The Lieutenant’s Lover (16 page)

The bar was in a cellar, with a low vaulted ceiling and dim lighting. Tables were jammed up close and tobacco smoke hung like river-mist. The Andrews Sisters were on the gramophone singing ‘Rum and Coca Cola’; not once but again and again. About three-quarters of those in the bar were men. The rest were prostitutes, many of them teenagers. There were American GIs, British squaddies, and a handful of Germans – black-market barons to a man. The sharp eyes and flashiness of the black-market men reminded Misha of that first wave of Russian communists – the swaggering young men in their leather coats, their air of ownership.

Misha stood at the door of the bar, feeling out of place.

He didn’t have the money for a place like this. No ordinary German did. But he’d been lucky. He was a member of a work party run by a bunch of British squaddies. The work was menial and stupid, but not unpleasant. Determined to get to Canada as soon as possible, he had taken Rosa firmly back to her orphanage, and set in train everything that was required for his emigration application to proceed. Part of that was learning English, and he had asked his supervisors to help him. Since he was already fluent in German, Russian, and French, the new language came easily to him. The British Tommies were impressed, and started to teach him not just English, but cockney English:
Gor blimey guv; wipe yer dial; would you adam and eve it
. They’d had fun, got on well. That afternoon, the corporal in charge of the work detail had invited Misha to the bar, offering to stand him supper.

Misha located the soldiers and pushed through the crowds towards them. The corporal turned to Misha, his eyes already shining with drink. A few seconds passed, in which the corporal failed to recognise Misha. For an instant Misha felt a surge of anger that he should have been asked to come here and then forgotten about; that he should have to perform tricks for food, like a trained spaniel. But then the corporal remembered, and his expression changed.

‘Blimey, it’s Mr M, the Russian cockney! Here, mate, have a drink…’

A seat was found. A glass of beer was shoved in front of Misha. Words shouted across the cellar in English produced a giant plate of fried potatoes and some thin strips of fat-streaked bacon. Misha began to eat the way he’d eaten that first post-revolutionary winter in Petrograd: slow but fast, fast but slow. Although Misha was careful to chew every morsel, especially the meat, knowing that his stomach would complain angrily if he didn’t, his mouth was never empty, his fork never stopped moving. Within a few minutes he had cleared his plate.

‘Good on yer, chum.’

‘Proper chow,’ said Misha. ‘I didn’t ’alf bleedin’ need that.’

There was applause, shouts, more beer.

‘’Ave a frigging fag, mate,’ he said. ‘Oi, come ’ere an’ say that. Shove it up yer arse, sergeant-major.’

More applause, more food.

Misha drank more than he should, ate until he knew that he’d be awake all night with stomach cramps. His mood changed. He was disgusted with himself for being here. Something in his attitude must have rubbed off on his hosts, because the conversation turned away from him, excluding him.

The gramophone had finally ditched the Andrews Sisters, and was now onto the ‘GI Jive’ by Louis Jordan, and ‘On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe’ by Johnny Mercer. The prostitutes who had formed a group on their own before had now melted into the crowd. One girl lay across the laps of four GIs, eating chocolate. In the tiny space by the gramophone a huge black NCO was dancing with a German girl who must have been less than half his weight. The NCO’s eyes were closed in reverie. The girl’s eyes were sharp and alert. Her feet moved nimbly, not dancing so much as dodging her partner’s boots.

‘I’d better bloomin’ scarper,’ said Misha, then, feeling deepening disgust, said the same thing in formal English, then German, Russian, French, and Evenki, a Siberian language he’d picked up during his time fighting for the Bolshevik partisans. He enunciated slowly and clearly, purposely insulting his hosts by displaying his mastery and their ignorance.

He climbed the stairs up from the cellar with a savage intensity. And why shouldn’t he feel humiliated, he asked himself. He was German now, wasn’t he? In which case, he belonged to a defeated nation, a beaten people. If this was the worst that could be expected from the occupation, what right did he have to complain?

