Restitution (32 page)

We’re speaking German. ‘Sorry.’ I look at Michael. ‘Michael, forgive me. This is . . . Gregor Fischer.’ I speak the name of Michael’s father for the first
time in his hearing.

‘I can manage a little English,’ says Gregor. He was always good at languages. He was always good at
everything.
‘Gregor will go far,’ Papi used to say.

‘I understood the bit about Kolyma,’ Michael says. ‘The Gulag?’

‘Part of my résumé,’ Gregor tells the younger man he doesn’t know, doesn’t recognize. His eyes turn back to mine, burning with intensity. ‘I found you
again, Alix. But nearly sixty years too late. But I’m forgetting something: Happy Birthday!’ He says the last words in English.

‘You remembered my birthday!’

‘I didn’t know today was your birthday,’ Michael says. But for the moment my attention is concentrated on Gregor.

‘How did you find me? How did you know I’d be here? How did you even know I’d survived?’ Questions burst from my lips. My head is still spinning.

‘For years I thought you hadn’t survived.’

‘It was a close-run thing at times.’ I remember the stink of the vodka on the soldier’s breath and shudder.

‘They invited me to cover the opening of the German Resistance Memorial Centre in Berlin back in eighty-nine – I’d become a journalist by then.’

I glance at Michael.

‘I couldn’t attend because Coca, my . . . companion, was in the last stages of cancer. But the Centre sent me the press release. Your name was on the guest list with a brief
explanation that you were Peter von Matke’s daughter, married to an Englishman and living in London.’

‘But that was years ago. You never wrote, you never . . .’ I think of the dying Coca. ‘But of course, your life was complicated. I’m sorry about your
companion.’

He nods. ‘Coca died and by the time I’d recovered the time for contacting you seemed to have passed. But the Wall came down and all kinds of political changes occurred.’ His
English is becoming more fluent by the minute. ‘Eventually it was possible for Germans to travel back here to Pomerania. I came to Alexanderhof regularly, most summers. And I paid the
caretaker a small retainer to telephone me if a Mrs Macdonald ever made contact and expressed an interest in visiting.’ He touches my arm, very gently. ‘I felt we should meet here, if
it were ever to happen. And this year I decided to come to the house on your seventy-fifth birthday.’

‘I still have your mouth organ.’ I keep it in a box with the few possessions I took from Germany when I married. ‘I’d have brought it with me if I’d known . .
.’ My throat seems to dry up.

‘My mouth organ?’ His eyes light up. ‘I’d reached Berlin before I noticed it was missing. But it didn’t seem . . .’

Important.

Michael’s eyes move from one of us to the other. I planned to tell him everything but not like this, not with his father present. I need to collect myself. I need Gregor to keep talking so
that I can recover from this shock.

‘Do you need anything, Alix?’ Michael asks. Perhaps he thinks I have pills in my handbag to take for such excitements and stresses as this meeting.

‘I’m fine, thank you.’ I take a breath. ‘It was one birthday surprise I didn’t expect.’

‘I wish I’d known,’ Michael says.

‘I didn’t want you to know, I don’t need cards and presents. All I wanted was to bring you back here with me. That was enough. This—’ I nod towards Gregor,
‘is something else altogether.’ Perhaps I do need some kind of medication. But there’s no palliative for the shock caused by such a reappearance.

‘I never knew what had become of you after you ran off into the forest that morning.’ Gregor is almost whispering. ‘I was so scared for you.’ His face seems to be that of
the young man he was when he sent me into the snowy forest.

‘Have I got this right? You two were here together at the end of the war?’ Michael asks.

‘For one night,’ Gregor says. ‘Just one night.’ He closes his eyes briefly, as though protecting his memories of that night from outside scrutiny.

Michael nods slowly. ‘I think I’ve worked out the answer to the question I asked you in London back in January, Alix. I know exactly who Gregor Fischer is.’

‘Yes.’ A bee buzzes over a clump of foxgloves, unconcerned with all of us, our secrets, our histories. Something about its unconcern gives me courage.

‘Michael is our son,’ I tell Gregor. ‘Born in the Rhineland in November 1945.’

I feel his astonishment as I would an electric shock and clutch at the edge of the rusty seat to steady myself.

Gregor

Whole minutes pass before Gregor can speak.
Son.

