The Pieces from Berlin (4 page)

Paolo danced well, but he danced rather under her chin. He danced with her in the Blu-room, in the Golden Gate, between swirls of cigarette smoke, where a little perfume did battle with cheap soap. He moved busily, immaculately, while she reared up above him, shaking out the red hair that smothered and bound him in his dreams. He orchestrated a grand turn, and his sigh tickled her breasts.

She went home to dinner with her family. There had to be a way out.

She tried to listen to Paolo’s story, when he volunteered it. A little farm near Todi, indeed. Olive trees; there had to be olive trees. Hunters out with guns, high moon, nightjars singing. More pudding-basin hills, all green. A father who worked on the roads, a mother who sold mushrooms in the market. It was too picturesque to be real, and she could not imagine what it would be to come from such a place, and never to be able to shut a good door on the world.

“One day,” Paolo said, “you’ll have to come to Todi.”

A long, rough table, with big plates covered in cooked tomatoes. She imagined herself smiling: the exemplary mother, the exemplary wife who might one day be. There would be all those hopeful faces.

This trip to another class was growing tedious.

“We should go for a walk,” Paolo said.

She said good-bye to Giorgio. She looked back at him, once: he was holding forth on the late music of Rossini, and nobody was listening.

She walked beside Paolo and, together, they demanded space from the people who walked, heads down, toward them. She put out a hand, took his; it was an experiment, to see what walking this way on a public street would feel like. It felt fine. Paolo and she became a couple: a ceremonial fact on narrow pavements, to be respected and indulged. As a couple, she noticed that his palms were wonderfully dry, and that his hands did not quite enclose hers.

They turned off the street of bright windows. They bundled together along the side of narrow streets. His eyes turned up to her, hungry and almost dependent eyes: like some sort of child.

“We could walk in the gardens,” Paolo said. “In the moonlight.”

She saw the family house on the Corso. They passed under its windows, by the heavy portico, with the heavy stone cherubim looking down. Far up the facade, she wanted to giggle at the thought, those great copper bees were watching too. She thought of saying “Good night” and turning in through the narrow doorway, but she didn’t want her name and address to be known, and the price of anonymity was walking on.

Tall iron gates, but with a gap to the side. They took the gap. Paolo could smell the lindens in flower; she saw sad parched shapes on either side of an avenue of stone and sand. Behind the trees, residual light and shapes of green bushes. The garden felt on the edge of everything.

She watched herself walk into the dark between the patches of faint light. Paolo tugged at her hand.

They sat on a wood bench for a moment. Since Paolo couldn’t speak, she kissed him.

He tugged at her hand again. He led her back behind the avenue trees, behind the bushes, to a patch of grass. She sat down. He lay down. She lay down now, and he kissed her left breast through the cotton of her dress. She liked the rasp, and then the wetness. He said: “
Ti voglio bene
.”

Her skirt had ridden up as she lay down, and she helped it ride higher. She smelt dust, felt tiny sand against her bare legs and buttocks. She was waiting now, to be shown.

She felt fingers, working into her. She heard Paolo’s breath. And then:

“Gesu!”
Paolo said. He had red on his fingers.

She stared at him.

“I didn’t know,” Paolo said. He had pulled a handkerchief from his trousers, and in doing so he had bloodied the opening of his pocket, and he was wiping his fingers and his trousers.

She said: “
Ti voglio bene.”
He looked funny, trying to shake his hand dry, trying to shake it loose.

He couldn’t bring himself to listen. He was up now and panicking. He was signing that she should wipe herself, bring down her skirt, prepare to return all proper to the streets. She wanted to ask: But what would they think we were doing in the bushes except this?

At the park gates, Paolo said: “I’ll find a taxi for you.”

“I don’t need a taxi,” she said.

She watched him disappear into the light between the trees.

And she walked.

She didn’t want to go home at once. She would give everything away; her mother would know. She thought she might wander back into the side streets, away from the Corso, where the musicians lived.

