‘I thought my new mummy and daddy would come both at the same time. But it doesn’t have to be like that, does it?’
‘No, little Knospe.’
‘Well then.’
‘Well then, what?’
‘Well then, that means I’m not waiting any more.’
‘Does it now?’ said Misha softly.
He stood up and took her tiny hand in his big one. He could stay in Berlin and accept the responsibility that Rosa seemed keen to thrust on him. Or he could emigrate to join his family in Canada. There was no way he could do both. His heart told him to stay. He had no particular desire to go to Canada, it was only that there was nothing left for him in Europe. But his heart hadn’t done him much good in his life so far. It was time for his head to rule. He knew what he had to do, and he fully intended to do it.
‘I’m sorry, little one, but I’m afraid I can’t help.’
8
Meanwhile, as Misha and Rosa were talking in the sunlight, inside the building the major and the lieutenant were arguing.
‘The guy’s Russian,’ complained the major, shoving another stick of gum into his mouth as he spoke. ‘He looks Russian. He’s got a Russian name. He admits he was raised there. So he’s Russian. Why the hell should we be bothering with him? Ivan’s guy, Ivan’s problem.’
The lieutenant protested. ‘If his story’s true, it might be dangerous for him.’
‘Dangerous? Why the hell would it be dangerous? The guy left twenty-five years back. And if he’s a Hiwi…’
‘The regulations say—’
‘The hell with the regulations. How would you feel if you found an American fighting for the Krauts? You’d pretty much want to beat the heck out of him too.’
‘I guess…’
‘Yah! His story don’t add up. Either he’s a German, in which case there’s no reason for him not to have a rations book. Or he’s a Hiwi, in which case he belongs to the Russkies.’
‘Yes, sir, only—’
‘Only nothing. I bet we never see him again. Did you see his face when I told him we’d need him to disclose all his past Nazi affiliations? I bet he’s a Nazi like all the rest of them. Jewish wife, my ass! Send his details around to Ivan. Name, address. Known facts. That sort of thing. Then Ivan can figure out what to do.’
‘You want me to disclose his identity to the Soviets?’ The lieutenant’s tone was downright incredulous; insubordinate. The major glared at him and the youngster coloured. ‘Yes, sir, sure thing. I guess they’re part of the team now. Sure.’
The lieutenant went to sort things out, while the major went to the window and stared gloomily out.
The queue had lengthened: a collection of raggedy scarecrows with famished faces. ‘Jeez,’ commented the major, which was his way of reflecting on the astonishing fact that this same collection of human beings had come so close to defeating the greatest military powers in the world. Then his gaze traversed sideways and he saw something else: the Russian was still there, talking to a little blond girl in plaits. The major rolled his gum into a ball and stuck it in the pouch made by his lower lip against his gum.
‘Goddamn Nazis,’ he muttered.
9
A golden evening was decaying into night. Here in ruined Berlin, darkness always seemed to leak upwards from the burned-out buildings, spreading first to the streets, then upwards to the sky. It was the most dangerous time of day, when the city turned itself over to its darker elements: the black-marketeers and the prostitutes, drunken Red Army men and the speeding cars of the NKVD.
Tonya made her way across town, up the Prenzlauer Allee, walking carefully in the thickening dark. A car passed, too close, with a blare of headlamps and engine roar. Tonya was forced to jump aside and managed to graze herself on a heap of rubble. She thought she heard men laughing as the car screamed away, but she couldn’t be sure.
Then she heard something else.
Down a side street, a woman was crying and, in between sobs, calling for help. Tonya hesitated. Of her fellow translators, almost all were either Party members themselves or married to a Party member. Those who, like Tonya, had served time in the Gulag, were rare and the scent of suspicion never quite left them. Few of the other translators would even speak to her socially. Though Tonya didn’t mind the isolation, she lived in fear that she would somehow betray herself or be denounced. Anything might trigger it. She knew perfectly well that there didn’t have to be any basis in truth for the accusation. So she was careful not to offend, to follow the Party line, to stay inconspicuous. And helping a German woman was not quite inconspicuous.
