The Lieutenant’s Lover (15 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it was bad with us too.’

They walked on in silence. The injured woman wasn’t as young as Tonya had first thought. She was in her thirties anyway. The building where she lived had had most of its front blown away, but there were some rooms at the back that had been made habitable. They went up some stairs and down a corridor towards the rear of the building. The woman threw open a door and led the way into her flat. There was a large green sofa, some shelving in dark wood, and an elaborate birdcage with no bird. An old Bluthner upright piano gleamed against the wall. Beyond the main room, there was a tiny kitchen, with an oil lamp hanging from the doorway.

And that wasn’t all. There was a large leather armchair, made to look small by the big-built figure who sat in it. The figure had straw-coloured hair and an easy smile. He was wearing civilian clothes, but that wasn’t how Tonya had first seen him.

‘Comrade Duck-feeder,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming.’

Tonya reeled back in shock. She might even have gone running from the building, except that the German woman, whose ankle had suddenly recovered, stood behind her and closed the door. Tonya felt trapped and frightened.

‘I’m sorry to scare you like this,’ said the Englishman. ‘My name’s Mark Thompson. I’m a captain in the British Army. And all I want is to talk to you for a few minutes. I’m not here to injure you in any way.’ Then, speaking to the German woman, he added, ‘Marta, I think we would all like some tea.’ The German woman, Marta, nodded silently and disappeared off into the kitchen.

Tonya still stood with her back to the door, saying nothing.

‘Just so you know,’ continued the Englishman, ‘the door to the apartment is not locked. If you go out of it, I won’t stop you, nor will anybody else. On the other hand, if you choose to stay, I will make absolutely sure that nobody ever needs to know that you saw me.’

‘I shouldn’t be here.’

‘No, you shouldn’t. But you came because you heard cries for help. You helped Marta into her house. She offered you tea and you accepted. That’s all true. That’s all you ever need to say to anyone if they ask. Which they won’t. I’m fairly sure that no one was watching you on Prenzlauer Allee just now.’

‘That was you in the car?’

‘And some colleagues. Yes.’

‘You’re a spy.’

‘Yes. Not a word we like very much, actually.
Smert shpionam
, death to spies, as your comrades so pithily put it… But yes, call a spade a spade, I’m a spy.’

‘And your name? Mark…?’

‘Thompson. No. You’ve hit the nail on the head, old girl. That’s not my real name. But it’s safer for everyone that way, you included.’

The Englishman, ‘Thompson’, spoke excellent German, but he had the habit of taking phrases straight from English and translating them directly. Sometimes that worked,
‘Sie haben den Nagel auf den Kopf getroffen’
. More often than not, it didn’t –
nenn’ ein Spaten einen Spaten
– and the linguistic strangeness made Tonya feel as though she’d stepped into a dream world.

She still stood with her back to the door. Electricity had been restored in most parts of Berlin, and the smoky yellow oil lamp was disconcertingly dim. Everything in Tonya screamed at her to leave, but somehow her legs felt rooted to the spot. She was vaguely aware that somehow she connected this unwelcome Englishman with Misha. They were physically quite unlike, of course. Where the Englishman looked like a ploughboy, Misha had looked more like a concert pianist. All the same, they had something in common, their ludicrously unwarranted confidence for a start. And Tonya didn’t leave. In fact, she stepped forwards and took a seat, but still dreamily, as though there were a second Tonya in the room standing and watching as the first one sat down.

‘What do you want?’

‘What do
I
want?’ he said. ‘Easy. Peace in our time. England to win the Ashes. Uncle Joe Stalin to have a nasty accident. Throw in some decent marmalade and I’d be in heaven. But that’s irrelevant. It’s what you want that matters.’

Tonya said nothing. There was a window open at the back of the kitchen, and the oil lamp swung a little in the draught. Light and shadow swam dizzily in the room.

‘I don’t want anything.’

‘Really? Nothing?’

Tonya shook her head.

