Pavel & I

by Dan Vyleta

  I rose and strolled over to his cell, formulating my first question.

  ‘You are married?’ I asked him. ‘I noticed the ring.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So? Is she pretty?’

  ‘You want to know whether my wife is pretty?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He smiled at that, a bitter little smile, and shook his head. When I left him, an hour later, he was smoking again, and spinning his wedding ring around his emaciated finger.

  That’s how it was, our first day in the basement: a day of silence, two men puffing away at their cigarettes, and a single, inept question around dinnertime that fell on recalcitrant ears. The truth is that I was hardly as much in control as I may have made it seem, nor as calmly content with my role of silent observer. It had been a day full of surprises. I had risen early that morning and dressed with extravagant care. My apartment was stuffy with the smells of my wash-basket and troubled digestion. I might have opened a window despite the cold, but the latch was frozen shut and the glass frost-smeared even on the inside. There was no need to make breakfast – I should have my morning coffee at the Colonel’s – but as every morning I took the time to iron a fresh collar and handkerchief, having long cherished the belief that one could tell a man’s mettle by the crispness of its crease (a foolish notion, no doubt, but one that had proven remarkably stubborn). It was not quite six when I went to pour hot water over my car’s windows and hood, and not half six gone when I let myself into the Colonel’s villa with my own set of keys. The drive had been uneventful enough, if cold, and punctured at one eerie intersection by the howling of wolves retreating back into the woods after their nightly excursions into the city.

  I arrived at the villa and reported for work with my usual gusto, only to have the Colonel wave me away and bid me wait out of earshot. He was on the phone, a terse conversation of barked half-syllables, one jowly cheek still swathed in shaving lather. Later, when he found me sitting idly upon the living-room couch, he ignored the simple present I had prepared for him and instructed me in language more plain than was his custom not to use any form of physical coercion on Pavel until further notice. I was conscious of the absurdity of the request, of course, but did not voice any protest. Midday, when I ventured into the kitchen and saw that the Colonel was missing from the Christmas table with its half-carved turkey and seasonal decorations, his wife advised me that Fosko was receiving a Russian officer in his study, ostensibly for the exchange of gifts. Later still, the Colonel left for town in gala uniform and polished boots: I saw him drive off from the servants’ bathroomwindow as I was taking a prolonged toilet break occasioned by my recalcitrant prostate. He had not yet returned when I knocked off from work at half six; his children sat playing under the Christmas tree without the benefit of a paternal presence, their mother thumbing idly through her husband’s record collection. In other words, I had been left, for the entirety of the day, with no real instructions, and a prisoner on my hands whom I was not allowed to touch.

  None of this would have made me quite as tongue-tied, being a chatty fellow by disposition, had the Colonel not made it clear that he expected answers out of Pavel Richter nevertheless. When I politely inquired how I was to do this, he merely told me that Pavel was a man ‘all broken up over the loss of a boy. Just ply him with cigarettes, and he will start talking all on his own.’ It was not the moment, I felt, to inform Fosko that we had hanged the wrong child.

  So I went down into the basement and stood over him for what seemed like an age, my face pressed against the bars of his cage, reading his dream off his lids. He slept like an infant, his face crushed into the ground, fingers bent and his hair limp from the cellar’s infernal climate. Even so he was a handsome man; a hollow-eyed beauty at once effete and masculine. Haggard, in any case. I was tempted to touch, and encourage him to claim the mattress’s comforts that he had either abandoned or altogether spurned. In the end I stayed my hand, already halfway through the bars. It wasn’t the time for a first touch. Instead, I straightened and patted my pockets for cigarettes.

