The Lieutenant’s Lover (37 page)

Misha put the binoculars back to his eyes and rolled back into position. Not for long. The snow falling between him and the camp obscured his vision. But it didn’t matter now. She was there and he had come for her. That was all that mattered.

Tonya too welcomed the snow.

When she was done with her paperwork, the light had been half-squeezed out of the day. The air seemed thick with the falling snow, as though a mist had come down and solidified. When she came out into the yard, lamps were on around all the main buildings in the staff quarters – the prisoners themselves had no lighting – but the light they threw out reached no further than a few yards. Tonya walked back to the quartermaster with her papers. Pavel’s car was still there, slowly disappearing from view beneath the white. When she drew level with it, she allowed herself to drop her topmost folder. She bent to pick it up. As she did so, she pulled a short kitchen knife from her pocket. She pressed the blade up against the tyre and pushed. The thick rubber resisted for a moment, then gave way. The air escaped in a rush, then died away with a soft sighing sound. The car settled an inch or two closer to the ground. Tonya stood up again and looked around. There was no one there, no one watching. She took her knife and threw it, as far as she could, over the wire into the prisoners’ compound. She didn’t hear it land.

She wiped the snow off her knees, where she’d knelt to pick up her papers, then walked on towards the quartermaster’s office. She wasn’t breathing hard. Her pulse was normal.

Pavel Kirylovich Lensky, lieutenant-colonel in the NKVD and commandant of the Oderbruch Special Camp Number 11, dressed with care. His uniform didn’t give him much scope for elaborate dressing, but he was exacting about details. His calf-length boots were aglow with polish. His belt buckle and buttons gleamed. His royal blue cap with its band of red looked as though it had never seen a day’s wear in its life. He settled his cap with precision and smiled at his reflection. He had pale gums and eyes, but his lips were blood-red, almost like those of a woman wearing lipstick. When he finished smiling, his mouth didn’t quite close. He wanted a drink, but wanted even more to defer that precious first moment of the evening: the first drink clinking with ice, the first sweet bite of vodka.

He walked from his bedroom to his living room. His driver stood with his back to the door, too uncomfortable in those strangely opulent surroundings to come more than a pace or two into the room. The driver saluted. It had become fashionable in parts of the NKVD to salute, Prussian-style, with a sharp click of the heels. Earlier in the war, such copying of the German enemy would have been unthinkable, but now, two and a half years after victory, the conquerors enjoyed any demonstration of their martial supremacy. In any case, Pavel liked the habit and gave it his tacit encouragement. He returned the salute, then indicated that he was ready to go to Bad Freienwalde.

The two men went to the car. It had stopped snowing now – or at least the flakes that still fell were few in number and came down almost hesitantly. The driver opened the rear door for his commander, then took the driver’s seat for himself. He started the car and reversed it in a brisk curve, in order to bring its nose pointing towards the front gate. But the manoeuvre failed badly. The collapsed tyre was pudding-soft on the rear wheel and the car simply slid in a long, sideways curve. The slap of the injured tyre on the wheel was easily audible inside the car. The driver swore and jumped out. The damage was obvious and changing the tyre wouldn’t be the fastest procedure in the cold and darkness.

Pavel was angry. He didn’t like arriving in town in an ordinary Tatra car. On the other hand, he was all set up for that first drink of the evening and he didn’t want to delay it any further. His dilemma resolved itself in anger. Getting out of the car, he tore a strip off his driver, ordering him to report in full uniform every two hours through the night to the duty officer until further notice. The driver went still-faced and tense as he bore the rebuke. Then Pavel, still angry, indicated one of the Tatras. They would go to town in that, then the driver would return and fix the wheel. He would need to remain on-call, until Pavel was ready to be collected.

The driver relaxed a little. He couldn’t understand why the wheel had gone flat, but these things sometimes happened. His punishment hadn’t been too bad. For a moment, he’d thought that his commander was going to strike him.

The two men got in the smaller car and drove out into the night.

