by Michael Pye
He was not a witness. He only lived while things happened. He didn’t have anything to say which he, and he alone, knew. If anything, he’d bring back the ridiculous details, like the toilet paper rough as wrapping paper, and the perpetual shortages, and the usefulness of all those fine paper propaganda leaflets that the British dropped.
He walked up the road to Sonnenberg. The sky was clean here, and the moon high. The snow was bright as mirrors on either side of the black line of road, shadows blue, fields evened out. Sometimes at the roadside the crust had broken on the snow and underneath that rough glass of ice he could see feathers of soft cold.
The house had been a farmhouse, once, when he and Nora found it: half solid stone, half the old brown wood of a barn. Geese straggled by the door. A small dog visited.
The world was brilliant as a picture in a lightbox. He could almost see clearly again: old eyes with ice for lenses. He would have stayed, if he could have done, outside in the cold, with the dog tasting his hand and the cat rubbing against him: an animate scarecrow, a passerby on his way to the high woods or perhaps to the next farm.
He didn’t do what he had done every time he came home to Sonnenberg, didn’t check the mailbox, didn’t go to see if there were messages, somehow always expecting a message from Nora even if she was dead six years, which, to him, was only a detail.
He went to the barn instead. It seemed like a perfect replica of a barn that you read about in books: a strong wood shelter with logs stacked like art along one wall, with a lawnmower, a washing machine, shelves of jam and paint. It didn’t seem to have a history of things breaking or falling at all. He looked out over the whiteness all around, and he thought for a moment the whole land had no terrible history, either: it was so easily reduced to its own bright, white, and shielding surface.
He loved to see the deer move against the woods, the branches of their legs and antlers. He wasn’t even looking for them tonight.
He thought the process of fading, of leaving just a chalk mark in a bright white world, ought to produce some countervailing calm or resignation. That would be the proper order of things.
He had been sent to school at the Italian embassy in Berlin for a while. He knew he wasn’t meant to be surprised, not by a great house that seemed all gold; only later did he suspect the railings were bronze. He saw doors of wood so black it had to be ancient, and seats taken out of churches, and the rooms were lit with a hundred cuts of light trapped by magic in glass. Now he would classify the magic: chandeliers from Venice.
He sat beside a boy called Luca, who seemed to think he should know about Italian things just because of his name. He explained that his father was Swiss, which was why he was also called Müller, and that Niccolo or Nicholas Müller-Rossi was born in Germany. Luca called him a “Mischling”—in German: a half-breed.
Nicholas didn’t like the word. Then Luca realized that Nicholas’s father was away, and in the wrong army. He didn’t use the fact directly because everyone behaved in the class: little premature gentlemen of six and seven. But it was always the interesting fact about Nicholas: that his father was in the wrong army.
Nicholas started his childhood when the bombers came, when there was time and space to play at last.
That first summer was hot, unusually hot, everyone said. Everyone wanted to get to the water. Lucia took him down to Wannsee one August day to watch the powerboats whirling around out on the lake waters. She said he could swim.
They were with someone: one of Lucia’s new friends, a man, of course, from the embassy. He was quite tall and he could play soccer well enough to impress a kid. He passed neatly, and Nicholas scored goal after goal between his jacket and the picnic basket.
He wanted to go out on one of the little sailboats. His mother looked up at the sky, which was part pewter and part a brilliant blue. Her friend shrugged. He thought it might be worth keeping Nicholas quiet and amused, and Nicholas was a persistent child.
They came away from the shore, and all of a sudden, there was a different kind of breeze. The boy felt wind across his whole skin. He saw his mother’s hair, a fine red in those days, her own red, stroked out and flying in the wind. They were in a tiny sailboat, nothing at all, a walnut shell in between the motorboats further out, but it felt like they were exploring across whole oceans, that they had found somewhere wild at last. A few girls and soldiers, in rowboats, were laughing much too much.
