The Pieces from Berlin (20 page)

“I saw the door of the main building close behind her.

“I sat at my window with a book in my hand, a full half hour. It was Shakespeare and it was
Hamlet.
I didn’t look at the pages, but they were my excuse for not looking at the door of the main building.

“Which opened, opened violently as I remember, and my mother came raging out with her coats swirling. She ran on the gravel path to the dormitory. She stood at the foot of the stairs and shouted my name.

“I seriously thought of not going down. In fact, I sat away from the window.

“I heard her on the stairs, and I went to the door of my room, just to avoid a scene.

“ ‘Come along,’ she said. ‘Come along. We’ll send for your stuff later.’

“She tugged me down the stairs. I didn’t want to go. At the door, she said: ‘This school has insulted your mother. It is not possible for you to stay here.’

“I said: ‘But it’s not half-term yet.’

“On the driveway I said: ‘But how are we going to get home?’ Then I said: ‘I ought to get my books’ and I tried to dash back but she stopped me.”

For Clarke all this remembrance was random, not a considered confession. But he was polite and took another glass of wine. He would remember things himself, for Sarah.

“They’d frozen her bank accounts. Stopped her selling things, so she couldn’t find the school fees. They knew perfectly well what she was. They just couldn’t find a way to deal with her, or perhaps they lacked the will to do it. Then it was 1946 and nobody wanted to say anything, or admit anything, and the case was dropped.”

He went to the file cabinet. “Helen gave me these,” he said. “I’m ashamed to say I never did ask for them myself.” He opened the packet. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t read German.”

“No,” Clarke said.

“They found a file of letters from Americans, you know,” Nicholas said. “People trying to get visas for their parents left in Germany. Jews, of course. They thought Lucia might help.”

For a moment, Sarah Freeman panicked.

“I’m not the right one,” she said to Helen.

She was standing by the newspaper kiosk, by the tram stop, opposite the Kunsthaus, bundled against the cold that seemed to blow up from every side, and she began to shiver. Nobody would particularly believe her, they would all suspect her motives, she wouldn’t be the proper and decently forgiving victim, she’d be wrong and Lucia would be right just because Lucia had gone on so long beyond her crimes. She’d be bringing down a grand old lady for the sake of a bit of marquetry with nicely turned legs.

Worse, if they believed her, they wouldn’t think it mattered: not a table, not something so easily put right.

She looked around her at the serious faces, the blank eyes, the well-wrapped persons all waiting for the same tram.

“You think you’re right, don’t you? That’ll carry you through. But I’m tired and I’m cold. I’m an old woman. And you expect me to be brave every day, all the time, until all this is resolved.”

She realized she had raised her voice.

She did not want people to watch her. It was always better to slip about unnoticed, better in Berlin, better in London, better here. When she’d been almost famous for decades, her wit and writing tossed about the fireplace on Sundays in a million middle-class homes, that was a disguise of sorts, a trade, a performance in which she did not need to involve herself. Nobody saw her in the act of writing.

People were looking at her now. Well, she’d ignore them.

“I know you want to be right,” Sarah said, very quietly. “I know you haven’t had much chance.”

The tram came and waited an extra second for her to notice and to board. She didn’t move.

The driver frowned.

Then she climbed aboard and left Helen standing in the cold.

“My father died, you know,” Nicholas said. “Just the other day. I never really knew him and I missed him so much when he was alive and I can’t work out if I miss him more now he’s dead.” He could feel the wine softening his tongue, making it inaccurate sometimes.

Peter Clarke could not remember the moment of losing his father. He thought it half indecent that Nicholas lived with such a fresh memory.

“She always talked about him as this great athlete. I remembered him that way: the great football player. Then he was a soldier on a mountain pass. But when I saw him after the war, I saw a banker. No, I just saw the bank. He was a clerk, a face for the bank, in a drab black suit with a neat tie, all of him perfectly brushed and polished. He always sat on the edge of the chair as though he had no right to be with us, or didn’t want to stay.

