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Authors: Michael Pye

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BOOK: The Pieces from Berlin
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Lucia thought she knew better. Lucia said nothing.

The Herr Doktor Professor was a bit of a footnote to the human race, insistent on every one of his three degrees, a belly trailed with vines of stuck hair, limbs like badly rolled cigarettes to hold the belly up, the perfect antidote if your husband is Adonis. She found herself an appetite surrounded by lard. She could rely on his selfishness, a grunting, sweating, demanding person, a man so wedded to the importance of what he’d read twenty years ago that he’d shout out abstract, compound nouns as he came.

She learned what he had to teach: how the making of porcelain had once been an occult wonder; how Meissen loved the arcane too much and almost went bankrupt guarding a secret that everyone else had already guessed; and how Heinrich Kühn threw out the alchemists, cut out the jargon, and let in the bracing, progressive, scientific air of the nineteenth century. The Herr Doktor Professor dearly loved a reformer like Kühn, the more violent, the better. Somehow in his mind everything circled back so simply to the glories of National Socialism, so nothing in particular did, so it did not seem to matter.

She did see flags, banners, slogans, prisoners, and houses that were empty. But what she remembered mostly was lectures on how well Meissen did when Germany was strong and united, or at least without customs barriers, and what a lesson that was for the modern state; and she remembered waiting, as she listened, for the good doctor to pounce on her breasts.

He said it was good they were both married, made them free. “You don’t have to explain yourself,” he said. He was always on his mettle to keep her happy, by books, by talking about glory, by fucking her fast and rough, and most of all by allowing her to expect and anticipate, which kept her in a state of constant excitement much more than the actual touch of his sausage fingers, or his unusually rough skin.

She didn’t want to come alive this way. She knew she’d depend on him.

He carried about with him the odd vegetable smell of old, deep dirt. He talked about personality and genius, about style and temperament, about the variation between pulls of a particular design and in their decoration. He talked about paste upon paste, and shaded flowers, as he held her by her hair.

Then she was pregnant.

There was a neat, blond man called Müller, rather tall, and a stubby little professor who was rather dark. There would not be any ambiguity about the father of her child. She simply decided that it could only be Müller’s. She wouldn’t let herself think anything else.

The professor liked to feel her belly as it grew, pressing and scratching. Müller attended to her, gently and calmly and on the exact timetable of the hours he could spare from his work.

And Nicholas was born: undoubtedly the child of Hans Peter Müller.

At the beginning, Nicholas was her portable lover. She loved the connection of having him suckle at her breast; she only stopped when he was already three. She loved his company, his utter absorption in her face, his willingness to be always at her disposal.

Hans Peter Müller, she decided, saw the boy as nothing more than the appropriate result of a marriage. But she was busy with the professor, and she never saw Müller playing football with his small, unsteady son, or teaching him how to pick berries on a hot afternoon, or easing him into the run of the river to swim. She was not interested in Müller’s emotions, which she had long ago decided did not count, so she missed the wild and generous look in his eyes when he saw his boy.

However, she still needed the professor. She was afraid of need, except for Nicholas, who had a whole life ahead to need to be with her.

So she stopped suckling her son. She knew she would need currency: her mind, her body, her knowledge. She couldn’t count on powerful men quizzing her about the paintings of Simone Martini, or being impressed by her command of logic. The breasts, then, mattered.

Everything was becoming uncertain. She never imagined living in Switzerland. She couldn’t go home to Milan. She thought it best to pretend to a feeling of ease in Germany, since she was there; but Müller never bothered with that. He didn’t live in Germany; he was only employed there.

She wasn’t Swiss, but because of Müller she lived as a Swiss. There was a shortage of skilled workers, factories working overtime, money was good; so there were immigrants out of Switzerland all around them. Müller wanted their company. She didn’t see the point.

