Pavel & I (19 page)

‘Nah, just boys from what I can see. Same place the pipsqueak ran to earlier. Richter's little friend.'

‘Well, in any case, tell the Colonel. In the meantime, get me some men out here in a car, and a big flask of coffee.'

‘Wonderful. I knew I could count on you.'

‘And a Merry Christmas to you, Jones.'

You see, in the Colonel's employ, we were all like one big, happy family.

They handled him roughly. Pavel wouldn't have minded, but one of the boys poked him in the kidneys as he helped to lift him over the courtyard's low wall, and the pain ran through him throat to groin.

‘Be careful,' he mumbled.

‘What are you, some sort of girl?' said the boy. He was armed, Pavel saw, with a carpenter's hammer. He wondered whether the boy had any idea what a thing like that could do to a man's face.

They pulled him inside a doorway at the back of a filthy old building, then up several flights of stairs. ‘There used to be an elevator,' one of his assailants told him proudly. The boy carried a home-made sap and something that looked like a saucepan's cast-iron lid. ‘You better have something to bargain with,' he added. ‘Paulchen's pissed as all hell.'

‘Yes,' said Pavel, ‘I will give him whatever he wants.'

They took him to an apartment on the top floor. There was no name on the door, just a rusty brass knocker. One of the boys gave it a brisk rapping. There were footsteps on the other side, and a squeaky voice asking: ‘Password?'

‘Open up, Hendrik, or I'll stick my foot so far up your arse I can use you for a boot.'

‘Yep,' said the voice. ‘That's the password.'

Pavel wondered where they had learned their humour. It may have been from the movies. It rang American, somehow.

Inside, there was a cramped two-bedroom garret, the walls lined chest-high with dark old wood. The main room's ceiling slanted down to one side and seemed to sag, yellowed and rain-damaged. It looked like the underside of some great fish that lay beached and dying; smelled, too, of cigarette smoke and unwashed child.

The latter smell came as no surprise. The room was packed with them. They lined every wall and floor-space; sat two, three rows deep on an ancient sofa livid with rot; stood huddled around the great oven or slouched in the doorway of the adjoining kitchen, unlit cigarettes
behind their ears. Pavel counted something like seventeen boys, aged eight upwards. They must have come from far and wide to bear witness to his humiliation before their war leader.

He sat amongst them like a savage chieftain. Sat upon an armchair at the very centre of the room. Green corduroy gone brown and greasy along the backrest and arms; a grey army blanket to cover his legs, this in spite of the room being warmer than any Pavel had entered in weeks, heated as it was by the crush of dirty bodies. Upon Paulchen's temple, the bruise sat like a leech: black and moist and pert with his blood. In any other weather he would have iced it. The swelling had squeezed shut one eye; its darkness set off the pallor of his face. The mouth was framed by longish tufts of hair, soft as a butler's glove. A boy too young yet to know when to shave. He stared at Pavel grimly, hands folded as though in prayer. He must have studied the pose somewhere. It added years to his squint.

Paulchen gave Pavel time to have a look around. His eyes travelled from the German flag that graced one wall, to the map of Europe showing the borders of '41 and a coloured pin for every capital fallen. On a coffee table, casually displayed, there sat a shoebox filled with military insignia and honours. Pavel recognized an Iron Cross and tried to guess at its journey from some Aryan hero's breast to the pockets of a Russian looter, and onwards, until it ended up here, the cherished prize of one just young enough to have eluded service in the
Volkssturm,
that army of children and decrepits that held the city in the last desperate days and weeks. Then again, he may have served, and won his cross with a daring charge against a Russian tank, much good it did him, his city burning and deserters strung from every lamppost.

