The Pieces from Berlin (9 page)

One day she dyed her hair blond, a brittle, vicious kind of blond. She kept asking if he liked it, if he liked it at all.

The weather was going to be lovely, as usual, for Hitler’s birthday. Anyone who could go had already gone. The city was half empty. But everything was bright with low spring light.

A car came: a substantial, maybe official black car. Lucia wore trousers. She told Katya to help with the suitcases. Katya stood on the steps of the building while Lucia and Nicholas climbed into the back of the car.

Nicholas wanted to say “Good-bye” but his mother said to say nothing of the sort and he remembered that Katya was not to be told anything.

He did turn back as the car pulled away and looked at her where she still stood. He thought he caught her eye, and he thought he saw kindness there, which was not at all what he expected.

They came into a street that stood empty, except for the swastika flags of red, white, and black: still and silent and finished, except for the colors of the flags bristling and twinkling between stones, no windows left, balcony iron twisted about, stairs that went up two treads and stopped, the walls just fronts for pits and spaces where there were walls at all.

He’d gotten used to sidestepping the dung from the horses that drew carts around the city. So he was startled at the seven trucks parked along one side of the street in perfect order, large to small. He checked them like a collector: Opel Blitz, the kind that ran on gas and not diesel, and a square-cabbed Ford V3000S with a box behind the cab for firewood and a gas generator, and a Mercedes diesel with the huge insignia still, just, attached to the radiator grille.

They were unofficial trucks, going about under the remains of sundry paint jobs; the effect was like city camouflage. One looked ominously old, a canary-yellow square-backed tug, suitable for taking bread around a suburb. One looked fit to carry a whole life’s worth of furniture. Two of them carried the names of household movers.

That morning, Nicholas met his mother for the first time: saw her operate. She commanded this whole convoy. She demanded. She checked and she bustled about. She wasn’t the film clerk anymore, or the pretty woman who went out to dinner and came back late, or the mother who looked after her boy, when she could. She called the drivers together and made them listen while Nicholas fidgeted on the steps of a building which did not exist anymore.

She went inside each truck. The large one opened on newspaper and cloth and carpets, all wedged between wrapped things. The small yellow van carried boxes jammed together with blankets under and above them. Nicholas had no idea his mother had such possessions, or that they needed such protection.

When she came back from settling the drivers, she asked if he wanted to ride up front: first truck in the convoy, driver’s cab. Of course he wanted to ride there. He would be the venturer, the explorer. He would be the guard and the intelligence man. He would gobble up the great roads.

He clambered into the cab, shook the hand of the driver who had one week’s start on a fine wide moustache and smelled of tobacco and coffee. Lucia climbed up after him, and slammed the door.

The driver sounded his horn and kicked the starter button just above the gas pedal. Slowly, laboriously, the engine caught and the weight of the truck rolled forward, out of the dead street.

Nicholas saw a banner across the street: “Our walls are breaking. Not our hearts.”

He saw a statue facing the wrong way into a wall.

He knew this was not the right day to be traveling. He thought they would certainly be stopped.

He had just seen all the furniture still in the apartment, Katya starting to wipe it. But the furniture wouldn’t fill all these trucks, even if it had been loaded while he wasn’t looking.

He wanted to see what was in the trucks. Then he understood that was the very last thing he should want. “Don’t you look,” his mother always said. “Don’t you ask!”

They went slowly, in a cloud of black engine smoke, a faint smell of spilled fuel. They must have carried cans of fuel, because there was little chance of finding it along the way. Three of the trucks certainly worked on wood gas, so they had great hunchback stores and furnaces behind the driver’s cab.

Nicholas studied the road ahead as though that was the map, and he was responsible.

He saw a wasted city, dust devils getting up among the ruins, the colors all wasted and buried, leaving only ghosts of concrete and brick.

He started to sing, the driver joined in, Lucia joined in.

Lucia watched the road in the side mirror. She shifted in her seat. She looked back again. Then she leaned across Nicholas and she grabbed the wheel and she said: “Stop now. What the hell is going on?”

