Restitution (33 page)

At night Sofia slept in a tent with her parents, but sometimes he could persuade her to squeeze under the canvas and meet him behind the enclosure where they stored luggage and
cooking pots. During the day, while they hunted down food and sought news of fellow Poles in dusty street markets, Gregor would carry Mrs Skotnicka’s decaying canvas bag and haggle with the
vendors for a palmful of dusty tealeaves, a wrinkled orange or some flat loaves. But he’d really be imagining the night to come. While he assisted the doctor in his makeshift surgeries
he’d be planning a reconnaissance of one part of Sofia’s body: her neck, perhaps, or the back of a knee, or the soft inside of an elbow. ‘You’ll wear out my skin,’ she
complained. He knew without asking that there were boundaries he couldn’t cross. She was, after all, the niece of a Catholic bishop – probably, by now, a very dead Catholic bishop. As
the sun grew hotter the knowledge of these forbidden territories preoccupied him more.

‘You could just marry me.’ She sat up and fastened her dress. Her parents were out of sight, sitting in the shade of a disused church across the square. ‘You’re nearly
seventeen and so am I. That’s old enough in wartime. They’d give you permission.’

Marry Sofia. Live in London with her parents while they both completed their studies. See the war through – it couldn’t be many years now. Create a brood of children to replace the
family he’d lost. A fresh start.

Gregor sat up too and gazed up at the sky as though there might be messages written across the deep blue. He saw nothing. What was he expecting? He was an exile. If he ever returned to Berlin
he’d be a stranger to all the people who’d ever known him. Alexandra would have grown up, too, would be engaged to some baron or count. Probably attending some finishing school in
Switzerland. Perhaps she’d grown up to approve of what the Germans had done. She probably barely remembered him. Foolish even to think of her when he had this other girl beside him with her
teasing eyes and those nights together when the air felt like warm silk.

‘You’re very young for an engagement.’ Doctor Skotnicki was recovering from his initial shock. ‘Neither of you have even finished your education. How
would you live?’

‘We were hoping . . .’ He didn’t even know what he
had
been hoping, presuming, more likely. ‘I could get a part-time job while I study,’ he said.

‘I see.’ Skotnicki undid his top button and loosened his tie. Even on the road he kept up appearances. ‘Naturally we’d support you both. But Sofia? Suppose she’s a
mother within a year? How’s she supposed to combine that with studying for a degree? You know she wants to be a lawyer. I don’t think you should marry for two or three years.’

‘Papa!’ Sofia’s eyes flashed. ‘It’s wartime, we can’t wait that long.’

‘At least a year, then. Your career matters, child.’

‘And you can’t possibly want to marry while we’re undergoing this terrible journey,’ Mrs Skotnicka added.

The doctor got to his feet, extending a hand. ‘It’s wartime, we should take joy where we can. You and Sofia represent a happier future. You have my permission to engage yourself to
my daughter. You can marry her when we reach London. Perhaps Brompton Oratory or Westminster Cathedral.’

‘Papa!’ said Sofia. ‘Two grubby refugees like us! A little Irish-Catholic parish church in North London, more like.’ Sofia had done her research into their hoped-for new
homeland.

By the time the train had pulled into the next town a message had passed along the Polish bush telegraph and a Catholic priest had been tracked down in the third carriage along
from the Skotnickis. He would be delighted to instruct Dr Skot-nicki’s prospective son-in-law.

‘I’m not Catholic,’ Gregor protested. He’d half-hoped a civil ceremony when they reached England would suffice.

‘You can be baptized.’ The doctor’s eyes twinkled momentarily. ‘It will cleanse you of original sin. The priest will give you instruction. By the time we get to London
you’ll know most of the catechism.’

Gregor didn’t like to imagine what his atheist mother and father would have made of this. He could almost hear his father’s roar of laughter. But if the Skotnickis wanted Gregor to
be a Catholic, he’d be a good Catholic.

So he spent hours with the priest, sitting next to him on a pile of suitcases in the cramped corridor of the carriage and learning about doctrine. Catholicism had a certain logic to it; he could
admire the way the Church Fathers had built up their arguments. By the time the lessons ended he could sometimes persuade himself of the existence of God. ‘You are a clever young man,’
the priest said. ‘Too clever, perhaps, for these dangerous times. In more peaceful days you’d have made a good cardinal.’ Gregor thought his journey to faith was like this
journey: a series of zigzags, the destination seemingly unreachable.

