Confession with Blue Horses

by Sophie Hardach

  ‘Aaron!’ It was Bernd, who had just stepped out of the lift and seemed genuinely pleased to see him. ‘How’s it going? Schnitzel time?’

  11

  Ella

  A Line Is a Dot that Went for a Walk

  Berlin 2010

  DISMANTLING MY LIFE IN London had been shockingly easy. I’d sublet the boat to an acquaintance from art school. I told the agency to put my shifts on hold for now. It’s not that I’d expected people to mourn my departure, gnash their teeth, drive a pair of oxen through Deptford Creek to pacify the Gods for my journey. But still, it was strange to be let go quite so easily. After all my back and forth with Tobi, the actual trip to Berlin was the simplest thing, with a lightness to it, like a sparrow hopping off a window sill.

  Through another art-school acquaintance I found a cheap room in Berlin; a Canadian friend of hers was on holiday and happy to let out her place. All the world’s artists were in Berlin, of course, to the point where it seemed that places like London and New York must be full of ghost studios, empty easels, abandoned lumps of clay, because everyone had upped sticks and moved to Neukölln. This drift towards Berlin had annoyed me for some time, for no good reason other than that I thought the city was mine alone, mine to feel nostalgic about, mine to revive through memories of Socialist bathtubs. Still, I took it as a good omen that the room was in an artists’ residence in Prenzlauer Berg.

  The residence was in a former umbrella factory, with studios at the back, an exhibition space downstairs and private rooms upstairs. Above the entrance hung a perspex box with an old black umbrella inside, presumably the old factory’s lone survivor.

  Two men, curator types in black turtlenecks and horn-rimmed glasses, were standing in the entrance hall and discussing a huge, garish painting in screaming pinks and greens.

  ‘That’s a lot of wall power, right there,’ one of them said in an American accent.

  ‘The best thing is, it doesn’t show anyone shitting or fucking, so you can hang it in the lobby of a bank.’

  ‘Or a hotel.’

  ‘Berlin is so hot right now.’

  ‘Did you know he painted this with a fire hose?’

  This was precisely the sort of scene I had been trying to avoid in London, and now it had followed me to Berlin. Wall power. Why couldn’t I make something with wall power? Why couldn’t I make something that would dazzle people in turtlenecks? Then again, I shouldn’t care what other people thought. An artist should be like wood, let herself be burnt up in a creative blaze, indifferent to criticism and praise. I am but a log, that would be my daily mantra from now on.

  My room was small but pleasant, with a bed, a desk and a chair, and a graffito of an umbrella on the wall. There was something distinctly cell-like about it, though the window offered a nice view of roofs and courtyards. I had packed Oma Trude’s green gaberdine coat, along with the photo of the blue horses and my mother’s journal.

  When I came back from the archive, I texted my brother and he called right away.

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘They showed me her file, or what’s left of it. I read a few lines from an interrogation, and that was pretty much it. There wasn’t anything about Heiko, not in the bit I saw, but there might be more coming.’ I decided to gloss over this part of my visit. Tobi would disapprove of my little arrangement with Archive Aaron. My brother hated secrecy, subterfuge, anything like that. ‘Listen, there’s so much Mama never told us about her trip to Berlin. She never mentioned this archive, never mentioned her file. I have a feeling she got a lot further than we think.’

  ‘You think she found him?’ The excitement in his voice took me by surprise. Always, always Tobi had been the one cautioning us, muttering platitudes about letting bygones be bygones, letting people live their lives. Always he had hinted, or even said outright, that looking for Heiko was about our own need, that it was selfish in a way.

  ‘I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure she found something. Otherwise, why leave us that letter from the archive?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Tobi?’

  ‘Yes.’ Another silence. ‘Could be.’

  ‘It’s not like he just vanished. There are people who know what happened back then, there’s a paper trail. I’ll try to think who else I could talk to while I’m here.’

  ‘Ella?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That interrogation you read…’ He lowered his voice. ‘Was it horrible?’

