Tying Down The Lion by Joanna Campbell

Author:Joanna Campbell
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Brick Lane Publishing
Published: 2015-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

6.

Waxing Moon

Grandma and Victor come back with greasy serviettes and onion breath, but my mind is too full of questions to ask for a spare frankfurter. Why didn’t Beate and Ilse go searching for Mum? As far as they knew, she was still suffocating in her cupboard. She just isn’t mentioned at all.

When Mum begged God to raze Berlin to the ground, her prayer was answered. Not by Him, but by the Allied bombers in the air and the storming Soviets who finished the task. She was one of the secret people in a city declared “cleansed of Jews”, a victor instead of a victim. So why not reclaim her two “sisters”?

I don’t know the answers, but I do know that this city, holding out against all the odds, never stops surprising me. My mission is all systems go again.

Beyond the Reichstag’s perfect symmetry, the TV tower soars like a thin rocket in the East. An even harsher landmark, restraining a tide of people, keeping them in as much as keeping us out, is the Wall. People no longer queue for water in Berlin. The normal flow of ordinary life has dried up instead.

A wall is a wall. But this one is different, a prison wall in the middle of a city for ordinary people to be kept apart.

Grey and solid, it is rounded on top, so no one can attach grappling-hooks. People have painted words and pictures on this side. Some of the graffiti is ugly, some is graceful. Most of it seems angry. Berlin, someone has painted in huge bubbly writing. Not West or East, just Berlin, to remember the past, or maybe it’s just a wish.

“Of course, lots of walls were built to stop invaders,” Dad says, trying to soften its impact. “There’s your Great Wall of China. And your Hadrian’s.”

“Yes, lad. But this is the only one built to keep people in,” Grandma says. “I shudder to think what it looks like over there,” she adds.

I imagine the death strip, raked and smooth, all set to show footprints in the sand.

“Can anyone paint on this?” Victor asks Dad, looking round as if someone might hand him a brush and palette.

“No one’s supposed to. They have to be careful, son. The actual border itself is about a yard inside the West.”

“So if you’re graffiti-ing it this side, you’re technically in the other half and they could shoot you?” I ask him.

“Bloody well right, Jacqueline. And you can bet your life there’s no graffiti on their side.”

Beate is weaving the pushchair on an erratic path through the crowds to the Victory Column. Mum tries to help her, but Beate thrusts out her elbows and ploughs on. Grandma makes us pile into a gift-shop to buy a cuckoo-clock for Elsie. We come out with three fluted ash-trays, a mournful wooden donkey that dispenses cigarettes out of his bum and a wind-up parakeet.

Beate lets her stow the packages in the push-chair, amid much clinking, and they push it together. Grandma lurches over Sebastian every few seconds, cackling like a witch with heartburn.

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