The Lieutenant’s Lover (36 page)

For sixteen minutes she froze, then decided against. Her thudding heart quietened to a soft thump. All this time, she had left her work and had been standing at the window looking out and pondering. She sat back down at her desk and the stack of documents to translate. She began typing again. After a few minutes, there was a tap at the door. It was the truck driver, come to ask some question about his fuel requisition documents. Tonya gave him the information he needed, then asked him, ‘Where are you headed for now?’

‘Me? Back to base.’

‘And the base is…?’

‘Bialystok. Poland.’

The driver nodded, as though vaguely surprised that anyone could have been so ignorant as not to know, then headed out into the rain. Tonya felt the violent chill of the fate she had just avoided. Bialystok lay close to the Polish-Soviet border, hundreds of miles to the east. If she’d jumped into the truck, she’d have taken herself closer to Siberia, not Misha. So though her commitment to escape remained red-hot, her caution increased as well. She thought of a hundred plans for getting away, and rejected every one.

In the meantime, camp life went on. Her working hours had grown longer again, but for the most part, and prisoner interrogations aside, she enjoyed the work. Most of her colleagues liked her. Besides, they knew she was the commandant’s sister and took care to treat her well.

Nor had Pavel forgotten her. Indeed, he got into the habit of inviting her around to his bungalow. ‘Invite’ wasn’t quite the right word, of course. His invitations were phrased as orders, and he hadn’t yet permitted her to call him anything other than ‘sir’. She was usually required to come around at nine or even ten o’clock at night – a late start to the evening, given that reveille was sounded at six every morning. He usually gave her dinner, irrespective of whether she’d already eaten or not. He himself always took a plate of food too, but it was one of his idiosyncrasies that he had always eaten before her, so that he hardly put a spoon or fork to his mouth. Instead, he just drank wine from a large crystal glass – she was never offered any, and never asked for it – and plied her with questions. Sometimes his questions had to do with the present. He asked her about her translations, about the prisoner interrogations, about her observations of her fellow camp staff. At other times, he leaped back into the past, asking her about their very earliest years together, back in the years before the revolution. Or he might ask her about the Gulag: a topic he never seemingly wearied of. He wanted to know everything about it, especially her arrival there, her sensations and impressions. His questions were never orderly, but jumped around. She might have just completed an answer about an interrogation conducted that morning, only to be faced with a question about the way their mother used to bake bread, or asked to relate how cold it became during the Siberian winter.

Gradually, Tonya came to realise certain things.

Firstly, despite Pavel’s need to display his authority, she realised that her status as his older sister still carried weight. Once, seeing him bare-headed on a cold day, she chided him that evening.

‘You only started doing that during that first winter of the revolution, sir. You were copying Rodya, but you never had his constitution. You shouldn’t have done it then, and you shouldn’t do it now. It’s not just a cold you might catch. Typhus is rampant amongst the prisoners, as you perfectly well know.’

The admonishment delighted Pavel. He teased her, called attention to his lieutenant-colonel’s rank, pointed out that he could and would go bare-headed as much as he wished – but still the very next day, Tonya saw him wearing hat and scarf, even though the wind was nowhere near as cold as the day before.

Secondly, she realised that Pavel needed her company. Much as he liked to exercise his authority, it left him without close friends. His only real companionship was with his opposite number in the tank regiment down the road in Bad Freienwalde. Several times a week he took a car down there and spent an entire evening eating and drinking.

And lastly, she realised this. Pavel was a drunk. She had seen it first in his eyes: greeny-blue, like hers, but less intensely coloured. But the whites of his eyes were crowded with red-veined blood vessels, and his focus was often loose and slow. Once she’d understood the message of his eyes, all the other evidence fell into place. Most evenings she was there, she watched him consume a full bottle of wine. But often enough, she realised that he opened another one after she had left. He had also often begun drinking, vodka usually, in the time before she arrived.

