by Dan Vyleta
‘Yes, of course. Come in. Would you like some tea?’
He nodded assent and sank into one of her armchairs. She put a pan of water on the hob, lit candles and put a record on the gramophone. Sonia sat across from Pavel; sat on her piano chair, long legs crossed before her. Her fingers caressed the instrument’s keys, a little yellowed with age.
‘Did you find Belle?’ she asked after she had poured out the tea.
‘Yes.’
He looked at her with tired eyes, accusingly perhaps, and she shrugged without apologizing. ‘I thought it best if you found out for yourself.’
The record player launched into a waltz, and it struck her as terribly out of place.
They sat in silence for a while. She began to think that he liked it, this silence, that he had withdrawn into it like a tortoise fed up with the weather, but then, all of a sudden, he started babbling. Well, perhaps not babbling precisely, but he started talking, a welter of words, and – this was what surprised her most – it was all utterly in earnest, this stream of words, spoken hastily but also with a shameless insistency. It was as though he had stumbled onto a secret, and now it needed out. In this, he reminded her of a schoolboy.
‘All day,’ he said, ‘I have been thinking about Dostoevsky. It’s because of the Russians, of course. They pulled me in, and the officer, he had a voice just like my grandfather. He creeps into your language, Dostoevsky does. All those almosts and howevers: they make it impossible to get a single thought straight. And the drama of it; four Russians in a room, and none of them will speak, and when one of them does – the youngest, the buffoon – all it is, is air, hot air, and secretly, on the inside so to speak, all four of them grinning because they like this, the absurdity of the moment, and the buffoon screaming “swine!” My grandfather, he used to say that we were a race knit for the absurd. We’re constituted for it. It brings out our passions. Hot, raging words, only a half-hour later will find us drinking, an arm round each of our enemies.
‘But then they showed me the photo: Boyd’s mouth clamped shut over one breast, and your neck twisted so you’re looking straight into the camera. And you know what it is that I see there? Love. It’s impossible, you must have hated him, down to the depth of your bowels, but on the photo, mind, what one finds is love. A smile that sits in the eyes, grainy, and enough bent to your body to imagine you are happy there, splayed out under his mouth. And at that moment, before anything else, I was happy for it. I very nearly smiled myself.
‘Only, if you are in the picture, you will know how he died. And if you know how he died, and did not tell me, then Fosko knows how he died, too, and everything has been a lie, even his corpse, which, at the time, seemed like the one thing that was true. It should have made me mad, you know. Should have! – my friend dead, and you holding out on me, who looked happy in his arms, just that one second, though of course you hated him. You know, I imagined you there, in your apartment, even before I saw the photo, that is; imagined you proud, which you are, and insolent before his touch. I held your panties today. Red, silky panties. The Russians didn’t steal them which means an officer dealt with your flat, on order from up high. Which is to say, whatever Boyd was tied up in, it was important, or money was on the line, which I guess amounts to the same. Red panties, Sonia. Will you forgive me if I say they seemed tasteless to me?
‘In any case, I tried to be angry. God help me, Sonia, I tried. Even just now, before I came in, I tried to work myself up into a frenzy. I would tear in and make a scene; strike you across one cheek perhaps. Only you wouldn’t take it, would you? You would hit back, a fist to my chin, revive me with smelling salts, your brows knit, and curious as to why I insisted on this farce. “Pavel,” you would say, “I never claimed to be something I was not.” And I would sit up, appeased, and ask you to play the piano. And later, with your back turned, perhaps I would tell you, past the lump in my throat, that I saw you, naked, under my best friend’s mouth; and that you were beautiful. Perhaps it would make you happy, just a little, you see, and things wouldn’t seem so shabby to you.
‘The thing is that today, from the moment I hit the street, there woke in me a strange love for life. Greed, let’s call it greed, a Dostoevskian, Russian sort of greed. It’s like that scene in his novel where Ivan (you have read Karamazov, have you not? He’s the ponderous intellectual plotting rebellion against God. God, you hear!), well, Ivan is talking to his younger brother, Alyosha, and he admits to being a “greenbeak”. He uses precisely that word, “greenbeak”. He speaks of revolution and it’s a greenbeak’s revolution; and faced with this, the truth of his being, he has to admit that all that matters to him – all, you hear – is life. There is even this bit about the “sticky buds” of spring, something sexual in any case, and for a moment it looks like youth will conquer all.
