by Dan Vyleta
‘Too many guard patrols. Besides –’
‘Besides?’
‘He might still be useful. The midget.’
‘Did he have papers?’
‘Nothing. No wallet, no briefcase, not even a fucking wedding ring.’
‘Okay, Boyd, I want him out of my bedroom. Let’s carry him into the back room. The boy will give you a hand.’
He called him in then, but the boy had already started opening the door. He made a show of helping the man lift the trunk, but left him with all the weight. They manoeuvred it into the second bedroom and propped it up against the wall next to the window. It was surprisingly small, smaller than Anders, he measured himself out against it.
A mit-chut, thought Anders, must be some sort of dwarf.
When they returned to the front room, Pavel was back on his knees, trying to pee. Boyd seemed unembarrassed about the act. He sidled up next to him, frowning a little when he saw the blood. Once Pavel was finished and back on his feet there was a long silence. The boy kept away from them, trying to figure themout, the roomso cold he could count his every breath.
‘So you’re circumcised,’ Boyd said after twenty. ‘You a fucking kike or something?’
Pavel smiled at that, and Boyd smiled back. The boy didn’t understand the joke.
‘He needs penicillin,’ he said, addressing the man for the first time, and got ready to duck in case he should try to hit him.
‘Oh yeah? Says who, pipsqueak?’
They stared at each other like gunslingers from a cowboy film. The boy knew all about cowboy films. He wished he had a gun.
‘Boyd,’ said Pavel, ‘this is Anders. Anders, this is Boyd White. He and I used to be in the army together. He is –’
‘I know what he is. He’s a Zuhaälter.’
‘Yes,’ said Pavel softly, ‘he’s a pimp.’ He smiled at the word and stroked his aching back. It seemed to the boy that there had been reproach in his voice.
Boyd shrugged like it meant little to him. He peeled a pack of cigarettes from out of his shirt pocket, offered one to Pavel and then, grudgingly, one to the boy. Anders pocketed it without a word, thinking he would have it later, when Boyd was not around. The two men stood in the room, smoking, cupping their cigarettes in identical ways. It was Boyd who spoke.
‘You could go back, you know, Pavel. The army. Wasn’t as bad as all that, and they are desperate for interpreters. Christ, you speak all four languages. You could live like a king.’
Pavel shrugged and blew smoke. ‘What are you going to do now?’
‘Shove off before one of his friends runs off with my wheels.’ Boyd pointed at Anders with his cigarette. ‘Make some inquiries about the midget. I’ll come back with some drugs, coals and cigarettes.’
‘Let’s swap overcoats,’ he added. ‘Mine is warmer and it’ll drop to minus twenty over the next few days.’
Pavel accepted the charity. It irked the boy that he would accept it so easily. ‘It’s a kind of payment,’ he said to himself, to soothe his wounded pride. ‘Cheap,’ he told himself, ‘he’s getting off cheap,’ and searched for a bitter parting word.
At the door, the two men embraced like brothers, Boyd’s hands careful not to press upon the kidneys.
‘Belle,’ he said. ‘If something goes wrong, go look for Belle.’
‘Who’s she?’ Anders found himself asking, jealous of the embrace. ‘She some sort of whore?’
Boyd disentangled himself.
‘You should box his ears,’ he said to Pavel, but said it gently. ‘She’s one of my girls. She’s also –’
He broke off and took the time to smile to himself.
‘She’s something special, Pavel. I mean real special.
‘One day,’ he said, ‘I’ll make her Mrs White.’
The boy thought that even his smile looked fake.
And that’s how he left them, Boyd White, turned on his heel and swanned out, Pavel’s thin coat too small for his frame, and a stoop in his shoulders like he was still carting it around, the midget’s death, down the stairs and into his limousine that stood cold and lonely before the bomb-chewed kerb. Outside, the snow had stopped falling. It had become too cold for it.
I will say one thing for Boyd. He did a good job. I mean, for a bloody amateur, it had been one hell of a performance.
