not so expensive to have a driver here. I showed my wife how to find small pieces of amber. You can find them there, if you look in the sand, tiny pieces of amber like these.' And he brings out a clean white handkerchief from his pocket, and folded inside it are specks of yellow amber.

  'My mother told me about the amber.'

  'What else did she tell you?'

  'Very little, I'm afraid. Almost nothing. That's why I thought I'd come.'

  'I remember the bombing. In August, the British Royal Air Force. The sirens. The bunker. The cathedral destroyed, the buildings on the island, the university where Immanuel Kant had taught. I remember the red glow in the sky. My father and brother going to see. Your mother must have been here during the bombing.'

  'I imagine so.'

  'How did she leave? When, do you know?'

  'I don't know how she got out. She may have come later even, I'm not sure.'

  Was she bombed? When did she go? Who was she? I cannot say. I know nothing.

  I know a place in Cheltenham where we used to walk on the way to the fishmonger, my mother and I. For a long time there was a bombed house there that was left as it was, just one house, like a tooth lost from the street. There were places like that, in those days, places even in Cheltenham or in Gloucester where, in the war, a bomb had dropped in an air raid, and nobody had got round to rebuilding them. They were pieces of history, there before your eyes on the street. Sometimes a site had hoardings in front of it so that you could see only if you went right up and peered through the cracks. Often there was just a wire fence. Plants with lovely names grew densely in the ruins, buddleia and rosebay willowherb. In summer when the buddleias came out they collected a mass of butterflies that you would not expect to see in the centre of a town, and sometimes these flew high, wavering upwards the way a leaf floats down, to where a seed had caught in the rift in a wall and a plant somehow survived one or two floors up.

  This particular house was gone entirely save for a single wall which stood to its full height: three floors gone but you could see where they had been, see the fireplace and the wallpaper of each room, one above the other. On the first floor the wallpaper was of a vivid green and so little damaged that you could see the pattern of it and the squares where pictures had hung. You could imagine a family sitting in the room, armchairs and a fire in the grate. I used to think about the family every time we passed, and sometimes I talked to my mother about them. Did the Greens get to the shelter before the bomb dropped? Were they still alive, all of them? Where had they gone to live? I imagined them going to save their things, if any of their things had survived, picking through the ruins afterwards in a cloud of dust.

  'Yes, sweetheart,' she would say. 'I'm sure they were safe. There were warnings, and sirens, and things.' She said for sure they were in a shelter when the bomb fell.

  She said it lightly, as we went on into the fishmonger's, and she talked to the fishmonger at length, and when we left she complained as she always did about the poor quality of English fish, which was never fresh as she was used to having it.

  Her answer stayed in my mind because it was so light and careless and unconvincing.

  I asked the old German where his family went, when they fled.

  'We had cousins,' he tells me, 'close to Hamburg. Not in Hamburg, I am happy to say, as Hamburg also was destroyed. Our cousins were outside, but close to Ham-burg. And then after that, we moved into the city. There were others there who had come like us from East Prussia.'

  'What about the rest, if they had no family to go to?'

  'There were programmes,' he said. 'There was a housing bureau. Arrangements were made. They were sent to camps, and people were made to give up rooms for them in their homes. Though of course there were some who did not fit in. There were people who could not settle and wandered about and did not stay. The doctors have a name for it now, the condition of people after war. There were men who used to come to the door, even years later. We would know who they were. We would give them some-thing and they would go on their way.'

  The Germans insist I visit the archive where they have been in previous years. The director is a good woman, they say, for a Russian. If there is anything to know, she will find it. When he goes out the old man walks slowly, his wife to one side taking his arm. His wife would have him take a taxi but he insists that we walk, and it is not far though it seems suddenly a world away as we step out of the rush and traffic of the Prospekt Mira into a wide avenue that is the first place I have come to in this city that is recognisably German.

  'Such a shame,' he says. 'Look what they have done to it.'

  And his wife looks about with bourgeois distaste and repeats, 'Look.'

  He stops and holds up his stick to point.

  'Imagine what sort of neighbourhood this was. The good houses, the gardens behind where there were trees and lawns and flowers. My grandfather's house was close to here. Later I will show it to you.'

