by Dan Vyleta
‘Who?’
‘My friend.’
‘Your friend?’
‘Downstairs. Right below. Please, he needs medicine real bad.’ She opened her mouth to answer, closed it again. Thought guiltily of the medicine chest that the Colonel had given her, that now lay inside her suitcase, wrapped in her silk nightgown and a Parisian negligee. Thought of the Colonel again, coming upon the boy like this, a German boy, dirt on his hands and a face like a prune. She pictured it, then dropped into a crouch. In one hand she still held the candelabra; on the other a jewelled watch kept ticking.
‘Listen to me,’ she whispered. ‘I will come in two hours. Not before. If I hear another sound out of you, or see so much as your shadow, I won’t show. Is that understood?’
He breathed raggedly, she thought in relief.
‘I asked whether you understood what I just told you.’
‘Yes, Miss,’ he answered and it sounded strange and unaccustomed coming from his lips.
She waited a minute, then reopened the door. Of the boy there remained no sign; across the hall, her neighbours kept quiet. For all she knew she had none. Quickly she closed it again and wiped the corridor and living room of all signs of struggle. The place was so dusty that soon her fine cuffs and underskirts were blackened. She hoped the Colonel would not notice them in the light of the candle. Then she settled back into her chair before the piano and launched into Beethoven’s piano sonata no. 17. She played it gently, her head cocked to one side, and waited for the sound of the Colonel’s key in her lock.
There was every reason to be suspicious. Of the woman as much as of his heart; hope, he had learned, was an enemy. All he knew of her was that she was rich. It had rung in those piano notes that seeped through the ceiling. He had jumped up, confused yet by the prayers that his need had blackmailed out of him. Had run upstairs, found the door standing ajar upon a dusty corridor. Footprints in the dust, and the cold dance of notes – they had led him on. Anders had found her in a fur-trimmed coat. She had been seated before the piano upon a leather chair with dainty legs curved like a woman’s. He’d taken in the mute tower clock, its face and pendulum long arrested. The Volksempfänger radio; the display cabinet with its cut glass and china; the carpet that showed oriental riders shooting arrows at boars and lions, and the leather armchairs that stood upon it, splay-footed and heavy. Above all he’d taken in the dust, the smell of disuse, and within it some sweet and musky fragrance that clung to the woman’s skin.
She had yelled at him and bid him speak. He had felt he could not. There had been a lump in his throat, along with the certainty that she could – and must – help him. When she’d sent him away, he’d merely rounded the stairs. There he squatted down upon his haunches, his teeth in his lips, and raged at himself.
‘Don’t trust her,’ he said. ‘Don’t you dare trust her.’
‘Chances are she won’t come.’
‘If she doesn’t come,’ he swore, ‘I’ll go back and kill her.’
He ran down then, checked on Pavel, and fetched the ice pick so he’d have something to kill her with.
She received a visitor. Anders heard him walk up the stairs, a slow, deliberate tread, and fled into Pavel’s apartment until he heard him unlock the woman’s door. He snuck up behind and put his ear to its wood. They spoke in English, albeit a different sort of English to Pavel’s. He heard him fire up the oven and boil some coffee, real coffee, you could smell it out on the landing. Then the sounds of his using her, in the manner of men. Anders listened to it red-faced, unable to picture it. He knew about sex, of course, but was ignorant of its mechanics. There were grunts, and the rhythmic slap of flesh upon flesh. It only lasted a few minutes.
‘Good night,’ said the stranger. ‘Tomorrow, I shall bring you a surprise.’
His voice was genial, magnanimous. The woman said nothing, and Anders hurried up half a flight and cowered behind the corner of the stairs. Once he was sure he could hear the man descend, he dared a peek, in the darkness of the staircase, moonlight falling through the windows of the landing. He saw a man, impossibly fat, and a cascade of furs. There was no hair on the man’s head; a polished dome, smooth as a grape. Above the collar, the neck folded itself into a giant, pallid slug. It seemed to Anders that his step was too soft for a man of his size.
Anders waited until he heard the door slam on the ground floor, then took up position outside the woman’s door. The ice pick was in his hand. He started counting to a hundred. When he reached a hundred, he swore, he would go and ram the ice pick through her heart.
