The Pieces from Berlin (30 page)

She wished Mr. Müller had been alive to hear the news. He would have had to cry.

She sat on the bed. She stared at the wall. Without her glasses, the wall became, as in a camera obscura, as flexible as a surface of water. It must be a wide expanse of water, she thought, but it was trapped, still water, with sometimes the tiny surface vortex of a fish gobbling air. It seemed not to be deep.

Her mind was emptying out, day by day, like the warehouse of a business that’s starting to fail.

There had been seven messages on the answering machine that Sunday: “Mother, I must talk to you.” Seven times she’d failed to pick up the phone, even to say she couldn’t talk just then. She resented thinking that the number seven somehow mattered.

But in memory, around the edges of the water, there were tall and brilliant yellow flowers. She didn’t know their names. Some of them were dense and stinking, some of them open and elegant. They grew up out of rubble, and they masked the rotted undersides of skeletal, torched cars.

She remembered running by this stretch of water. She was running, and she was looking for someone or something. She looked up, and she saw, just beyond this new dark lake, the remains of the Reichstag.

There were three children out on the water. One of them was Nicholas.

When he froze alive, he was telling her to remember. She did remember. She did.

He would have been nine.

The children drifted in the silver light off the water, their raft bobbing if they tried very carefully and nervously to change position, water sluicing over the planks and wetting and staining their shoes. They had rigged up a shirt as a sail. Nicholas was shirtless in the sun.

She didn’t want him to swim. There could be anything at all in the water, poison, explosives, knives, the dirt flooding back up out of the sewers. She wanted him to be covered and protected. She saw the raft and it seemed to be very far out at sea; but if it came back to shore, there were only these bright yellow weeds all clamoring with color and life, weeds that were hostile and swallowing the remains of a city, and the old cars rusted up and smoke stained, and the huge broken mass of the walls of the Reichstag.

She stood at the borders of the lake. She had to listen very hard to make sure she was not shouting still.

Then she shouted out loud in her room. She was afraid for Nicholas. She had to save him.

And after that, there was no more wall between memory and living.

ELEVEN

She’s anonymous again: nobody more anonymous than a mother with a clinging child, with a brace of fat suitcases, in a cloth coat, in the steam and the sweat of all the women and the men busy about her on the platform. She slips into Berlin. The trains hiss and shout.

She will not be anonymous one minute longer. She swears it.

This must be Berlin, she thought. She was almost sure. It might again be Paris, she might be high on her father’s shoulders, but she thought she was now in Berlin.

Nobody helps her get a taxi. Bad sign. But then she’s a mother, just a young mother, and all that red hair doesn’t count. She’ll make it count later. In the taxi, she wonders which of her names she should keep, and in what order.

She has a reassuring bundle of little notes written on thick card, addresses and phone numbers and who wants what. The Herr Professor Doktor certainly knows people. She has someone to call out at the UFA movie studios and someone else in Himmler’s private office. She has someone in the Italian embassy who says she might be able to give Italian lessons to German speakers, since her accent is perfect social Milan, and her family is a known family.

She winds down the taxi window. She breathes the city like other people breathe forests or the sea; soap, exhaust, and the lights go directly to her blood, brighten her eyes. When later she walks down the street and she takes in the glances of men she doesn’t know, never will know, she loiters in their looks. She sits at a café table and everyone sitting around her is a character in the story she is starting.

But when she goes to the Italian embassy, she’s just this Italian woman, married out to a Swiss, abandoned perhaps in Germany and struggling with a very young son in Berlin. She braces herself, makes herself shine, in case she faces the easy disrespect of some functionary in a bad suit.

She uses a side door. She waits a while. But the men look at her, the women look at her, and she cannot be ignored. Her looks are her introduction. And the invitations start to arrive, and she never quite knows who inspired them, but why should she care as long as the invitations keep coming?

One night: it’s some air attaché in a tiny Topolino, Ciro’s, champagne. She likes the fact of French champagne, not some
Sekt
or
spumante
or worse. She sits at a starched table, relying on bright eyes and fine legs, and it works: she is buoyed up constantly by looks. She likes the formality, the music, the wine.

She wants to dance, but public dancing is forbidden. Just when the wine shakes her loose, and the laughter rises all around her, and she truly wants to be up, wants the air attaché touching her, wants to sweep about to the music, she knows she has to hold herself down to her proper place. She fidgets on the neat, painted chair. All around her is a sea of bachelor faces, young men with ranks, missions, embassies, all bright and immaculate and shining, and she wants to be noticed by them all, to check the field, why not?

She is dancing, though. It must be San Martino’s. She can’t quite explain what San Martino’s was. Or perhaps it is the Chilean embassy, they had fine dances.

She’s dancing, dancing.

Nicholas is asleep when she gets home. She loves him so much. He’s protecting her, in his way, although he may not even know it: by being asleep, by not upsetting her evening plans, he gives her a life. The two of them are true conspirators, breathing together.

