The Pieces from Berlin

by Michael Pye

  There was liver with the Rösti, and a salad made from cabbage that had been sweetened by the frost all winter.

  “It was a country funeral. Very simple. White flowers and a lunch afterward.”

  Henry contemplated eggs and what he could do with them: build castles of potato, throw, strain, squelch.

  “I watched,” Nicholas said.

  “I never knew him.”

  “No,” Nicholas said. “Nor did I, really.”

  He began to gather up the plates.

  “There isn’t anything to say,” he said, firmly.

  “It’s not over. Look what happened to you yesterday.”

  “We’re an embarrassment to a good Catholic family. An anomaly.”

  “You’re not the embarrassment, Lucia is.”

  “They don’t know anything about her. My father told them she was dead. She died in the bombing of Berlin.”

  “I don’t know the whole story, either.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  She looked sharply at him. She did not like the idea that he might choose not to know things.

  They listened to the quiet, which was a way of making sure that neither of them said things.

  And then Henry was at the door, loud as a committee, demanding a snowman. They were both relieved; they both smiled great involuntary smiles; they went ambling out after the boy into the bright white garden.

  Helen pitched snow at Nicholas, who dusted himself off and pitched back a packed, iced snowball which broke on the trunk of an apple tree. Nicholas worried out loud about goose shit in the snow, but he was still scrabbling under the crust where the downy stuff lay.

  Henry labored on a great brick of snow, which he tried to throw, just throw away, but which fell back to the ground in a soft pile. So Helen made it the start of a snowman, scooped more snow onto the pile, firmed the soft stuff, packed it into a fat little body while Nicholas showed Henry how to roll a great head across the lawn.

  Then Nicholas brought a wizened carrot out of the barn, and Henry brought little black stones for the buttons, and Helen put twigs to show the arms and hands.

  They stood back, hot and grinning.

  Henry began to kick the snowman down. He was shouting: “Snow Man! Big Man!”

  Nicholas only laughed, but Helen was watchful. Henry was herded between them back to the warmth of the house, to the tile wall of the stove and the prospect of chocolate.

  The geese barked and wailed. Down in the valley, a dog was complaining. Then the world went quiet outside.

  Nicholas said, suddenly: “She cost me my father.”

  Then he said: “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “You never said it before.”

  “I couldn’t change things, you see. All I could do was make a life for Nora and for you, and keep you safe.”

  She said: “You did that. You did all of that.”

  “It would be wonderful to resolve things,” Nicholas said. “To have them over after all this time. I don’t think it is possible.”

  “If there was a crime—”

  “The law didn’t solve anything in 1945. Why should it do any better now?”

  Helen said: “Because all the circumstances are different. Because it’s possible now.”

  “But who has the energy anymore?” Nicholas said.

  She thought he must have slept badly again last night: panda eyes, watery and ringed with black. She wanted to hold him and let him rest; she wanted to force him into confession; she wanted justice and she wanted her father to sleep all at once. She invented an excuse for her confusion: that it was all about the healing force and use of bringing out secrets.

  “I do want to know,” she said. “I don’t really know what you saved me from.”

  “You want everything acknowledged, I suppose? You want people to own their own past?”

  “You don’t think that would be comforting?”

  “How could it be?” he said.

  Henry had a helter-skelter, where the marbles could run this way, then the other way, down to a tray. He played carefully at first, watching the progress of one marble at a time. Then he scooped up handfuls of marbles, let them run crashing one after the other, made the wood channels rock. The noise of hard glass on wood was almost all they could hear.

  But Nicholas did say, loudly: “I’m still going to the opera with Lucia. Even so.”

  He wanted the houselights down, the red curtains apart, the orchestra sounding out. He wanted to lose himself in the mass and swell of the music.

  Lucia took her seat, parterre center, second row: the usual seat. She might be old, but she’d learned to be infinitely careful with her movements so that she took the stairs without undue effort, no unneeded pauses, took her seat a little early so she would not need to push past others. She expected a little attention, but she had expected that for three quarters of a century at least: her redhaired due.