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t believe you. Listen, do you know that at the Yalta conference, your comrade Stalin promised to create a “free, mighty and independent Poland”? Perhaps the Poles believed him. Anyhow, they were brave enough and foolish enough to rise up against the Germans in Warsaw, just as the Red Army was on the outskirts of the city. And the Red Army did nothing. Nothing at all. They just waited on the banks of the Vistula and let the
Wehrmacht
troops massacre the Poles. Right now there are, we think, a dozen NKVD regiments throughout the country. A dozen regiments of secret policemen to make sure that Poland is just as free, mighty and independent as Uncle Joe Stalin wishes.’

Tonya shook her head. There was a buzzing in her ears, something she knew from the war, a noise that lasted for a few days after any particularly intense battle.

‘I’m only an interpreter,’ she said. ‘I’m not interested in politics. I don’t—’

‘No.’ The Englishman was gentle but persistent. ‘That’s all right to say if you’re an English housewife or an American businessman. Politics doesn’t have to matter. But for us, for anyone who lives in Germany or anywhere to the east, then politics matters. It has to.’

‘What do you want?’ said Tonya again.

From the kitchen, there was the hissing sound of a boiling kettle, and the sound of Marta making tea.

‘I want to save the world.’

‘
Entschuldigen
? Pardon?’

‘Well, you did ask. The point is, I think that your Joe Stalin wants Germany to be every bit as free, mighty and independent as Poland. We think he’s working very carefully to make sure of it. And as you know, conditions in Germany are fairly desperate. There’s no food. Winter will be abominable. Industry is at a standstill. The countryside has no fertiliser. The harvest will be poor and in any case no one has any money. Meantime, what with anti-fraternisation rules and the black market and prostitution and anti-Nazi witch-hunts, I don’t know that our Military Government is winning many friends. In short, if Mr Stalin wants a Communist Germany, then who’s to say he won’t get it? And if Germany falls, then Italy will follow. And Austria. And would the French hold out? I don’t know. But I do know that I’d be jolly upset to have fought this entire war simply in order to pass Europe from Hitler to Stalin.’

The buzzing in Tonya’s head had become so loud, she could hear no more. She sat forward in her seat, with her hands clamped over her ears. She rocked herself, as she had seen soldiers do in cases of severe combat-trauma. Her eyes were closed against the swaying lamp. Then she found herself not rocking, but being rocked. The big Englishman was holding her head against his chest and soothing her. It felt like being petted by a bear. She pulled free. Marta had reappeared with tea, hot and very sweet. The Englishman was still standing and his big, ramshackle presence made the room appear smaller. He looked upset.

‘I’m so sorry. Mostly my work brings me into contact with such worms – not you of course, Marta, you’re a brick – that I get clumsy when I meet real people.’

‘Why me? Why of all the people, why—?’

‘Because of your work. Because of the documents that you see.’

‘How do you…? What documents?’

‘You work in the
Hauptübersetzungsbüro
of the
Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland
in their Mühlendamm office. I know because I had you followed.’

The
Hauptübersetzungsbüro
was the Central Translation Office. The
Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland
, usually called the SMAD for short, was the Soviet Military Administration in Germany.

‘You had me followed. Why me?’

The Englishman took her hand and held it up. Her right hand, the one missing the tips of two fingers.

‘Because of this.’

‘My hand?’

‘It was frostbite, I suppose?’

Tonya nodded and heard the Englishman’s next words as though through fog.

‘We guessed that perhaps you suffered your frostbite in the Gulag. We guessed that perhaps you weren’t a great admirer of your comrade Stalin. It wasn’t hard to guess that you held some administrative post inside the SMAD. Some of those administrative posts give access to important information. It was because of that hope that I had you followed. When I found out that you worked for the translation office on Mühlendamm, I had to find a way to talk to you. That office has access to some of the most important documents anywhere inside the entire Soviet administration. I’m sorry to drop this all on you like this. I’m sorry to remind you of the Gulag and all that you suffered there. If you tell me to go to hell I would quite understand.’

