‘It reaches deep enough with me.’
‘These memories are recent. They are not buried. Something releases them within your mind, something deep within yourself that you would like to stay buried for ever. There is a trigger. What it is remains a mystery.’
‘You’re the doctor. What do you think?’
She laughed. ‘I know what Freud would think. He would look at you and he would think to himself: guilt. That is it. English guilt.’
I wasn’t sure if she meant it seriously or not.
‘Why English guilt?’
‘The English are born guilty. The first word they learn to say is sorry.’
‘I don’t feel guilty.’
‘You think you don’t feel guilty.’
‘I’ve nothing to be guilty about.’
‘You think you have nothing to be guilty about.’
‘Are you suggesting a course of psychoanalysis?’
‘I am suggesting nothing. I am trying to make you laugh.’
She was laughing herself, her head thrown back and her body arching away from me. I wanted to reach out and touch her, to take her in my arms and hold her to me. I did not want this moment to pass.
‘Is that better?’ Her face was close to mine, her smile still there. ‘You looked so worried just now.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You see? You apologize. You are always sorry, you English. Even when it’s not your fault. It is in your nature.’
We laughed again and she poured me some more tea.
‘What happens now?’ I asked.
‘What you are really asking is where is Mika.’
‘I don’t want to be a burden to you.’
‘I am pleased you are here,’ she said, and it sounded genuine. ‘Mika wants you to stay a few days until it is quiet once more. Then you will be able to leave.’
‘Will I see Mika again?’
‘Probably not. He will telephone with instructions about your departure. That is all.’
We talked on through the morning. She told me she had trained to be a doctor before the war and had worked in casualty stations near the front line during the Winter War. She had seen men die, but she had expected that. What had distressed her was the terrible nature of the dying she witnessed, the dreadful injuries men inflicted on one another and how the wounded could live on though their bodies were shattered beyond repair. Sometimes she had willed her patients to die to release them from pain.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I wanted the power to kill, to put the poor creatures out of their misery.’
‘Do your memories of that time come back to haunt you?’ I asked.
‘No more.’
‘I envy you.’
‘All that is over now. I have made a new life. Those memories are are under my control. I bury them in my new experiences with my mothers and their babies.’
‘But you still help Mika.’
‘Mika is all of my family I have left. He knows I think what he is doing is wrong.’
‘He is fighting for a cause he believes in.’
‘No, he is fighting for revenge, he is fighting because that is all he knows and he cannot give it up. Perhaps you are too. Perhaps that is why you have nightmares.’
I wanted to tell her about myself then, but before I could say anything, she said: ‘Come. It is dark again now. It is safe to go out. I will show you this city where I live.’
I have never known a city whose nature through the seasons matched that of its people more closely than Helsinki. In winter, deprived of the light, it is a dour place, its buildings granite-hard and grey, its people concentrating all their energies on outfacing the long days of darkness and cold. In summer, when light rules unopposed, the streets are never quiet, whatever the hour. A kind of summer madness takes over, a real coming to life after the rigours of winter. Even the houses seem changed, the greens, blues, yellows and reds of their painted walls making the streets seemed decked with enormous flags.
But the festival of summer is short-lived: soon after midsummer, the days start to shorten again, the extraordinary warmth of the Gulf Stream ebbs away and the long journey into the darkness and the cold begins once more.
But I love that city. I love its intimacy, I love the decorations on the buildings, each carved stone or shaped brick expressing a sense of the country and its people and their slow fight for independence. I love its Russianness, the beech trees and the Chekhovian houses in the diplomatic quarter. But most of all I love the water that surrounds it, so green and inviting in the summer months, so grey and treacherous in winter.
It was on that cold and blustery afternoon that I fell in love with the city and in my mind, Tanya and the city became one.
*
‘What will you do now?’
Mika had telephoned earlier. Arrangements for my departure had been made. I had picked up my ticket from the ferry office. In a few hours I would be on my way. Tanya was in the kitchen making me something to eat before I left.
‘I go back the way I came,’ I said.
‘Home?’
She had her back to me as she stirred something in a saucepan.
‘Berlin isn’t home. Berlin is where I work.’
At that moment Berlin had no reality. It was a distant city on the map whose streets I didn’t know, whose people I had never met, somewhere I never wanted to see again.
‘What do you do there?’
‘I ask the locals questions. If they give the right answers, they get a tick against their names, if they don’t, a cross. Something like that.’
We had been together for more than forty-eight hours. In that time we had only touched when she had taken my arm in the street. Now, in a few hours, we would say goodbye and I would probably never see her again.
‘You don’t sound happy about it.’
‘I hate it.’
The words were out before I knew what I had said. Tanya turned towards me at once.
‘Since I met you that is the first time you ever tell me how you feel about anything. Why are you so afraid of saying what you feel?’
