by Dan Vyleta
‘You are a fool then, giving it to me.’
He shrugged and she took the socks. They were thick woollen things, well worn and dirty. She could not detect any extra weight in them. After a moment’s hesitation she carried them over to a glass cabinet, took out a beautiful coffee pot that she no longer used because Fosko had bought her a more expensive one, and dropped the socks inside. Then she replaced it on the bottom shelf and locked up the cupboard. Pavel stood unmoved. She wished he would do something natural. Blow his nose, perhaps; hold her. His hands were on his trousers’ seams, palms turned inward.
‘You want some coffee?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘Sonia – what I tried to tell you last night. I have been thinking –’
‘I kissed you, you know.’
This startled him, chased away the butler. He stood baffled, brows heavy knit.
‘You did?’
‘In the middle of the night. I might have dreamt it, though.’ Deliberately – like a tramp – she circled him and slid up close, crushing her breast against his back. ‘There is that about you,’ she whispered into his ear, ‘that hankers after confession.’
He tried to kiss her then, turning his head around to her, and freeing one arm from her embrace, but in his haste he somehow missed and glanced off her nose and cheekbone. His lips, she noted, were thin and pink like a girl’s.
‘Jesus, you are worse at this than I imagined.’
‘I wish,’ he said, working himself free of her embrace. ‘I wish we could talk with honesty.’
Sonia giggled at that, and ran into the kitchen to make coffee after all. There were tears in her eyes. She scratched at them with her fist’s knuckles, and ground coffee beans into smithereens. They spilled their odour as they were crushed.
Pavel did not follow her. He stood impassively, fingers to his lips. She watched him from the kitchen doorway, sly, furtive glances every time she turned to fetch sugar, saucers, silver spoons. Reluctantly, she admitted to herself that she wanted to touch him again.
They sat and had coffee, him pulling the chair away for her before he sat down himself. Sonia could almost picture how his governess had taught him to, or perhaps it had been his Russian mother, running well-groomed fingers through his hair when he got it right. The coffee, she realized, was far too strong. They both piled sugar into their cups without acknowledging her mistake. Halfway through the cup she rose all of a sudden, pulling him up by his elbow. He stood, ill-balanced, one foot caught under the chair legs.
‘Let’s try again,’ she said and kissed him. She had never understood the phrase: the earth moved. Well, perhaps it did move. Her stomach heaved, too, and for a moment she thought, comically, that she might spew on him, right on his lapels. She gave a laugh, affected; held onto his elbows; shivered. He watched her passively, and allowed these things to happen. There was a quiver to his mouth.
‘We still need to talk,’ he said. ‘About Boyd.’
She could see how it pained Pavel to say his name, especially now that his hands were balanced upon her hips. He grasped at straws: ‘You don’t keep a diary, do you?’
She laughed at that; a peal of laughter, rising out of her very throat.
‘Whatever for?’ she said. ‘What’s the point in keeping evidence against yourself?’
He heard her say it, frowned, and buried his forehead in her shoulder. They stood like this, the coffee growing cold in their cups.
Perhaps she should n’t have been so surprised when she felt his erection against her hip. He was a man, after all. All of a sudden she felt his body’s weight; felt his hands stiffen upon her. Pavel raised his head as though to kiss her again – another sort of kiss. There was what they call rapture in his eyes, a visceral sort of greed. Sonia turned her face away.
‘I have never lain with a man for pleasure,’ she told him stiffly.
He took it in, thoughtfully. She watched him closely, lest there be pity. There was no pity.
It was a shame, really.
Pity might have cured her.
‘It’s only the war,’ he said.
Sonia looked back at him and mouthed the word: ‘Only.’
He shrugged and smiled like he was apologizing for a joke, one that was in bad taste, yet funny. Oh, she liked this Pavel.
‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘There is someone I promised to meet.’
His hands let go of her body; he stepped back and stuck them into his pockets, to mask his erection.
‘Come back, later. We can –’
She broke off. There was no reckoning what they could or could not do.
