The Pieces from Berlin (29 page)

She straightened up.

Sarah Freeman took her time over the uneven floor stones.

There was no music in the small chapel, no sound from the sacristy, and as yet there was nobody else for the service. A bit of birdsong sparkled outside. Nothing now could save the two women from meeting.

So Lucia, to keep her advantage, stepped to the end of the row of pews. “Frau Lindemann,” she said, thinking to honor her. “Sarah.”

Sarah smiled. Lucia was infuriated.

“Sarah Freeman,” Lucia said.

Sarah sat down in a pew, arranged her skirt.

Lucia wanted her to say something. Anything she said might somehow go wrong, be spoiled, be equivocal. It would help tell Lucia what she must do.

Helen and Jeremy stood at the back. Clarke stood close to Sarah, but on the side. The quiet weighed on them all.

Lucia said: “I didn’t have a choice, Frau Lindemann.”

Sarah looked interested, but as though she thought Lucia could do better.

“I had no choice,” Lucia said. “And the table is yours, if you want it now.”

Sarah’s silence was perfectly composed.

Lucia was shouting now. “I had no choice,” she said. “It was Berlin. The Gestapo. The—”

Sarah stood. “I know you had a choice,” she said.

She seemed a proper grandmotherly figure now, small and quiet and patient: someone intervening in a meeting, being reasonable.

“I know,” Sarah said, “because even I had a choice.”

Lucia stared at her.

“I didn’t have to be a Jew,” she said. “I didn’t have to live in the Jewish houses or eat Jewish rations or go away to do hard labor until I could be murdered. I didn’t have to live one whole year in a wooden shed, with a boy who atrophied alongside me. I made a choice.”

Lucia did not have to say that she did not understand. Her eyes were shocked open.

“The Nazis had a calculus of race. I had only one great-grandmother who was Jewish. But I had Max Lindemann and I would not leave him.”

Lucia had the doubts of any habitual mistress about the loyalty of wives, but she knew she had to be quiet.

“My race was an administrative mistake,” Sarah said. “A clerk could have corrected it, would have been happy to correct it. Would have apologized, I expect.”

And then Lucia ran out of her defenses. She said, very loudly although she had not meant to shout: “I had no choice.”

Sarah Freeman was on her knees for a moment, quite composed. The doors flew open on the next worshippers. The priest came in hurriedly.

Lucia sat through the service. She did not go to her knees, or rise for the responses, or go forward for Communion. She watched Sarah Freeman do all that.

And then she ordered her car at once. She thought the others might have a free, open day, but she had work to do.

Peter Clarke had always loved walking. Each mile was a purpose in itself; he didn’t need to imagine anything longer or grander. Walking gave a rhythm to his life. He was glad, relieved as well, to use his body again and feel the blood come back to limbs which had a healthy sense of looseness.

He was far above the others now as they stood, heads bowed. Everything was quiet, the air cool and damp, the cold white of the enclosing mountains beginning to warm with a little faint pink from the falling sun. It would be time to go back soon.

But for the moment he stood in the smell of woods and listened hard. He heard nothing discordant. There was not even the echo of a war. He had not left things undone, he thought, not this time.

He hung on the great comfort of silence. He knew that he must be very close to coming home.

Behind him, Sarah had run out of breath and stopped to sit on a dry wood trough. She pretended to care very much about the view.

“There are so many others,” she said to Helen, “who ought to be here, who ought to have spoken against Lucia. And it had to be me. And I was not even a proper Jew in the Nazis’ terms, which were all about blood and race. I do have a great-grandmother who was Jewish, although she was so much determined to be German I doubt if she would have told you that. I’m not even a ‘
Mischling
of the first degree,’ as they used to say.”

She frowned. “It was all absurd, of course. That was why it was so powerful; you couldn’t test it against reality. It was arbitrary, too, not everything worked. They used to collect the ration cards for everyone in the Jewish houses, all at once. People liked to have Aryan cards; there was less trouble buying things. And eating. But my card came, and it was stamped with a ‘J’ and I didn’t complain.”