He came out onto the street into a flamingo-pink sunset and the first dim violet of evening. The beer that had seemed so innocent downstairs found its edge outside, and Misha felt drunk and unsteady. The thought of returning home to the Nothing Factory, to Willi’s bitter, hungry humour, felt temporarily repulsive. A sudden self-destructive instinct directed Misha’s steps west down Alt-Moabit towards the old Reichstag building and the solemn arch of the Brandenburg Gate. Occupation troops stood around at the zone boundaries, not stopping traffic, but not off-duty either. Relations between the western troops and the Russians weren’t exactly tense, but they’d become touched by something prickly, a static charge that crackled in the air.

Misha strode on into the Soviet zone. Everything was the same here – the same ruins, the same military vehicles, the same hungry German faces – but it was the same and different too. The Red Army still engendered more fear amongst Berliners than the troops of any other army. The heavy iron heel of occupation was more iron, more heavy when attached to a Russian boot.

Somewhere in between Alt-Moabit and here in the dark destroyed blocks beyond Grellstrasse, the beer had worn off. Turning a corner, Misha almost walked into a group of three NKVD men smoking in an alley. He came close enough to see their blue enamel cap badges, the royal blue piping down the seams of their Khaki breeches. The officer’s head jerked up in angry surprise. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Misha in German, scuttling away to the far side of the street.

He was no longer drunk, just scared. The NKVD had no interest in zonal boundaries. They had no interest in passports or diplomatic niceties. If Misha were picked up here, with his dangerous name splashed all over his identity papers, he’d most likely find himself on a direct train to Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet far north, and the murderous embrace of a labour battalion. There were worse things in life than being patronised by a group of Tommies, after all.

Guarded now, frightened and very sober, Misha began to walk home. He walked at a measured pace, and checked every corner before proceeding on into the street. Crossing back a little south of the Brandenburg Gate, he felt relief break over him in a huge, cool wave. Only now did he realise that the palms of his hands had been sweating, the top of his spine between his shoulder blades was crunched and painful with the tension.

It would be good to get home, good to see Willi.

He reached Charlottenberg, and his old, precious Nothing Factory. The place was torn apart, wrecked, smashed to pieces. Willi lay with his head cracked open, his face blackened and smeared in a drench of his own blood.

‘It is of extreme importance,’ wrote Tonya, ‘that the appearance of domination by the Communist Party be avoided. Efforts must be made to include all classes in the political process. The “small Nazi” must be also welcomed…’

She stopped typing. The typewriter was an old machine from the twenties and each key had to be struck with alarming force in order to penetrate through all three sheets of typing paper, interspersed with some overused carbons. The missing fingertips on her right hand prevented her from touch typing, but even so the blackened flesh on the ends of her fingers tended to ache after a long day’s work.

She looked back at the Russian text: ‘Social Democrats or members of other authorised anti-fascist parties should be given prominent posts such as that of mayor. But in all cases the chief of the education department should be a reliable Communist, also the chief of police, also the director of communications, also the senior deputy mayor in charge of personnel…’

Tonya felt a sudden wave of breathlessness. Somehow, that first day in the Gulag came back again. Since meeting the Englishman, she was thinking about it all the time, dreaming about it at night. And the Englishman was right. The SMAD was single-mindedly devoted to the capture of Germany. The whole thing needed to look democratic – and be anything but. The Communists planned to infiltrate the country, then swallow it. Not just their zone, but all of it.

Tonya hated that. But what the Englishman was asking her to do was inconceivable. She had been punished once for conspiracy against the Soviet state, when she had been guilty of no such thing. How much more violent would her punishment be if she were genuinely guilty of espionage?

But she needed to breathe.

She jumped up from her desk, thinking that fresh air would clear her head. She hurried downstairs, past the bored reception clerk and the NKVD men who sprawled, smoking, in the lobby. Outside on the street, nothing quite seemed real. Tiny blue clouds decorated a hot summer sky. A girl cruised past on a bicycle, wearing a red-and-white dress, striped like an American peppermint. Tonya began half-walking, half-running down Mühlendamm, then kept up the same pace down Leipzigerstrasse.

