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The Pieces from Berlin - Hardcover

Pye, Michael

 
9780375414367: The Pieces from Berlin
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375414363 ISBN 13: 9780375414367
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Lucia Mnller-Rossi, a respected, ninety-year-old antiques dealer in Zurich, finds her reputation on the line when Sarah Freeman discovers a table in her shop that Sarah and her husband had owned before the war, in a novel based on a real-life historical figure, a woman who made a fortune dealing in stolen art in wartime Berlin. 20,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Novelist, historian, journalist, and broad-caster Michael Pye is the author of ten other books, including the novels Taking Lives and The Drowning Room.

Aus dem Klappentext

hor of Taking Lives: a riveting new novel, inspired by a true story from secret criminal files, about a woman who made her fortune trafficking stolen art in wartime Berlin and the fearsome price other people paid for her crimes.

Lucia Müller-Rossi is the grandest of Zurich antique dealers, still flourishing and still respect-able in her nineties. Her past is unknown, or conveniently ignored, until the day Sarah Freeman looks into her shop window and sees a delicate inlaid table that she and her husband once owned before the war. It is a piece from Berlin, and because of it, decades of lies and silence are about to end.

With the skills of a master storyteller and the insights of a historian, Michael Pye brings to life the devastating legacy that shadows the Holocaust. The Pieces from Berlin is the graphic story of survivors finding the courage to face a buried past, as Lucia s son, Nicholas, patches his memories of wartime Berlin int

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

He went rolling down into the city, his coat like a cone of green felt all around him, like some round wooden toy: so good and kind and clever, so big and so kind, so that everyone knew he must be a truly happy man. Helen watched her father striding past the dark shine of wet shrubbery and the high suburban walls. One minute he was in a puddle of streetlamp light, then the dark, then the next light: a flickerbook man.

She double-locked the apartment door, ran down the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, and she followed him. She was afraid of what he might do next.

The cold ached on her skin. There was mist lying sodden among the plain buildings and gray squares of Zurich, gilt clocks poking up out of lanes, the last relentless red geraniums, with linden trees bare, and blue trams snaking by the water, the lake steamers and beyond them shops that glowed with their own gold, armored with huge glass.

He mustn’t see her.

He was a brisk, effortless walker, used to scampering on mountains; she followed a block or two back, just able to make sure he was still ahead: the round man, in late middle age, under the shell of his green felt loden coat. His hair was white, and carefully wild: a professorial head. He had never once been ashamed of the great globe of his belly because he was not a self-conscious man.

Purposeful people were lined up for trams. The first shop and office lights were burning. At this blank time of the morning, hardly any light yet, the fact that he was moving was enough to make him stand out. Helen shivered as she walked. Her father retired from this kind of purpose years ago, had no obligation now to stride out on a bleak morning with the frost still standing in the trees.

He turned down the hill to the lake. He didn’t nod at any of the galleries on the street, not even the one that belonged to her husband, Jeremy: didn’t pause at all. She thought maybe he would catch a tram at the great turntable station down at Bellevue, but he didn’t. He wanted to keep moving. He didn’t even have time to wait to be carried where he was going.

Along the gray Limmat now, quiet and decorous: a triangle rushing along on his broad base, not bothering to look at the city around him. It was, in any case, already perfectly clean, no condom, ticket, newspaper, or candy wrapper left on the streets to anchor it even in the history of last night.

Nicholas Müller-Rossi knew better. He remembered things, which was what made him ominous.

In ordinary circumstances, he was happy to share in the official civic memory of the city: the memory that makes James Joyce an eye patient, Wagner a bit too showy, Lenin a good quiet tenant although he had visitors the night the Winter Palace fell. He liked the anesthesia of all that convention, to feel at home in a city whose great art is the window display, whose local poet is honored for being a good government clerk, although also a drunk.

