The Lieutenant's Lover

by Harry Bingham

  She got down off the truck, lay down on the chilly road, and fell asleep.

  FIVE

  1

  Something great had been accomplished.

  The war in Europe was won. The Führer’s last Wunderwaffen, his long-promised ‘miracle weapons’, had turned out to be not miraculous, just laughable: kids on pushbikes, holding anti-tank weapons they weren’t trained to use. And as for the other desperate predictions, talk of the Werwolfs who would wage ferocious underground war against the invaders, those too had turned out absolutely hollow. The war had been emphatically won. The plague which had ravaged Europe was ended.

  But that just raised a whole further set of questions. What now? What next? For Germany, for Europe and the world?

  Nobody knew. The Allies, in the urgency of their efforts to beat Hitler, had made almost no provision for what was to follow. About some of the big points, of course, there was agreement. Germany would not be dismembered. There would be one country, Germany, and there would be one capital city: Berlin. The nation would be divided into four zones, each to be administered by one of the four victorious powers, Russia, America, Britain and France. Berlin, too, would be divided and run the same way. But the administrative zones were simply that: lines of bureaucratic convenience. There would be only supreme occupation authority, the Allied Control Council, to be made up of the Military Governors of each zone.

  And that was it. All the crucial details had been left undecided. Would political parties be allowed to form in Germany again? Would there be free speech? Democracy? Would Germany’s industry be permitted to revive? Or would the country be turned into an agricultural economy, a pastoral nation of no threat to its neighbours? What would the defeated nation use by way of currency? And what would happen to the occupying troops? Would the Americans be home within two years, as President Roosevelt had promised Stalin? And even before the war, Germany had never been able to feed herself. What would happen now? Would Germany be given food, or would she have to buy it? And if she were to buy it, then what would she buy it with, bankrupt and ruined as she was?

  To all these questions, there were no answers. Or not too few, but too many. The point was that nobody knew. Everyone simply hoped that the broad framework of what had been agreed would be enough to cope.

  One country: Germany.

  One capital: Berlin.

  One government formed by the four wartime Allies, united.

  That, at any rate, was the plan. It was now the eighteenth of July, 1945. Though the war had been over for two and a half months, the Russians had only just permitted the Western Allies into Berlin. The Russians had muttered about the need to restore order and to clear mines, as though the Western Allies weren’t more than capable of doing both things themselves, but Western protests were so muted, they were barely audible.

  But at least the time of waiting was over. The Americans, British and French had arrived in Berlin. Perhaps now, the old wartime cooperation could begin again. Perhaps relations between the partners would improve.

  Perhaps.

  2

  The major stood at the window and stared out.

  The building was one of the few to have remained more or less intact through the battle for Berlin, though there was no glass left in the windows, of course. The sweltering heat bore down hard on the city, lighting the nearby streets with a burning intensity and leaving the rest to waver in the petrol-blue haze.

  ‘The damned thing is,’ he began, then glanced over his shoulder at a young captain. The captain, blond-haired and untidy, more like a ploughboy than a military officer, was leaning over his desk, correcting a typescript. ‘You’re not listening.’

  ‘The damned thing is that I’m not listening?’ said the captain, without looking up. ‘Why should I, if that’s all you have to say?’ He finished with his typescript, then hurled it into a wire out-tray. ‘Done. Lucky old Berliners. Everything they ever wanted to know about application procedures for displaced persons interzonal movement orders.’

  ‘What? Oh, never mind. The damned thing is that we’ve been put in charge here with no bloody strategy. Civilian Communications, that’s our business. Good idea. Top notch. Medal to the chap who thought it up. But what the bloody hell are we meant to communicate? All we do is transmit these communiqués from MilGov. They don’t make much sense to us. They make even less sense to the poor buggers out there. No wonder they’ve no idea what’s going on.’

  ‘Don’t they?’

  ‘What? Don’t they what? Christ, it’s hot.’