Then the cry for help came again. It was a young voice, almost girlish. Tonya wanted to walk on, but then the thought of her own two daughters came irresistibly into her head. The oldest of the pair would be just nineteen now. Before Tonya could think further, she found herself running and stumbling over the rubble heaps towards the darkness of the little alley.
The woman heard her coming and stopped crying.
‘Thank God. Who are you? I can’t walk.’
Tonya peered forwards, saw a patch of something gleaming white in the surrounding gloom, and made her way towards it. The patch resolved itself into a young woman, lying propped up against a ruined wall.
‘The bastards hurt my ankle,’ she said.
Tonya looked, but didn’t enquire. Almost certainly, the woman had been raped. Almost certainly, she had been raped by a Russian – the Americans and British were generally rich enough in cigarettes or chocolate to get what they wanted without force.
‘Let me help you home,’ said Tonya.
‘Thank you.’
The woman struggled to her feet and put one arm around Tonya.
‘Where to?’
‘Just up there. I only came out to get water.’
They went a little way, the woman hopping with her good leg, Tonya supporting her other side.
‘You’re Russian,’ said the woman, not quite as an accusation, but almost.
Tonya was about to do the sensible thing, to mutter what platitude the Party would want her to say, something about German bandits dressed in Red Army uniforms, but she couldn’t bring herself to.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it was bad with us too.’
They walked on in silence. The injured woman wasn’t as young as Tonya had first thought. She was in her thirties anyway. The building where she lived had had most of its front blown away, but there were some rooms at the back that had been made habitable. They went up some stairs and down a corridor towards the rear of the building. The woman threw open a door and led the way into her flat. There was a large green sofa, some shelving in dark wood, and an elaborate birdcage with no bird. An old Bluthner upright piano gleamed against the wall. Beyond the main room, there was a tiny kitchen, with an oil lamp hanging from the doorway.
And that wasn’t all. There was a large leather armchair, made to look small by the big-built figure who sat in it. The figure had straw-coloured hair and an easy smile. He was wearing civilian clothes, but that wasn’t how Tonya had first seen him.
‘Comrade Duck-feeder,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming.’
Tonya reeled back in shock. She might even have gone running from the building, except that the German woman, whose ankle had suddenly recovered, stood behind her and closed the door. Tonya felt trapped and frightened.
‘I’m sorry to scare you like this,’ said the Englishman. ‘My name’s Mark Thompson. I’m a captain in the British Army. And all I want is to talk to you for a few minutes. I’m not here to injure you in any way.’ Then, speaking to the German woman, he added, ‘Marta, I think we would all like some tea.’ The German woman, Marta, nodded silently and disappeared off into the kitchen.
Tonya still stood with her back to the door, saying nothing.
‘Just so you know,’ continued the Englishman, ‘the door to the apartment is not locked. If you go out of it, I won’t stop you, nor will anybody else. On the other hand, if you choose to
stay, I will make absolutely sure that nobody ever needs to know that you saw me.’
‘I shouldn’t be here.’
‘No, you shouldn’t. But you came because you heard cries for help. You helped Marta into her house. She offered you tea and you accepted. That’s all true. That’s all you ever need to say to anyone if they ask. Which they won’t. I’m fairly sure that no one was watching you on Prenzlauer Allee just now.’
‘That was you in the car?’
‘And some colleagues. Yes.’
‘You’re a spy.’
‘Yes. Not a word we like very much, actually. Smert shpionam, death to spies, as your comrades so pithily put it… But yes, call a spade a spade, I’m a spy.’
‘And your name? Mark…?’
‘Thompson. No. You’ve hit the nail on the head, old girl. That’s not my real name. But it’s safer for everyone that way, you included.’
The Englishman, ‘Thompson’, spoke excellent German, but he had the habit of taking phrases straight from English and translating them directly. Sometimes that worked, ‘Sie haben den Nagel auf den Kopf getroffen’. More often than not, it didn’t – nenn’ ein Spaten einen Spaten – and the linguistic strangeness made Tonya feel as though she’d stepped into a dream world.
