Displaced Page 17

  When Irving had told them that Gunther Beltz’s father had exhumed Rachel Austerlitz and re-buried her in his cellar, she had felt as if she’d just slipped into a pool of madness. What had prompted him to do that? And how did he even know for sure that the body he’d taken out of the cellar was Rachel? She’d died sometime in 1944, he’d buried her the following year. She must have been unrecognisable. And for what? Why had he done that?

  Irving said Beltz believed his father had loved Rachel. But had he? She knew that Christian Europeans, which Joachim Beltz must have been in his youth, had a different attitude towards the dead. In Islam, bodies had to be buried quickly because the soul was in pain until it was under the earth. There were practical considerations connected to hygiene as well. The same applied to the Jews. The Christians alone, as far as she knew, venerated dead bodies. The corpses of some saints were actually on display, while ‘relics’ or pieces of body, blood or clothing from Jesus, Mary or any number of saints were looked upon as magical talismans, able to perform miracles in their own right. Had Rachel been a talisman for Joachim Beltz or had his removal of her body had a darker purpose?

  She suspected his son veered towards the latter. She considered how, when things were hidden, they could sometimes sour. It was then that it occurred to Mumtaz that if she wanted to know why her husband had been murdered by the Sheikhs, she could do worse than ask them.

  ‘Wien. That means Vienna,’ Irving said.

  Jas had found the photograph. It had been in a side pocket of an old handbag she’d found on the back seat of the Morris Oxford. Items that had been with it included an empty perfume bottle, an almost full box of ‘Guards’ cigarettes and a gold lighter.

  ‘My mother smoked well into old age,’ Irving said. ‘Guards were her brand. My father disapproved, but he did so in silence. It was the one issue between them that he accepted without comment. He smoked himself, but I know he felt that women shouldn’t.’ He pointed at the photograph. ‘I’ve no idea who that is.’

  Pasted onto a stiff backboard, the photograph was of a young man standing to attention in a suit. From details stencilled onto the backboard, as well as the unnatural background of what looked like a garden of artificial flowers, it had been taken in the Viennese Photography Studio of one Zalan Kovacs. It was old.

  ‘It looks a bit Victorian,’ Jas said. ‘Standing like that. Victorians often looked as if they had rods up their backs. But the suit doesn’t look that old. Looks quite modern to me.’

  ‘Maybe it was a friend,’ Irving said.

  ‘Of your mother’s?’

  ‘This is one of her old bags,’ he said as he looked at what remained of the brown leather handbag where the photograph had been found. ‘He doesn’t look like anyone I know.’

  ‘You never met anyone from your mother’s side of the family?’ Jas asked. ‘Did she ever show you any photographs?’

  ‘No and no,’ he said. ‘She only ever spoke about her family as all dead. I knew nothing about them and I never asked.’

  Lee, who had been wondering about this, said, ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know, to be honest. My parents fought a lot. Not physically, but they argued. Then after the arguments came the silences, which could go on for days, weeks.’

  ‘What did your mother do while your father was at work and you were at school?’

  ‘She kept the house,’ he said. ‘In the sixties this still happened in a lot of middle-class families. My mother didn’t need to work and so she didn’t.’

  ‘What about friends? Or rather,’ Lee said, ‘what about people you invited to her funeral?’

  ‘My father’s family came,’ he said.

  ‘Only your father’s family.’

  ‘Just them. My dad’s sister, Auntie Evelyn, my cousins Robert and Dawn, and their families. My mother had various cleaners over the years, but they never stayed or became friends of the family. My mother was a difficult woman. She looked down on people, she was a snob. Because, through my father, she had money she had nothing but contempt for those who didn’t. She judged people, I think, on what they had and not who they were. That was why I sometimes fell out with her. She had no education and always failed to appreciate those who did.’

  Lee got an image in his mind of an old woman dripping in diamonds, watching daytime TV.

  Jas, still looking at the photograph, said, ‘Is there any resemblance between this man and anyone you know? What about the Vienna connection?’

