The Lieutenant’s Lover (21 page)

‘Something funny, Comrade Kornikova?’

‘No, sir, nothing.’

Tonya’s hands were a bit too full with the documents and a couple of files slipped from the top.

‘You are taking these down to be typed?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Then I’ll help.’

Konstantinov took the two files that had fallen and left her to carry the rest. He walked half a pace behind her, so she was very aware of his presence, but couldn’t see him. The stairs were wide enough that they could easily have walked abreast.

‘You laugh at nothing?’

‘Only something a friend said yesterday.’

‘A friend?’

‘A Russian, sir. A comrade driver with the 12
^th
Guards Rifle Division.’

‘Ah.’ They were downstairs now, in the basement. There must have been damp-proofing once, but if so it had been split or cracked in the shelling, and the basement was heavy with damp. ‘The name of your friend?’

Tonya told him, along with name, rank and unit. She felt scared now, though for no reason she could think of. Konstantinov nodded slowly. He slipped his two files on top of the stack that she already carried, and left silently, his footsteps inaudible on the soft linoleum.

Tonya felt a wave of fear so strong, she almost retched.

Konstantinov climbed the stairs again.

There had been nothing in his conversation with the interpreter, or almost nothing. But Konstantinov was good at his job. He felt the prickle of the
almost
, the way a hunter knows when a stag is hidden in a thicket. At the same time, Konstantinov knew that the interpreter had been thoroughly checked already. She wasn’t a Party member, it was true. She had been in the Gulag and in a
shtraf
battalion, but in some ways that kind of past stood as a guarantee of present loyalty …

Konstantinov fingered the phone on his desk, toying with the idea of doing nothing. But he was a man who always preferred action to idleness. Knowing that the phone call would almost certainly come to nothing, he made it anyway. He called the unit whose name Kornikova had just given him. He confirmed that there was indeed a corporal driver who served there. The woman’s name was as the interpreter had given it. But there was something else too. The driver had also been in the Gulag, had also been in a
shtraf
battalion.

Konstantinov replaced the handset with a tiny smile. The doubt that had been almost but not quite present had widened into something larger – still small, of course, but big enough now to be worth investigating. It was all very well releasing these men and women from the Gulag, but it was not preferable that they should spend unsupervised time together afterwards. Those with a tendency towards political dissent should be very careful about keeping themselves away from corrupting influences.

Konstantinov pulled a sheet of paper towards him and scribbled an instruction. The issue was a minor one. There was almost certainly no need for any action, beyond perhaps a formal warning from an appropriate Party authority. But the interpreter worked with some highly sensitive documents. No precaution could be too much.

Konstantinov wrote some instructions and signed them, then threw the sheet at his wire out-tray. The whole business was probably a distraction. He had more important things to worry about.

The doorman had confirmed Frau Fassbindert name and managed to locate an address. An hour later Misha had located the house, a place seemingly untouched by war-damage. Behind the painted front door, the yells and shouts of children racketed forth. Misha knocked. A woman answered.

‘Frau Fassbinder?’

The woman shook her head, ducked behind the door, called for someone, then disappeared. A second woman came to the door. Misha explained who he was and what he wanted.

‘There was a woman with Zavenyagin. It’s her I want to find.’

‘A woman. The interpreter, you mean?’

‘Interpreter? Yes, could be.’

‘Who told you to come here?’

‘The doorman, Herr Gärtner—’.

‘Gärtner, that old fool. It wasn’t me who cleaned up in there, it was Frau Wannemaker.’

‘Frau Wannemaker. Listen, if you have an address—’ Misha began to dip into his pocket for another packet of cigarettes.

‘Address!’ The woman snorted. ‘That’s simple. You’d better come in. On the third floor. If those are cigarettes in your hand, then you’re very welcome to hand them over.’

