The Pieces from Berlin (35 page)

In the tight rooms of the deep shelter, the diplomats’ shelter under thirty feet of concrete with its own special entrance, Magrit stays very close to Lucia. “Just don’t think,” she says. “Don’t think. Dear.”

Lucia looks down at her legs. She had no stockings that morning, so she’d charcoaled the line of a seam on the back of both legs, and now Magrit has smudged it.

She’d rather have no place, no time, than this place and this time. Her memory seemed to run forward as well as backward, to encompass what would happen next even as she seemed to live the closeness in the deep shelter, Magrit’s bony concern, the taste of breath on the air. She is breathing Magrit’s breath.

Their alliance did not last. When the Berlin goods were selling, and Magrit sensed trouble from the law, she sidled out of the business, let Lucia take the blame. Magrit was now entirely respectable, had her share of the capital from the Berlin goods and an annual rent for the use of the shop and her name over the door. Lucia could never challenge what Magrit demanded, however much it taxed her own life; she could only wait for her to die, which she did quite suddenly in 1956.

Memory inside memory now. How in the shelter, she is trying to be somewhere else. How surprised she was to inherit the shop, as though Magrit once had cared for her; and how glad to have independence at last. How Magrit loved to think about touching.

Frau Bartels is out of the ground floor at four in the morning, off to collect the newspapers she’ll push at people’s doors by six or seven. Nothing stops her.

Lucia is watching from the apartment window.

Frau Bartels picks her way between fires and ruins. She can afford not to notice the wreckage around her. She has her little business.

There are window frames loose from the walls, doors gone. Trees have their roots in the air, solid and bizarre. Where gas pipes have broken, there is perpetual fire, like a cinema effect.

Nicholas wakes up. He asks for Gattopardo. She hasn’t seen the damned cat. He asks again. Then he says he saw Gattopardo climbing the sky. She tells him not to be silly.

She didn’t want to wake him sleeping so warmly, so deeply, but now she reckons it is time to get down to the street when the emergency services arrive. She picks up bread, butter, sausage, thick soup, and coffee. She’s no idea why suddenly there’s enough for ordinary people; maybe there was always enough, and she never needed all the schemes and concentration.

She takes the cigarettes, even though she does not smoke, because she will need things to trade, and she wants things to carry, that she does not have to store, that Magrit and Hans cannot take from her.

Nicholas was there. Nicholas is with her. And now she has spun off in time, not anchored to her present hospital room or to that Berlin street, but sitting in some drawing room with Nicholas.

She did it all for him, she wanted to say. She couldn’t ever tell him that; he would have gone away at once. She pleaded sixty cold years of perfect front and never taking credit: her first punishment.

She could never have done what she did without him. There would have been no point. He was, in a certain sense, her accomplice, whether he liked it or not.

But, no. He was dead. He was gone.

Then she’d thank God she never told him the whole truth. Perhaps he had not, after all, been so important to her.

She started to notice the darkness at the edges of the room, not the lights anymore.

Time rushed her, wouldn’t let her stop for comfort. Berlin has gone wrong. It has energy, but the energy of a machine spitting and ratcheting over its own gears. And the lights, which used to be everywhere: bright, pretty lights on department stores, glamorous lights on plain facades, pillars and discs and towers of light, even a tower which said
“Licht ist Leben,”
light is life, not to mention the white globes by the café terraces on Kurfürstendamm. Now entire streets are dark. The theater of the city has shut down; there’s no more show.

The studio is stymied: an hour or so to work each morning before the start of the raids, and often the shots were lost because of the strain on the actors’ faces. Work is being shipped out to the countryside where it seems less dangerous, and then to the Bavarian Alps, and to Pomerania, East Prussia, Mecklenburg, anywhere far away.

But she can’t go. She works for animators, and animators stay by their drawing boards; they have no excuses for showing strain or filming in safer places. Her boss reckons that the Allies will not bother with Babelsberg again. It is already ruined, and what’s left is far too fragile to assemble the stories and dreams it once contained.

