Pavel & I

by Dan Vyleta

  ‘He went where?’ she heard him ask. ‘He must be there to sell. Don’t let any of them get away. Not one, you hear.’

  ‘That’s right. I want a dozen men up there with Peterson.’

  ‘Yes, I know what day it is tomorrow. Does that pose a problem for you?’

  ‘My good friend, I asked whether it posed a problem.’

  ‘Ah, that’s just what I’ve been thinking. Let me know how things turn out.’

  ‘And a very Merry Christmas to you.’

  He hung up grimly and turned to face her where she was standing in the bedroom doorway.

  ‘Christmas,’ he said with mock exasperation. ‘Gold, frankincense and myrrh, and suddenly everybody wants a bloody day off.’

  He poured himself yet another brandy and drank it off in one. She wondered whether the moment had come when Pavel had finally run out of luck.

  Half an hour later the phone rang a second time. Sonia made to pick it up, but a quick look from Fosko banished her to the kitchen instead, and bid her close the door. Pressing her ear to its wood, she could only make out tantalising snippets. Fosko’s voice dipped whenever he wanted to ensure its privacy.

  ‘You got who?

  ‘Ah, the boy. Splendid. He’s what?

  ‘How?

  ‘Never mind. Here’s what you do. Bring him –’

  And a little later:

  ‘No, don’t. Let them go through with their business. Just go on waiting until he leaves.

  ‘Oh, I know it is cold. Gives you a chance to practise the old “stiff upper lip”, eh, Peterson? Built the Empire, remember? Think of Nelson, or Wellington, if you like.

  ‘And Peterson – when he comes out, make sure he’s clear out of sight before your men jump the others.

  ‘Nothing. Just follow him home.

  ‘Oh, I think he will. He’s got a strumpet waiting for him here. One more thing, Peterson. About the man in the car downstairs.

  ‘Yes, him. What you want to do is –’

  She thought that there was room enough, in the gaps of his conversation, to dig graves for a half-dozen men. A spasm ran through her bladder and for a moment she thought she would piss herself. At last he rang off and called her back into the room. She ran past his watchful gaze and into the bedroom, to relieve herself on her chamber pot.

  ‘You piss like a horse,’ he called through the door, jocular. Even so, she could hear his mounting anger. She wiped herself with some paper, and swallowed the sob that had been building in her throat.

  When Sonia re-entered the room, he was sitting at the piano. His fingers searched out chords, seemingly at random. The bottle of brandy sat balanced upon some of the middle keys, its neck leaning against her sheet music. Fosko played around it, delighting in assonance. Every so often he would chance upon a particularly atonal combination, and hammer it out for four, five beats at a time. Once, the monkey joined in, screeching and chattering and drumming its fists. It would only shut up when Fosko dug a sweet out of one pocket and threw it over to where it sat. Then he resumed playing.

  Quietly, her feet seeking out the thick of the carpet, Sonia approached the piano. She took position behind him, not five feet from his round-shouldered back, and tried to gauge what it would take to kill him. The thought died in her no sooner than she had given it shape. Nothing in the room seemed sufficiently lethal. Had she owned a gun, she would not have dared shoot it, lest the bullet bounce off his skin and fall to the ground between them. At length he spoke.

  ‘I wonder whether you have been lying to me, my dear. Your friend, Richter, he’s not as innocent as it appeared. It looks like Boyd gave him the merchandise after all, which probably means he knows you for Belle. So the question is, is he playing you, or are you playing me?’

  He turned around then, scowling at her over one shoulder.

  Sonia did not react. If he kills me now, she thought, Pavel will never know.

  What she felt for him. She did not put a word to the feeling.

  Almost immediately, Fosko’s scowl softened.

  ‘No,’ he said, and ran a hand across his chin. ‘You wouldn’t play me. Not about something like this. There is nothing in it for you. The Yanks have a phrase for it: “seeing all the angles”. That’s you, my dear – look like an angel, for the most part, but on the inside it’s all hard and sharp and angular. Like a broken mirror. I wonder sometimes – was it the Reich or the Russians, or were you born that way?’

