The Pieces from Berlin (24 page)

But if he expected her to confess to conscience, she would not. Helen felt uneasy in her stomach, annoyed at the process which made Lucia, her grandmother, into a parcel of flesh to be analyzed.

“Are you afraid that something bad is going to happen to you?” the doctor said.

Lucia particularly did not look at Helen. She didn’t want to see what was in Helen’s eyes: whether the girl wanted her healthy and sane in order to ruin her.

“. . . worry about the future?”

“. . . do you think it is wonderful to be alive now?”

And then: “Do you worry a lot about the past?”

She thought: Not unless the world decides to worry a lot about my past.

“Do you feel that your situation is hopeless?”

She wanted to laugh. She had an extraordinary possibility at this very moment: she could choose to be an old woman. She could subside into pleasant rooms and constant care. She could outgrow responsibility.

“Do you know where you are?” the doctor asked her, abruptly.

And the temptation passed. She would be very exact.

“I am in the hospital,” Lucia said, “in a doctor’s consulting room because I seem to have alarmed people. I am so sorry, Helen. I sometimes have difficulty sleeping at night—”

“Very often?” the doctor said. He wouldn’t stop concentrating.

“You will notice, Doctor, that I am not at a loss for words.”

The doctor nodded. “Later on,” he said to Helen, as though Lucia was wearing a cloak of invisibility instead of a hospital dressing gown, “you’ll find a certain withdrawal from life—a lack of interest. Anger, which is only natural, and depression because memory is fading. No care about appearance or actions.” And here he looked at Lucia after a hospital night. “Manners go. Sometimes they misplace things and then insist and insist they were stolen.”

“I talked to her housekeeper,” Helen said, not wanting all these obligatory tests to turn into trouble. “My grandmother is meticulous about lights and fires. She’s always alone when she goes to bed because the housekeeper leaves after dinner, and there’s never been anything out of place.”

“So what do you think happened last night?”

Helen said: “I think you should ask Lucia.”

“I’ve been rather tired,” Lucia said. “A business—issue, as you would say. I organized some candles, some music, a book of poems that I like, and I tried to relax. I took a sleeping pill, and it took effect faster than I expected.”

“She did all this,” Helen said, pointedly, “while the housekeeper was still in the apartment.”

The doctor said: “You don’t think this—accident—might be some kind of aggression?”

In front of this neat, scented, impassive man, Lucia was no more than her dossier said: which mostly was “very old.”

“I really think,” Helen said, “my grandmother would be better at home.”

“It will be on your responsibility, Helen. We can’t be absolutely sure she has not had a stroke.”

“I think,” Helen said, “those tests could be run quite quickly. And then perhaps late today my grandmother could be released?”

This talk did not make Lucia entirely comfortable; she hadn’t expected Helen as such an ally.

“What is this?” the doctor said directly to Lucia, holding up a computer mouse.

Lucia thought for a moment that she had truly forgotten the word. It was not a word of her generation. She knew she couldn’t hesitate too much, couldn’t seem to stammer, must produce a perfect sentence. “That, Doctor,” she said—and she worried at the word, the “switch,” the “key,” the “rat,” in French the
“truc,”
in English the “thing”—“is the mouse for a computer.” She must not on any account show the relief she felt.

The doctor said: “I don’t think it would do any harm if she rested at home. For a while.”

Helen, as very nearly next of kin, thanked the clinic for their discretion, made Lucia’s health sound like the kind of business secret that is almost sacred in Swiss law, and paid the bill at once. She thought she caught blame in the senior nurse’s eye, as though this should never have been allowed to happen.

Lucia was dressed again, and slightly painted with the makeup Helen thought to bring.

“I don’t understand,” she said, “why it was necessary to take me to that place.”

“Would you rather we’d taken you to the cantonal hospital? With sirens blaring?”

Lucia said: “I took some pills to sleep. That’s all.”

Helen said: “And you made a whole play out of it.”

“I had appointments the next day. I would never have missed them.”

The Turk drove too slowly. Lucia was irritated by his care; she waved her hands.