Misha let the woman take the cigarettes from his hand; from his pocket almost. He stepped inside. The door closed behind him. The house was narrow, though tall, and it was clear that several families now lived here. The heaps of washing, the low hum of quarrelling, the precisely marked lines that demarcated territory in the communal kitchen were all familiar to Misha from Kuletsky Prospekt in the time following the October revolution. Frau Fassbinder jerked a thumb at the stairs, then turned away, ignoring him.

Misha made his way up. The stairs were steep and narrow. The house smelt of too many unwashed bodies, but also of boiled laundry and starched cotton; an odd mix. He got to the third floor. There were only two doors. Misha knocked on one and swung it open. It felt as though he had opened a door out onto the sky. A bomb or shell must have taken away a slice of roof, and the room lay open beneath the sky. Except for an abandoned dolls’ house, there was nothing in the room but rubble and snow. Misha closed the door again and knocked on the other. This time, though he still got no direct response, he could hear the sound of people just the other side of the door. He knocked again, for politeness, and opened the door.

Inside there was a single small room. There were three children, poorly dressed and hungry; also a woman, sitting on the only bed, suckling a tiny baby. The woman didn’t move the baby away from her breast when she saw Misha enter. She didn’t get up or say anything. She just looked at him through dark and deep-set eyes. There was very little furniture and the room was bare and cold.

‘Frau Wannemaker? My name is Michael Müller.’

The woman continued to look at him, but didn’t say anything. The children, their ages ranging from about four to eight or nine, drew together, but they too remained silent. Doing his best to avoid anything which might look or appear threatening in any way, Misha said, ‘Frau Fassbinder downstairs suggested I come up. She thought you might be able to help me.’

He took another full packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and placed it on the stool in front of him. The oldest of the children, a girl with bare feet, ran over and snatched it up before going back to the others. Misha was conscious of his height in the small room and tried stooping to make himself look shorter. He knew he looked very Russian, and took care to keep any trace of accent out of his German. Since the woman still said nothing, he decided to continue.

‘I understand that you were cleaning up in the room where the Russian General Zavenyagin was recently. He was the unpleasant man who shouted a lot. Now what I’m very interested in is the woman who was with him. She was a Russian too. I expect she wore an army uniform, but it’s possible that she was in civilian clothes. I wondered if by any chance you happened to learn the woman’s name. Or if you were able to describe her appearance in any way.’

Misha stopped, leaving plenty of silence for the woman to step into if she chose. She said nothing. The girl who had taken the cigarettes went over to her mother and whispered something into her ear. At least that proved she couldn’t have been deaf. Misha guessed that nerve damage from bombs or shells was probably a likelier explanation of the woman’s silence. As the girl drew her head back, she caught Misha’s eye. It wasn’t a nod, exactly, but Misha felt sure there was some gesture of encouragement, but without words he didn’t know what to do next.

Then his eye fell on a bundle of paper that the children must have used for schoolwork or writing practice. He took a sheet and drew a pen from his pocket. He carried the sheet into the light of the only window – then hesitated.

His thought had been to draw Tonya, but he found himself seized by sudden doubt. There was the gap of twenty-five years of course, but it wasn’t that. He suddenly doubted himself. He doubted that the picture of Tonya that he’d carried for all this time was the true one. Was she real or just a fantasy, a mirage? He put pen to paper, but made no further move. Ink from the nib began to spread out in a tiny spider’s web pattern on the coarse war-standard paper. The light coming in through the window seemed empty and unhelpful. Then Misha caught the eye of the girl who had encouraged him. Something in her watchful eyes, her ragged clothes and bare feet prompted him.

He began to draw, hardly even knowing in advance what he was sketching. But there was only one thing he could have chosen. Tonya, in the hunting lodge near Petrozavodsk, dancing. Misha left himself out of the picture, but he knew he was there invisibly, holding her waist, guiding her steps. He drew her with her head tilted back, her hair carrying out behind her. He drew her with bright eyes and an open, excited mouth. As a way of illustrating a person’s likeness, it was an absurdity. Misha should have drawn her face, the way a police identity poster might be drawn, showing the head in full detail, ignoring her body altogether. One of Tonya’s most distinctive features were her green, slightly slanted eyes, and yet he’d sketched those eyes with a few brief strokes of his pen; capturing the essence, but avoiding all detail. Feeling like a fool, he wrote
Augen – grün. Haare – braun
. Eyes green, hair brown.