But Tonya was a long way from telling him to go to hell.

She felt split between two selves again. The first one was nodding now and crying, copiously weeping. The second Tonya, still standing over by the door, was rocking back on her heels and watching the first one – this crying one – with pursed lips. It was the first time Tonya had cried for more than twenty years. It was the first time she had ever let herself cry about the day when she’d lost her fingertips.

‘I was sentenced to ten years,’ she said, speaking slowly. ‘Ten years, for nothing. I’ve no idea who denounced me or why. In those days, no one knew. We were put on a train, me and hundreds of others. We were taken to Siberia. It was spring, but the snows hadn’t yet melted. They led us to a snowfield, huge and totally empty. The only thing there was a sign that said “
GULAG
92
Y.N.
90”. We were made to kneel in the snow, in long lines facing outwards. For hour after hour, a roll-call took place. Detachments of prisoners were led off. I stayed. So did others. Then the roll-call finished. The remaining prisoners, some hundred and fifty of us, were allowed to stand. That snowfield was our camp. Everything that was ever built there was built by us. We began right there on that first day, breaking saplings with our bare hands to build a shelter for the night. I only lost my fingertips. I was one of the lucky ones.’

The Englishman was moved, but his posture contained as much anger as sympathy.

‘And that’s why I want to keep Germany free. That’s why I contacted you. But if you choose, you can leave now. I promise you we will never bother you again.’

Tonya nodded. She still hadn’t touched her tea, but drank it now, gulp after gulp, like an upset child. The Englishman watched her in silence.

‘I’ll go now,’ she said.

‘You do that. Remember. You helped Marta. You drank tea. You can point out this apartment to anyone who asks. I won’t try to contact you again, and you won’t see me feeding the Tiergarten ducks either. But if you do change your mind, or if you ever want to contact me for any reason, then go to the Tiergarten at midday. Throw bread for the ducks. We will find a way for you to talk to us safely, not then and there, but very soon. Is that clear?’

Tonya nodded. She stood up. She hadn’t quite finished her tea and now knocked the little table, upsetting the cup and breaking it.

‘Sorry, sorry.’ The two Tonyas joined up again into one person: a woman clumsily dabbing at the little wreckage of porcelain.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ said the Englishman from a huge distance. ‘It’s all quite all right.’

Tonya found the door and went running down the hall.

Major Grigory Makarevsky of the Soviet 58
^th
Guards Rifle Division yawned. After four years of fighting, in which he’d started out as a humble
frontovik
and risen all the way to his present rank, paper-pushing didn’t seem like a proper occupation for a man. But he was a soldier, and choice was a luxury not given to soldiers.

He reached for the next folder in the stack. The folder was thin, containing a couple of dozen typewritten chits sent over by the Americans. Makarevsky looked at the information: a list of ‘Persons Not in Possession of a Rations Book’. Makarevsky looked down the list, not even bothering to stifle the yawn that rose inside him.

Then one of the names caught his eye. His yawn died.

One of the names on the list was a Russian one, ‘Malevich, Michael Ivanovich – German citizen (?)’. There
were
Germans with Russian names, of course. There were those who had left Russia in Tsarist times, whose names now meant nothing at all about their real nationality. But not many of them. Not many, compared with the millions of men who had been swept up by the war and rushed here and there across Europe, across borders, across ideologies. And Makarevsky, like most of his fellows, was a patriot. He loathed the idea of a Russian betraying his country as intensely as anyone could.

He pulled a blank sheet of paper towards him and began to write.

‘To Lieutenant-Colonel Klochkov, NKVD administration, Karlshorst…’

Makarevsky was a better fighter than he was a bureaucrat. He didn’t like the secret policemen of the NKVD. He found words more recalcitrant than the German troops he’d fought for so long. His lips moved as he wrote. His black fountain pen sat in his hand like a gun.