Karen’s eyes widened. ‘How did you persuade him to break a lifetime of principles and do that?’
‘I told him Andrew was much feebler than him and would struggle to travel… What?’
He ducked as Karen aimed a pillow at him.
‘It worked. For a communist, Father is very competitive. To be honest, I thought it would be easier to manage him if he was off home ground. There is a condition though.’
Markus’s voice lost its laughing tone. Karen waited.
‘There is a ceremony later today, before tonight’s big celebration, to mark the passing of the DDR. I doubt anyone beyond the faithful will notice it’s happening, but Father wants to go and I said I’d go with him. It would mean a lot if you would come too.’
Karen passed him the wallet he was looking for, wondering how such a simple request could make him look so awkward but not sure how to ask.
‘The thing is, I’ve told him about you and me, about how I feel. He’s uncertain. A “decadent woman from the West” isn’t what he imagined for me. Not that he called you that, but I’ve no doubt that, on some level, he thinks it. And then there’s the connection with Liese and all that stirs up. I just think, if you were there today, at something that’s so important to him and who he is, well, he’d set a lot of store by it.’
He tailed off, looking younger and more adrift than she’d ever seen him.
Karen smiled and startled herself by suddenly feeling tearful. ‘Then of course. How could I miss it?’
‘Thank you. That makes me happy. I’ve hopes it will do the same with him.’
Markus wrote down the details and kissed her and was halfway out of the door before he turned back and grinned. ‘I should have told you first, how I felt. Not my father. Is that what you’re thinking?’
Karen laughed. ‘I’m not thinking anything except you don’t need to tell me. I already knew.’
She blew him a kiss and waved him away before her father came knocking. She knew it would be a while before she had enough composure to go down to breakfast.
I already knew.
It was the truth, and now there was a new truth to consider: that the words ‘I love you’ didn’t matter – what mattered was what she had seen in Markus’s eyes and felt in his kiss. She’d spent years treating the I love you she had always demanded to hear as the Holy Grail, putting more faith in what she heard than in anything else. All the relationships that had crashed down because of her desperation. All the relationships that had failed because, once the words were said or, worse, prised out, she no longer cared. And now here she was, in love and loved and finally listening; feeling the hurts starting to heal.
‘You have missed your turning – this is Hausvogteiplatz. Go back one corner and turn at Markgrafenstraβe. Gendarmenmarkt is only a short distance away from there.’
The man waved his arm in the direction from which Karen had just come and walked away. She stared after him, unable to move, everything he had said after Hausvogteiplatz fallen into a blur. The dark interior of Richters Schneiderei and her seventeen-year-old self standing on the threshold so hopeful and so naïve flew back more vivid than the bright October day she was currently standing in. Hausvogteiplatz: Haus Elfmann had stood here.
Karen whirled round, convinced if she moved quickly enough a signboard or a set of ghost letters would reveal themselves over the lintel of one of the narrow buildings. When that didn’t work, she had a wild impulse to run from door to door, knocking and shouting out the Elfmann name and demanding that someone, somewhere, must remember – must be able to point her to the place where the salon had stood.
Karen was at the first corner, hand poised when she remembered Frau Richter’s pleated mouth and folded arms and the shadows that clung to the old woman’s disapproving sniff. She sank down instead on one of a group of iron benches surrounding a fountain in the centre of the small square.
She didn’t want to do this frantic searching anymore. It was foolish to try, doomed to end in failure and that hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach that she didn’t want to make room for anymore. It was fifty years since Haus Elfmann had towered over Berlin’s fashion industry. That was another lifetime; in this part of the city, it was another country. She needed her energy for the future now, not the past.
Ignoring the pigeons who had immediately come flocking, Karen gazed up at the highest point she could see: a sunburst clock, picked out in faded red and gold on a rooftop still bearing the traces of what once must have been delicate carvings.
My mother must have known that clock in its grander days. She must have sat in the square and listened to the fountain play and watched the light and the clouds dance across the clock’s golden hands.
Karen tried to picture the Liese who once would have sat where she sat now. Fifteen or sixteen years old, the daughter of a wealthy fashion house, a young girl filled with dreams. She breathed in slowly, filling her nose and mouth with the woody scent of the bronze and cream chrysanthemums planted round the fountain and imagined her mother chattering here to her friends. She listened to the water splash, watched a group of sparrows taking a dust bath and imagined Liese and Michael trading secrets and squabbling, inhabiting the up and down but always so entwined relationship he had described. Although she knew that it couldn’t be true, given Berlin’s history of war and division, the little square felt untouched, unchangeable.
She didn’t need a sign; she didn’t need proof. The salon had been here, Liese had been here, happy and hopeful. Karen closed her eyes and let herself feel and knew that was enough.
She walked slowly back down Mohrenstraβe, turning where she had been told, taking time to study the narrow buildings with their elegantly arched windows that lined this part of the street. The pavements were far quieter here than the eager bustle she had left behind at the Tiergarten and Potsdamer Platz. Karen was glad of it. With no one else around, she could step back in time and find Liese, walking a pace in front, lolling a pace behind, running about and real. She could see the whip of her mother’s skirt as she dodged round a corner; hear her laughter chasing through the birdsong.
By the time Karen stepped onto the wide marble-like paving stones that covered the Gendarmenmarkt’s large sweep of a square, she felt lighter than she had done in months.
‘Are you all right? You’re a little later than I thought you’d come; you didn’t get lost, did you?’
There were so few people gathered there, Markus had spotted her almost at once.
Karen shook her head and hugged Liese closer. ‘Where is everyone?’
She could see a huddle of figures grouped round the bottom of a flight of steps which marched up to a classically colonnaded building. Other than that, the vast space, with what looked like a pair of identical churches placed one at each end, was deserted.
‘I thought this was a ceremony. I imagined it would be busier, more on the scale of what’s planned for tonight.’
‘No. Tonight is about something starting, a joining together that people want to bear witness to and be part of. What you see here is the opposite.’
Markus took her hand and led her towards the steps.
‘This is the diehards of the East coming to mourn. Everyone else has already turned their faces to the West.’