The Pieces from Berlin (6 page)

Later, Nicholas learned about air, how it masses together after bombs have fallen and comes through a city like a blind wave of force, throwing fire all around, taking down what the bombs themselves could not ruin. But at the time, he felt safe. He looked up at a man and a woman on the spiral stairs, curled around each other and playing with each other’s fingers, and he felt safe.

On his bed at Sonnenberg, he dreamt of a man walking away: walking steadily, purposefully, and not stopping for a moment even when Nicholas was shouting, shouting, shouting. The man did not acknowledge him, not even by ignoring him.

He always hated the moments in magic shows where there’s a flash, a puff of smoke, and someone disappears. The rest of the audience clapped, cheered, laughed. Nicholas wanted to cry.

He was good at imagining things, but he was still lonely. He couldn’t, officially, go out after dark, and it was dark when school finished in wintertime. Lucia was often out. There weren’t many children in the building. He heard a baby sometimes.

He wanted a cat.

He thought his mother would never agree, not even discuss such a thing. He sensed that it would be one last thing too many. Besides, she was not a sentimental woman.

He didn’t know where to look for a cat, whether there were shops for cats. He didn’t have money, anyway. He thought about leaving a saucer of milk by the door and leaving the door open at night, but the door had to be closed and locked.

The second winter in Berlin was very cold. The radiators knocked and rattled, and still sometimes ice formed on the inside of windows. He tried leaving a window slightly open in case a cat wanted to come in, but a knife of cold cut into the room and he had to close it again.

He had his own key when he turned eight. He had to have one, Lucia said, because he might need to go to the shelter before she came home, and she might have to spend the night out.

He never told her that he went out, too.

Those nights were like the dark in a movie house before the film starts, the same coughings and laughs from somewhere you couldn’t quite place, the same sense of being crowded and of strangers on the move, feeling their way, one foot ahead of another, shuffling.

Cars went about with caution, with animal eyes: a slit of light through the felt that was fixed over their headlights.

He didn’t want to be far away from home. He just wanted air, and the sight of other people. He watched the backs of the men going away, and sometimes he imagined he’d just missed his father.

Then he didn’t know the way.

This was not his city. He hardly knew it by daylight. He was not sure which way he should turn. He couldn’t call out because he knew it was always better not to be noticed.

He knew people must be moving around him. He didn’t know who they were, or what they wanted. There were a very few torches, masked in red or blue, and people tap tapping along like the blind.

He saw a woman’s legs: long, elegant, silky legs, just her legs, in the red light from a torch. He thought she might help him, so he tapped her on the back and she spun round, her torch catching faces in the black, and she said: “Well, kid?”

“I wanted—”

“Listen. I’m working.”

And she gathered herself, and kept the light playing down on those long, silky legs.

He put his back against a wall.

Someone was shouting, not shouting but honking out loud so that people would know he was there.

He didn’t know which uniform his father wore, so he didn’t know which uniform to trust.

He heard a tram coming. That was good; there was a tramline in the street next to their street. He heard it rolling and shearing on its tracks, and he heard crackling in the air.

There was suddenly blue, bright lightning in the street, earthed to its wheels, shocks of light in the quiet dark. Nicholas, very still on the sidewalk, could make out the shape of the tramcars. He saw their windows where people sat in iced cold light, very faint, that made them look as though they were already dead and their faces had started to fade.

Then the dark came together where the electric flares had torn it.

Nicholas had seen the store at the corner of the street; he knew at last where he was. He listened to the tram going away.

He heard a kitten bawling under a pile of fallen stones. He pushed the stones away and picked it up and it squirmed in his hand and then settled. He put it under his coat and it peed on him.

He managed to hide the animal for a couple of days. He saved bits of meat from Sunday dinner. He cut little pieces of cheese. He wished Lucia would bring oysters, because there were always too many oysters, one of those curiosities of war, although he didn’t know if cats ate oysters. He cleaned up after the kitten, and the kitten kept wonderfully quiet, except that it purred so loudly when it was lying warm against him that he thought the apartment would shake.