He looked at the picture. It was Tonya all right; his version of her perhaps, but a real one all the same. To him, it felt as though Tonya’s spirit had been captured on paper. The sight of his own drawing made him catch his breath with emotion. He showed the picture to the woman who still sat silently on the bed. She looked at the picture for about eight or ten seconds. Then she switched her eyes from the picture to Misha’s face. She nodded.

He wanted to explode into a thousand questions. Was it her? Could she be sure? Did she appear healthy? What was her voice like? Did she seem happy? But even as the impulse rose in him, it died away in the knowledge that not a single one of the questions would be answered.

And then he noticed that the woman was trying to tell him something. He held the drawing up again and the woman indicated Tonya’s right hand, shaking her head. Misha frowned and shook his head. He didn’t understand. The woman shifted the baby against her chest and held up her own right hand, with the first two fingers tucked down.

Misha returned the gesture carefully. The woman nodded vigorously. The interpreter – Tonya – had lost some fingers. Had it been war or frostbite? Hitler’s army or the Gulag?

Then Misha did something else. He put his fingers to the corners of his eyes and pulled them apart, so that his eyelids would appear slanted, like Tonya’s. Again the woman nodded, smiling this time.

Misha breathed out with a long shudder of relief and certainty. In an impulse of generosity, he emptied his pockets of all his money, his cigarettes, everything of value that he kept there. He wanted to give something to the girl who had encouraged him with her nod, but he had nothing suitable. He bowed to the woman and to the girl, then left the room.

Tonya was alive and working as a military interpreter somewhere in Germany, most likely in Berlin itself. She had been injured at some point, and Misha felt with a rush of certainty that the Gulag had been responsible. He wouldn’t rest until he found her.

It was a treat, albeit a small one.

Valentina had been commended by one of her superiors and had been given her own bedroom as a reward. The room was tiny. The bed filled most of the floor space. There was only about fourteen inches between the side of the bed and the wall, and not much more than twice that at the foot. All the same, it had been literally years since either Tonya or Valentina had had anywhere private to sleep and the privilege felt like a tremendous luxury. The two women took their evening meals there together, when they were able, embroidering handkerchiefs for Valentina’s niece and chatting.

In the unfamiliar privacy, both women felt an urge to unburden themselves. At one point, Valentina began a conversation in which she attacked the food shortages that were still desperately prevalent at home in Russia. It was the first time either of them had breached their unwritten rule against talking politics. In a sharp voice, Tonya said something of the sort required – no doubts the rumours were exaggerated; it was a soldier’s duty not to believe fascistic propaganda; in any case, if comrade Stalin were aware of the problem, it would surely be rapidly dealt with and those responsible punished. Valentina accepted the implicit rebuke, and hung her head and agreed with everything that Tonya had just said, adding a few more contrite phrases of her own.

It was just as well.

Behind their heads, buried in the light fitting, a concealed microphone picked up their words and relayed them to a tape recorder in a downstairs cupboard. When Konstantinov obtained the tapes, he had one of his men listen to them. There wasn’t much there, he reported. Just two gossipy women. One of the two – the comrade driver – was prone to spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. Konstantinov shrugged. He knew, of course, that whenever two Russians came together and spoke without fear, the crime of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda was likely to be committed. But still, it was his task to enforce the rules. Every minor infraction punished now meant a major problem avoided later. Valentina was summoned by her commanding officer, reprimanded for believing false rumours, and punished for spreading them. Her private bedroom was removed. She was given four weeks on guard duty, in addition to her existing work as a driver. She was demoted from corporal to a mere
ryadovoy
, or junior private. Valentina, of course, blamed Tonya for denouncing her. Tonya denied the charge. Valentina didn’t believe her and refused to see her again.