The driver stopped, sat back, and said with a patronizing kind of patience: “You could have run us off the road.”

“There are no trucks following us.”

“All the trucks are following us.”

“I can’t see anything on the road.”

“Listen,” the driver said, “you want to look like a convoy from the air? It doesn’t matter if we’re civilian, not to the bombers. We’re better off seven trucks, apart.”

“I’m waiting here for the other trucks.”

“We go down the autobahn, they kill us. Seven trucks together, they’d never believe we weren’t military.”

“I haven’t gone to all this trouble,” his mother said, “to give some fucking truck driver the profits.”

And they waited until the trucks caught up, stopped behind, and the drivers each came out to ask what was happening.

After that, Lucia insisted the convoy stick together and stop often, and at each stop she’d get out and open each truck’s doors and examine the cargo. The men had strong, cold coffee and beer, and bread and sausages.

They rolled south all day, skirting places. And they didn’t travel down the autobahns, which had already been broken by bombing; they used old roads, side roads where they could.

Nicholas saw soldiers on horseback, soldiers sleeping in a ditch. He half expected lances and pikes and cannon out of some tapestry; he looked through the windows, and he looked back in time.

The driver said they were lucky it was spring. In winter, you had to warm up the engine with a blowtorch and then you had to rock the whole damn truck back and forth to get the pistons and the bearings moving. Nicholas listened to every detail. He had a small boy’s fetish for the ways machines work, for figures and specifications: two-liter, six-cylinder, however many horsepower. He could hold the whole machine in his head, and somehow control its performance on these doubtful roads.

They kept moving at night, lights fixed down on the road, with the truck engines masking out the sounds of any planes above. Sometimes, they crossed other convoys that were on the move, shadows on the other side of valleys, great metal machines suddenly smoking out a wood: official, drab, purposeful convoys. At three in the morning, nobody could stay awake; so they parked off the road in the shelter of trees and Nicholas slept with his mother in the cab. The driver took a blanket down to the ground.

Before he slept, he propped stones under the front and back fenders. He said it would take the strain off the leaf springs and stop the truck rocking in the night.

Nicholas didn’t sleep at first. He could check the trees through the window. He listened for engines, planes, wind in the branches, animals, birds, coughs and snoring from the drivers, and he watched for lights. But he must have fallen asleep, because there is nothing in his memories until the moment of waking up abruptly and staring into an unknown face, under a cap, with a uniform coat and its collar pulled high: the sort of face you see across counters, across desks.

Lucia also woke.

She did something so curious: she pouted and she half complained, as though she’d been caught underdressed by a man she quite liked. Nicholas didn’t understand such things, but he saw the oddness of her reaction—no shock, not even surprise, just complete absorption in keeping the attention of the man at the window.

She told Nicholas to stay in the truck.

There were two cars parked on the road, long black cars: staff cars, Mercedes cabriolets, with great rolls of mudguard on either side of the high radiator and their enormous headlights blinded. Nicholas classified the cars, as usual. The first one looked like a 320, so it had to belong to someone important.

There were six men, standing by the cars in long leather coats. There must have been some light—moonlight, starlight—because he distinctly remembered glints on the coats as though they were polished. Lucia was arguing, gesturing.

He had to trust her so perfectly. They were out in the middle of a wood, nobody around, six men with guns in big, official, influential cars, and she had to explain how seven civilian trucks were on the move, how a woman came to be in charge, how an Italian and Swiss woman could have business here, how anybody could legitimately be heading for Switzerland; because Nicholas knew she could not tell a lie. There was no time or material for a lie.

The sky began to come back: like a pale cloth, then all suffused with pink, then bright.

The men seemed amused. Nicholas didn’t know if that was good or not. They seemed to like to keep Lucia talking at the roadside, to alarm her, to make her flirt and chat and charm, to detain her.

Nicholas watched the sky turn red behind the trees.

Lucia shrugged her shoulders hugely. She came back to the truck and she picked up a thick envelope of papers for them to read.

