The Lieutenant’s Lover (32 page)

The convoy ground its way past. Misha noted what he could: convoy size, regimental markings, any senior officers’ cars. All these details and more he memorised and would relay to Harry Hollinger in due course. He didn’t know how much use the Englishman could make of such reports, but he did know that the Western Allies were worried about Soviet intentions. Every little detail of troop movements could help Hollinger’s analysts build up a picture of what was going on. The last truck in the convoy grumbled past in a roar of exhaust smoke, then moved off to leave the road and woods in silence once again. Misha put his hand back to the ignition.

He turned the key.

Or rather, he began to turn the key, until the tumblers inside were engaged. Another one degree of turn would engage the ignition. But instead of completing the movement, he withdrew his hand.

‘The only real choice is fleeing to the West or a camp in the woods.’

It had been a strange thing for the manager to say, but that wasn’t what had suddenly caught Misha’s attention. He remembered the man’s hand movement. He had originally held his hand so that it was pointing roughly westwards out of the window. Then he’d glanced out at the forest and adjusted his hand so that it had pointed north-west. If there wasn’t a camp, then why adjust hand position? If there was a camp, then why deny it?

All of a sudden, those questions seemed suddenly immense, momentous, hanging in the air like artillery smoke over a battlefield.

Moving quickly again, Misha backed the car out of its intimate clinch with the Thüringen forest. Swinging back onto the road, he pointed the car not east to Rosa and Berlin, but back west the way he had come. He drove intently, angrily, first west to Weimar, then north, then west again.

The forest closed and thickened around the car. The sound of his engine was the only human sound audible for miles. The air was full of sunlight and bird noise, the quick scurry of squirrels. When he reached junctions in the road, he hesitated. He examined any road signs and any tracks gouged into the soft roadside grass. He navigated partly by judgement, mostly by intuition. The light began to soften as the big orange sun plunged towards the horizon.

Then Misha found a sign. The sign was in Russian only, not German. It read ‘Special Camp Number 2’ with an arrow pointing up a heavily-rutted road.

Misha felt the sudden clamour and jabber of excitement, a feeling made up of sweating palms, a cold rush of adrenalin, the sudden focused clarity of thought.

Misha took his car off the road and plunged right into the forest, far enough into the undergrowth that the vehicle’s flat grey lines wouldn’t be visible. Misha kept a pair of binoculars in the car. He didn’t ordinarily like using them – the risk of being denounced as a spy was too great – but now was no time to worry. He took the binoculars and darted off into the undergrowth, proceeding uphill, into the fading tree-filtered sunlight.

It took Rokossovsky and his accomplices in the quartermaster’s office two weeks to accumulate enough produce to be worth selling. The first trip they made, Gisela was away and Tonya had to bargain with a rodent-like man, who seemed to live in another part of the warehouse. Tonya didn’t trust him at all. She saw in him the classic black-marketeer, shifty and self-interested. She bargained hard and got a much better deal than the time before. Rokossovsky again was ecstatic.

Two weeks later, things were all set up for the trip, but then one of the NKVD camp staff needed a trip into town and borrowed a ride on the truck. That meant that the whole deal was off again – they couldn’t sell camp stores under the NKVD’s nose – and they needed to wait again. Four more weeks passed fruitlessly. Either Tonya was unable to leave camp, or when she did she couldn’t find Gisela. Then, finally, on the first day of August, she was in the truck again, with Rokossovsky nervous but excited at the wheel, heading for Bad Freienwalde.

Tonya had fallen in love with the German countryside. It wasn’t the landscape, so much, that enchanted her. The low hills, little banks of woodland and curving rivers all struck Tonya’s Russian eyes as somehow unreal: built on the scale of a doll’s house. But more than all that, it was the villages and farms that she loved. They had their doll’s house quality too, but in their case it had to do with their neatness, their perfect order. Tonya looked and could never stop looking at the neatly pruned orchards, the tidy fences, the trim cottages, the orderly fields. As Rokossovsky hammered the truck brutally forwards, he talked incessantly, while Tonya said nothing. When they got to town, Rokossovsky sorted out the fuel by himself.

