Pavel & I

by Dan Vyleta

  ‘I have a good life,’ she said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Respectable.’

  ‘Well, be happy. It’s more than a lot of other people got.’

  She said it with utmost sincerity. It must have been the same tone of voice with which she’d given her marriage vows. I couldn’t accept that she would lie to herself like this.

  ‘You loved him once, didn’t you?’ I asked her. ‘I need to know that you loved him.’

  She pursed her lips in a manner that suggested displeasure. Her lipstick did not go with her teint.

  ‘You can convince yourself of all sorts of things,’ she began. ‘That you have never loved. That you have always loved, loved undyingly, and could not but love. Once you get some practice at it, there comes the time when you experience an epiphany every other day of the week. And the worst of it is, you really feel it: your body feels it, the truth of your life has finally been revealed. Only by Wednesday it’s another truth and your body feels that one, too. Down to the bones.’

  It was the longest I ever heard her speak. Nothing I knew of her had prepared me for such loquaciousness.

  ‘You’re bitter things didn’t pan out,’ I told her.

  ‘You haven’t been listening, Peterson. You like telling stories, but you don’t listen for shit.’

  She waved for the check. The waitress came over, slipped a piece of paper under my saucer. I kept my eyes on Sonia.

  ‘I know things you don’t,’ I told her.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I know what he traded your lives for. Yours and Anders’.’ She held my stare for a moment, then shook her head.

  ‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘I know all I need to.’

  We exchanged two or three more words about trifles. Then we were both off on our separate ways. I think she despised me because I insisted on going Dutch.

  I did not tell her, then. The things I had found out. That I had inquired into his service file, and found it was classified. Had talked to fellow servicemen who had served with Pavel in ‘Intelligence and Infiltration’: tight-lipped veterans with the habit of caution, even after a bottle of Irish. That I tried to track down his wife and learned he had no wife. No parents in Cincinnati, nor a baptismal record. It was easy to guess what Sonia would have said to all this. ‘So he lied to you,’ she would have said. Or, perhaps, it could have goaded her into making excuses. ‘You must have mixed up the city,’ she might have said. ‘After all, it was seventeen years ago. You are liable to have mixed up all sorts of things.’

  Either way, I would have persevered. I would have told her that I’d met an American officer in London, in August 1953, just after the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics had developed their own atomic bomb and half the world blamed it on the Rosenbergs. His name was Finnigan, James Arthur Finnigan. As a favour to me, Finnigan had looked into Pavel’s service record and learned that, if the paperwork was correct, the man had never been decommissioned. Of course it could have been an administrative error.

  ‘It just doesn’t make any sense,’ I would have told her. ‘Killing Haldemann. We talked for nine days and he never even mentioned politics. Or loyalty to his nation. National security. He mentioned his wife, and the boy. Once he told me he had kissed you. “On the mouth,” he said, eyes downcast. He was so delicate about it you’d think he’d crap himself.’

  But what would have been the use? She would have heard me out and walked away, a shrug to her shoulders and no way of telling what she was really thinking. I had spent half my life with her memory, and when I met her again I finally stumbled on what she was: inscrutable. There was nothing I could do that would move her to help me assemble the facts.

  I tried the boy next. Anders Skinner. I half expected he would have changed his last name, to ‘Richter’ if in doubt, but he was living under his adoptive father’s name, working as a second-rate journalist for a Düsseldorf daily. I made tentative contact via letter, sending along a few pages from my notebooks that outlined some of the events of his past. There was no answer. I had no money just then to fly out to Germany, so I got hold of Anders’ phone number instead and called him collect. To my relief he accepted the charges.

  ‘Who’s this?’ he asked, and I introduced myself. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The man with the eye-patch. You sent me a letter.’

  I gave him a brisk summary of all the things that bothered me about the events of the past, then hit him with my question as quickly as I could. There was no way of telling how much money he was willing to spend on this, and the tone of his initial response pointed to some modicum of hostility.

  ‘Why do you think he did it?’ I asked.

