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

mother was around. He laughed more with her than he did with his friends from school, for he and his friends were about the immensely serious business of conquering the city, at least as far as legs and sometimes a train would carry them. He already knew Alexanderplatz. He knew what the whitewashed windows meant because a schoolfriend told him: gypsy families. He knew the florists’ windows which ran with water in summer to cool the roses you could just see inside; floats of color. He liked to watch the turtles gliding in the tanks at the aquarium on Budapesterstrasse.
    He was eight and a half so he was automatically in a kind of gang: six of them. They went about dressed sharp and neat: boy gentlemen. They smiled a lot. In any other city, they would have been ominous and unnatural, but in this Berlin they somehow seemed just another phenomenon on the frantic streets.
    They decided to be explorers. They couldn’t travel, so they explored where the bombs had fallen: it was a different place down there. They scrambled under fallen beams, cracked girders, in the new pits along what used to be decorous streets. They found treasure of sorts in the roots of a tree that had been torn half out of the earth; but the treasure was only an old cocoa tin with some boy’s marbles inside. They played marbles for a while on the sidewalk, called it a championship, until somebody told them to move on.
    They weren’t afraid in daytime then. They learned to get thoughtful, then edgy, then breathless only when it was properly dark and the bombers came. All the rest of his life, when the sun went down, even in some solid, safe house in Switzerland, fires lit, dinner cooking, lights blazing, Nicholas trembled.
    They saw one day a woman, old, dressed in black with a yellow star, carrying a canary in a cage. Nicholas followed her for a while, because people don’t take birds for a walk, and the others followed him and she must have noticed them because she stopped suddenly. She turned to Nicholas, and he thought for a moment she was going to give him the cage and then he saw how tired and angry she was.
    “What do you want?” she said, with the emphasis on the “you,” as though everyone else had shadowed and hassled her, and now it was a gaggle of boy gentlemen in a line.
    Nicholas said: “I never saw anyone take a bird for a walk.”
    “You like birds?”
    “Yes. Yes, I do, but I have a cat.”
    “I have to get a certificate,” she said.
    “What certificate? To show the bird is healthy?”
    She said: “I have to have a certificate that the bird is dead. We’re not allowed pets anymore.”
    And then the bird began to sing.
    He could never ask Lucia: not about practical things, physical things, much less moral things or things he saw in the street. He wanted a father to ask. But since Müller was away, doing his duty, like the German fathers of the German boys, he supposed, he was left to patch the real world together out of his random glimpses.
    There was an older man downstairs who sometimes left his door open during the day. The apartments were big enough, but they were awkwardly built to exclude every possibility of breeze; Nicholas assumed that he needed the air.
    But he was someone to ask, and Nicholas went down to see him often.
    He had books. He said he knew Lucia well. He told Nicholas that Goethe and Schiller were great writers, that Bach and Beethoven were great musicians; he had a record with a scratch of the first Goldberg variations. He said these things as though Nicholas needed to be told them, but it wasn’t entirely clear if he thought Nicholas was too foreign to have been taught them properly.
    Once he asked Nicholas to run an errand, four streets away. He had to ring a doorbell three times, wait, and ring once more. The door still didn’t open. He wanted to knock on it fiercely but the older man had told him not to.
    An old woman opened after a while. “Tell him I can’t find more,” she said. “Tell him this