Page 13 of The Banned Books of Berlin
Los Angeles, April 2024
Maddie and Ben had a lot to tell Sharon that evening over supper. ‘Eva’s an artist too,’ Ben said. ‘She says I can come and draw in her studio whenever I want, and she’s going to show me how to make collages.’
‘That’s cool,’ Sharon said, with a glance at Maddie. ‘And what’s she like, this Eva?’
‘She’s great,’ Maddie replied. ‘I think Gramps really likes her – they have a lot in common, apart from death. She’s going to help him research his family history.’
Sharon passed Ben a plate piled high with roasted peppers and pasta. ‘I’d be interested to meet her. Why don’t I give her a call and we can arrange a time to visit? Then I could give you a ride over there.’
‘I’m going on the bus,’ he said. ‘There’s a stop around the corner from her house. I’m not a kid, Mom.’
Sharon paused, her spoon in mid-air. ‘But you hardly know this person. I really would like to talk to her before you start spending time together.’
‘Why?’ Ben asked. ‘She’s my friend, not yours.’
‘Don’t be so rude,’ Sharon snapped, the colour rising in her cheeks.
An uneasy silence descended. ‘Have some salad,’ Maddie said, passing her mother the bowl. ‘It looks great.’
They concentrated on their food for the next few minutes, Ben scowling and pushing pasta tubes around his plate, Sharon shooting him angry glances. ‘By the way,’ Maddie said at last, ‘Gramps mentioned something about a suitcase of old clothes that he thought you might have taken when he was clearing out the house on East Street. Does that ring any bells?’
‘What?’ Her mother’s gaze slowly focused on Maddie’s face. ‘A suitcase? Oh, I can’t remember. I took most of Grandma’s clothes to Goodwill, that I do know. You could have a look in the basement – if I didn’t throw the case out, that’s where it will be. I wouldn’t get your hopes up, though.’
‘Mom!’ Maddie had been pinning her hopes on this case. With so little to go on, the very thought of it was unbearably tantalising.
‘I’ve had enough,’ Ben said abruptly, pushing back his chair. ‘Going to my room.’
‘But you’ve hardly eaten anything!’ Sharon exclaimed.
‘I’m not hungry.’ He left the table, scraped the remains of his food into the trash and walked out of the room without looking at either of them.
Sharon laid her knife and fork together and wiped her mouth deliberately with a napkin.
‘We ate a lot of cake at Eva’s house,’ Maddie said, squeezing her hand. ‘But this was delicious, Mom.’
Sharon took a breath, looking down at the table. ‘I took longer to bond with Ben than I did with you. He spent so much time in the NICU and sometimes I had to force myself to leave you and go to see him. It was only when we took him home that love began to grow and I could be a proper mother to both of you. I swore that I’d make it up to him for my failings in those early days, that I’d do whatever it took to give him the best life he could possibly imagine. That’s been my mission for twenty-three years. How can I stop now?’
‘And you’ve succeeded brilliantly,’ Maddie told her. ‘Don’t you see? It’s because you’ve been such an amazing mother that he has the confidence to strike out on his own.’
‘But he’s so vulnerable.’ Sharon raised her anxious eyes to meet Maddie’s. ‘I can’t bear to think of people taking advantage of him. This Eva person, for example; you’ve only met her once.’
‘Twice actually,’ Maddie said. ‘She was at the Death Café, too.’
Sharon shuddered. ‘Well, that’s hardly reassuring. And as for stuffing him with cake so he has no appetite for supper …’
‘Mom, stop.’ Maddie took her mother’s hand. ‘Ben eats healthily most of the time – a slice of cake now and then won’t kill him. Eva’s an elderly lady who wouldn’t hurt a fly and anyone can see she’s a kind, interesting person. Ben loved looking round her garden and the studio. He was so happy there.’
‘Happier than he is here, you mean?’ Sharon asked, bristling.
‘Yes, actually,’ Maddie replied. ‘At the moment, anyway. Look, he’s a young man; he’s bound to want what he can see other people having. I think he might like to start dating again.’
Sharon groaned. ‘Well, look how that turned out.’
The year before, Ben had started seeing Ruby, a lovely girl who had Down syndrome whom he’d met at summer camp. They’d gone to the movies together, and bowling, and out for meals – until Ben had discovered lovely Ruby was also dating several of the other boys from camp, and decided he didn’t want to share her.
Maddie laughed. ‘Come on! Just because it didn’t work out that time doesn’t mean he has to give up girls for ever. Look how many mistakes I’ve made in my brilliant dating career.’
