Pavel & I

by Dan Vyleta

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what’s the point? We’ll get to all that later. There’s plenty of time.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Oh, plenty.’

  ‘Fosko is away?’

  ‘I can’t talk about that.’

  ‘And Sonia?’

  I only shrugged and shook my head.

  ‘I wish you’d tell me more about your wife.’

  Naturally, he sulked for a while before complying with my wish. Whenever he thought to punish me, he would get down on his hands and knees and search his cell for insects. Oh, I got the point. He preferred the company of roaches. It occurred to me that I could march in there and exterminate the lot. It might upset Pavel though, so I left him to it. Eventually, he relented.

  ‘Why do you care?’ he asked.

  ‘Just curious,’ I admitted. ‘Did you get along?’

  ‘By and large. There were disagreements, but no fights. She cried when I went off to war.’

  ‘And then?’

  Pavel sat and thought it through, closing his eyes as he did so. His eyelids were very delicate.

  ‘I don’t know.

  ‘I hope –’ he started, then corrected himself. ‘Sometimes I hope she’s found herself another man.’

  ‘You don’t know? About the other man, that is?’

  ‘I haven’t heard from her in a while.’

  I knew better by now than to push him any further, so I busied myself sweeping out the basement’s corners and checking on the heater.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked when I was done.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know what you need. A spot of brandy. Let me just run upstairs and see whether I can find us some.’

  He seemed pleased when I brought down not only a half-bottle, but also two finely made goblets. I poured him several fingers’ worth and handed him the glass. Our hands touched ever so briefly.

  ‘She’s okay,’ I whispered. ‘Sonia is okay.’

  He nodded and sipped at his brandy.

  That afternoon Pavel and I played our first game of chess, his hand reaching through the bars of his cage in order to move his pieces. I insisted on playing white. He must have had me eight or nine moves in – all of a sudden I was in trouble and just trying to avoid his knights. When my queen fell he allowed himself the briefest of smiles.

  ‘Nothing’s over before it’s over,’ I intoned, but two more moves and I had to concede.

  ‘Better luck next time,’ he offered politely. I nodded as I packed away the pieces. I like a man who’s a good winner.

  ‘Now tell me about Anders. I need to know he’s okay, too.’

  I tried to explain to him that I did not know. That I had never even set eyes on the boy. He wouldn’t relent.

  ‘Is the Colonel looking for him? Surely you know that much.’

  ‘He thinks the boy’s dead. Strung up to your curtain rod. The light was so glum he never noticed the mix-up.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him?’

  ‘No. It must have slipped my mind.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I wondered whether he might be mocking me, but his physiognomy was fixed in its habitual sincerity. I felt touched and responded with a curt bow.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said.

  I judged it too dangerous to reach out and offer him my hand.

  I left early that evening, pleased with the day’s work. Mrs Fosko was in the back garden, smoking a cigarette out in the cold. I waved to her, but she didn’t see me. It did not matter. I would tell her in the morning. Right then, I needed to get home and start packing up my things. I had made the decision that afternoon to move in with Pavel for as long as it would take for the Colonel to come back. We should become cellmates, sharing air, food and buckets, the works. Something had begun that day, and I was keen to see it through. The first glimmer of companionship.

  Oh, I know what you will say: that I was a fool. That Pavel’s new-found willingness to engage with me was founded on little other than his need for information. That it was a change of strategy, for which he chastised himself before the ghosts of his friends. What of it? It gave us a chance to sit and talk and exchange our views. Time would take care of the rest. The soul is a porous thing: it leaks and betrays itself. I left for home that evening, eager for its drippings, and flattered that Pavel should be hunting for my own.

