The Pieces from Berlin (21 page)

“And if the property changed hands in Germany?”

“Oh, then the normal laws apply. Anything that happened in Germany was normal.”

Lucia tasted the words.

“Could you say,” the lawyer asked, “why you think this issue might be raised?”

“It’s fashionable.”

“But is there any other reason?”

Lucia did not explain that she sensed a coldness, an activity, a curiosity in her family which she did not like, nor that some old man, not a plausible customer, had been asking the wrong questions in a loud voice. She said only: “I gather there is some question about a table. I had it for some time, sold it in the 1950s, bought it back—for sentimental reasons, I suppose. Then I consigned it for sale in London. Then I decided I would not send the table to the sale.”

The lawyer said: “For sentimental reasons?” He seemed surprised.

“Someone evidently saw it,” Lucia said. “I think it was a woman who calls herself Sarah Freeman.”

“Calls herself Freeman?”

“When I knew her, she was Sarah Lindemann. Married to a man called Max Lindemann.”

“She would be the complainant in this case?” the lawyer asked, hoping to anchor himself on a date, a name, a writ.

“Poor Max,” Lucia said, distracted. “Such a lively man. Sarah simply retreated to their apartment and she sat there, like an animal that’s been marked out. Hands clinging to the chair so nobody could make her get up. Eyes wide open, and not bothering to see anything. Poor woman. Poor man.”

“And you came to know Herr and Frau Lindemann in Berlin?”

“Max just wanted to live until he had to die. He liked his friends, he liked music, he liked paintings. He was the only man I’ve ever known who could talk in an interesting way about wine—not just adjectives.”

“The table was his property?”

“I never did go to bed with Max,” Lucia said. “I don’t suppose that matters now. But just for the record, we couldn’t have managed. It was too complicated for him to leave the house after dark, and I worked all day.”

The lawyer wanted her to start to be discreet again, as soon as possible, before she handed over some incriminating scrap that he should never know; for he did assume there would be something incriminating. He also wondered if the old woman now regretted her virtue with Max.

“I remember the evening they gave me the table,” Lucia said.

He pulled his legal pad toward him, American yellow foolscap, his affectation.

“I was working at UFA. The movie studios, you know? You do know?” The lawyer nodded. “It was the night we’d seen the first movie with my name up there on the screen, in very small letters—by ‘we’ I mean just the people at the studio—and I went to the Lindemanns with a bottle of
spumante
I’d cadged from the Italian embassy and a bundle of asparagus. Max loved asparagus. You know it was an Aryan vegetable.” Lucia made a face. “Nothing much made sense in those days.

“Anyway. Max opened the wine. I explained the movie. I thought they’d find it ridiculous, just like I did: it had cute frogs, neat caterpillars, a bee buzzing around a meadow and finding a gramophone and playing the records with its sting. That sort of thing. But Max didn’t laugh at all. Instead, he panicked.

“His calm had always surprised me. He was being buried alive very slowly, like all the others. But there was Sarah putting out the glasses, and plates for the asparagus, and chatting all very proper and mechanical, and there was Max saying: ‘It’s not going to end, is it? It’s never going to end.’ I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have anything to say. So he said: ‘Why don’t you ever say what you think?’ ”

The lawyer was reluctant to nudge such a venerable client along. But he did say: “And the issue of the table?”

“I don’t remember whose idea it was,” Lucia said. “I wish I did, it would be very convenient, but I don’t. Maybe it was Sarah who asked if I could just look after some things. Or maybe it was Max, who did want to have the best things put away so the party functionaries wouldn’t steal them. Or maybe I said they could leave things with me, for safety. At any rate, nobody ever claimed the table.”

“Ah,” the lawyer said.

“Max meant to give it to me,” Lucia said.

The lawyer did not for a moment show that he was alarmed. He could see that memory was now an indulgence for Lucia, a little drink for the mind.

EIGHT

She sat on her embroidered chair, the housekeeper working the parquet floors in the hall with a cloth under her feet, the shop due to open in a half hour. She liked polish in the air: beeswax, a little rosemary. The driver would collect her in a few minutes, in seven minutes, to be precise.

