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

of a piano anymore, just plywood, it seemed, and a bit of lovingly shined veneer on the stones, and the keys flung about like teeth.
    Then there was a fountain of paper, pamphlets of music, that went up in the breeze and came slowly rustling down.
    His mother pulled him inside and slapped him.
    “Don’t you look,” she said.
    Helen waited for him to come back to the apartment. She wanted to comfort him; she knew he wouldn’t want to talk. She wanted him to sit in the kitchen while she assembled supper, wanted to share a glass of wine.
    He didn’t come. So he must have gone directly to his house, and he must be drowning in memories. He couldn’t be remembering Hans Peter without the ghosts of all Lucia’s notorious doings, and those ghosts parading through his mind.
    He was not a witness. He only lived while things happened. He didn’t have anything to say which he, and he alone, knew. If anything, he’d bring back the ridiculous details, like the toilet paper rough as wrapping paper, and the perpetual shortages, and the usefulness of all those fine paper propaganda leaflets that the British dropped.
    He walked up the road to Sonnenberg. The sky was clean here, and the moon high. The snow was bright as mirrors on either side of the black line of road, shadows blue, fields evened out. Sometimes at the roadside the crust had broken on the snow and underneath that rough glass of ice he could see feathers of soft cold.
    The house had been a farmhouse, once, when he and Nora found it: half solid stone, half the old brown wood of a barn. Geese straggled by the door. A small dog visited.
    The world was brilliant as a picture in a lightbox. He could almost see clearly again: old eyes with ice for lenses. He would have stayed, if he could have done, outside in the cold, with the dog tasting his hand and the cat rubbing against him: an animate scarecrow, a passerby on his way to the high woods or perhaps to the next farm.
    He didn’t do what he had done every time he came home to Sonnenberg, didn’t check the mailbox, didn’t go to see if there were messages, somehow always expecting a message from Nora even if she was dead six years, which, to him, was only a detail.
    He went to the barn instead. It seemed like a perfect replica of a barn that you read about in books: a strong wood shelter with logs stacked like art along one wall, with a lawnmower, a washing machine, shelves of jam and paint. It didn’t seem to have a history of things breaking or falling at all. He looked out over the whiteness all around, and he thought for a moment the whole land had no terrible history, either: it was so easily reduced to its own bright, white, and shielding surface.
    He loved to see the deer move against the woods, the branches of their legs and antlers. He wasn’t even looking for them tonight.
    He thought the process of fading, of leaving just a chalk mark in a bright white world, ought to produce some countervailing calm or resignation. That would be the proper order of things.
    He had been sent to school at the Italian embassy in Berlin for a while. He knew he wasn’t meant to be surprised, not by a great house that seemed all gold; only later did he suspect the railings were bronze. He saw doors of wood so black it had to be ancient, and seats taken out of churches, and the rooms were lit with a hundred cuts of light trapped by magic in glass. Now he would classify the magic: chandeliers from Venice.
    He sat beside a boy called Luca, who seemed to think he should know about Italian things just because of his name. He explained that his father was Swiss, which was why he was also called Müller, and that Niccolo or Nicholas Müller-Rossi was born in Germany. Luca called him a “
Mischling
”—in German: a half-breed.
    Nicholas didn’t like the word. Then Luca realized that Nicholas’s father was away, and in the wrong army. He didn’t use the fact directly because everyone behaved in the class: little premature gentlemen