Letters From Prague (27 page)

‘Okay.' They went down the precipitous stairs one by one. ‘Mum?' asked Marsha, in the airy bathroom, as Harriet ran a bath from ancient taps.

‘Yes?' Pipes banged, water spurted wildly, there were clouds of steam.

‘We don't have to have breakfast with Christopher, do we?'

A civilised hush hung over the dining room. The shutters were open but the morning was hazy still, and the light still pale. The smell of hot coffee and warm bread filled the room; there was the rustle of newspapers, quiet conversation. Christopher had not come down yet.

‘Thank God for that,' said Marsha.

Harriet said nothing. There had been enough misplaced reproaches already this morning; she would save up one suited to this particular attitude for a moment when it might become really necessary.

What sort of moment might that be?

‘Let's sit over here.' Marsha was leading the way to a comer table, laid for two. ‘I'm starving. What can we have?'

Harriet's mouth was dry. She could not, at this moment, waiting for Christopher's arrival, imagine eating anything much. She hadn't eaten anything much last night, either.

‘You can have what you like,' she said, sitting down.

‘I love the smell of the bread.' Marsha was looking round the room. ‘Who do you think killed that bird?'

‘An ancient Scheiber.' Harriet shook out her napkin, ‘Here comes Liesel.'

Dear Liesel. She began to feel like a friend. They ordered coffee, hot chocolate, a platter of
Wurst
and
Käse
for Marsha, and lots of bread.

‘What about you, Mum?'

‘I'll wait.'

A sigh.

Harriet said cautiously, ‘I'd like to go a bit further east today, if we can. I haven't arranged it properly with Christopher yet, but –'

Silence.

‘What would you like to da?'

A shrug.

Coffee and hot chocolate arrived, and a basket of bread. Marsha fell upon it.

‘If you really like it here, we might be able to move from Schöneberg, fetch our stuff …'

A long look. Bread dunked in hot chocolate.

Harriet poured coffee.

‘Good morning.'

He was in the doorway, he had crossed the room, he was beside them.

‘Have you slept well?' He was looking, himself, as though he had been through a difficult night, and had made efforts to disguise the fact. He had washed his hair and shaved and was wearing a different shirt, but he still looked tired and wrung out.

‘Very well, thank you,' said Harriet. ‘What about you?'

‘Not bad. May I join you?' He took a chair from the next table and sat down, his back to the room. Marsha looked past him, as Liesel approached with her platter. He ordered more coffee, and hot rolls. Liesel brought him a cup while he waited. Harriet filled it from her pot, and reached for the milk jug.

‘No, no thanks. Black is what I need this morning. So. How are you this morning, Marsha? Pass a quiet night on the sofa?'

‘Yes, thanks.'

‘And how are the kitty-cats?'

‘Fine.' She was cutting a piece of Emmental into tiny cubes. He watched her. ‘Is that for them?'

She gave a sigh. ‘No.'

‘Marsha fed the mother cat this morning,' Harriet said helpfully.

‘Did she? How charming.' He raised his cup and blew gently on the hot coffee; he drank. ‘Ah. That's better. The day begins to have possibilities.' He looked at her, and smiled. ‘And what about you? How is the mother cat this morning?'

Harriet returned the smile, sipped her own coffee and felt warmth spread through her. ‘Okay.'

‘Good.'

‘Here are your hot rolls,' said Marsha briskly.

‘So they are.'

The hot rolls arrived in a basket and with them unsalted butter in a cut-glass dish and two kinds of jam, in china pots. At the Hotel Kloster these things came in little plastic tubs with peel-off foil on top.

They ate, and poured more coffee. Other guests came and went.

‘Did you know,' asked Christopher, passing Harriet the basket, ‘that the first people to cross the wall did so from Prenzlauer Berg? A young couple – they went through the border crossing on Bornholmer Strasse, a mile or so north of here.'

‘I must go and see.'

He shook his head, reaching for the jam. ‘You won't see a thing. In most parts of the city it's as though the wall has never existed – there are a few chunks in Potsdamer Platz, and as I told you, you can buy dubious chips of it from stalls round what was Checkpoint Charlie, down the road, but other than that – poof. She vanishes.'