The authority of Lucia Müller-Rossi rested on stillness, like a monument, and this morning her hand shook once or twice. This would not do. The business was an obligation every day, and in return, it sustained her, gave her a position, someone to be each day.

She did not like having even seven minutes without anything to do.

The housekeeper jarred the bucket along the wood.

She wondered what it meant to fight for your life when you were already ninety-two.

The driver rang the bell.

She would like company. Helen judged her, and was finishing with her. She didn’t really know that husband of hers, the wandering dealer. Nicholas was distant, and thought that was loving enough.

The driver was at the door. He was a short, slim Turk, in his fifties perhaps, his trousers immaculate and cheap, nicely pressed by a wife, no doubt.

In the car, she said: “I want to buy chocolate.”

The Turk asked where she would like to buy chocolate. She realized she had never known his full name.

“Sprüngli,” she said, “of course.”

At eleven in the morning, there was a considerable line. The Turk said he would be happy to bring her whatever she wanted, but she wanted, most of all, to go stand in a line and buy chocolate.

At ninety-two, being ordinary is hard. Just being is remarkable enough. So the crowd parted for her, and she rather enjoyed that. The assistants brought her, with proper solemnity, slices of bitter orange dipped in white chocolate, and arranged them in a neat box. She paid, as she always paid, with cash; it was nobody else’s business what she bought.

And in the car, like a schoolgirl, she dipped into the box and ate.

The shop lights went up over lacquer and porcelain, ormolu and inlays, over warm rosewood and the shine of tables, vases, chairs, and desks, all polishing the air around them.

She sat at her table. She listened to an assistant reciting her messages. She was prepared to examine, she said, the porcelain Handkiss Group, Meissen, 1730s, that was on offer: which, the assistant said, looked a little odd since the lady was holding an oversized coffee bowl. “Probably the whole arm,” Lucia said. The assistant looked inquiring. “If the arm got broken, they’d have to replace the bowl as well. The bowl itself doesn’t break that way.” The assistant said: “And the man’s lips don’t touch the hand.” “That,” Lucia said, “doesn’t mean anything. Things vary. They just mustn’t be wrong.”

Lucia didn’t have to look up to know there was a customer at the door. She knew, in the same way dogs anticipate a shot.

She was hardly ever the one who spoke first. She liked the customers to have the notion that a conversation with Lucia Müller-Rossi was a privilege to which you were admitted, the promise of a glorious deal. Should she be a little absent, which was a natural sign of her age, the customers worked all the harder for her attention.

The assistant smiled too much, she thought. Customers have first to buy respect before they buy anything else.

“I’ve seen something very much like it,” the woman, an angular person, was saying.

“Yes. Yes,” her bloodless husband said.

“Very much like it,” the woman said. “This must,” she said, “be the original.”

Lucia Müller-Rossi did not enjoy ignorance, but she was not above making a profit out of it.

The anteroom of Georg Meier’s office was designer sparse: the carpet was gray, the chairs gray, the receptionist’s desk all glass and chrome, the phones immaculate on shining surfaces.

Sarah Freeman should have made an appointment so as not to be out of place in such a considered room. Instead, she turned up like some eccentric old person who could no longer cope with diaries or even dates and times.

The receptionist had called the secretary. The secretary had taken matters under advisement. There was a pause in which, so Sarah Freeman thought, her significance to Georg Meier was weighed and tested, then balanced against whatever else he had to do that day, tending a client, pruning or mulching a contract.

Perhaps the secretary would not even mention her to Dr. Meier. But then how would they devise a mannerly way to get rid of her, since she was old? Sarah still had the journalist’s instinct for when she was likely to be received and answered, and when not, and she was fretting.

She had put herself here to be humiliated. That was what she expected, after all. She was no more than a hobby for a corporate lawyer like Dr. Meier.

She longed for the simple, ordinary distractions of house and garden at home. She found it hard to tolerate these long minutes with nothing in particular to think, in the anxious, impatient, rigorously polite atmosphere of some doctor’s waiting room.

