‘No,’ I said. ‘I understand you. But I hadn’t thought of it before.’
She launched her cigarette out into the rubble and then folded her arms around her knees. I looked at the hand nearest me, the serrated nails, the dried blood on her thumb, the fingertips with their network of tiny cuts like shattered glass.
‘Is your father still there?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. I lost him. One day he left me to go to my mother, but he never arrived there. I looked for him. But nothing.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘It’s not unique,’ she said.
‘Your mother …?’
‘She’s all right. She’s in England, with my brother. He’s very clever. Already he owns part of a newspaper in Portsmouth. He looks after himself very well. That’s the first thing he does with his brain. I get letters from them. They’re very careful what they say, but I get the idea they don’t approve of what’s happening here.’
‘They will,’ I said. ‘It will become obvious.’
Or did I say that? This was forty-six years ago. It is like trying to see something in a forest, the wind blowing, the light moving through the trees. The mind completes what the eye of memory does not entirely see. But that is what I then believed – that we would triumph.
We were silent for a while, looking out. Then I said, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Here? With you?’ She laughed.
‘No, no. I mean your work.’
She turned to me, still smiling. She looked all around my face, very slowly. I heard the machinery of a clock. Her eyes settled on mine and did not move, her face close, soft, open, even as she made her judgement.
‘Why do you want to know?’ she said.
Well, everyone wants to know, I thought. Hadn’t you realised? ‘There’s just the two of us here,’ I said instead. ‘And I think your story is likely to be more interesting than mine.’
She laughed and then stood. We began to walk over the broken stone and timber. She faltered and I caught her hand. On higher ground I could see a band of pale blue along the line of the horizon, silhouettes of gargoyles, stone horses, statues with raised swords. We reached the street and I let her hand go slowly. We went back the way we came, the lamplight fading on the walls and the cobblestones seeming to ooze a kind of oil, early morning workers stepping from their doorways. We turned into Pawel’s and her street. A brief wind rose and the carnival mask clattered like a tap dancer over the stones. Above, the violinist’s light was out. I thought in a sequence of maybe twenty things that could be ahead of me as the night passed to morning, but I settled on none of them. I walked along next to her in silence. She put her key in the street door, turned it. The minute hand on the brass clock jumped forward, the parrot’s head was buried in his feathers. Our footsteps sounded across the hallway, up the marble stairs. We passed Pawel’s door and wound higher upwards, the whole house still and deep in its sleep, her movements slow as she reached again for her keys, her eyes flashing across to mine, a nerveless smile, the pressures building within me, the key fitting in the lock, turning.
Inside, all was dark. I heard her moving, then the lights came on. We were in a hallway, a single small lamp and a trunk spilling clothes on to the floor. Her green dress was there. There were two doors. She passed through one and I followed her into a large room with a gas ring and sink at one end and a camp bed pushed against the wall of the other. She took off her coat and laid it across the bed, then thought again and hung it on the back of the door. It was difficult to see what was there because there was no pattern to anything. Stacks of books, clothes, coffee cups, shoes, pots of paint, a bottle of ink, coiled brass tubing, all spread in heaps and drifts across the floor as if blown there by a random wind. On the wall colour plates cut out of books, deep reds and blues, and drawings in ink on paper, hanging by nails.
‘No one ever comes here,’ she said.
She went back into the hallway and held open the other door. She gestured for me to enter. I stepped into a large emptiness, the ceiling high, the wooden floorboards sending out an echo. There were some bulked shapes, but I couldn’t see them. She moved past me to the far wall and opened the curtains. A weak blue morning light leaked in. She stood still by the window looking down at the shapes that I could see then were sculpted white horses, four of them, smaller than life but the size at least of large hounds, set in a crescent in the centre of the room. They were all perfectly formed, muscles tensed, eyes brown and imploring, veins raised in the flesh, teeth bared, a streak of grey across the flank of one, a blond forelock on another, all of them caught imposed in the midst of a moment of life or death. I stood in the doorway looking at them.
The first was on its side, head thrown back, mouth fully open in what would be a cry if I could have heard it, the forelegs limp and broken, the hind legs two bloody stumps, raw bone pushing through the flanks. In the gut was a wide wound. Through the hole, sagging downwards, were the grey-brown and purple organs of the horse. Soon this horse would die.
