The Lieutenant's Lover

by Harry Bingham

  Misha, holding the ticket that authorised him to enter, looked around uncertainly. A group of cleaning women, certainly local Germans, sat at one table with a clutter of mops and buckets standing behind them. Two Red Army officers sat at another table, playing cards. Otherwise there was almost no one. Misha marked the rank and regiment of the two officers, then walked up to the counter and asked for a glass of ersatz-coffee, which he paid for in worn-out Reichsmark notes.

  As Misha moved away from the counter, he heard a noise behind him. Turning, he saw a man hurrying up to him. The man was dressed in a soft brown suit, and had a wispy beard and nervous eyes.

  ‘Herr Müller. Ja. I’m sorry. I’m late. Apologies.’

  ‘You’re Kunz?’

  ‘Kunz. Yes. I should have said. Kunz.’

  They shook hands. Kunz’s handshake was limp and apologetic. The man was of fighting age, but he didn’t look as though he’d ever been a soldier. Kunz himself bought a glass of hot milk and a bun so stale that it could have broken teeth. Then they sat down together at a table.

  ‘You need help with translation? Herr Ingenieur Bofinger said that…’

  ‘Yes.’

  Misha sighed, trying not to show his disappointment. He’d been in Cotbus selling his castings. His samples had been greedily accepted, a price agreed, and the plant manager – the forceful and intelligent Herr Bofinger – had arranged this meeting. The man’s Russian was halting but not bad, and he’d certainly be able to handle the business that Misha would give him. But no, Kunz had never heard of a female translator used by the Soviets. The name Kornikova meant nothing to him.

  After making arrangements for Kunz to handle the various bits of business relating to his transaction with Bofinger, Misha left the canteen. A vague sense of disappointment swirled like milk steam in the air. At first, he assumed that it was simply his continuing lack of success in finding Tonya that accounted for his gloom. But it was more than that.

  Thirty-ish, nervous, weak, only moderately skilled, Herr Kunz had been fairly typical of these provincial translators. Tonya simply wasn’t like that. She must have been highly skilled to have held her position. And there was nothing nervous or weak in her either. It felt wrong. For the first time, Misha felt as though he were searching for Tonya in places that she couldn’t possibly be. A deep instinct, a deep knowledge of the Soviet mind, told him he was on the wrong track. If Tonya had lost favour in Berlin, and if her skills were yet too valuable to waste, then they’d have found some other solution for her. Not this. She wouldn’t simply have been sent to fritter away her days working alongside the Herr Kunzes of this world. Misha knew he was failing, but he didn’t know how or why.

  He drove back home, to Willi and Rosa, past ripening wheat fields springing with wild poppies and blue cornflowers. But he saw none of it. For the first time, he felt his optimism start to crumble.

  7

  The trip took place just five days after Rokossovsky’s approach.

  His method of getting Tonya out of camp had been simple and effective. One of his companions in crime, a sergeant, had staged a public rebuke for some trivial offence. Roaring at her, till his face reddened and the ends of his moustache quivered like a northern aspen, he promised that he’d make her ‘work until she dropped’. The first element in her punishment programme was being made to go into town to help with getting fuel. As soon as possible after her rebuke, Rokossovsky had come hurtling around to explain that she wasn’t to worry, it was all part of the plan, there would be more roast hare for her that night, and so on. Tonya had just smiled and laughed. If there were risk in the plan, it wasn’t hers. She’d simply be obeying orders.

  So they’d loaded up the truck and driven straight into the nearby town, Bad Freienwalde. Tonya stared at her surroundings in astonishment. The town was a small miracle. Aside from two or three dozen houses lost to artillery fire in the last months of the war, nothing had been damaged. Prosperous municipal buildings jostled alongside steep-roofed houses complete with clean paintwork and flowering window-boxes. The inhabitants, of course, looked hungry and worn, and the town was home to a Red Army tank regiment, which would no doubt have stripped every house of any remaining valuables. But all the same, the town was the prettiest, cleanest, most well-to-do place she’d ever seen. Tonya drank in the sight.

  Rokossovsky gestured at it all.

  ‘These bastards, hey?’