  The cellar’s heat soon peeled me out of my overcoat. There must have been no other house in Berlin as well heated as the Colonel’s, and no other cellar so in thrall to a furnace’s pent-up fury. The wall was parched by it, a spider’s web of cracks running floor to ceiling, with the exception of one corner where a water pipe leaked and bled a patch of wet onto the plaster. It was a curious detail of that winter’s work that the poor souls we dragged down into the basement for interrogation or intimidation experienced, in the first few minutes and hours of their stay, the uneasy joy of finally, miraculously feeling warm. It was their flesh that betrayed them: after weeks of cowering, it unfurled itself and rose to meet wire, fist or knife with the moronic flush of well-being. In time, no doubt, the Colonel’s visitors came to despise the heat, along with the hulking shadow of the cast-iron stove and the smell of dry brick, and began to long once again for the sterile cold of winter.

  Meanwhile, my brow and underarms were running with sweat. I was loath to soil my freshly ironed handkerchief that early in the day, so I wiped my brow with my coat-sleeve instead. Still Pavel Richter would not wake. I went back into a crouch and tried to read his features. It was a mystery to me how I should get him to talk. I didn’t even know what it was I could say to him.

  In the end I didn’t. Speak to him. The whole of that first day. There were no threats I could make and be held to, and I was unsure whether I was allowed to use techniques that left little or no mark on a man’s body. Also, his face unnerved me, those dark, teary eyes that shone hard as moist granite. By the end of the afternoon, I began to fixate on his wedding ring. He did not strike me as the kind of man who would cheat on his wife (though all men did, during the war, and excused themselves by their fear of death). It came to be the only question I could formulate. What he thought about his wife. I did not do it very well and he sent me packing. I had hoped he would be polite enough to offer an answer. Then again, it was an unusual circumstance, a dead boy between us, and a lover who slept with the enemy. In any case, when I went home that evening, I earnestly hoped the Colonel would lift his restrictions upon my work. It wasn’t that I had any special desire to hurt Pavel, but we needed his secret, and I for one was becoming increasingly curious to learn more about our quiet, patient friend.

  I rose at half past five the next morning, and repeated my morning rituals. Then: a hasty drive, worn tyres skidding over snow-covered roads. When I entered the villa’s kitchen, I surprised the Colonel’s wife who, dressed in a silky morning gown with an oriental design, was preparing a family breakfast. She gave a start and dropped a butter knife, then collected herself and stooped to retrieve it. Her neckline gaped in response to her movement. I was polite enough to avert my gaze.

  ‘Very sorry to march in on you like this. I trust the Colonel is upstairs?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No. He called late last night and said to tell you he had to fly out to London. And to give you this.’

  She wiped her fingers on her gown, picked up an envelope from the top of the breadbin and passed it over by one corner. As I accepted the letter, we exchanged a glance and shared her statement’s implication. She had flown in, two days previously, to celebrate Christmas with her husband. Now she was stranded in Berlin, and acting as his messenger boy.

  ‘Anything I can do for you?’

  ‘Why thank you, but no. My husband said his chauffeur would fetch us whatever was needed.’

  I nodded my acceptance of the arrangements and allowed her to pour me a cup of coffee.

  ‘I understand you work in the basement.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Feel free to join me and my children for lunch.’

  ‘Much obliged, but I fear I will have to take my meals downstairs.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  I wondered whether her coolness came naturally to her, or at some strain. One could adduce arguments for either.

 
; I took my coffee in the drawing room and read over the note the Colonel had left. It added little to what she had already told me. He had left for London, to report at headquarters. I should proceed as discussed. His wife was not to leave the house. He’d return as soon as possible. Kind regards, etc.

  The letter seemed to confirm a budding theory of mine, that the Colonel’s ‘private’ activities had begun to draw the attention of his superiors; he might be hard pushed to smooth things over. If so, he would certainly have no wish for the maltreated body of a United States national to surface in the villa’s basement, along with a surgical bowl full of toenails and viscera. I was stranded then, with a silent prisoner and no leverage to make him talk. It was a question of breaking him, I guess: I needed to produce in him that peculiar blend of isolation and self-doubt that blossoms in detainees and makes them feel guilty before their jailers. Try as I might, the one thing that kept popping back into my head was the question of his wife.

  ‘Just a name, Mr Richter, that’s all I want. A name. It’s utterly useless to me. Make one up if you like.’

