The Pieces from Berlin (32 page)

Helen stepped back. The nurses, by reflex, formed a cordon.

“What’s so wonderful about what’s real?” Lucia said, a little quieter now, but clipping out her words. “We got butter from coal. We got leather from fish skin. We got frocks out of wood pulp. You call those things real?” She reached out to cuff Helen, like a child who needs direction. It didn’t seem to matter that she missed.

“The whole city was illusion. You saw it. All the open spaces, they built plywood streets like a movie set. You couldn’t tell the difference from the air. They put netting over the avenues so they looked like parks. They turned the lampposts into fir trees. They filled the lakes up with scaffolding and tarpaulin and painted it all to look like houses.

“The bombers came and they had firemen ready, and their job was to start proper fires and keep them burning and burning. You know all this. You think real things would have saved your life?”

Helen knew she was talking, now, to Nicholas. She was softening her voice. She forgave him for whatever he had made her remember. And she sat down.

“You remember the advertisements,” Lucia was saying. “There was one at the cinema with such pretty kangaroos, and a bull in a fine shiny smoking jacket and a cow, with horns shaped just like a lyre. I don’t remember anything about what they were selling.”

Helen wondered if Lucia noticed her reactions, and simply transposed them to Nicholas: and if Nicholas was a boy now, or a man, or a cold white carcass. She would react if it would help the old woman; she owed her a duty of kindness. But she was glad not to be recognized, glad that none of this had to do with Helen in particular. The distance made it bearable.

“The kangaroos were dancing,” she said. “They looked rather
moderne
. Art Deco, I mean. I think they must have been selling shoes.”

Lucia might be addressing the dead, but at least she knew she was dealing in memory.

“Me,” Lucia said, “I knew about cartoons.”

She composed herself. They could watch the process: the face controlled, the back straightened, the hands in positions that could be sustained.

“They really didn’t want people to have things to miss. There was a war on, and they were all half pretending that civilian life was all just the same. The bombs came down and the cinemas needed—I don’t know. Cute frogs and grasshoppers. Stories about silly geese. You couldn’t film reality anymore. Then the Americans came into the war, and there was no more Walt Disney so they needed Wicked Huntsmen and Evil Queens and Handsome Aryan Princes.

“So they ordered the animators to Berlin, and they didn’t have a choice, but when they arrived they turned out to be solitary and thoughtful and slow. That wouldn’t do. There was a crisis, and the studio had to be seen to respond. So they built offices, allocated space, promoted executives who were supposed to animate the animators. And they hired unnecessary people, like me.

“I wrote scenarios. I went to an office, between Berlin and Potsdam, and sometimes I went out to the UFA studios at Babelsberg. They’d brought in some cartoonist from a newspaper, and I worked with him. Then we sent the stories off to Herr and Frau So-and-So who were making the films.”

She smiled. “Herr and Frau So-and-So acknowledged receipt very politely, and filed the stuff. We got paid, and we got ignored.”

Helen imagined Lucia, cigarettes burning out all around her, making jokes to distract all Germany from the dead people walking in its streets. That was not unimportant work.

She said: “It was a shock when I first saw one of our films. I remember it very well. They had these small screening rooms, hard leather chairs. Someone smoked a cigar, someone sitting at the back. So it’s dark, and then there’s a flicker of white light, and then the screen fills up with numbers and then. Well, then. They had a bee, an ordinary bee, that flew down out of the sky and through the flowers and the grass, and then past particular stems and particular blossoms. Very close, very real. Then the bee was circling this record player on the ground. Then the bee uses its sting as the gramophone needle.”

Helen said: “Clever,” not meaning it.

“Here’s the bee, the record, the needle, and then there’s the music. It was a song about the week being nothing without the weekend. It was swing.” She looked ahead triumphantly. “Don’t you see? Swing was illegal.”

She could not sense reaction.

“It was illegal in Germany,” she said. “The song kept going on and on about nature being a good thing, which was almost all right. Blood and soil and getting back to the land. But then it kept saying that a whole week serving the fatherland was no use at all without time off. And this was wartime, with production targets and women working. It was very nearly subversive.”

