relationship.’
Inga laughs without humour. ‘You ended our relationship. Look, I understand. You are incapable of emotional commitment. You told yourself I left because I wanted children. This is not true. I am not overtly maternal. I left because I suddenly saw no future … Nothing was going to change.’
Her anger shows suddenly. ‘I deserve more. You are happy to be with me when you are a little lonely and equally happy to drop me when you are your normal self-sufficient self. Yes, we often had a very good time – you are an interesting and charming man to be with – but it was not enough. I wanted to live with you and you made it clear that you did not want me to. Too often you preferred to go away without me …’
She looks away, fiddles with her coffee cup. ‘You seem to need no one. I have some pride. I left because you were destroying my sense of self. I was losing confidence in myself and my work.’
She looks straight at him suddenly. ‘I pity you. To avoid the pain of loving, you miss the joy. Like so many of your generation, you are dishonest about your motives, in everything you do and in everything you did.’
They stare at each other. The coffee scalds his mouth. The words hang between them. Both their faces are shocked and angry. Like your generation. She has wanted to say this before to him, he can see that. It came out before she could stop it, startling her as much as him. Words that cannot be taken back. The meaning all too clear.
Silence hangs between them. He gets out of his chair and walks away towards the entrance. As he reaches the doors he hears her voice, softly this time.
‘I know that you wanted to draw a neat line under us today. So much easier when we meet in public. Neat lines are not always possible. Real life is messy and it hurts.’
He does not turn round, but moves steadily to his car. He does not see that she is crying as she watches his tall figure walk away from her. Ten years ago she was thirty-two. Young enough to be his daughter. She found him dangerous in an exciting and powerfully sexual way. He was a challenge she has lost. Her friends warned her. She knows him barely better now than she did ten years ago. She shuts the entrance door firmly so that she does not see him drive away.
The traffic is much heavier as he drives home. He taps the wheel impatiently as he sits trapped between two school buses, idly watching the people on the pavements, some hurrying, some stopping at the little Turkish café he used to wait in for Inga sometimes.
Your generation. His generation watched Berlin reborn from rubble. What the American and British bombers did not destroy, the Red Army finished. His generation watched as Berlin was carved up into four pieces … ‘YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR’ – the sign, which had you sweating in your sleep, that one wrong turning, one small error, would land you in the Eastern sector.
The traffic picks up speed and he breathes more easily as he heads out of town. Mutti moved sharply and wisely from her old family home in the east, ahead of the Red Army. She hated the British and American bombers, but she feared the oncoming Russians more.
He was sent back to Berlin at the end of the war with a medical unit. Berlin, about to fight for its life, left with only the old, the lame and children to defend it. Berlin had not been his childhood home as it had been Mutti’s but the devastation was still shocking. He thought that Berlin could never be rebuilt.
Reaching home, he parks and lets himself into the flat. He is angry with Inga for reminding him of the past, his age, and the fact that her generation and her children’s generation can never forgive or forget his. Because it is held in front of them, in books, films, or a left-wing challenge, by someone, somewhere, every single day. Her age group seem to have a monopoly on self-righteousness, while knowing nothing.
He lights a small cheroot and sees with a start that he has received the fax he has been waiting for. He has waited, restless, all week for Hans to get in touch. He tears the message off the machine.
What am I starting here? What am I doing?
Hans urged caution. Any hint of irrationality made him nervous. He left for London reluctant and tight-lipped. He knows only too well obsession can grow. Catch a glimpse, a smell, a memory and you want more. The past you buried always surfaces. Who said that to him? Suddenly, he needs to know what is shadow caused by faulty memory, and what is substance.
The fax is disappointingly brief; tells him little. The woman is, unsurprisingly, clever and ambitious. Hans lists her academic achievements at length. He details minutely the steady rise of her career. But there is little about her personal life. Is he doing this on purpose? Hans can find out how a man turns in his bed. How he makes love to his wife. What he eats for breakfast. He can find out anything he wishes to know. If he wants to …
This woman was born and brought up in the west of England. Head girl at some English boarding school. One brother. One child from a brief marriage to an Italian. Married for four years to Rudi Gerstein, a Swiss-German banker. She is an excellent linguist and so is her daughter.
Is this it? This barrister could be any middle-class English girl. Yet the one thing he needs to know Hans cannot possibly give him. He looks out of the window at the rain blowing sideways, obscuring his view, trapping him with ghosts that are rising like whispers out of the dark edges of the room.
The past is suddenly crowding in from all directions. In the long nights alone now he feels the horror of being overtaken by memories he believed he had firmly buried.
Dancing against Martha’s closed eyelids, the sun. Light and bobbing colours, patterns and floaters. A thrush in the garden sings and sings. The rain has stopped and the smell of cut grass comes in the window on a faint breeze.
In a moment Mama, or Hanna, their maid, will call up the stairs to make sure she is awake. Hanna, who is not much older than Marta, gets very cross with her because she will lie there ignoring Mama’s calls.
Hanna is a thin, obedient girl, who comes from a religiously observant Jewish family who vaguely disapprove of the Oweski family. Papa says they are so poor it is no wonder little Hanna has no sense of humour.
Marta loves these mornings. She has secretly been out in the garden in the first light, running in bare feet across the deliciously cold wet grass.
She likes to lie without moving, her face in pale yellow sunshine, daydreaming. She loves the dancing colours behind her closed lids and the safeness of opening her eyes again to familiar background noises, the sounds of a household waking up. Marta would like to be a child for ever and as she thinks this she remembers … she remembers with a jolt and her eyes fly open.
Fly open to an unfamiliar room of beige walls and white paint work. Beyond the long windows, lawns stretch into glossy-leafed shrubs and old fir trees that form a wall of green.
Martha sits up quickly, then, suddenly dizzy, hangs on to the edge of the bed for a moment. She goes slowly to the door and listens. Hearing nothing, she turns the handle and goes out into a large flagstone hall that leads into a drawing room filled with hot afternoon sun, which has bleached, over the years, all the covers and cushions to a uniform beige.
No one is there, but in a corner of the room a television flickers with images. Martha looks out into a musty geranium-smelling conservatory but cannot see her parents or Hanna. She swallows a slow-rising panic that they have all been taken from her while she slept in this place she does not remember coming to.
She pads on small bare feet to the French windows and looks out into the garden. She can hear voices now. A man and a girl are planting something near the cherry tree. She has no idea who they are.
Confused, desperately searching her mind for a clue to anchor herself here, Martha turns back inside to the flickering movements of the small screen, which has the sound turned off. She sees columns and columns of people moving in a mass along a road. Walking, hobbling, being pulled on carts or tractors.