But then Lucia got a maid, like everyone else, and she had to know.

He sometimes made an inventory of what he must have known. He didn’t know the proper rules of soccer, but he knew about fire, flares, bombs. He knew what they meant. He never learned to throw a ball, because ball games would have been disorderly on the streets, but he knew how to pitch a stone to bring down the plaster from a falling wall. He saw uniforms, and also dead people.

Lucia got herself a job out at the film studios, UFA, the Universum Film AG, taking the train out each day. He never discovered why she wasn’t at the embassy anymore; he thought he would ask her one day. She told him her job was to make sure there were cartoons in the cinemas, which seemed like quite a good idea, except that he was never very impressed with all the kisses in
Snow White
. He said she should leave those bits out of her films.

The maid’s name was Katya. She came from somewhere to the East. She didn’t speak much German. She had a pudding face, she didn’t smile. She had a wonderfully big bottom, an epic of solid flesh. She fascinated Nicholas when she sat down, or when she walked away.

She never seemed to have time off. She was allowed to go off for a few hours on Fridays, and he assumed she might go to the cinema, but when he asked if she was going to a film, she said: “
Verboten.
” He didn’t ask again.

He found a name for the cat: Gattopardo. He’d much rather have given it the sort of name a friend might have had, but Katya took him to the zoo one afternoon—she always wanted to take him to the zoo, because it was an excuse to be out and see other people—and he saw an ocelot which had just the same markings as his cat. Katya pointed out the label and he asked his mother what it was, and she told him in Italian. So the cat became Gattopardo.

He watched Katya for the sake of watching some other person. She washed out the apartment with a mop, a soft, sluicing sound that he could follow from room to room. It didn’t seem to make the apartment much cleaner. He remembered her food, heavy and with potatoes, always potatoes: potato dumplings, potato cakes, a dozen different thicknesses of potato soup.

One afternoon, when she was out, Lucia said Katya didn’t know everything about potatoes. Lucia took three potatoes out of the store and she juggled them, then she peeled them and cut them and then she said, “Shhh, you must never tell anyone,” and she took the iron out of the cupboard, heated it up, and put the cut potatoes on it. “Fried potatoes,” she said, and she gave Nicholas one. It was a bit raw in the middle, but it was gold and it was perfect to him. “Remember that,” she said.

Nicholas laughed more when his mother was around. He laughed more with her than he did with his friends from school, for he and his friends were about the immensely serious business of conquering the city, at least as far as legs and sometimes a train would carry them. He already knew Alexanderplatz. He knew what the whitewashed windows meant because a schoolfriend told him: gypsy families. He knew the florists’ windows which ran with water in summer to cool the roses you could just see inside; floats of color. He liked to watch the turtles gliding in the tanks at the aquarium on Budapesterstrasse.

He was eight and a half so he was automatically in a kind of gang: six of them. They went about dressed sharp and neat: boy gentlemen. They smiled a lot. In any other city, they would have been ominous and unnatural, but in this Berlin they somehow seemed just another phenomenon on the frantic streets.

They decided to be explorers. They couldn’t travel, so they explored where the bombs had fallen: it was a different place down there. They scrambled under fallen beams, cracked girders, in the new pits along what used to be decorous streets. They found treasure of sorts in the roots of a tree that had been torn half out of the earth; but the treasure was only an old cocoa tin with some boy’s marbles inside. They played marbles for a while on the sidewalk, called it a championship, until somebody told them to move on.

They weren’t afraid in daytime then. They learned to get thoughtful, then edgy, then breathless only when it was properly dark and the bombers came. All the rest of his life, when the sun went down, even in some solid, safe house in Switzerland, fires lit, dinner cooking, lights blazing, Nicholas trembled.

They saw one day a woman, old, dressed in black with a yellow star, carrying a canary in a cage. Nicholas followed her for a while, because people don’t take birds for a walk, and the others followed him and she must have noticed them because she stopped suddenly. She turned to Nicholas, and he thought for a moment she was going to give him the cage and then he saw how tired and angry she was.

