The Pieces from Berlin Read online

  They were praying in a knot about the black gap in the ground. Then the coffin was lowered on strong ropes. Then they were blessing the coffin, one by one, with a spray of holy water. The ground was white with chrysanthemums and asters.

  He remembered the last time he saw his father, except briskly or by chance or at some occasion where they were not obliged to talk. It was in the 1950s, when Nicholas was twenty and angry on principle with most of the real world.

  All his long life had been full. His life had been his. It had only this peculiar quality: that it began when he was twenty or so, that he had to put away everything that happened before then.

  His father was in Zug. He’d come out of the wartime army and into the bank, same rank, same manners, better pay. Most people did much the same: the men glided into work, the women went home again, somehow the fact of Armageddon on every border did not break up the usual life of Switzerland. His mother was in business for herself by then, and she was wholly exceptional; during the war, women only worked unofficially, as stopgaps and temps, so they were simply replaced when peace started. Everybody went back to their places.

  Every year in the army Nicholas, a professor with a doctorate, wanted to peel potatoes. Every year, everyone was shocked.

  Nicholas’s father had already started his second family: two girls, pretty but stolid. He loved Nicholas, but did not want to be reminded of everything that went with him, his mother included, so the meeting was peculiarly tense. Nicholas was not so much a son as an anomaly. And Nicholas was self-righteous, and drank too much beer at lunch and his father thought him sloppy.

  The mourners had walked away from the grave now, gone to the church for the funeral Mass. The priest, duly briefed, would extol the past of Nicholas’s father, gild his story and make it sound like a moral tale. Nicholas would not be mentioned, nor his mother.

  In that moment he thought he could move like a ghost, not quite seen. He carried white asters in both his hands, loose bunches of them. The gravediggers had a flask of coffee, maybe with pear Trasch in it; they were busy.

  He threw all the flowers at once into the grave. They spilled out like stars against the black earth.

  He would have liked some comfortable memory, but all he had was his father producing an official booklet from the war years, with brown covers. His father said he’d thought of sending it to Nicholas’s mother. It seemed that since the men had brown notebooks to keep a log of their days on active service, women were expected to have one too.

  So Nicholas read: “The homeland requires our resolute will for freedom, honor and humanity. Our homeland in these times requires,” and then the list. Number one: “Women who don’t complain.” Number two: “Women who willingly take deprivation upon themselves.” Three: “Women who raise strong children prepared for sacrifice.” Four: “Women who conscientiously use household appliances.”

  He had burst out laughing. His father was half offended, as though he’d giggled at the creed, and half agreed. He said: “You can see why I never sent it. Read on.” Nicholas was very aware that his father was watching him closely.

  Eight, he read, “Women who with open eyes and warm hearts recognize the need of their neighbors and who support those in need of help.”

  He looked up at his father and his father inspected him. They were a conspiracy of two, agreed not to make too clear a mental picture of Mama Lucia helping neighbors with a warm heart. He had read on, with some relief, out loud: “. . . stand up for the future of our country.”

  “It’s not a terrible thing,” his father said. “Standing up for the future of your country.”

  Nicholas said he had to get back.

  “It’s not a terrible thing,” his father said. “It wouldn’t be so terrible a thing to have children. To stand up for your country.”

  “If you know what your country is,” Nicholas said.

  “We knew.”

  Nicholas tried to make a joke of it, asking his father to imagine his mother being “conscientious” with a household appliance. But they were in terrible trouble: father and son trouble, fueled with the beer. They went for a walk, bristling.

  Nicholas was very aware of the dead smell of the earth, of the shine where the spades had cut his father’s grave.

  It was the streets that had started it. They were clean. They were neat. The buildings were all bunker solid and gray and decent and regular and somehow untouched. Nicholas thought the town was like a necropolis: a garden necropolis, architect-designed. Balconies for the dead to water their petunias. Sidewalks to step away from their black, black cars. Buses that took them to places nobody could particularly want to go, and took them regularly.