She goes to one last screening at the UFA building in town: a cartoon, with her name on it in small letters. She settles in the dark.

She sees a very young goose in love with the city and the chance to wear gaudy feathers, to go close dancing, and to meet exotic beasts. The goose makes herself finery out of anything she can steal: pig’s bristles for her eyelashes, a spider’s web for a veil. She turns down a steady kind of gander, and she lights out for town; and there she meets a slicked-back fox, in a fine gray uniform with spit-polished boots and long black cars at his disposal. She falls. She pines. She even goes home with him. And when she does, she sees his lair: sees geese caged ready for slaughter, sees the menagerie of slaves and bones.

Lucia knows it is all over if this film can be shown.

She is at her desk, writing a letter on a piece of good paper, embassy stock. She is writing to Himmler to ask for his help with a question of papers. She will send the letter by way of Hans.

She’s off to dinner with some Swedish envoys, who have lobster and copies of
Vogue.
She’s off to see the new Italian ambassador, since she’s still an Italian citizen, but she never gets past the outer offices, among minor paper pushers hot to give the impression they personally have a war to manage and a nation’s soul to save.

Hans calls. He says Himmler is most interested in her case, and remembers her from various parties. But he says Himmler likes blondes.

She can’t check the story. It sounds right. Perhaps Hans is humiliating her, perhaps he is helping, but either way, she can’t do without him.

She tries a hairdresser. The hairdresser laughs. “I can pour a kettle over your head, if you like,” she says. “I can’t even heat the water. You want color, you’re on your own.”

She walks back to the apartment. On the way, she sees a house gone crazy like something in an old fairground, beams slanted, door askew. That doesn’t frighten her anymore.

She shakes the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. She doesn’t like the sour chemical smell that comes out of the little bottle. She doesn’t like the notion that she is treating her hair like a wound.

She’ll never again be a contingent person, dependent on others. Never. She’ll get out of Berlin, and then they’ll have the devil’s job to prove who owns that cellar full of riches. She’ll play along with Magrit while she has to, and then she’ll make a business of her own.

There isn’t enough chemical. She’s never done this before, but she knows it will not be enough.

She goes to neighbors, to the stiff, proper couple who took over Mr. Goldstein’s apartment and filled it up with a bronze relief of Hitler and a number of little flags. They do not have hydrogen peroxide. Antiseptic would imply imperfections in their world, an unpatriotic thought.

So she tries the caretaker. She tells him Nicholas has a deep cut, and the caretaker says Nicholas was all right when he left the house to go to lessons. The caretaker produces a medicine bottle, almost empty. “You could use brandy,” he says. “Or whisky, or grappa. You people always get something. I know.”

She still isn’t sure she has enough. She tries Frau Werner, on the ground-floor landing. Frau Werner is always nervous about reality, and in her nervousness, she’ll surely have provisioned, years ahead, for all imaginable catastrophes. And she does have old aspirin in a tea caddy, bandages and gauze laid out in what was once her husband’s tool box, and the hydrogen peroxide stashed at the back of a cupboard, behind a row of drinks that have grown a sugar crust with neglect.

Lucia smiles. Lucia begs.

Frau Werner says she’s seen all these people who weren’t prepared for the worst, and look what happened to them.

Lucia says: “I’ll pay.”

Frau Werner says: “That’s fair.”

Back in the bathroom, facing a clear mirror, Lucia douses her hair in the chemicals and water. She knows she has to wait. She doesn’t know how long.

She wonders what it would be like to need to go to parties wearing glasses, or to wear false teeth and explain them to a lover, or to dye her hair in order not to seem gray and superannuated. She has to provide for all these coming times.

Breakfast time, she has a mass of brittle, yellow hair, persuaded into shape.

Nicholas looks shocked. She’s furious. She’s given up the very look of herself.

“They say,” Clarke said, “you get trapped in a moment. You stay there. You don’t have any more past or present.”

“You don’t have any more biography,” Sarah said. “Autobiography, I should say—the story you tell yourself. And you have no more self, because of that.”