  ‘Charlotte.’

  ‘Very well, Charlotte. A beautiful name. Is she pretty?’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘Ah, go on. It’s just a conversational question. Nothing in it. All you need to do is say yes.’

  But he just stared at me with that haggard, patient face, and waited me out. His eyes, I noticed, were on my boots again. I wished there was some way of getting past his suspicion of me.

  ‘Are you scared, Mr Richter?’ I asked after some thought.

  He snorted, took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled.

  ‘I saw Boyd’s body,’ he said. ‘I saw what you did to him. That was you, right?’

  I waved away the question.

  ‘Half of what you saw was put in place after the fact. The Colonel gave orders, you see, to make it look savage. “Make it look Russian,” he told us. Our boys had never seen an NKVD corpse, so it came down to guesswork.’

  Pavel gave a nod, but I could see he wasn’t listening.

  ‘It was you,’ he repeated. ‘Say that it was you.’

  ‘We don’t want to hurt you, Pavel,’ I told him. ‘You just have to start talking.’

  ‘You are a coward,’ he raged at me, and ground his cigarette into the floor. The voice no louder than if he’d asked a waiter for the bill.

  I kept at him. Asked the same question over and over. The whole of that morning, cigarette after cigarette.

  ‘Is she pretty?’ I asked.

  He only frowned and told me to ‘leave him alone’.

  I must have asked a hundred times before lunch. After lunch, I asked a hundred times more. It was mid-afternoon by the time I finally managed to make him respond.

  ‘Is she pretty?’ I asked. ‘Charlotte, I mean. Your wife.’

  ‘What is it to you?’

  ‘I’m only asking. Is she pretty?’

  He shrugged his shoulders, his brow clammy with the heat. ‘Yes. She is.’

  ‘I knew she would be. What does she look like?’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘All I’m asking is what does she look like? That shouldn’t be so hard.’

  ‘Short, slender. A blonde. Will that do?’

  ‘It’s not very poetic, but it’ll do. I have a lively imagination. Do you miss her?’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘I’m just trying to figure it out, Mr Richter. You’re decommissioned and there is a pretty wife waiting for you back home. No earthly reason why you wouldn’t be with her. And yet you are here.’

  He hung his head then, and rolled his shoulders, dark eyes turned inwards, into himself.

  ‘One has to wonder, doesn’t one? What the hell are you doing here?’

  It’s all I got that day. I tried again, of course, a dozen times over, targeting what I thought to be his weak points – the estranged wife, his passion for the Colonel’s whore, his reticence about the midget’s secret and the pain his obstinacy had precipitated. The curious thing was that I could see him being affected by my insinuations: his face would flush, with guilt or anger or shame. He never once tried to refute them, but rather listened with a certain receptive eagerness. And yet everything I said seemed to only entrench in him more deeply his refusal to co-operate. On occasion he would rouse himself to retaliate, calmly demanding that I expose myself as Boyd’s tormentor and the boy’s killer and thus ‘accept responsibility’. He never once raised his voice, and was scrupulously polite when it came to thanking me for the food, coffee and water I handed him.

  It drained me, this long day of questions. When I thought I couldn’t bear it any longer, I set up my chessboard and pretended a game against my brother, who had died long ago from a familiar mixture of patriotism and mustard gas, wedged tightly into some barren furrow of French earth. For every fallen pawn, I forced myself to formulate another question; three for a bishop and a half-dozen for the queen. By the time my king fell, I knew I had to be on my way.

  It was past nine o’clock. I stood, drew close to his cage, bid Pavel a good night. He nodded acceptance, sitting on the corner of his mattress, but did not reiterate the phrase. On impulse, I dropped to my haunches, looked him eye to eye.

  ‘All I want,’ I said, ‘is for us to talk like men.’

  He turned away then, and ran a weary hand through his hair.

  I walked out without further comment and, at the top of the stairs, switched off the light to leave him in total darkness. The door locked behind me with a pleasing little click.