Though she’d never accompanied him to his friend, the colonel of the tank regiment, she had once seen his car return. She witnessed it quite by chance. She was already in bed, and was only up because she’d needed to go to the loo and had to cross to the toilet block in order to do so. It was after midnight and windy, and a full moon stared out from wildly moving clouds. The car, the ZiS limousine, swirled in through the camp entrance, with a blare of headlamps and a howl of tyres. Instead of parking in the yard, the car drove right across the grass to Pavel’s bungalow. Fascinated, Tonya hurried over keeping to the shadows, watching to see what followed.

The car came to a stop by the bungalow’s entrance. Two burly tankists, warrant rank, no more, got out of the front seats. They opened a side-door and pulled Pavel out, taking him by the boots first, then the belt; handling him as roughly as a sack of turnips. In a flash of moonlight, Tonya saw her brother’s head loll backwards like a deer she’d once seen shot at a hunt. Then the two men rearranged their load and bundled it up the three little steps and into the house. They were inside just a few minutes, before emerging again. Then they got back into the car and drove away, back to Bad Freienwalde, she presumed.

Tonya went to the loo, went back to her hut, back to bed.

But not to sleep. She’d seen enough. Her alcoholic brother. That loose swaying head. She knew how she was going to make her escape. She knew how she would make it to Berlin.

For five solid hours she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, her heart pounding with excitement at the size of her future.

It was December 1946. It was two in the afternoon. The sky was a whitish blue. Not cloud really, just a thick haze, almost but not quite penetrated by the distant sun. There was no wind, not even a breath. A white duck’s feather, which happened to have fallen on the roof of the guard post by the main gate, just stayed there, a little speck of white on the tarred wooden roof. It didn’t move, didn’t even quiver.

It was very cold.

In the fields beyond the camp, Misha lay with his belly against the icy ground, his face pressed up against the long grass that sprouted in wintry hummocks all along the little culvert. He was stiff and cold from lying so long, but didn’t want to move now, for fear of being seen. He put his binoculars down, turning them sideways, so that the glass lenses wouldn’t catch the light and reflect it on into the camp. He lifted his belly and stretched his spine, shifting his boots back, keeping his shoulders forward, and giving his vertebrae room to unlock from their long afternoon’s ache. The stretch helped, but only for a moment. As soon as he dropped back into position, his back settled into the same dull cramp, as though it hadn’t shifted for a moment.

He put the glasses back to his eyes and continued to gaze.

Tonya left the quartermaster’s office with a stack of papers, a confused mass of receipts, usage statements, inventory reports, and requisition slips. Pavel had been haranguing the quartermaster for sloppy management and he in his turn had come to Tonya to beg for help.

Tonya crossed the yard to her office holding the papers against her chest. Because of the cold, she wore a rabbit-skin hat and a woollen scarf. Her hands were ungloved, but she liked the feeling of the cold air on her fingers. She liked the huge white sky and the way that any sounds seemed to carry for ever in the silence. She walked diagonally across the yard, altering her course only so as to avoid the elegant black shape of Pavel’s ZiS limousine. As she passed it, she put a hand out to touch the cold metal of its bonnet. She knew, because he had told her so, that Pavel was going down to Bad Freienwalde that night, visiting his friend, the tank regiment colonel. Pavel had implied some major party and Tonya had seen his alcoholic pleasure at the idea of a night spent drinking.

The feel of the bonnet gave her a sudden race of excitement and fear. If all went well, she would escape tonight. If all went well, she would be with Misha in less than twenty-four hours.

From his position in the culvert, Misha could see the wooden door open, discharge a single figure, then close again. He put the glasses back to his eye, touched the focus adjustment, and watched the distant image leap to life.

It was Tonya.

Because of the way the binoculars enlarged and concentrated the image, it looked as though she had jumped out at him. She seemed so close that Misha was actually startled into making an exclamation, a low ‘Oh!’ that rolled away across the frozen ground. The way Tonya was headed, she was actually walking towards him, as though she could see him with perfect clarity and there was nothing more normal in the world than strolling over towards him with a bundle of papers against her chest.

