The Pieces from Berlin by Michael Pye Page A

Constance, which he insisted on calling the Bodensee. He said she was crazy to think the ferries would be running as usual. She said he lacked faith in the Reich. He said: “And you have so much faith you’re moving to Switzerland?”
    She said: “Then we’ll go in by Thayngen and Schaffhausen.”
    Lucia never wanted to stop. The driver insisted. There was a cacophony of shouts and horns. When the truck rolled to a halt, and braking had begun to seem a long, slow, chancy process, they all looked back.
    Five trucks followed. There should have been six.
    “We lost one,” said the driver, complacently.
    Lucia kicked him once, hard, in the shins. He still had that soft, half-fancying look on his face, happy to be doing a job for this bright lady, but Nicholas wasn’t sure his mother had done the right thing.
    “Then find him,” his mother said.
    One of the other drivers, a man in late middle age carrying a lifetime of beer in front of him, came rolling up. “Went just off the road,” he said. “We’ll need a tow rope to get him out.”
    Lucia said: “Do it.”
    The heavy-bellied man checked the driver, just to see his reaction, just to know what to do. He couldn’t tell because Lucia’s manner and her accent were at war.
    She sat on a wall. She watched the convoy, her particular convoy, turn back on the road. Nicholas never saw her face so bare, so tight and angry.
    Nothing was safe until everything was safe across the border. And she wanted to be safe.
    A black bird came down in the next meadow, then another. They could hear, over the gunning of engines half a mile back, sheep blathering in a field. They could hear the wind.
    “It’s nice here,” Nicholas said, wanting something innocent to say. “Is it pretty like this in Switzerland?”
    She rounded on him. “Pretty? Like this?” She spat. He never saw her spit before. “This is all,” and she reached for a word violent enough, “landscape.”
    Nicholas said: “But the birds—”
    “Some people,” she said, “like birds. Some people like life.”
    “There’s life here.”
    “What’s living,” she said, “is out there with its tail up shitting. That’s all.”
    Nicholas stood up. “I like it,” he said, obstinately.
    She wouldn’t answer. He could read a kind of contempt in her eyes: he had given up, he was not struggling on. He liked fields, and birds, and landscape; he did not value will, plans, organizing.
    Breath knotted up in his stomach.
    And she left him. She started walking down the road to where the men now had the lost truck grappled to a cable, and the largest truck was nudging it out of the roadside mud.
    He didn’t want to follow her. He sat back on the wall and he listened, harder than he ever listened before in his life. Every sound in the city pushed itself on you; here, you had to seek out sound and break its code.
    He could hear a kind of whispering.
    He turned. The whispering was just a roar at a distance, he realized. Across the valley, water was breaking out of the rock, falling like hard smoke, the spring melt busting out of its usual course and arcing out into the air.
    Under his breath, he started to sing: “
Cucù
,
cucù
,
Aprile non c’è
piu
. . .”
    The largest of the trucks was struggling now, a sound so large it filled up the view and made the birds scatter. Then it stopped. He looked down the road, and he saw the convoy back in perfect line.
    Lucia was shouting. Nicholas listened to the water. Lucia was gesticulating.
    He clambered back into the cab of the truck, back in the convoy again, that little smoking particular of gas and wood fumes that stained the rosy, gilded sunset.
    Two men in familiar brown shirts, rifles over shoulders, belts full of cartridges. Barbed wire across a bridge; it looked the way roses look in autumn, all bare and looped and thorny.
    Men in procession, marching with shovels: no ease or enthusiasm, just taking used bodies home. They had a uniformed guard.
    Across the bridge, men