“He did take me skiing once. We went on one of the ski express buses, with the skis sticking out of the back like a cigarette pack. He said I was going to be good, but then he dashed away from me and he was much more quick. I was still a boy.

“When he visited, they always had something for me to do, something outside the house. But I heard them. Their voices were so tight you expected them to snap, but they never raised their voices.

“They argued about the Jews, a couple of times. He’d say there weren’t enough of them in Switzerland to be a problem. She’d say he was anti-Semitic like all the rest. She was very proud, this is the oddest thing, of not being anti-Semitic.

“Then the war ended. He didn’t want to see her anymore, but he did come to see me at school a few times.

“I heard the Swiss boys talking about the Soviets on the borders, about the revolution that was coming like it almost came in 1918, about the way we all had to hold together; and I heard them talking about the
‘faux suisses.’
I thought: That’s my mother. That’s me. No wonder my father doesn’t come to see us anymore. We’re the false ones, the ones who don’t know just what we’re doing.”

He gulped his wine, got up a little unsteadily, and went for a new bottle.

“I couldn’t find him for a while. Too many Müllers in the phone book. Besides, I thought he might be doing more army service. I thought about the railway station. Everyone, sometime, had to catch a train. I looked out for groups of soldiers.

“My mother didn’t like me in the shop, so I was supposed to be a man and go about on my own.”

The new bottle was exactly like the old, from a dozen crates out in the barn: a carload from the Valais.

“One night, I remember it was cold. There was ice, and it cracked like sugar brittle round the boats. It was properly dark, winter dark, and all the darker because of the extra lights and colors for Christmas.

“The bakeries had shut down for the night, so there were no more spices and sugar on the air, only beer and the smell of frying, the smells that meant the men had taken over the town. I thought I might see my father. I went out to see him.

“I was in an alley with the snow piled in the middle, and the footprints of days on either side. The trees were paper white. The air was silent. I expected the smell of beer to start the snow melting and falling.

“At the end of the alley people were standing still. I didn’t expect that, not on a cold night in the town. If people were standing still, they must be expecting someone.

“I heard bells, heavy bells.

“I got down to the bottom of the alley and I stood up on a doorstep.

“The next alley was narrow, too, a cobbled slip that broadened out down the hill, I suppose. I saw lights moving. The bells clattered, their sound a little muffled because they were carried by hand.

“Men in white were coming. They wore hats full of candles, and they had bells. They wore masks.

“From a distance, their faces were blank, full of straight lines. They walked two abreast down the hill, and they seemed to fill out the whole line of the alley.

“They came close, and their faces were terrible. This one’s nose was a triangle of card, that one had a letterbox mouth. Some faces were rounded out, some had hats cut out with deer, stars, flowers. The blankness, the prettiness of the candlelights, was suddenly alarming. They were bringing peace and happiness, whether you wanted it or not.

“I wanted to think that one of them was my father. But he was in an Advent procession. So he couldn’t possibly talk to me.”

Clarke’s head began to hurt, with the wine, with the fumes from the fire in a closed room, with the endless parade of human fact that Nicholas could marshal before him.

He so much wanted to be on Sarah’s side, to do something that was impeccably right and just and good after a whole long life of equivocation. He didn’t want the issues to turn subtle on him. He wanted to keep his great advantage over these people who had been in Berlin in the war. And each anecdote was spoiling his certainty: of being on one side, of opposing the other. It reminded him of that Christian burden of forgiveness. It loaded his mind with questions that gave the enemy enough time to get away: questions like, What would I have done in their place?

“I’ll walk to the station,” he said. “They must be finished with the lawyer by now. Sarah will be back in the hotel.”

“But there’s so much else,” Nicholas said.

“I know. And I’m not listening anymore. I have other things to do.”

“You think it’s a waste of time to know what happened.”

Clarke thought for a minute. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. You know as well as I do that you’ve told me nothing that could help. Nothing that could help make things right.”

“You can’t repair history.”

“You can face up to it.”

“And what exactly would that mean?”

Clarke was silent.