There was overlooked washing still on the balconies, crowded together. There was talk in the windows and the doorways, as though the houses had no depth and no light and everything happened just off the road. And she heard the musicians all around her, heard the untuned jar of wind notes, piano, forced soprano scales, of clarinets wailing, of trumpets blasting over violins and the thumping chords of some other bad cello player. She felt the noise now like a wall, and even when she stood still, as she did when she waited to cross a street or catch her breath, it was as though she was running faster and faster into that wall. Or else the music was massing against her, each half aria, each unaccompanied Bach piece, each mutant arpeggio played on a keyboard in the damp, was forcing her back and away.

She stopped her ears. She started running.

At home, she washed and washed.

For as long as she was panicking, she stayed in her nice gilt box. And then it was winter, and a Milan winter, mostly mist and soot and half-light. So everyone talked about leaving, skiing, and she just couldn’t face being sportive with all those other good local families, being the one to whom everyone was polite.

Her mother fixed the invitation: foreign associates of her father’s, bankers’ kids, nothing in common except the fact that their fathers handled money for respect. One shining winter day, she was driven to Central Station. The trees were gold and the shadows so deep they could drown people. And the driver carried her cases, and she could stride out up the station steps and the whole station was one great new tunnel of glass and light, marble and stone, like a church, with pictures in tiles; and the smells, leather and creams and fish, suits and skirts that hadn’t been washed recently, coffee, cheap soap, wet paper. Then the tracks spread out beyond the great hall into a huge and brilliant sky.

She was exhilarated by Monza, which is not what people usually make of Monza, and she loved passing through Como. She’d been too often to Como in the summers. If she could just get past Como, she wouldn’t be a banker’s daughter anymore, wouldn’t even be Milanese.

And then she was past the border, the uniforms, the questions from the customs officers; and the train was still moving, she was on her own and it didn’t matter if these lakes and Alps were the ones she already knew, which she’d seen years before with her parents. She changed trains, and changed trains again, always in the glamour of steam and smoke, and each time she was further from cities she knew, names she knew. She wasn’t responsible to the world outside the windows anymore.

Then she was on a train that had a snowplow up front, shining curtains of frost either side of the line, and the windows were open for the cut of the clean air. She watched out for the station, and it was the perfect model of a station in the perfect model of a village.

The sunset on the mountain blinded her, great flares of red and silver. She got vertigo in the cable car going up to the chalet. “It’s a very international party,” said the wife of the colleague of her father’s. “People from everywhere. Some English boys. Very clever. Some of the Jewish persuasion. No Italians, I’m afraid.”

She first saw Hans Peter Müller against the light. He might as well have been naked in his close clothes.

She’d seen so many poses, and so many suits, and so many people wrapped in cloaks and talking about their futures; and here was a man whose skill was written on his body. She watched the power and the elegance of his legs, so sure on the snow even when it sifted like sand on a mirror. And he was magnified by the thin brilliance of the mountain air.

They couldn’t not talk. He spoke Italian, but in serious, Germanic gobbets. She tried to speak German, and she sounded absurdly like the bankers to whom she’d been polite all her life.

He helped her on the ski lift, which was a hook on a cable on a wire. Then he helped her on the snow. She didn’t need to be touched; she balanced exactly, flung herself down slopes with no fear at all. He followed, overtook, turned in and out of her path without flurrying her, danced an arcing, whispering dance around her.

The snow was still wonderfully empty in those days. You felt you had come out into a wilderness, not a playground. At lunchtime, skis racked against a rope, poles jammed in the snow like a strong metallic bush, you looked out onto unmarked white.

She was entirely dazzled. She laughed hugely.

At night, the silence was perfect. Houses enclosed all the music and talk. And she walked beside Müller under a white moon, and she saw shooting stars for the first time in her life, each one arbitrary and lovely, no use watching out for them.

He skied; she knew that much. He was some kind of banker or accountant; that meant he was like her father. Her father had been a perfectly ordinary clerk, out of a small Piedmont town, with ambition, so the question of status did not necessarily arise. He was tall, hard, graceful; she loved to watch him. She thought she would be able to long for him properly when she went back to Milan. Longing was what she had in mind, even then.

