by Michael Pye
Nicholas laughed more when his mother was around. He laughed more with her than he did with his friends from school, for he and his friends were about the immensely serious business of conquering the city, at least as far as legs and sometimes a train would carry them. He already knew Alexanderplatz. He knew what the whitewashed windows meant because a schoolfriend told him: gypsy families. He knew the florists’ windows which ran with water in summer to cool the roses you could just see inside; floats of color. He liked to watch the turtles gliding in the tanks at the aquarium on Budapesterstrasse.
He was eight and a half so he was automatically in a kind of gang: six of them. They went about dressed sharp and neat: boy gentlemen. They smiled a lot. In any other city, they would have been ominous and unnatural, but in this Berlin they somehow seemed just another phenomenon on the frantic streets.
They decided to be explorers. They couldn’t travel, so they explored where the bombs had fallen: it was a different place down there. They scrambled under fallen beams, cracked girders, in the new pits along what used to be decorous streets. They found treasure of sorts in the roots of a tree that had been torn half out of the earth; but the treasure was only an old cocoa tin with some boy’s marbles inside. They played marbles for a while on the sidewalk, called it a championship, until somebody told them to move on.
They weren’t afraid in daytime then. They learned to get thoughtful, then edgy, then breathless only when it was properly dark and the bombers came. All the rest of his life, when the sun went down, even in some solid, safe house in Switzerland, fires lit, dinner cooking, lights blazing, Nicholas trembled.
They saw one day a woman, old, dressed in black with a yellow star, carrying a canary in a cage. Nicholas followed her for a while, because people don’t take birds for a walk, and the others followed him and she must have noticed them because she stopped suddenly. She turned to Nicholas, and he thought for a moment she was going to give him the cage and then he saw how tired and angry she was.
“What do you want?” she said, with the emphasis on the “you,” as though everyone else had shadowed and hassled her, and now it was a gaggle of boy gentlemen in a line.
Nicholas said: “I never saw anyone take a bird for a walk.”
“You like birds?”
“Yes. Yes, I do, but I have a cat.”
“I have to get a certificate,” she said.
“What certificate? To show the bird is healthy?”
She said: “I have to have a certificate that the bird is dead. We’re not allowed pets anymore.”
And then the bird began to sing.
He could never ask Lucia: not about practical things, physical things, much less moral things or things he saw in the street. He wanted a father to ask. But since Müller was away, doing his duty, like the German fathers of the German boys, he supposed, he was left to patch the real world together out of his random glimpses.
There was an older man downstairs who sometimes left his door open during the day. The apartments were big enough, but they were awkwardly built to exclude every possibility of breeze; Nicholas assumed that he needed the air.
But he was someone to ask, and Nicholas went down to see him often.
He had books. He said he knew Lucia well. He told Nicholas that Goethe and Schiller were great writers, that Bach and Beethoven were great musicians; he had a record with a scratch of the first Goldberg variations. He said these things as though Nicholas needed to be told them, but it wasn’t entirely clear if he thought Nicholas was too foreign to have been taught them properly.
Once he asked Nicholas to run an errand, four streets away. He had to ring a doorbell three times, wait, and ring once more. The door still didn’t open. He wanted to knock on it fiercely but the older man had told him not to.
An old woman opened after a while. “Tell him I can’t find more,” she said. “Tell him this is what I have, that I don’t need.” She gave Nicholas a little tin box, for throat lozenges, that rattled.
“What are they?”
She said: “Never you mind.” Then she said: “We call them Jewish drops.”
“But I’m not Jewish.”
“Then you won’t like them.”
He carried the box back to Mr. Goldstein, who made the Jewish drops disappear into his hand like a conjurer does.
Nicholas told his mother about this. He wanted to discuss it, a little. She only said he shouldn’t do such things. Then she went downstairs herself to talk to Mr. Goldstein, and from downstairs he heard music: and he knew it was Bach, the Brandenburg Concertos, and was proud to know the name, because Mr. Goldstein had told him.
“What’s happening?” he asked his mother when she came back.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing unusual.” And she was right; the usual was accelerated, frantic, menacing, but it was usual.
A few days later, Katya complained about having to clean a rug that had suddenly appeared, a fine red and gold affair. Lucia said she’d sort that out. “It can go into storage,” she said. He noticed there were a number of other new and fine things.
He always had the key in his pocket. He walked carefully, tiptoe, down the stairs. He half hoped Mr. Goldstein’s door would still be open, although he knew that adults all locked up at night; he’d been careful to check the locks on his own door.
The stairs were still very clean, the paint washed, the light dull neon gray. He didn’t like shadows at the time, and there were hardly any shadows because the lights were overhead. Sometimes he felt safer on the stairs than in the apartment.
On the next landing down, he stopped at Mr. Goldstein’s door. He pushed it. It came open. It didn’t seem he had opened it for the sake of the air, but it wasn’t locked.
He ought to warn him, say something, but he didn’t want to go any further in. But he could hear music, and if he shouted, Mr. Goldstein might not hear him.
