The Lieutenant’s Lover (13 page)

Tonya had been so overcome with grief that Rodyon, sensitive to her feelings as ever, had sought a new position in Moscow, in one of the economics ministries. Tonya had worked as an administrative assistant in an import-export house. Then, when her talent for languages came to light, she was given further training in German, and appointed translator. Rodyon hoped that the new city and new occupations would help her come to terms with her losses. For a while things had gone all right. They’d had children, two girls, Yuliya and Yana. They’d been happy, or something like it. Tonya loved her daughters with all her heart. Rodyon she liked and respected with such unwavering strength that her feelings there too could easily have been mistaken for true love. But, following Lenin’s death, the political climate had continued to change, continued to worsen. Rodyon didn’t like the new politics. He had his principles, and refused to let them slip with the times.

And now, almost certainly, he was dead. During the time of the Stalinist terror, he had been arrested twice for ‘terrorism against the state’. The first time, he had been punished by beatings and a year in jail. The second time, he was given fifteen years in the Gulag – a death sentence, almost for sure. Tonya herself had survived his second denunciation by just two years. In 1936, she too had been arrested, charged under Article 58 of the Criminal Code, the most serious article, and had been sentenced to ten years in the Gulag. When, in 1943, she’d been given the chance to fight in a
shtraf
battalion and wash away her ‘guilt’ in blood, she’d jumped at the chance. And despite everything, she’d survived. She hadn’t always been sure that she’d wanted to, but she had. Somewhere, perhaps, her two daughters had survived the famines and the purges, the Gulags and the war-making, but Tonya knew that the country was full of
bezprizornaya
, waifs and orphans of the times. She knew she was unlikely ever to meet up with them again. What was even worse, Tonya knew that it was her duty not to seek them out. The children of politically suspect parents were politically suspect themselves. Poor Yuliya and Yana would be better off if they never saw or heard from their mother again. Tonya thought of them all the time – more often even than she thought of Misha – and when she saw girls of about their age in the street, she would often just stop and stare, tears filling her eyes.

With the end of the war, she’d expected to be returned to Russia. But she wasn’t. The Soviet occupiers were short of translators and Tonya had become a very good one during her years in Moscow. So she’d been ordered to stay, here in the heart of Berlin. She was delighted. She had nothing to go back for. This Berlin summer felt like a golden interlude separate from ordinary time. She intended to enjoy the warm weather, enjoy her work, avoid trouble, avoid attention.

Smiling to herself, a lunch bundle under her arm, she headed off for the Tiergarten, the park at Berlin’s ruined heart.

Misha went closer.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not welcome to
the
Nothing Factory. Welcome to
my
Nothing Factory.’

‘Yours?’

Close to, Misha could see how young the kid was, a teenager, nothing more. Young and hungry of course, not that there was anyone with enough food these days.

‘Well, it used to be anyway. We didn’t always use it to make nothing.’

‘
Na, ja
,’ said the boy, with the true raw Berliner accent, ‘you missed out then.’

‘Missed out? How?’

‘Look. Look around. The factory’s doing a roaring trade these days. Nothing everywhere you look.’

Misha held up his loaf of bread and melting paper packet of butter.

‘Do you want to eat?’

The mismatched pair headed for the opening from which Willi had appeared. Inside there were two habitable rooms left intact. There was an old bedstead salvaged from somewhere and a pile of bedding. There was no water or lighting, a scatter of unwashed dishes. But it wasn’t the primitive living conditions which caught the eye, so much as the décor. There were big poster-sized pen-and-ink drawings of the major world leaders: Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Goebbels, Himmler. The drawings were caricatures: savagely accurate and bitingly funny. Mussolini was drawn as a ventriloquist’s dummy manipulated by a giant Germany. Churchill’s face was attached to the body of a union-flag-wearing bulldog, whose hindquarters were defecating on a map of Africa. Roosevelt was a crippled puppet, dangling from the long strings held by cigar-chomping industrialists. Most shocking of all, there was a drawing of Hitler and Stalin depicted as two middle-aged spinsters in bed with each other, sharing wine from a skull-shaped bottle. There were spare parts of old pumping equipment which had been linked together in a kind of frieze around the room, and a giant communist red flag, with the stars-and-stripes inked over it in black pen.

