by Dan Vyleta
‘Where did you serve?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘In the war. Where did you serve?’
I waited while he made up his mind whether or not to answer me.
‘The D-Day landing. France, then Holland, going east.’
‘Did you kill any Krauts, my friend?’
‘Krauts,’ he echoed. ‘I never liked that word.’
I repeated my question. ‘Did you kill?’
‘What is it to you?’
‘Look who’s not taking responsibility now.’
He screwed up his mouth and would not speak further, but I could see I had hit upon a nerve, blood rushing to his face and his hands curling into tidy little fists. Now it was up to me to find out what had got him so agitated about the whole affair.
I got there through sheer verbosity. Thoroughly bored of restricting myself to the same monosyllabic questions, I launched into a description of my own period of service; told anecdotes, sketched comrades, chattered about the war. I know it was hardly part of the interrogator’s handbook, but I must have felt that Pavel was a special case, who would not respond to the usual rigmarole of food deprivation and bright shining lamps. It felt good, I must confess, letting go of prudent restraint. All the same, I watched him carefully, looking for a means to rouse him from his passivity and goad him into some form of self-betrayal.
Throughout my chatter he sat with his back against the bars and his eyes on the roaches, shooting me a glance, on occasion, when I was laying it on a little thick. At long last – we had just eaten our lunch – I paused and stood up from my chair and drew close to where he was sitting.
‘But none of this seems to interest you very much, Mr Richter. It seems like you have no stomach for the war. It offends you. You’re one of those sensitive types – it’s all there in the cast of your mouth – who prefer to shut out the unpleasantries of existence. Let me tell you something, Mr Richter: I take the Colonel over you any day. Not a nice man, I will admit, but an honest one. Looks life in the eye. You walked your way from Normandy to Berlin, a gun in your hand, and now you pretend it never happened. You won’t even think about it.’
I spat out a piece of gristle, and hoped to God he would take the bait.
He did in the end, though he took his sweet time making up his mind. Sat sullenly upon the mattress, his head buried in one hand, and pushed tinned vegetables around on his lunchtime plate. Surrendered his cutlery, placed the plate on the floor, and stood. Took two steps and an age to walk over towards the iron bars. His face, I saw, had taken on a peculiarly solemn cast. I remember thinking that the man wore tragedy like a lady wears her stole. It set off his eyes.
‘I used to think about it,’ he began. ‘I worked on a list. All the bad things that happened in the war, and afterwards, in the first months of peace. The very worst of things. I wrote them down just so, unblinkingly. I distinctly recall using that word, unblinkingly, sitting at my typewriter late at night, the moon out across from my window –’
He broke off all of a sudden and sat back down on his mattress. I left him alone for a few minutes, his back stooped, the collar stiff with dried-in sweat.
‘What was on the list?’
It took hours before he got round to giving me an answer. But then it poured out of him like prophecy.
I don’t think he meant it to. You could see it in his face, those hollow cheeks and knitted brow: how he told himself to shut his trap. ‘Not a word,’ he will have sworn to himself. ‘ Don’t you say another word.’ Reminded himself about Boyd. How he got killed, and worse. ‘Blue fingertips,’ he’ll have told himself, ànd a cigarette burn on his scrotum.’ He took so long dithering over it, I literally fell asleep in my chair.
When I woke, though, there he was, crouching right down by the bars, so low I almost didn’t see him at first. He’d already launched into it, his story. For all I know he had been speaking for the past half-hour, the voice so quiet I had to time my breaths against his rhythm.
‘Item seventeen,’ he whispered. ‘Early May 1945. A girls’ school in Schöneberg, during the last days of fighting. The teacher tells her class that once they have taken the city, the Reds will rape them. Crawl into their beds at night and rape them. She tells them, “If they rape you, there is nothing left for you but to die.” By the end of that week, one third of the class have followed her orders. Dishonoured, they’ve jumped out of windows, hanged themselves on barn gates or drowned themselves in horse troughs. The rest of them get on with life, defiled. The teacher, too, is raped. She moves in with a Soviet corporal. Now she is married to an American GI from New Orleans. When one of her students bumps into her in the street, she asks her whatever happened. The ex-teacher shrugs. “As you can see,” she tells her, “I’ve fallen in love.” She makes the girl a present of some food coupons. They never meet again.
