The Lieutenant’s Lover (18 page)

Tonya listened for a while, then brought the drink up to her nose. She had assumed the drink was tea, which she drank often, or coffee, a little-seen luxury, but it was neither of these. She sniffed uncertainly.

‘Bournvita,’ said Thompson. ‘Malted barley, milk, cocoa and egg. Horlicks with chocolate. What a concoction, eh? I remember when it first came out. Seemed like a miracle, sign of the world becoming a better place. Completely bloody wrong, of course, but it’s a damned good drink all the same. What d’you think? Bit too imperialist-capitalist for you?’

Tonya sipped. She knew that Thompson was talking so much so she could compose herself. She held her face over the mug, feeling it steam up. The drink was delicious, the nicest thing she’d ever tasted. It felt like the taste of England; something comforting and parochial, unlikely ever to shine.

‘I love it,’ she said, and meant it. She had started spying because of her conviction that Stalin needed to be stopped in his attempted takeover of Germany. She had continued because of her deepening loathing for the Soviet system itself – but also because of this: Marta’s minor courtesies, and Thompson’s occasional visits, his shambling, genuine warmth.

‘I’d give you a tin or two, only that might not be quite the thing. How’s your week been? Pretty bloody from the look of you. The comrades bullying you as usual?’

‘Oh—’ Tonya shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about it. ‘Just the usual. There are more quota shortfalls, though. In Leipzig, agricultural production levels are running at just forty per cent of quota. The published statistics talk about yield increases, but that’s all nonsense, of course. I’ll be going to Leipzig tomorrow with General Zavenyagin. I’d expect to learn more then—’

Thompson initially looked alert and interested, but then his demeanour abruptly changed. He waved his hands in front of his face, stopping her in her tracks.

‘No, for God’s sake. Let’s not worry about all that for tonight. The comrades are making a pig’s ear of things, lying through their teeth, and blaming everyone except themselves, hey? Listen, tell me about yourself. You’ve been working for us for months now, and you’re the best. I mean it. Our best source in Berlin. Our best source in the Soviet zone. And so far, all we’ve given you is a few music lessons and one cup of Bournvita. We’ve been a bit stingy, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Stingy?’

‘Stingy. Mean. Tight. Parsimonious. As close as a Scottish money-lender.’

‘I wasn’t doing this to be paid. In any case, I don’t think…’

‘… that the comrades would be happy to see you swanning around in a mink coat and pearls. No, quite.’ Unconsciously, Tonya had been fingering the stub ends of her two frost-bitten fingers. Thompson’s eye caught the gesture, and Tonya dropped her hands. ‘There’s principle, of course,’ Thompson continued, ‘and a jolly good thing that is too. But I thought maybe you might want something else.’

Tonya shook her head. She wanted peace. She wanted to do the right thing. She wanted Germany to avoid the fate that Russia had suffered. That was all.

Thompson looked at her hard, then dipped inside his pocket. He pulled out a pouch of pipe tobacco, a pocket knife, a ball of string and a blue booklet with a heavy gold stamp on its cover. Thompson threw the booklet over to Tonya.

‘How about one of these?’

She looked at it. It was a British passport, something she’d never seen before. She fingered the grey pages in wonderment. All the time she had been working for Thompson, she had literally never once thought about reward; or if she had, the violin lessons had seemed like reward enough. The passport was Thompson’s own. There was no document in the name of Antonina Kirylovna Kornikova, not yet anyway.

‘Obviously, if you became a Brit, you’d have to have some money, and a nice little cottage somewhere, a few roses, view of the cricket pitch, that sort of thing. Old HM Government is a bit strapped for cash at the moment, but I expect we could find something suitable. A poky little boarding house in Clapham and a dozen tins of Bournvita at any rate.’

Tonya interrupted him. ‘Yes. If you mean it, then yes. I would be … very grateful.’

‘No, no, you’ll have earned it.’

Thompson swept his tangle of straw-coloured hair back from his face, and Tonya could see the sharp and solemn intelligence which lay behind his words, his sprawling asinine speech. She read struggle in his expression and realised that she was the subject of that struggle. She didn’t know why.

