The Pieces from Berlin

by Michael Pye

  Helen said Nicholas might be outside among the trees, gone for a walk, tending the geese. He never liked to have an answering machine in the mountains; it seemed incongruous, somehow.

  Both Sarah and Clarke were angry on her behalf at Jeremy, whom they’d never met, for not being there.

  Helen was beginning to know things. She should never have handed him the court papers, “in the matter of Lucia Müller-Rossi.” In that righteous moment, she hadn’t understood that she was disrupting the balance in his life, which now depended on not quite knowing and ignoring things. He couldn’t ever again bear reality.

  He was wired to be on time. She’d seen him once, through a crack between curtains, standing in the utter cold outside their house waiting for precisely eight o’clock to ring the bell.

  She’d have to find him.

  Little Henry came in, solemn, with his Lego train to mend. Sarah took it from him.

  Helen pulled on her coat, only smiled at Henry, slammed the door. She threw herself into the car, started the engine with a roar.

  Clarke said: “She’ll find him.”

  Sarah went to talk to Henry. It was serious business, although she found bending down difficult.

  Helen didn’t want to knock at the door of the old farmhouse. It would seem absurd, this concern, if it was at all misplaced. It would be as though she expected some melodramatic consequence from the simple act of reminding a man of truths he already knew. She shouldn’t be so arrogant.

  She found it hard to tell if the house was alive or not. There were no lights, except where the low sun blazed back out of window glass. There might or might not be a faint haze of fumes coming up from the chimney, but it would only be the oil central heating even if he was at home; he’d lost the habit of lighting a fire. He used to light the fire for her mother, Nora, he said.

  The barn doors were shut. There was no car in the road. But there was snow in the air, so he’d have the car put away.

  She had her key.

  She shouldn’t burst in on him like this, unannounced. What if he’d run to pick up the phone, and missed her call and was worried and waiting now for the next call.

  She sat in the car and pulled out her mobile phone. She ought to go see him, and talk to him face to face; she knew that. But instead she dialed.

  She thought she could hear the phone ringing inside the solid walls of the house: ringing in the clean kitchen, among the low, deep chairs of the living room, in the bedroom to the left at the top of the stairs. She imagined the sound seeking him out.

  A thought: if she slipped the car out of gear, let it run down the road without engaging the engine, then if he answered she wouldn’t be embarrassed and have to say she was calling from the front doorstep.

  There was still no answer.

  She sat back in her seat. She certainly couldn’t use her key now; she’d been told, by the unanswered ringing in the house, that Nicholas was not there, not available, or did not want to be disturbed.

  Now she was like a detective, up out of the car, trying not to walk in the tracks around the house, seeing footprints that led to the door and led back, seeing prints sunk down into inches of snow that must be old evidence, looking through the windows where the shutters were not closed.

  He’d been there. He was gone.

  So she tried again the usual methods: she tried calling the apartment. No answer.

  She felt entirely cold. It was a curious sensation, not at all like the cold you feel in your skin, in your eyes, on your teeth; it was a pervasive cold, in the bones.

  She walked to the barn doors. They were closed with a strong wood latch that she could easily move.

  The car was there.

  She looked around the horizon, trying to read every detail, every smudge of dark under a tree that could be a man walking, every faint line in the snow that could be tracks, every place where the bright, white fields disappeared into the dark of woods.

  She saw him walking toward her with a frozen, snowy cabbage in his hands.

  “I am glad to see you,” he said. “I have things to tell you.”

  She looked at his smile as though it was a document that needed study.

  “I’ve picked a cabbage. For salad.”

  “You’re all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  But he wasn’t. He tried to cut the cabbage while it was still solid, the great sharp blade glancing off ice. Then he said: “We could have cheese.”

  Helen said: “But it’s Sunday.”

  “But I’m here on my own,” he said.

  They ate at the kitchen table, quickly, as though they were going somewhere.

  “I wanted to tell you that I love you,” Nicholas said.

  The words amazed Helen, and then horrified her: not their meaning, of course.

  “I used to be so afraid we wouldn’t make a home for you,” he said. “Because of my own mother and father. Because of the divorce and then—then everything that kept us separate.”

  “But you did.”

  “I’ve been remembering,” Nicholas said. “I’ve been remembering much too much. All the old women and men are remembering, and we’re talking, and it sounds like thunder but it’s really just snoring and farting and growling and complaining. There are some things I wanted to tell you I remember.

  “There was the time my father took me to lunch to tell me about the divorce. He didn’t say why and neither did Lucia. But he’d become very straight, very proper in the war years; he’d learned his place, in a way. Lucia did not fit. Lucia was suspect. Lucia was being investigated. Lucia was a false Swiss. I think he had to disown her just to hold on to his own new sense of place.

  “Anyway. We ate in one of the guild house restaurants, high ceilings, wood walls, gilt and starch. I had, I remember, a Wienerschnitzel. I don’t remember what he said, only his very careful kindness. I left him at the door of the restaurant.

  “I remember feeling that my face was set on that day. I would never be able to change.”

  He tried to smile, but it didn’t work.

