by Michael Pye
“Bugger,” she says.
She tries to pass the gun to Lucia, to pull her in. Lucia, flattered, steps forward.
Federico Díaz says: “First one to hit gets scent. Or stockings.”
He has them ranged now: seven women, good names, fine ways, all waiting their turn.
Lucia aims, closes her eyes, fires, and looks up. She can’t tell where the bullet has gone. Díaz is rubbing his elbow, with pantomimed irony. The other women laugh.
They are firing at a perfectly fine little Böttger piece, early eighteenth century; she knows what will be the usefulness of such objects in an emergency, like the emergency of losing a war.
“I’ll get a target,” Díaz says.
He won’t talk about politics with her. The ambassador, truth to tell, doesn’t care to talk very much at all. Talk implies the kind of social life that he gets at home.
But she can’t miss some things. Here is Mussolini talking to Hitler, and nothing coming of it, not even a grand formal pronouncement. That is bad. The English and the Americans are in Sicily. Then the great northern towns of Italy shiver and burn under raiding bombers.
The ambassador comes to her, for once. He says: “There are some papers, some money. Some silver, some plates. I know you know people. You could get them to Switzerland.”
She wants to shout and laugh. She’s depended on him for parties, for her odd and equivocal place among the diplomats. Now he depends on her for half his life.
Then the ambassador buggers off, which is his phrase, not hers, and it seems he’s going to some Grand Council session in Rome.
She waits. What else can she do? Even the ambassador can no longer figure with precision his chances of survival and usefulness.
He did once say to her, as they disentangled on a single bed in a servants’ room at the official residence: “I wonder what would happen if Italy changed sides.”
She blinked at him. First of all, she was annoyed that he was thinking politics just seconds after he had come; wasn’t she occupying him enough? Second, she didn’t understand what he said. Italy and Germany were allies, surely, and it was unthinkable either should change sides.
He muttered something about the workers in Turin. She said she didn’t understand, and drew a sheet around her, which was difficult since he was lying on the other half of it. He said the workers in Turin were on strike again and in Milan, too, and maybe there’d be a revolution. It would be better to lose the war than see a revolution.
She wondered at the time why he had spelled out his pillow thoughts just this once: better to be always discreet, or always talkative. She understands when he quits Berlin suddenly; he has simply been telling her that it is time for him to go.
The heat crushes her. Agreeable ambassadorial lawns are closed to her. She does take Nicholas to the public beaches, where he’s her escort and her protection. She’s so absorbed in her boy that nobody ogles or bothers her. She can walk the boardwalk among soldiers still in uniform, cross the city of wicker cabanas on the beach, and she does so as a mother, no temptation to any of them.
It was the mothers who sent the soldiers off with pride. Perhaps the soldiers hated mothers.
Women and children are to leave Berlin. Schools shut down as of August 1. She worries about leaving, but she can’t leave, not with the cellars out at Potsdam and everything stored there.
A railway station, not even a main railway station, besieged by women in head scarves and children wrapped up warm despite the smothering heat and all carrying cases. They won’t find a seat on a train. In any case, there are no trains.
Phone call from the Swiss legation. They’ve been told to leave Berlin by August 15. Her friend the minister says: “But I do know you have your own resources. It’s entirely your decision whether you go or not.” Then he adds: “We can’t advise you to go.” And then: “But it might be as well to be ready.”
She notices the lines for flowers in the Frankfurter Allee: women and men wanting tokens of summer life.
She hears that many of the South American diplomats are leaving, at last. She imagines them packing up parties and dances in their trunks, music and all, a whole social life ready to be unwrapped and remade in some other city.
She also hears about the political realities in Italy, fragment by fragment, sometimes from chatter in the embassy itself. There has been a meeting of the Grand Fascist Council, her ambassador present. Nineteen to seven, the council asked the king of Italy “to assume command of the armed forces and the fullness of his constitutional powers.” Mussolini was not present. When he went to see the king the next afternoon, he was much surprised to hear that his resignation had already been accepted. As he left, he was bundled into an ambulance and taken off to a city barracks.
