The Pieces from Berlin (18 page)

“Come and sit down,” Peter said and led her out of the room for a minute. She did sit, but awkwardly; her flesh and her muscles seemed to hang from tired bones. She took a cup of tea, she finished it quickly, and she said: “He’ll miss me.”

“He’ll be asleep.”

“He’ll miss me. He’s my boy.”

“I’ll sit with him for a bit. You rest. Listen to the radio, put your feet up.”

She glared at him as though she’d like to tell him he was wrong, all wrong. She couldn’t. Instead, she said: “Just for a minute, then.”

But the minute became an hour. He could hear her downstairs, not lying down sensibly but propped up in a chair and breathing awkwardly. He ought to have gone to cover her, but that would mean leaving the boy, who now lay still on his pillow in the crook of the big bed.

It’s breath that will kill him. He’ll fight for breath until his heart stops or the blood bursts in his brain. He’ll die, anyway.

The boy was quiet. Peter moved closer. The boy curled into himself, and shook as though a whole other body was trying to get out through his mouth, and couldn’t any longer stayed hunched down. He came up into Peter’s face, his white, pinched face like winter in the hot room. His eyes were unfocused, almost blind.

Peter said: “It’s all right.”

The boy tried to swallow all the air in the room. His face had the blue-white edge of a carcass in a butcher’s store, after the blood drains away.

His heart had stopped by the time the ambulance arrived, and the crew worked his fragile chest and blew air into him and still could not bring him back to life.

Grace came from the hospital and she could not speak. He tried to nurse her, but she did not notice. She sat in the kitchen, back straight, arms on the table so she did not even need to make the muscular effort to hold them up or down or out. She stayed like that for fourteen hours; he counted. Then he thought he heard her snuffling or whimpering, but she was trying to sing to herself, or perhaps to sing to the boy, something plangent and sentimental and now without tune or rhythm: “Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling . . .”

Then she said: “I did it all for him, you know.”

He didn’t expect her to make sense, not in these circumstances. He was just glad she could speak to him again.

“You have to eat something. Drink something.”

“I’d like a gin,” she said.

“You don’t drink gin.”

“How would you know?”

She was right; he didn’t know anything about her tastes except for what she had given away in the past few weeks.

“Do you have gin in the house?”

She laughed. “You been looking for it?”

“You said you wanted it—”

“I said I’d like it. I’d like to sit in the pub and have a good glass of gin. I would. I might as well. I don’t do anyone any good sitting here like a statue, do I?”

He knew this was a trap. He just hadn’t lived long enough to see how the trap worked and when it would spring.

“That’s what you think, isn’t it? You want me to cry. I won’t cry. I won’t do it.”

She stood up without due care, and the long sitting made her unsteady. “I thought I could make the fire in the parlor, just lay it, not light it. Then again I could wash the floors.” She looked around her, as though the house now puzzled her. “What do you want me to do?”

He said: “He’s at rest now.”

“You expect me to be grateful?”

“It’s kinder. He’s with God.”

“You don’t bloody want me to thank God, do you?”

He didn’t know how to react. She could almost be accusing him, but he was almost sure she had no grounds. The boy’s death was officially natural, a matter of dirty air and ruined airways. Anything he did, if he did anything, he did to spare her pain.

But now she was in full, fierce spate. “I did it all for him,” she said. “Had you in. Had you to live here. It was all so he’d have a man about, and so we could get more food, so I could look after him and make a life for him and there’d be someone else to care for him. You needn’t fancy yourself.”

He said: “Listen, I don’t have to stay—”

“No,” she said. “No, you don’t.”

He’d been told, down the years, in the worried tones of a house full of men, about women’s moods and hysterias and how they blow out as suddenly as they appear. He thought she might think again after a night, after a week, and need him again.

“I’ll sleep in the garden,” he said. He took only the uniform he was wearing when he first came, nothing else. To find it, he had to clear drawers. He saw the starched white shirt she bought for the boy out of her hopes for him. He handled it as carefully as he would handle the boy himself.

He lay down on the dry ground between neglected rows of peas and beans, using his jacket for a pillow.

