He did, said it, what he had rehearsed in his mind.
Mikhail looked up, languid, disinterested.
He said it again and hoped his voice had hardness.
Mikhail stood. Josef Goldmann watched, as if curious, but Viktor slept on.
Mikhail came towards him, seemed relaxed, not wary, but the shadow was on the face and Carrick wasn’t certain of it. Two more steps, then Mikhail would be close enough for the first strike with the fist.
He sucked in air. His wrist was held. He had not heard the movement. His wrist, at his back, was held tight, then twisted up high against his spine. He realized he was helpless. He was edged back, the sharp, stabbing pain in his shoulder and elbow, and could not resist. He was taken to the place beside the river where he had sat, his wrist was freed, and the water swirled past. He saw Mikhail slump again beside Josef Goldmann.
Reuven Weissberg said, in his ear, ‘He would have broken your neck, Johnny. With a broken neck you are useless to me.’
‘Where does it go?’
‘Where does what go?’
‘Life …’ Luke Davies said. ‘Us.’
‘Does it have to go somewhere?’ She faced him.
A great log had been left by foresters. Among the pines and birches it had been a rare oak, uprooted by a winter gale years back. The upper sections had been cut off and carted away, but where the trunk joined the splayed roots it had been left for the weather to destroy. Luke Davies leaned against it and Katie Jennings sat astride it. He held her hand, or she held his, and neither loosened the grip.
‘It would be nice,’ he said.
Her eyes rolled. ‘That’s a big word to use to a girl, nice, makes her feel pretty special.’
‘I think it would be good,’ he said, slowly and with care, as if taking steps on ground where cluster bomblets had rained down. ‘Yes, pretty good, if things sort of moved on, went somewhere.’
‘Are we talking futures?’ Mouth open, eyes wide, mocking but not cruel. ‘Is that where we’re going?’
‘I think it’s where I’d like to go.’
‘For a proposal of cohabitation it’s a little off the obvious. Nothing agreed, right. Nothing accepted, understood. Just conversation. Where do you live? What’s there?’
He said, ‘It’s a room in a house, Camden Town. A grotty road and a nasty house. I have a room, single-occupancy tenancy, and the rest is full of nonentities. I can’t afford anything better. Shall I do my CV, what and where I am? I live there because what I’m paid doesn’t let me get higher up the bloody property ladder. I don’t have a car, and I save on the transport fares by cycling to work and back. I eat in our canteen because it’s cheap and subsidized, and I’m working late most evenings. I’m twenty-eight, I have first-class honours in East European and Slavonic studies, I’ve been with the Service for five years, and I think what I do is important and –’
‘And you’re paid a subsistence wage, probably less than me.’
‘– and most of the guys round me, and the girls, have had a lift up, financially, from parents. I haven’t – my dad cleans office windows and my mum’s a dinner lady. I have this bloody accent, can’t lose it unless I do speech training, and that typecasts me at VBX. What I’m saying is that I work hard, I don’t have any link left with home, and I’m not on everybody’s invitation list in the section. I suppose I’m pretty lonely, and I don’t like it.’
She grinned. ‘You and your tragic life.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean, you know …’
‘God. I have a one-bedroom place, with a living room, a kitchenette and a bathroom not much bigger than you’d need to swing a cat in. It’s down in south-west London, where I did beat work. I’m well paid, I do all right. I like going to work each day. Remember the narrowboat?’
‘I do.’
‘It’s my dad’s. I have the run of it any time I want. Wake up in the morning, nothing but cows on the bank, and the odd rat, and quiet, and—’
‘I remember it because he was there.’
‘What did I say?’
‘You said, “Nothing’s for ever.”
Katie Jennings’s leg was hard against his shoulder. He felt her warmth, the heat in her hand. Her eyes danced. ‘I decide who goes there. Me. No one else has ownership.’
‘Do you think they need us?’
‘If they need us they’ll call.’
He kissed her. More exactly, she kissed him.
