The train was busy, full of chatter Karen tuned out. The image of herself watching through the bedroom door, of her father’s tenderness as he bent over the bed, had triggered others that flew in as crowded as the birds swarming into the linden trees.
Was it Father keeping her mother up at night, stalking through the kitchen and the living room, talking and talking, or was it her who wouldn’t settle? Come away now, pet. She’s not here; she won’t answer. Words that had drifted up the staircase and made no sense, that Karen had pressed down until they were buried and now they nipped at her like nettles. Who was she and why wouldn’t she answer?
And those awkward Saturday evenings: was her mother crying because she didn’t want to go to the dances she got dressed up and ready for, or because she did but the walk to the door was too far? So much of her childhood adjusted around and never questioned.
What if she stayed with you as long as she could?
Father Kristoff had been reclaimed before she could ask what he meant. Before Karen could spill the long-ago-swallowed fear that had resurfaced with his words. That, one day, she would open the bedroom door and the bed would be empty. That the pale figure who could barely find a smile when Karen asked ‘do you need anything?’ but meant ‘do you need anyone?’ would have vanished.
Please, my love, eat something. How many times had Father said it?
You get slimmer by the day – tell us your secret! Her dressmaking clients had twittered it on the doorstep as if her mother’s tiny frame was a goal to aspire to. Except it wasn’t: she was ill. All those days when the face on the pillow was waxen, translucent. When the fingers Karen scrabbled for had no more substance than twigs.
Which is why I was afraid she would vanish and why Father was as frightened as me.
Karen closed her eyes and could have wept for them both.
By the time she got back to the Kurfürstendamm’s jumble, her head was splitting.
The street was lit up and swelling with its night-time traffic, a kaleidoscope of flashing adverts and cinema signs, blaring music and drink-loosened voices. Karen huddled past it all, desperate for sleep and an escape from the collision of emotions the day had let loose. She had lived for years not knowing who her mother was, but she had always thought she knew every inch of her father. Now he was shifting too. This wasn’t what she had asked for. She had made a plan; she had carried it out. She had come to Berlin; she had walked in her mother’s footsteps. She had found a trace of a flesh-and-blood Liese Elfmann, but every answer only led to another question.
Karen stumbled, her head whirling. She shouldn’t have come. She shouldn’t have gone to the dressmaker’s and let herself be spooked by a malicious old lady. She shouldn’t have let the priest open up doors that were doing perfectly well left shut.
She stopped abruptly, swearing back at the man who crashed into her, glad of an excuse to hit out. None of this was fair. If these were her mother’s streets, if Liese Elfmann had become whoever she was in this city, why was she still so hard to pin down? No, it was worse than that.
Stepping back from the chaos, Karen studied the passers-by. Some of them looked the right age to have walked here thirty years ago. They might have known Liese; they might have crossed paths with her. And if she asked any one of them what those days had been like, they would throw another shadow on the pile. Karen had come looking for answers and all she had to show for her searching was a far harder question. If this was the city which had shaped her mother, why had she slipped even further away?
Ask him. Ask your father.
The instruction was so loud, Karen started and looked round to see who had spoken. The crowd carried on oblivious.
Ask your father. At least try.
It wasn’t her mother’s voice. It was her own. The one that she had become so adept at pushing away.
She shook her head, but it kept on coming.
If he’s shifting, why don’t you?
Karen closed her eyes, took a breath and let herself listen. These streets had been Liese’s, but surely they had been Andrew’s too? If even a fraction of what Father Kristoff had suggested was true, didn’t she owe her father the chance to tell her? Didn’t she owe herself the chance to try to change how they were?
She opened her eyes and stepped back onto the pavement, let herself be swept along with the crowd. There was a part of her that had its roots in this city, in these people, and there was a part of her that was as English as her father She had come to Berlin to unlock the past and yet he was its key. He always had been. She needed him to be her father, not her enemy. It was time she grew up and told him that.
Part Two
Seven
Liese
Berlin, August 1939
How can it only be nine months since Kristallnacht?
So much had changed it felt like nine years; it felt like ninety. Liese had stopped looking in the mirror months ago. She didn’t believe a nineteen-year-old would look back at her; she didn’t remember what nineteen meant. She assumed that, a long time ago, she must have imagined being the age she was now. She assumed she had imagined it would bring with it parties and flirtations, kisses and promises. Perhaps even a handful of liaisons, some suitable and some not, before she met the magical ‘one’. If she thought about it now, which she tried her hardest not to do, she also assumed that there were nineteen-year-olds still out there who lived that stardust kind of life. Who had managed to grab more than a fleeting taste of it. Who were able to chalk up the ‘wrong sort of men’ to experience and slip away unscathed. Liese refused to let those girls pop up when they tried, as she refused to allow herself regrets it was pointless to indulge. There were a lot of things Liese’s life no longer had, but the days of pining for them were done. Besides, she had the baby: how could parties and flirtations ever compare with that?
Liese kissed her daughter’s head and settled her into the drawer she had painstakingly scoured for splinters. The child was perfect. Even Margarethe, who had greeted Liese’s pregnancy with all the outrage of a nun and recoiled from Grandma as if Minnie was listening, had stroked the tiny cheek and pronounced her ‘likely at least to be pretty’.
She lowered herself onto the fold-out bed as carefully as she could. The midwife had been more efficient than gentle, but she had come, a mercy Liese would be eternally grateful for. The thought of being left to Margarethe’s flapping care had horrified her more than the shock of the first contraction. With the city’s hospitals closed to Jews, Frau Schenkel’s skills were thinly stretched. She had arrived with one eye on her watch, bundled Liese into the apartment’s only good bed and the baby out into the world and rolled away with her fee and no more than a dozen words exchanged. Forty-eight hours later and Liese was too much in love to remember anything of the birth but the joy of it.
‘I’m going to call her Lottie. You can’t say it without grinning.’
Liese waited for Michael to compliment the name and its snuffling owner. He continued to stare out of the grime-coated window and took no notice of either. At least he was here. Six months ago, when Liese had finally pieced together her never-ending tiredness and her nausea into something more than shock at the speed with which their lives had collapsed, Michael’s anger and disdain had been hard to bear.