Restitution (34 page)

‘If you say so.’ Gregor looked at Piotr. ‘Why did they send you here?’

‘Someone had my name on a list. And my parents. And my sister.’

‘Have you seen them since you arrived?’

Piotr pulled at a thread on his blanket. ‘No.’

Gregor looked round at the hospital wing, spartan, stained floors, but paradise in comparison with what had come before.

‘Where do we go from here?’ Gregor glanced at the barred window.

‘Mining. Road building.’

Gregor scratched. The blanket seemed to be alive. ‘And if we refuse?’

‘Serpantinka. A punishment camp. Even less sunlight than here. And less food.’

A nurse came in and fired off a volley of Russian in an accent he had to strain to understand. ‘She’s telling you you’ll be off to work tomorrow,’ Piotr said, closing his
eyes. ‘Try and think of something you can do that might keep you indoors. Otherwise we’ll be in the mines by next week.’

‘What do they mine?’

‘Gold.’ Piotr frowned. ‘You don’t know much about the Magadan peninsula, do you, Comrade?’

He didn’t. The Poles at Kotlas had muttered about these Gulags far, far away to the east, so distant that even the Archangel peninsula seemed metropolitan by comparison. But Gregor had
never been able to imagine a place harsher than the camps around Kotlas. And Dr Skotnicki had never wanted to talk about this place, as though superstitious about even mentioning the name of
Kolyma.

The nurse returned, clapping her hands, followed by an orderly pushing a trolley. ‘Baths!’ She handed each patient a sliver of evil-smelling black soap and ordered them out of bed.
Gregor clutched at the iron bedhead, head spinning. ‘Go to changing room!’ the orderly shouted. ‘You’ll be given water there.’

‘It begins,’ Piotr muttered.

And in the chaotic stink of the icy changing rooms where they flung their rags to the floor, knowing they’d never recover their own clothes, Gregor knew he’d reached the point in his
own history from which no escape, no reprieve, would be possible.

Gregor

Pomerania, 2002

Gregor stops and lets out a breath. ‘I haven’t talked so much about myself for years. And I’ve never really spoken about that place.’

‘Kolyma?’

He nods.

‘That name—’ Alix swallows. ‘It has such terrible associations. Almost as bad as—’ She shakes her head. ‘It’s not for a German to say that any
place could be as terrible as our death camps.’

‘Perhaps not.’ Now is not the time for such a discussion.

‘I had no idea just how much you’d endured when I saw you here that night.’ Her head is still bowed down, as though she’s praying.

‘It was one of several things I kept to myself.’

‘The other one being your marriage?’

Impossible to read her tone. He shifts his position on the bench: uncomfortable for lengthy conversations. ‘Shall we walk a little, Alix?’

They walk slowly up to the terrace. The shutters on the salon windows have gone and Gregor and Alix can see into the interior – dark and empty.

‘I should have told you about my wife.’ They’d stood in Alix’s bedroom, looking out at the wolf, and his defences had melted away. ‘Our marriage – well,
afterwards it felt like a dream. Sofia and I were only together for a short time.’ Just long enough for them to consummate it – with the guards probably listening in at the door and
laughing. ‘I let myself be convinced I wouldn’t see her again.’ A spider drops down a smeared glass pane on a silk thread. ‘I should tell the rest of my story, really. Put
it all in order.’

They turn away from the window. A pigeon coos in the branches of the big chestnut which once provided shelter for picnics on the lawn. Gregor once owned a photograph of his mother sitting on a
plaid rug at one such picnic. It was lost in Kolyma, along with many other things.

Gregor and Alix walk slowly round the house through grass that has already grown long and luscious and past bushes and shrubs that may or may not be the ones planted by Alix’s mother in
the thirties. Alexanderhof isn’t a huge house but is of a size befitting an extended family and its retinue, built to show the neighbourhood – especially the Poles and any other foreign
interests who might need reminding – that the Prussians meant business. Gregor knows it will take several circuits of its walls for him to complete his tale.

Gregor

Kolyma, Magadan, Soviet Union, autumn 1943

In the camp’s clinic Gregor finished stitching the stab wound and cut the thread. ‘Try and keep it clean.’

