The Pieces from Berlin by Michael Pye Read Free Book Online Page A

brutal August day, hot and airless, and the policemen came to every house to announce that they couldn’t buy anything much anymore without ration cards. There were seven different kinds, and the colors seemed all wrong, somehow: blue for meat, green for eggs, orange for bread.
    Müller took note of the cards, but he didn’t seem to register what they meant. “We’re all in this together,” he said, but he didn’t seem convinced.
    She watched the dust in the air: the still flecks of dust that did not catch the sun.
    She waited without fear. Something had to happen; she simply did not know what would happen next. War must change everything, somehow.
    She never expected that Müller would be called up by the Swiss army; he had never mentioned the possibility. Perhaps he thought it was entirely obvious, or perhaps he didn’t expect to have to leave Germany.
    He paid two months’ rent and he left. He sent pictures. He looked fine in uniform, on a slope somewhere. He couldn’t say where, of course.
    She remembered the consoling pull of Nicholas’s lips on her nipples. She had liked the sense of being absorbed in being essential to him. But he was a child now, not a baby. She had to think. She was in small-town Germany, her child could have German nationality but she couldn’t, she didn’t have much of an income because the Swiss army were meant to be voluntary heroes, and it didn’t help being Swiss and Italian, which were two wrong nationalities as far as the butcher, the grocer, the baker, the laundry were concerned.
    So the Herr Doktor Professor gave her some names and addresses in Berlin, and a little money and the tickets she’d need. It did occur to her that he might have wanted her out of the way.

THREE
    He was six years old in the train. He sat under luggage like mountains, crags of leather, falls of belt. Everything smelt of other people instead of the outside.
    A man was eating meat sandwiches out of greaseproof paper and his fingers shone. He was reading a newspaper. Nicholas wanted to show that he could read too, but Lucia kept him back.
    Then they were in Berlin.
    He remembered how open his eyes were, stitched open by sights. There were more people, more floors, more streets, more cars, more noise than he’d ever imagined could be in one place. He’d always been in a small town, his territory was a garden with geraniums; he could run down the street and be a shadow in the woods.
    He knew this city was somehow his mother’s place, not his. She held on to his hand.
    There were flags everywhere, and people smelt strong. He might say, nowadays, that they smelt good, but he didn’t know what expensive soap and French perfumes were meant to smell like at the end of a long day.
    Their first apartment was not at all grand: five rooms. The kitchen wasn’t clean. His pretty mother, who was always so careful, threw bleach around it and said something very rude about people who lived on fried food. She scrubbed until her hands were raw, and then she looked at her hands and shrugged and said they’d be having a maid, somehow.
    Nicholas could see down into the courtyard from the kitchen, and into the street from the living room. He’d always been on the comforting flat before.
    There was a corridor with doors, so he could play hide-and-seek. He could run from one room to another, arms out and dipping like a plane turning in the sky.
    The fourth day, some men in uniform started hammering on a door across the courtyard. Lucia told him not to look, so of course he looked directly across the courtyard.
    A window opened very wide. The men must have taken the glass off the sashes.
    He saw the end of a piano on the windowsill. It was an upright piano, cheap, light wood, with some of the keys discolored.
    The piano teetered on the sill. The men in uniform shoved it. It fell and splintered and the wires sprang about and sounded like a cat in the works. Nicholas looked down and he couldn’t make out the particular shape