Did Lucia any longer even need her audience? Perhaps it was a kindness for others to sit and listen, to license Lucia’s unstoppable flow of memory.

She certainly wouldn’t be interrupted. “You could see there were the remains of a picnic, and beside it a garter. A garter someone had lost. With a lucky clover growing through it. We were all so decent and proper, that was the official line. No good German girl ever lost a garter.”

“I never saw that film,” Helen said. She wondered if Nicholas had seen it.

“It was lost, after the war,” Lucia said.

Helen thought, without saying it: Then how can we know it existed at all?

Around this time, she loses touch with Max Lindemann. A mutual friend says he’s moved to Riga or one of those Baltic towns, but it’s only a hint of a story, not even a rumor, produced for the sake of seeming to know and having something to say.

She takes Nicholas to the aquarium because he’s bound to like that. It turns out he’s been there before. She is a little annoyed, but she still loves to watch as he watches the turtles glide and turn in the water.

She sees Sarah Lindemann on the way home, who nods, but not in her direction, as though she doesn’t like to do anything so definite anymore.

Lucia crosses the road.

“How’s Max,” she says, falling in alongside Frau Lindemann, who scuttles forward.

“Max isn’t, I mean, isn’t.”

“You mean he’s left Berlin?”

“It’s very difficult. I shouldn’t be seen talking to foreigners.”

“But you and Max—”

Sarah Lindemann so much wants her not to be there, to leave her alone. “Max is so obstinate,” she says, very softly, smiling at strangers, pretending interest in a window, “and so he thought it would be better—”

“You’re alone?”

“It’s better if you’re not at home. They go away if you’re not at home.”

“But you’re on your own?”

“Not exactly. There isn’t room anymore to be on your own.”

“He’s well?”

“It’s very hard to get soap. He just can’t keep clean.” She ducks and shakes her head as though she was talking to everyone else except this obvious foreign woman and her child.

“But he had such lovely clean hands,” Lucia says. “Could you tell him from me—”

“That’s all over. All over. Now let me get along.”

She darts across the road, startling drivers, and leaves Lucia and Nicholas standing still on the sidewalk.

But then she telephones after dark, which means she must be staying with gentile friends who still have a legal phone.

“I went downstairs,” she says, “and they’ve been already. Already. They’ve taken the nameplate down from Frau Bernstein’s apartment.”

“They do that,” Lucia says.

“Lucia,” says Frau Lindemann, and Lucia can hear the effort the words are costing, “I would be very grateful—”

“Yes?”

“If you could collect some things. Like the table Max wanted you to keep for us. Just some things that have come to matter.”

“Of course,” Lucia says. She has a talent for this: nothing in her answer smacks of the businesswoman.

“Some Meissen.”

“How lovely.”

“If you could keep it until things are better. Then I’ll come for it.”

“But this apartment might get bombed, too.”

“I don’t think the Gestapo will come so close to you.”

“I wish I could get some things to Max—”

“Come for coffee, on the Ku-damm,” Frau Lindemann says. “I’ll pass by and you can come and talk to me.”

And there, between the globe lights and the starched white tables, she gives Lucia the name of someone who might find Max and pass on a message. She also gives Lucia a little shopping bag, very tightly packed with paper and solid things.

“I’ll bring the rest,” Sarah Lindemann says.

“Thank you.”

“They call them divers, you know,” Sarah Lindemann says. “The ones who hide.”

Lucia says: “I didn’t know.”

“I went down by the Bernsteins’. They were holding an auction. And you know,” Sarah Lindemann says, “there were cups still on the table. They still had tea in them.”

Helen came from the hospital with so many questions; she tested Sarah’s tolerance again and again. Each sensible question dug out an appalling memory.

“But why did you tell her anything?” Helen said. “Why did you trust her?”

