November 1989, Poland
Miranda
It isn’t even there. I hold up the torn postcard with the yellowed strip of peeling Sellotape holding the two halves together. Looking at arm’s length, I can see exactly where it should have been. But my grandmother’s childhood home no longer exists. Gone is the half-timbered brick and the thick oak door. Gone, too, are the trees and hedge on one side. Instead there is a dusty patch of bare muddy gravel, rutted with tyre tracks, an unofficial widening of the main road where it swoops round the corner. There are houses further back: boxy grey things that look more like bunkers than homes, blankly utilitarian, like the rest of the village.
My neck aches from falling asleep on the back seat earlier. I stand, looking at the place where it should have been, where a family lived and a history began, and now there is nothing but an empty lot.
A lorry thunders past behind me, and the postcard wobbles in my hand. ‘There’s nothing left,’ I say, turning my head to Michael. I feel as puffed-up and angry as the thick clouds that tower above us.
‘Does it matter?’ he says.
‘But I’ve dragged you all this way, and it’s not even here.’
‘What were you expecting? What wasn’t blown up by the Red Army was probably flattened by Communism.’ He sounds matter-of-fact. ‘We might as well look around, as we’re here. I don’t know about you, but I could do with a coffee and something to eat before we head off. And you might feel differently about the place if you’ve seen more of it,’ he says, touching me lightly on the sleeve and pointing over the road behind us. ‘Look, the church is still standing – that would have been the church your grandmother went to, wouldn’t it?’
I turn to look. I hadn’t noticed it when we pulled up: a large white church, outlined in thick terracotta paint, with an onion shaped spire. ‘Yes,’ I say, my mood lifting a fraction.
Three cars pass in quick succession and then we walk through a veil of exhaust fumes to the other side, where there is a pebble-dashed house, with a garden that attaches to the churchyard. There is a single beech tree in front of the manse. I falter, and a shiver runs through me. ‘You okay?’ Michael says, slipping a hand under my elbow. ‘You look pale.’
I have a swimming feeling, as if I’ve got up too quickly, and the whole world throbs. ‘Just a little light-headed,’ I say, reaching out to steady myself on the tree trunk. The bark is rough beneath my fingertips.
‘Maybe your blood sugar is low – you didn’t have much breakfast, did you?’ he says. I shake my head. ‘Let’s find somewhere where we can get you a drink, at least. And you’re shivering. Here – take this.’ He unwinds the sky-blue scarf from his own neck and wraps it round mine.
He is right. I am cold. The temperature, already chill, seems to have plummeted further. I pull the scarf up so it covers my head. ‘Thank you,’ I say.
‘That might be a hotel,’ he says, pointing up behind the manse, beyond the churchyard, to where a large Schloss is glimpsed through the winter-bare trees. ‘Why don’t you have a look round here, and I’ll go on ahead and see if we can get something to eat and drink up there?’
‘Okay,’ I say. I hear his footfalls crunch away up the path.
I hold up the postcard again. I was too close, I realize. The photograph would have been taken from here, across the road. And the leaves in the foreground may well have been the branches of this tree. I put the postcard in my jeans pocket and run my hands over the trunk.
The tree has been fire damaged. It looks as if it was hit by lightning once, long ago, half of it withered and blackened. There is a hole the size of a head, at shoulder height. Inside it new growth sprouts, like arms, reaching up, pushing through the blackened space. There is a mixture of old charcoal and leaf mold at the base of the hole: dark brown and moist. I dig my fingertips down, through the clamminess of it, feeling, deeper, deeper, down through past years of blown leaves and detritus. But I can’t find anything. Maybe someone else has been treasure hunting since 1945. Maybe it’s the wrong tree. Maybe the necklace was never there.
As I rub the muck from my hands, I look up through the empty tree branches at the upstairs window of the manse, and for a moment I think I see the pale outlines of two faces behind the glass. There’s an odd smell in the air: not the fading scent of exhaust but stronger – acrid smoke – something burnt. I wrinkle my nose, and blink, and when I open my eyes again the faces have gone. I must have imagined them.
I decide to have one last look, just to be certain, and plunge my hands back inside the trunk, scrabbling down as far as I can. There’s something stringy, like a root, in the way, catching the edge of my baby fingernail. I pull to get rid of it, this sinewy thread. As I tug it out, there is a tiny sparkle, as the light catches something hidden. Underneath the grime is metal, tarnished dark grey and cold. And on the end of it a blackened lozenge. A chain and locket. I smile, and put it safely in my jeans pocket, next to the torn postcard. I have two things to take back to my grandmother. And a hundred questions to ask about the story that lies behind them.
I hear a rustling sound and look up into the bare branches. Two black birds with silver speckles on their wings – starlings – flutter away over the rooftop, as if disturbed by something.
I pull my grandfather’s Rolleiflex from my rucksack, hugging it into the space below my heart. I take photographs: the tree, the manse, the church, the churchyard, the empty space where the guesthouse used to be. I’m planning to put together an album of photographs to take to Gran in hospital.
The storm clouds are piling up, skies darkening overhead, and I decide to go and find Michael. An icy blast of wind tugs the scarf, and I wind it closer round my face, pushing my chin into my chest. I begin to walk along the path that winds in front of the church. There is frost on the ground: fallen leaves bronze-silver and slippery on the surface of the beige mud. A few ragged old rose bushes trespass spindly branches over the manse fence into the graveyard. One still holds half a yellow rose, quivering in the chill air.
The track continues, past a flat piece of earth that is covered in a rectangle of concrete, with jagged spikes of rusted metal poking up above ground, and a dark hole with crumbling steps disappearing downwards – there would have been a large building there once, but all that is left is the cellar. As I pass I have another moment like the one just now: a swooning feeling and the scent of burning. Perhaps Michael is right and it’s just low blood pressure causing these odd sensations.
The track narrows to a path and rises through some trees. There are firs like green bottlebrushes, and bare silver birches with blots of pale green mistletoe clotted on high branches. I can see the Schloss through the trees. I look up at the sky: the dense clouds make twilight of the daytime. The air feels charged. There is a rumble, like distant ordnance. I carry on walking, uphill, across the frosted ground.
I see him then, between the trees, coming down from the Schloss, striding in his long, grey coat, with his fair hair dull gold in this strange light. As we get closer to each other I notice the chink of blue, as his eyes meet mine. There is an uncomfortable sensation inside me, like numb-cold fingers thrust in front of an open fire.
And that’s when it happens: the sky is rent with electric yellow, and there is a blinding flash, followed a split-second later by a tearing roar, as the dark clouds rip apart above our heads. White snowflakes spew down. The storm has broken.
I raise the Rolleiflex to the space below my heart. ‘Snow!’ Michael holds out his arms, lifts his head, then opens his mouth wide. I see him through the lens, caught in a moment of childish excitement. He snaps his mouth shut, looks across, and grins. ‘My first snowflake of winter!’
He looks straight through the viewfinder, right at me, as if the camera isn’t there at all, catching my gaze and holding it fast. From this distance his eyes are like twin blue sparks seen through the snow-veil between us.
That’s when I know. It’s only when I see him through glass that I realize: Michael is the man from the kerbside in Berlin, the one who called for me to phone for an ambulance, the one who used his long coat to cover the overdosed junkie, who waited on the kerb for the medics, the night the Wall was breached. It’s him.
I click the shutter. I capture the moment.
And it’s perfect.