Tadeuz Komiski saw them, their bodies locked together. The search for Father Jerzy’s wood had taken him longer, and he had gone further, than he had expected.
He stopped. Where they were, the curse had taken hold of him. He stayed. They were at the place where guilt had been born. He was among the trees, unseen by them, and a child’s memories were stirred.
Lawson listened.
Bugsy hung back but Deadeye spilled it. ‘We’ve been to the river, where they were yesterday. They’d left footmarks and fag ends but – and sorry about it, Mr Lawson – they’re not there today, haven’t been, and there’s no trace of the boat. Stands to reason it was where they did the reconnaissance and where they expected to find their people on the opposite side. Not there. We backtracked up- and downstream, tried to find them that way. Didn’t. We cut back into the forest and looked for the cars. By then, have to say it, we’d little chance because the light’d gone. Mr Lawson, we don’t know where they are, don’t know where to look. We’ve lost them. Somewhere they’ll be hunkered down and waiting for their pick-up, but I don’t know where to start looking for it.’
Lawson said briskly, ‘What we need now, Deadeye, is a smidgen of luck.’
He thought he’d spoken with confidence and authority. Where did luck come from? They stood in a half-circle but away from him. He thought they had such faith, deep reservoirs of trust. He smiled at each in turn, at Shrinks, Deadeye and Bugsy, at Adrian and Dennis, and they waited on him for an answer handed down as to where luck could be gained. He realized then how long young Davies and the girl had been gone, but they were not a solution. Two more bodies would make no difference.
He turned away from them. They should not see the deep worry lines that cut his face.
His one certainty stood firm. It would be here, close to the site of the Sobibor camp, that collection would be made and delivery taken. That much he knew.
‘I give it an hour. We’ll move then. Just let the light settle a little,’ Lawson said. Anxiety squirmed in his stomach, but he summoned up the medley of confidence and authority. ‘They won’t come until it’s decently dark, I’d bet on it.’
Two kilometres back, they had worked for two hours, Molenkov doing better than Yashkin, and had shifted a tree’s lower trunk – three metres long and a half-metre in diameter – that blocked a trail into the forest. They had left an apology for a road, the only route going south from the village of Malorita. They had – together – sweated, cursed, grunted, sworn, gasped, but had moved it, and had been left with feeble strength after the log that had been embedded in winter mud was slid aside sufficiently for Yashkin to wriggle the Polonez past it. Then they had had to reverse the process. Molenkov had insisted on it. The log must be returned to its old place. It had sunk back into the mud groove it had lain in before its disturbance. They had done it, and they had fallen on each other and hugged. Neither had known who supported the other. Then they had kicked out the rigid lines of the Polonez’s tyres and used dead branches to smear the mess they had made in the mud. Yashkin had driven into the forest and Molenkov had the map on his knee. Each metre the car took them, with its petrol-gauge needle stationary at the bottom of the red section, seemed important and an unlikely bonus.
A kilometre back, the Polonez had sunk into mud on the trail. The engine had died after Yashkin had tried to accelerate out of the pit they’d gone into, then reverse out, and had failed in both. They had been there an hour. The solution, Molenkov had announced, was to make a secure base on which the tyres could find a grip. They had gathered up ev
ery branch and pine frond, every limb that the winter snow’s weight had broken off. They had brought the wood in armfuls to the trail, had slapped it down into the mud, heaved the pieces against the tyres and insinuated them under all four wheels. Then more had gone in front and been stamped down. Yashkin had started the engine, Molenkov had pushed and mud had flown. He had thought he had used the last energy he possessed, had sworn oaths at the great mound in the Polonez underneath the tarpaulin and … the wheels had gripped. The Polonez had surged forward. Molenkov had been left, a filthy, grunting, muddy wretch, on his hands and knees.
They had come off the trail and Yashkin had woven between the trees, the lower branches scraping the car’s sides.
Molenkov had his arms up as if he expected, with each lurch of the wheels, to be thrown against the dashboard or the lower part of the windscreen, and he had tried to read the map. The light was failing, and his eyes could make out only the blur of a deeper shade of green and the line of the Bug. Among the trees, off the track, the ground was firmer than it was on the trail, and they made progress – slow but steady, Molenkov thought. Almost, he had relaxed. Almost, he had forgotten.
