Pavel & I (36 page)

All this on Christmas Day, 1946. At this point, Pavel and I, we weren't yet talking – a dozen cigarettes ground into the basement tiles – and I was ignorant of Sonia's flight and the pathologists' melancholy labour. I found out after, through persistent questions and the reading of stony faces. 1947 it was by then, the smells of spring. One might have thought spring would thaw it out, our Berlin, but the city remained bitter and hard, a gut-shot Medea, crouching on her children's grave.

The boy's fever had fallen overnight, but he remained in no condition to leave the apartment. She made it clear to him that she would go to the black market that day; he could advise her on whom to approach or choose not to, but either way she would go. He held out for half an hour during which she made sure to mention Pavel's name half a dozen times. Then he spilled.

‘Paulchen,' he said. ‘You could go and see Paulchen.' He gave her an address back in the English sector.

‘What do I tell him?'

‘Give him this, and tell him I'm sorry.' He passed over his gun. ‘If anyone can find a projector, he can. On the quiet, too.'

She nodded, rummaged around for a pair of scissors, then cut off a few centimetres of microfilm so Paulchen could check the width. She put the reel back into the desk drawer and turned the key on it.

‘Don't go picking the lock. We both want the same thing.'

The boy made no sign of having heard and watched her gather her things, teeth busy with his dirty nails. She was almost out the door when he stopped her.

‘You promised me you wouldn't fall in love with Pavel.' He had to say it twice: his voice broke.

‘So?'

‘Do you love him now?'

She wet her lips, then nodded. He shuddered and ran a hand across his face in a terribly adult gesture of grief.

‘When I last saw him he was carrying Schlo', and Schlo' was dead, and I couldn't even tell him I was there.'

‘You'll see him again soon.' She forced herself to sound confident. ‘I promise.'

He looked at her from between his fingers. ‘You're not like him. You don't keep your promises.'

Sonia had no reply. She stepped out into the hallway and locked the apartment door behind her.

Sonia walked the long way to the boys' hideaway, hoping she would not be asked for her papers as she entered the British sector and hurrying down streets she had fled only the previous day. When she got to the building, her scarf drawn high into her face, she stood and watched it for a while to make sure it was not under observation. In the end the cold subdued her caution. She approached.

The building's door was framed by man-sized piles of rubble, snow-choked and angular. Beyond the unlocked door, a glum, battered staircase wrapped itself around an empty elevator shaft. Its banister had been stripped for firewood, along with half the steps. The walls were spotted with bullet holes and angry scrawls, chalky etchings of a thousand cocks. She climbed past them to the top floor as she had been instructed. A sentry sat planted before the attic door, shivering in a
Wehrmacht
coat. He was a boy of twelve, with filthy hair and an army knife on his belt. The left side of his face showed signs of a recent beating.

‘What do you want?' he snarled.

‘I need to talk to your boss.'

‘He's busy.'

Sonia had no time for this, and pulled the gun out of her bag.

‘I'm just returning something he mislaid.'

The gun's barrel pointed to his feet, but the boy complied without need for further threat. He opened the door.

‘Some cooze to see you,' he hollered ahead, ‘and she's packing.' The words sat awkward in his child-mouth. They may have been recent acquisitions.

She brushed past the boy and stepped into the attic, noted the wall with its map and Hollywood pin-ups, the rows of mats and blankets, the well-stocked coal bucket and smell of corned beef. A dozen cocktail glasses sat in a crate near the window, next to a cabbage and a cast-iron casserole all bent out of shape. Paulchen, too, was in a sorry state, the face bruised, his arm in a cast, and some teeth missing, right up front, where one took notice. He sat upon his armchair, feet up on a ragged ottoman, and an iron cross pinned to his scarf. There were no other boys around.

‘Anders asked me to return this to you.' She indicated the gun, but made no move to hand it over.

‘Give it here.'

‘Later. I need something from you.'

‘Oh yeah?'

‘Yes. And I can pay for it.'

‘How much?'

She placed thirty dollars onto the ottoman, along with a silver brooch.

‘This, for starters. My watch, when I have what I want.' She held it up to the window's light, so he could see the stones were real. The boy with the knife whistled in appreciation. Paulchen's face did not betray any emotion. Perhaps it hurt to move its muscles.

‘What do you need?' he asked.

‘Some sort of viewing device for film.' She placed the snipped-off negative next to the money. ‘I brought you this so you'll know what size.'

He looked at it without moving in his chair. She wished she had a way of telling what he was thinking.

‘Okay,' he said. ‘This might take a little while. Where do I find you?'

‘How long?'

‘I don't know. Film like this, it's used by the military. I'll have to pull some strings. Could be a while. You think you can get it faster elsewhere, you just go ahead and try.'

She paused, then nodded her acceptance.

‘Where do I find you?' he asked again.

She pointed to the telephone that was standing on the floor next to his armchair. ‘Does that work?'

He nodded yes. ‘Bought the line off a doctor downstairs. He said he didn't need a phone if he was going to starve.'

‘I'll call every day. The faster you get it, the more I'm willing to pay. What's your number?'

