Pavel & I (34 page)

Sonia woke early that morning, anticipating the sun by several hours. The room lay dark around her, its quiet punctured only by the monkey's snore. There was, in the first moment of her waking, no memory yet of the previous day's events. She stretched out an arm and stroked the pillow next to her; rubbed her eyes with the base of one palm. When her mind came into focus, she thought first of all of their kiss; held off all other thought until she had savoured it, the touch of his fingers at the nape of her neck. Then it came to her that the man who had kissed her might be dead; might be beaten, bleeding, spitting teeth. She pushed back the blankets reluctantly, found her slippers and pulled a coat over her nightdress. Outside in the corridor, all was quiet; Christmas morning and not a shadow in the stairwell. She returned to her bedroom for a moment to pull on tights and two pairs of socks. Then she climbed down the stairs and put an ear to Pavel's door.

It was his smell that drew her, though she could hardly have said why. There was a vague notion in her mind of lying down in his bed and wallowing in his smell before it dissipated in the cold. She pictured herself, supine across the mattress, sniffing at his underwear, and almost laughed.

‘Oh Pavel,' she whispered. ‘The things you make me do.'

Her eyes were dry when she said it. She opened the door.

Inside she found the boy, asleep and wrapped in Pavel's blankets. He was wearing a coat made of wolf's fur, much too big for him, its buttons carved out of wood. Above him, at the window, hung a frozen noose in silent invitation. On Pavel's desk Sonia noticed two camera lenses, a pair of scissors, and a military flashlight. She wondered what use they had been put to, if any. She glanced in the waste basket, but found it empty save for a crumpled page of typewritten notes.

The boy was hard to wake. She shook him twice, but he barely opened an eye. His brow was hot and clammy. Sonia gathered him up in her arms, turned to carry him downstairs, then stopped and laid him down on the bed once more. It had occurred to her that she would never return to this room. In Pavel's closet she found one of his shirts, worn and wrinkled. It had been bleached too often and was threadbare at the elbows. She wrapped it around her neck like a shawl, and picked up the boy once more. When she closed the door behind them, he nestled his head against her breast.

‘Don't you get comfortable there,' she mumbled.

He was much heavier than she had anticipated.

Upstairs, she tucked Anders into her bed, along with a hot-water bottle. His hat had slipped down over his brow; she made to move it, but found herself reluctant to touch the boy more than was necessary. The boy's teeth were dug into his lips, dark with old blood. She stood for a moment, listening to him breathe through one half-clogged nostril; stooped to lay a hanky next to his grubby hand. Then, another pot of water on the cooker, Sonia stepped over to her display cupboard and retrieved the china teapot. Inside, a pair of Nordic socks. She placed them on top of the dining table, ground coffee beans in a little wooden mill, brewed up. It filled the apartment with the most wonderful smell.

He came in just as she was taking her first sip. It scalded her gums, it was so hot. She must have forgotten to lock the door behind her when she had returned with the boy. The man who entered was hardly more than a boy himself, a ruddy-faced youth in a fur-lined leather coat and similar cap. His eyes, Sonia noted, were almost transparent. It was as though they had been drawn into his face with watercolours; their blue bled into their whites. In his hand he held a gun. It was pointed at Sonia.

‘You have fresh coffee?'

His German was good, but she immediately knew him for a Russian. There was not a woman in Berlin who didn't know the accent.

‘You forgot your uniform,' she said.

He slid a palmover his expensive coat. ‘It is Colonel's sector. Better not be noticed.'

He glanced around the apartment and whistled appreciatively when he saw the piano. ‘Nice
Klavier
for
kurva.
' The way he said it, she did not think he meant it as an insult.

‘What do you want?'

‘Information. We want to know where is Söldmann. And merchandise.'

‘Get out.'

He wagged his chin as though he was looking over a horse he was thinking of buying. In his left cheek there bulged a wad of tobacco.

‘How about cup of coffee? It is cold morning.'

‘I will fetch you one.'

She rose from her chair and walked over to the kitchen. As she walked, she drew her coat tight around her frame. The presence of a Russian in her living space made her uncomfortable. It brought back memories she had long thought banished.

He followed close behind her. When she reached around for a cup, he gently stopped her other hand from clasping a knife. Her eyes appraised the frying pans for their weight and heft while she
poured sugar into a dish, but he caught her glance and tutted his disapproval.

‘You better talk,' he urged her. ‘One of our men is missing. If he's dead, we will kill you.' He shrugged like it was too bad.

‘I don't know what you are talking about.'

‘
I don't know what you are talking about.
You sound like movie.' He spat, tobacco discolouring his phlegm. It sat brown and viscous upon her kitchen tiles. ‘These days, movies full of people who don't know what talk is about. And half hour later they shoot one another.'

He looked at her as though he expected a response; some sort of verdict on the state of cinema. Dinner-party talk in front of a loaded gun. He held it waist-high, the barrel pointing at her abdomen.

Sonia ignored him, threw a dish towel over the gob of spit at her feet. She took hold of cup and saucer, the dish full of sugar, and moved to step past him, back into the dining room. The Russian waited until she was level with him, then pushed her back into the kitchen. Her back collided with a cupboard door and slammed it shut.

‘Talk,
kurva,
' he said. His eyes sat like marbles in his knotty head.

‘Talk, or I'll make you. You fucked Soöldmann. We have pictures.'

It might have been her fear, but she thought she saw his hands inch towards his fly.

The boy saved her. He was there, all of a sudden, pointing a gun with both of his hands. His feverish cheek burned quite as bright as the Russian's.

‘Leave her be.'

The voice quivered in its childish timbre. He might have done better, she thought, not to speak.

