Pavel & I (18 page)

Once the boy was gone, Pavel stripped off the coat Boyd had given him the night the midget had died, spread it out over the kitchen table, and calmly searched its lining for secrets. A little later he'd rummage around for his camera, a flashlight and some scissors. His was a busy afternoon full of revelations.

All day she sat and waited for a knock on the door. She found she dreaded it, no matter whom it would announce: Fosko, studying her from behind fat cheeks, his chubby hand gently combing through the monkey's pelt; or Pavel, her inept suitor, begging her for a truth he did not want, and taunting her with the possibility of love. For a while Sonia returned to the piano, trying to tease solace from its wooden guts; heard notes within notes, dark scrapings in the under-carriage that shouldn't have been there but were, and remained inexplicable to her until, opening the piano's great lid and shining a light into its workings, she found some of the monkey's waste grown hard around its strings and hammers. It seemed to her that the monkey never stopped shitting, shat more than she gave it to eat; it was as though it had been instructed to expel at all cost and thus play symbol to the absurdity of her existence. In her frustration she left the piano and sat smoking cigarettes before her mirror, one after the other, until her tongue tasted of ashes and nausea had settled in her throat. A mountain of butts, and still: no knock. She rinsed her mouth with brandy, swallowed aspirin, filed her nails.

It was late afternoon by the time Pavel showed. She was unprepared for the wave of joy that welled up in her, and immediately set
to avenge herself for it. It started in her stomach, the seat of all her affects;
it must be,
she told herself spitefully,
because your heart's so meagre an organ.
She pictured it beating, empty and wrinkled like a child's scrotal sack, pumping blood so diluted it showed translucent in its vents and chambers: all this in the single moment it took him to step into the middle of the room and stand there with the stiff-waisted serenity of the drawing-room butler. In his hand he held a pair of rolled-up socks.

‘You come bearing gifts?' she asked.

‘After a first shared night,' she said, ‘flowers are more traditional. Or champagne, if one has a touch of the cad.'

She scratched over one breast, as though to remove a stain. It brought colour to his cheek. He lowered his gaze, stepped forward, still with the same solemnity of purpose, and made to pass her the socks.

‘The Colonel is looking for this. It's why Boyd died.'

She arched an eyebrow.

‘Not for the socks, Sonia. For what's inside. It's what he's been after all along. Fosko.'

‘You are a fool then, giving it to me.'

He shrugged and she took the socks. They were thick woollen things, well worn and dirty. She could not detect any extra weight in them. After a moment's hesitation she carried them over to a glass cabinet, took out a beautiful coffee pot that she no longer used because Fosko had bought her a more expensive one, and dropped the socks inside. Then she replaced it on the bottom shelf and locked up the cupboard. Pavel stood unmoved. She wished he would do something natural. Blow his nose, perhaps; hold her. His hands were on his trousers' seams, palms turned inward.

‘You want some coffee?' she asked.

He shook his head. ‘Sonia – what I tried to tell you last night. I have been thinking –'

‘I kissed you, you know.'

This startled him, chased away the butler. He stood baffled, brows heavy knit.

‘You did?'

‘In the middle of the night. I might have dreamt it, though.' Deliberately – like a tramp – she circled him and slid up close, crushing her breast against his back. ‘There is that about you,' she whispered into his ear, ‘that hankers after confession.'

He tried to kiss her then, turning his head around to her, and freeing one arm from her embrace, but in his haste he somehow missed and glanced off her nose and cheekbone. His lips, she noted, were thin and pink like a girl's.

‘Jesus, you are worse at this than I imagined.'

‘I wish,' he said, working himself free of her embrace. ‘I wish we could talk with honesty.'

Sonia giggled at that, and ran into the kitchen to make coffee after all. There were tears in her eyes. She scratched at them with her fist's knuckles, and ground coffee beans into smithereens. They spilled their odour as they were crushed.

Pavel did not follow her. He stood impassively, fingers to his lips. She watched him from the kitchen doorway, sly, furtive glances every time she turned to fetch sugar, saucers, silver spoons. Reluctantly, she admitted to herself that she wanted to touch him again.

They sat and had coffee, him pulling the chair away for her before he sat down himself. Sonia could almost picture how his governess had taught him to, or perhaps it had been his Russian mother, running well-groomed fingers through his hair when he got it right. The coffee, she realized, was far too strong. They both piled sugar into their cups without acknowledging her mistake. Halfway through the cup she rose all of a sudden, pulling him up by his elbow. He stood, ill-balanced, one foot caught under the chair legs.

‘Let's try again,' she said and kissed him. She had never understood the phrase: the earth moved. Well, perhaps it did move. Her stomach heaved, too, and for a moment she thought, comically, that she might spew on him, right on his lapels. She gave a laugh, affected; held onto his elbows; shivered. He watched her passively, and allowed these things to happen. There was a quiver to his mouth.

‘We still need to talk,' he said. ‘About Boyd.'

She could see how it pained Pavel to say his name, especially now that his hands were balanced upon her hips. He grasped at straws: ‘You don't keep a diary, do you?'

She laughed at that; a
peal
of laughter, rising out of her very throat.

‘Whatever for?' she said. ‘What's the point in keeping evidence against yourself?'

