by Dan Vyleta
‘So?’
‘Do you love him now?’
She wet her lips, then nodded. He shuddered and ran a hand across his face in a terribly adult gesture of grief.
‘When I last saw him he was carrying Schlo’, and Schlo’ was dead, and I couldn’t even tell him I was there.’
‘You’ll see him again soon.’ She forced herself to sound confident. ‘I promise.’
He looked at her from between his fingers. ‘You’re not like him. You don’t keep your promises.’
Sonia had no reply. She stepped out into the hallway and locked the apartment door behind her.
Sonia walked the long way to the boys’ hideaway, hoping she would not be asked for her papers as she entered the British sector and hurrying down streets she had fled only the previous day. When she got to the building, her scarf drawn high into her face, she stood and watched it for a while to make sure it was not under observation. In the end the cold subdued her caution. She approached.
The building’s door was framed by man-sized piles of rubble, snow-choked and angular. Beyond the unlocked door, a glum, battered staircase wrapped itself around an empty elevator shaft. Its banister had been stripped for firewood, along with half the steps. The walls were spotted with bullet holes and angry scrawls, chalky etchings of a thousand cocks. She climbed past them to the top floor as she had been instructed. A sentry sat planted before the attic door, shivering in a Wehrmacht coat. He was a boy of twelve, with filthy hair and an army knife on his belt. The left side of his face showed signs of a recent beating.
‘What do you want?’ he snarled.
‘I need to talk to your boss.’
‘He’s busy.’
Sonia had no time for this, and pulled the gun out of her bag.
‘I’m just returning something he mislaid.’
The gun’s barrel pointed to his feet, but the boy complied without need for further threat. He opened the door.
‘Some cooze to see you,’ he hollered ahead, ‘and she’s packing.’ The words sat awkward in his child-mouth. They may have been recent acquisitions.
She brushed past the boy and stepped into the attic, noted the wall with its map and Hollywood pin-ups, the rows of mats and blankets, the well-stocked coal bucket and smell of corned beef. A dozen cocktail glasses sat in a crate near the window, next to a cabbage and a cast-iron casserole all bent out of shape. Paulchen, too, was in a sorry state, the face bruised, his arm in a cast, and some teeth missing, right up front, where one took notice. He sat upon his armchair, feet up on a ragged ottoman, and an iron cross pinned to his scarf. There were no other boys around.
‘Anders asked me to return this to you.’ She indicated the gun, but made no move to hand it over.
‘Give it here.’
‘Later. I need something from you.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yes. And I can pay for it.’
‘How much?’
She placed thirty dollars onto the ottoman, along with a silver brooch.
‘This, for starters. My watch, when I have what I want.’ She held it up to the window’s light, so he could see the stones were real. The boy with the knife whistled in appreciation. Paulchen’s face did not betray any emotion. Perhaps it hurt to move its muscles.
‘What do you need?’ he asked.
‘Some sort of viewing device for film.’ She placed the snipped-off negative next to the money. ‘I brought you this so you’ll know what size.’
He looked at it without moving in his chair. She wished she had a way of telling what he was thinking.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘This might take a little while. Where do I find you?’
‘How long?’
‘I don’t know. Film like this, it’s used by the military. I’ll have to pull some strings. Could be a while. You think you can get it faster elsewhere, you just go ahead and try.’
She paused, then nodded her acceptance.
‘Where do I find you?’ he asked again.
She pointed to the telephone that was standing on the floor next to his armchair. ‘Does that work?’
He nodded yes. ‘Bought the line off a doctor downstairs. He said he didn’t need a phone if he was going to starve.’
‘I’ll call every day. The faster you get it, the more I’m willing to pay. What’s your number?’
Somewhat reluctantly he gave it to her. She placed the gun on the floor and turned to leave. As she was walking out, Sonia reminded herself that this was where Anders had lived for many months. It was a shabby, ugly space. No wonder some of it had rubbed off.
