Restitution (28 page)

‘They ran into a patrol.’ Gregor wondered whether Jacob had recovered and travelled on to Persia. More likely the NKVD had sent him to a camp too.

Vavilov held out his glass for a refill. ‘That’s what tends to happen to people who associate with me. Deportation. Loss.’ Another man might have sounded maudlin; Vavilov
sounded matter-of-fact. Gregor recharged their glasses.

‘I don’t understand you.’ Gregor drank his brandy. ‘The more you tell me about yourself the more of a cipher you become.’

Vavilov’s eyes refocused on Gregor and his words were studiedly neutral again. ‘There’s probably not much of me to understand. People have often made the mistake of taking me
far too seriously. Give me some sunflowers in a field or a swan on a pond and that’s all I need.’ He looked towards the window. ‘I always thought I could keep myself free of some
of the misery by distancing myself from the ordinary human ties. But when I see what’s happened to this city and Warsaw before it and all the others before that I accept that no man living in
the middle of the twentieth century in the middle of Europe can possibly be free.’

‘What’s so wonderful about personal freedom?’ Gregor asked, the spirits emboldening him. ‘What’s life without other people?’

Vavilov leaned back into his chair. ‘I was like you when I was a boy. I was optimistic’ He gave a faint smile. ‘It amazes me that you still seem to have some optimism. God
knows why.’ A cloud must have passed over the sun. The room grew dark. ‘I grew up a happy child. My father was a veterinarian and we lived in a country house just outside the town of
Cluj, then part of Hungary. After the first war Cluj was given to Romania and we were forced out. We moved to Budapest. We’d lost a lot, but we were still together and my father planned to
start a new veterinary practice and I was to study art.’ Vavilov’s eyes narrowed. ‘One day in 1920 my mother went out to buy bread. It was the time of the White Terror. Some
drunken militiamen came out of an inn and attacked her. Just for being on the streets. Apparently they thought she was Jewish. She wasn’t, in fact.’ The lids half lowered over his eyes.
‘They kicked in her skull and she died of a brain infection a week later.’

Vavilov was speaking so rapidly Gregor had to strain to catch the words.

‘My father seemed to retreat into his own world after that. Stopped eating. Just sat staring out of the window. I tried to help him but I couldn’t. Eventually he died too. I decided
I would never allow myself to feel pain like that again. I moved to Vienna and devoted myself to . . . myself.’ Vavilov raised an eyebrow. ‘I’d always spoken several languages
well: we spoke German and Magyar at home, my mother taught me Polish because she’d grown up in Cracow and I’d had a Russian governess for a few years. So I could adapt myself to
whichever city best suited me. I was entirely free.’

‘And yet you have accepted some human obligations, haven’t you?’ Gregor could not believe he was daring to say this but something pushed him on. ‘You’ve saved
people.’

Vavilov raised an eyebrow. ‘The brandy is making you sentimental, my friend.’

‘I remember East Prussia,’ Gregor said. ‘I remember what happened at that big house.’

The rest of the intelligence unit had wanted to question the village pastor, rumoured to be anti-Communist and unrepentant. Gregor had muttered something about clergy not being
his area of expertise and found himself walking alone for the first time in months. Ahead of him lay a red-brick manor house. He checked Vavilov’s list. The house wasn’t listed. This
family, whoever they were, had somehow fallen through a crack in the system.

Behind him he heard singing. Another wave of soldiers passing through. They wouldn’t be able to resist this manor. The family might have been spared Vavilov’s attentions but the
alternative was probably worse.

Gregor found his legs pulling him into a run.

The young woman and old man were plucking chickens in the kitchen. Why hadn’t they left? Fools if they thought the stories about the Red Army were just rumours. ‘Get out!’ He
waved a gun at them. ‘No packing, just go!’

They stared at him, feathers floating round them like snow.

‘I must get blankets for the baby.’ The woman roused herself and ran for the stairs.

Gregor pushed past them into the orchard. He’d done all he could.