‘Oh Sonia,’ he said. ‘Do you have any idea what I am trying to say to you here?’
He looked up earnestly, wet coals for eyes, and the faintest of smiles upon his features. Sonia just sat there, not really listening to any of this nonsense, her eyes on his lips, thinking, asking herself what it would feel like to kiss Pavel. They sat unmoving, while the monkey crouched in the corner and shat a putrid turd upon its rug. It had bowel movements like a toddler.
‘Ah, well,’ said Pavel, ‘that’s how it is.’ He paused and looked her up and down. ‘Do you want to tell me how Boyd died?’
‘It is late, Pavel. Tomorrow.’
‘Then I had better go to bed.’
He placed the mug on her coffee table, and got up stiffly.
‘Don’t go,’ she said, and slowly unbuttoned her coat.
He flushed and stared at her blankly.
‘The Colonel is having you watched. He told me to … spend the night with you. He will know it if you leave.’
He nodded wearily, rubbed the back of his head.
‘I can sleep on the couch again.’
Sonia shook her head. ‘Sleep in the bed. The Colonel will want … details.’
‘Tell him I was too sick for it. Tell him I wanted you to hold me. He will like that.’
Sonia smiled at that, and together they cleaned up the monkey’s filth. When they were done, she persuaded him to share her bed anyway; it was big enough for two, and a second night on the couch would hurt his back.
She changed into her nightgown in the bedroom, then called him in. ‘Put these on,’ she said, and passed over a pair of flannel pyjamas Fosko had ordered for her from England. ‘You won’t be cold. I have good bedding.’
He stepped back into the living room so that he could undress in peace. When he returned, they slipped under the covers together, each of them turning to arrange their pillows.
‘You good and ready?’ he asked, before turning off the light.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said.
It was to her the most ridiculous of questions.
They lay next to each other on the big marital bed, taking care not to touch. In the darkness Sonia could hear the monkey clambering about, watching them; the room stank of it. Pavel’s body exuded almost no heat, and she was tempted to reach over, just to make sure he was really there. His breathing was quiet and regular, and after a few minutes she heard him scratch discreetly, moving the bedding a little as he did so. She lay still, hands upon her stomach, asking herself whether she thought him a fool.
‘Tell me, Sonia,’ he said when she had already half dozed off. ‘Did you see the boy today? Anders.’
‘Yes. He’s angry with you because you cried in front of Fosko.’
‘I’m glad I cried. Can you understand that?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘And neither will the boy.’
She heard him roll from his back onto his stomach. Moments later she was asleep.
Once, halfway through the night, Sonia woke and found Pavel breathing a few inches from her mouth. She reached over and put her lips on his. When she woke in the morning, she convinced herself it had just been a dream.
5
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24 December 1946
Pavel woke first. Woke to darkness, an hour before dawn, and lay there guiltily for long minutes, savouring her smell: spring flowers and a touch of honey. It was her hair, he believed. She must have washed it the previous day.
He slipped out from under the coverlet and almost called out when his feet touched the icy floor. It took him some minutes to stand up. Again and again he would touch the floor with the soles of his feet, then raise themup in the air and bunch them into fists in order to get the circulation going. When he finally rose it was with the gingerly gait of the rheumatic. He stood on the outer edges of his feet and hopped along until he found a rug. It was still so dark in the room that he could see neither the bed he had left, nor the very walls that surrounded him. This circumstance gave him a delightful sense of the absence of space. Had it not been so cold, he might have stood there awhile, feeling himself lost by the world, and also at its centre.
