The Summer of the Bear

by Bella Pollen

  ‘Should we go and say hello?’ Jamie said hopefully.

  ‘No, they might think we’re friendly.’

  ‘Aren’t we friendly?’

  ‘No, we are not. In fact, I’m going to get rid of them.’

  ‘Alba, wait!’ Georgie called, but Alba was already zigzagging down the dunes waving her arms frantically at the small family. The couple looked up.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ Alba stopped, panting, in front of them, ‘. . . but I had to warn you.’

  ‘Goodness, what?’ They frowned.

  ‘You mustn’t let your child play on this beach.’

  The couple stared at her. Alba stared back. They belonged to her least favourite anthropological category of hippy.

  ‘Why on earth not?’ asked the mother.

  ‘Jellyfish.’ Alba made a vague gesture designed to take in not only the entire length of beach, but most of the island too. ‘They’re poisonous this year.’

  ‘Poisonous!’ The couple exchanged a look. ‘In Scotland?’

  ‘Yes, I know, that’s what we thought, but my brother, my beloved little brother Jamie . . .’ she hung her head, ‘. . . well, he was stung a few months ago. The jellyfish were only small, normal looking. No one knew . . . no one could have known.’ She broke off and shamelessly began wailing. The couple, torn between scepticism, the grieving child before them and their own toddler pawing at the sand, perilously close, as it happened, to one of the beach’s many harmless jellyfish, were taking no chances. Hurriedly, they scooped up the baby and thrust a tissue at Alba.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ the woman said, her own eyes brimming. She glanced desperately up and down the beach. ‘Are you all right? Are your parents with you?’

  ‘My mother’s at home and my father . . . well, the thing about my father,’ Alba continued in a tiny voice, ‘is that he’s dead too.’

  The couple reeled back in comic unison.

  A recently deceased parent had its uses, Alba had discovered. The merest reminder of her father’s accident was enough to silence most people and the pity it invoked was a commodity that could be traded for all manner of benefits. A particularly stricken look she’d developed had saved her from school detention on numerous occasions and even the manner of her father’s death could be embroidered or adapted to suit every eventuality. Over the past six months, she’d had him murdered, dying of a brain tumour, executed by the Red Army, falling out of a plane and rotting in a Siberian prison – although this last version had been a mistake, as the idea that he was still alive had made her feel the incomprehensibility of his loss far more than the fact of his death. She hadn’t easily come to grips with the irony of these feelings, until she reminded herself that these fabricated stories were easier to believe than the truth. After all, look at the business her father was in. He knew so much about everything. It stood to reason that buried in all that knowledge was something dangerous, something he might have been killed for.

  ‘How could he have fallen?’ Alba had shouted hysterically that terrible night. ‘People don’t just fall. It doesn’t make sense.’

  Letty had hugged her close, crying herself. ‘It was an accident, darling, no one’s fault, just a terrible, terrible tragedy.’

  And ‘a terrible tragedy’ had effectively been her mother’s last word on the subject. But though Alba had spent the majority of her sentient years ignoring the feelings of others, she was not insensitive when it came to herself. As time went on she picked up on an undercurrent, a certain fear and reluctance on the part of her mother to explain. And not only her mother.

  ‘What do you mean, they want to see you at the embassy?’ she’d demanded of her sister.

  ‘They just do.’

  ‘There has to be a reason. They’re sending a car for you.’

  Georgie had shrugged. ‘They want to know about Berlin.’

  ‘Berlin?’ Alba said indignantly. ‘Did something happen in Berlin?’ It was bad enough she hadn’t been allowed to go herself, but the idea that something noteworthy had occurred there was too much to bear and when Alba caught the hesitation in her sister’s answer, her already narrow synapses closed further, sending a sharp signal to her brain. Information was being kept from her – and it made her spit.

  ‘Oh, my dear child.’ The woman clutched her sandy angel to her breast and grasped her husband’s arm for comfort. ‘Oh, you poor girl. Look, we have a car. Can we take you somewhere? Why don’t we drive you home?’