When they got down to the canal-side, Tonya braced herself against the disappointment of not seeing Gisela again, but the roar of the truck engine hadn’t even died away, before Gisela emerged in her dark skirt and white blouse, wanting to smile, only not able to because of Rokossovsky.

This time they had no coal to sell, only food: a sack of rice, a sack of flour, five crates of mixed vegetables. Tonya guessed they weren’t just taking food from dead prisoners, they were probably stealing from the mouths of the living too. She didn’t like it. The poor brutes were desperately hungry and every now and then waves of infection would sweep through the camp and another few corpses would be carried out to be buried in the woods by the prisoners themselves. However, Tonya wasn’t in a position to do anything about it, and in the meantime if the food helped Gisela and her family, it wasn’t going to waste.

They began ‘bargaining’, keeping their roles from the time before: Tonya angry, bullying. Gisela defiant, then beaten.

‘How are you? I didn’t see you the last time I came.’

‘I’m fine. You saw Jurgen. He can be difficult.’

‘No meat, I’m afraid, or coal. But the vegetables are excellent.’

‘It makes all the difference. We women have a little collective. We distribute the food so the children never go short. You can see through the doorway there, how healthy they are.’

‘Despite everything!’

‘Yes.’

‘Last time, I asked you if—’

‘I haven’t forgotten.’ This was the first time Gisela’s acting slipped, and she gave a bright smile that showed all her teeth, and both women could feel Rokossovsky scowl in displeasure. Gisela stopped smiling instantly and fell straight back into role – ‘A friend of mine, Herr Kirsten, has a canal-barge. He runs loads of wheat and potatoes straight from here into Berlin.’

‘To Berlin!’

‘The Heiligensee. Near Tegel. The French sector, I think. The barges are searched sometimes. Your countrymen don’t like seeing food go west. They interfere with things, make it hard. But if you don’t mind lying flat in the bows under some boards, we’ll load the produce straight on top. They’d have to empty the whole boat to find you.’

Tonya was so happy at the idea, she couldn’t keep the jubilation out of her voice, as she thanked Gisela. Gisela responded cleverly, making Tonya’s jubilation seem like victory in the bargaining contest. She went – humbly, browbeaten – to the warehouse and dragged out some baskets of knick-knacks, rubbish mostly, which she laid out for Tonya’s approving inspection.

As they pretended to haggle over a few remaining items, they began to deal with some of the practicalities.

‘When is Herr Kirsten here?’

‘It’s hard to say. His timetables are very variable. It depends on so much that’s out of his control. But every ten days or so.’

‘It’s difficult. I can only come so irregularly myself.’

‘If you wanted, you could try to hide here, in the warehouse.’

Tonya could tell Gisela was unhappy with that idea. And in any event, so was she. ‘No. That wouldn’t be safe for either of us. I don’t know how hard they’ll try to look for me, but it would be no good if they caught me… Listen, I’ll try to come here on Mondays. It’s not entirely in my control, but I’ll try.’

‘Do you want to say Tuesday? There’s a street market on the Hauptstrasse on Tuesdays. That could serve as an excuse, perhaps.’

‘Excellent. Tuesday. If Herr Kirsten can try to be here then – other things permitting, of course – then we can hope to try something then.’

‘What about him?’ Gisela indicated Rokossovsky, who was crouching down by the pile of bartered goods: scarves, embroidered tablecloths, children’s spinning tops, blunt chisels, rush baskets.

‘I don’t know. He’s scared all the time. I’ll think of something.’

‘You will be taking a big risk.’ Gisela spoke soberly.

‘Yes. But less than I risk by not trying. I could do none of it without your help.’

Gisela shrugged. ‘We women must help each other. Nobody else will.’

Rokossovsky was happy with his haul, pitiful as it was. Tonya made an excuse to go into the warehouse with Gisela, where the two women hugged in privacy. By the time they came out again, Rokossovsky had loaded the truck and was waiting, with engine throbbing, beginning to be nervous. Tonya climbed in, resisting the urge to wave.

