The Pieces from Berlin

by Michael Pye

  “You think that will work in a courtroom?”

  “We’re not looking for devices.”

  “But we have to. We have to look for what works.”

  “Besides,” Helen said, “nobody thinks like that anymore.”

  “Anymore?”

  “I used to think that way. It was all too late and too awkward. This house was stolen, that’s a fact, but there have been five owners since then and do you throw out the man who bought the house in good faith and could barely afford it and needs somewhere for his family? And suppose there’s a business that was stolen; in fifty years, it’s been nationalized and privatized and globalized and probably now it’s been downsized. And suppose it’s a masterpiece of some kind which is maybe in a national museum where I’d want it to be. And suppose it’s money. You leave cash alone for long enough, it’s anonymous again, it’s like buried treasure.”

  Sarah brushed the crumbs from her fingers. “You think this?”

  “I used to think all this,” Helen said.

  “And now?” Sarah said.

  “I know it is theft. It has to be put right.”

  “And punished?”

  Sarah waited. The swan in by the shore, Helen with her fierce certainty, the swan in its perfect pose, Helen standing there: they rhymed, she could see.

  “You don’t have a lot of patience with history, do you? Your father’s history or your grandmother’s history.”

  “They can’t expect us to care about the details now. They left them out for so many years.”

  “And you don’t think it is all too late? That we have to move on?”

  “No,” Helen said. “I know it took sixty years for people to listen. As it did in Britain, and in Holland, and America and everywhere else.”

  “Good,” Sarah said.

  “And that is why any court will want to throw out your case,” Helen said. “Because they tried it once before and they couldn’t get a conviction, and then they didn’t do anything even though they knew all about Lucia. They had their one chance to be moral and superior, and they threw it away, and now they’re defensive.”

  “You see things very clearly.”

  “It doesn’t mean I’m right.”

  Helen handed her a tissue to clean her fingers. Sarah thanked her like a child. Helen took Sarah’s arm again, seemed to direct her along the path.

  Sarah said: “I’m wasting the bit of life I’ve got left. I’m wasting it on a woman I almost forgot for fifty years.”

  Then she said: “When can I meet her?”

  Nicholas went to see Lucia when the shop had closed. He felt he had no honorable alternative: if he couldn’t even talk to her, then he was just an accomplice in her silence.

  It was the big change as you got older: you knew you were implicated. Only the young could protest and boycott and go out masked in the streets and burn cars and stone the police and think that made them right and pure.

  But when he sat down with his little brandy, he didn’t know exactly how to start with Lucia. He rather envied the police, who start with uniforms to say who they are, and warrants to say what they are allowed to want.

  He nudged the subject, said it was extraordinary how everyone—the newspapers in particular, he said—was talking about the 1940s. He said even younger people seemed to be interested, as they had never been interested before; because, he said, it seemed a moral issue now.

  He waited for Lucia. She didn’t help. She wondered if he would come to the opera next month: something French, she said, Massenet. She said Massenet was underrated.

  There was a blunt fuss of a sound: the apartment bell.

  Lucia looked up. Nicholas waited for her to say who it might be, who was expected. Lucia said nothing. Nicholas supposed he would have to go to answer the door.

  The bell rang again.

  It was not the moment for strangers, but it was not possible to ignore the unsocial, unnecessary noise.

  The intercom fizzed. “Delivery,” a voice said.

  Nicholas never questioned deliveries. He could hear the elevator trundling and rising.

  But he should have asked Lucia, he thought.

  He heard the elevator doors open. There was a knock on the apartment door.

  He felt absurd squinting through the spyhole. He knew nothing more when he saw the faces outside.

  There were three of them: two squat, purposeful men and a young man in a very careful jacket. He thought they had a faintly deferential air, so he opened the door.

  The young man said: “Is Frau Müller-Rossi at home?”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  Lucia said she had no idea what anyone would be delivering to her. She could not guess.

  “It’s not roses,” Nicholas said. “It took two men.”

  “I don’t expect roses at my time of life. Lilies, possibly.”

  The two men carried their parcel into the living room. The young man followed.

  He didn’t seem to know what to say, so he spoke very quickly. “We thought,” he said, “you might prefer to have this in the apartment. In the circumstances.”

  “Do you want it unwrapped?” the older man said.

  Lucia, in her chair, glared at them all. She was not prepared for company, her hair a little wild, her skin all too present through the paint. She said: “You may as well.”

  The men didn’t want to look at her with her bare face. They began to strip away paper and card and tape and string. The parcel had legs, it seemed, and a flat top. It had the shape of a desk. Inside the brown card and paper there was tissue paper lying against the wood. The two men lifted the tissue paper away, without tearing it.

  The desk was covered in huge open flowers, all in light wood cut into the darker wood, with gilded corners and gilded handles for the drawer. It was a little carved garden in a corner.

  Lucia seemed to want to protest, but she wanted even more to stay entirely in command of the moment, which meant she had to pretend she knew what was happening.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Just for the time being,” the young man said. “It seemed better, in the circumstances.”