  ‘I think they know exactly what’s going on.’

  ‘Wish they’d bloody tell us, then.’ The major picked up a cricket bat that lay beside the window, and began to take dummy swipes at non-existent balls. Block, block, drive. Block, block, sweeping left-angled hook to the boundary.

  ‘The point is,’ persisted the captain, ‘the Russians knew exactly what they were doing. They had a system of ration books for the entire city sorted out in less than two weeks. A daily paper in the same time. The Red Army may have behaved like a horde of savages when they arrived, but it’s the Russians, not us, who are getting water sorted out. Power, mail, rubble-clearance, the U-Bahn, hospitals – you name it. That’s why they have things to communicate, and all we have to talk about is our damned interzonal movement orders. And the Berliners know it. They’re scared of the Russians. They hate the Russians. But they know damn well that Comrade Stalin is very, very interested in this city and the country it’s supposed to govern.’

  ‘Yes, well, I don’t suppose there’s a lot we can do about it. Friend Ivan has been here two months longer than we have. In any case, what does it matter? Oof!’ The exclamation came as the dummy-bowler dropped a wicked ball short at the major’s feet, forcing a piece of brilliant defensive bat- and foot-work. ‘Ivan’s only got one voice out of four on the Allied Control Council. That’s three against one – at least, it is if you count the French as being on our side.’

  ‘Yes, and of course Ivan is a well-known democratic sort, who wouldn’t dream of using underhand means to install his loathsome system right here in the heart of Europe.’

  ‘God, Hollinger, you are a gloomy sort. That’s what too much time in Intelligence does to a chap.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The major practised another couple of strokes and was about to put the bat away, when the captain took a brown roll out of his desk drawer and tossed it in the air, interrogatively.

  ‘Go on then,’ said the major.

  The major moved to a spot on the wall where the outline of a wicket had been drawn in chalk. A line of insulating tape marked the crease. The captain stood at the far end of the room, rolling his shoulders, with a dreamy look in his blue eyes. There was a moment’s inaction, when it seemed as though the strongly-built captain had forgotten where he was. Then, rolling into a single-step run-up, he whirled his right arm in a perfect bowling action and released the bread roll.

  The roll shot through the air. The major swung at it. The bat nicked the edge of the roll, but couldn’t deflect it. The roll broke full-toss against the leg stump, shattering into a thousand glossy crumbs.

  ‘Damn you, Hollinger,’ said the major placidly, as he bent down to sweep up.

  The captain didn’t move to help. Instead he stood, still swinging his arm in a scything bowling movement, launching ball after ball at the chalk-drawn stumps.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘we really ought to do something about it.’

  ‘About what?’ said the major, knowing better than to expect a reply.

  But he was wrong, because Hollinger did reply, albeit crookedly. ‘D’you know, I think I was wrong to give up my post in Intelligence,’ he commented. ‘I thought I’d be more use here.’

  ‘You are of use here. Don’t go getting it into your head that I’ll support you if—’

  ‘You’ll support my move back again?’ said Hollinger, deliberately mishearing. ‘Good on you, old chap.’

  3


  Misha picked his way down the street.

  The old Berlin quarter of Charlottenberg had changed its name. The sardonic Berliner humour had renamed it ‘Klammotenberg’, heap of rubbish. Similarly, Lichterfelde was now ‘Trichterfelde’, field of craters. Steglitz was now ‘steht nichts’, nothing left standing. And that was Berlin now. A heap of rubbish. A field of craters. Nothing left standing.

  It was a hot day, the fifth in a row.

  Misha had with him a loaf of bread and a thick pat of butter. He wore a cotton shirt and a torn black flannel jacket, items which he’d purchased with the gift of cigarettes given him by an American army unit he’d worked for briefly as an interpreter. And the Americans had been generous. Misha still had six packs of cigarettes left, which made him a rich man in these broken times. Misha opened one pack and began to smoke. The summer sun felt good.

