The Pieces from Berlin (2 page)

He heard a car. There must be cars coming and going on the road; you couldn’t expect perfect silence for a funeral even here in the bowl of white mountains. He stepped forward. One of the graveyard workers looked up at him. He put his card into the bowl.

He moved in the heavy, meaningful way that people use in church. He turned toward the cart with the coffin.

The first mourners were coming through the white curtain of mist, straggling up the path to the chapel.

He saw them, but he didn’t want to see them. He wanted to see his father.

The graveyard worker cleared his throat.

The mourners, all in proper black, came forward. The men, he could see, wore overcoats and suits that were far too tight; they kept the black for funerals, and funerals were not that common in their lives. They were younger, naturally.

Nicholas passed the coffin. Inside he saw his own face, but drawn and ruckled in ways he hadn’t yet seen in the morning mirror: himself, worn out. He wanted to kiss the face.

The mourners were close now.

He must protect his father’s dignity. He walked briskly away. The graveyard workers, out of instinct, made a guard around the coffin.

One of the women looked in the bowl of condolence cards. There was, of course, only one so far. She opened it, she read the signature, she tore it into pieces.

He sat on a cold wood bench and looked down at the mourners around the grave. He asked himself if his father would have wanted him there.

They were praying in a knot about the black gap in the ground. Then the coffin was lowered on strong ropes. Then they were blessing the coffin, one by one, with a spray of holy water. The ground was white with chrysanthemums and asters.

He remembered the last time he saw his father, except briskly or by chance or at some occasion where they were not obliged to talk. It was in the 1950s, when Nicholas was twenty and angry on principle with most of the real world.

All his long life had been full. His life had been his. It had only this peculiar quality: that it began when he was twenty or so, that he had to put away everything that happened before then.

His father was in Zug. He’d come out of the wartime army and into the bank, same rank, same manners, better pay. Most people did much the same: the men glided into work, the women went home again, somehow the fact of Armageddon on every border did not break up the usual life of Switzerland. His mother was in business for herself by then, and she was wholly exceptional; during the war, women only worked unofficially, as stopgaps and temps, so they were simply replaced when peace started. Everybody went back to their places.

Every year in the army Nicholas, a professor with a doctorate, wanted to peel potatoes. Every year, everyone was shocked.

Nicholas’s father had already started his second family: two girls, pretty but stolid. He loved Nicholas, but did not want to be reminded of everything that went with him, his mother included, so the meeting was peculiarly tense. Nicholas was not so much a son as an anomaly. And Nicholas was self-righteous, and drank too much beer at lunch and his father thought him sloppy.

The mourners had walked away from the grave now, gone to the church for the funeral Mass. The priest, duly briefed, would extol the past of Nicholas’s father, gild his story and make it sound like a moral tale. Nicholas would not be mentioned, nor his mother.

In that moment he thought he could move like a ghost, not quite seen. He carried white asters in both his hands, loose bunches of them. The gravediggers had a flask of coffee, maybe with pear
Trasch
in it; they were busy.

He threw all the flowers at once into the grave. They spilled out like stars against the black earth.

He would have liked some comfortable memory, but all he had was his father producing an official booklet from the war years, with brown covers. His father said he’d thought of sending it to Nicholas’s mother. It seemed that since the men had brown notebooks to keep a log of their days on active service, women were expected to have one too.

So Nicholas read: “The homeland requires our resolute will for freedom, honor and humanity. Our homeland in these times requires,” and then the list. Number one: “Women who don’t complain.” Number two: “Women who willingly take deprivation upon themselves.” Three: “Women who raise strong children prepared for sacrifice.” Four: “Women who conscientiously use household appliances.”

He had burst out laughing. His father was half offended, as though he’d giggled at the creed, and half agreed. He said: “You can see why I never sent it. Read on.” Nicholas was very aware that his father was watching him closely.

Eight, he read, “Women who with open eyes and warm hearts recognize the need of their neighbors and who support those in need of help.”