  He resumed playing, pressing down on the pedal to muffle the sounds. It was as though he was gagging the piano.

  ‘Never worry, my dear. I will honour our deal. When all this is over, you’ll have your passport. And the money. I wonder though – will you be happy?’

  He wagged his head and hit a series of F sharps.

  She was off the hook.

  Sonia should have felt a sense of relief, but instead cold sweat began pouring from her armpits and the folds under her breasts. She cast around for a chair to sit on, but felt she could not move. Above all, she was sickened by the thought that he could know her so, like the calluses upon his palms. It seemed unfair to her.

  Fosko played a final chord, then turned around, swivelling on his buttocks like a schoolboy. He smiled ruefully, and recommenced speaking with a changed tone of voice.

  ‘But I forgot what I wanted to tell you all along. My wife is flying in tonight.’

  ‘Your wife?’ she blurted out, then bit her lip. ‘I … I was just thinking about her.’

  ‘Were you? Well, she’s come for Christmas. New regulations for officers’ dependants, you see. She’s bringing the children, too. For all I know they are here already – I had a man pick them up from the airport.’

  He dusted off specks from his uniform trousers, then wet his lips with a giant tongue. ‘I got the boy a little train, and the girl one of those wooden Babushka dolls the Russians are so fond of. A garish little thing: it’s built like a coffin, hollow, only there are more dolls inside, so it’s as heavy as a brick. It opens up along a seam that runs the length of its side.’

  His hands went through the motion, delicate despite their bulk.

  ‘It’s flawed psychology, really: you crack open the surface, and what you find is another just the same as the first, all the way down to a tiny little doll that’s solid and hard and shan’t be broken. I wonder what Peterson would say to that. He loves psychology. Not the book kind, mind, just good old looking people up and down, though, fact is, he only has one eye, which makes for flat viewing.’

  He looked up as though he’d just woken from some reverie. ‘Am I boring you?’

  She shook her head no, and wondered what it was that had led him to think about breaking people. Boyd’s body danced before her mind’s eye; danced awkwardly, on account of its broken shins.

  ‘I had a doll like that when I was a child,’ she said, just to say something, although it was a lie.

  He shrugged his shoulders as though he couldn’t have cared less, and poured himself another glass.

  ‘In any case, they are going to be in town for a few days. I thought about introducing you, but really there is no point. My wife, she takes no pleasure in the company of women, and I doubt you would take to the children.’

  ‘I quite understand.’

  ‘I knew you would.’

  He got up to pat her cheek, then fetched a knife to peel the monkey an apple and feed it by the slice. Sonia watched him do it, and picked up the apple peel from off the ground when he was done.

  They sat in silence after that, Fosko drinking further glasses of brandy, Sonia sitting on the sofa with a book spread across her lap, pretending to read. An hour passed with painful slowness, then another. She began wishing for something to happen, longing for it with all her heart. Then: a knock at her door, a familiar rhythm, and immediately she berated herself for her foolish wish. Fosko raised himself soundlessly and retreated into the bedroom, lifting up the monkey as he passed it on his way, and cradling it in the crook of his arm.
r />   ‘Sonia, my dear,’ he whispered. ‘It appears you have a guest. Better go and open up.’

  She hung her head and did as she was bidden.

  The story took hours to tell, though Pavel could have picked off its facts on the fingers of one hand. Söldmann gradually drifted into its background, his life providing Paulchen with an excuse to narrate his own, and that of his parents – the mother an early convert to Nazism, the father more reluctant, a patriot, and unaccountably bitter when the order came for him to march east, and kill Bolsheviks. ‘That night, they fought so hard, I thought he would beat her to death,’ Paulchen confided. ‘She even called him a filthy, no-good Yid.’ He glanced around sternly to impress upon his brood that the charge had been devoid of grounds.