Misha drew his breath in shock. Willi’s caricatures would have drawn certain retribution from any Russian troops or surviving Hitler loyalists. Nor were the British or American forces immune from dishing out a good thumping to anyone whose attitudes they disliked.

‘Quite a gallery, Willi.’

Willi shrugged. His skinny right arm shot up in front of his portrait of Hitler. ‘
Heil… Ach
, what-was-his-name?’ He dropped his arm. ‘Food?’

Misha got out his treasures. He himself was hungry enough, but the boy was famished. The boy ate like a wolf, tearing huge chunks of the bread and stuffing them into his mouth, with both hands busy. In between mouthfuls, or rather during them, but in between the times when his mouth was too full to do anything but chew, he answered Misha’s questions.

His name was Willi Spranger, but these days he called himself Willi Nichts. His father had been killed in France early on in the war. His mother had been killed in an Allied bombing raid just a few months back. In theory, children like Willi had all been called up to save the Reich at its final, most desperate hour. Willi had chosen otherwise. He’d hidden away all through that final battle, and then for the last couple of months had continued sleeping rough and scavenging for food. He finished his story, then said ‘And you?’

Misha told his story in condensed, almost staccato form. Willi only asked one question, which was, ‘You said you hid for the last two months. You only came out when the Americans arrived. Why?’

‘Because if the Russians had found me and discovered who I was, they’d probably have had me shot. As a deserter, as a political fugitive, as a bourgeois. I didn’t fancy finding out.’

‘No.’ Willi stopped tearing into his half of the loaf and sat staring at Misha with unblinking eyes. After long contemplation, the boy said, ‘So, we’re related then.’

‘Related? How is that?’

‘I’m Willi Nichts, because I’ve lost my mother, father and home. You, you’re the same. You’ve lost your father, your family home in Russia—’

‘—
Homes
, plural, we were rich then.’

‘—Your homes –’

‘—My wife.’

‘—Your home here, your business.’

‘—My business partner and my closest friend.’

‘—Your money.’

‘—I lost Tonya, the first girl I ever loved. I lost my country. Imagine that, losing a whole country!’

‘No, no. Not one, two. You’re German now, aren’t you? And Germany doesn’t belong to we Germans any more. You’ve lost two whole countries, big ones. That’s bad. Careless.’

The two of them, man and boy, stared at each other. Misha didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The boy was the same. His mouth flickered with mockery. When he’d told Misha off for being careless, he’d adopted the exact tone of a German schoolmaster issuing a reprimand. But his eyes were different. They were too large for his hungry face. They were full of loss.

Misha put his hand to the boy’s back and rubbed him between the shoulder blades. The kid leaned into the movement and was silent. When Misha withdrew his hand again, neither of them spoke and they finished their bread in silence.

Berliners spoke of this time as
die Stunde null
, zero hour. Now for the first time, Misha knew exactly what the phrase meant, exactly what it referred to. This, this moment now, was his zero hour. He’d lived in the world for more than four decades, and now here he was sitting in the very rubble of his life, in the ruins of a city, in the heart of a ruined country. He owned nothing, had no one, was nobody.

It felt like the end of everything.

Tonya walked on towards the Tiergarten. Her way took her out of the Soviet zone into the British one. But that didn’t matter. The zones weren’t meant to be important. There was only one country, after all, and one capital city. Movement in and out of the zones was commonplace, an ordinary thing.

The Tiergarten was a blessed relief. The linden trees cast a welcome shade. The war seemed infinitely distant. Even the bomb craters and shell holes that still pockmarked the park were covered over in green. Song birds sang.