This wasn’t the first time he’d seen her through binoculars. Over the last three weeks he’d spent as many days as he could lying here, watching the camp, following her movements. He’d identified her office, the canteen, the interrogation block, and her sleeping quarters. He knew the approximate daily pattern of her life and movements. And yet, by odd chance, he’d only ever caught her in partial view. She had always been walking away from him, or had her head turned, or had been wearing a cap whose brim shielded her face. And this was different. Her face was turned directly towards Misha. It was as though she were looking at him.

He’d often wondered what he would feel actually seeing her again. Would he still feel the same way about her now, or had he been in love with a dream all this time? A dream of Tonya as a young woman, clear-skinned and youthful? He needn’t have worried. The extraordinary thing was how utterly familiar she was. There was age in her face, of course, but Misha was more struck by how much had remained unchanged. The clarity was still there. The soft roundedness of her face was still the same, the slight slant to the eyes. Misha felt the old love surge in him again, just as it had done back in Petrograd and Petrozavodsk.

He watched her cross the yard. She paused only once to touch the black metal bonnet of the commandant’s limousine. It was a curious gesture; something he hadn’t expected. Ordinarily, a lowly Red Army private wouldn’t think to touch the elevated luxury of a senior NKVD man’s car. But perhaps the commandant wasn’t entirely a brute. Or perhaps Tonya had seen some speck of dirt and had been cleaning it away. But no sooner had these thoughts formed, than they vanished. Misha didn’t have to speculate about Tonya as he would have done about anyone else. Tonya had seen the smoothness of the cold, black metal and she wanted to touch it. That was all.

Her pace picked up a bit as she crossed the rest of the little yard. She was closer to him now and Misha had to adjust the focus of his binoculars one more time to keep her in view. She came to a second building – single-storey, wooden, tin-roofed – opened the door and entered. The door fell shut behind her.

Misha put his glasses down. It was the confirmation that he’d needed. Not just the confirmation of her physical presence there, but confirmation that his own feelings were as unchanged, as strong, as utterly certain as ever. He hadn’t known that he’d needed that reassurance, but now that he had it, he was aware of the tiny doubt that had all this time been ringing away in his mind.

For some time – perhaps five minutes, perhaps fifty, he hardly knew – he lay on his belly with his head pillowed on the damp grass and the binoculars dropped on the ground beside him. He held the knowledge of Tonya’s presence to his heart, cherishing the feeling like nothing else.

Eventually he looked up.

For no reason in particular, he looked first at the guard post on the main gate. He saw its roof speckled with white. At first, he thought that some small bird had been mauled by a hawk or buzzard, and this scatter of white feathers was the result. But the thought was absurd, as he well knew. They weren’t feathers, but snowflakes, and the snow was being added to all the time. Nor was it only in the sky over the camp. It had begun snowing over Misha’s culvert too; he had simply been too tied up in his thoughts to notice. But now he rolled on his back, to look up at the sky. The snowfall would be a heavy one. The sky was already crowded with flakes. Looking up as he was, the flakes seemed black against the luminescent air. They were so dense, reaching right up as far as Misha could see, that it looked almost as if the sky were turning solid, darkening over with the falling snow. And the snow was settling. Before long, the drab greys and browns of the December landscape would be locked under a covering of solid white.

There were ways in which the snow would complicate his plans, but he was pleased all the same. For one thing, he was Russian. Snow was his element. He could never feel uncomfortable in an icy landscape. And there was one other thing. For some reason – why, he couldn’t say – but he Was reminded of that snowfall back in 1917, when he’d first read the newspaper headline that had announced the revolution. He remembered being on that station platform reading the article under the lamplight and the falling snow. The world had been turned upside down then. Perhaps it would reverse itself again now.