The Lieutenant's Lover

by Harry Bingham

  Tonya shook her head. ‘No, no.’

  Thompson stood up, getting ready to leave the room. He looked down at Tonya and gave her a wink of encouragement and support.

  She smiled back, then added, ‘I loved him very much. I’m sorry to ask you for something so foolish.’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing foolish about it. Enjoy your lesson.’

  Thompson departed, leaving Tonya and Marta to the violin. But Tonya played this evening like a dunce, as though this was only her second or third time at the instrument. Marta was patient, but also exasperated. And Tonya? She didn’t know how she felt. Once before with Thompson there had been this feeling, of a sudden slippage of emotion, like a roof suddenly shedding its burden of snow in the spring thaw. The first time it had been to do with the Gulag, her lost fingers, the pain and awfulness of those first days. And now it was to do with something still closer to her heart: Misha, her first and only true love. Here in Berlin, in Germany, it was he who seemed real, Rodyon who seemed far away and impossible to believe in.

  Tonya played the violin for another fifty minutes. When she got into bed that night, she fell asleep instantly and didn’t dream about a single thing.

  2

  The jeweller removed his eyeglass with a sideways twist of his head, but the loose folds of skin over his eye still retained the circular imprint. He tapped the identity documents in front of him.

  ‘A routine matter.’

  ‘Good. And how much do you charge for a routine matter?’

  ‘How much? To convert a Malevich into a Müller? We may say four hundred cigarettes.’

  Misha grimaced. He had three hundred cigarettes in a cardboard carton and the boxful represented his entire stock of savings. ‘Can we say three hundred? I have it here.’

  The jeweller rubbed his eyes, blotting out the circular mark. He sighed, as though making a small fortune from forging identity papers was just one of the crosses he had to bear.

  ‘Very well then. Sit.’

  The jeweller’s room lay just near the Schlasisches Tor in the Soviet sector. Since all the watches and most of the jewellery once owned by Berliners now adorned the wrists and necks of the Red Army and their wives back home, the jeweller had turned his hand to the closely related trade of document forgery. Perhaps, Misha wondered, the jeweller had had the same profession in Hitler’s time. In any case, the man had a reputation for knowing his business. His little office had a huge glass window overlooking the road, for the light presumably, and the narrow workbenches were crammed with the intricate clutter of his trade. The heavy snow-laden sky outside filled the apartment with clear grey light, toneless and impartial.

  Misha found a small fabric-covered bench and sat, always interested in the technical side of any skilled occupation. The man began with Misha’s ration book. He took a scalpel and began to scrape patiently at the offending surname. The scalpel appeared to make no difference, but the jeweller didn’t either hurry his movement or apply more pressure. A minute or so passed and Misha could see the black lettering had grown fainter. Another few minutes and it had vanished altogether, leaving the surface of the paper scuffed and abraded. The jeweller inspected his work with the eyeglass, then dipped his finger inside a little pot filled with a thick grey ointment – china clay, Misha guessed, mixed with graphite to darken it. The jeweller compared the paper against the ointment for colour match, grunted his satisfaction, and applied the substance to the paper with a light dabbing motion. He continued to dab and blot, until the ointment was invisible and the paper magically restored. The jeweller inspected the surface of the paper under his eyeglass for almost a minute. Misha had already spotted the rows of neat wooden drawers which would house the man’s collection of printing blocks and typefaces. A glass jar contained a couple of dozen tubes of printers’ ink. Misha wondered who the jeweller’s principal clients were now – Russian Hiwis, Displaced Persons, former Nazis, a whole sea of lost souls.

  Misha wanted to leave.