The last part of the journey, a loop south-east through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, passed in a blur of long nights and drowsy days catching up on rest, curled up together in a
wagon. At least they could sleep in the train, saving precious money on accommodation. Sofia turned up her nose at the sheep’s kidneys, which were the only thing her mother could find in the
market. ‘Eat, child,’ her father told her. ‘You need protein. We haven’t had meat since . . .’ He turned to Mrs Skotnicka. ‘Where was it we had the
lamb?’

He raised his hands in hopeless ignorance. ‘The towns have all blurred together. They were all stinking and wretched.’

They reached Krasnovodsk in Turkmenistan, the port for the ship to Iran.

‘Four days until we sail,’ said the doctor. ‘We’ll need to set up another temporary clinic, Gregor. This dysentery – I’ve never known anything like it. The
British will block the port if we can’t contain it.’

A group of Polish soldiers, recently released, had trailed along with them for the last few days, filthy, lice-ridden and suffering from dysentery. This would have been his own condition by now
had it not been for the Skotnickis, Gregor reflected.

Gregor helped construct a canvas surgery beside the docks, sweeping the ground and arranging cushions on it, which he covered with a white tablecloth. Not exactly a sterile examination table but
it was as clean as he could make it. From the surgery he could make out the iron hulk of the merchant ship which would take them to Iran. The whiff of oil and coal from its engine room was a
friendly foretaste of the voyage to come. He couldn’t help whistling as he took the doctor’s thermometer and stethoscope out of his leather bag, ready for the first surgery. He wondered
how long the British would want to keep them in Iran before they were allowed to travel to England. What route would they take? Perhaps via Mesopotamia and Palestine, and from there through the
Mediterranean and round the Strait of Gibraltar. The morning passed in happy contemplation of the coming months.

Passing the huddle of transient Poles waiting to see Dr Skotnicki, Gregor stopped. The tall thin lad shivering under an overcoat. Something about him was familiar. The boy’s chin was
covered in the beginnings of a beard. His cheeks were sunken.

He didn’t know him. He found the box of pills the doctor had requested and walked back past the waiting patients. Again the boy’s face jogged a memory. Take away that beard and plump
out the cheeks. It could only be Jacob Gronowski – muttering to himself, obviously delirious. Longing filled Gregor. But his old friend could be his death warrant now. Gregor would have to
stay away from him until he’d recovered and could be made to understand that Gregor Fischer from Berlin was dead and buried.

Jacob’s eyes opened and he stared at Gregor. ‘Once knew a German who looked just like you!’ A couple of NKVD officers waiting to see the doctor about their sexually transmitted
diseases turned their heads. ‘Best damn German I ever knew.’ Perhaps the NKVD men wouldn’t understand Polish. Gregor shook his head and walked away, forcing himself to take his
time, pretending to study the notes he was taking to the doctor.

When he reached the entrance he dropped the file and took the opportunity to turn round and look back into the waiting area as he picked it up. One of the officers was kicking Jacob as he lay on
the floor. ‘What was that you said, Comrade? Where’s this German?’

The whippings Gregor received did not make him say anything other than that he was Paul Smolinsky from Pinsk, as verified by his papers. He repeated again and again that he
didn’t know Jacob, that Jacob had been delirious when he’d shouted all that nonsense about knowing him. They had never met. Dr Skotnicki sat in an interview cell with Gregor and pleaded
with the NKVD officers to let Gregor continue to Iran. ‘He’s of conscriptable age. He wants to fight the Nazis. He’ll be off Russian soil tonight if you let him go.’

‘He’s German.’

‘He has Jewish blood. He wants to fight the Germans as much as you do.’

‘Shut your mouth or you and your family will go north with him.’

Gregor shook his head at Skotnicki but the doctor continued.

‘Here are the testimonials given to this young man by the head of security at the logging camp near Kotlas.’ Skotnicki pushed the letters under the officer’s nose.
‘You’ll see he assisted me when I treated many Russians.’

The NKVD brushed the papers aside.