The light was shut off in the corridor, but he could see some faint shine, like a candle, in the living room.
He knew he should stop there. He looked back and the door bounced on its hinges and swung shut.
He was still an adventurer. He knew Mr. Goldstein, and Mr. Goldstein would be glad to see him, surprised, but glad. He was an adventurer, brave and intrepid, and he ought to go walk on down the corridor.
He ought to turn back.
If someone moved on the staircase, that would explain why he lost his nerve. But there was no movement in his memory, no foot-steps. All he remembered was suddenly starting to run toward that faint gold light at the end of the corridor and stopping short of the door and hearing the needle catch in the gramophone record.
Mr. Goldstein would now get up from his chair and correct the record. But Mr. Goldstein did not correct the record. The needle banged and fizzed on the groove.
Nicholas was more afraid to run back than to run forward. Ahead there was light, behind was a throat of darkness, ready to swallow him.
The light changed. The candle, which had been flickering in a glass at the level of a tabletop, was now down on the floor.
He opened the door. The candle caught papers on the floor which burned up in a little boiling of flame.
He knew what to do. He stamped on the flames. He picked up the candle and pinched it out between his fingers.
He had seen something in the light. He saw Mr. Goldstein, in his chair. But now he could see nothing at all.
This living room must be much like the living room upstairs, so it would have windows over to the left, with shutters inside. If he could get to the shutters and open them, there would be light from outside: the Christmas lights of a bombing raid, perhaps.
He felt his way across the room.
He said: “Mr. Goldstein. Mr. Goldstein. Are you asleep?”
He fumbled with the low catches on the shutters and opened them. He wasn’t sure if he could reach the higher ones, but he did not need to. The shutters were off their hinges, and tumbled open by themselves.
Mr. Goldstein sat
facing the street. He was dressed in a suit, the trousers creased, the jacket tucked about him neatly. He wore his medals. In his hands, he had a book, and Nicholas knew from the heft and the binding and the gold on the edges of the pages that it must be one of his volumes of Goethe.
The little box for throat lozenges sat on the table by his side, with a glass of water.
He backed away from Mr. Goldstein, from his stillness and his indifference to the odd sounds in the room and the smell of scorched paper on the carpet and he turned and ran into the corridor.
He ran downstairs, not upstairs. He just wanted to be somewhere else, to be out of the building.
He wanted to talk to his father, there and then. He wanted to be sure he was still alive.
It was cold outside. He fussed with the locks, which had never seemed difficult before, and he went upstairs to wait at the window for his mother. He didn’t like to seem anxious; it only made her fret. She turned up in a tiny, silly car that night: a Topolino, a Fiat. He told her he wished they could have a Topolino. He couldn’t find the words for anything else.
It was often six weeks between letters from his father. His father described mountains and rivers, but never said anything about the war. Nicholas didn’t think it was interesting to write about the bombs, either. He didn’t want to worry his father, who would be there if he could be but who had a duty somewhere else. Nicholas could not define duty, but he could feel how it must trap and pull a man.
Besides, what could he have said in those letters? He didn’t have landscapes to discuss. He saw animals only in the zoo or the aquarium. He never did get used to the ground shaking under him. He found it strange how, with everything, from the conduct of the war to the troubles of the Jews to the price of coal, you knew and you did not know, all at once.
He didn’t want his mother to know he could take the key and go down to the streets and be anywhere his legs would carry him, but she’d certainly read his letters before she found envelopes and stamps. And yet, for all his venturing, he was always aware that he was dependent on Lucia like something unweaned. If she didn’t come home, he would die.
He did write in one letter how they kept bathfuls of water just to put out fires. The basement was reinforced with tree trunks. Someone loosened the bricks in a couple of walls so the fattest tenant could get out if the main doors were blocked. There were card tables, a radio. The basement somehow got organized into a set of rooms, one for each family. Everyone always kept a suitcase packed.
That letter got lost, or censored. In his next letter, his father complained there had been no answer to his last one.
As for the excitements, the diversions, it wasn’t fair to tell his father.
They’d been out to dinner, mother and son, with a couple of men who must have been Swiss. She didn’t touch them; Nicholas noticed that. He always noticed that. He remembered having oysters, but he wanted something called crawfish. They came, long, pink, and thin. Then he had venison because he was hungry for grown-up, show-off meat, and it arrived a little bloody in the middle. He was upset for a moment but, like a grown-up, he ate it.
On the street, there was a soldier standing. He was clean-shaven, but the uniform wasn’t quite right, and he looked tired. He asked Lucia, very simply, if he could look at her pretty hands.
She was furious when the authorities banned perms. The big, glossy shops with truly expensive things had begun to close down, too; Nicholas had liked that old gold light they used to throw out even in the middle of the day. And there were no church bells anymore, because of the war effort, they said. He remembered the bells where he used to live, how they rolled and roared.
