Pavel & I
Page 1
Pavel & I
A Novel
DAN VYLETA
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part One The Midget
1 18 December 1946
2 21 December 1946
3 22 December 1946
4 23 December 1946
5 24 December 1946
Part Two Pavel & I
Part Three Haldemann
1 25 December 1946
2 26 December 1946
3 27 December 1946
4 3 January 1947
5 3 January 1947
6 3–4 January 1947
Part Four After Pavel
1 Spring 1947
2 May 1964
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Imprint
For Chantal, and for Rick. You read me first.
I was in the habit of observing the ways of the faubourg, its residents and their characters .[…] Observation had already become deeply ingrained in me, it took hold of the soul without neglecting the body, or rather, it seized on external details so well that it immediately moved beyond them, it gave me the ability to live the life of a person upon whom I had trained my sights by allowing me to substitute myself for him, like the dervish in 1001 Nights who stole people’s bodies and souls after pronouncing certain words over them.
Honoré de Balzac,
‘Facino Cane’
It is a striking and generally observed characteristic of the conduct of paranoiacs that they endow small, negligible details in the behaviour of others with enormous significance; they interpret these details and find in them grounds for far-reaching conclusions.
Sigmund Freud,
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Part One
The Midget
1
18 December 1946
The boy was always around him then. Time and again he had to shoo him away into his room, only to see him re-emerge a few moments later, chewing at his lip with crooked teeth, and fussing. They did not speak. The boy tried to now and again, in German, or else in that flat-vowelled English he had, but Pavel never answered with more than a gesture until the boy, too, took to this language of signs and trained his face to betray his purpose. It was during this time that the pain in his kidneys grew worst. They sat in him like stones, cold against his skin. He would trace their outlines gingerly, lying face down upon his bed. Every half-hour or so they bid him get up, his kidneys, walked him over to the corner and pushed him to his knees in front of his chamber pot’s blood-flecked rim. At first he’d had qualms about exposing himself before the child and had tried to shield his nudity with the flat of his hand. Now it did not matter to him, and he even felt grateful when the boy drew near and stood over him, a hand upon his shoulder, and watched him squeeze crimson drops from his organ. Afterwards he would help him up, unbend those stiffened knees; time and again he had to walk them supple across the hardwood floor. Upon every turn, his image in the looking glass, loathsome to him now with its hollow cheeks and stained overcoat, a woollen hat drawn low into his brow. And behind him, watching, the boy with the crooked teeth, running grubby fingernails across the window’s frost-lined glass and etching his name, always his name, Anders.
There was no noise to the night, no means of telling the time. He did not have a watch, had not owned a watch for a long time now. His kidneys were his only timekeepers, that and the interval it took for the frost to eat into the boy’s name and obscure it. Pavel longed for liquor but had none. Perhaps in the morning he would send the boy to find him some. He had cigarettes, of course, but dared not smoke them. Cigarettes were the only currency left to the city, would buy him coals tomorrow, could buy him company if he should seek it, six Luckies for a sympathetic lap, and less if all he required were the services of a pair of German lips, cold-chapped and bare of lipstick that cost more than the sex. Once or twice that night he would bend to prise a pack from under the corner of his mattress, and sniff at the tobacco through layers of wrapping for minutes at a time, the boy’s eyes upon him, crooked teeth dug deep into his childish lip. Then his kidneys would bid him kneel again before his blood-encrusted idol, his manhood between fingers that had long lost all sensation. ‘God,’ he cursed once, and meant nothing by it. Behind him, the boy moved his right hand in deliberate provocation, touched chin, belly and both sides of the chest. ‘Amen,’ he said, hardly a whisper, and for the first time in their month-long acquaintance Pavel had the urge to lash out at him, though truth be told he loved that boy. Then the phone rang, rang shrill in the half-lit room, and before he even had time to wonder that the line was working again, he answered it mechanically, giving his number, one palm against the icy window, melting yet another hole into Anders’ frostbitten name.
