Potsdam Station jr-4

by David Downing

  If the British introduced a National Health Service he could almost guarantee that those who shouted loudest would get the best treatment. Which would still be better than rationing according to income.

  His mind was rambling. What if the shouting failed to shift them? What should he do then – travel back to the West? Once the Red Army took Berlin, the Americans, British and French would insist on their own people going in to administer the agreed zones, and he, as a Western journalist, should have no trouble going with them. But who knew how long it would be before the Red Army declared the city safe, and allowed their Allies in? Weeks probably, maybe even months.

  Was there nothing more he could offer the Soviets? He couldn’t think of anything. He needed a friend, a sponsor.

  Shchepkin, he thought, without much hope. But there was no one else.

  Yevgeny Shchepkin was the closest thing he had to a friend in Moscow. When Russell had refused the Russians’ invitation to the Soviet Union at the end of 1941, he had gained the impression that Shchepkin had actually been pleased, as if he knew that his bosses meant Russell no good, and was pleased that their plans had come to nought. That might have been wishful thinking – it was hard to know. When they had first met in 1924, both had been enthusiastic communists. At their meetings in 1939, Shchepkin had still seemed committed, but on a much more pragmatic level, and by 1941 Russell had gained the distinct impression that his old comrade was just going through the motions.

  Shchepkin might speak in his favour, he thought. Always assuming he could – the average life expectancy of Stalin’s international reps had taken something of a dip in recent years.

  But how could he find him? There were no private numbers in the Moscow telephone directory.

  He could just go straight to the NKVD. Put them at their ease by sticking his head between their jaws. Say Shchepkin was an old friend whom he wanted to look up while he was in Moscow. Witter on about internationalism and other mad ideas from Lenin’s day. What did he have to lose? They could only say no.

  The young woman who brought the child seemed cold and brusque to Effi, as if she was passing on a parcel rather than another living soul. ‘This is Rosa,’ was all she said, handing over the false papers and a small and very battered suitcase. She was clearly disinclined to linger, and Effi did nothing to detain her. The child could answer any questions about herself.

  Rosa seemed small for her age, with large hazel eyes, a small straight nose and soft lips. In better times, she would have been pretty, Effi thought, but hunger and grief had taken a toll. The curly fair hair was short and roughly shorn, adding to the waif-like impression. More to the point perhaps, there was nothing in the girl’s features or colouring to suggest her Jewish heritage.

  ‘I’m Erna,’ Effi said. ‘Erna von Freiwald. And this is Mathilde,’ she added, introducing Ali. ‘She’s moving out in couple of days, but she’ll still come to see us.’

  Rosa solemnly shook hands with both of them. ‘Rosa is not my real name,’ she said. ‘But I can’t tell you my real name until the war is over.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Effi said. ‘Erma and Mathilde aren’t our real names either. When the war’s over we can all tell each other.’

  The girl nodded. ‘Are you my mother now?’ she asked Effi, with a discernible hint of challenge.

  ‘We’re both going to be your friends,’ Effi offered, uncertain of what to say. ‘And we’ll try and look after you the way your mother would have wanted.’

  ‘For ever?’ the girl asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Until the war is over, at least. I’m sorry, but no one has told us about your family – what happened to your father?’

  ‘I don’t know. Mother told me he might be alive, and we must hope, but I don’t think she believed it.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I was very small. He just went away one day.’

  ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Is there any food, please? I’m very hungry.’

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry, I forgot. I made some soup this morning for when you arrived.’

  There was no gas to heat it, but Rosa gulped it down. After she’d finished, Effi showed her round the apartment. ‘You’ll sleep with me,’ she said. ‘I hope that’s all right.’

  ‘I think so,’ Rosa agreed. ‘I go to bed at eight o’clock.’

  ‘Where you were before,’ Effi asked, ‘did you go down to the shelter for the air raids?’

  ‘Not when my mother was alive. We had to stay in the shed where we lived. We used to get under the bed, but mother went out to get something.’ Her eyes brimmed with tears, which she angrily wiped away. ‘Frau Borchers took me down after that. She said I was her niece from Dresden, and that my mother and father had been killed.’

  ‘That’s a good story,’ Effi agreed. ‘We shall say the same here.’

  Later that evening, as the British thundered overhead, she told the same story to Frau Esser. The block warden wrote down the fictional details, which someone somewhere would doubtless try to verify. Most such stories, as many U-boats had found to their cost, could eventually be checked, but surely the time was now too short. With any luck at all, the Gestapo would be much too busy looking for last-ditch ways of saving their own skins.

  Watching Rosa interact with the other children in the shelter, Effi was reassured by the child’s obvious reticence. She wouldn’t be giving herself away – her mother had taught her well.

  Later, lying awake upstairs with the sleeping girl’s arm possessively draped around her, Effi found herself wondering how many millions of children would enter the coming peace as orphans.

  Russell’s Monday morning visit to the NKVD headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Street was long and fruitless. His arrival caused consternation, his request for Shchepkin’s address a look of such incredulity that it almost made him laugh out loud. The young officer stood there mute for several seconds, torn between a transparent desire to send him packing, and an equally obvious fear that doing so would render him personally liable for any other outrageous acts that Russell might commit in the temple of socialism. After ordering him to take a seat, he disappeared in search of help.