  Tonya, not wanting to argue, simply nodded. She didn’t see any obvious Hitler Youth. She did see plenty of women, her age, struggling to feed their families.

  ‘Their cellars, I tell you, full of gold. These men from the tank regiments, they’re the lucky ones. I bet they’ve milked the cow dry, eh?’

  He imitated the act of squeezing an udder. Tonya had realised by now that her companion didn’t always need her to reply. As for herself, she was nervous, though not much. Along with the empty fuel drums in the back of the truck, there was a sack of carrots, two sacks of winter potatoes, long gone soft, and six bags of coal in fifty kilo bags.

  ‘We’ll do the fuel first. If the bastards ask about the supplies, we just tell them nothing.’

  Rokossovsky muttered to himself, as he swept the truck around to the fuel dump set up by the tank regiment. The tankists always looked down on ordinary army units, and their respect for the lowly troopers at Oderbruch Special Camp was somewhere well south of zero. But the fuel made its way from the fuel dump into the drums in the back of the truck. There were a couple of local German men employed on menial duties around the dump and Tonya duly interpreted any orders which were bellowed their way, which weren’t many and certainly not ones that needed much translation. Then Rokossovsky signed some receipts for the fuel and climbed back into the truck.

  ‘Bastards.’

  He swung the truck back out onto the road, then, driving too fast, plunged down a network of side roads to a small brick warehouse built beside a pretty tree-lined canal. The warehouse was built so that its brick sides rose straight out of the water.

  ‘Now then,’ said Rokossovsky. ‘Careful. We need to get a good price. These bastards … gold … but look out, we must keep a good lookout…’

  Plainly frightened by what he was doing, he went to the back of the truck and opened the tailgate. A German woman, alerted by the noise came out of the warehouse. She was brown-haired, brown-eyed and pretty. Her clothes were in poor repair, but though hungry, she didn’t have the famished look that so many Germans now had. Behind her, a group of small children watched with wide eyes. The children, as so often, looked almost properly fed: the result of parents going hungry. Tonya felt an instant sympathy for the woman, who was roughly her own age.

  Rokossovsky continued to fuss. She calmed him down, saying, ‘Ssh! The egg can’t teach the chicken.’ It was logic he instantly accepted, and he went obediently quiet. He tugged the coal, carrots and potatoes from the truck. The German woman inspected them, insisting on burrowing deep into each sackload to be sure that they hadn’t been filled out with stones or logs at the bottom. Rokossovsky, speaking Russian, but whispering anyway, began telling Tonya what kind of exchange would be acceptable: watches, clocks, jewellery, gold, china, carpentry tools, saucepans, decent clothes, lace. The list ran on. Tonya shushed him again.

  She introduced herself to the German woman, who was called Gisela.

  Tonya adopted a very sharp voice, almost a shout, and said, ‘Gisela, you must make it look as if I’m bargaining very hard. Answer me angrily to begin with.’

  There was a quick flash of understanding in the woman’s sharp-featured face – hunger made every face sharp – then her old suspicious expression returned.

  She shouted back, ‘I will answer you angrily, but what do you want for all this?’

  Tonya – using the tone of voice her father had once used, before age and alcohol had rendered him feeble – yelled back, ‘Anything reasonable. But I can’t accept rubbish or this man won’t use me again.’

  Gisela spat furiously on
the ground and flung up an arm. ‘You are very kind,’ she thundered. ‘We are all nearly starving here and your verdammte cousins in the tank corps have already robbed us of almost everything.’

  The ludicrous conversation continued. Gisela was little short of a genius at it. Her tone and expression varied between rage, scorn and stubborn refusal to debate.

  In the meantime, with her words, she told Tonya that she had four children; that her husband had died in Russia, that Tonya would be very welcome to come to dinner any time, that if only women had been in charge of things the world would be a much happier place.

  At times Tonya wondered if they were overdoing the theatrics, but Rokossovsky looked rapt in pleasure and admiration. Slowly Gisela brought out a pile of offerings – a poor-quality carpet, a non-working clock, three old saucepans, some foolish little ornaments made of straw and embroidered cotton, a real oil painting, a few other things besides.

