The Pieces from Berlin

by Michael Pye

  “We wanted to inform you personally—” He tried to sound official, nothing more, but that was because of a muddle in his mind between compassion for an old woman who’s lost her only son, deference to a substantial citizen, deference to her grand age, and a sense that Lucia Müller-Rossi used all these things to stop questions before they could be formed.

  “He was an old man, wasn’t he?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And he died of natural causes?”

  “He did.”

  “I’m very grateful,” she said, “that you troubled to come and tell me this.” She had, almost within reach, a phone, fax, computer, a terminal for taking credit cards, and still she held the room as if it were her private drawing room. “These are private matters, you will understand.”

  “If there is anything—”

  “I don’t think I need to know any more, not at present.”

  The policeman had never been a servant, but he knew very well he had been dismissed.

  He let the cold of the night into the shop as he left. He hoped the door would lock open and blow the old woman away like dust.

  Helen took responsibility because there was nobody else. Jeremy said he’d come back early from Boston, of course. It was no business of Sarah Freeman or Peter Clarke, although now they stayed around her as though they were a kind of family, trying hard not to make any claims, just to help. And she would not talk to Lucia, not yet.

  “The priest is bound to know,” she told Jeremy.

  But he didn’t seem to see the point. They had all this world in common, deals, timing, airports, but at the root they were so entirely different her words went past him.

  “Because,” she said, annoyed that Jeremy made her say it out loud, “he can’t be buried in consecrated ground if he killed himself. So he can’t be buried with my mother.”

  She wanted him to acknowledge sentiment. She understood he was in a practical Marriott room somewhere, far away, maybe the bathroom TV still on CNN, drapes shut, air conditioning high, two empty water bottles out of the minibar, but she still wanted feeling.

  “The whole thing’s ambiguous,” Jeremy was saying, reasonably. “It could be an accident.”

  “I don’t think so. Nobody thinks so. He knew the mountains.”

  “There’s no suicide note, is there? You don’t have to say anything.”

  “I have to tell the priest it was an accident. He’ll want to be told.”

  “Say what you can.”

  “He has to be buried with Mother,” Helen said. “I couldn’t keep them apart.”

  Then he said: “I’ll fly back today. I’ll talk to the priest.”

  It was, they both thought, a start.

  Now Nicholas’s absence was as loud in the house as his presence had ever been, enough to subdue them all.

  Sarah Freeman wanted to know everything, then she wanted the interpretations and the explanations, and she had to have them now.

  “I don’t understand where they found him.”

  “In the mountains up by Glaubenberg,” Helen said. “He must have gone for a walk in the woods and gotten lost. Or he didn’t notice the time. I suppose.”

  Henry walked about solemnly. He asked once where Jeremy was; he called his father “Jeremy.” Helen, who was always so agile and loose, now held her hands so she could touch her sides when she needed reassurance.

  “You think he could truly have made a mistake?”

  Helen shrugged.

  Sarah raised her voice. “I didn’t mean him any harm.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” Helen said. “It has nothing to do with you.”

  “How can anyone freeze to death? Don’t you try to walk away from the cold?”

  Clarke said: “I think once you’re really chilled, you give up. I think. I’ll make you some tea.”

  “Please don’t bother,” Sarah said. “I just want to know.”

  The doorbell rang once, and Clarke broke away, gratefully. He wanted Helen to cry for a while. He wanted Sarah to be quiet. He wanted everything to be appropriate, which did not happen. So he straightened his cuffs because he never felt quite formal enough for the Swiss, not even for a Swiss delivery man.

  Someone had sent flowers: a mass of green-white tuberoses with a chapel smell.

  He walked back slowly. He saw how every surface shone in this kitchen. Everything was in its proper place.

  He decided Helen might not want the flowers just yet. He laid them in water in the sink.

  Then he thought: It won’t do. A sin like suicide cannot answer Lucia’s crimes. The answer has to have its own moral worth. We’re being distracted.