Harriet took another hot roll, and broke it. ‘Well. If we can't see anything of the wall, might we see something of the place you were talking about yesterday? Where the Scheiber factory is?'

‘Marzahn? I'm not sure about that, actually –'

‘Oh, please. I really shan't feel we've been to Berlin unless we go east, and see some of the changes. And it does sound interesting, from what you were saying – the factory, I mean, and the changeover to a market economy. Unless –' she looked at him, wondering about his reluctance. ‘Perhaps you're too busy?'

‘No, no, I have to go there anyway. I can make a phone call, tell them I'm bringing visitors, if that's what you'd really like.'

‘I'm interested, that's all.' And also it would provide an emotional breathing space, a distraction – to be thinking, once again, about issues in the public arena, as she was used to doing in London. ‘If you're sure that's okay –'

‘Yes. Just –' he hesitated. ‘Forgive me – you won't make too many enquiries, will you? Dieter's still feeling his way, and it isn't always easy, with his workforce and so on. And east Berliners still keep their guard up – they're not used to being questioned. Or perhaps I should say they don't like it –'

She took the point. ‘I'll do my best.'

‘And what about Marsha?' He turned to her; she was smothering her third hot roll in butter. ‘How would you like to visit a factory in one of the grottiest parts of Berlin? Just for the experience.'

‘It's up to Mum.' She went on spreading, concentrating on every crumbling corner.

Harriet hesitated, torn once again between her own desires and Marsha's. Even before they'd come to the Hotel Scheiber the dilemma had been with her – wanting to see the whole city, wearing both of them out. And now there was another factor: she wanted Christopher's company. Marsha didn't.

‘We could go back to Schöneberg, Marsha,' she said. ‘Would you prefer that?'

She studied the tablecloth. ‘I'd like to stay here, really. With the kittens.'

‘Yes, but –'

Christopher finished his coffee. ‘I think I'll leave you to it. I'll have a smoke and a look at the papers.'

When he had gone, Harriet and Marsha had a discussion, which became an argument. Harriet won. She reached across the table for Marsha's hand, which was withheld.

‘I just want to feel I've seen both sides of Berlin, and understood things a bit more, and I really don't think I can leave you here for hours on end. But then we'll come back here, and do whatever you want tomorrow, your birthday, of course, and then –' She stopped. ‘God. And then we're leaving for Prague.'

‘Yes,' said Marsha, pointedly. ‘To look for Karel.' She rose from the table. ‘I'm going to look for the kittens.'

There was no direct U-Bahn connection betwen Prenzlauer Berg and Marzahn, so they took a tram, leaving the tenement-lined back streets and humming along the lines going east, on wider main roads. Much of the traffic was heading in the opposite direction, carrying workers to the western side of the city; many of the roads were in visibly bad shape, pitted with holes or badly surfaced: every couple of miles they passed boarded-up sections enclosing pounding drills and smoking barrels of tar. Tower blocks stretched into the distance, beneath a brightening sky.

When they got on, the tram had been crowded. Harriet and Marsha had found a couple of seats at the back, leaving Christopher to strap-hang, like a great tree, amongst the press of local commuters down near the driver. Gradually the commuters thinned out, and now, as they stopped at traffic lights, he came up towards them.

‘Another twenty minutes or so. Mind if I smoke?'

It felt like years since London Transport had banned smoking: already, Marsha had voiced objections as people around them lit up.

‘Actually,' said Harriet, ‘do you mind if you don't? It does feel a bit airless in here.'

‘Sorry. Of course.' Christopher put his cigarettes back in his pocket, but Marsha was already rising.

‘Go on, if you want you can have my seat. I'd like to go to the front, anyway.' She turned to Harriet. ‘Is that okay? It looks cleaner down there.'

‘All right.' They watched her move along the slatted floor, holding on to the back of an empty seat as the tram swayed, then stretching up to get hold of a strap. She could just about reach, and seen from the back she could, because of her height, just about be an early teenager, travelling alone. This was, Harriet realised, the effect she was aiming for, and the state she probably desired. In another few years it would not be possible to win arguments so often, to take her hither and thither across Europe without consultation. In another few years …

Christopher, beside her, said, ‘She wants to do her own thing.'

She turned to him. ‘That's just what I was thinking.'

‘Well. There we are.' He looked at her directly. ‘And what else have you been thinking, after last night? I hope all that talk didn't shake you up too much.'

‘No, no, I –' She what? She was sitting next to him, which felt quite different from being across the table. It was always awkward to talk to people next to you, rather than opposite, unless you knew them so well that it didn't matter where you sat, or looked, you could just chatter away, as she and Marsha did. She did not know Christopher so well, she was very aware of him being so close, and she did not, above all, want to reopen last night's conversation. Later, perhaps. Not on a tram to an eastern suburb of Berlin first thing in the morning, with Marsha only yards away from them. She shifted along the seat towards the window. They were passing a parade of narrow-fronted shops, which looked as though they had been there since the Fifties, and then a very Nineties supermarket, brightly lit, plastered with notices of special offers.

‘A lot of big chain stores have opened up in the East in the last couple of years,' said Christopher, following her gaze. ‘Seizing the moment. I think some have lived to regret it – after the first rush for western goodies a lot of people lost their jobs and had to tighten their belts again.'

The tram stopped at a junction, and its doors opened; a couple in their early fifties climbed on, he in an ill-fitting suit and open-necked shirt, she carrying an ancient shopping bag.

‘It's been a complete social upheaval, hasn't it?' said Harriet, half-watching them, glad of the opportunity for impersonal conversation.

‘Of course. And especially for people like them.' He nodded towards the couple, settling into a seat. ‘They're of an age which is caught in the middle – they've never known anything except communism, they've no pre-war memories of a united Germany to make them feel hopeful about reunification now, but they're too old to benefit from capitalism. They're not going to become the new rich in the West. If they've lost factory jobs they probably won't work again. And unemployment is something they've never known. Unlike the young – there's a whole lot of the new generation who've never known anything else.'

‘I know.'

He smiled at her. ‘Of course you know. You've read it all up, haven't you?'

‘That's what Susanna said –' She broke off. ‘Let's not talk about Susanna or anything now. Anyway, it's not a question of “reading it all up”, that sounds –'

‘I know. It sounds like a tourist. Whereas you, of course, are a traveller, quite different, taking a lively interest in contemporary affairs.'

‘Oh, shut up.'

He raised an eyebrow to comic effect.

She laughed. ‘Go on.'

‘Go on what?'

‘Go on telling me what I already know.'

‘On the contrary, I feel I should sit back and let you educate me.'

‘Don't be silly.'

The tram had stopped again, and Marsha was at the door, looking out. They were near a little park, an oasis in what was now a succession of sprawling high-rise estates. Marsha stepped back as the doors closed again, and a young mother carried a heavy toddler up the aisle. The child was wearing a bright blue and green tracksuit, which looked like something out of Marks & Spencer – certainly smart and new. Harriet remarked on it.

‘Well, yes. People do spend money like water on western stuff when they've got it, especially for kids. Shiny new bikes, and all that. Colour. Of course there are changes and some people are making good – making better, anyway.' He shifted in the seat as the tram gathered speed. ‘I can remember when I first came here, in '88, how grey everything looked. It really did. You came through Checkpoint Charlie and stepped back thirty years: virtually no traffic except for ancient trams, half-empty shops, half-finished housing, shell damage, cobbled streets. And at night you went about in the half-dark.'

Christopher nodded towards the press of traffic alongside, the secondhand Golfs and Audis amongst ancient Skodas and Trabants. ‘All that's changing in some places, but it's not going to keep pace with what people want, and in some ways things are worse, as I said. There's a lot of disappointment, a lot of anger – since unification the East Germans feel like the underclass. There are dole offices on the estates now – that's new. And not only is there massive unemployment, but when they go for jobs in the west they're treated like idiots, stuck in a Fifties time-warp, who've never seen a computer.'