  “I shall be back in the shop tomorrow morning,” she said, too clear and too emphatic.

  And when they were gone, she said to Nicholas: “Everyone is suddenly so interested in my little business.”

  “Someone has to tell the story.”

  “I suppose so. I always assumed you didn’t want to know.”

  “It’s a fine table.”

  “I sold it once. Bought it back. I couldn’t bring myself to sell it again. But it was in the shop where anyone could see it. I’m becoming careless. Or I’m becoming frank. Or just very old indeed.”

  Nicholas, who had so much wanted to be the interrogator, now wanted to stroke the worn fabric of her face. He thought, wrongly, this was a sign of weakness.

  The housekeeper called at eight and said Lucia was asking for Helen.

  Helen asked why Lucia did not make the call herself, but Lucia’s housekeepers were not expected to consider questions beginning with “why.” The housekeeper did say, though, that she was leaving early that evening. She’d be gone when Helen arrived. Frau Müller-Rossi would want an egg, and some Madeira.

  So Helen walked, not wanting the old woman’s imperious ways to be rewarded. She was grateful for the first specks of hard rain.

  She rang the doorbell, but Lucia did not bother to answer. Usually, Helen did not use her own key to the apartment, never challenged Lucia’s autonomy, but this time she did.

  The inner doors all seemed to be open, but there were no lights. Helen could hear music: the pilgrims’ chorus from Tannhäuser, the pilgrims coming from far away and cresting some stage hill. She stood quite still for a moment, wondering whether to call out.

  She realized one door was shut. There was enough light from the streetlamps, pale bluish light, to let her pick her way through the treasures of the hall. She pushed the closed door.

&
nbsp; Candles burned. The light was steady and gold. In a circle of light, Lucia sat, the music bawling at her now. Helen fretted at once about the neighbors. Then she saw that Lucia’s straightness was carefully supported, that it did not necessarily mean she was alert and awake. Helen wanted to turn down the music so it would be possible to talk, but she kicked against one of the candles, which spilled a little spoiling pool of wax which stayed alight for a moment on the rug. She snuffed it out.

  Lucia was smiling.

  Helen found the volume control. “Lucia,” she said. Lucia said nothing. “Lucia,” she said, “this is dangerous.”

  Lucia slipped out of her chair and onto the floor.

  A pair of candles lit her shawl for a moment, and there was a stench of burning. Helen stamped on the fire. She held Lucia under the arms and dragged her up from the floor. She felt the slackness in Lucia’s body, the will that had relaxed and died.

  She thought Lucia might be dead.

  Softly, the pilgrims’ chorus repeated itself.

  She stashed Lucia in a chair. Lucia’s mouth drew back from a smile into a gawp, as though she was drunk. Lucia’s teeth, a few on a plate, slipped in her mouth. Lucia’s features slacked like old cloth over her bones.

  She had been reading Goethe. She’d even marked a page:

  Ich besass es doch einmal

  Was so köstlich ist!

  Dass man doch zu seiner Qual

  Nimmer es vergisst . . .

  And Helen was not confused, not frightened, not unsure anymore. She was angry. She was a fury in a drawing room. She grabbed at Lucia’s hair, half afraid the old woman wore a wig, and she slapped Lucia’s cheeks, a little powder coming away all pink on her hands, and she shook the woman. She was no longer afraid that a touch would break a bone.

  She was tackled and winded by sheer, sudden fury. Her father had told her about Goldstein’s suicide, about the body between the candles, about the volume of Goethe. She knew exactly what Lucia was doing: she was stealing Goldstein’s death.

  I once possessed it

  The thing that is so precious

  To one’s torment

  One never forgets it.

  She couldn’t have it. If this was Goldstein’s death, then she’d used barbiturates. Then, if she was drunk on barbiturates, she had to be made to move. Helen would walk her, up and around the drawing room, even if her slack hands knocked down the pretty porcelain, even if she left behind a trail of broken things. That was what Lucia had always done to others, after all.

  She dragged Lucia to the window and pushed her out into the air for a moment, into the cold sting of the rain, which fussed in rivulets on Lucia’s powdered face. She shook the old woman’s fine dyed hair like cloth in the streetlights.

  She wanted the world to see.

  NINE

  Lucia woke surprised. She often wore earplugs so she could listen to her own heart; any shocks and bumps would come from the workings of her own body and not from the outside world. So it was not the quiet that alarmed her.

  She opened her eyes. She could see white walls, which were not her white walls. The bed was smaller, tighter than she liked: the wrong bed.

  They’d put her in a hospital.

  It was just a charade, she thought. She took a few pills to get to sleep when the world upset her; she had not, of course, taken a reliable dose.

  She wanted to throw off the bedclothes in one grand gesture, a test of will and muscles, but they were so tightly folded that she had to tug at them. When she was free, she could see the plain cotton gown that was scratching against her skin, with a faded pattern of blue flowers.

  There was no machinery in this hospital, no tubes, cranks, screens, or ventilators. The room had a window, but the blinds were down.

  It was not an ordinary hospital, then.

  She did not want to try the door. They would not have humiliated her by locking the door.

