The Lieutenant’s Lover (24 page)

Tonya stared and stared and stared and stared.

The name itself was not uncommon. It was similar in occurrence to the German ‘Schneider’, or the English ‘Wilson’. But the handwriting! Surely that was Misha’s own handwriting, with its characteristic flicked tail to the
and the
Tonya desperately wanted to see more – but the cartoon had been torn. She held not even half of it in her hand. The cartoonist’s name, or pen-name more like, was given at the bottom: Willi Nichts. Perhaps there was more – more handwriting, some further clues, an address even? – but not in the scrap which was all Tonya possessed. She searched her own stall, then all the others, for further copies. There was nothing. She even went down the hall into the privates’ toilet block to search there. Still nothing.

She went back to that first little scrap and interrogated it. The handwriting, which had first seemed so intensely familiar, dissolved into mystery. It wasn’t exactly the same as she had remembered it – but twenty-five years had passed since she had known Misha. Of course his handwriting would have changed. Then again, Tonya knew that she so strongly
wanted
the writing to be Misha’s that her judgement was hardly likely to be reliable.

Was she crazy to be thinking of him again? What were the odds against such a thing? And yet, and yet … great as the odds looked, they shrank away as Tonya thought about it. She had always expected Misha to end up in Germany – he’d always said that Germany was the engineering capital of the world. And if he’d come to Germany, then why not Berlin? And if Berlin, then it was perfectly conceivable that he might have caught sight of her, or heard her name. And if he had seen her, still loved her, still cared about her, then how else could he find her, but by asking in code if she would return to him?

Her heart crashed against her chest.

Back in the sergeants’ and petty officers’ toilet block, she stood in front of the only mirror, a dingy, fly-spattered affair. She unfastened her hair, combing it behind her with her fingers. She had aged. Her hair – the colour of the forest floor, as Misha had once described it – was flecked with grey now. Lines had crept into her face. Her green eyes were still bright and clear, but she’d never liked her eyes, never quite accepting their slightly eastern look. She had grown thinner too, lost some of her old soft roundness. In the old days, Misha had always been the lean one. Perhaps, as she’d aged, she’d somehow taken on something of him, his energy, his leanness. She hoped so.

Was he here in Berlin? Just miles away? Looking for her?

It seemed impossible and all too likely, both at once. Tonya didn’t know what to think. But the art of living without hope that she’d once learned in the Gulag was lost to her now. Hollinger had started her on her new course, Valentina had confirmed it.

She had begun to hope, begun to trust. She washed her face, tied up her hair and went to bed, tremulous with fear and hope, love and anxiety.

Marta Kappelhoff, Tonya’s piano teacher and ‘handler’, had her day job working in one of the construction crews in Prenzlauer Berg. The phrase ‘construction crew’ was the one favoured by the city authorities, but rubble-clearance not construction was their primary task. Marta herself was too slightly built to be of much use carrying buckets or pushing barrows, so she passed her day using a small hammer to chip mortar off bricks, so that the bricks could be reused. It was slow work. Slow and cold. At the end of the day, Marta either went directly back to her apartment or went shopping for food in one of the street markets that thrived alongside the old Zeiss Planetarium.

But today was Tuesday, and every Tuesday and Thursday she visited her mother who lived on the edge of Berlin, out at Neukölln, not far from Tempelhof airport. Her way took her through one of the most comprehensively damaged parts of Berlin, where the Soviet Eighth Guards Army and the First Guards Tank Army had battered their way through German defences. In that fighting, buildings already wrecked by Allied bombs had been further pounded. Ruins to rubble; rubble to powder.

Marta’s shoes crunched on gritty mud. Recent wet weather had made the roads stream with dirty grey. The sun had just set, and the sky was violet streaked with red. One of Marta’s shoelaces was loose, and needed retying. She came to a corner, glanced ahead and behind her, saw nothing, then stepped lightly into a ruined doorway and thrust her hand into a pocket-sized gap in the masonry. When Hollinger wanted to get a message to her, he left it here. When she wanted to communicate with him, she did it the same way. But today the gap was empty and the doorway wasn’t.

‘Marta.’

Harry Hollinger moved silently in the gloom, holding his finger up to stifle any involuntary exclamation. The exclamation came, but very quietly.

‘Thompson! You shouldn’t be here!’

‘No, not exactly. But don’t worry, we checked the place very carefully before I stopped off.’

‘What is it? Bad news?’

‘No, no, nothing like that. Information for Kornikova, that’s all.’

‘Oh?’

‘We’ve looked for Malevich and we’ve got news, some good, some bad. The good part is that Malevich is certainly alive or at least he was a few months ago. The Soviets found out about him, tried to grab him, but failed. The bad part is that he’s no longer living at his old address. I guess he’s tried to run from Berlin into the Allied zones, maybe under an assumed name. That’s certainly what I’d do if I were him. You can tell Kornikova all that, and you can promise her that we’ll continue to look.’

Marta stared furiously at the Englishman.

‘You came to tell me that? You could have written it. You didn’t need to come here. You shouldn’t have come.’

Marta lit a cigarette and retied her lace – her excuses for using the doorway. Glaring again at Hollinger, she left, moving briskly and angrily up the street.

Hidden away in the fold of some tumbled masonry, Ekaterina Ershova, junior sergeant in the NKVD, hesitated. Her instructions were to follow this woman, Marta Kappelhoff, but they were also to note and pursue anything out of the ordinary that happened along the way. But what did ‘out of the ordinary’ mean? Kappelhof had stepped into a doorway to light a cigarette and retie a shoelace. Why not? Ershova might have done the same thing.

