Restitution (27 page)

‘What were you thinking while you played that song?’ Sofia had been watching him again. Although she frequently told him what a waste of space he was, how stupid and slow and
generally
male,
he noticed that her eyes were soft now.

‘I was contemplating the relativity of time,’ he told her.

She sniffed.

‘Poles and Russians, fellow victims of Fascist aggression.’ The commissar folded the letter from Moscow. ‘We share glorious Slavic mission to defeat
Germans.’ He stretched his pitted face into a smile which looked as though it hadn’t been used for some years. ‘You are free to leave now.’

‘Never mind that our Russian friends imprisoned us up here for nearly a year,’ Gregor muttered to Sofia. They were standing at the back of the crowd assembled to hear the official
announcement of their new freedom.

Sofia glared at him. ‘He’ll hear you.’

The Skotnickis unrolled a map of the Soviet Union and started planning. They might almost have been organizing a holiday rather than a journey of two thousand kilometres south.
Gregor saw Mrs Skotnicka bend down over her bunk and unroll a belt like a bandage she wore the year round under her shirt. He averted his eyes but not before he’d seen the glint of diamonds
and sapphires falling onto the blanket.

‘As I said before, we had time to prepare for deportation.’

He hadn’t noticed Sofia coming in.

‘Mama unstrung her necklaces.’

Gregor thought of his own possessions: a tattered photograph of his mother and a mouth organ. The more he considered it the more obvious it seemed that he should distance himself from the
family, who could barter and buy their way across the continent. The Skotnickis would feed and clothe him, possibly even pay for his railway tickets, but he couldn’t accept their charity.
Especially when he felt like he did about Sofia.

He muttered an excuse to her and went outside. Sasha the guard sometimes gave him bread if he carried out extra work: groomed the horses or helped on the family vegetable patch. He considered
trying to persuade Sasha to convert the extra food into roubles.

‘And where do you think you’re going, young man!’

Gregor froze.

‘Get back here and start boiling water. I want all my instruments sterilized before we leave.’ But the doctor’s eyes were kindly. ‘I keep telling you, there’s no
way I can cope with the thousands of sick people we’re going to encounter on this journey if I don’t have an assistant, Paul.’

The doctor was careful to use the new name.

‘I can’t pay you but I can feed you and wherever we travel you’ll come with us. You’ve become,’ he coughed, ‘well, let’s just say I couldn’t
manage without you.’

When the time came to leave Gregor showed the official his newly acquired Polish papers. The man observed him through his round lenses. An eternity seemed to pass before he
nodded him forward to stand with the Skotnickis. Sofia’s hand squeezed his. ‘Thank God.’ She gulped. Sofia was gentler with him these days.

They planned to head south across the Soviet Union to Krasnovodsk, over the Caspian into Persia and the protection of the British. ‘New lives for all of us in London.’ Doctor
Skotnicki rubbed his hands. Gregor knew he was hoping to join the Free Poles as a medic. ‘And you will get a place at medical school,’ he told Gregor. ‘At St Thomas’s or
Guy’s. I’ll coach you in the sciences while we travel.’

‘What if he doesn’t want to become a doctor, Papa?’ Sofia folded her arms.

‘I wouldn’t mind.’ Gregor had enjoyed assisting Dr Skotnicki with the patients. Nothing wrong with making medicine his career. His parents would have approved: it was a
socially useful calling. But he’d promised himself not to think of his father and mother.

Sofia’s hazel eyes had swept Gregor’s face with something that looked like approval.

Berlin, 1945

Gregor pushed aside the daydreams of how his life might have gone had he reached London. Anyway, the British would probably have incarcerated him in a camp for enemy aliens in
some damp corner of their cloud-covered island. At least in Berlin he was a misfit in his own home.

He told anyone in uniform who asked that he was Gregor Fischer. A German deserter had stolen his ID and fire had claimed the rest of his papers. ‘Foot injury, the Wehrmacht wouldn’t
take me,’ he said. ‘Been working as an orderly for most of the war.’

‘What about the Volksturm?’ asked a sharper Soviet officer. ‘Surely they conscripted you at the end? We heard they even dragged men out of hospital wards to fight.’

‘They gave us some old guns and sent us east to defend the city, but the officer commanding us sent us back, said it was hopeless.’