  I moved in the next morning and slowly, gradually, Pavel and I started speaking with greater ease. We played game after game of chess and changed to draughts or backgammon whenever he had beaten me once too often to sit well with my pride. I made him little presents from time to time, mostly of the culinary variety: fresh rolls with butter; apricot jam; Italian coffee from the Colonel’s personal stash. Used the good tableware too, English silver and cloth napkins, that I had to pilfer from the display cabinets and smuggle past a watchful Mrs Fosko who might not have approved. Pavel never made explicit his appreciation of my efforts, but I could tell he was pleased. They spoke to his breeding. We smoked a lot as the days unfolded, unhurried now, giving full attention to the rich American tobacco. To help Pavel keep order in his cell, I gave him an ashtray, though nothing heavy enough to use as a weapon. Once, he asked me for a razor, to scrape off his stubble, but this I had to refuse. I relented as far as the toothbrush was concerned, despite disquieting visions of its pointy handle buried in his throat – or mine. A man has a right to freshen his breath. Whenever one of us had to answer his bodily needs, the other turned politely away. He gave me no trouble when it came to retrieving the dishes and buckets from his cell; he’d step back a few yards and lock his hands around the bars so as to make my gun redundant, though habit still bid me draw it from its holster on these occasions. Much of the time we simply sat and talked, always keen to take the other’s measure. Our talk turned on violence, more often than not. It was as though there were things in our lives that we had to first clear away before there could be any semblance of genuine understanding.

  ‘This doesn’t suit you,’ he told me late one morning, his disapproving gaze upon the long workbench with its leather restraints, and the butcher’s apron that hung off a hook not far away. ‘How did you get mixed up in this?’

  I shrugged, weary of another diatribe about the baseness of my profession. ‘Same way everybody did,’ I said. ‘The war.’

  He made to argue, then swallowed it, his face falling in on itself in an expression I could only read as grief.

  ‘The war,’ he repeated, speaking past the hand that had risen to shelter his mouth. ‘It leads one down some curious paths.’

  I studied him for a while with all the sympathy my single organ could afford. Imagine a cup brimming to its fill. Red-rimmed and a little greasy. But still.

  ‘You fought and killed,’ I said. ‘In the war. Didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘It haunts you.’

  He lowered his lids and turned away. ‘Let’s talk about something else.

  ‘Churchill,’ he said. ‘We could talk about Churchill. I picture him fat and hard like your good Colonel upstairs, stroking his gut while making speeches about a battle on the beach.’

  All that day we talked about the war. First we talked about strategy: soldier stuff, about the bomb in the east, and whether it might have been possible to take Fortress Europe via the Balkans; why the Canadians had failed in Dieppe in ’42. Then we turned to life on the front, the coarseness of it, the company of men. ‘I looked at these men and thought they were assholes,’ he confided during a rare foray into vulgarity. ‘I had been asked to go to war and die with assholes. It was a difficult thing to stomach.’

  He kept his remarks brief and was elusive as to any specifics. The closest I got out of him to an actual war story was a narrative about sitting aboard his transport ship, approaching the English Channel, and waiting for the U-boats to sink him. Watching the sister ship go down not two hundred yards away, destroyers dropping off depth charges, a thousand seamen standing on deck, wait
ing to drown in black ocean and the wind so stiff one couldn’t light one’s cigarette. He could have made more of it – it’s a nice picture after all, but kept to a brittle skeleton of facts. It was disconcerting this, his distrust of story.

  We talked about women, too, here and there; how they stood by the side of the road in France, then Holland, then Germany, watching the soldiers’ march. And about the soldiers’ hunger for women; the violence of their language; the way they reached into their crotches and promised copulation. It led us to atrocity, naturally enough, and from there back into more interesting waters.

  ‘Why did you stop making lists?’ I asked him. ‘About the things that happened after the war, I mean. You said you stopped. Why?’

  He thought about it. A closing of the eyelids, the mouth stretched into a line.

  ‘They weren’t true. Everything had happened just as I wrote it down, but they were lies nonetheless. The dead people, the children betrayed, women raped – it didn’t mean anything to me.’

  Pavel licked his lips and studied my face. I am sure he found in it the sobriety he was looking for. For once he was making perfect sense to me.

