The Lieutenant’s Lover (25 page)

And automatically, almost without consciously choosing to do it, she changed the topmost carbon paper after every page of typing and retained it. By the end of the night, she had thirty-eight sheets of carbon paper. The dimpled black surface wasn’t possible to read with the naked eye, but each key stroke had made an impression which would certainly be visible under magnification. As dawn broke over the city, Tonya shuffled her carbons together into a stack and folded them twice. The package was too large to fit into her hollowed-out boot heel. So, silently borrowing some sewing things from the desk of a female worker, she slit her boot lining at the top, placed the papers inside, then sewed up the incision. She was a good seamstress and her work was practically invisible. She continued to work on lesser documents, until the meetings reconvened at around eight o’clock. By this time, she was so tired, so overcome, that she hardly felt the size of the risk she was taking.

But the strangest thing of all was yet to come.

At one point that morning, Sokolovsky was called away to the telephone. It was clear that he was speaking directly to Moscow. A whispered rumour went around the room that the general was speaking to Stalin himself. During the interval, people relaxed and joked. Cigarettes were lit and the air turned blue with the smoke. Over in one corner of the room, people began laughing and passing some printed poster-sized pages around. The pages circulated around the room. Wherever they passed, people bent over them, read them and chuckled. Then they reached Tonya.

It was the cartoons again. Comrade Lensky, with his little pot-belly and his comical strutting walk.

Tonya’s tiredness dropped away from her in an instant. She felt as fresh and clear as if she’d just bathed in ice melt-water. She scanned the cartoons with astonishment. Now that she had them in her hand, an entire page of them, their message was clear beyond doubt. There were references everywhere. To Tonya’s maiden name. To Misha’s mother and Tonya’s father. To Kuletsky Prospekt and the hunting lodge in Petrozavodsk. To waltzes and sleigh-loads of black-market logs and china figurines from Meissen. And the clinching thing was Lensky’s best friend, a perfectly drawn caricature of Misha himself. And at the bottom of the page there was a name, Willi Nichts, and an address in Charlottenberg. The entire page was an invitation addressed to Tonya.

All that remained was for her to walk across town, and come home at last.

Konstantinov gave a short, sharp nod.

Lieutenant Bezarin, a burly Siberian peasant, built short and square, gave the door a thundering kick about nine inches left of the lock. Nothing happened. Behind Konstantinov and Bezarin there stood a pair of NKVD men armed with axes. One of them made as if to step forwards, but Bezarin shook his head. He stood ox-like in front of the door, his big head slightly swaying on his shoulders. He collected himself, his small eyes narrowly focused on the part of the door that had resisted his kick. There was another second or two of silence, then Bezarin collected himself and crashed into the door again. The wood splintered and broke. The metal lock was torn from the frame. The door smashed open. Bezarin, tumbling forwards, lay happily smiling in the debris.

‘
Harasho
,’ he said. ‘Good.’

The owner of the apartment, the German woman Marta Kappelhoff, was away at work. She would be gone all day. Konstantinov and his men moved slowly into the apartment, savouring the moment.

One of the Moscow technical experts was describing the scope for further industrial reparations from the region about Leipzig. His Russian was dense with technical terms, unnecessary jargon, and mangled grammar. His pauses were too short for Tonya to translate effectively. Ignoring her difficulties, the expert ran on, as though deliberately making life hard for her. Tonya, already dazed with tiredness and the events of the previous twenty-four hours, began mumbling and getting her sentences confused. Sokolovsky, who was present at the meeting, banged the table with his fist and glared at her. The room went suddenly silent. Tonya swallowed nervously. Then Sokolovsky’s face changed. He had it in him to be genial and humorous, and something lit up in his expression now.

‘You were interpreting yesterday also?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘And this morning, since how early?’

Tonya hesitated. How was she to answer that, since she hadn’t been to bed?

‘Well?’

The general’s face was a curious combination of inviting and stormy. On an impulse, Tonya decided to trust him and speak the truth.

