The Pieces from Berlin

by Michael Pye

  “I mean, could your husband have been persuaded, by her attractions or his feelings, to make her a gift of the table?”

  Sarah stared at the shining man. She, too, thought she never saw anyone so clean.

  “I know he did not.”

  “Do you know everything about your husband?”

  “How could I not know? We couldn’t go out at night. We couldn’t go to the movies or go to a concert. We had to shop at special hours.”

  Dr. Meier waited. It was not entirely a kind waiting.

  “We spent every day, all day, in our apartment, in each other’s company. You didn’t lose sight of people, Dr. Meier. If you lost sight of them you might never see them again.”

  “Memory is very odd, isn’t it?”

  Nicholas sneezed, abruptly.

  “I remember I walked too fast when I was in Zurich. You walked fast in Berlin so you spent less time at each point a bomb might fall so you had more chance of living. But in Zurich, there just wasn’t enough city to walk fast.”

  He opened a new bottle of wine.

  “I remember once, when my mother was out, opening her wardrobe, which was more like a small room. It smelt like roses and old wine and a little like a dry-cleaning shop. There were so many clothes. Some of them, a few, had her initials. Some of them had monograms like ERK and SL and MH. I counted sixteen different monograms and I couldn’t count anymore.

  “So I ran away. I went down to the lake. There were swans plodding around. A hot-chestnut vendor on the waterside. The smoke hung about, sociably. There was ice everywhere, creeping out over the water.”

  He didn’t say that the ice was starting to break into great gray-white plates, each big enough to be a boat that could push out from the river walls and tack back if the current seemed too lively. Boys were out on the ice boats, punting them with long poles, edgily balanced. Their adventure couldn’t last: the ice would soon melt or crack or capsize.

  In any case, he had to get home. In any case, they didn’t know him and wouldn’t ask him to join them. He went home crying for friends.

  “I know what Max told me,” Sarah said.

  “Max always told the truth?” Georg Meier treated interrogation like plainsong; he didn’t like to miss his cue.

  “He told no more lies than most men.”

  “You realize a court would expect a widow might be ignorant of her husband’s little affairs? Or that a widow might deny they ever happened, in order to keep a memory entirely for herself?”

  “I only want Lucia Müller-Rossi to acknowledge that she stole that table.”

  Meier said: “One last set of questions. Can you document the piece? Appraisals, maybe? Transport records or maybe a storage bill? Did anyone ever put your table in a magazine?”

  “I’m afraid not. It was just furniture.”

  “And you are absolutely sure there could be no piece like it?”

  “I am going to swear an oath. I am going to tell the truth that I know. What else do you want me to do? You want papers and—”

  “It’s absolutely true that an invoice for the table when you first bought it—”

  “Does everyone have to prove their whole lives? I thought an identity card was enough.”

  “Not,” Dr. Meier said, “with the power you have to harm Frau Müller-Rossi. She’d be out of business, out of Zurich if you won. In the present atmosphere. So the court will sit and it will think—How much do we need to know in order to do this terrible thing?”

  “This,” Sarah said, “is a terrible thing? A little justice is worse than the crime?”

  Helen said: “Sarah, if you don’t want to go on?”

  Meier said: “One last thing. Is there anything in the medical record which could suggest impaired memory? Anything at all?”

  Helen said: “I don’t think so.”

  “Who was the foreign minister of Britain in 1947?”

  Sarah said: “Bevin.”

  “What’s the church behind the Berlin Opera House?”

  “It’s a cathedral. St. Hedwig.”

  “Who painted the Demoiselles d’Avignon?”

  “Picasso,” Sarah said. And then: “Pablo Ruiz Picasso,” just for emphasis.

  “This is general knowledge,” Helen said.

  “Yes, it is,” Dr. Meier said. “It matters, because we would have to show that Mrs. Freeman knows enough about art and the world, and remembers it clearly enough, to identify that particular table. There are many pretty tables.”