He wanted a sign that he should go back. He was almost sure he should go back. But she couldn’t phone him, couldn’t smile at the window when he went past; he felt too self-conscious just to walk in her street, anyway. She’d have to come to the garden to find him, and he knew in his heart that she would never do that because she was not the one in the wrong. Even if what he did was right, and drastic enough to be truly kind, he knew he could not claim to be in the right.

Three mornings later, the stubble itching on his face, sandy dirt ground into his khakis, he climbed onto a train and went back to his father’s house.

SEVEN

He never did like being left out. People were meeting. People were talking, not to mention hints and glances. Sarah’s story was being drafted and polished where he couldn’t see, couldn’t read it.

He had sort of a right to know.

He’d already changed the whole city into a puzzle, and his occupation. He read the dullest corner carefully. Show him a pleasant bakery, with strong women eating cake, and he tried to work out their wartime stories. He contemplated crime encoded on the discreet facades of private banks. The process was a mad, solipsistic kind of politics: anything might require action, so everything was charged with drama, even the tram slinking into town or the girl selling vitamins in the pharmacy or the damp, high inner halls of a flowershop full of tulips and palms or the ticket line at the Hauptbahnhof.

He began to eat lunch alertly. He fussed about Sarah, in case she was just waiting for the right time to explain things.

He strolled past the bookshops on either side of Lucia’s shop. He considered maps, prints, volumes of Max Frisch carefully bound, some Goethe and some Rilke. He waited for someone to go into Lucia’s shop, someone to come out.

He wondered if this Lucia would simply talk to him. He was almost in her country of the very old; she would trust him. They were fellow conspirators against time and the young.

But he could not quite imagine how he would make a social half hour with her, and then how he would put his questions.

He tapped his fingers on his thigh. He pinched the cloth.

He longed for the familiar precision of his fields, his seedbeds, the sight of rogue colors, rogue shapes. He longed to know where he was down to the last row of the last cultivar because, here in this polite city, he seemed to live in the middle of an abstraction: faces in whose business he had no business, streets like the idea of streets, not specific, not dirtied, not full of particular and demanding faces, and landscapes hanging like postcards at the end of those streets.

Helen had control of the kitchen for the day: and Sarah sat across the table from her, looking quizzically at the carrots being shredded, the chicory being grilled, as though these were museum things you don’t see every day.

She had insisted on bringing Peter Clarke. She saw him as a safety device, something to open up the closed and explosive possibilities of Helen, Nicholas, and Sarah at a table, even if they both insisted they only wanted to help Sarah, to make things right. She wondered why they didn’t simply go to Lucia; but if Lucia had not, in fifty years, shown signs of remorse or guilt or even anxiety, then going to Lucia would never be enough.

“Why don’t you work?” she asked Helen abruptly.

Helen said: “I wanted to have a baby.”

“You don’t have a baby anymore. You have a child, and he’s gone off to nursery school.”

“I wanted to be there when he comes home. I didn’t want to have to tell him I was going off around the world and I’d send him a postcard.”

“Men do that all the time.”

“So,” Helen said. “I’m not a man.”

“Lucia never stopped working, I don’t think. Not in Berlin. And she’s had the shop ever since, you tell me.”

“I make my own decisions.”

Helen had chicken breasts in her hands. She smoothed them out, spread the fillet out from the meat, and slapped each one of them, very hard. The sound of the slaps cut the air in the room in two, between her and Sarah.

“This Meier,” Sarah said. “He’s a friend of yours?”

It was all accident, this accuracy. She said what was obvious, what she wanted to know; she had no special and magical insight into what Helen was feeling. And yet she was accurate, and it stung.

“He was a colleague.”

“In the same office?”

“He was a lawyer we consulted sometimes.”

“So what does he know about restitution?”

“He’s interested.”

“Good,” Sarah said. And then she said: “I feel I should be helping. I feel I should be having a drink, too, but maybe I’d better not before Meier. Better to be as sharp as an old, old woman can be.”

Two old men going briskly through the snow. Nicholas Müller-Rossi, round as he was, was surprisingly efficient. Peter Clarke swung ahead. They formed a conspiracy that cut along the cleared black lanes.