She made the food, brought the bottles. They’d listen to the radio, communally. There was a football game from Paris, the commentators rushing their words, and the men sitting about with their beers, all together, not loud and cheering but desperately serious. It was some kind of championship; she never knew which. It was Switzerland against Greater Germany.

The game was over, there was a brief silence, then it was obvious: Switzerland won.

The men didn’t cheer, even then. They were contract workers, signed up to show respect for a fee. They smiled, though, and they stood up like one man and toasted the victory with their half-liter glasses.

Müller used to read her the letters he got from home; his family all sent short, neat letters at regular intervals. After the game against Germany, they wrote, there was something like a riot in Basel, if you can imagine such a thing: streets full of whooping, shouting fans, glorying in the momentary downfall of the great Third Reich.

And when Hans Peter read that, he took Nicholas out into the garden, he told him what had happened, he took his boy’s hands and together they danced a rapid, jerky jig.

A November night, quite cold. She was standing at the bedroom window and she was looking down the path to the road. There were no leaves or flowers. She could see the road very clearly.

She thought there was some kind of parade. Brown uniforms. It was dark, and they were quiet and they were keeping to the pavement: very orderly, unhurried, as though they were going to work. They didn’t hide but they didn’t have a band.

They almost all went past the end of the path. Two of them stopped. It was one in the morning and they were in uniforms and they were so quiet. They hadn’t been drinking, obviously. They were under orders.

One of the boys—they all seemed like boys—stopped just opposite her window. She didn’t know if he could see her. She thought not. He stood there and he stared in, as though he could see foreignness written all over the walls and the eaves of the house. He said something to the boy at his side, gestured at the house, seemed to point out Lucia at the window, and then they all went on.

The next morning the Jewish shop in town, the little haberdashers, was broken up. The windows had somehow dematerialized, but the street was stuck with glass. The silks and the bales had all been taken down and thrown around. It looked very lovely: all those colors shining in the sun. There were some of the boys in brown uniforms, SA, in and around the shop, and they were tugging out special things—lace things, silk things, embroidered handkerchiefs, rather elegant ties, and they were trying to present them to the passersby, like medals, like rewards. Most people walked by on the other side of the street.

She was never more conscious of being a dark redhead, a southerner, and very foreign. It suddenly made sense for Müller to go about alone in a town that was mad for blondes.

She knew there would be a war because of the ration cards. It was a brutal August day, hot and airless, and the policemen came to every house to announce that they couldn’t buy anything much anymore without ration cards. There were seven different kinds, and the colors seemed all wrong, somehow: blue for meat, green for eggs, orange for bread.

Müller took note of the cards, but he didn’t seem to register what they meant. “We’re all in this together,” he said, but he didn’t seem convinced.

She watched the dust in the air: the still flecks of dust that did not catch the sun.

She waited without fear. Something had to happen; she simply did not know what would happen next. War must change everything, somehow.

She never expected that Müller would be called up by the Swiss army; he had never mentioned the possibility. Perhaps he thought it was entirely obvious, or perhaps he didn’t expect to have to leave Germany.

He paid two months’ rent and he left. He sent pictures. He looked fine in uniform, on a slope somewhere. He couldn’t say where, of course.

She remembered the consoling pull of Nicholas’s lips on her nipples. She had liked the sense of being absorbed in being essential to him. But he was a child now, not a baby. She had to think. She was in small-town Germany, her child could have German nationality but she couldn’t, she didn’t have much of an income because the Swiss army were meant to be voluntary heroes, and it didn’t help being Swiss and Italian, which were two wrong nationalities as far as the butcher, the grocer, the baker, the laundry were concerned.

So the Herr Doktor Professor gave her some names and addresses in Berlin, and a little money and the tickets she’d need. It did occur to her that he might have wanted her out of the way.

THREE

He was six years old in the train. He sat under luggage like mountains, crags of leather, falls of belt. Everything smelt of other people instead of the outside.

A man was eating meat sandwiches out of greaseproof paper and his fingers shone. He was reading a newspaper. Nicholas wanted to show that he could read too, but Lucia kept him back.