That’s when the confession began. I told her things I didn’t even know I knew or thought or felt, things that had been buried deep in me for a long time. It was like talking about someone else, someone whose existence I would rather not have owned up to.
I talked about the war, about those few but soul-destroying moments of fear when you think your life is about to end, and the humiliating sense of relief when you know you are still alive. How the ordinariness of life, everyday sights and sounds – the sun rising, a bird singing, rain falling – suddenly become more precious than gold. I described the humour and the boredom of war, the way that fighting with men over weeks and months changes you so that afterwards, when the war is over, you are no longer who you were before, and how sometimes you don’t know who you are any longer. I told her about my father, about the paradox of his detachment from me and yet what I felt to be his need of me to fulfil his idea of what I should be. How I would always fail him in that respect, and how that sense of failure shamed me, since I longed for him to accept what I had become.
Tanya said very little. She didn’t need to. The words poured out of me. At some point we ate something, I can’t remember what it was; we drank, and I talked. Once I looked at my watch but she covered the face with her hand.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘This is more important.’
It was after midnight when I stopped, and the ferry had sailed two hours before.
‘Why did you let me do that?’ I asked.
‘Once you started,’ she said, smiling, ‘I don’t think anyone could have stopped you.’
‘And now?’
‘I think you have to stay another night.’
She bent towards me, put her hands on my face and kissed me. I took her in my arms and felt the weight of her body against mine.
‘Why did you not do this earlier?’ she asked after a while. There was nothing I
could say, except confess my weakness that this was what I had wanted from the moment I had first seen her.
‘But I thought you did not like me,’ she said, between kisses. After all, you have seen me naked. I have not met many men like that, you know.’
All the time beneath the surface lay her laughter, the gentle mockery both of me and of herself.
‘Then I thought you did not like women.’ She laughed again. ‘I have heard dreadful stories about your English schools. Then I listened to you and I knew why. You are afraid. Not of guns and bullets, I am sure you are a brave man. But you are afraid of yourself. Of the person you have become. The bad dreams will not stop until you accept who you are.’
Her hands were on my face, soothing me, drawing the pain out of me.
‘You are like a man frozen. So I have to make the first move.’ More laughter. ‘We are not used to that in our country. Finnish girls are shy. But I could not let you go away to Berlin without telling you that I have fallen in love with you. Will you tell me that you do not hate me for saying that? Or will you look at me like a sphinx for ever?’
*
We lay together in the dark.
‘What happens next?’ I asked.
‘For most men that would be enough for now. Perhaps with the English it is different. I have never made love to an Englishman before.’
‘And … us?’
‘In a few hours you will catch a ferry and go back to your Germans and their questions, and I will go back to my women and their babies.’
‘We say goodbye and that’s it?’
‘What else can we do?’
‘But—’ I was confused. ‘You said you loved me.’
‘You never said you loved me.’ It was neither a reproof nor a question. It was a simple statement of fact.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No,’ she said, sitting up and leaning over me. ‘No guilt. No sorry. I have said I love you. I have shown I love you. You are here beside me now, in my bed, this is my body you have made love to, this is my heart that is beating here,’ and she took my hand and held it to her breast.
She put her arms on my shoulders and pushed me back into the pillows.
‘You have shown me that you love me too, I know that. I would like to hear you say it, but I know it is difficult for you. I will have to believe in your silence.’
I tried to put my arms around her but she pushed me away. For the first time I saw that behind the laughter, there was uncertainty too.
I looked into her blue eyes, saw her soft golden hair falling around her face and felt the warmth of her body over mine. In that moment I experienced an intensity of feeling stronger than anything I had known before. Then something broke inside me, and I felt like I was bursting out of the restraint that had held me captive all my life. For the first time I became someone I could recognize without shame, someone I could face without fear. I had discovered myself in her embrace.
‘Tanya.’
All the love and emotion that I had withheld from others all my life poured out of me then. I told her that I loved her, that I had never loved anyone else; that with her I was complete, whole; that with her I was someone I had not believed I could ever be.
She held me in the dark, speaking to me in Finnish. I could not understand the words but I sensed what she was saying, and I wanted to weep with happiness.
‘In the war,’ she said later, ‘I learned to ignore the future. Remembering yesterday meant that I was still alive. And there was now, what I was doing, where I was doing it, that meant I was alive too. But I never thought about anything after that because I could never be sure that I would be there to live through it. Be happy now. That is what matters. It is a useful lesson.’
‘I can’t leave you like this. I can’t walk out of here not knowing if I will ever see you again.’
‘I don’t want you to. It would break my heart if you did. But I do not know what to say.’
Nor did I. Our lives were being pulled apart before they had a chance to come together. It seemed impossible, wrong.
‘I will come back. As soon as I can.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘We both know that will not be possible. Don’t say it. Don’t think it.’
‘I won’t go then.’
