by Michael Pye
She almost remembered, for a moment, what it was to remember.
Here’s a nice puzzle, for which she has the mind: the perpetual present invaded by a sense of perspective that could only come from the past.
She knows, now, as she knew then, that so many people wanted to trust her. She knew about passports, even after America entered the war and there was no more hope in waiting for a U.S. quota number. She understood the preciousness of things, their market value and their emotional price. There was sometimes a misunderstanding—someone who came back to find their suitcases had been opened—but it was rare for people to come back.
She knew how much silver could be exported, what area of carpet, before the authorities wanted their share; and she was happy to cope with what could not be taken abroad. She was entirely helpful in this.
She once saved a Jewish woman from deportation, and her reputation was burnished by the fact. One woman, who got out to Switzerland, sent money every month because she couldn’t see how Lucia, civilized Lucia, could get by in Berlin.
She knew, too, how to shuffle money through the banks in country towns, into her own accounts and out into the Swiss embassy; and then into Switzerland where, at a discount, its rightful owners would claim it, if they could. Gentiles, too, were interested; the most surprising people seemed to have the private kind of Swiss account.
Indeed, so many people trusted her that their trust became a practical problem.
She remembers all this: and then she can’t stay remembering anymore. She’s there.
Her skirt is dull and long, arms covered, and she has a head scarf: the uniform of a serious woman, a mother. She’s in a stopped train, which does not move for hour after hour, but nobody dares to leave it in case the next is worse. There is nothing to be seen through the windows. People no longer try to keep themselves separate and respectable. They pile like cats or little dogs.
She is going back to Berlin. She thought she could throw herself on the mercy of holy women, that they were bound to help her great work of charity; for it could have been that, she thinks. It could have been that.
So she came out to the sandy lands just south of the city, to a new and practical convent, devoid of fine monastic touches, just walls for prayer. She has not made an appointment; she assumes the nuns will have mercy. She walks over the gravel drive as though she’s crossing a church to light candles.
The porteress has a face that laughs, although she’s a singularly skinny woman. A gun goes off somewhere close, Lucia startles, the porteress says it’s just Father Gerhard out after squirrels. And her face laughs again, silently.
Lucia waits in a corridor. It could be a sanitarium, a cheap hotel, even a barracks, except for the black crucifixes on the wall.
Finally, the abbess sees her. Lucia’s unannounced appearance is so odd that it requires the attention of someone senior. There is always the possibility of some kind of trap.
Yet Lucia hasn’t thought this out. She doesn’t think the nuns will be suspicious of the outside world. She expects them to accept. They’re beyond the world, so they should be accomplices in the world without guilt.
The abbess is a formidable woman when she chooses to be still: a face of hard, durable virtue.
Lucia is a little girl, a flirt, a worthy mother, a citizen more troubled by her virtue than her sins, one after the other. The abbess stays still.
Lucia is saying that she has household goods that she needs to put into storage for friends, for Jewish friends, and perhaps the Mother Superior could help her?
The abbess says: “These are difficult times.”
Lucia says she is trying to help these people, but she can no longer find the space.
The more Lucia talks, the more she feels obliged to work her arms and smile too much and sometimes mention a saint.
“I’m afraid,” the abbess says, “you will have a long and uncomfortable journey back to Berlin.”
She makes no argument against Lucia, does not justify the empty cellars that a new nunnery must have; she only offers a sandwich of cold pork for the journey back. And then she says: “People come here because they are pursued by their sins. It’s not usual that someone comes here because they’ve done too much good.” And Lucia doesn’t know whether to read judgment on that alabaster face.
But on the train, she knows. She wonders what the nuns are up to, what they’re hiding; they must be hiding something. They’ve forgotten all their Christian duty, their duty to her.
All this she seems to remember while she’s still brushing off some sailor, some clerk, some weekend athlete who’s breathing too close to her on the still unmoving, jam-packed train.
Oddly, she remembered the rest like a memory, although it happened after her visit to the convent. She knew if she couldn’t beg space, she’d have to find it some other way, and, with her limited resources, best to fuck it out of someone. The ambassador had this odd little Dutch cottage out toward Potsdam; it was the house he didn’t mention. There were cellars under the cottage. She was there with him once, went down into the storerooms with a candle, saw a whole empire of red brick caves just waiting for a purpose: her purpose.
She pleasured him in a corner with the candle flickering. He was happy to give her keys to the cellars.
She filled the first rooms with simple wood to screen off the rest because she knew the Gestapo liked their share of any prizes going, and she was not prepared to pay very much for their protection. But once through the first rooms, she had more than objects in her store; she had her childhood, her entitlement to gilt and marble and show. Sometimes, at the weekends, she’d go down to her storerooms and walk around with a flashlight, picking out a shine of glass here, a brass molding there, marble or silver or sometimes even gold. She felt protected by so many things.
She needs a new, official job. The ambassador’s attentions are perfectly fine at teatime at Wannsee, sometimes in a booth at Horcher’s restaurant, anywhere you care to name that is not the embassy, where his wife sees and hears and also imagines everything. Lucia needs to be able to come and go at the embassy, but not to work there every day.