The second horse was pictured in the moment of crashing to the ground, its four legs snared in a coil of barbed wire. Its neck was flattened along the wooden floorboards of the room. Its ears were down, its eyes partly closed from the force of the fall. Its hindquarters were raised because the back legs were nearly straight from the way they were hobbled by the barbed wire. There were drops of blood from where the pointed shards of wire entered the flesh of the horse. This horse seemed unaware as yet of what had happened to it.
The next horse was emerging from sand. The sand was heaped in a dome on the floor, the horse coming up out of it, only its front visible as it struggled upwards from where it had been buried, the right foreleg free and crocked, the head inclined to the side, the eyes half closed and the mane flying as it shook the sand from itself.
The fourth horse, a colt, was standing, its legs splayed. It seemed uncertain of how it got to this position and unwilling to test its ability to walk forward. It looked amazed at the strange piece of luck of being able finally to get to its feet. Its head was bowed but it was looking upward, towards the door, where I was standing.
I looked over to Angelina.
‘You did that?’ I said.
She nodded.
‘Well, you asked,’ she said.
In the days that followed I went to my office like a sleepwalker. I attended to my papers. When I could no longer resist it I wrote Angelina a note. I went from the office to her. We cooked meals on her gas ring, we walked under the trees and then we found each other again on the mattress we put on the floor as though it was something new each time. I went back to my desk the next morning, often without sleep. There is something that carries you at times like this. I have seen it shining through the eyes.
Gottfried seemed to see it. Whenever he passed me he bounced back as though he’d walked into a spring. He laid his hands down gently on my desk, he tilted his head, he smiled a little coquettishly. He told me jokes, he asked me if I’d heard what the English had done in Africa, or if the shipment of eggs had gone to Lübben. One day he called me into his office and told me he believed that he was to be given new responsibilities in military transport. He did not know when but he thought it could be soon. He took a bottle of vodka from a drawer in his desk. He would have some influence over how his position would be filled, he said. He poured us each a glass, smiled.
We drank the vodka and then had two more. The meaning of the order sheets, the eggs, the Party and Gottfried seemed far away. It was as if we were speaking to each other from hilltop to hilltop, wind scattering the words. All that was real was Angelina. We moved on to a bar and drank more, our jackets off, our ties loosened. I thought it was as well to be passing the time that way as any other, for Angelina had gone to the library to look at pictures of horses. We spoke about Wilhelm the bookkeeper who was making his way steadily through his club’s chess championship, Ernst the driver, who took back roads all the way to Bad Freinwalde at the Polish b
order and when he arrived and opened the back door of the truck was nearly drowned in a flood of broken eggshells and yolk. Gottfried bent over helpless with laughter, his fat little hands beating on his knees. He turned then to our office, his ‘little team of immigrants’, as he called us. How were we managing, how were we settling in? Well, very well, I told him. We have a laugh among ourselves, I said, it’s not just eggs and eggs only, and I told him about Pawel’s parties and his pranks, the use he made of the knots he learned in the Boy Scouts. Gottfried nodded, laughing again, that soft, tolerant, fatherly laugh we heard every day.
‘And Dieter,’ he said. ‘I worry about him. He seems so frail and solemn.’
I told him it was true that Dieter put himself under great strain. His commitment was so fierce, yet he lacked strength. ‘I worry about him too,’ I said, and I told him about that day we sat together in the bus coming back to Berlin from the farms, how he turned to me with those pale blue eyes and asked how it was possible to never stop believing, even for a moment, to carry such a weight.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Those pale blue eyes.’
* * *
From a rooftop high above the street I watched the white and gold clouds roll and churn, the sky blue and bright all around them. They moved as though in huge vats boiling, white columns of froth thrown up into the air. It was evening, the richness of the light deepening into a yellow-orange as the sun descended. I looked down. Tremendous shafts of concentrated light poured through gaps in the clouds and hit trams, steeples, walls, windows, faces. I saw everything magnified – creases in iron, the tiny pits in the bricks. This glory of love.