  Yes, I say, it must have been lovely here, and I can just about imagine it. The old German villas are grey beneath half a century of dirt. The lindens along the streets are outgrown and their roots have heaved the paving. Yet the new leaves are very green on the trees and there is a haze of buds on the lilac bus
hes which have seeded themselves everywhere.

  This is too suburban though. This is not the kind of district where my mother lived.

  'I think my mother must have lived somewhere closer to the centre. She told me about the house. She said that it went up and up, and from a window at the top you could see the sea.'

  'That is not possible,' he says. 'That she could see the sea.'

  'I remember her saying it. It was one of the few things she ever told me.'

  'It is not possible, I tell you. We are more than thirty kilometres here from the sea.'

  I am sure of the words. I want to tell this old man that he must be mistaken, however much he knows the place.

  'Definitely,' he says, 'it could not have been the sea. However, she might have seen the river, and the ships there.'

  'Yes of course, that must be it.'

  Still I hear my mother's voice speaking of the sea.

  Throughout the Cold War what had remained of the Königsberg archive lay undisturbed while the archives concerning the new city of Kaliningrad grew about it. The archivist, whose family came from Kursk in one of the first inward migrations of Russians in 1947, has been employed there all of her working life. She takes us into her office and talks for a long time, and the German translates. For the first twenty years, she says, she knew it as a place of silence and order as an archive should rightly be. The building was brand new when she first came to work in it, a tall and functional block, appropriately resembling a filing cabinet, of white-painted concrete (now turned to grey like her hair) with vertical lines of smoked-glass windows down its front and steel doors at its base. Papers went in, and registers and records were made and classified, and passed from office to office and con-signed to shelves and stacks on one of thirteen near-identical floors, with little expectation, in most cases, of their ever being needed again. For in those days the principle on which the archive operated was that of the systematic disposal, rather than retrieval, of information.

  There is a quality of refinement in her, a wryness, that surprises since it is in such apparent contradiction to the crude city outside.

  Perestroka, she says, came to the archive as something of a shock. In 1992, Kaliningrad opened its borders with Lithuania. Until then the region had been entirely closed to foreigners. And suddenly people came knocking on the steel door of the archive wanting to know things. Not strange things, not secret things, but just about themselves. A first wave came then from Lithuania, Lithuanian citizens and with them German citizens who used Lithuania as a route, and a second wave of Germans came in 1995 once direct travel from Germany was permitted. Through those first years they came daily. They came with names and addresses, sometimes with the name of a father or husband or brother gone missing fifty years before. Most were old, people who had some memories of the place and of their flight or explusion, people who had reached that stage of life, she saw, when a human being wants to look back and make sense of the past. A few were the children of this generation come to find out on behalf of their parents. There were even some who came to her (and these stories she found most tragic) who as small children, in the extremity of the first Russian occupation, had been en-trusted by German parents to Lithuanian families and brought up in Lithuania as Lithuanians, and came now with no more than the memory of their former German names. They came to her to ask who they had been.

  It was a strange time for her. In the archive building, in the library and on the chairs in the hallway, she saw people bursting into tears. She felt then that she should have had a training as a psychiatrist, so that she could sort the contents of the human mind.

  We sit in her office, facing her across her brown desk. The room has a shabby ease to it, prints of old Königsberg on the wall and plants well tended in pots, the glass-panelled door left ajar to the bigger office beyond, where women talk in Russian with a lightness that suggests that they are not speaking about their work.

  'I know my mother's name, that's all.'

  'She says that she does not have so very much for you.'

  The archivist speaks German. The old man speaks to her in German and then turns towards me and translates into English. It gives the conversation the moves of a formal dance.

  'She says that most of the books from the churches, the books of births and deaths and marriages, were taken away to Germany. These things can be found in other archives, in Germany and some in Poland.'

  'So what does she have?'

  The archivist's hands indicate a rectangle. A large book. Her hands and her eyes communicate directly.

  'She has the postal register. I do not know what you call it precisely in English. Names and postal addresses of all the citizens of Königsberg at the time when the war began. If you know your mother's name you will surely find her family there.'

