The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

  'You don't know anything either.'

  He knew that I'd be with Dad in the end. That he was the odd one out, that I was like Dad and that if he might have been close to anyone it would have been to the one person who was no longer there. (And he was right in that; Dad and I had an understanding even in our silence, from which he was excluded, and that was in our nature, in the dynamic, and there was nothing any of us could have done about it.)

  'I saw her, when I ran away. I did. I saw her.'

  He spoke flatly, without force. The French windows were open and there was the sound of summer outside, yet his voice resounded between us.

  'You didn't. It's not true.'

  He went upstairs to his room. He removed himself so completely that he didn't even have to slam the door. I heard his radio start up and knew that he had cut himself off as effectively as by any violence.

  It was such a big lie he couldn't ever go back on it.

  I was going to write to Peter. Give him the facts, the history and the circumstantial clues, let him make out of them what story he will. See, he could say then. Even if he does not say the words I would hear them in him and that would be the same. Peter's old dry tone. A bitter self-justification. He was right, we were right to sense that she was not who she said she was. That there was something there to be discovered. So, she might have been a spy, a plant, a sleeper, after all.

  But there's more to it than that. There's something else. It comes to me now. Strange, how things can suddenly make sense in the darkness; that there can be clarity in the dark that isn't there in the day. I see how important it was. It hadn't seemed to matter much before.

  'Say she's Polish, if anyone asks you, at school or any-where.'

  He has come home tough from his first term away at school. He is eight, only just eight since he is young for his year. He tells me like it's great advice he's offering but I don't see the point of it.

  'What's Polish?'

  'If they notice her accent or anything. Polish is OK. They don't mind that. And they can't tell the difference.'

  It was more than a year before she died. She was around and I might have asked her if I didn't understand, but I didn't. This was between Peter and me.

  He didn't like school. He made a big fuss at the end of the holiday, before he went back. It started out by the car when everything was ready, the cases packed and the four of us standing about it ready to get in, Peter all neat in his shorts and his blazer. I didn't hear what began it. I only saw it happen, on the other side of the car, Peter suddenly with his face twisted and punching, my mother holding him, trying to hold him still; and it went back into the house, she pulled him back into the house off the road, quickly so that the neighbours didn't see, and he was kicking her and crying and trying to get away. We followed them into the hall, Dad and I, and the screaming and the row went up the stairs and along the landing and back to his room, and the door slammed and the two of them were in there, and we stood and did nothing but heard him hitting and screaming.

  Nazi, Nazi!

  'Stop it, Daddy. Stop him saying that.'

  But he stood at the bottom of the stairs as if he was stuck there.

  Then she came out and her face was red like I'd never seen it. Her hair was all messed and her print dress was torn where Peter had grabbed it.

  She looked at us as though she didn't know us, or we didn't know her, ran out to the car and drove away.

  Ages later, or it seemed ages later, she came back. She must have driven off somewhere and parked, and fixed her hair and her face in the driver's mirror. I could see her doing that, in a place where you could drive off the road into the woods. Head raised, taking out from her bag comb, compact, lipstick, looking herself over in the narrow strip of mirror. Doing that, and composing herself, carrying herself when she came back with such dignity that the tear in her dress hardly showed. Dad took Peter to school and I went along too. She stayed behind then and all the times afterwards, and didn't even go to the school when sports day came round.

  Dad was surprisingly soft about it. I thought he would have been more angry. He got the story off Peter in the car. How when they played games at school they made Peter be a dead German. He had to be dead from the very beginning of the game, not even getting the chance to die. Just lying where they told him to be, where they said they'd shot him, on the floor or under the table or in the mud. It's not fair, he said. I don't even get to have a gun.

  I have thrown away the postcard I had started. There is another that shows Immanuel Kant's death mask, which is kept on a velvet-covered pedestal in an upstairs room in the restored section of the cathedral.

  Dear Peter, There's almost nothing to see here. The war and the Russians eradicated it all. All that's left are a few dismal ruins and poor old Kant, who was the only German inhabitant that Soviet ideology could permit to remain. Back to Berlin tomorrow. Love, Anna.

  That's barely enough. The card's only half filled. But it will serve the purpose. I shall leave it at that. Peter has moved on, after all. Peter got away, remade himself somewhere else. He is the one who takes after her, not I.

  I shall go back to bed. I shall try to sleep again now. I heard an ambulance come outside but the noise has subsided. I have set my alarm. In the morning I must wake early. I shall take a taxi, an official one that has been ordered by the hotel, back to the station, back through the last I shall see of this place. If I have not slept enough I can sleep more on the train, sleep across Poland.

  5

  It is the first weekend in May. I have returned to the same hotel but this morning when I came out the Berlin streets seemed quite different from before; so many people out, all dressed in fresh colours, the cafis alive on the wide pavements, upright bicycles gliding by. In the centre of the nearby platz a fat man in a red shirt was playing gentle football with a boy and it was as if they were performing for the circle of idlers on the benches and on the spring grass. There was a market around the platz; a barrel organ, bright stalls of food and clothes. I was tempted and bought a cotton blouse I saw hanging on a stall, not even trying it on. It is a bit flimsy, not really my style, but perhaps I shall wear it on a hot summer's day. It would be so light to wear in the heat, and today comes as a reminder of what summer can be.