‘Item twenty-nine. July 1945. Two children are playing out in the woods. They play a game of hide-and-seek. One of them falls down a little ditch and wakes a million flies. It stinks down there, and an arm is sticking out of the bushes. “Come out of there,” cries his brother. “Just one moment.” The boy in the ditch finds a boot with something in it, and a munitions belt. He picks it up and plays with it, pulls the pin out of a grenade. The explosion kills him, and busts the eardrums of his brother. He just stands there, the flash has blinded him and the world’s gone silent. He stands and screams. It’s how his parents find him a few hours later. Later that night the father assures his wife that things are for the best. “We could never have fed both of them through the winter.” The boy doesn’t hear him; his ears will never heal.
‘Item thirty-one. Spring 1946. Two British soldiers in a bar. They are very drunk and hassling the barkeep in bad German. A platoon of Russians come in, three bottles of vodka between them. For no particular reason they stand up for the barkeep. Soon a fist fight breaks out. The Brits, outnumbered and already bloodied, draw their guns. The Russians do likewise, leap for cover behind the bar. Shots ring out. They are so drunk that not one of them hits the other lot. Once they’ve gone through their magazines, they call it a truce, and finish the last bottle of vodka together. As they step out, ten minutes later, a ring of people has formed around a woman shot through the chest. A stray bullet’s hit her through the window. The Russians run for it, but one of the Brits pushes through the crowd and lifts up her sweater to have a look at the wound. There is nothing to be done – she was dead the moment she got hit. “A shame,” says the soldier over breakfast the next morning. “She had a smashing pair of jugs.” The others giggle, and tell him to shut his trap.
‘Item forty-three. January 1946 –’
But I had heard enough. ‘Okay, okay, I get your point. Life is hard. All men are greedy, fickle and ungrateful – in a word, they are bastards. Is that what’s got your goat?’
He shrugged and held my stare.
‘Something like that.’
‘What about you?’ I demanded. ‘Who cares about all the rest? Deaf children and a spoilt pair of titties. Tell me about yourself, Pavel. What did you do during the war, when you weren’t busy making lists?’
But he only smiled and turned, and sat himself back on his mattress. I was beginning to ask myself, then, whether I would ever learn a single truth about this man that went beyond the meekness of his smile.
For the next two hours we sat in total silence.
One wonders did he show them to Boyd, his stories. Type them out up in his room and pass them on to his comrade-in-arms, studying his face for effect. Two men smoking, and the rustle of paper. Boyd’s reaction will have been much like mine.
‘You’re taking it too hard,’ he’ll have said. ‘Live a little.’
The voice a little sore, because Pavel had consistently declined to visit him in his brothel.
It is hard to reconstruct what drew them together, Boyd White and Pavel Richter. I certainly never got to the bottom of their friendship. It could be that Pavel cared more for him now that he
was dead. It happens. I have often noticed that the past adds a sense of clarity to affect; in the present, one too often strains to feel anything much at all.
Towards the end of the day, Pavel started picking on me. He must have been chafing about giving away too much of himself; that burst of words, it smacked of collaboration with his jailer. I could see it in his eyes, a new-found anger that peeked out of his customary serenity and hungered after confrontation.
Things started innocently enough. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked me late afternoon, sitting on his usual perch upon the mattress.
‘London,’ I told him before I could think better of it. ‘The East End.’
‘You don’t sound English. I suppose your accent does, but your words – they come from all over.’
I smiled, pleased he had noticed. ‘I’ve spent some time on the road. You pick up words, here and there. After a while I made a game of it.’