  It is not a book but a box, boxes, mottled grey box files containing well-worn facsimiles, cheap photocopy pages that have been worn soft by people's fingers. Some are smudged and hard to read, dark lines and shadows of folds on them from the originals, and the type is Gothic, heavy and black.

  The names are listed alphabetically, with the occupation of the head of the household afterwards, and then the address. These can be cross-referenced to another file where the listings are made by street, with floor and apartment numbers recorded, and even courtyard and alley plans. There is an admirable method and precision to these records, even though they run to 1940, into the time of the war itself.

  There is no hurry. The Germans have said that they will meet me later. The archivist has brought me to this empty library with its smell of dust, and sits now at the desk at the end of the room as she is required to do. She has brought some work with her and attends to it discreetly. I do not begin my search immediately but only look down the pages, beginning with the As. There is an impassive history just in the way these names are crammed together, even on the first page: Aachener, Abe, Abel, Aberger, Abernetty, Abert, Abeszer, Abraham, Absiewicz.

  I know my mother's name as Karoline Odewald. Caro-line was what everyone called her but before that she was Karoline with four syllables instead of three. Karoline Odewald was the name on the papers that she had when she married, Karoline Wyatt on the passport she brought with her to England, Caroline she became once she was there. There are six Odewalds listed. No Karoline - of course I should not have expected that since Karoline would have been only a child in 1940 - but Ernst, Fritz, Hermann, Karl, Margarete and Otto. Their occupations give no clue. I have no notion of Karoline's father's occupation, have only assumed that the family was relatively prosperous and middle class since they had a grand piano in the house. I imagine someone stereotypical, a little paunchy in a waistcoat: a professional, a lawyer, a business-man.

  There is only the name to go by, and the fact of the piano, and the attic window. I have that memory my mother gave me, of the grandmother's apartment upstairs and the window in the roof with its view of ships and erroneous sea. I turn to the second file to identify the position of each street, apartment building and floor where an Odewald was recorded as living, on Radziwillstrasse, Poggenstrasse, Ungulstrasse, Balterstrasse (where two Odewalds live side by side), and finally Margarete's address on Barenstrasse. Of the six apartment addresses, not one is above the second floor.

  The archivist's grey head is bent low over the high desk as she writes, a dry rustle that has become the only activity in the room.

  I have that window pinned in my mind like the pictures of childhood, like the window in the book I had with the story in it of the tin soldier, that I still have and that I used to read to my own daughter: the nursery window through which the soldier falls, from a height in a tall town house, clattering on to the cobbles of the street below. I know the high roof, the street, the ships, the sea glinting in the distance, as if they were there and I had seen them. Now I cannot distinguish memory from illustration.

  There was a story my mother used to tell us about Königsberg, about the time their house was burgled. She must
have told the story more than once, but there is one time in particular that I remember.

  'They were not burglars,' she says, 'so much as vandals.'

  'What are vandals?' asks Peter.

  She is cooking our tea. Wearing an apron, neat and tidy, not a hair out of place. Her engagement ring in the bowl on the shelf where she puts it safe when she is working in the kitchen. Standing at the cooker, something on the grill, sausages perhaps or fish fingers, the sort of thing she would give us after school. The grill is at eye-level and she peers into it to see if they are done.

  'People who smash things up,' she says. 'You will learn about them sometime. They were the people who smashed things up in ancient Rome. Vandals and Huns, and Huns were Germans, so maybe it was Huns. They broke in when we were away at the seaside in the summer, and we found it all when we came back, when we came with our cases and our bags and opened the door and came into the hall: everything thrown around, chairs overturned, papers from the drawers, books from the shelves. The scene of a disaster!' She takes the pan down, lays it on the cooker top.

  'And do you know what was the worst thing they did? The thing that made my mother glad that my father was away, that he was not there?'

  'What?'

  'They had spread jam over the piano keys.'

  She tells it as if it is a murder. I see a murder scene, red jam oozing across ivory.

  'And she and my grandmother tried to clean it them-selves, but in the end they had to call the piano makers, and the men came and took the keyboard apart on the drawing-room floor.'

  Men in brown overalls now, the pieces of the piano arranged across the floor like the dinosaur bones in the Natural History Museum.

  'And was it done before your father got home?'

  'It was, thank goodness. He never knew.'