The Pieces from Berlin (14 page)

Peter Clarke said: “We were nobody when we came back.”

“I knew Sarah Freeman. She could walk about London on her own. She knew where to go, and she went just where she was expected, and she did all the proper things. She wasn’t work anymore. Some days, she was me.”

“Yes,” Clarke said, not quite understanding.

“And it didn’t matter that I prayed at night, and didn’t sleep well. I knew how to manage the days, you see. You learn that if you’ve been underground for a while. And to tell the truth, I never bothered to contradict all the men in suits all around me because at least I was in a comfortable trap. I knew more than they did, and I knew how much worse it could all be.”

“What did you do?” Clarke asked.

She explained. She had gone to work on a Sunday paper, recommended as a literate, clever girl by Marje’s publisher friends. Those were eight-page-edition days when everything was cut to fit, when the open columns belonged to gentlemen who had just dined at All Souls and belonged to more than two London clubs. She was the not-quite-pretty little thing among the suits.

She read the proofs. For that work, she came highly recommended. On Saturdays, she shut herself in a small cream-painted room with coffee and the smell of strong cigarettes still in the air, and she read half the paper on narrow, inky sheets, and she cut what seemed wrong or fatuous, too long or misspelt. She read, usually, the cultural and foreign half. People could not place her exactly, but they thought she would be more at home with the cultural and the foreign.

“I remember,” Clarke said, abruptly. “Frances always used to read you.” Then he worried for a moment, punctiliously, about the pronoun. “I mean, she used to read Sarah Freeman’s articles, out loud. We never watched television very much, but she always read the column.”

“There weren’t many women on the paper then,” Sarah said. “All suits. All ties. All clubs. But television was like movies, and movies were a woman’s job like fashion. And I was a woman. QED.”

“You were very funny.”

The steamer settled by its last quay.

“I was a very good Sarah Freeman,” she said. “I had my friends, even my lovers sometimes. I had my house and my garden. I had a perfectly occupied life.”

She stood up, picked up her bag, took Clarke’s arm down the steps to the wide main doors.

She said: “You see what it means, of course. I take an interest in this table, in this Lucia Müller-Rossi I used to know in Berlin, and I’m back to when I talked like a German. I worked so hard to be Sarah Freeman and now I can’t be Sarah Freeman anymore.” The doors opened on the gangplank. “Do you see?”

At teatime in Zurich, she was still distant. He tried small talk; she put on a perfectly adequate smile. He discussed the cakes, and she did not. She asked for one glass of water, and then another.

She let this empty busyness continue for a bit, and then she said: “You’re angry.”

He stared at her.

“I don’t know why you’re angry,” she said.

He wanted to say he wasn’t angry, not at all, but he didn’t want to lie to her. He was furious at hearing stories about the choices other people made; he wanted to talk about his own choices. He wanted her to listen to his stories, as he listened to hers, to establish some equal seriousness between them, or else she was the only one whose life was all about war, loss, pain, change, and every huge matter of life and death.

He fussed with a napkin.

“It’s that,” he started. He started again. “It’s not easy to say.”

Sarah smiled: the smile of a thoughtful, but over-occupied, nurse.

“I had to make choices, too,” Clarke said. “I knew a woman, saw her every so often. I was married. She lived at the other end of the country. She died, and I didn’t know for five whole months that she was dead. I just missed her phone calls at work. Officially I didn’t know her, so I couldn’t mourn her, and then my wife died, and I was allowed to mourn at last and everyone got it wrong and nobody wanted an explanation. They all thought they knew.”

“It can be easier that way,” Sarah said.

Clarke said: “You don’t have to patronize me.”

He put his napkin down.

“What was your name before you were Sarah Freeman?” he asked.

“Before?”

“It isn’t a very German name. And you were married. So either way, you must have had another name.”

“An alias, you mean?”

“No. Just another name. My wife had another name before she was Mrs. Clarke.”

Sarah said: “My name was Sarah Lindemann. I told you that. Before, it was Sarah Becker. I never had any other names.”