Sonia went shopping on the way back, making sure to leave the sector before she went looking for a butcher’s shop. The queue took a good hour, and when she finally made it to the counter, the butcher was suspicious about how many ration cards she produced. He held them up against the light with bloodied fingers to check they weren’t forgeries, then accepted them along with the dollar bills she’d stuck between the cards. Behind the counter sat a vat full of pig’s trotters. A snout stood upright on the counter scales, blond hairs cresting the pale and puckered flesh. It reminded Sonia of the day, during the battle for Berlin, when dawn had revealed a dead horse stretched across the sidewalk just outside her building. She and her neighbours had picked it clean. Ran out of their basement hideaways with paper scissors and cutthroat razors; cut chunks out of its body until all that remained was its bones, its hoofs and a tangle of entrails. Young girls running down the street with a strip of horse flesh in each fist, happy; their arms bloodied to the elbow. Sonia hadn’t entered a butcher’s shop since without picturing the scene. She wondered whether she ever would.
‘You want all this?’
‘However much you’ve got. But no trotters.’
She walked home with five pounds of liver, a side of streaky bacon and a big slab of wurst. A bakery sold her a two-kilo loaf of black bread and a dozen rolls. There was a risk that they would remember such an affluent customer, but this way she would not have to leave the flat until Paulchen had found her a projector.
She could only hope that Fosko would not kill Pavel out of sheer frustration before then.
When Sonia was gone, Paulchen reached inside his coat pocket and produced a piece of paper with a telephone number. He sat staring at it for a little while, then reached down to the phone with his good arm and pulled it up onto his lap. It rang four or five times before a woman picked up.
‘Margaret Fosko speaking,’ she said. ‘How can I help you?’
‘ Ich moöchte mit dem Herrn Colonel sprechen,’ Paulchen said formally.
‘Oh, I’m afraid I don’t speak any German. The Colonel is out.’
‘ Herr Fosko?’
‘He’s out. Aus. Won’t be back for a week or so. Eins Woche. You understand?’
‘ Ja.’
‘Can I ask who’s calling?’
‘ Was?’
‘Who are you? Your name?’
‘ Sagen Sie ihm ich hab’ seine Hure. His woman. I has his woman.’
‘Well,’ said the voice, ‘I’ll make sure to tell him if I see him before I leave.’
‘Who’d you call?’ Gunnar wanted to know once he’d rung off.
‘The English Colonel.’
‘The ped-i-rast? Why you call him, after what they did to us?’ Paulchen closed his eyes. He remembered how they had burst into the flat, four or five men; Woland, on guard, pistol-whipped across the face. They wore no uniforms but made no effort to disguise their English voices; kicked over the Christmas tree, barked questions, slapped faces. Remembered, too, how one of them, a big bruiser, broke his arm against the corner of the windowsill. He’d lined it up and kicked it through, the way one breaks a piece of wood. The arm hanging at an angle, blood rushing into the break.
‘You hear anything, you call this number,’ the Brit had told him with the thickest of accents. ‘You hold out on the Colonel, and I’ll come back for you.’
He’d stuffed a thumb through the gap in Pau
lchen’s front teeth and trapped his tongue underneath. ‘Don’t think we won’t know. Berlin is our city now.’
Paulchen just lying there, trying to scream, his tongue trapped in his own mouth.
‘The Colonel, he will pay us more than the woman can,’ he told Gunnar.
The boy nodded appreciatively. ‘Smart play, boss. Do you want me to go looking for a projector anyway?’
‘Don’t bother. A projector like that, that’s military issue. We don’t want to be messing with that.
‘The last thing we want,’ he said, ‘is the Russians come calling too.’ Said it, and sat back in his chair, scratching the skin near the rim of his cast, wishing to wash his hands of the matter, and for Fosko’s speedy return.