Nicholas knelt up at the bows, staring out. The wind got brisk. There were pellets of rain and they beat back off the lake water. The sky blackened. There was a distant rumble of thunder.
His mother said: “It’s beautiful out here.”
Her friend said: “Look. We’d better get back. Lightning’s no fun when you’re out on the water like this. Exposed.”
His mother stared at the horizon of green, tangled trees and she seemed to be willing the lightning to come. Out of the blue sky she brought white light, as though the sky had cracked open and shown the hot glare beyond. Out of the pewter sky, Nicholas truly believed this, she brought a different kind of lightning: red light, broad light, a tree of it.
Her friend stood, rocked the boat, took down the little sail he could no longer trust. “We have to go back,” he said.
The wind flicked up ripples from the lake. They could see, looking away from the city, the rain starting in a curtain. Lucia’s friend had the oars now.
She said: “It’s beautiful.”
Nicholas stayed at the bow, even though he had to hold on as the boat began to slip and turn, and his knees were marked and bloody when they got to shore.
His mother hugged him. She never bothered with that particular friend again.
He liked to think he remembered what was specific, what happened in front of him. So he knew the caretaker rattled pans when the air raids came. He’d come up out of the courtyard, two tin saucepans and a spoon in each that he worked like a clapper in a bell, and he’d run around, up and down all the stairs, insisting everyone go down to the shelter.
But children hear stories. They heard and believed that it wasn’t always safe in the cellars. One whole building ran down, barricaded the doors, made sure the ceilings were propped with beams, settled to a glass of milk or schnapps or cold coffee; and then drowned, because the pipes burst and they couldn’t get out in time.
There was nobody for Nicholas to believe. Things you knew seemed more real than things you were told. He sometimes thought he’d moved into a world from the comic strips.
He passed a butcher’s shop and saw a sleeping donkey being carried inside. He thought it was asleep because the men were carrying it suspended from a pole, its hooves shining. Then he looked again and he saw the throat was slit.
So he relied on his mother, and she used to make things all right, one way or another. Sometimes, she took him to the Kurfürstendamm to make things all right. He’d wear a very stiff white shirt. It almost hurt, but he was proud to wear it: a badge of being a man. She wore new, shiny shoes. They ate kuchen with a lot of cream.
They took the subway home. They went one stop sitting in among the neat afternoon crowd, and the air raid siren went off: a noise that sounded as though it had to be wound up.
The train stopped in the next station. Everybody knew they had to get out, so everyone went to the doors. Everyone stood around.
A pudgy man, a silly man out of a cartoon book, started talking very loudly. Nicholas tapped his mother to make sure she saw him: a little walking joke. He was insisting on attention, but he couldn’t speak properly. He kept stuttering over words. People didn’t quite laugh at him, but they shifted about as he told them how to survive.
After a minute, when the crowd wanted to be somewhere else and showed it, he said: “Listen. I only took this job to get away from my wife. You’d want to get away from my wife.”
He had the crowd silent.
“She’s orders, orders, orders. I can’t breathe at home without permission. So just give me a minute—”
/> The all-clear siren sounded out. Everyone stepped back into the train.
Lucia went out in the evenings, and cars came for her. She went out in a cloud of Chanel No. 5—Nicholas had time to read everything in the apartment after she’d gone at night, so he knew all the brands—and she left behind an expensive, perfect ghost of scent. Sometimes very late she’d bring back pasta in a box from some restaurant.
Nicholas understood he had to be out of sight if anyone called for her, although she never let anyone into the apartment. She made things up to him at weekends and when she could. In winter, especially, he loved the one bath night, Saturday or Sunday. The soap scratched, and it didn’t lather much; in fact, it made scum on the water. But he loved the attention and he loved the sheer, luxuriating warmth. He was always wrapped up, but he only felt truly warm in the bath.