‘Wise officer.’ The officer’s pale blue eyes reminded Gregor of the icy seas during the voyage from Kolyma, waters he didn’t intend seeing again.

So Paul Smolinsky and all he represented was gone.

Gregor wrapped his gun in one of his father’s silk handkerchiefs and placed it in the piano. Vavilov’s creatures would find it in minutes; he’d have to find somewhere better to
hide it. He waited for Alix. And for Vavilov. Most of the day he sat in his mother’s old chair, windows open so he could smell the lilac. The cordite and burned-metal odour was subsiding but
sometimes the scent of death overwhelmed the lilac and he had to close the windows.

He managed to make his way back to Woyrchstrasse the following evening. As he walked past the letter to the girl called Astrid he shone his torch on the paper. ‘Astrid, still no word from
you?’ the writer had added. ‘Your father died and the children and I are trying to get out of the city. We need to know where you are,
Liebling.’

His own note was unanswered.

The next night he tried to return again but the Russians had set up a roadblock and he feared his orderly-with-an-injured-foot story wouldn’t get him through it.

Dieter’s mother ignored the fever and cough until Coca and Gregor convinced her to take to her bed. ‘I’ll handle any repairs that come in,’ Coca said.
‘Gregor can help.’

Ute’s Russian protector had vanished and the girls and their mother hadn’t eaten for two days. Gregor sold a pair of Eva’s shoes, dainty evening pumps with beads around the
toes, to an officer. With the proceeds he bought bread. The process took hours. He’d learned how to move through the rubble-strewn streets, dodging Russian patrols, discovering that, even
when the piles of bricks seemed impenetrable, there’d be a route through: a miniature mountain pass.

Now the first wave of rapes was dying down, Berlin women were appearing in daylight, heads wrapped in turbans (no point in showing off unwashed hair), to clear the rubble. They worked in groups,
stopping for cigarette breaks during which, to Gregor’s amazement, they’d often break into howls of laughter. He saw a certain irony in his own situation, but nothing at all comical in
theirs. When they saw him looking at them they’d turn away. He understood. Men were redundant in this new world. Having done their worst to the city and the country, males had no role to play
in trying to build something new – that was women’s work. He thought of Sofia, how she would have nodded her head at these observations. She’d always believed women were tougher,
more resilient. And Alix had been tough, too, working the farm while her father was away at war.

It was still Alix who preoccupied him as he negotiated the rubble mountains. Perhaps he’d catch a glimpse of her in a backstreet or at a bread queue.
Alix, Alix, Alix.
Sometimes he
realized he’d been saying her name aloud, over and over again. People didn’t stare at him; his was a very mild form of the insanity you could see on the streets every day: people
rocking and clutching themselves while they muttered, sometimes bursting out with hysterical laughter. The
Kellerkinder
– children sleeping in cellars – were too busy scavenging,
and their mothers were occupied with rubble-clearance and cooking whatever could be found to eat.

At the edge of the temporary lake at the end of the street a man in a peaked cap muttered something about fresh eggs. Gregor stopped.
Eier.
He couldn’t remember the last time
he’d seen one. Dieter’s mother would benefit from a boiled egg. ‘Let me see them.’

The man opened his pocket and showed him two creamy-white eggs. Gregor reached into his pocket.

‘Not money,’ said the man.
‘Zigaretten.’

‘How about some brandy? I’ve got some in my apartment, I can get it in a second—’

He stiffened. Reflected in the stagnant floodwater was a familiar outline. Gregor swore under his breath. He could run but Vavilov would have posted men along the street. The egg vendor slipped
away. Gregor checked for the cyanide capsules in his pocket and turned round to Vavilov, keeping his head up, forcing himself to meet the older man’s stare.

‘Hello, Fischer. Amazing how nature adapts, isn’t it?’ He nodded at the swan on the water. ‘Could we go up to your apartment, Comrade?’

He led the way up, feeling Vavilov’s eyes on his bastardized uniform jacket. He should have worn Dieter’s suit today; he’d grown careless.

‘That’s the thing about standard tunics, you can’t change the basic shape. Even if you remove the trimmings.’

‘Did you come here to discuss tailoring?’ Gregor showed him inside. ‘I found a bottle of my father’s brandy. God knows why nobody drank it during the raids.’ He
poured them both measures while Vavilov paced the sitting room, picking up books and records, studying paintings.

