by Michael Pye
Rain caught his skin and left it briskly scoured. It didn’t seem enough to shock him back to sense. He was still walking the wrong way, away from home.
What was he going to do, old man on a bad night? Get drunk, then stumble around the railway station in that odd, sooty, lifeless light of early morning? Get a woman, pay to lose himself for a minute or two; but he’d never done that.
He crossed the Limmat. He didn’t have the training to handle so much memory. He couldn’t do it alone.
When her housekeeper had gone, when she had drunk her warm milk with honey and a little Madeira, Lucia sat on the edge of her neat bed. It was a sleeping shelf, very plain.
She let every part of her clean face die. It was like an exercise: a relaxation of self. She retreated under the mask of her own features, where everything was consistent, where it was private and not uncomfortable and nobody asked questions.
Müller. So Müller died old. He must have been better stock than she thought. They’d kept their story alive a very long time, even so. And for all his virtue, his law, his authorized decency, she’d outlived the bastard. She had her little business; he had a plot and a stone.
She put on an eye mask. She didn’t want it known if the pupils of her eyes were moving, making out faces while she dreamed.
Henry was off being socialized through play, at great expense, and the days were tricky. Henry was the occupation for which Helen had given up work; now he was starting his own separate life, she could almost fancy that work, the old, obsessive, fascinating kind, was something comfortable and enfolding, a structure to the days, a relief from all this coffee and waiting.
“Bullshit,” Helen said, out loud. But she didn’t want to be caught talking out loud.
They were better together, she and Jeremy. You couldn’t say the same for all their friends. Besides, she careened about the world for years as though she was anxious without an air ticket. She’d worked for a bank, but not in a bank: she went about like a broker, now brutalizing some cable TV company, or flirting with the movies, or solemnizing a marriage between newspapers. She couldn’t simply continue, not if she wanted a child.
So here she was, officially married, in love, with a lovely child. Everyone found it all too easy to accept the situation. Even her old colleagues didn’t ask when she might come back; they said they envied her courage and her choice.
But Jeremy hadn’t stopped moving. Jeremy was in New York, was in Los Angeles, was dining the money and trying to turn its taste to the pictures he happened to have in stock. He was flirting very studiously at cocktail parties, holding the attention of the buyers any way he could: performing much as she used to perform.
Nicholas once complained that Jeremy treated her like a novel he couldn’t quite finish, but sometimes left lying around, forgetting where he put her. But it wasn’t like that. They had separate orbits, which came together splendidly. They could hugely enjoy the game they played around the world, or at least the world’s cities with money and major airports, and the knowledge that they chose and conspired in order to be together.
But now she had a fixed address: day in, day out. Everything was entirely satisfactory, but nothing more.
She didn’t want to call someone, make a plan; it sounded too desperate.
She’d go to a couple of bookshops, why not. She was enrolled in the spending classes now: a rich wife. She could study shop windows like folk art, read each display like a museum piece.
She took the tram.
There was enough distraction for an afternoon, bookshops full of pink painted children, shops hot with red rugs, a window with a single stone Buddha lit so perfectly that nobody would dare buy or move him, a couple of shops full of souvenirs from a life nobody ever saw—tuned cowbells, pretty cow halters—and some with toys as intricate as jewels: a lake steamer, a funicular train, a machine for printing. There were shops a little below eye level on steep streets, full of immaculate bottles, or birdcages made from metal that had been beaten into lace, or paintings which were never quite strong enough to break through the brown varnish and get into the eye. There were shops so gorgeous you could never be lovely enough to go in, but plain people did.
Bankers sidled up to windows and ogled the chocolates. A tram passed, driven by someone’s aunt in a two-piece. There was a window full of shining French horns, and another full of pretty pots, but she was not quite interested enough to see if they were jams or oils.
Among the steady people, in front of the parade of windows, a woman had stopped.
The wind was too bitter for anyone to stand still so long. The woman was looking into a shop window. She was very old, wrapped often and deeply in scarves and down.
She was crying.
She didn’t touch her face. She let the tears run, and she held her shoulders straight, her body remembering the manners it had been taught.
Her face was neat with intelligence. Evidently, she was distraught, but evidently not because she had forgotten things, even forgotten forgetting, and did not know what to do next. She hadn’t wandered off into the world and got lost like some ancient, humiliated child.
She was standing before Lucia’s shop: the pretty plates, the welcoming lights.
She was crying, but other people all walked around her as though she was some inanimate obstacle, maybe not seeing her, maybe not wanting to see her. They seemed to understand that an old woman sobbing on a frosty street was something ominous. You stopped, you smiled, you helped, and you were bound to know her story, share her senses.
Helen stopped, though. She should not intrude. She should not embarrass this old woman, who didn’t look as though she needed to be helped out of her tears. Much more, she needed to cry.
But she was frail, alone, cold; Helen felt a rush of responsibility. She had no other business to excuse indifference, after all. Her day was empty until Henry next came home.