A scream from the first floor told him he’d been too late. They’d got the woman. He crept round the side of the house and in through the back door. The child lay unattended in a baby
carriage in the hallway. He was powerless to stop whatever they were doing to the adults but the kid might have a chance. He picked it up and grabbed one of its blankets and ran through the orchard
to a farm worker’s cottage where an old woman rose from her fireside seat with a wail, holding out her arms for the child. Gregor pulled her coat from the peg on the back of the door and
threw it at her. ‘Leave now.’

He felt a blade at the back of his neck. ‘No, Jean-Luc!’ the old woman screeched. ‘One of us!’

The blade moved a millimetre. ‘In that uniform?’

‘He came to warn us. Let him go.’ The knife dropped. Gregor put a hand to his neck.

‘I thought you were like the others.’ The young man spoke good German but the French accent was still marked. He must be a French prisoner-of-war sent out here to work in the fields
who’d found kind treatment in this isolated, almost manless, community.

‘Just go – they’re already in the big house!’ Gregor made for the door, anger and pity so muddled together inside him that he thought he might vomit.

Despite everything he was still German, still one of them.

Vavilov was waiting for him outside the farmhouse where they’d set up base. In the gloom the red tip of his cigarette looked like a single baleful eye. Vavilov’s
own eyes were sleepy as ever. He might have been taking a stroll on his way out to dinner. ‘Did you detain all the family members?’

‘Not the child.’ Gregor looked down at the snow. ‘And they got the woman and old man.’

Vavilov threw the cigarette stub into the snow where it hissed briefly. ‘That’s not your concern, Comrade. You just provide intelligence.’

‘There you are,’ Vavilov said, when Gregor had finished reminding him. ‘I warned you not to let sentiment cloud your judgement.’

‘And yet you let some of those people go,’ Gregor said. ‘You knew they didn’t deserve execution or imprisonment and you let them escape.’

‘I arrested a fair number, Comrade. And we shot a few of the worst Fascist aristocrats.’

‘But you never touched the innocent – not if you could help it. And when we were near Alexanderhof you made sure I saw the list with the von Matkes’ names on it. You
didn’t stop me from going ahead to warn them because that’s what you wanted me to do.’ He was almost shouting now. ‘You used your free will.’

Vavilov’s face was so still he might have been turned to stone. But the pupils of his eyes seemed to have expanded as he listened. ‘The Catholics must have got to you in Poland or
somewhere else, Comrade,’ he said finally. ‘Your mother would have laughed at all this talk of the innocent and the guilty and free will.’ He swallowed the last of his brandy.

‘Tell me more about my mother,’ Gregor said, when a moment had passed. ‘What happened to her when she left Brest?’

‘For a while I managed to keep her safe in a labour camp in the Urals.’ Vavilov’s voice seemed to be coming from far away. ‘It was hard but at least she was doing indoor
work and the food was regular.’

‘Did you see her there?’ He could hardly get the words out. His mother – labouring in a camp thousands of miles from civilization, beyond all contact, all help. It was no more
than he’d feared for the last five years, but hearing confirmation of her fate was shattering.

‘It would have been too dangerous for her to see someone like me. I fell under suspicion, too, within a month of her arriving in the Urals. Then they sent her on somewhere else and I
couldn’t trace her.’

‘So you came to find me . . . there . . . instead.’

‘I found you by fluke. I was in Kolyma looking for Eva.’

Gregor found his hands clenching the arms of his chair at the mention of the place. Even its name could conjure up the stink of unwashed bodies and sour breath.

‘By then I’d managed to ingratiate myself with the Soviets. The official reason for my visit to the Magadan peninsula was recruitment. They gave me all the files of Poles in that
lager.
I had no idea that Paul Smolinsky was Gregor Fischer until I saw you walking across the yard to the hospital and something about you seemed familiar – I’d seen you before,
back in Warsaw, with Eva.’

‘You’d seen me with my mother?’

‘In a department store one Saturday morning. I was there buying braces or something equally trivial. I saw Eva with a boy.’ Vavilov stared at one of the photographs of Gregor’s
mother. ‘I didn’t show myself, but I watched you both as you shopped. She was buying you socks. “Don’t be so fussy, Gregor,” she said. “Just choose a
pair.”’

Gregor recalled the Saturday morning trips to the Brothers Jablkowski.