  He was furious, but his father took this decorous world for granted, and kept smiling so that nobody else would notice how angry or how drunk or how—how shamefully, irresponsibly young his son was. He wore that smile like his suit and tie: his uniform disguise.

  And Nicholas remembered thinking: They’re not in this century. They hadn’t been bombed or starved or tortured or burned. They’d been spared the whole terrible process of changing and even growing up. So when the war ended, all they cared about was keeping very, very still, like an animal that’s been cornered.

  He said all that.

  He wondered if there was a spell to call back words from the ears of the dead.

  His father had been quiet, reasonable, as though he was talking about the content of his son’s last literature course or the last book he’d read. But he insisted on his words. Nicholas tried to talk over him, but he heard him, all the same. He was saying he’d worn a uniform, been prepared to fight, had gone to the Alps with the army to save the nation.

  And Nicholas, all righteous, had said: Then what about all the flatlands where everybody lived? What about the women and children who were down on the plains while you were up the mountains playing at cowherds?

  His father had talked, matter of fact, about sacrifice. About there not being money. About being billeted on some family near the border by France; it was where he met his second wife. He said people were hungry. They were afraid.

  Nicholas asked why he never wrote to tell him all this truth. He said: How could he? He couldn’t write anything like the truth in a letter that was going to Berlin. He couldn’t tell his son how they were pulling every last old gun out of the cellars, rusty ones, ones with wormhole in the stocks. Or how all the best kind of people left town suddenly when the Germans were supposed to march in, and then for five years everybody else just sat around waiting and waiting and waiting.

  Nicholas had said: “You did write to me. You told me about how the central heating was cut, and how maybe people were all the healthier for it. And you mentioned gas masks, and the blackout.”

  Until that moment, Nicholas now thought, his father might have regretted the distance between them.

  But he turned then. They were on the steps of some big civic building in Zug, columns and pediments and maybe lions in stone. The building was like propaganda. And he said: “I know you were in Berlin. I know things weren’t good. But don’t think you can come here and try to be like the damned Germans—always arrogant, always sure you have the best music, the best poetry. Then the best wickedness. Then the greatest heroism in facing the best damned pain.”

  Nicholas said his father had no idea what Nicholas and his mother had been through in Berlin. He said his father hadn’t lived it, and he couldn’t now make up for it.

  His father sat down on the steps.

  It was an outrageous thing to do. He was a proper banking gentleman, who might well go for a brisk walk with his young son, who’d be entitled to walk away complaining if his son shouted too loud; and there he was, down on the stone ground. He looked up at Nicholas.

  “You belong to her,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  Nicholas was so angry he didn’t know what to say anymore. He walked away. His father sat there, looking after him. The one time Nicholas looked back, he seemed so sad, so s
hocked all at once, as though it was a catastrophe to have the perfect surfaces of his world challenged.

  He wrote a letter to Nicholas that evening. In it, he listed the charges against his first wife, mother of Nicholas, after the war: blackmail, extortion, receiving stolen goods. That was all. And he sent his love.

  The mourners would go to lunch now, schnapps and wine, three solid courses, maybe venison because it was the season, and a half pear filled with red-currant jelly and the small white noodles. Nicholas could taste it all. A bottle of Fendant. A bottle of Dôle. They wouldn’t cry and they wouldn’t laugh, not until they had the schnapps.

  He walked out of the graveyard, a shade much too solid not to draw attention. He thought of going back in the afternoon to see the grave settled and dressed with flowers, but he did not want to meet the others. He kept walking in the cold, and now that the mist had lifted off the lake, his face burned with the bright, metallic light off the high slopes.

  He was an old man, officially. He had cards to prove he was an old man. He was a widower, a father, a retiree; there was nothing left to change in his life. He had lacked a father almost all his life, forfeited his father’s attention completely at the age of twenty, made a good marriage, made a life that was perfectly sufficient and self-contained, a fort from which to watch the world. But now that his father was gone, he was shivering.

