Pavel & I (5 page)

Now that he was looking, Anders found more such eights scribbled onto doorways and courtyard walls across Charlottenburg. Once, he spotted them chalked onto the green canvas of a British Army truck. That night, stretched out next to Pavel's feverish form, Anders lay awake asking himself whether there was any truth in the rumour that Hitler had survived the invasion and that his Reich would rise once more from its ashes. He got up, cut a piece of ice from out of the bucket, slipped it into his mouth. ‘Heil Hitler,' he whispered past the ice's ragged edges, just to try it out, then shrugged his shoulders. It was all the same to him, just as long as Pavel made it through the night.

The fever was getting worse. Anders had no way of taking Pavel's temperature, but in the cold of the room he watched steam rise from the exposed skin of his cheeks and piled blanket after blanket on top of him. The coal oven burned night and day, but its heat lacked the strength to traverse the room. It was, to Anders, like they were burning money; coal prices soared, rumours of people freezing to death in their beds. Paulchen made Schlo' and some of the other small-framed boys creep down coal shafts at night to score a few buckets' worth, then distributed it amongst his crew. They swore unending devotion. Those who had families supplied fathers, mothers, rape-pregnant sisters. The others heated their cubbyholes and traded the excess for chocolate and smokes. Anders brought his coals home to Pavel, sat inches before the iron stove, stoking the fire and beseeching it to break through the wall of cold that grew out of the floor a mere two yards from it. Coal fumes hung so heavy in the room that the sick man's face was mucky with soot. Five times a day Anders made a point of breaking off a corner of ice, clutching it in an oven-warmed fist, and pressing it to Pavel's lips. Water revived Pavel, bade him wake. They spoke on and off, boy and man, never mentioning the midget. Pavel tried to read but had to give up. His eyeballs looked swollen in their sockets; they could not focus.
Anders watched him for hours at a time and thought that surely he would die.

‘Tonight,' he whispered into a soot-covered ear, mentally sorting through the contents of his bucket of meat. ‘Tonight I will cook you a good dinner.

‘Meat,' he whispered. ‘Meat for health. It will make you good again.'

His hand crawled over Pavel's dry-hot cheek and when it crossed his lips he saw them pucker. Anders did not feel the kiss. It was parched and dry and had no strength.

Pavel dreamt. Day and night, always the same dream now. Him, naked, rolling upon a mountain of raw kidneys. Rolling in the manner of a swine, naked, the smell of kidneys strong in his nose. His naked body: writhing, and on occasion the heavens would open, more kidneys raining down on him, sticking to him, cold and clammy meat on skin. Whenever he woke, he told himself that it was nothing but the fever.

Then, early one evening, he woke yet again from his dream and found them on his dresser. He was convinced, then, that they were his own, and in truth he felt relieved. They lay upon a plate, the last of his china, at the very centre of the dresser. Lay within a circle of blood upon a plate of chipped Meissen, a pinch of dried rosemary scattered across. Pavel lay still, his eyes fastened upon the kidneys, hysterical laughter sounding in the depths of him. He tried to move and felt unbearably heavy. A pile of blankets pressed down upon his body; he had to fight to free an arm and a hand, and dug his nails into his palm to test it for sensation. Deliberately – tenderly – he reached out towards the plate. He wished to know whether they were still warm, those kidneys that had been taken
from him during his sleep. He found them freezing, a coat of frost crystals clinging to their membranes. The rosemary stuck to his sweaty fingers. He brought it back to his nose and through it he smelled the tangy smell of kidney. It was then that the laughter burst free of his chest and he began to flail and kick against the blankets' leaden weight.

It went on so until the boy was there, shouting at him. The Meissen lay smashed on the floor; the blankets were bloodied. ‘Meat,' the boy kept screaming at him, and at long last Pavel relented. He settled back into sleep, thinking that it did not matter now, without kidneys, thinking
I should've sold my books,
thinking I am dead now, because
I was too proud to sell them
, trying to weep for himself, asleep again before any tears would come to him, asleep upon a mountain of kidneys, writhing.

Anders woke up to his laughing, watched him kick and flail. One arm hit the dresser. The plate that he had laid out in order to cheer him up sailed down, cracked right down its middle; the meat bounced hard like a stone. The boy leapt on top of him, held him down. Marvelled at how weak he was, a grown man, his palms and cheek stained by the meat. It did not take long to calm him. Pavel slipped into sleep like a toddler, lay oblivious as Anders rearranged the blankets and cleaned his face with a moistened towel. He picked up the dinner from off the floor and went to see whether the electricity had been turned on yet. It had, and he hastily melted a piece of lard in Pavel's cast-iron pan, then patiently fried both pieces of meat until they were done. They took their while getting tender on account of being frozen, and by the time Anders was finished the outsides were scorched, the centres still bloody. He cut them into bite-sized chunks with a pen knife, shoved them into an army-issue
bowl and carried it back into the sick room. The boy's entreaties woke Pavel quickly enough, but try as he might he could not get him to chew the meat. He would just lie there, a piece between his lips, and suck on its warmth. In the end Anders ate most of the kidneys himself, thinking that it had been a long time since he had tasted meat this good. Pavel had already gone back to sleep. After dinner Anders sat in the light of a candle, watching his friend die.