Then, finally, he left her, smiling still, his hair sticking up where she had touched it, tugged it, torn at him. He left stiff-legged, his stride debilitated by desire.
Pavel left the building. He stopped outside the door to tighten the scarf around his neck and put on his hat. The lining of his coat was cut open along the seams, and the discrepancy between the two layers made it sit awkwardly on his narrow frame. A scarecrow, you see, stumbling down Berlin’s icy streets. He would have done well to turn around now and again. He would have seen, in a dozen places where the terrain provided no possible cover, a pursuer hot on his heels. A respectable figure in a good duffel coat; middle-aged, stout and one-eyed, a patch upon the other, and lamb’s wool drawn low into his eyes: in a word, yours truly. To be quite honest, I wasn’t trying to be too clever about the chase. It was dark already, and bitterly cold, the kind of cold when you think your eyeball is going to freeze. The cigarette I was smoking was glowing at one end and stone cold at the other. It wasn’t the weather for cleverness. I was happy just to keep moving.
There was one thing that surprised me as I hurried after Pavel down Charlottenburg’s murky streets. I had expected my fellow watcher to follow us. It was still the same man, half-frozen and exhausted, no doubt, who stared back at me through his car’s windshield when I left the building. Very nearly I beckoned for him to join us in our late-afternoon ramble, but of course I checked the impulse. The cold must have wormed its way into his brain by then; there was no way he was thinking straight after something like eighteen hours in that car, his bones hurting with cold and a bottle of spirits his only friend. Still, it made me think, his passivity. If he was not going to follow us, who the hell was he waiting for so patiently all these hours, and on whose orders? I tried to shake off my doubts as I ran after Pavel. There was only so much I could keep in my head at one time just then. For the moment, all that mattered was that I did not lose sight of my careless prey.
We passed a phone box, Pavel some thirty paces ahead, walking with a slouch and a tilt, coat-tails flapping in the wind. Next to it there stood a boy and a girl, hardly out of their teens, huddling in a close embrace. I remember her clutching a tin of American orange juice in an outsized mitten, no doubt a present from her darling; his hands were buried in her coat, rubbing her warm. When Pavel passed them they stopped their carousing and turned to look after him. The boy whispered something in his lover’s ear. She gave a brief laugh, charmed by someone else’s wretchedness, then turned back into his embrace.
I drew level with them, and wished them a Merry Christmas. ‘ Frolicke Wey-nackten,’ I said in my accented German.
‘And to you, Tommy,’ answered the boy belligerently. Jesus, you would have thought they could forget about occupation on a night like this. Pavel and I, we walked on in darkness. All around us the city eased into the miracle of Christmas Eve.
I have often wondered how much celebrating went on that winter, the winter of ’46. On the whole I am inclined to be optimistic. Had the windows not all been frozen, I am sure we would have been able to make out a tree in every living room, a little shabby perhaps and more likely than not stolen from under their occupiers’ noses. On their twigs: talc candles, wooden trinkets and, amongst the wealthy, fragile glass balls, hand-painted, and a silver star to top the crooked little bugger. I gather there wouldn’t have been much in the way of presents, but perhaps the
y managed to procure something a little special for their dinner: a roast bird perhaps, or carp and almonds, a little torte for afters and a half-shot of something lively, just to toast the Christ-child on his coming. Call me sentimental, but I like to think they kept up their spirits, the Krauts, and forgot them for a night, those pangs of defeat. Pavel, though, seemed oblivious to their merrymaking. He kept his eyes on the ground. God knows it was treacherous enough.
In the end it wasn’t much of a walk, though there was plenty of time to freeze right down to the bone. No sooner had he rounded one last corner than some hoodlums set upon him from out of the shadows. They rammed him into the building wall and searched his clothes for weapons. I hung back, watched them push him over a backyard wall, and escort him through a doorway. The electricity was on, and I could watch their progress by their turning on the corridor lights one floor after another. They took him into some place just under the roof. It wasn’t my job to follow him there.
