Pavel & I

by Dan Vyleta

  She nodded yes, amused at his choice of verb. He sat with his forehead creased in thought.

  ‘Was it any different?’ he asked.

  ‘No different.’

  ‘But he was shorter than you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘That much is certainly true.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘You shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Pavel wouldn’t have.’

  She considered this. ‘No, he wouldn’t have. But I’m sure he must have thought it.’

  She could see he didn’t understand her and refused to say anything more. There were things in her past about which she would not talk.

  ‘Tell me about your family,’ she asked instead. ‘How come you don’t know how to read?’

  ‘I didn’t go to school,’ he answered. ‘My uncle didn’t want me to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t know. Something to do with politics.’

  ‘You’re Jewish?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Schlo’ said that if you are Jewish you have a number on your arm.’ He showed her his wrists.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’m clean.’

  She got his story out of him bit by bit. Best she could tell his family really wasn’t Jewish. It sounded like Anders’ father disappeared in ’33, shortly after Anders’ birth, which probably meant he was a socialist. Reds were rounded up first. Jews didn’t start disappearing until later, along with Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and men who had a taste for men. Anders didn’t know the slightest thing about his father. All he had was a name – Herbert. Nor did the boy remember a mother, other than a photo in a bedside frame that showed a dimpled beauty. He grew up with Uncle Richard in his two-room flat in Wedding.

  The war started when Anders was six. School curricula had long been revised to reflect Aryan values, and a new law made membership of the Hitler Youth compulsory for all Germans from the age of ten. It would seem that Uncle Richard had no wish to see his nephew indoctrinated by Nazi ideologues. They moved out of their apartment and found shelter in a decrepit old mansion by the Müggelsee, in the far east of Berlin. Its owner was Richard’s eccentric mother-in-law, Marlene. Richard’s wife had left him years earlier and emigrated to the Argentine. She sent money on occasion, and once, in a well-padded parcel, an authentic bola, the three-limbed throwing device that local gauchos used to lasso their cattle’s feet. Anders could describe it in considerable detail.

  Mutter Marlene was what they call ‘a character’. She lived in the inflated memory of a theatre career on the stages of Munich, Bayreuth and Vienna. Richard had bestowed upon her the sacred trust of Anders’ education. She taught him how to roll cigarettes, play (and cheat at) cards, and how to rouge one’s cheeks. They sat in front of the wireless most of the day, pink-of-cheek, aces up their sleeves, puffing on hand-rolled smokes. She liked cultural programmes, especially radio plays. Sometimes they would recite entire monologues together; she went first, and Anders imitated her every inflection. They were both inordinately fond of history plays. Their absolute favourite was Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris: Marlene did a mean fury, and Anders could still remember snatches of Orestes. For lunch they would slice a loaf of bread and toast it on their cooker’s hotplate until it was black and covered in soot. Then: a spoonful of butter that would slowly soak into the burned slice, and the energetic rubbing of a peeled garlic clove along its rim. Sometimes there was also some soup – pea or lentil, ennobled by pieces of smoked ham or sausage. When the radio got to be monotonous, Anders would play in the overgrown garden at the back of the house. He was forbidden to leave the premises, but took off anyway, on select afternoons, to explore the neighbourhood. Richard came home late every evening, dead beat from factory work with two bottles of beer under one arm. Anders did not know what he did for a living, but said he smelled of machine grease and petrol. On summer weekends they would ride a bus out to the woods and collect mushrooms in a wicker basket. In winter they built snowmen back in the yard, stones for buttons and a smile made of brittle twigs.

  Towards the end of the war – the radio said that victory was imminent – Richard had to report to the front. Until then he had been considered too old. He wrote letters for a while which Marlene read out to the boy in fast declamatory snatches. Then the letters stopped and Uncle Richard dropped out of Anders’ life.

  The old lady was soon to follow. One afternoon in early March ’45, Anders returned from an excursion into Berlin proper to find the house in flames. Perhaps Marlene had forgotten to shut off the cooker after making her lunchtime toasties, or else the building’s rotten cabling had outwitted the fuse and sparked a flame. The house was so filled with papers and knick-knacks that it burned like kindling. No body was recovered from its smoking foundations. The old lady had just rolled up into herself and turned to ashes.