The patient looked at him as though he were talking in riddles. Perhaps he was. Sometimes he felt as though he’d fallen down the rabbit hole or into the looking glass. But things were
better now, he reminded himself. Only three months ago he’d still been working out at the satellite camp, labouring outdoors on the bridge-building programme. The ache in his foot, still
barely healed, was a souvenir from the place. Today the foot felt like a slab of marble attached to his leg.

He searched in a drawer and found a sliver of soap. ‘Take this.’

‘Can’t you keep me in here?’ An educated voice. She’d probably been a teacher or civil servant. ‘I’m sure the wound would heal more quickly and I’d soon
be up to full productivity.’
Quota. Productivity. Numbers. Percentages.

Gregor found it hard to meet the patient’s eyes. She looked middle-aged but was probably only in her late twenties. He decided to be candid. ‘We’ve reached our quota because of
that logging accident yesterday. If we exceed the quota the guards throw out all the patients.’

Even the six whose hunger-related diseases the doctor and Gregor had almost cured.

The woman rolled back her sleeve. ‘I see.’ She didn’t sound bitter. Everyone understood quotas. ‘Do you ever treat the children in the nursery?’ She clenched the
tiny bar of soap in her hand.

‘No. This hospital is purely for adult workers.’ And he flushed, aware that his relief must be audible.

‘I have a girl in the children’s camp.’ The words rushed out of her. ‘She was a baby when we arrived here, just a month old. You might have treated her because she had
frostbite and lost part of her left ear.’

God.

‘I worked in the north building bridges until recently.’ He turned and pretended to scribble something in a file. If he’d stayed in the construction brigade he wouldn’t
have had to cope with situations like this. If he’d stayed in the construction brigade he’d have been dead by now. The shattered bone in the foot was nothing. The hospital job was a
privilege; they could replace him with fifty, a hundred, a thousand eager substitutes.

‘Someone told me they’d misplaced the children’s files.’ Gregor knew where this was leading. The infants were shipped to orphanages when they were two or three, too young
to remember their own names. ‘I wondered if someone would pin a label to my child’s clothes. So they know her name when she arrives.’ She pulled something out of her pocket, a
scrap torn from a cigarette carton, with the girl’s name scrawled on it. ‘You’ll know it’s her because of her ear. And she has a mole on her chin.’

Gregor’s mouth seemed to fill with something bitter. ‘I’ll try.’ He took the carton. ‘But your child may already have left.’

He scribbled down a description of the girl. Perhaps he could find a reason to walk over to the nursery, say they were worried about an outbreak and needed to check the children. He avoided the
cursed place as much as he could. It wasn’t so much the stink, barely covered by the disinfectant, but the silently rocking infants in their iron cots that disturbed him.

As the woman left he wondered whether she’d really been the victim of a knifing. Perhaps she’d inflicted the wound on herself in order to try and find out about the child.
She’d expended so much precious energy, needed for finding food and keeping warm every day, on this attempt to find the girl. But perhaps her concern for her child
was
what kept her
alive.

The door swung open and Olga Sergeyevna, one of the nurses, bustled in. ‘They’re asking for you in the commandant’s office.’ Her face was even paler than normal.

The moment had come. Gregor’s mind ran through the mental check-list he’d compiled from the very first day of his arrival in the hospital. ‘The patients’ files are up to
date. Bed number three needs his dressing changing. The doctor should check the wound. We’re short on iodine. Oh,’ he pulled the label out of his pocket, ‘if I don’t come
back I need you to go to the nursery and pin this to the right kid. Frostbite to left ear. Mole on chin. They’re shifting them out.’ He caught the expression on her face. Even hardened
prisoners tried to avoid seeing the children. ‘I wouldn’t ask you in any other circumstances. You’ll find a loaf of bread in my top desk drawer.’

‘You don’t have to bribe me.’ She took the label.

‘Give it to the children then.’

‘Hurry up, they’re waiting for you.’

‘A girl of three months,’ he called back to her. ‘Don’t forget about the damaged ear.’

Those mute rocking infants in their iron cots.

‘I won’t forget.’ And she wouldn’t. He’d never seen Olga Sergeyevna smile, hardly extracted a single word from her that didn’t relate to the job at hand, but
he’d seen her looking at the patients with an expression that made him want to fold her in his arms.

