by Michael Pye
She had insisted on bringing Peter Clarke. She saw him as a safety device, something to open up the closed and explosive possibilities of Helen, Nicholas, and Sarah at a table, even if they both insisted they only wanted to help Sarah, to make things right. She wondered why they didn’t simply go to Lucia; but if Lucia had not, in fifty years, shown signs of remorse or guilt or even anxiety, then going to Lucia would never be enough.
“Why don’t you work?” she asked Helen abruptly.
Helen said: “I wanted to have a baby.”
“You don’t have a baby anymore. You have a child, and he’s gone off to nursery school.”
“I wanted to be there when he comes home. I didn’t want to have to tell him I was going off around the world and I’d send him a postcard.”
“Men do that all the time.”
“So,” Helen said. “I’m not a man.”
“Lucia never stopped working, I don’t think. Not in Berlin. And she’s had the shop ever since, you tell me.”
“I make my own decisions.”
Helen had chicken breasts in her hands. She smoothed them out, spread the fillet out from the meat, and slapped each one of them, very hard. The sound of the slaps cut the air in the room in two, between her and Sarah.
“This Meier,” Sarah said. “He’s a friend of yours?”
It was all accident, this accuracy. She said what was obvious, what she wanted to know; she had no special and magical insight into what Helen was feeling. And yet she was accurate, and it stung.
“He was a colleague.”
“In the same office?”
“He was a lawyer we consulted sometimes.”
“So what does he know about restitution?”
“He’s interested.”
“Good,” Sarah said. And then she said: “I feel I should be helping. I feel I should be having a drink, too, but maybe I’d better not before Meier. Better to be as sharp as an old, old woman can be.”
Two old men going briskly through the snow. Nicholas Müller-Rossi, round as he was, was surprisingly efficient. Peter Clarke swung ahead. They formed a conspiracy that cut along the cleared black lanes.
Nicholas was glad of Clarke. He was company. He was an ally for Sarah. But most of all, he was something new. Nicholas didn’t like colleagues his own age, retired, who now felt cut off from work, their whole meaning left behind in some university office. He didn’t always want to go into town and organize a meeting with his older friends. He wanted strangers, who did not assume all the things that he was supposed to assume.
As for Clarke, he surprised himself. He wanted so much to be the champion, Sarah’s protector, but he fell easily into this brisk walking chat with Nicholas. He even had time to feel a slight resentment: the notion that old men were safe and therefore automatic allies.
Two Englishmen, two Swiss men, could not have been as direct.
Clarke said to Nicholas: “I don’t meet many professors. I avoided the geneticists. They didn’t understand what I did.”
And Nicholas, with a certain generosity: “I’ve never met anyone who did anything as lovely as breed a flower. A new kind of flower. I wish we could look at the garden afterward, and you could tell me if there’s anything here that you bred.”
Clarke smiled, grateful even for the carefully plotted overture. Evidently, he had already been researched, or perhaps explained; which meant that Sarah talked about him.
“All I can do,” Nicholas said, “is point to a couple of books.”
“It’s lovely here,” Clarke said.
They did not want to slow on the last rise of the hill, neither one of them. They wanted a view to see when they reached the top, though, which would allow them time to breathe.
They’d been walking in a brilliant landscape, with helpful signposts giving the minutes to the next summit, with the blue-white shine of snow; but now they came to a wood, a wall of trees. The branches painted out the light: dead, thick, and black. The snow stopped exactly where the trees started.
Nicholas pointed to a view of white fields; Clarke looked with him.
There was a noise between tearing and a crash. The two men were very still.
Out of the lifeless wood came a young deer, legs splayed, eyes wild, frantic at the end of its cover and alone. Its sides were scratched where it had forced through nets of thorn. It barely noticed the men, because it ran directly for them, as though it had a single idea of direction and could not change, or perhaps the sudden bright light was blinding. It took to the path, then looked back, then broke away down over the fields, at once quick and uncertain, legs skittering on ice.
