The Pieces from Berlin (31 page)

She knows a man in the Ecuadorean embassy who is good for a passport, cash down, for people who might need one, and a counselor at the Swiss embassy who would help move money, and the Italians, when it comes to anything practical, are still downright deferential; but she needs German friends. She sits in a café on the Kurfürstendamm, lit by great white globes: coffee and a cake with the man from Himmler’s office, nothing definite, a noncommittal start.

“He taught me, too,” the man from Himmler’s office says, meaning the Herr Doktor Professor. Lucia, just for a moment, imagines him being taught as she was.

“He’s a remarkable man,” Lucia says, because that seems safe.

They prattle a bit. The official, named Hans, says he is proud to work for such an honest servant of the Reich, a man whose ambition is to die poor. Lucia can’t see the point of that, but she keeps quiet.

“Such an honest man,” Hans insists. “He has laid out the exact vitamins and calories required for every person in a concentration camp. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to ensure the local people do as they’re told. Some of them are not,” and he pauses a moment, wondering if this could be counted as obscurely disloyal, “entirely honest,” he says.

Lucia says: “No.” Hans, she can tell, expects to be overheard.

“And he works all the time. Less than an hour for lunch, just soup and some fish. A quick supper, just one glass of red wine. Then he works until two or three in the morning.”

“I’m lucky you could get away.”

And she sings her own little aria: how much she loves Berlin, the excitement of it all, the sense of being at the heart of history; and she uses exactly that phrase.

Then she says: “Sometimes it’s difficult being a foreigner.”

“In what way?”

She doesn’t have to say anything more. Even now, she knows she could make some general point, express polite and social regret at not herself being born German.

Instead, she says: “People ask the most extraordinary things. A couple came to me last week and asked me to help them get money out of Germany. I mean, I know I have foreign passports, but I would never think—”

“Jews, I suppose.”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose they were.”

“You have their names?”

She always remembers names: she was raised politely.

Mr. Goldstein is at the apartment door.

“I shouldn’t have sent my friends,” he says. “I didn’t know what to do. You seem like a good person and you know everybody—”

“I had coffee today with one of Himmler’s assistants.” But she doesn’t need to boast.

“You know everybody, Frau Müller-Rossi.” He takes his hands out of his jacket pockets for a moment. “You know, I saw Herr Himmler once. I was in the street, outside a movie house, and he was there with his fat little wife. They had no bodyguard, no protection. They were going to see
Broadway Melody.
”

“Everybody loves the movies.”

“I used to,” Mr. Goldstein says.

A small, sealed van arrives that day, and unloads a pendulum clock, some good Meissen plates, some gold rings, a silver coffee service which looks English, a few austere chairs, and an unexpected daybed which cries out for odalisques.

And now—time seemed to be rushing her—Mr. Goldstein is waiting at his door when she comes home. He’s sorry, but there’s no point in her doing anything now, because his friends have been taken away. They must have tried something foolish, because there was talk in the building about currency offenses, which are a hanging matter.

“I’ll always be grateful,” Mr. Goldstein says. He sighs. “Grateful for what you were going to do.”

Lucia turns up the stairs, not wanting to seem hurried.

The violinist comes in daylight on Sunday, and leaves his violin. He says he can’t use it anymore, and he can’t bear the idea of it being broken for firewood. Perhaps Lucia would be very kind, perhaps she would keep it for him? He will play for her one day.

He doesn’t have the right to call again, but he does. October, already cold, and he says he just wants to tell one other person, someone who isn’t a Jew. He has to pack for a work detail: two socks, two shirts, two underpants, two wool blankets, one sweater, some bed linen. He has to sign over his bank account in return for his board and keep.

“It has to be hard labor,” he says to Lucia. “Doesn’t it?”

Then days pass, and she’s on a tram. There are a half-dozen people with suitcases. She almost falls over a case that blocks the aisle. All the people with suitcases wear yellow stars.

On Levetzowstrasse, they all get off. They walk into the burned remains of the synagogue.

She hears a baby crying in a cardboard suitcase.