“What do you want?” she said, with the emphasis on the “you,” as though everyone else had shadowed and hassled her, and now it was a gaggle of boy gentlemen in a line.

Nicholas said: “I never saw anyone take a bird for a walk.”

“You like birds?”

“Yes. Yes, I do, but I have a cat.”

“I have to get a certificate,” she said.

“What certificate? To show the bird is healthy?”

She said: “I have to have a certificate that the bird is dead. We’re not allowed pets anymore.”

And then the bird began to sing.

He could never ask Lucia: not about practical things, physical things, much less moral things or things he saw in the street. He wanted a father to ask. But since Müller was away, doing his duty, like the German fathers of the German boys, he supposed, he was left to patch the real world together out of his random glimpses.

There was an older man downstairs who sometimes left his door open during the day. The apartments were big enough, but they were awkwardly built to exclude every possibility of breeze; Nicholas assumed that he needed the air.

But he was someone to ask, and Nicholas went down to see him often.

He had books. He said he knew Lucia well. He told Nicholas that Goethe and Schiller were great writers, that Bach and Beethoven were great musicians; he had a record with a scratch of the first Goldberg variations. He said these things as though Nicholas needed to be told them, but it wasn’t entirely clear if he thought Nicholas was too foreign to have been taught them properly.

Once he asked Nicholas to run an errand, four streets away. He had to ring a doorbell three times, wait, and ring once more. The door still didn’t open. He wanted to knock on it fiercely but the older man had told him not to.

An old woman opened after a while. “Tell him I can’t find more,” she said. “Tell him this is what I have, that I don’t need.” She gave Nicholas a little tin box, for throat lozenges, that rattled.

“What are they?”

She said: “Never you mind.” Then she said: “We call them Jewish drops.”

“But I’m not Jewish.”

“Then you won’t like them.”

He carried the box back to Mr. Goldstein, who made the Jewish drops disappear into his hand like a conjurer does.

Nicholas told his mother about this. He wanted to discuss it, a little. She only said he shouldn’t do such things. Then she went downstairs herself to talk to Mr. Goldstein, and from downstairs he heard music: and he knew it was Bach, the Brandenburg Concertos, and was proud to know the name, because Mr. Goldstein had told him.

“What’s happening?” he asked his mother when she came back.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing unusual.” And she was right; the usual was accelerated, frantic, menacing, but it was usual.

A few days later, Katya complained about having to clean a rug that had suddenly appeared, a fine red and gold affair. Lucia said she’d sort that out. “It can go into storage,” she said. He noticed there were a number of other new and fine things.

He always had the key in his pocket. He walked carefully, tiptoe, down the stairs. He half hoped Mr. Goldstein’s door would still be open, although he knew that adults all locked up at night; he’d been careful to check the locks on his own door.

The stairs were still very clean, the paint washed, the light dull neon gray. He didn’t like shadows at the time, and there were hardly any shadows because the lights were overhead. Sometimes he felt safer on the stairs than in the apartment.

On the next landing down, he stopped at Mr. Goldstein’s door. He pushed it. It came open. It didn’t seem he had opened it for the sake of the air, but it wasn’t locked.

He ought to warn him, say something, but he didn’t want to go any further in. But he could hear music, and if he shouted, Mr. Goldstein might not hear him.

The light was shut off in the corridor, but he could see some faint shine, like a candle, in the living room.

He knew he should stop there. He looked back and the door bounced on its hinges and swung shut.

He was still an adventurer. He knew Mr. Goldstein, and Mr. Goldstein would be glad to see him, surprised, but glad. He was an adventurer, brave and intrepid, and he ought to go walk on down the corridor.

He ought to turn back.

If someone moved on the staircase, that would explain why he lost his nerve. But there was no movement in his memory, no foot-steps. All he remembered was suddenly starting to run toward that faint gold light at the end of the corridor and stopping short of the door and hearing the needle catch in the gramophone record.