Misha went straight to Hollinger with his news

They met once a week at what, Misha supposed, he should call a safe house. But the term was too technical, too like the fieldcraft jargon of a paid and trained secret agent. Misha didn’t think of himself like that. He toured the east zone. He kept his eyes and ears open. He passed on anything useful to a friend of his in intelligence. What happened to the information after that, he didn’t spend much time thinking about. The meeting place itself was nothing special: just the windowless back room of a former tourist information office. The walls were painted in a pale, sickly green, and were hung with pre-war posters advertising the many pleasures of travel in the Third Reich.

‘It was an old Nazi camp, Buchenwald,’ said Misha. ‘The Soviets just converted it. Same buildings. Same use.’

‘Well, that would make sense. Birds of a feather and all that.’ Hollinger translated the phrase direct from the English, then repeated himself in proper German, ‘
Gleich und gleich gesellt sich gern
.’

‘Yes, quite.’

‘How close could you get?’

‘A hundred metres. But I had binoculars.’

‘Not an easy sight, I imagine. For you especially.’

Misha nodded, rubbing his face with both hands.

‘It was awful,’ he said, simply. ‘I was never in Buchenwald. Perhaps never anywhere that bad. But…’ He shook his head. For three hours he had lain on his stomach outside the camp, gazing at it through his glasses. It had been little more than a year since he’d been released from captivity himself, and thus far he’d simply tried to wall himself off from his memories. But back there, in the woods outside Buchenwald, staring at row after row of wooden huts and barbed-wire fences surveyed by machine guns, all those memories had come shockingly back to life. Misha had seen the ragged, starving prisoners moving listlessly between the buildings. It had been awful to watch. The old, hopeless depression had seeped into him like February mist, a cold that no summer warmth could ever hide.

‘How long were you in camps?’ asked Hollinger gently.

‘Seven years. It felt like a lifetime. After two years, I was sure I would die there.’

‘It’s unimaginable. Beyond thinking about.’

‘And it wasn’t only me.’

‘No, no. Your wife…’

‘Lillie. Yes. I loved her very much. We were happy. And not only her. Otto, her father, died somewhere like that too. I think perhaps one of the reasons why Tonya matters to me so much now is because of what happened to Lillie. To lose one’s wife and best friend is awful. Almost the worst thing that could happen to a man. To lose Lillie and Tonya too – as you say, it’s beyond thinking about.’

Hollinger nodded, allowing Misha as much time and silence as he needed. Misha had always tried to think of Lillie as she had been: laughing, healthy, bright-eyed, vivacious. He had tried never to think about what she must have become before death: one of those walking ghosts that filled the camps. Mostly he had succeeded in keeping her old self alive. The hours spent outside Buchenwald had summoned up his old demons again, and Misha fell silent. Hollinger, with his usual unobtrusive tact, lit a couple of cigarettes and passed one over to Misha. Neither man smoked much, but there were times for everything.

They smoked in silence for a few minutes.

Then, sensing a shift in the mood again, Hollinger drew them back to the main subject. ‘The prisoners. How many?’

‘Thousands. Not less than two thousand. I didn’t think more than eight or nine.’

‘Poor souls.’

‘Yes.’

‘Not still an extermination camp, I hope?’

‘No. Not that. I’m afraid I know the difference all too well. In any case, that’s not the Soviet way. Stalin doesn’t mind killing people, but he doesn’t do it on a production line like the Nazis. These were prisoners, pure and simple.’

‘And nationality? I suppose you couldn’t tell?’

‘Mostly German, I think. Perhaps all German. I couldn’t tell.’

‘And the camp staff?’

‘Soviet, of course. But not many of them. The prisoners looked as though they ran things themselves without much interference. The entire camp staff can’t have been more than a couple of hundred at the most.’

There was a long pause, before Hollinger asked the million-dollar question. ‘But big enough to need a translator?’