'CELLO STRINGS AND SCREECHING METAL

by Vanessa Gebbie



It happens when you give me champagne. Not that that happens a lot, you understand, but occasionally, perhaps when I have played my 'cello well, and there is a party to say thank you. You must wonder why it is that an eighteen year old German girl who likes to party seems a little distant, and stands back looking at the glass in her hand, watching the bubbles spiral from a single point in the base of the glass. It also happens when I hear screeching metal, maybe train wheels locking on the track.

It removes me, you see, back to a day when I was quite small. Not more than four, perhaps, although, you know, were I to calculate, I could tell you the age precisely.

My memories up to that point were sketchy. Yes, incomplete. We lived within fifty metres of the Wall, and it was not special to me. It was just something there. I remember the sounds. But then, I am a musician. You would expect this, would you not? That I recall sounds more than emotions? Or maybe that is what brings the emotion to the surface . . . the senses?

The barking of dogs. I remember the barking of dogs, all day, all night. Kept hungry to be a deterrent. I remember the sound of the leashes those dogs were tethered to. Expandable metal links, that screeched like distant trains in the dark, as the dogs ran back and forth, looking for food. They kept them hungry, you see.

My bedroom did not face that way, but the sound whirled round the building, pushing in through every window until I could not escape it. The barking and the screeching metal. All night. In the end, when it stopped I could not sleep for the silence.

But before that, there was one night. My parents had gone out, and a neighbour was to stay the night with me. She slept in my parents room, in their big bed, in the room that overlooked, at some distance, but still overlooked, the Wall. Wall is a misnomer. I heard this word and it is right. It was no real wall, near our block. It was a chain link fence, watch towers at intervals, a strip of green grass they called no mans land, and another chain link fence. So light, so simple, so easy.

On that night, the neighbour (I want to give her a name, but none comes) and I were playing cards. We were listening to the radio. The radio was reporting things I did not understand, and I wanted music. Music is what I always listened to, even then, but the neighbour said no. This was important. She was then on our telephone to someone quite soon, telling them that it was only a matter of days. Please, I remember saying. Please, can we play another game?  But no, I had to go to bed. I begged and begged to be able to stay in the big bed, because without my parents there, the apartment seemed very empty and echoing, The sounds were round and huge.

I was put to bed in the large bed, and told to be a quiet girl.

In this room, the sounds were loudest. The dogs barking, and the leashes, cutting into my ears. I wished I could have my 'cello, as those sounds might calm the dogs as they calmed me, but it had to stay in the basement. (These flats have such thin walls, I was told. You can practise only now and again.)

I go to the window to look out and see if I can see the dogs. I can see them between the flats, between the buildings in front. Running back and forth in patches of light. It is dark, you see. There are yellow lights at intervals, not strong enough to light up everything, but which catch movement like moths.

Then I see him. Hunched over, carrying something, a blanket? I see a man throw a blanket up, and it catches on the fence. I see him begin to climb, and falter, slip back, and climb again. I see the dogs assembling. In the spotlight. That is what I see. And what am I? Four? Five? But I know I am seeing something horrible. I want to shout to him. I have just heard, because my neighbour has explained, it will not be long, just wait a little, and you can walk, walk through. But my thoughts don't reach him. He is throwing a hand over the top of the wire, and is dropping down the other side.  The dogs on their leashes are barking. The leashes are screeching and the dogs are kept so hungry. Maybe he loves someone over the other side of the green grass?

What I haven't seen before are the floodlights. They are beautiful when they come on. It is like daylight. He is caught hanging on the fence, one hand on the top, the dogs below, and only me watching. I hear something through a loud hailer, but I cannot hear the words. Even me with my musical ears cannot hear them because this is no music. I know. If he falls the dogs will get him. If he stays the voices will get him. I can see his hair from the window. It lifts in the breeze, in the lights. Then I shut my eyes before the guns start. I don't see him drop although I know what is happening. I don't hear him call out although my ears are straining. I don't understand. I am too little. I cannot sleep.


A very few days later, we are all in the apartment, my mother, my father and I. My parents are listening to the radio, and I am bathing a doll. Of a sudden, my father picks me up and shouts to my mother to come, come quickly.  They do not normally do things with excitement like this, I think.

We rush outside, I am bumped and crushed in my father's arms, and he puts me on his shoulders. I ride up there proud to be his daughter, above the hundreds and thousands of people. All our neighbours, and the sounds. I hear them, the sounds. Car horns blaring out. Trabant engines, the revving of engines like your mowers in parks, people laughing, pushing, men I do not know saying Dieter, what a day! The running through to where the Wall is stone, not wire. Bulldozers, revving, pushing, the wall cracking and giving way with dust and noise. People singing. People crying.

I remember someone holding a  glass up to me and saying drink this little one. It is a good day, is it not? The drink fizzes and my eyes water. My father laughs, and my mother is crying and smiling.

I wish so hard that the man with the hair lifting in the breeze could have waited just a few more days. 

END

Vanessa Gebbie is a journalist living and working in the UK. She was shortlisted for the biennial Asham Award for new women writers last year. Her fiction has been accepted for publication in Aesthetica Magazine, Cadenza, Birmingham Words, Buzzwords, Smokelong Quarterly, and many other literary ezines.  She studies short story writing with the author Alex Keegan, who runs a tough hard-working web based writing group. For details of his group's extraordinary success rate Alex can be contacted direct: alex.keegan@btclick.com.