The Pieces from Berlin by Michael Pye

Author:Michael Pye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307429186
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

He never did like being left out. People were meeting. People were talking, not to mention hints and glances. Sarah’s story was being drafted and polished where he couldn’t see, couldn’t read it.

He had sort of a right to know.

He’d already changed the whole city into a puzzle, and his occupation. He read the dullest corner carefully. Show him a pleasant bakery, with strong women eating cake, and he tried to work out their wartime stories. He contemplated crime encoded on the discreet facades of private banks. The process was a mad, solipsistic kind of politics: anything might require action, so everything was charged with drama, even the tram slinking into town or the girl selling vitamins in the pharmacy or the damp, high inner halls of a flowershop full of tulips and palms or the ticket line at the Hauptbahnhof.

He began to eat lunch alertly. He fussed about Sarah, in case she was just waiting for the right time to explain things.

He strolled past the bookshops on either side of Lucia’s shop. He considered maps, prints, volumes of Max Frisch carefully bound, some Goethe and some Rilke. He waited for someone to go into Lucia’s shop, someone to come out.

He wondered if this Lucia would simply talk to him. He was almost in her country of the very old; she would trust him. They were fellow conspirators against time and the young.

But he could not quite imagine how he would make a social half hour with her, and then how he would put his questions.

He tapped his fingers on his thigh. He pinched the cloth.

He longed for the familiar precision of his fields, his seedbeds, the sight of rogue colors, rogue shapes. He longed to know where he was down to the last row of the last cultivar because, here in this polite city, he seemed to live in the middle of an abstraction: faces in whose business he had no business, streets like the idea of streets, not specific, not dirtied, not full of particular and demanding faces, and landscapes hanging like postcards at the end of those streets.

Helen had control of the kitchen for the day: and Sarah sat across the table from her, looking quizzically at the carrots being shredded, the chicory being grilled, as though these were museum things you don’t see every day.

She had insisted on bringing Peter Clarke. She saw him as a safety device, something to open up the closed and explosive possibilities of Helen, Nicholas, and Sarah at a table, even if they both insisted they only wanted to help Sarah, to make things right. She wondered why they didn’t simply go to Lucia; but if Lucia had not, in fifty years, shown signs of remorse or guilt or even anxiety, then going to Lucia would never be enough.

“Why don’t you work?” she asked Helen abruptly.

Helen said: “I wanted to have a baby.”

“You don’t have a baby anymore. You have a child, and he’s gone off to nursery school.”

“I wanted to be there when he comes home.

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