His tone was measured, but there was a tightness in his face Karen hadn’t seen there before. She wanted to ask him how he felt, what this goodbye meant to him, but he was already steering her towards Michael, who was fixed in position at the side of the building. He was watching them come, standing ramrod-straight and dressed in a black overcoat with a cluster of medal ribbons above the breast pocket. There were a handful of other spectators arranged round him. None of them looked younger than forty. The flight of steps he was standing next to was wider than she had first realised – there was space along them for a hundred people or more to stand without feeling crowded. There were only four figures there, uniformed men in officers’ peaked caps, who clustered at the bottom looking oddly small and out of place. There was no one waiting to join them, none of the foreign dignitaries or Heads of State Karen knew had flocked to Berlin to witness the reunification ceremony planned for midnight at the Brandenburg Gate.
‘Thank you. For attending this.’
Karen shook the hand Michael stiffly held out.
‘Andrew raised no objections to Markus taking you away?’
‘No, of course not. We visited the Reichstag this morning and the Gate before it got busy. He was glad to go back to the hotel and—’
The rest of her too-quick response was lost as a band marched into the square and came to a halt beneath the flagpole, where the DDR’s hammer-and-compass-adorned flag was still flying. The tune they struck up took Karen’s breath away, its melody was so haunting.
‘“Auferstanden aus Ruinen” – “Rising from the Ruins”. It is the DDR’s national anthem. This is the last time I imagine that we will hear it played.’
Michael’s voice choked and fell silent. Markus took his hand and held it while the music swelled. Karen watched the two men standing as one as the ceremony began, joined by a love and respect that overran their differences, and had to rub her eyes.
Everyone around them was staring ahead and mouthing the anthem’s words. No one was actually singing.
The two ranks of soldiers who had followed the band stood stiffly to attention behind a standard-bearer. Some saluted; some kept their arms down and looked awkward; some blinked away tears. As the music stopped and silence fell, one of the officers hunched on the steps walked stiffly forward and gave a short, muted speech in which the words ‘comradeship’ and ‘loyalty’ featured heavily. No one clapped when he finished. The standard-bearer marched his gaudily fringed banner away, its head pointing down. The red and black and gold flag was pulled from its pole in one smooth movement and folded inside out so its colours no longer showed. The band launched into ‘Das Deutschlandlied’, the tune that would now represent the whole of Germany. No one clapped that either. When it was done, the band and the soldiers marched away and the spectators melted silently after them. Less than ten minutes had passed and a country that had stood and birthed generations who had known nothing else but the DDR for forty years was gone. It was one of the saddest things Karen had ever seen.
‘This must seem very foolish to you. My need to say farewell to a regime most people will be delighted is over.’
Michael was staring away into the distance, his face set in hard lines.
Karen wasn’t sure how to answer. ‘You don’t need to apologise …’
He turned on her so fast, she jumped.
‘I am not apologising. Why would I? I am proud of what this country was. I came out of the war with nothing: no family, no home. Nothing but my beliefs in a fairer society, and the DDR nurtured those and nurtured me. I wasn’t on the outside here: the tolerant, equal way of life I wanted for the future was what everyone wanted. We had ideals; we cared for each other. We weren’t easily bought by trifles the way the West was. Why should I regret being a part of something so pure?’
He sounded so angry, but it was grief; Karen could feel it pouring from him. Her German was strong enough now to understand what Michael said, but she waved Markus back in case her nerve, or her words, failed her. If she had any chance of winning Michael’s respect, she had to stand up to him and speak from the heart.
‘You shouldn’t. And you have misunderstood me. I was actually thinking that this ceremony didn’t feel like enough. This is an ending, a funeral, I suppose. Surely it deserved more marking than this lonely spectacle, whatever your view of the DDR’s politics. More than something that felt, I don’t know, embarrassed?’
Michael’s face softened. He finally smiled. Not for the first time that day, Karen felt the prick of tears.
‘It seems I owe you a different apology. It appears I have misjudged you.’ He paused while the soldiers exited the square. ‘An embarrassment. That, I am sad to say, is a well-chosen word. That is what the DDR will be in this newly united world. It will pass into history as a relic, a museum piece only remembered as real while its old men and women are still standing.’
‘Except for the damage done to so many lives in its name.’ Markus was also watching the last soldier go. ‘Those will be raked over and last, no doubt, far longer than the country ever did.’
The two men stared at each other. Karen knew there was a question Markus needed to ask but couldn’t quite get to. She slipped her hand in his.
‘Do you think that would be a bad thing? That the sins are remembered?’
She was relieved for his son when Michael answered.
‘No, Karen, I don’t. I think there are men who must be held to account for what following our ideals too rigidly led to. And I think there are people in great need of answers. Who deserve every assistance to find them. No matter what you might think of me after our last meeting, or since you learned what your father and I did, you have taught me the value of that.’
He crooked his elbow and held it out to her. ‘And now this part of the past has been lain to rest, shall we make a start on our own?’
Karen hesitated before taking his arm. ‘My father is afraid that you blame him for Liese’s suicide.’
Michael nodded as they began to make their way across the square. ‘Maybe, until I see his face and hear his side of the story, that is true.’
The drive to Karen and Andrew’s hotel was a subdued one, each of them lost in their own concerns about the forthcoming reunion.
Karen had hoped to have a few moments alone with her father to explain what Michael had just witnessed and how saddened it had left him, but Andrew was already waiting in the sofa-stuffed lounge. He was dressed in his tweed suit and had a pot of tea on one side of him and a newspaper folded to the crossword on the other. He had never looked more impossibly English.
The introductions and reintroductions were awkward. Hands knocked into each other; stilted greetings became overlaid and muddled as Karen and Markus rushed in to soften them. Although Karen knew he had been practising and he was clearer than she expected, Andrew’s German was hesitant from lack of use. Michael refused to understand it as well as he could and made a show of turning to Markus, until Markus threw up his hands and refused to translate what did not need translating. Andrew ordered tea for everyone; Michael insisted on coffee. Karen was beginning to despair of finding any safe or common ground, and then they sat down and the men’s similarities almost overwhelmed her.
It wasn’t just their appearances, but their manner that meshed. Both were tall, broad-shouldered and strong-featured, and grey hair and age’s sharpening and softening had rendered them more of a match than they were in the wedding photograph. Their voices, too, were an echo of each other, the tone in each deep and thoughtful and better tuned to serious conversation than light-hearted amusement. And they both caught the same look in their eye when Liese was mentioned: warm and wistful and sad.