  He watched her attentively. He wondered always what others could deduce from her careful appearance, what they thought of her if they only glimpsed her at some public moment like this. Perhaps she was heroic just for being old.

  She’d suggested the opera four weeks ago, which was two weeks before he knew his father had died. He sent her a copy of the death notice, faxed it to the shop. If she saw it, she said nothing. He didn’t expect her to take any interest in the funeral, since she’d abandoned Hans Peter Müller sixty years before, but he thought she might thank him for the information. Instead, she confirmed the opera, as though he would know now that he was perfectly obliged to her: his only point of origin.

  Perhaps he was. He’d lost his wife. He’d lost his father. His daughter had her own life. What he had left, by the oddest of circumstances, was a mother who outlived almost all of them.

  The velvet curtains opened. The whole high space of the proscenium was filled with a gray scrim, with a square cut out in which sat a man with a lyre: Tannhäuser, he assumed.

  Lucia had brought him here as a boy, and he’d loved the size of the sound, and the rush of the music and the mad prettiness of the world on the stage: all harem girls and significant ghost ships and the singing Queen of Spades, fairy-tale stuff that a whole audience agreed to take seriously with a grand collective act of will. He wanted to be lost again in all that determined glory. He wanted distraction more than anything.

  Until the orchestra came to order, his mind still worked on. The word he kept avoiding, and knew he kept avoiding, was “accomplice.” A child could not be considered his mother’s accomplice, not in law or morals, not without some particular evil intent of his own; and he knew he did not have that. He might have been implicated. He wasn’t guilty. It was such an equivocal, intolerable position.

  “Thank you for telling me about Hans Peter,” Lucia said, very distinctly, just as the conductor raised his baton and there was nothing he could properly say.

  She was smiling. It might be the prospect of the music or her clever little tactic or some memory that tickled a corner of her mind.

  So she’d decided, again, there was nothing to be said.

  Tannhäuser sat waiting for the overture to end.

  He watched her in profile, radiant in the great brass blare of the first big tune: intent, not abstract like the old sometimes become, when their command of autobiography dissolves and with it their very self. So if Lucia was Lucia, so bright, so convincing, then by definition Lucia remembered. The idea made him shiver.

  He wanted to think it was the strings, yearning energetically, stepping up to a great crescendo with an undertow of timpani and the bright, top amazements of cymbals and triangle. Everyone in the warm red circle of the auditorium, gilt still catching the dimming houselights, was being tugged into the music, sitting straighter in their chairs as the music wound upward and upward.

  He still wasn’t lost. He wasn’t close to Venusberg at all. He was in polite, unassuming Zurich, which sometimes struck him as a much more alarming place.

&nb
sp; For after Berlin, the city had amazed him. Houses still entire. Trees still in the ground. Pipes and cables in order under the sidewalks.

  He kept waiting for trouble.

  He’d go walking, looking for barbed wire, but there wasn’t much. He saw boys fishing on the lakeside, and steamers taking off across the lake. He saw chocolate everywhere: it wasn’t a secret or a privilege anymore.

  Lucia had a magazine, a big, glossy paper, which she kept in the apartment those first few days across the border: Die Schweiz, the February issue. It was full of snow, of holidays, of trains with their windows open to catch the mountain air and laughing, joyful people on skis, on ox sleighs, in chalets, on open, shining mountains. There was a folkloric woman on the cover, in blue and red.

  He remembered a crowd at a demolition, how every man wore a hat. It couldn’t have been a very large house, just an unwanted element in between the new, rounded buildings that were smooth as medicine pills. It buckled inward and the crowds didn’t trouble to stand back. The walls wrenched, and their clean, white plastered certainty twisted about, and you could see what made the whole thing stand: sand, shit, fiber. The crowd approved with an intake of breath. Someone clapped. Stairs fell slowly. The wall looked like new bread cut with a blunt knife. Wooden frames lost all their right angles.

  In Zurich, when a building came down, walls failed, windows blew out, it was just a fairground show. Then the show was over and they built something new.