Pavel located the bedroom door by memory, stepped through and gently closed it behind him before groping for a light switch. His fingers found it, but nothing happened. Evidently the electricity was off again. In the darkness he could hear the heavy, rhythmic breathing of the animal somewhere to his right. It sounded to him like the breath of copulation. He veered left, away from the noise, stumbled painfully over a low piece of furniture – a footrest? a coffee table? – and caught his weight upon the piano’s bared teeth. The cacophony drew a screech from the monkey’s throat, too close for comfort. Disoriented, Pavel sat on the floor by the piano and tried to remember where he had left coat and trousers, his kidneys already hurting with the cold. To his relief Sonia had not reacted to the noise; he was not ready to talk to her yet, wearing another man’s pyjamas, the smell of her hair still thick on his tongue. He sat, arms thrown around his body, and waited for the first rays of dawn.
While he sat thus, he forced himself to think about her, this woman whose bed he had shared, and the questions he must ask. He remembered how she had invited him to spend the night with her. She had said it calmly, and the blood had poured into his face. Then the ritual of preparing for bed, always conscious of her moving around him. In the bathroom, Pavel had found Fosko’s things lined up on a porcelain shelf: nail scissors, razor, a scented bar of soap. Her underwear hung half-frozen from a washing line above the tub. Standing straight, holding out the pyjama suit she bid him wear, Sonia’s nightshirt had covered her to mid-thigh; white legs, curvy in the calf. Her toenails were painted a dark shade of rose, a little chipped. Upon the night table, tweezers for the plucking of eyebrows, and a forgotten cup of water. Dust on the saucer. The core of an apple. A small bottle of cologne.
Pavel had taken it all in with a strange, childlike intensity. Indeed he felt thrown back to the age of sexual awakening, and remembered a similar bedroom, many years ago, and a young aunt – a widow – who had asked him to minister to her needs one weekend when she claimed to suffer from migraine. He had laboured then under the same sense of illicit desire, and had studied with the same intensity the many paraphernalia of adult life that littered her chambers. What was absent here, however, was that strange sense of being watched by a seducer’s eye; Sonia seemed to barely notice him even as she offered her bed to him. As dawn finally broke, it seemed to Pavel that she must despise him, and for a moment he wished he had stormed in last night and taken Boyd’s death out on her hide.
He got up stiffly and gathered his things, putting on trousers, sweater and coat without bothering to remove the pyjamas first. All of a sudden he was in a great hurry; he wished to leave before she should rise. There would be time to speak to her later. His cold-stiff fingers had trouble with his socks, and he took the boots in one hand to avoid any further delay. The monkey, he noticed, was playing with the gramophone, deliberately sticking the needle into its own leathery paw. When it finally drew blood it screeched yet again, and began to tug violently at the turntable and buttons. Alarmed by the noise, Pavel ran to the door and rushed out. As he walked down the flight of stairs to his own flat, he thought for a moment that he’d spied somebody lurking in the shadow of the staircase down below.
‘Anders?’ he called, but received no answer. Pavel stood by the landing for a few moments, the railing in one hand and his boots in the other, but was unable to ascertain whether his impression had been correct. In the end he gave up and turned to unlock his apartment door. He’d hoped that the boy would be there to greet him, but was disappointed. Inside the coal oven stood stone-cold, and he noticed some drops of dried blood on his sink that had eluded his notice the previous night.
He stood still, running a fingertip over the blood, and asking himself who had been hurt there, before his mirror’s stare.
There you have it: Pavel’s ‘morning after’. Cold feet and adolescent reverie; a fitting harvest for a night barren of consummation. The thought of it, that he should spend a night next to a beautiful woman (for she was, in her own way, quite beautiful), a woman experienced in matters pertaining to the heart – in short, a whore – and somehow manage to walk away from it, undone. It boggles the mind.
If you ask me, the fault was all his. She must have been willing enough, if only to rid herself of all doubts that this man, Pavel, was any different from a dozen or so others whose bed she had shared, not always under any direct duress. And yet nothing had happened. Not a thing. A kiss – maybe! – in the depth of night: lips parched by the cold and briefly pressed together, too quick even to taste the other’s sleep-soured breath. Ah, well. At least the monkey had some fun, tugging its Thomas late in the darkness, and smearing its own fur with the discharge. Nature will out, you see, even in this frigid age.