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Kill Haldemann. With practised hands. Snapped his neck like a Christmas turkey.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ he said. ‘You were in the car, waiting for them to come down. For all you know the old man slipped on the stairs. Broke his neck on the way down.’

  He said more, much in the same vein, recommending that I should shave my memories of all their romance and boil them down to the facts. ‘And I mean actions,’ he said, ‘not some passing observations. You put too much faith in shrugs and frowns, build whole castles on a smile. Just write down the things he did and leave it at that. Like Hemingway. It makes for better copy.’

  I was hurt by this critique and quickly switched to accusation.

  ‘You never even loved him,’ I said.

  ‘Mr Peterson, I was twelve years old. Now I am thirty. All I remember with any clarity is that he read me Dickens.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  He hung up on me. Perhaps he figured he did not have to stand around and pay for my insults. I tried him again a week later, but he was away. I lost heart after that and ripped up his phone number.

  Don’t think I did not take Anders’ warnings seriously. Of course I was plagued by the possibility that I had misperceived or misremembered. It is a terrible thing to distort the past. All the same, I came to realize that I simply could not remember it otherwise, down to the last little frown. At long last I accepted my commission and brandished the pen; sat and wrote him out, my Pavel, belabouring each comma and word. I thought it would put him to rest in some poetic sort of way, but that was to prove an illusion. He haunts me at night; not quite every night, but often, especially in winter. Oh, I have dreamed him many times since I finished, dreamed them all, dreamed them through their own words, will you believe it, Pavel’s blushing confessions through the bars of his cell, Sonia’s acidity, even the boy (whom I barely met) mouthing man-words with his crooked mouth. In my dreams I become what Thomas Mann calls the ‘rasping conjurer of the past’, only the German indicates the grammatical tense, not the past as such, which through some irony all its own bears the title ‘imperfect’. The rasping conjurer of the imperfect. The imperfect’s rasping conjurer.

  There you are, shaking your head: your guide’s read his Mann. You don’t like it, I sense. It does not befit a torturer.

  Feel free to doubt me, then. I don’t really mind: it is part of the story, built into it from the first word I wrote. Just one thing you have to believe. I loved that man, loved him like a brother. The thing is, he wasn’t born for this, a story about microfilms, but this is what he got, and he damn near broke his heart over it. Broke mine too, and the boy’s, and chipped away at Sonia’s best he could. I wish I could talk to him again, just one more time, and ask him what he paid with to save our lives.

  He’d give me the briefest of smiles.

  ‘I simply asked,’ he would say.

  ‘Asked politely, without pleading. Karpov had said it himself. You had no value for the Soviet Union.’

  And he’d kiss me, right on the mouth, five whole seconds, to let me know we did not part in anger.

  The End

  Acknowledgements

  This is a work of fiction. While many facts about living conditions in Berlin during the winter of 1946–47 have been rendered with a good degree of accuracy, the events
and characters that populate this novel are pure invention. There was no such person as Colonel Fosko. The administration of occupied Germany was performed by some surprisingly flamboyant figures, some of whom may have strayed beyond the strict confines of their legal mandates, but none that I know of wore mink. Elsewhere, I have bent or disregarded historical fact to accommodate novelistic needs. It is highly unlikely, for instance, that a refugee train would have pulled into Bahnhof Zoologischer Garten (Zoogarten station) rather than one of the city’s other stations during the period under discussion; there are significant inaccuracies in the depiction of the command structure within British and Russian forces, and some minor inconsistencies in the description of border procedures as well as of those governing food acquisition via ration cards; the number of functional telephone extensions was smaller than the novel may seem to imply, and so on. In a book interested in the question of how many of our personal needs and desires we inject into narrations of the past, such inaccuracies may perhaps be excused.

  For readers wishing to learn more about the period there exist some excellent books dedicated to the primacy of historical fact. For a general overview, deftly told, one may confidently turn to Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin by Alexandra Richie, and Douglas Botting’s In the Ruins of the Reich, both of which are rich in anecdotal accounts of the hardship experienced during the post-war years, and proved invaluable to me as reference works on anything from the exchange value of a cigarette on the Berlin black market, to the occupation armies’ policies towards the German civilian population. For a visual impression of what Berlin looked like in the immediate aftermath of the war, Roberto Rossellini’s Germania anno zero makes for sombre viewing.

