Brickwork

Most historical events seem to me to be a fine balance of intention and cock-up. Here’s one scenario, leaning towards the latter.

Her father needed to float that boat. He’d known his own father would really be in the boat with him, in spirit. All he had to do was to extend his evening stroll over a fence or two. Locate the vessel he’d sighted earlier and give it a shove out. But some twitchy guard saw him. This gangly, spotty, kid recited the rote-learned warning twice but the architect’s mind was engaged in acts of memory.

The man who was able to reason out his run before the advancing Red Army – and survived – was vulnerable in his own home territory. When the authorities discovered the guy they’d shot had quite some standing, they got a shock. Things were supposed to be opening up. They couldn’t tie it all up too neatly. So they followed the example of Mrs Thatcher’s British Government Ministers, in courts of law, and were ‘economical with the truth’.

Here’s another version. Even a story that is fixed, secure in its train of narrative detail, is different every time it’s told. And this one has very little fixed, except some background information which might be essential.

An eminent architect had been invited over to view certain designated sights. He knew he had to stick to the script. He couldn’t stray. He was reported as having behaved impeccably up to that critical point. The delegation had been touring a fine piece of Baltic minimalism. Sympathetic designers from Finland had worked with the Party to produce the hotel. Rest and recuperation for those with onerous duties. The new hotel was set back a safe interval from the dunes. For more than one reason. Forecasts for erosion and encroachment suggested the need to allow a generous distance back from the water’s edge, if you were to think of a projected lifespan of at least a hundred years. That would be enough because there are of course some unfortunate precedents in buildings planned to last out a full glorious millennium.

And then of course there were the shanty villages of caravans and bothies for normal workers, erected closer to the water. A sensitive degree of separation was clearly required. So the great and good would not be disturbed by inquisitive eyes, looking to the shine of the new modernism.

Now we could all buy a ticket to swim in the trapped rays of winter sun, but it would have been private functions only when your father made his officially sanctioned visit.

These wide, triple-glazed windows looked seaward but the angles had been cleverly thought out. You wouldn’t see the line of watchtowers, close to the swaying tops of the pines.

Maybe the visitors really could believe that this was a sign of solid economic foundations. This was of course only the start of a building programme which would make that level of recreational and conference facility available to the many as well as to the few. Later.

At least one of these visitors from the West, however, had the mark of a survivor. As surely as if it had been inked under his living skin. Two youths from the architectural class of 1939 had been in it together. They had been transported across a continent, fought and then been rounded up together. This history had to be the key.

Gabriele’s father and his friend had heard the stories. If you went behind that wire in that camp you would not come out again. The two men had lived through fire from both sides by lying low during the day and sighting the plough in the night sky. Their angle on the pole star had taken them all the way across the desolate kilometres. But one man’s past life was still trapped here in Rügen.

I think he set a course, that dim night. He’d crossed more than one frontier by night, before. He’d emerged on the lucky side or at least the prosperous one. He hadn’t even needed to walk across a long bridge. The survivor has to live with guilt.

But to put his Rügen past behind him, he’d have to sail from it, alone, on his own wits. A black boat in a dark sea, criss-crossed by the wakes of all these ferries and cargo ships.

I’ll go for that story. It’s like diving down the stairwell, in a solid apartment block in Turin, the very house where he was raised before the madness of fascism struck. That’s what Primo Levi did. Or probably did. How can anyone know, for sure? Maybe he’d only kept everything together till he’d borne witness to all the things it was possible for a human being to tell.

It was me now, lying awake, trying not to move about. Gabriele had found the sleep she needed. It was worth two ferries and a long drive for that. The Periodic Table, in English, was lying unopened on the table, her side. She’d come late to bed after waiting up, drinking pear schnapps with her brother, when the rest of us had sloped off. Nothing was resolved but they had now held their wake.

We’d have one collective family walk on New Year’s Day, out past the empty Sekt bottles and spent fireworks. Some said, this one, ’98 to ’99, was the real Millennium? And others said it was 2000–2001. Was that logic or maths? Where’s the logic in the arbitrary marking of time, anyway? Hang on though, there’s a bit of astronomy and natural physics involved. Difficult to argue with the sun and the moon. Shit, a party’s a party.

The Caspar David Freidrich cliffs were reflecting the light, casting it back seaward. The flints in the shingle shimmered. The cousins were sifting for fossilised octopus. Sure enough, the brown tentacles were recognisable. You hoped for amber. It only took time for all these animal bodies to stop being so sinister. A bit unfair on left-handed folk, that continuing extension of meaning. Casting nasturtiums. But that’s how language is.