It was the winter of ’46, Berlin, the city trussed up into twenty pieces like a turkey on Thanksgiving dinner, eight to the Russians and word had it not a woman there who had not been raped. A winter of death, people freezing in their unheated flats, impoverished, hungry, scraping together something less than a living from the crumbs that fell from their occupiers’ tables. And yet, amongst the misery, the first stirrings of recovery: a nightclub in Schöneberg, a working man’s brothel in Wedding; some bars around Zoogarten and in the December air the reek of the monkey cage. Small-time businesses, American customers, local staff. It was in one of these that Boyd White was standing, one eye out onto the street, where snow was trying to bury his car. He shielded the phone with his girth, his collar turned high over neck and chin, counting off the rings under his breath. Pavel picked up after the third.
‘Your kidneys keeping you awake?’ Boyd asked and listened to the lie that answered.
‘Glad you’re feeling better. Listen, Pavel, I need help. Are you alone?
‘The boy? Send him away.
‘What do you mean you can’t?
‘I’ll be there in ten. Make sure the downstairs door is unlocked. I’ll have my hands full.
‘Let’s say I’m bringing some laundry.
‘Laundry, Pavel. A man’s gotta wash.
‘Ten minutes, Pavel. Just wait in your place. And get rid of the boy.’
He rang off and asked the barkeep what sort of booze they were serving.
‘Potato vodka. Chocolate liqueur. French brandy, but it’s watered down and costs a fortune.’
‘You tell that to all your customers?’
‘Why not? My boss is an Arschloch.’
Boyd shrugged and bought a half-bottle of vodka. He paid with some food coupons and whatever was left of a pack of cigarettes. They shared one, he and the barkeep, watching the snow through the dirty windows.
‘That your car?’ the barman asked enviously.
‘Sure,’ said Boyd. ‘If someone asks, I was never here.’ He put another half-dozen cigarettes on the counter. ‘You hear me?’
‘Hear who?’
‘Thatta boy.’
Boyd threw the butt of his cigarette onto the floor and made his way out into the cold. He walked over to the car, opened the back. Inside lay a trunk, the kind one uses for overseas travel, brass on the corners and two belts to hold it shut. Boyd ran a hand along its base, testing for wet. Then he got in, turned the ignition, and set off for Pavel’s place. A ten-minute drive on ice-slick roads and all the while his lips were moving, rehearsing the words he would have to speak. Trying them on for size.
‘I swear to God I never saw him coming. I mean, Jesus Christ, who drives around looking out for a fucking midget? All I know is I was driving through one of the Russian sectors, a quart of rye for company, and then I hit him, hit something, and felt it dragging under the car. I get out and it’s snowing hard, my breath showing in the air and not a soul out
. Some godforsaken alleyway, a handful of bathroom windows sticking out of the ruins, frost-blinkered glass, and not a light to be seen. At first I think it’s my tail lights that are tinting the snow, but when I get my flashlight from out of the glove box, I see it for what it is, a path of red starting ten yards back and leading right up to my rear fender. So I grab under, feeling spooked, you know, figuring I hit a dog or something, and what is it I touch? Two hundred dollars’ worth of cashmere wool, that’s what, warm and soggy with somebody’s dying. It takes me a while to drag him out, he’s got himself stuck to the axle, and by the time I am done and stand over the body something strange has started to happen. The alley’s filled with a half-dozen cats, runty little things with their ribs showing and their tails worn high like they’re pointing to the moon. I stand there, breathing froth into the snowflakes and watch them gather round me, soft kitty paws, and now and then a patrol car rolls past in the distance. The cats are circling us, tails cocked at the moon, their muzzles bloodied by the tail lights’ glow. They are vicious bastards, let me tell you: frost on their whiskers, eyes like cut glass, a half-dozen pairs, on me and the dead man. And then they start licking. Licking at the snow I mean, the blood in the snow, they lap it up like mother’s milk. And all the while from their throats, from their whole bodies, there issues this sound, you hear it with your skin, it’s like an engine running under your palm. That’s when I realize they are purring, man, purring as they feed on the midget’s death.
