by Michael Pye
Helen examined her, the look security guards give a stranger. She knew this would come: the telling of stories after all these years. But she was not sure if Lucia would burden her with every terrible thing, would make sure that she, like Nicholas, lived in the shadow of this old woman’s career; or if this was the moment when she would justify herself, try to make an accomplice out of Helen.
So Helen did not want to listen and could not leave.
“I never minded how separate Nicholas became,” she said. “I could still see him. I could see you. I was an observer. I could help out. At least he wasn’t absent from my life.”
A long, ingrained habit of decorousness stopped her from going on like that; she had no way to show her loss. She was not the kind of woman you expect to show great feeling. She’d lived such a considered, businesslike life that such a show would seem like sudden madness. And yet it might seem madder to talk reasonably and politely about the fact that you are more than ninety and you will still outlive your child.
She had work to do. Out of calculation, she attacked.
“You gave him the court papers, I think? You were the one who brought all this up again.”
But Helen was proof against that accusation; she’d made it too often to herself.
“It was,” Lucia said, “disgraceful. I only helped people. I moved money out to Switzerland, and they could have it whenever they arrived in Zurich. I charged a commission. So do banks. But banks wouldn’t do it for Jews. You had to find someone like me, who would take a risk, who knew people at the Swiss embassy. And I tried to protect all the beautiful things that people had. They weren’t just objects, or names like Meissen and Gobelin, or things to trade. They were people’s lives, the point of people’s lives. I stored a Breughel once and it broke my heart that somebody would have to live apart from it.
“I did my best. And then when Berlin was falling apart, when the Russians were coming, when the Americans were bombing and bombing, I got out. It took some ingenuity, but it meant I had all that evidence of all those lives, safe in Switzerland. I was keeping the owners alive, in my way.”
Helen said: “If you don’t feel well enough to come to the funeral, everyone will understand.”
“You will not talk to me like that,” Lucia said. And then she subsided, smiled, almost simpered. “I loved Nicholas,” she said.
And if that was true? Helen thought. What difference did it make if the woman was capable of the most perfect and selfless maternal love? Helen knew, from having Henry, there was gratification involved, too, and a life that filled the gaps in your life: a constant person.
“They kept questioning me when we got to Zurich,” Lucia said. “You may as well know all this. Nicholas must have known it.”
Helen wanted to defend her father, but Lucia was a lawyer working for her own life.
“They just keep on questioning me,” she said. “Again and again. First it was money. How much did I take to Germany in 1932, and of course it was nothing much; how much did I bring out of Germany in 1944, and of course it was more. Then all the customs people, and the people who had to track down German goods in Switzerland, they turned up. I told them I had brought only household goods. But they keep coming to the apartment. I know these people, little people, they have no idea at all how people live. It’s as though they were chanting under their breath ‘But those are Meissen, those are pictures, that is tapestry, that is silver, that is old, that is lovely.’ ”
Helen heard the change to the present tense, but she set it aside because Lucia was still lucid, fluent, loud.
“They spend whole days counting things in my apartment. Everything in my apartment. I can see it just makes them angry. They keep asking: Where does this come from? I’m like the art teacher. I’m always explaining. I tell them most of it is from Italy, because it is, you know, it’s the goods I used to have when I was a child, it’s the house in Milan with the great copper bees, it’s what I know. I have to explain who the Rossis are; can you imagine?” Helen wondered if she was acting, if this rush of words was considered rather than compulsive, if she was simply trying to make sure nobody could spoil her story. “I do buy things as well, I buy from my partner in the shop, the name over the door. And they go to the damned bank and the bank tells them I’m overdrawn and I never had the money to buy anything. So they say. And they talk about Swiss secrecy.”
It was vivid to her, obviously; but Helen could not quite tell if it was vivid like yesterday, or vivid like this very moment.