  ‘Do you think my colleague will be happy with that?’ Tonya hectored, her voice now beginning to go hoarse. ‘I don’t know what he normally accepts for this sort of thing.’

  Gisela – who now stood with hanging head, as though cowed and browbeaten into submission – said, ‘He should be. This is less than normal, but you can tell him that the tankists have been robbing us. That much is true at least.’

  Tonya nodded. She turned to Rokossovsky and began to apologise for the relatively poor deal she’d struck. He shook his head, eyes wide with awe.

  ‘You were splendid,’ he cried. ‘You really had her begging for mercy. That old wet hen! I wish I’d brought you here before. I’m an old fox, but whiskers can’t take the place of brains. You sent her clucking from the yard!’

  Rokossovsky began to clear his treasures into the back of the truck.

  Tonya turned to the woman, who had tears of gratitude standing in her eyes. Tonya wanted desperately to embrace her. How long had it been since she’d felt that kind of touch? She’d experienced something warm with Valentina and something courteous, even gracious, with Marta. But in neither case had she felt the instant rapport she’d built with Gisela.

  Crossly, Tonya said, ‘If I wanted to get a letter to Berlin, could you send it?’

  Still humble, still defeated, Gisela answered. ‘Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your help. Of course I can send a letter for you, but it may be opened on the way. Everything now is spies, soldiers and policemen.’

  ‘No, it would have to be secret. There’s a man there… I want to join him, but I’m not at liberty myself.’

  Again, there was that quick movement of understanding flashing deep in Gisela’s brown eyes. ‘Let me think. There may be ways. Will you be here next time?’

  Tonya nodded.

  ‘Let me think. I’ll tell you next time.’

  ‘Thank you. It would mean everything.’

  Again, Tonya wanted to hug her, but Rokossovsky would never have trusted her again if she’d done so. The two women, still in role, nodded farewell. Rokossovsky, exultant at his triumph but becoming nervous, gunned the engine. Tonya climbed in next to him. Rokossovsky put the truck into gear and roared away up the hill.

  8

  All that summer it was the same thing. More and more, Misha felt he was on the wrong track, but couldn’t for the life of him work out what the right track would be. He didn’t give up. Apart from anything else, his business was thriving and would have taken him into the east zone continually anyway. But for the first time, he allowed his search for Tonya to slacken in intensity. His bedtime stories to Rosa grew in length again. The family took time off. And – the biggest change of all – they moved house. Rosa, via a schoolmate, happened to learn of a little cottage that backed onto the grounds of Rosa’s old UNRRA orphanage. The cottage had been used by a group of British nurses, and as a result, was in good repair and ready to move into. Misha had called on Brandt for some overdue payments, which the black-market man had handed over in a mixture of scrip dollars, Reichsmarks, cigarettes and a strange array of other oddments: whole hams, cases of wine, a clock, a forty-litre drum of petrol. The money had been enough to pay for the house, and Rosa, Willi and Misha all moved across one Sunday in September, pushing their belongings in a borrowed handcart. Willi grumbled, of course. In place of his much beloved Nothing Factory, he would now have to put up with the bourgeois cosiness or Gemütlichkeit that he, in theory anyway, so detested. Misha bought him a second-hand American camera and a supply of film and the complaints soon evaporated.

  As for Rosa, she was, of course, ecstatic. She had charged around the house, feeling the glass in all the windows, opening and closing the curtains for the sheer joy of having them, insisting on laying the table for dinner because that allowed her to spread out the clean linen tablecloth. Misha had watched her joy, wondering if he should accept that Tonya would never be there to share it.

  And then, finally, he got a break.

  It was one of those back-to-front discoveries that revealed nothing to begin with, but which, when looked at the other way around, promised to reveal absolutely everything.

  It had happened in the desolation of a failing optical products factory in Weimar. The plant had been one of the worst he’d seen: an echoing shell, staffed by ghosts. The manager himself had been in wistful, almost elegiac, mood.

  ‘Yes, my choices get narrower by the day. There’s no real prospect of rebuilding this business. The local Ivans understand that, but they have their political bosses in Berlin and their bosses’ bosses in Moscow. Sooner or later, someone will have to pay. For me, the only real choice is fleeing to the West or a camp in the woods.’