  A fresh-faced girl ran the stall. I think that she made the clothes herself.

  'What a lovely day.'

  'Yes,' she said. 'It has only just come like this. This is the first weekend that it has not been raining, all of this spring. Even when there has been a fine day in the week, when the weekend comes it has not been so.'

  That explains the lightness of the city. I had not expected such lightness here.

  Before the Brandenburg Gate stands a man dressed and painted entirely in yellow with a yellow tulip in his hand, absolutely still. Passers-by stop and fidget and watch him, and throw money into the yellow bag at his feet.

  On the other side of the Gate stands a giant sculpted car painted a solid shining silver. A girl in sunglasses climbs on to it and poses for a photograph where Russian soldiers once posed on tanks.

  At the new Holocaust Memorial children play hide-and-seek within the forest of granite blocks. Their laughter travels up and down the aisles where others wander and reflect or sit and take the sun.

  In the Tiergarten the lilac is out.

  There was a clump of lilac in the garden at home, just where you walked through into the orchard, and my mother used to cut it, early, when the buds were fat but you could hardly see their colour. They opened fast once you brought them into the warm. There was a day like this, at this time of year but not I think such a fine day. It was just a mild, ordinary English day in May. We were in the sitting room and my mother was arranging lilac in a wide blue vase.

  My mother has spread the stems on newspaper on the floor, and she cuts each one to length with secateurs and hammers the woody base as she has shown me how to do, so that it can more easily take up water. She is singing, a song without words
as it seems neither German nor English.

  To the memory though there are words. (If you follow a memory through, words grow in it, but you can never be quite sure whether they come from the memory or from the imagination.)

  'Did I ever tell you, Anna, that we had white lilac for our wedding?'

  'Did you have a white dress too?'

  'No. Only a cocktail dress someone gave me, and I was up half the night altering it.'

  'Then it wasn't white.'

  'It was only the lilac that was white. And the snow. That was the lovely thing, you see. It was December and it was snowing. We got engaged in May but we had to wait all that time until the papers came through. Your father said that he would arrange for flowers. He was wonderfully sure about it although I could not imagine where he was going to get them from, in December. And he found lilac. It must have been grown in a hothouse. You would not have thought there could be such a thing as lilac in Berlin that time of year.'

  I read this line recently: Many trees and bushes, particularly chestnuts and lilacs, had a second flowering in Hamburg in the autumn of 1943 a few months after the great fire. After the firestorm, the bombing, the trees flowered. The thought was deeply comforting but I could not say then precisely why.

  When the girl - no, I do not see my mother as a girl, but as a young woman, by her sophistication -when the young woman comes to the city it is still winter. It is the winter of 1947 - the winter before she will be married - and the weather has been exceptionally hard. Each morning there are dead pulled out on to the pavements: the bodies of those who have frozen during the night in the cellars and shacks in which they slept. The only mercy of the cold is that it shrouds the hideousness of the ruins, of what they are, and what they represent. Snow turns rubble wastes into fields of dunes, smashed blocks into Rhineland castles. Icicles hang before gaping windows like black-market diamanté.

  She wears a felt hat pulled low on her head, a scarf wrapped round her neck, a thick woollen coat belted tight. She walks tidily, briskly, picking a sure way across the patches of ice and the packed snow. She walks faster than those on the street about her, weaving past almost as if they were things; as if she does not see them, their dull eyes and their shuffling and their hunger. She passes a queue, queues. This is the morning and it is the time for queues. Almost everyone but herself is carrying something, an empty bag, a box, a bucket. She has only a small purse clenched under her arm.

  She comes to an entrance, checks the address against a paper from her pocket. The building's façadeh as superficial damage and its number has been lost but a board has been put up to identify it. It is a substantial building. There is an archway, a hall with a staircase leading off on either side, pieces of coloured glass in the windows intact where they have been sheltered beneath the arch. Through the archway, a quiet open courtyard, and beyond that a second arch and another, smaller courtyard so narrow that the height of the building suddenly towers above the space.

  Here there is a desk at the foot of the flight of stairs, a woman in uniform to check her papers and direct her to the second floor. Her papers still have a crispness to them. They will soon be so handled, in this city of checkpoints and checks and coupons and passes, that they will begin to acquire the texture of cloth.

  Her steps sound on the stairs. From above comes a hum of English voices, a sound that she follows from the landing and along the corridor to the open door of the office. She is standing in the room a moment before anyone notices her. There is time to take in the strange normality of the scene, the orderly activity, the rustle of papers, the muffled thud of typewriter keys on interleaved paper and carbon, the smells of coffee and Virginia tobacco, and most of all, the warmth. It is like coming to an oasis.