She came out somewhere in the high eighties, carrying a box marked with a cross and taking his hand as though he was a child. He did not object. Downstairs, in Pavel’s place, he heard her gag at the stench, but her eyes softened when she saw the sick man.
‘Pavel,’ he said, weighing his weapon in his hand, ‘this lady here will save your life.’
The sick man did not answer. When the woman asked him what was wrong, first in German, then in fluent English, he mouthed a single word: ‘Kidneys.’ She nodded and walked over to the phone to call a doctor.
‘Don’t worry,’ Anders heard her say into the receiver, ‘I have money and drugs.’
Then they sat down, one on each side of the bed, and waited for help to arrive.
There you have it: the piano sounding notes just as death comes a-knocking; a neighbour upstairs who returns after a long absence; a medicine chest draped in a negligee; and a doctor who agrees – grumpily, no doubt greedily – to come out in the middle of the night. Coincidence at the heart of our story. It has bothered me ever since I learned its facts.
It cannot be helped though, because there she was, dear Sonia, sitting on Pavel’s bed and stroking his brow with a moistened handkerchief. A woman in a tweed dress, in a city where most women still wore the trousers left to them by their husbands and fathers, dead in the war. Perfume on her wrists and in those sensual valleys where collarbones grow into throat; perfume, though no lipstick. She found it whorish, which some found hypocritical, coming from her. It was not something, though, they would say to her face.
You will want a description, a study in physiognomy. We must learn to know her. I shall try, though I never met her in good daylight, and thus am liable to put too much shadow where it does not belong. Let me conjure her up for you – she is worth it. In truth she was remarkable: a remarkable face. Not by any means an everyday face, though, of course, in its own way, anonymous enough, a face you see on the tram, or in the crowds at railway stations, only this one might give you pause. You’d start studying it, and it would even seem strange to you that you should notice it amongst all the others, a little prettier perhaps, and starker; a woodcut of a face. A face with broad cheekbones, a little too Slavic for her nation and the times she had endured, though her passport made her out the purest of Aryans. The lips heavy; owlish, hooded lids; a smudge of moustache upon her upper lip, though she took care to pluck. Quite beautiful in any case, though it only became so once you had got used to it. Good teeth on her, clean breath, and a throaty voice whose moan would drive you to distraction if you were so inclined. A modern woman in a tweed dress. She wore leather gloves whenever she wasn’t playing the piano.
Another thing demands mention, though once again I will be charged with stretching the limits of credulity. There was a remarkable similarity between herself and the sick man that, I believe, is not wholly in my imagination. In fact, sitting there next to Pavel and under the boy’s watchful gaze, they might have seemed to him like twins – those hollow eyes and raven hair – only she wore her steel on the surface while he smothered it under layers of manners; of calm; the meekness of indecision – and yet (and yet!) the boy thought him as unbending as the times themselves. They were alike; too much alike for comfort. She saw it, too, I wager, or how else to explain the set of her mouth and the way she used her hair to shield her emotions?
But I digress, or worse, fall prey to fancy. They met in any case, Sonia
and Pavel. The doctor came and stuffed him full of drugs. They made him chicken soup from an English tin she fetched from upstairs, and when the boy fell asleep, exhausted, she sat up a while, listening to his snore, and idly searched the apartment for clues about its owner.
She found one, principally, though it was quite mangled: a midget in a suitcase, his head leaking, with no socks on his wooden feet.
It gave her quite a fright.
The doctor was unmoved by his patient’s plight. He ran long-boned, grubby hands over Pavel’s body, smelled at his chamber pot and held a flashlight to its content’s colour; took the temperature under the tongue and snuck a hand down to Pavel’s testicles as though he were measuring them for size. Sonia studied his movements and the exposed body of the sick man. She ran her eyes along the twin rack of ribs and thought of the plaster cast of Jesus that had hung in the family living room until the day its arms fell off during an air raid. There was the birdlike ridge of collarbone and, at the nape of the neck, a twist of spine, bony like a fish carcass. In Pavel’s armpit, matted black hair, clumpy with disease. She reached out to touch him but checked her movement before her glove made contact with his skin. It was hard to feel pity for something so ugly.
Throughout the examination the boy stood vigil with suspicious eye, waiting for the doctor’s pronouncement over life and death.
‘A mild infection,’ he diagnosed. ‘And a bad cold. He’s already on the mend.’