‘It really gave me the willies.
‘Anyway, so I figure, no point sticking around, only I’m worried: that cashmere coat, man, it gives you pause. What if I nailed someone important, you know? So I bend down to have a closer look, and to check the pulse, on the neck, see, right up under the jawbone, only clearly the neck’s all broke, and then I see his collar. Midget wears a pair of fucking stars, red stars, wears them through the button holes. I nearly crapped myself I got so scared. So here I am in the middle of the Russian sector, my car’s all busted up, a dead midget at my feet, the cats are purring like it’s Christmas and Easter all rolled into one, and the stiff is a fucking Russky apparatchik or something. I gotta think of something fast. And then it comes to me – the suitcase. It’s been rolling around in my car forever; some clothes are in it, money, papers, a toothbrush, just in case, you know, only it’s as big as a fucking tuba case. Plenty big for a midget. There is no time to lose. I upend the case right on the back seat of my car, and then I throw the body inside, it’s a bit of a squeeze after all, but hell, he don’t mind no more, and two minutes later I’m off, the cats still licking up evidence and enough snow coming down to cover my tracks inside the hour.
‘Thank Christ it was a midget. Just imagine he was fully grown. Doing an ax job out in an alley.
‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
That was his story anyway, Boyd White’s, the night he killed the midget, packed him away in a suitcase, and carried him up four floors to Pavel’s two-bedroom in a quiet part of Charlottenburg. Boyd was California-born, a crook and grifter by vocation, a hard man grown fat in a city of starvation. For the most part he spoke like a second-rate stooge from a Chandler novel, though he had his moments of eloquence, too, like the present one in which he conjured up cats’ tails taking aim at the winter moon.
You have to wonder about those cats, though, emaciated to be sure – how did they ever survive? It was the winter of ’46, winter of death, people freezing while taking craps in the outhouse, you heard the spiel. Most cats in the city had long been eaten, their fur turned into gloves and collars, the black market awash with viola strings. Berlin that winter was dog-eat-dog and worse, and that night its vengeful gods had thrown a wrench into Boyd’s spokes, if you will pardon my metaphors, and here he came running to the one friend he had left in the city, ran up four floors and barged through the door without so much as a knock, the middle of the night and a dead midget in his fist.
What the hell was he thinking?
When the door had opened and Boyd’d come in, Pavel had been down on his knees again, straining before the chamber pot. It had taken him a moment or two to collect himself, struggle up against his kidneys’ weight. Then he had stood and studied the bulk of the trunk pulling at Boyd’s arm, the crease of worry that ran through the man’s face; had taken in the patch of wet that had collected in one of the suitcase’s brass-encrusted corners, threatening to drip.
‘What’s in the suitcase?’ he’d asked, stiff fingers struggling to button his fly.
‘You have a look,’ Boyd had grunted, letting go of the trunk and shuffling over to the bed to sit down. He’d lit a cigarette, silver Zippo lighter, had inhaled. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’
It certainly didn’t look good. The midget was four foot one, maybe four two, Boyd had had to bend him to make him fit. Not that he wasn’t bent enough already. As far as Pavel could tell both legs were broken, and one of the arms, at elbow and wrist, and some of the head was missing, too. The body was leaking blood from all ends; it had soaked into his expensive tan suit and gave him a jellyfish slipperiness that sent a wave of nausea through Pavel’s guts. Quickly, ashamed of himself, he turned the face over, but, of course, he didn’t recognize it. He did not know any midgets. There was a pencil moustache and the teeth were broken. Inside lolled a serrated tongue.