  I paused. ‘There wasn’t anything that would surprise you. It was just weird to see it all written down. They said to her – it was something like, you’ll never forget this. No – we’ll be in your mind always. That was it. We’ll be in your mind always, we’ll make ourselves at home there. But we knew that anyway, right?

  Tobi said softly in German, and somehow this broke my heart: ‘Arme Mama.’ Because when Tobi spoke German, he sounded like a little boy. He didn’t know how to speak grown-up German at all.

  *

  It was the mid-nineties, in London, and Mama and I were sitting on the sofa and watching a documentary together. Friends in Germany had recorded it and sent us the video. There was no internet to speak of in those days, no online forum where parents could meet and swap information. The documentary was about families like ours, East German dissidents who were trying to trace their stolen children. Many of them were told that it was too late, the children had been adopted by nice families. One of the social workers still had a portrait of Honecker in her office.

  A handful of the parents did manage to track down their children, and found that they had grown fond of their adoptive families. If they remembered their birth parents at all, it was as people who had abandoned them. They clung to their adoptive parents, hid their faces, shrank away from the crying, desperate women reaching out for them. There was one mother in particular, who had finally traced her little daughter and arranged a reunion. It went terribly wrong. She argued with the adoptive mother, and at one point slapped her across the face and screamed: ‘You red pig! You stole my child, you red pig!’ The little girl hugged her adoptive mother’s legs and begged her to make the scary woman go away.

  My mother stiffened as we watched this scene, but did not say anything. When the credits rolled, she put her hand on my arm and asked in a low, almost inaudible voice – as if half hoping I would not hear the question – ‘Do you think Heiko…’

  ‘… misses us?’ I offered.

  ‘No, no. I mean… do you think he would be frightened of me?’ She sniffed, rubbed her nose, sniffed again.

  ‘I don’t know, Mama,’ I said, staring straight ahead at the rolling credits. ‘I don’t know.’

  He would be about ten now. A ten-year-old boy playing football. Running home to show his adoptive mother his grazed knee, letting her comfort him, just like this little girl in the documentary. A ten-year-old boy climbing trees. I realised I could only think of Heiko in these generic images, doing generic little-boy things, and that I had no idea what he was actually like now. Perhaps he hated football and was afraid of heights. And the loving adoptive mother? I could not contemplate the alternative. I needed to believe that whatever his circumstances, there was someone who cared for him, who comforted him when he was sad.

  My mother shook her head, as if she’d read my thoughts. ‘I’m his mother! Would he really be frightened of his own mother?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Would it be better, do you think, if I let him be? Would it be better if I stopped looking for him?’

  She wanted to hear encouragement, she wanted to hear me say that she should not give up, that she must keep going. But I could not bring myself to say what she wanted to hear. I felt very tired, unable to help her, angry with myself for being unable to help her. And so we sank into our habitual silence instead.

  After a while, I went into the kitchen and started making dinner. My mother moved over to her desk and buried herself in her manuscripts and books. I warmed up some leftove
r soup and sliced the end of a loaf of bread, and as I was slicing the bread an image came to me, a moment from the past: Heiko chewing on a slice of bread. He looked at me with his big eyes, reached into his mouth, took out the mushy piece and offered it to me. ‘No thank you,’ I said, ‘I’ve already eaten.’ So he drove the piece around his plate instead: ‘Auto!’

  I put down the bread knife. A deep sadness passed through me, an ache I could not have put into words.

  *

  A few nights later I came home, opened the front door and saw Mama’s coat and shoes on the floor, as if she had stormed in and flung them off. I looked around the house. She was not in her bedroom, she was not in the bathroom. The bathroom tiles were wet and there was a pile of clothes on the floor. She was not in the kitchen, she was not in the living room. She was not in my room, she was not in Tobi’s room. Then I thought I heard a noise from the cellar.

  She could not possibly be down there: Mama avoided the cellar. Mama was afraid of the dark. She never went into the cellar, not even to get fizzy water or potatoes; she always sent me or Tobi. Once Tobi had thrown a tantrum and asked why she couldn’t just get her own fizzy water, and I had explained it to him, quietly, so she could not hear: Mama mag den Keller nicht. Mama doesn’t like the cellar.

