The Pieces from Berlin (11 page)

Alpine meadows, for example: streams rushing, pretty troughs cut out of tree trunks for the soft, strong cattle, the dark trees, the clatter of ptarmigan coming up suddenly out of rowan at the side of a path, meadows woven with pale autumn crocus. He needed that sort of thing. Walking with Nora, he had the course of a stream, light broken in water, sudden shade, and a path over ground that was fallen needles and tiny cones. They still walked together when he dreamed.

They were both away in the mountains on one of those weeks when the Swiss dash up and down the Alps in pursuit of their souls: this was for postgraduate students, put out of their library stalls just to get the blood moving. They were bright, unconnected people, defined by work. They met, he knew, up by Glaubenberg.

On the first day, they went around in parties: bustling too much, sometimes singing. He wasn’t given to outdoor singing. He saw Nora; Nora saw him. Nora knew him at once. He’d never had to tell her his story. It wasn’t an issue. They sat together at dinner, both furiously hungry, forking down
Rösti
and sausage and chicory with too much vinegar on it. Nora said: “It’s very brave of you.” He said: “What do you mean?” She said: “All this Swiss business, when you don’t really have to. It is an effort, isn’t it?” And they looked at a dozen intellectuals in shorts, knees sunburned, and they were laughing out loud.

They separated a little from the group, went out one morning at nine and walked the ridge of the mountains around Glaubenberg, up military roads, over tussocky grass, down over meadows to the summer houses for the Alplers, through forest and rutted fields and down roads torn up by tractors and loads of timber. They were each other’s breath all the way. By five in the evening, they were struggling up the last sharp slope to the
Berghotel
and they stopped short.

He couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe. It had nothing to do with exhaustion, although that was close.

At the intermission, Lucia took a small gilt chair just outside the auditorium door. An usher hovered, trying to ask if there was anything she wanted, not able to finish the sentence.

She had, thought Nicholas, a perfectly self-contained look. She would engage with others, but she did not need to. “I have,” she said, “seen better productions.”

“At least it’s simple,” Nicholas said.

“It’s always simple nowadays.” And she began to complain about the grotto for Venus, which was a kind of sandbox, and the tenor rolling around with his bottom in the air.

He’d lost his way now in the milling chorus in evening dress that was filling up the blank bits of the stage, in the list of minstrels all about to sing. The music left his mind wandering.

Together, Nora and Nicholas. They waited to have a child. Occasionally, when he was in the middle of one of those therapeutic psychochats with a colleague in a café, he’d hear how children brought a couple together, saved a marriage. But that all seemed very alien. He and Nora had to learn how to separate just a little in order to have Helen. For years, they were a closed society, not ready even for a biological intruder.

Then Helen was born, and Helen was glorious, of course.

The three of them became provincials. Nicholas traveled to conferences, and he went with Nora on elaborate holidays; and Helen decided to take on the whole world; but these were all side issues in their lives. They belonged, Nora and Nicholas at least, to the province of an apartment and a garden and a study and a bed.

And Lucia did not. Lucia could be loved and respected. She kept a certain glamour, the glory of a woman sculpted or painted: a figurehead, a lovely fiction. She played with Helen, took her on expeditions into the city when she had time, supervised her taste, which was something she never tried with Nora. And Helen seemed fond of her, found her wonderful, but was also a little afraid of how she never seemed to become fragile with age, only stronger. Helen expected advantages, to be strong as Lucia grew weaker, lucid as her mind failed, but none of that had happened. Her sense of wonder, Nicholas thought, had turned to a mild pervasive anger.

He never saw his father. They had no reason to coincide, not in the same town, not in the same business; they couldn’t be casual, so any meeting was draped with far too much significance. His father did not come to the wedding, although he did come alone to the party later in the day and said nothing at all to Lucia.

So Nicholas made up his father, as he made up himself, but with much less material. He made the man into a mean little cliché: conservative soul, started off good with his body but then turned steady, drab, persistent, and undistinguished in his work. It was a comfort when he so much missed the fact of a father.