  Alba had intended to round off the encounter with a theatrical blow of her nose, but suddenly her real feelings converged with her fake ones and she felt the welling up of actual tears behind her eyes. She shook her head and waved them away.

  The thing was, some days it was all she thought about. The how and the why. Her father had died over six months ago. One day he had an office to go to, a suit to wear and a briefcase to carry. He had been a man with a job, a family to love and a set of ethics to live by. One moment blood had been pumping round his veins, his brain had been a mass of connecting thoughts, each one sparking ideas, evaluating problems, offering solutions. In the next moment, a moment that would only ever belong to him, he was gone. So what had he seen, her father, as he fell? The faces of his children? Had he flashed through his early years in Germany, then moved on to the cloisters of Eton, Canterbury Quad at Christ Church, the metal latrines of the army quarters? Had he tasted again his first kiss and subjected each of his life’s successes and disappointments to the millisecond of re-examination allotted them? Alba thought not. Her father was a practical man. In the time left to him he would have tried to solve the problem of his impending death, considered how best to survive. Ingrained in his diplomatic nature was the desire to weigh all options evenly but perhaps this time, this one time, the necessity for a decision had come too fast.

  ‘That was quick.’ Georgie was always appalled by, yet at the same time secretly admiring of her younger sister’s behaviour. ‘Did you tell them there was a grizzly loose on the island?’

  ‘A grizzly?’ Alba quickly wiped her nose on her sleeve and swiped the tears from her eyes.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Georgie, they’d never have believed that.’

  30

  East Berlin

  The trip had been the month before her father died. It was the first time Nicky Fleming had ever taken any of his children away with him on business and Georgie experienced a degree of smugness at being the chosen one – a smugness which grew exponentially after Alba became inconsolable on discovering she was not to be invited. But then Alba did not boast her elder sister’s credentials. On 13 August 1961, at the precise moment that armed military units of the GDR sealed East Berlin from the rest of the world and began construction of the wall, Georgiana Gisela Fleming was speeding through the underpass of her mother’s womb towards a freshly changed hospital bed in St Thomas’s, London. So it was Georgie’s wall, too, and though conceived as a prototype, a semi-porous trial run of barbed wire and oppression, by the time the Flemings arrived in Germany it had grown into an impenetrable concrete barrier incarcerating East Germany’s seventeen million inhabitants in an open prison of material and civil deprivation. Yet, even though the division of Germany was a national convulsion, it had not been the first thing Georgie studied when she’d graduated to the Bonn High School, nor, could it be said, was the war, with its fifty-five million dead, placed top of her educational agenda. This hadn’t bothered Georgie. Despite the shared birthday, she had little genuine enthusiasm for the subject, and had begun studying it with the sole purpose of impressing her father. There were almost always references to East Berlin in the General-Anzeiger, snippets for her to latch on to during those agonizing newspaper trials on the chaise longue, and so she’d feigned an interest in Trotsky’s perpetual revolution. She’d memorized quotes from Lenin, Churchill, Stalin, Truman and Hitler, those venerable fathers of Germany’s bizarre game of modern-day politics, but in the end it was the Wall itself, with its metal plating, electric fences and cr
eepy observation towers, that caught her imagination for real. She had found herself devouring stories of houses cut in two, of families leaping from the window of one country to the soil of another. Bonn was full of refugees who had fled East Germany at one time or another and her grandmother, Gisela, had been one of them. On surviving the river crossing, she had been rescued by widower Lieutenant Peter Fleming, who had bound her inflamed leg and married her within the year. By the time Georgie turned fourteen, the Wall wasn’t just a physical divide between two opposing ideologies, it had become the very embodiment of danger and romance and she declared herself desperate to see it.

  ‘Not now,’ her father had said, ‘but one day, yes.’

  ‘One day, when?

  ‘Maybe when you’re seventeen,’ he’d joked, ‘and beginning to get some lefty ideas, perhaps then I’ll take you.’