Sarah said: “It wasn’t a question of trust.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There wasn’t anybody to trust. You did deals, that’s all. Everybody did. Didn’t anyone ever tell you about the special trains that ran from Belgium into France, with the ceilings hollowed out to smuggle cigarettes? Or the railway station at Prague, and the tens of thousands of dollars that were changed there every day? Or the money that went to the Ecuadorean embassy to get passports or—”

“You dealt with Lucia.”

“There was nobody to deal with except one kind of thug or another. Some of them were in the government and some weren’t. I sometimes think,” and she carefully did not look at Helen directly, “you have too much respect for the Nazis. Their crimes were enormous. They were the first truly modern killers and thieves. They staged gigantic shows. But they were small-time criminals, all the same, a protection racket on a continental scale. They had no great vision, only clichés: searchlights and Teutonic giants and all that rubbish. Even the Holocaust was a failure of imagination. They couldn’t imagine their new world for themselves, so they had to make it new by taking away some defining fact about the old world.”

Helen said: “How could you phone her? How could you talk on the phone? They must have tapped phones.”

“I suppose I already knew nothing would happen to Lucia,” Sarah said.

All she can hear is dance music, but she doesn’t hum along or step to the rhythm. She can hear dance music coming from every radio station; that’s all there is. Wherever she turns, whenever she has the radio on, she knows there is morale in grave need of boosting.

Lucia, the old lady, knew there was something she did not want to know. She could not quite seize the order of things, and the connection between them, so she was always afraid there would quite suddenly be something she did not want to live again; and she would be living it. She would be behind this managed face, made immaculate with powder, and she would be living an intolerable thing.

She was suspicious of the ease with which she remembered UFA. She’s on the cafeteria line, edging forward, considering the list for the day: stonefish patties. She never did know what a stonefish was, but ground up and thinned out it is not at all a glorious dish. There is red cabbage, white cabbage, and potatoes. There is vanilla pudding, as always.

Someone she half knew, an assistant director’s assistant who’d seen her eating here, says: “I’ve got something to show you.”

She could still ask herself why she was in this particular moment, looking at a plate of pale green and purple-blue cabbages. Something shadowed the memory, all memory, all that she saw and knew.

“We’re making a man fly to the moon by balloon—live, in front of you,” the man was saying. “And he rides a cannonball and he turns invisible and—”

“And everything,” says Lucia.

“I’ll show you how it’s done,” the assistant assistant director says.

He’s eager, even though he’s fortyish and his hair is sparse and the lenses in his glasses are impressively thick and maybe explain why he is not in a uniform. He is working very hard at being charming.

She says: “I have to get back to the office.”

“They don’t even notice if you’re there. How could they miss you?” They stroll to the tall fortress towers of the sound studios, the distance between the two of them becoming more of an issue at every step: he getting closer. They slip between two huge sliding metal doors, along the line of the sliver of sunlight from the gap.

Inside, the space is dark until it becomes brilliant with arc lights, dusty and full of piled struts and angled flats until it turns into the skin of a palace or a garden.

They are under a gigantic wooden gallows, up to the ceiling, lit by naked lightbulbs, with ladders rising up to a perch for the camera. The gallows allow the camera to look down on a great drum, hanging on its side between scaffolding. It smells of paint, turpentine, and new cut wood.

“You see,” the man says.

Lucia, old in the sun, did not think she remembered what had happened next. But that did not stop it happening again: vividly, and now.

The man clambers up ladders to the side of the drum. He tells Lucia to climb up to the camera’s perch, which she does with difficulty in a long skirt; and he watches every step.

“You’ll like this,” he says, almost plaintive.

She sits dizzyingly high. She wonders when all the other members of the crew will come back. Her legs dangle in the air, no support, and her back is pressed hard onto the cameraman’s seat. She is afraid to move in case the high scaffold might move and rock underneath her.

She’s not fascinated enough to lose her anxiety. And this anxiety rhymed precisely with her sense, sitting in a hospital chair, that she did not want to be in this place a second time.

Below, in front of her, the man puts his shoulder to the huge drum and he begins to turn it.

“Look through the camera,” he says.

She looks. She loses the world for a moment: she sees only a glass square and the guidelines inside it.

“Just look,” he says.