The Pieces from Berlin (25 page)

Nicholas wouldn’t stop. “You wouldn’t pay for ‘special’ omelettes, but the woman kept saying they were special. You said there was nothing in them, and the woman said of course there wasn’t; there was a war on. You said: ‘But that young man had liver. Perhaps bacon. He had to use a knife and a fork.’

“The woman blocked the way. ‘You may not know it, Madame,’ she said, and you could tell she never said ‘Madame’ in a friendly way, ‘but here in Switzerland food is rationed.’ You said: ‘The bill was wrong.’ She said: ‘Are you going to pay?’ And there you both were like statues on a fountain: righteousness and righteousness, head to head.

“Then the woman said: ‘If you think I’m breaking the law, I’ll call the police.’

“And then you gave her the money, full payment and a small tip. The woman said: ‘Ah. Must have been a misunderstanding. It’s so easy, with all the different languages. Madame.’ ”

Nicholas beamed. “It was the first time I ever saw you defeated,” he said.

Lucia dropped the stone deer onto the carpet. She looked down at it for a moment and said: “You used to like that fawn.”

Nicholas scooped it up and put it back in place. His face was now close down to Lucia’s face, but for all his anger, he could not quite bring himself to be unmannerly. He pulled back.

So she was not going to discuss the first years in Zurich. And he was not going to go away without bringing something into the open.

She thought it had better be Berlin.

He said: “It must have been difficult with a child, and on your own.”

He did not want to ask out loud: “And were you ever on your own?”

“You, Niccolo. Like having a lover you couldn’t mention. I’d have to go out, and I’d have to leave you, but some nights I’d get a lift from a few streets away just so I could come back with a squeal of brakes and you’d know I hurried.”

He thought: She is going to say that every fakery was kindness, because she wants every kindness to be suspect.

“It was a lively city,” she said. “Until the bombing got worse. I came alive in Berlin. I’d been in a small town so long. I was so glad,” she said, “to be back in a big city. Glamour and spectacle and gray and black and ceremonial red. All that history. Great shows, although you could hardly get tickets. You could always get pasta, oysters, and game because they weren’t rationed. And there were men.

“All the soldiers. All the men in the ministries,” she said. “The diplomatic corps. There were so many young bachelors and so few women. You never sat down to a table with even numbers.”

He said: “You must have enjoyed yourself.”

She paused. She would have liked him to see her as she had been: the sumptuous breasts, those long silken legs, of course, but also the way she challenged men. She had a real taste for sexual pleasure, but she had always seemed at one remove; a man had to make her real before he could love her. She had to be brought down.

She could tell him these things; that was the threat that lay between them. She could make him listen to what he did not want to know. She could explain, and perhaps her nice monogamous child needed the explanation, that when she was calling out and her eyes had gone to glass and her whole body turned on the axis of the man inside her, that man was still not quite sure she was not acting again. So he had to go on testing and proving and hoping.

“To war,” she said, raising a glass. She had measured her irony exactly. “Sometimes it’s fun.

“I always tried to get things for you. I brought you oysters one night, two dozen of them. I’d forgotten you had never seen them before. I thought they were a great treat, and I don’t know what you thought—organs, I suppose, all gray-green and slippery. I said they were good, and good for you, and ate one. You looked at them and said you could see things moving inside.

“I really thought you were just being difficult. Childish. You said you wanted salami. I said you can’t always have what you want. You said you’d like me to stay home more. I told you I had things to do. I told you at least you were safe, and oysters were just as good as meat. So you said you wanted meat. I told you I did what I could. And I was so annoyed I held your nose, and I poured an oyster into your mouth.”

He hadn’t remembered until then: not being able to breathe, this sliding, lively thing in his mouth, and his mother’s huge eyes.

“We stepped around the broken glass,” Lucia said. “We had straw shoes about that time: chic and shining, but they were made of straw. We couldn’t get fish, so we ate oysters.”

Nicholas said: “You went dancing.”

Lucia shrugged.

“But you were there.”