It was dawn before the boy fell asleep. Pavel waited him out patiently, reading to him from his favourite novel, trying to numb his own pain with his voice’s quiet rasp. Once or twice he almost dozed off, and caught the boy trying to sneak into the back room in order to investigate its secrets. Each time Pavel called him back without anger. Somewhat to his surprise, the boy obeyed without argument.
‘A mit-chut is some sort of dwarf?’ Anders asked him once. Pavel smiled at this.
‘Yes. Something like that.’
‘A dead Russian dwarf, eh?’ the boy sneered. ‘That God of yours has a sense of humour.’
Pavel did not rise to the bait. It was part of an ongoing theological debate they were having. He went back to the book and started reading. Eventually Anders succumbed to sleep. His breath rose above him like a plume. Pavel refrained from kissing him, lest he should wake. Now it was his turn to sneak off to see the midget. He took the bucket of ice along, and the cold shaft of the ice pick.
It took a while to wash the blood off the dead man’s face. Pavel had to don gloves to prevent the ice from sticking to his fingers and they made his hands clumsy. He did not bother much with the body, but closed the mouth above the broken teeth and combed the frozen hair with a penny comb that he warmed in one armpit. When he was done, the midget stood peacefully in the leaning trunk, though try as he might Pavel could not get the eyes to close. After some thought he lifted him out once more and struggled to free his overcoat, then inspected it inch by inch. At last he set it aside with approval: the coat was too dark to tell whether it was soiled by blood or something else. There was no point taking the shirt – it was not ripped, but stained a heavy, muddy red, especially at the back. To rob him of his trousers seemed undignified; besides, they would be too short for the boy. Pavel took the boots though, after some struggle, for he did not want to cut the laces; the socks too, for they were warm and new. Once he was done, he placed the midget back in his casket and stood him up against its back. The feet stood yellow and wooden upon the trunk’s lining, the nails chipped and dirty, coarse hair upon the toes. Shaken, Pavel wrapped them in an old towel, though some part or other always stuck out accusingly, the midget’s feet refusing to be forgotten. At last, Pavel gave up and sat down on a stool, right in front of the corpse. He sat there, for half an hour perhaps, and watched ice crystals spread across the midget’s glassy eyes, thinking to himself.
Thinking: ‘Winter.’
Thinking: ‘God, I hate winter.’
Trying to say a prayer for the midget, the words freezing in his mouth.
The last thing Pavel did was remove the red stars from the midget’s shirt collar and place them in his pocket. Then he closed the lid on the dead man, and returned to the front room where he covered the boy with the cashmere coat. He stretched out next to him and smelled his hands. Try as he might he could not smell the blood. He shrugged and told himself it was too cold for smells. As he drifted off, towards sleep and dreams, he mumbled a name.
‘Mrs Belle White.’
It sounded ridiculous to him, a thing from a fairy tale, and also beautiful. Beside him the boy, sleeping, blew plumes into the air, while the first rays of the sun began to probe the wall of ice that had grown upon their windows.
Anders woke mid-morning to find his new coat, along with the midget’s socks and boots. He put them on and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked good, like he was from money, although the boots pinched a little. Pavel was still asleep, his woollen hat drawn down over his eyes. Anders snuck next door, opened the trunk. The mit-chut looked clean and glass-eyed, only the feet were ugly. Anders went through his trouser pockets, but found not
hing apart from half a book of matches encrusted with frozen blood. He pocketed them out of habit, then went back to check on Pavel. The fever was still upon his brow, and his body shook with cold. The boy didn’t trust Boyd to keep his word and come back with medicine. He tied on two of his scarves, stole a number of leather-bound volumes from the bookshelves, and went out to find some for himself.
Penicillin.
Penicillin was worth much that winter; was worth gold, worth murder in this city of the sick. The boy knew all about penicillin. It’s how they had met, Pavel and he: it had brought them together, the boy thought it fate, thought penicillin some sort of God, the kind you went to war for, or else the kind that got you killed. Pavel had asked for it on the black market at Zoogarten station more than a month ago, when his kidneys had first started playing up. He wasn’t in uniform, wore a half-decent coat and spoke the language like a German. He looked game. Schlo’ had picked him up, eleven and a half with those clear-water eyes that always put the hook in suckers. Schlo’ had asked Pavel to show him how he was going to pay. Pavel had reached into a bag and unwrapped a china tea set, unchipped, along with a gold wedding ring.