  “I know when I don’t know, too,” Sarah said.

  All Sarah could see was his shine, as though he was bottled and the light was on the glass.

  “I imagine my medical records could be found. I had cancer once, but they caught it very early. Cancer of the breast. I have had no mental problems, unless, of course,” and again she tried to make him smile, “I’ve forgotten them.”

  For a moment, she had the oddest sense of slipping into one of Max’s fantasies. He loved English whodunits, loved their sense of order and propriety and the moral certainties that you could comfortably expect in the last ten pages; and now she, too, would like a pleasant, written world out of English novels, where death had proper witnesses, was documented and proved, where there were priests and doctors and wills read out aloud to family gatherings at long polished tables, and lawyers to tot up what was left and assign it with all the nice pedantry of the makers of great dictionaries, or phone books.

  Dr. Meier then asked, as though the question was social and casual: “What did you have for breakfast this morning, Mrs. Freeman?”

  “I had coffee, and a Gipfli. I had raspberry jam with the Gipfli. I did not have butter.”

  “And where did you have it?”

  “In my room.”

  “I mean: at what address?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “At what address? What number, what street?”

  Sarah Freeman said: “Ninety-seven. Hotel Grindelwald.”

  “And the street?”

  “My short-term memory still functions, Dr. Meier. I know where the bathroom is. I know how to catch a bus in London when I need one.”

  “The street?”

  Helen said: “I’m not sure we need to go any further today.”

  “We’ll need to go much further,” Meier said. “Any hesitation, any pattern of hesitation, any tendency to fluster or be unsure, anything like that will tend to discredit you. And it will be used. Perhaps not in a court, but when the lawyers discuss whether to bring a case, and when Müller-Rossi’s lawyers argue among themselves. If all this had been solved in 1945—”

  “We’re here precisely because it was not,” Helen said.

  “Of course,” Meier said. “But if we had witnesses—”

  “I have one enormous advantage as a witness,” Sarah Freeman said. “I am alive.”

  Meier smiled for the first time.

  Sarah stood up. “I had breakfast on Tiefenaustrasse this morning,” she said. “Number ninety-seven Tiefenaustrasse.”

  Helen smiled at Meier on the way out, but she wouldn’t stay to talk. She was afraid of all the wonderful possibilities of a clean, mechanical, biddable lover.

  “My mother has absolutely no talent for worrying,” Nicholas said.

  “They should have rung by now,” Clarke said.

  “She thought it a kind of failure, an admission that she could not reason her way out of trouble. I could tell something must be wrong, I wanted to help. I wanted to be there. But I’d head back to school and after the train and the funicular, and the bus, after settling into the dormitory again with the same official friends, after the first games of tennis and the first failures with irregular neuter nouns of the fourth declension, she faded in my mind. I read, and I played, and I hardly noticed what everyone was saying.

  “Schools work like that, I think. Everyone knows something, long before the person affected has the slightest clue. Everyone knew that I might be leaving, but I smashed balls back across the t
ennis court and I knew nothing at all.

  “I did notice that other boys began to be kind, in a rather slippery way. Even the ‘slaves,’ which I regret to say is what we called the cleaning women, seemed ominously sympathetic, and smiled if I wanted more coffee at breakfast.

  “I used to watch the woods and the driveway to the school from our dormitory window. I liked the flicker of birds on the boundaries of the woods. I liked the random order of the vans and cars that made their way to the door: meat, priests, bread, parents, fruit.

  “I saw a taxi come to the door. I saw my own mother.

  “She’d said nothing at all to me about coming to the school. She wasn’t supposed to be there. You hate the unusual when you’re a junior boy.

  “I saw the door of the main building close behind her.

  “I sat at my window with a book in my hand, a full half hour. It was Shakespeare and it was Hamlet. I didn’t look at the pages, but they were my excuse for not looking at the door of the main building.