The Herr Doktor Professor, in a letter of odd tenderness which for once made not a single pornographic suggestion, reminded her about UFA. “In wartime,” he wrote sententiously, “the Volk must be amused.”
UFA: her first day. She walks in through the studio gates with all the authority of a star because nobody knows she is nobody in particular, and she wants them all to think she will matter.
The second day is harder. She has a place assigned, an office and a rank. She’s supposed to know where she’s going, no need to stop and ask a passing man, and she has a job to do at a fixed time. It is nobody’s business to recognize her or look after her.
She loves to get lost, when she can. She reckons if she doesn’t matter, she won’t be challenged. She slips inside hangars of gypsy frocks and hussars’ coats and a whole stand of showgirls’ headdresses, of spats and toe shoes and furs. There is dust on the more diaphanous costumes. Neglect is puritan, it seems. There are the remains of Africa in a corner. And fairy tales, imperial worlds, all organized by size of collar, waist, and foot.
She’s challenged once. She apologizes and walks briskly on.
Armies pass her, peasants off giggling with airmen, dozens of Bohemians, a new species for Lucia, all tousled, wild, and paint-stained, all loafing until someone snaps: “Action!” Everyone is someone else, like a factory for Carnival. In the hot spring sunshine, she passes streets and bridges in a world that stops the very moment it can no longer be seen by the whirring cameras which, around here, are God. She passes great bunkers and huge tanks full of water.
Nicholas knows something about this. He’s decided they have live lions out at UFA, and a black man, and a model train. But she can’t take her child to her work, however much he wants to be with her and wants to see the lions.
On a Sunday, he says: “You couldn’t just stay here for the day? One day?�
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“I have to work.”
“A Sunday. All day.”
“I have to do things.”
“We could go sailing. You could bring your friends and I could bring my friends.”
“We’ll go out to dinner.”
The maid Katya puts a huge dish of boiled potatoes onto the table, and a bowl of yogurt. Lucia says: “Is that all we have?”
Katya shrugs.
“I like it,” Nicholas says. He wants to be reassuring. Or maybe he’s gone over to Katya’s side, because she’s always available. “It’s good.”
“But you ought to have meat, and cheese, and pasta, and fish, and chocolate—”
“I don’t like chocolate.”
“But you do like chocolate.”
“No,” Nicholas says. He runs out of the room.
She frowns for a moment. She says to Katya: “I’ll be out tonight.”
Lucia on the hospital terrace, eyes open on something two meters away; but there was nothing there. Helen spoke her name, very quietly. Lucia pushed at the air. Helen said: “Lucia. It’s me.”
Lucia’s eyes snapped open.
“It’s me,” Helen said. “I’m real.”
She could read a clash on Lucia’s face. She expected the hand to come out to test her.
But instead, Lucia reared up out of her chair, stood firm, and shouted: “You’re real. What a wonder. You’re real and you think it matters.”
Helen stepped back. The nurses, by reflex, formed a cordon.
“What’s so wonderful about what’s real?” Lucia said, a little quieter now, but clipping out her words. “We got butter from coal. We got leather from fish skin. We got frocks out of wood pulp. You call those things real?” She reached out to cuff Helen, like a child who needs direction. It didn’t seem to matter that she missed.
“The whole city was illusion. You saw it. All the open spaces, they built plywood streets like a movie set. You couldn’t tell the difference from the air. They put netting over the avenues so they looked like parks. They turned the lampposts into fir trees. They filled the lakes up with scaffolding and tarpaulin and painted it all to look like houses.
“The bombers came and they had firemen ready, and their job was to start proper fires and keep them burning and burning. You know all this. You think real things would have saved your life?”
Helen knew she was talking, now, to Nicholas. She was softening her voice. She forgave him for whatever he had made her remember. And she sat down.
“You remember the advertisements,” Lucia was saying. “There was one at the cinema with such pretty kangaroos, and a bull in a fine shiny smoking jacket and a cow, with horns shaped just like a lyre. I don’t remember anything about what they were selling.”
Helen wondered if Lucia noticed her reactions, and simply transposed them to Nicholas: and if Nicholas was a boy now, or a man, or a cold white carcass. She would react if it would help the old woman; she owed her a duty of kindness. But she was glad not to be recognized, glad that none of this had to do with Helen in particular. The distance made it bearable.
“The kangaroos were dancing,” she said. “They looked rather moderne. Art Deco, I mean. I think they must have been selling shoes.”
Lucia might be addressing the dead, but at least she knew she was dealing in memory.
“Me,” Lucia said, “I knew about cartoons.”
She composed herself. They could watch the process: the face controlled, the back straightened, the hands in positions that could be sustained.
“They really didn’t want people to have things to miss. There was a war on, and they were all half pretending that civilian life was all just the same. The bombs came down and the cinemas needed—I don’t know. Cute frogs and grasshoppers. Stories about silly geese. You couldn’t film reality anymore. Then the Americans came into the war, and there was no more Walt Disney so they needed Wicked Huntsmen and Evil Queens and Handsome Aryan Princes.