  Once upon a time, he thought he’d successfully rebuilt his life. He had spent two years fighting with the Bolshevik partisans in the civil war that had followed the revolution. Every day for those two years he had looked for a chance to escape, but weather, remoteness, famine and the partisan guards themselves had made it impossible. Then, one day in 1921, Misha found an opportunity to slip away from his unit. He’d walked a thousand miles south to Persia, then travelled by sea and train to the coast of Italy, then up to Switzerland. He’d had no money, and had had to work his passage any way he could. It had taken him almost a year to do it, finally rejoining his family in the spring of 1922. For years, he had hoped that Tonya would find a way to follow him there, but it never happened. He wanted to write, but didn’t know her address and knew that any letter from him could only get her into trouble. They were separated by a thousand miles and the iron walls of the world’s most complete dictatorship. She might as well have been living on the moon.

  In 1925 he had moved to Berlin, where he used his share of the family’s money to start an engineering business, a pump manufacturer, in partnership with Otto Goldhagen, a Jew. Years went by. Misha had given up hope of ever seeing Tonya again. Goldhagen had a pretty daughter, Lillie, with whom Misha had always got on very well. In time, friendship had turned into something deeper. He and Lillie had married. They’d not been able to have children, but the marriage had been a full and happy one all the same.

  At the next street intersection, Misha paused.

  Once he had known this district very well indeed. But the devastation was simply extraordinary. What had once been fine rows of grandly built apartment blocks lay smashed to pieces across the cratered roads. Tanks and trucks lay burned-out like the extinct corpses of another age. The places that Misha still recognised no longer seemed to fit together with the rest. The city was like his life. Both Otto and Lillie had been killed in extermination camps. Misha himself, a long-standing Social Democrat, had been arrested and imprisoned both because of his politics and his choice of partners in business and marriage. In Nazi camps for seven years, Misha had survived only because his technical knowledge had been too valuable to waste. He still mourned every day for Lillie, his laughing, dark-haired, olive-skinned wife.

  Unable to orientate himself, Misha approached a group of Trümmerfrauen, ‘rubble women’. Dressed in skirts, summer blouses and headscarves, the women were systematically clearing the rubble. He asked for directions. One of the women put down her wooden bucket and looked at him strangely.

  ‘You want the old Berlin Pompentechnik? It’s there, of course, there.’

  She pointed. She pointed not to a building, but to a hole, a gap in the skyline, a void.

  Misha felt strange, as though big weights were shifting inside him. The tangled geography around him fell into place. Of course he had been disorientated. The place he had been searching for was no longer there. There was hardly even a ‘there’ left.

  ‘Danke.’

  ‘Bitte.’

  Misha offered the woman a cigarette. She took two, but lit neither, just tucked them away in her blouse.

  Misha walked towards the void.

  Towards and into it.

  The place had obviously been bombed out long before the Red Army had arrived. The old factory hall – his factory hall, the place which had produced the best marine pumps in Germany – was now a whistling desert. Once, there must have been a tangle of steelwork, but the steel had long been taken away and reused. The old factory walls, once thirty feet high, were nowhere higher than ten feet. In most places the walls no longer existed at all, they were just lines of rubble. Buddleias had colonised the ruins, and their purple flowers released a heavy scent. A few butterflies fluttered yellow and white against the grey stone. The old factory floor caught the heat, and the air hung like a furnace. Except for the butterflies, nothing moved.

  Misha stood in the middle of the old factory. He had been prepared to find little enough, but nothing at all? He could feel the burning concrete through the worn-out soles of his shoes. It was the only feeling that made sense to him. The rest of it felt like a dream.

  And then he spotted something. A heap of ruins in the corner concealed an opening. One of the offices hadn’t been utterly destroyed. Something white hung down over the opening, a sheet or strip of cloth. Misha moved towards it.

