by Dan Vyleta
Do you think he ever lived to regret his trade?
They came in without bothering to knock. The woman, Sonia, entered first, made a show of shaking hands with him with a coldness and formality new to their acquaintance, then declared that she had brought him a visitor.
‘Another doctor?’ Pavel asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘A friend.’
She started to say more but bit her lip instead. Pavel was charmed by the movement. It reminded him of the boy. He turned his attention to the visitor.
He came in like he owned the place. A most singular man. Fat, for starters, quite possibly the fattest man Pavel had ever known. It had crept into his every extremity, from the lobes of his ears to the musculature of his palms; they looked padded like a newborn’s. Fat fingers made fatter by a half-dozen rings, gold and precious stones, the nails manicured and glossy. Upon his entrance, a flutter of furs. Mink, it had to be mink: a woman’s coat that fell to mid-thigh, tailored at the waist and rising up to the crest of a foot-wide collar. It crouched upon his shoulders and nuzzled his neck. Underneath, an ill-fitting officer’s uniform, British, brass buttons straining against his girth. His skin was the colour of dough; cakes or Kaiser rolls, not a kernel of rye. A basset’s cheeks, no hair on his head. Wet lips that formed an enormous, bulging oval. The upper lip was as thick as the lower, with no furrow beneath the nose: sausages for lips, though not unbecoming. His step delicate, the tread soundless. A beautiful voice, the words shaped to perfection; his handshake dry and dexterous. Deliberately, the man placed one plump palm upon Pavel’s cheek to test his fever, then wiped it on a handkerchief. A most singular man, strolling in upon a cloud of perfume. The gun on his belt holster looked oiled, and like it had never been used.
‘So,’ said the fat man with an air of concern. ‘Sonia’s sick new friend. Enchanted, I am sure.’
Pavel lay dazed, tasting perfume in his mouth, and thought that he would never be able to resist this man.
‘Richter,’ he said. ‘My name is Richter.’
‘Fosko. Colonel Stuart Melchior Fosko, at your service. I am here about a friend of yours. You know a man named Boyd White? Boyd Ferdinand White, Private, US Army, honorably discharged some nine months ago and since then active in Berlin gambling and prostitution circles? The thing is, Mr Richter, I have some bad news for you. Boyd White’s dead. Dead as a dodo. I should like to figure out who made him so.’
The Colonel smiled with those wet lips of his, and Pavel found he had no choice but to return the gesture, grit his teeth and smile as he bore the news of his best friend’s murder.
The Colonel gave him no time to recover from the shock. He had hardly stopped talking when the door swung open again and two British privates entered, carrying a stretcher between them and a canteen filled with French brandy. Fosko would not hear of Pavel’s remonstrations that he was well enough to walk, but simply bid him roll onto the stretcher once it had been placed parallel to his narrow bed, then slipped the canteen into his hand and instructed him to take a few swallows, ‘against the cold’. The soldiers carried him down the stairs at a precarious angle: Pavel went head first and felt himself slide helplessly towards the frontman’s buttocks. When he finally made contact the latter pushed him back unceremoniously, with a grunt and a flip of the hips. On the street the cold crept down Pavel’s windpipe and assaulted his lungs. The day was clear, icy, the sky stuck in a peculiar shade of leaden blue. Gruffly the soldiers assisted Pavel into a waiting car. They promised a wheelchair at the end of the journey. The boy tried to get in next to him but the Colonel cut him off and manoeuvred his girth into the adjacent seat. His thighs bulged in his uniform and threatened to crawl up Pavel’s own; he felt his shoulder disappear in his neighbour’s breast and turned his face towards the window. Sonia squeezed in next to the Colonel and offered her lap to the boy. The soldiers got in at the front, lit cigarettes, rubbed warm their hands. They drove in silence through broken Berlin, the rubble frozen into jagged edifices of ice and stone.