They allowed him half an hour alone with Sofia. She came with the priest. ‘He’s going to marry us now, even if we’re too young—’ she held up a
hand to halt Gregor’s interruption. ‘And even if you haven’t been received into the Church because he knows I’m going to be your wife now, with or without the Church’s
blessing.’ Her hazel eyes were chips of fury, despair and desire. Sofia nodded at the guard and handed him some banknotes and he shouted something to his colleague in the guard room, who
joined the group in the cell. The priest began to mumble words, pausing while Sofia nudged the guards to remind them of their witness duties. ‘. . . et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.’ A final
Sign of the Cross, it was done. Priest and guards vanished. It couldn’t have taken more than five minutes.

The newlyweds sank to the hut’s earthen floor, pulling at buttons and hooks. Her tan seemed to have faded in the last twenty-four hours, Gregor noticed as he plunged into her. It was quick
and almost brutal but she seemed to drive him on, whispering at him not to stop, to hurry. When they’d finished he felt shame but she put her hand over his mouth to stop the apology.
‘It could be the first and last time. We needed this.’

She rearranged her dress and pushed something into his palm. Precious American dollars. How? He shook his head but she wouldn’t take them back. ‘I sold some clothes.’

He knew she was down to her last threadbare dresses.

‘Please,’ she urged. He took the money.

‘Don’t wait for me,’ he said as the guards came back in. ‘Get an annulment. Tell the priest we didn’t consummate our marriage, say I was too scared to manage it.
Don’t let your parents talk you out of it.’

‘I’ll find you again, Gregor.’ Her eyes blazed through the tears she wouldn’t let fall. She took his hand, pressed it to her lips.

‘Don’t wait for me,’ he called to her.

In the cattle wagon there was time enough to run the past months through his mind again and again. If only they hadn’t married. He’d been weak, agreeing to this
just for his brief and selfish enjoyment of her body. He ought to have stopped it even earlier. The Catholics were right, sin was the cause of everything wrong in the world. His sin.

Single, Sofia Skotnicka would have had men queuing up for her in London. She could have continued her studies. Now she’d probably never know for sure whether or not she was a widow.
Please God, if you exist, let her find a way to annul the marriage. Sweet Mother of God, let her be happy.
He cast his mind back to his catechism classes. This must be punishment for
accepting a religion for which he felt no belief.

Time enough, too, to run a thorough comparison of this transport with the first one he’d endured from Poland back in the early years of the war. This train offered its
passengers proper carriages, which ought to have made it more comfortable. But they were shut in bunks from which they could only emerge once a day to relieve themselves on the tracks. The elderly,
sick and young couldn’t wait that long. Every time he breathed in he thought he’d vomit. After two days he no longer noticed the stench, and the knowledge that it now attached itself to
him as well made him want to hammer at the wooden panels on the side of the carriage in desperation. But there was no point wasting precious energy. Where he was going, he’d need all he
had.

‘Za chto
?’ he asked himself, in Russian. ‘Why? What did I do to deserve this?’ And all round him in the fetid heat he heard others asking themselves the same
question.

He shivered despite the furnace-like warmth of the wagon. The friend who’d once joked with him in Warsaw, who’d encouraged him to learn Polish obscenities and teased him about
practising the piano, had both denounced him and infected him with his fever without knowing he’d done either.

‘You’ve still got your mouth organ?’ In the next bed the man called Piotr’s eyes were wide. Gregor looked around the hospital. He’d been here two
days. Of much of the rail journey thousands of miles east to the Pacific coast and the subsequent sea voyage north to the Magadan peninsula he had no recollection. Apparently they’d carried
him off the train and down into the hull of the SS
Dzhurma
without him regaining consciousness. ‘For which you may be truly grateful.’ Piotr raised himself on an elbow.
‘That hulk was worse than the train. We slept on the floor. The criminals,
Urki,
had the platforms. They emptied their slops over us so we lay there soaked with vomit and piss for
days. Then a gang knocked out the lights and went on the rampage. They raped the women and stole everything they could get their hands on.’ Gregor looked at the mouldy black lumps on the end
of his bed.

Piotr shrugged. ‘Bread is sacred. Even to them.’

‘Nobody would want to eat this.’

‘You’d be surprised. Save it. You can sell it.’