  He had to walk Bahnhofstrasse on his way home. He passed his mother’s shop. He wondered if she even knew that Herr Müller, half her name, much of her credibility, was dead, and that he had been buried that day.

  The shop was painted rooms, lights as gold and rose as anything on a stage, a nice commercial dawn in between chemists and bookshops. The shine of the place was inventoried: its wax and glazes, glass, gilt and biscuit. In the window, a few small Meissen pieces: a dwarf with whiskers like a cat, two porcelain heads of children that would obviously be the originals, a pretty beaker with stooped Chinese and a baby dragon. Beyond that, a defensive wall of marquetry and plush and ormolu: engulfing sofas, tables spiked with ornament, bureaus which could fortify entire new social classes. Beyond that front line, the far interior of the shop was a warm, welcoming confusion of pretty things, china and glass, delicate bent legs, enamels and inlays shining against fine rosewood. Tapestry hung on the walls: a zebra, a hunt.

  He could see her through the windows: a porcelain figure, suggested with paint, in her plain round chair—Louis Delanois, still underpriced, no provenance to speak of—surveying her empire. It was pretty. It was profitable. It was pleasant. Nothing here would challenge unduly, unless it challenged someone’s wallet. She had spent half a century dealing in the refined and elegant trivia of a civilization, trying to imbue it with significance: a date here, the name of an artisan, a place in history for a pot, a chair, a bit of porcelain which would not even hold a meal or support a visitor.

  Nicholas stood at the door and thought about going to talk with her. But they were not used to being spontaneous.

  An assistant stood by her, the keeper of keys, making the nightly checks: the alarm systems, the storeroom lights and dehumidifiers, whether the coffee machine was shut down. Nicholas sympathized: it must be hard in these last half hours before the shop was locked, because Lucia was no longer the authority, the patron, but a body to be inspected in an almost scientific way.

  She was so old now that age had become her very nature; Nicholas could see that. And yet she traded still on the remains of bright eyes, dark eyes. The hair was dyed the color of old flames. The skin was like cloth, ridged and draped, but over bones so strong and fine that the features stole your whole attention. He saw her as something out of a storybook, where being old always has its own dark meaning: wisdom or evil or magic.

  She checked the answering machine again. She always did that herself.

  Nicholas read her lips. “That will be all,” she was saying.

  The front lights went down. She was left in the gleam of the back of the shop, in the warmth of rosewood and gold and kind lights, and she stood up. She was making a phone call.

  Nicholas decided not to wait.

  She would go home now, and have a glass of Madeira, to which she had become accustomed in old age. Someone would bring her eggs.

  Nicholas went briskly into the lanes of the old town. He thought he might spend the night with Helen and Jeremy again. He liked the notion of playing drums with their son Henry, of setting out the Lego train and running it.

  But he couldn’t bear to talk. So he took the train and then the bus to Sonnenberg: to his house, to the house he made with Nora, to the place where Nora was still alive to him.

  Helen paced the white rooms, huge steps. She liked order, but she liked it more when Henry was here, crabwise shuffling on one buttock over the floor, beating on his tin drums, assembling his train and taking the tracks apart to make proper crashes. She wanted handprints on the immaculate surfaces, a sense of breath and action.

  She thought of Nicholas. Then she tried to think of her grandfather, who was an absence in her mind; she hadn’t even bothered to invent some whiskery, selfless, beaming grandfather, so Alpine his breath would be wildflowers, just to fill the gap. She thought of Nicholas’s loss, and, not knowing the man he was mourning, she could think of it only in the most general terms, which helped nobody.

  And as for her grandmother, the cause of all this, she knew nothing Lucia did not want her to know.