I looked down into the street. A rectangle of light with some rose in it hit the pavement as Angelina rounded the corner in a yellow dress. She walked directly into the light. There was never to be a time when I would be ready for this, the shock I got at the way she was made, the way she moved. A small round man in a long coat and with a walking stick scuttled past her with steps so short it seemed he was on wheels and then turned to watch her until she reached the door, his hand on his stick. She shook her head, her black hair flew and then settled. I heard just her last steps as she reached the landing, her key in the door. I watched her through the open window from the rooftop as she entered the room where we lived. She was wearing canvas shoes for playing tennis in and white socks made for a man. She took them off, her fingers working the laces. She stood, her back to me. I saw her hands move down along the front of her as she unbuttoned her yellow dress. She lifted it from her shoulders and it fell. She turned, just herself, her arms opening to draw me to her.
I returned to my room after eleven consecutive days with Angelina. I needed shirts, and a book I would like her to read.
I found a letter with a postmark from the Crimea. It was from the General, the one who went swimming with Jerzy in the middle of the night and then talked with him until dawn and later sat in front of me in a restaurant in Berlin eating enough for ten.
He wrote,
‘I greet you from the Crimea, where we are on manoeuvres with the Poles. What I have to say concerns our mutual friend. I have not been in contact with him since the time I was teaching at the academy, but one of the Polish officers has given me news of him. This news has disturbed me.
‘As you no doubt know he left the academy with the highest distinctions. He returned to Poland and has been ascending through the ranks of the army there. I am told that there is no more brilliant young officer in that country. Of that, my source tells me, no one is in doubt. Great things are expected of him.
‘Recently the academy invited him back to give a series of political lectures. This is a considerable honour for so young an officer. He arrived one month early and spent all the time that was available to him in the library. He read there, at meals and back in his room at night. Then he would think. He was putting a great strain on himself. The impression I have been given is that he was attempting to arrive at a complete understanding of the workings of power in the world. Comrades began to note that his behaviour was becoming strange. He rarely slept. He could be seen down in the courtyard of the academy standing absolutely still with his back against a tree through the whole of the night. He did not speak with others.
‘The first lectures went badly. His voice was weak, he made all manner of mistakes with dates, places and names. Occasionally he would lose his train of thought and could not recover unless he returned to the beginning. This you will find surprising, I am sure.
‘On the fourth day he entered the lecture hall, took up his position at the lectern and looked down at his notes. The students waited, but Jerzy said nothing. He looked up at them and they could see in his eyes that he was trying to say something, but he could not speak. They went to him then and found him frozen there by the lectern. My young friend, something seemed to have broken inside him. They had to carry him out. He was nine weeks in a military hospital in Moscow.
‘Now he is in Poznan. His wife is with him. I am told he speaks more or less normally, but he reads nothing at all. He is also eating a great deal. This is to do with a theory he has about the restoration of his strength. There is every wish to accommodate him there in Poznan. Much is still expected of him. But they are anxious. His weight has increased from 79 kilograms to 102.
‘Forgive me for writing to you with this news, young comrade. You should be assured that your friend is in good hands. His wife is there, there is a psychiatrist in attendance and his fellow officers wish him well and are ready to assist him in every way. But his problems are not yet over. I felt helpless when I heard this story. Perhaps you can imagine. I did not know where to turn. I thought of you because his family are all dead or far away and to my knowledge you are his closest friend.’
I stood at the foot of the bed where I no longer slept. I felt the spreading of a stain, the sense of something vague shaming me. I did not look for the root of it. I took the letter, my shirts, the book for Angelina, and I went out into the street towards her, everything I was flowing towards her. I heard my footsteps sound against the walls, nervous footsteps here in Berlin. I thought, and as I did the shame came back. I tried to concentrate on Jerzy. I saw him with his shoulders down nearly to the ground, hinged on one leg, the line of his back pointed up to the sky like a heron bending to water, his calm eyes following the flight of the discus across Pan Kazimierz’s lawn. I saw him before our class explaining the workings of the internal combustion engine. I saw him in his white suit, a shaft of sunlight hitting him as he said goodbye. Did the story about what happened at the academy become corrupted by the time it reached the General? Was the General playing a trick? Was Jerzy? What force could there be in him that he could not control?