‘Listen, I’m serious about the passport. I’m also serious when I tell you that HMG is unlikely to pay you what it ought to, but I’m sure there’ll be a job for you as a translator over in London. But we should make sure we have an understanding.’

‘Yes?’

‘How long you go on working for us here before we bring you over into our sector. What seems reasonable to you?’

Tonya shook her head. She had never in her life been asked by anyone in authority what seemed reasonable. ‘I don’t know. For a passport? Perhaps two years? Three?’

‘Good God, woman!’ Thompson exploded, speaking English, before continuing, ‘You don’t bargain very hard. Listen, I want you here as long as possible, but I’m damned if I want to be the one responsible for letting you injure yourself. Can we say six months? At most. If we get worried about you before that, we’ll bring you across without delay. And for Christ’s sake, think of yourself. I know that’s a damned bourgeois thing to worry about, but just do it anyway, will you?’

He stood up. As usual when standing, he seemed too big for the room. Marta stopped her violin playing and swivelled around on her stool. Tonya realised that the big man was worried about her. That he was facing a conflict between duty, which was urging him to retain her services for as long as he could, and some softer protective instinct. Tonya was now forty-six. Her son Vassily, had he lived, would have been about Mark Thompson’s age now.

She nodded. ‘I will.’

‘I doubt it. Damned Bolsheviks. Lost any decent sense of selfishness. Listen. I’m interrupting your lesson. I’ll skedaddle. Don’t worry about your damned agricultural quotas today. Just play.’

He was about to go. Tonya had taken the violin from Marta and her fingers were already beginning to find their places on the strings, when she was shaken by a wave of longing so strong, it physically shook her. Thompson stopped and stared at her.

‘You asked me if there was something I wanted.’

‘Yes?’

‘A passport… I would like that – no, love it. I’d never thought. But in the meantime, there’s something else you could do for me. It’s probably silly. There’s probably no chance. There’s somebody you could try to find for me. A man, Mikhail—’

‘—Kornikov?’

‘No. Malevich.’ Tonya blushed – what an unfamiliar sensation that was! ‘I was not married to him. I last saw him in 1919. He was taken off to fight in the Civil War, against the Whites, against his own sort really. He promised to escape if he could. Sort of promised, anyway. He couldn’t do much more than nod. But I believe that he would have come to Germany to settle. Here or Switzerland. He was an engineer. Not exactly trained, but a born engineer all the same. Gifted. I have no idea what happened to him. Perhaps it’s no use. It was so long ago. But I suppose you have lists of who’s who in your sector—’

‘Yes. Lists and lists. Rooms full of them. The Americans too, of course. Even the French, if they’d have the grace to cooperate with us about anything ever. Do you know what town or district we should start looking in?’

‘No. I have no idea. None. He had family in Switzerland.’ Tonya gave their names. ‘But that was so long ago now. Perhaps it’s useless.’

‘Perhaps.’ There was that grave look in Thompson’s eyes again, the look which Tonya guessed was much closer to the true him than all the nonsense about Bournvita and donkey rides. Thompson closed the moment with a long, slow nod. ‘But perhaps not. We won’t know until we start looking, will we?’

Tonya shook her head. ‘No, no.’

Thompson stood up, getting ready to leave the room. He looked down at Tonya and gave her a wink of encouragement and support.

She smiled back, then added, ‘I loved him very much. I’m sorry to ask you for something so foolish.’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing foolish about it. Enjoy your lesson.’

Thompson departed, leaving Tonya and Marta to the violin. But Tonya played this evening like a dunce, as though this was only her second or third time at the instrument. Marta was patient, but also exasperated. And Tonya? She didn’t know how she felt. Once before with Thompson there had been this feeling, of a sudden slippage of emotion, like a roof suddenly shedding its burden of snow in the spring thaw. The first time it had been to do with the Gulag, her lost fingers, the pain and awfulness of those first days. And now it was to do with something still closer to her heart: Misha, her first and only true love. Here in Berlin, in Germany, it was he who seemed real, Rodyon who seemed far away and impossible to believe in.