“So they ordered the animators to Berlin, and they didn’t have a choice, but when they arrived they turned out to be solitary and thoughtful and slow. That wouldn’t do. There was a crisis, and the studio had to be seen to respond. So they built offices, allocated space, promoted executives who were supposed to animate the animators. And they hired unnecessary people, like me.
“I wrote scenarios. I went to an office, between Berlin and Potsdam, and sometimes I went out to the UFA studios at Babelsberg. They’d brought in some cartoonist from a newspaper, and I worked with him. Then we sent the stories off to Herr and Frau So-and-So who were making the films.”
She smiled. “Herr and Frau So-and-So acknowledged receipt very politely, and filed the stuff. We got paid, and we got ignored.”
Helen imagined Lucia, cigarettes burning out all around her, making jokes to distract all Germany from the dead people walking in its streets. That was not unimportant work.
She said: “It was a shock when I first saw one of our films. I remember it very well. They had these small screening rooms, hard leather chairs. Someone smoked a cigar, someone sitting at the back. So it’s dark, and then there’s a flicker of white light, and then the screen fills up with numbers and then. Well, then. They had a bee, an ordinary bee, that flew down out of the sky and through the flowers and the grass, and then past particular stems and particular blossoms. Very close, very real. Then the bee was circling this record player on the ground. Then the bee uses its sting as the gramophone needle.”
Helen said: “Clever,” not meaning it.
“Here’s the bee, the record, the needle, and then there’s the music. It was a song about the week being nothing without the weekend. It was swing.” She looked ahead triumphantly. “Don’t you see? Swing was illegal.”
She could not sense reaction.
“It was illegal in Germany,” she said. “The song kept going on and on about nature being a good thing, which was almost all right. Blood and soil and getting back to the land. But then it kept saying that a whole week serving the fatherland was no use at all without time off. And this was wartime, with production targets and women working. It was very nearly subversive.”
Did Lucia any longer even need her audience? Perhaps it was a kindness for others to sit and listen, to license Lucia’s unstoppable flow of memory.
She certainly wouldn’t be interrupted. “You could see there were the remains of a picnic, and beside it a garter. A garter someone had lost. With a lucky clover growing through it. We were all so decent and proper, that was the official line. No good German girl ever lost a garter.”
“I never saw that film,” Helen said. She wondered if Nicholas had seen it.
“It was lost, after the war,” Lucia said.
Helen thought, without saying it: Then how can we know it existed at all?
Around this time, she loses touch with Max Lindemann. A mutual friend says he’s moved to Riga or one of those Baltic towns, but it’s only a hint of a story, not even a rumor, produced for the sake of seeming to know and having something to say.
She takes Nicholas to the aquarium because he’s bound to like that. It turns out he’s been there before. She is a little annoyed, but she still loves to watch as he watches the turtles glide and turn in the water.
She sees Sarah Lindemann on the way home, who nods, but not in her direction, as though she doesn’t like to do anything so definite anymore.
Lucia crosses the road.
“How’s Max,” she says, falling in alongside Frau Lindemann, who scuttles forward.
“Max isn’t, I mean, isn’t.”
“You mean he’s left Berlin?”
“It’s very difficult. I shouldn’t be seen talking to foreigners.”
“But you and Max—”
Sarah Lindemann so much wants her not to be there, to leave her alone. “Max is so obstinate,” she says, very softly, smiling at strangers, pretending interest in a window, “and so he thought it would be better—”
“You’re alone?”
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br /> “It’s better if you’re not at home. They go away if you’re not at home.”
“But you’re on your own?”
“Not exactly. There isn’t room anymore to be on your own.”
“He’s well?”
“It’s very hard to get soap. He just can’t keep clean.” She ducks and shakes her head as though she was talking to everyone else except this obvious foreign woman and her child.
“But he had such lovely clean hands,” Lucia says. “Could you tell him from me—”
“That’s all over. All over. Now let me get along.”
She darts across the road, startling drivers, and leaves Lucia and Nicholas standing still on the sidewalk.
But then she telephones after dark, which means she must be staying with gentile friends who still have a legal phone.
“I went downstairs,” she says, “and they’ve been already. Already. They’ve taken the nameplate down from Frau Bernstein’s apartment.”
“They do that,” Lucia says.
“Lucia,” says Frau Lindemann, and Lucia can hear the effort the words are costing, “I would be very grateful—”
“Yes?”
“If you could collect some things. Like the table Max wanted you to keep for us. Just some things that have come to matter.”
“Of course,” Lucia says. She has a talent for this: nothing in her answer smacks of the businesswoman.
“Some Meissen.”
“How lovely.”
“If you could keep it until things are better. Then I’ll come for it.”
“But this apartment might get bombed, too.”
“I don’t think the Gestapo will come so close to you.”
“I wish I could get some things to Max—”
“Come for coffee, on the Ku-damm,” Frau Lindemann says. “I’ll pass by and you can come and talk to me.”
And there, between the globe lights and the starched white tables, she gives Lucia the name of someone who might find Max and pass on a message. She also gives Lucia a little shopping bag, very tightly packed with paper and solid things.
