The Pieces from Berlin

by Michael Pye

  “I’ll bring the rest,” Sarah Lindemann says.

  “Thank you.”

  “They call them divers, you know,” Sarah Lindemann says. “The ones who hide.”

  Lucia says: “I didn’t know.”

  “I went down by the Bernsteins’. They were holding an auction. And you know,” Sarah Lindemann says, “there were cups still on the table. They still had tea in them.”

  Helen came from the hospital with so many questions; she tested Sarah’s tolerance again and again. Each sensible question dug out an appalling memory.

  “But why did you tell her anything?” Helen said. “Why did you trust her?”

  Sarah said: “It wasn’t a question of trust.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There wasn’t anybody to trust. You did deals, that’s all. Everybody did. Didn’t anyone ever tell you about the special trains that ran from Belgium into France, with the ceilings hollowed out to smuggle cigarettes? Or the railway station at Prague, and the tens of thousands of dollars that were changed there every day? Or the money that went to the Ecuadorean embassy to get passports or—”

  “You dealt with Lucia.”

  “There was nobody to deal with except one kind of thug or another. Some of them were in the government and some weren’t. I sometimes think,” and she carefully did not look at Helen directly, “you have too much respect for the Nazis. Their crimes were enormous. They were the first truly modern killers and thieves. They staged gigantic shows. But they were small-time criminals, all the same, a protection racket on a continental scale. They had no great vision, only clichés: searchlights and Teutonic giants and all that rubbish. Even the Holocaust was a failure of imagination. They couldn’t imagine their new world for themselves, so they had to make it new by taking away some defining fact about the old world.”

  Helen said: “How could you phone her? How could you talk on the phone? They must have tapped phones.”

  “I suppose I already knew nothing would happen to Lucia,” Sarah said.

  All she can hear is dance music, but she doesn’t hum along or step to the rhythm. She can hear dance music coming from every radio station; that’s all there is. Wherever she turns, whenever she has the radio on, she knows there is morale in grave need of boosting.

  Lucia, the old lady, knew there was something she did not want to know. She could not quite seize the order of things, and the connection between them, so she was always afraid there would quite suddenly be something she did not want to live again; and she would be living it. She would be behind this managed face, made immaculate with powder, and she would be living an intolerable thing.

  She was suspicious of the ease with which she remembered UFA. She’s on the cafeteria line, edging forward, considering the list for the day: stonefish patties. She never did know what a stonefish was, but ground up and thinned out it is not at all a glorious dish. There is red cabbage, white cabbage, and potatoes. There is vanilla pudding, as always.

  Someone she half knew, an assistant director’s assistant who’d seen her eating here, says: “I’ve got something to show you.”

  She could still ask herself why she was in this particular moment, looking at a plate of pale green and purple-blue cabbages. Something shadowed the memory, all memory, all that she saw and knew.

  “We’re making a man fly to the moon by balloon—live, in front of you,” the man was saying. “And he rides a cannonball and he turns invisible and—”

  “And everything,” says Lucia.

  “I’ll show you how it’s done,” the assistant assistant director says.

  He’s eager, even though he’s fortyish and his hair is sparse and the lenses in his glasses are impressively thick and maybe explain why he is not in a uniform. He is working very hard at being charming.

  She says: “I have to get back to the office.”

  “They don’t even notice if you’re there. How could they miss you?” They stroll to the tall fortress towers of the sound studios, the distance between the two of them becoming more of an issue at every step: he getting closer. They slip between two huge sliding metal doors, along the line of the sliver of sunlight from the gap.

  Inside, the space is dark until it becomes brilliant with arc lights, dusty and full of piled struts and angled flats until it turns into the skin of a palace or a garden.

  They are under a gigantic wooden gallows, up to the ceiling, lit by naked lightbulbs, with ladders rising up to a perch for the camera. The gallows allow the camera to look down on a great drum, hanging on its side between scaffolding. It smells of paint, turpentine, and new cut wood.

  “You see,” the man says.

  Lucia, old in the sun, did not think she remembered what had happened next. But that did not stop it happening again: vividly, and now.

  The man clambers up ladders to the side of the drum. He tells Lucia to climb up to the camera’s perch, which she does with difficulty in a long skirt; and he watches every step.

  “You’ll like this,” he says, almost plaintive.

  She sits dizzyingly high. She wonders when all the other members of the crew will come back. Her legs dangle in the air, no support, and her back is pressed hard onto the cameraman’s seat. She is afraid to move in case the high scaffold might move and rock underneath her.

  She’s not fascinated enough to lose her anxiety. And this anxiety rhymed precisely with her sense, sitting in a hospital chair, that she did not want to be in this place a second time.

  Below, in front of her, the man puts his shoulder to the huge drum and he begins to turn it.

  “Look through the camera,” he says.

  She looks. She loses the world for a moment: she sees only a glass square and the guidelines inside it.

  “Just look,” he says.

  And through the camera she makes out a road. She could be flying along it. There is a landscape all painted on the skin of the great drum and then the walls of a palace that rises up in pink sugar with guns on the battlements, a tower that goes up in monumental layers to meet its own painted shadow on a painted sky.