Then they were in Berlin.

He remembered how open his eyes were, stitched open by sights. There were more people, more floors, more streets, more cars, more noise than he’d ever imagined could be in one place. He’d always been in a small town, his territory was a garden with geraniums; he could run down the street and be a shadow in the woods.

He knew this city was somehow his mother’s place, not his. She held on to his hand.

There were flags everywhere, and people smelt strong. He might say, nowadays, that they smelt good, but he didn’t know what expensive soap and French perfumes were meant to smell like at the end of a long day.

Their first apartment was not at all grand: five rooms. The kitchen wasn’t clean. His pretty mother, who was always so careful, threw bleach around it and said something very rude about people who lived on fried food. She scrubbed until her hands were raw, and then she looked at her hands and shrugged and said they’d be having a maid, somehow.

Nicholas could see down into the courtyard from the kitchen, and into the street from the living room. He’d always been on the comforting flat before.

There was a corridor with doors, so he could play hide-and-seek. He could run from one room to another, arms out and dipping like a plane turning in the sky.

The fourth day, some men in uniform started hammering on a door across the courtyard. Lucia told him not to look, so of course he looked directly across the courtyard.

A window opened very wide. The men must have taken the glass off the sashes.

He saw the end of a piano on the windowsill. It was an upright piano, cheap, light wood, with some of the keys discolored.

The piano teetered on the sill. The men in uniform shoved it. It fell and splintered and the wires sprang about and sounded like a cat in the works. Nicholas looked down and he couldn’t make out the particular shape of a piano anymore, just plywood, it seemed, and a bit of lovingly shined veneer on the stones, and the keys flung about like teeth.

Then there was a fountain of paper, pamphlets of music, that went up in the breeze and came slowly rustling down.

His mother pulled him inside and slapped him.

“Don’t you look,” she said.

Helen waited for him to come back to the apartment. She wanted to comfort him; she knew he wouldn’t want to talk. She wanted him to sit in the kitchen while she assembled supper, wanted to share a glass of wine.

He didn’t come. So he must have gone directly to his house, and he must be drowning in memories. He couldn’t be remembering Hans Peter without the ghosts of all Lucia’s notorious doings, and those ghosts parading through his mind.

He was not a witness. He only lived while things happened. He didn’t have anything to say which he, and he alone, knew. If anything, he’d bring back the ridiculous details, like the toilet paper rough as wrapping paper, and the perpetual shortages, and the usefulness of all those fine paper propaganda leaflets that the British dropped.

He walked up the road to Sonnenberg. The sky was clean here, and the moon high. The snow was bright as mirrors on either side of the black line of road, shadows blue, fields evened out. Sometimes at the roadside the crust had broken on the snow and underneath that rough glass of ice he could see feathers of soft cold.

The house had been a farmhouse, once, when he and Nora found it: half solid stone, half the old brown wood of a barn. Geese straggled by the door. A small dog visited.

The world was brilliant as a picture in a lightbox. He could almost see clearly again: old eyes with ice for lenses. He would have stayed, if he could have done, outside in the cold, with the dog tasting his hand and the cat rubbing against him: an animate scarecrow, a passerby on his way to the high woods or perhaps to the next farm.

He didn’t do what he had done every time he came home to Sonnenberg, didn’t check the mailbox, didn’t go to see if there were messages, somehow always expecting a message from Nora even if she was dead six years, which, to him, was only a detail.

He went to the barn instead. It seemed like a perfect replica of a barn that you read about in books: a strong wood shelter with logs stacked like art along one wall, with a lawnmower, a washing machine, shelves of jam and paint. It didn’t seem to have a history of things breaking or falling at all. He looked out over the whiteness all around, and he thought for a moment the whole land had no terrible history, either: it was so easily reduced to its own bright, white, and shielding surface.

He loved to see the deer move against the woods, the branches of their legs and antlers. He wasn’t even looking for them tonight.