  ‘It was as though,’ he said, ‘I’d put my pen to an outrage I never even felt. And in the war –’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I shot at people in the war. I mean I shot them. Shot them dead. I was very good at it. They gave me medals.’

  ‘Did it bother you? The killing?’

  ‘I remember doing it the way one remembers a scene from a book. Anna Karenina jumping under the train. God, how I sobbed when I first read it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I sighed. ‘I’ve always loved Tolstoy.’

  It didn’t sit right with the image I had formed of him, this confession of callousness; did not befit the man I saw slumped before me, with his tousled, unkempt hair and his long fingers cupped over the stub of yet another cigarette. A man delicate down to the fibres of his bones. All through lunch I sat mulling him over, trying to make sense of him.

  ‘You cried over Boyd,’ I reminded him, my fork listless amongst the peas. ‘I was told that you cried. Down in the morgue; cried like a little baby. The Colonel made a joke of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, without looking up from his food. ‘I cried all right. Only then, afterwards,I set to wondering whether it had just been my kidneys.’

  ‘You don’t like yourself,’ I whispered.

  In truth I was surprised.

  He shrugged, as though what I had said was too banal for words. ‘Whosoever does? One would be a fool to.’

  ‘How about Sonia? You feel something for her, don’t you? The Colonel says she’s in love with you. It bothers him, I think.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I feel something for her.’

  He did not say anything further. He did not need to. It was stamped into his face.

  ‘Then tell me what I’ve been asked to find out. Where’s the merchandise? Once we have it, I may be able to let you go.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘No. I thought I might, but now I won’t.’

  ‘Not in a thousand years?’ I mocked. ‘Proud words.’

  He flicked a pea at me through the bars. It bounced off my forehead and plunged straight into my glass of beer, sinking, rising, swimming in a cloud of bubbles. I don’t know why, but we both started laughing and didn’t stop until I thought I’d bust my gut.

  ‘You are like me,’ I told him later, as we embarked on the first of the afternoon’s games of chess. ‘Just like me.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Down here,’ I confided, ‘we hurt people. I have seen some terrible things, let me tell you. Some of the boys, they go crazy with wire clippers. Men beaten till the bones in their faces start wandering. Burns, the smell of burned skin, it lingers in your hair for days on end. But the truth is – it doesn’t really bother me. When I go home at night, I shrug it off like a coat. Inside’ – I thumped my chest – ‘I am unmoved.

  ‘Besides,’ I explained, ‘most of these people we pick up – they’re bastards. I mean real bastards. With some of them, I think they enjoy the torture. Christ, for them it’s like a journey to the promised land.’

  Pavel gazed at me thoughtfully and moved a pawn. Three moves in, and things were already looking pear-shaped for my queen.

  ‘You are nothing like me,’ he told me in the evening, just as I was settling down to share my first night with him. ‘All we’ve got in common is this –’ He used his chin to gesture at the cellar, the cage and the boiler, the cracks in the plaster. ‘Other than that, we are perfect strangers.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘It’s something, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, pensive. ‘Something. It’s the easiest thing in the world, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Identifying. It sneaks up on you like flu.’

  The next day he asked me for a sponge, a bar of soap, and some luke warm water. I brought it down for him and, from the corner of my eye, watched him strip and wash his body best he could. Not that I was queer, either then or ever; but I savoured observing him in unguarded moments, searching his face and body for clues. It still felt like I only knew the half of him. The pallor surprised me, especially around the buttocks and thighs. A swarthy man shut away from the sun. There were a few scars, though nothing dramatic; too red, perhaps, to date from boyhood but all well healed and looked after. Slim hips, a birthmark on the left shoulder blade, crescent-shaped, and a fetching dark line rising out of his pubic hair to form a noose around his navel. He took his time with his wash, and stepped back into his clothes with considerable disgust, frustrated that I had been unable to find him clean replacements.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said with great formality when handing back the soap and the sponge, along with the fluffy towel I had fetched for him from the Colonel’s laundry. ‘And now, why don’t you tell me something about the midget? I haven’t the faintest idea who he is.’

