The Lieutenant’s Lover (41 page)

Tonya arrived in Preobrazheniye one spring evening. She didn’t know where she was meant to go. There was no one on the platform to meet her. She put down her bag – her life’s possessions packed into a bag small enough to swing easily from her shoulder – and waited. In the lee of the station canopy, the shadows grew thicker. A quince tree hung its blossoms over a fence. The air was curious to Tonya: it felt heavy, thick and moist, almost like the air in a communal bath house. She supposed it was the unseen presence of this eastern sea, so unlike the cold northern sea she remembered from Petrograd. Some way away, a bird sang, in a voice Tonya couldn’t recognise.

An hour passed. It became darker. Tonya wondered what to do – realised that there was nothing she could do, not this late in the evening – and determined to wait. Another forty minutes ran past. The smell of the quince blossom grew more intense as the evening breeze dropped away.

And then, she heard boot steps running across the dirt yard in front of the station. She stood up. The steps approached. A wooden door was thrust aside with a hollow boom. A man emerged onto the platform and stood in the thin iron lamplight above the doorway, looking around. Tonya realised that she was standing in the shadow, effectively invisible. The man couldn’t see her.

But she could see him.

The man was thinner than he had once been. The old flash and fire in his eyes had gone, his former tigerish energy sunk away almost to nothing. But it was Rodyon, all right. She walked towards him, hands outstretched.

It was the evening of June the 18
^th
, the end of a fine, warm day. The linden tree in Misha’s back garden was just budding into early flower. A honeysuckle had clambered up into the lower branches then collapsed downwards as though fagged out. The scents of both hung seemingly for ever on the still air.

It was eight-thirty in the evening. Rosa was usually required to be in bed by that time but, uncharacteristically for her, she had hung around downstairs, making excuses and dragging her feet. Misha, after a couple of attempts to shoo her up, had given up. He’d mixed her a drink of lemon juice, water and sugar and the two of them had gone outside to sit in the garden and enjoy the last of the sun. They didn’t speak much. Willi was out somewhere with his camera and his journalist friends. Misha had erected a hammock under the linden tree in the garden and Rosa swung on it, while Misha sat on the grass beneath. She sipped her drink. There was almost no sound except the bedtime songs of birds and the squeak where the hammock rubbed against its fixing.

Suddenly Rosa spoke.

‘Harry’s coming now,’ she announced.

‘Harry? Hollinger?’

Rosa nodded.

‘I don’t think so, little
Knospe
.’

The truth was that Misha hardly ever saw Hollinger now. There was a real friendship between the two men, but their professional relationship had come to an end. It was no longer possible to reach Tonya, and Misha could no longer safely travel in the east zone, and consequently no longer had nuggets of information to feed the Englishman. Hollinger still came around from time to time, but he was too busy to come often.

Rosa didn’t argue against Misha’s verdict – she hardly ever did – but she just nodded again to demonstrate that she didn’t agree. In any case, her occasional bursts of intuition had nothing to do with logic. She went on rocking. Misha saw a spider lower itself onto her head from the branches above and he stood up to brush it away. And just as he did so, there was the sound of a car engine outside. The car slowed and stopped. Rosa raised her eyebrows in a silent told-you-so. Surprised, Misha stood up and walked around the side of the cottage – its stone walls still warm from the day’s heat – to the front. There, sure enough, was Hollinger struggling with a large cardboard box.

‘
Guten Abend
, old bean,’ said Hollinger. ‘Here, take an end.’

The two men carried the box around the house into the garden. Rosa had jumped down out of her hammock and came skipping to greet the Englishman with a big hug around the neck.

‘Hello there, Rosie. Still up, eh? Here, do you want to see what’s in this box?’

