Restitution (36 page)

Gregor’s feet bound him to the pavement while people rushed towards him. Guards fired shots into the air and the crowd hissed and spat at them.

It wasn’t until he found himself standing outside Dieter’s door that he realized his legs had turned of their own accord and walked him back into the western sector.

He found a job on a West Berlin business magazine. The editor rolled his eyes when Gregor described the kind of writing he’d done on the other side. ‘You wrote
about the joys of the collective system and the benefits of socialism for farmers?’

‘Yes.’

The editor leaned back and studied him. ‘It won’t be like that here.’ He pulled a packet of chewing gum out of the desk drawer, unwrapped a stick and threw the wrapper into an
overflowing wastepaper bin. So many Germans had adopted the American habit of gum-chewing. Gregor could imagine the disdain on his mother’s face. The editor would confirm her views that
die Amerikaner
were bovine, uncultured capitalists.

‘I shouldn’t have thought so, no.’

‘Tell me, when you were a boy, what did you think you’d grow up to be?’ The editor was leaning back now, hands folded behind his head.

‘A pianist. Or perhaps a doctor.’ Gregor remembered Dr Skotnicki showing him how to use the blood-pressure sleeve and the stethoscope, how to read a patient’s health from his
skin colour, the brightness of his eyes, the pinkness of his tongue, the strength of his fingernails. But then he’d graduated from the University of Kolyma.

‘What’s amusing you?’ The editor carried on chewing. Perhaps he was a former smoker attempting to replace nicotine with gum.

‘I’m sorry. I grew up during the war years. It warped my mind, I sometimes think.’ Part of him had perhaps rotted in the hold of the NKVD prison ships or in the hospital in
Magadan.

The editor gave a wave with one hand that was both dismissive and understanding. ‘Probably neither of us ended up where we thought we would.’ The hand bore a long scar across its
back. Shrapnel, or possibly a fragment of glass from a window shattered in an air raid. They both looked around the office, purpose-built, new. The scene outside was of other new buildings, hazy
sunlight reflecting off glass panes. This was still Berlin, Gregor told himself. Still his city. Even if it felt foreign.

‘No,’ Gregor said. ‘We ended up somewhere different.’

Alix

Pomerania, 2002

A thrush bangs a snail shell on a stone and I am back sitting on a bench in the garden at Alexanderhof with Gregor. Michael has finished his photography now and sits on the
grass in front of us.

‘And you never married again?’ I ask Gregor.

He shakes his head. ‘I was never completely sure whether Sofia was still alive somewhere, even though I could never trace her or her parents. Perhaps they travelled on to South Africa
instead of London.’ He pauses. ‘Whatever she did, I hope she found great happiness. As for me, in the end Coca and I managed to settle down together quite happily, though we never
actually married.’

‘Where did you live?’

‘Hamburg.’ A wrecked city, but no ghosts of family or loved ones to haunt them. ‘We never had children.’

‘I didn’t have any children with Robin,’ I tell him. ‘It just didn’t happen. I thought I’d mind, but I didn’t. Children have always been part of my
life.’ I rise. ‘Shall we go back indoors? I’d like to look at the salon.’ The other two follow me.

‘You continued to teach?’ Gregor asks as we climb the front steps.

‘When we came back to England I went from teaching German children English to teaching English children German.’

He’s grinning that old Gregor grin.

‘What is it?’

‘I remember the school you made in your bedroom with all those stuffed toys.’

‘I made a school for my toys?’ What a memory he has.

‘I always imagined your parents would marry you off to some young blade from the
Almanack de Gotha
and you’d spend your life mixing with the elite.’

‘At least I escaped that fate.’ By the end of the war my life had changed so utterly I’d never have made a society wife. ‘I enjoyed my career. It was an exciting time to
be working with young people. Terrible as it was, war and exile gave me a peculiar kind of freedom.’ But at some cost. I find it hard to keep my voice from trembling now. ‘I never
forgot about the two of you. Not for a single day, not a single day. Michael, I always regretted that I’d given you away. That’s why I wanted to bring you to Alexanderhof, so I could
express that regret to you here, where it all started.’

