Free The Pieces from Berlin by Michael Pye Page A

things. It was entirely different inside the apartment. There were pots and plates and chairs—sometimes the chairs didn’t have cushions and Nicholas asked why. There were some tapestries, a couple of pictures. And when they moved apartments, somehow all that stopped being clutter and there were a couple of rooms he didn’t like at all because they were like a museum.
    His father stopped writing—or, at least, his letters no longer arrived. It was wartime; Nicholas was told not to be disappointed, or even surprised. He began by waiting for his father and very soon he was angry with his father and then he put his father—the particular, complicated man, with his tics and skills—out of his mind completely. He thought he had his ration of parents: a mother who stayed with him.
    He remembered life like some gallery, made up of exhibits and pictures that sometimes made sense and sometimes did not: little moments, little dramas, never connected because connection would be a reminder of how everyone was waiting, waiting, waiting. They waited for victories that didn’t come. They waited for soldiers to come back triumphant from Russia, and they didn’t come back at all.
    They waited, most of all, for the bombers.
    Just once, he saw a truck carrying people away: carrying Jews away, he knew later. He could see their feet under the tarpaulin sides of the truck, like a puppet show upside down: some of them in slippers, neat leather shoes, pretty shoes, one bound up with cloth as though the foot was broken.
    The next day, maybe the next week, very soon anyway, he learned the rules of chess and saw there could be whole epics in the moves. He learned to sing. His mother was charmed, then infuriated. “
Aprile non c’è piu
,” he sang. “
È ritornato il Maggio al canto del cucù
.”
    He learned about women’s eyes from movie stills. The eyes were all important in those days: Zarah Leander giving things up, Luise Ullrich trying to get home, Ilse Werner with her girl’s way of showing polite, devoted skepticism, and Marika Rökk, who was his favorite. He had that picture of her from
Kora Terry
where she’s turned to the camera, arm bare, shoulder draped, the light brilliant on those perfect lips and those welcoming, understanding, and, above all, interested eyes.
    Gattopardo grew sleek, too sleek, handfuls of belly fur and belly. Nicholas watched him wash, paws articulated and flexible and too complicated to map or draw; and his tongue going in and out between the toes.
    Nobody told him how to put all this together into the kind of childhood you can remember when your father dies; or how to make a self from all these moments, or a moral code, or even a strategy for staying alive.
    In February, he was coming home from school on an evening of black cold. He tried a different street for once. Katya would be waiting for him, but he didn’t much like Katya, and his mother was still working. He had no reason to hurry, except the cold.
    The trees were rattling; there must have been a high wind, enough to rush the blood along a little. The streetlights were already on, a violet haze. The windows of apartment buildings were blank, nobody home yet, and the balconies bare. You couldn’t even dry anything; it would have frozen stiff.
    He heard a soft wave of sound, like crying in the streets. He never heard crying. He heard shouts or orders or fights, or else silence, but not crying.
    He turned the corner.
    He saw a dozen women standing around the entrance to some undistinguished building. All of them looked young, younger than his mother. They had cloth coats and they had bare faces and they trembled with weeping.
    He didn’t know what to do. He thought perhaps he should comfort them, but he couldn’t take the hands of all of them and he didn’t know which hand he should take first. And he felt, perhaps knew, that nothing kind and personal could ever be enough. He saw loss itself standing in that street, plain as a