Using his car key, he ripped the tape on the box and opened the lid. The box inside was crammed with tinned goods from England and other things that had seldom been seen in Berlin for almost as long as Rosa had been alive. There were tinned peaches, condensed milk, golden syrup, tea, Oxford marmalade, bars of soap, and much else. Hollinger let Rosa dig around in the box emitting shrieks of excitement and delight, then he himself reached down into a corner and pulled out a bottle of whisky. Misha went into the kitchen and came out with two glasses for himself and Hollinger, and a bowl, spoon and tin opener so that Rosa could enjoy her first ever taste of tinned peach. He poured the whisky and decanted the peaches. Rosa bent over her bowl breathless with excitement.

Hollinger’s face had been beaming while Rosa was being sorted out, but as soon as Misha stood up again and faced him, the Englishman’s face looked sombre.

‘What is it?’ Misha spoke in French, a language that Hollinger knew well enough and that Rosa didn’t.

‘Nothing, nothing … well, I hope nothing.’

‘And if it weren’t nothing?’

Hollinger sighed, swilling whisky around his glass, staring hard at the glittering liquid.

‘More and more, I’m getting a bad sense of things.’

‘The Soviets?’

‘Yes, in a way. In the western zones, things have become very bad. In some of the bigger cities, the daily calorie count was down to just 900. That’s awful, but at least it’s had the effect of waking people up. The Americans, more. Our chaps were awake, but too poor to do much. Anyhow, as you know, this fellow General Marshall has offered real help. Money. Increases in permitted industrial production, even steel. There’ll be reform of the currency as well. There’ll have to be. You can’t get a country to function on cigarettes and banknotes that everyone knows are worthless.’

‘And comrade Stalin won’t like that.’

‘No. He’ll never permit a western currency reform to take place in his sector, which means that the country will be effectively split in two.’

‘And Berlin?’

‘I don’t know. The Russians have it surrounded. If they want to cut it off, they can do so easily. We’ll never start a shooting war to stop them. Even if we did, we don’t have the troops to do it. If Stalin wants Berlin, he’ll take it.’

Rosa had almost finished her peaches now, but she was making the last peach half last by chasing it around the painted china bowl with her spoon, watching it squirm and squeal away from her. The box full of goodies had taken on a darker meaning now. It was Hollinger’s way of protecting them against what was about to come; the starvation and the hopelessness. But a cardboard box, no matter how large and wonderful, would not go far against a Soviet attempt to starve the city.

‘It won’t be soon,’ said Hollinger, reading his thoughts. ‘That box isn’t meant to be … well, it’s just a gift. But if you want to get out of the city now, I’d help clear the paperwork.’

Misha breathed out, watching his girl playing on the grass. A brown caterpillar with purple spots had crawled over the lip of the bowl and Rosa was intent on seeing whether the caterpillar liked peach.

‘I ought to do it, I know,’ he said. ‘For Rosa’s sake, if not mine. But I can’t. Somewhere, back in the early days with Willi, I realised I could never run again. I still can’t.’

Hollinger nodded, then changed the subject.

‘How is Willi?’

‘Well. Very well. His photography is getting better all the time. He is getting commissions from the best American papers now. He’s still doing cartoons for
Die Trümmerzeitung
. He’s always busy.’

‘He’s got a talent, that boy.’

‘Yes.’

Hollinger opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, then decided to say it anyway. ‘You know, your little family here?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Germany, isn’t it? Germany as she was always meant to be and now is.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You, the engineer, the bourgeois, the businessman. The man who’ll fix anything, make something of nothing. And Willi. The democratic spirit, the freethinker, the journalist. The sort of person to put an end to any number of Hitlers.’

‘Yes, and Rosa, the future, the one who gives hope to all the rest of us.’

Rosa had finished her peaches and rolled over on hearing her name. Misha smiled at her and pulled her over onto his lap. The three of them played and chatted until the sun went down, and Rosa couldn’t keep from yawning.

Hollinger stood up, ready to go. He spoke in French one last time.

‘Your Antonina, she was very special. She did a lot for us. I didn’t know her well, but what I did, I liked very much. I’m sorry we couldn’t get her out. God knows, if anyone had deserved it, she did.’

