Pavel & I (4 page)

‘I can get you penicillin,' Anders found himself saying.

‘You what?'

‘I can get you penicillin,' Anders said again, said it in English, best he knew. ‘For a price.'

‘I don't have enough left to sell.'

‘You have books.'

‘They are not for sale,' said Pavel, also in English now, and closed the door.

Anders went away thinking that the man's English sounded much harsher than his German.

He went back. There was no reason for it, he couldn't afford to give away medicine, and besides, he didn't owe the man a thing, not a thing, but still he went back. Twice he simply sat there, listening to the typewriter through the closed door, counting the letters and typewritten lines that ended in the sounding of a bell. The fourth time he came he brought a bottle of mint liqueur which he had heard was good for when one was ill. He placed it on the step, knocked on the door and ran away. He avoided the flat for a week after that, running with his crew instead, ripping off punters and flogging wares on the market. The weather was gradually growing worse, and Anders bought himself boots and a blanket from his proceeds. The boots were second-hand army issue, three sizes too large and heavy as lead. Anders walked them proudly, and made sure they didn't carry him back to the man's door.

Then, when he almost thought he had kicked the habit, he found himself retracing his steps yet again. For an hour he stood there, one hand spread up on the door, telling himself to leave. But this time he didn't leave. Instead, he knocked, a series of quick hard raps like he had seen the police use, and went over in his mind how he would ask the man for money retrospectively, to pay for the bottle of liqueur. ‘You drank it, didn't you?' he'd say without balking, and the man would have to admit that he was in his debt.

The door opened, that is to say, Pavel opened it, opened wide and without hesitation. He saw Anders, saw he was alone, outsize boots
on his feet and a blanket thrown over one shoulder. There was no reaction, nothing the boy could read. Pavel simply turned, turned on his heel, and marched back over to an armchair upon which he had been sitting prior to being interrupted. He sat, threw a coat over his lap and legs, and picked up a book that lay face down by his feet, its pages spread across the wooden floor.

The book was one of hundreds. They lined the apartment's walls, standing on cheap shelves made out of pressed, unvarnished wood. Hundreds of books, bound in leather, linen and cardboard; some as fat as Anders' fist, others so thin they looked like magazines, only the size was wrong. Amongst them, a few books whose pages looked like they were made out of gold, and, in one corner, a stack with books so large they did not fit upon the shelf. Enough books so that you could smell them, the smell of paper. Anders hadn't known that paper smelled.

‘Come in or stay out, but either way, please close the door.'

Anders did not react. His eyes remained riveted upon the books. He knew their worth on the market. They would have bought plenty of medicine. He stepped up to them, ran his fingers over the titles that lay embossed upon their spines.

‘These are in different languages,' he said at last, impressed despite himself. ‘You read all these?'

‘Yes,' said Pavel.

‘I speak German, English and Russian,' said Anders. And then, unaccountably moved to honesty: ‘Only a little Russian. To trade, you see.'

‘Do you read?' asked Pavel, and the boy shook his head.

‘Reading is for pencil pushers and bureaucrats,' he explained. ‘I have no time for it.'

And after some thought, looking at the book that sat in Pavel's hands: ‘If you wish to read, you may read aloud, if you like. I don't mind.'

Pavel smiled at this and got up to close the door. He locked it deliberately, the sound of the lock loud in the room, reminding
Anders how foolish it had been to come there. Then Pavel turned to peruse his shelves with the same quiet calm with which he had lit that cigarette in the face of Paulchen's Luger. His hand hovered over a number of books until at last he pulled out a dog-eared hardback, whose back-flap was badly torn. He settled down with it and started reading. He read:

‘“Among other public buildings in a certain town which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, it boasts of one which is common to most towns, great or small, to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born, on a day and date which I need not take upon myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events, the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.”'

Anders puffed up his cheeks and let out air, noisily. ‘Gibberish,' he complained in German. ‘It makes no sense at all. “I-tem of mor-tility” – it's all nonsense.'

‘All it's saying is that a boy was born in a workhouse – something like an orphanage – in some town or other. Only, I forgot to tell you his name. It's Oliver Twist.'

‘Oh yeah? Well it sounds like it was written two hundred years ago,' the boy said, sour-faced and dismissive. ‘It's not
modern,
' he added in order to settle the issue.

‘As a matter of fact it was written just one hundred years ago,' Pavel started to respond, but then he broke off, shrugged, closed the book and went back to the one he had been reading before the boy arrived.

‘What's it about anyway?' Anders asked after a while, his voice feigning boredom, the feigning audible even to himself.

‘Words,' said Pavel.

‘Words?'

‘Words. And a young orphan boy who starts living with an old Jew.'

‘Is the Jew good to him?'

‘No. He tries his best to squeeze him for every cent he's worth.'

‘What's his name again?'

‘The Jew? Fagin.'

‘No, I mean the boy. Olliwer?'

‘Oliver. Oliver Twist.'

The boy mouthed it a few times, stretching and contracting the vowels until he chanced upon a version he liked.

‘You may read on,' he said magnanimously. ‘Olliwer Tweest. Mind you, most likely I will fall asleep.'

