Pavel & I (39 page)

Three days into the wait, and Sonia's patience was wearing thin. She needed to know whether Pavel was still alive. If he was dead, there was no point in staying in Franzi's apartment any longer; she would clear out, attempt to leave the city. Head west, or maybe southwest, into the American zone. Far away from all this.

She waited until Anders fell asleep after lunch, and dialled Fosko's number. The electricity remained unreliable and the line went dead a number of times. Eventually she got through, counted the rings. A woman picked up after the fifth.

‘Margaret Fosko speaking,' she said.

Sonia had forgotten about the Colonel's wife.

‘Is the Colonel in?' she asked in English.

‘No, he's away. Can I take a message?'

‘When will he be back?'

‘Not for a few days, I'm afraid. Who am I talking to?'

‘Have you seen a man in the house. An American?'

‘Who are you?'

‘Dark hair. Slender. Have you seen him?'

The woman mulled it over. Sonia could hear her thinking down the line.

‘You are German, aren't you?' she asked. ‘Could you help me with a word? Somebody used it in a conversation with me recently, and I just cannot work out what it means. He was saying something about “Fosko's
Hu-re
”. Do you have any idea what that means?'

Sonia hung up. She scrambled for her cigarettes, then for a book of matches. At last: smoke in her lungs. She kept it there for as long as she could stand it.

‘
Fosko's hoor.
'

She wondered who had described her to the Colonel's wife like that.

The rest of the day she spent stretched out next to the boy's sickness, thinking about the past. It was the final months of the war that stayed with her. She remembered the air-raid sirens, sounding all hours of the night. The weary calm with which one collected the pre-packed suitcase; one's mattress and blanket; the bottle of water to moisten one's lips. She had hated the shelter, that forced community of neighbours, always a
Blockwart
amongst them, the party's spy, egging on their conversation. People eating, talking, farting in the dark, fear playing havoc with their bowels; half-whispered apologies and the giggling of girls. Sonia would sit alone in her corner, unloved for her pride and her family's supposed wealth, and patiently await the all-clear.

She remembered ascending the stairs afterwards, dust motes dancing in the morning sun. It might have been April by then, the Russians drawing closer every day. Long queues at the butcher's, casting jealous glances at those who had finished their shopping before it was disrupted by yet another air raid. People falling into a hush whenever they spotted someone with a party pin ahead, or a patrol of coppers. Picking through their words to determine whether they had said something they had not meant to say. Their shadows shrinking in the late-morning sun.

Sonia remembered, too, the propaganda flyers outlining what the Russians did to the women along the moving front. She found them
posted on advertising pillars and lampposts; tore them off sometimes and took them home to peruse themat her leisure. The flyers were fond of facts: the age, whether the woman had been married or not, and how many times – it all boiled down to numbers. Three in one night for a virgin of sixteen. Seven in an hour for a mother of two, the last one a Mongol who had the daughter next. A war widow endured twenty-three before slitting her own throat, the Führer's name upon her lips. A girl of fourteen, a girl of twelve. A girl of seven. There was, to Sonia, a strange fascination about the flyers; they brought the war home somehow, and mixed it with the mystery of sex. Sonia remembered hunting for them on her city strolls. She read themand broke into goose bumps; blushed at the thought of bodies exposed.

This was before Berlin was taken. This much she could articulate to herself, and with something like nostalgia. She stopped short when it came to picturing what happened next.

The boy beside her groaned in his sleep. She rose and wiped his brow with a dampened cloth.

She never spoke about the rapes. Who could blame her? It had been a trying time. Her reticence was not caused by a failure of memory, or by what psychiatrists call repression. Her first, in any case, she remembered quite vividly. He took time to close the door, secured the latch with great care, and proceeded to undress before he had so much as laid a hand on her. In this he was different from many others who took their women standing up against some kitchen table, trousers around their ankles. Whole queues formed like this, man standing after man with a loosened belt. Sonia's first scorned such rush, found time even to roll up his socks and stick them into his boots' grease-slick shaft. He had spindly white legs, skinny white buttocks, untouched by the sun, save for the feet which showed signs
of some tanning. Out of this meagre carriage grew a solid body the colour of dried earth, sunburned and knotty like a bulbous root. She had never seen anything quite so grotesque.

Afterwards, when he stepped back into his underwear, she looked on in wonder as he carefully pulled away the elastic and reached in to arrange himself to the best of his comfort. Only then did he step into his trousers and pull his soldier's shirt over his head. His face, as she lay there and bled, was serenely peaceful and he rubbed his neck and cheeks with his palms, delighted at his good health. Is it a wonder then that she came to hate men – all, that is, apart from Pavel who ‘snuck into her heart' (a fine phrase that, for is not all love thievery?) while her hatred lay slumbering, huddled inward perhaps from too much cold.

