Pavel & I

by Dan Vyleta

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She paused. The boy looked at her with burning cheek. ‘The monkey might eat him.’

  Sonia stood and pictured it. It made up her mind.

  ‘Stick it into a potato sack. We’re taking it along. Hit it over the head if it gives you any trouble.’

  Then, with their suitcases already waiting on the landing, Sonia dialled Fosko’s number. He answered and immediately fell into a rage:

  ‘I told you to leave me alone for a few days.’

  ‘I have the microfilm,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The microfilm. I have it. Don’t bother looking for me. I am long gone.’

  He considered this for a moment.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want Pavel,’ she said. ‘Unharmed.

  ‘Harm him,’ she said, ‘and I’ll burn the fucking film.’

  ‘You’ll trade the film for Pavel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘God damn it, Sonia. When?’

  ‘When I’m ready. Unharmed, you hear me? I don’t take damaged goods.’

  She threw down the phone and yanked the line out of its socket.

  ‘And now?’ asked the boy.

  ‘Now we run like hell.’

  Her last glance, as they cleared the door, belonged to the piano. She would have loved to play it one last time. Inside the bag she had thrown over one shoulder the monkey started breathing deep and heavy. She prayed to God it would hold off shitting until they’d got to where they needed to go.

  They burst out of the building in Seelingstrasse, ran down the street, rounded the corner, changed sides a half-block down and took refuge in a doorway, piling up their bags and suitcases before them. After two or three minutes’ wait it seemed evident that they were not being followed. Quickly, they gathered up their things again, walked a few blocks to the main street and caught the bus in the direction of Wilmersdorf, the driver’s face pockmarked and covered in Vaseline against the cold. After a twenty-minute ride they got off, doubled back on themselves on the subway, then jumped onto a second bus, headed for Potsdamer Platz. The snot in Anders’ nose had long since frozen and formed a clammy slug upon his upper lip. Anders put his tongue to it a few times, probing its dimensions and flavour, until Sonia caught him at it and wrinkled her mouth in disgust.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.

  She shrugged her shoulders and turned to stare out of the window, her face growing hard whenever they passed a uniformed soldier. A grubby old man pushed between them from behind and tried to sell them his record collection of Volkslieder. They got off the bus a few blocks south of Friedrichstrasse. Anders still had no idea where they were going. All he understood was that Sonia was trying to save Pavel. He followed her meek as a lamb.

  They walked for maybe ten minutes, their suitcases banging against their knees, then stopped in front of a building, or rather half of one. The other half had been bombed away with astonishing precision. The rubble still stood more than man-high, pipes and cables sticking out of the brick. Up above, a cut-in-half living room clad in floral wallpaper, its cut-in-half floorboards sticking out ragged beyond the edge. Anders half expected to see a cut-in-half maid, serving out half a Christmas lunch. His fever was making him giddy.

  Sonia chose a bell and rang it without hesitation. Anders saw a net curtain move in one of the windows of the ground-floor apartment. Moments later the door was opened. A fat-arsed whore stood waiting for them on her apartment threshold. She was wearing a dressing gown and sucking on a cigarette’s soggy stump.

  ‘Franzi. Are you alone?’

  ‘You? What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Are you alone, Franzi? You don’t have a customer in there, do you?’

  The whore shook her head.

  ‘No. I stopped working at home a few days ago. Can’t afford the heating.’ She looked Sonia up and down. ‘What the hell happened to you?’

  ‘Let us in.’ Sonia flashed a wad of dollar bills that she pulled from out of her breast pocket. Without another word, the fat-arsed whore opened the door and led them into her apartment.

  Inside it smelled of cheap alcohol and sweat. The woman had been having her breakfast: Ersatzkaffee, a quarter-bottle of schnapps, and what looked like a corner of mouldy Speck, all laid out on a patchwork of tablecloth riddled with cigarette burns.

  ‘Make yourselves right at home. I’d put the kettle on, but I’m out of coffee.’