  ‘No Vienna connection that I know about,’ Irving said. ‘But then maybe that was where this woman who was my mother came from. The man looks, to me, more like an Italian than a Jew. Or maybe a Gypsy. I’m sorry if you think my assumptions are racist, but that’s just how I see him.’

  Lee crossed his arms over his chest and frowned. ‘What I can do is ask my artist contact to compare this photo to one of your mum and see whether she thinks they’re related. Not foolproof, and it will cost you …’

  Irving shrugged. ‘Money?’ he said. ‘What’s that to me? I can’t take it with me.’

  EIGHTEEN

  The punters dripped onto the site through the drizzle. Such as they were. A small parade of the long-term unemployed, kids bunking off school and the occasional fat man on a disability scooter. They depressed the hell out of all those taking money at the entry booths. But David Sanders was elated. A low turnout for a half-price wristband day proved his point about the need for change. If they ran a Victorian-themed funfair, lots of the attractions could be put under canvas or wood and they’d do a roaring trade on food and drink. Just one look at the face of a bloke in a shell suit morbidly sucking on soggy candyfloss was enough to convince David. How much more grub could they sell, admittedly to a different type of punter, if they could offer mulled wine, hearty soup and home-made bread?

  The old sideshows didn’t interest anyone. Dismal and grubby, full of soft toy ‘prizes’ they’d had for donkey’s years, they looked like relics from the 1970s, which of course they were. How much better if the shooting gallery and the hook-a-duck stalls were done up in Victorian splendour complete with new quirky prizes that people could actually win. Maybe each stall could be run by a Dickens character? That was a good idea.

  David watched far fewer people than he would have liked climb onto the BigO. He suspected most of them just wanted somewhere to get in the dry. Who, after all, wanted to see a view over a naff old fairground and Barking Station? Things would pick up in the evenings and, once he got his way and the Victorian Fair was up and running, they’d make real money.

  But in the meantime he had a problem. Old Bela Horvathy had called Roman Lester to complain about the resurrection of the freak show van. Gala’s bloody mother had seen it, nearly had a conniption, and then told her old man. Apparently, Bela had gone on to Roman about how the old freak show would bring back bad memories for him and especially for Ping and Pong. He felt it was cruel.

  But then if David knew the Twins, they’d relish the chance to display themselves and appal people. Old Horvathy could think he had control of them as much as he liked, but since they’d stopped working, back in the seventies, they’d taken every opportunity they got to frighten the punters. David had complaints. The only reason he never acted on them was because he knew his missus’s family would all gang up against him and he couldn’t be arsed with that. But now Ping and Pong might as well earn their keep. In fact, given the financial fragility of the organisation, it was essential the fair had no passengers.

  She saw him through the window. Tall and handsome, he nevertheless looked like a bad thought as he stood, a man in grey, beneath a grey umbrella, in the street outside Sara’s office. He looked as if he was waiting for someone, which could, Sara knew, be her. What did he want? Was it about the DNA test he’d agreed to have? Had he changed his mind?

  ‘No, I have agreed to do that and so I will do it,’ he said when she went outside to join him in the rain. ‘I want to speak to you, though. Would you care to join me for lunch
?’

  They went to one of Berlin’s many vegan restaurants where Sara allowed herself to be led by Beltz, who ordered them both aubergine and pesto pizzas with a side salad that looked like a small garden.

  ‘I’m not a full-time vegan,’ he explained. ‘But I like this place.’

  Now she was alone with him it was even harder for Sara to be with Beltz. Not only was he an ‘enemy’ he was also attractive and really rather charming. And he was using that charm to great effect. What did he want?

  And so she asked him. She knew she sounded like a nervous fool, but Sara didn’t care.

  He put his fork down. ‘Frau Metzler,’ he said, ‘I fear that the English people may have told you something I told them in a moment of, well, let’s call it unwise self-disclosure.’

  ‘What?’

  Sara thought she knew, but she waited for him to carry on. He leant forwards. ‘About the place my father chose to bury Rachel Austerlitz.’

  ‘Oh.’