“Why wouldn’t you?” Helen said.

Sarah remembered for a moment the evenings, around eight, after curfew, sitting with Max in their single room, wanting a book they had been forbidden, wanting to be out, wanting to eat some Aryan vegetable like asparagus.

“I have to tell you,” she said, “that I married Max for love. I just didn’t go on loving him. It happens. But it isn’t supposed to happen in a war, in a nightmare. I know that.

“I’d much rather tell you almost anything else. I always used to remember the order in which things happened. When we were told we couldn’t drive for fun, then we couldn’t drive, then we couldn’t sit down on a tram. No cigarettes. No clothing coupons. Our books checked and edited and burned. The move from the apartment to a house we had to share, then we had to scrap and negotiate to keep even our two rooms. The new taxes. I learned it all like a litany so I could always recite it in perfect order.

“And this,” she said, “is easier to remember than Max.”

She put out her hand to Helen, asking something: a share in her certainty, perhaps. “I should have saved his typewriter,” she said. “They took away typewriters after a while. But he was writing his story. So many people were writing their stories. They wanted to live on paper, to have a record of what they’d been and who they were and we all knew the only record would be the taxes and confiscations and—whatever was going to happen afterward, when we didn’t have enough life left to live.”

She saw Jeremy’s sympathy, which he was subtle enough not to pantomime. She wondered, being with these practical people busy about a new world, if there was any more point in telling the stories or if she was damned to sainthood in perpetuity: everything particular about her erased because she had suffered, nothing but a survivor. Then she thought: But I can go on trying.

“We were always together in a single room,” she said. “We had a kind of truce. You can have a truce in a war, so why not in a marriage? I was always loyal. He was always there.

“How could I leave him? How could I walk away? I was meant to love him.

“No cigarettes, no movies, shopping at fixed hours in fixed places for a few of the things that everyone else could have; all that. You can’t imagine how life shut down around us, until the simplest things were part of the prison. And we never brazened it out, as the younger men often did, just went walking, just bought tickets to a show; we had known what it was to be citizens, you see. They never did.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, but when she opened them again, she was still among the mountains, still dressed in black, still looking down on a stream full of winter water.

“We applied for thread. We applied for trousers. I had to apply three times, beg in the end, so Max could be given new carpet slippers. I owed him that much.”

She had begun to rock a little.

“People were taken, people were accused, people vanished. Food short. Turnips and lettuce. Medicine was impossible. There were people sick, people we knew, and Max could do nothing, nothing at all, except that sometimes a diagnosis comforted them—that it wasn’t even worse than they thought. And they kept us moving.”

Jeremy said: “I thank God you survived.”

“I don’t,” Sarah said. “Not every day.”

He didn’t want to press her, but he did want to know.

“The damned card came. I could have refused it, but I took it. You know why? Because I wanted to suffer with Max if I couldn’t love him anymore. I thought it was the least I could do. I didn’t want the shame of simply going off. I certainly wasn’t going to make a new life while he was losing his. I couldn’t just make the officials check my record and go away, maybe marry some blond and breed some boys for the fatherland.

“I stayed with my life and with my husband. I chose. In the nature of things, a bureaucracy likes everything to be consistent. So all my cards now carried the letter ‘J.’ ”

She said: “The other people in the house didn’t know I had a choice to make. But Max never questioned me, and he knew. He never said he was grateful.”

She wondered for a moment if Max could hear her, nagging him after sixty years.

“I did not make the right choice,” she said. “If I’d refused the card, you see, I could have saved Max. Other gentile wives did that. They fought for their men. There were all those women who went down to Rosenstrasse in 1943, when their men were arrested, and just would not go away until they were free. The Gestapo couldn’t fight a street full of furious women. And there were other men who got through the war somehow because they were married to gentiles.”

Sarah’s whole body ached with memory, like broken bones.

“But I couldn’t,” she said. “And because of that Max died.

“I played patience all day,” she said. “I didn’t read or talk. I turned those cards and shuffled them and turned them over again. That’s what happens. First you die, and then you’re just bored.”