Tonight: cocktails with the witty Swedes. Tomorrow: supper at Roma, because you don’t need coupons for pasta and you can meet the Italian press corps, hear the latest. Then: the moments of absurd obligation, like the little party where she joins a row of Italian women, some chic, some resigned, none of them domestic, all knitting bootees and jumpers for Goering’s new baby.

She teaches: how to sing a sentence properly, the use of
benzi
with the subjunctive, irregular plurals, and the different kinds of pasta. She likes these daily trips into the embassy, the sense of privilege stepping off the streets into a private, guarded enclave, footmen around, flowers in the corners, chandeliers of pink Venetian glass: of being where she ought to be, without any of the encumbrances of her own family and background. She looks at the paintings and sometimes wonders if she might have inherited them from someone, if things were different.

Old Mr. Goldstein, neighbor downstairs, at the door. He can’t have a private phone anymore, he explains, and he does not find it comfortable using the public ones.

She’s dreaming what she’ll dream again in sixty more years: the scattered memories of nights at parties, bring your own bottle, of balls with an endless supply of blond, clean officers, the schemes to get to the theater when tickets were reserved for soldiers on leave. A show about a female pig, which Hitler much enjoyed; she didn’t.

She sometimes takes something from the embassy to her new Jewish friends, the ones with whom she could really talk, who had nothing to think about except paintings, music, books, and the end of the world. She took jam, chocolate once, butter, toilet paper, a salami, and sometimes vegetables from the kitchen, and she felt like a heroine: a gracious person, charitable to the unfortunate who are forever moving from a small apartment to a smaller one, then into rooms in a Jews’ House, leaving behind their domesticity and their peace.

This has to do with Max Lindemann, somehow. Max Lindemann isn’t dead yet.

Lucia, the doctor said, would fret when she was awake, like a sleeper who is dreaming, cat’s paws working away on the air. She had started to ask for the lipsticks she knew in Berlin, 1940, and a powder she used to like; and she didn’t understand at all that she couldn’t any longer have such things.

She believes what she’s told, but on principle: because nothing is unbelievable anymore. Some officer tells her, over coffee at the embassy, how everyone used to think all the phones were tapped all the time (“and now,” he says, “we know that’s true”) and wouldn’t even talk close to a phone still down on the hook, just in case. “The Poles,” he says, “used to keep a tea cozy over all their phones.” She has to ask what a “tea cozy” is, and then she starts to laugh. “No, no,” the officer says, but he is laughing, too. “It’s perfectly true. Ask anyone.”

She doesn’t believe the war will go on. But Churchill becomes prime minister in London, and there is soon to be a new Italian ambassador in Berlin, and while she is out trying to buy a second jar of jam for April, which is only worth doing because it is not entirely legal, she believes in the war all at once. There will be no easy retreat, not to Switzerland, certainly not to Milan, not to any kind of normality. She has to live on the swings.

One of the embassy cleaners tries to talk to her. She doesn’t much like this, doesn’t encourage any notion that teacher and cleaner should be on equal terms, but the cleaner is boiling with a story. It has to do with being down by the old Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, and looking in through the gates and seeing children playing there: hide-and-seek around the marble mausoleums, firing finger guns around stones, running and shouting in a vast walled city of the dead. She could hear their voices echoing off all the great graveyard houses.

“They have no respect at all,” the cleaner says. “Dirty Jews.”

Lucia has nothing amusing to do that night. She sits with Nicholas until he goes to bed, and then, as she sits in the armchair by the tiled stove, she starts a kind of fever dream: Nicholas, playing in among the dead, dancing on a stone, pelting a friend with snow or water and writing in the dirt on monuments, pacing slowly in a street of tombs, ducking, looking side to side, waiting for an ambush that never comes.

She woke up, aware that she was remembering a dream about a dream. She was confused for a moment. She did not like confusion at all. She preferred the certainty of the ever-present past.

The embassy is fizzing with anticipation, but careful to maintain an indifferent facade, as though its ways were so settled that no new ambassador could possibly upset them. The new man gives his first reception. Lucia, in a city without women, is invited as a matter of course. She holds the invitation in her mind: and so she knows the date, May 22, 1940.

This ambassador is a solid man, not tall, not short, a muscular average, dressed in all the perpetual power of the Grand Fascist Council, so he feels no need to strut or preen unduly on his own account. She likes the fact that he can stand still.

A few days later, one of the military attachés takes her to the movies, to see a bit of rococo called
Hotel Sacher,
a long sugared memory of Hapsburg Vienna, of moustaches, uniforms, parades, and ballrooms. Both she and the military attaché hate the film. She half expects this particular attaché to make his move, but instead he mentions that the new ambassador would really like to meet Lucia.

“And his wife?”