Next to the box of trinkets there stood a little tree upon a stand, decorated with red cotton bows. Its twigs hung half-wilted, the needles more brown than green. All of a sudden Pavel remembered that it was Christmas, and that it was now, in the early hours of the evening, that it would be celebrated all across Germany, just as
Charlotte would celebrate it back in Ohio, that woman he had married and whispered words to, about eternity. This was before he had made lovers of women who sold themselves for comfort; before the war and the peace and his decision to stay. The whole weight of his life settled upon him in this moment, and – briefly – he was afraid that his eyes would show tears. From the kitchen there came the smell of leek and potato soup. His stomach grumbled and washed away Christmas. He had not eaten all day.

‘Can I have a bowl of soup?' he asked.

Paulchen looked at him, incredulous. He was about to flare up, then thought better of it and nodded his assent. A boy – Salomon – peeled himself from out of the pile on the sofa and ran into the kitchen. He returned with an earthenware dish of soup and a wedge of dark bread.

‘Here, Herr Richter,' he said. The other boys, Pavel noticed, saw it as a collaborator's act. Young Salomon was in for a rough night.

Pavel ate greedily, gulping down soup and bread in a few quick minutes. It could have used salt, but was otherwise well prepared. The band of thieves were clearly getting by on their own wits. When he was done, Pavel placed the dish next to the little tree and returned his attention to Paulchen.

‘Where is Anders?' he asked.

‘You don't know?'

‘No.'

‘We thought you'd know.'

‘Well, I don't.'

‘He stole my gun.'

‘So Sal – Schlo' – told me. What does he want with it?'

‘How the hell would I know? Shoot someone, I guess.'

‘Who?'

‘He told us that someone stole his coat. Maybe he wants to shoot him.'

‘Someone stole his coat?'

‘Yeah, the pretty one you gave him, with the blood stains down the back. The thing is, some way or another he found the money to get himself an even better one. Nice little fur number with a collar this wide.' He held his hands apart theatrically. ‘So really, he had nothing to complain about.'

‘I see. Did he say who took the coat?'

‘No.'

‘Did he mention the Colonel?'

‘The Colonel?'

‘Fosko. Colonel Fosko. He's the big fat man who runs this neighbourhood. Surely you've run into him.'

‘Ah, the fairy. Yes, Anders asked about him recently. I told him to watch his back around the man. What do you have to do with him?'

Pavel thought about this for a moment. At length, he said: ‘I think he killed my friend.'

It felt good to say it out loud.

‘And now you think he might snuff Anders, too, eh?'

Paulchen said it roughly, but Pavel thought he could detect concern in his one good eye. Salomon, though, had heard enough. Pavel saw him duck out, as though he no longer wanted any part of this, though surely he would have to return later for a berth, and his peers' camaraderie. Pavel would have liked to tell him to stay around, that things would turn out all right, but there was no time for it. The chieftain wasn't done with him yet.

‘In any case,' he said, ‘I hold you responsible for the gun.'

Pavel did not dispute the point. It was ridiculous, of course, but he understood Paulchen's logic. This way he would not have to hunt Anders down like a dog; would retain his boys' fealty without practising a cruelty that wasn't native to his soul.

‘What do you want?' he asked him meekly. ‘I have no gun to give.'

‘Do you have money?'

Pavel thought about it. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘I have money.'

‘Schlo' says you live as poor as a pecker, only you got yourself shelves full of books.'

‘There is a woman in my building. She will give me the money.'

He marvelled at how easy it was to say it, and dispense with Sonia's wealth before he even owned her heart. It was as though he thought them married; had convinced himself, somewhere along the line, that she was his to command. It was worse than stupid: it was treacherous.

‘She will give me the money,' he repeated. ‘More than a gun's worth, if I can count on your help.'

‘You want to hire us for help?' Paulchen asked moodily. Pavel realized his mistake and revised his terminology.

‘A job,' he said gruffly. ‘Money up front for services rendered. If you boys have the pluck.'

‘Don't you worry about no pluck, Mister.'

They were getting on swimmingly.