I have often wondered what the Colonel thought about Pavel Richter on this, the first of their meetings. Naturally, I never asked him; it wasn’t my place. I reckon it must have been scorn – the scorn of the silverback for the pack’s ailing runt. Then again, who knows? Perhaps he saw through the disease and the habit of meekness to that stony core that took me so long to divine. If he did – for the Colonel was a fine student of character, with a novelist’s eye for nuance – I wager he found it in his heart to like him. There was in the Colonel a generosity of spirit even for his enemies. In this, I never learned to follow him. I am a humble man and have a humble man’s fear of those who can harm him.
‘Peterson,’ the Colonel would often say to me, ‘you have the heart of a chicken. Stomach like a pig, deft hands, good habits, always punctual. But your heart, Peterson, your heart.’
Would say it and pinch my cheek as though I were some errand boy. I was never man enough to object.
The drive took mere minutes. They did not leave the British sector. Pavel hadn’t known the Brits had their own morgue, but upon reflection he realized that they must have need for a place to accommodate those corpses not fit for Soviet eyes. The Russians ran the city police, but there was more than one law afoot in Berlin, and wide disagreement whether or not a bullet through the heart should be counted as a natural cause of death. The building’s purpose was unmarked: flaking red walls, and a freezing soldier by the gate. They drove into its courtyard, parked carelessly at its centre. The driver fetched the promised wheelchair. Once again the boy tried to take charge of Pavel’s fate, but failed: the Colonel blocked his path, as though by accident, and clasped his newborn’s hands around the wheelchair’s handles. A door spilled them into a linoleum-lined corridor; a rickety elevator shaped like a baroque zoo cage carried them downwards in a creaky, seemingly endless journey, during which Sonia stood with her breast dug into Pavel’s ear, her legs spread around the chair’s cumbersome wheels. He blushed and longed to apologize for an intrusion that was not his, and a situation that lay outside his control. Only the hulking presence of the fat man kept him from doing so. After the elevator ride, another linoleum corridor; a double door on swings, like those used to separate a restaurant’s kitchen from its diners, then a steel gurney ridden by a stiff-backed corpse. A sheet covered his friend, and for a moment Pavel was content to pretend to himself that there had been a mistake, that Boyd was alive and well in one of the US sector’s gin joints, watching his girls hustle a soldier or one of the army of young writers who were flocking to the city in search of their muse. The hand that stuck out from under the sheet was curled into a loose fist. Its fingernails had been plucked like petals, exposing smooth, darkly bruised skin. It seemed impossible to Pavel that this should be Boyd’s hand. A man in a lab coat came forward. He wore his spectacles like a shield. ‘Voila’, he mumbled as he threw back the sheet. Underneath a broken body.
It was Boyd.
Broken.
From where he was sitting, he couldn’t even tell what got him killed.
Pavel gagged and tasted bile; it leaked through his clenched lips and travelled to his chin, saliva and stomach juices warm upon his stubble. He struggled to stand and fell back into his chair; wished to shout but found no air in his lungs. My body, he berated himself, conspiring against my grief. His eyes were parched. He closed his lids to moisten them. Distractedly, as though from a distance, he heard Sonia turn on her heel and leave the room. The boy gave a low whistle and sought his side. Behind him the fat man, smelling like a bucket of roses.
The boy had never seen a corpse such as this. It had been, you know, messed with, though that wasn’t the root of it either. Anders had seen beaten bodies before, bodies whose limbs were crushed and faces torn, and once, at a public urinal, an ex-soldier had shown him the scar left by a grenade splinter that had ripped off much of his plumbing and a goodly chunk of thigh. He had puked then, to the veteran’s delight. He cringed at the memory. It had seemed weak to h
im even then. He did not puke now.
It was Boyd White, the pimp who had brought the midget. They had shot him through the throat, the wound was level with Anders’ face, and at first the boy kept his eyes there, upon the star-shaped hole. The flaps of white skin looked like a three-way lip; a lip drained of blood, and sucked in over the teeth, or else toothless lips, lips that fell inwards, upon the darkness of a hole. He imagined the lab-coated man sticking his fingers in there in order to fish for the bullet. It boggled his mind that a man should have such a job, that he should live by sticking his hand into another man’s throat, and he told himself that he would have used a tool, a pair of scissors perhaps, or something like a delicate set of pliers. The boy wondered how big it would have been, the bullet, and imagined the sound it made when it was flicked, carelessly he was sure, into one of the metal dishes that stood upon a nearby table. Not much of a sound. Anders let it echo amongst the room’s tiles: a brisk little click like a tooth falling into the sink. Then he turned his focus back to the corpse.
