The Pieces from Berlin

by Michael Pye

  “How are you? How’s Henry?”

  So she told him: disconcerted, alarmed, fretful, not quite sure what to do next. And Henry was perfectly fine. But she now had her own business, family business.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” Jeremy was saying. “You have no legal obligation. I’m not even sure you have a moral obligation.”

  “But it’s my story, too.”

  Jeremy said nothing for a moment. “Do you really want me to argue the point?” he said.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “You won’t let me understand.”

  “I always felt uneasy.”

  “That’s not true. She bought you cream cakes at the Dolder and you felt happy.”

  “I felt uneasy. Nobody talking. You go deaf with the silence in the end.”

  “You just have a hint. A suggestion.”

  “Someone from Berlin. A table that Lucia has, that’s enough to reduce Sarah Freeman to tears. It’s obvious enough.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Nothing ever gets resolved,” she said. “Nothing. I’m going to call Georg Meier.”

  “You always liked Meier.”

  “Fuck you,” Helen said.

  Later that night, he sent a fax: a little scrawled short story, what a woman and a man might be doing by a lake, very pretty in its way. A cop came along and the man had to say he couldn’t help himself, Officer, and nor could she.

  She hugged the paper, then smoothed it out, and then she went to bed alone. The next day, which was the day Lucia did not go to the shop, she’d pay her a visit at home.

  Helen allowed no settling, absolutely no ease: she circled in the room, considering a table, pacing in a state of mild embarrassment at how much aggression she exposed simply by moving and moving. She remembered this kind of physical language from negotiations, and how you had to remember at times to whisper with your body.

  Lucia had posed herself on a neat, embroidered chair, by a table with a tasseled lamp, in front of tall, closed curtains.

  Lucia said, loudly: “I suppose you’d like some coffee?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s a little late.”

  “I’m an old woman. But I’m perfectly well organized. I can make coffee.”

  “I know that,” Helen said.

  Lucia, dismissively, flickered her fingers against the arms of the chair.

  Silence again. Helen noticed for the first time that she was staring at a photograph of her own father: in plain, cheap silver, but in a prominent place.

  She wondered if Lucia could sense that something had changed, something was going to happen: but the idea was absurd unless there were already lawyers involved. Lawyers always know when other lawyers are busy; they scent work on the wind.

  If Lucia knew nothing, Helen must be discreet.

  But she wanted confrontation. She wanted Lucia to change: not to be the lovely grandmother anymore, but to show herself as the woman in the indictments.

  She organized cushions.

  Lucia considered the trouble with being old: that you couldn’t resist other people’s kindness. They would always feel entitled to come back. Resist them too much, and they were sure resistance must be proof of decline, that you had something to hide. Resist at all, and you were only being selfless, trying not to trouble them too much.

  Lucia said: “What is it that you can’t bring yourself to say to me?”

  Nothing. Helen said nothing and made a great, resounding statement out of it. Then:

  “I met a woman called Sarah Freeman. She said her friends in Zurich love your shop,” Helen said.

  “They’re very kind. Do I know them?”

  “They always say you have such perfect taste. That you know how to find exactly what they like. That you always did.”

  Now it was Lucia’s turn to make silence operate in the room. She did it by seeming to fade, her face vague as though it were dusty, her shoulders down, her eyes almost closed under the weight of fine eyelashes. Helen wondered about the sheer weight of her routines: about the fifty-five years of never going to the shop on a Thursday, the gap that all those Thursdays must make in a life.

  “If you want to know things, I can tell you things,” Lucia said, suddenly. “I do remember things, you know.”

  Helen shrugged. It was the gesture of a cross child who’d later regret refusing the offer of something sweet.

  Silence. The two wills tussled: the will to make ordinary talk, the will not to listen to anything but a confession.