I know I shouldn’t have, but I showed him my little notebook in which I had made a habit of jotting down any curious phrase or piece of slang that I came across.
‘See, there’s a whole section here for words from overseas. “Dope fiend.” “Pussy hound.” “Make whoopee.” Lots of fine little phrases. I thought they might come in handy some time. For writing stories. I mean, I have seen things –’
I made an unfortunate gesture meant to encapsulate the whole of the world, though from where he was sitting he must have taken it as being directed at the room with its many paraphernalia of pain. ‘Things most people wouldn’t even dream of.’
He snorted and shook his head. Upon his lips the shadow of a smile, though the eyes were hard as granite. I thought he would speak, but he held on to the silence like a gun, the minutes ticking away and my underwear soggy with sweat. I could have done with a bath then, and a finger of scotch.
‘What?’ I asked when it was clear he would leave me hanging on his smile, and annoyed now that I had been so open with him. ‘A man such as me isn’t allowed to take to the pen?’
He pursed his lips like he was about to blow me a kiss. I had never before witnessed his face gird itself for mockery.
‘A torturer that tells stories?’ he said. ‘Or is it the other way round? Are you a storyteller who’s turned to torture for inspiration? Is that what you do – flail people’s skin, until they stand before you naked? Stealing stories the way rapists steal kisses.
‘What good can they be?’ he asked. ‘Secrets surrendered in order to make you stop.
‘Don’t lecture me on taking responsibility,’ he said. ‘There is a reason why I burned that list.
‘Some stories,’ he said, ‘they pass judgement on the teller.
‘Tell me what happened to Boyd.
‘Tell me,’ he shouted. ‘Tell me how you killed him.
‘Tell me,’ he repeated, ‘and perhaps we can talk like men.’
His eyes aglow like embers in a gale.
I confess I had no patience with his rant and literally ran out of the basement. I even made a point of slamming the door behind me. Mrs Fosko was in the kitchen, a pan of spotted dick steaming in her arms, and gave me the funniest of looks. I caught my breath and told her we had vermin.
She wrinkled her nose.
‘Try arsenic,’ she recommended and, pudding in hand, stepped through to the living room to cater to her brood. I lingered and watched for a while, soothed by the spectacle of her mother’s touch.
Of course there were things I could have said in my defence. I only thought of them when I got home, rolling around on my mattress during a sleepless night. The thing was: he didn’t know a thing about me. Worse than that, he didn’t want to know. There he was in his prison cell, his head hung low over things that weren’t his to change, and not a thought that I, his keeper, might have my own set of nags and worries, and did I go to town with them? I could have, you see: washed my linen right here in public, and pages at a time, on and on until you loved me, too, who breaks bones for a living. Did I not once have a wife (and who wants to hear about her?), dead from cancer, whom we buried under a rough slab of stone, the ground frozen hard and pissy out, too? And did I not hold within my breast the story of my eye, losing it that is, to a chance piece of shrapnel and a doctor’s inept fumblings? The horror of easing a finger into my socket and finding it empty, save for some viscous mess which no longer felt, let alone saw; and the morning that followed, waking up with a dull throb and an itch, thinking that all that was needed was to open my lid, and there it’d be, God’s own sun, bending my eye into a squint (and how I howled when I learned the truth). Oh, yes sir, I have known my share of hardship. A father who was quick with his belt, and would use his buckle, too, if the offence warranted it; a year in service that ended in brisk dismissal and a brush with the law; first passion (a redhead named Ginny, sweet girl, udders like a bloody cow); deep pangs of hunger, like something out of Dickens, and an idiot bar fight that ended with a knife in my thigh. Then: a boat ride to America, at an age when most men had long found their station in life, my stomach heaving for a whole week, only to discover that New York was as big a dump as my native London. A year in jail, an education cobbled together from novels. Raskolnikov as my teacher, Sam Spade and Captain Hook. Rest at ease: I won’t bore you with any of it. Mine is a lonely vigil, devoid of sympathy.