  He didn’t like being away from the factory too long these days. The factory had become a place of business again. Pump manufacturing was out of the question in present conditions. The entire German economy was at a standstill. There was no currency which meant anything, no money to buy raw materials, no capital to restore damaged production lines. There was no hope that anything would change at all soon. But if running a complex manufacturing operation had become impossible, the extent of the destruction had created new opportunities. Misha had borrowed and begged some timber and built a weaving loom, operated by pedal and hand. He’d got hold of some raw cotton thread, woven headscarves, sold them, bought more cotton, made more headscarves. He had four looms now, all hand-built, and employed women to work them. It was a tiny business – laughable compared with what he’d once had – but it was a start. The business was busy. It now made headscarves, cotton cloth, aprons, anything which sold. It kept Rosa in food and clothes and schoolbooks. It had now, finally, earned enough to ‘convert a Malevich into a Müller’.

  And, of course, the factory wasn’t the only thing that kept him busy. Misha was not not only a businessman, but also, in effect, a father. Rosa’s arrival had turned them into a little family, the Nothing Factory into a sort of home. The girl needed proper food, regular bedtimes, hot baths, family meals. She needed all the things that years of war had stripped from Germany. And Misha supplied it. Willi grumbled at the regularisation of his free-and-easy routines, but Misha realised that the boy needed an ordinary family just as much as Rosa, and his grumbling was just part of the pleasure. The family had settled down. In a modest way, they were happy.

  Hours passed. Then the jeweller pushed back his chair.

  ‘Herr Müller,’ he said, smiling slightly as he handed over the new, carefully constructed papers. ‘The glue is not yet dry. I would advise you, if you can…’

  Misha took his papers, feeling the glow of relief like a hot coal inside him. He’d forged some poor-quality documents himself, in case the NKVD came calling again, but he’d feel far safer with these new ones. He walked downstairs and onto the frozen street. Snow particles, blown by the wind, hissed and skittered across the ice.

  He pulled his coat tight and set off for home.

  3

  Anxious to avoid any inspection of his papers before the glue was yet dry, Misha kept to side roads paralleling Skalitzerstrasse and Gitschinerstrasse, thinking that he was less likely to run into trouble in the quieter back roads. But just as he approached the Hallesches Tor, the road network led him back to the main street. A small convoy of Russian vehicles crept eastwards, a Tatra truck, a couple of motorcycles, and a black ZiS limousine, the 101 model which looked like a Russified American Packard. The limousine was the indicator of a high-ranked occupation official. Misha glanced idly at the car.

  Glanced, then stared.

  Not at the car itself, but at those inside it. And not at the Soviet general who sat flung back in the rear of the car, but at the woman who sat with a bent head on the seat next to him. Misha could hardly see her face. He could see little more than the colour of her hair, the angle of her cheek, the way she held herself. For a moment the world went still. The convoy crept forwards. Misha stood like a man frozen.

  Then he moved. ‘Tonya,’ he shouted. ‘Tonya!’

  Nobody heard him. The limousine moved on and away. The people inside didn’t look around. A couple of soldiers in the back of the truck stared out at him without much interest. Misha ran, slipping and blundering on the new snow back into the Soviet zone. But it was a useless chase. Before more than twenty seconds had passed, the car was seventy yards away and accelerating all the time. Misha’s voice pistoled off the nearby buildings into silence. He stopped running and tried to catch his breath, buildings towers of vapour in the freezing air.

  Was it Tonya, or not Tonya?

  Misha perfectly well knew that he hadn’t had a good enough view to tell. The odds were heavily against it. A thousand to one? Ten thousand? But Misha wasn�
�t in a place where he thought about the odds. Over the last awful decade, Misha’s reasons for living – his much-loved wife Lillie; his friend, father-in-law and business partner, Otto; his home and business – had evaporated one by one into the maelstrom of history. Then Willi had become a reason to live, then Rosa too. But Tonya was the last, the best reason to live. In a world turned upside down, it was sometimes the things from the far distant past which echoed most strongly in this bombed-out, war-torn present.

  In an instant, Tonya’s image was as real to him as it had ever been. She had been his first and best true love; always had been, always would be. If she were alive, then he would find her.

  4

  The car was the clue.

