Good People (40 page)

The subject preoccupied him, and there were doubtless other details he wanted to mention. He had always been studious, flaunting facts and figures. She was tempted to say: Kolya, tell me about the Panzers. We have all the time in the world. She scrambled to find the right tone but the words all sounded disproportionate, like furnishing a huge room with one little table.

Kolya wrapped himself in silence and stared at the woods across the river. His gloom saddened her: once there was at least one person who would listen, no matter the hour, to any of his stories, however
improbable. A chill passed over her: the chasm of his orphanhood opened up before her.

She sat on a stump. A soldier with air force insignia passed between them and pointed at the mess shed with his chin.

‘They've saved your portion for you,' she said to Kolya, surprised by her joy that he was treated with respect. She began to move her feet, which had thawed out a little.

‘They drafted him in Belaya Tserkov,' Nikolai stated.

‘Are there a lot of Ukrainians?'

‘Two.'

‘Do you get along?'

‘Very well,' he said. ‘The Caucasians, especially Grigorian, are sometimes annoying.'

‘Well, they're not exactly like us.'

‘But not so different.'

‘Is there anyone from Leningrad?'

‘Nobody. There are Chechens and one spoiled guy from Moscow, who still hasn't figured out that mummy isn't serving him tea in bed.'

‘Where do you sleep?'

‘There.' He pointed at the sheds that were enveloped in the stench of grease.

‘Aren't you cold?'

‘Sometimes.'

‘You've run out of rabbits.'

‘Tomorrow we'll raid some village around here.'

‘There's no meat supply?'

‘We manage. If we were hungry, could you help?'

‘Maybe it's possible to speak to certain people.'

‘Please. If we had more than forty grams of meat per week, maybe we wouldn't insist on remembering things.'

‘What things?'

‘Maybe we'd learn to forgive, Zaitchik.'

He was mocking her but above all his voice sounded strange: every word was a reproach.

‘When did you get to the area, Zaitchik?'

Mother stood next to the primus stove and called out, ‘Zaitchik, where's the water? Zaitchik, where are the boys?' She was stunned—in the last two years her nickname had vanished from her memory.

‘A few days ago.'

‘Really?'

‘Before that I had other missions.'

‘What kind of missions?' Once more she could hear his defiance, as if he was anticipating the usual rebuke: Don't call me that.

‘Routine things, nothing interesting. I'm a small wheel.'

‘When did you get here?' he asked again.

‘About two weeks ago.' Did malice flash in his eyes, celebrating her lie? Could someone have told him in the past few months that she was stationed in Brest? That wasn't possible.

She looked at the lined hands that had thrust the bayonet into the rabbit's eye. His arrogant look, like an interrogator playing with the accused, distressed her. She struggled with the apprehension that his right hand, which was close to her, was about to hit her. She stood up and stretched her limbs, moved away slightly and wondered whether she should tell him the truth. But what good would it do to Kolya to know that she had been in Brest for six months? Sometimes she had been sent on missions to other places in western Belorussia, she hadn't lied about that, but the reason she hadn't wanted to meet him till now was simple: she was afraid that something of Styopa's guilt had clung to her. Only after it was clear that Styopa was regarded as a separate case, which wouldn't trigger other arrests, and was sentenced—she was amused by the charge against him, ‘fabrication of evidence and preventing a just trial'—did she decide that her visit would not endanger Kolya. Sometimes she remembered Styopa fondly: an unlucky man, succumbing just when the number of arrests was falling and stories were circulating about citizens whose sentences had been commuted. After years in gulags they were reappearing in cities and villages like ghosts.

He stared at her. ‘They say that recently you rose to great heights in Leningrad.'

‘The smaller a person is,' she said, ‘the more he needs wild rumours.'

He cracked his knuckles, enjoying her answer. Hope blazed up in her that the memory of their nights would grow warmer.

‘Last week,' he said, ‘when you were still in Leningrad, did you by chance read
Leningradskaya Pravda
?'

He knew something. ‘It's been two years since I read that paper.'