He looked up at his father and his father inspected him. They were a conspiracy of two, agreed not to make too clear a mental picture of Mama Lucia helping neighbors with a warm heart. He had read on, with some relief, out loud: “. . . stand up for the future of our country.”

“It’s not a terrible thing,” his father said. “Standing up for the future of your country.”

Nicholas said he had to get back.

“It’s not a terrible thing,” his father said. “It wouldn’t be so terrible a thing to have children. To stand up for your country.”

“If you know what your country is,” Nicholas said.

“We knew.”

Nicholas tried to make a joke of it, asking his father to imagine his mother being “conscientious” with a household appliance. But they were in terrible trouble: father and son trouble, fueled with the beer. They went for a walk, bristling.

Nicholas was very aware of the dead smell of the earth, of the shine where the spades had cut his father’s grave.

It was the streets that had started it. They were clean. They were neat. The buildings were all bunker solid and gray and decent and regular and somehow untouched. Nicholas thought the town was like a necropolis: a garden necropolis, architect-designed. Balconies for the dead to water their petunias. Sidewalks to step away from their black, black cars. Buses that took them to places nobody could particularly want to go, and took them regularly.

He was furious, but his father took this decorous world for granted, and kept smiling so that nobody else would notice how angry or how drunk or how—how shamefully, irresponsibly young his son was. He wore that smile like his suit and tie: his uniform disguise.

And Nicholas remembered thinking: They’re not in this century. They hadn’t been bombed or starved or tortured or burned. They’d been spared the whole terrible process of changing and even growing up. So when the war ended, all they cared about was keeping very, very still, like an animal that’s been cornered.

He said all that.

He wondered if there was a spell to call back words from the ears of the dead.

His father had been quiet, reasonable, as though he was talking about the content of his son’s last literature course or the last book he’d read. But he insisted on his words. Nicholas tried to talk over him, but he heard him, all the same. He was saying he’d worn a uniform, been prepared to fight, had gone to the Alps with the army to save the nation.

And Nicholas, all righteous, had said: Then what about all the flatlands where everybody lived? What about the women and children who were down on the plains while you were up the mountains playing at cowherds?

His father had talked, matter of fact, about sacrifice. About there not being money. About being billeted on some family near the border by France; it was where he met his second wife. He said people were hungry. They were afraid.

Nicholas asked why he never wrote to tell him all this truth. He said: How could he? He couldn’t write anything like the truth in a letter that was going to Berlin. He couldn’t tell his son how they were pulling every last old gun out of the cellars, rusty ones, ones with wormhole in the stocks. Or how all the best kind of people left town suddenly when the Germans were supposed to march in, and then for five years everybody else just sat around waiting and waiting and waiting.

Nicholas had said: “You did write to me. You told me about how the central heating was cut, and how maybe people were all the healthier for it. And you mentioned gas masks, and the blackout.”

Until that moment, Nicholas now thought, his father might have regretted the distance between them.

But he turned then. They were on the steps of some big civic building in Zug, columns and pediments and maybe lions in stone. The building was like propaganda. And he said: “I know you were in Berlin. I know things weren’t good. But don’t think you can come here and try to be like the damned Germans—always arrogant, always sure you have the best music, the best poetry. Then the best wickedness. Then the greatest heroism in facing the best damned pain.”

Nicholas said his father had no idea what Nicholas and his mother had been through in Berlin. He said his father hadn’t lived it, and he couldn’t now make up for it.

His father sat down on the steps.

It was an outrageous thing to do. He was a proper banking gentleman, who might well go for a brisk walk with his young son, who’d be entitled to walk away complaining if his son shouted too loud; and there he was, down on the stone ground. He looked up at Nicholas.

“You belong to her,” he said. “Don’t you?”

Nicholas was so angry he didn’t know what to say anymore. He walked away. His father sat there, looking after him. The one time Nicholas looked back, he seemed so sad, so shocked all at once, as though it was a catastrophe to have the perfect surfaces of his world challenged.