‘Very early, I suppose, sir. I was translating documents through the night. I haven’t slept.’

The general’s face blackened and he turned to the technical expert. ‘You haven’t slept and now this blockhead who can’t even speak proper Russian makes your life hell! Idiot!’ The technical expert went pale and took a step or two back. The silence in the room continued, as people waited for Sokolovsky’s next pronouncement. The great man consulted his watch. It was five to twelve. ‘Lunch,’ he roared, adding in a quieter voice to Tonya, ‘eat well, finish this afternoon’s session, then get some rest. Well done.’

His attention turned away from her, and towards the meal that would be awaiting them all downstairs: huge bowlfuls of soup, full of beans, cabbage, onion, beetroot, and ham. There would be black bread and the pale yellow butter of the local German creameries.

But Tonya didn’t want food. In a daze, she began to walk downstairs, heading for the open air. The carbon papers in the lining of her boot formed a stiff band down the outside of her right calf. Although the actual physical pressure was very slight, the crashing significance of those papers suddenly seemed so intense that it was all Tonya could do to avoid walking with a limp. She was suddenly appalled at herself for the risk she was taking. What had she been thinking of?

She knew the answer, of course. Quite simply, when she had taken the carbon papers, she had no real expectation of finding Misha again. Now, just a few hours later, she didn’t just know that Misha was alive, she knew where he was living. She had read, that very morning, an invitation conceived by him and addressed to her, an invitation that asked her to find him, to live with him, to marry him… In contrast with the crashing importance of those facts, her own feelings on the German situation, on the importance of helping Mark Thompson, suddenly paled into insignificance, a candle flame in sunlight.

She walked into the grandiose Karlshorst lobby, once adorned with Nazi flags, now spread with red banners and Soviet slogans. The blood seemed to pulse with strange forcefulness in her calf, as though her heart had slipped and was beating down there instead. She glanced outside. It was a brilliant day. It had snowed overnight, perhaps the last real snowfall of spring, and the bright March sunshine leaped from drift to drift, splashing brilliant reflections and the hard diamond glitter of ice in every direction. Outside a car stopped. An NKVD captain, recognisable from the royal blue splashes on his uniform, got out. Tonya recognised him. It was Arkady Konstantinov. There was something alert and bounding in his stride, something that reminded Tonya of a hunting dog at work. The captain, followed by two of his men, strode towards the front entrance.

Tonya recoiled backwards. There was no logic at work that made her do it, just the thumping pressure in her boot. She bumped backwards through a side door, and found herself in a passage from which a number of low-level clerical offices opened. It was the lunch hour and most of the offices were empty. Tonya went into one of them and sat down. Her head was thumping. She missed Misha like a physical pain in her side. A small part of her wondered at the strangeness of seeing him again after so long, but not most of her. Mostly, she knew that after being with Misha for a single minute, it would be exactly the same as if they had never been apart. It was as though a fragile porcelain cup had been carried through the battlefields of the Eastern front, from Stalingrad to Berlin, and ended up exactly the same: unchipped, unbroken, uncracked. It might be a miracle, but if so, it was a miracle Tonya knew she could rely on.

But she didn’t want to go to Misha with these lethally dangerous papers in her possession. She unpicked the thread on her boot lining with a pair of scissors. She pulled the thread free and drew out the folded black carbons. Now in her hand, it seemed like a very fragile cargo for a thing of so high a value. She had an impulse simply to throw them away. Who would bother to check some discarded carbon papers lying with other rubbish in a wastebasket? But she held back. Some sense of loyalty to Thompson stopped her. That, and a sense of how important they were, a sense of how much they mattered to the future of Germany, the future of Europe. She hesitated. There was movement in the passage outside, but it was only office workers going to or from the canteen.

She continued to dither.