A door flapped open. A woman came through, acknowledged Sarah briefly—just in case, Sarah thought, in case I matter—and left the office.

Anyone else sitting here, with a proper appointment, would have brought papers in a briefcase, would make a call on a mobile phone, would disguise the fact of waiting. She couldn’t. She was old; waiting was her talent, obviously.

After ten minutes, she asked again if she could see Dr. Georg Meier. The receptionist called the secretary. The secretary listened, and put the phone down. Sarah thought she heard the moment of disconnection, the cut.

She deserved to be angry.

She’d worked half a lifetime to avoid anger, always thinking that anger would rope her up and leave her helpless, as loud and ludicrous as a heroine tied to the railway tracks. She’d been angry only once to memorable effect, and she found the memory shameful. It was the day Churchill died, and some shiny, radical child in the office, an intern of sorts, had said: “Good riddance.” She had stared at him, then crossed the office, then slapped him across the face twice.

She could remember the feel of hitting the man, and then how quickly anger died away and left her sick on adrenaline. Remembering it all, she could now imagine a whole bill of indictment for Churchill; but he had fought against the people who were trying to kill her, and at that moment she couldn’t bear the notion that this bright, dumb baby intellectual had forgotten the fact.

The phones rang. The receptionist coped.

And then Meier scrambled out of the corridor, drying his hands, like a rushed surgeon.

“I didn’t know you wanted to see me today,” he said.

“I just wanted to tell you that I am going back to England.”

Meier said: “Will you come and talk to me? In my office?”

“That’s why I came,” Sarah said.

He sat her down, ordered coffee. “You weren’t angry, were you?” he asked.

She knew at once that he wanted proof that she could be angry. And since she knew, he had to apologize. “I didn’t mean to annoy you,” he said.

She said: “I’m a little old for that kind of game.”

“Do you want to go ahead with this case?”

“I’m going home.”

“You don’t have the energy? You’re not angry enough?”

She wanted to say she didn’t need anger, didn’t need to be fueled by anything except a cold sense of justice.

“I’m angry enough,” Georg Meier said, quite unexpectedly. “I’m angry for all the members of my family who died. When it’s the anniversary of Kristallnacht, I want to get out there with a baseball bat and I want to beat in the windows of the stores the Germans own and I want to wear a placard on my back that says—‘Happy Kristallnacht.’ ”

She stared at him.

“But,” he said, “you see that I can be quite perfectly calm when I need to be. If that works better.”

She wanted to say: What right have you to all the strong emotions that we had to set aside in order to have lives?

“Do you want to think about it?” he said.

She took a taxi to the hotel. She found herself remembering a man, a filmmaker she once knew who was never angry at all, put up with any casual idiotic remarks, as when some French actress talked about the Mediterranean as “that Jewish sea,” was kind to the world even when it was indifferent. She knew one other thing about him: he was among the troops who first entered Dachau at the end of the war. She concluded—assumed, really—he exhausted all the possibilities of anger in that moment.

“I have my ticket,” she told Peter Clarke. “It’s perfectly simple. I already called the airline.”

“You didn’t meet Lucia. You didn’t even go into the shop,” he said.

“I don’t have the time.”

“Without you,” Peter Clarke said, “nothing happens. I mean, nothing happens to Lucia.”

“Nothing changes then. It’s always easier when nothing changes.”

“I’ll come with you to the airport.”

“I’ll take a taxi. It’s easier.”

“I’d like to come with you.”

Sarah laid down her knife and fork. “You tell me. Why does everybody think I need them?”

Clarke was crestfallen.

“I don’t mean to be unkind. I came here for a silly reason, and I’ve done all I want to do.”

She seemed to be willing him to agree.

“I can’t do any more,” she said.

“But—”

“Have you any idea what I dream?”

Clarke looked at her, old eyes wide. They were in the Kunsthaus restaurant, big square tables far apart, couples and quartets being sociably loud, and yet he thought the question hung around for a moment, suspended on silence.