  The limousine had certainly been a ZiS 101. There were very few such cars in Berlin. There couldn’t even have been all that many on the streets of Moscow, since the production of luxury cars had been brought to a total halt by wartime. And Misha had certainly seen a senior Soviet officer inside the car. Probably only a full general could command such a vehicle and such an escort.

  But who was the woman? Misha knew that though there had been enough of a resemblance to suggest Tonya, he had been a long way short of making a positive identification. In any case, he knew that he was very prone to seeing Tonya in a thousand and one different women, many of whom barely resembled her at all. In his first few years in Germany, after his escape from Russia, hardly a week had gone by without Misha being sure that he’d seen her, often two or three or four times in the same week.

  But still, Misha’s ‘sighting’ brought home to him that Tonya might indeed be alive, that she might even be with the Soviet forces in Berlin or the east zone. And though the odds were against it, they weren’t ludicrously against it. Germany still swarmed with Red Army personnel. Tonya had been a good student of German all those years ago, in the little hunting lodge outside Petrozavodsk. She’d enjoyed her lessons. Perhaps she’d continued with her language training thereafter? If so, then her presence in Germany made sense. Perhaps she had even wangled her way to Berlin in the hope of somehow finding Misha… His heart beat thunderingly at the thought. He knew already and for certain that he would never rest until he had found Tonya, or learned for sure that she was lost for ever.

  But first things first. Misha had to start somewhere, and the car was the clue.

  On a cold, bright day, with sunshine glittering over a black, white and grey cityscape, Misha walked into the Soviet sector to the offices of the Tägliche Rundschau, the Soviet-backed daily newspaper. The paper was a propaganda tool, of course. Soviet achievements in increasing rations or rebuilding schools were heavily covered and praised. Soviet bullying, deceit and criminality were never mentioned. But alongside the propaganda, the activities of senior occupation officials were usually given a mention, no matter how unreliable the gloss put on them.

  Misha, giving his surname as Müller as he always did these days, asked to see the journalist responsible for compiling the relevant column. The journalist a thin man with a dark beard and moustache clipped to be exactly like Lenin’s, came down from the offices upstairs. Misha identified himself. The journalist nodded, didn’t bother to shake hands, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, lit it and said, ‘Yes?’

  Misha recognised the type. This man, though German, was almost certainly a Moscow-trained communist. If so, his sympathies would be entirely with the country’s new occupiers, not at all with their reluctant hosts.

  Looking down at the ground, and deliberately stumbling over his sentences, Misha explained that he was a father – he’d been out on the street the day before – he’d seen a convoy – a ZiS limousine – he’d recognised the driver – a good man – a man who’d saved his daughter from a shameful episode. The phrase Misha used was the common euphemism for rape, often gang-rape, perpetrated by Red Army men on the rampage. Misha explained that he was keen to thank the driver properly, to offer a small gift. He wondered if the journalist were able to find out the name of the driver, or even the official who was being driven around.

  The journalist surveyed Misha carefully as he spoke. Then, without answering Misha directly, took a telephone from the desk, and made a call. He spoke in rapid, German-accented Russian to the person on the other end. Misha heard that the officer in question was General Zavenyagin; that the journey had been to the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences in Leipzig. He also heard that the journalist had made no enquiry at all about the identity of the driver.

  The journalist turned back to Misha.

  ‘What is your name again?’

  ‘Müller.’

  ‘All the officials of the Sowjetische Militäradminstration in Deutschland were engaged on their regular business,’ said the journalist.

  ‘Yes, sir, but the driver—’

  ‘All Red Army personnel are instructed to supervise and ensure the safety of all German citizens. If there was an unfortunate incident, it is highly likely that surviving fascistic units in stolen Red Army uniforms were responsible.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘It is not necessary to offer gifts for the ordinary performance of duty.’

  ‘No.’

  The journalist nodded once, then turned away. He had been utterly, deliberately unhelpful, but Misha had already heard enough. General Zavenyagin. Leipzig. The Faculty of Agricultural Sciences. It was a small lead, but it was enough.

