The Pieces from Berlin (3 page)

But he couldn’t bear to talk. So he took the train and then the bus to Sonnenberg: to his house, to the house he made with Nora, to the place where Nora was still alive to him.

Helen paced the white rooms, huge steps. She liked order, but she liked it more when Henry was here, crabwise shuffling on one buttock over the floor, beating on his tin drums, assembling his train and taking the tracks apart to make proper crashes. She wanted handprints on the immaculate surfaces, a sense of breath and action.

She thought of Nicholas. Then she tried to think of her grandfather, who was an absence in her mind; she hadn’t even bothered to invent some whiskery, selfless, beaming grandfather, so Alpine his breath would be wildflowers, just to fill the gap. She thought of Nicholas’s loss, and, not knowing the man he was mourning, she could think of it only in the most general terms, which helped nobody.

And as for her grandmother, the cause of all this, she knew nothing Lucia did not want her to know.

She’d been taken to tea at the Grand Hotel Dolder, in the formidable propriety of the old-fashioned rooms; and sometimes to buy clothes, which did not much interest her own mother; sometimes to the Kunsthaus where Lucia talked very sensibly about Giacometti’s sketches, for which she had a clever passion; sometimes on a walk where Helen could confess, happily, anything that crossed her mind, but never somehow confessed any questions, a walk which always ended with chocolate and cream. Lucia knew things, and Lucia gave things. Given the closeness of her father and her mother, which was like claustrophobia to Helen as a child, this old woman had been the vent, the breath, the frivolity in her very young life.

She’d always assumed Lucia was too busy with the shop to see her often. But perhaps her parents rationed out such a heady treat. They must have had their reasons.

TWO

Lucia knew all the places everyone knows from postcards; she’d just been there before everyone else, sometimes when there was still time to discover things.

She knew Paris, for example, but the Paris of 1914 when she was a very small child.

The Rossi family had habits: a few days in some German spa, often Baden-Baden, or a Swiss mountain and lake, or at weekends the house in Piedmont which stood on pudding-basin hills with a view of the Alps, or somebody else’s house around Lake Como or Lago Maggiore. They went to Paris, briefly, to be properly dazzled. The city was further, larger, lighter, grander, and truly foreign in its grandness, and her parents had shone with its reflected glory.

But now there was a war coming. Everyone said so. They had to get home to Milan.

They drew up outside the great iron vaults of the railway station, father in an overcoat in a hot July, mother veiled and ringed with a fox, the taxi smelling of roses because of her; on the outside of the cab, hefty cases. The station halls were stale, air unmoving where there was air, with people pressed back into doorways, scrapping at doors, leaking into the roadways and ebbing and backing and suddenly stopping up against walls. Some looked as though they had slept the night on the road, not even the benches of the waiting rooms. And all of them sounded Italian, except for the fussy officials.

Two porters swung the cases to make a way for the Rossis: metal-edged leather cases, not easy to swing. A nun turned with her mouth open. A pair of soldiers stood like fair angels, but wouldn’t part to let the family through. Small men sat bundled on the ground.

“We all want to go home,” a man said.

Lucia was nestled up in her father’s arms, watching the crowd like a show: watching how they were usually short, usually poor, dressed in thick cloth in summer, how there were blondes in among them, how none of the men had shaved that morning except for her shining father, how none of the women was quite as pretty as her mother. She watched happily.

A tiny man, absurdly in pince-nez, in a railway uniform that bagged and sagged around him, was trying to throw the third-class passengers out of the second-class waiting room; and as one group left, another entered, constantly.

Her mother shouted.
“Via! Via!”

Her father held her tightly. The porters now had stalled and they had still not reached the platform, let alone the train, let alone the proper and appointed first-class carriage for the long haul back to Milan.

Her father shouted about a sick child, although she’d never in her life felt more alert and lively. Several parents nodded in sympathy and produced their own sick children.

Her father was taller than most of the men, she noticed. She looked out onto caps and hats and heads, some of them almost bald like monks.

Her mother lowered her shoulder and she charged.

The porters evicted boys from a cart that had ground to a halt in the crowd. They stashed the cases on the cart, helped Lucia’s mother onto the front of it, and then her father surrendered Lucia to her mother and the porters strained on the handle of the cart and started rolling into the crowd. People were startled, resentful, but the ones they had bruised could not fight their way forward to where the cart now bumped along the platform. There was a smell, tired onions, tired sweat, that she had never smelt before in her well-washed world.