‘Will it do?’ he’d asked as he watched the boy bite the ring. Schlo’ had nodded.
‘I ain’t got it here,’ he’d told Pavel. ‘Come and follow me.’ Anders wasn’t there to witness it, but he imagined Pavel noticing the tattoo upon the boy’s forearm as they walked away from the station. He had a quick eye for things like that, though he was blind to so much else. Schlo’ had led him on a right goose chase, deep into Charlottenburg, signalling to the boys who lingered on street corners, smoking, talking, pretending to play.
‘Right over there,’ he’d said, and then they had him, a dead end that finished in a pile of war rubble, twelve boys armed with clubs and stones, and Paulchen, their leader, showing off his father’s Luger. Anders took position right behind Pavel, gauging his weight, the quality of his shoes, making him for a German civil servant, a little down on his luck.
‘He’s got china and a wedding band,’ Schlo’ told them triumphantly, ‘and maybe some dough.’
Anders searched his pockets and found some dollars, along with his papers. He passed them over to Paulchen who took one look and started cursing.
‘You fucking idiot,’ he barked at Schlo’. ‘He’s a Yank.’
‘He speaks German!’
‘So what? You moron!’ And to Pavel, shoving the papers into his face: ‘Are these real?’
‘They are real,’ Pavel replied calmly.
It made him look up, Anders, the calmness of it and how he spoke without an accent. He found himself studying the man again, the slope of his shoulders, the thick dark hair. There was nothing there that prepared you for the calm.
‘You in the army?’ Paulchen wanted to know.
‘I used to be. Not any more.’
‘A civilian?’
‘Yes.’
The man took a cigarette from behind his ear and quietly lit it with a match he found in his shirt pocket. The gesture reeked of army; it was there in the way he held the cigarette, in the way he took in its smoke. It was to Anders like the stranger failed to understand the situation, or else he understood it and refused to play along. He turned his attention over to Paulchen, who stood feet spread, gun in fist, the soft outline of a moustache twitching upon his upper lip.
Anders could tell Paulchen wasn’t sure what he should do. The stranger didn’t conform. Foreigners were off-limits; mugging them could be dangerous. Then again, this one did not look like he had any juice; if he did he wouldn’t be buying penicillin on the black market. Paulchen shuffled and thought. The others waited him out. There was respect there. Rumour had it he had killed a man, in ’45, with a crowbar and the heels of his boots.
Pavel helped him make up his mind.
‘You can keep the tea set,’ he told Paulchen. ‘I get the wedding ring, the cash and the papers. That way, we both get something.’
They were preposterous terms. After all, they had him, twelve boys armed with clubs and stones, never mind the fucking Luger. He had no leverage other than being American, and Anders thought that if they burned his papers he wouldn’t even have that. You had to have papers to be somebody in Berlin, papers and friends. The man did not look like he had too many friends. But Paulchen bought it. Never thought twice about it. Not a word, not a threat – he just gave back the documents, threw him the ring.
‘Get moving,’ he said to Pavel, and Pavel walked off, smoking, a little limp to his gait from how his kidneys bothered him. Anders followed. No good reason, he just did. Something about the way he had lit up, and the terms he had bought himself. Or perhaps it was because he spoke German like that, like he had been born there, only perhaps a little softer, like he thought it a fragile tongue, one that would shatter in his mouth.
It was child’s play, following him. He never once looked back. Anders gave him a head start up the stairs of his building, but stayed close enough to make sure he knew which apartment he went into. When he crept close to press his ear against the wood there was nothing but silence. Anders sat there for the better part of the afternoon, with his back against the door and enough weight in his legs to make a run for it should he have to. He sat, sucked on caramels, and listened. The only sound he heard was the metallic rattle of a typewriter that started up after perhaps an hour and continued throughout the day. At long last Anders got up and knocked. He wasn’t sure why, but he knocked. The door opened a crack. Behind it, the man’s tired face and a shelf laden with books.