I knew I was in for a long, cold wait. A little disgruntled at having been abandoned so quickly, I rushed back to the phone box we had passed in order to call for backup. Its frame was badly bent, but amazingly I got a line almost at once.
‘Peterson here,’ I said. ‘Richter has rendezvoused with some local gang of street urchins. Schillerstrasse 48, round the back.’
‘Nah, just boys from what I can see. Same place the pipsqueak ran to earlier. Richter’s little friend.’
‘Well, in any case, tell the Colonel. In the meantime, get me some men out here in a car, and a big flask of coffee.’
‘Wonderful. I knew I could count on you.’
‘And a Merry Christmas to you, Jones.’
You see, in the Colonel’s employ, we were all like one big, happy family.
They handled him roughly. Pavel wouldn’t have minded, but one of the boys poked him in the kidneys as he helped to lift him over the courtyard’s low wall, and the pain ran through him throat to groin.
‘Be careful,’ he mumbled.
‘What are you, some sort of girl?’ said the boy. He was armed, Pavel saw, with a carpenter’s hammer. He wondered whether the boy had any idea what a thing like that could do to a man’s face.
They pulled him inside a doorway at the back of a filthy old building, then up several flights of stairs. ‘There used to be an elevator,’ one of his assailants told him proudly. The boy carried a home-made sap and something that looked like a saucepan’s cast-iron lid. ‘You better have something to bargain with,’ he added. ‘Paulchen’s pissed as all hell.’
‘Yes,’ said Pavel, ‘I will give him whatever he wants.’
They took him to an apartment on the top floor. There was no name on the door, just a rusty brass knocker. One of the boys gave it a brisk rapping. There were footsteps on the other side, and a squeaky voice asking: ‘Password?’
‘Open up, Hendrik, or I’ll stick my foot so far up your arse I can use you for a boot.’
‘Yep,’ said the voice. ‘That’s the password.’
Pavel wondered where they had learned their humour. It may have been from the movies. It rang American, somehow.
Inside, there was a cramped two-bedroom garret, the walls lined chest-high with dark old wood. The main room’s ceiling slanted down to one side and seemed to sag, yellowed and rain-damaged. It looked like the underside of some great fish that lay beached and dying; smelled, too, of cigarette smoke and unwashed child.
The latter smell came as no surprise. The room was packed with them. They lined every wall and floor-space; sat two, three rows deep on an ancient sofa livid with rot; stood huddled around the great oven or slouched in the doorway of the adjoining kitchen, unlit cigarettes behind their ears. Pavel counted something like seventeen boys, aged eight upwards. They must have come from far and wide to bear witness to his humiliation before their war leader.
He sat amongst them like a savage chieftain. Sat upon an armchair at the very centre of the room. Green corduroy gone brown and greasy along the backrest and arms; a grey army blanket to cover his legs, this in spite of the room being warmer than any Pavel had entered in weeks, heated as it was by the crush of dirty bodies. Upon Paulchen’s temple, the bruise sat like a leech: black and moist and pert with his blood. In any other weather he would have iced it. The swelling had squeezed shut one eye; its darkness set off the pallor of his face. The mouth was framed by longish tufts of hair, soft as a butler’s glove. A boy too young yet to know when to shave. He stared at Pavel grimly, hands folded as though in prayer. He must have studied the pose somewhere. It added years to his squint.
Paulchen gave Pavel time to have a look around. His eyes travelled from the German flag that graced one wall, to the map of Europe showing the borders of ’41 and a coloured pin for every capital fallen. On a coffee table, casually displayed, there sat a shoebox filled with military insignia and honours. Pavel recognized an Iron Cross and tried to guess at its journey from some Aryan hero’s breast to the pockets of a Russian looter, and onwards, until it ended up here, the cherished prize of one just young enough to have eluded service in the Volkssturm, that army of children and decrepits that held the city in the last desperate days and weeks. Then again, he may have served, and won his cross with a daring charge against a Russian tank, much good it did him, his city burning and deserters strung from every lamppost.
