Karen gasped, her throat clenching as she watched the East German guards shouting at the photographers, as she waited for bullets. Instead sparklers, not searchlights, lit up the concrete and the wastelands, and the human tidal wave kept surging.
‘After almost thirty years of being firmly barred, the gates between East and West finally stand open.’
The reporters carried on as best they could, while denim-clad and fake-leathered hordes surrounded them, clinging to each other, thrusting themselves into the camera as if only by recording the moment they would make its bizarreness real.
‘No more Stasi! No more secrets!’
Karen let out her tightly held breath. The journalists sensed danger and swung back to the party, but Karen could still hear the chant. It gathered itself up at the edges of the screen, roaring at the displaced soldiers who shuffled and blinked into shot and suddenly looked frightened.
No more secrets.
The doorbell rang. Karen ignored it. The letter box rattled to a strident ‘cooee’ as the neighbour, Mrs Hubbard, emerged, drilling for news like a wasp after sugar. Karen didn’t hear her. She was lost in the sight of long-separated people crying and hugging. In the possibility of spaces reopening, surrendering their histories.
There’s nothing to find; there’s no one to ask.
Karen stared at the screen as the house shifted round her. What if that was no longer true?
Eleven
Karen
Aldershot, December 1989–March 1990
Karen had never thought of herself as superstitious before, but the Wall’s moral, if not yet completely physical, collapse had her clutching at signs. Facing the past suddenly felt like the brave, the in-step-with-the-world thing to be doing.
In the weeks after her father’s heart attack, she raced to and from the hospital, torn between watching his slow progress and the far quicker moving news. She was mesmerised by the bulletins, switching between channels, glued to the set as chunks of concrete fell away in haphazard holes and Berlin stepped its way back through them. Instead of searching out a hotel to spend her enforced holiday in, she had decided instead to reclaim the house. To reinhabit its rooms and let her mother back in.
‘What if she stayed with you as long as she could?’
Memory after memory surged, and the newly emboldened Karen dived down under them. Every image she could grasp became a stepping stone to the next. She pictured herself as one of the Mauerspechte, the ‘Wall-woodpeckers’, with their clinking hammers and pickaxes, who the news reporters obsessed over. Not chipping away at crumbling stone, but peeling back the absences and the stillness; the night-time ramblings and the tears. Looking closer, listening harder.
‘Come away now, pet. She’s not here; she won’t answer.’
How had she missed the sob in her father’s voice? Why had she never questioned who she was?
As the weight of wasted years pressed more and more sharply, Karen finally did what Father Kristoff had asked her to do and shifted the angles she looked at the past from. It wasn’t easy – the events she summoned up had had their narrative set long ago. But she began and, when she did, she discovered that, if she decided Andrew’s hand on Liese’s shoulder was calming not controlling, she could see the way her mother leaned into it. If she refused to be frightened by the frozen figure in the bed, she remembered the tight embraces and the ‘I love you; I’m sorry’ pressed into her hair that followed the reawakenings.
There were no thunderbolt moments, nothing made any more sense than it had. The stings, however, blunted a little. Karen finally began to see that mothers stayed with their children whatever happened could perhaps be less rigid a gospel at twenty-nine than she had believed it to be at eleven.
The need to talk to her father consumed her. She was desperate to lay open her new way of seeing and have him embrace it, embrace her; to spill out the secrets and lighten them both. The nurses, however, too used to frantic sickbed declarations to indulge the ones they could stop, batted her away.
‘Whatever that light is in your eye, he’s not ready for it. He’s had major surgery; he’s weak. Let him be.’
Even if Karen had dared disobey, she wouldn’t have got close enough. Andrew was not the solitary figure she had always assumed: he had as wide a circle of friends as she did. There was always someone by his bed when she arrived at the hospital, reading aloud from a book or the newspaper, chatting quietly, even though he was still mostly unconscious. The visitors were, almost without exception, men, always scrupulously polite to Karen and all of them in thrall to Mrs Hubbard.
‘I’ve set up a rota of his old colleagues so he’s never without a bit of friendly company to gee him along. Clearly you must be terribly busy, you breeze in and out so fast.’
The last part was delivered through pursed lips as she copied the nurses and waved Karen’s agitation out of the ward.
‘Besides, there are more useful things you could be doing with your valuable time. Making a start on clearing the house for one. I have the details of his financial affairs, numbers for bank accounts and the like; I’ll pass them over to you this evening. And, as he assumed if this happened you’d be looking for a facility, you should know his preferred option is The Mountbank.’
Karen slunk away smarting, not confident enough of her standing in Mrs Hubbard’s eyes to mount any form of defence.
When she began tentatively poking at his neatly organised papers, she realised their old neighbour was right: her father had left nothing to chance. Mrs Hubbard’s pointed ‘why would he, when he couldn’t know what you would, or wouldn’t, listen to’ hardly made sorting through the files any easier.
There were funds arranged to bridge any payment gaps, the details of an estate agent ready for instruction. Everything was laid out as precisely and impersonally as his old holiday notes. Karen knew without searching that there would be no letters brimful of Liese’s past tucked away in the binders, no packets of fading photographs waiting to be revealed.
So, what, he was prepared to die without telling me anything?
No matter how hard she tried to block them out, the old hurts kept resurfacing.
In the end, it was a relief to find the envelope.
She had returned to work once it was clear her presence at the hospital was less than necessary, although she phoned for daily updates and raced down the motorway to Aldershot every weekend. Her father gradually showed signs that his recovery was coming; a buyer appeared for the house; the task of properly dealing with it became too urgent to keep stalling. Karen finally forced herself to begin the packing on a dark Saturday morning, boxing up the ground floor’s more neutral spaces before she could face tackling her parents’ bedroom and its uncomfortable memories.
The kitchen drawers and the small bureau in the living room yielded nothing unexpected; the hall cabinet contained little beyond telephone directories. She worked methodically, convincing herself her only focus was sorting out the house. As the hours went by, however, the task became the quest she knew it inevitably would be and the past’s refusal to cooperate took on the feel of an insult.
The greying rectangle fell into Karen’s lap as she shook out one of the last remaining books to be boxed, an unremarkable and faded paperback. Her first response was ‘thank goodness for that’.