  The sirens were whispering, a hidden chorus promising all manner of burning love. Tannhäuser was saying he’d had enough of Venusberg. And Nicholas still wasn’t engaged. Sacred and profane love, he thought, was not exactly his problem. He’d never had to choose.

  He invented himself, out of necessity. His father, very soon after the war, had a new wife, and was ready for a new life without Nicholas. His mother didn’t know how to be Swiss, didn’t care. She was not yet an anomaly in 1944 when she rolled into Zurich with her truckloads of stock, when women still ran businesses for their absent husbands; her antique shop was almost usual. But she was very curious indeed by 1946 when the women had all gone back to their homes. She wasn’t even attached to a man, anymore. She was foreign, whatever her passport said.

  So there was nobody around to teach Nicholas the ordinary things: how to ski, the weather in the Alps, the wait for the proper job in a bank.

  He grew fat quite young, just because he wasn’t his athlete father; he did not want to win. He became a ragged-assed professor instead of a banker, and it was quite an effort to be a professor and wear corduroy in those days. Besides, he had no automatic coalition of people his own age doing exactly the same thing. He formed alliances laboriously: a shared taste for books, sometimes the same level of skill on a ski slope. He was never entirely sure of his friends because they did not, like friends from the same class and the same street and the same past, know everything about each other’s lives already.

  He fell in love just once. All the exploration lovers do out of enthusiasm, he did out of necessity. He needed to know. He needed Nora to know him, too.

  He couldn’t bear the notion that Nora was gone. He avoided it, constantly, never allowed it to cross his mind because that would be too much like celebrating the emptiness. He talked to her still.

  He remembered her entirely. He couldn’t always give single details of her because every detail was bound into the whole, and the whole was bound into his life. He had to think like a scholar to remember that at some point they met for the first time, began on a particular day at a particular place. He had been afraid to share all the need he carried with him, the confusion of a boy who knew war and a man who knew nothing, and Nora shared all of that at once.

  She became the ruling principle of his entire life. He couldn’t imagine a time before Nora, not a time that belonged to him, to Nicholas Müller-Rossi; which meant that he did not have to engage, day by day, with the fact of Lucia and her past. Nora absolved him.

  He had not even been listening to the huge musical tussle onstage.

  Tannhäuser was out on the mountain now. There was a soprano corseted to play a boy, a great chorus of old pilgrims, a crowd of hunters and nobles that arrived on a painter’s scaffold dressed in gray-green. There were all too many vistas, lots of significance being wheeled about.

  If he worried about general things, he’d worry why he ever needed Nora so much: if she was only an evasion, not all the reality he had ever known. He loved particulars instead.

  Alpine meadows, for example: streams rushing, pretty troughs cut out of tree trunks for the soft, strong cattle, the dark trees, the clatter of ptarmigan coming up suddenly out of rowan at the side of a path, meadows woven with pale autumn crocus. He needed that sort of thing. Walking with Nora, he had the course of a stream, light broken in water, sudden shade, and a path over ground that was fallen needles and tiny cones. They still walked together when he dreamed.

  They were both away in the mountains on one of those weeks when the Swiss dash up and down the Alps in pursuit of their souls: this was for postgraduate students, put out of their library stalls just to get the blood moving. They were bright, unconnected people, defined by work. They met, he knew, up by Glaubenberg.

  On the first day, they went around in parties: bustling too much, sometimes singing. He wasn’t given to outdoor singing. He saw Nora; Nora saw him. Nora knew him at once. He’d never had to tell her his story. It wasn’t an issue. They sat together at dinner, both furiously hungry, forking down Rösti and sausage and chicory with too much vinegar on it. Nora said: “It’s very brave of you.” He said: “What do you mean?” She said: “All this Swiss business, when you don’t really have to. It is an effort, isn’t it?” And they looked at a dozen intellectuals in shorts, knees sunburned, and they were laughing out loud.

  They separated a little from the group, went out one morning at nine and walked the ridge of the mountains around Glaubenberg, up military roads, over tussocky grass, down over meadows to the summer houses for the Alplers, through forest and rutted fields and down roads torn up by tractors and loads of timber. They were each other’s breath all the way. By five in the evening, they were struggling up the last sharp slope to the Berghotel and they stopped short.

