Pavel & I (15 page)

‘Now,' Lev told him. ‘Get out.'

He pulled his hat back and realized he was at one of the border points to the British sector. A young soldier was waiting for him in an army jeep.

‘Get in, sir, before we freeze our bums off. I have orders from Colonel Fosko to drive you home.

‘You look tired, sir,' he added as they chased down the sector's empty streets. ‘The Colonel said you had a chat with them Russkies. Hope they didn't rough you up none.'

Pavel smiled absent-mindedly. He felt like he had done a good day's work. Eighteen hours earlier he had set out to find Belle. He had found her, on a grainy photograph, with Boyd's mouth clamped tight around one youthful breast. It was a frivolous thought, but Belle, she had beautiful breasts.

Back in the office, General Karpov sat alone, having dispatched both of his assistants on their respective errands. He used the phone to request a couple of files through channels, then dismissed Richter from his mind. The photos lay spread out across his desk. Karpov studied them, and ran a gloved hand over the man in the white lab coat. From afar one might have called it a caress. It's impossible to vouch for it, of course: I wasn't there to witness. And yet it happened all the same, the touch, and the name, tumbling from his tidy lips.

Haldemann.

We were all of us looking for Haldemann in the winter of '46. It was Karpov who was destined to find him in the end.

Sonia heard him climb the stairs. It was a few minutes before midnight. Of course it could have been just about anyone climbing the stairs, and yet she was sure it was Pavel. The footsteps stopped one flight down. Sonia heard his door open and close, stood still in her tracks and held her breath. It should have been quite impossible to hear anything through the floor, unless he was making a ruckus. Nevertheless she thought she could make out his quiet tread upon the floorboards, the slow, methodical motions as he fired up the stove. Pavel seemed restless. She heard him pace from wall to wall, the gait uncertain. Now he grabbed a book, read a page or two, placed it back on the shelf; sat down at the typewriter, punching out letters with no pattern or meaning. The sounds were so transparently clear to her ear that it was a shock when, all of a sudden, she heard his rap on her apartment door. She hastened over to open up for him. Pavel looked tired and excited all at once. She made a conscious effort not to interpret the tone of his voice.

‘You're still up?' he asked.

‘Yes, of course. Come in. Would you like some tea?'

He nodded assent and sank into one of her armchairs. She put a pan of water on the hob, lit candles and put a record on the gramophone. Sonia sat across from Pavel; sat on her piano chair, long legs crossed before her. Her fingers caressed the instrument's keys, a little yellowed with age.

‘Did you find Belle?' she asked after she had poured out the tea.

‘Yes.'

He looked at her with tired eyes, accusingly perhaps, and she shrugged without apologizing. ‘I thought it best if you found out for yourself.'

The record player launched into a waltz, and it struck her as terribly out of place.

They sat in silence for a while. She began to think that he liked it, this silence, that he had withdrawn into it like a tortoise fed up with the weather, but then, all of a sudden, he started babbling. Well, perhaps not babbling precisely, but he started talking, a welter of words, and – this was what surprised her most – it was all utterly in earnest, this stream of words, spoken hastily but also with a shameless insistency. It was as though he had stumbled onto a secret, and now it needed out. In this, he reminded her of a schoolboy.

‘All day,' he said, ‘I have been thinking about Dostoevsky. It's because of the Russians, of course. They pulled me in, and the officer, he had a voice just like my grandfather. He creeps into your language, Dostoevsky does. All those
almosts
and
howevers:
they make it impossible to get a single thought straight. And the drama of it; four Russians in a room, and none of them will speak, and when one of them does – the youngest, the buffoon – all it is, is air, hot air, and secretly, on the inside so to speak, all four of them grinning because they like this, the absurdity of the moment, and the buffoon screaming “swine!” My grandfather, he used to say that we were a race knit for the absurd. We're constituted for it. It brings out our passions. Hot, raging words, only a half-hour later will find us drinking, an arm round each of our enemies.

‘But then they showed me the photo: Boyd's mouth clamped shut over one breast, and your neck twisted so you're looking straight into the camera. And you know what it is that I see there? Love. It's impossible, you must have hated him, down to the depth of your bowels, but on the photo, mind, what one finds is love. A smile that sits in the eyes, grainy, and enough bent to your body to imagine you are happy there, splayed out under his mouth. And at that moment, before anything else, I was happy for it. I very nearly smiled myself.

‘Only, if you are in the picture, you will know how he died. And if you know how he died, and did not tell me, then Fosko knows how he died, too, and everything has been a lie, even his corpse, which, at the time, seemed like the one thing that was true. It should have made me mad, you know. Should have! – my friend dead, and you holding out on me, who looked happy in his arms, just that one second, though of course you hated him. You know, I imagined you there, in your apartment, even before I saw the photo, that is; imagined you proud, which you are, and insolent before his touch. I held your panties today. Red, silky panties. The Russians didn't steal them which means an officer dealt with your flat, on order from up high. Which is to say, whatever Boyd was tied up in, it was important, or money was on the line, which I guess amounts to the same. Red panties, Sonia. Will you forgive me if I say they seemed tasteless to me?

