The Pieces from Berlin (17 page)

He told her, bit by bit, where he used to live, what he used to do, how he got called up for a war and never quite entered it because he was a prisoner almost before he could fire a gun. She told him she was married, that he was killed, that sometimes at night she dreamed he’d come back in a rage, but she knew he never would.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“You just know things like that.”

That night he lay awake, expecting to defend her against this stranger who would certainly come back.

She got up to check on the boy, who was tossing and turning and sweating under a sheet, whose breath came awkwardly as though he was forgetting sometimes to breathe, who cleared his throat like an old smoker. She came back and settled down beside Peter and said nothing at all. She was still not sure how much of a burden she could share with such a young man.

Since the pub was not friendly, and they didn’t talk to people much at the café, they formed a closed circle of two, absorbed in each other so deeply that they didn’t even have a private language that any outsider could hear. They didn’t need the reminders of touch and graze because they knew that they owned each other.

The beans and the peas in the garden needed stakes. He didn’t know where to get them. Grace opened the padlock on the boxy wood shed at the end of the garden and showed the old bamboos her husband used. Some were rotten, some were broken, and they smelled of damp, but there were enough to stake the peas.

He was working in the garden when he knew that something was wrong.

He threw the bamboos down crisscross on the ground. He went through the door and forgot to put the boards back. He ran down the street, knocked against a spinster, a vicar, a coalman on his way, skidded into the front garden, and realized he still did not have a key. He liked to ask to come in, usually, but this time he knew he had no time at all.

He knocked on the front door, on the wood, then on the frosted glass. He rang the doorbell. He ran around the side, through the second painted gate, and to the back door. He hammered on the green painted wood. He’d take a pick to the wood if he had one.

He shared Grace’s terrified mood; it was his mood. In the minute he had to stand there, waiting for the door to open, he tried to start a story to explain his terror, but all he had was this instinct to be here and to save her.

The door opened suddenly. Grace said: “It’s the boy.”

He ran into the front parlor. It was a room like a waxworks, everything shining vaguely, an orange carpet, three chairs, and a table covered in a lace cloth. On this bright afternoon, the light cut into the floating dust from the old coal fire, and there was still the faint damp smell of smoke from the chimney. He noticed all this as though for the first time; he had not spent much time in the parlor.

The boy was on the floor, hiding his face. He made ratcheting sounds, as though he had gears in his lungs. He heard Clarke, and he looked up, his face blue and pinched.

“It just came on,” Grace said. “He doesn’t say anything.”

The boy couldn’t speak; that was clear. He couldn’t cut the words out of his breathing.

“Get an ambulance,” Peter said. He didn’t know what else to do, except to get the boy out of the house, where there was nothing they could do for him. “Does anyone have a phone?”

“The woman next door. But she doesn’t talk to me.”

“She’ll have to talk to you.”

The boy couldn’t stay still. He was trying to duck away from whatever was strangling him. His face ran with sweat that made the blue tinge in his lips, in the fine skin around his eyes, seem like a paint of some kind. But it wasn’t on the surface anymore; it suffused the skin, poisoned it.

Grace went next door. The woman wouldn’t answer for a moment. Grace shouted through the letterbox that she had to use the phone.

The woman crashed about in her kitchen, rattling bottles in a garbage pail so as not to hear. Grace shouted: “It’s my boy. He’s bloody dying.”

The woman opened the door. “You should have thought of that,” she said.

Grace could see the phone.

“There’s a public phone two streets away.”

“It can’t wait.”

The woman was like a bright, inflexible cutout of a shrew, a soft brown creature stiff with propriety.

“I’m very sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Rogers. I would be very glad if I could use the phone. Please.”

Grace had performed. Mrs. Rogers allowed.

And the boy rocked back and forth airlessly. Peter felt for the child’s ribs; they seemed to have great gaps between them with no flesh at all when the boy breathed, and then to fill out like a balloon when he struggled to pull in air. And the dust, from the fire and perhaps from the broken bits of the city, Peter could see that hanging in the air, a sample of what must have settled into the boy’s lungs. Dust glints, he saw. It wasn’t dull or inert at all; it was tiny blades.