This is what it came down to then: a long wait for the Colonel. And while Pavel and I sat trading words, the city reclaimed them all, the boy and the woman and the gang of child toughs, prised them loose from the excitements of espionage, and returned them to the calmer rhythms of survival: the prerogatives of food and drink, the patient feeding of their ovens’ blaze; ration cards and the constant trips to the water pump, a life by the bucket load, and always the pain of the freeze. For Paulchen and his crew it was a time of healing, and a return to the routines of the black market. Tinned sardines for butter, the butter for bicycle parts, the bicycle for a travel pass, the pass back into sardines, a profit margin of eight hundred per cent. Once daily, Sonia’s phone call, a good half of them truncated by the whims of Allied electricity; a terse answer in the negative; her impotent threat that she would not wait much longer. In her flat, too, a period of calm, Anders sick and she herself ablaze with cabin fever. They sat together in silence, awkward in the roles that fate had dealt them; then turned to talk, from boredomand the need to understand the other’s love for Pavel. It started over dinner one night, an awkward question and overblown answer, range-finding on the battlefield of their relationship. I don’t know whether they ever worked themout, their feelings for one another. In this perhaps they kept to convention: mother and son, forever held hostage by the cruelties of birthing.
They sat having dinner. She had fried two pieces of liver along with half an onion. There was bread and boiled potatoes on the side. Anders did not have much of an appetite but forced himself to eat anyway. He remembered, all too vividly, the day when he had tried to feed Pavel on what he’d held to be his deathbed. It had been innards then, too. He chewed slowly and smuggled the meat past his swollen tonsils.
A record was playing, a woman singing something foreign. Franzi owned a gramophone and a few dozen records. Sonia had gone through them several times, putting aside three or four she liked. Whenever the record stopped, she got up and moved the needle back to the beginning. She did not seem to like silence.
Anders wasn’t comfortable with Sonia. She kept watching him. Every time he looked up, her eye was on him. He had pieced together a few things about her: that she must have lived with Boyd, but worked for the Colonel, whom he had failed to shoot. That the mitchut was involved somehow. That she sold herself for money.
‘Did he force you to do it?’ he asked all of a sudden. ‘The Colonel, I mean.’
Her fork stopped halfway between plate and mouth. The piece of liver, seen in cross section, looked grey. There was a sliver of pink at its centre.
‘Do what?’
‘You know – going with Boyd and all.’
‘You ask too many questions.’
‘He paid you to do it, right? You could’ve said no.
’ Sonia pushed her plate aside and stared at the tabletop. The record finished, and this time she made no move to restart it. Anders wondered whether she might be crying.
Why should she? he marvelled. I didn’t say nothing bad.
‘Did I say something bad?’ he asked her after a while. ‘It’s not what I meant.’
She looked up then, and her eyes were dry. ‘You really don’t know, do you? How it is. You’re too young, I guess. Good God, the way you sit there, dangling snot into your dinner – who would ever believe that a few years down the road you’ll be one of them.’
‘One of who?’
‘Men. We’d all be better off without them.’
‘Why?’
The question shot out before he had time to swallow it. He felt it gave him away somehow, made him look childish. Still, it slipped out, and he was keen for an answer. ‘Why?’
She sighed and took a deep breath.
It wasn’t something she could explain. She took refuge in platitudes, launching into a speech about men controlling women’s lives: second-hand truths inherited from her suffragette mother and her claque of liberal friends. She told him that as a woman she could not rent an apartment or buy a car without a father or a husband signing for her; that she could not cross a border without papers that were issued by men. ‘A man decided whether I was a Nazi or not,’ she told him, ‘while he shot glances at my breasts across his narrow desk.’
She stopped herself short and studied the boy. He sat, untouched by her ramblings. She wanted to drop the conversation, but found herself asking a question instead.
‘Do you know what sex is?’ she asked. ‘Love-making?’
He nodded. His teeth were in his lip.
‘It’s like a disease. It takes hold of them and won’t let go. When a woman steps near, you understand, and there is a curve to her body, just so’ – she stroked her flank where torso gradually widened into buttock and hip – ‘Christ, it well near eats them up.’
Sonia pulled a face, then smiled.