Next to the box of trinkets there stood a little tree upon a stand, decorated with red cotton bows. Its twigs hung half-wilted, the needles more brown than green. All of a sudden Pavel remembered that it was Christmas, and that it was now, in the early hours of the evening, that it would be celebrated all across Germany, just as Charlotte would celebrate it back in Ohio, that woman he had married and whispered words to, about eternity. This was before he had made lovers of women who sold themselves for comfort; before the war and the peace and his decision to stay. The whole weight of his life settled upon him in this moment, and – briefly – he was afraid that his eyes would show tears. From the kitchen there came the smell of leek and potato soup. His stomach grumbled and washed away Christmas. He had not eaten all day.
‘Can I have a bowl of soup?’ he asked.
Paulchen looked at him, incredulous. He was about to flare up, then thought better of it and nodded his assent. A boy – Salomon – peeled himself from out of the pile on the sofa and ran into the kitchen. He returned with an earthenware dish of soup and a wedge of dark bread.
‘Here, Herr Richter,’ he said. The other boys, Pavel noticed, saw it as a collaborator’s act. Young Salomon was in for a rough night.
Pavel ate greedily, gulping down soup and bread in a few quick minutes. It could have used salt, but was otherwise well prepared. The band of thieves were clearly getting by on their own wits. When he was done, Pavel placed the dish next to the little tree and returned his attention to Paulchen.
‘Where is Anders?’ he asked.
‘You don’t know?’
‘No.’
‘We thought you’d know.’
‘Well, I don’t.’
‘He stole my gun.’
‘So Sal – Schlo’ – told me. What does he want with it?’
‘How the hell would I know? Shoot someone, I guess.’
‘Who?’
‘He told us that someone stole his coat. Maybe he wants to shoot him.’
‘Someone stole his coat?’
‘Yeah, the pretty one you gave him, with the blood stains down the back. The thing is, some way or another he found the money to get himself an even better one. Nice little fur number with a collar this wide.’ He held his hands apart theatrically. ‘So really, he had nothing to complain about.’
‘I see. Did he say who took the coat?’
‘No.’
‘Did he mention the Colonel?’
‘The Colonel?’
‘Fosko. Colonel Fosko. He’s the big fat man who runs this neighbourhood. Surely you’ve run into him.’
‘Ah, the fairy. Yes, Anders asked about him recently. I
told him to watch his back around the man. What do you have to do with him?’
Pavel thought about this for a moment. At length, he said: ‘I think he killed my friend.’
It felt good to say it out loud.
‘And now you think he might snuff Anders, too, eh?’
Paulchen said it roughly, but Pavel thought he could detect concern in his one good eye. Salomon, though, had heard enough. Pavel saw him duck out, as though he no longer wanted any part of this, though surely he would have to return later for a berth, and his peers’ camaraderie. Pavel would have liked to tell him to stay around, that things would turn out all right, but there was no time for it. The chieftain wasn’t done with him yet.
‘In any case,’ he said, ‘I hold you responsible for the gun.’
Pavel did not dispute the point. It was ridiculous, of course, but he understood Paulchen’s logic. This way he would not have to hunt Anders down like a dog; would retain his boys’ fealty without practising a cruelty that wasn’t native to his soul.
‘What do you want?’ he asked him meekly. ‘I have no gun to give.’
‘Do you have money?’
Pavel thought about it. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have money.’
‘Schlo’ says you live as poor as a pecker, only you got yourself shelves full of books.’
‘There is a woman in my building. She will give me the money.’
He marvelled at how easy it was to say it, and dispense with Sonia’s wealth before he even owned her heart. It was as though he thought them married; had convinced himself, somewhere along the line, that she was his to command. It was worse than stupid: it was treacherous.
‘She will give me the money,’ he repeated. ‘More than a gun’s worth, if I can count on your help.’
‘You want to hire us for help?’ Paulchen asked moodily. Pavel realized his mistake and revised his terminology.
‘A job,’ he said gruffly. ‘Money up front for services rendered. If you boys have the pluck.’
‘Don’t you worry about no pluck, Mister.’