The Pieces from Berlin (8 page)

Then it was all zoo stories: how the crocodiles used to answer back the bombers, cold blood to cold blood, so it seemed.

The lilacs flowered as usual. The candles caught light on the chestnuts. All of the apparatus of spring was there, the prospect of getting out into the woods, onto the water; but Nicholas and his friends were preoccupied. Their little gang sensed that most other people also had gangs.

He’d seen a woman one afternoon in a gas mask, pushing a pram that was heaped up with blankets to keep the air from her baby. She was out for a stroll by the ruins of a movie house.

The year grew hotter and hotter.

Lucia said everyone was going away. The names stuck with Nicholas like a litany, which must be magic because you can’t quite work out what it means: the Meinsdorps and the Edelstems, the Rocamurros, the della Portas and the Barros, the Furstenbergs were all going away.

On August 1, 1943, schools closed. Women, children, and the sick were told to leave the city. Nicholas’s friend Gerhard was taken to the station, but it seemed nobody had told the railways about the crisis; so there were no trains.

The next day, a leaflet at the door: all women not doing war work, all children, to leave at once. The day after that: leaflets from the air, telling women and children to go. The temperature had slipped ruthlessly upward—90°, then 95°—and the heat met the crowds like a wall. They still butted and rushed their way to the railway stations.

Lucia was not leaving. Nicholas didn’t understand. She knew so many important people, it seemed, so many names that must matter from the way she intoned them, so many diplomats and politicians and people who still had cars they could send to take her to dinner; she must have had a choice. She knew enough to want Nicholas in Switzerland, as soon as possible. But she didn’t want to go herself.

She was still the whole world for Nicholas. What other world can you have when the sky goes red and streets start falling?

There were lines for flowers at the stalls on Frankfurter Allee. All these years later, he wondered what people expected from the flowers. A certain coolness, perhaps. Distinct colors, any colors, in a city turning the drab standard of soot. They were a reminder of a world of gardens and living things. Or perhaps they were subject to discipline and order: something you could arrange, when life was so manifestly out of control.

The radio was always playing dance music. Always.

He started to notice that things were broken, not just the ruins, although those had stopped being playgrounds because they were too obviously dangerous, great cairns of stone that could fall anytime. But people were nicer to each other, in a way. The formality, the starch, was also broken up.

He asked his mother why men had long hair now and women had short hair.

It was the right kind of night for catastrophe—cold, rainy, November, trees bare, world gone to mud.

Everyone felt safe under such heavy rain because the clouds would surely make the bombers’ job short, and perhaps impossible. So Nicholas could see from the window the heavy leather curtain going back and forth on the bar across the street: people out, people in.

Gattopardo hated noise. He curled up against it. He ran frantic to escape it. But it was a quiet night to start with and he came to the window. Nicholas stroked him under his chin. He licked Nicholas’s hand.

Lucia was out. She almost always had people to see.

Everyone knew, the way everyone does know things in wartime without being told, that nothing could happen after half past seven.

At half past seven exactly, the sirens roared.

The caretaker came around bellowing and ringing a bell he’d found somewhere. Nicholas did not go down to the cellar. He didn’t think the raids could be very long. And he wanted to see for himself.

He heard, first. He heard the bombers in the distance, like drums, then, unmistakably, engines rumbling, then roaring, then above his head. The sky filled up with noise. And that night, it did not come in waves. There seemed to be no intervals at all.

There was always a long moment between hearing the planes and the first damage. Gattopardo hid. Nicholas sat like a boy at a movie, with the curtains open. He thought at first the bombs were all duds, because sometimes there was no sound of impact you could make out through the roar of the engines and the pelting of the rain.

But first the marker bombs came down, slow as silk. Then the blast bombs: timpani and fire. Then the stick incendiaries, each opening in flames already, magically lit and consuming.

He saw light a few streets away: red light between the violet of the streetlights, a flash of a pale, poisoned green. He knew the blue was phosphorous fire. The sky was all neon, diffused by the rain still falling.