“I have been a proper, respectable businesswoman in this city for almost sixty years,” she said. “Nobody has to worry about my checks. Nobody worries about their husbands. What I sell is what I say it is, and it is fine. I do not draw attention to myself, only to the shop and what I sell, and I sell under another name, as I always have done. I am a private person and I do not wish to be made public. Do you understand that?”

She was hunched as the Turk helped her out of the car, and across the sidewalk and into the building, and into the shiny metal box of the elevator. But then she saw herself in the mirror of the walls. She straightened herself.

“I hope you can afford your morals,” she said to Helen. “I always had the morals I could afford.”

She used her own key to open the apartment door. She pushed it hard, and she swept into the hall.

The living room had not been touched.

Lucia said: “That woman. She’s not here?”

There were porcelain bits on the carpet, and candlewax, and damp. Lucia’s chair had shifted from its usual place. A table was overturned.

“This is intolerable,” Lucia said. “I shall fire her.”

Helen watched the old woman pick her way about the room, checking and inspecting how the damp had darkened the carpet by the open window, and the rain left faint stains on the pale curtains.

“I might as well have been burgled,” she said.

Helen said: “You said nothing happened.”

“The woman should have cleared things up.”

“I told her not to.”

“You told her?”

“I wanted you to see all this.”

Lucia sat down very cautiously.

“I made a mistake,” she said.

“And the candles?”

Lucia said nothing. For a moment, Helen fancied she might mean a mistake in the past, something terrible. But then Lucia said: “You never had a chance to do wrong. You should be grateful.”

“I don’t want excuses,” Helen said.

“There might be explanations.”

“I couldn’t stand them,” Helen said.

Lucia said: “So you have one point of weakness?” She rubbed her hands together out of necessity because they were dying on her. “Such a strong girl,” she said, furiously.

Sarah had the power to alarm him, make the quiet, decent Peter Clarke terribly aware that nothing was going to be simple ever again.

“Purpose,” Sarah said. “They want bloody purpose. They all want me to be their bloody purpose because it’s easy for them and they know I am right.” She spilled gin on her skirt, looked up defiantly. “Easy. Easy. Easy.”

Clarke said: “You think it’s easy to think these things of a mother or a grandmother?”

“What the hell else do they have except bad thoughts about the past? The past is a bad thought in itself. They’ve grown out of politics, they’ve grown out of nations, they just want a good time and a nice car and a quiet life and a winter holiday in the damned Maldives. There’s nothing left to connect them to history except what their family remembers, and that’s not entirely real to them. Hegel,” she said.

“I expect so.”

“Hegel. They really believe they have come to the end of history, and the end of politics, and from now on they just need managers to cope with a few fiscal questions. They don’t need morals anymore, so they find them interesting and amusing and diverting and—like a game. They play at condemning, they play at pardoning. They play at it all. They don’t understand what it means to the rest of us.”

Clarke said: “I’m sometimes glad I didn’t read too much.” “What do you mean? You mean you’re glad you don’t have to doubt and worry?”

“I doubt,” Clarke said. “I doubt if my legs will carry me through the day. I doubt if my heart will still work tomorrow. I don’t worry, that’s true. But I doubt.”

“That’s different.”

“Yes. It is. It’s fundamental.”

“I don’t know why I talk to you,” Sarah said. She slammed her glass down on a glass table.

“You have to talk to someone,” Clarke said. Later, he came to think he’d come dangerously close to a declaration with those words.

“I suppose so,” she said; which was the answer he wanted.

And they sat, old, stiff, opposite each other.

“If she asked me to forgive her,” Sarah said, “I wouldn’t hear her. If I hear her, I have to deal with her as an equal. She asks, I give.”

“She won’t ask.”

“I’m not equal to her. She is wrong. She did wrong.”

“Nowadays,” Clarke said, very carefully, “people don’t seem to think about doing wrong. It’s all psychology and excuses.”

“They like an absolute wrong that comes along with dramas and spotlights and horrors. That, they like. And in time, they’ll explain that, as well.” She sat forward. “And if I just coexist with the woman, not challenging her, not prosecuting her, not throwing a rock through her lovely windows—what’s that except forgetfulness, pardon in disguise? And if I do anything, if I do anything—”

“We used to say you shouldn’t bring yourself down to the other person’s level.”