  He sat down at the table and he walked his mind into a church. It was a trick he’d learned when he was much younger as a way of memorizing things, stacking words and ideas around an imaginary building: a greenhouse, a warehouse, a church. Now he could pass between instructions and morals on the walls, step around the facts he was supposed to confront.

  He was still as muddled as the rest of them. A hundred sermons told him Lucia might be redeemed; he wanted her punished. He was supposed to forgive, he knew. He kept remembering this, like a phrase out of catechism. He did not think he had the right to be magnanimous, though, because it would involve setting aside the crimes she had done to others. He was not the one who could forgive.

  Their attention should be turned, exact as a knife, on Lucia. Nicholas’s death occupied the whole house with sorrow when they should have been busy with anger.

  He had startled himself.

  He’d always imagined that his deep moral sense was a fragile, flexible thing. He was very sure of his own weakness. He’d never talked about Grace, kept her as his particular secret. He’d run away from Grace, whom he loved, and then from the death of her child, because he was afraid he could not summon a grand enough sympathy to remain with them. He remembered, too, the temptation of going away from Frances.

  He should find a vase for the tuberoses. They were such a particular, heavy flower he was not sure Helen would want them at all. Then he thought: But it was always the gardeners, the men, who organized the flowers in our house.

  The night Jeremy came home, nobody slept well.

  Helen fought with the sheets, then fought with Jeremy, then woke up with her eyes wide. Jeremy watched her through the night. Once she woke up and shivered with tears; she had dreamt that everything canceled itself out, that everyone was neutral, that no wrong could be redressed in the tangle of everybody’s rights. Once she sat up and began to argue soundlessly, her hands talking. She never allowed herself to dissolve into sorrow; there were still things to be done.

  Peter Clarke, in his hotel room, was reading, but not reading properly, only glancing down lines of type. He grumbled out loud at the bedside lights, which were never strong enough. He was thinking about the past, which was the subject he shared with Nicholas.

  They had talked about Shakespeare’s past, and sometimes their own. Sometimes it was an image of the war through which they’d both lived, but they did not need to go into detail; it was enough that each shared the memory and knowledge of a war.

  So later they could talk about comfortable things: parades; the taste of apples; particular tin toys, a MitEuropa train with passengers and lights, a few tin soldiers in a wooden box carved out to serve as a fort; birthdays; bodies of water in which to swim, a lawn and a lake with swans for Nicholas, violent birds, and a slim black river with weeds and unctuous mud for Peter. Nicholas loaned Peter his book on Shakespeare’s early tragedies, which he thought was written like a careful pastiche of English; Peter, in a public park, pointed out a bed of tall lupins and explained that they were his, that he had spotted, chosen, bred, and selected them until they constituted a fixed category, a cultivar.

  Clarke did wonder if Nicholas had simply walked away from Lucia into the snow. He was used to leaving her, being sent away while his mother was going through her trials—to school, a couple of weeks in Piedmont with a co
usin, a Berghotel once to walk himself out of worrying. But then he thought: I am the one who walks away. He began to sweat.

  And Sarah Freeman, in her room, looked at her little case, set against the wall with its airline tags. She’d unpacked and let all those demons loose.

  She couldn’t bear the idea of kind, thoughtful Nicholas out in the cold woods, and Nicholas dead. He should not have died. He had nothing to do with it.

  Then she had a thought of which she was half ashamed. If Nicholas killed himself, he still hadn’t made any reparation. He hadn’t, even now, suffered as she did. So he was not entitled to eclipse her story and her pain or, worse yet, annex it and insist on being mourned.

  Finally, like the others, she slept in the shallows. She did dream, but it seemed like what she could remember of another dream: that she was in a rich, fine house with a great open aquarium as one whole wall, with weeds and a reef. She sat and watched the fish, in her dream, all turning at once, all blue, green, and gray, all flickering and shimmering: not clown fish, lionfish, sergeants, and exotic parrots, but plain, shining herring.