Jeremy called from Los Angeles, full of business. He’d seen one minor, aspirational star at home, two directors, a studio executive who definitely had money and two who wanted to make it seem they did. He’d been interviewed by an agent, which he found odd. He’d been taken to lunch at a proper industry grill by a minor museum director who wanted to stage an Anselm Kiefer retrospective; they ate only vegetables.

“How are you? How’s Henry?”

So she told him: disconcerted, alarmed, fretful, not quite sure what to do next. And Henry was perfectly fine. But she now had her own business, family business.

“You don’t have to do anything,” Jeremy was saying. “You have no legal obligation. I’m not even sure you have a moral obligation.”

“But it’s my story, too.”

Jeremy said nothing for a moment. “Do you really want me to argue the point?” he said.

“You don’t understand.”

“You won’t let me understand.”

“I always felt uneasy.”

“That’s not true. She bought you cream cakes at the Dolder and you felt happy.”

“I felt uneasy. Nobody talking. You go deaf with the silence in the end.”

“You just have a hint. A suggestion.”

“Someone from Berlin. A table that Lucia has, that’s enough to reduce Sarah Freeman to tears. It’s obvious enough.”

“Not to me.”

“Nothing ever gets resolved,” she said. “Nothing. I’m going to call Georg Meier.”

“You always liked Meier.”

“Fuck you,” Helen said.

Later that night, he sent a fax: a little scrawled short story, what a woman and a man might be doing by a lake, very pretty in its way. A cop came along and the man had to say he couldn’t help himself, Officer, and nor could she.

She hugged the paper, then smoothed it out, and then she went to bed alone. The next day, which was the day Lucia did not go to the shop, she’d pay her a visit at home.

Helen allowed no settling, absolutely no ease: she circled in the room, considering a table, pacing in a state of mild embarrassment at how much aggression she exposed simply by moving and moving. She remembered this kind of physical language from negotiations, and how you had to remember at times to whisper with your body.

Lucia had posed herself on a neat, embroidered chair, by a table with a tasseled lamp, in front of tall, closed curtains.

Lucia said, loudly: “I suppose you’d like some coffee?”

“I don’t think so. It’s a little late.”

“I’m an old woman. But I’m perfectly well organized. I can make coffee.”

“I know that,” Helen said.

Lucia, dismissively, flickered her fingers against the arms of the chair.

Silence again. Helen noticed for the first time that she was staring at a photograph of her own father: in plain, cheap silver, but in a prominent place.

She wondered if Lucia could sense that something had changed, something was going to happen: but the idea was absurd unless there were already lawyers involved. Lawyers always know when other lawyers are busy; they scent work on the wind.

If Lucia knew nothing, Helen must be discreet.

But she wanted confrontation. She wanted Lucia to change: not to be the lovely grandmother anymore, but to show herself as the woman in the indictments.

She organized cushions.

Lucia considered the trouble with being old: that you couldn’t resist other people’s kindness. They would always feel entitled to come back. Resist them too much, and they were sure resistance must be proof of decline, that you had something to hide. Resist at all, and you were only being selfless, trying not to trouble them too much.

Lucia said: “What is it that you can’t bring yourself to say to me?”

Nothing. Helen said nothing and made a great, resounding statement out of it. Then:

“I met a woman called Sarah Freeman. She said her friends in Zurich love your shop,” Helen said.

“They’re very kind. Do I know them?”

“They always say you have such perfect taste. That you know how to find exactly what they like. That you always did.”

Now it was Lucia’s turn to make silence operate in the room. She did it by seeming to fade, her face vague as though it were dusty, her shoulders down, her eyes almost closed under the weight of fine eyelashes. Helen wondered about the sheer weight of her routines: about the fifty-five years of never going to the shop on a Thursday, the gap that all those Thursdays must make in a life.

“If you want to know things, I can tell you things,” Lucia said, suddenly. “I do remember things, you know.”

Helen shrugged. It was the gesture of a cross child who’d later regret refusing the offer of something sweet.

Silence. The two wills tussled: the will to make ordinary talk, the will not to listen to anything but a confession.

But once she was out of the apartment, Helen knew exactly what she had to do. It was only a couple of days since she met Sarah Freeman in the street. If the woman was in a hotel then, she might still be there. She couldn’t do nothing when all those people doing nothing had allowed Lucia her rich, fine life.