Anders struggled against it for the longest time. He sat on a stool by the bed clutching his knees and bravely fighting the impulse. Whenever his hands threatened to join up, or he found his eyes casting about for a towel or shawl, he would jump up and pace the room instead. The tears were in his throat but not yet on his face. When he finally relented and slipped on a cap as he had watched Pavel do, he did so with bitterness. The wood felt hard under his knees, and there was something ridiculous about the tea towel that he held stretched out behind the back of his head. Anders prayed.

‘God,' he prayed, ‘I think you're mean.'

‘Mean, you hear. What sort of God would kill a man like this?'

‘God,' he prayed, ‘if he lives, I promise to believe.'

‘If he dies,' he prayed, ‘I will curse you.'

‘Curse you, you hear.'

‘My name is Anders,' he added, ‘and this here is Pavel,' lest there be any mistakes.

He stopped praying then, lost for words, and grief took hold of him like a rabid dog. He sobbed and lay a cheek upon the icy floor. It took his breath, literally, and for a moment he tried to still body and blood so that he might better hear. It was to him as though, above, at the precise moment when his ear had touched the wood, he had heard a piano burst into song. He did not dare move for a whole minute and then another, sat out ten, with his breath screwed into him, biting his lip against the cold. Then he leapt up, slid a sleeve across his tearstained
face, and ran as fast as he could up the stairs to the apartment directly above.

He burst in, not bothering to knock. She must have forgotten to lock the door behind her, it gave way to his childish fist and he stormed in, kicking up clouds of dust. He bolted down the corridor, she heard him crash into her suitcase, and on towards the light. The drumbeat of his feet upon her carpets – she stopped her playing in surprise, craned her neck to see, and no sooner had she done so than he, too, stopped with great suddenness, his legs still stretched for running, and stood stock still at the very centre of her living room. She picked up the candelabra from where it stood next to the piano chair and rose to inspect him.

He was an ugly boy, physically stunted, twelve, perhaps thirteen years old. In figure short and angular; a prune face above, with crooked teeth and eyes that didn't sit quite even, like he had broken a bone there some time ago and it had never been set. He opened his mouth to speak but not a word came out.

‘What?' she asked, and noted how cold it sounded. ‘What do you want?'

He rubbed his eyes, the dust must have got to them, his voice rasped in his throat.

‘What?' she asked again, disentangling her coat from the chair, and prepared herself to use the candelabra as a weapon if need be. The boy did not answer, so she raised her left and used it to point into the black of the corridor.

‘Then go,' she said, one eye on her jewelled wristwatch. ‘Go, or you'll get into trouble.'

The boy would not leave. Instead, he leapt at her, or rather at her hand. Initially she thought he was after the watch, the little thief, but it was the hand itself that he grabbed and applied his weight to.

‘Please,' he mouthed, just as she had resolved to hit him with the candelabra. His eyes were on the floor. ‘Please.'

He smelled of street waste and burnt meat.

‘What do you want?' she tried again, the boy still clinging to her hand. His prune face quivered, he was ugly like a monkey, and spat when he talked, unmodulated, too loud for the room and the hour.

‘Please,' he said. ‘My friend, he is ill. You – you have a piano. You are rich. Please. Save him. He is dying.'

It sounded made up, a trap perhaps, and she longed to get back to her playing. It had been so long since she had enjoyed the pleasures of a piano.

‘I can't help you,' she told him, and then, ‘Let me go, you little beast,' only his grimy fingers were clamped upon her jacket now, pulling at it and threatening to pop its buttons. A boot-tip to his crotch got him away from her, gave her the time to sink a fist into his hair and drag him to the door. She was too fast for his flailing leg and slammed the door in his face. Then she stood, panting, and waited for him to go away.

He didn't.

Instead he drummed against the wood with feet and fists, threatening to wake up the whole house. ‘Please,' he screamed, his voice breaking, and through the closed door she pictured spit flying from his crooked mouth. The fool. The Colonel would be back soon. She did not want to think what he might do to the boy. In truth she could not predict it.

‘Boy,' she hissed through the wood. ‘Be quiet. For your own sake, be quiet.'

The drumming stopped. She heard him shift.

‘Please.' It sounded from the crack underneath the door. Half a dirty pinky squeezed its way into her apartment. ‘He's sick.'

‘Who?'

‘My friend.'

‘Your friend?'

‘Downstairs. Right below. Please, he needs medicine real bad.' She opened her mouth to answer, closed it again. Thought guiltily of the medicine chest that the Colonel had given her, that now lay inside her suitcase, wrapped in her silk nightgown and a Parisian negligee. Thought of the Colonel again, coming upon the boy like this, a German boy, dirt on his hands and a face like a prune. She pictured it, then dropped into a crouch. In one hand she still held the candelabra; on the other a jewelled watch kept ticking.