  Sonia got right down to business. Stood calmly at the centre of the shabby room and issued her orders. It reminded Anders of Pavel, his encounter with Paulchen’s gun.

  ‘I want you to leave town,’ she said to the whore. ‘Just for a few weeks. I need the apartment.’

  The woman laughed. ‘Oh yeah? Just for a few weeks? That’s a good one.’

  ‘I mean it, Franzi. How much will it cost?’

  Sonia counted off fifty dollars and placed them next to the schnapps bottle. The bills looked crisp and tidy against the ruin of the tablecloth.

  ‘Fifty American dollars. Well, I’ll be buggered. You really do mean it, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Franzi reached out a hand and touched the money.

  ‘I could use a vacation,’ she said cautiously. ‘Got an auntie just south of the city, in Trebbin. It’d be nice to be with family for Christmas. Homey, you know, bake cookies and shit. You really do mean it, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You need a place to lie low?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’ll cost you more than this.’

  ‘How much?’

  They set to haggling. Anders could hardly stand to watch it – the whore was taking Sonia for a ride. Within five minutes she had signed over to Franzi some six pairs of knives and forks, a pearl necklace, a silk dressing gown and sixty-five dollars in cash. Fat-arse was pleased as punch. She even gave Sonia a sisterly hug and offered her a sip of the schnapps.

  ‘Call your aunt,’ said Sonia. ‘Tell her you will be on the next train out. You have ten minutes to pack. And Franzi – I will walk you to the station. Help you with your luggage.’

  ‘No problem, darling. I quite understand. Let me just get my things together.

  ‘My, my,’ she whistled. ‘Who would have thought it? Christmas morn, and guess who comes snowing in, pretty little Belle, and her pockets full of dough.’

  The boy heard it and chewed his lip. Nobody had told him that Sonia went by more than one name. He wondered whether it changed things between them.

  The train to Trebbin left from Anhalter Bahnhof, not far from Franzi’s flat; they walked through the cold and joined the queue for tickets. The station had no roof, the leaden sky rising out of its serrated walls. It looked like a refugee camp. People wrapped in coats and blankets sitting on suitcases; children milling, begging for scraps; the hall noisy with the impotent anger of malnutrition. Two thirds of the crowd were women, the normal ratio in Berlin’s blood-let streets. They looked mannish in upturned trousers and straight-cut coats; bitter women and gentlemen’s Sunday suits, the main survivors of six years of war. Sonia felt out of place in her tweed ensemble and heels.

  ‘Where’re they all going?’ she wondered aloud.

  ‘Hunting for food. There’s a rumour going round that some of the villages have butter to spare.’ Franzi gave a snort of derision. ‘Like shite.’

  A child passed them, her feet wrapped in newspapers and rags. Her toes were blackened with frostbite. She was following two smoking soldiers, waiting for them to toss their butts. Her hand was already clutching some five or six. Sonia wondered how many she would need to buy herself a pair of shoes.

  At long last they reached the counter. Franzi bought a ticket, third class. First and second class had ceased to exist since the war. It was a full hour’s wait before the train would leave, but Sonia refused to return home.

  ‘I’ll see you off,�
�� she said tersely. ‘The trains aren’t very reliable these days.’

  Franzi snorted. ‘You don’t trust me an inch, do you now?’

  ‘Franzi, I know you’ve never liked me, and I know you can smell that there’s money to be made here, one way or another. But if you tell anyone I’m in your apartment – if you so much as breathe it – then I will die, and that boy will die, and you’ll be the one who’s killed us. It’s as simple as that. I can’t keep you from taking the next train back; and I can’t keep you from using the phone once you are in Trebbin. All I can do is ask that you be content with what you’ve already got and leave it at that.’

  ‘You countin’ on me being a Christian, Belle? That’s sweet.’

  ‘I am counting on you to stand by our deal. That’s all I ask.’

  ‘This has to do with Boyd, right? He’s dead, you know. Shot, they told me.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Did Shorty kill him? The one with the maroon tux? He was real sweet on you, that one.’