‘But I’m telling you fairy tales. Ghost stories, is what I am telling. Here, let me put on a new record. It’s Glenn Miller, who plays trombone. My grandmother used to say it sounds like a god breaking wind.’
They sat and listened to Miller for a while. Every time the trombone set in, the boy shifted to one buttock and made as though to fart.
Later, over tea and milk, he told her he wouldn’t get mixed up with sex.
‘I won’t,’ he said sulkily. It made her laugh.
‘Won’t what?’
He sat in silence, searching for words.
‘I won’t be mastered like that.’
She swallowed her laugh and watched him spoon sugar into his tea. He used so much of it she would have to get another packet soon.
‘Where did you learn to speak like that?’ she asked him as she stood doing the dishes in Franzi’s cramped little sink. ‘ Mastered. It’s a bookish word. But you don’t read.’
He sat there chewing his tongue. ‘Should I say it different?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I think it’s one of the reasons why Pavel loves you so.’
He looked away at that, and she pretended not to see the tears that sprang into his eyes. He might have accepted some comfort then, a hug or a brush of the cheek, but she didn’t find it in her heart to reach over and touch him. She poured more tea instead, and made him drink it. When it was all gone, she went out to fetch more water from the pump and suggested he wash, despite the fever. The boy smelled to high heaven. Anders acquiesced when she promised that she would not come into the bathroom while he was in there getting clean.
‘God knows,’ she murmured to herself, ‘I have seen enough peckers in my life.’
He surprised her by singing as he stood naked in his wash bowl, sponging himself with Franzi’s lavender soap. He could barely hold a melody. The monkey joined in, and between them they made a right racket. While they were thus occupied, Sonia went through Franzi’s wardrobe and found a pair of men’s briefs that she laid out for the boy to wear. His own underwear was soiled beyond repair. She threw it out along with the undershirt, then washed her hands with soap. If Pavel had been there, he might have taken care of such domestic duties. She tried to picture him, to remember his hand on hers, but all she could conjure was the myth of their love. It was devoid of content: three brief kisses and some half-hearted admissions; the pressure of his erect
ion against her body. It did not suffice for mourning. Moodily she searched the apartment for booze, but all she found were empty bottles. She tried smoking instead and noticed she was running out of cigarettes. There was no piano to play, nor any books to read. She sat around on Franzi’s well-worn couch and asked herself what she would do once Paulchen found her a projector.
The boy came out of the bathroom and got into bed. She put a hand to his forehead an hour later and noticed his fever had risen again. Sleeping, his face looked particularly ugly, screwed up and wrinkled like the monkey’s. It might have been easier to care for a handsome child.
Sonia left the apartment to go for a walk. The cold taut on her skin and in her joints, forcing itself on her body. She entered a bar, charmed cigarettes off an American journalist and drank chocolate liqueur, the only alcohol on offer. When the barman suggested she might want to go home with him and warm his bed, she called him names and stormed out. It wasn’t that she was upset about his offer. She had simply learned that one needed to be emphatic in one’s refusals, lest one be misunderstood.
Early the next morning, Sonia called Paulchen to see whether he had got hold of a projector for her yet. He hadn’t and sounded annoyed.
‘It’ll take a few days. Maybe a week.’
She rang off and wondered whether Pavel had that long. It might be best to forget about it; burn the microfilm, run for cover. Only then she would never know what she had sold her body for, and whether there could be such a thing as love.
Tomorrow, she told herself. You can always burn it tomorrow.
The boy woke, and she put out some rolls. They ate breakfast in silence. He remained feverish, and visibly preoccupied by last night’s talk. As the morning stretched into midday she watched him strain to formulate a question. He would curl his lip around the first syllable or so, then abandon the effort.
‘What is it?’ she asked, irritated.
Anders flushed and dug himself into his blankets.
‘You were like Franzi, right? One of Boyd’s girls. Did you’ – he hesitated – ‘did you ever do it with the mit-chut?’