  The drum stops moving, so the palace is still. It is in full view of the camera.

  “Now imagine—”

  She is very aware of eyes.

  “—that you’re flying, flying, and suddenly you collide with the top of the palace—”

  Down below, around the square wood scaffolding, men have assembled silently. She didn’t see them come; she was busy with a fantastic palace that shivered a little while the assistant assistant director talked. She can feel the presence of the men, though. She has to get down among them. She has to get through them.

  The palace moves again. It comes steadily toward her, closer and larger, only the steadiness of its motion to tell her she is not truly flying into a painted world.

  “And kerboom!”

  She wants to tug down her skirt, to cover herself, but she is straddling the cameraman’s perch and she can only study the great drum ahead of her and try to imagine she is still almost alone. She doesn’t want to struggle for the ladder, and come sashaying down and down in front of this random lot of stagehands and gaffers. She sits, motionless.

  “Kerboom!” The man’s shout is a challenge. She has to be stirred and impressed. She can’t just freeze.

  She grips the cold metal of the camera. She thinks she can hear, far away, the faint whistling of a falling bomb; but she tells herself that is impossible, that the soundstages are sealed against the outside world. She might as well be sitting in a vacuum. Then she can’t hear the whistling anymore. The bomb has landed.

  She sees the light between the soundstage doors.

  The scaffold shifts under her, like a chair no longer braced doesn’t just stop being solid; it stops being a chair.

  She sits up in the dead, still air, under the wide saucer lights in the roof, and she feels cold sweat going very slowly down her spine.

  She hears the flat sound of an explosion. She can hear everyt
hing through the gap between the doors.

  She hopes for a moment that the sound and the impact may be movie tricks, that maybe the men down below are nudging the scaffold and making it sway, worrying her, disconcerting her, and someone with a drum and a blanket is making the sound as an effect. But if that’s true, she needs even more to get away briskly.

  She swings herself over to the top of the ladder, going down backward, not knowing who’s waiting down below.

  The men shift forward, an audience to every curl and bend of her haunches as she clambers down.

  She can’t move.

  She is only halfway down, arms and legs apart so she can flatten herself against the ladder, and she can move neither up nor down. And she has to be out of there, to be somewhere else.

  She feels the men’s eyes.

  She can see, through the rungs of the ladder, that her new friend is still standing by the drum, holding it steady, waiting for it to lock back into place.

  She edges one foot down. A man cheers. She slips a little.

  She moves her hands down first, and then her legs. She wants to be close to the ground so they can all support and hold her and protect her. But she doesn’t want them to touch her at all.

  She reaches the ground, eyes back in her head, as unpredictable as any animal that is alarmed.

  The men part for her, but not much. So she pushes them apart.

  Lucia tells the office she is taking the afternoon off. The director, who seems to be amused at the notion of Lucia needing to ask to do nothing for a while, says she can take his car.

  The old woman fretted in her bed, side to side, tugging the sheets out of place, talking politely as though at some social gathering.

  The doctors decided there was no value in giving her a sedative. There would come a time when she needed them much more.

  A paper in her pocket: the address that Sarah Lindemann gave her, in tight writing. She tells the driver to take her there.

  She tells herself all she wants is a little sane conversation, and to be among other outsiders who don’t simply want to fuck her or to stare at her, who don’t live in a romance and do allow her to think out loud. She’s hungry for difference in a world full of normal horrors.

  The driver takes her to streets she doesn’t know: each block lined with five featureless stories of apartments, each range of dark homes with another, smaller block inside it, squares within squares, broken only by tunnels of archways and entrances. There is a little bar on the corner, hung at the door with heavy leather curtains for the blackout.

  She tells the driver to wait.

  Max can’t be here. This must be someone who might know someone who might pass on a message from a friend who knows people, who might even help.

  She goes out of the sun and into one of the tunnels. The air changes. The tunnel is broken, five times, with a line of dim light where one court backs onto another. It smells of soot, of sewers not working well, of machine oil and ersatz soap, sometimes beer, once rotten meat. She looks down to see where her neat straw shoes were walking: on a rat-run of grime, old paper, old dirt.

  She has never been to such a place. It isn’t at all like the back-streets of Milan, which were old and familiar and open even when they were hung with washing and full of children; this is exotic as a souk. She worries about who might be ahead, behind her, whether the children pick pockets. But she worries even more that the smell will stay forever on her skin: the smell of people who have nothing at all, not even the cleaning and bleaching sunlight, to lose.

  Max Lindemann can’t be here. This place cannot be in Berlin.

  She walks carefully, but she tries not to walk delicately: not to look different, even rich.

  She finds the proper door, knocks and knocks again, waits and knocks again. She wants it to seem that she knows a code, which means she knows a code is necessary.

  She thinks there may be someone behind the door: a child, dog, or idiot, she doesn’t care anymore.

  “Is Max here?” she asks through the door.

  No answer.

  “Can I leave a message?”

  No answer.

  She shouts: “Max! Max! Are you there?” And her voice doubles in the narrow tunnel and comes back from the far courts crisscrossing on itself.

  “Max!”

