The envelope was thin and unsealed, its dried-out flap heavily creased. Karen wiped her hands and wiped them again and discovered she couldn’t open it.
It’s another dead end flashed through her mind like a neon sign.
It wasn’t until her legs cramped, forcing her into a chair, that she steeled herself to slide the envelope’s contents out. There were two items tucked inside: a postcard with a street scene picked out in acid-tinged green and yellow, and a photograph in black and white which took her breath away.
She picked up the photograph first. It was the image her imagination had conjured up years ago in the church in Berlin: her parents, impossibly young, on their wedding day. Andrew was in uniform, her mother in a calf-length pale dress and veiled hat. The couple were posed awkwardly outside a grubbier version of the Lindenkirche, with a second man a pace behind. The trio looked like actors in three different plays.
Andrew was joyous – there was no other word for it. He grinned out at the camera as if every birthday-cake wish had rained down on him at once, a wide smile brightening his solid face. Liese, in contrast, was looking down and held her long-stemmed bouquet raised, as if she longed to hide behind it. Her shadowed face and hunched shoulders made her look both bewildered and afraid, as if the simple act of being photographed was overwhelming.
It unnerved Karen to see her mother so uncomfortable, but it wasn’t Liese who made her eyes blur. The second man, who was as handsome as her father was plain, was visibly heartbroken. His distress was written in the hand hovering beside Liese’s elbow as if he was desperate to clutch it; in the way he couldn’t find a smile; in the pleading gaze fixed so hopelessly on the bride. His pain was too intimate to look at.
Her heart racing, Karen turned the photograph over in search of a name. There was nothing, not even a date.
Putting the image reluctantly to one side, she picked up the postcard. On closer inspection, the view wasn’t so much of a street as a boulevard. A wide expanse of manicured grass and spotless roads separated two identical rows of pristine buildings which stretched out towards a stately pair of towers. The effect was elegant, deliberately palatial. The tiered-wedding-cake architecture reminded Karen of diagrams of buildings in Moscow she had studied at university.
Unlike the photograph, the back of the card was covered in writing. A title identified the location as Stalinallee. There was a red postage stamp next to that, featuring the hammer and compass she remembered from the border crossing, the wording Deutsche Demokratische Republik and a smeared date stamp that said 1953. The message crowding the small space was in German, but, apart from the last line whose construction sent Karen upstairs for her old dictionary, its meaning was simple to follow.
Dearest Liese,
I am finally settled; my new home is better than any place I could have dreamed of in the war years, or after. You can write to me regularly now; whatever you send will find me. Please let me know you are well; please tell me that we did the right thing. That he gave you the good life I dreamed of for you. This silence between us stretches out endlessly.
The handwritten plea was followed by an address picked out in neater letters: Stalinallee Block C, 502, Friedrichshain, Berlin, DDR.
Karen knew at once that the Michael whose name was signed below the hard-pressed lines was the young man in the photograph. It was clear from the card’s gaps, as much as its words, that he loved her mother. What she couldn’t make sense of was ‘tell me that we did the right thing’.
She was still puzzling pointlessly at it when the clock struck six and she realised she’d missed her allotted slot at afternoon visiting.
I should ring the hospital, check on him; find an excuse before Mrs Hubbard comes snooping.
She made the call, but she didn’t put down the card. 1953. Karen ran her finger over the stamp and stroked the edge of the photograph. Thirty-five years. Michael could well be alive, could be living at the same address. Her father had been in this house longer than that. Which is all very well, but Aldershot had never been carved up in the same way as Berlin. What was here thirty-five years ago was still here. Where was the guarantee of that in Berlin?
Karen spent the rest of the night oblivious to everything but the possibility of other clues unfolding. She rechecked every book she had packed and went back through every boxed-up folder, searching for some scrap that would shed light on the man, on who he was to her mother. There were no more revelations. The only thing certain was that this Michael held an important place in Liese’s story. She couldn’t ask her father in his present condition; neither could she afford to ignore what she had found. All she had was an old address and a sneaking suspicion that names honouring Stalin might not be in favour anymore. Not very much to go on.
But not a dead end.
‘Such a delight to know you’ve kept up your German. So few do. And a mystery, how exciting! Let me just find my map box and I’m sure we can crack it.’
Time hadn’t diminished Mrs Hubbard’s busy-bodying, and it hadn’t dimmed Miss Dennison’s enthusiasm. The moment Karen had appeared, tentatively knocking on the classroom door of her vastly different old school, the teacher had been all squeals and handclapping. Once Karen had produced the postcard and explained she was trying to find out if the address was still valid, Miss Dennison’s enthusiasm bubbled over like lava.
‘Such a thing to bear witness to, the end of the Wall. I remember it going up. August 1961. I would have been eighteen, a proper little hothead. There wasn’t a word of warning, of course. One day it wasn’t there, the next it was and, whatever side you woke up on, you were stuck with it. So many people desperate to escape from the East and me and my friends threatening to go and join “the great revolution”. How crazy we must have sounded. My parents must have been horrified.’
Karen stared at her, wrong-footed by the revelation.
‘Why on earth did you want to do that?’
Miss Dennison laughed. ‘If you could see your face. Because we were socialists and young and naïve, and we thought the DDR promised nirvana.’
She has such a mischievous twinkle in her eye. Karen had never noticed that before, or how pretty the woman’s auburn hair was.
‘You were a socialist? That’s the last thing I would have taken you for.’
‘No, I imagine that wouldn’t fit the box you all put me in. Don’t look awkward; it doesn’t bother me. What pupil considers their teachers as people with lives of their own? I never did. We’re like parents to our pupils: some kind of other that’s not quite people. Well, Karen Cartwright, now you’re all grown up, let me properly introduce myself: I never was a Miss, I have a husband and two children and, for all its flaws, the DDR still fascinates me.’
She hauled a crate full of maps onto the table and began sorting through it.
‘Now, close your mouth and let’s see what we’ve got. Here, these two should do it.’
She pulled out two maps and spread them out. Both were of Berlin. The larger of the two was yellowing and had a bright red wall rendered across it, so carefully drawn it stood out like 3D. The second had removed West Berlin completely, leaving behind a gaping white space where the sector’s streets should have been.