Nicholas was glad of Clarke. He was company. He was an ally for Sarah. But most of all, he was something new. Nicholas didn’t like colleagues his own age, retired, who now felt cut off from work, their whole meaning left behind in some university office. He didn’t always want to go into town and organize a meeting with his older friends. He wanted strangers, who did not assume all the things that he was supposed to assume.

As for Clarke, he surprised himself. He wanted so much to be the champion, Sarah’s protector, but he fell easily into this brisk walking chat with Nicholas. He even had time to feel a slight resentment: the notion that old men were safe and therefore automatic allies.

Two Englishmen, two Swiss men, could not have been as direct.

Clarke said to Nicholas: “I don’t meet many professors. I avoided the geneticists. They didn’t understand what I did.”

And Nicholas, with a certain generosity: “I’ve never met anyone who did anything as lovely as breed a flower. A new kind of flower. I wish we could look at the garden afterward, and you could tell me if there’s anything here that you bred.”

Clarke smiled, grateful even for the carefully plotted overture. Evidently, he had already been researched, or perhaps explained; which meant that Sarah talked about him.

“All I can do,” Nicholas said, “is point to a couple of books.”

“It’s lovely here,” Clarke said.

They did not want to slow on the last rise of the hill, neither one of them. They wanted a view to see when they reached the top, though, which would allow them time to breathe.

They’d been walking in a brilliant landscape, with helpful signposts giving the minutes to the next summit, with the blue-white shine of snow; but now they came to a wood, a wall of trees. The branches painted out the light: dead, thick, and black. The snow stopped exactly where the trees started.

Nicholas pointed to a view of white fields; Clarke looked with him.

There was a noise between tearing and a crash. The two men were very still.

Out of the lifeless wood came a young deer, legs splayed, eyes wild, frantic at the end of its cover and alone. Its sides were scratched where it had forced through nets of thorn. It barely noticed the men, because it ran directly for them, as though it had a single idea of direction and could not change, or perhaps the sudden bright light was blinding. It took to the path, then looked back, then broke away down over the fields, at once quick and uncertain, legs skittering on ice.

It was gone in a minute: just tracks in the white.

Nicholas said: “Well.”

Clarke smiled. He also said: “Aren’t they a problem, the deer?”

By the time they began to circle back to the house, they had sorted out other things in common. Since they had known the same war, they both knew how parachute flares come down soft and bright as Christmas lights, the cone a searchlight makes as it rakes about the sky, how the cone glints at its apex when it catches on a plane; and then the dot dot dot of fire from the ground, and the silvery machine transfigured first into a mirror light, then into a torch flaring and falling out of the sky. They both knew bombs whistle as they come down.

All that they could share with a few words of history: Nicholas in Berlin, Peter Clarke close to London before he was taken off to war.

But Clarke wasn’t happy with the notion that such shared knowledge made them equivalent; that was clear. He wanted to listen, but he knew those were his planes, his side raining bombs down on Berlin, for all the right reasons; and those were alien machines in the sky over his village, murderers with wings.

Nicholas sensed that, or perhaps he only expected it. He was used to the general sense that no experience out of Nazi Germany—not being in love, not eating a bratwurst—could ever count as entirely human.

He even told Clarke what Clarke was bound to think of the wartime Swiss. He expected the world to be angry. He said he’d sometimes tried to explain that there really had been rationing, that cats out at night sometimes ended in pies, but the Swiss never rationed what foreigners ate: so foreigners, most of them, reckoned they were in a land of milk and honey and potatoes. But then the foreigners just compared black acorn bread with chocolate, ersatz honey (just add sugar) with cheese from the Alps. The Swiss had not suffered properly.

“I don’t make excuses,” Nicholas said, “and I’m not boasting.”

Peter Clarke said: “And Lucia?”

Nicholas knew he’d have to answer. “People knew, nobody could do anything,” he said. “I asked my father once why nothing was done and he said it nearly was, but still nothing happened.

“Nothing happened. I mean, nothing that mattered. There was a trial. My mother had difficulties. I remember she grew thin, so I tried to reason out why that was happening. Children do that when things are going wrong. I lay and I thought. It couldn’t be the rations, which were far more reliable than in Berlin, and far more generous as well. We saw eleven liters of milk a month, and a hundred grams of raw bacon, two hundred of butter, and half a kilo of sugar; we even saw meat, coffee, chocolate, and sweets. Nothing that happened had to do with lack.

