The Pieces from Berlin (12 page)

“Alive and in business. She’s my grandmother.”

Sarah Freeman said: “I’m sorry. I’m being a nuisance—”

“Not at all.”

“I know the name. I mean, I knew her. Once. I shouldn’t take up your time. I ought to get back. Let me pay for the coffee—”

“You speak very good German,” Helen said.

“It was my first language.”

“You’ve been very kind. I shouldn’t take up your time.”

Helen said: “I’d be happy to take you home.”

“I couldn’t trouble you. I couldn’t,” Sarah Freeman said. “It’s very strange for me to sit at a table with the granddaughter of Lucia Müller-Rossi. You have to understand that.”

She stood up suddenly, and her small leather bag slipped out of her lap and burst on the floor. Helen bent down to help her catch up the papers, the purse. But Sarah Freeman swept the papers toward her, covered them, and put them away quickly. A single credit card receipt got away. Helen tried to pick it up, but Sarah snatched it.

“I want to help,” Helen said. “I want to know.”

Sarah said: “Everybody thinks they want to help, that they want to know.”

“I know something about Lucia. I’m not afraid to hear the rest.”

“No,” Sarah said. “You all have such courage. Now.”

And then she said: “I’m being graceless. You were very kind. I don’t mean—”

“It was a table? A little table with flowers?”

Sarah shrugged into her coat, so it was hard to tell if she meant the shrug to answer Helen’s question.

“If I was sure I wanted to remember,” she said, “then I wouldn’t have been crying.”

Helen couldn’t stand around to watch which direction the taxi took. Between the shiny glass and the posters and the bent metal shelters, she couldn’t even be sure Sarah Freeman even went to the stand or took a taxi, that the old woman hadn’t disappeared into the railway station, to the suburban trains or the intercities.

She could be anywhere: the one witness who wasn’t Lucia or Nicholas, who hadn’t spent fifty years with memory packed away.

Helen ran down the steps among the underground shops, ran down to find a telephone directory. She looked up “Freeman”; perhaps Sarah was here with relatives, or living here.

There were seven Freemans. She went to a phone and called the first, asked to speak to Sarah. It was a misunderstanding; she had to apologize. She tried the second, and an American voice, a very tired and angry American voice, said there was no Sarah Freeman there, why would anyone called Freeman want to be there? Again, Helen apologized.

She wasn’t a detective. She didn’t know how to shortcut the process of examining every house in a city, every hotel and boarding house, in the half hope that somewhere there was a woman called Sarah Freeman. She had to assume that was, indeed, her name. She had to assume she’d check into a hotel using that name; Helen might be Müller-Rossi, or she might be Garvey. It took just a smidgen of social convention to fox the whole trail.

She spun around suddenly. She’d decided, like a children’s game, that Sarah would be standing there. But Sarah was not: only the gentle waves of commuters, some with bread, some with lilies, some with briefcases locked with brass.

She could call all the other Freemans when she got home. And she ought to get home; Henry would soon be there.

She waited in line for the tram. When it came, when she was safely going home, she formed a very simple thought.

She could not pretend she never met Sarah Freeman. She could not easily find Sarah Freeman. But she did have some minimal clues: a woman who didn’t know the shop, but did know Lucia as Müller-Rossi, a woman mourning a simple table, a woman whose first language was German. An old woman, too: perhaps not as old as Lucia, but going back to the years that Lucia never mentioned.

Sarah Freeman must have been in Berlin.

She wouldn’t have been Freeman, though, which was far too English a name; Lucia might not know her as Sarah Freeman, if she remembered her in particular out of those years.

Whatever Sarah Freeman knew was more than Helen knew; and Helen wanted to know. Whatever it was could reduce an old woman to tears, which is not what fifty years of loss or mourning does; tears have to be tricked out of old eyes, by something that has just happened, or just been remembered or seen.

When she went back the next day to Lucia’s shop, the windows had been changed.

Sarah Freeman sat down in the lobby of her kind, clean hotel. There were armchairs that were only ornamental, cushions too flat and orderly to have been used, set around a fire that never actually burned: a little tricked-up domesticity in a public place. Nobody ever sat there, except when they were waiting for a taxi to take them away. There was a basket of red, polished apples.

She liked it, she told herself. She didn’t want, yet, to go to her room and be shut up. There wasn’t any comfort in the room, even if it had a wing chair, a good bed. She didn’t want to be enclosed. She’d have stayed in the street if she could. She wished she had the energy to go walking forever in the cold.