Over the next hour or two they made their arrangements. The boys in the room relaxed, broke into groups and played cards, swapped jokes and stories, competed at push-ups, squats, the wrestling of arms. Before long, Pavel was offered a second bowl of soup – it was Christmas after all – and a swig of corn schnapps from a ceramic jug. The first of the services he paid for, on credit, was the passing on of information about S৞ldmann, the midget who'd been stabbed in the back. Paulchen gathered what little he knew of the man and fashioned it into a yarn: grandiloquent truths grown out of unsubstantiated rumour;
pissoir
banter blown up into character study. His gang gathered at his feet to hear it all, lapping it up with no less an appetite than, in some other story expertly told, cats had been said to lap at a dead man's blood. Paulchen, too, told his story well. As he was listening, Pavel cast back his mind to how they had washed the body,
Sonia and he, and carried it up to the attic's darkest corner. In retrospect it seemed to him like he must have loved her even then.

But this won't do, having a boy tell Söldmann's story. It's not that Paulchen was short on wits or minced his words – quite the contrary. His horizon, though, was limited by age and lack of education. As a narrator, he was liable to render as mere biography a subject that clamoured after history. Nor was Paulchen in the best position to be free of bias, Greater Germany pining away on his wall and a box full of Nazi insignia. You do better listening to me; have I not guided you thus far, with no major hiccups? Besides, I was much better informed, having been ordered to sniff out Söldmann's story many months before, at a time when the Colonel had first taken an interest in the midget's affairs. A few deft questions to former associates and neighbours, some well-placed food parcels and the occasional threat of investigation, and the rudiments of a life began to manifest, in crude brushstrokes to be sure, though not devoid of a certain suggestiveness. The thing, of course, was that nobody knew anything for certain. Söldmann's was a war story, disarticulated and liable to distortions and falsehood. Events only become clearer towards war's end, when he turned into a crook and a fence, dealing in stolen information, primarily, with a sideline in narcotics.

In any case, people say that Ernst Rainer Söldmann was born on the eve of the Great War – the last but one, which dug itself into trenches – to a respectable greengrocer's wife somewhere on the outskirts of the beautiful city of Dresden, before, that is, it was reduced to rubble and glassy pools of molten sand. There had been no hereditary taint in the family, but a circus by the unlikely name of ‘Rancini' had passed through the area some months previously, so naturally there was talk when he turned out a midget and his hair much darker than Mr
Söldmann's chestnut curls. Little is known about Ernst's childhood, or whether he was apprenticed and to whom. One imagines that the humiliations of school and a puberty devoid of prospects left their mark upon his fledgling soul; in any case he left home at the tender age of seventeen, a knapsack over one shoulder and a maternal kiss on his cheek.

Söldmann's itinerant years are hard to reconstruct. Once upon a time Germans had made a tradition of them – the
Wander
-years described in Goethe's
Wilhelm Meister
–but by the time young Ernst took to the road he would have been perceived as little more than a vagrant. He washed up in Berlin around the autumn of 1932, just in time to become inspired by the noxious invective of the moustachioed chancellor-to-be and his brown-shirted flock of devotees. After the
Machtergreifung
(a phrase only imperfectly rendered into English as the National Socialists' ‘seizure of power'), Söldmann attempted to join their ranks. The Party wouldn't have him. It prided itself on being a racial vanguard and would not have its ranks diluted by degenerates, turncoats or opportunists. It certainly had no truck with swarthy midgets, Goebbels' pre-eminent position not withstanding. Söldmann tried the party headquarters in Charlottenburg, then Kreuzberg, those in Wedding and finally in Berlin-Buch, on the northern outskirts of the city. Not one registrar even handed him so much as the application form. Instead they laughed in his face and made jibes familiar to Söldmann since his earliest childhood. At the Buch headquarters they sent him on, not entirely in jest, to report at the famed psychiatric clinic that had made its name by investigating homosexuals and other deviants since the middle of the previous century. Voluntary sterilization was heartily recommended.