The Pieces from Berlin by Michael Pye

of six and seven. But it was always the interesting fact about Nicholas: that his father was in the wrong army.
    Nicholas started his childhood when the bombers came, when there was time and space to play at last.
    That first summer was hot, unusually hot, everyone said. Everyone wanted to get to the water. Lucia took him down to Wannsee one August day to watch the powerboats whirling around out on the lake waters. She said he could swim.
    They were with someone: one of Lucia’s new friends, a man, of course, from the embassy. He was quite tall and he could play soccer well enough to impress a kid. He passed neatly, and Nicholas scored goal after goal between his jacket and the picnic basket.
    He wanted to go out on one of the little sailboats. His mother looked up at the sky, which was part pewter and part a brilliant blue. Her friend shrugged. He thought it might be worth keeping Nicholas quiet and amused, and Nicholas was a persistent child.
    They came away from the shore, and all of a sudden, there was a different kind of breeze. The boy felt wind across his whole skin. He saw his mother’s hair, a fine red in those days, her own red, stroked out and flying in the wind. They were in a tiny sailboat, nothing at all, a walnut shell in between the motorboats further out, but it felt like they were exploring across whole oceans, that they had found somewhere wild at last. A few girls and soldiers, in rowboats, were laughing much too much.
    Nicholas knelt up at the bows, staring out. The wind got brisk. There were pellets of rain and they beat back off the lake water. The sky blackened. There was a distant rumble of thunder.
    His mother said: “It’s beautiful out here.”
    Her friend said: “Look. We’d better get back. Lightning’s no fun when you’re out on the water like this. Exposed.”
    His mother stared at the horizon of green, tangled trees and she seemed to be willing the lightning to come. Out of the blue sky she brought white light, as though the sky had cracked open and shown the hot glare beyond. Out of the pewter sky, Nicholas truly believed this, she brought a different kind of lightning: red light, broad light, a tree of it.
    Her friend stood, rocked the boat, took down the little sail he could no longer trust. “We have to go back,” he said.
    The wind flicked up ripples from the lake. They could see, looking away from the city, the rain starting in a curtain. Lucia’s friend had the oars now.
    She said: “It’s beautiful.”
    Nicholas stayed at the bow, even though he had to hold on as the boat began to slip and turn, and his knees were marked and bloody when they got to shore.
    His mother hugged him. She never bothered with that particular friend again.
    He liked to think he remembered what was specific, what happened in front of him. So he knew the caretaker rattled pans when the air raids came. He’d come up out of the courtyard, two tin saucepans and a spoon in each that he worked like a clapper in a bell, and he’d run around, up and down all the stairs, insisting everyone go down to the shelter.
    But children hear stories. They heard and believed that it wasn’t always safe in the cellars. One whole building ran down, barricaded the doors, made sure the ceilings were propped with beams, settled to a glass of milk or schnapps or cold coffee; and then drowned, because the pipes burst and they couldn’t get out in time.
    There was nobody for Nicholas to believe. Things you knew seemed more real than things you were told. He sometimes thought he’d moved into a world from the comic strips.
    He passed a butcher’s shop and saw a sleeping donkey being carried inside. He thought it was asleep because the men were carrying it suspended from a pole, its hooves shining. Then he looked again and he saw the throat was slit.
    So he relied on his mother, and she used to make things all right, one way or another. Sometimes, she took him to the Kurfürstendamm to make things all right. He’d wear a