“Nothing’s happened,” he said when Grace got back.

“He’ll want a drink,” Grace said. She brought in water, but it did not seem to help.

The ambulance arrived with bells. The whole street stood out of doors to see it, so she thought. The ambulance men put the boy on a stretcher, put the stretcher in the back, pulled Grace in afterward, and she wanted Peter to come, too. She shouted for him.

The boy rose up from the stretcher and hooted like a terrified owl: a grating sound, rough as sandpaper, that sent the neighbors back into their front rooms to watch between the curtains as the ambulance pulled away.

Peter followed. He followed, running. They’d never let him into the ambulance; he was just the mother’s new bloke. But he could not fail to be with her; that was the point. He didn’t know what he would do, any more than he knew what to do when the boy sat there looking like a bent paperclip with flesh on him, battling with something as ordinary as air.

He cut over a crossroads, by the Tube station, down a brick tunnel, along a street that somehow kept its plane trees even in the cold wartime winters, kept running until his breath caught up with him and he was running as though he was back on a track, running for glory.

He arrived sweating, awkward, falling over himself at the emergency room, and he found Grace at once.

“They took him,” she said. “They just took him.”

Both of them sat on wood chairs in the second row, in a low room painted white, with smells of antiseptic around them and cool, damp air coming from the door even though outside the sun was going down hot.

A nurse asked: “Has anything like this happened before?”

“He’s coughed sometimes. And he does wheeze at night, I noticed. Of course, he’s always seemed anxious, having grown up during the war, you’re not surprised. Are you?”

The nurse said: “Has he seen a doctor about it?”

“He seemed well enough. I never thought about a doctor.”

“We don’t often see asthma here,” the nurse said. “It’s something you treat at home.”

“But I didn’t know—”

Grace wanted to be judged, he could see that, wanted to be told what she had done wrong so she could always be right in the future, and bring her boy back from whatever white, cold place now held him.

Instead, the nurse smiled. “He’s going to be fine,” she said. “Sometimes it does happen, out of the blue, like they say.” Then she thought about the boy’s cyanosed face and she stopped smiling. “They give him ephedrine,” she said. “That controls the lungs. They may put him in an oxygen tent for a while, so he can breathe more easily. He’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

They did not get home that night. They sat together, not touching. Once, Grace was asked to go forward and Peter was told he must wait. Grace went through the swinging doors. He thought he could hear her heels on the linoleum of the corridor floor. He tried to imagine what she would see.

“How is he?” he asked.

“I couldn’t really see him,” she said.

After a minute he asked: “What do you mean?”

“He’s in a kind of hut. A sort of shelter. With oxygen.”

He wanted to know exactly what she had seen, so he could share the sight and share her feelings. She couldn’t say. Her heart was down there beating by the boy whose breaths were so desperate and forced.

At four in the morning, he went to fetch her tea in a thick, white cup. When she’d finished, he noticed that his cup was perfect, but the glaze on hers was crazed. He wished he’d taken the other cup.

A new nurse said: “You have to go home. There’s nothing to do here. Take yourself home.” She said to Peter: “Your brother will be fine—”

Grace said: “Thank you” before the nurse could say anything else.

Grace lay in bed like a plank, rigor mortis of the heart. She could not even cry. She was alert for news which would come to the door, like all the other news in her life had come: the death of her husband in a neat, official letter, the family letters before and after, but not many afterward when she had turned into an anomaly, a spare woman with a child. She would have liked a telegram saying that everything is now all right, and always will be. A telegram from the king.

He lay against her, flat against her, the skin of their hips and their shoulders touching and their bodies arching separately away in between. He wanted to share her warmth. He wanted her to share his warmth. It was a start. But the day was stark hot, a copper sun polishing the air, and she didn’t want touch, either.

He couldn’t bear this. Her pain touched him, but he couldn’t touch her back. She wasn’t just frightened for the boy in the next hours, the next days, he knew that. The boy had changed for her, become an unreliable body with frightening possibilities that she couldn’t handle alone. She sighed very deeply, and sighed again, and again.