I won’t tell them of the days of my early marriage, how I moved to the rhythms of life without hearing the notes that would make me feel truly alive. And yet Robin was so kind. Eventually,
after years, I started to feel pleasure in the ordinary things: the first frost whitening the trees in the square outside our house; the first smell of honeysuckle on summer nights. I started to
tolerate my guilt, as though it were contained in a bag I had to carry everywhere but wasn’t required to unpack. We’re in the salon now. Some of the plaster work has survived but has
been repainted in brown gloss.

‘Neither of you owe me any apologies,’ Michael says. ‘My God, I’ve read accounts of what the Red Army did to those who got in its way. You could have terminated the
pregnancy. Or left me on church steps or in a box beside the road. But you didn’t. You gave me to good people, people who’d give me the best start in life. And now you’ve put my
mind at rest.’

He turns away to examine the carvings on the salon fireplace.

His father and I stand together on the spot where Gregor once played Chopin to me. ‘I was a coward,’ he says, ‘afraid you’d reproach me for never coming to find
you.’

‘There’s so much we didn’t know back then.’ I don’t blame him for anything that happened after we spent the night together here. ‘You’d have found it
impossible to track me down just after the war. I’d married. I’d changed my name.’

The three of us walk round the dilapidated room looking for signs of the past. There are none. The only noise comes from a sparrow pecking at the few bits of gravel remaining on the drive. Where
did all the furniture go? The Soviets must have sent it all west. Perhaps the Poles chopped it up for firewood. If I hoped to find many traces of my family here I was mistaken.

‘When you came to the house that evening, what were you looking for?’ I ask Gregor eventually. ‘I always wondered.’

‘You.’ Our eyes lock. ‘Officially Vavilov sent me here to check whether your father was in the house.’

‘To arrest him?’

‘He’d heard of his part in the July Plot and wanted to ensure he was kept safe. He might have viewed your father as one of the few Germans worth saving.’

‘He was taking a hell of a risk for a man he’d never even met.’ Michael moves to one of the shutterless windows and gazes out over the terrace. ‘I’ve read a little
about Soviet views on Junkers. They treated them with savagery, and if they thought Vavilov had sympathies they’d have pushed him onto a train back to Siberia with no restaurant
car.’

‘Vavilov had met both Peter von Matke and his wife,’ Gregor says.

Michael turns to us. ‘When?’

‘Where?’ I add. Then I remember Mami’s curiosity about Gregor’s superior officer – something about a missing fingertip.

Gregor’s face shows wry satisfaction at the reaction he’s elicited. ‘In Vienna between the wars, when he was my mother’s lover. He was called Vargá
then.’

I can’t remember Mami mentioning that name. But so much has been forgotten.

‘That’s why he got her out of Warsaw, he thought she’d be safe farther east. And that’s why he found some reason to come to Kolyma four or five years later – he
thought she might have ended up in that hell.’

‘But he didn’t find her,’ Michael says softly.

‘He knew she had a son – he’d seen us together in Warsaw. Because he was recruiting for an intelligence unit he was allowed to read some of the files on Polish prisoners at
Kolyma. My name and area of origin were wrong but the NKVD file on me stated I’d been arrested on false identity charges, which had never been proved. I might, in fact, be German.’
Gregor’s sigh was soft. ‘I might be Eva’s son. I might, in fact, be
his
son, because I’d been born nine or ten months after he’d left Vienna back in 1926. When
he came to the apartment in Berlin he couldn’t take his eyes off my father’s photograph. I suppose he saw the truth there – that I was Matthias’s son, not his.’

Photographs can sometimes show the less obvious, deeper physical likenesses between people. When he was laughing or arguing or furious or expressing love Gregor looked like his mother. But in
repose his face resembled his father’s.

‘When Vavilov realized the truth he could have handed me over to the NKVD for desertion. But he didn’t.’

’Because he loved your mother.’ And what a love that was.

‘He never stopped loving her. I don’t believe he ever stopped looking for her, either.’ As though following some secret signal, Gregor and I go to stand beside Michael at the
window. How long have we been here now? The chestnut’s shadows have lengthened on the grass. I am thinking of Eva’s beauty, not, perhaps, as classically perfect as my mother’s,
but so vivid, so vibrant. Our housekeeper Lena distrusted Eva; she didn’t approve of her stunning evening dress the night of the dinner party.