  He returned five minutes later with a senior officer, a much older man with a prominent scar on one side of his neck, who coldly asked what Russell wanted.

  He repeated his story. He had attended the Fifth Conference of the Party in 1924 as a fraternal delegate, and made friends with a young Russian, Yevgeny Shchepkin. Since his job as a journalist had brought him back to Moscow, he was hoping to renew their acquaintance. But, unfortunately, he had lost his old friend’s address.

  ‘And why have you come here?’ the officer asked.

  ‘I met Yevgeny again in Stockholm in early 1942, and he told me he worked for State Security. These are the State Security offices, are they not?’

  The NKVD officer gave Russell a long look, as if trying to determine what he was dealing with – an idiot or something more threatening. He then spent five minutes examining the passport and papers which Russell had voluntarily submitted to his first questioner. ‘I hope this is not some journalist’s scheme to make trouble,’ he said eventually. ‘I find it hard to believe that you expected us to tell you the address of a security officer.’

  ‘I did not expect it. I just hoped. And I have no wish to make trouble.’

  ‘Perhaps. In any case, there is no one of that name working for this organisation. I think you have been misinformed.’

  ‘Then I’m sorry to have troubled you,’ Russell said, extending a hand for his passport.

  After a moment’s hesitation, the officer handed it back. ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked.

  ‘The Metropol.’

  ‘It is a good hotel, yes?’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘Enjoy your stay, Mr Russell.’

  He nodded, and walked back out onto a sunlit Dzerzhinsky Street. A mistake, he thought
. Entering the monster’s lair was always a bad idea, especially when the monster was as paranoid as this one. As far as he could tell, he hadn’t been followed since his first visit to the American Embassy, but he was willing to bet that a fresh human shadow would be soon be waiting at the Metropol.

  So why go back? He altered course, turning left down the side of the Bolshoi Theatre and eventually finding a street which led him through to Red Square. As on his last visit, the vast expanse was almost empty. A few lone Russians were hurrying across, and a party of middle-aged men were conversing in Polish as they gawped up at Stalin’s windows. The next government in Warsaw, Russell guessed.

  He walked on past St Basil’s and down to the river. Leaning on the parapet above the sluggish-looking water, he wondered how else he could search for Shchepkin. What had made him think that the NKVD man lived in Moscow? Had he just assumed it? No, he hadn’t. He remembered Shchepkin telling him so, if not in so many words. In Stockholm, the Russian had taken him out in the embassy car – a minion had done the actual driving – and walked him round the city’s Northern Cemetery. Standing in front of Alfred Nobel’s grave, Shchepkin’s had said how much he enjoyed cemeteries. ‘They make you think about life,’ he had said. ‘And its absurdities. Nobel probably thought his prizes would stop people associating him with dynamite, but of course the juxtaposition was too perfect – people who remember one always remember the other.’

  And then Shchepkin had half joked that some graves were a constant reproof, and that he lived near Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery, where Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Revolution’s most famous poet, was buried.

  Where was the Novodevichy Cemetery? The first three passers-by that Russell asked gave him looks of alarm and hurried on, but the fourth – an oldish man with a thumb-sucking child in tow – told him what he wanted to know: the cemetery was next to the monastery of the same name, an hour or so’s walk along the river. Or if he was in a hurry, he could walk straight down Kropotkin Street.

  Russell set off, walking west between the Kremlin and the river, and eventually found the head of Kropotkin Street. As he strode down the broad avenue, he remembered more of what Shchepkin had said. To reach Mayakovsky’s grave, it was necessary to pass Kropotkin’s. And Shchepkin often talked to them both. ‘I try to answer their criticisms of where the Revolution has taken us.’

  ‘And are they convinced?’ Russell had asked him with a grin.

  ‘Who knows?’ Shchepkin had admitted with an answering smile. Chekhov’s grave was another that gave him pause for thought. The playwright had died in 1904, the year before the first Russian Revolution, and had therefore missed the most tumultuous years of his country’s history. But Chekov’s own times had been just as compelling, just as challenging to him, as these times were for those who lived through them. ‘It might be a lifetime to us,’ Shchepkin said, ‘but no one experiences more than a brief span of history.’

  ‘So only history can judge itself,’ Russell had suggested, half ironically.

  ‘No, we have to make our own judgements. But we do so on insufficient evidence, and we should always bear that in mind.’ And having said that, Shchepkin had tried to persuade Russell that the Soviet Union should be his temporary home. Russell had told him he could never get used to the weather.

  No one could complain about it today – the sun was still shining in a mostly blue sky, and out of the slight breeze it actually felt warm. When he finally reached the unguarded gates of the Novodevichy Cemetery, the lure of a bench under shady trees proved irresistible. He sat for a while enjoying the sense of peace and beauty, the grey stones amidst the greenery, the golden onion domes of the adjacent monastery gleaming in the bright blue heavens. He thought about looking for Kropotkin, but the stones were myriad, and there was no one to ask.