  Anders lived in streets and doorways in the months that followed. The war was ending, and nobody paid much attention to a child vagrant roaming the city. Before long he had hundreds of companions, and the Soviet Army ruled the city. He met Paulchen and the Karlsons in May that year; together they laid the foundations for what was to be a criminal organization, a brotherhood, a society en miniature. They had been inseparable until very recently. In his heart, no doubt, he was yearning for a surrogate father who would read him Dickens at bedtime, and share his lot in life. He had found one in Pavel, on account of his kidneys and a certain way of holding his own. Now he was living with Sonia, sharing her breakfast and asking awkward questions about men and the midget, using words that he had snatched from a thousand radio broadcasts. They had rolled so easily from the old actress’s lips.

  She heard him tell his story, nodded, and put on a record. If he was waiting for consolation, she had none to give. It was a war story amongst many others. She had her own, and a taste for brandy, urgent just then, when there wasn’t a drop to be found.

  He fell asleep after his telling, and she – she paced the flat in silence, humming swing tunes under her breath.

  3

  27 December 1946

  December twenty-seven by the Gregorian calendar, and ten days to Russian Christmas, for those of his nation’s comrades who flouted the law and remained addicted to the homely fumes of the people’s opium. A cold day, though there had been colder days in Moscow. Dimitri Stepanovich Karpov, General of the Red Army, was standing before a freshly dug grave. The earth stank of gasoline. His aides had had to burn the frozen ground in order to make it malleable to their spades’ sharpened edges. Even so, their best efforts had only yielded a shallow grave, barely deep enough to admit the coffin. It was made from ragged plywood, hastily painted to give it a veneer of dignity. There was a dearth of man-sized boxes in Berlin just then.

  Inside the coffin lay Karpov’s assistant, Comrade Sergei Semyonovich Nekhlyudov, age thirty-six. An ex-wife in Leningrad, and a new one in Smolensk; three children, Anton, Evgeny and Masha. Sergei had been found in an alley, without his face. Dimitri Stepanovich had yet to write his letters of condolence. He placed a piece of shrubbery on the coffin in lieu of flowers, and called to mind some Pushkin. The men took it as a sign to start shovelling back the dirt.

  The General was a clean-shaven man with salt-and-pepper hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Trim and rather long-boned; wore his face like a mask. He had asked Sergei to follow Jean Pavel Richter after his interrogation. Richter had seemed genuinely ignorant about Söldmann’s whereabouts, but the fact that he had shown up in Söldmann’s woman’s flat could not entirely be ignored. To be on the safe side, Karpov put in a request with headquarters to inquire whether the agency held a file on the man.

  Sergei had telephoned in after midnight to report that he had taken position outside a house on Seelingstrasse. He sounded cold. Karpov told him that his efforts were appreciated.

  ‘The Union of Soviet Socialist States is grateful,’ he told him. Sergei replied that he was proud to serve.
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  He called a second time at six-thirty the next morning. He’d gone to get bread rolls and tea at the corner bakery, along with information. The baker had identified the woman on the surveillance photos as a resident of Richter’s house. She had been away for a while but had recently returned, had more than her share of ration cards, liked poppy-seed rolls and kept bothering him for doughnuts.

  ‘I asked him what was the problem with doughnuts. He told me they used up too much frying oil, and that he was short on sugar.’

  Karpov instructed Sergei to arrest the woman. Sergei demurred.

  ‘There are too many people around. I think they’re keeping an eye on her. A guy with an eye-patch and a gun bulging under his coat. There may be others.’

  ‘Do you know who he works for?’

  ‘Not sure. No uniform. But he looks English to me.’

  ‘So the English are involved. Or maybe just the Colonel, the one who made us release Richter.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  Karpov thought it over.

  ‘Wait until she comes out, then arrest her on the quiet. If there’s trouble, call the police. I would rather this did not become an incident.’