One of the men, the oldest, considered the papers and clicked his heels and said: “Madame” in a parade-ground voice, as though he meant it. It was definitely “Madame”; he was trying to be respectful to a foreigner.

The sky was blue like a robin’s egg is blue. Lucia smelt of sweat when she got back into the cab.

He should have asked her. But he wouldn’t have known how to frame the questions: What are we carrying, why are we carrying it, why does it matter, why did they let us go? If he’d been able to ask those things, he would already have learned mistrust, and he still had to depend on Lucia.

Besides, he saw how serious she was. This was not the time for him to ask questions.

Much later, when he woke up in the long nights, eyes wide, brain stopped, and wondered how he could even be connected to such things, he had others to protect. He wanted wife and child, all the years, to live as they wanted and not to concern themselves with a convoy creeping down to the Alps. He didn’t want to infect them with his doubts.

So the doubts grew until they stole his sleep. He was a realistic man, and knew he never had a choice—just a boy in a wood in a war—but he was sure he could never trust anyone who claimed that all morality was suspended for them because they had no choice. Year by year, he learned not to trust his own story, then not to trust himself.

The official cars droned away into the dawn. The drivers woke, complained, went off into the woods, and came back for cold coffee. One of them wanted to make a fire, but Lucia kicked wet leaves over the first flames and told him to get on.

They rolled around Magdeburg and Dessau and Weissenfels. They avoided Bayreuth and Nuremberg and Augsburg. They held to local roads, and then made dashes on the autobahns where they could, and then went back to the slow, narrow roads that they blocked for hours. Lucia muttered that she didn’t know if it was worse to be bombed by the Allies or harangued by the peasants up ahead and behind them. She used a bad word before “peasants.”

They saw the smoke coming up from Stuttgart.

Lucia argued with the driver; she wanted nothing to happen without her orders. She said they’d be faster crossing Lake Constance, which he insisted on calling the Bodensee. He said she was crazy to think the ferries would be running as usual. She said he lacked faith in the Reich. He said: “And you have so much faith you’re moving to Switzerland?”

She said: “Then we’ll go in by Thayngen and Schaffhausen.”

Lucia never wanted to stop. The driver insisted. There was a cacophony of shouts and horns. When the truck rolled to a halt, and braking had begun to seem a long, slow, chancy process, they all looked back.

Five trucks followed. There should have been six.

“We lost one,” said the driver, complacently.

Lucia kicked him once, hard, in the shins. He still had that soft, half-fancying look on his face, happy to be doing a job for this bright lady, but Nicholas wasn’t sure his mother had done the right thing.

“Then find him,” his mother said.

One of the other drivers, a man in late middle age carrying a lifetime of beer in front of him, came rolling up. “Went just off the road,” he said. “We’ll need a tow rope to get him out.”

Lucia said: “Do it.”

The heavy-bellied man checked the driver, just to see his reaction, just to know what to do. He couldn’t tell because Lucia’s manner and her accent were at war.

She sat on a wall. She watched the convoy, her particular convoy, turn back on the road. Nicholas never saw her face so bare, so tight and angry.

Nothing was safe until everything was safe across the border. And she wanted to be safe.

A black bird came down in the next meadow, then another. They could hear, over the gunning of engines half a mile back, sheep blathering in a field. They could hear the wind.

“It’s nice here,” Nicholas said, wanting something innocent to say. “Is it pretty like this in Switzerland?”

She rounded on him. “Pretty? Like this?” She spat. He never saw her spit before. “This is all,” and she reached for a word violent enough, “landscape.”

Nicholas said: “But the birds—”

“Some people,” she said, “like birds. Some people like life.”

“There’s life here.”

“What’s living,” she said, “is out there with its tail up shitting. That’s all.”

Nicholas stood up. “I like it,” he said, obstinately.

She wouldn’t answer. He could read a kind of contempt in her eyes: he had given up, he was not struggling on. He liked fields, and birds, and landscape; he did not value will, plans, organizing.

Breath knotted up in his stomach.