  She had invented a little moment of romance, and she had not intended anyone to see it; being old was not a state of being reduced to the practical. She was entitled to poems, candles, music. Perhaps, since she was old, they would believe she was praying.

  Under her breath she rehearsed speaking for a moment, wanting to get it right, and then she shouted: “Service! Servizio!”

  She was mortally afraid of the time when nobody even thinks of listening to you, when all your reasons are obviously unreasonable and you struggle to say what you think and people comfort you instead of listening.

  She must be haunted; everyone would think that. And now it mattered what they thought, because that would be the condition of her leaving this clean, brutal place.

  For there was nothing delicate or particular in the room that she could see: nothing painted, nothing shaped, only unkind angles and crisp sheets and plain whites and the closed blinds. They had not left a book, no patch of color, and she could not make out where her spectacles lay. They must have left her spectacles, surely? They had not put a picture on the walls: she supposed that images might confuse the other images that were supposed to race inside her mind and tell them all about her.

  She was not available to be understood.

  She had performed this charade once before, when she was much younger, for a set of three judges in a Zurich courtroom: a gentle subservience to investigation, followed by a proper measure of self-righteousness, all notions of anger carefully put away.

  She could remember how to do it. But all these years later, she couldn’t be quite sure she had the strength or elasticity or concentration. She’d hesitate at the wrong moment, and lose everything. She’d be angry, or even guilty.

  She closed her eyes.

  She could summon such terrible images: fires and deaths, treacheries and murders, a city dying before her eyes. They didn’t come. She only imagined her entire person was, at that very moment, being dissolved by a committee of doctors and concerned relatives.

  She would only surrender if struggle was out of the question, she told herself. Then she thought: Perhaps it is. Perhaps if I struggle, I will crack bones that never mend, open cuts that I do not have the blood to heal.

  “I am old,” she said out loud, and then she thought she had better not say anything out loud while she was alone and being watched.

  “I left her there,” Helen said. “I had to leave her there.”

  Peter Clarke had gone to make tea, and now he put the cup beside her. She had Henry’s train in her lap and her hands: a red and yellow engine, two generous carriages. The track ran in an oval in the corner of the room.

  “They said she’s physically all right,” Helen said. “And then I had to leave her. I can call the clinic at ten.”

  He thought of Lucia in the clinic, which meant he thought of how he would be in a clinic, in a place whose official name was a “home,” in a world come down to four square walls and sometimes a view of the prints of landscapes in the corridor on the way to piss.

  “I told Jeremy last night,” Helen said. “He’s still in New York.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Clarke said.

  Helen attached the carriage to the carriage, and the carriages to the engine; all of it connected. She’d been dreaming of a train, she was a passenger, everything was traveling on the train or connected to the train, everything, and she couldn’t get off. The train stopped, and the doors stayed locked. Then the train didn’t stop at all.

  Clarke said: “But he’ll be home soon.”

  Helen smiled.

  “And Lucia will be fine,” he said.

  “You think she will be?”

  He wished he could give her the reassurance she needed, but he had only words, not touch, not love; so he would have to get the words right. He might slip and make things worse.

  “Maybe she’s warning us. If she really is—depressed, I mean, ill, then I suppose the whole business has to stop here. You can’t drag some frail old madwoman into court.”

  “She was sane a very long time.”

  “The
candles, the music, the Goethe: it was like a play. I always loved the show of her—the clothes and the glamour. She lit those candles as though she was parodying herself.”

  Clarke wanted to go back to his own bright-colored memories, to a small enclosed world of family, seed grounds, fields of brilliance, trips to the sea. He knew what was right and what was wrong there; it seemed more a matter of custom and rules than judgment. You knew your side, and kept its laws.

  And Helen kept traveling on the train she remembered from her dream. So she broke apart the carriages and engine in her lap, and set them down by her cup.

  “I’ve no idea what makes her do things,” she said.

  Peter Clarke said: “Sarah wanted to be here.”

  “I know.” And Helen folded her hands.

  “I don’t think it can be stopped now,” Nicholas said. “I don’t want it to stop.”

  “Helen’s worried,” Clarke said. “She worries people will think it’s a way of evading the moral issues if Lucia is sick. Avoiding what you want and she wants.”

  “Helen wants a full accounting. It’s not a question of a lawsuit, or a settlement, or publicity or anything like that.” He sighed. “It’s me, having to go back over a story that I put away a long time ago.”

  “You were only a boy in Berlin.”

  “Helen,” Nicholas said, obscurely, “feels very Swiss. I suppose I taught her that.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You’re Swiss because you come from the place. It’s not a question of language, because we have too many, and it can’t be religion, except that we’re all insistent Christians. It isn’t blood, either. It isn’t race. It’s to do with those bloody mountains. The glaciers. The passes. The lakes. You know other people teach their children history at school to make them patriotic; we take them into the mountains for a week.”

  “You’re what you’re born,” Clarke said, with a defiant show of common sense. “I’m English. You’re—” and then he realized that Nicholas must have had some kind of choice, being born in Germany, one parent Italian, one Swiss.