  But once she was out of the apartment, Helen knew exactly what she had to do. It was only a couple of days since she met Sarah Freeman in the street. If the woman was in a hotel then, she might still be there. She couldn’t do nothing when all those people doing nothing had allowed Lucia her rich, fine life.

  She wrote a brief note. She said again that she was the granddaughter of Lucia Müller-Rossi, and that was why she was concerned for Sarah Freeman: that she would understand Sarah’s suspicion, but she strongly believed that the wrongs of the last war had to be righted. They should have been righted at the time; that failure had to be undone.

  She would like to offer help, the names of lawyers. She would do anything she could to support Sarah Freeman in any legitimate claim she might have. She realized the difficulties of dealing with a foreign legal system in an unfamiliar city. She offered, in effect, to be family.

  So where would Sarah Freeman stay? She hadn’t seemed grand, and she wasn’t an age when ostentation was automatic. She hadn’t seemed poor; if she was, she would hardly have chosen Zurich in autumn. She would probably not be up at the Dolder, and probably not down in the raucous streets of the Niederdorf. She would be in some decent, comfortable middle-class hotel.

  Helen checked the phone book, and then she went out walking in a mean, faint rain. Her shoes were quickly wet; she thought that might make the hotel clerks suspicious as she walked in. People with messages come by car; they don’t walk in from the rain all sodden, as though they’re not quite sure where they’re going.

  So the wetness of her soles reminded her: you must be authoritative. She could do that, easily. She went to the desk and said she wanted to leave a message for—she’d have to say Mrs. Sarah Freeman, she supposed, not Miss.

  The clerk checked a list, and apologized and went directly back to checking bills.

  She set out for the next hotel and the next. Some of them were all chrome; some of them tried to look like drawing rooms; one had a basket of apples at the door. Some of them advertised their restaurant, trying to sell tourists on something “typical.” Some were tucked back on pleasant, shrubby streets, but their parking lots gave them away.

  Sarah Freeman wouldn’t be at one of those anonymous, suburban towers: Helen already had a sense of the woman that could not involve staying in some businessman’s shelter, a standard and padded pile. She had time in the rain to ask herself just why she was so sure, what notion of a woman like Sarah Freeman was ready in her mind before she even met her.

  A hotel with a view of the lake, just. They were sorry. A hotel with a view of tramlines, and a lobby so narrow two people could hardly pass. They were sorry. A hotel flying the rainbow flag and proposing a discotheque. She didn’t bother.

  The rain was in her hair and in her bones: chill, wretched damp. She’d set out on a kind of pilgrimage and she was now a convincing pilgrim: determined, exhausted, cold, and manifestly, unarguably, magnificently sincere. Or so she hoped, so she hoped.

  She didn’t think, in her time with the bank, she’d ever been quite so self-conscious. But then she had mostly been selling a deal, a proposition, an abstraction, not asking a stranger to trust her at once, without papers to read or figures to scan.

  A hotel close to the Kunsthaus: they thought they knew the name. A clerk took the letter. Then the clerk came back, shook his head, and said, no, that was a Miss Hermione Freeman.

  Helen didn’t turn away for a moment. Hermione was an absurd name; she could
hear that. It was stuck between dowager and music hall. A Hermione might easily claim to be a Sarah. Or else Hermione Freeman might have thought it impolitic to give a Müller-Rossi her full name.

  The clerk said, firmly: “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Would you like a taxi, Madame?”

  So she shook her head and she did as she was told, so indirectly but so forcefully: she went away.

  She kicked up rain from the sidewalks. She rushed along. She even ran for a few hundred meters. She stood at a street corner and she stretched for a moment. She thought of stopping for coffee, but she wanted to get on: to cover every possibility, check every hotel.

  She walked across another forecourt, into another genteel lobby: no lifts, a desk tucked away to one side like an extra window.

  She pulled the envelope out of her briefcase one more time.

  “I’d like to leave this for Mrs. Sarah Freeman,” she said.

