Free The Pieces from Berlin by Michael Pye

did not need to. The shutters were off their hinges, and tumbled open by themselves.
    Mr. Goldstein sat facing the street. He was dressed in a suit, the trousers creased, the jacket tucked about him neatly. He wore his medals. In his hands, he had a book, and Nicholas knew from the heft and the binding and the gold on the edges of the pages that it must be one of his volumes of Goethe.
    The little box for throat lozenges sat on the table by his side, with a glass of water.
    He backed away from Mr. Goldstein, from his stillness and his indifference to the odd sounds in the room and the smell of scorched paper on the carpet and he turned and ran into the corridor.
    He ran downstairs, not upstairs. He just wanted to be somewhere else, to be out of the building.
    He wanted to talk to his father, there and then. He wanted to be sure he was still alive.
    It was cold outside. He fussed with the locks, which had never seemed difficult before, and he went upstairs to wait at the window for his mother. He didn’t like to seem anxious; it only made her fret. She turned up in a tiny, silly car that night: a Topolino, a Fiat. He told her he wished they could have a Topolino. He couldn’t find the words for anything else.
    It was often six weeks between letters from his father. His father described mountains and rivers, but never said anything about the war. Nicholas didn’t think it was interesting to write about the bombs, either. He didn’t want to worry his father, who would be there if he could be but who had a duty somewhere else. Nicholas could not define duty, but he could feel how it must trap and pull a man.
    Besides, what could he have said in those letters? He didn’t have landscapes to discuss. He saw animals only in the zoo or the aquarium. He never did get used to the ground shaking under him. He found it strange how, with everything, from the conduct of the war to the troubles of the Jews to the price of coal, you knew and you did not know, all at once.
    He didn’t want his mother to know he could take the key and go down to the streets and be anywhere his legs would carry him, but she’d certainly read his letters before she found envelopes and stamps. And yet, for all his venturing, he was always aware that he was dependent on Lucia like something unweaned. If she didn’t come home, he would die.
    He did write in one letter how they kept bathfuls of water just to put out fires. The basement was reinforced with tree trunks. Someone loosened the bricks in a couple of walls so the fattest tenant could get out if the main doors were blocked. There were card tables, a radio. The basement somehow got organized into a set of rooms, one for each family. Everyone always kept a suitcase packed.
    That letter got lost, or censored. In his next letter, his father complained there had been no answer to his last one.
    As for the excitements, the diversions, it wasn’t fair to tell his father.
    They’d been out to dinner, mother and son, with a couple of men who must have been Swiss. She didn’t touch them; Nicholas noticed that. He always noticed that. He remembered having oysters, but he wanted something called crawfish. They came, long, pink, and thin. Then he had venison because he was hungry for grown-up, show-off meat, and it arrived a little bloody in the middle. He was upset for a moment but, like a grown-up, he ate it.
    On the street, there was a soldier standing. He was clean-shaven, but the uniform wasn’t quite right, and he looked tired. He asked Lucia, very simply, if he could look at her pretty hands.
    She was furious when the authorities banned perms. The big, glossy shops with truly expensive things had begun to close down, too; Nicholas had liked that old gold light they used to throw out even in the middle of the day. And there were no church bells anymore, because of the war effort, they said. He remembered the bells where he used to live, how they rolled and roared.
    The outside world was now without fine