The violinist does not acknowledge Lucia. Probably he does not want to get her into trouble, or perhaps he is obscurely ashamed. She sees he is not a young man anymore.

She almost remembered, for a moment, what it was to remember.

Here’s a nice puzzle, for which she has the mind: the perpetual present invaded by a sense of perspective that could only come from the past.

She knows, now, as she knew then, that so many people wanted to trust her. She knew about passports, even after America entered the war and there was no more hope in waiting for a U.S. quota number. She understood the preciousness of things, their market value and their emotional price. There was sometimes a misunderstanding—someone who came back to find their suitcases had been opened—but it was rare for people to come back.

She knew how much silver could be exported, what area of carpet, before the authorities wanted their share; and she was happy to cope with what could not be taken abroad. She was entirely helpful in this.

She once saved a Jewish woman from deportation, and her reputation was burnished by the fact. One woman, who got out to Switzerland, sent money every month because she couldn’t see how Lucia, civilized Lucia, could get by in Berlin.

She knew, too, how to shuffle money through the banks in country towns, into her own accounts and out into the Swiss embassy; and then into Switzerland where, at a discount, its rightful owners would claim it, if they could. Gentiles, too, were interested; the most surprising people seemed to have the private kind of Swiss account.

Indeed, so many people trusted her that their trust became a practical problem.

She remembers all this: and then she can’t stay remembering anymore. She’s there.

Her skirt is dull and long, arms covered, and she has a head scarf: the uniform of a serious woman, a mother. She’s in a stopped train, which does not move for hour after hour, but nobody dares to leave it in case the next is worse. There is nothing to be seen through the windows. People no longer try to keep themselves separate and respectable. They pile like cats or little dogs.

She is going back to Berlin. She thought she could throw herself on the mercy of holy women, that they were bound to help her great work of charity; for it could have been that, she thinks. It could have been that.

So she came out to the sandy lands just south of the city, to a new and practical convent, devoid of fine monastic touches, just walls for prayer. She has not made an appointment; she assumes the nuns will have mercy. She walks over the gravel drive as though she’s crossing a church to light candles.

The porteress has a face that laughs, although she’s a singularly skinny woman. A gun goes off somewhere close, Lucia startles, the porteress says it’s just Father Gerhard out after squirrels. And her face laughs again, silently.

Lucia waits in a corridor. It could be a sanitarium, a cheap hotel, even a barracks, except for the black crucifixes on the wall.

Finally, the abbess sees her. Lucia’s unannounced appearance is so odd that it requires the attention of someone senior. There is always the possibility of some kind of trap.

Yet Lucia hasn’t thought this out. She doesn’t think the nuns will be suspicious of the outside world. She expects them to accept. They’re beyond the world, so they should be accomplices in the world without guilt.

The abbess is a formidable woman when she chooses to be still: a face of hard, durable virtue.

Lucia is a little girl, a flirt, a worthy mother, a citizen more troubled by her virtue than her sins, one after the other. The abbess stays still.

Lucia is saying that she has household goods that she needs to put into storage for friends, for Jewish friends, and perhaps the Mother Superior could help her?

The abbess says: “These are difficult times.”

Lucia says she is trying to help these people, but she can no longer find the space.

The more Lucia talks, the more she feels obliged to work her arms and smile too much and sometimes mention a saint.

“I’m afraid,” the abbess says, “you will have a long and uncomfortable journey back to Berlin.”

She makes no argument against Lucia, does not justify the empty cellars that a new nunnery must have; she only offers a sandwich of cold pork for the journey back. And then she says: “People come here because they are pursued by their sins. It’s not usual that someone comes here because they’ve done too much good.” And Lucia doesn’t know whether to read judgment on that alabaster face.

But on the train, she knows. She wonders what the nuns are up to, what they’re hiding; they must be hiding something. They’ve forgotten all their Christian duty, their duty to her.

All this she seems to remember while she’s still brushing off some sailor, some clerk, some weekend athlete who’s breathing too close to her on the still unmoving, jam-packed train.