It was gone in a minute: just tracks in the white.
Nicholas said: “Well.”
Clarke smiled. He also said: “Aren’t they a problem, the deer?”
By the time they began to circle back to the house, they had sorted out other things in common. Since they had known the same war, they both knew how parachute flares come down soft and bright as Christmas lights, the cone a searchlight makes as it rakes about the sky, how the cone glints at its apex when it catches on a plane; and then the dot dot dot of fire from the ground, and the silvery machine transfigured first into a mirror light, then into a torch flaring and falling out of the sky. They both knew bombs whistle as they come down.
All that they could share with a few words of history: Nicholas in Berlin, Peter Clarke close to London before he was taken off to war.
But Clarke wasn’t happy with the notion that such shared knowledge made them equivalent; that was clear. He wanted to listen, but he knew those were his planes, his side raining bombs down on Berlin, for all the right reasons; and those were alien machines in the sky over his village, murderers with wings.
Nicholas sensed that, or perhaps he only expected it. He was used to the general sense that no experience out of Nazi Germany—not being in love, not eating a bratwurst—could ever count as entirely human.
He even told Clarke what Clarke was bound to think of the wartime Swiss. He expected the world to be angry. He said he’d sometimes tried to explain that there really had been rationing, that cats out at night sometimes ended in pies, but the Swiss never rationed what foreigners ate: so foreigners, most of them, reckoned they were in a land of milk and honey and potatoes. But then the foreigners just compared black acorn bread with chocolate, ersatz honey (just add sugar) with cheese from the Alps. The Swiss had not suffered properly.
“I don’t make excuses,” Nicholas said, “and I’m not boasting.”
Peter Clarke said: “And Lucia?”
Nicholas knew he’d have to answer. “People knew, nobody could do anything,” he said. “I asked my father once why nothing was done and he said it nearly was, but still nothing happened.
“Nothing happened. I mean, nothing that mattered. There was a trial. My mother had difficulties. I remember she grew thin, so I tried to reason out why that was happening. Children do that when things are going wrong. I lay and I thought. It couldn’t be the rations, which were far more reliable than in Berlin, and far more generous as well. We saw eleven liters of milk a month, and a hundred grams of raw bacon, two hundred of butter, and half a kilo of sugar; we even saw meat, coffee, chocolate, and sweets. Nothing that happened had to do with lack.
“She could be ill. But she didn’t seem ill. She had a kind of shining, polished shell that never opened; and if she was ill, it would surely have started to break. Her eyes were very fierce. She was concentrated on the world as if it was a chess game, although she would never be the kind to play chess.”
He stopped, and stamped on the road.
Gray flirts they were at lunch: Nicholas and Peter, chivying each other out of the way for Sarah’s attention. It was a reflex action, a little absurd, but it filled the huge silence left by the person who couldn’t be mentioned and the subject that couldn’t be raised.
Peter talked about gardens, and Sarah had a garden in London. Then Nicholas talked about some production of Pericles
he had seen, and the translation; Sarah knew about it. Peter suggested another lake trip.
Sarah said to Nicholas, suddenly: “You had a cat called Gattopardo.”
“I did.”
“A tiger.”
“Yes, I did. In Berlin, when I was very young.”
Sarah smiled, and then she started to cough as though she was choking and she had to be helped from her chair and given water.
Clarke watched her as closely as any lover or any policeman. And in doing so, he noticed very clearly who else was watching: Helen. He couldn’t be sure if she felt protective of her grandmother, or concerned with Sarah. He was suspicious, he realized.
Nicholas and Peter heard the car go away, taking Helen and Sarah down into Zurich to the lawyer’s office. The geese complained quietly. No dog barked.
“What if it’s better not to remember?” Nicholas said.
Neither one of them could cope with the question.