  Sergei told him not to worry. The truth was that Karpov did not think the lead would amount to much. If the woman knew anything, the Brits would have pulled her in long ago. The fact that they were watching her meant they had no more knowledge of Söldmann’s whereabouts than the NKVD. They had to be hoping the midget would contact her. It was like believing in Father Christmas.

  Then, late on the night of the twenty-fourth, Karpov received Richter’s file and his assessment of the situation changed dramatically. His first instinct was to take a whole squad car over to Seelingstrasse and arrest anyone he found. But little would be served by a diplomatic incident that would alert the American and French authorities; the British, too, if he was right in assuming that Colonel Fosko was playing a private game. Sergei’s call was long overdue. He was either pursuing the woman and unable to contact the General, or else something had happened to him. When he had still not called by five a.m., Karpov sent Lev over to find out which. He instructed him to move carefully and scout the area first. The house was being watched.

  Lev took his time. He identified the house, walked around the block several times. There was no sign of Sergei, or anyone else for that matter. He studied the nameplates next to the doorbells, trying to figure out which flat the woman lived in, without success; all he knew of her was that she had worked under the name of ‘Belle’. The front door was locked and not one of the windows lit. Patiently, Lev waited for Seelingstrasse to wake to Christmas morn, spitting tobacco juice into the snow drifts, and rubbing his gloves over his face whenever the cold had robbed it of sensation. Nobody approached or left the building. At around six-twenty a window lit up on the second floor. Half an hour later a man emerged, his face and hands hidden in an enormous coat.

  ‘ Wo wohnt diese Frau?’ Lev asked him in his staccato German as he shouldered past and into the hallway. He held a surveillance picture to the man’s nose. The other answered without hesitation.

  ‘ Vierter Stock, Vorderhaus links. Schon wieder Herrenbesuch?’ Lev grinned at that. ‘Ànother gentleman caller?’ This was Belle all right. He found her, made small talk, fell prey to her frying pan. Around ten, Karpov, concerned for his young adjutant, sent over three further men, armed to the teeth. They came back an hour later saying they had found Lev tied to a chair with a bloody lump frozen to his head; the doctor was having a look at him now. By then his office had received a phone call that Sergei’s body had been found and identified. The General allowed himself a modicum of anger.

  He acted without hesitation. Called British Army headquarters and demanded to be given Fosko’s private address. He sent a formal complaint to the British Military Police urging an immediate investigation, then drove over to Fosko’s villa in order to confront him personally. In the flesh, he had to admit that the Colonel was imposing. Fat. Composed. Unhurried. The General told him point blank that he knew Fosko was trying to acquire Söldmann’s microfilm.

  ‘Do you have it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s the first I hear about it.’

  The Colonel pointed to a tray of biscuits he had lined up in front of his visitor. ‘You should try those. My wife made them herself.’

  ‘Hand it over,’ Karpov ordered. ‘The microfilm is Soviet property. We will not tolerate interference.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘There will be an investigation. By your own people. I have already sent in the report.’

  ‘Ah. I’d better call by headquarters. Smooth things over.’

  He was perfectly self-possessed. His fat lips were smiling.

  ‘Where is Richter?’

  ‘I haven’t the foggiest. My advice, though, is to leave him well alone.’ The Colonel scratched his head ruefully. ‘That man is nothing but trouble.’

  There was nothing else Karpov could do, apart from shoot him, so he left and ordered his agents to search the city for Richter, Söldmann and his kurva. Thus far they had not turned up anything, not even a body.

  They buried Sergei on the morning of the twenty-seventh. Karpov had a plaque engraved that named him a hero of the Great Patriotic War. When the planned memorial was completed, near Treptower Park, he would have the body transferred, there to bask in history’s glory.

  Later that day, the General sat in his office, sipped on scalding hot tea, and wondered whether it was worth the risk to have the Colonel killed. It might precipitate a diplomatic fuss, but if he was reading the British correctly, they had no stomach for another war.

  For the time being, he settled for having the Colonel’s house watched around the clock.

  Three days into the wait, and Sonia’s patience was wearing thin. She needed to know whether Pavel was still alive. If he was dead, there was no point in staying in Franzi’s apartment any longer; she would clear out, attempt to leave the city. Head west, or maybe southwest, into the American zone. Far away from all this.