‘In any case, I tried to be angry. God help me, Sonia, I tried. Even just now, before I came in, I tried to work myself up into a frenzy. I would tear in and make a scene; strike you across one cheek perhaps. Only you wouldn't take it, would you? You would hit back, a fist to my chin, revive me with smelling salts, your brows knit, and curious as to why I insisted on this farce. “Pavel,” you would say, “I never claimed to be something I was not.” And I would sit up, appeased, and ask you to play the piano. And later, with your back turned, perhaps I would tell you, past the lump in my throat, that I saw you, naked, under my best friend's mouth; and that you were beautiful. Perhaps it would make you happy, just a little, you see, and things wouldn't seem so shabby to you.

‘The thing is that today, from the moment I hit the street, there woke in me a strange love for life. Greed, let's call it greed, a Dostoevskian, Russian sort of greed. It's like that scene in his novel where Ivan (you have read
Karamazov,
have you not? He's the
ponderous intellectual plotting rebellion against God. God, you hear!), well, Ivan is talking to his younger brother, Alyosha, and he admits to being a “greenbeak”. He uses precisely that word, “greenbeak”. He speaks of revolution and it's a greenbeak's revolution; and faced with this, the truth of his being, he has to admit that all that matters to him –
all
, you hear – is life. There is even this bit about the “sticky buds” of spring, something sexual in any case, and for a moment it looks like youth will conquer all.

‘Oh Sonia,' he said. ‘Do you have any idea what I am trying to say to you here?'

He looked up earnestly, wet coals for eyes, and the faintest of smiles upon his features. Sonia just sat there, not really listening to any of this nonsense, her eyes on his lips, thinking, asking herself what it would feel like to kiss Pavel. They sat unmoving, while the monkey crouched in the corner and shat a putrid turd upon its rug. It had bowel movements like a toddler.

‘Ah, well,' said Pavel, ‘that's how it is.' He paused and looked her up and down. ‘Do you want to tell me how Boyd died?'

‘It is late, Pavel. Tomorrow.'

‘Then I had better go to bed.'

He placed the mug on her coffee table, and got up stiffly.

‘Don't go,' she said, and slowly unbuttoned her coat.

He flushed and stared at her blankly.

‘The Colonel is having you watched. He told me to … spend the night with you. He will know it if you leave.'

He nodded wearily, rubbed the back of his head.

‘I can sleep on the couch again.'

Sonia shook her head. ‘Sleep in the bed. The Colonel will want … details.'

‘Tell him I was too sick for it. Tell him I wanted you to hold me. He will like that.'

Sonia smiled at that, and together they cleaned up the monkey's filth. When they were done, she persuaded him to share her bed anyway; it was big enough for two, and a second night on the couch would hurt his back.

She changed into her nightgown in the bedroom, then called him in. ‘Put these on,' she said, and passed over a pair of flannel pyjamas Fosko had ordered for her from England. ‘You won't be cold. I have good bedding.'

He stepped back into the living room so that he could undress in peace. When he returned, they slipped under the covers together, each of them turning to arrange their pillows.

‘You good and ready?' he asked, before turning off the light.

‘Yes, I'm fine,' she said.

It was to her the most ridiculous of questions.

They lay next to each other on the big marital bed, taking care not to touch. In the darkness Sonia could hear the monkey clambering about, watching them; the room stank of it. Pavel's body exuded almost no heat, and she was tempted to reach over, just to make sure he was really there. His breathing was quiet and regular, and after a few minutes she heard him scratch discreetly, moving the bedding a little as he did so. She lay still, hands upon her stomach, asking herself whether she thought him a fool.

‘Tell me, Sonia,' he said when she had already half dozed off. ‘Did you see the boy today? Anders.'

‘Yes. He's angry with you because you cried in front of Fosko.'

‘I'm glad I cried. Can you understand that?'

‘No,' she said. ‘And neither will the boy.'

She heard him roll from his back onto his stomach. Moments later she was asleep.

Once, halfway through the night, Sonia woke and found Pavel breathing a few inches from her mouth. She reached over and put her lips on his. When she woke in the morning, she convinced herself it had just been a dream.

Pavel woke first. Woke to darkness, an hour before dawn, and lay there guiltily for long minutes, savouring her smell: spring flowers and a touch of honey. It was her hair, he believed. She must have washed it the previous day.

He slipped out from under the coverlet and almost called out when his feet touched the icy floor. It took him some minutes to stand up. Again and again he would touch the floor with the soles of his feet, then raise themup in the air and bunch them into fists in order to get the circulation going. When he finally rose it was with the gingerly gait of the rheumatic. He stood on the outer edges of his feet and hopped along until he found a rug. It was still so dark in the room that he could see neither the bed he had left, nor the very walls that surrounded him. This circumstance gave him a delightful sense of the absence of space. Had it not been so cold, he might have stood there awhile, feeling himself lost by the world, and also at its centre.

Pavel located the bedroom door by memory, stepped through and gently closed it behind him before groping for a light switch. His fingers found it, but nothing happened. Evidently the electricity was off again. In the darkness he could hear the heavy, rhythmic breathing of the animal somewhere to his right. It sounded to him like the breath of copulation. He veered left, away from the noise, stumbled
painfully over a low piece of furniture – a footrest? a coffee table? – and caught his weight upon the piano's bared teeth. The cacophony drew a screech from the monkey's throat, too close for comfort. Disoriented, Pavel sat on the floor by the piano and tried to remember where he had left coat and trousers, his kidneys already hurting with the cold. To his relief Sonia had not reacted to the noise; he was not ready to talk to her yet, wearing another man's pyjamas, the smell of her hair still thick on his tongue. He sat, arms thrown around his body, and waited for the first rays of dawn.