The Pieces from Berlin (27 page)

Clarke did wonder if Nicholas had simply walked away from Lucia into the snow. He was used to leaving her, being sent away while his mother was going through her trials—to school, a couple of weeks in Piedmont with a cousin, a
Berghotel
once to walk himself out of worrying. But then he thought: I am the one who walks away. He began to sweat.

And Sarah Freeman, in her room, looked at her little case, set against the wall with its airline tags. She’d unpacked and let all those demons loose.

She couldn’t bear the idea of kind, thoughtful Nicholas out in the cold woods, and Nicholas dead. He should not have died. He had nothing to do with it.

Then she had a thought of which she was half ashamed. If Nicholas killed himself, he still hadn’t made any reparation. He hadn’t, even now, suffered as she did. So he was not entitled to eclipse her story and her pain or, worse yet, annex it and insist on being mourned.

Finally, like the others, she slept in the shallows. She did dream, but it seemed like what she could remember of another dream: that she was in a rich, fine house with a great open aquarium as one whole wall, with weeds and a reef. She sat and watched the fish, in her dream, all turning at once, all blue, green, and gray, all flickering and shimmering: not clown fish, lionfish, sergeants, and exotic parrots, but plain, shining herring.

Lucia had Nicholas’s letter. She thought of not opening it at all: making it a dead letter. She opened it with her fingers, which she hardly ever did; there was a perfectly good silver blade on her desk.

She looked at the torn envelope for a moment. She liked the roughness of the edges. This was not an ordinary letter, which she would pull directly from a neatly cut envelope. This was something particular, and not safe.

Her fingers were not swollen or broken, but they were not quick anymore. So in taking out the letter, she tore the envelope down its seams. She let it fall to the floor.

And she read the two sides of cream notepaper, written neatly, as though he’d thought long and hard and made several copies until he had the fairest fair copy of them all.

She set the letter on her desk.

So he couldn’t bear it. So he couldn’t live with it all. So he couldn’t thank her for having known and borne all there was to know, and lived with it, too. He seemed to think he’d protected Helen, but he didn’t think that she, too, had protected him.

There was nothing proven. The charges had been dropped.

They thought Berlin was a city, operating like a city, when really it was all of it a kind of underworld, the parts any sensible citizen would avoid, if she could. People went around with soot on their faces like robbers, and gas masks, and it wasn’t enough just to be who you were; nobody could see. Everybody needed protection. Somebody important had to know your name and your fate, and to care. And even then, you worried. Ambassadors worried. Ministers at the Swiss embassy worried. You could die tomorrow and yet you still had to act as though the world made some kind of sense.

She picked up the phone to call Helen. Nicholas had saved her from the story; Lucia would make her hear it all.

But then, what story was she to tell? There had never been any evidence against her, none that made the slightest sense, how could there be? There was envy and there was spite. Who was she, a foreigner, to turn up with beautiful things? Who was this newcomer who wouldn’t be provincial, wouldn’t dress down and keep quiet and go home? Somehow it was fine for the banks to be legalistic, to demand death certificates for people from the camps, and account numbers and proper papers before they’d even think of parting with what the dead clearly owned; but if she was left with other people’s property, if other people could no longer claim it, she was somehow a thief.

She had nothing to confess.

And those terrible others, who didn’t care at all. She remembered how disgusted she had been with the friend from the studio who said it was odd to see Germans wandering around with sacks in their hands, like you used to see the Jews.

As for Helen, she was desperate for occupation, anything that would stop her seeing her father’s body all bright with frost, or save her from circling the issue of what it could possibly mean to bring such an ancient woman to justice. Lucia couldn’t be deprived of goods, life, freedom; she had such a short lease on any of them.

So Helen went immediately to sort out Nicholas’s possessions, to turn the house and his memory into a dead estate. She went like a detective, or a pathologist, someone for whom the papers were all evidence: the file cabinets of letters on paper with curious seals, black-bound notebooks, conference agendas, offprints, postcards with the names of books, sometimes proofs, sometimes manuscripts rolling up under the pressure of the rubber bands at their waists.

She sorted as best she could: the ones that would be part of the Müller-Rossi gift to some university library, the ones that were clearly private, the ones that a biographer would need if ever her father had a biographer.

