The Pieces from Berlin

by Michael Pye

  They couldn’t not talk. He spoke Italian, but in serious, Germanic gobbets. She tried to speak German, and she sounded absurdly like the bankers to whom she’d been polite all her life.

  He helped her on the ski lift, which was a hook on a cable on a wire. Then he helped her on the snow. She didn’t need to be touched; she balanced exactly, flung herself down slopes with no fear at all. He followed, overtook, turned in and out of her path without flurrying her, danced an arcing, whispering dance around her.

  The snow was still wonderfully empty in those days. You felt you had come out into a wilderness, not a playground. At lunchtime, skis racked against a rope, poles jammed in the snow like a strong metallic bush, you looked out onto unmarked white.

  She was entirely dazzled. She laughed hugely.

  At night, the silence was perfect. Houses enclosed all the music and talk. And she walked beside Müller under a white moon, and she saw shooting stars for the first time in her life, each one arbitrary and lovely, no use watching out for them.

  He skied; she knew that much. He was some kind of banker or accountant; that meant he was like her father. Her father had been a perfectly ordinary clerk, out of a small Piedmont town, with ambition, so the question of status did not necessarily arise. He was tall, hard, graceful; she loved to watch him. She thought she would be able to long for him properly when she went back to Milan. Longing was what she had in mind, even then.

  The last day, he hired a sleigh. They put the luggage on the back, and the horses took off and neither one of them had worked out how the story was supposed to end.

  The breath from the horses smoked out ahead of them. And the woods opened out and they saw new valleys, new rock, and water frozen as it fell. They weren’t high on the mountain anymore.

  He helped her onto the train, like a gentleman. Then he jumped aboard too. She didn’t know how far he thought he was going, but he wouldn’t step down, and the train rolled slowly down the mountain between banks of still white.

  He didn’t have his passport, so he got off the second train just before the Gotthard.

  The night they married was also the first night they made love. Lucia remembered so clearly how she anticipated glory at last, and what she got was comfort, which was nowhere near enough.

  Müller surrounded her body with his, was infinitely patient, was considerate and gentle, was absorbed in her beauty, which was, in the circumstances, of very little interest to her. She wanted to be shocked and excited, but he was always waiting for her.

  Her parents did not seem to mind that she was leaving Italy. Her mother was making sharp little jokes about the “interests of the state” nowadays, and how Mussolini wouldn’t allow pictures of women too thin or too wiry to bear babies; “It’s an offense to be smart,” she said. “Think of that.” Her father’s authority had grown a little dusty. He said he wished he’d been a proper captain of industry, which required inheritance, and not a moneylender, which kept you a kind of omnipotent clerk. It was important that someone do what you did; but you did not matter in particular.

  Lucia, in the next few years, had all too much time to think. She wondered if her parents would have had the same easy tolerance if she had presented some carpet man from Turkey, an ironworker from Lille, a peasant from the Alsace; she wondered if they would still have been glad for her to go. She at least produced an accountant who might have ambitions, and a Swiss who could get her out of the flag-ridden streets and the thuggish countryside and keep her safe.

  So Lucia Rossi went to live with Hans Peter Müller in a small town in Bavaria. He was the accountant in a firm that made buttons.

  He knew things. He knew about bone and horn and glass and Bakelite and brass and the knock-on pricing differential between hole and shank. He talked about such things. He once explained to her, when she’d run out of ways to stop him, that it took phenol and formaldehyde to make Bakelite.

  She had every reason to resent him. He remained such a ruthlessly kind man. She woke up beside him, and he was kind. She drank coffee with someone sweet and generous. And when he finally walked down the garden path to go to work, checking the five flowering shrubs, then she’d go deep into the house, the inner rooms, and she learned to bellow into the corners without making a sound, her face red, her cheeks out, not even the sound of breathing.

  She’d have coffee again, and read the social columns: Bella Fromm, she remembered, in the Vossische Zeitung. She started to be able to remember all the dinners and musicales and galas and picnics Bella went to, not just imagine them. There weren’t many galas in their small town.

  And it was a town so small that nobody looked directly at anyone else; everything was a rumor. The mayor shot himself and everyone said the police made him do it, but they didn’t know if he was a crook or a pervert or Hitler’s best friend or all three. Everyone resented everything—the price of meat because everything had to be sent to Berlin, the fact that you couldn’t get asparagus in tins. Lucia learned something. In small places, it isn’t that people know everything about you, because that would be tolerable. Each of them makes you up and sticks to his story, and each of them has a slightly different version.

  She had to get out, obviously. But she couldn’t simply run. She was a wife, and as such had a proper place, guaranteed by papers. She was a foreigner, too. Her parents did not want her back in the muddle of fascist Italy. She thought perhaps she could find herself a lover, pick someone out of the main street, someone from the button factory or the butcher’s shop.

  She decided, instead, on art.

  The Herr Doktor Professor liked to talk about Siennese painting, about Beccafiumi and the Roman career of Il Sodoma, and about Meissen porcelain. He knew everything about Meissen, and passed it on. He also insisted that the Nazis were excellent persons because they would bring back the Kaiser, and the glorious great estates, and there would again be a shining culture all through Germany.

  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 p
articular 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, thr
ew 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.