He heard her say it, frowned, and buried his forehead in her shoulder. They stood like this, the coffee growing cold in their cups.

Perhaps she should n't have been so surprised when she felt his erection against her hip. He was a man, after all. All of a sudden she felt his body's weight; felt his hands stiffen upon her. Pavel raised his head as though to kiss her again – another sort of kiss. There was what they call rapture in his eyes, a visceral sort of greed. Sonia turned her face away.

‘I have never lain with a man for pleasure,' she told him stiffly.

He took it in, thoughtfully. She watched him closely, lest there be pity. There was no pity.

It was a shame, really.

Pity might have cured her.

‘It's only the war,' he said.

Sonia looked back at him and mouthed the word: ‘Only.'

He shrugged and smiled like he was apologizing for a joke, one that was in bad taste, yet funny. Oh, she liked this Pavel.

‘I have to go,' he said. ‘There is someone I promised to meet.'

His hands let go of her body; he stepped back and stuck them into his pockets, to mask his erection.

‘Come back, later. We can –'

She broke off. There was no reckoning what they could or could not do.

Then, finally, he left her, smiling still, his hair sticking up where she had touched it, tugged it, torn at him. He left stiff-legged, his stride debilitated by desire.

Pavel left the building. He stopped outside the door to tighten the scarf around his neck and put on his hat. The lining of his coat was cut open along the seams, and the discrepancy between the two layers made it sit awkwardly on his narrow frame. A scarecrow, you see, stumbling down Berlin's icy streets. He would have done well to turn around now and again. He would have seen, in a dozen places where the terrain provided no possible cover, a pursuer hot on his heels. A respectable figure in a good duffel coat; middle-aged, stout and one-eyed, a patch upon the other, and lamb's wool drawn low into his eyes: in a word, yours truly. To be quite honest, I wasn't trying to be too clever about the chase. It was dark already, and bitterly cold, the kind of cold when you think your eyeball is going to freeze. The cigarette I was smoking was glowing at one end and stone cold at the other. It wasn't the weather for cleverness. I was happy just to keep moving.

There was one thing that surprised me as I hurried after Pavel down Charlottenburg's murky streets. I had expected my fellow watcher to follow us. It was still the same man, half-frozen and exhausted, no doubt, who stared back at me through his car's windshield when I left the building. Very nearly I beckoned for him to join us in our late-afternoon ramble, but of course I checked the impulse. The cold must have wormed its way into his brain by then; there was no way he was thinking straight after something like eighteen hours in that car, his
bones hurting with cold and a bottle of spirits his only friend. Still, it made me think, his passivity. If he was not going to follow us, who the hell was he waiting for so patiently all these hours, and on whose orders? I tried to shake off my doubts as I ran after Pavel. There was only so much I could keep in my head at one time just then. For the moment, all that mattered was that I did not lose sight of my careless prey.

We passed a phone box, Pavel some thirty paces ahead, walking with a slouch and a tilt, coat-tails flapping in the wind. Next to it there stood a boy and a girl, hardly out of their teens, huddling in a close embrace. I remember her clutching a tin of American orange juice in an outsized mitten, no doubt a present from her darling; his hands were buried in her coat, rubbing her warm. When Pavel passed them they stopped their carousing and turned to look after him. The boy whispered something in his lover's ear. She gave a brief laugh, charmed by someone else's wretchedness, then turned back into his embrace.

I drew level with them, and wished them a Merry Christmas. ‘
Frolicke Wey-nackten,
' I said in my accented German.

‘And to you, Tommy,' answered the boy belligerently. Jesus, you would have thought they could forget about occupation on a night like this. Pavel and I, we walked on in darkness. All around us the city eased into the miracle of Christmas Eve.

I have often wondered how much celebrating went on that winter, the winter of '46. On the whole I am inclined to be optimistic. Had the windows not all been frozen, I am sure we would have been able to make out a tree in every living room, a little shabby perhaps and more likely than not stolen from under their occupiers' noses. On their twigs: talc candles, wooden trinkets and, amongst the wealthy, fragile glass balls, hand-painted, and a silver star to top the crooked little bugger. I gather there wouldn't have been much in the way of presents, but perhaps they managed to procure something a little
special for their dinner: a roast bird perhaps, or carp and almonds, a little torte for afters and a half-shot of something lively, just to toast the Christ-child on his coming. Call me sentimental, but I like to think they kept up their spirits, the Krauts, and forgot them for a night, those pangs of defeat. Pavel, though, seemed oblivious to their merrymaking. He kept his eyes on the ground. God knows it was treacherous enough.

In the end it wasn't much of a walk, though there was plenty of time to freeze right down to the bone. No sooner had he rounded one last corner than some hoodlums set upon him from out of the shadows. They rammed him into the building wall and searched his clothes for weapons. I hung back, watched them push him over a backyard wall, and escort him through a doorway. The electricity was on, and I could watch their progress by their turning on the corridor lights one floor after another. They took him into some place just under the roof. It wasn't my job to follow him there.

I knew I was in for a long, cold wait. A little disgruntled at having been abandoned so quickly, I rushed back to the phone box we had passed in order to call for backup. Its frame was badly bent, but amazingly I got a line almost at once.

‘Peterson here,' I said. ‘Richter has rendezvoused with some local gang of street urchins. Schillerstrasse 48, round the back.'