Pavel & I (50 page)

I noticed that neither Anders nor Sonia were in any rush to get out.

We crept into the house like thieves. Initially, I guess, we were hushed by the question of whether or not Fosko was still alive. We stood stock-still in the dining room, near the corner where the good
china lay stacked in a glass cabinet, and listened for a sound of his movement. None was audible. Not one of us ventured to go up the stairs just then.

His pain assuaged by the morphine, the boy soon fell asleep. After a moment's hesitation, I carried him downstairs into the cellar, and laid him on the mattress that had been Pavel's. The warmth would do him good. I guarded him for half an hour or so, but he never stirred, let alone woke. Reassured by his regular breathing, I went back up and joined Sonia, who was sitting on the living-room sofa and had put on a record to keep her company. I took a seat at the sofa's far end, careful not to crowd her. Bach was playing, the Cello Suites. The Colonel had been very fond of Bach. Perhaps he still was.

We sat a long time before she asked me.

‘Why did they let us go?' she asked. ‘The Russians?'

I thought it over, formulating various theories to myself.

‘Perhaps,' I said at last, ‘Karpov isn't that bad a sort.'

She smiled at that and stood to turn over the record.

‘You said you wanted to give me money?'

‘Yes. The Colonel has a safe in his office.'

‘Get it then.'

I did as I was bidden: walked up to the study and opened the door, keeping my face averted from the spectacle of Fosko until I had opened the wall safe and counted out some three hundred pounds for Sonia. Then I turned and chanced a glance. It wasn't a pretty sight. The man just wouldn't die. He lay on his back, slick as a seal with his own blood; spoke from time to time, bubbles of spit rising from his sausage lips, or moved an arm in a half-circle, writing red crescents into the wood. The worst of it was the monkey. In the cold that had seeped in through the half-open window it had become frozen to the Colonel's shirt. It stuck to him like another limb, a hole in its chest, filthy, a dour witness to his dying.

‘I'll be back,' I told him, and quickly returned to the living room.

Sonia counted the money and stuffed it into her pocket, then instructed me to get her some blankets from upstairs, and wake the boy.

‘We are going. I'm taking Fosko's car. I'll leave it somewhere in Charlottenburg. You can find it there if you care to.'

I followed her instructions without a murmur. The boy would not wake, so I just carried him up as he was, and then out to the Beetle.

‘Don't come near me,' she said as she started the car. ‘Don't even think about it.'

I promised I wouldn't, and waved as she made her way down the driveway. Then I went back inside, brewed up a big pot of coffee, and went upstairs.

Do you know what I did?

I sat and watched Fosko die.

I swear to God it took him all night.

When he was finished, I wrenched the monkey from his shirt, stuffed it down the old outhouse toilet, then called the British Military Police to report a terrible accident.

‘What sort of accident?' asked the chap over the phone.

‘Domestic,' I said. ‘I just reported to work and found the Colonel dead in his office. He seems to have fallen on his iron.'

‘You stay where you are and we'll be over with an ambulance right away.'

I did just that and braced myself for a hundred indiscreet questions.

Winter did not break until the fourteenth of March, when the temperature suddenly rose by twenty-five degrees in a matter of hours. There was a moment when the air was already warmer than the frozen ground, and water collected in the streets and hardened into black ice. It cost a few lives, and of all those lost to this winter, they may have been the most tragic, tripped up on the verge of spring. Berlin's streets were full that day, and even more so the next: people staring up into the sun, and breathing air that no longer stung their lungs. All of a sudden the city was alive with the smell of grass and dog shit. By the end of the week, Berlin stood in the fullest of blooms. I am no sentimentalist, but I bought myself a big bunch of flowers as soon as they became available. They gave a little beauty to my poky little room.