  ‘I don’t know who killed Boyd.’

  ‘Now that I’m thinking about it – there was somebody looking for you, a while back. Dark eyes, a little moist; manners like he had a broomstick up his arse. He said he and Boyd had been friends in the war.’

  ‘Did you tell him about me?’

  ‘Just where you lived. I wouldn’t have said more.’

  ‘No? Why not?’

  ‘Didn’t like the type. He thought himself special. Airs and fucking graces. Comes calling on a woman and never even took a look at me.’

  ‘Perhaps you two just didn’t get along?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I talked and he fed me ciggies. You could say we got along just fine.’

  The train arrived and the two women climbed in and found Franzi a seat. The compartment was packed with a Pomeranian family; thick eastern accents and grandfather’s chequered hanky bloody with TB. As Sonia stood, stuffing a suitcase into the overhead luggage rack, Franzi suddenly seized her by the waist.

  ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ she said fervently. ‘About you being in the apartment, I mean. I promise. Us girls, we gotta stick together.’

  She squeezed and kissed her as though they had been lifelong friends.

  Sonia was unsure whether to be touched by her bout of sentimentality, or see it as but another symptom of a life so very barren of tenderness, one had to invent emotion, against all the evidence. She left the train with the final whistle, and stood on the platform as it rolled out of the station. Then she made her way back to the apartment, making sure to walk to the end of the block and double back on herself before she went in. There was no sign of a pursuer. Her face and hands were so cold, it was as though they were on fire.

  Inside waited the boy. He stood stiffly by the kitchen table. On the table top, close to his hands, lay the gun. Anders’ eyes were ringed black with exhaustion.

  ‘Belle,’ he said. ‘That woman called you Belle.’

  ‘It used to be my name. For a little while.’

  ‘You were Boyd’s woman.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I was.’

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘But I never cared for him.’ The boy thought it over, chewing his lip.

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like him either.’ He shoved the gun into one pocket, sat down on a chair and huddled deeper into his coat. Sonia could see he was running a bad fever.

  ‘What happens now? Do we go and rescue Pavel?’

  By way of an answer Sonia pulled the reel of microfilm from her coat pocket, unrolled half a foot and held it up to the kitchen lamp. They both stared at the film for several minutes, getting closer and closer until their eyes were inches from the bulb. It was impossible to make anything out.

  ‘We need to find out what’s on the film.’

  ‘Why? Why don’t we just trade it in for Pavel?’

  ‘Because Fosko will kill us as soon as the film is in his possession. We need somebody to help us. And for that we need to know what’s on the film.’

  She wondered whether she believed it herself – that knowledge would point a way out of this mess. Perhaps she was being greedy. It might be that she couldn’t have both: her life and Pavel. I’d choose life, she thought grimly. She wasn’t ready yet to admit it to the boy.

  ‘So what are we going to do?’

  ‘We need a projector. Something to help us see.’

  ‘Like they use at the movies?’

  ‘Yes, but a different size.’

  She thought about appealing to the Americans for help, some officer who had crossed her linens during her life at Boyd’s, but decided it was too risky. The army might confiscate the film and send her packing.

  ‘Do you think I can get something like that on the black market?’ she asked.

  The boy shrugged and settled back into his chair.

  ‘I can go look,’ he offered.

  ‘You are sick.’

  ‘I’m not sick.’

  ‘You are sick. Tell me where to go, and I’ll do it now.’

  ‘But I’m not sick.

  ’He fell into a sulk and stared at her through screwed-up eyes. Minutes later he fell asleep. It was like somebody had reached into him and turned him off. He did not wake when she carried him over to the bed and piled blankets on top of him. Sonia held his hand for a while as he was sleeping, then let it go and turned her back on the boy. The monkey was watching her from underneath the sofa.

