The Pieces from Berlin Read Online Free PDF

took her to a tiny theater where the lights and the seats squeaked with rust and made her sit through an evening of mangled lieder.
    They were never again alone in the same room.
    She watched the others flash their reviews, the reviews that Giorgio still sent home to his family in the Veneto even when they were bought notices, two lire a line, of some minimal performance. She got to know one older man, who talked about the Paris Opera and the velvets and silks he wore to sing something in
Faust
, about the sound of applause in London and the prospects in Leipzig, but who was now working part-time as a slow, shuffling butt among waiters in a trattoria.
    She was studying, not living; she knew that. She went home to salons, dinners, weekends in the country, weekends at Lake Como, to being discreet around a house where politicians now quite often dined with bankers.
    Then Giorgio produced his friend Paolo, from somewhere in Umbria, who played the cello. He was skinny, quick, and small. He fixed on the cello like prey, hunched forward to play, as though the bow might fall short of the strings. Then he extended himself by sheer will, made the body of the instrument sound out.
    “He shouldn’t play cello,” Giorgio said. “Really.”
    “He plays very well,” Lucia said.
    That was when she started asking her friends about birth control. She thought they were stalling, since the whole subject had just been put outside the law, but in fact they did not want to show how little they knew. They’d skim the movie magazines, see two people in the same frame, and they could usually tell biting from kissing, the lovers from the heroine’s last-reel struggle with the villain, but not always.
    Paolo danced well, but he danced rather under her chin. He danced with her in the Blu-room, in the Golden Gate, between swirls of cigarette smoke, where a little perfume did battle with cheap soap. He moved busily, immaculately, while she reared up above him, shaking out the red hair that smothered and bound him in his dreams. He orchestrated a grand turn, and his sigh tickled her breasts.
    She went home to dinner with her family. There had to be a way out.
    She tried to listen to Paolo’s story, when he volunteered it. A little farm near Todi, indeed. Olive trees; there had to be olive trees. Hunters out with guns, high moon, nightjars singing. More pudding-basin hills, all green. A father who worked on the roads, a mother who sold mushrooms in the market. It was too picturesque to be real, and she could not imagine what it would be to come from such a place, and never to be able to shut a good door on the world.
    “One day,” Paolo said, “you’ll have to come to Todi.”
    A long, rough table, with big plates covered in cooked tomatoes. She imagined herself smiling: the exemplary mother, the exemplary wife who might one day be. There would be all those hopeful faces.
    This trip to another class was growing tedious.
    “We should go for a walk,” Paolo said.
    She said good-bye to Giorgio. She looked back at him, once: he was holding forth on the late music of Rossini, and nobody was listening.
    She walked beside Paolo and, together, they demanded space from the people who walked, heads down, toward them. She put out a hand, took his; it was an experiment, to see what walking this way on a public street would feel like. It felt fine. Paolo and she became a couple: a ceremonial fact on narrow pavements, to be respected and indulged. As a couple, she noticed that his palms were wonderfully dry, and that his hands did not quite enclose hers.
    They turned off the street of bright windows. They bundled together along the side of narrow streets. His eyes turned up to her, hungry and almost dependent eyes: like some sort of child.
    “We could walk in the gardens,” Paolo said. “In the moonlight.”
    She saw the family house on the Corso. They passed under its windows, by the heavy portico, with the heavy stone cherubim looking down. Far up the