She saw the cyclist again. A chain of American lorries. A Russian jeep. Tonya felt disconnected from the real world. She came into the Tiergarten and stopped hurrying. She didn’t look at her watch. She didn’t know what time it was, didn’t want to know. But the sun was high overhead and Tonya’s running shadow was puddled down by her feet. She had a bread roll in her pocket that day: rye bread, made in the Russian way, unleavened, dark and heavy.

She reached the lake.

She wanted to run, but the words she had been translating earlier still beat in her head.
‘The chief of the education department should be a reliable Communist, also the chief of police, also …, also, …, also…’
. Her missing fingertips throbbed in pain.

With tears streaming down her face, she stood by the water breaking her roll into pieces and hurling it at the guzzling birds, piece after piece after piece.

Misha jumped to check Willi’s pulse.

For a second his fingertips could find nothing – not even a ghost of movement. Then he shifted his fingers and closed on the right vein. The blood flow kicked strong and healthy. Misha was almost literally dizzy with relief.

Most of the blood on the floor came from a long gash on the side of Willi’s head, and Misha bathed it and dressed it with care. The boy no longer bled. As Misha rolled the lad over to get the bandage in place, Willi came to, blinking but unfocused.

‘Christ, Willi, what’s happened here?’

‘Oh, you know, visitors, the normal thing.’ The boy’s lip was so badly swollen, his words came out soft and misshapen, like spoonfuls of mashed potato.

‘Visitors? Who?’

‘Friends of yours. Russians. Nice men with khaki uniforms and big boots. I think they wanted to invite you around to their place. We exchanged the normal courtesies. They admired my picture gallery.’

Willi attempted a gesture around the room, which was now smashed to pieces. Willi’s drawings had been ripped from the wall, torn up, then pissed on. Every item of furniture in the room had been broken – some of it, no doubt, over Willi’s body. But the boy didn’t manage to complete his gesture. His right arm was certainly broken. Misha guessed that he had one or more cracked ribs as well.

‘NKVD?’ he asked.

Willi nodded. ‘Ideological instruction. Most informative.’

‘And they knew my name? They were looking for me?’

‘Mikhail Ivanovich Malevich. That is you I believe.’

The kid’s voice wasn’t nearly as strong or brave as his words. Misha was tempted to comfort him the way a father would comfort a child, then realised that Willi’s carefully assumed identity as self-sufficient boy-man was vital to him, more vital than mere comfort. So Misha changed tack.

‘Schnapps,’ he said. ‘Always vital after ideological instruction. First schnapps, then hospital.’

Misha managed to find an unbroken bottle of schnapps in the debris. They’d only ever had one glass between the two of them and that one was now smashed, so they drank from the bottle. The boy sipped a tiny amount, but his cut lip hurt too much to take more.

‘They didn’t say how they’d got this address?’

‘No.’

Misha remembered the gum-chewing American major and guessed that he had played a part in this visit. Remarkably though, he had been away and Willi had escaped with nothing more than a bad beating. All the same, Misha felt his anger rise and tighten inside him. It lodged inside him like a black stone, very hard and very dense.

‘If they come back…?’

‘I don’t know, Willi. Not yet.’

‘When you get to Canada, then—’

‘If. If I go there. It’s not certain.’

Willi stared at him. The boy’s eyes were huge, too big for his face. ‘You’re not going, are you?’

Misha looked inside himself and felt only his anger. He traced its outline with his mind, feeling the hard black smoothness, round like a slingshot. He knew that there was nothing for him in Canada. Canada was escape. It was an easy life. But it was also an abandonment, a withdrawal. He’d already been an exile once. He’d been persecuted by regimes of the far right and the far left. He’d been stripped of family, of possessions, of loved ones. And he was sick of it. He’d run no more. Not another inch. He would occupy his own space and damn the consequences.