The outside world was now without fine things. It was entirely different inside the apartment. There were pots and plates and chairs—sometimes the chairs didn’t have cushions and Nicholas asked why. There were some tapestries, a couple of pictures. And when they moved apartments, somehow all that stopped being clutter and there were a couple of rooms he didn’t like at all because they were like a museum.
His father stopped writing—or, at least, his letters no longer arrived. It was wartime; Nicholas was told not to be disappointed, or even surprised. He began by waiting for his father and very soon he was angry with his father and then he put his father—the particular, complicated man, with his tics and skills—out of his mind completely. He thought he had his ration of parents: a mother who stayed with him.
He remembered life like some gallery, made up of exhibits and pictures that sometimes made sense and sometimes did not: little moments, little dramas, never connected because connection would be a reminder of how everyone was waiting, waiting, waiting. They waited for victories that didn’t come. They waited for soldiers to come back triumphant from Russia, and they didn’t come back at all.
They waited, most of all, for the bombers.
Just once, he saw a truck carrying people away: carrying Jews away, he knew later. He could see their feet under the tarpaulin sides of the truck, like a puppet show upside down: some of them in slippers, neat leather shoes, pretty shoes, one bound up with cloth as though the foot was broken.
The next day, maybe the next week, very soon anyway, he learned the rules of chess and saw there could be whole epics in the moves. He learned to sing. His mother was charmed, then infuriated. “Aprile non c’è piu,” he sang. “È ritornato il Maggio al canto del cucù.”
He learned about women’s eyes from movie stills. The eyes were all important in those days: Zarah Leander giving things up, Luise Ullrich trying to get home, Ilse Werner with her girl’s way of showing polite, devoted skepticism, and Marika Rökk, who was his favorite. He had that picture of her from Kora Terry where she’s turned to the camera, arm bare, shoulder draped, the light brilliant on those perfect lips and those welcoming, understanding, and, above all, interested eyes.
Gattopardo grew sleek, too sleek, handfuls of belly fur and belly. Nicholas watched him wash, paws articulated and flexible and too complicated to map or draw; and his tongue going in and out between the toes.
Nobody told him how to put all this together into the kind of childhood you can remember when your father dies; or how to make a self from all these moments, or a moral code, or even a strategy for staying alive.
In February, he was coming home from school on an evening of black cold. He tried a different street for once. Katya would be waiting for him, but he didn’t much like Katya, and his mother was still working. He had no reason to hurry, except the cold.
The trees were rattling; there must have been a high wind, enough to rush the blood along a little. The streetlights were already on, a violet haze. The windows of apartment buildings were blank, nobody home yet, and the balconies bare. You couldn’t even dry anything; it would have frozen stiff.
He heard a soft wave of sound, like crying in the streets. He never heard crying. He heard shouts or orders or fights, or else silence, but not crying.
He turned the corner.
He saw a dozen women standing around the entrance to some undistinguished building. All of them looked young, younger than his mother. They had cloth coats and they had bare faces and they trembled with weeping.
He didn’t know what to do. He thought perhaps he should comfort them, but he couldn’t take the hands of all of them and he didn’t know which hand he should take first. And he felt, perhaps knew, that nothing kind and personal could ever be enough. He saw loss itself standing in that street, plain as a monument.
There was nobody to stop him walking through the door of the building. He was a child, after all, and nobody expected a child to take an initiative so nobody made rules to stop him. And besides, this place was a school: a place for children.
The lights inside were all turned on. The first room had a few chairs, a few tables. It had cribs, a dozen of them. All empty. There were two medicine balls, comfortably battered, and some colored blocks, and on the wall, some drawings done by very small children: stick people in box houses by lollipop trees.
It was very quiet. In all his life he only heard the same kind of silence one other time, and that was during a full eclipse of the sun: when the light went wrong, when the life went out of the air, when everything fell silent and the shadow took away the sun.
Strollers stood in two neat half circles on the tiles. Outside noises broke in: trams grinding on metal, a car Klaxon.
March 1, 1943, was the first night the bombers got to the very heart of Berlin. It became a date he remembered, like a birthday, like a saint’s day.
Until then, he could imagine there was an order in the world, a way to make sense of everything. It might be the order of prison, or the order of school with all its rules and bosses and communal rumors and fantasies, and also like being part of some great civilian army whether you liked it or not. But he imagined that the adults all walked down the street, carrying their assumption that the world made sense.
Of course, people sometimes saw too much, as stagehands step out of the dark between scenes at the opera. Ever since the Russian campaigns began, there were wounded people, on one leg, with one arm; there was a stump of a man, cut off at the waist, on a board with little wheels, who exercised each day in the courtyard, frantically pushing and pulling himself from side to side, getting nowhere. You also saw people with no particular purpose, when everyone was supposed to be part of the fatherland’s machine, or people swapping rumors on a corner, or adults making jokes, or people who forgot to say Heil Hitler, ever.
Some schoolmate told Nicholas about the time Zarah Leander went to Hitler by special invitation to sing him a song. And the song was: “I Know a Miracle Will Happen Some Day.”
Nicholas knew he was virtually a foreigner, so he decided not to laugh.