The last day, he hired a sleigh. They put the luggage on the back, and the horses took off and neither one of them had worked out how the story was supposed to end.

The breath from the horses smoked out ahead of them. And the woods opened out and they saw new valleys, new rock, and water frozen as it fell. They weren’t high on the mountain anymore.

He helped her onto the train, like a gentleman. Then he jumped aboard too. She didn’t know how far he thought he was going, but he wouldn’t step down, and the train rolled slowly down the mountain between banks of still white.

He didn’t have his passport, so he got off the second train just before the Gotthard.

The night they married was also the first night they made love. Lucia remembered so clearly how she anticipated glory at last, and what she got was comfort, which was nowhere near enough.

Müller surrounded her body with his, was infinitely patient, was considerate and gentle, was absorbed in her beauty, which was, in the circumstances, of very little interest to her. She wanted to be shocked and excited, but he was always waiting for her.

Her parents did not seem to mind that she was leaving Italy. Her mother was making sharp little jokes about the “interests of the state” nowadays, and how Mussolini wouldn’t allow pictures of women too thin or too wiry to bear babies; “It’s an offense to be smart,” she said. “Think of that.” Her father’s authority had grown a little dusty. He said he wished he’d been a proper captain of industry, which required inheritance, and not a moneylender, which kept you a kind of omnipotent clerk. It was important that someone do what you did; but you did not matter in particular.

Lucia, in the next few years, had all too much time to think. She wondered if her parents would have had the same easy tolerance if she had presented some carpet man from Turkey, an ironworker from Lille, a peasant from the Alsace; she wondered if they would still have been glad for her to go. She at least produced an accountant who might have ambitions, and a Swiss who could get her out of the flag-ridden streets and the thuggish countryside and keep her safe.

So Lucia Rossi went to live with Hans Peter Müller in a small town in Bavaria. He was the accountant in a firm that made buttons.

He knew things. He knew about bone and horn and glass and Bakelite and brass and the knock-on pricing differential between hole and shank. He talked about such things. He once explained to her, when she’d run out of ways to stop him, that it took phenol and formaldehyde to make Bakelite.

She had every reason to resent him. He remained such a ruthlessly kind man. She woke up beside him, and he was kind. She drank coffee with someone sweet and generous. And when he finally walked down the garden path to go to work, checking the five flowering shrubs, then she’d go deep into the house, the inner rooms, and she learned to bellow into the corners without making a sound, her face red, her cheeks out, not even the sound of breathing.

She’d have coffee again, and read the social columns: Bella Fromm, she remembered, in the
Vossische Zeitung
. She started to be able to remember all the dinners and musicales and galas and picnics Bella went to, not just imagine them. There weren’t many galas in their small town.

And it was a town so small that nobody looked directly at anyone else; everything was a rumor. The mayor shot himself and everyone said the police made him do it, but they didn’t know if he was a crook or a pervert or Hitler’s best friend or all three. Everyone resented everything—the price of meat because everything had to be sent to Berlin, the fact that you couldn’t get asparagus in tins. Lucia learned something. In small places, it isn’t that people know everything about you, because that would be tolerable. Each of them makes you up and sticks to his story, and each of them has a slightly different version.

She had to get out, obviously. But she couldn’t simply run. She was a wife, and as such had a proper place, guaranteed by papers. She was a foreigner, too. Her parents did not want her back in the muddle of fascist Italy. She thought perhaps she could find herself a lover, pick someone out of the main street, someone from the button factory or the butcher’s shop.

She decided, instead, on art.

The Herr Doktor Professor liked to talk about Siennese painting, about Beccafiumi and the Roman career of Il Sodoma, and about Meissen porcelain. He knew everything about Meissen, and passed it on. He also insisted that the Nazis were excellent persons because they would bring back the Kaiser, and the glorious great estates, and there would again be a shining culture all through Germany.