  She’d been taken to tea at the Grand Hotel Dolder, in the formidable propriety of the old-fashioned rooms; and sometimes to buy clothes, which did not much interest her own mother; sometimes to the Kunsthaus where Lucia talked very sensibly about Giacometti’s sketches, for which she had a clever passion; sometimes on a walk where Helen could confess, happily, anything that crossed her mind, but never somehow confessed any questions, a walk which always ended with chocolate and cream. Lucia knew things, and Lucia gave things. Given the closeness of her father and her mother, which was like claustrophobia to Helen as a child, this old woman had been the vent, the breath, the frivolity in her very young life.

  She’d always assumed Lucia was too busy with the shop to see her often. But perhaps her parents rationed out such a heady treat. They must have had their reasons.

  TWO

  Lucia knew all the places everyone knows from postcards; she’d just been there before everyone else, sometimes when there was still time to discover things.

  She knew Paris, for example, but the Paris of 1914 when she was a very small child.

  The Rossi family had habits: a few days in some German spa, often Baden-Baden, or a Swiss mountain and lake, or at weekends the house in Piedmont which stood on pudding-basin hills with a view of the Alps, or somebody else’s house around Lake Como or Lago Maggiore. They went to Paris, briefly, to be properly dazzled. The city was further, larger, lighter, grander, and truly foreign in its grandness, and her parents had shone with its reflected glory.

  But now there was a war coming. Everyone said so. They had to get home to Milan.

  They drew up outside the great iron vaults of the railway station, father in an overcoat in a hot July, mother veiled and ringed with a fox, the taxi smelling of roses because of her; on the outside of the cab, hefty cases. The station halls were stale, air unmoving where there was air, with people pressed back into doorways, scrapping at doors, leaking into the roadways and ebbing and backing and suddenly stopping up against walls. Some looked as though they had slept the night on the road, not even the benches of the waiting rooms. And all of them sounded Italian, except for the fussy officials.

  Two porters swung the cases to make a way for the Rossis: metal-edged leather cases, not easy to swing. A nun turned with her mouth open. A pair of soldiers stood like fair angels, but wouldn’t part to let the family through. Small men sat bundled on the ground.

  “We all want to go home,” a man said.

  Lucia was nestled up in her father’s arms, watching the crowd like a show: watching how they were usual
ly short, usually poor, dressed in thick cloth in summer, how there were blondes in among them, how none of the men had shaved that morning except for her shining father, how none of the women was quite as pretty as her mother. She watched happily.

  A tiny man, absurdly in pince-nez, in a railway uniform that bagged and sagged around him, was trying to throw the third-class passengers out of the second-class waiting room; and as one group left, another entered, constantly.

  Her mother shouted. “Via! Via!”

  Her father held her tightly. The porters now had stalled and they had still not reached the platform, let alone the train, let alone the proper and appointed first-class carriage for the long haul back to Milan.

  Her father shouted about a sick child, although she’d never in her life felt more alert and lively. Several parents nodded in sympathy and produced their own sick children.

  Her father was taller than most of the men, she noticed. She looked out onto caps and hats and heads, some of them almost bald like monks.

  Her mother lowered her shoulder and she charged.

  The porters evicted boys from a cart that had ground to a halt in the crowd. They stashed the cases on the cart, helped Lucia’s mother onto the front of it, and then her father surrendered Lucia to her mother and the porters strained on the handle of the cart and started rolling into the crowd. People were startled, resentful, but the ones they had bruised could not fight their way forward to where the cart now bumped along the platform. There was a smell, tired onions, tired sweat, that she had never smelt before in her well-washed world.

  She knew worlds that were entirely alien to the bright young assistants in her store, with their manicured sense of history, and the dealers she knew, who knew nothing inessential, and even her well-heeled, well-aged customers, who were all of them younger. But she turned her memories over like stock in the shop: nothing to treasure, everything moving on.

  She stood at the window of the train and watched the confusion on the other side of the glass, men who hit and spat and shouted, who broke against each other. She thought it was like an aquarium.