She is alone.
She’s done so well, for a woman in Berlin. She’s been a brilliant kind of neutral, on absolutely all the right sides. She is Swiss, which used to be at least a comfortable nationality, and Italian, which used to make her an ally, and with a child born in Germany, which gave her a certain claim on the authorities in an emergency.
But now Italian is an insult. Her Italian allies are on the wrong side. Italy is divided up between the Allies advancing in the South and the Germans in possession of the North. As for the comfortable Swiss, she hears stories that they boo the German newsreels off the screen.
She’s telling Nicholas it’s time he got out. The embassy staffers will soon have to leave, she’s sure. She can’t establish their exact moving day, but they are the fascists who repudiated Mussolini, and Mussolini is the man the Germans just rescued from custody and put back in charge of a shrunken little stub of a Republic.
She walks to the embassy. It’s a cold day in a tattered city: leaves down on the ground, streets bare.
She turns the last corner, and the whole street is cluttered with parked cars. The embassy is besieged this morning, as it used to be on the nights of grand receptions; but in daylight she can see a couple of ambulances standing by.
On the steps, women who once snubbed her. They wear their heaviest coats, like armor. Men who know vaguely who she is, or rather what she was to the ambassador, aren’t sure if they should acknowledge her or not. Some nod. Some find themselves looking another way, any other way. All of them have that lifeless, helpless air of people with nothing to do but wait, and all of them have suitcases at their sides.
“They’ll beat us up, of course,” says one of the military attachés. “They’re bound to beat us. But then they’ll have other things to worry about.”
Lucia asks: “You know where you’re going?”
“Holidays,” the attaché says. “We’re all going to the Alps.”
“Really?” Lucia says. “You know where?” She has visions of some nighttime crossing into Switzerland, maybe into the arms of her lost husband, she can imagine all kinds of safety, at the very least into the protective comfort of his nationality.
“Garmisch,” the attaché says. “Isn’t that a joke? We’d all have killed to go to Garmisch for the winter. We’d all take skis but we’re not sure they’ll have room on the train.”
“That’s not close to Switzerland, is it?”
The attaché says, shrewdly: “Not close enough, Lucia.”
And she walks on. She sees that a bomb has twisted some of the grand bronze and old timbers, shivered the gilt off cherubim and brought down the great glass chandeliers; what’s left does not quite add up to the old splendor. Against the occasional Old Master, the black stained wood from churches, the marble and the double painted doors, there are people squatting, fussing, suitcases tucked under their arms or used as seats, like refugees already. All their heads are down.
As she’s leaving by the main front door, one woman, a sharp-faced secretary bird with fingernails still long and painted, says: “This is for all the Italians, you know. All the Italians have to go.”
And Lucia says: “My dear. I’m so sorry. I am Swiss.”
“I mentio
ned the shop,” Helen said. “She didn’t even seem to process the idea. And then she was angry. You could tell she knew there was something she ought to remember, but she couldn’t. That’s half a century, gone.”
“I don’t want to know,” Sarah said.
“She’s always angry, the doctors say. She’s worried by something, something she has to do. She keeps very quiet, though.”
“We all got used to that.”
“You think she thinks she’s in Berlin?”
Sarah said: “You know how frightened I am of being like Lucia? Of losing the present time entirely, all the possibilities, all the scents and tastes and—and hopes. How can you hope if you’re on an endless loop of time, past time, time you’ve lived already? You know how it turns out.”
“She sometimes seems to be discussing with a child,” Helen said.
“Then she’s gone back,” Sarah said.
But Lucia woke in a hospital room again. She’d woken there before. She was acutely aware of the smell of the place.