He slipped Pavel’s trousers down over one buttock and injected him with the contents of a little vial, then shoved two knuckle-sized pills into his patient’s mouth.
‘Now, as to the little matter of money.’
Sonia reached to pay him, but the boy stayed her hand.
‘He almost died,’ he challenged the doctor, his chin pushed forward and his hands raised into fists. For the first time Sonia heard the hoodlum in his voice. The doctor shrugged and reached for the wad of Reichsmarks and the Hungarian sausage Sonia had prepared in payment.
‘As you wish.’
He left counting the money, the sausage in one grubby fist.
‘You’re a quack,’ the boy shouted after him. ‘A quack, you hear?’
It rang in the staircase and forced a reaction out of the medical man.
‘Degenerate,’ he shouted back. ‘Filthy little Untermensch.’
In the building’s entranceway, the doctor passed the double eight and mumbled the greeting that went with the numbers. Outside, he slipped off one of his mittens and rummaged in his pocket for the bottle of pills he had pinched from the woman’s medicine chest. They would buy him his coals for the next few weeks.
Then a sleepless night, a trunk opened, the corpse’s vacant stare. She flinched and shut the lid on him. The sick man raving a little, calling for a man named ‘Boyd’ who’d ‘said he would come.’ It made her think. She went upstairs to fetch some wine, to keep her company with her thinking.
Then, mid-morning, over some broth of beef, first chance for a conversation. She made the soup from another tin the Colonel had left; avoided mention of the corpse. Instead she wished to learn his life, knowing already that, that very night, she must betray him.
‘You work as an interpreter?’
‘Yes.’
‘For the army?’
‘Used to. Stopped. It did not suit me any more.’
‘Where did you learn to speak German like this?’
‘Father German. Mother Russian. French governess. Jean Pavel Richter.’ He smiled thinly, like it was an old joke. ‘Born in Cincinnati, 1914.’
‘That’s in America?’
‘Ohio,’ he assented. ‘A rat-hole.’She mulled over the designation, then dismissed it as the ravings of a sick man.
‘Berlin is a rat-hole,’ she told him.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘It is now.’
They paused, ate soup, looked at one another. Their breaths, visible in the cold, mingled over the bed. She reminded herself that it was her duty to herself not to care.
‘The boy?’ she asked, in order to change the topic.
‘Street loafer. A thief. Thoroughly degraded.’ Again that smile, thin in his face.
‘He doesn’t speak as though he grew up on the street. Not always, in any case. He sounds, I don’t know. Bookish.’
Pavel nodded assent, then objected: ‘He does not read. I haven’t figured it out yet.’
‘Did you ask him?’
‘That,’ he explained, ‘would be to break our rules.’
‘You have rules?’
He took her in his eye.
‘Like lovers,’ he murmured. ‘We like it that way.’
She left him then, thoughtful. Thinking that Pavel was a subtle man, and, as such, dangerous.
Sonia passed the day playing piano. At around six in the evening she started to drink. She drank wine and French brandy, preparing herself for the Colonel. It occurred to her that she had not washed that day but she assured herself that the Colonel would not care; that he was capable of taking pleasure even in her body’s stink. She dressed in tweed, silk and furs, like an English lady; stoked the fire, cut ham upon the sideboard in case he should be hungry, and made sure her diaphragm was in place.
He came at eleven sharp and brought the promised present, grinning as she turned away in disgust.
‘I got him from an old Wehrmacht corporal who said he used to work in the circus before the war. Isn’t he a beaut?’
‘It stinks,’ she complained, and made him tie it to the doorknob by its lead.
The monkey screamed and clawed until he fed it some ham and sugared tea; once sated, it hunkered down to pick at its own tail. Only then did the Colonel kiss her welcome, his wet, affable lips twice the size of hers and holding her mouth in his own as though it were a sweetmeat.
‘My darling,’ he said. ‘My sweet little strumpet. Play us something on that fabulous piano of yours.’