Other nights, Lucia would sit in the living room, alive but inside the pages of a book. She might as well have been a picture behind glass. Or she would be pacing about the apartment, and Nicholas would say something, and she would either ignore him, or at best say: “Not now.” Other days, she was teaching him to dance, him so short, head fixed just above her belly button, counting under his breath to a waltz. He tried to hold back, to play the man properly, but his face always ended in the warmth of her belly on the turns.
She always tried to be home when the air raids came. He was sure of that.
She took him to the movies one evening, and the sirens went off just as they were coming out of the theater, and they had to get to a shelter. There was a vast new bunker by the zoo, all stuck about with flak guns. Its walls felt like all the rock in a mountain. You didn’t believe anything could move them.
They were checked as they went in, and searched. Lucia’s papers must have seemed a bit odd, being Italian married to a Swiss and living in Germany. It didn’t usually matter. But it seemed that, at the entrance to the zoo bunker, she didn’t know anybody.
The sound of the siren was winding up and up. There was a long line waiting to be safe.
She pushed another set of papers at the guards. They must have been Nicholas’s papers: born in Germany. So he could go in, and she followed, smiling kindly, letting her bag be searched, letting the guard say that in that dress he hardly needed to search her. Being young, Nicholas still wondered if the guard disapproved or approved.
He heard gunfire. He heard the low, droning sound of air engines. He heard the sirens. He wanted to be behind those safe, thick walls.
People kept their hats on. There weren’t many lights, but the few lights were bright like theater lights, and the hats made odd shadows on the pale brick walls, made middle-aged persons into pharaohs and Turks and general infidels. It took forever to climb up level by level through the press of people, who didn’t want to move from the doors, who still at that time of the war had the old animal instinct to stay close to the ground and the air. When the anti-aircraft guns fired, the earth shook under them.
Later, Nicholas learned about air, how it masses together after bombs have fallen and comes through a city like a blind wave of force, throwing fire all around, taking down what the bombs themselves could not ruin. But at the time, he felt safe. He looked up at a man and a woman on the spiral stairs, curled around each other and playing with each other’s fingers, and he felt safe.
On his bed at Sonnenberg, he dreamt of a man walking away: walking steadily, purposefully, and not stopping for a moment even when Nicholas was shouting, shouting, shouting. The man did not acknowledge him, not even by ignoring him.
He always hated the moments in magic shows where there’s a flash, a puff of smoke, and someone disappears. The rest of the audience clapped, cheered, laughed. Nicholas wanted to cry.
He was good at imagining things, but he was still lonely. He couldn’t, officially, go out after dark, and it was dark when school finished in wintertime. Lucia was often out. There weren’t many children in the building. He heard a baby sometimes.
He wanted a cat.
He thought his mother would never agree, not even discuss such a thing. He sensed that it would be one last thing too many. Besides, she was not a sentimental woman.
He didn’t know where to look for a cat, whether there were shops for cats. He didn’t have money, anyway. He thought about leaving a saucer of milk by the door and leaving the door open at night, but the door had to be closed and locked.
The second winter in Berlin was very cold. The radiators knocked and rattled, and still sometimes ice formed on the inside of windows. He tried leaving a window slightly open in case a cat wanted to come in, but a knife of cold cut into the room and he had to close it again.
He had his own key when he turned eight. He had to have one, Lucia said, because he might need to go to the shelter before she came home, and she might have to spend the night out.
He never told her that he went out, too.
Those nights were like the dark in a movie house before the film starts, the same coughings and laughs from somewhere you couldn’t quite place, the same sense of being crowded and of strangers on the move, feeling their way, one foot ahead of another, shuffling.
Cars went about with caution, with animal eyes: a slit of light through the felt that was fixed over their headlights.
He didn’t want to be far away from home. He just wanted air, and the sight of other people. He watched the backs of the men going away, and sometimes he imagined he’d just missed his father.
Then he didn’t know the way.
This was not his city. He hardly knew it by daylight. He was not sure which way he should turn. He couldn’t call out because he knew it was always better not to be noticed.
He knew people must be moving around him. He didn’t know who they were, or what they wanted. There were a very few torches, masked in red or blue, and people tap tapping along like the blind.