  I did, too, tell him about the midget, that is, and in return I received the story of how Boyd had brought Söldmann round in a suitcase. Not in a thousand years would I have come up with the story of the cats! I made Pavel repeat it several times, until I had it memorized.

  ‘Incredible,’ I mused. ‘Boyd must have heard it somewhere.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Pavel conceded. ‘But he told it well, didn’t he?’

  ‘That he did. What did you do then?’ I asked. ‘After Boyd left you?’

  ‘I combed the midget.’

  ‘You what? Oh Pavel, that’s priceless.’ And upon consideration: ‘How was it?’

  ‘Difficult. His hair had started to freeze.’

  He had me in stitches, this Pavel. I could see he took pleasure in my joy, and soon he told me how he’d gone about hiding the corpse.

  Pavel and I spent New Year’s Eve together, down in our cellar. I had hoped we might be able to hear some of the fireworks from down there, but either the walls were too thick or the Allies kept their celebrations to a minimum. Perhaps they feared that the sound of explosions, however celestial, would bring back bad memories. I had pilfered a bottle of champagne from the Colonel’s larder, and we sat together at my little table, drinking it up before it turned tepid in the cellar’s heat. At midnight we shook hands and clinked glasses – proper champagne flutes, I might add, I like to do these things in style. Throughout, I felt I had to keep one hand on my gun holster in case Pavel should try anything stupid. It was the first time I’d let him out of his cage. Pavel behaved like a gentleman, however, and when the bottle was gone he got up wordlessly to return to the cell.

  ‘Thank you for the drink,’ he said courteously.

  ‘You are very welcome.’

  The bubbly gave me some funny dreams that night, including one where I combed Pavel’s hair over and over, looking for lice.

  ‘Find any yet?’ he would ask, and I would answer in the negative.

  ‘They must be here,’ I insisted.

  He just smiled sweetly and
let me get on with the combing.

  He had marvellously thick hair.

  The next morning, the first of January 1947, Mrs Fosko walked in on us as we were having our morning coffee. I don’t know how she decided on opening the cellar door. Perhaps she had been curious about it all along. I had taken care to lock the door at night, and had thought my presence alone would discourage her and her progeny from exploring. As it turned out she had more pluck than I had given her credit for.

  She had dressed for the occasion, grey flannels and a knitted patterned scarf that set off her reddish hair. Slowly, choosing her steps on the battered old staircase, she came down far enough to catch sight of us sitting on our respective sides of Pavel’s cage, a Meissen cup and saucer on each of our laps, alongside some homemade cookies that I had pulled out of the oven very early that morning.

  ‘How do you do?’ she breathed, barely audible. She really did have impeccable manners. A spasm ran through her nostrils when they caught our smell. The basement lacked ventilation and no attempt at washing could dispel the odour of prolonged confinement.

  I jumped up from my chair, spilled coffee from my cup into my saucer, and started walking towards her.

  ‘Mrs Fosko,’ I beamed desperately, casting around for a plausible tale with which to see her off. All I managed was a rather dangerous: ‘Would you like to join us for a cup of coffee?’

  Mercifully, she declined.

  ‘That man,’ she asked instead. ‘Is he a prisoner of war?’ Her eyes betrayed an intelligence that thus far I’d had no reason to suspect.

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ I answered.

  ‘My husband, he knows that he is down here?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, he does.’

  ‘Does the prisoner understand English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then perhaps I should speak to him.’

  To my growing horror, Mrs Fosko proceeded further down the stairs and made her way towards the cage, noting in passing the various instruments of abuse that lay stacked on cheaply constructed shelves along the wall. The heat of the cellar settled on her, and I imagined I could see some perspiration gather by the side of her nose.