After all, there were no friends in her room, and she needed friends now. Here, in public, everyone was her friend: the waiter who brought a glass of Scotch and water, the girl behind the desk who was trying not to observe the old woman although it was her job to observe, the bright apartment manager, even the man sweeping the parking lot in the cold, working against the brisk wind.

The Scotch stung her mouth. Her eyes watered a little. Then she signed the bill, and added a few francs for the waiter. She thought she’d added too much. She needed friends, and yet something told her not to draw attention to herself: some memory, perhaps.

The hotel doors opened and shut. She felt the cold on her legs.

She’d been a journalist many years, trafficked in facts. Facts were supposed to heal and bring justice. The news levered up great static wrongs and pushed them headlong out of the way. But when it was a question of just one woman’s history, a personal matter, a story she might not even want to tell out loud, then there were no headlines and column inches to instruct the world that this was a serious matter. She could tell the truth, and nobody need bother to believe her.

She put the Scotch down on a little round table. It wasn’t helping.

A man stood just outside this circle of stuffed chairs, waiting perhaps: a trespasser. She’d acquired this public space, she reckoned.

“I’d like a drink,” he said, “too.”

She didn’t want to invite him, and she didn’t care to reject him. So he sat down.

She’d traveled beside him on the plane, he’d helped with the plastic around the knife and fork, and they’d grimaced together at the dry turkey and the sandy potatoes. His name was Peter Clarke. But that was not an introduction, not enough. He’d said he was a tourist, on the same circuit—lakes and mountains off season, cities of Switzerland. He’d always wanted to travel, and now was going anywhere and everywhere, spending his days and his capital.

He had never picked up the useful habit of being alone, she thought. He might have just lost a wife of many, many years.

He sat, but with his hands on the arms of the chair.

He was not at all easy to place: white hair, a neat, unassertive chainstore tweed over shoulders that were only slightly stooped, a thin tie, his body in some kind of shape with the vague form of old muscles now working under too much skin. English, unmistakably: a small-town Englishman, perfectly preserved, maybe a rower in his time and perhaps a schoolmaster with a little extra money for coffee and cakes.

He liked her company, that was obvious; she liked his. She just wasn’t sure if he was the one to whom she could tell all the things she needed to tell, who would do them justice.

“It’s cold,” he said. “Don’t you think?” He seemed to mean all kinds of things by “cold.”

She shivered. She hadn’t meant to; she couldn’t stop herself.

“It’s hard to be a tourist in the cold,” he said. “ Your eyes water all the time.”

So he’d noticed.

She remembered a party in London, 1940s, jiving on a tiny carpet, desperate wine, a man with a cigarette in a corner, talk about Thomas Mann: that kind of party. She remembered how she had wondered if the man with the cigarette would do.

She made herself smile. It had to be right to smile. It proved she was back in this moment.

She was grateful Peter Clarke wasn’t the kind of man who launches into a whole life story all at once. She didn’t need more stories. She needed an ally.

She liked him, too, she reminded herself.

Helen kept a list of numbers remembered from her other life: lawyers’ numbers, friends’ numbers, bank contacts, corporate persons. Usually, she kept the list in a file next to household insurance.

She called Georg Meier, she told herself, because he was a Zurich lawyer the bank once used. After she’d dialed the number, she half wanted to find it engaged or be brushed off by some bland assistant. She felt awkward that she was no longer Helen Müller-Rossi from the bank. She was only herself.

So she was a little grateful, dangerously so, that he took the call. They didn’t know much about each other; they couldn’t gossip through the last big deal they both handled; so they blustered for a moment about kids, weather, music.

Helen recovered herself.

“It’s an absurd thing,” she said. But she wouldn’t have said that if she was still Helen Müller-Rossi of the bank. She started again. “Someone’s turned up who used to know my grandmother. In Berlin, believe it or not. In Berlin, in the 1940s.”

“The late 1940s?”

“No. No, it’s not that easy.”

“I see.”

“I don’t know all the story, but I just wanted to—I wanted to know if anything went through the courts in 1944 or 1945 or 1946, anything at all, where would the judgments be?”

“Bern, probably. Swiss Federal Archives, Archivstrasse.”

“And if I just wanted to know whether a particular name came up?”

“This isn’t business, is it?”

“No. No, it isn’t exactly business.”

“Then I could get a clerk to check this afternoon.”

“You wouldn’t do that if it was business?”

“No business could afford that kind of speed.”

“The name,” Helen said, “is Lucia Müller-Rossi.”

“You want to know if your grandmother was in the courts?”

“Yes. As it happens.”

“Best to check,” the lawyer said. “People keep digging up the past. You might as well dig first.”

“And if there was anything—”

“I’ll get you a precis. Not overnight.”

“Before the weekend?”