  The manager had waved out towards the sea of beech trees beyond the town.

  ‘A camp?’ asked Misha, surprised by the manager’s use of the word. The Soviets imprisoned people freely of course. They deported them to their loathsome labour battalions and the Gulag. But camps?

  ‘No, no, of course.’ The manager dropped his hand. ‘I only meant…’

  He didn’t say what he meant. He’d steered hard away from the subject as though regretting bringing it up.

  That was it: the breakthrough.

  To begin with, Misha had thought nothing of it. He’d begun the long drive back through the woods, heading east towards Berlin. The light was golden, but not as warm as earlier in the summer. The leaves on the trees were just beginning to be tinted with gold, as though too much summer sun had worn away the green. Misha drove fast, wanting to be back in time to put Rosa to bed – something that mattered even more now that Willi had set up as a photographer and his always-uncertain hours had become more erratic than ever. His jeep-style bucket car, or Kübelwagen, jounced and leaped on the rutted roads. Taking a corner too fast, Misha encountered a convoy of Soviet military vehicles heading straight for him, blocking the road. There was no time to brake, so Misha flung his car off the road and came bumping to a halt in a spray of leaf-fall and underbrush. He killed the ignition.

  The convoy ground its way past. Misha noted what he could: convoy size, regimental markings, any senior officers’ cars. All these details and more he memorised and would relay to Harry Hollinger in due course. He didn’t know how much use the Englishman could make of such reports, but he did know that the Western Allies were worried about Soviet intentions. Every little detail of troop movements could help Hollinger’s analysts build up a picture of what was going on. The last truck in the convoy grumbled past in a roar of exhaust smoke, then moved off to leave the road and woods in silence once again. Misha put his hand back to the ignition.

  He turned the key.

  Or rather, he began to turn the key, until the tumblers inside were engaged. Another one degree of turn would engage the ignition. But instead of completing the movement, he withdrew his hand.

  ‘The only real choice is fleeing to the West or a camp in the woods.’

  It had been a strange thing for the manager to say, but that wasn’t what had suddenly caught Misha’s attention. He remembered the man’s
hand movement. He had originally held his hand so that it was pointing roughly westwards out of the window. Then he’d glanced out at the forest and adjusted his hand so that it had pointed north-west. If there wasn’t a camp, then why adjust hand position? If there was a camp, then why deny it?

  All of a sudden, those questions seemed suddenly immense, momentous, hanging in the air like artillery smoke over a battlefield.

  Moving quickly again, Misha backed the car out of its intimate clinch with the Thüringen forest. Swinging back onto the road, he pointed the car not east to Rosa and Berlin, but back west the way he had come. He drove intently, angrily, first west to Weimar, then north, then west again.

  The forest closed and thickened around the car. The sound of his engine was the only human sound audible for miles. The air was full of sunlight and bird noise, the quick scurry of squirrels. When he reached junctions in the road, he hesitated. He examined any road signs and any tracks gouged into the soft roadside grass. He navigated partly by judgement, mostly by intuition. The light began to soften as the big orange sun plunged towards the horizon.

  Then Misha found a sign. The sign was in Russian only, not German. It read ‘Special Camp Number 2’ with an arrow pointing up a heavily-rutted road.

  Misha felt the sudden clamour and jabber of excitement, a feeling made up of sweating palms, a cold rush of adrenalin, the sudden focused clarity of thought.

  Misha took his car off the road and plunged right into the forest, far enough into the undergrowth that the vehicle’s flat grey lines wouldn’t be visible. Misha kept a pair of binoculars in the car. He didn’t ordinarily like using them – the risk of being denounced as a spy was too great – but now was no time to worry. He took the binoculars and darted off into the undergrowth, proceeding uphill, into the fading tree-filtered sunlight.

  9

  It took Rokossovsky and his accomplices in the quartermaster’s office two weeks to accumulate enough produce to be worth selling. The first trip they made, Gisela was away and Tonya had to bargain with a rodent-like man, who seemed to live in another part of the warehouse. Tonya didn’t trust him at all. She saw in him the classic black-marketeer, shifty and self-interested. She bargained hard and got a much better deal than the time before. Rokossovsky again was ecstatic.