He stares at the man in late middle age sitting next to Alix. His
son.
He opens his mouth to dispute the point: Gregor Fischer has no family; he has lost everyone.

Michael stares back. For whole seconds nobody says anything, nobody moves. Then Michael extends a hand. ‘Don’t know what the correct form of words is in such circumstances.’ He
sounds shaken, too.

Gregor ignores the hand and gets up, pulling his son into his arms. This can’t be a dream because Michael feels solid, substantial. ‘There’s no set form of words.’ Damn
his awkward, rusty English. If this conversation were taking place in Polish or Russian or German how much more eloquent he could be. ‘This is a miracle.’ He lets Michael go and laughs
a shaky laugh. ‘I should sit down again.’

‘I never dreamed, I never even hoped . . . Meeting my father was the last thing I thought of. I’m so . . .’ The words seem to jam in Michael’s throat.
‘Relieved.’

‘The last thing I thought of, too.’ Alix clears her throat. ‘I should have guessed when the caretaker said she’d given the key to someone else. But I thought you were
dead, Gregor. You didn’t come to find me in the Rhineland and you didn’t write.’

There’s no hint of a complaint and yet her words stab him. ‘At the time I thought you were dead too. Vargá—’ he turns to Michael, ‘he was my superior
officer, told me they’d found a dead girl in the forest. She had a book with her, with your name in it.’

‘A dead girl?’ Alix lifts her head and stares at the birches and firs. ‘Who . . .?
Ach.
I remember now. We had a Polish girl working here. What was her name . . .? Jana,
that was it. So she never made it home. Poor Jana. She was the only friend of my own age I had during the war.’

He feels her pain, but even while she’s mourning the long-dead Jana, Gregor can’t keep his eyes off Michael. He can see Matthias in him, the same laughter lines around the eyes. When
the Gestapo arrested Matthias he was younger than Michael is now; but Michael shows Gregor how his father’s face might have aged, how the small lines around Matthias’s eyes would have
deepened to wrinkles. His mind brims with possibilities. ‘Tell me, my son, do you have children?’ he asks greedily. ‘Am I even more fortunate?’

‘Two boys. I married late so they keep me busy.’ Michael pulls out a wallet and shows him a photo. Two dark-haired teenagers with snowboards. Broad smiles, easy grace; they could
only be American. His grandsons, great-grandsons of Eva and Matthias Fischer, late of Berlin. Gregor almost tears the picture from his son. He thinks he can see Eva’s cheekbones in the older
boy and the younger boy has something of Alix in him.

‘Du lieber Gott.’
Something is shifting inside him, a huge rock that has blocked all emotion for years. Gregor prays he won’t disgrace himself.

Michael pulls a mobile out of his pocket. ‘I’m going to let you have some time together. I need to digest all this.’

His hands tremble. ‘Are you all right, Michael?’ his mother asks.

‘Yes.’ He swallows hard. ‘It’s just the shock. Can’t take it all in.’ He waves the mobile. ‘I should call Stephanie. She won’t believe
it.’

Gregor watches him walk down the terrace steps. ‘I’ve scared him off.’ He speaks in German. ‘It must be bizarre to meet your father after so many years.’

‘Our son is a resilient person. He’s coped with meeting me again.’

‘Meeting you
again?’
Gregor sits up. ‘You mean . . . you didn’t keep him?’

Very slowly she turns to look directly at him. ‘I couldn’t, at least I thought I couldn’t.’

Gregor remembers what Germany was like in those months after the war. He left this young girl, as she’d been then, to stumble alone across a country undergoing a death spasm, carrying his
baby. Of all the things he’s done, this has to be the worst. And yet . . .

‘I wondered later on whether I might have kept him. My husband was a kind man.’ She bites her lip. ‘I should have waited longer for you.’

‘I had no right to even dream you’d wait.’

She blinks.

‘There are things I didn’t tell you, Alix.’

‘I always knew that.’ She gives him one of the knowing looks that remind him of her as a girl. ‘Tell me now, Gregor, tell me the part I don’t know.’