  And just then, the cloth was torn aside. A figure stepped out, dressed in a Red Army greatcoat worn over shorts and a cotton undershirt. The figure was barefoot. He had a few days’ growth of beard on a chin that was only just old enough to need a razor at all. The youth spread his arms wide open, like some dream image of a crazy Jesus.

  ‘Wilkommen,’ he shouted. ‘Wilkommen an der Nichtsfabrik-Berlin.’ His voice ricocheted off the remaining walls and shot around the empty space in a spreading series of echoes.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the Nothing Factory, Berlin.’

  4

  Tonya stepped out into the glare.

  There was something strangely bright about Berlin this summer. For one thing, there were few buildings now high enough to block out the light. On top of that, old stonework had been shattered by, explosions, the edges lay sharp and white, glittering with mica, throwing back the sunlight from a million tiny mirrors.

  She stood on the steps and waited for her eyes to adjust. She retied her headscarf. There was still so much dust in the air, her hair filled with grit almost instantly unless she wore a scarf. The thought made her think of Misha; of his hands on her hair, that time he’d first unpinned it high up in the old servants’ attic in Kuletsky Prospekt. The moment felt like only yesterday. In Russia before the war; Misha had become little more than a memory to her. A much beloved one, of course, but a memory all the same. Here in Berlin, that all changed. It was Misha who seemed real, Rodyon who had become the memory. Had Misha ever succeeded in escaping Russia? Had he made it to Europe? To Germany? Had he married? Did he have children? Had he survived the war? Tonya had no way of knowing the answer to any of her questions, but they drummed insistently in her head all the same.

  Her renewed preoccupation with Misha made her feel guilty. Rodyon had only ever been good to her. They’d spent two happy years in Petrograd, but the period was ended by a ferocious and hungry winter which had brought about the deaths, in quick succession, of Babba Varvara, her father Kiryl, and – most poignantly of all – the little baby boy, Vassily, Misha’s son.

  Tonya had been so overcome with grief that Rodyon, sensitive to her feelings as ever, had sought a new position in Moscow, in one of the economics ministries. Tonya had worked as an administrative assistant in an import-export house. Then, when her talent for languages came to light, she was given further training in German, and appointed translator. Rodyon hoped that the new city and new occupations would help her come to terms with her losses. For a while things had gone all right. They’d had children, two girls, Yuliya and Yana. They’d been happy, or something like it. Tonya loved her daughters with all her heart. Rodyon she liked and respected with such unwavering strength that her feelings there too could easily have been mistaken for true lo
ve. But, following Lenin’s death, the political climate had continued to change, continued to worsen. Rodyon didn’t like the new politics. He had his principles, and refused to let them slip with the times.

  And now, almost certainly, he was dead. During the time of the Stalinist terror, he had been arrested twice for ‘terrorism against the state’. The first time, he had been punished by beatings and a year in jail. The second time, he was given fifteen years in the Gulag – a death sentence, almost for sure. Tonya herself had survived his second denunciation by just two years. In 1936, she too had been arrested, charged under Article 58 of the Criminal Code, the most serious article, and had been sentenced to ten years in the Gulag. When, in 1943, she’d been given the chance to fight in a shtraf battalion and wash away her ‘guilt’ in blood, she’d jumped at the chance. And despite everything, she’d survived. She hadn’t always been sure that she’d wanted to, but she had. Somewhere, perhaps, her two daughters had survived the famines and the purges, the Gulags and the war-making, but Tonya knew that the country was full of bezprizornaya, waifs and orphans of the times. She knew she was unlikely ever to meet up with them again. What was even worse, Tonya knew that it was her duty not to seek them out. The children of politically suspect parents were politically suspect themselves. Poor Yuliya and Yana would be better off if they never saw or heard from their mother again. Tonya thought of them all the time – more often even than she thought of Misha – and when she saw girls of about their age in the street, she would often just stop and stare, tears filling her eyes.