  Pavel listened to it all with great attention; listened to the repetitions and asides, enjoying the vibrancy of the young man’s vocabulary as it struggled manfully to keep abreast of life. At times the other boys would chirp in, providing snippets of their own tales. What united them, more than anything, were narratives of death, invariably rendered with a studied nonchalance. The Karlsons, for instance, had lost their father to Stalingrad and their mother to a German grenade, carelessly lobbed through the wrong apartment window on the penultimate day of the Battle of Berlin. She had, they said, only received a minor abdominal wound, but had never returned from hospital. ‘Probably bled to death,’ one brother stated matter-of-factly. ‘They were running out of blood reserves just then.’

  Next, a boy they called Woland told of how he had stumbled upon a ring of schoolboys climbing on each other’s shoulders in order to touch – and spin – the foot of a man hanged for desertion; hanged from a lamppost in broad daylight, a paper sign around his neck that explained his misdeed. A look at his ashen face – Woland had climbed a pair of shoulders himself – and it turned out he was the boy’s uncle, with whom he was living at the time. ‘He didn’t do no deserting,’ he insisted sulkily, and repeated the phrase two or three times until Pavel conceded that ‘it must have been a mistake’. The boy shook on it and his friend Hansi suggested that maybe the Russians had hanged him there, in a ploy against civilian morale. Only then was Paulchen given leave to resume his story. The upshot of which was this: Söldmann was organized crime, had been from before the peace, and dealt primarily in information, with a sideline in drugs and firearms. When Pavel asked about his headquarters, Paulchen gave him an address, a few streets over from Boyd’s bordello.

  ‘That’s all I got,’ said Paulchen. ‘We’ve never done any business with Söldmann.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He says he doesn’t deal with boys.’

  The announcement, grimly made, was met by a chorus of hisses. Pavel quickly assured them that he was no such fool.

  He left shortly after, reiterating his promise of money. Outside, the cold had intensified, and he hurried home without a backward glance. His mind was on Sonia: the memory of their kiss. He wondered whether he should hold her again; there was time enough, on that walk home, to nurse the seed of a dream in which he saved her, from misfortune and her life of vice. No sooner had he thought it than he chided himself. The cold was making him light-headed.

  When he reached his apartment building, Pavel walked up to Sonia’s door without caring to stop at his own rooms first. He knocked, impatiently, already picturing her face. Sonia was slow to react. He was about to repeat the motion when she pulled back the latch.

  ‘Mr Richter,’ she said. ‘Pavel. So good of you to come.’

  He knew at once that she was not alone. Anger took hold of him, banished all prudence.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked.

  ‘Who?’

  He walked past her and threw open first the kitchen, then the bedroom door. There, upon the edge of her bed, sat the Colonel, stroking the monkey upon his knees. He was so fat that his stomach came halfway to his thighs. The monkey clung to it like a suckling babe.

  ‘Ah, Pavel! How do you do?’

  Pavel stood in the doorway, hands clenched into fists, unsure of himself.

  ‘A glass of brandy perhaps? You look like you are freezing. Sonia, a glass for our guest, and make it quick.’

  Fosko rose, depositing the monkey on the floor. Once again Pavel marvelled at how effortlessly he moved.

  ‘But we should go through to the living room. A lady’s boudoir – it is no place for men to talk. Not amongst crumpled linen.’ He waved carelessly towards where Sonia’s negligee peeked out from under one pillow. ‘I sense you have something important to convey.’

  They returned to the living room, the Colonel leading Pavel by the elbow, Pavel allowing himself to be led. Sonia lined up two glasses, and poured from the half-empty bottle. They raised them solemnly in front of their faces; stood eye to eye like duellists; drank. Pavel’s left, he noticed, remained in the guise of a fist.

  ‘You have been out and about on business?’ Fosko asked, as though innocently.

  ‘You know I have.’

  ‘Then perhaps it was imprudent to go. Unhealthy, even. For you and your associates.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

  A flicker of amusement ran through the Colonel’s face. He shaped his lips into a smile.

  ‘It is not a phrase you should grow fond of.’

  He waved for Sonia to top them up. It occurred to Pavel that Fosko might be very drunk just then.

  ‘I should go,’ he muttered, thinking that he must run back to Paulchen’s, and warn the boys.

  ‘On the contrary – you should stay awhile. It is I who has to leave. Duty calls.’

