Free The Berlin Crossing by Kevin Brophy

father now? What good can it do you? You and your mother shared a life, she
     brought you up on her own and I’m sure she was proud of you. You did your best, you told me you have a doctorate from Rostock
     University, any mother would be proud of your achievement. What good can it do you now to seek out knowledge that might upset
     you, even do you harm?’
    ‘My mother wanted me to know.’
    ‘Your mother was dying, Herr Ritter. I’ve seen a lot of people die. Sometimes they want to change things just
because
they’re dying. They ask for things they’d run a mile from if they thought they could go on living.’ The priest edged his
     stool closer to mine. ‘Despite what you read in storybooks, Herr Ritter, the words of the dying have no special value – they’re
     just the words of people who know they haven’t long to live. They have no special wisdom, believe me.’
    ‘Still, she sent me to you—’
    ‘And I’m saying to you to think of yourself. All we have is today, the past is over and done with.’
    ‘So everybody keeps telling me.’ I could tell from the look he gave me that he knew what I meant but he let it go.
    ‘So why go chasing a father now, Herr Ritter?’
    And in that barely heated sacristy in Bad Saarow, under the grey gaze of a priest I hardly knew, I found myself confronting
     the many ghosts of my absent father. School prize days, certificate days, days when my classmates gloried – and, as teenagers,
     squirmed – in the presence of their fathers. Fathers on the touch-line at football games, loud with encouragement and remonstration.
     Fathers in summer allotments, smoking in shirtsleeves, hailing one another across the makeshift fences. And the way they’d
     sometimes call me into the allotment huts with their own children for a lemonade and a sandwich and I’d try not to see the
     wariness in their expressions, the words held back, constrained in the presence of this serious schoolboy with the non-participating
     mother and the dead father.
    Maybe the priest read the struggle in my expression.
    ‘I just want to know.’ It sounded lame, even to myself. ‘I’m thirty and I just want to know.’
    Pastor Bruck studied my ID card for a moment.
    ‘You were born in August nineteen sixty-three, Herr Ritter,’ he said, fingering the card.
    ‘So I’m told. I don’t remember any of it.’
    Pastor Bruck chose to ignore my flippancy.
    ‘I knew your mother for a short while in the winter of nineteen sixty-two, Herr Ritter.’
    ‘I suppose . . .’ I hesitated, ‘I was on the way then.’
    ‘In November and December of nineteen sixty-two your mother was . . .’ it was the pastor’s turn to hesitate, ‘a slim and lovely
     young woman. And brave too.’
    ‘Brave?’
    ‘Yes, brave and beautiful.’
    ‘She sent me here – you must have known my father?’
    The priest seemed to slump on the stool; maybe the metalbrace was failing in its job of keeping him upright.
    ‘I knew the young man she loved at that time – the young man who loved her.’
    He looked away from me. He closed his eyes, wrapped his arms around himself as though to protect himself against something
     other than the damp cold of the sacristy.
    ‘Please,’ I said.
    When he opened his eyes, I could see the struggle in him.
    ‘In that winter of nineteen sixty-two, the world was a different place. It was a dangerous world. In Berlin they had just
     built the Wall, every day we could see army trucks and tanks on the roads. Many of us feared there might be war, the Americans
     and the British were rumoured to be building up their armies in the West. Rumours, always rumours. And the Russians were here
     – officers, colonels, generals, being driven in and out of Berlin, on the boats in the lake – and the sky was full of planes,
     Herr Ritter, even here in this quiet place, in Bad Saarow.’ He paused. I could see the shadow in his face, the remembered
     fear, but I wanted to get the old man back to the