  I heard a noise again, a sob. Not from the kitchen, not from the living room.

  I opened the cellar door and shone my torch inside.

  There in the dark crouched my mother. She was half-naked, wrapped only in a towel, her wet hair dripping on the earthen floor. She was hugging her knees and crying. Long red scratches ran down her face and arms. Her nails were bloody.

  ‘Mama, komm.’ I kneeled down next to her, put my arms around her, tried to warm her. ‘Bitte, Mama, steh auf. Steh doch auf.’

  But she did not want to stand up.

  ‘Don’t punish yourself, please,’ I said in English, but it was as if she could not hear me. She was not really there. All I could do was fetch a blanket, cover her with it and hold her.

  *

  My mother’s old prison was now a museum. I had looked it up online; it was maybe a couple of hours on foot. The walk through my old neighbourhood would be useful. It might bring back details, fill in the gaps in my memory.

  Prenzlauer Berg was looking very cheerful. Gone was the tang of coal fires and cabbage soup. The balconies were firmly attached now, and decorated with spinning pinwheels and anti-nuclear posters. A red sun on yellow ground, clenching its fist in protest: Atomkraft Nein Danke! Fathers strapped chocolate-smeared children into buggies. Women swished past on fixed-gear bikes, reflective clips flashing from their ankles. A bearded man in a panama hat sat outside a cafe, carving a clog. There was, in fact, a surprisingly large number of people in wooden clogs about. Another trend I had missed, clearly. Everyone cycled on the broad pavement instead of the road, cheerfully ringing the pedestrians out of the way.

  There were mezze platters on the tables outside the cafes, and blackboards that promised Cold-brew coffee here, in English. The shops opened at twelve and shut at three. And there were so many children in this neighbourhood: balancing on metal scaffolding, crying over a dropped ice cream, wobbling ahead on their own little bikes, their heads enlarged by duck-yellow helmets. It was all rather fun and uplifting and yet it unsettled me because I could not find myself, or my family, in any of this. It was not just the yoga studios and the restored facades and the ivy winding in and out of the balconies. It was the people. Everyone was so young and healthy-looking. No dimly lit Kneipen where men sat and drank schnapps.

  I soon got lost. I used to know every dog and lamp post in this neighbourhood. No part of it was alien to me. In my mind I could find our old home within seconds, I was right there. There was Frau Rachmann, holding out my lost woollen glove in her paper hand: ‘I think a little goblin must have found it on the stairs,’ she said with a smile. ‘Shall we go look for it?’ And we looked for it, and found a piece of chocolate instead that the goblin had left there for me in a corner of the hallway.

  There was Frau Minsky with her mop, there were the bullet holes in the facade. So vivid before my inner eye. But in real life? In real life, they were gone and I was lost.

  ‘A line is a dot that went for a walk,’ Paul Klee said. ‘Moving freely, without a goal.’ That was me, a dot without direction.

  I asked a man with a beard: ‘Entschuldigung, wo ist die Dunckerstraße?’ And he replied in English, with a Liverpudlian lilt: ‘Sorry love, I don’t speak German.’

  I asked another man with a beard: ‘Entschuldigung, wo ist die Dunckerstraße?’ And he replied in an American accent: ‘Sorry, I don’t speak German.’

  This was infuriating, and rather embarrassing. How would I ever find Heiko if I could not even find our old street? But I refused to ask them in English. I had spent years assimilating to the English in London, I would not now assimilate to them in Berlin.

  ‘Entschuldigung…’

  ‘Sorry sweetheart, I don’t speak German.’

  Panic rose inside me. It was like one of those nightmares where you come home and no one knows who you are. Your family asks who this stranger is at their table, and your dog growls with suspicion. I walked on fast, sure that this must be the one, here was the Helmholtzplatz after all, here was the bike shop that used to be a grocery with empty shelves, here had been Heiko’s nursery.