So she said: “I’m sorry.”
The woman didn’t answer. Helen thought of raising her voice. But the woman walked a little closer to the great plate of the window. She’d set off alarms soon, for sure.
She stared inside. Helen wondered what exactly she was seeing: whether it was a splendor that she had lost, or sight itself she was losing, or some particular object which set off this flood of feeling.
The old woman said: “It was a table. A little table, with flowers in marquetry. Like a garden in the corner.”
And then she noticed Helen, who said: “Can I take you for some tea?” She had to offer tea: something medicinal, something kind.
The old woman said: “I should be very glad to have some tea.”
Helen offered her a handkerchief; she always had handkerchiefs, for Henry if he needed them. The woman blotted her eyes, once.
“I thought I would be angry,” she said.
An assistant happened to come to the shop window, happened to flick at some intruding dust on the mirror shine of the woods.
The older woman walked so neatly and precisely nobody wanted to notice that her face was wet.
“I was so afraid someone would ask me what was wrong,” she said.
Then, efficient like someone who’s been at receptions and meetings and conferences all too often, she said: “I’m Sarah Freeman.”
“Helen Garvey.” Helen was helping, being kind, so she used her married, wifely name.
“I don’t suppose you know who owns that store?”
“Lucia Müller-Rossi. There’s no mystery about it.”
Sarah Freeman ordered coffee, after all; Helen asked for cakes.
“But that’s not the name of the store.”
“Mr. Harrod doesn’t own Harrods anymore.”
“She’s still alive, Lucia Müller-Rossi?”
“Alive and in business. She’s my grandmother.”
Sarah Freeman said: “I’m sorry. I’m being a nuisance—”
“Not at all.”
“I know the name. I mean, I knew her. Once. I shouldn’t take up your time.
I ought to get back. Let me pay for the coffee—”
“You speak very good German,” Helen said.
“It was my first language.”
“You’ve been very kind. I shouldn’t take up your time.”
Helen said: “I’d be happy to take you home.”
“I couldn’t trouble you. I couldn’t,” Sarah Freeman said. “It’s very strange for me to sit at a table with the granddaughter of Lucia Müller-Rossi. You have to understand that.”
She stood up suddenly, and her small leather bag slipped out of her lap and burst on the floor. Helen bent down to help her catch up the papers, the purse. But Sarah Freeman swept the papers toward her, covered them, and put them away quickly. A single credit card receipt got away. Helen tried to pick it up, but Sarah snatched it.
“I want to help,” Helen said. “I want to know.”
Sarah said: “Everybody thinks they want to help, that they want to know.”
“I know something about Lucia. I’m not afraid to hear the rest.”
“No,” Sarah said. “You all have such courage. Now.”
And then she said: “I’m being graceless. You were very kind. I don’t mean—”
“It was a table? A little table with flowers?”
Sarah shrugged into her coat, so it was hard to tell if she meant the shrug to answer Helen’s question.
“If I was sure I wanted to remember,” she said, “then I wouldn’t have been crying.”
Helen couldn’t stand around to watch which direction the taxi took. Between the shiny glass and the posters and the bent metal shelters, she couldn’t even be sure Sarah Freeman even went to the stand or took a taxi, that the old woman hadn’t disappeared into the railway station, to the suburban trains or the intercities.
She could be anywhere: the one witness who wasn’t Lucia or Nicholas, who hadn’t spent fifty years with memory packed away.
Helen ran down the steps among the underground shops, ran down to find a telephone directory. She looked up “Freeman”; perhaps Sarah was here with relatives, or living here.
There were seven Freemans. She went to a phone and called the first, asked to speak to Sarah. It was a misunderstanding; she had to apologize. She tried the second, and an American voice, a very tired and angry American voice, said there was no Sarah Freeman there, why would anyone called Freeman want to be there? Again, Helen apologized.
She wasn’t a detective. She didn’t know how to shortcut the process of examining every house in a city, every hotel and boarding house, in the half hope that somewhere there was a woman called Sarah Freeman. She had to assume that was, indeed, her name. She had to assume she’d check into a hotel using that name; Helen might be Müller-Rossi, or she might be Garvey. It took just a smidgen of social convention to fox the whole trail.
She spun around suddenly. She’d decided, like a children’s game, that Sarah would be standing there. But Sarah was not: only the gentle waves of commuters, some with bread, some with lilies, some with briefcases locked with brass.
She could call all the other Freemans when she got home. And she ought to get home; Henry would soon be there.
She waited in line for the tram. When it came, when she was safely going home, she formed a very simple thought.
She could not pretend she never met Sarah Freeman. She could not easily find Sarah Freeman. But she did have some minimal clues: a woman who didn’t know the shop, but did know Lucia as Müller-Rossi, a woman mourning a simple table, a woman whose first language was German. An old woman, too: perhaps not as old as Lucia, but going back to the years that Lucia never mentioned.
Sarah Freeman must have been in Berlin.