The investigation into Fosko's death had taken me out of circulation for a few weeks. I was suspect because I was a civilian whose services to the Colonel had been strictly off the record. In fact, I passed myself off as a butler-cum-housekeeper, and to my relief the other chaps in Fosko's employ, headed by the chauffeur and burly Easterman, backed me up on this. In the end the Colonel's death was judged an accident. Rumour had it that headquarters was pleased to see the back of him and quickly shut down any further investigation.
As for me, I found myself stranded in Berlin without an income, living frugally off my meagre savings. It was from the marginal vantage point of a middle-aged pauper that I watched history unfold. Berlin was in the eye of the world in the spring of 1947.

As the new year got going, the relationship between the western Allies and the Soviets slowly dipped from bad to worse, and it was beginning to smell like another conflict. By March, the Americans had declared the ‘Truman Doctrine', vowing to ‘contain' the spread of Communism throughout the world. The Soviets reacted by sabotaging Berlin's electricity and water supply at random intervals and by filling the streets with violence. Incidences of murder spiralled out of control, and there was talk of German prisoners of war dying in Russian uranium mines. Scientists and engineers continued to disappear at alarming rates. New rumours made the rounds day after day, growing more outlandish with every passage from tongue to tongue, and feeding a mounting economic panic. Berliners talked food stamps, talked currency, talked glorious Hitler.

Against this rich canvas of history, my prime interest, of course, lay with the life paths that had so recently intersected with my own. About Pavel I was unable to ascertain a single fact, not even whether he was dead or alive. I tried writing to his family in Cincinnati, but could not locate any Richters who were missing either a son or a husband. Former comrades told me a story or two about his past, but not even a Russian drinking buddy (a major, no less) could procure any information about what had happened to him after Karpov had whisked him off.

Sonia was easier to keep an eye on. Against my expectations she did not leave Berlin immediately. Instead, she moved flats, to a two-room maisonette in Wilmersdorf, and had the Bösendorfer grand transferred there from her old quarters. I made the acquaintance of the lady who lived across from her, Frau Walkowitz, a war widow of a well-preserved forty, and met her once a week for coffee and cake in order to sound her
out about her neighbour. She must have thought I was courting her, and after our last meeting in September, when I announced that I was leaving Germany for good, I left her with tears in her eyes. She told me that Fräulein Sonia Drechsler lived frugally with her teenage son. She was teaching the boy to play the piano and to read; for some reason he was not enrolled in school. In early April she confided that she thought the young
Frä ulein
might be pregnant; two weeks later she was sure of it. I would have loved to learn who was the father, and also why she hadn't taken any precautions. Even if I had allowed myself the liberty of sending her a letter, however, there was no easy way to phrase such a question to a perfect stranger. The only time we had spoken was in Fosko's villa, to the rumblings of a cello. In May there was another shocking piece of news. Despite her pregnancy, Sonia had ‘made the acquaintance' of an American serviceman who had agreed to marry her without much ado. His name was Skinner, rank of lieutenant. They would leave Berlin in October, taking the newborn and Anders along. The boy, I was told, never referred to Skinner by anything but his last name. The Lieutenant did not seem to mind and treated him well once he'd heard that his father had been a socialist. ‘He has sympathies in that direction,' the widow Walkowitz confided. Trust Sonia to find the one card-carrying pinko in the whole of the American occupation army.

Once I heard of Sonia's plans to emigrate, I too decided to leave the city before things could deteriorate any further. In the event, I anticipated her departure by a week and a half: packed my bags, put a parting tear in the widow's eye, and returned to old Blighty where the economy was shot to pieces and people eked out miserable little livings without a shadow of a hope for improvement. After some months I found work as a night watchman and went about my life guarding a chemical factory with the assistance of an Alsatian by the name of Fritz. We had a close relationship until he developed testicular cancer and had to be put down.