“People expect the English to talk about their schooldays,” Nicholas said. Then he thought he had made a mistake, blundered into the thickets of English issues of class, and Clarke did not go to the kind of school that makes for polite conversation. Or maybe he was wrong about the English.
Either way, it was too late. He had to confess, or else he would have to listen to the huge white silence.
“I liked school when I went in September,” he said. “It was very separate, up above the lakes and the mists. It had walls and customs, so you could always dream of breaking out or breaking rules, and the air was brilliant. A huddle of tall, blocky chalets, some single conifers, in the middle of unbuildable ground that was, inevitably, known as the park. The chapel, which looked as though it had been stolen from a village, painted a subversive yellow. After that, there were Alps.
“I found, to my surprise, that I liked books. I liked being away from home. I liked both so much I didn’t mind being told about my character, about the glories of being far above cities and fogs, about the importance of whatever faith I might happen to have brought with me. The easiest ploy was to claim a Catholicism my mother had never mentioned much.
“I got into a fight in the first snows, which were wet and blinding and soft. I was out between the chapel and the dormitory and so was one of the German kids: a soft-spoken, angry boy called Helmut.
“ ‘You let us down,’ he said. He could shout into the new snow with little chance of being heard.
“ ‘What do you mean?’ I really didn’t know.
“ ‘You Italians. Wouldn’t fight. Couldn’t fight.’
“Whatever I was, I knew I could be even more German than Helmut, having seen much more of Germany being burnt and broken.
“ ‘You can’t fight, can you?’ He had come up very close to me on the path, both of us wrapped against the cold.
“I backed a little, slipped a little. I didn’t want trouble.
“He was determined, I could see. My feet tricked me on the new wet snow. I wasn’t sure I could hold a position if I had to.
“ ‘You don’t fight. Do you?’
“He was bulked out with coats and pigeon-chested to begin with, so he looked like a top-heavy burgermeister on the pathway. But out of him came a boy’s unbroken voice, a flute where there should have been a growl.
“I started to laugh.
“He pushed my shoulder.
“I didn’t stop laughing.
“ ‘You Italian,’ he said. He piped the words.
“I stopped, I picked up new snow, I threw it over his head so it broke and fell around his shoulders like wet dust.
“ ‘You can’t even fight fair,’ he said.
“This time, I grabbed both his arms. I wrenched them behind his back and I went on pushing them up and up until his face was forced forward. He was howling, but the noise meant nothing in the snow and the wind.
“I felt something snap.
“He was crying now, big hot tears between the soft flakes of snow on his face. I let him go and he went down to the ground, and one of his arms seemed to hang at his side.
“He said: ‘You’ve done it now.’
“I heard a master say: ‘Get in, boys.’ I waited for Helmut to make his complaint, but he just said, when he had pulled off his boots in the main building: ‘My arm’s gone funny.’
“In the sanitarium he said it was an accident, because he could never say he had been beaten by an Italian. And then I was the violent Italian, which helped.” Nicholas smiled.
Sarah Freeman concentrated, but now like a child at an exam, like someone trying to see past the horizon. Georg Meier made a note of this.
“I saw the table in a Christie’s catalogue,” Sarah said. “In London. I knew it at once. It was on consignment from a shop in Zurich, and I rang Christie’s to ask if I could see it, but they told me it had been withdrawn very suddenly. The shop belongs to Mrs. Müller-Rossi, but of course I didn’t know that.”
Helen said: “And you saw it in the window?”
Sarah said: “Oh, no. I didn’t see any one thing in Lucia’s window. I recognized everything. It was like seeing a world that died, all on show.”
“You do know what they will do?” Meier said, quickly.
Sarah took in the round, small eyeglasses, the neat brush-cut hair, the expensively modest suit, the immaculate skin: a man with a profession, but no experience of his own.
“Mrs. Freeman?”
She said: “I have some idea.”