She still stood with her back to the door. Electricity had been restored in most parts of Berlin, and the smoky yellow oil lamp was disconcertingly dim. Everything in Tonya screamed at her to leave, but somehow her legs felt rooted to the spot. She was vaguely aware that somehow she connected this unwelcome Englishman with Misha. They were physically quite unlike, of course. Where the Englishman looked like a ploughboy, Misha had looked more like a concert pianist. All the same, they had something in common, their ludicrously unwarranted confidence for a start. And Tonya didn’t leave. In fact, she stepped forwards and took a seat, but still dreamily, as though there were a second Tonya in the room standing and watching as the first one sat down.
‘What do you want?’
‘What do I want?’ he said. ‘Easy. Peace in our time. England to win the Ashes. Uncle Joe Stalin to have a nasty accident. Throw in some decent marmalade and I’d be in heaven. But that’s irrelevant. It’s what you want that matters.’
Tonya said nothing. There was a window open at the back of the kitchen, and the oil lamp swung a little in the draught. Light and shadow swam dizzily in the room.
‘I don’t want anything.’
‘Really? Nothing?’
Tonya shook her head.
‘I’m sorry, but I can’t believe you. Listen, do you know that at the Yalta conference, your comrade Stalin promised to create a “free, mighty and independent Poland”? Perhaps the Poles believed him. Anyhow, they were brave enough and foolish enough to rise up against the Germans in Warsaw, just as the Red Army was on the outskirts of the city. And the Red Army did nothing. Nothing at all. They just waited on the banks of the Vistula and let the Wehrmacht troops massacre the Poles. Right now there are, we think, a dozen NKVD regiments throughout the country. A dozen regiments of secret policemen to make sure that Poland is just as free, mighty and independent as Uncle Joe Stalin wishes.’
Tonya shook her head. There was a buzzing in her ears, something she knew from the war, a noise that lasted for a few days after any particularly intense battle.
‘I’m only an interpreter,’ she said. ‘I’m not interested in politics. I don’t—’
‘No.’ The Englishman was gentle but persistent. ‘That’s all right to say if you’re an English housewife or an American businessman. Politics doesn’t have to matter. But for us, for anyone who lives in Germany or anywhere to the east, then politics matters. It has to.’
‘What do you want?’ said Tonya again.
From the kitchen, there was the hissing sound of a boiling kettle, and the sound of Marta making tea.
‘I want to save the world.’
‘Entschuldigen? Pardon?’
‘Well, you did ask. The point is, I think that your Joe Stalin wants Germany to be every bit as free, mighty and independent as Poland. We think he’s working very carefully to make sure of it. And as you know, conditions in Germany are fairly desperate. There’s no food. Winter will be abominable. Industry is at a standstill. The countryside has no fertiliser. The harvest will be poor and in any case no one has any money. Meantime, what with anti-fraternisation rules and the black market and prostitution and anti-Nazi witch-hunts, I don’t know that our Military Government is winning many friends. In short, if Mr Stalin wants a Communist Germany, then who’s to say he won’t get it? And if Germany falls, then Italy will follow. And Austria. And would the French hold out? I don’t know. But I do know that I’d be jolly upset to have fought this entire war simply in order to pass Europe from Hitler to Stalin.’
The buzzing in Tonya’s head had become so loud, she could hear no more. She sat forward in her seat, with her hands clamped over her ears. She rocked herself, as she had seen soldiers do in cases of severe combat-trauma. Her eyes were closed against the swaying lamp. Then she found herself not rocking, but being rocked. The big Englishman was holding her head against his chest and soothing her. It felt like being petted by a bear. She pulled free. Marta had reappeared with tea, hot and very sweet. The Englishman was still standing and his big, ramshackle presence made the room appear smaller. He looked upset.