The Russian began to turn, first one foot and then the other, shoulders bulky under his leather coat. His pistol was still in his hand. On his lips, an affable smile.

‘Boy,' he said. ‘You want no trouble with me. Not over her. She's no good.'

He said no more, because that's when her frying pan caught him at the back of his skull, twisting her wrist upon impact. He crumpled like a leaf.

‘Help me tie him,' she ordered Anders. They strapped him to a chair with some belts and scarves. The blood ran freely from the Russian's head and dyed his blond hair ginger. Up close she could smell the tobacco on his breath and in his sweat.

Quickly, with new-found clarity, Sonia grabbed the Nordic socks from the dining table and unwrapped their content. In her rage she almost burned it: threw it in the oven, and watched it burn. Instead, she started pulling on clothes and ordered the boy to pack a bag for her.

‘Take all valuables. Two pounds of coffee, my cigarettes and underwear, especially the silks. The winter coats and all the stockings you can find. The bedding, if you can fit it somewhere. Don't forget the silver cutlery.'

The boy stared at her climbing into her tweed skirt, then did as he was bidden. They were ready to go in less than half an hour.

‘Will he freeze to death?' the boy asked at one point, pointing at the Russian. The monkey had climbed onto his lap and was chewing on his coat.

‘I don't know.'

She paused. The boy looked at her with burning cheek. ‘The monkey might eat him.'

Sonia stood and pictured it. It made up her mind.

‘Stick it into a potato sack. We're taking it along. Hit it over the head if it gives you any trouble.'

Then, with their suitcases already waiting on the landing, Sonia dialled Fosko's number. He answered and immediately fell into a rage:

‘I told you to leave me alone for a few days.'

‘I have the microfilm,' she said.

‘What?'

‘The microfilm. I have it. Don't bother looking for me. I am long gone.'

He considered this for a moment.

‘What do you want?'

‘I want Pavel,' she said. ‘Unharmed.

‘Harm him,' she said, ‘and I'll burn the fucking film.'

‘You'll trade the film for Pavel?'

‘Yes.'

‘When?'

‘I'll be in touch.'

‘God damn it, Sonia. When?'

‘When I'm ready. Unharmed, you hear me? I don't take damaged goods.'

She threw down the phone and yanked the line out of its socket.

‘And now?' asked the boy.

‘Now we run like hell.'

Her last glance, as they cleared the door, belonged to the piano. She would have loved to play it one last time. Inside the bag she had thrown over one shoulder the monkey started breathing deep and heavy. She prayed to God it would hold off shitting until they'd got to where they needed to go.

They burst out of the building in Seelingstrasse, ran down the street, rounded the corner, changed sides a half-block down and took refuge in a doorway, piling up their bags and suitcases before them. After two or three minutes' wait it seemed evident that they were not being followed. Quickly, they gathered up their things again, walked a few blocks to the main street and caught the bus in the direction of
Wilmersdorf, the driver's face pockmarked and covered in Vaseline against the cold. After a twenty-minute ride they got off, doubled back on themselves on the subway, then jumped onto a second bus, headed for Potsdamer Platz. The snot in Anders' nose had long since frozen and formed a clammy slug upon his upper lip. Anders put his tongue to it a few times, probing its dimensions and flavour, until Sonia caught him at it and wrinkled her mouth in disgust.

‘Sorry,' he mumbled.

She shrugged her shoulders and turned to stare out of the window, her face growing hard whenever they passed a uniformed soldier. A grubby old man pushed between them from behind and tried to sell them his record collection of
Volkslieder.
They got off the bus a few blocks south of Friedrichstrasse. Anders still had no idea where they were going. All he understood was that Sonia was trying to save Pavel. He followed her meek as a lamb.

They walked for maybe ten minutes, their suitcases banging against their knees, then stopped in front of a building, or rather half of one. The other half had been bombed away with astonishing precision. The rubble still stood more than man-high, pipes and cables sticking out of the brick. Up above, a cut-in-half living room clad in floral wallpaper, its cut-in-half floorboards sticking out ragged beyond the edge. Anders half expected to see a cut-in-half maid, serving out half a Christmas lunch. His fever was making him giddy.

Sonia chose a bell and rang it without hesitation. Anders saw a net curtain move in one of the windows of the ground-floor apartment. Moments later the door was opened. A fat-arsed whore stood waiting for them on her apartment threshold. She was wearing a dressing gown and sucking on a cigarette's soggy stump.

‘Franzi. Are you alone?'

‘You? What the hell are you doing here?'

‘Are you alone, Franzi? You don't have a customer in there, do you?'

The whore shook her head.

‘No. I stopped working at home a few days ago. Can't afford the heating.' She looked Sonia up and down. ‘What the hell happened to you?'

‘Let us in.' Sonia flashed a wad of dollar bills that she pulled from out of her breast pocket. Without another word, the fat-arsed whore opened the door and led them into her apartment.

Inside it smelled of cheap alcohol and sweat. The woman had been having her breakfast:
Ersatzkaffee,
a quarter-bottle of schnapps, and what looked like a corner of mouldy
Speck,
all laid out on a patchwork of tablecloth riddled with cigarette burns.

‘Make yourselves right at home. I'd put the kettle on, but I'm out of coffee.'

Sonia got right down to business. Stood calmly at the centre of the shabby room and issued her orders. It reminded Anders of Pavel, his encounter with Paulchen's gun.

‘I want you to leave town,' she said to the whore. ‘Just for a few weeks. I need the apartment.'

The woman laughed. ‘Oh yeah? Just for a few weeks? That's a good one.'

‘I mean it, Franzi. How much will it cost?'

Sonia counted off fifty dollars and placed them next to the schnapps bottle. The bills looked crisp and tidy against the ruin of the tablecloth.