“You know they went to Müller. Such a proper man, such an orderly man. He kept an inventory of every little thing we owned when we were in love, and he gave it to the authorities.
“I really don’t know what to do. I have Nicholas, of course, I have to care for him. He has to go to a good school. I can’t open my own little shop, it’s always under somebody else’s name. I make some money but it’s simply not enough. Not enough. I am poor. I can’t be poor. I have no talent for being poor.”
The present tense, the present threat.
“The divorce doesn’t help. Müller hinted at all kinds of things, and the court seemed to care about them, too; I truly believe they wanted to call me a ‘loose woman.’ ” She stood up. “This is such a small town, this is such a clean country.
“They keep asking for proof.” She was not addressing Helen in particular. She seemed, so the odd gentleness in the voice, the deferential swoop of the body, suggested, to be addressing someone of influence. “They say I sold goods from the Italian embassy in Berlin. But the Italian ambassador himself gave me those things to sell. Am I supposed to call him a liar?
“I did tell them that I bought some of the goods. But what else could I say? They seemed to think Berlin was like Zurich: an orderly place.
“It’s supposed to be safe here. Everyone comes here to be safe. I want to be safe. But I’m an Italian woman, with a child, alone in Switzerland. The Swiss have their doubts about the Italians, you know. They have doubts about foreigners. They want to keep all their secrets.”
Helen said: “The funeral is tomorrow.” She wanted to see if the word “funeral” would shock Lucia back from this historic present.
Lucia said: “And then these people called Bernstein started claiming some quite nice Meissen plates they said they’d left with me: gold-bronze on white, I remember. They wouldn’t go away. They kept insisting. And I was just an Italian woman, with a child, alone in Switzerland, when the Swiss were looking out for all the fake Swiss to throw out.
“So I gave them money. They could never have brought a case into court, they didn’t have papers or anything. The Swiss wouldn’t touch anything that happened in Germany. They didn’t have the law on their side, and the plates were mine, now, but I had to give them money. It was,” she said, “outrageous.”
So now it was memory again, not the pressing reality. It seemed to slip back and forth in Lucia’s mind. She might have found it all easier if she had been some kind of believer, with a grand idea to defend instead of this catalogue of little actions, each one subject to being picked open by the law. She didn’t have a life; she had details, and she couldn’t lose even one of them.
“They’re going to auction my property,” she said. “They’re going to sell everything I have. If they can find a way. I think they’d break the law to do it. I can’t use any of my bank accounts, all blocked, even the ones at Müller’s bank. I have no business. I have no money. It’s the middle of term and now I have to go to Nicholas at school and take him away because there isn’t the money to pay the fees. Taking him away from his friends, from his books. From his life.”
Then, abruptly, she was back on the day before a funeral, back remembering: “Sometimes,” she said, “I think that’s why he was so lonely later on: they made me cut him off.”
She seemed to realize that something was odd about her telling of the story, because now she fussed for sympathy, for some warm reaction from Helen in particular.
“My
health suffered. I told the court that. I had creditors at the door. Even my lawyer walked out on me because he said my stories didn’t add up. Then he said there were rumors he was having an affair with me.” She snorted. “You see how they thought of me? They couldn’t even be honest about wanting me.
“Besides,” and now she was singing her case, “other people did things. They didn’t do such constructive things.
“I was never close enough to tell Nicholas the whole story,” she said, “like this. I didn’t want to burden him. I didn’t want him to turn against the money that was buying his degrees and his comfort.” She was testing Helen with her eyes. “If I’d been alone, I could have saved myself without all the dealing. I’m sure of that. But with Nicholas, I had no choice.”
She was shivering a little; Helen put a shawl around her shoulders. “I see their faces,” Lucia said. “Sometimes. So full of hate and suspicion. I see Eva, who got fat in America. I see Richard, who said I was the immediate cause of his mother’s death. I see them all lining up to take advantage. I was sick, I was out of business, I was exhausted. These wretched people in the clearinghouse, who were supposed to go after all the Nazi property in Switzerland, came after me instead. But they didn’t have the papers. And even then, they didn’t acquit me. They just let me go and they never mentioned the case again.”
