The Lieutenant’s Lover (17 page)

‘No, no, I’m going nowhere at all.’

Tonya climbed the stairs to the first floor. The corridor that led away from her had a huge gash in the ceiling and front wall, as though some giant bear had slashed at the building leaving ripped stone and torn plaster. Dim blue twilight filtered in through the gash.

Tonya walked down the corridor to the door at the end. She hesitated before knocking, then, feeling somehow more afraid of the emptiness behind her; knocked anyway.

‘Komm!’

The woman’s voice was brusque, Germanic. Tonya hesitated again, then pushed at the door. It was the same room as before: the oil lamp, the big green sofa, the dark wood furniture, the birdcage, the piano. And the German woman, Marta – if that was her name, of course – stepping briskly forwards, her long hair tied behind in a bun, dressed in a long dark skirt and cream blouse. Standing on the seat of the sofa, was an open violin-case, with a violin inside, gleaming in the lamplight.

‘Come in, good evening, you may put your scarf down there.’

‘Here? Thank you.’

‘
Bitte
. Now your hands, please.’

Tonya held her hands out. Marta inspected them, especially the damaged right hand, with little clucks of disapproval and disappointment. She said things like, ‘Really … no … it is hardly going to be correct.’

Then she asked Tonya to stand. Tonya was in fact already standing, but she tried to stand straighten

‘No, no,’ Marta said. ‘Not stiff like a poker.’

Tonya relaxed.

‘No! Not flopping like a fish!’

Marta pushed and prodded Tonya’s body into the right position, then nodded when Tonya had the posture right, or at least not horribly wrong.

‘Now relax.’

Tonya relaxed.

‘Now stand.’

Tonya tried to recapture the pose, but somehow got it wrong again and had to be prodded back into shape.

‘Now relax … now stand …
ja
, better.’

The next item on the agenda was how to hold the violin and the bow. Not the real violin or the real bow – Marta obviously thought Tonya was a long way from being ready for that – but a pretend-instrument and a pretend-bow. Marta didn’t seem to be very pleased with Tonya’s undamaged left hand, the one that would actually hold the neck of the violin, but she was especially displeased with Tonya’s right hand, which would hold the bow. Tonya meekly did whatever she was told.

It all felt so strange.

With the door closed and the bombed-out, ruined city shut away, this little apartment felt like a glimpse of the old, domestic Germany: quietly, solidly content. For all the ruin outside, for all Tonya’s knowledge that the apartment now contained just two rooms, because the other three had been shot away, she felt as though she had travelled back twenty years, to a place and time more prosperous and at ease than anything she had ever known. Tonya remembered her amazement on first entering East Prussia. The farms and cottages, fields and orchards had been so tidy, she had been simply staggered that any country so richly blessed should even have wanted to grab the poor and wild territory to its east.

‘You can read music, of course?’

Tonya shook her head.

‘You can’t read music.’ Marta spoke as if Tonya had declared herself unable to read at all. ‘Never mind. The first thing is to stand right. Now then…’

For forty minutes the lesson proceeded, as though it were an entirely normal violin lesson. It was half an hour before Tonya was actually allowed to hold the violin itself, and when she did Marta was so appalled by something in the way she held it – too stiff, or too loose, or too rigid, or too something – that the instrument was snatched away and Tonya had to go back to practising her dummy exercises.

And then, just as Tonya was beginning to wonder if this whole thing was based on misunderstanding, there were quick, sharp footsteps in the corridor outside, a triple-tap on the door, then the footsteps passing away again down the hall. Marta turned to Tonya with a smile – the first glimpse of friendliness she’d shown her.

‘Good. That means that Mr Thompson’s friends have checked the area. There is no one watching you. There is no one who can hear us.’

‘Thank goodness! You were so strict with me, I thought maybe you really thought I was here for a violin lesson.’

‘You
are
here for a lesson. That’s very important. Whenever you come, we will play. And you will pay me at the agreed rate, twenty Reichsmarks.’

‘Yes, yes of course.’

‘And Mr Thompson promises that there will be somebody to watch. If there is any danger, then we will play the violin, nothing else.’

‘And the papers? I have a packet with me.’

‘I will take them.’

Tonya handed over a packet of documents. She was both translator and typist. There was no great difficulty in inserting an extra carbon paper and making an extra copy of documents that came her way. The difficulty was in removing that spare copy from the building, which was always alive with NKVD men. The first time Tonya had left the building with a typescript crackling inside the belt of her skirt, she felt as though her guilt were shouting loudly enough to attract a couple of armoured divisions. When she’d managed to walk out, unmolested, unfollowed, she’d been almost dazed with surprise and relief.

‘Good,’ said Marta, as though she were just accepting a pat of butter or slice of ham. ‘Now before we complete our lesson, there are a few other things to tell you.’ Without altering her matter-of-fact tone in any way, she began talking about rudimentary codes, secret drops, ways of signalling difficulty to Thompson, ways in which Thompson himself could send warning signals to Tonya. Marta took measurements of Tonya’s feet – ‘We are constructing some boots for you, with a compartment in the heel. You will find the man who will sell you the boots standing in the Friedrichskirche market at two o’clock on Monday. He will wear a grey woollen cap and a green jacket with leather buttons. The price will be eighteen marks…’

Instructions followed in a stream.

She nodded as though she had absorbed everything, but felt as though she’d absorbed nothing at all. And then it was back to the violin. Tonya still hadn’t played a note. Marta still seemed very worried about Tonya’s damaged right hand. But her clucks of disappointment had softened. By the end of an hour and a half, Marta seemed almost content.

‘Good. You may finish there. That’s a good first lesson. It is hard for you with your hand.’

Tonya stood up, realising that she’d come to know this little apartment much, much better before long.