  The girl at the desk, who had one of those angelic faces as open as a calculating machine, said brightly: “I could tell her you’re here. If you like.”

  Helen said: “Yes. Why don’t you tell her there’s a letter. Then if she wants to come down—”

  “I could say she has to sign for it,” the girl said. She had such nice, surprising country manners, not wanting to disappoint in any way.

  Helen didn’t like to sit on the pretty chintz, so she stood in the middle of the lobby, was considered by a waiter carrying a tray of Birchermuesli, shifted aside when two large Italians came by with aggressive luggage.

  The girl was answering other phone calls. Perhaps she hadn’t called Sarah Freeman, or Sarah Freeman did not want to come down, or this was the wrong Sarah Freeman.

  Helen thought of hotel detectives: the moment they come to ask if they can help. The hotel was too decorous for that, she thought; and besides, she was waiting for a guest.

  Water puddled around her feet.

  She heard the elevator doors open.

  “You have a letter for me,” Sarah Freeman said to the desk girl.

  The girl produced it. “It’s from that lady over there,” she said.

  And Sarah Freeman turned to see Helen.

  Helen smiled. Sarah didn’t react. Instead, she asked for a letter opener, a silvery thing. She slit open the envelope. She held the paper away from her eyes; perhaps she should have brought her reading glasses, but was—was too vain, perhaps? Helen needed every possible clue.

  Sarah read.

  “I thought,” she said to the girl, “I had to sign for this. That it was something important.”

  Helen said: “I would very much like to talk to you.”

  Now the girl at the desk was embarrassed by the possibility of a drama. She was absorbed in the pigeonholes for letters, able to hear, not needing to acknowledge.

  Helen said: “I would like to help.”

  “You look half drowned.”

  “I didn’t know where you were staying. I didn’t know if you were still in Zurich. So I walked.”

  Sarah said: “You want me to trust you.”

  “I would like it. If you could trust me just enough.”

  “I don’t understand why you care.”

  “If I don’t make things right, who will?”

  Sarah couldn’t stand anymore the sight of a wet, sad girl: like a hopeful child. She said: “You have to dry off.” She went to ask the desk clerk for towels, which required a call to housekeeping, and the sudden irruption of a waiter with a tray of bleached white cloth.

  “She’ll dry off in my room,” Sarah said.

  She sat like a child, legs at the edge of the bed: hair toweled, coat hung, frock by a radiator, in a white shift. But she was very aware that there was no simple exchange of roles, the carer suddenly needing care. Sarah Freeman was not the mother who brings warmth and hot drinks. She sat apart, at the desk, and she watched Helen intently; and Helen had to tolerate this, in case it was the price of trust.

  “All this is about a table,” Sarah said. “It’s nothing important.”

  “I don’t know the story,” Helen said. “But I know the other stories. I think it’s about something very important indeed.”

  “You don’t understand. If it was truly important, I could never bring myself to trust you. I can trust you if it’s about a table.”

  “I have a lawyer friend,” Helen said.

  “Yes, I expect you do.” Sarah tried to act as if she was in a place of work, nothing as intimate as a small hotel bedroom with wet clothes; she even shuffled the papers on the desk, the tourist brochures and the menus and the giveaway magazines about expensive things, as though she might need to file them in a moment. “I suppose,” she said, “you would like to know something about this table?”

  Helen said: “Only if you want to tell me.” But she didn’t mean it. “I’m only telling you this,” Sarah said, “as a rehearsal. I suppose I shall have to tell it again.”

  Helen shivered. Her hair was still a little damp against her neck. But the shiver was for something quite different: the change that was about to happen. Sarah had been a cause, on which the moral issues were all clear, and she was about to become a particular person, and this was not a comfortable moment for either one of them—not for Sarah, who would have to acknowledge that she could so easily be generalized, nor for Helen, who would have to deal with all the floating strands of someone’s history in order to keep her attitudes loud and clear.