Gregor

Soviet Union, 1942

It was easy to keep close to Sofia in the months that followed their departure from the logging camp, as they made their way south – or as approximately south as they
could – across the Soviet Union. By boat. By cattle wagon. By train, each day falling into the same pattern of rushing for
kipyatok
from the hot water tap at the railway station so
they could make tea. Praying there’d be a working lavatory so it wouldn’t be necessary to use the tracks beneath the train. Never feeling completely clean, completely fed, but knowing
himself to be more fortunate than almost everyone else on this trek because he was with the Skotnickis and their supply of money and goods for barter. Helping the doctor with chickenpox cases,
infections, dysentery. Occasional quiet times in station entrance halls when the crowds weren’t pressing into them which the doctor filled with lectures on physiology, anatomy and sometimes
even psychology, if Mrs Skotnicka didn’t object to the discussions of theories that contradicted Church teaching. Sofia would sit on the suitcases beside him, listening to her father. But she
preferred Latin and French.

The towns and cities that blurred one into the other: dusty and smelling of bad drains and filthy clothes. Go’rky. Kazan. Kuybyshev.

And then long stretches on foot, walking behind a string of camels, the sun growing warmer on his face each morning. He began to feel excited about seeing the Caspian Sea, crossing over to
Persia, the land of nightingales and wine, where neither the Gestapo nor the NKVD could follow. Even the bedbugs, the lice, the infections their group always seemed to pick up, couldn’t
dampen his optimism. ‘I’ll buy you iced sherbet,’ he told Sofia as they sat under the shade of a tree in a railway town in south Kazakhstan. It probably had a name, but Gregor
hardly bothered to note place names any more. All that mattered was making for the Caspian. Even if the route seldom took them directly where they wanted to go. ‘Or Turkish Delight, if you
prefer,’ he added.

‘What with?’

‘I’ll play my mouth organ and earn money. Persians love music.’

Something was clouding her hazel eyes.

‘Sofia?’

For once she looked uncertain, hesitant. ‘Sometimes I think this is the best we can hope for, as long as the war lasts.’

He looked round the dusty town with its boarded-up shops. ‘This squalor? Never knowing where we’re going to sleep or what we’re going to eat?’

‘While we’re on the move it’s hard for them to track us. And we’re all together.’

‘They let us go, Sofia. We’re free now.’

‘Perhaps.’ She attempted a laugh. ‘Perhaps I’m being illogical. But these last few months we’ve been away from the war, I’ve felt . . . almost free. Even if
I’m always worried I’ve got lice or I’m about to catch dysentery.’

Had the heat finally unhinged her mind? ‘Have some water.’

She pushed the flask away. ‘When we lived in Poland, if I was even five minutes late home from school my mother wanted to know what I’d been up to.’

‘But this journey . . .’ Their fellow logging camp inmates had suffered from almost every infectious illness known to humans. And last week two small children had been left on the
train by their mother, who’d disembarked at a station to buy bread and water, believing the stop would be of the usual lengthy duration. The train had moved off while she queued.

‘I know. I know it’s wicked of me to say that I feel free when so many suffer.’ She examined the back of her hand, frowning at the tanned skin. ‘But it’s how I
feel.’

He ought to draw her out further, but there were more urgent needs to meet while it was quiet. He muted the little internal voice that told him he was taking advantage of Sofia’s
vulnerability and moved closer to her.

She darted away from his detaining hand and he saw her parents walking towards them. Mrs Skotnicka carried a bulging canvas bag. The Skotnicki dollars and jewellery had lasted well and there
always seemed to be food of some kind to buy, even if it was just a bowl of curd cheese or milled barley with which to make
kvasha.
Once they’d even found tins of crab from the
Archangel peninsula in a roasting hot bazaar. They’d tasted good.

Beside him Sofia sighed. He’d have to wait until later to kiss her and steal a quick touch of her breasts, bunched together like two eggs in a cosy nest under her faded but still
reasonably clean cotton frock – Sofia and her mother seemed to find soap in the most remote places. It had taken a full month for Gregor to advance as far as he had, but now Sofia seemed as
excited by their explorations as he was.

Nobody knew if the train they were waiting for would arrive today after all. Things either happened or they didn’t in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan and it was too hot
to worry either way. Even Doctor Skotnicki had rolled up his tattered pre-Revolutionary map of the territories round the Caspian, submitting to the forces that decreed that any apparently
straightforward journey between two towns in this part of the world would prove to be no such thing. As long as they could eat and remain together nothing else mattered. ‘It would be nice to
make some contribution to the war,’ Dr Skotnicki would say, wistfully. ‘I fear we will reach London too late.’