The Pieces from Berlin by Michael Pye Page A

very stiff white shirt. It almost hurt, but he was proud to wear it: a badge of being a man. She wore new, shiny shoes. They ate kuchen with a lot of cream.
    They took the subway home. They went one stop sitting in among the neat afternoon crowd, and the air raid siren went off: a noise that sounded as though it had to be wound up.
    The train stopped in the next station. Everybody knew they had to get out, so everyone went to the doors. Everyone stood around.
    A pudgy man, a silly man out of a cartoon book, started talking very loudly. Nicholas tapped his mother to make sure she saw him: a little walking joke. He was insisting on attention, but he couldn’t speak properly. He kept stuttering over words. People didn’t quite laugh at him, but they shifted about as he told them how to survive.
    After a minute, when the crowd wanted to be somewhere else and showed it, he said: “Listen. I only took this job to get away from my wife. You’d want to get away from my wife.”
    He had the crowd silent.
    “She’s orders, orders, orders. I can’t breathe at home without permission. So just give me a minute—”
    The all-clear siren sounded out. Everyone stepped back into the train.
    Lucia went out in the evenings, and cars came for her. She went out in a cloud of Chanel No. 5—Nicholas had time to read everything in the apartment after she’d gone at night, so he knew all the brands—and she left behind an expensive, perfect ghost of scent. Sometimes very late she’d bring back pasta in a box from some restaurant.
    Nicholas understood he had to be out of sight if anyone called for her, although she never let anyone into the apartment. She made things up to him at weekends and when she could. In winter, especially, he loved the one bath night, Saturday or Sunday. The soap scratched, and it didn’t lather much; in fact, it made scum on the water. But he loved the attention and he loved the sheer, luxuriating warmth. He was always wrapped up, but he only felt truly warm in the bath.
    Other nights, Lucia would sit in the living room, alive but inside the pages of a book. She might as well have been a picture behind glass. Or she would be pacing about the apartment, and Nicholas would say something, and she would either ignore him, or at best say: “Not now.” Other days, she was teaching him to dance, him so short, head fixed just above her belly button, counting under his breath to a waltz. He tried to hold back, to play the man properly, but his face always ended in the warmth of her belly on the turns.
    She always tried to be home when the air raids came. He was sure of that.
    She took him to the movies one evening, and the sirens went off just as they were coming out of the theater, and they had to get to a shelter. There was a vast new bunker by the zoo, all stuck about with flak guns. Its walls felt like all the rock in a mountain. You didn’t believe anything could move them.
    They were checked as they went in, and searched. Lucia’s papers must have seemed a bit odd, being Italian married to a Swiss and living in Germany. It didn’t usually matter. But it seemed that, at the entrance to the zoo bunker, she didn’t know anybody.
    The sound of the siren was winding up and up. There was a long line waiting to be safe.
    She pushed another set of papers at the guards. They must have been Nicholas’s papers: born in Germany. So he could go in, and she followed, smiling kindly, letting her bag be searched, letting the guard say that in that dress he hardly needed to search her. Being young, Nicholas still wondered if the guard disapproved or approved.
    He heard gunfire. He heard the low, droning sound of air engines. He heard the sirens. He wanted to be behind those safe, thick walls.
    People kept their hats on. There weren’t many lights, but the few lights were bright like theater lights, and the hats made odd shadows on the pale brick walls, made middle-aged persons into pharaohs and Turks and general infidels. It