  Lucia had Nicholas’s letter. She thought of not opening it at all: making it a dead letter. She opened it with her fingers, which she hardly ever did; there was a perfectly good silver blade on her desk.

  She looked at the torn envelope for a moment. She liked the roughness of the edges. This was not an ordinary letter, which she would pull directly from a neatly cut envelope. This was something particular, and not safe.

  Her fingers were not swollen or broken, but they were not quick anymore. So in taking out the letter, she tore the envelope down its seams. She let it fall to the floor.

  And she read the two sides of cream notepaper, written neatly, as though he’d thought long and hard and made several copies until he had the fairest fair copy of them all.

  She set the letter on her desk.

  So he couldn’t bear it. So he couldn’t live with it all. So he couldn’t thank her for having known and borne all there was to know, and lived with it, too. He seemed to think he’d protected Helen, but he didn’t think that she, too, had protected him.

  There was nothing proven. The charges had been dropped.

  They thought Berlin was a city, operating like a city, when really it was all of it a kind of underworld, the parts any sensible citizen would avoid, if she could. People went around with soot on their faces like robbers, and gas masks, and it wasn’t enough just to be who you were; nobody could see. Everybody needed protection. Somebody important had to know your name and your fate, and to care. And even then, you worried. Ambassadors worried. Ministers at the Swiss embassy worried. You could die tomorrow and yet you still had to act as though the world made some kind of sense.

  She picked up the phone to call Helen. Nicholas had saved her from the story; Lucia would make her hear it all.

  But then, what story was she to tell? There had never been any evidence against her, none that made the slightest sense, how could there be? There was envy and there was spite. Who was she, a foreigner, to turn up with beautiful things? Who was this newcomer who wouldn’t be provincial, wouldn’t dress down and keep quiet and go home? Somehow it was fine for the banks to be legalistic, to demand death certificates for people from the camps, and account numbers and proper papers before they’d even think of parting with what the dead clearly owned; but if she was left with other people’s property, if other people could no longer claim it, she was somehow a thief.

  She had nothing to confess.

  And those terrible others, who didn’t care at all. She remembered how disgusted she had been with the friend from the studio who said it was odd to see Germans wandering around with sacks in their hands, like you used to see the Jews.

  As for Helen, she was desperate for occupation, anything that would stop her seeing her father’s body all bright with frost, or save her from circling the issue of what it could possibly mean to bring such an ancient woman to justice. Lucia couldn’t be deprived of goods, life, freedom; she had such a short lease on any of them.

  So Helen went immediately to sort out Nicholas’s possessions, to turn the house and his memory into a dead estate. She went like a detective, or a pathologist, someone for whom the papers were all evidence: the file cabinets of letters on paper with curious seals, black-bound notebooks, conference agendas, offprints, postcards with the names of books, sometimes proofs, sometimes manuscripts rolling up under the pressure of the rubber bands at their waists.

  She sorted as best she could: the ones that would be part of the Müller-Rossi gift to some university library, the ones that were clearly private, the ones that a biographer would need if ever her father had a biographer.

  He wouldn’t, of course, unless there was some polite notice in an academic quarterly. He would end up dusty as those papers. A thousand memories of kindness weren’t enough to keep him alive, although the shadow of a crime might give him a certain notoriety.

  She organized books by size and not by subject, and she slammed them into packers’ boxes for someone else to use. It was like an autopsy of the mind, this process: or something geologic, layer by layer of old thought and knowledge now made orderly and put away.

  She heard the geese complaining in the snow.

  She went into the kitchen to make coffee. There was an over-serious espresso machine, one with a handle to pull and a tendency to shower the room with hot grounds, and she left it well alone. She made coffee in a pot.

  It was the snow that made for quiet. The house was never noisy; but in summer there was not this sense of stilled life. She longed for spring.

  She sat down at the kitchen table.