“Is she still there, even?”

She is there, alert, exact, attentive. In the office of Henrich Himmler, she expects to use charm as usual; but immediately, everything is business.

“Magrit will make sure you can take the goods into Switzerland,” Hans says. “But you will need papers to take the goods out of Germany.”

“I see.” She envisions dinners, quickies in a cot.

“Your information has been very useful at times.”

Lucia does not see herself as an informer. She sees herself as a dealer in information.

“We’d like just a little more. We can pick up the male Jews easily enough because every decent German male is in a uniform, so the ones who aren’t get checked on the street. We can’t pick up the women so easily.”

Hans has an envelope, a thick envelope on his desk. “A
laisser
passer
and an authorization for fuel and trucks. You help us, we help you.”

Lucia says: “I came to see Herr Himmler.”

Hans says: “He’s such an honest man,” meaning he is too honest to have time for Lucia.

She has no tactics left. She tugs on her gloves.

She hears him shouting after her: “Remember. We would appreciate your help.”

Outside his door, there’s a long, polished corridor, with a bustle of men coming at her, and in between them a little man absurdly crucified on the shoulders of his burly minders, his muscles all tense, face wounded with pain, his pince-nez trailing from his neck. The man’s face is round, and almost Asiatic under the grimace. He is struggling with his dignity and the hurt in his gut.

The scrum passes.

“Herr Himmler,” says Hans, through the door. “You have now seen Herr Himmler.”

Outside, people stare. She knows exactly why: such crude blond hair can only be some kind of disguise.

Sixty years in a decorous town: sixty years of dealing, most of it honest, and proper and timely payments of tax, passing on beautiful objects to people who truly desired them, sitting in the middle of the glint and shine of what was inessential but often perfect.

But sixty years, also, without memory, so that she could not be herself all those sixty long years. She was alone even with lovers.

She walks out into the street. She’s infected already with this loss. People see it in her eyes. But they think, in the circumstances, that what they see is death, and they think it will not be Lucia’s death.

She’s not going to give up now. It will take only a few more sins.

She is walking the wrong street. It isn’t the kind of place she would like to be found, much less spend all her waking time: it’s a broken place, a gap between things left standing.

She always meets Sarah Lindemann, always sees that her dress is torn but mended.

Sarah doesn’t see her as a friend. She sees just a wild card, a slight variation in circumstances which might help when nothing else can.

Sarah says: “They keep telling me there aren’t any more ration cards. Not for me, anyway. You know people, don’t you? You know who could help?”

The two women on a street, for a second that will not ever end. Then Sarah always looks into Lucia’s eyes, sees the coldness of morgues and storerooms, and a passion for such things.

Lucia’s hand is out. “Come with me,” she says. But Sarah always breaks away, running zigzag in the traffic, arms and legs everywhere, always through the same corner shop with a door on two streets. She won’t stand still to be delivered. She is running for her life.

“Come with me,” Lucia shouts. “I can help.”

She is furious, humiliated, she hunts in her memory, she tracks in her mind, and she stands on this broken street in the hope of finding Sarah again, or another.

And this is her last unresting place, the last place she will ever know.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

I first heard the story of Andreina Schwegler-Torré from Thomas Buomberger, whose account of the Swiss art trade in the last world war,
Kunstraub, Raubkunst
(Zurich, 1998), has a full account of that lady’s crimes. Without Thomas’s generous help, this book could not have been written. It is, however, the story of another woman: Lucia Müller-Rossi, who exists only in fiction.