He thought the process of fading, of leaving just a chalk mark in a bright white world, ought to produce some countervailing calm or resignation. That would be the proper order of things.

He had been sent to school at the Italian embassy in Berlin for a while. He knew he wasn’t meant to be surprised, not by a great house that seemed all gold; only later did he suspect the railings were bronze. He saw doors of wood so black it had to be ancient, and seats taken out of churches, and the rooms were lit with a hundred cuts of light trapped by magic in glass. Now he would classify the magic: chandeliers from Venice.

He sat beside a boy called Luca, who seemed to think he should know about Italian things just because of his name. He explained that his father was Swiss, which was why he was also called Müller, and that Niccolo or Nicholas Müller-Rossi was born in Germany. Luca called him a “
Mischling
”—in German: a half-breed.

Nicholas didn’t like the word. Then Luca realized that Nicholas’s father was away, and in the wrong army. He didn’t use the fact directly because everyone behaved in the class: little premature gentlemen of six and seven. But it was always the interesting fact about Nicholas: that his father was in the wrong army.

Nicholas started his childhood when the bombers came, when there was time and space to play at last.

That first summer was hot, unusually hot, everyone said. Everyone wanted to get to the water. Lucia took him down to Wannsee one August day to watch the powerboats whirling around out on the lake waters. She said he could swim.

They were with someone: one of Lucia’s new friends, a man, of course, from the embassy. He was quite tall and he could play soccer well enough to impress a kid. He passed neatly, and Nicholas scored goal after goal between his jacket and the picnic basket.

He wanted to go out on one of the little sailboats. His mother looked up at the sky, which was part pewter and part a brilliant blue. Her friend shrugged. He thought it might be worth keeping Nicholas quiet and amused, and Nicholas was a persistent child.

They came away from the shore, and all of a sudden, there was a different kind of breeze. The boy felt wind across his whole skin. He saw his mother’s hair, a fine red in those days, her own red, stroked out and flying in the wind. They were in a tiny sailboat, nothing at all, a walnut shell in between the motorboats further out, but it felt like they were exploring across whole oceans, that they had found somewhere wild at last. A few girls and soldiers, in rowboats, were laughing much too much.

Nicholas knelt up at the bows, staring out. The wind got brisk. There were pellets of rain and they beat back off the lake water. The sky blackened. There was a distant rumble of thunder.

His mother said: “It’s beautiful out here.”

Her friend said: “Look. We’d better get back. Lightning’s no fun when you’re out on the water like this. Exposed.”

His mother stared at the horizon of green, tangled trees and she seemed to be willing the lightning to come. Out of the blue sky she brought white light, as though the sky had cracked open and shown the hot glare beyond. Out of the pewter sky, Nicholas truly believed this, she brought a different kind of lightning: red light, broad light, a tree of it.

Her friend stood, rocked the boat, took down the little sail he could no longer trust. “We have to go back,” he said.

The wind flicked up ripples from the lake. They could see, looking away from the city, the rain starting in a curtain. Lucia’s friend had the oars now.

She said: “It’s beautiful.”

Nicholas stayed at the bow, even though he had to hold on as the boat began to slip and turn, and his knees were marked and bloody when they got to shore.

His mother hugged him. She never bothered with that particular friend again.

He liked to think he remembered what was specific, what happened in front of him. So he knew the caretaker rattled pans when the air raids came. He’d come up out of the courtyard, two tin saucepans and a spoon in each that he worked like a clapper in a bell, and he’d run around, up and down all the stairs, insisting everyone go down to the shelter.

But children hear stories. They heard and believed that it wasn’t always safe in the cellars. One whole building ran down, barricaded the doors, made sure the ceilings were propped with beams, settled to a glass of milk or schnapps or cold coffee; and then drowned, because the pipes burst and they couldn’t get out in time.

There was nobody for Nicholas to believe. Things you knew seemed more real than things you were told. He sometimes thought he’d moved into a world from the comic strips.