She wouldn’t have been Freeman, though, which was far too English a name; Lucia might not know her as Sarah Freeman, if she remembered her in particular out of those years.
Whatever Sarah Freeman knew was more than Helen knew; and Helen wanted to know. Whatever it was could reduce an old woman to tears, which is not what fifty years of loss or mourning does; tears have to be tricked out of old eyes, by something that has just happened, or just been remembered or seen.
When she went back the next day to Lucia’s shop, the windows had been changed.
Sarah Freeman sat down in the lobby of her kind, clean hotel. There were armchairs that were only ornamental, cushions too flat and orderly to have been used, set around a fire that never actually burned: a little tricked-up domesticity in a public place. Nobody ever sat there, except when they were waiting for a taxi to take them away. There was a basket of red, polished apples.
She liked it, she told herself. She didn’t want, yet, to go to her room and be shut up. There wasn’t any comfort in the room, even if it had a wing chair, a good bed. She didn’t want to be enclosed. She’d have stayed in the street if she could. She wished she had the energy to go walking forever in the cold.
After all, there were no friends in her room, and she needed friends now. Here, in public, everyone was her friend: the waiter who brought a glass of Scotch and water, the girl behind the desk who was trying not to observe the old woman although it was her job to observe, the bright apartment manager, even the man sweeping the parking lot in the cold, working against the brisk wind.
The Scotch stung her mouth. Her eyes watered a little. Then she signed the bill, and added a few francs for the waiter. She thought she’d added too much. She needed friends, and yet something told her not to draw attention to herself: some memory, perhaps.
The hotel doors opened and shut. She felt the cold on her legs.
She’d been a journalist many years, trafficked in facts. Facts were supposed to heal and bring justice. The news levered up great static wrongs and pushed them headlong out of the way. But when it was a question of just one woman’s history, a personal matter, a story she might not even want to tell out loud, then there were no headlines and column inches to instruct the world that this was a serious matter. She could tell the truth, and nobody need bother to believe her.
She put the Scotch down on a little round table. It wasn’t helping.
A man stood just outside this circle of stuffed chairs, waiting perhaps: a trespasser. She’d acquired this public space, she reckoned.
“I’d like a drink,” he said, “too.”
She didn’t want to invite him, and she didn’t care to reject him. So he sat down.
She’d traveled beside him on the plane, he’d helped with the plastic around the knife and fork, and they’d grimaced together at the dry turkey and the sandy potatoes. His name was Peter Clarke. But that was not an introduction, not enough. He’d said he was a tourist, on the same circuit—lakes and mountains off season, cities of Switzerland. He’d always wanted to travel, and now was going anywhere and everywhere, spending his days and his capital.
He had never picked up the useful habit of being alone, she thought. He might have just lost a wife of many, many years.
He sat, but with his hands on the arms of the chair.
He was not at all easy to place: white hair, a neat, unassertive chainstore tweed over shoulders that were only slightly stooped, a thin tie, his body in some kind of shape with the vague form of old muscles now working under too much skin. English, unmistakably: a small-town Englishman, perfectly preserved, maybe a rower in his time and perhaps a schoolmaster with a little extra money for coffee and cakes.
He liked her company, that was obvious; she liked his. She just wasn’t sure if he was the one to whom she could tell all the things she needed to tell, who would do them justice.
“It’s cold,” he said. “Don’t you think?” He seemed to mean all kinds of things by “cold.”
She shivered. She hadn’t meant to; she couldn’t stop herself.
“It’s hard to be a tourist in the cold,” he said. “ Your eyes water all the time.”
So he’d noticed.
She remembered a party in London, 1940s, jiving on a tiny carpet, desperate wine, a man with a cigarette in a corner, talk about Thomas Ma
nn: that kind of party. She remembered how she had wondered if the man with the cigarette would do.
She made herself smile. It had to be right to smile. It proved she was back in this moment.
She was grateful Peter Clarke wasn’t the kind of man who launches into a whole life story all at once. She didn’t need more stories. She needed an ally.
She liked him, too, she reminded herself.
Helen kept a list of numbers remembered from her other life: lawyers’ numbers, friends’ numbers, bank contacts, corporate persons. Usually, she kept the list in a file next to household insurance.
She called Georg Meier, she told herself, because he was a Zurich lawyer the bank once used. After she’d dialed the number, she half wanted to find it engaged or be brushed off by some bland assistant. She felt awkward that she was no longer Helen Müller-Rossi from the bank. She was only herself.
So she was a little grateful, dangerously so, that he took the call. They didn’t know much about each other; they couldn’t gossip through the last big deal they both handled; so they blustered for a moment about kids, weather, music.
Helen recovered herself.
“It’s an absurd thing,” she said. But she wouldn’t have said that if she was still Helen Müller-Rossi of the bank. She started again. “Someone’s turned up who used to know my grandmother. In Berlin, believe it or not. In Berlin, in the 1940s.”