I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin

Book by Malone Stephens Gerard

1932

Michael blew into his hands, then pulled tight the collar of his woollen coat. Being tucked in behind the old battery’s crumbling concrete sure wasn’t helping much in the way of keeping dry, not from snow so wet it was falling this side of rain, but there was no better spot around Halifax to watch the lights. Gene, plunking her arse down on a beached log beside her big brother, was more interested in seeing that shiner of his. And Jesus that looked like it was gonna ­hurt.

“He still mad?”

“Uh-­huh.”

They watched the back wheel of her bike spinning slowly to a ­stop.

“Some dark, eh?” Gene didn’t care for Point Pleasant Park at night. Good thing her brother never ran off much farther than his own back yard. “Mrs. Herzfeld came by.”
Michael threw a rock from the pebbly beach, but without moonlight there was no telling where it hit the ­water.

“Not right running away on her like that, Michael. She’s old.”

All that water gushing through the ceiling plaster and onto the piano, Mrs. Herzfeld flapping her arms, screaming for buckets? For sure, that whole upper floor was looking to come down. Well, Gene would’ve run too. Besides, the mess wasn’t Michael’s fault. Putting in a bathroom in that ­richie-­rich house over on Oxford Street was too big a job for one man, not that his father had listened. When Michael got ­home–­where his family still had to share a shitter out back with the ­neighbours–­and told August what happened, the old man landed Michael with a single punch and only the second goddamn he’d ever said. And in German, god sounded less important than the ­damned.

Shit.

Michael wiped the wet snow away from his ­eyes.

“He’s not sending you away ’cause of this.” Gene wasn’t sounding too reassuring. “Me? I’d go.”

Not a chance, their father replied to that suggestion when Michael had made it. Send Eugenia by herself to Europe? What was he thinking? The girl was needed at home to take care of her mother. Michael had just proved he wasn’t needed for ­anything.

“Dadda says our Nan lives in a big house by a canal. Some adventure you’ll have.”

Hissing through the nearby spruce made them glance behind, but neither expected to see anything. Only wind. Gene shivered. The thing was, their older brother Felix once shot a bird out of those trees, that last summer before the Spanish influenza. Michael always felt his father lost his favourite that ­year.

“That’s not true.” Gene slung her arm about his shoulders. “He says you’ll be back before Christmas.”

Then she smiled. Best expression for her and Michael. You didn’t notice those dark rings under their grey eyes so much, something they got from their Renner side. Solid and boxy, Michael and Gene weren’t likely to ever turn a head. Not like Felix. Athlete’s build, a real looker. More like his mum, the happy ­Grahams.

“And who knows?” Gene said. “Maybe you’ll even find someone over there you’ll want waiting for you behind Saint Peter. Heaven can’t be, well, Heaven if you’re up there alone. When Dadda was your age, he was married.”

Michael shoved Gene off the log. “Those copies of Sweetheart Stories in the shitter are for wiping your arse, not reading.”

“Feel sorry for yourself then.” And she tossed snow back up into his ­face.

Michael helped his sister to her feet as that light on the horizon, now a fully formed freighter, steamed into Halifax ­harbour.

“Where do you think it’s from?”

“C’mon,” Gene said. “Avon’s mom invited us for supper.”

Michael went for the bicycle. “We’ll get home faster if I pedal.”

As his sister climbed on behind, she held on to his waist and felt Michael trembling. Stay out of puddles, she ­warned.

-

In Michael’s ­twenty-­five years, he’d only once tried to spend a night away from home. He’d been shy of six and that was just to visit his uncles across the harbour in Dartmouth. Felix and Gene had been excited for days about the trip, but when their father got them all down to the waterfront, Michael kicked up such a fuss the ferry master crossed his arms and said that young fella wasn’t going anywhere on this boat. No one tried again, even if that meant Michael missed out on Lake Banook skating parties or swimming off McNab’s Island. Until now, and that damned letter from Aunt ­Beate.