She wrote a brief note. She said again that she was the granddaughter of Lucia Müller-Rossi, and that was why she was concerned for Sarah Freeman: that she would understand Sarah’s suspicion, but she strongly believed that the wrongs of the last war had to be righted. They should have been righted at the time; that failure had to be undone.

She would like to offer help, the names of lawyers. She would do anything she could to support Sarah Freeman in any legitimate claim she might have. She realized the difficulties of dealing with a foreign legal system in an unfamiliar city. She offered, in effect, to be family.

So where would Sarah Freeman stay? She hadn’t seemed grand, and she wasn’t an age when ostentation was automatic. She hadn’t seemed poor; if she was, she would hardly have chosen Zurich in autumn. She would probably not be up at the Dolder, and probably not down in the raucous streets of the Niederdorf. She would be in some decent, comfortable middle-class hotel.

Helen checked the phone book, and then she went out walking in a mean, faint rain. Her shoes were quickly wet; she thought that might make the hotel clerks suspicious as she walked in. People with messages come by car; they don’t walk in from the rain all sodden, as though they’re not quite sure where they’re going.

So the wetness of her soles reminded her: you must be authoritative. She could do that, easily. She went to the desk and said she wanted to leave a message for—she’d have to say Mrs. Sarah Freeman, she supposed, not Miss.

The clerk checked a list, and apologized and went directly back to checking bills.

She set out for the next hotel and the next. Some of them were all chrome; some of them tried to look like drawing rooms; one had a basket of apples at the door. Some of them advertised their restaurant, trying to sell tourists on something “typical.” Some were tucked back on pleasant, shrubby streets, but their parking lots gave them away.

Sarah Freeman wouldn’t be at one of those anonymous, suburban towers: Helen already had a sense of the woman that could not involve staying in some businessman’s shelter, a standard and padded pile. She had time in the rain to ask herself just why she was so sure, what notion of a woman like Sarah Freeman was ready in her mind before she even met her.

A hotel with a view of the lake, just. They were sorry. A hotel with a view of tramlines, and a lobby so narrow two people could hardly pass. They were sorry. A hotel flying the rainbow flag and proposing a discotheque. She didn’t bother.

The rain was in her hair and in her bones: chill, wretched damp. She’d set out on a kind of pilgrimage and she was now a convincing pilgrim: determined, exhausted, cold, and manifestly, unarguably, magnificently sincere. Or so she hoped, so she hoped.

She didn’t think, in her time with the bank, she’d ever been quite so self-conscious. But then she had mostly been selling a deal, a proposition, an abstraction, not asking a stranger to trust her at once, without papers to read or figures to scan.

A hotel close to the Kunsthaus: they thought they knew the name. A clerk took the letter. Then the clerk came back, shook his head, and said, no, that was a Miss Hermione Freeman.

Helen didn’t turn away for a moment. Hermione was an absurd name; she could hear that. It was stuck between dowager and music hall. A Hermione might easily claim to be a Sarah. Or else Hermione Freeman might have thought it impolitic to give a Müller-Rossi her full name.

The clerk said, firmly: “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

She didn’t respond.

“Would you like a taxi, Madame?”

So she shook her head and she did as she was told, so indirectly but so forcefully: she went away.

She kicked up rain from the sidewalks. She rushed along. She even ran for a few hundred meters. She stood at a street corner and she stretched for a moment. She thought of stopping for coffee, but she wanted to get on: to cover every possibility, check every hotel.

She walked across another forecourt, into another genteel lobby: no lifts, a desk tucked away to one side like an extra window.

She pulled the envelope out of her briefcase one more time.

“I’d like to leave this for Mrs. Sarah Freeman,” she said.

The girl at the desk, who had one of those angelic faces as open as a calculating machine, said brightly: “I could tell her you’re here. If you like.”

Helen said: “Yes. Why don’t you tell her there’s a letter. Then if she wants to come down—”

“I could say she has to sign for it,” the girl said. She had such nice, surprising country manners, not wanting to disappoint in any way.