And now the pilgrim’s chorus was returning from Rome, and he managed at last to put away his thoughts. By the time the principals came through the red velvet for their curtain calls and their official bouquets, they seemed huge as though through a lens, lit from beneath as though by limelight, spectacularly alive. He got back, gratefully, his talent for being fooled.

The crowd milled under a great shining tortoise of umbrellas, went for cars and taxis and the trams. Lucia’s car waited efficiently. Nicholas did not want a lift.

He had to stop thinking. He walked off into the rain along the Limmat.

He wasn’t old enough to walk out of his own story. He wasn’t so old he couldn’t walk, couldn’t reason, couldn’t remember or stop remembering as a conscious act.

There had to be a way to escape the present city. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t hold Nora. It was slick and wet and shining, leftover cows on awnings from some old parade, chocolate shops and equally glossy pornographic cinemas in the new town, all packaged, all rich, and the squared-off corporate buildings with official art out front. He looked at the river through the rain, but not the clean, quick modern river: he saw the Limmat clogged with weirs and islands and mills and bridges and a prison, as it was when he was a boy. He passed some shops, bars, hotels on the front, but he had in mind the barbers where he had his hair cut as a boy, with its six machines for electric massage of the scalp and the smell of pomade and machine oil and talc. He rebuilt the power office that used to jut into the water, with the huge white outline of an electric bulb on the side; and even the fields of potatoes that had been ostentatiously planted in wartime where now there was snipped, rolled grass.

Rain caught his skin and left it briskly scoured. It didn’t seem enough to shock him back to sense. He was still walking the wrong way, away from home.

What was he going to do, old man on a bad night? Get drunk, then stumble around the railway station in that odd, sooty, lifeless light of early morning? Get a woman, pay to lose himself for a minute or two; but he’d never done that.

He crossed the Limmat. He didn’t have the training to handle so much memory. He couldn’t do it alone.

When her housekeeper had gone, when she had drunk her warm milk with honey and a little Madeira, Lucia sat on the edge of her neat bed. It was a sleeping shelf, very plain.

She let every part of her clean face die. It was like an exercise: a relaxation of self. She retreated under the mask of her own features, where everything was consistent, where it was private and not uncomfortable and nobody asked questions.

Müller. So Müller died old. He must have been better stock than she thought. They’d kept their story alive a very long time, even so. And for all his virtue, his law, his authorized decency, she’d outlived the bastard. She had her little business; he had a plot and a stone.

She put on an eye mask. She didn’t want it known if the pupils of her eyes were moving, making out faces while she dreamed.

Henry was off being socialized through play, at great expense, and the days were tricky. Henry was the occupation for which Helen had given up work; now he was starting his own separate life, she could almost fancy that work, the old, obsessive, fascinating kind, was something comfortable and enfolding, a structure to the days, a relief from all this coffee and waiting.

“Bullshit,” Helen said, out loud. But she didn’t want to be caught talking out loud.

They were better together, she and Jeremy. You couldn’t say the same for all their friends. Besides, she careened about the world for years as though she was anxious without an air ticket. She’d worked for a bank, but not in a bank: she went about like a broker, now brutalizing some cable TV company, or flirting with the movies, or solemnizing a marriage between newspapers. She couldn’t simply continue, not if she wanted a child.

So here she was, officially married, in love, with a lovely child. Everyone found it all too easy to accept the situation. Even her old colleagues didn’t ask when she might come back; they said they envied her courage and her choice.

But Jeremy hadn’t stopped moving. Jeremy was in New York, was in Los Angeles, was dining the money and trying to turn its taste to the pictures he happened to have in stock. He was flirting very studiously at cocktail parties, holding the attention of the buyers any way he could: performing much as she used to perform.

Nicholas once complained that Jeremy treated her like a novel he couldn’t quite finish, but sometimes left lying around, forgetting where he put her. But it wasn’t like that. They had separate orbits, which came together splendidly. They could hugely enjoy the game they played around the world, or at least the world’s cities with money and major airports, and the knowledge that they chose and conspired in order to be together.