  She waited until Anders fell asleep after lunch, and dialled Fosko’s number. The electricity remained unreliable and the line went dead a number of times. Eventually she got through, counted the rings. A woman picked up after the fifth.

  ‘Margaret Fosko speaking,’ she said.

  Sonia had forgotten about the Colonel’s wife.

  ‘Is the Colonel in?’ she asked in English.

  ‘No, he’s away. Can I take a message?’

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘Not for a few days, I’m afraid. Who am I talking to?’

  ‘Have you seen a man in the house. An American?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Dark hair. Slender. Have you seen him?’

  The woman mulled it over. Sonia could hear her thinking down the line.

  ‘You are German, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘Could you help me with a word? Somebody used it in a conversation with me recently, and I just cannot work out what it means. He was saying something about “Fosko’s Hu-re”. Do you have any idea what that means?’

  Sonia hung up. She scrambled for her cigarettes, then for a book of matches. At last: smoke in her lungs. She kept it there for as long as she could stand it.

  ‘Fosko’s hoor.’

  She wondered who had described her to the Colonel’s wife like that.

  The rest of the day she spent stretched out next to the boy’s sickness, thinking about the past. It was the final months of the war that stayed with her. She remembered the air-raid sirens, sounding all hours of the night. The weary calm with which one collected the pre-packed suitcase; one’s mattress and blanket; the bottle of water to moisten one’s lips. She had hated the shelter, that forced community of neighbours, always a Blockwart amongst them, the party’s spy, egging on their conversation. People eating, talking, farting in the dark, fear playing havoc with their bowels; half-whispered apologies and the giggling of girls. Soni
a would sit alone in her corner, unloved for her pride and her family’s supposed wealth, and patiently await the all-clear.

  She remembered ascending the stairs afterwards, dust motes dancing in the morning sun. It might have been April by then, the Russians drawing closer every day. Long queues at the butcher’s, casting jealous glances at those who had finished their shopping before it was disrupted by yet another air raid. People falling into a hush whenever they spotted someone with a party pin ahead, or a patrol of coppers. Picking through their words to determine whether they had said something they had not meant to say. Their shadows shrinking in the late-morning sun.

  Sonia remembered, too, the propaganda flyers outlining what the Russians did to the women along the moving front. She found them posted on advertising pillars and lampposts; tore them off sometimes and took them home to peruse themat her leisure. The flyers were fond of facts: the age, whether the woman had been married or not, and how many times – it all boiled down to numbers. Three in one night for a virgin of sixteen. Seven in an hour for a mother of two, the last one a Mongol who had the daughter next. A war widow endured twenty-three before slitting her own throat, the Führer’s name upon her lips. A girl of fourteen, a girl of twelve. A girl of seven. There was, to Sonia, a strange fascination about the flyers; they brought the war home somehow, and mixed it with the mystery of sex. Sonia remembered hunting for them on her city strolls. She read themand broke into goose bumps; blushed at the thought of bodies exposed.

  This was before Berlin was taken. This much she could articulate to herself, and with something like nostalgia. She stopped short when it came to picturing what happened next.

  The boy beside her groaned in his sleep. She rose and wiped his brow with a dampened cloth.

  She never spoke about the rapes. Who could blame her? It had been a trying time. Her reticence was not caused by a failure of memory, or by what psychiatrists call repression. Her first, in any case, she remembered quite vividly. He took time to close the door, secured the latch with great care, and proceeded to undress before he had so much as laid a hand on her. In this he was different from many others who took their women standing up against some kitchen table, trousers around their ankles. Whole queues formed like this, man standing after man with a loosened belt. Sonia’s first scorned such rush, found time even to roll up his socks and stick them into his boots’ grease-slick shaft. He had spindly white legs, skinny white buttocks, untouched by the sun, save for the feet which showed signs of some tanning. Out of this meagre carriage grew a solid body the colour of dried earth, sunburned and knotty like a bulbous root. She had never seen anything quite so grotesque.