The wind rattled the windows of the interrogation room. November now, and the cold had long regained its cutting menace. Gregor had a coat he’d taken from a corpse, but
you weren’t allowed to wear outer garments here. Or sit. He shifted his weight to ease the pressure on his left foot and focused on the poster on the wall.
We work for freedom and
peace.
We work for a sliver of soap, for a few hundred extra grams of bread. We work because there is no choice.

‘What happened?’ The tall man behind the desk nodded at his foot. He had a curious accent, not Russian by birth, Gregor thought, despite the name. His face was expressionless.

‘A boulder fell on it when I was working on a bridge.’ Gregor didn’t bother telling him that a guard had dropped the rock on his foot as a punishment because he’d taken
one too many latrine trips when he’d been suffering from dysentery.

‘But you’re a medical assistant now?’ his interrogator went on.

‘Yes.’ In answer to the man’s raised eyebrows Gregor explained, ‘I worked with a Polish doctor when we were together in a logging camp. So I had some previous medical
experience, although I have no qualifications.’

‘No doubt preferable to bridge-building?’

Gregor shrugged. Not that this man with his strange, sleepy gaze would be fooled. What kind of idiot wouldn’t prefer working in the hospital to labouring in the open?

‘And it was your injury that brought you back to Magadan?’

He nodded. Not a day passed that he didn’t thank God or fate or whatever that the brigade leader in charge of the bridge-building had sent him back here with the empty wagons returning for
supplies. He might just have locked him up in a cell until he recovered or died from exposure. And the doctor who’d treated the broken foot had just lost an auxiliary to tetanus and needed a
replacement . . .

‘Why don’t you sit, citizen?’ They didn’t call you ‘comrade’ in the camp. You lost the right to brotherhood by coming here.

Gregor pulled the second chair out and sat.

‘Tell me some more about yourself. It says on this file that you were identified as Gregor Fischer of Berlin while trying to obtain a passage across the Caspian Sea to Persia. But you
denied this.’

‘My name is Paul Smolinksy.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes, Comrade. The person who misidentified me was running a fever of 105 at the time. It was a mistake.’

‘So you are not the son of Eva Fischer, formerly Eva Mauer, the Viennese actress?’ Something different in the man’s face now, as though the muscles round the mouth and eyes had
loosened for a moment. Gregor tried not to react to his mother’s name.
Forgive me,
he told her silently. For a moment he could almost smell her scent, feel her softness, hear her laugh
– mocking and tender both at the same time.

‘My name is Paul Smolinsky,’ he said again.

The face tightened again. ‘And you explain your German accent how, exactly?’

‘I attended German school when my parents moved to Danzig.’ Gregor prayed his interrogator – Vavilov, his name was – wouldn’t dredge up a native of Danzig to ask
searching questions about the port city. ‘And then we spent some time in Berlin before it became too dangerous for us.’ Give him some of the truth. ‘My father moved in radical
circles. We were in Pinsk when the war started and the NKVD removed us from the border area for our own protection.’ Gregor hoped he’d managed to keep the irony out of his voice.

‘And what are your impressions of Kolyma?’

What if he just said nothing? Or laughed? Perhaps Vavilov would think he’d lost his mind. A psychiatric case. That would mean the end of the job in the warm hospital. Almost certainly they
planned to send him back to the boulder-building brigade. In the hospital he received occasional meat, once even a pickled herring, as well as black bread and soup. At the satellite camp,
Urki,
criminals from Moscow, ran the food-distribution system.

‘The system of correction allows no questioning of the strength of the State’s response to counter-revolutionary activity.’ Not bad, but probably not good enough. Vavilov
raised an eyebrow.

‘The strength of the State’s response, eh?’ He sat back in his chair and examined Gregor. ‘Would your commitment to your patients preclude any interest in defeating
Germans as part of the counter-revolutionary effort, citizen?’

Of course, another trick question, designed to make him confess to his real nationality. Perhaps it was worse than he’d imagined: not boulder-clearing but the gold mine. Perhaps
Serpantinka itself. He waited.

‘There’s a Red Army Polish division, the Kosciuszko division. I work alongside them.’

Alongside
the division. What exactly was this man? Some kind of commissar perhaps. Gregor didn’t think this Vavilov was a Pole either. Something about the careful way he spoke the
language made him sound as though he’d learned it as an adult.