  “Which opened, opened violently as I remember, and my mother came raging out with her coats swirling. She ran on the gravel path to the dormitory. She stood at the foot of the stairs and shouted my name.

  “I seriously thought of not going down. In fact, I sat away from the window.

  “I heard her on the stairs, and I went to the door of my room, just to avoid a scene.

  “ ‘Come along,’ she said. ‘Come along. We’ll send for your stuff later.’

  “She tugged me down the stairs. I didn’t want to go. At the door, she said: ‘This school has insulted your mother. It is not possible for you to stay here.’

  “I said: ‘But it’s not half-term yet.’

  “On the driveway I said: ‘But how are we going to get home?’ Then I said: ‘I ought to get my books’ and I tried to dash back but she stopped me.”

  For Clarke all this remembrance was random, not a considered confession. But he was polite and took another glass of wine. He would remember things himself, for Sarah.

  “They’d frozen her bank accounts. Stopped her selling things, so she couldn’t find the school fees. They knew perfectly well what she was. They just couldn’t find a way to deal with her, or perhaps they lacked the will to do it. Then it was 1946 and nobody wanted to say anything, or admit anything, and the case was dropped.”

  He went to the file cabinet. “Helen gave me these,” he said. “I’m ashamed to say I never did ask for them myself.” He opened the packet. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t read German.”

  “No,” Clarke said.

  “They found a file of letters from Americans, you know,” Nicholas said. “People trying to get visas for their parents left in Germany. Jews, of course. They thought Lucia might help.”

  For a moment, Sarah Freeman panicked.

  “I’m not the right one,” she said to Helen.

  She was standing by the newspaper kiosk, by the tram stop, opposite the Kunsthaus, bundled against the cold that seemed to blow up from every side, and she began to shiver. Nobody would particularly believe her, they would all suspect her motives, she wouldn’t be the proper and decently forgiving victim, she’d be wrong and Lucia would be right just because Lucia had gone on so long beyond her crimes. She’d be bringing down a grand old lady for the sake of a bit of marquetry with nicely turned legs.

  Worse, if they believed her, they wouldn’t think it mattered: not a table, not something so easily put right.

  She looked around her at the serious faces, the blank eyes, the well-wrapped persons all waiting for the same tram.

  “You think you’re right, don’t you? That’ll carry you through. But I’m tired and I’m cold. I’m an old woman. And you expect me to be brave every day, all the time, until all this is resolved.”

  She realized she had raised her voice.

  She did not want people to watch her. It was always better to slip about unnoticed, better in Berlin, better in London, better here. When she’d been almost famous for decades, her wit and writing tossed about the fireplace on Sundays in a million middle-class homes, that was a disguise of sorts, a trade, a performance in which she did not need to involve herself. Nobody saw her in the act of writing.

  People were looking at her now. Well, she’d ignore them.

  “I know you want to be right,” Sarah said, very quietly. “I know you haven’t had much chance.”

  The tram came and waited an extra second for her to notice and to board. She didn’t move.

  The driver frowned.

  Then she climbed aboard and left Helen standing in the cold.

  “My father died, you know,” Nicholas said. “Just the other day. I never really knew him and I missed him so much when he was alive and I can’t work out if I miss him more now he’s dead.” He could feel the wine softening his tongue, making it inaccurate sometimes.

  Peter Clarke could not remember the moment of losing his father. He thought it half indecent that Nicholas lived with such a fresh memory.

  “She always talked about him as this great athlete. I remembered him that way: the great football player. Then he was a soldier on a mountain pass. But when I saw him after the war, I saw a banker. No, I just saw the bank. He was a clerk, a face for the bank, in a drab black suit with a neat tie, all of him perfectly brushed and polished. He always sat on the edge of the chair as though he had no right to be with us, or didn’t want to stay.

  “He did take me skiing once. We went on one of the ski express buses, with the skis sticking out of the back like a cigarette pack. He said I was going to be good, but then he dashed away from me and he was much more quick. I was still a boy.