He wouldn’t, of course, unless there was some polite notice in an academic quarterly. He would end up dusty as those papers. A thousand memories of kindness weren’t enough to keep him alive, although the shadow of a crime might give him a certain notoriety.

She organized books by size and not by subject, and she slammed them into packers’ boxes for someone else to use. It was like an autopsy of the mind, this process: or something geologic, layer by layer of old thought and knowledge now made orderly and put away.

She heard the geese complaining in the snow.

She went into the kitchen to make coffee. There was an over-serious espresso machine, one with a handle to pull and a tendency to shower the room with hot grounds, and she left it well alone. She made coffee in a pot.

It was the snow that made for quiet. The house was never noisy; but in summer there was not this sense of stilled life. She longed for spring.

She sat down at the kitchen table.

She thought that Nicholas was not supposed to die. He was only supposed to know, and that was supposed to change things. His death was unreasonable.

The phone rang.

For a minimal second, she remembered calling the house from outside the house. She’d pick up the phone; she’d hear her own voice, nervous, sheepish.

Everyone knew Nicholas was dead. His death led to obituaries, and comments on Alpine danger, and a little bit of tabloid sensation since he had been naked.

The phone still cut up the quiet, three separate tones: from kitchen, living room, and bedroom.

She put the white mug down on a marble surface, hard. The cup held, and then cracked, and the last of the coffee pooled out onto red-white stone.

She’d have to clean it now. She ought to answer the phone.

She reached for the phone and it slipped out of her hands, hanging from the wall. She heard a voice saying: “Professor Müller-Rossi? Doctor? Professor?”

She got hold of the receiver. “Yes,” she said.

The voice at the other end was secretarial and peevish. “Will you please tell Professor Müller-Rossi that the seminar has been rescheduled—”

She was the one who killed Nicholas.

She put the phone down on the corncrake voice, blotted up the coffee with a paper towel, and went back to the papers. She was hoping for a pardon on a spare sheet of A4, some explanation that would take away the knowledge that she had caused her father to die.

She started laughing at the notion: causing someone to die. It sounded like a subclause of a fine, gothic contract, a euphemism, something you want to stop someone doing, but don’t dare suggest they might ever try. She was also guiltily aware that she was denying her father his own decisions.

It was as cold as the day he died. She wondered how he could be sure enough to walk into that wood in the cold. He must have meant it as a statement: to Lucia, when all else failed. He was too good to bear the information. But how could he derive such an instinct for good from Lucia when it was she herself, all his childhood, who had been wrong?

For the first time, and in thinking about a suicide, it crossed her mind that there might be such a thing as innate good.

It must have been the quiet.

The phone rang again. She ignored it. She thought it might be some other secretary or a salesman.

She thought she heard a car on the road, heard it stop, a door close quietly. Then it was as though the house door opened, a cold shaft of air, something moving in the hallway: a coat put on the side, perhaps.

She stood staring out of the window. She didn’t want to see an intruder. She thought it might be a cleaning lady, but Nicholas did not have one, or else a neighbor curious about the lights. It might be something worse.

Her mind was full of ghosts, cold ghosts.

She felt hands at her waist, warm and utterly familiar hands: Jeremy.

“I closed the gallery,” he said. “I’ve come to help.”

And the fit of his body made her smile.

The funeral Mass would be at Glaubenberg, at the small chapel there; and the burial in the graveyard of the small town down by the lake, where Nora already lay. Helen made the arrangements, organized a priest to go up the mountain from the small town by the lake, ordered the flowers, talked to the
Berghotel
by the pass about the lunch. Then she invited Sarah Freeman, and of course Peter Clarke. Then she went to see Lucia.

“I’ve made all the arrangements,” she said.

Lucia seemed to take that for granted. She was not a woman to make uninteresting arrangements for herself.

“I have,” Helen said, “invited Sarah Freeman. Because she was a friend of my father’s.” Even now she wondered if she should have said “of Nicholas’s,” if she was being too possessive and cutting Lucia away from her son.

Lucia said: “My dear.”

Helen made a gesture like dusting her hands.