‘I’m so sorry. Mostly my work brings me into contact with such worms – not you of course, Marta, you’re a brick – that I get clumsy when I meet real people.’
‘Why me? Why of all the people, why—?’
‘Because of your work. Because of the documents that you see.’
‘How do you…? What documents?’
‘You work in the Hauptübersetzungsbüro of the Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland in their Mühlendamm office. I know because I had you followed.’
The Hauptübersetzungsbüro was the Central Translation Office. The Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland, usually called the SMAD for short, was the Soviet Military Administration in Germany.
‘You had me followed. Why me?’
The Englishman took her hand and held it up. Her right hand, the one missing the tips of two fingers.
‘Because of this.’
‘My hand?’
‘It was frostbite, I suppose?’
Tonya nodded and heard the Englishman’s next words as though through fog.
‘We guessed that perhaps you suffered your frostbite in the Gulag. We guessed that perhaps you weren’t a great admirer of your comrade Stalin. It wasn’t hard to guess that you held some administrative post inside the SMAD. Some of those administrative posts give access to important information. It was because of that hope that I had you followed. When I found out that you worked for the translation office on Mühlendamm, I had to find a way to talk to you. That office has access to some of the most important documents anywhere inside the entire Soviet administration. I’m sorry to drop this all on you like this. I’m sorry to remind you of the Gulag and all that you suffered there. If you tell me to go to hell I would quite understand.’
But Tonya was a long way from telling him to go to hell.
She felt split between two selves again. The first one was nodding now and crying, copiously weeping. The second Tonya, still standing over by the door, was rocking back on her heels and watching the first one – this crying one – with pursed lips. It was the first time Tonya had cried for more than twenty years. It was the first time she had ever let herself cry about the day when she’d lost her fingertips.
‘I was sentenced to ten years,’ she said, speaking slowly. ‘Ten years, for nothing. I’ve no idea who denounced me or why. In those days, no one knew. We were put on a train, me and hundreds of others. We were taken to Siberia. It was spring, but the snows hadn’t yet melted. They led us to a snowfield, huge and totally empty. The only thing there was a sign that said “GULAG 92 Y.N. 90”. We were made to kneel in the snow, in long lines facing outwards. For ho
ur after hour, a roll-call took place. Detachments of prisoners were led off. I stayed. So did others. Then the roll-call finished. The remaining prisoners, some hundred and fifty of us, were allowed to stand. That snowfield was our camp. Everything that was ever built there was built by us. We began right there on that first day, breaking saplings with our bare hands to build a shelter for the night. I only lost my fingertips. I was one of the lucky ones.’
The Englishman was moved, but his posture contained as much anger as sympathy.
‘And that’s why I want to keep Germany free. That’s why I contacted you. But if you choose, you can leave now. I promise you we will never bother you again.’
Tonya nodded. She still hadn’t touched her tea, but drank it now, gulp after gulp, like an upset child. The Englishman watched her in silence.
‘I’ll go now,’ she said.
‘You do that. Remember. You helped Marta. You drank tea. You can point out this apartment to anyone who asks. I won’t try to contact you again, and you won’t see me feeding the Tiergarten ducks either. But if you do change your mind, or if you ever want to contact me for any reason, then go to the Tiergarten at midday. Throw bread for the ducks. We will find a way for you to talk to us safely, not then and there, but very soon. Is that clear?’
Tonya nodded. She stood up. She hadn’t quite finished her tea and now knocked the little table, upsetting the cup and breaking it.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ The two Tonyas joined up again into one person: a woman clumsily dabbing at the little wreckage of porcelain.
‘Don’t be sorry,’ said the Englishman from a huge distance. ‘It’s all quite all right.’
Tonya found the door and went running down the hall.
10
Major Grigory Makarevsky of the Soviet 58th Guards Rifle Division yawned. After four years of fighting, in which he’d started out as a humble frontovik and risen all the way to his present rank, paper-pushing didn’t seem like a proper occupation for a man. But he was a soldier, and choice was a luxury not given to soldiers.
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