“Probably not his wife.”

“But he’s not alone.”

“You’re alone,” the attaché says. “That’s the point.”

Girls in the wet, hot garden by the lake; roses; great blue balls of agapanthus; music out of speakers; a lawn full of skirts rising high like theater gauzes on long, bare dancers’ legs; then the soft rain growing harder; then everyone turning on the wet grass, all aware they might slip any moment but nobody slipping, everyone fast, everyone graceful, everyone singing.

Men in uniform like maypoles, women dancing attendance around them. Uniforms crusted with gilt and brass, shining in the rain. The rain suddenly ferocious.

Lucia shouting: “We might as well swim!”

The girls in costumes, the men bare-chested, all running for the water. The rain spluttering on the lake.

The men conspiring without talking. The boats tied at the foot of the lawns. Everyone jumping aboard.

The racket, the smoke, the false-started engines. The boats roaring out onto the lake, cutting great white circles out of the waters, some of the women clinging now to the men just as the men had expected: the women exhilarated, alarmed, ecstatic at the rush of the air and the bucking, roaring motion of the boats; the men enchanted with their thoughtful risks.

There was some kind of memorial service that day: a marshal killed in an air crash over North Africa. Then, this “quiet swim,” held in honor of Foreign Minister Ciano: a diplomatic afternoon full of pretty girls and music, at the Italian ambassador’s house by the Wannsee.

And after the swimming and the boating, skin baked warm and dry by the sun, a drawing room in the ambassador’s house with the curtains closed. Ciano is there, and a woman. The ambassador is there, and Lucia. Outside, it is still a bright, splashing afternoon, but the two couples turn together very closely, pressed together, as though it was the last half hour of the social morning in some night-club they all once knew.

A knock at the apartment door, gentle but repeated. A couple in their sixties, pleasant in appearance, the man almost military, the woman’s hair solid as a helmet.

“Mr. Goldstein sent us,” the man said.

The woman adds, quickly: “Your downstairs neighbor. You know.”

They sit perfectly still in Lucia’s living room, as though they didn’t want to claim unneeded space.

“I don’t quite know where to begin,” the man says. “You know how things are. To be honest, we can’t even know if we ought to trust you.”

“Mr. Goldstein said you were a good person. He said you knew people. You’re Italian, aren’t you?”

“And Swiss,” Lucia says.

“So you’re not German? We’re German. It doesn’t seem to be doing us much good.”

“The thing is,” her husband says, “we have to make some kind of arrangement. We can’t stay here waiting. Since you’re Swiss, I suppose you’re allowed to send things across the border, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“And you’re Italian, too,” the woman says. “I used to love Florence.”

“There’s some money, for visas,” the man said. “And a few things that are worth something. So we have money if we manage to leave. We can’t carry anything, of course, they’d take that from us.”

“They’ll take it soon, anyway,” his wife says. “I didn’t want to ask you, I know how difficult it must be, but Mr. Goldstein said you were a good person and we don’t have time anymore.”

“I can see what I can do—”

“If there was anything at all,” the wife says. “Of course we’d make it worth your while.”

“Some friends of ours put money with the Swiss embassy, and they sent it to Switzerland, and they collected some of it later.”

Lucia says: “I have to think about it.”

“Mr. Goldstein said you cared about music, and pictures,” the man says, standing now like a soldier stands, precisely straight. “Sometimes I go outside and I wish I was blind.”

His wife studies Lucia. “I’m sure Frau Müller-Rossi doesn’t want to hear—”

“I understand,” Lucia says, filling the word up with all the meaning her guests could need.

“We have some jewelry. It’s nothing much, but there is one good diamond. There’s gold: the wedding ring. We have some furniture, now we have to move again into a smaller place there’s no point in keeping it. It’s worth something. People still seem to want furniture, don’t they, if it’s old and it’s French?”

“But I can’t sell this. People would want to know where I got it.”

The wife says: “You have such good friends.”

So Mr. Goldstein must have noticed the long black cars that sometimes bring her home.

Through a car window: lake waters crowded as any city street, stuck with bare bodies, families and couples overlapping and entangling in the shining continuum. There is a slide wet with water, a mass of men around it. She can see a plain girl in a swimming cap on the slide, shoulders like a porter, arms thrown back and forward like a foursquare dancer, dazzled by the sun and the laughter, herself smiling wildly, not wanting ever to reach the water, wanting always to fly on all the shouts and cheers.

The love of a good ambassador involves the resentment, at the very least, of his wife. Lucia starts to feel very slightly under threat in the embassy, as you do when being buffeted by a theater crowd; uncomfortable, no need to look out for the knives just yet. So she starts to call on all those other names that the Herr Doktor Professor kept mentioning in his letters, in between the high-flown stuff about the nation’s soul and future, and what he’d do to her between the bears in a corner of the Berlin Zoo.