He left at the end of chapter four. Night had fallen, the flat was freezing. ‘Later,' he said, and wondered whether he should tell the other boys about the books. They would want to steal them.

The next day he came back with two tins of sardines and half a kilo of floury potatoes.

Thereafter the boy came time and again; dropped in after breakfast, or on his way home from work. Sometimes, though not always, he would sleep there. Mostly he came to listen to the book, or else to talk. They talked about many things, Pavel and he. It took some time for Anders to get used to this. It was strange talk, talk about thoughts one had late at night before dozing off, or perhaps on the crapper sometimes, when one's bowels made one wait and the mind started to wander. Anders had not known such thoughts were for talking. Pavel spoke of little else. When Anders asked him to tell him about normal things, say the war or his past, he declined. ‘Books, beauty, and fear of
the dark,' he said. ‘These I will talk about. Forget about the war. There was no war. Only of course there was, but we do better in forgetting.' Whichever way he looked at it, it sounded a little
meschugge
to the boy.

Then the kidneys got worse. Anders tried to buy Pavel some medicine but there was none to be had. He couldn't tell whether Pavel was already pissing blood at that point. This was before the water had frozen in the pipes – before there was any need for the chamber pot, that is. Anders learned to gauge the disease by Pavel's walk; by the shadow that would pass across his face and force his lips into a liar's smile. The kidneys got worse, then better, then worse again. Once they gave occasion for one of those talks. Afterwards, Anders stayed away for a few nights, before he came back, wordlessly, and gestured for Pavel to get on with the book.

It happened like this. They had sat up during the night, Pavel praying in one corner, a little hat in his hair and a piece of cloth stretched taut behind his back. He was speaking foreign words. When he was done he turned, holding his kidneys, his eyes moist now with pain. ‘God,' Pavel said and the word stood in the room like a lodger overdue on his rent. It wasn't the first time the subject had come up; it was in the book, here and there, and in the church bells that carried it in during their morning airing; in the prayers Pavel spoke each night and upon the covers of a dozen of his books, stars and crosses, and the slender sickle of a crescent moon. Anders thought it over and decided he should clarify the point.

‘I don't believe in God,' he said. ‘Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against him. He's useful, you see. Keeps the masses in place.' His hand made a dismissive gesture.

‘Who taught you this?'

‘Nobody taught me,' Anders said proudly. ‘I taught myself. Or else the war taught me.'

He mulled it over for a minute, running his tongue through a gap in his teeth. He found he liked the sound of it.

‘Yes, the war taught me. There is no God.'

He looked over to Pavel, making sure he did not look like he was looking. Pavel's face was pale, impassive.
He looks like a girl,
the boy thought to himself,
and also like a statue.

‘You disapprove?' he asked.

‘And what is it to you whether I approve or disapprove?' Pavel shrugged and picked a book from a pile that sat by his bed. He began reading it in silence, the boy sitting there, gap-toothed upon his stool. They sat like that for perhaps an hour.

‘So there is a God?' Anders asked at last, and flushed because his voice sounded childish in his ears.

‘I don't know,' said Pavel, upon reflection. ‘There may be.'

They went back to their silence, the man reading his book, and rats scrambling in their walls.

Later, after they had shared a tin of sardines for a midnight supper, Pavel crouched to hug the boy. He lay in his arms stiff-backed and hostile.

‘I am too old for this,' he said disdainfully.

‘On the contrary,' said Pavel. ‘You're old enough.'

The boy did not understand this and thought it a lie. Outside, in the cold, he found he was crying and bitterly berated himself for it. He swore that this time he would not go back. But then, two days later, he moved in with Pavel permanently. It was the third of December. On the sixth the cold settled upon the city. A week and a half later, Boyd came to visit. And the next morning, Anders stole four leather-bound volumes from Pavel's private library in order to get his friend some penicillin, and a lemon. He had heard it said that lemons were good when you were ill, even better than mint liqueur.

Boyd did not come back that day, the nineteenth of December, nor the next, nor the one after. Nor was there any penicillin to be had on the market. In its stead, Anders bought a fungus-ridden lemon from a sallow-faced German who claimed to run a private greenhouse – a greenhouse? How could he possibly heat it? – and some Class One meat coupons that he traded in for six pounds of innards and a plastic bucket to carry them in. The blood froze on the half-hour walk back to Pavel's place, and he had to chip free with the ice pick whatever pieces he wanted to use that night. The thermometer had fallen to minus thirty and made each breath hurt in his chest. It had long ceased to snow, was too cold to snow, the sky scrubbed clean of cloud and germs. The house's pipes remained frozen, of course, Anders had to fetch their water by the bucket from one of the neighbourhood pumps. On the twentieth, signs went up around the neighbourhood declaring that electricity had been limited to a few hours a day. The boy did not remember it so well, but he heard the old people grumble that it was worse than during the war. In the entranceway of the house there appeared a smeared message: ‘88'. It had showed up overnight and nobody moved to wipe it off. Anders asked Paulchen about it, and he told him the figures stood for the eighth letter, H. Double H: ‘Heil Hitler,'.