  He couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe. It had nothing to do with exhaustion, although that was close.

  At the intermission, Lucia took a small gilt chair just outside the auditorium door. An usher hovered, trying to ask if there was anything she wanted, not able to finish the sentence.

  She had, thought Nicholas, a perfectly self-contained look. She would engage with others, but she did not need to. “I have,” she said, “seen better productions.”

  “At least it’s simple,” Nicholas said.

  “It’s always simple nowadays.” And she began to complain about the grotto for Venus, which was a kind of sandbox, and the tenor rolling around with his bottom in the air.

  He’d lost his way now in the milling chorus in evening dress that was filling up the blank bits of the stage, in the list of minstrels all about to sing. The music left his mind wandering.

  Together, Nora and Nicholas. They waited to have a child. Occasionally, when he was in the middle of one of those therapeutic psychochats with a colleague in a café, he’d hear how children brought a couple together, saved a marriage. But that all seemed very alien. He and Nora had to learn how to separate just a little in order to have Helen. For years, they were a closed society, not ready even for a biological intruder.

  Then Helen was born, and Helen was glorious, of course.

  The three of them became provincials. Nicholas traveled to conferences, and he went with Nora on elaborate holidays; and Helen decided to take on the whole world; but these were all side issues in their lives. They belonged, Nora and Nicholas at least, to the province of an apartment and a garden and a study and a bed.

  And Lucia did not. Lucia could be loved and respected. She kept a certain glamour, the glory of a woman scul
pted or painted: a figurehead, a lovely fiction. She played with Helen, took her on expeditions into the city when she had time, supervised her taste, which was something she never tried with Nora. And Helen seemed fond of her, found her wonderful, but was also a little afraid of how she never seemed to become fragile with age, only stronger. Helen expected advantages, to be strong as Lucia grew weaker, lucid as her mind failed, but none of that had happened. Her sense of wonder, Nicholas thought, had turned to a mild pervasive anger.

  He never saw his father. They had no reason to coincide, not in the same town, not in the same business; they couldn’t be casual, so any meeting was draped with far too much significance. His father did not come to the wedding, although he did come alone to the party later in the day and said nothing at all to Lucia.

  So Nicholas made up his father, as he made up himself, but with much less material. He made the man into a mean little cliché: conservative soul, started off good with his body but then turned steady, drab, persistent, and undistinguished in his work. It was a comfort when he so much missed the fact of a father.

  And now the pilgrim’s chorus was returning from Rome, and he managed at last to put away his thoughts. By the time the principals came through the red velvet for their curtain calls and their official bouquets, they seemed huge as though through a lens, lit from beneath as though by limelight, spectacularly alive. He got back, gratefully, his talent for being fooled.

  The crowd milled under a great shining tortoise of umbrellas, went for cars and taxis and the trams. Lucia’s car waited efficiently. Nicholas did not want a lift.

  He had to stop thinking. He walked off into the rain along the Limmat.

  He wasn’t old enough to walk out of his own story. He wasn’t so old he couldn’t walk, couldn’t reason, couldn’t remember or stop remembering as a conscious act.

  There had to be a way to escape the present city. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t hold Nora. It was slick and wet and shining, leftover cows on awnings from some old parade, chocolate shops and equally glossy pornographic cinemas in the new town, all packaged, all rich, and the squared-off corporate buildings with official art out front. He looked at the river through the rain, but not the clean, quick modern river: he saw the Limmat clogged with weirs and islands and mills and bridges and a prison, as it was when he was a boy. He passed some shops, bars, hotels on the front, but he had in mind the barbers where he had his hair cut as a boy, with its six machines for electric massage of the scalp and the smell of pomade and machine oil and talc. He rebuilt the power office that used to jut into the water, with the huge white outline of an electric bulb on the side; and even the fields of potatoes that had been ostentatiously planted in wartime where now there was snipped, rolled grass.