There was something wrong with the face. It hung shapeless. It was as though it was being held together by the beard. Anders imagined that the cheekbones were broken – the corpse’s eyes were all swollen up. He considered this fact and realized, glumly, that they must have been broken before the man was dead. It looked like they had had plenty of time to swell. The man’s mouth was untouched, but there were burns upon the freckled shoulders, from cigarettes and worse. Thin welts across chest and the stomach, as though he had been whipped with a wire, the legs broken in ways that had given them trouble to put them straight again, and the left foot so swollen it looked like a black cloven hoof. It was ugly, this corpse; scrubbed, too, and shamelessly naked.
Anders wondered how Pavel saw it, the corpse of his friend, who had given him an overcoat and done nothing to help him with his sickness. He looked up at him as he struggled out of his wheelchair and stood next to the boy. Anders saw a great blankness of expression, the face of a restful night’s sleep. It flooded the boy with relief, flooded him, that is, until the first of the tears started to fall. It fell past Anders onto the floor, and he covered it with the midget’s fur-lined boot. A second hit his shoulder, and then they ran freely, mingled with snot, ran down Pavel’s face and pooled around the chin; stuck to his collar and chest; dangled, like threads of spit, from his buttons and his hands, which he had thrown up but then forgotten, spread out before his chest. It was silent, this weeping, and Anders stood motionless and undecided, until the fat man, the Colonel, reached over and spread a handkerchief over Pavel’s features. He wiped them as one might wipe a window, or a stain upon the floor.
‘My, my,’ he cooed, and Pavel, in his terrible weakness, buried his face in Fosko’s mink-lined shoulder and sobbed. It rather made up Anders’ mind.
He made sure to kick open the door as he stormed out. It wouldn’t slam– it was on swings – but the least he could do was to give it a kick. The elevator took an age to come, but he could not locate the stairs. On the way up he paced the cage, then ran out and across the yard. At the gate, the soldiers heckled him about his pallor and the wet that had collected on his own cheeks, and before he was out of sight he turned upon his heel and swung out his arm at something more than a right angle, the elbow stiff and his chin raised high into the wind.
‘Heil Hitler!’ he called back at them.
They only laughed and watched him run away.
Anders didn’t have far to go. He was looking for Paulchen and his crew. He had some questions for them, about the broken corpse and the fat man. Pavel, he swore, would be sorry about that tear-stained mink.
Sonia walked on home alone. She knew that there would be no peace for her there. The Colonel would come and find her. He wasn’t done with Pavel for the day, not by a long shot, and would want to reap the fruits of this morning’s harvest; would want his pleasure, too, a lunchtime fuck, and then a smoke, running an absent-minded thumb over his manicure. She recognized herself in this, his cold relentlessness, his love for comfort. Still, if she walked fast she might garner a few minutes to herself, alone at the piano. She would play Beethoven, one of the late sonatas. She tried to focus upon Beethoven, tried to fill her head with his brooding, deaf-man’s rhythms. The music would not come. Boyd White stood in the way: a hulking figure, face broken by expert fists. Boyd had had no time for Beethoven, nor knowledge of him, for that matter. He’d liked Glenn Miller and American lady crooners; had liked Goodman, Basie, and a spot of Chopin when he wanted to sound cultured. Chopin, he’d once explained to her as though imparting some great secret, was Polish. Sounded French, but was, as a matter of fact, Polish. Sonia had smiled, wide-eyed, and feigned surprise.
‘Polish, eh?’
‘Yeah. Want some champagne, sugar? Thatta girl.’
The body, it bothered her. She had known he would be killed, and had not cared. And, of course, he had been tortured. She had known this too, had spelled it out to herself even, so there would be no semblance of a lie. Still, the body had got to her – the broken legs, the mutilated fingers, almost black at the tips. She tried to penetrate to the root of her unease. It had to do with the violence, the capacity for inflicting such pain. It took a special sort of courage to do a thing such as that, to deafen one’s ears to another’s pain and set to him with rubber hose and pliers. Courage, and practice. She feared she had neither, and it struck her as weakness.