  In his cellar. So that she’d be close. It had been on Sara’s mind.

  ‘I should never have spoken,’ he said. ‘It’s not like me.’

  Given his background, it probably wasn’t.

  ‘Of course, should you decide to go to the authorities, I can’t stop you,’ he said. ‘And given what I used to do for a living, my words may fall on deaf ears. But I should like to ask you not to do so. It’s my belief that my father loved Rachel with a passion. I don’t know that, and I had hoped that maybe Herr Levy would be able to illuminate me about that. But sadly he knew nothing.’

  She didn’t know what to say.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘this country is not the same as it was when Mutti came to power. Many of the young people are tired of Frau Merkel’s politics with no highs and no lows. This is not a dynamic Germany. They seek other, some would say, older ideologies.’

  Sara began to feel cold. She’d heard this language before. Contrary to what foreigners always seemed to think, those who had held the DDR together for forty-one years hadn’t always done so with an iron fist. There had, she recalled, been ‘conversations’ too.

  ‘I find,’ he said, ‘unwittingly, that such people sometimes seek me out.’

  He was a writer, he’d told her, but she’d never read or even seen any of his books.

  ‘Passionate young people who feel that maybe Germany needs another alternative.’

  Sara looked into his eyes and saw nothing. In the mouth of almost anyone else, his words would have been benign. Ordinary political speculation. But from a man who used to be in the Stasi they were ominous and threatening. He would know, as all Germans did, that discontent with Chancellor Merkel’s administration was higher than it had ever been. Inconceivably, to Sara, some people, particularly the young, had started to embrace both far-right and far-left ideologies in recent years. And where the far right and the far left met, at the extreme ends of those ideologies, lay madness and, she now felt, Herr Beltz.

  Feeling exposed and scared, she looked around for a way out of this conversation. Even if what she perceived as a threat wasn’t, she wanted to go.

  And then she saw a friendly face outside the window. Thank God!

  She stood.

  ‘Frau—’

  ‘I’m so sorry, but I’ve just seen one of our young workers,’ she said. ‘I’m mentoring him. I have to go.’

  She waved to attract the young man’s attention and began to work her way through the crowds and out of the restaurant. At the door, in a moment that was in truth a reflex, she turned back to Beltz and said, ‘I’ll say nothing. You don’t have to worry.’

  He smiled. What she didn’t see was the way he then also smiled at the nice young voluntary worker she was so keen to be with.

  He was called Rolfe.

  The rain had stopped, but the ground was still wet underfoot. Mumtaz took Irving’s arm to steady him. Lee, walking ahead, turned and said, ‘You sure you came in this way?’

  ‘After over fifty years? I can’t be certain, but this is the quickest way in from the house,’ Irving said. ‘My mother was pushing Miriam in the pram; she wouldn’t have wanted to go out of her way.’

  ‘Did you hold your mum’s hand?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘My mother was not a demonstrative person. Probably not.’

  They’d entered Barking Park through the main entrance, nearest to the town centre. Irving’s house was almost opposite.

  ‘My mum had me on reins,’ Lee said.

  ‘Your mother probably cared for you,’ Irving said. ‘The more I recall my mother, the more it occurs to me that she was only really interested in herself.’

  As usual the fairground had been set up in the open, grassed areas of the park nearest to Longbridge Road. As they had been the previous year, the entrance booths were to the right of the path.

  Mumtaz asked, ‘Was the fair always set up here, do you know?’

  Irving smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That I do know. But that’s mainly because there’s really no other place for it to be.’

  They paid a bored-looking woman for three wristbands and entered a churned-up, muddy space surrounded by sideshows festooned with large soft toys. The site smelt of cooked onions, toffee and fag smoke.

  Lee said, ‘Christ, if you took that big wheel away, we could be back in 1972.’

  There was even a young boy floating around wearing a tank top and sporting a mullet. However, the BigO, the largest big wheel in the world with its enclosed seating, in futuristic blue-lit pods, was something that would have amazed and probably frightened people back in the seventies. Very much along the lines of the London Eye, but bigger, or so it was claimed, it completely shadowed the entire site, blocking out the little light being thrown by a very weak afternoon sun.