One detail that busied my mind for many weeks before I left Berlin was the fact that the midget had disappeared. He should have been found up in the attic when spring stole over the city, but he was not – I looked for news of his discovery in the papers every day, and, one morning in April, I went over to the house in Seelingstrasse in order to find out for myself. I asked all the tenants, but nobody had the slightest idea what I was talking about; searched the attic, but found nothing apart from a row of bloomers that one of the tenants had hung up to dry. Of Söldmann there was not a sign. Who is to tell who took him? If I were to hazard a guess, I would say one of Pavel's former neighbours had stumbled upon him and snuck him down into their basement larder. Stuffed him next to the pickle barrel, perhaps, where they'd complement one another in their smells. To what purpose, you will ask. Ah, well, there you have me stumped. For food or barter? To add to the assemblage of skeletons in one's closet? Because they knew he'd once been notorious, and now was dead? With the hope, perchance, of selling him to the authorities, for a shovelful of coals? In any case, Söldmann disappeared and it is unknown where he met his final thaw.

The day I left Berlin, at the end of September 1947, I clutched to my breast a little suitcase filled with notebooks. In these, I had put down all that I knew and remembered, clumsily to be sure, with many repetitions and in the order of memory rather than that of event. The guard on the train had trouble convincing me to store it in the luggage net overhead, and even after I did, I kept my eye on it all the way to Calais. I remember falling asleep near the Belgian border, my head thrown back upon my shoulders. I woke with a flailing motion, afraid that my memories were gone. There they sat, though, heavy in their case, and all that had happened was that I'd got myself a crick in the neck, sticking fast like a bloody burr. It took me days to shake it off entirely.

I couldn't leave it at that. Wanted to, I'll admit, but curiosity got the better of me. I had to see them again, one of them, or all three, whatever could be arranged. I failed with Pavel. There was no way of locating him. I had extended my inquiries into his past as much as my meagre income permitted, and had learned some disquieting facts. His present was lost to me, the Soviet Union a sealed box. If he had got out since his ‘arrest' (and there was some reason to believe that he did get out), he was now living under a different name, in Washington DC most likely, or perhaps in Bonn, in the service of a government or two.

Sonia I did find without too many problems. After their wedding, the Skinners had moved to Lexington, Virginia. He was in carpets (a Communist in carpets – ridiculous, I know), she gave piano lessons. Anders had left the house as soon as he had come of age and returned to Germany. The younger child, a daughter by the name of Jean, was a ‘junior' in high school and working hard on becoming next year's prom queen. I saved up for a flight to the United States, wrote Sonia a letter and requested a meeting. ‘You may not remember me,' I wrote, ‘but I had the pleasure once of passing on to you some money that you were owed. I was Pavel's friend,' I added, thinking it might help. She wrote back a week later, suggested meeting in a downtown coffee
shop, and showed up in a flower-patterned summer dress and sunglasses. Her hair was very Jackie Kennedy. It had been seventeen years since I'd last seen her, and she was still beautiful, if a little thicker of waist.

‘I almost forgot you had an eye-patch,' she said after we shook hands. I grinned like a fool and ordered a cup of coffee. We sat in a booth at the back near the jukebox. Fortunately the place was as good as empty.

We talked, and at first Sonia proved a little monosyllabic. I asked her about her life, and she answered in short, precise phrases that she was doing very well, thank you very much. The coolness of her response surprised me; the speed with which she had responded to my request for a meeting had convinced me that she would be keen to talk herself out. I had even toyed with the idea of asking her in advance to put pen to paper, and supply me with her own version of our story. In my confusion I started babbling, explaining to her again who I was and how I knew Pavel, skirting over some of the more unsavoury details, perhaps, and going easy on the parts that outlined her sexual conduct back then. There was no point in insulting the woman. What I ended up dwelling on, I'm afraid, was the time Pavel and I had spent down in the Colonel's basement, talking. The thing is, when does one ever get to do that? To talk of the essential things, all those thoughts and experiences a man shuts up in his chest and gags on for half his life? They don't spill out but once or twice in a lifetime – and very often not at all. Pavel and I, we had spoken as one might to a priest, only better than to a priest, for even there all talk is strategic, and especially that portion of it that is self-accusatory. It's filled my life, this talking. Only sometimes I feared we had never really talked at all.