“Exactly,” Sarah said. “It’s in the moral philosophers, and it’s in your common sense, both. It’s a question of where you stand—remember that? And whether you’re entitled to look down on someone. A question of level.”

“Nobody else is up there with you. Nobody else is still alive.”

He saw that her eyes were watering, but out of anger.

He shouldn’t say anything more. He should start to repair the afternoon, fill it up with a gentle walk, the sight of the lake, the prospect of cakes and coffee; whatever it would take. But he said, even so: “You think she can forgive herself?”

He was startled, even alarmed, to see that her face was suddenly easy and loose, not bent in with feeling as it had been.

“Nobody can do that,” Sarah said. “Nobody. You pardon someone, you make yourself equal with them, but she’s always more concerned with what she did than with forgiving it. Crime traps you that way.”

She smiled. She’d managed now to push away the image of an old Lucia, a sad Lucia, sitting under the influence of a pill in the middle of flames. She needn’t bother with pity. She seemed to relax back into the chair, no longer tense on the edge of it.

“You know,” she said, “you forgive, you give. It’s like in French:
pardonner
is close to
donner. Geben
to
vergeben. Dono
to
perdono.
Pardon is a gift, and I won’t think of giving it, any more than I would give her my table.”

“I only thought—”

“You’re a good Christian. It’s not the only kind of goodness. And when it forces people into forgiving the ones who sin against them, it’s a mistake. It makes the virtuous just the same as the wicked: two terms in the same equation.”

“I’m afraid to stand on the high ground. I’m afraid I would be lonely.”

“Would you rather be down with Lucia?”

Clarke didn’t show that he needed to think about that.

Nicholas came, all solicitude, all pity. Lucia suspected him at once. He thought she was weak, thought she was panicking. She much regretted her taste for Goethe and candles.

And he chattered, as though the substance of what he said didn’t matter, only the sound, as though he was soothing a child or a cat.

“You remember the milkmen?” he said. “Those metal cans. Those carts with huge wheels. Those first few days in Zurich, I used to look at all the washing in the sun on the roof terraces and I thought the whole city was cleaning itself—washed, polished, and bleached on the line.”

“Yes,” Lucia said.

“And the food in the windows. Caviar. Bananas in a silvery light. Cakes that looked like hats. Hats that looked like stars on a net, or a butterfly. There was a couple on a bicycle, with a trailer behind and a sofa on it. There was that lottery seller on Bahnhofstrasse, in a metal drum, with a metal hood to keep her dry. And the men went shopping in the market as well as the women. Great tentacles of carrots, like something underwater. And—”

“I sometimes think you’re older than I am,” she said.

Nicholas said: “Just because I remember things?”

“I remember Berlin. I had a life in Berlin.”

“We’d go out of the city sometimes, on a train with wood seats,” Nicholas said. “We never went anywhere from Berlin. At least, I didn’t. I was quite alarmed at how easy it was to go somewhere else when we got to Zurich.”

“You were old enough to have tastes. You seemed to like flowers and open air and mountains.”

“We used to eat in village places. You remember? With wooden walls, and those grand tiled ovens for warmth and wrestling pictures on the wall, enormous square men hurling each other.”

Lucia said: “It was good for you. I expect.”

“I remember,” Nicholas said, and Lucia could already tell from his bright eyes that this was not going to be an innocent memory, “one place with little windows and lots of geraniums. A big, generous woman serving. There was a younger man in the corner and she asked if he’d like something ‘special’ in his omelette. He wasn’t a friend; she called him ‘Mein Herr.’ You were listening, and when you ordered, you asked for something special, too.

“But I suppose the woman didn’t feel like doing favors for someone foreign and glamorous with a child in tow. The omelettes came back plain, but with a bunch of parsley on one side. So you inspected the young man’s plate, as best you could, and you thought there was a whole meal hidden in between the folds of egg: bacon, perhaps, certainly liver. All that was rationed at the time.

“The woman brought the bill and you’d been charged for two ‘special’ omelettes. Do you remember?”

Lucia fussed with a little stone deer, head pressed back against its flank, a piece too sentimental for her usual tastes. “Do you remember this?” she said.