The Pieces from Berlin

by Michael Pye

  “Nothing changes then. It’s always easier when nothing changes.”

  “I’ll come with you to the airport.”

  “I’ll take a taxi. It’s easier.”

  “I’d like to come with you.”

  Sarah laid down her knife and fork. “You tell me. Why does everybody think I need them?”

  Clarke was crestfallen.

  “I don’t mean to be unkind. I came here for a silly reason, and I’ve done all I want to do.”

  She seemed to be willing him to agree.

  “I can’t do any more,” she said.

  “But—”

  “Have you any idea what I dream?”

  Clarke looked at her, old eyes wide. They were in the Kunsthaus restaurant, big square tables far apart, couples and quartets being sociably loud, and yet he thought the question hung around for a moment, suspended on silence.

  Then the forks clattered, the talk swelled again.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah said. Then she ate very quickly, as though she regretted what she had said, and she said: “I don’t know how she got away with it, all these years.”

  “You have to tell me what she did.”

  Sarah shrugged. “I only know what happened to me.”

  “Then you have to tell me—”

  “People never grasp it. They say they understand, but they never do.”

  “Try me.”

  “I lived in a shed,” Sarah said. “The sheds they had on allotments, on the summer gardens. A wooden shed with curtains, two meters by three. I lived there for a year.

  “It was very full. Rakes, spades, forks, hoes, brooms. Raffia and drawers and nails and dust. Seeds drying. A pile of old magazines to read in summer. There were tools hanging on the walls, and sometimes I caught myself on them and I sucked at the cut to try to stop infection.

  “The shed belonged to friend, a baker. He brought food every day, almost every day, and took away the waste in an old bucket. He said he walked backward over his tracks so it wouldn’t be clear where he was going so often. I don’t know what good that did.

  “We couldn’t move much, two meters by three, and there were two of us: me, and a boy. The boy had stayed on to do cemetery work and then it was too late to get away and he had to hide, too. In winter, sometimes the rats got the cloth we used to block the drafts.

  “Lucia doesn’t know all this. I’m sure she doesn’t.”

  “She ought to know,” Peter Clarke said, “if it’s her responsibility.”

  Sarah spoke rather quietly.

  “Our friend couldn’t carry water every day because it would be too conspicuous. We couldn’t wash and drink, both. So we washed when it rained and I could move some of the planks in the roof and then it was hard to put the planks back so the water puddled on the floor, and we slept there. And I had to move the planks silently. We coughed silently. We shat silently. I wasn’t private, not for a moment, for a year.

  “The boy lay there and I wanted to sing to him, tell him stories, but we had to keep as silent as we could. And all the day and all the night I wondered what was left outside our box. There were old curtains at the window. I didn’t look through because I was afraid I would find someone looking back.”

  Peter wanted to hold her hand. He thought of ghost stories: of white moon faces seen through dirty glass.

  “I am,” Sarah said, “another one of those terrible stories. They get so familiar with time. I do have another history: my history as Sarah Freeman. I’m not going to give that up just to be angry again.”

  Clarke said: “I’ll get you your table. I’ll—”

  “It’s never just about an object. It’s about the whole past.”

  “Sometimes I envy you,” Clarke said. “Being able to claim back the past.”

  “Envy?” said Sarah Freeman.

  The remains of the meal lay heavy on the table. The waiter who came to see if everything was all right, to move the plates and make the usual offers, stayed away.

  “It went on for so long I stopped imagining things. I couldn’t imagine the feel of a chair, hot food, a bed. Anything.

  “Then there were three whole days,” Sarah said. “Nobody came. I remember the boy’s skin: it was as thin and as blue as watered milk. And it was quiet at night, too. I’d been in Berlin all through the war, and quiet was the one thing I couldn’t stand—no engines, no bombs, just fire and wind, hissing and whispering out there where I couldn’t see.

  “I had this absurd idea I should change things. But I couldn’t change things outside the shed, so I thought I’d get up and change the tools around. The rake for the spade. The fork for the hoe. I’d make the shed change, and it wouldn’t seem like a prison anymore. But I didn’t have the strength. You know what it’s like to be impossibly weak, where your legs don’t answer you when you try to stand up? And besides, if I changed things, then we could never get about safely at night. I couldn’t drop anything, hit anything; there must be no noise at all. And besides, I was hungry and I knew I couldn’t waste my strength.

  “I so much wanted it to rain.”

  The restaurant room, cool already, seemed to lose its last colors. Clarke wanted her to go on, and he wanted her to stop, wanted to spare her the pain of telling him, wanted her to tell him everything so that he could—could somehow become her equal in pain, perhaps, or simply find a cause, a wrong to right. He would not have been able to separate the two.

  “I was sure he’d come, my friend. He always came. I couldn’t hear anything at all when he came, I couldn’t look out, I just had to trust. Then the latch would flick up suddenly, and I had to learn to trust all over again. There was nowhere to hide.

  “But he hadn’t come, and I was empty. I kept rubbing my fingers together, to keep them from going to sleep. I have to do that now I’m very old, but this was fifty years ago. More than fifty years.

  “And then I started to think: I could move. I could go outside. Probably there wouldn’t be anyone there. But I’d been shut up so long, curled up, always wrestling for a bit of space the boy didn’t want. We might as well have been married.

  “The third day came. It didn’t rain, so there wasn’t any water. It was still very quiet. I thought my friend—my good, good friend—must be dead. Or maybe they caught him, in which case we had to get out of there quickly.

  “I remember feeling flushed as though I was exhausted, and then touching the metal of an old, rusted spade which seemed very cold indeed.

  “And then I was truly angry. I’d come through so much, the boy was still breathing, too. We couldn’t waste all the year we’d been concentrating on staying alive.

  “So I prized the door open. Very slightly. I pushed at the door and it began to slip open, rotting on its hinges. The hinges were quiet; my friend always kept them oiled. I put all my weight on my legs. I hadn’t done that for a long time.

  “And I looked out. The whole world seemed so huge.”

  Clarke said: “It was like that when the guards weren’t there anymore. At the prisoner-of-war camp. You couldn’t really imagine going for a walk and not being stopped by a wall.” Then he regretted what he said. Perhaps she needed the uniqueness of what had happened to her much more than any companionable sense of things shared. Perhaps she didn’t need to know what he recognized.

  “I’d been imagining what was happening outside, all those months. You do, you know. You hear the sounds and you make a panorama out of them. You hear the thunder and the blasts and you sometimes see the colors of fire when you open the roof for the rain. And now, I looked out and I saw—I saw it was all over.

  “The boy pretended he could stand, but he couldn’t, not even with his hands braced against the sides of the shed door. I told him he’d have to walk, I couldn’t help him. He took his hands off the sides of the door, and he teetered for a moment. All bones and angles. Then his legs folded up and he was down on the threshold of the hut.

  “I was furious with him, of course. I didn’t have the strength to help, a
nd I knew I had to help. I kept wiping my hands on my skirt. I wasn’t even surprised—a growing boy, a whole year keeping still, with not enough food. I couldn’t leave him there, because if my friend hadn’t come, then something must be terribly wrong.

  “I kept thinking it was the quiet that was wrong.”

  She took her napkin and folded it exactly. “I am telling you my dream,” she said. “It happened once, and now that I think about Lucia, it happens again and again and again.”

  She summoned the waiter. “I’ll tell you the rest,” she said. “I just need a little walk.”

  There was a fine fountain of gray stone, water very clear and hardly moving. Sarah looked into it for a moment, composed herself, and talked again: walking with Clarke as though with a school class.

  “There was a cart,” she said. “It hadn’t been used for years. The wheels were set with rust. I remember I had a bit of stone, and I banged on the wheels and the rust came off in red flakes. Then the wheels screamed.