At the time, of course, I knew nothing of the night’s chastity, and imagined (only to stay warm, mind) all manner of excess. You see, I had spent the whole of the previous morning on Pavel’s coat-tails, shadowing his every step. It was me whom he saw tying my shoelaces in the street as he entered Sonia’s former block of flats; and it was I who called Fosko – forcing coins down a public phone’s frozen slot – when the Russians made off with Pavel. When he was returned to his flat late last night, the Colonel bid me resume my watch. I was to be relieved at dawn.
I spent a boring, freezing night, first in the stairwell armed only with a blanket and a large thermos, making quick runs out into the street when the coffee had worked its course. Out there I noticed a man slumped behind the wheel of a car and a cup of hot brew on the dash. After a few hours of sitting on the draughty stairs – I was frozen through to the bone – I decided to imitate him and got into my own car, hoping it would be warmer there. We were parked on opposite sides of the road, my fellow spy and I, the only cars in the road. I couldn’t make up my mind as to who had sent him. Was he a Russian agent sent to keep an eye on Pavel? One of Söldmann’s boys who had picked up Pavel’s trail? Or perhaps Fosko had sent him, to keep watch on the watcher and ascertain whether I was as reliable as I claimed. To be honest, without this second lookout I might have left the post for an hour or two, driven home for some more coffee, a bottle of gin, and a fresh shirt and collar. As it was, I sat there, dreaming up ways – scenarios, positions – of how those two might be making it, and trying to keep my teeth from chattering. My windows got so steamed up and frozen over, had Pavel decided to make a run for it, there is not a chance that I’d have spotted him. Nor would my fellow watcher; once, when I got out of the car to walk up and down the street, I found him drunkenly and ineffectually scraping at his windshield with the butt of a gun. I nodded a greeting, but he ignored me. I didn’t care. Chances were he was just as out of coffee and cigarettes as I was.
At dawn, I left the car and took up position two flights down from Sonia’s flat. I was there, crouching in one corner, when Pavel came out, boots in hand, and hollered ‘Anders’ at my shadow. A half-hour later my replacement came, sporting fur mittens and a thermos full of hot grog.
‘Get yourself home,’ he said, after a quick shared cigarette.
�
��There’s another watcher,’ I warned him. ‘Out in the street.’
He shrugged. ‘Better tell the Colonel.’ And added, after another rueful shrug: ‘What does he want this one here watching for, anyway? We could just pull him in. Get him talking, like.’
I thought it better not to answer and made off after a quick handshake. With the Colonel, one was never sure when one was being tested. In truth, I’d had the same thought for much of the night. By this point, I think, there had awoken in me the desire to speak to Pavel face to face, and be done with these childish games of hide and seek.
Sonia woke the moment he began to stir. Long experience bid her not to speak; men, she thought, liked to wake lonely, gather their thoughts, and admire their handiwork. She listened to his sitting up, the intake of breath when his feet met the floor. He was like a child getting out of bed, reluctant to accept the fact that it was cold beyond the bedding. When he finally made his way out of the room he promptly fell onto the piano. The monkey’s shriek hid her giggles. Sonia remained in bed, enjoying its comfort, and piled his half of the coverlet on top of her. Her hair smelled clean around her, and she was glad now that she had washed herself the previous afternoon.
As she lay there, her mind was thrown back to last night’s scene, Pavel talking while she pondered his lips. She thought of his earnestness, how important it had seemed to him that she should believe him. It made her smile in the darkness. And all that nonsense about Dostoevsky! ‘Sticky buds’ indeed. A man who talked of his greed for life, and blushed when she unbuttoned her coat.
She wondered whether he had always been thus: a man carrying a schoolboy around in him, kept under buttons as it were, camouflaged with the help of army gestures and the odd word of slang. He was worldly enough, most of the time, to keep his mouth shut and live by the rules of man; until, that is, something broke in him and it all spilled out, all kinds of blather, and all true, no doubt. Then he became like a drunk who would shoot off his mouth at an official party, knowing full well that sooner or later there would be repercussions. He wouldn’t even complain about it: two ushers would come up to him and take him by the scruff of the neck, throw him out by the back door, and all the while he would apologize for putting them to all this trouble. It was hard to believe that she should fall for a man like that. It was a charming trait, no doubt, and dangerous. It stemmed from a world she had left when she had first been raped.