Free The Pieces from Berlin by Michael Pye Page B

monument.
    There was nobody to stop him walking through the door of the building. He was a child, after all, and nobody expected a child to take an initiative so nobody made rules to stop him. And besides, this place was a school: a place for children.
    The lights inside were all turned on. The first room had a few chairs, a few tables. It had cribs, a dozen of them. All empty. There were two medicine balls, comfortably battered, and some colored blocks, and on the wall, some drawings done by very small children: stick people in box houses by lollipop trees.
    It was very quiet. In all his life he only heard the same kind of silence one other time, and that was during a full eclipse of the sun: when the light went wrong, when the life went out of the air, when everything fell silent and the shadow took away the sun.
    Strollers stood in two neat half circles on the tiles. Outside noises broke in: trams grinding on metal, a car Klaxon.
    March 1, 1943, was the first night the bombers got to the very heart of Berlin. It became a date he remembered, like a birthday, like a saint’s day.
    Until then, he could imagine there was an order in the world, a way to make sense of everything. It might be the order of prison, or the order of school with all its rules and bosses and communal rumors and fantasies, and also like being part of some great civilian army whether you liked it or not. But he imagined that the adults all walked down the street, carrying their assumption that the world made sense.
    Of course, people sometimes saw too much, as stagehands step out of the dark between scenes at the opera. Ever since the Russian campaigns began, there were wounded people, on one leg, with one arm; there was a stump of a man, cut off at the waist, on a board with little wheels, who exercised each day in the courtyard, frantically pushing and pulling himself from side to side, getting nowhere. You also saw people with no particular purpose, when everyone was supposed to be part of the fatherland’s machine, or people swapping rumors on a corner, or adults making jokes, or people who forgot to say Heil Hitler, ever.
    Some schoolmate told Nicholas about the time Zarah Leander went to Hitler by special invitation to sing him a song. And the song was: “I Know a Miracle Will Happen Some Day.”
    Nicholas knew he was virtually a foreigner, so he decided not to laugh.
    The caretaker came to take down the wooden shutters. Nicholas asked why, and he said: “Because they burn too easily.” Nicholas said: “Why would they burn?”
    There was a rush to patch up damage, put up flags, put up boards so nobody could see into the shell of buildings, put up notices to say that repairs were about to be done by someone about to be named.
    Lucia asked Nicholas, quite abruptly, if he wouldn’t rather go to school in Switzerland. He didn’t know what she wanted him to say. He asked if he could be with his father. She said that wouldn’t be possible, because he was still in the Swiss army and he was guarding some mountain pass somewhere. Nicholas wanted to know: “Who’s he guarding it against?”
    She said it was very nice in Switzerland, he’d like it. She’d always meant to take him. He said he liked it there, in Berlin, with her. She said there’d be more bombs. So he asked one more time: Would he be able to see his father? And she said he’d have to live in school. He asked if she would come to live in Switzerland, but she said she had things to do in Berlin. And it never once crossed his mind that he was at last old enough to be dismissed to school.
    He told Lucia she could do whatever she wanted in Switzerland. They could go to the mountains with Dad. Lucia said, again: “He’s in the army.”
    Nicholas went back to the cardboard box with all his father’s letters. He wanted clues, and there were none; a soldier writes carefully in a war. He was well. He was in the mountains. He said something about how much he admired the Finns when they