  “I thought perhaps I could loosen the wheels. I ought to find oil. But now the door was wide open, and the shed was full of air and there was a brilliant moon and we might have been seen. And the boy kept saying he didn’t know, didn’t know about his legs and arms and he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask out loud not to be left there.

  “I was thinking: We move, with the cart, and there will be tracks. So we have to have somewhere to go, or else we’ll be caught in the streets. Our being alive will be treason.

  “I pushed that damned cart. I don’t know how. I got it to move a bit through all the grass and weeds, but then it rolled back. I tried pulling it, and I slipped over and I took the skin off my knee and I was almost relieved that I could feel the pain.

  “The boy helped. He slung himself so the cart would tip up and move on its front wheels. And I started to push.”

  She said: “You never tell me I can stop. You never let me stop.”

  “I don’t think you want to.”

  “I will always have it in my mind: the boy all flaccid, and the scream of the wheels and the jolt of the rough ground and the big high moon and the appalling quiet. The boy was crying at first, but he tried to do it quietly.

  “I saw the city at the end of the allotment fields. There wasn’t much to see. First there were the cabbages and the old brown stems. Then there was rubble, stone and ruins. It looked very old indeed, as though there’d been time already for wind and water to weather it down. There was nothing sharp or jagged.

  “I saw a statue facing the wrong way. I remember.

  “I stopped in the doorway of some building. I suppose it was an apartment building once, and I suppose I once lived somewhere like it. Only it wasn’t a building anymore. There was a sketch of steps, some chunks of wall, a couple of rather elegant window frames that rocked in the wind. And above it, stars and quiet.

  “I had to have water. But there wasn’t water, only rust from the tap: a bit of red powder, then nothing. So I went on. There wasn’t anything to do except go on.

  “And now, I don’t know what happens if I tell this story out loud. I never told anyone before. I thought if I gave you details, you’d want more, and more. You’d want to know about the ulcers on the boy’s legs. You’d want my hands slipping on the handles with blood. They did, but I never wanted to have to say that just to make people believe.

  “I can’t tell you anything else.”

  Clarke said: “I wanted to know.”

  “You don’t know anything. It was a year, and you know just one night.”

  “I can try,” Clarke said. “I didn’t live your life, but I can at least try.”

  “The boy was dead,” she said. “So I didn’t need the cart anymore.”

  She packed with a precision that made her laugh, as though she had decided she could lock everything away and go back to England. She could lose the suitcase, and all her memories with it. She could leave it in this room; but they’d send it on with mechanical decency.

  She went for a drink of water.

  Since her ticket home was open, she thought she would simply take the train to Kloten and take the first available flight. She didn’t want to book, because that might hold her up and what she most wanted was to be on her way. Then the prickling self-consciousness took over: perhaps she did not truly want to go, to be committed to a window seat on a twelve o’clock plane. Perhaps she was waiting to be stopped.

  But the bellboy had the cases in reception, and she had paid her bill, and nobody stopped her.

  Peter Clarke ought to be here. Helen should be here. Nicholas, perhaps. She’d let it be known that she was going.

  They didn’t care, either.

  It was such a spoiled girl’s complaint; she was shocked at herself. Obviously they were concerned. It could be the perfect evidence of concern that they were letting her go now that she wanted to go.

  The taxi arrived. She stepped through the awkward revolving door.

  The cases were in the back of the taxi. Nobody came for her.

  The taxi cleared the city, went into a tunnel, emerged in another city, and headed to the airport. The driver loaded her bags onto a trolley, and she struggled to check in.

  She didn’t have the will to stay, not in her muscles, not in her mind.

  She put herself in the line. There were six people ahead of her, including the inevitable couple with passport trouble who had too much luggage and wanted it all checked through to somewhere in South America with an airline nobody knew.

  She heard her own name on the air: Sarah Freeman, to go to airport information.

  Peter Clarke called the hotel room, but the voice was unfamiliar: Danish, perhaps, trying to be polite in English to this odd old man.