He wrote a letter to Nicholas that evening. In it, he listed the charges against his first wife, mother of Nicholas, after the war: blackmail, extortion, receiving stolen goods. That was all. And he sent his love.

The mourners would go to lunch now, schnapps and wine, three solid courses, maybe venison because it was the season, and a half pear filled with red-currant jelly and the small white noodles. Nicholas could taste it all. A bottle of Fendant. A bottle of Dôle. They wouldn’t cry and they wouldn’t laugh, not until they had the schnapps.

He walked out of the graveyard, a shade much too solid not to draw attention. He thought of going back in the afternoon to see the grave settled and dressed with flowers, but he did not want to meet the others. He kept walking in the cold, and now that the mist had lifted off the lake, his face burned with the bright, metallic light off the high slopes.

He was an old man, officially. He had cards to prove he was an old man. He was a widower, a father, a retiree; there was nothing left to change in his life. He had lacked a father almost all his life, forfeited his father’s attention completely at the age of twenty, made a good marriage, made a life that was perfectly sufficient and self-contained, a fort from which to watch the world. But now that his father was gone, he was shivering.

He had to walk Bahnhofstrasse on his way home. He passed his mother’s shop. He wondered if she even knew that Herr Müller, half her name, much of her credibility, was dead, and that he had been buried that day.

The shop was painted rooms, lights as gold and rose as anything on a stage, a nice commercial dawn in between chemists and bookshops. The shine of the place was inventoried: its wax and glazes, glass, gilt and biscuit. In the window, a few small Meissen pieces: a dwarf with whiskers like a cat, two porcelain heads of children that would obviously be the originals, a pretty beaker with stooped Chinese and a baby dragon. Beyond that, a defensive wall of marquetry and plush and ormolu: engulfing sofas, tables spiked with ornament, bureaus which could fortify entire new social classes. Beyond that front line, the far interior of the shop was a warm, welcoming confusion of pretty things, china and glass, delicate bent legs, enamels and inlays shining against fine rosewood. Tapestry hung on the walls: a zebra, a hunt.

He could see her through the windows: a porcelain figure, suggested with paint, in her plain round chair—Louis Delanois, still underpriced, no provenance to speak of—surveying her empire. It was pretty. It was profitable. It was pleasant. Nothing here would challenge unduly, unless it challenged someone’s wallet. She had spent half a century dealing in the refined and elegant trivia of a civilization, trying to imbue it with significance: a date here, the name of an artisan, a place in history for a pot, a chair, a bit of porcelain which would not even hold a meal or support a visitor.

Nicholas stood at the door and thought about going to talk with her. But they were not used to being spontaneous.

An assistant stood by her, the keeper of keys, making the nightly checks: the alarm systems, the storeroom lights and dehumidifiers, whether the coffee machine was shut down. Nicholas sympathized: it must be hard in these last half hours before the shop was locked, because Lucia was no longer the authority, the patron, but a body to be inspected in an almost scientific way.

She was so old now that age had become her very nature; Nicholas could see that. And yet she traded still on the remains of bright eyes, dark eyes. The hair was dyed the color of old flames. The skin was like cloth, ridged and draped, but over bones so strong and fine that the features stole your whole attention. He saw her as something out of a storybook, where being old always has its own dark meaning: wisdom or evil or magic.

She checked the answering machine again. She always did that herself.

Nicholas read her lips. “That will be all,” she was saying.

The front lights went down. She was left in the gleam of the back of the shop, in the warmth of rosewood and gold and kind lights, and she stood up. She was making a phone call.

Nicholas decided not to wait.

She would go home now, and have a glass of Madeira, to which she had become accustomed in old age. Someone would bring her eggs.

Nicholas went briskly into the lanes of the old town. He thought he might spend the night with Helen and Jeremy again. He liked the notion of playing drums with their son Henry, of setting out the Lego train and running it.