‘So you didn't read the long poem, ‘See, Soldier Dmitry'?'

‘No.' She felt like slapping him, peeling off that insolent expression. Everything between them was spoiled.

‘Too bad. You would have enjoyed it. It's been years since Nadyezhda Petrovna published a new poem.'

‘They let Nadya go?' she asked.

‘They don't publish poets in the gulag.'

‘She returned to Leningrad?'

‘She came back.'

‘When?'

‘Not long ago.'

Now she understood. The plain began to whirl before her eyes, along with the brass trees to the north—are those Germans, or is it us?—dancing and rejoicing in her downfall. Nadyezhda, with a throng of admirers, recounting amazing tales about the gulag in her raucous voice. She had been dead for a long time, and that was fine. The disappointment at hearing that Nadyezhda was alive weakened. When had Sasha become someone who regarded death as a worthy revenge? There was Morozovsky lying with his head shattered. Lots of questions buzzed: did they know about that evening? Had anyone else been freed? Why hadn't her husband told her anything?

On his nose and moustache there were still blood-soaked hairs.

‘You have rabbit on your face.'

He didn't answer. After causing such an upheaval in her soul, maybe he didn't have anything else to say. She was filled with black despair: he would never understand that she had sacrificed everything
for him. ‘Do you understand that it would have been easier for me to die?'

‘Me, too, and we're both still here, maybe the only ones.' He took a dry plug of tobacco from his pocket, cut slivers of it with his knife, rolled it in newspaper, and lit it.

‘Don't say that. They're alive.'

‘I mean that we always played with talk about death, and envied people who loved life, and now most of them are dead or as good as dead, and we're here.'

‘You're saying that we liked being alive?'

‘More than we thought.'

‘I haven't liked being alive since you disappeared,' she said.

‘Maybe you have, more than you thought.'

He handed her the cigarette. She puffed the smoke. The taste was nauseating, like sticking your head in a chimney. Styopa-Podolsky was shouting from the stage, ‘The Revolution needs you, body and soul, everything.'

‘When did you start smoking?'

‘At school.' He chuckled. ‘I was afraid to tell you.'

The tumult in her head died down a little: it wasn't clear how much he knew, maybe not much. ‘Nadya contacted you?'

‘Yes. She sent me a long poem and a letter.'

‘What did she say?'

‘Not much. She told me that the NKVD made a wunderkind out of you, that you hadn't been in Leningrad for a long time, that Brodsky died in Kolyma.'

‘When did he die?'

‘Last month.'

‘I thought he'd make it.'

‘You were wrong.'

‘Is the poem good?' she asked.

‘Very interesting.'

‘Nadka wrote a poem about the heroism of soldiers? Now she's a Party poet?'

‘Dmitry isn't a soldier. He's a seven-year-old boy dressed in his dead father's uniform.' He said the last words without any triumph, even with sadness. Most likely he understood that as soon as she returned to the office, she would find the poem. Where was
Boris Godunov
in the bookshelf?
*
On top. All six volumes of Pushkin were on top.

Now only one thing remained. A film veiled his eyes. Apparently he no longer wished to hurt her. She decided to be generous and say it for him. Anyway, the moment she realised what accusation had been fabricated against her, she swore to escape from this stinking plain: Nadyezhda had dedicated the poem to the dead soldier Vlada.

LUBLIN

JANUARY 1941

Keeping to the shadows, avoiding the streetlamps, hugging the buildings, Thomas walked along the main street, then turned left down an alley that opened into Adolf Hitler Square. He felt his way around the small craters made by the Luftwaffe's bombs. Beyond the corner he was dazzled by the light blazing from the second-floor windows of the SS headquarters. How imposing the building was. There was a cold, sharp burning in his throat, and his tongue licked icy teeth. He pressed against the wall, passed his hand over the bricks, looked away from the building: he would always remember the humiliation he had suffered here in the SS headquarters of the Lublin District.