But the circumstances were not ordinary at all. Nicholas cut across the Limmat and through the lanes up to the open space of Lindenhof. Helen slowed down, even though the cold caught at her legs. Only a few lanes led up to Lindenhof, and the park itself was small, and she did not want him to see her.

He could make his own mind up, she told herself. She thought he might just need her.

He stood looking down on the houses racked up each side of the valley, little terraces and squares, an ingrown city full of plain fountains.

Three days ago, Nicholas Müller-Rossi read in the newspaper that his father had died: ancient, at ninety-five, in a small town in a valley with a lake.

Two days ago, he had gone to see if he could pay for a wreath or subsidize the funeral masses; first the local florist and then the local priest said there was no need. Everything had been attended to. Everything had been considered.

So today he would be a spectator at the funeral, not taking part because he had been told he was not welcome.

Helen watched him stamp one foot and then the other: like a windup toy that’s frustrated by a rug, she thought. She’d like to give him coffee, courage, anything he needed. She couldn’t tell if he had yet decided to go or not to go.

All Nicholas did, for a moment, was stand under the bare trees, on a path of soft leafmeal, and brood.

He once had a friend who was a pharmacist. Every morning at nine, this friend went to the end of a tramline and opened the doors of a bright white confessional, a shop with shining walls and neat drawers, him in a starched white coat with young women, such graceful young women perfumed with oxygen, fetching and whispering. And everyone came, citizens and neighbors, the ones who kept such a perfect facade, the ones with good credit, fine names, a seat in church and a slot in the graveyard: and they told him things.

This one had a bruise that couldn’t be explained, a yeast was infiltrating decent households, tiny, armored insects got in the private parts of the nicest people; this one needs vitamin B and codeine on account of the mornings after drinking, and this one needs eyedrops, homeopathic number 2, on account of the pills; and you could chart the cracks in marriages through the times they suddenly needed hair dyes, anti-flatulents, and tonics. He even knew the most terrible secrets of all: the antidepressants and tranquilizers and barbiturates which revealed when they lacked confidence for a moment in the perfect order of their lives.

Then the pharmacist retired. He said the whole business had changed him; he couldn’t even buy aspirin without wondering what the pharmacist knew. His conversation was mostly hints: he knew where the whole city itched.

Then there were the secrets kept in dealers’ safes, in the vaults of banks, in files and archives. Nicholas Müller-Rossi looked at the lake mist and the low cloud and it seemed to him the outward, visible sign of some great communal silence.

Standing around isn’t proper in Zurich; you need a purpose, a destination. Nicholas, when he went traveling, wandered canals in Venice or Amsterdam, prowled boulevards in Paris, spent imaginary money up and down New York. But here, close to home, going somewhere in particular was a moral matter.

Helen thought for a moment he was going to turn back. She wasn’t good at tucking into doorways like some private eye; the shops were not yet open; if she ran, she’d be conspicuous, but he’d outwalk her if he chose the same lane.

So she didn’t see him leave Lindenhof at all, bustling down to the lovely, empty riches of Bahnhofstrasse, passing easily by the windows that used to fascinate him as a boy—the painted fruit, the spotlit hats, the occasional Chagall next door to fur and lace.

He bought his ticket from the machine at the main station, wonderfully efficient with the coins. He checked the information board, sorted out his train from the grand expresses and the suburban shuttles.

She knew he’d have to take the train. She checked the times and platforms so she could see him waiting.

She wouldn’t offer to go with him. She had seen her grandfather once or twice, so her parents had told her. He was a bit of biology somewhere in the past, the necessary condition of her father and of Helen. But he wasn’t there to be loved.

Nicholas settled on the upper deck of the Lucerne train.

He’d gone to see the priest, of course, to offer to pay for the seventh-day Mass, the year Mass. The priest said that was already arranged. He went to the graveyard gardener, thinking the man would be glad to set up the usual twenty-year contract to tend some flowers and clean the grave, but the man wouldn’t listen to him.

The...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375414363
ISBN 13 
9780375414367
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
335
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar