Flying High

She nodded dumbly, recalling the terrible months after they had first arrived in the city more than fifteen years before, when her mother, like so many others, had died from influenza.

‘And your father? I have just begun to realize how strange it is to have married a girl whose parents one knows nothing about.’ He paused and she felt his eyes piercing into her. ‘I bet they were gypsies! That’s why you’ve always been so secretive about them.’

‘They weren’t gypsies!’ Greta cried indignantly. ‘How can you say such things! My father was a Prussian farmer, who was killed in the war fighting the Russians. I was six years old and I saw him die. That’s no secret! You’ve known that from the very beginning. You’ve seen a photograph of him.’

‘Of course. How stupid of me to forget. I remember thinking now how much he reminded me of your brother.’

‘And Hans looks every bit a Prussian.’

She saw her husband nod slowly. ‘He does indeed,’ he said. ‘But then you look nothing like him. You take after your mother – whose photograph I’ve never ever seen.’

‘That’s because I don’t have one,’ Greta answered quietly. ‘You know what it was like then. Most of what we had was left behind in the East. Almost all the family records were lost.’ She tried to turn round to face him, but found he was still holding her too tightly. ‘You know the problems you had getting a marriage licence because I had no documents and they could find no records in the East.’

He nodded slowly. ‘I remember.’

She hesitated nervously. ‘Why are you asking me these things, Wolfgang?’

‘Curiosity. Only curiosity.’ He smiled suddenly and she saw his hands travel down across her body and begin to lift the hem of her dress. ‘I’m sorry if I upset you.’

She stared, horrified, at their reflection, as though she were watching him with another woman. He pushed the fabric up around her waist and then began to caress her bare thighs. Closing her eyes, she leaned limply back against him, and then shivered as she felt his hands slide beneath the waistband of her underwear. He was whispering in her ear.

‘You must make me a father, Greta. Tonight, when we come home. I want a son who will look just as German as I do.’

The fierce words dissolved into the sunlight and silence that filled the room but the shadow on the glass, though it seemed to fade, did not disappear entirely. Feeling weak and rather frail, Frau Maier turned away towards the window. She pulled up the blinds and pushed the curtain aside so that she could look out. She resented the way the past she had tried to forget, hers and this city’s, still found it so easy to intrude upon the present. In the last ten years since they had pulled the Wall down she seemed, in the most unlikely places, at the most unexpected of times, to be at the mercy of these memories that, unchecked, surged up to overwhelm her. Once she had been able to control them, to limit their excesses and shut out those that she found too painful to bear, but recently, as if out of contempt for her age, faces that she had long forgotten had risen up to either greet or mock her. It was as if the Wall’s demolition had released a host of captive memories that for the twenty-eight years of its existence she had kept locked within her.

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