Sulkily, yet knowing also that he would be amused rather than offended, she chose a dreary funeral march. While she played, he undressed freely in the middle of the drawing room, oblivious to the cold. By the time he asked her to stop, he stood only in his shoes, socks and garters. The cold stretched taut his ample skin. It gave a bladder-like firmness to his girth, baby-pale and shot through with a powder-blue network of veins. He called her over and she obeyed without hesitation. The act itself she performed upon the bed, using her mouth and hands to bruise his skin in the way he liked her to. Then, in the aftermath, it became time to tell him, before he left her for his oaken desk upon which stood the photo of his wife and children, and an ashtray shaped out of a sperm-whale’s ivory tooth. Still, she hesitated for another moment or two, knowing perfectly well that it was her time to talk, that she could not risk his finding out by other means. Sonia got up, crossed the room to her dressing table, and watched herself shape the words in the make-up mirror.
‘There is a sick man downstairs,’ she said without introduction. ‘He knows Boyd White.’
She had thought that it would rattle him a little, but could spy no reaction in her mirror. He lay still upon his back, fat legs spread wide and a pillow propping up his head far enough so that his eyes could watch her across his stomach’s expanse.
‘You don’t say,’ he said. ‘Downstairs?’
‘We’re right on top of him. Crazy, isn’t it?’
He chuckled to himself good-humouredly, blew bubbles of spit from his generous lips.
‘Not so crazy,’ he said. ‘He told us that much. Fifth floor.’
‘It’s the fourth, not the fifth.’
‘Fifth for an American. “We are two cultures divided by a common language.” I wonder who said it first.’
She watched him laugh in her mirror and thought he was taking it rather well.
‘Does he know anything?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so. I talked to him this morning and he mentioned Boyd, for no particular reason.’ There was no need, she felt, to mention the midget. Not at this stag
e, in any case. It would get Pavel into trouble, and she had no wish to make more trouble for him than she already had.
‘He’s sick?’
‘Yes. Getting better, though. I called a doctor.’
‘Wonderful. Like a Good Samaritan. I expect you can introduce me in the morning.’
‘What will I say?’
‘Nothing,’ said the Colonel. ‘You will say nothing. I will do the talking.’
He laughed to himself and used the silk of her nightgown to wipe clean his crotch before retrieving his clothing in the living room. Once he was dressed, he untied his present and fed it some more ham.
‘Take it away,’ she begged, but he shook his heavy head.
‘Just give it time. Before long, I’m sure, you will learn to love one another.
‘It’s human nature,’ he explained, ‘two lonely souls in the prison of their luxury. Don’t worry, my dear. Before long, I swear, you two will get on like a house on fire.’
After he was gone, promising to return before dawn, she locked the door and went back to her drinking. She had no stomach now to climb down the stairs and look in upon the sick man.
3
22 December 1946
Late dawn over Berlin. The sun still in hiding behind great Russian plains, its rays giving her away, albeit feebly. In Sonia’s flat, in Charlottenburg, the Colonel naked before his morning mirror. Foam in the face and upon the throat, a razor poised beneath his chin’s fleshy dimple. Sonia in the kitchen, waiting, kettle in hand, for the electricity to be turned on. In the living room a frantic animal, running leathery paws over a Bösendorfer keyboard. One flight down Pavel dreams, no longer of kidneys, but of a tuba player stranded on Crusoe’s island; smiles, too, for it seems absurd to him. Next door, a sleeping boy and a dead midget: the latter stiff and indifferent as befits his state, the former splayed out, luxuriously, his face screwed up in the intense concentration of the slumbering babe. Elsewhere in town, the last stirrings of bought love in a Russian-sector brothel. Across from it a young engineer, German, relieved not to wake to an officer’s gun and the emphatic invitation to relocate eastwards, where Magnitogorsk has need for men with his expertise. Westward, at a Wedding butcher’s, the day’s first blood is drawn with bone saw and filleting knife; before the gate already his customers are waiting, food coupons buried in their mittens. Closer to home, an adolescent – Paulchen – sleeping stiff-necked upon the barrel of his Luger which protrudes from underneath his pillow; two flights down, an old woman coughing knotty phlegm into a handkerchief as stiff with cold as she is herself. Closer still – it will take them mere minutes to drive – an impromptu morgue; a steel gurney; a body curled around death in the shape of a jagged hole, a little north of the sternum, its shins split and cheekbones broken, for whoever worked on it, they knew their business. Late dawn in Berlin, and the scene set for action. A morning like this and I wake on my berth feeling old and spent like the god Odin who gave one eye so he should know past and future through the other.