“They will point to your age. They will ask for your medical records. If there is any suggestion of a stroke, of odd behavior, of the first signs of dementia—”
“I don’t think so.”
“They may simply point out that you are trying to recall events from sixty years ago.”
“I am not trying to recall them. I am remembering them.”
Helen said: “Is it necessary to be so aggressive, Dr. Meier?” She gave his doctorate its full defensive force.
“I could be kind,” the lawyer said, “but then Mrs. Freeman would be entirely unprepared for what may come. Do you want that?”
Helen said: “If I wanted that, I would never have suggested she talk to you.”
“I know this is not a pleasant process,” Sarah said. “I’ve seen worse.” She grinned, and grinned even more at the disconcerted quiet in the room.
The lawyer cleared his throat. Old men do that, pompous men in clubs, judges on benches; and he could not be more than—what—thirty-five? She wanted to laugh at her worry that she was losing her skills at placing men.
“Very well,” he said. “There is a rather exact list of questions I have to ask. Who made the table? Is it known?”
“Pierre Fléchy. Maître ebéniste. Born 1715. His work is very valuable.”
“There’s no title, of course, no subject. The date, can you say?”
“I don’t know. 1760, maybe.”
“And the country of origin?”
“France.”
“Type of object. Well, that’s obvious enough. The medium, now.”
“Wood. Marquetry. Lacquer.”
It had been her garden when she could no longer walk freely outside: a single object that proved she and Max had not yet been destroyed, that they still had eyes and hearts.
“And the measurements?”
“I never measured it. It was the last nice thing we kept in the apartment, in a corner. I suppose I could guess.”
“Better not to guess. If you’re wrong, it looks like proof you’ve misidentified the piece.”
“Oh,” Sarah said. “Oh, yes.”
The table had stood surrounded by piles of books. She remembered the rough edges of the pages, like stacks of leaves. She imagined the titles on the top. Max kept rereading Balzac at the time, but he read magical Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin.
“Now,” Dr. Meier said. “Is the piece signed?”
“It’s stamped. The stamp was still attached when we had it.”
“And dated?”
“I told
you.”
“Any edition, any number? Inscriptions? Any special marks—did you ever have it repaired?”
She had polished the table even when she couldn’t get polish, had saved it from the faintest scratch of dust. Thinking now, all that care simply puzzled her.
“It wasn’t repaired while we had it,” Sarah said.
“And the present location? Or the last known location?”
“In a shop in Zurich. You know that.”
“Any other description?”
She wondered how the table would look to anybody else. She didn’t know. So she shook her head, gently. Then she said: “It’s chinoiserie. That’s what Fléchy was known for.”
“Photograph?” She shook her head again. “Insured, I suppose?”
She said: “Max would have handled that. He’d be the policy-holder. I don’t even know the company and I don’t know which city and I don’t know the number of the policy.” She thought she might have to explain so she said: “I have no papers. Nothing from that time.”
“Next,” said Dr. Meier, making a copperplate note. “Circumstantial information. Was the victim present at the seizure of the object?”
Sarah said: “Yes.”
“Ah. Then we don’t need to ask if he fled his home.”
“He did. He knew what was happening and he went into hiding. We used to call people like him the ‘divers.’ ”
“But he was present when the object was seized?”
“It wasn’t seized. I handed it to Lucia for safekeeping.”
“Now,” Dr. Meier said. He tapped his pencil on the perfect stone shine of his table. “What if Frau Müller-Rossi says that your husband gave her the table? Gave it to her without entail?”
“Why should he do such a thing?”
“You admit you entrusted her with the table. And he expected at any moment—”
“He expected to be killed.”
“Frau Müller-Rossi was an attractive woman?”
“She was—bright. And redheaded. And she had a vast smile. And she had good legs. Yes, she was an attractive woman, I suppose. A professionally attractive woman.”
“And your husband might have been susceptible to such a woman?”
“You mean, did they have an affair?”