  “I was married once. To a man called Max Lindemann, in Berlin, in the war. He was a doctor. He was a proctologist, actually. He was a Jew, so he’d been expelled from the German medical association. He was,” she said, “a remarkable man, very logical and precise. He found a lawyer and persuaded him that if he couldn’t practice medicine, then he ought to get a refund on his subscription to the association. The lawyer went to court, and the court actually agreed. Dr. Lindemann won. You forget how perfectly ready people sometimes are to keep going in a straight line, even if they start from grotesque places.

  “The association felt obliged to appeal, and the case was heard very quickly. They had a very simple argument: the details didn’t matter because in law Lindemann was dead. All Jews in the Third Reich were legally dead. So he couldn’t possibly be an active member of the association and he couldn’t have any rights. I imagine their lawyer looked very sure of himself.

  “Max loved telling the story. He’d tell it to everyone, because he didn’t have any other victories to tell them. You see: he’d expected the association to argue the way they did. But he hadn’t bargained for his own lawyer, who was a witty man and a dangerous one. He stood up and said that if Dr. Lindemann was dead, then I was due a pension: Mrs. Lindemann, Sarah. And what’s more, the judge listened. He kept asking: How could a man be dead when he tried to practice medicine, but alive when his wife needed a pension?

  “And Max was famous for this. He made sure he was famous for this. It didn’t make the papers, of course, but the story went everywhere else, as stories do, where there are people to listen. This group and that group. The houses where Jews had to live.”

  She said: “You know about the houses, do you?”

  Helen nodded.

  “It’s wonderful,” Sarah said, “how people think they know already.” She went into the bathroom for a glass of water. She kept talking. “His victory only worked on paper. And you can lose paper. Max couldn’t practice medicine. He could advise, but he couldn’t cure.

  He could diagnose, he knew what was wrong, but he couldn’t prescribe drugs and he couldn’t operate, not even on Jews. He knew everything and he could do nothing at all to help. Poor Max.

  “He started to believe that things had to change eventually. He couldn’t have gone on if he didn’t think that. All the wrecking and burning would be a memory and life would start up again, as it was.”

  Helen said: “And you knew my grandmother?”

  “You’re impatient. Impat
ient, already.”

  “I don’t mean that. I was trying to connect things.”

  “We knew Lucia. I suppose she liked us, in her way. We’d lost a lot, sold things to keep going, like everyone else, but we still had some paintings that weren’t all brown varnish and dark woodlands and heroes. We still had some records—some swing, some jazz, even some Al Jolson. There was a catalogue of degenerate music the Nazis put out in 1938, with a black saxophonist on the cover with the Star of David, and Max always kept it out. Nobody could object, really; it was an official catalogue. Nobody ever took it.

  “Max liked Lucia. He used to puff up when she came in, back straight, chest out. I can’t tell you how much I liked the fact that he liked her. She was lovely, and she was glossy and she was healthy and she made him come alive, just for an hour or so. And he’d talk and talk: opera in Milan, politics of La Scala, and she knew about Siennese painting and Max and I did, too. Not that it mattered much what I knew.

  “She admired some of our things. She admired the table. I told her all about it, because I had time to get interested in all sorts of things in those days. We were prisoners, we had time. I told her it was made by a man called Pierre Fléchy, who had a taste for chinoiserie, and covering every part of a table with elegant vines that mysteriously carry the flowers of peonies. I may have taught Lucia about marquetry, but I’m not sure. She talked to so many other people.

  “But she really wanted to talk to Max. And after a while, I’d see that he wasn’t as straight-backed anymore, that she wasn’t distracting him, and he was remembering that he couldn’t go out anymore or go to the theater or keep his books and his pictures or help anyone at all. So I’d interrupt and say I was sorry we had nothing we could share for dinner, and thank you for the butter.”

  She spoke like a witness in court, like a good teacher: but then, Helen thought, she’d had five decades to remember the details, and to put them into one set of words and then another.