Read The Pieces from Berlin for Free Online

in tiles; and the smells, leather and creams and fish, suits and skirts that hadn’t been washed recently, coffee, cheap soap, wet paper. Then the tracks spread out beyond the great hall into a huge and brilliant sky.
    She was exhilarated by Monza, which is not what people usually make of Monza, and she loved passing through Como. She’d been too often to Como in the summers. If she could just get past Como, she wouldn’t be a banker’s daughter anymore, wouldn’t even be Milanese.
    And then she was past the border, the uniforms, the questions from the customs officers; and the train was still moving, she was on her own and it didn’t matter if these lakes and Alps were the ones she already knew, which she’d seen years before with her parents. She changed trains, and changed trains again, always in the glamour of steam and smoke, and each time she was further from cities she knew, names she knew. She wasn’t responsible to the world outside the windows anymore.
    Then she was on a train that had a snowplow up front, shining curtains of frost either side of the line, and the windows were open for the cut of the clean air. She watched out for the station, and it was the perfect model of a station in the perfect model of a village.
    The sunset on the mountain blinded her, great flares of red and silver. She got vertigo in the cable car going up to the chalet. “It’s a very international party,” said the wife of the colleague of her father’s. “People from everywhere. Some English boys. Very clever. Some of the Jewish persuasion. No Italians, I’m afraid.”
    She first saw Hans Peter Müller against the light. He might as well have been naked in his close clothes.
    She’d seen so many poses, and so many suits, and so many people wrapped in cloaks and talking about their futures; and here was a man whose skill was written on his body. She watched the power and the elegance of his legs, so sure on the snow even when it sifted like sand on a mirror. And he was magnified by the thin brilliance of the mountain air.
    They couldn’t not talk. He spoke Italian, but in serious, Germanic gobbets. She tried to speak German, and she sounded absurdly like the bankers to whom she’d been polite all her life.
    He helped her on the ski lift, which was a hook on a cable on a wire. Then he helped her on the snow. She didn’t need to be touched; she balanced exactly, flung herself down slopes with no fear at all. He followed, overtook, turned in and out of her path without flurrying her, danced an arcing, whispering dance around her.
    The snow was still wonderfully empty in those days. You felt you had come out into a wilderness, not a playground. At lunchtime, skis racked against a rope, poles jammed in the snow like a strong metallic bush, you looked out onto unmarked white.
    She was entirely dazzled. She laughed hugely.
    At night, the silence was perfect. Houses enclosed all the music and talk. And she walked beside Müller under a white moon, and she saw shooting stars for the first time in her life, each one arbitrary and lovely, no use watching out for them.
    He skied; she knew that much. He was some kind of banker or accountant; that meant he was like her father. Her father had been a perfectly ordinary clerk, out of a small Piedmont town, with ambition, so the question of status did not necessarily arise. He was tall, hard, graceful; she loved to watch him. She thought she would be able to long for him properly when she went back to Milan. Longing was what she had in mind, even then.
    The last day, he hired a sleigh. They put the luggage on the back, and the horses took off and neither one of them had worked out how the story was supposed to end.
    The breath from the horses smoked out ahead of them. And the woods opened out and they saw new valleys, new rock, and water frozen as it fell. They weren’t high on the mountain anymore.
    He helped her onto the train, like a gentleman. Then he jumped aboard too. She didn’t