He saw a woman’s legs: long, elegant, silky legs, just her legs, in the red light from a torch. He thought she might help him, so he tapped her on the back and she spun round, her torch catching faces in the black, and she said: “Well, kid?”
“I wanted—”
“Listen. I’m working.”
And she gathered herself, and kept the light playing down on those long, silky legs.
He put his back against a wall.
Someone was shouting, not shouting but honking out loud so that people would know he was there.
He didn’t know which uniform his father wore, so he didn’t know which uniform to trust.
He heard a tram coming. That was good; there was a tramline in the street next to their street. He heard it rolling and shearing on its tracks, and he heard crackling in the air.
There was suddenly blue, bright lightning in the street, earthed to its wheels, shocks of light in the quiet dark. Nicholas, very still on the sidewalk, could make out the shape of the tramcars. He saw their windows where people sat in iced cold light, very faint, that made them look as though they were already dead and their faces had started to fade.
Then the dark came together where the electric flares had torn it.
Nicholas had seen the store at the corner of the street; he knew at last where he was. He listened to the tram going away.
He heard a kitten bawling under a pile of fallen stones. He pushed the stones away and picked it up and it squirmed in his hand and then settled. He put it under his coat and it peed on him.
He managed to hide the animal for a couple of days. He saved bits of meat from Sunday dinner. He cut little pieces of cheese. He wished Lucia would bring oysters, because there were always too many oysters, one of those curiosities of war, although he didn’t know if cats ate oysters. He cleaned up after the kitten, and the kitten kept wonderfully quiet, except that it purred so loudly when it was lying warm against him that he thought the apartment would shake.
But then Lucia got a maid, like everyone else, and she had to know.
He sometimes made an inventory of what he must have known. He didn
’t know the proper rules of soccer, but he knew about fire, flares, bombs. He knew what they meant. He never learned to throw a ball, because ball games would have been disorderly on the streets, but he knew how to pitch a stone to bring down the plaster from a falling wall. He saw uniforms, and also dead people.
Lucia got herself a job out at the film studios, UFA, the Universum Film AG, taking the train out each day. He never discovered why she wasn’t at the embassy anymore; he thought he would ask her one day. She told him her job was to make sure there were cartoons in the cinemas, which seemed like quite a good idea, except that he was never very impressed with all the kisses in Snow White. He said she should leave those bits out of her films.
The maid’s name was Katya. She came from somewhere to the East. She didn’t speak much German. She had a pudding face, she didn’t smile. She had a wonderfully big bottom, an epic of solid flesh. She fascinated Nicholas when she sat down, or when she walked away.
She never seemed to have time off. She was allowed to go off for a few hours on Fridays, and he assumed she might go to the cinema, but when he asked if she was going to a film, she said: “Verboten.” He didn’t ask again.
He found a name for the cat: Gattopardo. He’d much rather have given it the sort of name a friend might have had, but Katya took him to the zoo one afternoon—she always wanted to take him to the zoo, because it was an excuse to be out and see other people—and he saw an ocelot which had just the same markings as his cat. Katya pointed out the label and he asked his mother what it was, and she told him in Italian. So the cat became Gattopardo.
He watched Katya for the sake of watching some other person. She washed out the apartment with a mop, a soft, sluicing sound that he could follow from room to room. It didn’t seem to make the apartment much cleaner. He remembered her food, heavy and with potatoes, always potatoes: potato dumplings, potato cakes, a dozen different thicknesses of potato soup.
One afternoon, when she was out, Lucia said Katya didn’t know everything about potatoes. Lucia took three potatoes out of the store and she juggled them, then she peeled them and cut them and then she said, “Shhh, you must never tell anyone,” and she took the iron out of the cupboard, heated it up, and put the cut potatoes on it. “Fried potatoes,” she said, and she gave Nicholas one. It was a bit raw in the middle, but it was gold and it was perfect to him. “Remember that,” she said.