Then the forks clattered, the talk swelled again.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. Then she ate very quickly, as though she regretted what she had said, and she said: “I don’t know how she got away with it, all these years.”

“You have to tell me what she did.”

Sarah shrugged. “I only know what happened to me.”

“Then you have to tell me—”

“People never grasp it. They say they understand, but they never do.”

“Try me.”

“I lived in a shed,” Sarah said. “The sheds they had on allotments, on the summer gardens. A wooden shed with curtains, two meters by three. I lived there for a year.

“It was very full. Rakes, spades, forks, hoes, brooms. Raffia and drawers and nails and dust. Seeds drying. A pile of old magazines to read in summer. There were tools hanging on the walls, and sometimes I caught myself on them and I sucked at the cut to try to stop infection.

“The shed belonged to friend, a baker. He brought food every day, almost every day, and took away the waste in an old bucket. He said he walked backward over his tracks so it wouldn’t be clear where he was going so often. I don’t know what good that did.

“We couldn’t move much, two meters by three, and there were two of us: me, and a boy. The boy had stayed on to do cemetery work and then it was too late to get away and he had to hide, too. In winter, sometimes the rats got the cloth we used to block the drafts.

“Lucia doesn’t know all this. I’m sure she doesn’t.”

“She ought to know,” Peter Clarke said, “if it’s her responsibility.”

Sarah spoke rather quietly.

“Our friend couldn’t carry water every day because it would be too conspicuous. We couldn’t wash and drink, both. So we washed when it rained and I could move some of the planks in the roof and then it was hard to put the planks back so the water puddled on the floor, and we slept there. And I had to move the planks silently. We coughed silently. We shat silently. I wasn’t private, not for a moment, for a year.

“The boy lay there and I wanted to sing to him, tell him stories, but we had to keep as silent as we could. And all the day and all the night I wondered what was left outside our box. There were old curtains at the window. I didn’t look through because I was afraid I would find someone looking back.”

Peter wanted to hold her hand. He thought of ghost stories: of white moon faces seen through dirty glass.

“I am,” Sarah said, “another one of those terrible stories. They get so familiar with time. I do have another history: my history as Sarah Freeman. I’m not going to give that up just to be angry again.”

Clarke said: “I’ll get you your table. I’ll—”

“It’s never just about an object. It’s about the whole past.”

“Sometimes I envy you,” Clarke said. “Being able to claim back the past.”

“Envy?” said Sarah Freeman.

The remains of the meal lay heavy on the table. The waiter who came to see if everything was all right, to move the plates and make the usual offers, stayed away.

“It went on for so long I stopped imagining things. I couldn’t imagine the feel of a chair, hot food, a bed. Anything.

“Then there were three whole days,” Sarah said. “Nobody came. I remember the boy’s skin: it was as thin and as blue as watered milk. And it was quiet at night, too. I’d been in Berlin all through the war, and quiet was the one thing I couldn’t stand—no engines, no bombs, just fire and wind, hissing and whispering out there where I couldn’t see.

“I had this absurd idea I should change things. But I couldn’t change things outside the shed, so I thought I’d get up and change the tools around. The rake for the spade. The fork for the hoe. I’d make the shed change, and it wouldn’t seem like a prison anymore. But I didn’t have the strength. You know what it’s like to be impossibly weak, where your legs don’t answer you when you try to stand up? And besides, if I changed things, then we could never get about safely at night. I couldn’t drop anything, hit anything; there must be no noise at all. And besides, I was hungry and I knew I couldn’t waste my strength.

“I so much wanted it to rain.”

The restaurant room, cool already, seemed to lose its last colors. Clarke wanted her to go on, and he wanted her to stop, wanted to spare her the pain of telling him, wanted her to tell him everything so that he could—could somehow become her equal in pain, perhaps, or simply find a cause, a wrong to right. He would not have been able to separate the two.

“I was sure he’d come, my friend. He always came. I couldn’t hear anything at all when he came, I couldn’t look out, I just had to trust. Then the latch would flick up suddenly, and I had to learn to trust all over again. There was nowhere to hide.