  She thought that Nicholas was not supposed to die. He was only supposed to know, and that was supposed to change things. His death was unreasonable.

  The phone rang.

  For a minimal second, she remembered calling the house from outside the house. She’d pick up the phone; she’d hear her own voice, nervous, sheepish.

  Everyone knew Nicholas was dead. His death led to obituaries, and comments on Alpine danger, and a little bit of tabloid sensation since he had been naked.

  The phone still cut up the quiet, three separate tones: from kitchen, living room, and bedroom.

  She put the white mug down on a marble surface, hard. The cup held, and then cracked, and the last of the coffee pooled out onto red-white stone.

  She’d have to clean it now. She ought to answer the phone.

  She reached for the phone and it slipped out of her hands, hanging from the wall. She heard a voice saying: “Professor Müller-Rossi? Doctor? Professor?”

  She got hold of the receiver. “Yes,” she said.

  The voice at the other end was secretarial and peevish. “Will you please tell Professor Müller-Rossi that the seminar has been rescheduled—”

  She was the one who killed Nicholas.

  She put the phone down on the corncrake voice, blotted up the coffee with a paper towel, and went back to the papers. She was hoping for a pardon on a spare sheet of A4, some explanation that would take away the knowledge that she had caused her father to die.

  She started laughing at the notion: causing someone to die. It sounded like a subclause of a fine, gothic contract, a euphemism, something you want to stop someone doing, but don’t dare suggest they might ever try. She was also guiltily aware that she was denying her father his own decisions.

  It was as cold as the day he died. She wondered how he could be sure enough to walk into that wood in the cold. He must have meant it as a statement: to Lucia, when all else failed. He was too good to bear the information. But how could he derive such an instinct for good from Lucia when it was she herself, all his childhood, who had been wrong?

  For the first time, and in thinking about a suicide, it crossed her mind that there might be such a thing as innate good.

  It must have been the quiet.

  The phone rang again. She ignored it. She thought it might be some other secretar
y or a salesman.

  She thought she heard a car on the road, heard it stop, a door close quietly. Then it was as though the house door opened, a cold shaft of air, something moving in the hallway: a coat put on the side, perhaps.

  She stood staring out of the window. She didn’t want to see an intruder. She thought it might be a cleaning lady, but Nicholas did not have one, or else a neighbor curious about the lights. It might be something worse.

  Her mind was full of ghosts, cold ghosts.

  She felt hands at her waist, warm and utterly familiar hands: Jeremy.

  “I closed the gallery,” he said. “I’ve come to help.”

  And the fit of his body made her smile.

  The funeral Mass would be at Glaubenberg, at the small chapel there; and the burial in the graveyard of the small town down by the lake, where Nora already lay. Helen made the arrangements, organized a priest to go up the mountain from the small town by the lake, ordered the flowers, talked to the Berghotel by the pass about the lunch. Then she invited Sarah Freeman, and of course Peter Clarke. Then she went to see Lucia.

  “I’ve made all the arrangements,” she said.

  Lucia seemed to take that for granted. She was not a woman to make uninteresting arrangements for herself.

  “I have,” Helen said, “invited Sarah Freeman. Because she was a friend of my father’s.” Even now she wondered if she should have said “of Nicholas’s,” if she was being too possessive and cutting Lucia away from her son.

  Lucia said: “My dear.”

  Helen made a gesture like dusting her hands.

  “You think that’s appropriate?” Lucia said.

  Helen said nothing.

  “It is because of that woman,” Lucia said, “that my son is dead.” She, too, would not say “Nicholas.” She, too, insisted that the man was hers.

  Helen put a sheet of paper by her side, with the times for the burial and the Mass.

  Lucia did not tolerate her silence. She seemed like a player again, an operatic lady who can rehearse a story and turn it into recitative, and expect to be heard with attention.

  “There is so much I could tell you,” she said. “If you were prepared to listen.”