There you have it, her story. She hated, she loved, and of the rapes she would not speak. Myself, I have no such compunction. After all, you have a right to know.

Sonia did one more thing that day. Idly, sitting over the remains of their dinner, she unrolled the first few metres of the reel of microfilm, where it was wound a little sloppily. She soon found out why. A metre and a half in, the film came loose in her hand where it had been cut in half. Sonia sat and studied the cut at either end and came to the conclusion that they did not match up. Someone had removed part of the film, literally cut it out of its middle. It wasn't clear to her what difference it made. She wound the film back onto the reel as tightly as she could manage, and fastened it with a rubber band. Then she leaned over the sleeping boy, and fed the monkey. Outside it had warmed up enough to snow a little, though soon the skies would be clear again, and a thin crust of ice would form upon the powdery lightness of virgin snow.

Midday on the third of January, precisely ten days after his somewhat hasty departure, Colonel Stuart Melchior Fosko pulled into the driveway of his Berlin villa in a newly requisitioned Volkswagen Beetle whose cramped space pinned him awkwardly against the curve of its wooden wheel. He got out, walked over to the front door, unlocked it, and stood in his hallway, a carpet bag in one hand, and the stump of a cigar in the other. There was no answer to his call of greeting. His wife had left for England after breakfast, the driver had taken the rest of the day off, the men were busy with their routine duties, and I was too preoccupied with Pavel to take notice of the somewhat crabby ‘Hello' that rang through the upstairs of the house. In fact, I only became aware of Fosko's return when I went up to fetch some beers a quarter of an hour later, and stumbled over the overcoat that he had carelessly thrown on the floor. As I searched the downstairs rooms for a sign of my master, I chanced upon a trail of discarded clothes that led me up the stairs and down the hallway to the main bathroom. The door stood ajar, and I found the Colonel, buck naked, testing the water with one chubby toe. His penis cringed in the relative cold of the upstairs rooms. I was impressed that water pipes and boiler were working impeccably.

‘Ah, Peterson,' he sang out. I felt immediately that he was somehow very angry. ‘How good of you to come.'

He eased one leg into the bath, then the other, went down into a crouch and stood for a while, his buttocks a half-inch from the steaming water.

‘I'm sorry, Colonel. I was down in the basement.'

He finally settled in the bath. The tub was not made for a man his size, and his stomach and hips stuck to its sides. The combination of electric lighting and white tiles brought out his flesh's clammy pallor. He reminded me of a cuttlefish.

‘So, how is our guest? Well, I trust.'

‘Yes. As instructed.'

‘Did he spill the beans yet?'

‘Beans, sir?'

‘Don't play dim now, Peterson. Did he tell you what he knows?'

‘Some of it.'

‘Some? What have you been doing?'

‘You told me not to hurt him.'

‘I told you I didn't want any visible damage.'

‘Ah. I must have misunderstood.'

‘Perhaps I should see to him myself. Light me a cigar, will you? There's a darling.'

I walked over to the cigar box next to the sink, selected one and cut off its end, keeping my back turned towards the Colonel to hide my agitation. My heart was pounding with the realization that, very soon now, Pavel would be lost to me forever.

‘All I need is one more night, sir,' I told him as I passed over cigar and matches. ‘I'll have something for you in the morning.'

Fosko studied me attentively, blowing out a plume of blue smoke.

‘One more night, Peterson. After that, he's mine. It's time we stopped mollycoddling the bastard.'

He asked me to stay around until he was done with his bath, and help him dry off. I was working on his left leg when the phone rang in the study next door. Naked as he was, Fosko walked over to it. I followed, towel in hand, like a faithful valet. Truth be told, I had a premonition about the call: it rang to the final act. The Colonel answered with his usual air of self-possession.

‘Colonel Fosko speaking.'

‘
Endlich. Sie sind zuröck.
'

‘Who is this?
Wer da?
'

‘Paulchen.'

‘The head of the arsewipes?
Kinder-Gauner-Chef
?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Hold on, I'll put my man on the line.
Warten.
' The Colonel waved me over and handed me the phone. ‘Your German's better than mine. It's Paulchen. The boy mobster. Ask him what he wants.'

I held the phone to my ear and introduced myself formally. A strange three-way conversation ensued.

‘
Peterson hier. Was wollen Sie?
'

‘
Ich weiβ wo der Film ist.
'

‘He says he knows where the film is.'

‘Well, where is it?'

‘
Wo ist er?
'

‘
Die Frau hat ihn. Sonia.
'

‘He says Sonia has it.'

‘Dear Lord. I know that myself. But where's Sonia?'

‘
Wissen Sie wo Sonia ist?
'

‘
Nein. Aber ich kann sie Ihnen besorgen.
'

‘He says he can get her for us.'