Only two things bothered her. Kappelhoff didn’t smoke much. Only two or three cigarettes a day, according to the report she’d seen. And it was a still night. It would have been easy to light up here on the street, there was no need to find the shelter of a doorway. And why the delay? Ershova couldn’t help feeling that Kappelhoff had spent just a few seconds too long out of sight of the street.

Ershova continued to hesitate. If she were going to continue following Kappelhoff, she would need to do so at once, or give up altogether. But the woman was surely on her way to her mother’s. Ershova reasoned she could always catch up with her later.

She continued to hesitate, then decided to stay. She remained in position, hidden by the wall in front of her, watching the street turn slowly from grey to black.

The night proved as exhausting as the day.

It wasn’t that Tonya couldn’t sleep. She did. But all night long, the cartoon haunted her. Or rather in her strange dream-state, it had seemed to her as though she
were
the cartoon, as though she herself were the little black-ink figure of Comrade Lensky, with his slight paunch, his bulging eyes, his air of slightly baffled mystification. In the guise of this comical little figure, she had spent the whole night wandering Berlin – or rather, the line-drawn, cartoon version of the city – searching for Misha. Every sign, every shop window, every notice was written in Cyrillic; handwritten; with those little flicked tails, once so characteristic of Misha, and now …? It hadn’t even been clear in the dream whether she was looking for Misha the person, Misha the cartoon, or Misha the artist who had drawn or dreamed the whole thing. The entire intense dream had lasted from the moment she had closed her eyes to the moment that she was physically pummelled awake by her neighbour in the dormitory, long after the reveille bell had sounded.

And now? Well, Tonya knew she had to go directly to her Mühlendamm office. The work there had piled up. She was sure to be reprimanded if she were even a few moments late. But though there were limits on her freedom, she was no prisoner. She was a
starshiy serzhant
in the Red Army. She could come and go as she pleased. In her lunch hour, after work, while out on errands. Surely, surely, she would be able to find half an hour to walk the streets in search of another copy of that precious cartoon. And if all else failed, then it would only be another week before she had her next violin lesson with Marta.

For now, though, waiting that week seemed like being asked to stand still while a century passed. She sped to work. After the night she’d just had, Tonya had expected to find work slow and difficult, but for some reason the opposite happened. She raced through her work like never before. The Russian sentences had formed themselves in her head before her eye had even reached the full stop in the German text. Her fingers flew over the typewriter. The thirty-two typebars of the Cyrillic alphabet danced like a small black cloud of angrily buzzing insects over the page. Time flew by.

Then, at around eleven fifteen, Tonya got up to go to the toilet. There was no chance of finding that cartoon again here: the Mühlendamm office was used by a number of high-ranking officials and all the cubicles were stocked with plain grey toilet roll imported from a factory in the old East Prussia. She began to return to her desk, but in the hall outside her office, she encountered a group of senior occupation officials, including a number of the technical experts she had accompanied over the last ten days. She saluted the Red Army officers, then stood aside, not wanting to barge her way through the crowd to get back to her desk. She didn’t listen to the conversation, just waited quietly. A few minutes passed. Then the posture of the group in front of her suddenly changed. Tonya looked up. She saw General Sokolovsky himself stride down the corridor towards them. Tonya, and all the other soldiers present, braced themselves into a stiff, formal salute. Sokolovsky swept up. There was a brief conversation. An important meeting was about to take place in Karlshorst. Some of the technical experts were required to be there. Yes, there would be German-only speakers present also. Interpreters would be required. Sokolovsky jerked his head impatiently, not wanting to be bothered with details. One of the technical experts pointed at Tonya.

‘Sergeant Kornikova, there. She can interpret.’

Sokolovsky nodded and waved his hand. ‘Come.’ It was an order.

The thirty-six hours which followed that instruction were among the strangest of Tonya’s life.

For one thing, she didn’t sleep, not even for a minute. For another, the meeting she was asked to attend – or meetings, rather, because one symposium rolled on into another, in seemingly interminable sequence – turned out to be of the highest possible importance to the future of the Soviet Union in Germany. All the most senior officials were there, Russian and German. The purpose of the meeting was to present Soviet plans for the east zone, and elsewhere in the emerging Soviet bloc. A succession of speakers from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia were there to survey the progress of the Communist Party in their home countries. The meeting rooms echoed with the sound of Russian triumphalism, Russian greed.

And that in turn led to the third strange aspect of the whole experience. A vital document, with the highest security classification available, needed to be translated into German. The document summarised the state of the Communist presence throughout Germany, east and west zones together. The longest single section was on Berlin itself. Tonya was ordered to carry out the translation. It was that task which kept her up the entire night, as all the others were either feasting or sleeping. Page after page swooped through her typewriter. The state of the Communist advance was carefully analysed. Key Communist sympathisers were named, as were the Party’s most important opponents. In the latter case, the individuals weren’t just named, they were evaluated for their susceptibility to bribery and blackmail. The weaknesses of the Western Allies were listed in precise and remorseless detail. Without question, the document was the most shocking, comprehensive and important information that Tonya had ever come across. She had been asked to type up three copies of the whole thing: three thin white sheets interspersed with flimsy black carbon papers. She typed in a trance, her fingers rubbery with tiredness, her mind spinning with the implications of the text in front of her.