“You think that’s appropriate?” Lucia said.

Helen said nothing.

“It is because of that woman,” Lucia said, “that my son is dead.” She, too, would not say “Nicholas.” She, too, insisted that the man was hers.

Helen put a sheet of paper by her side, with the times for the burial and the Mass.

Lucia did not tolerate her silence. She seemed like a player again, an operatic lady who can rehearse a story and turn it into recitative, and expect to be heard with attention.

“There is so much I could tell you,” she said. “If you were prepared to listen.”

Helen examined her, the look security guards give a stranger. She knew this would come: the telling of stories after all these years. But she was not sure if Lucia would burden her with every terrible thing, would make sure that she, like Nicholas, lived in the shadow of this old woman’s career; or if this was the moment when she would justify herself, try to make an accomplice out of Helen.

So Helen did not want to listen and could not leave.

“I never minded how separate Nicholas became,” she said. “I could still see him. I could see you. I was an observer. I could help out. At least he wasn’t absent from my life.”

A long, ingrained habit of decorousness stopped her from going on like that; she had no way to show her loss. She was not the kind of woman you expect to show great feeling. She’d lived such a considered, businesslike life that such a show would seem like sudden madness. And yet it might seem madder to talk reasonably and politely about the fact that you are more than ninety and you will still outlive your child.

She had work to do. Out of calculation, she attacked.

“You gave him the court papers, I think? You were the one who brought all this up again.”

But Helen was proof against that accusation; she’d made it too often to herself.

“It was,” Lucia said, “disgraceful. I only helped people. I moved money out to Switzerland, and they could have it whenever they arrived in Zurich. I charged a commission. So do banks. But banks wouldn’t do it for Jews. You had to find someone like me, who would take a risk, who knew people at the Swiss embassy. And I tried to protect all the beautiful things that people had. They weren’t just objects, or names like Meissen and Gobelin, or things to trade. They were people’s lives, the point of people’s lives. I stored a Breughel once and it broke my heart that somebody would have to live apart from it.

“I did my best. And then when Berlin was falling apart, when the Russians were coming, when the Americans were bombing and bombing, I got out. It took some ingenuity, but it meant I had all that evidence of all those lives, safe in Switzerland. I was keeping the owners alive, in my way.”

Helen said: “If you don’t feel well enough to come to the funeral, everyone will understand.”

“You will not talk to me like that,” Lucia said. And then she subsided, smiled, almost simpered. “I loved Nicholas,” she said.

And if that was true? Helen thought. What difference did it make if the woman was capable of the most perfect and selfless maternal love? Helen knew, from having Henry, there was gratification involved, too, and a life that filled the gaps in your life: a constant person.

“They kept questioning me when we got to Zurich,” Lucia said. “You may as well know all this. Nicholas must have known it.”

Helen wanted to defend her father, but Lucia was a lawyer working for her own life.

“They just keep on questioning me,” she said. “Again and again. First it was money. How much did I take to Germany in 1932, and of course it was nothing much; how much did I bring out of Germany in 1944, and of course it was more. Then all the customs people, and the people who had to track down German goods in Switzerland, they turned up. I told them I had brought only household goods. But they keep coming to the apartment. I know these people, little people, they have no idea at all how people live. It’s as though they were chanting under their breath ‘But those are Meissen, those are pictures, that is tapestry, that is silver, that is old, that is lovely.’ ”

Helen heard the change to the present tense, but she set it aside because Lucia was still lucid, fluent, loud.

“They spend whole days counting things in my apartment. Everything in my apartment. I can see it just makes them angry. They keep asking: Where does this come from? I’m like the art teacher. I’m always explaining. I tell them most of it is from Italy, because it is, you know, it’s the goods I used to have when I was a child, it’s the house in Milan with the great copper bees, it’s what I know. I have to explain who the Rossis are; can you imagine?” Helen wondered if she was acting, if this rush of words was considered rather than compulsive, if she was simply trying to make sure nobody could spoil her story. “I do buy things as well, I buy from my partner in the shop, the name over the door. And they go to the damned bank and the bank tells them I’m overdrawn and I never had the money to buy anything. So they say. And they talk about Swiss secrecy.”