Misha nodded, and found himself repeating Hollinger’s last sentence.

‘Yes. If anyone deserved it, then she did.’

They used the past tense. Both men knew they were never likely to see or hear from her again.

Half a world away, Tonya’s life began again.

Rodyon had taken her back to his apartment, a single room really, with a communal toilet at the bottom of the stairs, and a small cooking stove crammed into the corner of the room. There was no chair, but a bed big enough for them both to sit.

He didn’t apologise for the accommodation – how could he, when the apartment had never been of his choosing? – but Tonya didn’t mind it anyway. Of all the futures that Pavel could have arranged for her, this one was the least bad by a long distance.

That first night they sat together and talked until dawn. Rodyon told his story: prison camp in Siberia; the harshest of conditions only barely survived; then war in a
shtraf
battalion; his pleasure at the idea that he might at least die in the fight against fascism, rather than waste away in prison. After the war had ended, his remaining prison sentence had been cancelled. He had been posted here, to Preobrazheniye, and given a job as a warehouseman down at the docks. He liked the sea, he said. He found it peaceful.

Then Tonya spoke about herself. Her imprisonment. Her wartime experiences. At times, it appeared the two of them had been located on the same part of the front, just a dozen miles or so away from each other. But it could have been a million miles for all the difference that it had made or could have made. She skipped over her time as interpreter in Berlin and then Oderbruch quickly enough. She didn’t mention Misha or her attempted escape.

They spoke about their daughters of course, Yuliya and Yana. Neither of them had heard what had happened to the girls. Even if they were alive, they would be best advised to make no attempt to contact their parents, political outcasts as they were. Tonya realised that the girls had somehow come to mean more to Rodyon than she did. She accepted his feelings. She had never fully given herself to her husband. It was only right that he had now managed to pull away from his long-standing obsession with her. He told her that she was to be given a job in a fish-packing factory close to the waterfront. ‘It’s not the nicest work, but it’s not the worst. Maybe in time they’ll let you move to an office job somewhere.’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe. In time.’

Only late on that night, when a huge pink sun had reared itself from a pale blue sea so smooth you couldn’t tell where water ended and sky began, did Rodyon mention Misha.

‘You saw him,’ he said.

Tonya wasn’t sure if it were a statement or a question. She didn’t know how much, if anything, he knew. But she wasn’t going to lie. She was too old for that now, and too much had happened.

‘Yes.’

‘In Berlin?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course you must have wanted to go and…’

‘I tried, yes.’

‘But you were caught, I suppose. So that’s why they sent you here.’

‘Not they. Pavel.’

‘Pavel?’ Rodyon was genuinely astonished. He’d had no idea. ‘Really? You know that brother of yours… There was always something not quite right about his political convictions. I used to think in those early days, that he might … well, perhaps…’

Tonya nodded. She knew what he was saying. ‘He denounced us. First you. Then me. Why, I don’t know. I think I never understood him at all.’

Rodyon nodded. He got up from the bed to make a fire in the stove and put on a pot of water to boil. He had some coffee beans from somewhere, which he ground by putting them into a cloth bag and thumping them with the end of a stick. Tonya realised he must have gone to extraordinary lengths to find coffee for her. As the stove grew hot it leaked gritty smoke and coal fumes into the room because the chimney joints fitted poorly. It was the sort of problem Misha would have sorted out on his first day, with his long fingers and incessant, deft creativity. Tonya missed that beloved man more than ever now, useless though that feeling was.

Rodyon went downstairs to shave, politely leaving the room for her to change in if she wanted. She didn’t bother to change, just untied her hair, combed it out, then tied it again. The water boiled and Tonya made coffee.

All through the night, sitting side by side together on the bed, they had held hands. Once, Rodyon had brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. She had let him. And that had been it. He had made no attempt to take her to bed and, she realised, he never would. Though they would sleep side by side of course – the room had only one bed in it and no room to fit a second – they would never make love again. Tonya felt a little sorry for him: Rodyon, who had only ever been good to her.