‘Your family lived well.’

‘We paid for it.’

‘Germans certainly are paying a heavy price.’ He took a sip of his brandy and raised his eyebrows in appreciation. ‘Tell me about your parents. Your mother went back on the
stage for a while after you were born, didn’t she?’

He looked amused at Gregor’s surprise. ‘It doesn’t take us long to find Berliners willing to talk.’

‘She turned to cabaret, reviews, that kind of thing. She never went on the classical stage here.’

‘Why not?’ Vavilov’s face was inscrutable.

‘I think she liked the rawness of some of the new material. But then all those shows started disappearing in 1933.I was only six or seven then but I remember her coming back one evening
after a matinee and saying she’d never stand on a Berlin stage again.’

Vavilov gazed at the piano and the photographs. ‘She made a comfortable home for you and your father?’

Gregor nodded. ‘I can’t remember her complaining about missing her work, but she must have done.’

‘She wasn’t one of nature’s hausfraus
.
’

‘No.’ Why was he blabbing about his distant childhood to this man? He reminded himself that Vavilov could still send him east. Or blindfold him and order him to kneel on the Persian
rug to be shot.

‘You had a secure childhood?’

Gregor stared at him.

‘I sound like a psychiatrist, don’t I?’

‘You certainly don’t sound like someone who recruited at Kolyma and interrogated Prussian landowners.’ Gregor watched the older man carefully and thought he detected a glimpse
of some emotion in his countenance. Hard to tell whether it was anger or shame.

‘You know, I never thought it would come to this.’ Vavilov glanced at the window and the ruined streets outside.

‘What do you mean?’

‘When Germany invaded Poland I thought the British and French would make a noise but keep out of it. I assumed they’d let Hitler head east to take on Stalin, friendship pact or not,
somewhere beyond the Polish border.’ Gregor had never heard him volunteer opinions like this. ‘The rest of us could have avoided the worst of it and the dictators would have destroyed
each other.’ Vavilov’s hand sliced the air in demonstration. ‘Leaving Europe the better off.’

Gregor blinked rapidly. ‘But you’re a Communist!’ he blurted out.

Vavilov seemed to stare straight through him. ‘Of course, it would never have worked. I saw that by 1941. By 1942 it had all gone irreparably wrong.’

Marie’s interest in this man when they’d been sitting round the kitchen table at Alexanderhof. Suddenly Gregor saw the connection. ‘I know who you are.’ The words seemed
to drop out of his mouth. ‘But I don’t understand why you turned to the Soviets.’

‘The Germans smashed the Polish Home Army Intelligence Service. I had to go somewhere.’

‘But why not to the west?’

‘Ideologically impossible.’

‘It might have spared you the last few months.’ Vavilov blinked. ‘You’ve hated it, too, haven’t you? All those lists you’ve made, but you’ve shot so few
people. You’ve let so many escape.’

‘Others will remedy any gaps in my work.’ Vavilov spoke very quietly and Gregor had to lean forward to hear him. ‘And so, Gregor Fischer, you and I each have information on one
another.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you must have worked out by now that I knew your mother. And the baroness.’

‘In Vienna before the war. Where you were called Viktor Vargá. You left Vienna in the mid twenties and moved around between Poland and Hungary and one or two other countries.’
It was as though Gregor were reciting it all by heart.

Vavilov raised an approving eyebrow. ‘Yes, I found myself compromised and had to leave Austria in a hurry. Then I heard Eva’d gone off to Berlin to marry a young radical German
publisher.’

‘My father.’

‘A bad choice for a half-Jew.’ Vavilov shook his head. ‘Not that I’d have been much better.’

‘You were . . . involved with my mother?’ But Gregor hardly needed to ask, he’d sensed it already.

Vavilov nodded. ‘She was probably the love of my life. I wasn’t good at acknowledging emotional ties in my youth. And politics intervened. Then years later, when I’d washed up
in Warsaw, I heard that Eva and her son were also in Poland and needed help getting out of the city.’

‘You organized the timber van.’

‘That part worked well. But I had no idea the Soviets would jump on the eastern Poles like that.’ Vavilov rose and closed the sitting-room door. ‘What happened to the Gronowski
brothers? I know that Jacob reached Krasnovodsk, where he recognized you.’

Krasnovodsk. Gregor hadn’t let himself think about what had happened there.