  Upstairs, the drawing room was still alive with occupants, and I stopped at the door for a moment to watch the Colonel’s young children at a game of charades: a boy and a girl in their Sunday best, whispering in some private tongue of theirs. The gramophone was spewing forth some opera, drowning out their voices, something dour and German with too much brass. I did not notice the children’s mother at first. She was sitting in the shadow of the Christmas tree, stiff-backed upon the couch, with her palms in her lap and her feet aligned beneath her. It was only when she rose to greet me that I saw she was crying.

  ‘Say good night to the gentleman,’ she instructed her children. ‘Mr Peterson, is it?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  The girl curtsied and the boy shook my hand, both of them doing their best not to stare at my patch.

  ‘Good night,’ said the mother.

  They had all three of them the most wonderful manners.

  ‘All I want, Pavel, is for us to talk like men.’

  I’d said it lightly, on a hunch, to draw him into me and bait his heart. I wonder, though, how much truth lay in those words even then, in those early days of interrogation. In retrospect, it is hard to imagine a time when my heart was not yet heavy with the thought of him. Something about the man spoke to me: his gentleness, the calm good manners, a man dignified even when passing his water, down in his enemy’s cell, and his jailer vexing him with questions.

  But this is me talking now, gorged upon the illusions of hindsight. Back then, after my second day spent with Pavel, I lay exhausted, snoring, oblivious still to what lay in store. Wore a nightcap of wool and a triple layer of socks; my alarm clock ticking and a glass of water half-frozen on the dresser, eye-patch hanging off the bathroom hook. At sunup, I rose, ironed my hanky, and planned my next move. Outside, the sun hung low and sickly in the sky, barely clearing the mounds of rubble. I drove to work rehearsing words and strategies, my mind already with Pavel.

  One wonders how he spent the nights, Pavel, haggard, sweating, cut off from all life. He will have searched the cage first of all; run his hands down its bars and rattled the lock. Will have kneeled in prayer, perhaps, his shirt spread out behind his head and shaping Hebrew syllables he barely understood. The conviction must have grown on him, that second night, that he would not be tortured. It may have signalled to him that the Colonel had long since secured the merchandise, and that he, Pavel, was marked for quiet
execution. One can picture him coming to terms with it: a bullet to the base of his neck, or the edge of a spade, if one wanted to be quiet about it. A long, dark night, sweating into his mattress’s straw; not a wink of sleep, I should have thought, and shy brittle thoughts about Sonia, spelling out words he might have said, but never did.

  When I got down to the basement that morning, Pavel was on his hands and knees. He had found that, in the basement’s heat, a bunch of cockroaches had decided to defy the laws of the season and come out of whatever form of hibernation their kind favours. Pavel was crouching over them with delight, watching them dart from shadow to shadow and feed on the crumbs of his previous night’s dinner. ‘Life,’ he told me gloatingly, ‘down here in your torturer’s den.’

  The vision of his dark, moist eyes glowering at me from the cage while insects scuttled across its concrete floor so took me aback that I forgot all about the questions I had been mentally preparing all morning. I excused myself and went upstairs to brew some coffee. The Colonel’s wife was there, dressed in her morning gown. There had been no news from the Colonel, and should she butter me some rolls? We talked about the weather, the Nuremberg trials, Germany’s capacity for self-pity. Half an hour later I was back in the basement with Pavel.

  ‘Tell me more about your wife,’ I said.

  He turned his back on me and stared at roaches.

  We said little more for the rest of the morning. I felt tired, uneasy, frustrated. Here we were, our third day in the basement, and I was not an inch closer to the information the Colonel had asked me to procure. At the same time, I was becoming aware of my mounting curiosity. I had, within those very walls, listened to perhaps a half-dozen life stories and taken careful note of them. Now I was eager to learn Pavel’s, right down to his private habits and desires. You would be surprised what men part with when under duress. I cast around for something that would hurt him. Sticks and stones, I remember thinking. No words came to mind that would compare to a good old-fashioned beating. Until I chanced upon the war, that is.