Michael knew his father had been born overseas, not that August talked much about those days. By eighteen, he’d already worked his passage across to Canada. Claimed he wasn’t putting up with his father’s only two choices in life for ­him–­scholar or ­soldier–­when August really wanted to work with his hands. Sure, August taught his own kids the language, and he scoured the evening paper for any news about Germany, but the von Renners of Berlin meant nothing to him anymore. Besides, he had enough on his plate with Mum. Apart from her blindness, in the last few years her forgetfulness had gotten worse. No longer just names and faces of people she’d known forever, sometimes now even her own kids. And there was that poor neighbour of theirs, Mrs. Glyn, who lately Mum accused of stealing her false teeth, even when she had them in her ­mouth.

But Michael’s grandmother had suffered a stroke and was being cared for by a doctor who just happened to be an old, dear friend of the family. Too dear, by Aunt Beate’s account. The doctor’s slippers were under the bed, according to her. With a sizable property at stake, someone had better keep a close eye on Nan. That someone wasn’t going to be her. Aunt Beate’s husband was an important something or other in Leipzig and needed her, so she couldn’t be riding the trains back and forth to Berlin. Time for her older brother to see to matters. Enclosed please find one passage to ­Europe.

Except it wasn’t August going, although right now, standing next to chains thick as a man’s torso straining to keep the ship tied alongside the wharf, he sounded as if he almost regretted ­that.

“See it? It’s like a floating city. Just look at it, will you.”

August Renner was pacing back and forth, whistling over the grandeur of the General von Steuben, New York to Hamburg with stops in Halifax and Southampton, docked alongside Pier 22, its two stacks smoking in readiness. Boy oh boy. His son, he’d be sailing in grand ­style.

Michael and his family huddled against the wall of the low warehouse. Winter, not yet ready to concede, had surprised the city with an April dump of snow. Michael had had to shovel his way that morning to the outhouse, where his last few hours at home were spent nursing a nervous stomach. Even Mrs. Glyn, rapping on the door, eye to the cracks, had asked if he was all ­right.

“It won’t last,” his father said, about the snow. “Lilacs’ll be blooming when you get to Berlin.”

Mum, hooked on to Gene’s arm and wearing her round ­blacked-­in spectacles, wanted to know, were they going to her parents’ ­house?

“They’re dead, Mum,” Gene said. “Don’t you remember?”

“Oh? When did that happen?”

December 1917, after the Renners’ house in Richmond, the one with the veranda, survived that munitions ship colliding with the Imo in Halifax harbour with only some broken windows. But the city inspectors came by, poked around the foundations, left with shaking heads. The whole block came down not long after. Church too, even Michael’s school. They spent the winter under canvas in a park with other refugees while Mum got the glass fished out of her eyes over in the ­hospital.

Come spring, August found that row house on Waverley Terrace. Cockroaches had eaten away at the glue under the wallpaper, and what was left you could spit through, but it beat the hell out of living in a tent. Michael’s father said they should all be thankful the old woman who’d died there hadn’t yet gone cold or there’d have been a lineup to kingdom come for the place. And besides, they had real nice neighbours, the Glyns, with their son Avon who was just about Felix’s age. So what if the trains grinding and rolling over tracks nearby made it hard to ­sleep.

Right after they’d moved in, before anyone could unpack, August carted his family off to nearby Point Pleasant Park where crumbling towers secured the harbour entrance from enemies that never came. Felix shot a blue jay out of those spruce trees with a pellet gun and ­Gene–­she was Eugenia back ­then–­cut her toe on a shell. Michael thought they were supposed to be having a picnic and got wet to his knees on the pebbly beach, but after his father told them Mum wasn’t going to see again, no one was very ­hungry.

There was more. With a war on, lots of folks in Halifax were getting worked up, blaming the Kaiser for the city’s thousands of dead after the explosion, one of those being the man August worked for, now somewhere in a mass grave. That meant Michael’s father was going to have to make it on his own as a plumber and he was taking ­fifteen-­year-­old Felix out of school to apprentice. Renner & Sons. Felix went, yippee, but August said there was nothing to yippee about and it was as good a time as any to stop using the von before their last name, or speaki...