  “I knew my father was leaving me. I had some sudden rush of warmth for my mother. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted her to know I loved her, and I thought it was urgent she should know.

  “I ran to the shop. The doors were always open in those days, everyone trusted everyone. I ran right up to her and I threw my arms around her.

  “I felt her stiffen. So I pulled back, I thought I had done wrong, I thought I was inappropriate or unmannerly or unmanly. I pulled back, coughed, made my body straight.

  “Then, only then, she unbent.

  “ ‘Don’t you love me anymore?’ she said.”

  Helen shivered. She said: “You’ve decided something, haven’t you? Tell me what you’ve decided.”

  He washed the dishes when she had gone, wiped them, and put them neatly away. He wrapped the cheese and put the bread into a basket. He put out food for the cat: dry food that would last for a while. He also put out the garbage into the cold.

  He sat down to write a letter to Lucia. He had such extreme things to say that the first draft turned out pompous and the second was unclear, and he didn’t get it right until the fifth draft. But he went on because he would not allow her to misunderstand him.

  He thought of writing other letters, but all that mattered was that Lucia would know.

  Then he drove to the mailbox, and then he drove up the mountain roads toward Glaubenberg. Close to the very top, at one of the cowherds’ houses on the road, he left the car and went for his walk.

  It was afternoon already, and the dark was rising as a tide rises. The cold came with it, black branches held in a glass of ice.

  Nicholas had stopped shivering. The cold held him in ways he associated with warmth: the warmth of a bed, a coat, a blanket, a coat somewhere in an army or a nursery.

  Then the cold slipped between Nicholas and his skin, so he could hardly feel it anymore.

  He could smell damp on the air, which is
just as distinct as smoke. When he walked into the woods, he’d seen the mountains closing in on him, which is what they always do when there will soon be snow.

  He had a sense that people were stealing away from him, somewhere at the edges of his eyes, all of them trying hard not to let him see them go.

  Such a kind man, he remembered being. Then he couldn’t remember how he used to regret not remembering things, when a word got away from him, when a face lost its place.

  He was stumbling, not over tree roots, but over his own slowness. He was alarmed. He stood quite still between the trees. It was so warm, he thought, and he was tangled up in clothes. He threw off his jacket, his sweater, his shirt. He was a man made for good suits, gartered socks, silk ties, in padded civic dining rooms, in company, and he was blundering out here in his shining skin.

  Eyes opened wide. He did not want to be startled by anything in the half-dark.

  He now knew the meaning of the word “alone.” Even the word “alone” was too weak, for this was certainly not the trivial aloneness of a night in his own house, a bowl of soup, a book; he could repair that loneliness with a phone call, a walk to the bar, just waiting for the next morning.

  He missed small noises behind walls, or down streets, or the closeness of a telephone. He missed the other people who could remind him who he was. He even missed, in a way, his criminal mother.

  He could hear nothing except a slight wind polishing the snow.

  He could let go now.

  He didn’t have strong glasses. So the distant Alp was a pink smear on the sky, and he was surrounded by slipshod, charcoal verticals that must be tree trunks, and a sheen on the ground which was like a painting of the color white and not the color itself.

  He was surprised to be on his knees.

  There was a small kerfuffle of splashing snow, a black splutter of feathers moving up to his shoulder. He didn’t know birds moved at night.

  The bird was at his left eye. He couldn’t defend himself, but he thought of it. He felt what must be his very self retreating inside big tendons and bones and curling there like a scared creature.

  Another bird stirred.

  He sank down. His head fell back, like a hanged man. He tried to get breath into his lungs; he couldn’t help himself. He even tried to scream, but he could produce only a rattle in the throat.

  He sucked such bitter air that his chest seemed to freeze from the inside. He couldn’t help himself: he wanted to break out of the sharp, knifing ice that held him.

  He shouted, briefly.

  The bird flew off, startled, but only to a close branch.

  No blood was flowing from his eye. So he knew his heart was abandoning him.

  But he could hear something, movement at a distance, something between a rumble and a crack, a world of snow and rock now starting on the move. He thought his howl must have set off some fresh, deep snow that lay on the old frozen mirror of snow. He knew all about that. He heard the new snow moving, gathering itself, rushing like water. It was working at the trees, gouging out small rocks, building its own boulders out of ice and spray and stone.

  He knew what to do in an avalanche. You spit or you piss to work out which way is down. Then you swim up through the soft crystals, like fine iron filings with their own brilliance, and with luck you may live. Then again, snow will keep you warm if it doesn’t drown you. He knew all this, had known it since he was a child. It was second nature.

  He thought for a moment he’d saved himself: involuntary virtue. So he was laughing when he died.

  TEN

  The shop opened at the usual time. Assistants fussed with the single bunch of bright, heavy keys, then spread about the painted rooms, and seemed to fade away.

  Lucia, too, was on time. The assistants had the door open for her, and a brisk mannerly set of “Good mornings” in appropriate accents.

  She took her usual chair. She was fussing with an assistant over a pretty little Meissen group, showing how the flesh was only very slightly tinted: “Like sugar,” she said, “the same faint pink you find on a sugar pig. And the hair: just look at the hair. You see the shape is molded, but there’s hardly any color. Just fine threads of brown. It looks almost like gilding.” Her interest seemed to dim briefly; “Eighteenth century,” she said flatly.