The trade respected Lucia too much to call and offer her, say, a fine piece of red Böttger stoneware on such a difficult day.
The staff couldn’t find things to say to her. In their eyes, the son was old enough to die, and the mother too old to mourn him. They left her in the warm golden light at the front of the shop, until the car came at ten. And then one girl offered to close down the shop out of respect; and Lucia asked why she imagined that might be necessary or appropriate. The girl stood back.
“This is a business,” Lucia said.
She was alone on her way to the funeral. The Turk, driving neatly, did not count.
She looked at gray-green landscapes passing fast: at neatness, cleanness, precision, and squared corners. I’m guilty of not settling for all this, she thought. I don’t settle. I’ve always dealt in glamorous, lovely things. She saw immaculate green, some snow, clear roads of houses hunkering down, the gilded onion dome on the church, the brilliant white of the church walls, all through the smoked glass of the car windows.
She was going to see Sarah Lindemann again. Like old times, like old and present times. She rehearsed her repertoire of polite, minimal gestures, little statements. She thought there would be no disruption of the moment, out of respect for Nicholas, and perhaps a little respect for her as a bereaved mother, too.
The shop must stay open, she thought; that was obvious. The business had nothing to do with her personal story, facts, or feelings. She had insisted on that for fifty years.
She must not be angry with Sarah Lindemann, she told herself. Poor Sarah had come too late. Sarah was the brown mouse in the corner, her hands always passing one over the other, a spineless, lifeless little thing. Max Lindemann always puffed up when Lucia came to visit; without her, he was a deflated thing. And Sarah never went out.
Lucia kept her talent for resentment through all her cushioned, organized life. She revived it easily. She couldn’t trust her family, never could. She was ominously quick and clever and visible for a grandmother, and they wanted to find the fault in her so they could be kind to her and make her ordinary. They loved Sarah because of her accusations, not in spite of them.
Perhaps Sarah Lindemann wouldn’t come. Perhaps she didn’t like Christian funerals.
All the others, the family, the friends, the older colleagues from a long working life, had gathered by the small chapel in the graveyard, had left their cards of condolence in the stone bowl, had gone in processions of one past the coffin on the cart and seen the face of Nicholas Müller-Rossi for the last time. The cold light shone off the white flowers matted on the coffin: autumnal chrysanthemums, asters in wreaths.
And once they had done what was always done, they were left waiting for Lucia. Their love for Nicholas, their memories of tutorials, dinners, afternoons on mountains, their desire to remember his kindness, goodness, cleverness, were all vitiated by this nervous anticipation: of a single old woman, who was determined to arrive very exactly on time.
Sarah Freeman stood by Peter Clarke. She had thought she was ready for this moment: she now knew she was not. Lucia would be close to her, close enough to touch, to hit. Lucia might speak; she would speak back.
It was eleven o’clock, precisely.
Sarah thought she must not take away their moment of saying good-bye. But it was as though Helen was offering her this moment, as a sacrifice, some kind of recompense. You can do that to gods, Sarah thought, but not to old ladies. We don’t know how to take such gifts.
Lucia stepped out of her car. Helen thought to go forward and help the old woman. But Lucia did not want help, did not need it, would not accept it; and did not deserve it. All these things went through Helen’s mind. She held gratefully to Jeremy’s hand, the two of them standing so close the others could hardly see that particular contact, skin to skin.
Lucia walked without self-consciousness. She was in black, and veiled discreetly: another mourner in the crowd. But she knew very well that nobody could take their eyes from her.
Sarah Freeman saw her as she might see the remains of a story: something picturesque and old. Then she remembered everything in a second, a roar in the ears and the eyes and the mind. She tasted a Berlin street on the wind: the horses, the wood fumes, the coal fires.