Misha waited in his car in the woods. The engine and lights were both turned off. It was eight in the evening, cold and becoming colder. He wore a heavy greatcoat, a khaki cap and scarf. The clothes weren’t technically identical to those worn by the Red Army, but they were so similar as to make no odds. Certainly, in the dark nobody would be able to tell the difference. On the seat beside him, he had a pair of heavy-duty wire cutters, some string, a short iron bar wrapped in cloth, a loaf of bread and a bottle of water. The iron bar was intended as a weapon of last resort. Misha had wrapped cloth around it to dull its impact in a fight, as he didn’t want to injure anyone more than necessary. With luck he wouldn’t have to use it at all. The loaf and water weren’t strictly necessary under any scenario, but some old instinct of hospitality made Misha feel somehow obliged to have food ready for Tonya when he got her out. Not that she would be likely to make much use of it. For one thing, they’d still have to reach Berlin before they would be safe. For another, both water and bread were well on their way to freezing solid.

The forest was mostly silent. Every now and then, a rook cawed loudly, or some large bird suddenly tore from its perch with a sudden beating of wings. There was very little wind and the normal sighing sound of a pine forest was entirely absent, so that it was almost like standing by a waterfall without hearing the sound of water.

Misha looked again at his watch. The tiny luminous dots which told the time hardly seemed to have moved since he’d last looked. He had determined that he wouldn’t make a move till midnight, and he forced himself now to abide by his earlier decision. Four hours to go.

Time crawled.

The driver had taken Pavel into town, then come back to camp and changed the wheel on the ZiS limousine, swearing softly to himself as he did so. It was long after dark by now, of course, and he was working in the light thrown by the headlamps of one of the little Tatras. Tonya came up to him with a tin mug of tea.

‘Here, comrade,’ she said in a friendly way.

The driver looked at her with a slight jolt, recognising his commandant’s sister. He swallowed the swearword that had been on his lips, and said, ‘Thanks, comrade. No offence.’

She shook her head, indicating that anyone was allowed to swear where her brother was concerned. ‘He’s a difficult one, that.’

‘Ach! These officers, they’re all the same. That tyre though, somebody stuck a knife in it.’

‘Well, this camp is hardly full of his friends. And I can say that, being his sister.’

‘Older or younger?’

‘Older. He was a handful, even as a youngster.’

‘Here, hold this a moment.’ The driver handed her his mug as he repositioned his spanner. Then, before applying pressure to the locking nut, he steadied himself. ‘Is it true he makes you call him sir?’

‘He’s a lieutenant-colonel. I’m only
ryadovoy.’

The driver shook his head and spat, then leaned on the spanner. The barrel nut resisted a moment, then gave way. The driver did the same to the remaining nuts, grunting with the effort.

‘What time do you have to collect him?’

‘Don’t know. He phones. This one’s a big night, apparently. I probably won’t get the call till three or four in the morning.’ The driver’s face contracted as he thought of it.

‘He phones you where? At the guard house?’

‘No. His bungalow. I have to sit and wait. All those luxuries, comrade Kornikova. They say the poor man pinches kopecks, the rich man steals gold.’

Tonya laughed. The driver swigged down his tea with a loud gulping sound. The sweep of light from the Tatra’s headlamps made every shadow or fold in the ground appear like a solid object, hard and black. When the driver threw the last few drops of tea away, the steam rose in clouds from the frozen ground. Tonya took the mug.

‘Well, then, if you don’t need me to help…’

‘No, the job’s half done already. Thanks for the tea.’

‘It was nothing.’

‘Oh, and comrade … no offence, all right? If I said anything, I didn’t mean…’

‘No, don’t worry. I won’t say anything. He wouldn’t ask me anyway.’