  ‘I don’t need this,’ she said to herself and rummaged around for some alcohol. ‘Playing nursemaid to a street urchin.’ There was a half-bottle of kirsch liqueur in the kitchen cupboard. She drank it from a thimble-sized shot glass and passed the time counting the flowers on the wallpaper print. At length she fell asleep herself, and only woke when the oven had consumed the last of its fuel and the room temperature had dropped another two or three degrees. Her cheek felt as hard as the wood it rested on. Sonia cast around and found a small pile of firewood beneath the sink. It took several minutes to relight the oven. Once the wood had caught she sat with her palms pressed to the oven’s metal, shivering. Wet smoke curled from its open grill and made her eyes water. Soon after she found that she was crying. This flat, it reminded her of a life she had thought to have escaped when she was taken up by the Colonel. She had become a whore since then, had paid her way with mouth and lap, but this was worse, freezing in a shabby room, cheap kirsch burning in her stomach. The indignity of poverty. The boy moaned in his dreams and she swore at him to be quiet, muffling her voice with one hand. The tears kept coming and she cried herself back to sleep, curled up next to the oven. In the shadows, the monkey came to life and chose her body’s warmth for company while it examined its fur for parasites. Once, late that afternoon, it bent down low over her face and rolled back its lips to reveal yellow teeth.

  Depending on how you looked at it, it was either making to kiss her, or to bite off her ear.

  The police picked up the watcher’s corpse at dawn. They found him in an alley in the American sector. He had no papers, and his face had been severely mutilated. There was no means of identifying the deceased, and they shoved him off to a morgue for holding. A call came in an hour later ordering the city police to report all recent ‘incidents of violent death’ to one General Karpov. Naturally, the station sergeant obeyed. By ten o’clock a Russian forensic team had transferred the body to a Friedrichshain lab, along with two other murder victims who had been discovered that morning: a corpulent youth, and a gaunt man with an SS tattoo specifying his blood group. The lab technicians compared their teeth against the information in the file Karpov had sent over, then checked the ears against a morphological chart. The man without a face was a perfect match: Sergei Semyonovich Nekhlyudov, thirty-six, special adjutant to General Dimitri Stepanovich Karpov. The photo in the file showed a melancholy man with dark hair and red-rimmed eyes. They hadn’t opened him up to have a look at his liver, but judging from the tangle of veins th
at bloomed upon his photo’s nose and cheeks, one could surmise that the man had liked his liquor.

  A lab assistant called the General’s office with the news. A clerk answered the phone.

  ‘The body matches.’

  ‘You mean Sergei Semyonovich is dead. How did he die?’

  ‘Knife wound to the chest.’

  ‘Thank you, comrade. I will inform the General.’

  All this on Christmas Day, 1946. At this point, Pavel and I, we weren’t yet talking – a dozen cigarettes ground into the basement tiles – and I was ignorant of Sonia’s flight and the pathologists’ melancholy labour. I found out after, through persistent questions and the reading of stony faces. 1947 it was by then, the smells of spring. One might have thought spring would thaw it out, our Berlin, but the city remained bitter and hard, a gut-shot Medea, crouching on her children’s grave.

  2

  26 December 1946

  The boy’s fever had fallen overnight, but he remained in no condition to leave the apartment. She made it clear to him that she would go to the black market that day; he could advise her on whom to approach or choose not to, but either way she would go. He held out for half an hour during which she made sure to mention Pavel’s name half a dozen times. Then he spilled.

  ‘Paulchen,’ he said. ‘You could go and see Paulchen.’ He gave her an address back in the English sector.

  ‘What do I tell him?’

  ‘Give him this, and tell him I’m sorry.’ He passed over his gun. ‘If anyone can find a projector, he can. On the quiet, too.’

  She nodded, rummaged around for a pair of scissors, then cut off a few centimetres of microfilm so Paulchen could check the width. She put the reel back into the desk drawer and turned the key on it.

  ‘Don’t go picking the lock. We both want the same thing.’

  The boy made no sign of having heard and watched her gather her things, teeth busy with his dirty nails. She was almost out the door when he stopped her.

  ‘You promised me you wouldn’t fall in love with Pavel.’ He had to say it twice: his voice broke.