She couldn’t quite remember how she knew things: but she knew very well that the ambassador was sneaking off to Switzerland, asked the Swiss to save his family’s life and find him some quiet place in a discreet canton, for preference German-speaking. He liked Zug.
She knew things. She heard rumors out of Garmisch that things were terrible: so bad that nobody cared who took power or who lost it.
She is walking on a street by railway tracks. She hears Italian being spoken in a cattle car. Prisoners of war, obviously. A cold, frosty morning.
Suddenly, she’s grateful for the Swiss.
The doctor visited. She said: “I feel very tired. It’s extraordinary, don’t you find, the way your resources are suddenly gone. You can’t lift that arm or speak that word. You just can’t.”
“I’m glad to find you so lucid,” the doctor said.
“I really think I need to rest.” It was better to rest than find herself sodden with regret and ready to make apologies and amends for all kinds of crime.
So she decided the doctor was Nicholas. She roused herself for a moment to be a mother: a loving look, determined and rather knowing, an order given with the eyes.
There were no crimes, only circumstances. She was sure of that.
All the art dealers lost their stock, except for old man Grosse in the Esplanade Hotel, and he was just lucky. You saw people tugging bits of furniture down the street and you never knew if it was their furniture they were saving or furniture they just found. They tugged mattresses sometimes. When they bombed the zoo, there were snakes in the hedges and tigers in the cake shops and crocodiles in the canals, so they said. And the colors: it was like fairground neon, but all the time, phosphorous blue and flame red and sometimes an unnatural acidic green.
There was no possibility of an orderly deal in this disordered city. The courts waited until the war was over to demand “orderly deals.”
She was trying to hold on to that justifying thought, but it wouldn’t stay with her. She stared at it as though it was written, or a solid object, but she couldn’t see. Then she couldn’t remember. Then . . .
The Hotel Adlon, an odd island of business in a wrecked city. Food on plastic plates, which no longer seems a scandal. It is a sign of privilege, though, a scandal in the eyes of the unlucky, if you manage to get a table.
And how smart people look, how uniforms hold in all disarray like they hold in a spreading gut, how a briefcase of the right leather makes a man look useful and a pair of slacks on a woman who cares about her face and her body will suggest she’s useful, too, that she has been cleaning house or cleaning a city and deserves her drink.
She’s alone, cold, without a useful nationality, in a city surrounded by invaders. She knows she’s losing. She wants to know the forfeit.
It comes briskly, without fuss. Her friend Hans from Himmler’s office introduces her to a woman called Magrit Huber, who knew everyone at the Swiss legation. Lucia has friends there, but not enough.
Magrit is waiting in the Adlon, at a table. Hans is with her.
“My dear,” Magrit says. “Things must be difficult.”
Lucia is perfectly presented, entirely calm. She can’t agree. But then she might need this woman, so she can’t call her a liar, either.
“When the ambassador left,” Magrit says, “there was some trouble about the cellars in Potsdam. So I’ve been paying the rent.”
Lucia wonders if this could be true, and, if it is true, how much it can matter. The owners were bombed out and long gone, in no position to insist on payment.
“So I have the keys,” Magrit said.
Lucia sees her storehouse emptied out by some improvident bitch who happens to have the lease. But she smiles.
“You have a remarkable collection,” Magrit says. She’s a very tall woman: a stork. “Too remarkable to remain safely in Berlin, I’m afraid.”
So she’s taken it already: shipped away everything. But Lucia smiles.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Magrit says. “Hans and I were discussing your problems, and we want to help. I have a shop in Zurich, a little gallery. The stock would be so much safer there. There are people with money who can buy.”
Lucia’s smile isn’t calm anymore; it’s just unmoving.
“Naturally, you would have an interest. You would be in the little shop all the time. You’d take a percentage of the sales.”
Lucia knows an interest is easily dissolved. Contracts don’t stand like they used to stand. So she starts to talk. She makes Magrit understand what she knows about Meissen: details, marks, what’s fake and what is not, what it means when something looks wrong which sometimes means it’s right but badly mended.
