Karen glanced at her: the lines on the woman’s face had hardened into crevices. The shop’s shadowy interior no longer felt charming but choked with a history Karen feared unpicking.
Hannah coughed. ‘Perhaps she was one of the… Glücklichen.’
The lucky ones?
Karen still had dozens of questions, but the older woman’s arms were folded and Hannah was determinedly busy. Karen nodded a goodbye and ducked out onto the street, retracing her steps back to the Kurfürstendamm.
Its bustle bumped and butted, winding the pavement up into a battleground. Karen spun round, her sense of direction wavering. She knew Hannah had softened her grandmother’s words, but Frau Richter’s disapproval had still soured the shop. East and West; capitalists and communists; Jews and non-Jews. Berlin was split into too many layers.
Karen leaned against a lamp post pasted with flyers as face after face whirled past. She closed her eyes as the city spun. How many stories was each person hiding?
How many was her mother?
On any other day, Wilmersdorf’s sleepy suburban streets would have set Karen’s teeth on edge. After the confusion of Richters, she was grateful for their quiet tree-lined familiarity and the luck that had at least left her second destination safe in the West.
From the moment the school trip had been announced, Karen’s life had narrowed to a single point: getting to Berlin and unravelling the mystery of her mother. She had set out with a name and two addresses and no clue about anything, as if solving Liese would be as simple as slotting the pieces into a children’s jigsaw. She hadn’t thought any of it through. She had thought Berlin and her mother’s place in it would unroll like a red carpet simply because she wanted them to. She had learned her history well enough to pass exams and never considered war outside her books. She had been intrigued by the Wall’s haphazard divisions and barely given a thought to the impact of such a brutal dissection on the city and the people it separated. The arrogance of it made her cheeks smart. That and the wasted opportunity in not talking to her father, demanding that he tell her the truth of her mother’s life in Berlin before she came.
Regret stopped her in her tracks, making her long for a phone box and his voice. And then she remembered the reality of how things stood between them; how impossible such a conversation would be long-distance when they had failed so completely to have it face to face. So now here she was, naïve and clueless; stumbling through a broken city, trying to restitch her family. The irony was almost laughable.
The Lindenkirche appeared before Karen was ready for it.
It was a solid-looking white building with a simple cross on the front and a clock tower peeping from behind a curtain of tall, wide-arching trees. Part of her hoped it would be closed. That, if it was open, it would offer no answers. Then she could go home still nursing her anger, feeding it with another secret her father had kept, another piece of her mother he had stolen. Her mother wasn’t Elizabeth, but Liese. She wasn’t English, but German. And now she was also apparently Jewish, trailing a history around that Karen sensed carried shadows she had no frame of reference for. She was not, in fact, anyone Karen knew at all.
She crossed the little square, her mind made up to leave and find her classmates, to see how many glasses of schnapps she could drink before anyone noticed. The church door, however, was open.
I’ll go in but not stay past a minute. It won’t be welcoming. It’ll be stuffy and forbidding, like the one on the base.
Karen sloped inside, expecting darkness and air too dense for anything but whispers. Instead, the walls were pale and creamy and the light dancing blue and green through the long narrow windows took her breath away. She sank into a pew and watched the reflections ripple. It was so quiet, she could hear a bird singing in the trees outside.
She was exhausted and hungry and her head was a jumbled mess. She forced herself to focus on the plainly covered altar and tried to picture a bridegroom standing there, holding the hand of a happily smiling bride. When she added her parents’ faces to the uniform and white dress, the illusion shattered. Tears she had been swallowing for years began pouring; she no longer had the energy to care.
‘Geht es Ihnen gut? Brauchen Sie Hilfe?’
Karen rubbed at her eyes, but the tap wouldn’t turn off again.
The voice continued in an English that carried a slightly transatlantic twang.
‘Are you needing help?’
‘My mother and father were married here.’
If the answer struck the man who had sat down in the opposite pew as peculiar, his tone didn’t show it.
‘And they are dead? Which is why you are crying?’
The handkerchief he handed over blunted some of the directness.
‘My mother is.’
Karen caught sight of the man’s white clerical collar and didn’t know if she should admit it was suicide.
‘She drowned.’
‘I am sorry to hear that. You are English?’
She nodded.
‘But your parents were German – that is why they were married here?’
‘She was, not him; he was a British soldier – he was here in the war.’
Karen sneaked a look at the man’s face. He had soft brown eyes and a patient smile. Her tongue untied.
‘And I didn’t know she was from Berlin. And her name wasn’t what I thought it was. And now I think she was Jewish, which I didn’t know either, but I know that was dangerous here then. And I want to know the truth and no one will help me. And her death wasn’t an accident, it was suicide. And I don’t know why she did it.’
She tumbled to a halt in a fresh wave of tears.
‘Come.’
The priest got up and held out his hand.
‘What is it you English like when everything is falling to pieces?’
Karen sniffed. ‘Tea?’
‘Genau. Exactly. We will have tea. And you will tell me all of this slowly and we will see what is to be done.’
They had tea and a mound of biscuits, which were sugary and thick with chocolate and stopped Karen’s head from aching. She talked without interruption, except when her memories ran too fast for even Father Kristoff’s excellent English. When she finished, she sat back, waiting for a stream of sympathy. His response was not what she expected.
‘All this pain you carry, does your father also feel it as deeply? No, Karen. Wait a moment before you throw away the question and tell me you do not care. All this blame you pour on him, perhaps he deserves it. But I wonder: can you try something for me? Can you think of your father, for a moment, as someone different to this man you are so angry with? Can you try to imagine how it must have been, in 1947, for a young English soldier marrying a young German girl? Not everyone would smile at that, would you agree?’
The question, if not the task, seemed reasonable enough. And she certainly hadn’t thought of the two of them quite in those terms before: Father on the winning side, Mother on the losing. Karen nodded.
‘Good. Thank you. But they married, so there must have been a reason to do it. Couldn’t we believe it was love?’
She wasn’t ready to answer that.
The priest waited a moment but didn’t press her.
‘You said you think he controlled her. Perhaps, again, you are right. But what if we try this in a different way too? What if he was trying to look after her? What if she wanted the quiet and seclusion you think was too much; what if that was what she needed?’