  The assistants clustered about, papers and files in hand, asking minor questions, reporting details, watching for tips on their immediate future. They knew Frau Müller-Rossi did not usually waste her time in teaching.

  “We’re glad you’re well again,” the favored assistant said.

  It was an obvious impropriety; all the others knew that.

  “I’m always well on business days,” Lucia said.

  The assistants dispersed, back to their natural shadow state.

  The little red light flickered on her phone. Lucia answered. There was a brief silence on the line, as though someone was waiting for breath.

  “This is the police,” a voice said.

  Three hunters, an operatic little party: boots, grays, greens, wool trousers, and felt hats. They found Nicholas hanging like butcher’s meat in the crotch of a silver birch. He was laughing so freshly they imagined for a moment he was alive.

  They stashed their guns and bags against trees, and trudged into the deep snow. They discussed for a moment the propriety and legality of touching the body, and then they pulled it down until it fell and cracked like glass.

  They knew that people often pull off their clothes while dying in the cold; it seems a man gets impatient to die. So all three decided not to be surprised by the gray, loose bareness of the body.

  They thought to look around for clothes. There was a down jacket and a wallet inside, so that identification was easy: Herr Professor Niccolo, sometime Nicholas, Müller-Rossi, a known name, distinguished by a careful book on Shakespeare’s early tragedies.

  Since there was no sign of coercion, his car was parked at the pass, there were no other tracks in the snow, and the hunters were very proud of making sure of this, there was an official story at once. He was an old man who had an accident while walking in the woods, and died of hypothermia.

  The local police looked about for next of kin. They called Helen first, because that was the kind of call they were used to making: reporting the death of a beloved father. They felt able to tell her everything.

  Helen said: “I’ll call Lucia.”

  The inspector said: “I’m sorry. Lucia?”

  “My father’s mother,” Helen said. “I’ll tell her.”

  The inspector blurted: “She’s still alive?”

  “Obviously. You’ll find her at her shop, but let me call first.”

  “She’s in business?”

  “Yes,” said Helen, sharply, “under another name.”

  Two senior, polished city policemen called ahead to Lucia. The question of dress, and whether they should take an unmarked car, was considered at a high level. If they went in uniform, Lucia Müller-Rossi might think they were investigators, accusing her in some way. Given her standing, and her record, there could easily be a misunderstanding.

  So they went in civilian clothes, and an unmarked car.

  “He was Swiss,” the inspector was saying on the way. “Lived in the same canton most of his life. Son of a man from the place where he died. He knew perfectly well you don’t go walking at night in the Alps on your own at this time of year. He must have known what he was doing.”

  “He was sixty-six,” the driver said, a handsome blank stamped out on a farm somewhere. “What possible reason could anyone have to kill themselves at sixty-six?”

  They parked just behind the long shopping show of Bahnhofstrasse and edged into the rush.

  “His skin was all white with hoarfrost,” the driver said.

  “I’m not going to go into details.”

  The inspector, alone, rang the bell to be allowed in.

  Across the whole glittering distance of the shop, Frau Müller-Rossi considered him.
>
  The buzzer sounded. The inspector entered. Frau Müller-Rossi said: “Grüetzi. Welcome.”

  She sat alone.

  “Grüetzi,” the policeman said, politely.

  He walked across the shop, between the lovely things all lit to seem immaculate. He came very close to Lucia.

  He had never in his life been so close to somebody so old, he thought. He knew that her face must be an illusion, and he worried that a change of lights might take away the skin, the blood, the color in the eyes.

  “I am sorry I come with bad news,” the inspector said.

  “I know,” the old woman said.

  He stood by a table very close to her chair, which held objects she did not want out of her sight, devices really: a pair of halved metal balls, one topped with a kind of heart shape, the other with a rod and a screw; a fine wood frame, like one end of a suspension bridge, with channels where the cables ought to be, and a wooden carriage with huge wheels and no top. There was a fine, inlaid, gilded, and painted screw that he recognized: Archimedes’ screw, for drawing water out of a pool.

  “Archimedes,” he said.

  “And the Magdeburg hemispheres. And a device for showing the trajectory of different objects in movement.” She picked up a cylinder that was covered in polished metal, and ended in a kind of tit. “Look,” she said. She drew out a box of papers, painted with circles like eyes and pupils; outside the circles were bright distorted scenes, stretched for an anamorph. She found one which was all black and gray, with a pink streak. She set the cylinder on the paper, and in the reflection he saw a bearded man in black. “Not that one,” she said. She put down a paper with a curious, square-angled pig figure tucked into a swirl of sideways draperies. “Now look,” she said. The angles resolved themselves in the mirror, the pig-pink became soft and flexible, and he was looking at a naked woman climbing into bed.

  The old woman said: “My son liked that one. But he never said so.”

  He said: “It’s charming.”

  “And much more than you could afford.”

  “Madame,” he said, “I regret to have to tell you that your son has been found dead.”

  She said: “I’m closing now.”