But now she had a fixed address: day in, day out. Everything was entirely satisfactory, but nothing more.

She didn’t want to call someone, make a plan; it sounded too desperate.

She’d go to a couple of bookshops, why not. She was enrolled in the spending classes now: a rich wife. She could study shop windows like folk art, read each display like a museum piece.

She took the tram.

There was enough distraction for an afternoon, bookshops full of pink painted children, shops hot with red rugs, a window with a single stone Buddha lit so perfectly that nobody would dare buy or move him, a couple of shops full of souvenirs from a life nobody ever saw—tuned cowbells, pretty cow halters—and some with toys as intricate as jewels: a lake steamer, a funicular train, a machine for printing. There were shops a little below eye level on steep streets, full of immaculate bottles, or birdcages made from metal that had been beaten into lace, or paintings which were never quite strong enough to break through the brown varnish and get into the eye. There were shops so gorgeous you could never be lovely enough to go in, but plain people did.

Bankers sidled up to windows and ogled the chocolates. A tram passed, driven by someone’s aunt in a two-piece. There was a window full of shining French horns, and another full of pretty pots, but she was not quite interested enough to see if they were jams or oils.

Among the steady people, in front of the parade of windows, a woman had stopped.

The wind was too bitter for anyone to stand still so long. The woman was looking into a shop window. She was very old, wrapped often and deeply in scarves and down.

She was crying.

She didn’t touch her face. She let the tears run, and she held her shoulders straight, her body remembering the manners it had been taught.

Her face was neat with intelligence. Evidently, she was distraught, but evidently not because she had forgotten things, even forgotten forgetting, and did not know what to do next. She hadn’t wandered off into the world and got lost like some ancient, humiliated child.

She was standing before Lucia’s shop: the pretty plates, the welcoming lights.

She was crying, but other people all walked around her as though she was some inanimate obstacle, maybe not seeing her, maybe not wanting to see her. They seemed to understand that an old woman sobbing on a frosty street was something ominous. You stopped, you smiled, you helped, and you were bound to know her story, share her senses.

Helen stopped, though. She should not intrude. She should not embarrass this old woman, who didn’t look as though she needed to be helped out of her tears. Much more, she needed to cry.

But she was frail, alone, cold; Helen felt a rush of responsibility. She had no other business to excuse indifference, after all. Her day was empty until Henry next came home.

So she said: “I’m sorry.”

The woman didn’t answer. Helen thought of raising her voice. But the woman walked a little closer to the great plate of the window. She’d set off alarms soon, for sure.

She stared inside. Helen wondered what exactly she was seeing: whether it was a splendor that she had lost, or sight itself she was losing, or some particular object which set off this flood of feeling.

The old woman said: “It was a table. A little table, with flowers in marquetry. Like a garden in the corner.”

And then she noticed Helen, who said: “Can I take you for some tea?” She had to offer tea: something medicinal, something kind.

The old woman said: “I should be very glad to have some tea.”

Helen offered her a handkerchief; she always had handkerchiefs, for Henry if he needed them. The woman blotted her eyes, once.

“I thought I would be angry,” she said.

An assistant happened to come to the shop window, happened to flick at some intruding dust on the mirror shine of the woods.

The older woman walked so neatly and precisely nobody wanted to notice that her face was wet.

“I was so afraid someone would ask me what was wrong,” she said.

Then, efficient like someone who’s been at receptions and meetings and conferences all too often, she said: “I’m Sarah Freeman.”

“Helen Garvey.” Helen was helping, being kind, so she used her married, wifely name.

“I don’t suppose you know who owns that store?”

“Lucia Müller-Rossi. There’s no mystery about it.”

Sarah Freeman ordered coffee, after all; Helen asked for cakes.

“But that’s not the name of the store.”

“Mr. Harrod doesn’t own Harrods anymore.”

“She’s still alive, Lucia Müller-Rossi?”