  Many of the anecdotes told by various characters in the novel are adapted from true-life events as narrated by a number of eyewitnesses. The most astonishing of these accounts, perhaps, is Ruth Andreas-Friedrich’s diary of the period 1945–48, published in German under the title Schauplatz Berlin. Here one may find the story of starving Berliners cutting a dead ox to shreds during the battle for Berlin; of a schoolteacher’s reprimand to her female students to choose death over the ignominy of rape; an account of the execution of a dozen schoolboys at the Markusschule just days before the collapse of the Reich in reaction to their ‘unpatriotic’ remarks. Andreas-Friedrich also recorded the vagaries of the weather in the long winter of 1946–47 with great specificity, and was punctilious in her descriptions of the toll exacted by this extended freeze. For a version of the story of the denazification of Karli Schäfer’s circus – complete with ‘Lilliputians’ – one must turn to George Clare’s memoir, Before the Wall: Berlin Days 1946–1948; for a harrowing yet level-headed account of the mass rapes that followed the city’s liberation by Soviet soldiers (complete with some psychologically remarkable observations about the fascination of rape propaganda as disseminated by the Nazis) the anonymously published memoir A Woman in Berlin is without peer. Annett Gröschner’s edited collection of Berlin school essays from 1946, Ich schlug meiner Mutter die brennenden Funken ab, provides fascinating insights into how teenagers experienced the first year of peace; Vladimir Sevruk’s collection of eyewitness accounts entitled How Wars End, and the final volume of Konstantin Simonov’s war diaries offer powerful descriptions of the city in the immediate aftermath of the war as well as of the attitudes prevailing amongst Allied soldiers and German civilians. All these books have provided me with a thousand little details that facilitated my creation of a version of post-war Berlin which, though fictitious, makes close reference to a glum piece of reality just sixty years old.

  Like all stories, and perhaps more so than some, Peterson’s wild yarn also draws on those told by a host of fellow fabulists, many of whom far outstrip his own modest literary talents. These have contrived to wriggle into his memory, shape his vocabulary, and fuel his imagination. Unlike many storytellers, ours seems sufficiently indiscreet to pay overt homage to at least some of his heroes – above all to Dostoevsky and Dickens, both of whom may have wished to protest such imposition. In the spirit of Peterson’s indiscretion one should nonetheless add a few names, equally referenced in his tale, though perhaps less openly. These include Wilkie Collins, whose fat Count finds himself reincarnated in an officer’s garb to plot new villainy, and Günter Grass, that post-war poet who holds a near monopoly on clever midgets, and whose sense of line and grammar proved irresistible at times. It may be thought disconcerting that fiction throws as deep a shadow over this novel as the sombre realities of historical fact, but this, alas, cannot be helped.

  I would also like to take this occasion to thank those people who have helped me in writing the novel, either by providing first-hand information about the period, or through their careful responses to, and corrections of, my manuscript. These include: Simon Lipskar at Writers House, Kathy Belden and Mike Jones at Bloomsbury; Richard Lapidus, Kristin Semmens, Aya Soika, Bernhard Fulda, Eckhard Leberl, Ivan and Anna Crozier, and Johanna Greenwood. I would also like to thank my family for putting up with a son who has taken it into his head to write in a foreign tongue, James Boyd White for lending me his name, and my wife, Chantal Wright, whose editorial pen marks every page of this book. Your efforts were greatly appreciated.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s. He has a Phd in history from the University of Cambridge. He lives and works in Edmonton, Canada. This is his first novel.

  Copyright © 2008 by Dan Vyleta

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner

  whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief

  quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury

  USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

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  ISBN: 978-1-59691-451-3 (hardcover)

  First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2008

  This e-book edition published in 2011

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-651-7

  www.bloomsburyusa.com