Tonya took the mug back to the kitchens, then went to the toilet block to wash. There was no hot water, except for a couple of times a week, and the cold water was like melted ice. All the same, Tonya washed every day, and today she was more careful than ever to wash herself hard. She scrubbed at her face as though trying to remove a layer of skin. Her skin, which was clear enough anyway, tingled with the coarse sponge and the ice-water. She untied her hair, combed it out hard, wished she were able to wash it, but knew that it would be more likely to freeze than to dry. She didn’t usually like her eyes – that slight slant tended to attract insults from the European chauvinist Russians – but Misha had always loved them, so she did too. She gazed at herself in the little scrap of mirror. She saw the brightness of her cheeks and the sheer happiness of her smile; a happiness that came from her increasing certainty that in a matter of a mere day or so, she would see Misha again. She knew there were risks to be overcome, but they seemed too trivial to worry about: a little summer brook to be hopped over, nothing more. She turned her head from side to side, enjoying the idea that somebody would soon be looking at her with love, enjoying the sense of being a woman again.

Just then, there was a noise on the snowy path outside. The toilet block was shared by both sexes and there was little privacy at any time. Tonya quickly retied her hair and left the block. She went straight to bed, but not to sleep, just lay awake, listening to the snores of her neighbours. Time passed. Ten in the evening came. Then eleven. Then midnight.

She got up, ready to make her move.

The two luminous dots came closer, then closed into one. Misha forced himself to wait another minute or two. The single dot lengthened, then one dot broke away from the other. It was now past midnight, beyond any doubt.

Misha found himself shivering. He was cold, of course, but it wasn’t cold but fear that had struck him. He got out of the car, peed in the snow at the edge of the forest track and got back in. He was still shivering, but alongside the anxiety he felt very calm. It was as though the anxiety were just a coat lightly thrown over the top of everything else, indicating nothing about what lay beneath. He turned the key in the ignition and the car came to life, crashingly loud in the silence.

With headlamps on, he drove down the track back to the road, then killed his lights for the slow ride towards the camp. The camp was only about a mile distant, but without lights, he couldn’t drive at more than a few miles an hour. He’d intended to stop three hundred yards before the camp entrance, in the mouth of a farmer’s gate he’d identified earlier, but he drove too far by accident and had to reverse back to find his spot. His pulse stayed high and he was given to bursts of shaking, but his calmness remained too. He realised that he only shook if he thought of Tonya. If he pretended that he was just going to enter the camp to fetch a package, he felt no nerves at all.

He parked the car by the farm gate, leaving the key in the ignition. The car was tucked well back from the road and its khaki front was camouflaged under a thick pelt of snow. Misha took the wire cutters and his iron bar and walked to the camp. Though the area was mostly flat, there was a corner where the camp dipped down to an area of low-lying ground, marshy in summer, but frozen hard now. The corner was little used by day. At night it was deserted. Misha approached the stretch of fence and listened. He heard only silence. He put the cutters to the wire and began to snip. The frozen metal parted easily and without noise. Within a couple of minutes, Misha had created an opening large enough to admit him. He slipped through the wire, then folded it back in place.

There was little cloud cover now, but there was no moon, just the glitter of starlight over snow, the huge emptiness of sky. Misha now felt nerves for the first time, real nerves; not the fake variety that he’d felt before. He oriented himself carefully. He knew the camp layout well from his time spent watching, but everything felt different now that he was actually there. The buildings loomed larger and more substantial. All the same, he knew where he was and what he was doing.

He located the little women’s sleeping hut and walked over to it. He walked carefully, not making any great racket, but also trying to look as though he had every right to be where he was, trying to look, feel and act like one of the camp guards themselves. His boots creaked in the frozen snow. His breath rose in clouds.

Midnight.

Tonya stared at her watch until the luminous dots formed a single point at the top of the watch dial. She couldn’t quite believe that the moment had arrived and waited until the two dots separated again before she was certain.

She got out of bed, and pulled on her uniform tunic, trousers, boots and coat. The two other women in the hut were heavy sleepers, and in any case, if they heard her getting up, they’d simply assume she was going to the loo. In cold weather such as this, no one went to the toilet block unless fully dressed.