  The typist looks up. Hello, love, you must be the new girl they sent. Take off your coat then and tell us who you are.

  Beneath the coat she is wearing a brown suit, nicely tailored. Nothing special but the typist's glance reminds her that she looks good in it. It has a prettier cut than an ATS uniform and it serves an equal purpose. Coming from what she has come from makes you appreciate the value of good tailoring. It is dignity. Identity. It is an assertion against chaos. It holds a person together.

  There is tea, and sugar to put in it. Biscuits. She takes one. Here, take more than that, love, take a few. The typist puts out half a dozen on a plate. You'll be hungry. Everyone's hungry in this city, and it's all the worse, isn't it, in the cold?

  She has learnt the language well. She understands what this woman says but as yet she can speak only precise monosyllables in response. It will not take her long to acquire an ease with it, idiomatic ease, though her German accent will always remain noticeable. She will be helped in this by the tall man who has a desk at the far end of the office, by the window. He will give her words, phrases, an understanding of English irony, soften her too-punctilious grammar. Yet for now he appears to be the one person in the office who has not yet seen her, sitting bent over his work with the snowlight from the window falling across him.

  She speaks to him first at lunchtime, in the canteen downstairs. He is tall, but stands with a diffident hunch that seems an attempt to make himself smaller. His look is vague, his smile light. He hands her a bowl of soup. He speaks to her in German that is almost perfect. He studied in Germany before the war. He is one of the few British she will meet who have a sympathy for the place, its landscape and even its people. But she does not know that yet, only she sees the hands that cup the soup bowl and the thought comes to her that if they were to touch her they would touch her softly as they would a wounded bird.

  It is good that he does not ask her questions. He chats, pauses, breaks up his piece of bread and drops it into his soup. In the silences the words rise that she might but will not say. The past she has known that would answer to his past: places, sights, rooms, faces. The other past that she knows as a list, the trail of facts that lies behind a person with a particular name. He does not appear to mind what she withholds. Perhaps this is a man to whom she will never have to explain herself, with whom she can simply be. Then he speaks again. I'm not really a soldier, you know, though they've got me in uniform now. Spent most of the war behind a desk. And the first couple of years I was teaching - German, of all things - at a school in the depths of the country. He names a place that she has never heard of. She pictures it green, with hills.

  She fixes on it in that moment. She will come to a place like that. In a place like that the past will be a great distance away.

  * * *

  Is that how it went? All that matters will be the present and the future, and the rest will be put away: whoever she was, whatever brought her to precisely this place, this city, this office and no other. This is what everyone is doing, all about them. What the rubble women have been doing since the moment the war came to an end, out on the streets clearing the debris, picking out from the ruins the bricks that are whole and chipping them clean, piling them in stacks ready for rebuilding, the stacks that have lined her path here this morning, that are to be found all across the city. This is what the whole world is doing: clearing, forgetting, reconstructing.

  The Tiergarten lies at the heart of the city and at the centre of the devastation. The war and its aftermath have laid it bare, barer than the ravaged districts about it because of the systematic actions of men that have followed on the bombs, the axes that felled the trees, first for firing lines and later, in the winter just passed, for firewood. Their stumps stand like gravestones, receding into the flat distance. There are craters that were made not by bombs but by human hands with spades, as even the roots of the trees were dug out for burning. Areas of soil between them have been cleared, dug over to be planted with potatoes. Soon as the snow was gone the gardeners came and turned the centre of the city into a peasant field. Coated, scarved and aproned figures came and worked with bent backs, broke the ground, heaped the soil, then brought the seed potatoes they had saved even through the winter of frost and hunger, pu
t them in around the week of Easter. There is an appropriate resurrection in the planting of potatoes at Easter.

  By May their rounded leaves show above the soil. (The knowledge there to those who grow them of new tubers about to form, spread underground.) Open to the sun, the Tiergarten begins to heal. A soft green line in the distance shows where the zoo lies, where a few trees have survived though almost all of its animals are dead of starvation and eaten, many of them, by the starving. And here and there, where there are hollows and about the ponds, are remnants of thickets, and undergrowth that is all the more profuse for the loss of the canopy that used to shade it. Bracken begins to emerge, touch-me-nots, woodland plants, shining grass.

  The Englishman walks beside the girl. He does not touch her and yet his step is so adjusted to hers that the connection between them is clear as if his arm is about her. His head leans to hers, just so slightly, his whole body turns by a few degrees towards her when she speaks; there is a care to him - or perhaps this is an effect produced by his height, for he is tall, much taller than she is - that suggests that he is her protector as much as her lover. The girl looks ahead, looks about her in a lively way, only sometimes looking directly to him, poised as if she is dancing in the light of the attention that he is giving her. There are other soldiers out with their girls, but this couple stand out. This particular girl is strikingly attractive, dark hair falling back in waves from her face. (She wears no hat because of the warmth of the spring sun.) And the man wears his uniform amateurishly, for he did not fight in the war, with a bookish, desk-bound look that sets him apart.