Sonia climbed the stairs to her apartment, unlocked her door and closed it behind her, savouring the sound of it, a door falling into its latch. Then: a jabbering scream, inhuman in pitch. Her body panicked, stomach, guts and rectum curling up into themselves like hedgehogs. She had forgotten about the monkey, straining at its collar and lead, its eyes bulging and black lips distended for a clear view of teeth. It had fouled the rug; had thrown its own filth across the room and against the windowpane where it had stuck and hardened in the cold. Black islands of monkey shit, growing out of the glass like boils.
Sonia stood at the door, unclenching herself. Thinking that it was funny that fear crawled up your arse like that, shamelessly; thinking, too, that he had brought her the monkey just for this, to scare the daylights out of her in some unsuspecting moment when she thought herself safe, and him far away.
It took her a long time to prise free the animal turds from the frozen pane. She did not bother with the carpet, did not approach the animal at all. Instead she withdrew into the kitchen, lit a smoke, and checked whether the electricity was on. It was, and she boiled two pans of water, the first to heat the large ham the Colonel had brought her that morning, the second for some potatoes. When they were done she peeled them, then cut them into thin slices with a heavy kitchen knife that said ‘Solingen’ on the blade and sat in her hand just so. She imagined, her brows screwed up in concentration, how it might feel to slit the animal’s throat; hold its chin up like a corner-store barber and cut it ear to leathery ear. Imagined the Colonel’s reaction if he should return to a slaughtered animal, the carpet soaked with its blood. In the background she could hear its chattering, less aggressive now, and she realized that it wished for food. It would be child’s play to poison it. There was bleach, formaldehyde and lye underneath the sink, and a tub full of sleeping pills by the bed. She filled a china cup with potato water and placed it in reach of the animal’s outstretched arm. It grabbed for it and knocked it over. Up close the stench of its faeces was overpowering, even in the icy air. She walked back into the kitchen, fetched another cup. This time she slid it closer. When she saw it drink in hasty, sloppy draughts, she brought it a potato and some dried slices of apple. The monkey handled the food dexterously, using its tiny, black leather palms. Throughout it did not take its eyes off her, and she, too, crouched and watched it feed. The eyes did not seem to have any whites, and the fur around them was yellowed and encrusted with old secretions. She took a napkin from the table, wet it with her own spit, and reached to clean them away. The monkey recoiled, bared its fangs. Then Sonia heard the
key in the lock, straightened, dropped the napkin mid-step, and rushed back to the kitchen.
When the door opened and the Colonel led in a stumbling Pavel, they found Sonia striding to the dining table, a steaming dish of potatoes clutched between two cheerily coloured tea towels.
Pavel sat in his chair, exhausted. The kidneys were bothering him and he wished that he could lie down on the sofa rather than sit at the dining table on a high-backed Biedermeier chair, a napkin spread across his lap, and good kitchen silver lined up before him. He watched with strange fascination as the Colonel cut the ham into half-inch slices upon a wooden cutting board, and listened to his story of how he had bought the monkey, quite cheaply, from a decommissioned Wehrmacht corporal after a night’s carousing earlier that week. ‘I know what you will say, Pavel, he stinks and he is filthy, but by God I love the little critter.’ The woman, Sonia, was dishing out boiled potatoes and fetched beer for the Colonel, chamomile tea for Pavel. The food stood before him and obscured the stench of animal; it rose to his nose and seduced his body. Pavel realized that he was hungry, ravenous even, and felt ashamed. He closed his eyes to conjure up Boyd’s body but already it was difficult to remember the details, the smell of gammon thick in his throat. Unable to wait any longer, he cut himself a bite and chewed on it. It tasted wonderful. He tried the potatoes and found them well salted and seasoned with chives. Chives, he berated himself, you are betraying a friend over the smell of chives. He chewed another bite and hoped the Colonel would break the silence. He didn’t.