‘What do you want?’ asked the man in his mealy-mouthed German.
‘I can get you penicillin,’ Anders found himself saying.
‘You what?’
‘I can get you penicillin,’ Anders said again, said it in English, best he knew. ‘For a price.’
‘I don’t have enough left to sell.’
‘You have books.’
‘They are not for sale,’ said Pavel, also in English now, and closed the door.
Anders went away thinking that the man’s English sounded much harsher than his German.
He went back. There was no reason for it, he couldn’t afford to give away medicine, and besides, he didn’t owe the man a thing, not a thing, but still he went back. Twice he simply sat there, listening to the typewriter through the closed door, counting the letters and typewritten lines that ended in the sounding of a bell. The fourth time he came he brought a bottle of mint liqueur which he had heard was good for when one was ill. He placed it on the step, knocked on the door and ran away. He avoided the flat for a week after that, running with his crew instead, ripping off punters and flogging wares on the market. The weather was gradually growing worse, and Anders bought himself boots and a blanket from his proceeds. The boots were second-hand army issue, three sizes too large and heavy as lead. Anders walked them proudly, and made sure they didn’t carry him back to the man’s door.
Then, when he almost thought he had kicked the habit, he found himself retracing his steps yet again. For an hour he stood there, one hand spread up on the door, telling himself to leave. But this time he didn’t leave. Instead, he knocked, a series of quick hard raps like he had seen the police use, and went over in his mind how he would ask the man for money retrospectively, to pay for the bottle of liqueur. ‘You drank it, didn’t you?’ he’d say without balking, and the man would have to admit that he was in his debt.
The door opened, that is to say, Pavel opened it, opened wide and without hesitation. He saw Anders, saw he was alone, outsize boots on his feet and a blanket thrown over one shoulder. There was no reaction, nothing the boy could read. Pavel simply turned, turned on his heel, and marched back over to an armchair upon which he had been sitting prior to being interrupted. He sat, threw a coat over his lap and legs, and picked up a book that lay face down by his feet, its pages spread across the wooden floor.
The book was one of hundreds. They lined the apartment’s walls, standing on ch
eap shelves made out of pressed, unvarnished wood. Hundreds of books, bound in leather, linen and cardboard; some as fat as Anders’ fist, others so thin they looked like magazines, only the size was wrong. Amongst them, a few books whose pages looked like they were made out of gold, and, in one corner, a stack with books so large they did not fit upon the shelf. Enough books so that you could smell them, the smell of paper. Anders hadn’t known that paper smelled.
‘Come in or stay out, but either way, please close the door.’
Anders did not react. His eyes remained riveted upon the books. He knew their worth on the market. They would have bought plenty of medicine. He stepped up to them, ran his fingers over the titles that lay embossed upon their spines.
‘These are in different languages,’ he said at last, impressed despite himself. ‘You read all these?’
‘Yes,’ said Pavel.
‘I speak German, English and Russian,’ said Anders. And then, unaccountably moved to honesty: ‘Only a little Russian. To trade, you see.’
‘Do you read?’ asked Pavel, and the boy shook his head.
‘Reading is for pencil pushers and bureaucrats,’ he explained. ‘I have no time for it.’
And after some thought, looking at the book that sat in Pavel’s hands: ‘If you wish to read, you may read aloud, if you like. I don’t mind.’
Pavel smiled at this and got up to close the door. He locked it deliberately, the sound of the lock loud in the room, reminding Anders how foolish it had been to come there. Then Pavel turned to peruse his shelves with the same quiet calm with which he had lit that cigarette in the face of Paulchen’s Luger. His hand hovered over a number of books until at last he pulled out a dog-eared hardback, whose back-flap was badly torn. He settled down with it and started reading. He read:
‘“Among other public buildings in a certain town which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, it boasts of one which is common to most towns, great or small, to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born, on a day and date which I need not take upon myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events, the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.”’