Gently, getting down into a crouch to do it, Pavel closed the lid of the trunk, then limped over to the sink to scrub his hands. He had to hack a piece of ice from out of a bucket and run its jagged edge over fingernails and knuckles. It was as though he was carving away the blood stains, planing his skin like a carpenter.
As Pavel stood there, the ice pick sticking to his palm, hammering away at the ice, Boyd coughed and offered up his tale. ‘I swear to God I never saw him coming,’ he said. Pavel only half listened, his soul turned inward, tuned in to his breathing, his heart’s anxious goose-step marching him back to the war’s many corpses. God, how he hated that midget just then. And all the time he stood there, his fingers white against the sink, Boyd talking kittens, he kept wondering whether the boy could hear him through the bedroom door, and worse yet, understand.
There is no telling people. Take Pavel, for instance. By rights the midget should have broken his back, coming for a visit at a time like this; put him down like a sick dog. You picture him: a slight man, eyes like wet coals. Curved woman’s lips and skin so delicate you could trace the veins. The ears almost translucent, black hair worn parted, the teeth rocking from lack of fruit. A weak man in all respects. He had bad kidneys, and that was just the start of it. Pavel suffered from that terminal disease called empathy, forever trying to exchange points of view even with the boot that kicked him. He was a quiet man, intensely sincere, often silent for hours on end though capable of passionate outbursts during which his tongue kept tripping over the edge of words and everything came out as a muddle. He’d backtrack time and again to correct himself, for above all he wished to be sincere. A weak man, you see, brought up for the previous century, for a world of calling cards and drawing-room courting; for chessboard gambits and the Novel; for a quiet love of life. By rights he should have been, in his time and place, a sacrificial lamb. As it was, he turned into a bloodhound the minute he took the midget’s scent.
You don’t believe me? I spent hours and days eye to eye with Pavel, just us in the dark, some bars between us and the scuttle of roaches. I know Pavel like the back of my hand. And yet, time and again, I was surprised by him; he threw me, more than once, and there were moments when it felt like I had to start all over again.
Boyd, by contrast, does not compare. Boyd was twentieth-century through and through: a braggart, a womanizer, a boor. Boyd talked tough and had fists to back him up. Men liked Boyd, as did women; he wore spats as an affectation and thought them a sign of originality.
Forget about Boyd. I only spoke to Boyd once, and even then he had nothing of interest to say.
But we weren’t talking about Boyd. We were talkin
g about the boy, Anders, who stood ears pressed against the bedroom door, and tried his hardest to understand. What he was asking himself, in German no doubt, the word sticky in his child-mouth, was this: What the fuck is a mit-chut?
Whatever it was, it was dead, and Russian. The death did not bother the boy. He had seen plenty of it, had stolen from the stiff grasp of corpses more than once. Nor did he care that it was a Russian. What was there to care? One stiff was as good as another. He understood, too, why the man Boyd had not left him behind in the snow. The mit-chut was important, one way or another, and it was unwise to kill those who were important, even in Berlin. The boy and the crew he ran with had learned the city’s rules. You robbed those who looked like they had something, and avoided those who looked like they had too much. Russkies, Tommies, Amis – they were all off limits. You sweated locals, those who had made it through the war with a bag of gold under their pillows but were too stupid or too compromised to have found protection. This the boy had learned and learned well. You didn’t break the rules and walk away unbroken.
Which was to say that the man Boyd had made a mistake, and now he was sweating over it, with the thermometer at minus five. The boy had seen him around, driving his car, trading on the black market. He was a whore-man, a Zuhälter. He did not know the English word for it.
The conversation carried on. Anders listened, his ear at the keyhole, holding his breath so it wouldn’t drown out the voices.
‘What do you want to do?’ Pavel asked. He sounded cool, composed, only his teeth were chattering. The boy felt a pang of pride. Pavel wasn’t like the fat American. He had backbone, despite the disease.
‘How the fuck do I know? If it wasn’t so fucking cold, I’d drive him out to the river. Sink the little bastard.’
‘You could drop him in the woods.’