Tonya played the violin for another fifty minutes. When she got into bed that night, she fell asleep instantly and didn’t dream about a single thing.

The jeweller removed his eyeglass with a sideways twist of his head, but the loose folds of skin over his eye still retained the circular imprint. He tapped the identity documents in front of him.

‘A routine matter.’

‘Good. And how much do you charge for a routine matter?’

‘How much? To convert a Malevich into a Müller? We may say four hundred cigarettes.’

Misha grimaced. He had three hundred cigarettes in a cardboard carton and the boxful represented his entire stock of savings. ‘Can we say three hundred? I have it here.’

The jeweller rubbed his eyes, blotting out the circular mark. He sighed, as though making a small fortune from forging identity papers was just one of the crosses he had to bear.

‘Very well then. Sit.’

The jeweller’s room lay just near the Schlasisches Tor in the Soviet sector. Since all the watches and most of the jewellery once owned by Berliners now adorned the wrists and necks of the Red Army and their wives back home, the jeweller had turned his hand to the closely related trade of document forgery. Perhaps, Misha wondered, the jeweller had had the same profession in Hitler’s time. In any case, the man had a reputation for knowing his business. His little office had a huge glass window overlooking the road, for the light presumably, and the narrow workbenches were crammed with the intricate clutter of his trade. The heavy snow-laden sky outside filled the apartment with clear grey light, toneless and impartial.

Misha found a small fabric-covered bench and sat, always interested in the technical side of any skilled occupation. The man began with Misha’s ration book. He took a scalpel and began to scrape patiently at the offending surname. The scalpel appeared to make no difference, but the jeweller didn’t either hurry his movement or apply more pressure. A minute or so passed and Misha could see the black lettering had grown fainter. Another few minutes and it had vanished altogether, leaving the surface of the paper scuffed and abraded. The jeweller inspected his work with the eyeglass, then dipped his finger inside a little pot filled with a thick grey ointment – china clay, Misha guessed, mixed with graphite to darken it. The jeweller compared the paper against the ointment for colour match, grunted his satisfaction, and applied the substance to the paper with a light dabbing motion. He continued to dab and blot, until the ointment was invisible and the paper magically restored. The jeweller inspected the surface of the paper under his eyeglass for almost a minute. Misha had already spotted the rows of neat wooden drawers which would house the man’s collection of printing blocks and typefaces. A glass jar contained a couple of dozen tubes of printers’ ink. Misha wondered who the jeweller’s principal clients were now – Russian Hiwis, Displaced Persons, former Nazis, a whole sea of lost souls.

Misha wanted to leave.

He didn’t like being away from the factory too long these days. The factory had become a place of business again. Pump manufacturing was out of the question in present conditions. The entire German economy was at a standstill. There was no currency which meant anything, no money to buy raw materials, no capital to restore damaged production lines. There was no hope that anything would change at all soon. But if running a complex manufacturing operation had become impossible, the extent of the destruction had created new opportunities. Misha had borrowed and begged some timber and built a weaving loom, operated by pedal and hand. He’d got hold of some raw cotton thread, woven headscarves, sold them, bought more cotton, made more headscarves. He had four looms now, all hand-built, and employed women to work them. It was a tiny business – laughable compared with what he’d once had – but it was a start. The business was busy. It now made headscarves, cotton cloth, aprons, anything which sold. It kept Rosa in food and clothes and schoolbooks. It had now, finally, earned enough to ‘convert a Malevich into a Müller’.

And, of course, the factory wasn’t the only thing that kept him busy. Misha was not not only a businessman, but also, in effect, a father. Rosa’s arrival had turned them into a little family, the Nothing Factory into a sort of home. The girl needed proper food, regular bedtimes, hot baths, family meals. She needed all the things that years of war had stripped from Germany. And Misha supplied it. Willi grumbled at the regularisation of his free-and-easy routines, but Misha realised that the boy needed an ordinary family just as much as Rosa, and his grumbling was just part of the pleasure. The family had settled down. In a modest way, they were happy.