  5

  Harlan Bauer, Hollinger’s counterpart in the American military intelligence services, rolled a baseball around his desk with the flat of his hand. The raised seams made a clunking sound as they passed over the polished desktop, and Bauer, frowning hard, concentrated on moving the ball so that the clunking sounds came at exact, regularly spaced intervals.

  ‘Stuttgart,’ he said, ‘you been there? Probably not. My grandpa came from there. Grandpa Bauer. A nice place, so he said. And now? We put a mayor in. A decent guy. No Nazi. The Oberbürgermeister. A hard worker. I seen a report from him today that says the city has 60,000 pairs of shoes, 220 suits and 71 overcoats. Only 71 coats and it’s January and it’s freezing hard and the city has a population of 330,000.’

  ‘Listen, Bauer, I know all this—’

  But Bauer wasn’t done. Clunk-clunk-clunk the baseball continued to roll around his table. In the summer, a group of baseball-loving Americans had engaged with a group of cricket-loving Brits and tried to understand the joys of each other’s national game. The experiment had failed. The Americans felt that batting in front of stumps was a typically tight-arsed British way of doing it. The Brits felt that the American game lacked technique and that the pitcher’s throwing action came suspiciously close to cheating. Bauer and Hollinger were among the few who had enjoyed the experience and maintained easy social relations afterwards. Bauer held up a finger for silence.

  ‘No, no, hear me out. We’re getting in our zone alone maybe 5,000 refugees a day from the east. Where do we put ’em? Even as it is, we have maybe one dwelling for every two families. We’ve set a target ration of 1,550 calories a day – around half of what an active adult needs to eat in these conditions – and we don’t even supply that. We need coal for heating. We need it badly. Only – shoot! – we can’t feed the miners, so they’re too hungry to work, so they don’t dig the coal, so Germany doesn’t have the industry, so it can’t make the goods, so it can’t make the money, so it can’t buy the food, that it could give to the miners, so that they could dig out the goddamn coal.’

  On the last word, Bauer brought his hand down hard on the side of the baseball, spinning it, but also preventing it from rolling sideways. The effect was to make the ball jump up off the table into his hand, and he mimed the action of hurling the ball hard at the dead centre of his window. Bauer let a few moments pass in silence, as though to let the imaginary broken glass finish its descent down into the icy street below. Then he said, ‘I’m doing it, aren’t I? That thing Limey grandmothers do.’

  ‘Our grandmothers? I think they mostly knit comforters for our
gallant boys overseas.’

  ‘With eggs. Grandmothers and eggs.’

  ‘Ah yes! They suck them. Strictly speaking, it would be powdered egg these days, so I don’t suppose they suck exactly. Snort, perhaps.’

  ‘You got it. That’s what I was doing, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We got all these problems – I say we got, but really it’s Fritz who’s got ’em – and you want us to pour manpower into looking for a guy who might or might not have arrived here twenty-five years back, who might or might not have stayed, who might or might not have been killed, and who means nothing at all to me or to us or to my good buddy, the Oberbürgermeister of Stuttgart.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve looked already?’

  ‘Started.’

  ‘Found nothing?’

  ‘Not a thing.’

  Bauer grinned, or maybe grimaced. Bauer was a compact, powerful man, with a face that looked as though it had been mechanically pressed from something durable. In Bauer’s case, grinning and grimacing were two expressions which sat close together. He stood abruptly and yelled down the hall for someone to bring him two coffees. He pulled his head back in and asked Hollinger if he wanted coffee. Hollinger nodded. Bauer sat back down.

  ‘It’s gives and gets, buddy. I’m not saying we won’t give, but you gotta trade.’

  ‘Can we make this unofficial?’

  ‘How unofficial?’

  ‘Completely. You don’t write any of this down. You report this conversation to no one.’

  ‘Depends what you got. I might have to talk to my boss. I can’t say.’

  ‘But you won’t if you don’t have to.’

  ‘I won’t unless I have to. Spit ’n’ shake.’ Bauer did a mock-spit on his hand and stretched it out. Hollinger shook without spitting.