“You saw more women in black after the Russian front. Men without legs. They started reserving seats on the trams and the buses for men wounded in the war. I even saw some communist slogans once, on a wall near the Roman restaurant. I wondered how long they’d last. Hours, not more.”

“You can’t say you didn’t know things, guess things. See things.”

“Of course.”

“How could you carry on—?”

“Life doesn’t stop just because history is going on all around you. People fall in love. They trick each other. They get hangovers, and they change flats, and they go swimming.”

“You could have left.”

“Could I? Müller was in the army, no money. Besides, I didn’t want to see him. It might have been safer in Switzerland, but it didn’t seem that way at the time. The Swiss all talked about retreating to the mountains and fighting to the last man, although they didn’t seem clear about who exactly they’d be fighting. And they left the women down in the plains.

“Besides,” she said, “I was having a good time. People have a good time in wars, you know. It happens. Ask your friends about the blackout in London and the things they’d never have done if the lights were on.”

She thought she was almost safe.

“They rationed clothes. So we fussed about hats.” Lucia said: “You’d expect me to remember that, wouldn’t you? Well, I do. Why shouldn’t I remember? I needed my looks. My looks brought my contacts, and my contacts made my life better, and I did it all for you.”

“I really don’t know anything about hats,” Nicholas said.

“And there was nothing, nothing I could do.”

“About hats?”

“Nothing I could do about what was happening.”

“But they were your friends?”

“Max Lindemann was, among others. I met a lot of others through Max.”

She was waiting in a café window the next morning, the room full of hot still air, view of breezes catching at bare gray trees.

She hadn’t waited for a man in forty years, not Sarah Freeman.

The froth on the coffee looked all constructed, maintained. Laws of gravity, laws of entropy, weren’t enough to make it die. Carefully, she began to spoon it into the saucer.

Someone at the next table noticed, and made a point of looking away sharply so she would know he’d noticed, and she didn’t give a damn.

She had the surface of the coffee bare now. It was a beige surface. She added two, then three spoonfuls of sugar. Then she added one more. If it wasn’t going to be coffee, it could be a kind of sweet.

The mumble of the bells sounded out like a great machine, the chimes flying off like sparks.

You don’t get patient as you get older, she thought. You get resigned.

He’d better bloody come, Müller-Rossi. And he better not think she had any kind of absolution to offer, or even help.

She sipped the coffee.

She had thought very hard about not coming back at all.

The bells stopped. She thought she could hear the water running in a stone fountain by the window. She didn’t want to order another cup of the coffee. She thought about tea, instead, but she knew it would be hot water and packaged herbs.

She tried to remember who said
“Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.”
She knew it was Madame de Staël who said
“Tout comprendre rend très indulgent.”

The door flapped open and Peter Clarke came romping into the café like a big dog. Since he wouldn’t wear his glasses, he paused a moment before he found her. He sat down at the table and looked at her saucer full of froth.

“I hate the coffee here too,” he said.

“Good morning.”

“I’d have brought you a paper, but I suppose you could read the Swiss papers.”

She shrugged.

“Or we could go somewhere else,” he said.

“What about Nicholas?”

“Oh,” he said. “Nicholas. Yes. Well, I called his house. No answer. No answering machine, either.”

“But he didn’t say anything about not coming, did he?”

Clarke sucked his teeth. “He didn’t say anything,” he said, trying to be pedantic. “He doesn’t say much. But I’m sure he’ll come.”

“I suppose the Swiss haven’t changed, have they?” she said. “They’re always on time?”

Nicholas went one last time to see his mother. He never had a key to her apartment: not being on such casual terms, and Lucia being a woman—ancient but independent—who would have resented any suggestion that she might have emergencies.

Helen had another key, but then she knew so much less.

He carried the court papers with him, in a torn envelope, no briefcase, as though they were something newly delivered into his life: a revelation.

But he’d always known. He’d known as you know the weather from a pain in the bones or a pressure in the head: not consciously, but thoroughly. He knew the money had been frozen, there was a prosecution; he heard these things in his father’s voice on his occasional visits, the peculiar embarrassment of a banking man who finds his wife is a storybook villain, a headline of crime. He’d once been taken to the courthouse with Lucia, as though she wanted to show him off: her claim on motherhood and honesty. She implicated him.