Oddly, she remembered the rest like a memory, although it happened after her visit to the convent. She knew if she couldn’t beg space, she’d have to find it some other way, and, with her limited resources, best to fuck it out of someone. The ambassador had this odd little Dutch cottage out toward Potsdam; it was the house he didn’t mention. There were cellars under the cottage. She was there with him once, went down into the storerooms with a candle, saw a whole empire of red brick caves just waiting for a purpose: her purpose.

She pleasured him in a corner with the candle flickering. He was happy to give her keys to the cellars.

She filled the first rooms with simple wood to screen off the rest because she knew the Gestapo liked their share of any prizes going, and she was not prepared to pay very much for their protection. But once through the first rooms, she had more than objects in her store; she had her childhood, her entitlement to gilt and marble and show. Sometimes, at the weekends, she’d go down to her storerooms and walk around with a flashlight, picking out a shine of glass here, a brass molding there, marble or silver or sometimes even gold. She felt protected by so many things.

She needs a new, official job. The ambassador’s attentions are perfectly fine at teatime at Wannsee, sometimes in a booth at Horcher’s restaurant, anywhere you care to name that is not the embassy, where his wife sees and hears and also imagines everything. Lucia needs to be able to come and go at the embassy, but not to work there every day.

The Herr Doktor Professor, in a letter of odd tenderness which for once made not a single pornographic suggestion, reminded her about UFA. “In wartime,” he wrote sententiously, “the
Volk
must be amused.”

UFA: her first day. She walks in through the studio gates with all the authority of a star because nobody knows she is nobody in particular, and she wants them all to think she will matter.

The second day is harder. She has a place assigned, an office and a rank. She’s supposed to know where she’s going, no need to stop and ask a passing man, and she has a job to do at a fixed time. It is nobody’s business to recognize her or look after her.

She loves to get lost, when she can. She reckons if she doesn’t matter, she won’t be challenged. She slips inside hangars of gypsy frocks and hussars’ coats and a whole stand of showgirls’ headdresses, of spats and toe shoes and furs. There is dust on the more diaphanous costumes. Neglect is puritan, it seems. There are the remains of Africa in a corner. And fairy tales, imperial worlds, all organized by size of collar, waist, and foot.

She’s challenged once. She apologizes and walks briskly on.

Armies pass her, peasants off giggling with airmen, dozens of Bohemians, a new species for Lucia, all tousled, wild, and paint-stained, all loafing until someone snaps: “Action!” Everyone is someone else, like a factory for Carnival. In the hot spring sunshine, she passes streets and bridges in a world that stops the very moment it can no longer be seen by the whirring cameras which, around here, are God. She passes great bunkers and huge tanks full of water.

Nicholas knows something about this. He’s decided they have live lions out at UFA, and a black man, and a model train. But she can’t take her child to her work, however much he wants to be with her and wants to see the lions.

On a Sunday, he says: “You couldn’t just stay here for the day? One day?”

“I have to work.”

“A Sunday. All day.”

“I have to do things.”

“We could go sailing. You could bring your friends and I could bring my friends.”

“We’ll go out to dinner.”

The maid Katya puts a huge dish of boiled potatoes onto the table, and a bowl of yogurt. Lucia says: “Is that all we have?”

Katya shrugs.

“I like it,” Nicholas says. He wants to be reassuring. Or maybe he’s gone over to Katya’s side, because she’s always available. “It’s good.”

“But you ought to have meat, and cheese, and pasta, and fish, and chocolate—”

“I don’t like chocolate.”

“But you do like chocolate.”

“No,” Nicholas says. He runs out of the room.

She frowns for a moment. She says to Katya: “I’ll be out tonight.”

Lucia on the hospital terrace, eyes open on something two meters away; but there was nothing there. Helen spoke her name, very quietly. Lucia pushed at the air. Helen said: “Lucia. It’s me.”

Lucia’s eyes snapped open.

“It’s me,” Helen said. “I’m real.”

She could read a clash on Lucia’s face. She expected the hand to come out to test her.

But instead, Lucia reared up out of her chair, stood firm, and shouted: “You’re real. What a wonder. You’re real and you think it matters.”