  ‘When I’m seventeen? Promise?’ She watched him closely as he hesitated, weighing up the commitment.

  ‘Yes, all right. I promise.’

  It was the first and only time she thought he might break his word. Whether after three years, he’d forgotten. Whether it was the sheer inconvenience of having her tag along on one of his draining Schyndell trips, she didn’t know – neither did it matter. She was holding a trump card in the form of a written IOU posted in her promise box and eventually she was forced to play it.

  There had been much sucking of bureaucratic teeth when Nicky had applied for permission. ‘A most unusual request,’ the head of the delegation had apparently declared, but he’d turned out to be a fatherly old figure and eventually a concession had been made. Georgie had been ecstatic. East Berlin was West Berlin’s evil twin and she was to go there for real. She was to lay flowers on her great-grandfather’s grave, spend solo time with her father and Alba’s tears be damned.

  The first thing that struck Georgie about East Berlin was the fine yellow dust hanging in the air, which might have been mistaken for gold mist had it not been for the phosphorous smell that accompanied it.

  ‘Lignite,’ her father said as she wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s why car engines here are so noisy. That little Wartburg, for instance,’ he said as a tin can of a taxi heaved alongside them emitting a succession of scatological explosions from its exhaust, ‘is definitely running on lignite.’

  ‘Why do they use it, if it smells so bad?’

  ‘Because East Germany is rich in the stuff and they’re not allowed to import oil. In fact they’re not allowed to import coffee, fruit or anything. That’s why we filled up the Peugeot on the other side.’

  Her father almost always flew to Berlin, but at the last minute he’d changed his mind. ‘A road trip will be more interesting. We’ll make it fun, don’t worry.’

  Privately, Georgie recognized that her teenage brain had yet to make the necessary connections to appreciate the romance of a ‘road trip’. Nevertheless, she had loved having her father to herself and on the journey there he’d done what he did best, chatted and joked, yet somehow managing in the process to impart a folder full of information – did she know, for example, that one in every six citizens was an informant? That hotels and taxis were uniformly bugged? That there existed a mortuary garage at one of the checkpoints where coffins were searched to confirm the occupants were truly dead?

  As they approached the border, however, the atmosphere changed. Georgie had watched her passport travelling along a conveyor belt towards the processing building and experienced a strong urge to snatch it back and run. The border area was a no-man’s-land, the police manning it looked like robots, prototypes for humans before God had breathed heart and compassion into their souls. The allied checkpoints, the East German Control point, the dismal corridor of the autobahn, the barbed wire, watchtowers and armed guards; it had felt like navigating her own nightmare with no hope of waking. The whole process had taken forever. When finally they’d been reunited with their papers and allowed to continue on their way, her father had turned to her and grinned. ‘So, how was it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your first experience of totalitarianism?’

  Georgie had shrugged. Just before the trip, a rogue thought had crept into her head. Had the insane tyranny of the Cold War been exaggerated? Was it really so awful, this eternal battle where nothing appeared to happen and nobody took up arms? But that was before she’d seen the wall. It was the Grenztnauer, her father told her, the third wall, a new and improved version. Forty-five thousand sections of reinforced concrete bordering the raked gravel of the ‘death strip’. Here was no romantic divide separating East Germany’s Tristans from their West German Isoldes. Here was a sheer unscalable monument to fear.

  At least that’s what she told Norrell and Porter.

  The questioning was routine, her mother had tried to reassure her. She was not to be scared. They were just ordinary people doing their job by an unbendable set of rules.

  ‘But what do they want to know about Berlin?’

  ‘In any government investigation there are bound to be questions. It would be the same process for the Ambassador or anyone else.’

  ‘You do not tell my daughter about the letter,’ she had said to Porter and Norrell. ‘If you so much as put the idea of suicide in her head, I will come after you with everything I’ve got left – and please don’t underestimate what that is.’ It had been a bluff, of course. She had nothing left, but for the first time she had glimpsed a modicum of respect in their eyes.