He passed a butcher’s shop and saw a sleeping donkey being carried inside. He thought it was asleep because the men were carrying it suspended from a pole, its hooves shining. Then he looked again and he saw the throat was slit.

So he relied on his mother, and she used to make things all right, one way or another. Sometimes, she took him to the Kurfürstendamm to make things all right. He’d wear a very stiff white shirt. It almost hurt, but he was proud to wear it: a badge of being a man. She wore new, shiny shoes. They ate kuchen with a lot of cream.

They took the subway home. They went one stop sitting in among the neat afternoon crowd, and the air raid siren went off: a noise that sounded as though it had to be wound up.

The train stopped in the next station. Everybody knew they had to get out, so everyone went to the doors. Everyone stood around.

A pudgy man, a silly man out of a cartoon book, started talking very loudly. Nicholas tapped his mother to make sure she saw him: a little walking joke. He was insisting on attention, but he couldn’t speak properly. He kept stuttering over words. People didn’t quite laugh at him, but they shifted about as he told them how to survive.

After a minute, when the crowd wanted to be somewhere else and showed it, he said: “Listen. I only took this job to get away from my wife. You’d want to get away from my wife.”

He had the crowd silent.

“She’s orders, orders, orders. I can’t breathe at home without permission. So just give me a minute—”

The all-clear siren sounded out. Everyone stepped back into the train.

Lucia went out in the evenings, and cars came for her. She went out in a cloud of Chanel No. 5—Nicholas had time to read everything in the apartment after she’d gone at night, so he knew all the brands—and she left behind an expensive, perfect ghost of scent. Sometimes very late she’d bring back pasta in a box from some restaurant.

Nicholas understood he had to be out of sight if anyone called for her, although she never let anyone into the apartment. She made things up to him at weekends and when she could. In winter, especially, he loved the one bath night, Saturday or Sunday. The soap scratched, and it didn’t lather much; in fact, it made scum on the water. But he loved the attention and he loved the sheer, luxuriating warmth. He was always wrapped up, but he only felt truly warm in the bath.

Other nights, Lucia would sit in the living room, alive but inside the pages of a book. She might as well have been a picture behind glass. Or she would be pacing about the apartment, and Nicholas would say something, and she would either ignore him, or at best say: “Not now.” Other days, she was teaching him to dance, him so short, head fixed just above her belly button, counting under his breath to a waltz. He tried to hold back, to play the man properly, but his face always ended in the warmth of her belly on the turns.

She always tried to be home when the air raids came. He was sure of that.

She took him to the movies one evening, and the sirens went off just as they were coming out of the theater, and they had to get to a shelter. There was a vast new bunker by the zoo, all stuck about with flak guns. Its walls felt like all the rock in a mountain. You didn’t believe anything could move them.

They were checked as they went in, and searched. Lucia’s papers must have seemed a bit odd, being Italian married to a Swiss and living in Germany. It didn’t usually matter. But it seemed that, at the entrance to the zoo bunker, she didn’t know anybody.

The sound of the siren was winding up and up. There was a long line waiting to be safe.

She pushed another set of papers at the guards. They must have been Nicholas’s papers: born in Germany. So he could go in, and she followed, smiling kindly, letting her bag be searched, letting the guard say that in that dress he hardly needed to search her. Being young, Nicholas still wondered if the guard disapproved or approved.

He heard gunfire. He heard the low, droning sound of air engines. He heard the sirens. He wanted to be behind those safe, thick walls.

People kept their hats on. There weren’t many lights, but the few lights were bright like theater lights, and the hats made odd shadows on the pale brick walls, made middle-aged persons into pharaohs and Turks and general infidels. It took forever to climb up level by level through the press of people, who didn’t want to move from the doors, who still at that time of the war had the old animal instinct to stay close to the ground and the air. When the anti-aircraft guns fired, the earth shook under them.

BOOK: The Pieces from Berlin
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