The planes did not stop. They shat fire on the city. On each pass, you could sense the earth a little less stable, the air less cool, the rain contaminated now with ash and cinder.

He did not move from the window. He could not make himself safe. The cellars would be barred now. He couldn’t make anyone hear him through the appalling rumbling and thumping and roaring outside.

He was nine years old. He sat by a window and he watched a city die.

He felt a bizarre calm, a sense of distance even as the ground shook. From the trees on the street he could tell the wind was getting up. If the wind got up, it would tend and blow the fires. He thought that among the sounds of aircraft engines, of the air they displaced, of the houses spilling out their organized life onto the sidewalks in a mess of stone and wood and steel, there was also the sound of flames. You couldn’t hear any one thing as definite as flames because of the hot pressure of the air.

The rain stopped.

There is that magical moment after rain when you can see forever. Nicholas could see too far.

A whole barrier to sight was falling away: a barrier that had been apartments and homes. One of the walls dissolved, just dissolved, as sand dissolves when water passes. Inside, he could see a chandelier hanging, a spreading affair of pink glass. He saw the chandelier rock and pitch, then fall to the floor. But there was no more floor, and the glass went on falling, catching the red flame light out of the sky and breaking it, down through room after room until he couldn’t see it anymore.

The windows cracked. Glass fell around him. When the wind came in, and it was still a cold wind even with all the fires, the room changed with it: the room was stripped of life, naked like a dead thing, just objects on a platform of wood and rugs. The wind invaded, and he had no more home. It was like a kind of light that made things sinister or featureless or, mostly, alien.

He knew he had to shelter, but he didn’t want to shelter. He wanted to stand out in the fire and shout. Other men tell you about the moment they think they became men, maybe in someone’s bed, maybe in a moment of courage or epiphany. This was his moment: the certainty that he could not look away, let alone move away.

He was a hero. He also pissed himself.

He wanted to find Gattopardo, to comfort himself with something warm, living, subtle to hold. The cat saw him, and came for him, meaning harm. The sight of that madness helped keep Nicholas sane.

Gattopardo went for the window, for the glass.

Fire rained down close. There were sparks as pretty as Christmas toys.

Gattopardo went through the window with a fine grace. He seemed, in the blood light outside, to catch fire. He seemed to climb the sky, paws out as though he would rip it as he came down.

Nicholas, alone, was terrified. He wanted to get out of the apartment, but he felt responsible for the apartment. He wanted to find his mother, but she could find him only if he stayed where he was. He wanted to be held, to be given warm milk, to be talked into sleep.

The bombers had not yet stopped coming.

He saw the clock: a tall mahogany piece, gilt at the top, a pendulum that had not stopped all through the shivering of the city. It said: 8:25. He didn’t know if it could possibly be right. It seemed the bombs had been falling for days.

He watched the clock. There had to be a last bomb, the diminishing roar of engines in retreat, soon, please, soon. He saw the minute hand of the clock twitch forward, the first time he ever noticed a minute being completed and recorded that way. He still liked to check his own watch rather than look at the clocks on Swiss railway stations, which also jerk forward on the minute.

At eight-thirty, the last bomber droned away, went from the sound of engines to the sound of drums and then to the sound of the rain starting again. All this time, the lights did not fail. But now they failed.

He wanted not to have to play his father’s part anymore. He wanted his father there.

Lucia came home on foot, at eleven by the tall pendulum clock.

She came through the door and Nicholas, instead of wanting her to hold him, wanted to kick and thump and beat and bruise her. He was never so relieved, so furious, so happy, so wretchedly abandoned to every emotion he had known so far in a brief life.

She said: “I got down to the Adlon cellar. I couldn’t get out, and I couldn’t get to you.”

Her shoes looked as though they had been cut.

“I never meant to leave you here, not when there was a raid—”

Nicholas showed no feeling.

“You know,” she said, “people started dancing afterward. They danced in the streets.”