“She could be ill. But she didn’t seem ill. She had a kind of shining, polished shell that never opened; and if she was ill, it would surely have started to break. Her eyes were very fierce. She was concentrated on the world as if it was a chess game, although she would never be the kind to play chess.”

He stopped, and stamped on the road.

Gray flirts they were at lunch: Nicholas and Peter, chivying each other out of the way for Sarah’s attention. It was a reflex action, a little absurd, but it filled the huge silence left by the person who couldn’t be mentioned and the subject that couldn’t be raised.

Peter talked about gardens, and Sarah had a garden in London. Then Nicholas talked about some production of
Pericles
he had seen, and the translation; Sarah knew about it. Peter suggested another lake trip.

Sarah said to Nicholas, suddenly: “You had a cat called Gattopardo.”

“I did.”

“A tiger.”

“Yes, I did. In Berlin, when I was very young.”

Sarah smiled, and then she started to cough as though she was choking and she had to be helped from her chair and given water.

Clarke watched her as closely as any lover or any policeman. And in doing so, he noticed very clearly who else was watching: Helen. He couldn’t be sure if she felt protective of her grandmother, or concerned with Sarah. He was suspicious, he realized.

Nicholas and Peter heard the car go away, taking Helen and Sarah down into Zurich to the lawyer’s office. The geese complained quietly. No dog barked.

“What if it’s better not to remember?” Nicholas said.

Neither one of them could cope with the question.

“People expect the English to talk about their schooldays,” Nicholas said. Then he thought he had made a mistake, blundered into the thickets of English issues of class, and Clarke did not go to the kind of school that makes for polite conversation. Or maybe he was wrong about the English.

Either way, it was too late. He had to confess, or else he would have to listen to the huge white silence.

“I liked school when I went in September,” he said. “It was very separate, up above the lakes and the mists. It had walls and customs, so you could always dream of breaking out or breaking rules, and the air was brilliant. A huddle of tall, blocky chalets, some single conifers, in the middle of unbuildable ground that was, inevitably, known as the park. The chapel, which looked as though it had been stolen from a village, painted a subversive yellow. After that, there were Alps.

“I found, to my surprise, that I liked books. I liked being away from home. I liked both so much I didn’t mind being told about my character, about the glories of being far above cities and fogs, about the importance of whatever faith I might happen to have brought with me. The easiest ploy was to claim a Catholicism my mother had never mentioned much.

“I got into a fight in the first snows, which were wet and blinding and soft. I was out between the chapel and the dormitory and so was one of the German kids: a soft-spoken, angry boy called Helmut.

“ ‘You let us down,’ he said. He could shout into the new snow with little chance of being heard.

“ ‘What do you mean?’ I really didn’t know.

“ ‘You Italians. Wouldn’t fight. Couldn’t fight.’

“Whatever I was, I knew I could be even more German than Helmut, having seen much more of Germany being burnt and broken.

“ ‘You can’t fight, can you?’ He had come up very close to me on the path, both of us wrapped against the cold.

“I backed a little, slipped a little. I didn’t want trouble.

“He was determined, I could see. My feet tricked me on the new wet snow. I wasn’t sure I could hold a position if I had to.

“ ‘You don’t fight. Do you?’

“He was bulked out with coats and pigeon-chested to begin with, so he looked like a top-heavy burgermeister on the pathway. But out of him came a boy’s unbroken voice, a flute where there should have been a growl.

“I started to laugh.

“He pushed my shoulder.

“I didn’t stop laughing.

“ ‘You Italian,’ he said. He piped the words.

“I stopped, I picked up new snow, I threw it over his head so it broke and fell around his shoulders like wet dust.

“ ‘You can’t even fight fair,’ he said.

“This time, I grabbed both his arms. I wrenched them behind his back and I went on pushing them up and up until his face was forced forward. He was howling, but the noise meant nothing in the snow and the wind.

“I felt something snap.

“He was crying now, big hot tears between the soft flakes of snow on his face. I let him go and he went down to the ground, and one of his arms seemed to hang at his side.

“He said: ‘You’ve done it now.’