  Outside again, he began the search for Shchepkin’s home. He remembered the Russian mentioning an apartment, but it soon became apparent that all the houses in the cemetery’s vicinity had been converted into flats. Most of the buildings looked at least a century old, and were quite beautiful – Russell found it easy to picture Tolstoy’s Natasha gazing rapturously out of one of the large bay windows, or dancing down a flight of steps to a waiting droshky.

  He began knocking on doors, expecting a long and probably fruitless afternoon. Several nervous rejections confirmed his pessimism, but then, at only the sixth or seventh attempt, he struck unexpected gold. A young man leaving by the front door simply held it open for him. ‘Number four,’ he said.

  It was on the first floor, at the back of the building. Russell’s knock was answered by a smartly dressed young woman. She was slim, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and looked about nineteen. She had her father’s mouth.

  ‘Yes?’ she asked, almost angrily. There was fear there, too.

  ‘My name is John Russell,’ he said. ‘I am looking for Yevgeny Shchepkin.’

  ‘He’s not here,’ she said abruptly, and started to close the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ another woman’s voice asked anxiously from further inside the apartment. The young woman’s answering burst of rapid-fire Russian contained the word ‘father’.

  ‘I am a friend of your father,’ Russell told her.

  The second woman appeared in the doorway. She was probably in her forties, with grey hair tied back in a bun, and clothes that had been worn too long. She had been a beauty once, but now looked worn-out. There was a large spoon in her hand, and Russell realised he could smell borscht.

  ‘My name is John Russell,’ he said again.

  ‘You are German?’ she asked, worrying him somewhat. Was he speaking Russian with a German accent?

  ‘I’m English. Are you Comrade Shchepkina?

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

  ‘I met your husband in Poland in 1939, and again in Sweden in 1942. And as I was here in Moscow, I thought I would visit him.’

  ‘He’s not here,’ she said dully. ‘He is away.’

  ‘Will he be back soon?’

  ‘No, I do not think so. I’m sorry. We cannot help you. Please.’

  The young woman said something to her mother about Russell being a friend of father’s, but she was still opening her mouth to reply when they all heard the creak of a door opening further down the landing.

  No one appeared.

  ‘I will show Grigori Sergeyevich back to the Metro,’ the daughter said in a loud voice. Her mother looked like she wanted to argue, but forbore from doing so. ‘Come,’ the daughter said, almost pushing Russell towards the head of the stairs. The door down the landing clicked shut.

  Outside on the street, she turned towards the river. ‘The spiteful old cow won’t be able to see you if we go this way,’ she told him coolly.

  Like father, like daughter, Russell thought to himself. ‘I know my way back,’ he told her.

  She ignored him. ‘Tell me about my father,’ she said with more than a hint of hostility.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve hardly seen him since I was a child.’

  ‘Surely your mother…’

  ‘She knows him the way a wife knows her husband. The world outside – she doesn’t like to even think about it. When he leaves, it’s as if he was never there. Until he suddenly appears again, and then it’s as if he had never left. It drives me crazy.’ She put an arm through Russell’s. ‘So tell me.’

  ‘I don’t really know him. We met more than twenty years ago, here in Moscow. We were both in the First War…’ He paused to order his thoughts. ‘I think we both became communists because of what that war showed us about the way the world was run. But we didn’t get to know each other, not really. We were both involved in the same discussions and arguments about the Revolution, and where it should be headed. Your father was always full of passion,’ he added, remembering as he did so that Shchepkin had said the same of him in that Danzig hotel room six years earlier.

  ‘Passion?’ she murmured, as if trying the word on for size. They had reached the river, and the ha
lf-repaired roof of the Kiev Station was visible to the north. A line of empty barges was chugging downstream.

  ‘That’s how all this started,’ Russell said, as much to himself as to her. ‘Hard to believe now, perhaps. But twenty years is a long time. Once it becomes clear that your passion will also cause innocents to suffer, it begins to wear you down. First there’s good and evil, and then the good gets tarnished, and soon it’s only a lesser evil. Some quit at that point; they walk away, either physically or mentally. Those that don’t, it just gets harder. Your father kept going – that’s the one and only thing I really know about him.’

  ‘You make him sound like a hero,’ she said, with more than a trace of anger.

  ‘Do I? I don’t mean to. People like your father, they lock themselves in. Like a sailor who ties himself to a mast in a storm. It makes sense, but once you’re tied up there’s not much you can do for anyone else.’

  ‘Why did you really come looking for him?’

  ‘I need help, and he’s the only person I could think of.’

  ‘I don’t think he can help himself anymore,’ she said.

  ‘You think he’s been arrested?’

  ‘We don’t know, but we haven’t seen him for over year. I went down to Dzerzhinsky Street just before Christmas, and they said his whereabouts were unknown. I asked why they had stopped sending my mother his pay, and the man promised he would look into it. But we’ve heard nothing.’

  ‘If he was dead, they would have informed you,’ Russell said, with more conviction than he felt.

  ‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘You can take a tram from that stop over there,’ she said, pointing across the street. ‘It goes up Arbat and along Mokhavaya.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.