I told Angelina the story of Jerzy as written by the General. We ate fish on the floor with candles spread around us and drank a bottle of wine given me by Gottfried. Later the last of the candle was flickering, beads of wax slithering to the floor. Angelina’s head was on my shoulder, her breath slow and regular, her long leg wrapped in a single stitch around mine. I was awake trying to think of what to do about Jerzy. I thought of going to him in Poznan. But there was the money, the explanation I would have to give to Gottfried. Of Angelina alone in Berlin while I was in Poland I did not wish to think at all. I thought then of writing to him. The General had given me his address at the bottom of his letter. I thought of how I should approach such a letter, what he might best be able to receive. A few phrases formed, and then there was sleep. I carried the thought of it around with me in the days that followed, trying to get it right and clear, imagining the moment when I would write it. Sometimes I forgot about it for a few days, then the idea came back.
But I did not go to him. I did not write to him. This man who as a boy held the bully Feliks with the mule’s teeth by the throat against a tree and told him to apologise to me. One year after his bad time at the academy he was sent to Africa to run a mine. I did not see him again until long after he returned.
I felt s
omething small and sharp strike me on the side of the head, just over the ear. I had to think for a moment of where I was. A political meeting, I could see, from which my attention had strayed. I saw a small ball of paper in a fold in my grey trousers. I turned to my left and saw Pawel. He was pulling at his moustache and grinning and about to throw another small ball of paper at my head. He was trying to get me to look at something, but I did not look, I turned instead to face the front of this room in which there were maybe forty others in their office suits facing a long table occupied by Gottfried, two local Party officials and the Russian named Odiniktsev I then clearly remembered we had been assembled to hear. He was slender, pale, fair, good-looking, I would say. A kind of speed and sinewiness about the arms. His jacket was off, his tie had been loosened, the sleeves of his white shirt had been rolled up. A small, blond goatee. Difficult to imagine him drunk, or at least drunk and having a good time. He did not try to draw us in through his manner of speaking. He did not try to charm us. He spoke instead with the steadiness of winter rain of Russia and the Red Army and the German advance towards Stalingrad: ‘… and when their vehicles could not make progress through the mud they shot our prisoners and laid out their bodies like planks to make a road. They took our food, demolished our homes for firewood. They rained bombs down on us, they slaughtered orphans, they rounded up tens of thousands of our citizens telling them it was for relocation and then shot them and threw them into pits. They sought to end our culture, our nation, the bright flame of liberation which we held up to the rest of humanity. Those of us they did not kill they tried to turn into slaves. This is the naked sadism and egomania of the mystical Fascist. But …’ I had heard this before, but though I did not find it displeasing I turned back to Pawel. When he saw me looking at him he held up a square of paper. I had to lean over to see it well. It was a drawing made with a pencil. It depicted a hyena standing up on its hind legs on the back of a saddled donkey. In the manner of the posters of the time, the chin of the hyena was held high, his chest was out, wind was blowing through his hair and he carried in his front paw a large spanner. There was a drawing of the sun in the corner with the rays coming out as if they were pouring over the face of the hyena. Pawel had drawn a goatee on him in case I did not understand that this was a picture of Odiniktsev. And with the donkey he was equally clear. The moustache, the broken front tooth, the two thick eyebrows angling upwards towards the middle like regimental pistols were those of Gottfried. He had even placed a smouldering pipe in the donkey’s front hoof. It was not the funniest joke ever made by Pawel. But there was something about the smug displeasure of the hyena as he rode towards the setting sun and the eagerness to please of the donkey that were exactly right. And that pipe, the smoke rising up around its ears. I held myself taut but I felt a fit of unstoppable laughter forming within me such as afflicts schoolboys during particularly solemn moments in the classroom or in church. I knew that the more I tried to escape it the worse it would become. Pawel caught it, as always happens in cases such as this. He was even worse than me because he felt it was the glory of his wit which had made me so helpless. We tried to hold our breath and look straight ahead at the Russian, but it was no use. We knew that if our eyes met we were finished. We ducked down behind the backs of those in the row in front of us, our torsos convulsed, our hands beating at the sides of our legs, tears streaming from our eyes. Just when it seemed we had stopped and we made to rise to our former positions, it hit us again and we dived down.
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