It developed through many conversations with witnesses to these periods, and historians who have studied them; I owe many of these meetings to the help of Mario Pelli and Anna Ehrensperger. It was fed by dozens of memoirs, diaries, biographies, and studies, including:
Skeleton of Justice,
by Edith Roper and Clara Leiser (New York, 1941);
Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany,
by Marion A. Kaplan (New York, 1998);
Berlin Diaries:
1940–1945,
by Marie Vassiltchikov (New York, 1987);
The Klemperer
Diaries 1933–1945,
by Victor Klemperer (London, 2000);
Guns and
Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the Holocaust,
by Thomas Geve (Chicago, 1987);
Diary of a Nightmare: Berlin 1942–1945,
by Ursula von Kardorff (New York, 1966);
While Berlin Burns: The Diary of
Hans-Georg von Studnitz 1943–1945
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964);
Blood and Banquets: A Berlin Social Diary,
by Bella Fromm (New York, 1990);
Shadows Over My Berlin,
by Heidi Scriba Vance (Middletown, Conn., 1996);
Mixed Blessings: An Almost Ordinary Life in
Hitler’s Germany,
by Heinz R. Kuehn (Athens, Ga., 1988);
Albert
Speer: His Battle With the Truth,
by Gitta Sereny (London, 1995);
The
Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution,
by Richard Breitman (Hanover, N.H., 1992);
The Kersten Memoirs 1940–1945,
by Felix Kersten (London, 1956);
The Fall of Berlin,
by Anthony Read and David Fisher (New York, 1995);
Berlin im Zweiten Weltkreig,
by Hans Dieter Schäfer (Munich, 1985);
Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany,
by Nathan Stoltzfus (New York, 1996);
The UFA Story,
by Klaus Kreimeier (New York, 1996);
Opel at War,
by Eckhart Bartels (West Chester, Penn., 1991), and other volumes in this series on Ford, Mercedes, and Volkswagen;
Il Faut Encore Avaler La Suisse,
by Klaus Urner (Geneva, 1996);
The Lifeboat Is Full,
by Alfred A. Häsler (New York, 1969);
Sketchbook 1946–1949,
by Max Frisch (New York, 1977);
Correspondance
of Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, presented by Peter Rüedi (Geneva, 1999);
Ces Messieurs de Berne 1939–1945,
by Claude Mossé (Paris, 1997); papers by Malcolm Pender, Regina Wecker, Gianni Haver, and Joy Charnley in
Switzerland and War,
edited by Joy Charnley and Malcolm Pender (Bern, 1999); papers by Luc Van Dongen, Josef Mooser, André Lasserre, and Rudolf Jaun in
Switzerland and the Second World War,
edited by George Kreis (London, 2000); papers by Wilfried Fiedler, Georg Kreis, and Matthias Frehner in
Das Geschäft mit der Raubkunst: Fakten, Thesen, Hintergründe,
edited by Matthias Frehner (Zurich, 1998);
Revendication de
biens spoliés,
by Jean-Pierre Grenier (Bern, 1946), and other Swiss government reports on stolen art (Bern/Prague, 1948);
Le banquier
noir, by François Genoud (Paris, 1996); L’Ombre Rouge: Suisse-URSS
1943–1944, Le Débat Politique en Suisse,
by Sophie Pavillon (Lausanne, 1999);
The Book of Zurich,
by Edwin Arnet and Hans Kasser (Zurich, 1954);
Il Banchiere Eretico: La Singolare Vita di Raffaele Mattioli,
by Giancarlo Galli (Milan, 1998);
Le Donne nel regime Fascista,
by Victoria de Grazia (Venice, 1993; originally published in English);
Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism,
by Franklin Hugh Adler (Cambridge, 1995); extracts from essays by Vincente Blasco Ibáñez, Karel Capek, and André Suarès in Milano e L’Europa, edited by Attilio Brilli (Milan, 1997). The dates and places of publication are correct for the editions that I consulted.

I owe particular thanks to the staff of the
Nederlands Instituut voor
Oorlogsdocumentatie
in Amsterdam; to Minister Lukas Beglinger of the Political Division of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs
(Eidgenössiches Departement für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten)
in Bern; and to Dr. Peter Pfrunder, director of the
Schweizerische
Stiftung für die Photographie
in Zurich.

Of course, none of these is responsible for what I’ve made of my story. But since it is founded in terrible events whose scale and even reality some people continue to deny, I have made sure that no public event in this book—that is, no trial, no crime, and no betrayal—is without a close, factual counterpart.