She concentrates. She never concentrated like this before, not on love, not on Nicholas. She spins expertise out of the air, golden names, lovely things, all set in a hierarchy of time and value. She makes Magrit want the knowledge of these things as well as the things themselves. She explains why there is never an AR mark on a love scene, how apprentices got to paint the sword marks so you never know which is which. Which thrower and which molder marked their work with four dots and which with two stars. All exquisite, intricate knowledge which turns those exquisite, intricate objects into the stuff of a shop and a sale.
And so the deal changes. Clearly Lucia is not just a woman with a talent for acquiring things.
“We’ll be partners,” Magrit said, brightly. “You can sell things. I can’t. You can be out front.”
Lucia thinks: She’s grateful for this little holiday while I talk, no bombs, no burning, no dead, just the shine of luxury.
“I can’t imagine being a shopkeeper,” Lucia said.
Magrit frowns. “You’ll survive it.”
“You didn’t earn those goods. You did nothing for them.”
“Thank God,” Magrit says.
Lucia won’t be judged, but she can’t afford to complain. So she’s quiet. But Magrit goes on: “Hans may have something to say to you about that.”
Hans says: “One or two things. You can come to see me at the office.”
The room very slightly rocks. The bombers come just then, without a pause, roaring abominably, pressing the air overhead into a blind wall. There have been raids before, but none when the planes did not stop coming.
She’s thinking of Nicholas back in the apartment, of what is left in the apartment, too. She can’t get back now, not through the fire and rain that’s falling. She has to wait among the gentlemen with briefcases, and wonder what business they found to do anymore, and these women in neat slacks, smiling, whose business still thrived, and some bright girls shouting about oysters and a very few men in uniform who did not look deadly tired.
She says, out loud: “Nicholas.”
“Who’s that?” Magrit asks, sharply. “A friend of yours?”
Lucia says: “Yes.”
“A good friend?”
“Yes. I’m worried about him.”
“Listen,�
� Magrit says, “we all take our chances.”
The roaring always came in waves before, but tonight it is merciless and continuous.
“He is my son,” Lucia says.
Magrit glares at her. “Are you coming to the shelter or not?”
In the tight rooms of the deep shelter, the diplomats’ shelter under thirty feet of concrete with its own special entrance, Magrit stays very close to Lucia. “Just don’t think,” she says. “Don’t think. Dear.”
Lucia looks down at her legs. She had no stockings that morning, so she’d charcoaled the line of a seam on the back of both legs, and now Magrit has smudged it.
She’d rather have no place, no time, than this place and this time. Her memory seemed to run forward as well as backward, to encompass what would happen next even as she seemed to live the closeness in the deep shelter, Magrit’s bony concern, the taste of breath on the air. She is breathing Magrit’s breath.
Their alliance did not last. When the Berlin goods were selling, and Magrit sensed trouble from the law, she sidled out of the business, let Lucia take the blame. Magrit was now entirely respectable, had her share of the capital from the Berlin goods and an annual rent for the use of the shop and her name over the door. Lucia could never challenge what Magrit demanded, however much it taxed her own life; she could only wait for her to die, which she did quite suddenly in 1956.
Memory inside memory now. How in the shelter, she is trying to be somewhere else. How surprised she was to inherit the shop, as though Magrit once had cared for her; and how glad to have independence at last. How Magrit loved to think about touching.
Frau Bartels is out of the ground floor at four in the morning, off to collect the newspapers she’ll push at people’s doors by six or seven. Nothing stops her.
Lucia is watching from the apartment window.
Frau Bartels picks her way between fires and ruins. She can afford not to notice the wreckage around her. She has her little business.
There are window frames loose from the walls, doors gone. Trees have their roots in the air, solid and bizarre. Where gas pipes have broken, there is perpetual fire, like a cinema effect.