The priest came forward. “Frau Müller-Rossi,” he said.
Helen waited to see who would answer: the Lucia with the shop still open on Bahnhofstrasse, or the one who was beginning to live in her history. This old woman in black, almost stately on her small feet, might be either one.
She only bowed her head and took her place, a mother mourning for her son.
Sarah turned away a little and followed the cart by Peter Clarke’s side to the black ditch cut between the older graves.
Lucia went first, but alone. She was the first to asperge the grave with holy water, the first to throw her bundle of white flowers into the hole. She watched the workmen lower the remains of Nicholas into the place which had been prepared, five years earlier, for his wife, Nora.
She didn’t cry. She was kept charged by the anger in the other mourners.
She crossed herself twice. She did not do it out of respect; she wanted protection against all the dead.
She had an impression of the others around the grave; she chose not to look too carefully. Their faces were solemn and white, coats dark, their talk very low but still echoing across the odd acoustics of the snow. They stood as a block, which made her think of them as a conspiracy.
But the priest was very gentle with her age and her loss. He went with her, in the car, up to the mountain chapel for the Mass.
Behind her, on the long way up the mountain, Jeremy drove Helen and Sarah and Peter, all of them anxious in their ways, Sarah that she was going to a remote place with only a few people and would now, surely, have to talk to Lucia; Peter Clarke that he would not know how to protect Sarah and make it all end right; Helen, in a vein of melodrama that was most unusual, thinking that her father had died to shout out from the dead about Lucia’s crimes, and nobody at all was listening.
Lucia and the priest arrived first. The chapel was tiny, a whitened box with a high reredos at one end, some pale and solid wood pews, some stained glass in small windows. There was a door to one side of the altar leading to a sacristy; the priest left her alone.
Lucia turned around. Against the far wall, where the door opened onto the road, there were a hundred bright and tiny colored images on board. Here, a cow who was cured, white and black; here, a woman who came through childbirth alive; all saved by prayer and recorded in paint. She used to delight in such portable beauty.
She tried to compose herself for the
Mass. It would be in German. She was not in a state of grace, she could hardly take Communion; she remembered all that.
“Lord in your mercy, hear our prayer. We pray to the Lord, Lord, hear our prayer.” But she heard it in Latin in her mind.
She didn’t understand why the chapel should seem so much more intimate than the crowd around the grave, why she should be suddenly afraid. It had nothing to do with sin; this was a place for absolution. It was not the judgment of others, because she had already faced that down, and there was little or nothing Sarah Freeman could do to her now. As for God, she was not in the habit of thinking about abstract nouns.
But she remembered a phrase from the Mass: “Dying, you destroyed our death.”
She could not go on forever. She couldn’t do it now.
Sarah said: “I’m not the perfect victim. I shouldn’t be the one. I can’t confront her at a time like this.”
“You have to explain,” Jeremy said.
“It ought to be someone else,” Sarah said. “There are so many others.”
“We’re going to celebrate Nicholas,” Peter Clarke said, quietly.
Helen was surprised at the certainty in his voice, the authority of a believer of some kind.
They walked up the steps of the little chapel, and pushed open the double door.
Peripheral vision goes with age, Lucia knew that very well indeed, and yet now she sensed someone coming up behind her. She thought it would be Nicholas. Nicholas would give her an explanation for this bizarre rumor of his death. He would be the orderly, sensible, professorial Nicholas, and not this romantic suicide who walked into the snows. He wouldn’t be at all judgmental. Everything would go on as before, and she would be allowed to continue until death, which could not be so very long delayed, as long as she maintained the perfect front. She would stay sealed in this hermetic privacy that she had endured so long.
For the moment, Lucia made herself stand as straight as old bones, properly maintained, allow. She would not give the slightest advantage to this Sarah Freeman. She would hold the space of the chapel as her territory.