His father also made sure he knew the terrible charges, extortion, dealing in stolen goods, blackmail, and he remembered how they were suddenly abandoned even though there were living witnesses prepared to come into court. His mother had been convicted, one month suspended, for misleading Swiss customs: declaring the contents of those seven trucks as her own household goods.

Being silent, he did not just obscure the facts. He diminished them. Lucia herself would soon be able to do the same: anyone would believe that, ancient as she was, she had lost her memory of those years. Together, they were fading history until it could no longer be read. He was almost sure he never meant to do that, but Lucia was old, she could tighten her mind at will, she must have some residual sense of shame even if it was buried under a fluent justification of every damned thing she had done.

He’d trigger her. He’d remind her about Zurich as the war ended, about the barbed wire coming down and the GIs taking “Switzerland Leave Tours I, II, III, IV,” staring at every scintillating thing in shop windows, the sudden free flow of Coca-Cola and the chewing gum which shockingly stuck to your heels on the pristine length of Bahnhofstrasse.

Then she’d remember how she was always more frantic than before, more occupied, reckoning out each hour and each day. She expected things to go wrong.

But he would show her again how that summer shone: shone with sun off the lake waters, with the white trousers of the sailors on their small boats, with the glittering hair of the girls on the steamers. The days were full of flowers, of fishing and swimming and sailing.

He’d gone with her once to the tea dance in a rose garden at the Hotel Baur au Lac. They did the foxtrot together as a stiff and distant dance, which amused the other people. He was so proud of her, and glad that nobody approached her, tried to talk or dance with her; but he also knew she hated to be ignored.

An American wanted to ask her to dance. She was disposed to get up with him. But one of his friends called him back, and he smiled apologetically, and he never tried again.

He watched the couples turning in the afternoon sun, and he was happy with the cakes, too, mysteriously aware that he was a child and not a child at the same time: in a limbo of sun and perfume and sugar.

He mustn’t get lost in his own memories. They were just little levers to open her own past. He could remind her how at home she lay for what seemed like hours in the bath. He’d fretted at the door.

He’d even wondered, just for a wishful moment, if she had arranged to meet his father that time at the Baur au Lac, and if she was angry that he had not been there.

She had to tell him. There was nobody else who could demand that, and nobody else who had a chance of succeeding. He was marching to her door like a priest in search of confessions, for the sake of souls, and not simply for the law.

Then he ran out of street, and he ran out of memories, and he was standing, wrapped up, at her door. He felt the cold of the wind off the lake.

“It’s me,” he said through the intercom, under the eye of the video camera.

“Nicco,” she said. “I was just going out.”

But where would she go on a cold Sunday morning? She had no appetite for Mass, was still a little annoyed that funerals were not in Latin.

“It’s very urgent.”

“Why couldn’t you have phoned?”

He wondered why she didn’t simply let him into the apartment, whether there was something she did not want him to see: disorder, maybe she wasn’t feeling well.

“I have the court judgment,” he said. “May 26, 1946.”

The intercom worked only when she held the switch down. He thought she’d released the switch for a moment, a faint insect noise through the speaker. He didn’t want to shout on the street, it would have been absurd: a man in his sixties bawling “Mother, Mother” into a machine.

The intercom clicked again.

“Go home,” she said.

“I have to talk to you.”

He tried to argue, but he was arguing with a silence and a nest of wires and a dead bell.

He caught the shine of the camera lens above his head and its little black snout. He wondered if she was still watching him.

“Of course you have to go to him,” Sarah said. And Peter Clarke, too, said: “He must be very upset.”

The phone was a body, dead and heavy, in Helen’s hands.

Nicholas was not in Zurich. He always called before coming to Zurich. But there was no answer at the house, either. Clarke was alarmed by that; you always answer the phone on a Sunday, hoping for a family call, to be remembered.