  Oma and I had picked him up from there in the winter, and on the way home he had pointed at all the lit windows in the dark and said, light, light, light, light. So many lights. Licht, licht, licht. So if this was the former nursery – another yoga studio – and back there was the Helmholtzplatz – then our street should be over there.

  I broke into a half-trot, turned left, turned right, turned left again, and came out not in our street, but at the Bösebrücke.

  The smooth broad bridge stretched from Prenzlauer Berg to Wedding. Cars swooshed back and forth. The watch tower, the walls and fences, the tall floodlights: ‘All gone!’ as Heiko would have said. (Pushing his plate away: ‘Fertig!’ All gone!)

  The allotments were still there. From the bridge I could see the tulips and the lilac bushes.

  I walked up to a cluster of black-and-white photos at one end of the bridge. They showed cheering crowds smashing through the Berlin wall. I looked at all the faces but did not recognise anyone.

  Further on, a memorial stone marked the spot where a young man had been shot while trying to escape. So Sandy hadn’t made it up. It was possible now to do this, to find out who had lied and who had told the truth.

  I had not spoken to Sandy since that summer. But it should be fairly easy, I thought, to track her down.

  12

  FOUR COACHES WERE PARKED in front of the prison of Hohenschönhausen. Lanky teenagers spilled out of the coaches, blocked the street and gaped up at the high concrete walls topped with barbed wire. The large metal gate was shut and we had to file through a smaller side gate, past a ticket vendor. I paid six euros for a guided tour. How odd it was to pay for a tour of my mother’s prison. I should at least have asked for a concession!

  It was a bleak day, with a sharp wind that seemed to blow in straight from Siberia. I turned up the collar of my jacket and rubbed my arms. The metal gate rumbled open. I jumped; my mother had detested the sound of metal scratching across stone.

  When someone drags a heavy saucepan across the hob, that metallic screech.

  An entry in her anxiety journal, and this time I could match it to its source. The scraping noise of the gate, the scraping noise of the saucepan. This gate had rumbled shut behind her. Right here, she’d been dragged out of her van. She’d been standing here, in this courtyard, looking up at the grey sky.

  ‘Excuse me?’ One of the teenagers tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Could you take a photo of us?’ He put his arm around his girlfriend and they posed in front of the barbed wire.

  In a way I was glad that there were teenagers around, tour guides, pensioners with pens and notepads, becaus
e it made the place less threatening. One of the guides, a black-haired woman in jeans and a check shirt, held up her red umbrella to signal the start of her tour.

  ‘Is anyone here claustrophobic?’ she asked cheerfully. A couple of people raised their hands. ‘You might want to stay out of the rubber cells then. Any asthma?’ A couple more. ‘Any allergies?’

  One of the older men laughed and mumbled something about health and safety gone mad.

  The guide frowned. ‘Is that a comment or a question?’

  ‘What, we’re not allowed to laugh any more?’

  ‘A comment, then? Thank you. Let’s start with the basement.’ The guide turned her back to the man and herded us down a narrow set of steps, into a maze of underground cells and corridors.

  The prison had the usual Berliner history: built under the Nazis, repurposed by the Soviets, expanded and modernised by the GDR, and finally, opened to the general public in the united Germany. The Nazis had used it as an industrial kitchen for one of their welfare organisations; the Soviets had noticed that the kitchen was ideally suited for imprisoning people. Captured Nazis were among the first inmates, followed by Social Democrats, priests, thieves, murderers, suspected spies and anyone else who stood out. I knew, of course, who the subsequent generation of inmates were: the GDR’s pacifists, dissidents and failed escapees. What surprised me was the guide’s brief aside at the end of her introduction:

  ‘… and after reunification, a few GDR officials were imprisoned here. The head of the Stasi, for example.’

  The older man, the one who had laughed at our guide, gave an eager nod. ‘You see? Pure revenge! Pure spite!’

  The guide sighed. ‘Is that a comment or…’

  ‘The people should know the truth!’ The man thumped the floor with his cane. The guide did her best to ignore him.

  ‘So this …’ – she gestured at the hot, damp cells – ‘… this would have been where the prisoners were held when…’