And still I could not sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, his face was there before me, that hollow-cheeked nobility that, once upon a time, I’d thought it my job to realign with fist and sole. It held my attention. The longer I faced his hooded stare, the more I felt my anger evaporate before it. It left something else behind I could not put a name to. As dawn began to break behind the frost-shrouded window, I slowly came to realize that I was no longer much interested in the secrets that Fosko had bid me unearth. For all I knew the Colonel was looking at dishonourable discharge, at military prison, the firing squad. No, it was the man who had begun to move my imagination. Perhaps it was our prolonged proximity that had done the trick; perhaps it had been with me all along – the deep yearning to sound his soul. This was the thought that finally lulled me to a brief hour’s sleep: that I had been trying to break a man where what needed doing was more akin to seduction.
‘Talk to me, Pavel,’ I prayed. ‘Just talk to me, and I will make sure this all ends well for you.’
As I slipped into dreams it was as though I already knew the whole of him and had made a home in his heart. I woke up in a fabulous mood.
Day four or thereabouts: early morning, and dark out. The cold tugging at my fillings, my nose bunged up, every breath a pain. The car wouldn’t start and I had to go back in to fetch two additional pails of boiling water; pour them over the hood. The paint cracked under the heat, but the engine caught amidst a plume of dirty smoke. I sat pumping the gas until it’d settled into a regular rhythm, then wrestled with the frozen handbrake. Wolves howling on my way to the villa, calling it quits on their night-time prowl. There were stories going around about the Russians shooting at them with machine pistols, for sport and for mittens; of soldiers crouching in the snow, peeling the fur off with their hunting knives and grinning like they were back on the parental farm. At the villa, no signs of portent: no news about Sonia, no word from the Colonel, Mrs Fosko uptight like a government seal, though her dressing gown was worn more carelessly with every passing day. Her boy chasing her girl around the living room, and Fosko’s chauffeur dropping off groceries, including three dead rabbits for the pantry. I took my time before I climbed down into the basement, nervous now not to screw things up. Pavel greeted me with the ghost of a nod, his chin dark with stubble and rings under his eyes. I ignored him at first, cleaned out his shit bucket, made a show of setting up my chessboard. He, too, was quiet, watched me launch into a solitary game. Black won twice in a row, then a remise. The two of us waiting, wondering who would break the silence first.
‘You don’t seem to want to talk today.’
‘You didn’t ask any questions.’
�
�Questions or not, yesterday you could hardly shut up.’
He smiled at that, a new kind of smile, open and honest and acknowledging the truth of my words. Hoping that he, too, had decided to make a fresh start of things, I excused myself to make us coffee. I returned shortly and handed him his cup, along with a piece of chocolate still in its wrapper.
‘You should try this. It’s from England. The Colonel’s wife brought it.’
He slipped it between his lips, pulled a face.
‘It’s awful.’
‘Isn’t it now?’
I swear to God he nearly laughed out loud.
We sat silent for a while, our tongues busy dislodging shards of sticky chocolate from our teeth and gums. This time he broke the silence.
‘What’s she like anyway, Frau Fosko?’
‘Oh, you know. Mousy. She doesn’t have an easy life.’
‘I imagine not.’
‘If you ask me, Mr Richter, the whole institution of marriage has to be rethought. It’s somehow flawed. It isn’t fair that one has to choose someone for life before one knows anything at all.’
‘One could marry late.’
‘That’s what everybody says. And then they go and elope with their village sweethearts. Perhaps it’s all those radio romances. Giving us the wrong idea.’
‘Peterson,’ Pavel asked. ‘When are you going to stop screwing around and ask me some questions about the “merchandise”?’
There. He had to go and ruin the moment. I had just been warming to our banter, and he had to bring us back to the squalid real, and in such coarse terms, too. Still, now that I had him talking I didn’t want to anger him. The best I could do was to be honest.
‘Would you tell me? If I asked.’