‘Warsaw was dangerous enough for her before the Germans arrived. There were Polish right-wingers in the city who could have shown – probably
did
show – the Germans a few
tricks. But I kept my ear to the ground; found out what I could about her through my network – which included friends of the Gronowski brothers.’

Gregor bowed his head.

‘Then, one evening,’ Vavilov continued, with an eye on the closed door, ‘your mother came to a café I used to visit, a Jewish café. I hadn’t seen her since
Vienna about ten years earlier. She asked for help to get out of Warsaw. I managed to give her papers allowing her to cross into the Russian zone and found her a place in a truck with a permit to
leave Warsaw.’

‘Where do you think she is now?’

Vavilov studied the empty glass. ‘She may still be alive, thousands and thousands of miles inside the Soviet Union.’ His voice grew flat. ‘We’ll never know.’

Again they let the silence lie between them undisturbed for some minutes. Then Vavilov stood, pulling something out of a tunic pocket, a scrap of paper that looked as though it must have been
ripped from a notebook, covered in urgent, hasty writing. ‘But there are things we do know.’

Gregor focused on the piano.
Deportation. His mother’s
death . . .

‘Before we left Alexanderhof a woman’s body was discovered. A Baroness von Matke.’

Gregor sat up. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘You were under enough suspicion. Just keeping you alive was enough of a job. You were safest knowing as little as possible.’ The man sounded harsh now. ‘You of all people
should know that only the ignorant are safe.’

Why, Gregor thought, why so keen to save me? Just for my mother’s sake?

The older man’s voice flattened. ‘The baroness was in the forest. With Preizler. He still had his Gestapo warrant in a pocket. They had a woman’s pistol with them but there
were no bullet wounds, no sign of a struggle. They were just sitting together in the snow, dead. Neither of them wore coats.’ He removed a piece of paper from his tunic pocket. ‘This
isn’t addressed to you but you might want to read it. It’s from Maria von Matke.’

Gregor folded it and placed it in his own pocket, expecting Vavilov to protest, but he didn’t. ‘I never thought Marie was his creature. She was just trying to help her
husband.’

‘They went back a long way, Eva, Maria, Preizler and Lena.’ Vavilov looked at his watch. ‘Which brings us to you, Herr Fischer. You could try and swim over the Elbe to the
Americans, I suppose, but I don’t rate your chances. I’ll do what I can to let you just disappear. But I want your gun.’

Gregor walked to the piano and moved a photograph of Matthias onto the stool so he could open the lid. He handed Vavilov the revolver. ‘Why are you letting me go?’

But Vavilov was preoccupied with the photograph Gregor had placed on the stool, scrutinizing the image of the man with the unruly hair and carelessly knotted tie.

‘Is it because you’ve told me incriminating things about yourself and you’re worried I’ll report you?’ Gregor went on.

Vavilov said nothing until he had replaced the photograph. ‘I had a theory about you.’ He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t true, I should have known it wasn’t. But now I find I
can’t just throw you to the dogs.’

Gregor felt his puzzlement work its way across his face. ‘Don’t ask me to explain, Comrade. I won’t.’ There was an emotion in his tone Gregor couldn’t decipher.
‘I’ll tell them that I believe a desperate SS unit may have taken you prisoner.’

‘Thank you.’

Vargá walked to the door and halted. ‘Don’t.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve been putting off telling you something else that was found at Alexanderhof. Another body in
the forest. A girl.’

Gregor clutched the side of the piano.

‘Her name was written in a book. I’m afraid it was Alexandra von Matke.’

Vavilov said something else but Gregor didn’t hear him. He barely noticed the older man opening the door and leaving the apartment. The spring light illuminated motes of
dust in the air and outside a blackbird burst out in a flood of notes.

At some stage Gregor must have moved to the window, where he found himself watching Vavilov’s progress along the street. He longed to call him back to the apartment, to beg him to unsay
what he’d said about Alix. Mechanically he noted Vavilov pause a second or two at the lake to watch the swan, who seemed to have acquired a mate. A woman came towards Vavilov pushing a
handcart full of burned timbers. The cart struck a stone and overturned, sending singed chunks of wood tumbling across Vavilov’s path. A sixth sense seemed to warn him of the accident before
it happened and with a sideways step he glided out of the way, graceful as a dancer.