  She’d gone.

  And why shouldn’t she walk away from memory, from this duty that everyone wanted to impose on her? He was beginning to be clear now: that the duty lay on others to resolve things.

  He called Helen. But she was not at home. He called Nicholas, who said he hadn’t heard anything. Clarke tried to read his voice, whether he was glad, relieved, or disappointed that Sarah Freeman was going home, but he could not: Nicholas spoke to a beat he couldn’t interpret, an arbitrary lilt.

  He called the airport.

  “I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye properly,” he said.

  “I have a plane to catch.”

  “Have you checked in?”

  God, she thought: he’s such a regular person that he’d worry if she wasted the ticket.

  “If you haven’t checked in,” he said, “please come back. I wish you’d come back.”

  “Can you give me one good reason?”

  “I like you very much,” Peter Clarke said. “I want to make things right.”

  “I’m tired and I want to go home.”

  She was standing in the rush of people, at one of the three phones on the information desk, blocking the anxious relatives, the ones who needed to find the office of baggage irregularities, the nurse, the police, the insurance-company shop. She felt like some teenager being summoned back by a lover, if teenagers still loved melodrama, if they didn’t just shrug and let go.

  She was damned if she’d go back just for Peter Clarke.

  “Helen wanted you to meet Lucia again,” Clarke said.

  It couldn’t be true, she thought acutely.

  “I asked them to find you a new room,” he said.

  She never had confronted Lucia, not in that earlier life, not in this one. She wanted legal process at most, which meant keeping her distance. She wasn’t at all sure what would happen, face to face: wasn’t sure what she had felt about Lucia then, and how it would spoil her nice clean fury now.

  Lucia would know things. But she knew worse.

  She put the phone down, and Clarke knew what that meant. He called Helen to say she should be at the hotel when Sarah returned.

  “She might admit it,” Sarah said.

  Helen had her arm looped through Sarah’s arm as
they walked, slowly, along the lakeshore.

  “It worries me,” Sarah said. “She might admit it and say it was an unfortunate misunderstanding, and why didn’t I come forward before? She might simply give it back to me.”

  Helen said: “She won’t do that. If she did that, she’d be admitting all the other possible claims on her.”

  “But she could say it was impossible to find me. That I was in London, that I changed my name, that I might be just a little famous but my picture was never in the paper and why should she be reading the Sunday papers from London in any case?”

  “She didn’t want to know.” Helen took a deep breath. “She assumed you were dead.”

  “You don’t know that. I don’t know that.”

  Sarah tugged her arm from Helen’s grasp, and she started to fidget in her handbag, scrabbling under a mirror, a Chapstick, some cards and money.

  “I do know that,” she said. “You’re right, I do. Besides, why should I be the only one who isn’t entitled to know everything about someone else all at once? Everyone in Berlin knew everything about me because I was a Jew.” She tipped the bag, pushed the papers to one end. “They didn’t have to prove anything. Why do I have to prove everything?”

  Out of the new disorder in her bag she pulled half of a Gipfli, which flaked in her hands.

  Helen said: “We could continue this later.”

  Sarah tore the croissant and threw it for the swans that had been fussing out on the water with a show of elegant indifference and now turned with great power into shore.

  “Does it worry you,” she said, talking out to the water and the white birds, “that I’m not the perfect and civilized victim? Not always brave and always sure?” She turned to Helen. “I’m a lousy touchstone, aren’t I?”

  “All this can wait.”

  “I won’t live long enough to wait. They’re going to ask me why I waited so long, aren’t they?”

  “You couldn’t have known where Müller-Rossi went.”

  Sarah turned to Helen. “Call her Lucia,” she said, “or Frau Müller-Rossi. She is your grandmother.”

  “You couldn’t have known that she was in business, or where she was in business, or guessed that she got the table out of Berlin, even. It isn’t likely that any single table survived the ruin of Berlin.”