And then there was a cough, like a fucking death rattle. It was the way his wife had gone, a cough deep in the throat that persisted for three, four seconds and then quiet. When the quiet had come, his wife was dead. The Polonez, too, was dead, engine expired.
Yashkin could be an idiot, could be precise and disciplined. He was in the middle of a forest with a car that was going nowhere and had a dry fuel tank. His response was to set the gear in neutral and apply the handbrake.
They climbed out of the car. They met at the back, and each took hold of a corner of the tarpaulin. Together, they dragged it clear. It was not done with words but from some instinctive agreement. Each reached forward and laid a hand on the covering, where the writing was stencilled and the serial number posted. It did not breathe, did not hiccup. It showed no sign of life. Again, without consultation or debate, they took the side straps and heaved, lugged, dragged the fucking thing off the tail. Yashkin locked the car.
They took their positions on either side of it.
They lifted, felt its weight.
Yashkin asked, ‘How far?’
Molenkov answered, ‘More than three kilometres. My friend …’
‘Yes?’
‘Why are we doing this?’
Yashkin stuck his chin forward. ‘To show that we can, and because we said we would.’
They went forward, towards the fall of the sun.
Carrick stared at the water, and saw only the dull flecks where the flow held debris in a swirling eddy. He waited for the moon to rise, and for a light to flash. Reuven Weissberg’s hand still rested on his coat, and they were together. The others, behind them, were apart.
Chapter 19
16 April 2008
Carrick felt the cold around him. He scanned the bank for a light.
With the darkness, Reuven Weissberg had been decisive: the boat had been dragged from cover and was beside them with the coil of rope. The instructions had been given for Viktor, Mikhail and Josef Goldmann to spread themselves out, take the positions at hundred-metre intervals, but that evening they were ordered to be downstream of himself. Carrick was told that Reuven Weissberg and he were at the best place for a crossing, where the flow was fastest but the river narrowest. He sensed certainty in the man beside him that the delivery would be made.
Carrick would have sat in the quiet that was threatened only by the rumble of the river, owls’ cries and the motion of the high branches behind him. He did not need to talk. He was numbed by tiredness and hunger. Reuven Weissberg talked to him, and, if he had wished to, he could not have escaped the purr and persistence of the voice alongside him.
He wanted it over, done with, wanted to see the light, make the crossing and bring back what was bought.
The voice dripped in his ear.
Reuven Weissberg said, ‘I could have arranged, Johnny, for it to be carried up north to the Finnish border, or taken into the Kaliningrad oblast, into Latvia or Estonia, because there all the frontiers leak. It could have gone into Ukraine far to the south or to a Black Sea port. I have the connections to have collected it at any of those places … but it had to be here, Johnny.’
Only blackness and lines of deep charcoal grey were in front of Carrick. He couldn’t see the water, only hear it.
‘From the time I was a child, Johnny, I have known of this place. She did not, but she could have taken a knife and used its tip to carve its name on my chest or my forehead. When I was a child, in Perm, when I lived first with my grandmother, I knew this place, the paths and huts inside the fences and the tracks in the forest better than I knew the route to the block where we lived and the streets around it. I could have walked from the hut where the clothes of the dead were sorted and the hut where the cut hair of the dead was graded and the hut where the valuables were parcelled, and I could have gone to the Happy Flea or the Swallow’s Nest or walked on the Road to Heaven. If I was late for school, I ran. I was a child and was late for the bell at school, but I did not think of punishment from a teacher. I was always running from the fence through the minefield, then through the open ground and the machine-guns fired, and I was running through the trees in the forest. If I fought in the yard at school, it was not against an older child who tried to keep me from his customers over whom he had made a roof, but I was one of those who waited in hiding for the German officers to visit a place that it was routine for them to come to, and I imagined I hacked with an axe and stabbed with a knife. Everything about me was the creation of my grandmother. It was from this place.’