“Easily. Listen, you want to have a drink sometime—”

At dinner, Peter Clarke was all concern. He didn’t fuss, though, only made it clear that he was entirely on her side.

“It’s just,” she said, “I saw something in a shop today.”

She was still not sure he knew what it meant to be on her side.

“I saw something, and it disturbed me. Made me remember things.”

He didn’t ask. He knew very well that memory was a private thing; it took too much effort to explain it to others.

He said: “You don’t want to be remembering all the time.”

She changed the subject at once.

“I don’t know,” Nicholas said. “I have no idea.”

“I thought of checking all the hotels,” Helen said.

“All the hotels?”

“I was going to go to every one of them. With a letter for Sarah Freeman, to see if they’d accept it, and if they did, I’d have found her.”

“And if she’s staying with friends?”

“I don’t know.”

“And why? Why do all this?”

Helen thought she would have an answer all ready for him: something with slogans, bright and morally right. But she didn’t.

“I suppose,” Nicholas said, “the police probably know where she is. Don’t foreigners fill in those forms at a hotel?”

“I don’t know any policemen who would check for me.”

“You could pretend it was some kind of emergency.”

“But I’d have to lie—”

Nicholas said: “And you wouldn’t lie?” He really wanted to know.

FIVE

Sarah Freeman sat at Peter Clarke’s table in the breakfast room. She wondered, gleefully, what the furry old ladies and their stick-thin gents would think.

He wanted to talk about the lake. She said it was cold. She noticed that he poured coffee for her, automatically. He said it would be wonderful to be out on the water, in the mists, in the sun. She was a little surprised, but she knew the English could be romantic when it came to landscape.

She didn’t trust the notion of finding allies by accident, let alone on the next airline seat and then in the same hotel; if someone was accidental all the time, they must be up to something. But she needed someone who would listen to her, consider her story, let her know if it convinced or not, if it was the right story to tell out loud.

So she tested him, coldly.

“Someone,” she said, and she didn’t specify, “was telling me about the Bührle collection. I wanted to see it for myself.”

He’d studied the guidebook, but he didn’t remember Bührle.

“It’s open twice a week, I think,” Sarah said. Then she said: “It’s too cold to go for a walk, anyway.”

He did like the idea of being taught by Sarah. He basked in her faint air of foreignness. If she couldn’t quite put away her old suspicions of chance and strangers, that only made it more interesting: he had to convince her. He’d always been so well known, in such small places, he hardly ever had anybody to convince before.

He set off with her in a taxi into a sleek suburbia, all dark, shining shrubbery.

“It’s supposed to be extraordinary,” she said.

The Bührle house, when they reached it, was one more pile of discretion, wrapped up in ivy, with spiky irons along the roof.

He hesitated to lean on the door of such a grand suburban mansion. So Sarah pushed it.

They walked into a house, not the didactic order of a museum. The entrance hall was the way to a dining room or a bedroom: no bombast, no grandstanding. The stairs simply led up. The floors were squeaky parquet, and the windows looked onto winter lawns with the stucco of city snow.

Clarke bought the tickets.

Someone was calling loudly for “our driver.” Someone else was talking, in German, about Venice.

Clarke realized he was nervous. Sarah, too, was sharply awake.

They turned together into the music room. They had it to themselves. For a moment, Clarke’s eyes went to the grand piano, the view through the windows, anything but the paintings which were packed around the room in a tight, unbroken line, so many the eye could not easily choose one to see.

Sarah made him look. She walked him to the wall, and pointed, one by one.

She didn’t know if he liked paintings, or if he bothered with galleries and names. But she would worry about an ally whose breath did not stop in this room.

There was a Lautrec tucked in the corner, a front-stage Messalina, a wicked woman in black, standing in limelight with hellfire red around her. In another corner, difficult to get to see behind a chair, a Gauguin: dying sunflowers, and a window looking out on a Tahitian beach. There was a van Gogh of chestnut blossoms, all riotously alive but in a space of peace and light and energy. There was more than one portrait by Cezanne, a glorious young girl by Renoir, a count and two daughters by Degas. Oh, and a field by Monet, a mournful sky, a pale pink-ocher village with tall dark columns of trees; but in front of that elegant drabness, a field bright with poppies, with tiny slashes of blue to make the red sing, with grass of green and yellow, a triumphant meadow with young girls flourishing bunches of flowers.

Two soft ladies in felt hats, eyes bright, talked about their need to see absolutely everything.

Sarah said: “There’s much more. Come along.”