  “When he visited, they always had something for me to do, something outside the house. But I heard them. Their voices were so tight you expected them to snap, but they never raised their voices.

  “They argued about the Jews, a couple of times. He’d say there weren’t enough of them in Switzerland to be a problem. She’d say he was anti-Semitic like all the rest. She was very proud, this is the oddest thing, of not being anti-Semitic.

  “Then the war ended. He didn’t want to see her anymore, but he did come to see me at school a few times.

  “I heard the Swiss boys talking about the Soviets on the borders, about the revolution that was coming like it almost came in 1918, about the way we all had to hold together; and I heard them talking about the ‘faux suisses.’ I thought: That’s my mother. That’s me. No wonder my father doesn’t come to see us anymore. We’re the false ones, the ones who don’t know just what we’re doing.”

  He gulped his wine, got up a little unsteadily, and went for a new bottle.

  “I couldn’t find him for a while. Too many Müllers in the phone book. Besides, I thought he might be doing more army service. I thought about the railway station. Everyone, sometime, had to catch a train. I looked out for groups of soldiers.

  “My mother didn’t like me in the shop, so I was supposed to be a man and go about on my own.”

  The new bottle was exactly like the old, from a dozen crates out in the barn: a carload from the Valais.

  “One night, I remember it was cold. There was ice, and it cracked like sugar brittle round the boats. It was properly dark, winter dark, and all the darker because of the extra lights and colors for Christmas.

  “The bakeries had shut down for the night, so there were no more spices and sugar on the air, only beer and the smell of frying, the smells that meant the men had taken over the town. I thought I might see my father. I went out to see him.

  “I was in an alley with the snow piled in the middle, and the footprints of days on either side. The trees were paper white. The air was silent. I expected the smell of beer to start the snow melting and falling.

  “At the end of the alley people were standing still. I didn’t expect that, not on a cold night in the town. If people were standing still, they must be expecting someone.

  “I heard bells, heavy bells.

  “I got down to
the bottom of the alley and I stood up on a doorstep.

  “The next alley was narrow, too, a cobbled slip that broadened out down the hill, I suppose. I saw lights moving. The bells clattered, their sound a little muffled because they were carried by hand.

  “Men in white were coming. They wore hats full of candles, and they had bells. They wore masks.

  “From a distance, their faces were blank, full of straight lines. They walked two abreast down the hill, and they seemed to fill out the whole line of the alley.

  “They came close, and their faces were terrible. This one’s nose was a triangle of card, that one had a letterbox mouth. Some faces were rounded out, some had hats cut out with deer, stars, flowers. The blankness, the prettiness of the candlelights, was suddenly alarming. They were bringing peace and happiness, whether you wanted it or not.

  “I wanted to think that one of them was my father. But he was in an Advent procession. So he couldn’t possibly talk to me.”

  Clarke’s head began to hurt, with the wine, with the fumes from the fire in a closed room, with the endless parade of human fact that Nicholas could marshal before him.

  He so much wanted to be on Sarah’s side, to do something that was impeccably right and just and good after a whole long life of equivocation. He didn’t want the issues to turn subtle on him. He wanted to keep his great advantage over these people who had been in Berlin in the war. And each anecdote was spoiling his certainty: of being on one side, of opposing the other. It reminded him of that Christian burden of forgiveness. It loaded his mind with questions that gave the enemy enough time to get away: questions like, What would I have done in their place?

  “I’ll walk to the station,” he said. “They must be finished with the lawyer by now. Sarah will be back in the hotel.”

  “But there’s so much else,” Nicholas said.

  “I know. And I’m not listening anymore. I have other things to do.”

  “You think it’s a waste of time to know what happened.”

  Clarke thought for a minute. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. You know as well as I do that you’ve told me nothing that could help. Nothing that could help make things right.”

  “You can’t repair history.”