  Fosko’s eyes ran over Sonia’s body, ignoring her face.

  ‘She’s quite something, wouldn’t you say, Pavel? Good legs on her, and that husky voice. Oh-la-la. And the tits are a dream. She’s morally tainted, of course, but I know what you’ll say. The world has ill used her. So it has, my friend, so it has.’

  ‘Don’t you dare –’

  ‘My mistake, forgive me. I forgot that you are delicately put together, though I daresay there’s a cock on you some place. In any case, where’s my coat? I have some business to attend to.’

  He dressed with great rapidity, drawing his mink coat around him. At the door, he stopped himself like a man who has forgotten his umbrella.

  ‘You enjoy yourself. My house is your house. There will be time to speak further – later.’

  Through all this Pavel could do nothing but stand and stare. It was that, or launch himself at the man and strangle him with his bare hands. It was an unbecoming thought.

  No sooner had Fosko closed the door behind him than Sonia ran past Pavel and into the bedroom. Pavel did not understand her urgency until he heard the tinkle of her urine stream, violent against the chamber pot’s side. Embarrassed for her, he retreated to the far end of the room and even turned his back. She re-emerged a minute later, rubbing at her hands with a shard of ice.

  ‘Nerves,’ she shrugged, and he smiled to assure her he quite understood.

  ‘I should go. He sounds like he’s planning … mischief.’

  She laughed at his word. Pavel sat down upon the sofa.

  ‘I really should go,’ he repeated.

  ‘Forget it,’ she whispered. ‘You’re finished. The minute you walk out this door.’

  She stepped over to him and sat by his side. Through his anger and his fear he could smell the fragrance of her hair. He reached for her hand, not looking. By accident he touched her thigh instead. She recoiled and moved a half-foot away from him. They sat next to each other, conscious of the gap, and stared at the wall.

  ‘What did he do to you?’ he asked at length.

  She shrugged, sought his eyes, then evaded them once they’d found her.

  ‘Nothing,’ she croaked. ‘But he knows.’

  ‘Knows what?’

  ‘He knows that I – but what’s the use in saying it?’

  Pavel wished that, just once, she would use the word.

  ‘I love you?’ he murmured.


  She got up to blow her nose. Perhaps she had not heard him. He watched her pace the room, then settle herself before the piano. Her fingers stroked the keys but did not strike them. Things would have been better had she played.

  ‘We could just give him what he wants.’ Sonia’s eye travelled to the teapot in the cupboard. ‘It might change things for you.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘No, we can’t do that. Not if he killed Boyd we can’t.’

  His voice sounded stubborn to himself, like a child’s, but Sonia did not argue the point.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Better that way. For myself, that is.’

  ‘Just tell me one thing,’ he asked meekly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you know Boyd would die?’

  ‘I knew he was a pawn who thought himself king.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I knew he would die. I helped kill him.’

  ‘You had no choice.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  He heard her say it and fell to thinking.

  Thinking that Sonia had grown hard in the war, hardest of all on herself.

  ‘I must go,’ he said yet again, and struggled to raise himself from out of the couch. She did not stir at the announcement but sat round-shouldered upon her stool. And then, just as it seemed they would part in anger, another kiss, their third, pressed up against the piano, his hand sounding bass notes. In all his life there had been no kiss such as this.

  ‘You taste of brandy,’ she said, light-heartedly, the only time he had known her to blush.

  ‘And you of the Colonel’s cologne.’

  He turned around then and walked out the door, not daring to look back and see whether or not his words had hurt her.

  Pavel left her apartment, unsure what to do next. He had half expected the Colonel’s men to be waiting for him there, and place him under formal arrest, but the staircase was empty of life, and dark too, with only the moon to draw its outlines. For the briefest of moments he considered whether they had misunderstood Fosko; whether the man had just been drunk, and had shuffled off to bed in order to sleep off the liquor. Pavel dismissed the notion at once. He knew better than to delude himself. His kidneys sat uncomfortably in his back and he decided that, whatever else happened, he had better take his evening medicine. As he walked towards his apartment door, he noticed that it stood ajar. There was no light on the inside.