I put a hand on the French window catch and pull it. The window opens and I walk out onto the terrace. Years ago I stood here, watching Papi as he himself watched Eva picking flowers with Mami.
I felt all that bitterness towards Mami because I thought she’d been having an affair and all the time perhaps it was Papi who’d strayed. This thought I will keep to myself.

‘My father adored my mother, too.’ Gregor follows me onto the terrace. ‘And she loved him, I never doubted that. But our comrade Vavilov, he was something different. He was
“the love of her life”, as the English say.’ He shakes his head. ‘He gave the impression of only looking out for himself, of being beyond loyalties or affections. But I
think he was a true romantic.’

‘What became of him?’ asks Michael, standing behind us in the salon.

Gregor smooths out a crease in the smart linen jacket. He hasn’t lost his love of clothes in old age. ‘I am an old man now, I probably indulge my own little fantasies. But years ago,
just after the Berlin Wall went up, I received a letter from my mother. Just the one.’

The hairs rise on the back of my neck. ‘From a camp?’

‘Somewhere east of Moscow. She said she was in good health, that the work wasn’t too arduous.’ He gives a wistful smile. ‘That bit was probably to spare me. But her
handwriting was firm and clear. She said she’d never given up hope of coming home to Berlin. But then she said something else.’ He pauses. ‘She wrote, “He is . .
.”’

‘What? He is what?’

‘That’s all I could read. The censor had struck out the rest of the sentence.
He is dead. He is in another camp. He is in the west.’
Gregor’s hands open to express
the ambiguity.

‘He is
here?’
says Michael. ‘Could it be she was saying that she and Vavilov were together?’

It might be possible. Other reunions – like our own – have occurred.

‘There was nothing else,’ Gregor continues. ‘The censor had done a ruthless job, except for her name at the bottom.’ He purses his lips. ‘Vavilov was probably
swallowed up by Stalin’s postwar neurosis and thrown into a Gulag, just like me. He’d crossed too many borders, played too many roles. But sometimes . . .’ Gregor hesitates,
looking very young now, very unsure, ‘sometimes I indulge myself and imagine that he got himself sent to where my mother was, that they ended their days together.’ He comes to a halt
and stares out towards the chestnut. I know he’s seeing his mother and Vavilov in some distant settlement, seeing out their days with their shared memories of Vienna, talking about the
friends of their youth.

Our son is still standing behind us, waiting patiently. ‘Did you manage to speak to Stephanie?’ I ask.

‘She was asleep. But she agreed all this news was worth waking her up in the early hours. She sends her greetings to her new father-in-law.’

‘Perhaps I can meet her and the children soon,’ says Gregor. I can almost see him struggle to throw aside the past so he can embrace the possibilities of the future.

‘Don’t worry. She’s already making plans to redecorate the guest rooms so you can both come over.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘But she’s giving me grief because she
says I haven’t explained it all properly.’

‘Steph’s right.’ Gregor gives a rueful grin. ‘It’s like rolls of film all tangled up together. Your mother and I were, naturally, the centres of our own universes
when we were young. We could probably barely even imagine our parents as young people at all. What would
they
know about falling in love?’

‘But they knew right enough,’ I say.

‘I’m building up a picture.’ Gregor speaks the words very slowly. ‘I think it all goes back to Vienna, Vienna in the Twenties. Marie and my mother are young actresses.
Preizler’s a disappointed young Tyrolean looking for a mission, and Vavilov, or Vargá as he was then, is a dispossessed Hungarian who’s lost everything. An insider with an
outsider’s objectivity, if you like.’

Gregor’s voice takes on a more intense note. ‘None of the others can quite make him out, but they’re fascinated by him. At least the girls, our mothers, are.’ He raises
his eyebrows. ‘These are just my theories, mind you, I’ve no proof. He dabbles in radical politics but doesn’t really seem to care that much. It’s like a kind of hobby for
him, ducking the Heimwehr – they were a right-wing militia,’ he adds for Michael’s benefit. ‘Women are a hobby, too. But then he falls in love. With my mother Eva. And
Marie, Alexandra’s mother, perhaps falls in love with him too. But meanwhile Anton Preizler has fallen for Marie. Perhaps he’d been in love with her since they were children.’

‘A series of love triangles?’

‘Exactly.’

‘What do you think happened between Mami and Preizler on that last morning in 1945?’ I ask.