‘Stay here and live with me? I would like that, but it is impossible. It is not safe for you here. The Russians will soon know that Mika was involved in Krasov’s escape. They will put pressure on our government – they are expert at that – and before long the police will start to look and it is not hard to find an Englishman in Helsinki, even in winter.’
‘I will write to you, every day, every week, twice a day. You will be drowned in a sea of my letters.’
She laughed and put her fingers to my lips.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We will not write to each other. We do not need letters to remind us of what we already know.’
‘What can we do?’
‘You will go away now. Don’t come back in the winter. Don’t write to me. Don’t send messages. Remember me, and I will remember you. We will be together in our minds. Come back in the summer. One day there will be a knock at the door and I will open it and you will be there. We will go to the lakes. There I will look after you and love you and you will love me. That is when we will start our life together.’
She traced the contours of my face with her fingers.
‘I will wait a year,’ she said. ‘If you do not come back in a year, then I will know that you no longer want me.’
I told her that was impossible, I would always love her. I would say her name a thousand times a day and when the days grew longer I would return.
‘I will wait a year,’ she said again. ‘Not a single day more.’
PART THREE
1
DANNY
I left the army in March to work for Charlie Faulkner. The disease that had begun to cripple him since we’d first met had struck another blow at the end of January, and by the time I joined him in Eccleston Street he was in a wheelchair. Each morning, at nine sharp, his chauffeur Thomas would bring the Rolls to a halt outside the office and Charlie would be delivered into the hands of the redoubtable Beryl, who had been with him since his early days in Manchester.
On Mondays we would have what Charlie called his ‘prayer meeting’. We would analyse the political news in the Sunday papers, review the past week’s events and refine our own timetable of work for the coming week. Each Monday afternoon, Charlie was driven to South Street for his regular meeting with Watson-Jones. We never knew what was said there nor how much of our work was influenced by their discussion. We imagined that some hard talking had gone on about spheres of influence and that Charlie had won. Whether that was true or not, it was what we wanted to believe, and Charlie never did anything to discourage us. Watson-Jones never came to Eccleston Street.
Charlie’s great gift was his memory. He would sit listening to us, head bowed, drawing star shapes in pencil on a pad, never taking notes. That did not prevent him from recalling with alarming accuracy conversations that might have taken place a week or more before, when we had made promises which for some reason or other were now not being met. We learned a number of lessons in the early days. It was simply not worth arousing the other side of Charlie Faulkner, when the sophistication he had acquired during his years in London was ditched in favour of what Beryl described as his ‘plain face’. He could be downright crude if he chose, but you were never left in any doubt about what he wanted or where he stood, and when you delivered he was never short in his praise.
There were three of us besides Beryl: myself and two researchers, Roger Blake and Tony Meadows, both recently down from Oxford, too young to have fought in the war. They were the writers on the team (‘my bright young men’, as Charlie called them) drafting speeches for Watson-Jones, creating the copy for the newsletter we established, packaging the endless research projects into pamphlets and reports. I was what Charlie described as the ‘team leader’, by
dint of my age and experience, though I was the oldest by only three or four years. I was never excluded from any political discussion, but I found I never had very much to say, and I don’t think Charlie expected me to contribute. But once a course of action had been decided, he looked to me to make it happen.
It was an unlikely structure, but it worked because we were all ‘Charlie’s boys’. He was the driving force in our lives, a man even then in his last years with a quite extraordinary level of energy and commitment. We soon understood why Beryl had spent her life with him. If you got on with Charlie – and many didn’t – you came to love him. I wasn’t alone in wishing I’d known him in his prime.
*
I found those first weeks of civilian life very difficult. As the train pulled out of Charlottenburg station I had imagined I would be able to cast off the taste and smell of Berlin and all that it represented in my life, but memories of my time in occupied Germany persisted. I felt uncomfortable, uprooted, unable to settle. I was haunted by the despairing faces of the Germans I’d rejected in the months I’d been there. The London I returned to was not the city I had known in the past. Many of the landmarks had gone, obliterated for ever in the bombing, but the changes went deeper as I and others like me tried to reassemble our lives. Wartime privations continued though we were no longer at war. Our experiences in uniform made the customs and attitudes of the society we had fought to preserve seem hopelessly out of date. We searched for new certainties, only to find they were not there. If we wanted them, we would have to make them ourselves. It was a mystifying and unsettling time, made stranger because I no longer had the comforting support of khaki and rank to sustain the decisions I needed to take. All of a sudden I was on my own. It was what I had wanted, but coming to terms with it was nowhere near as straightforward as I had expected.
I rented a small flat in Strutton Ground, near Great Smith Street in Westminster, three rooms above a cobbler. I got to know Manny Leman and his long-suffering wife Esther because Manny, a Latvian Jew who had been brought to this country when he was ten, was unashamedly curious.
Making Enemies Page 22