‘Please, Marta, could you play something for me, anything? It’s just I’ve never heard violin-playing before, not properly.’

‘Never? You have never heard a violin?’

‘In church sometimes. Sort of. Not really.’

‘Hmm! Do you like Brahms?’

Marta picked up the violin and half-closed her eyes. Without looking at any music, she began to play. The notes streamed out; pure, liquid perfection. Tonya listened for a while, awestruck by the beauty. Then, without saying goodbye, not wanting to break the flow of the music, she went to the door and crept silently away.

The orphanage lay on the outskirts of Grunewald. There was a lodge house set beside the high wrought-iron gates, but the gates were open and Misha walked through unchallenged. The orphanage itself was a neo-classical affair in pale yellow stucco and white pilasters. Misha walked up to the house, then wasn’t sure what to do next. He sat down on a bench in the driveway.

He would stay in Berlin. That was one of the few certainties now. Just as the various bureaucracies were beginning to grind out a favourable result for his emigration application, he wrote a series of letters cancelling all the requests he’d made. He’d done so curtly and without explanation, as though purposely hoping to antagonise the relevant officials and so block off any hope of trying again. Meantime, he’d made up his mind that if Rosa should want a father, she should have one. Beyond that, he knew nothing at all.

Every now and then, groups of children would emerge from one door and hurry off in formation to one of the other buildings scattered around the grounds. The front drive saw a stream of UNRRA-stencilled vehicles arriving and departing. Nobody looked long at Misha. Nobody asked him why he was there.

Misha took a yo-yo from his pocket – Willi said that he’d been given it by a GI at the hospital; Misha was fairly sure he’d simply stolen it – and began to play. The yo-yo was an American one, with a looped slip-string, and an amazing ability to hover and glide. Misha played seriously, his engineer’s brain trying to understand the play of forces inside the twirling object. He challenged himself to find new tricks to play with it, then was delighted when he began to add more stunts to his repertoire. Time went by.

And then, almost as he’d forgotten that he was there for any purpose, he felt a presence at his right elbow. He looked up. It was Rosa.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hello.’

‘I came back.’

She nodded.

‘I’m not going to Canada. I changed my mind.’

Rosa had eyes too big for her head – most Berliners did, of course, especially young ones, the consequence of too little food. But her long dark-blond plaits, scrawny shoulders and wide eyes made Misha once again think of her as an elf.

‘I made a mistake when I brought you back here, but then again, maybe you’ve thought about it some more and decided that you’re happiest here. If you are, you must stay.’

She looked at him with her grave hazel eyes and shook her head.

‘I don’t have much of a house for you,’ he continued. ‘Or much food. I’m rubbish at sewing. There won’t be a mummy, or at least there certainly isn’t one now. You will have a big brother though, a sort of brother anyway. I really can’t promise you much. Most little girls would decide they were happiest here.’

She shrugged, bony shoulders lifting and falling in careful imitation of the adult movement. The movement said she wasn’t most little girls.

‘I’ll get my things,’ she said.

It was the seventeenth of December, 1945.

Snow was falling.

It fell in great white spirals, as though some heavily padded fabric were being unrolled from high above. Then, when the flakes had reached almost to street level, they were caught up in the city’s unpredictable winds and eddies and the snow was rushed around, first this way, then that, like a man struggling to pick up papers on a windy day.

It was evening, almost dark. Tonya had stacks more work to do, but a sudden jabbering headache began to crowd the muscles at the back of her neck. She felt wrung out and exhausted. The tone of the documents that spun through her typewriter – accusatory, aggressive, ideological, grasping – felt like a physical pressure on her skull.

Making a sudden decision, she stood up. She’d leave now, get an early night, catch up first thing the next day. She muttered apologies to her fellow translators – Tonya was the only member of her group without an officer’s rank; she was also the only woman and the only non-Party member, and she always took care to show the others the deference they required and expected. Then she put on her army greatcoat and cap and walked out onto the street. The night was clear and freezing. In a city still shorn of streetlamps, the stars shone down bright and hard

Her way back to her barracks took her along Prenzlauer Allee, close to Marta’s apartment. Tonya was scheduled to have a ‘violin lesson’ that night, but had decided to skip it. But as she passed the little alley, her resolution suddenly wavered. Marta had never been overtly affectionate towards her, but she had always behaved with a perfectly measured courtesy that somehow amounted to almost the same thing. Tonya suddenly realised that she needed human contact more than anything in the world. The muscles knotting in her neck almost tangibly relaxed at the thought of it. Before any conscious change of mind, her steps changed direction and headed for the little bolthole of Marta’s apartment.

She reached the familiar door, tapped and entered. Marta answered the door as usual, but almost at once Tonya realised there was something different about the light in the room, the balance of space inside it. She stepped on inside and there, sprawled untidily in the armchair, was the Englishman, Mark Thompson. She felt instant relief at his presence; a feeling of reassurance and warmth.

‘Hello, old thing,’ said Thompson, rising from his seat. As usual he translated his English idioms directly into German, mangling them horribly on the way. ‘Thought I’d better pop over to see how you were getting on. Damned cold, isn’t it? I suppose it isn’t by your standards. Probably ice cream and donkey rides on the beach, as far as you’re concerned.’

As Thompson babbled, Tonya found herself being wafted into a seat, her coat taken, and a steaming drink put into her hands. Marta helped welcome her, then picked the violin out of its green baize case and began to play, imitating Tonya’s own level of technique. To anyone listening – and Thompson’s presence almost certainly meant that there were British agents posted to give warning in any event – it would have seemed as if it were Tonya, not Marta, drawing her bow over the strings. But after months of lessons, Tonya had become a reasonably competent player, and the music flowed with some grace.