Sharon smiled reluctantly. ‘I guess you’re right. And Ben took it on the chin, didn’t he? He wasn’t too upset when he and Ruby broke up.’
‘Not at all. He believes in himself, Mom, and that’s because of you. Now we just have to believe in him, too.’
Sharon looked her full in the face. ‘Do you honestly think he could manage, living on his own?’
‘I don’t know,’ Maddie replied. ‘But I do know he’ll be miserable unless we let him try.’
After she’d raced through clearing the plates and loading the dishwasher, Maddie hurried down to the basement storage room to look for a mythical suitcase that might only have existed in her grandfather’s imagination. Locating anything in there was a nightmare, but the thought of finding even the tiniest clue to the mystery of her German great-grandparents spurred her on. Containers filled shelves around the sides of the room and the floor was stacked up to the ceiling with more boxes and paraphernalia; she had to drag most of it out into the passage to clear a space to stand. Here was the fabric of their life together, arranged and labelled by her mother: the Christmas and Hallowe’en decorations Sharon dragged out, put up and then packed away again, year after year; the crate that a succession of dogs had occupied as puppies; the picnic baskets, fishing nets, surfboards, tennis rackets, jump ropes and sagging footballs of their childhood; the tricycle Ben had ridden until well into his teens. What a lot of work it took to raise a family, to create all the special occasions they had taken so much for granted, and their mother had done most of that single-handed. No wonder she was finding it hard to let go.
Once there was room to move, Maddie stood in the centre of the room with her hands on her hips, reading the labels in her mother’s handwriting on the columns of plastic storage crates. Surely there had to be a few suitcases somewhere? And yet when was the last time Sharon had travelled anywhere and needed one? Maddie couldn’t remember.
‘How are you getting on?’ Her mother’s voice came floating down the stairs, to be followed shortly afterwards by Sharon herself, threading her way through the junk in the passage.
‘Not well,’ Maddie replied. ‘I can’t see any luggage at all.’
‘You need to raise your eyes,’ Sharon said. ‘Wait, I’ll fetch you a ladder.’
‘How ever did you manage to get up there?’ Maddie asked, peering at the bottom of a wire rack bolted to the ceiling that loomed over her head like a spaceship landing on earth.
‘With difficulty.’ Sharon unhooked a step ladder from the wall and pulled it open for Maddie to climb. ‘Jeez, Maddie, you’ve turned the place upside down. I hope this won’t be all for nothing.’
‘Come on, Mom – go big or go home,’ Maddie said, pushing aside a duffle bag and sending up a cloud of dust that made her cough. She pulled out a large wheeled suitcase that was obscuring her view and handed it down to Sharon. ‘Could you take this for a second?’
Now she had room to move, she could sort through the pile of sports bags, backpacks and cases piled in the rack. And there it was, at last, pushed to one side: a small, chestnut-leather suitcase with reinforced corners, metal clasps and a worn handle.
‘Yes!’ Maddie’s heart leapt as she reached for it. This had to be the one; the other bags might have been old, but they all had zips or wheels or modern plastic inserts.
‘Promise I’ll put everything back as it was,’ she said, scrambling down the ladder. ‘Let’s take this case upstairs and go through it together.’
‘No, you make a start,’ Sharon replied, standing back to let her pass. ‘If you tidy up in here, I’ll never find anything ever again.’
Maddie could tell from its weight that the suitcase wasn’t empty. She laid it on the living-room rug and set about the rusty metal clasps with a kitchen knife and a can of spray lubricant. At last she managed to prise them open and lifted the lid, releasing a faint scent of mothballs and mildew. Inside she found a swathe of tissue paper, yellow and brittle with age, which she drew apart with clumsy fingers to reveal several items of women’s clothing: a couple of crêpe-de-chine dresses with dropped waists and ruffles around the neck and hem, an evening cloak with a Pierrot collar in striped silk, three pintucked blouses fastened by a row of tiny pearl buttons, and finally a gold brocade robe with a tasselled cord at the waist. Maddie shook out each garment reverently, admiring the tiny, exquisite stitching, and laid it aside for later inspection. The clothes were faded and deeply creased, but still intact.