All the names that Clarke knew seemed to be there. Canalettos: two. A Frans Hals that looked to him like something impressionist, a few brushstrokes for a portrait face. A Tiepolo with creamy bottoms. A Goya showing a procession. And two women lying together, Toulouse-Lautrec it said on the label, one bare-breasted and turning to her shorthaired, shirted friend whose hand was being attentive somewhere between her legs. And Picassos over the postcard desk, and Delacroix on the stairs and both horses and ballerinas from Degas, and a Braque and a Rembrandt and the lovely silvers of a Matisse scene of the Seine. And more, much more, the fact of so much only tolerable because each painting was so fine.

He could see the dizziness in Sarah’s eyes. She stopped herself on the stairs. As for him, he looked closely, which had been his lifetime’s job, but now he had the luxury of looking only for himself. He wasn’t entirely sure what to feel, though. He was waiting for his heart to catch up with his eyes.

Sarah began to talk, softly. “I always wondered,” she said, “what I would do to have one of these paintings. What I would do to have them all, all this.”

“Yes.” Then Clarke said: “I never thought I would own things.”

“You know who Emil Georg Bührle was?”

“I never heard of him.”

He was letting his eye play with a plump and underdressed harem girl standing in a shift, who seemed exotic until you realized from the calculated nipples and the accentuated bush that she was just a working girl in the costume that Manet ordered.

“When the Second World War started,” Sarah said, with startling, teacherly clarity, “he was worth maybe a million Swiss francs. When the war ended, he was worth 170 million. Does that tell you anything?”

He didn’t want to draw attention, so he walked, slowly, with Sarah talking in his ear.

“He had a machine tool company and he made weapons. And his best customers were in Germany. He made the 20 mm anti-aircraft gun, and it made him the richest man in Switzerland, richer than bankers, richer than dealers.”

They turned into a room they had missed before, the Louis XVI room.

“That’s her,” Sarah said: the Degas portrait of Madame Camus at the piano.

Madame faced into the room, right hand picking at notes behind her back, a sheet of vivid Beethoven on the music stand standing out in the subdued light around her little, dark figure. The painted room was comfortable, predictable: a gilt mirror, a gilt lampholder on the wall, a cushion at Madame Camus’s feet, a pile of scores to one side, the edge of a good rug.

Clarke knew the source of the light must have been somewhere behind the painter as he worked: lamplight, maybe, a single domestic source, catching the score on the piano and the woman’s face. But it didn’t seem like that. It seemed as though in this quiet, careful room, the music itself gave out light. It made a plain pink figurine throw the shadow of a winged angel. It caught the detail of a hand at the end of a long dark sleeve and brought it alive. It changed the dark, pretty face of Madame Camus into a kind of puzzle, because the proper doctor’s wife was suffused by music as well as light. She seemed so muted and so fragile, but she had found and she was about to find again all the passion in the score.

He checked the catalogue in his hand. He didn’t like to be without a book of other people’s opinions; it put too much strain on his own eyes.

Sarah took the book from him.

“Provenance,” she said. “Degas studio, of course. First sale, May 1918, Paris: catalogued. Sold for 32,000 francs. Then in the collection of Alphonse Kann, Saint Germain en Laye, from 1924 ‘until at least 1937.’ Then: ‘purchased by Bührle in 1951 from a private French collection.’ You see?”

Clarke stared at Madame Camus.

“There’s something missing. Fourteen years,” she said. She sounded impatient.

Clarke could fall in love with Madame Camus. He had done so already.

“Of course,” Sarah said. “Anyone could guess that Alphonse Kann was a Jew.”

He tried to see grace and sheen in those studies for the woman’s sleeves and hands: calm, too, and dexterity.

Sarah thought he was trying to slip past the real issue. So now she addressed the room, although it was empty except for Peter Clarke.

“Bührle bought this painting in February 1942,” she said. “The Nazis were in Paris. They stole the great Jewish collections, they brought the pictures to the Fischer galleries in Lucerne. Then Fischer swapped them for the pictures the Nazis liked: the landscape, Cranach, Ruysdael, Rubens, anything with brown varnish. And then Fischer sold the modern stuff to men like Bührle.”

Peter said: “But it was stolen.”

“Ah, yes. Kann couldn’t do anything; he was in London. And later the Swiss courts ruled that nobody could possibly have known the Nazis were behaving badly in Paris in 1942. Everybody, especially all the dealers, agreed on that. Apparently, nobody noticed there was a Nazi decree, from late 1940, that ‘confiscated’ all the art that the Jews had ‘abandoned.’ And nobody noticed that Bührle was in Paris himself in 1941, occupied Paris, doing business with a rather luckier Jewish dealer called Wildenstein. The courts agreed that Bührle couldn’t possibly have known anything. He was much too rich to be guilty.