  It had not occurred to Letty that Georgie had anything to say to MI6 about her trip to East Germany. It had not occurred to Georgie either, but sitting at the table, facing the two men, it was easy to imagine herself back in Berlin. There she had felt under the same scrutiny – from the fish-eyed stare of the VoPos, from the guards staring down from their watchtowers. Even on the road home, she had been unable to shake the feeling that someone was watching them, listening to them, breathing over them.

  Porter had directed the questioning.

  Who had her father met? Had there been contact with anyone outside the convention? A cup of coffee? A chance encounter on the street? Georgie responded with the polite minimum. Her father’s meetings in East Berlin had to be logged with the authorities in advance, that much she’d learned. ‘The Russians and East Germans attached to the delegation are all spies,’ he had told her, ‘so they naturally assume everyone else is too.’

  ‘Torsten,’ she told Porter. ‘Torsten was the only person my father met with.’

  Up until that moment she’d answered them truthfully enough. How her father had checked them into the drab state-owned Interhotel. How the next morning, at the meeting of delegations, she’d been left to read her book in Room IV of some government headquarters. How the Peugeot had broken down and been towed to a garage . . .

  Torsten was her father’s friend on the delegation, a pleasant-looking man, with brown curly hair and an intermittent stutter that occasionally burst over his conversation like machine-gun fire. The conversation had been as interesting as watching sand trickle through an egg timer. Georgie read one chapter of The Mayor of Casterbridge while they reminisced about a convention in Birmingham where they had originally met, and a second chapter while they worked their way through the usual grown-up pedantries of their respective lives in Stockholm and Bonn. Nicky, however, was well aware that his daughter’s expectation of the trip had been disappointed and, noticing she was restless, tapped the cover of her book with his pen. ‘You realize we’re being watched, don’t you?’ he whispered.

  Georgie looked up.

  ‘Ever since we sat down.’

  ‘Really?’ she said doubtfully. She knew her father well enough to suspect she was being set up.

  ‘Trust no one,’ he winked. ‘They’re all watching you.’

  ‘Who?’ she said, in spite of herself.

  ‘Stasi.’

  Instinctively, Georgie hunched behind her book. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘That’s one there.’ Her father tilted his head t
owards an ordinary-looking individual sitting at a nearby table. ‘Another there.’

  Georgie peered through to the reception area, where a man standing under an exit sign was attempting to straighten a map. ‘They don’t look like policemen,’ she said uncertainly.

  ‘Stasi are chameleons,’ Torsten said. ‘They understand how to blend in.’

  ‘So how can you tell?’

  ‘Oh, after a while, you get a nose for them,’ he said airily.

  ‘We’ve been under observation since the moment we arrived in Berlin,’ her father said. ‘Today, despite the fact that Torsten has attempted to dress inconspicuously, a precise record will have been made of what he is wearing, down to his rather dubious choice of footwear.’ Torsten smiled the weary smile of a foreigner acknowledging himself to be the butt of an English joke. Georgie looked at the Swede’s muddy-coloured nylon jumper, his khaki knit tie and orange shoes, which didn’t look as if they were made of leather. If he had dressed to blend in, then fashion in East Germany was more woefully behind the times than she’d thought.

  ‘The fact that we are here in this restaurant will have been logged, along with a record of exactly what we chose to eat. I, for instance, took milk in my coffee. You’ve been reading Thomas Hardy. All this information will be stored in a file, which, later on, some official will study and analyse.’

  ‘Are you being serious?’

  ‘Nobody is anything but serious in this city.’ Torsten smiled grimly.

  ‘But why do they care?’

  ‘Guess.’ Her father’s eyes flickered almost imperceptibly towards Torsten and Georgie felt her pulse quicken.

  ‘Really,’ she breathed. She turned to him. ‘You are?’

  Torsten put a finger to his lips and glanced meaningfully at her school notebook, lying on the table. Georgie snatched up her pen. Are you a spy? she scribbled, then, fully expecting Torsten to laugh at her, blushed.