Tucked between the layers of fabric she made discoveries that were even more intriguing. A framed picture was wrapped in another layer of tissue paper that fell apart in her hands: a watercolour painting of a large house built of honey-coloured stone, set in parkland with a dark forest behind. ‘Beechwood Grange’, read the caption beneath the painting. Maddie studied it for some time. A quick search by phone informed her that Beechwood Grange was a country house in Oxfordshire, England, home to the Framley-Chambers family since the eighteenth century. What could such a place have meant to Freya? This was definitely her great-grandmother’s suitcase: an inscription inside the lid read, ‘Freya Amsel, Holsteiner Ufer 40, Berlin’. Had she spent some time in England, then, as well as America?
Aside from the picture, Maddie found a silver-backed hairbrush and hand mirror, both badly tarnished, a pair of flat leather slippers and, most fascinating of all, a rectangular jewellery box made of shiny black lacquer, inlaid with mother-of-pearl birds and butterflies. The inside was lined with red velvet and contained something far more valuable than jewellery, as far as Maddie was concerned: a sheaf of letters, several of them still in their original envelopes, addressed to Mrs L Cole in Sherman Oaks, California. Her heart in her mouth, she carefully extracted the first sheet of flimsy paper and began to read.
‘So, found any treasures?’ Sharon asked, coming upstairs half an hour later. ‘I hope it’s been worth turning the basement upside down.’ She looked around. ‘And now the living room looks like it’s been hit by a bomb.’
‘Sorry,’ Maddie murmured. ‘I’ll tidy up in a second.’
‘These clothes are beautiful.’ Sharon held up a dress against herself. ‘Wonder if this would fit me? Far too precious to wear, though. Imagine if you spilled barbecue sauce on it.’
‘Did you ever meet Gramps’ mom?’ Maddie asked.
‘Once or twice, apparently,’ Sharon replied, ‘though I don’t remember. She died when I was small.’
Maddie nodded, looking back at the letter she was holding.
‘What’s that?’ her mother asked, kneeling on the rug to look over her shoulder.
‘A letter from Gramps’ father during the war. Except …’
‘Except what?’ Sharon smiled. ‘You’re being very mysterious. Spit it out.’
Maddie hesitated, wondering how to continue – and even whether she should. She wanted to confide in someone, though. ‘Well, the other day Gramps told me he was born towards the end of 1943,’ she began, ‘which meant he escaped the Vietnam draft lottery that applied to men born from 1944 onwards.’
‘That’s right,’ Sharon said. ‘His birth date is 15 November, 1943. I happen to know it’s his computer password.’
‘Well, these letters are dated from June 1942 till August 1943, shortly before his father was killed,’ Maddie said, feeling troubled. ‘Once men had been posted overseas, they couldn’t go back to the States until the war was over, could they? When they were given leave, I always assumed they took it locally rather than going home.’
‘That’s right.’ Sharon’s expression changed. ‘Oh Lord, I see what you’re getting at.’
‘And there’s no mention of a baby in any of these letters.’ Maddie nodded at the envelopes scattered around her. The letters were written in English, presumably so the censor would let them through. ‘Not even in the summer of 1943. He can’t have known that his wife was expecting.’
Sharon sat back on her heels. ‘Maybe she wanted to tell him face to face, once he was home. Or maybe she was going to wait until she was further along in the pregnancy.’
‘But she would have been around six months pregnant by then. Face facts, Mom: she didn’t want to tell her husband at all because he wasn’t the father. I can’t see any other explanation.’
They sat in silence for a moment. ‘Gramps mustn’t know about this,’ Sharon said at last. ‘He adored his mother. Just put those letters back in their envelopes and forget about them.’
‘You think?’ Maddie frowned. ‘I’m not sure what to do. Eva’s helping him research his family history. What if he hears the truth from somebody else, and then discovers we knew all along?’
‘You’ll just have to put them off,’ Sharon told her. ‘Tell this Eva to mind her own business and distract Gramps somehow. Perhaps we could take him back to the Death Café, or for a tour around a cemetery – something suitably morbid.’
‘But on the other hand,’ Maddie said, ‘we might be able to find out who his real father is. He might have half brothers or sisters, nephews and nieces. Wouldn’t that be amazing? And come on, these are your relatives too. You must want to trace them.’
‘No, I do not,’ Sharon said grimly. ‘I’m not having my father upset, not at his time of life – the shock could kill him. I’m telling you, Maddie, you need to keep this information to yourself. I wish you’d never uncovered it in the first place.’
Maddie watched her mother fold up the clothes with quick, angry movements. Yet again, they were at odds. She hated the idea of knowing something so fundamental about her grandfather’s identity and keeping it from him. Didn’t Gramps deserve to hear the truth, no matter how painful that might be? And what if his mother’s journal revealed it anyway?