He waited and watched and did not see a light, and constant with the voice was the river’s unbroken surge.
‘I am shaped by it, Johnny. When I was a child she told me of it, and I sat at her knee. When I was a man, she came into my room before I slept. She would bring me a drink. She would not sit on the bed but would stand in the darkness of the room, not moving, and she would tell me of what happened here to her. You cannot free yourself from it. Man and child, after the door had closed behind her and whether or not I switched a light back on, I could not be free of it. No part of the story is better than another. It is a slide towards despair. The man does not exist to whom I am in debt. She was out of the camp, was with Samuel, was in the forest where dragnets closed on them. One enemy? A German enemy only, with a Ukrainian ally? No, Johnny, many enemies. Vultures circling to find food. My blood carries no debt to any man.’
We had made love that morning. For him it was the first time, and for me, the first time that it had been meaningful. It was after the dawn. We had slept on the forest floor and the rain had fallen on us, but we had slept and had held each other for warmth through the night. I think we were too tired to have done it in the dark and it was better, then, to sleep. The morning had come.
In the night the forest had been quiet except for owls, the bark of a fox and the fall of the rain. The wind had thrashed the trees. We had some shelter against a big pine. I wanted him to do it … Germans came near to us, and had dogs, but the rain had killed the scent we had left and the wind would have covered what tracks we had made. I think we were now five or six kilometres from the camp. They were in a line, and their officers could not ride their horses because of the denseness of the trees so they led them. The end of the cordon line they made would have been less than fifty metres from where we hid, and we held each other close. Samuel had whispered to me that if we were seen we would run together. It would be better for us to be shot than taken and herded back to the camp. And they were gone …
So we lived. To celebrate, two rats that the dogs had not found, we made love. He knew what to do, he said, because it had been talked of endlessly in the unit he had been with. Always they had talked of it. He was gentle with me. I wanted to do it, but was frightened … I was in a forest, I was hunted, I had lived more than a year in the shadow of death, and it
was ridiculous to be frightened of love. He opened the clothing on my chest and touched me, and as he touched me I felt the wetness coming. It did not matter to me that the rain dripped hard on us. He had lowered his trousers to his knees, and I had lifted my skirt, and he had taken my hand and had guided me to hold him. It did not hurt when he came into me. I had thought it would, but it did not. The only sensation I felt was love, no writhing pleasure. It was love. I buried him in me, squeezed my muscles, held him, and did not want him to leave me. It did not last long, but I told myself I would remember each moment of it. He was spent. He was more tired than I after it. I held him close to me, and I could see his white buttocks and they had the marks on them where my fingers had been. His head was against my chest. It could have lasted for ever … Those minutes, gripping him and holding him, were the only ones in more than a year that I had lived. In those minutes the shadow of death was gone. They did not last.
Minutes of love were snatched. Death took them.
Men came. They were not Germans, not Ukrainians. They were of the Armia Krajowa. The first to see us shouted that he had found ‘Christ killers’ from the camp. Others came running. We could not run. Samuel could not because his trousers were at his knees and my old knickers were at my ankles. We were trying to cover ourselves. I was a Pole, Samuel was a Russian from the army attempting to liberate Poland, and they were Poles. To them – partisans in the forest who were from defeated units of the Polish Home Army – we were Jews and as much of an enemy as the Germans. They would have shot us, then and there, but did not – I believe – for fear of the noise of a gunshot. There were perhaps a half-dozen of them, and the leader was a bear of a man with a great beard. He stood over us, his legs apart, took the bayonet from his belt and fastened it – I heard the click, metal on metal, of the action. Then Samuel tried to save me. He fell across me. We were fighting each other for the right to protect the other, but Samuel had more strength than I. He was across me, covering me, and I felt the blows to his body as he was stabbed. Then there was a whistle, a signal. Again there was the shout of ‘Christ killers’, and they were gone. Perhaps they thought the Germans were close. They were around us. Then there was the emptiness of the forest.
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