Somewhat reluctantly he gave it to her. She placed the gun on the floor and turned to leave. As she was walking out, Sonia reminded herself that this was where Anders had lived for many months. It was a shabby, ugly space. No wonder some of it had rubbed off.

Sonia went shopping on the way back, making sure to leave the sector before she went looking for a butcher's shop. The queue took a good hour, and when she finally made it to the counter, the butcher was suspicious about how many ration cards she produced. He held them up against the light with bloodied fingers to check they weren't forgeries, then accepted them along with the dollar bills she'd stuck between the cards. Behind the counter sat a vat full of pig's trotters. A snout stood upright on the counter scales, blond hairs cresting the pale and puckered flesh. It reminded Sonia of the day, during the battle for Berlin, when dawn had revealed a dead horse stretched across the
sidewalk just outside her building. She and her neighbours had picked it clean. Ran out of their basement hideaways with paper scissors and cutthroat razors; cut chunks out of its body until all that remained was its bones, its hoofs and a tangle of entrails. Young girls running down the street with a strip of horse flesh in each fist, happy; their arms bloodied to the elbow. Sonia hadn't entered a butcher's shop since without picturing the scene. She wondered whether she ever would.

‘You want all this?'

‘However much you've got. But no trotters.'

She walked home with five pounds of liver, a side of streaky bacon and a big slab of wurst. A bakery sold her a two-kilo loaf of black bread and a dozen rolls. There was a risk that they would remember such an affluent customer, but this way she would not have to leave the flat until Paulchen had found her a projector.

She could only hope that Fosko would not kill Pavel out of sheer frustration before then.

When Sonia was gone, Paulchen reached inside his coat pocket and produced a piece of paper with a telephone number. He sat staring at it for a little while, then reached down to the phone with his good arm and pulled it up onto his lap. It rang four or five times before a woman picked up.

‘Margaret Fosko speaking,' she said. ‘How can I help you?'

‘
Ich moöchte mit dem Herrn Colonel sprechen,
' Paulchen said formally.

‘Oh, I'm afraid I don't speak any German. The Colonel is out.'

‘
Herr Fosko?
'

‘He's out.
Aus.
Won't be back for a week or so.
Eins Woche.
You understand?'

‘
Ja.
'

‘Can I ask who's calling?'

‘
Was?
'

‘Who are you? Your name?'

‘
Sagen Sie ihm ich hab' seine Hure.
His woman. I has his woman.'

‘Well,' said the voice, ‘I'll make sure to tell him if I see him before I leave.'

‘Who'd you call?' Gunnar wanted to know once he'd rung off.

‘The English Colonel.'

‘The ped-i-rast? Why you call him, after what they did to us?' Paulchen closed his eyes. He remembered how they had burst into the flat, four or five men; Woland, on guard, pistol-whipped across the face. They wore no uniforms but made no effort to disguise their English voices; kicked over the Christmas tree, barked questions, slapped faces. Remembered, too, how one of them, a big bruiser, broke his arm against the corner of the windowsill. He'd lined it up and kicked it through, the way one breaks a piece of wood. The arm hanging at an angle, blood rushing into the break.

‘You hear anything, you call this number,' the Brit had told him with the thickest of accents. ‘You hold out on the Colonel, and I'll come back for you.'

He'd stuffed a thumb through the gap in Paulchen's front teeth and trapped his tongue underneath. ‘Don't think we won't know. Berlin is our city now.'

Paulchen just lying there, trying to scream, his tongue trapped in his own mouth.

‘The Colonel, he will pay us more than the woman can,' he told Gunnar.

The boy nodded appreciatively. ‘Smart play, boss. Do you want me to go looking for a projector anyway?'

‘Don't bother. A projector like that, that's military issue. We don't want to be messing with that.

‘The last thing we want,' he said, ‘is the Russians come calling too.' Said it, and sat back in his chair, scratching the skin near the rim of
his cast, wishing to wash his hands of the matter, and for Fosko's speedy return.

This is what it came down to then: a long wait for the Colonel. And while Pavel and I sat trading words, the city reclaimed them all, the boy and the woman and the gang of child toughs, prised them loose from the excitements of espionage, and returned them to the calmer rhythms of survival: the prerogatives of food and drink, the patient feeding of their ovens' blaze; ration cards and the constant trips to the water pump, a life by the bucket load, and always the pain of the freeze. For Paulchen and his crew it was a time of healing, and a return to the routines of the black market. Tinned sardines for butter, the butter for bicycle parts, the bicycle for a travel pass, the pass back into sardines, a profit margin of eight hundred per cent. Once daily, Sonia's phone call, a good half of them truncated by the whims of Allied electricity; a terse answer in the negative; her impotent threat that she would not wait much longer. In her flat, too, a period of calm, Anders sick and she herself ablaze with cabin fever. They sat together in silence, awkward in the roles that fate had dealt them; then turned to talk, from boredomand the need to understand the other's love for Pavel. It started over dinner one night, an awkward question and overblown answer, range-finding on the battlefield of their relationship. I don't know whether they ever worked themout, their feelings for one another. In this perhaps they kept to convention: mother and son, forever held hostage by the cruelties of birthing.