Tonya’s path took her around to the lake on the west of the garden. There was an Englishman there feeding the ducks. He was straw-haired and burly, looking more like a ploughboy than an army officer. He had an enormous loaf of stale bread and was breaking chunks off it, as though he were expecting to feed turkeys not ducks. Tonya, wishing she had bread to throw, stood and watched. There were crowds of mallards, tufted ducks, and comical white-fronted Canada geese waddling amongst them all.

The Englishman saw her watching and winked at her. She was about to look away, when he put his huge hands to the loaf and ripped it in two. He dropped one entire half, but, just as she thought it was about to hit the ground and roll away into the pond, he swung his foot and booted it. The half-loaf rose high into the air, then dropped down towards her. The kick was so perfectly judged that Tonya merely had to put out her hands to catch the loaf.

‘Well held,’ said the man in English, before adding in German, ‘
Für Sie
. One man can’t have all the fun, eh?’

‘
Danke
.’

‘
Bitte
.’

Tonya accepted the man’s bread, but didn’t want to talk to him. The NKVD were everywhere in Berlin, and Tonya didn’t want to compromise herself by being caught talking to English army officers – capitalists and imperialists to a man, in NKVD eyes at least. Besides, there was something unusual about the man. He seemed to be staring hard at her right hand, at the darkened stumps of her missing finger joints. As she tucked her hand away out of sight, his gaze travelled up, met her eyes, stuck there for a moment, before being washed away in an affable and foolish grin.

She smiled briefly, then looked away, fed the ducks, and walked quickly back to work, feeling disconcerted by the encounter. She decided she wouldn’t go back to the Tiergarten again.

Misha found the address he’d been given: a former schoolhouse with American army jeeps drawn up behind. The street was one of the few in the city that had emerged from the fighting mostly unscathed, and the buildings looked tidy and clean.

But the schoolhouse was a school no longer. A sign announced the building’s new function: ‘Interzonal Movement Orders Authorisation Office’. Further placards set out complex regulations in English and German for the benefit of applicants.

Misha had come early and was the first to present himself. He was told the office would be open in another fifty minutes. Outside in the sunshine, a little girl, perhaps seven years old, sat on a wooden bench in the sun, eating a plum. She had dark blond hair with golden highlights in two plaits.

‘May I?’ asked Misha pointing to the place beside her.

‘Yes.’

‘That looks like a nice plum.’

‘Yes.’ She nodded. Her eyes were hazel-coloured and grave. ‘Are you waiting, then?’ she asked after a while.

‘Yes.’

‘Me too. What are
you
waiting for?’

‘I’m waiting for the office to open. I want a piece of paper that will let me travel to a country called Canada.’

‘Yes, I know Canada,’ said the girl, with as much dignity as if she were the daughter of an Inuit and a Mountie. ‘It’s snowy and there are bears.’

‘Well, I’m Russian – or I was – so I don’t mind snow. Or bears.’

The girl nodded as though she had been looking for an interesting fact to add to her stock, and she continued to sit, kicking her feet and eating her plum.

Misha had been forced to acknowledge the obvious. There was nothing left for him in Germany now. He had no assets, no income, no wife, no family, just one big Nothing Factory, in whose ruins he now lived with Willi Nichts. Misha had just two realistic options. One was to join his sister Raisa and her husband, Markus, in

Switzerland. The other was to leave Europe altogether and head for Canada, where his mother, brother and second sister had emigrated long before the start of the war. He had resisted taking either track, knowing that to do so would mean admitting that everything he’d spent his life on so far had been a failure. But then again, as Willi had so candidly pointed out, everything he’d invested in so far
had
failed. Going to Canada would only mean that he was finally obliged to admit the truth.

He sighed. The girl finished eating.

‘Yum!’ she said.

Misha gave her an answering smile.

‘What are
you
waiting for, then? You didn’t say.’