Her hair, which had been gloriously red, was caked in soot and dust. Her eyes were tired, not bright at all. Her dress was intact but he noticed, as she walked away, that she was not wearing stockings. She had penciled the line of a stocking seam on the back of each calf, and the line had smudged.

She turned to Nicholas and said: “I do it all for you.”

But he knew that could not be true.

He heard Berlin.

A bombed city creaks. The glass gets splintered, and it crashes often. There aren’t any more old, solid verticals; they’ve all fallen. There are new verticals: water going up like a rope and falling in plumes against flaming walls, breaks in the road going up in orange fire where the gas mains broke, the roots of trees and the twists of melted cable in the air. Things rumble and predict trouble everywhere and anywhere at random. You go quickly in case the collapse begins while you’re still in range of girders, doorjambs, flying lintels.

And the newspapers still came on time.

Then there’s the sound of fire. It’s never truly out. If you’ve ever seen peat fires, you’ll know the kind of fire that burns just under the surface, that seems to smolder forever. Fire and dust together accounted for all the air.

The same night the bombs fall, the fires rear up and they run. As they run, they seem to press the air which is already dense with dirt and fire. The air itself becomes fire.

And the streets are all bright as in the daytime, brighter now because the November cloud and gloom are beaten back by this air which is fire. It never gets dark. You think it will never get dark again. But then day comes, and the smoke is so dense you think it will never be light again.

As soon as it seems nothing worse is going to come from the sky, people are out. They’re slipping here, slipping there. They carry things. They have furniture on little carts. Lorries roll, maybe salvaging, maybe thieving. There’s so much soot, you can’t make out faces, and anyone might wear a mask.

He remembered a shop that sold antiques. It burned for days, and as it burned, the flames lit up the shine of brocades and silk inside, all red and gold.

As for the apartment, the windows were gone. The frames of the windows, something you always imagine as fixed and solid, now rattled and creaked. There were random doors. There was no heat, no light, no water, no gas. Someone had written on the side of the front door of the building, in chalk: “Lucia, where are you? We have room for you.”

He went into his room and tried to close the door. It would not quite close.

He had a boy’s world in that room, separate from all the prettiness and fussiness of his mother’s rooms. He had pictures of machines on the walls, cut out from advertisements: cars and trucks, mostly. There were Ford cars parked in some medina under palm trees, Ford trucks in the shelter of a plane’s propellers, Fords with wood-gas generators “for the home front.” There were Mercedes roaring out of the horizon on caterpillar tracks, with bombers overhead like a guard of honor woven on a tapestry, and the cover of
Deutsche Kraftfahrt
for June 1939, with two pale cross-country Opels rambling over an open field; and a poster with an Opel rumbling over a slack wood bridge held up by railway sleepers.

All the shaking and settling had torn only one of them: a magazine page on the far wall, for Opel, “the dependable one.” He liked that particular picture. Light beams cut a parallelogram out of the dark sky. Under that, two Opels stood, nose to nose, their headlight beams as solid as running water and on the same downward track. His father drove an Opel when he was in Bavaria, when he was a father still.

The emergency services were on the streets. They had cigarettes and coffee, which seemed astonishing, and they had liver sausage and buttered bread and soup. Lucia liked the cigarettes. She found chocolate, too, and an old salami in the cupboard which stank but which she insisted was still good.

There was another smell Nicholas could not place for a while among all the other smells that go with disorder. It tasted like the dead of winter at the back of the throat. It spoiled everyone’s breathing, as though it could make the air too thick to breathe. Someone told him, later, it was the fires in every backyard, the coal supply of the whole city for the winter, all burning and all impossible to put out.

They couldn’t even trust the bombers anymore. They’d come, and they’d drop nothing, and then they’d come over again. Sometimes they passed over three times before anything started to fall. It was because the Americans had reached Berlin at last, so Nicholas’s friend said. And if the Americans could get here, they could come in tanks. And the Russians could come, too.

Lucia still had her job at the film company, but the studios were all flattened now. Two or three times, she took Nicholas to the Swiss consulate. It was the only building still standing in the diplomatic quarter.