She knew worlds that were entirely alien to the bright young assistants in her store, with their manicured sense of history, and the dealers she knew, who knew nothing inessential, and even her well-heeled, well-aged customers, who were all of them younger. But she turned her memories over like stock in the shop: nothing to treasure, everything moving on.

She stood at the window of the train and watched the confusion on the other side of the glass, men who hit and spat and shouted, who broke against each other. She thought it was like an aquarium.

Lucia, older now, and such a girl: tiny in pink, being tugged past the glitter of shop windows and the other decent people on the street, very aware that she ought to be marching with proper grace and acknowledging exactly her own kind. But her arm hurt in its socket.

She saw the street filled up with people, banners, people she didn’t know. She heard bawling and whistles and drums. She needed the sidewalk to show off her fine pink dress, and, instead, she found herself being rushed out of the parade of the streets and in through the door that was cut into the front door, into the cool and quiet of the hall.

Her mother said: “There. Dear. Go and change.” Her mother would need a drink now.

Lucia went up the wide marble stairs, pulled herself up on the balustrade since there was nobody to see, like a sailor up the side of a huge ocean ship, like a monkey on its bars.

She’d always lived with the filigree gold, the mosaic floors made up to look like Persian carpet, the carving and the gallery of paintings. But she’d always known there was a world boiling just outside the cool, shaded glass of the windows. Inside, between solid tables and decent velvet, family and servants walked judiciously, guardedly; outside, even on cold lightless days, people milled and muscled into each other, fought and paraded and stopped work and changed party and showed their anger and ambition. She saw riots, she saw funerals.

Inside, Papa like a good banker took orders and made it seem he was in control, listened to what the Germans told him to do and listened to their account of precisely what the Italians needed. Outside, whole orders fell. Governments balanced on a single stone. There were rumors of violence in the countryside, men bludgeoned, rinsed out with castor oil until they were broken and lost, sometimes shot for the wrong attitudes. There were parades of girls and mothers in support of D’Annunzio’s snatch at Fiume, a mad bit of nationalism held together with a few poems and arias and many very inefficient guns. There were trains that did not move because of strikes, streets that suddenly came to a stop, like the moment she remembered from the afternoon movies: when the film stopped running through the gate, when reality froze and began to catch fire from the bottom left-hand corner.

At the top of the stairs, she paused for a moment.

She was eleven years old. She had nowhere to show off her pink dress.

She could hear the men talking: barks and whispers, seals and snakes. She could tell they were keeping their voices down. They fussed over words. They cut up sentences and then sucked in their breath and looked solemn. They even made notes.

Lucia, in her pink dress, danced into the room. They looked up. She swirled her skirt, to the left, to the right, then tugged it up, all graceful like a ballerina, flourishing neat white knickers.

The skirt went over her head.

The men coughed.

She smiled, and then, as a dancer runs with more deliberation than speed, she ran back out of the room.

“Signori,” she heard her father say.

The house was the shape of her life: staircases with marble, the gilt, the verandas at the back looking out onto trees and walks, and the giddy pretension of some of the rooms: maps set in mosaic on the floors, a room named for peacocks. In the best 1900s manner, the house carried a frieze of huge copper bees: a gesture to nature that quickly turned green and sooty. It once had its own stone women by the front door, one either side, but they were too ample and too friendly-looking, so, after some fit of public morality, they had to be taken down.

The house did not impress all her schoolfriends; they seemed to think it was entirely too grand, too new, and they were either amused or intimidated by it. But it was the shape of her life; if they didn’t like the house, they couldn’t like her. She couldn’t be bothered with the children of her father’s colleagues, and she couldn’t make friends with the grander girls.

She floundered until she broke out of the house, afternoon and evenings.

Seventeen, eighteen, she’d go sometimes to the cinema, the afternoon shows, mostly women there. She’d go out like a tomboy in the best American style. She’d go to the Galleria, the great commercial cathedral that stood opposite the Duomo, its high glass and iron vaults inside, all up against the sugar-white mountain of spiky church marble. It was always open.

On her own, this wasn’t easy. A woman couldn’t seem available, but she wanted to know people. The cafés hummed. She heard heels clatter, kept walking. She passed women and men, packages in their hands, heads down. She felt eyes on her; she was decor to the crowd.

She walked more quickly, not wanting to seem as though she, Lucia Rossi, was unsure of anything.

It was tough just to overlap with others. She was the great banker’s daughter, but it wasn’t such a grand thing to be a banker; banks did not yet have the kind of power that interested people, not like the makers of cloth or cars or steel. She was too grand for some parties, not quite grand enough for the best parties. She saw the girls linger at the shop windows, chatting. She saw the police smile under their black helmets. She wanted to flirt, but correctly.