From the windows tongues of fire assailed him, contorting his features into a grimace of fearful malice. Perhaps he still offered an ingratiating smile, but his eyes revealed his acceptance of fate. His was the face of an acrobat who had fallen from the trapeze. Erika Gelber's techniques had long since stopped helping him: there was no spark of life to concentrate on, either around him or in his memory. Maybe he
would write to her, in the labour camp at Ravensbrück: Dear Frau Gelber, I hope you are enjoying your work in the service of the Third Reich. Because of a certain deterioration in my situation, I would like to ask you to refresh my memory regarding the Four Stage System for dealing with attacks.

He climbed steps blocked by piles of snow and wandered into a small grove of trees: the branches leaned over the red tiles, from whose edges pointed icicles hung, while smoke curled from chimneys like tree limbs. In the background a frozen city dozed, its sounds muted, its barren streets wrapped in fog; from here it was possible to imagine it as a huge void. The trees restored his strength of spirit—the courage of cowards. Only from another continent do you fire arrows at the god Wotan and his wild army.

At night, among the small stone houses that had become an entertainment district with beer halls, a casino and a brothel, they didn't ask who he was. He would sit on a leather armchair leaning against the wall, drink schnapps, Okocim beer and cognac on the weekends, and listen to the music that was played all night. Cigarette smoke rose, young women dashed back and forth with trays of sausage and cabbage, bread and beer, or sat in men's laps and let them press their lips against their necks. It was as if they were in uniform: a blue-black line around their eyes, shiny cheeks, off-the-shoulder dresses, small bones, black silk stockings.

At the far end of the hall was a small wooden stage, lit with a few coloured lanterns and the bluish-orange flame of a kerosene stove. Sometimes short performances were presented there—choruses of drunken officers, a young soprano who sang arias from
Don Giovanni
, voices humming
‘Der Sennerin Abschied von der Alm'
*
and mournful songs of childhood. A bespectacled officer in a dress uniform with starched cuffs, decked out with medals, read parts of a speech by von Alvensleben from the SS that pierced the heart: ‘Nothing has ever been constructed out of delicacy and weakness. New worlds are cast
in stone, in lead, in blood and in men as tough as Krupp steel.' Then the officer added words of his own: ‘In a democracy the government needs the people's love, and we too need it, but we can also manage without it. Sometimes the people will love us, then they won't, and then they will fall in love with us again. We will retain power.' His fiery expression annoyed Thomas. He would have gladly thrust a spear down his throat.

A proud voice rose from a smoke-filled table. ‘Have you heard what they call Globocnik at the SS-Führer Headquarters?'

‘Globus,' Thomas muttered. That was one of Himmler's old jokes that Wolfgang had told him. Sometimes he hoped that Wolfgang would be sitting among the officers: he was the only one Thomas liked among those who had laid a trap for him in Warsaw. He had made great plans for both of them. He forgave Wolfgang because, from the moment the young officer encountered the Kresling-Hermann-Weller triumvirate, his only choice was to do their bidding with good cheer and fighting spirit. Truly loyal men, who would have acted differently, had never crossed his path. There were too many characters, Thomas felt, in religion, folklore, art and even in public discourse—the inventions of popular morality—who were merely theoretical, who behaved irrationally in unrealistic scenarios; and under the influence of these stories, poor children were filled with guilt because they couldn't live up to such exalted ideas.

A stocky man, one of the district governor's assistants, stepped up to the stage. He closed his eyes and swayed to the tune of the piano:

The song was greeted with cheers and a jumble of drunken shouting: ‘Hans-Hans-Hans.' No doubt, stocky Hans, who had studied acting in Reinhardt's theatre, was everyone's beloved romantic tenor.

Late at night Thomas watched the couples dancing to melancholy French love songs. Was Clarissa dancing now? Every evening he imagined a different suitor for her, the two of them dancing all over Berlin. Once she confided to him that some of her friends secretly listened to swing, and now he imagined her dancing like in American movies.

He hadn't written to her since he was sent away from Warsaw. What news did he have for her now? That his career had been blocked again? That the Foreign Office had stolen his model and handed it to his enemy, while he had become a miserable warehouse worker in Lublin? She had seen him defeated once, and that was enough.