Driving back to Zurich, Helen saw things because her eyes were not entirely trustworthy.

The pile of ration cards in their odd colors. The ones marked with a “J.” Waiting on a hall table, perhaps, to be collected by each household from each room. A matter of routine, because the notion of marking people out and cutting them out of the world had become routine.

The cards that Sarah shuffled, day by day, so she had occupation, something to hold while her mind turned over and over the same incidents, moments, facts.

A fancy: that Sarah turned up the Queen of Spades.

When Sarah and Peter Clarke had gone, she took Jeremy’s hand and they went to bed to remember, as quickly as they could, how much their bodies knew and loved each other. The rest, they could settle later.

For their last night in Zurich, Jeremy arranged tickets for the opera, and sent Sarah Freeman and Peter Clarke off to be together without having to talk too much. Helen loved his blunt kind of thoughtfulness.

There was in the Opera House the usual faint smell of good wool, good skin, good perfume everywhere, the unostentatious ether that money lets loose in the air. When one woman was on crutches, a man’s face was bone-thin, it was shocking in a whole house full of such well-being.

Clarke saw Lucia Müller-Rossi.

He wondered how well Sarah could see her without the glasses she would wear for the performance, and he held her elbow tightly, and Sarah felt the new pressure.

She looked at him, but she did not ask.

“Look,” Clarke said. “Over there.”

Sarah held fiercely to her small, shining bag.

They could see only Lucia’s head, sometimes the crowd parting as she sailed through them under authority: as the doyenne, as the grande dame of her business, the one with the shop that tourists passed with a sense of awe at all the money in the world, and Zurich in particular.

She was alone, not even an escort of convenience, Sarah saw. But her hair was the red of a wine with light coming through it, and she was in elegant black.

“I remember now,” Sarah said.

Nobody spoke to Lucia. Nobody cut her, but nobody acknowledged her, either, except by making room for her progress up the stairs to the parterre, and by maintaining those faint smiles they were all at once directing somewhere else.

Clarke wanted to say that he was shocked. The death of Lucia’s only son was known in the papers: distinguished scholar, accidental death. In Peter Clarke’s world, people would speculate, hesitate, make up a story and hold on to it; they would be curious. They would read the obituary several times to work out its true meaning. They would want to commiserate and sympathize. But here, they spared her any embarrassment, or any sentiment at all. Each frock and shawl, each smart suit, each veil of perfume, insulated them carefully from the possibility that she might in public show any pain or loss.

“Nicholas used to bring her here,” Clarke said. “Helen told me.”

Lucia allowed herself to be seen, head up, back straight.

She must have worked out the seats long ago: not the public spectacle of a box by the stage, but the center of the parterre, with a view down on the crowd in the stalls and the protection of the balcony overhanging her head, and the sense of being properly private but among friends.

On the eighth step, going up, she tripped a little. She stopped.

The people around, even the older people, the ones who should have understood, drew in their breath very slightly. She had broken the rule of invisibility. They might now be obliged to steady her, encourage her, touch her, and help her.

Lucia continued. But the memory of her little slip seemed to stay on the stairs like a shadow.

At the shank end of the evening, when her housekeeper had gone away, Lucia sat very still on the edge of her neat bed.

Age had immunized her against the thought of loss; she was not prepared for the real thing. Besides, this death was a gesture, a slogan. It was vulgar in intent, and terrible in fact; and it was meant to insult her, not move her.

She was rehearsed in every other move of all her life, but not this one.

Now it was done, she did not know how she had endured the hour’s drive into the mountains, the walk in the village where Nicholas had chosen to live, the minutes at the graveside in her nice dark coat. She knew the techniques that she used to defend herself: the quiet, the watchfulness, waiting for people to come to her. But she also knew, as she stood there, that this time she was allowed nothing else. She was obliged to be an old woman; all strong feeling was improper and not possible at her great age.

She could, of course, have chosen. She knew that. She simply could not bear to know it. It disorganized her mind.