  Irving stood. ‘So what now?’

  It was highly unlikely he’d remember anything except the most salient points from that awful trip to the fair back in the sixties and so Mumtaz suggested they start by getting a cup of tea. Encouraging context-dependent memories, especially memories that were so old, took time. She had suggested that if all else failed, Irving might benefit from hypnosis, but he’d said he wasn’t comfortable with that. Like a lot of people, he distrusted a technique he saw as not much more than a magic trick.

  Mumtaz watched Irving watch the fair. They’d managed to find some tables under cover where they sat and drank their tea. There were very few punters. Most of the people she could see were fairground people talking to each other. But then un-glamourised by the multicoloured lights that illuminated the place at night, it was a pretty shabby affair. Most of the rides and the sideshows looked distinctly dated. The rain didn’t help.

  After a few moments, Irving said, ‘To be honest with you it all looks about the same as it always has. I know that’s no help at all, but a fairground is a fairground. Unless I see the freak show, which I won’t, it’s all much of a muchness. Even as I child I wasn’t really interested in anything much except the freak show. Oh, and the animals. They had a tiger and a monkey. But I don’t suppose they have animals any more. I think there are laws about such things now.’

  ‘Cruelty to animals,’ Lee said, fully aware that he was probably breaking some sort of animal cruelty legislation by keeping his mynah bird, Chronus, chained to his perch. But then at least he could see what was going on outside and had a great view of the telly. Fairground and circus animals had been notoriously ill-treated.

  ‘When we’ve finished our tea, we’ll walk the site and see what you can remember,’ Mumtaz said.

  ‘And if I remember nothing?’

  ‘Then maybe you’ll remember later,’ she said. ‘Context-dependent recall isn’t always instant. You may even have a significant dream in the next few days.’

  She saw Lee turn away. The context-dependent recall she knew he could get on board with. But the dreams …

  And yet sometimes they really did mean something. Sigmund Freud hadn’t been a complete fool.

&nbs
p; Eva watched her father sleep. His chest sounded like a bag of nails these days. When he did die, she’d be lost. Only Bela had loved her – inasmuch as he could love anyone. There had been Gala’s father for a while, and Gala herself, before she met David. Only Amber came close and it was for the young girl that she’d hold her tongue even when her father died. Far better he died as he had lived, ignoring what he couldn’t bear.

  Bela had built a whole new identity when he left mainland Europe. Unable to fly by that time, he’d found a new purpose, which he had maintained ever since. He’d taken care of his family, sometimes by means that were not kind to others. But he’d looked after his own without judgement. Eva knew she couldn’t do that. She knew that she still found it hard to like him even though she loved him.

  Amber entered the van and Eva put a finger to her lips.

  ‘He’s sleeping,’ she whispered. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I came to see if Nagyapa knows where Ping and Pong are?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ Eva asked. ‘You heard what Nagyapa said: no flying. Not until we leave here.’

  ‘Yeah, but why?’ Amber said. ‘Why here?’

  ‘We don’t like you flying anywhere,’ Eva hissed.

  ‘Nagyapa does.’

  ‘And he is wrong,’ Eva said. ‘Silly old man. You won’t fly here, and in fact, you won’t fly anywhere from now on. I’m sick of how worried you make your mother!’

  Amber pouted. Then she said, ‘Well, actually, I wasn’t getting the Twins to help me, but Dad. Ask him, if you don’t believe me.’

  Eva frowned.

  ‘For the freak show,’ Amber said. ‘Dad’s put it all back together. He wants to pick the Twins’ brains about how it used to look in the old days.’

  They walked in silence. Both Lee and Mumtaz watched Irving as he trudged slowly past shooting galleries, a haunted house and a hall of mirrors. As a child, Lee had always wanted to believe in something beyond what he could see. Raised with little concept of religion, he’d always secretly wanted life to offer a bit of fairy dust. Not that he’d ever told anyone.