What had brought Konstantinov here? It could be anything, of course. Karlshorst was the headquarters of the Russian occupation in Germany. Konstantinov could have a hundred reasons for coming, none of them likely to be connected with her. All the same, she remembered the glimpse she’d had of him. His bright face and eager strides. He had reminded her a little of Rodyon, back in the old days, the first days of the Revolution, when he’d stridden around Moscow seeking to put old wrongs right …

An envelope lay on the desk in front of her. She shoved the carbon papers into the envelope, then ran the envelope into a typewriter and paused over the keys. She wanted to send the package to Mark Thompson, but she knew that that wasn’t his real name, nor did she possess an address for him. What about Marta? But envelopes leaving Karlshorst didn’t generally go to German citizens of no importance. Tonya paused another fraction of a second, then began to type. She had decided that the envelope should go to a senior official in the British military government; and the more senior the better, because the envelope was less likely to be tampered with on the way. She typed in the name and address of a major-general in the British sector, whose contact details she happened to know from her other work. She completed the address, then realised she had typed over the carbons inside. Oh well, there was nothing to be done about that. She pulled the envelope free of the typewriter and went to the door of the office.

There were a couple of people in the passage outside, but no one of significance. No Konstantinov. No NKVD men. She went to the door leading into the lobby and peeped through. No Konstantinov. There were a couple of NKVD men, but there always were. No one seemed unusually on the lookout. There was a uniformed driver collecting packages from the central desk. A murmur of conversation carried across the room, amplified by the stone walls and floors. And suddenly, Tonya was walking out across the lobby, striding briskly towards the desk. The driver was only a
yefreytor
, a senior private and a glorified messenger boy. Tonya handed him her envelope.

‘And quickly now,’ she snapped, ‘this one’s urgent.’

The driver nodded, acknowledging Tonya’s rank. He tucked the envelope in with the rest. Tonya walked towards the door of the lobby, followed by the driver. She stepped outside. The sunlight and the snow stung her eyes, but stung in a good way, stung in a way that marked the end of one thing and the start of another. She heard the driver start up his car and move off.

Karlshorst was on the eastern edge of Berlin. It was here that the Soviet 5
^th
Shock Army had pounded its way into Berlin. It was here that the German armed forces had finally signed the document of surrender. It was a long walk from here to Charlottenberg, to ‘Willi Nichts’ and the ‘Nothing Factory’. But the walk meant nothing. The past no longer meant anything. In two hours, no more, Tonya would be in Misha’s arms. She began to walk westwards down the street.

Seven minutes later, Captain Arkady Konstantinov of the NKVD came running into the Karlshorst lobby, followed by his two men. He sprang to the front entrance and gazed up and down the street. There were a few women around, including a couple of Red Army soldiers, but no sign of Tonya. Konstantinov went to the driver of a Tatra truck that was unloading boxes at a side entrance. He asked the driver for information about Tonya’s movements. The driver shrugged and pointed.

Konstantinov climbed into his jeep and took the wheel. His two men climbed in after him. Konstantinov raced up through the gears, turning sharply and driving snow upwards in a fine white arc.

The jeep disappeared, heading west.

Sixty-five minutes later, at one twenty-two that afternoon, a curious scene took place at the Brandenburg Gate.

A woman, a Red Army sergeant, warmly dressed against the cold, was walking briskly past the gate, crossing from the Soviet sector to the British one. The woman was in her forties and her life had clearly etched its difficulties in the lines of her face. All the same, though, there was something ineffably bright about her, something joyous. Her walk wasn’t just brisk, it was also full of life, movement and hope.

Whatever the reason for the woman’s optimism, she certainly had a fine day for it. Snow lay around, with the brightness of a new fall. The air was cold and sharp. A brilliant sun marked every shadow with a crisp, clear edge, so the solemn shape of the big limestone arches, all the more solemn for being war-damaged, was repeated in perfect outline on the ground. The air was perfectly still.

The woman had crossed through. That is to say, she had left the Soviet sector and she was clearly inside the British zone. There was a trio of British Tommies just in front of the Reichstag, or whatever was left of it, and those soldiers were absolutely certain of the point. But it made no difference. Why should it? Berlin was one city, Germany was one country. Invisible lines on the ground should make no difference, and they didn’t.