“You think you faced up to history? All those nights the bombs were raining down on Berlin?”

“I was bombed as a boy. Then I was on a battlefield. Then I was in a prisoner-of-war camp.”

“You mean you had an alibi?”

“As you did?”

Nicholas said: “I thought you’d want to know. Who else is going to listen?”

“I sometimes think,” Clarke said, “that if we go on talking long enough then nobody will be responsible for anything any longer. No more juvenile delinquents, just cases of social exclusion. No more wickedness, just underprivilege and failure to thrive morally. No more Nazis, only victims of totalitarianism. Is that what you think?”

Nicholas was standing now, not steadily, head down. “I didn’t want to remember,” he said. “I put all this away so I could make a life for myself.”

“Remember. Don’t remember. It makes no difference.”

And Clarke tugged on his coat, flicked his scarf around his neck. He walked briskly away, too briskly for Nicholas, even though he was younger, to have a chance of catching him. Only at the first fork in the road did he remember that he was not sure of the way.

He was still pushed on by anger when he got to Zurich, anger and wine. He’d made up a scheme as he walked, as he waited for the train. He would confront Lucia Müller-Rossi himself. He would take back the table.

By the Hauptbahnhof, he no longer saw himself raiding the shop like a bailiff. He’d be subtler. He’d ask after the table in the shop, express great interest, then drop some hint about title to the piece. He’d ask her about provenance.

He sailed to the door. Then the process of security, the ringing of the bell, the door buzzed open, slowed him. Then he found that there was no old lady to be seen, only perfectly smoothed-down people in black who seemed a little disconcerted by this older man, as though he might at any minute bump into something fragile.

“I’m looking for a table,” he said.

“Yes,” said a girl.

“Marquetry. Flowers. Eighteenth-century.” He couldn’t quite remember the name of the man who made it. He couldn’t be exact enough to be suspicious; which was annoying, since the whole point was to worry the old monster by his knowledge, his policeman’s concern. Then it occurred to him that he was being vain. He was much too old to be a policeman.

He stood, flustered for a moment.

The girl said: “We do have a piece that you might like to see.” She came between him and anything of value, he noticed.

She pointed to a small table: flowers gilded onto black lacquer, vines everywhere.

“Would you ask,” he said, “where this comes from?”

“I’m afraid we wouldn’t have that information.”

“It’s very important,” he said. Then, as he turned to leave, he said: “Please ask Mrs. Müller-Rossi for me.”

So her man, a round creature with huge exophthalmic eyes, sat in the small room usually reserved for privileged customers, at the back of Lucia’s shop: a white, plain room for looking carefully at things.

In the nature of things, it was her lawyers who came to Lucia, out of deference to age and standing, but also discretion: all kinds of questions were being raised about people like Lucia Müller-Rossi, and it might be better if she did not visit the office until all that virtuous high pressure had gusted away.

Lucia said: “I hope none of this will be necessary.”

The lawyer nodded.

“And I think I probably know the law as well as you do.”

He said: “Of course, Frau Müller-Rossi. It is your business.” He smiled, and she wondered if there was a minimal innuendo: that she’d have to have known the law really well so as not to fall foul of it.

“Oh for God’s sake,” Lucia said. “I may be over ninety, and I may have a lot of money, but I could still be wrong.”

Her man looked at his notes. “Article 933,” he said, “protects you if you received the goods in good faith. Article 934 says that if you received goods that had been taken from their rightful owner against her or his will, then the rightful owner has five years to claim. No claim, no recovery. If you bought them at auction, or from another merchant, you can be told to surrender the object, but you have to get back the price you paid for it. And Article 936,” he said, “provides that if you received goods in bad faith, they can be taken from you at any time.”

“So the issue is my good faith.”

“Precisely. And I’m sure any court would notice the fifty years, more, you’ve been in business here, and so forth. However, there are other issues. If property was stolen in occupied territory, by military or civilian organizations, armed forces, or occupying forces, between September 1, 1939, and May 8, 1945—”