  He infuriates her with his discretion. He’s supposed to come forward and show his face for her, risk anything for her.

  Her driver leaves the car for a moment and says, quietly: “Signora. Perhaps if we left now—”

  An official car stops at the end of the tunnel.

  “Max!” Lucia shouts.

  Three men in black step out of the car. Lucia walks toward them, incensed that Max is not eager to see her, that the people behind the door do not trust her. She is also instinctively, carefully aware that three men with guns and warrants are walking toward her.

  When Frau Lindemann comes with the other dishes and pots and vases she wants to save, she says she has not heard from Max for a week. Nobody has heard from Max.

  Berlin is shutting down around Lucia. They’ve closed Horchers, and the Quartier Latin, the Neva Grill and Peltzer’s Atelier and Tuskulum; so she doesn’t know, this evening, next evening, where to go for all that venison, wild pig, chicken, the meat that does not require coupons, to be eaten with the tide of red wine that still floods in grand Berlin cellars.

  She’s seen the art trade, too, being shut down, at least the official trade: so shops stay shut, but the prices roar along. Brown, varnished pictures: prices up a third at least. Her friend in Himmler’s office, who expects to get out of the war in good shape, says there was one picture at Lange’s auction house that he knew for a fact was worth only four thousand Reichmarks, that Lange’s put up for sale at twenty-five thousand, which was already pushing it, and which sold to a Munich dealer for sixty-four thousand; “and God knows what he’ll sell it on for.”

  So she asks him about furniture. “Anything Louis XV, Louis XIV,” he says. “Lots of it coming in from Paris, but the prices don’t go down. They always lose the cushions, though, and it’s difficult to match them now all the good shops are closing.”

  She thanks him politely.

  She hears the bombs coming closer. You can’t trust anyone anymore: they wait for the bombs to break open buildings, and they steal whatever they see. The Gestapo take away a woman on a stretcher. The city is either ruined by heat or frozen white: two seasons, equally bleak.

  She’s thinking, always wide-eyed on the world for every possibility.

  Everyone who hasn’t left is about to leave: fussing about getting the silver safely to a bank, the children to the country, throwing out clothes they don’t need, getting the furniture somewhere safe before the bombs hit at home. Even her diplomat friends have no more magical answers. They can still dance, they can still travel a little, but they’re squabbling now about the supply of country houses still standing. Italian officers turn up to find their landlady has given the lease to Romanians; so the landlady, the officers smugly say, is now in jail.

  She takes in every rumor, every fact and sight, so she can calculate her survival, which she begins to think will mean her escape.

  She tells herself she did not denounce Max Lindemann. People do disappear. They disappear all the time.

  She has her little business, her storage service; that’s how she sees things. Everyone has a second job nowadays.

  She does this to protect Nicholas. She likes the warm, kindly feeling in other people when they see a mother protecting her child. She’s going to get out of here, and Nicholas too.

  But she isn’t with Nicholas. She’s out socializing. She goes out for her little business, her means of leaving Berlin, of keeping Nicholas safe. But she likes the parties, too.

  She likes the Spanish diplomats, Federico Díaz in particular. He has proper drink in a proper house. And he has presents, too, and she likes presents.

  Lovely lights. There is mariachi music, and she love
s the blare and attack of the tunes. She wonders where Díaz found Mexican musicians in Berlin, but then she’s seen black actors on the set in Neubabelsberg; there are all sorts fitted into the corners of the great white Reich.

  She wants very much to dance.

  There’s no ambassador, of course. This is the kind of event at which he’d probably appear with his wife, which nowadays means he’d rather not appear at all.

  “Every few weeks,” a bright little woman is saying of a friend. “She goes to Switzerland every few weeks. I think that’s very brave. You never know about the roads.”

  “Why does she go?” Lucia asks, having not quite caught any of the names.

  “She’s lady-in-waiting to the Infanta, when she can get there.”

  “How extraordinary,” Lucia says.

  “I see nothing extraordinary about it,” the woman says, and turns away.

  These people should be her friends. She’s fazed by how many have seen her, know her for an associate of the Italian ambassador, but also know all too clearly what kind of associate. That woman’s a Furstenberg; they should be friends. There is a Henschel; they’re always at the same parties.

  She talks for a while with a minister from the Swiss embassy. She takes one more drink.

  She is the daughter of a distinguished Milano banker, after all; she might yet be near the start of a dynasty. She has a worth like the worth of all these women, and it is fired up now with the brandy that Díaz had brought from his vineyards in Jerez.

  She pauses at double doors that lead into a study. She sees a gun pointing at her.

  “Pop!” says a Furstenberg, smiling furiously.

  She wonders if the woman is sober; if she knows about the safety catch; if she does, what she has done about it.

  “Bang!” says the Furstenberg, now annoyed that Lucia is not performing the proper smile. The safety catch clicks off.

  Lucia says: “Prego.”

  “Oh, really,” the Furstenberg says, and turns about half-circle. She has the gun pointed now at a pretty writing desk across the room, at an odd white figurine of a cat-whiskered dwarf.

  She fires.

  The bullet tracks over the desk, lodges in the wall.