“But apparently he did know enough to consult a lawyer before he bought Madame Camus. He bought anyway. He went on buying, too. He bought his last stolen picture in 1944: a Picasso.”

Peter Clarke said: “I was in a prisoner-of-war camp then.”

He was already too much in love with the picture. Standing in this room, so close, he could sense the way the brush must have moved and the paint settled. Everything moral was suspended because of the fringe of the good rug in the foreground, the light, her eyes, the satin on her sleeves.

He might never have seen her if Bührle had not bought and shown her.

He never thought an art gallery could be a dangerous place. “Come on,” he said. He wanted to get out of that polite house. He also wanted to stay in it forever, with those glorious pictures on the wall. He wondered if Bührle had somehow saved these pictures from the ruin of the war, been some other kind of moral hero.

On the stairs, they ran into an executive secretary type, fiftyish, so smart in her suit she could be sandblasted. She carried papers. It was as though somewhere in this house, the old man was still transacting business: guns, pictures, grabbing chances.

Sarah said: “He didn’t sleep very well. It’s interesting. When he was awake, he used to come to this house to sit all night among his pictures.”

“I suppose it had to be the very best,” Clarke said.

“Does it make it any better,” Sarah said, “that he never killed anyone himself?”

Clarke insisted that they call a taxi. The afternoon was darker now, and colder. When the car came, and he had tucked Sarah into the back, he said: “So. The shop you mentioned. Is that the same kind of story?”

“You don’t have to be concerned.”

“I don’t see how you can say that.”

“You can’t put things right,” she said.

Later, at his table in the hotel, he studied the books he bought. He had so many clichés in mind: hard-faced men, did well out of war, merchants of death, all that. He wanted to see a specific face: Bührle with his huge teeth and his narrow, police eyes and the bone-cracking jaw.

Helen liked having a drink with Meier: a midday drink, almost like an assignation with office hours as an alibi. He was shiny-headed, blond, and strong. She kept wanting to sniff him to see if any human being could possibly be so clean.

“I haven’t looked at this,” he said, passing over a square brown envelope tied with string.

“Thank you.”

“How’s life now you don’t have anything to do?” he asked.

But she hadn’t practiced official, mannerly flirting for a while; she was rusty.

“Where’s Jeremy these days?”

She took a taxi back to the house so as not to keep Henry waiting. She could still sense where Meier touched her shoulder as she was leaving the room.

She didn’t wait to read the court papers: charges, testimonies, complaints. She knew she would either read them now, immediately, even if they were scattered around the room when Henry came back from nursery school, or else she would make excuses not ever to know.

They were photocopies. Somehow she’d expected documents with age and taste. These had no archive smell, no suggestion that bits of other people’s skin had settled on them over the years; the signatures just shadows without the pressure of a pen or the color of ink.

She felt a little like a judge, as though she was not connected to the name on every page: Lucia Müller-Rossi.

The woman couldn’t be honest about anything at all, it seemed. When she loaded up the trucks to come to Zurich, she had the Italian ambassador’s goods, too: porcelain with gold leaf, jewels and pictures. She sold the lot. They belonged to the Italian embassy in Berlin.

She thought: Lucia is a thief. Then she began to consider what the thought might mean. It was more than the statement that on some occasions Lucia had stolen things. It meant her very nature was to be a thief. And how can that be, how can the old lady at the Dolder, the subtle teacher of taste and manners, how can she be reduced to a single, criminal category?

Helen shuffled the papers.

Some people were ready to give evidence in 1946. Some, most of the others, were already dead; their families had to speak for them, if they knew what to say.

There was a woman who left her dowry with Lucia, and died in Theresienstadt. Another who left suitcases full of stuff, and then came back unexpectedly to find they’d been opened. A man who ended up in Sweden who said he never got back anything that he left with Lucia, and a woman who flew all the way from America to Switzerland—which was something, in 1946—to say that she recognized the property of her dead sister in Lucia’s shop. And her sister died in Auschwitz. Then there was a man who gave evidence about his mother, who thought of Lucia as her very best friend. She handed her furniture to Lucia so buyers could see it and the authorities would not find it. She sold her pictures, and gave the money to Lucia to take to Switzerland; and suddenly the German office of foreign-exchange transactions knew enough to shoot her for having money in Switzerland.

All these stories, the documents said, tallied with Lucia’s own file of names.

Helen finished the court judgment. Her Lucia was a “criminal prostitute,” a phrase which amused her for a moment: maybe Zuricher gentlemen knew a nicer class of tart, who wouldn’t do anything underhand or dubious, unless asked for and paid by Zuricher gentlemen.