At least in the Galleria she felt a little insulated: no weather, no stench from the engines in the street, no beggars, no truly poor people. She could find, in the echo and bustle, all those men who’d be happy to talk, but she had no excuse to talk to any one of them in particular.

She thought how much easier it would have been if she had brothers, who could lend her their friends.

A young man stopped in front of her. She failed to dodge him. He said: “Signorina, I am a singer.” She said nothing. “I am a singer,” he said, “who has heard the applause of the French.” Since he blocked her, she looked him over: tall, narrow shoulders, too much chest, pipe legs, and all wrapped in a cloak that could have warmed half a chorus. “Unfortunately,” he said, “at this particular season, the impresarios have chosen not to favor talent. Not at all.” She thought of kicking him. “I was wondering,” he said, “if I could buy you a coffee.”

She stared at him. She had already, in her mind, counted the change in her purse.

They sat in the way of the crowds, a table by potted plants. Lucia told the man nothing, which did not seem to matter since he told her everything about a brilliant career now briefly and only temporarily spoiled by unemployment. His name was Giorgio. He was, of course, a tenor.

She bought him pasta in the end. She thought of him as a clue: how to find a different city, how to get out and not just to wait for her life to begin. And for a little while, quite chastely, she did move out into a city she had only glimpsed as she walked past the cafés: a minor Bohemia of resting musicians, all waiting for the next season’s contracts, all hungry to go sing in some tiny box of a theater in far Piedmont rather than live without an audience at all.

She went to his house one afternoon when her parents assumed she was with friends at the cinema. Giorgio lived off the main avenues, down cobbled streets with no sidewalk, on the wrong side of an unused church.

She sat on the edge of a chair and drank coffee he made with a metal espresso pot on a gas ring. She could smell stale water somewhere.

She learned that the stars her parents followed at La Scala were all fakes and frauds and failing, that only the conspiracy of managers stopped a whole new generation showing them up. She learned a little, too, about singing Pagliacci, but she got the impression Giorgio had never actually done that in public.

She heard voices, one after another, through the whole afternoon: uncertain sopranos, rustbucket basses, a mezzo whose breath swelled and failed like a graph. There was a double bass being bowed, a sound just under her conscious hearing. There was a harpist, not good.

One of the two shutters on Giorgio’s window slammed into place.

“Don’t worry,” Giorgio said.

Lucia wondered why the half shade was supposed to make her anxious.

“There’s still light enough,” Giorgio said.

She used to think she learned everything that mattered in that moment: that Giorgio couldn’t go on, could hardly think until she gave him an excuse. He wanted her, but he couldn’t place her: not a working girl, clearly of good family, and so dangerous. She couldn’t possibly want what he wanted. But then, why was she there?

Lucia didn’t move.

“Unless,” Giorgio said, “you’d like me to close the other shutter.”

But she had learned her lesson already. She remembered that she had to meet someone, so she said, and she left, and after that Giorgio hailed her in the Galleria any time she wanted, presented her to his friends, sometimes took her to a party, once took her to a tiny theater where the lights and the seats squeaked with rust and made her sit through an evening of mangled lieder.

They were never again alone in the same room.

She watched the others flash their reviews, the reviews that Giorgio still sent home to his family in the Veneto even when they were bought notices, two lire a line, of some minimal performance. She got to know one older man, who talked about the Paris Opera and the velvets and silks he wore to sing something in
Faust
, about the sound of applause in London and the prospects in Leipzig, but who was now working part-time as a slow, shuffling butt among waiters in a trattoria.

She was studying, not living; she knew that. She went home to salons, dinners, weekends in the country, weekends at Lake Como, to being discreet around a house where politicians now quite often dined with bankers.

Then Giorgio produced his friend Paolo, from somewhere in Umbria, who played the cello. He was skinny, quick, and small. He fixed on the cello like prey, hunched forward to play, as though the bow might fall short of the strings. Then he extended himself by sheer will, made the body of the instrument sound out.

“He shouldn’t play cello,” Giorgio said. “Really.”

“He plays very well,” Lucia said.

That was when she started asking her friends about birth control. She thought they were stalling, since the whole subject had just been put outside the law, but in fact they did not want to show how little they knew. They’d skim the movie magazines, see two people in the same frame, and they could usually tell biting from kissing, the lovers from the heroine’s last-reel struggle with the villain, but not always.