He asked if she wanted tea. He went to make some, anyway. He stood on the linoleum squares in the little kitchen, boiling a kettle on an electric ring. He looked at the soles of his feet, but they were clean; her floors were always clean because they were used. It was only the parlor that had dust through the air.

He made the tea, took down a can of condensed milk. Hot, sweet tea; he knew it was what she needed.

At eleven she got up, pulled on a church frock, said she was going to the hospital. He went with her. She visited the boy in his oxygen tent, and this time she saw his eyes open so wide they must be hurting him.

“They’re looking after you, then?” she said, softly, just for the sake of his hearing her talk. “They’re looking after you. Special tanks. Special injections. They’ll make you good as new.” Then her words speeded up. “Better, even, maybe,” she said. “Better than new. You’ll see. You’ll be down playing football again. You’ll see.”

Peter Clarke sat on the hard seat outside. He wanted to help, somehow. He wanted to carry this burden that had suddenly fallen on Grace, and stop the boy hurting, too. He knew he had been ungenerous to his own father, that he had run away, and now he insisted on being quite magnificently kind.

She came out of the wards and she said: “They’re doing everything they can.”

The boy came home in an ambulance, but he walked out of the back. He smiled at the crew, who laughed back at him.

“What’s for dinner,” he said.

“Sausages,” Grace said. “I got you sausages.”

They sat in the kitchen. They spoke quietly, except for the boy, and they moved with care between the table and the cupboards.

Peter said: “You want to see the garden? Things are coming up now.”

“You don’t want to tire him,” Grace said.

The boy stuck out his tongue. “I’m all right,” he said.

“You have to rest,” Grace said.

And for a week or so, it was almost all right. The boy sat at the window and he didn’t seem to mind not rushing out to the other kids in the street; he was always a loner. He did visit the garden, but there was nothing much to see: a few broad-leaved sprouts above ground, the odd sight of weeds like willow herb all in pink formation.

Grace had the boy to sleep with her. She said she wanted to hear if his breathing changed during the night. She was supposed to listen for wheezing, she said, and if his breath came in pants or in long, slow sucks. Peter tried to sleep on the sofa in the parlor, which was not quite long enough for him.

Grace’s concern was his concern. He was almost sure he did not become jealous.

The boy went to have a bath. He wouldn’t let Grace go with him; he said he was old enough now. And she couldn’t argue with him.

“He’s fine,” Peter said. He put out a hand. Grace said: “It’s all right for you.” He wanted to say: It’s not all right at all for me. I know what you feel. I feel it, too. “He’s never going to be all right,” Grace said, suddenly.

She went to a drawer and pulled out a new white shirt. She had ironed and starched it meticulously. “I bought it for him,” she said. “For later.” She turned to Peter. “I want him to have a good white shirt. It makes all the difference. People look at you—”

They both heard a cough upstairs. “That bloody heater,” she said. “It’ll be the gas. It’ll set off his asthma.”

She slipped on the carpet near the top of the stairs, dropped back for a moment onto Peter, and then threw herself forward. The bathroom door wasn’t locked; she wouldn’t let the boy lock it.

He was standing naked by the bath. He was fighting to breathe and he was winning for the moment: a tenuous kind of victory that only emphasized the skinny pale ribs, the way his chest seemed to sink and to blow beyond what a boy’s body ought to be able to do, the pallor of his tight face.

“I’m all right,” he said. “Really.”

All the boy had was a scrap of a life, enough to send Grace running for the terror and the ether smell of a casualty ward, enough to give her pain when he felt pain. There were going to be no miracles.

Peter Clarke had a sense of anger. This was a new bloody world, wasn’t it? A new world of homes for all and a welfare state and maybe even medicine you didn’t have to pay for, when pain would be somehow solved, when someone in authority would always know what to do.

So why don’t they save the boy, then? Doesn’t he matter in their grand overarching schemes? Doesn’t Grace count?

The boy had been in bed for two days, Grace giving him drinks with sugar, making balsam in bowls for him to inhale from under a thick towel. She seemed to think this was like a summer cold. He lay in the double bed, curled up at the top on Grace’s side, like a cat curls. She’d pushed a pillow under him where his back started to arch in spasms.