The Lieutenant's Lover

by Harry Bingham

  Willi looked savagely into the lamplight. He picked up his glass ‘Berliner’ shade again, settled it back on the lamp and sent it spinning wildly around oil its stand. The huge shadows whirled and flashed on the walls.

  ‘I’m not much use to you, though am I? You don’t need to deny it.’

  ‘You help look after Rosa.’

  That’s hardly an affliction, is it?’

  ‘And you can maybe help me in one other way.’

  ‘Ja?’ Willi had stopped the lampshade. With a dab of red ink, he adjusted his profile of Sokolovsky, to add more strut, more exaggerated swagger.

  ‘I think it’s hopeless for us to look for Tonya. Hopeless for us. Dangerous for her.’

  ‘You won’t even try?’ Willi was incredulous.

  ‘No. She needs to look for us. But first we need to tell her that we’re here.’

  Willi put his brush and ink carefully away. He was more careful of his brushes than of anything else in the happy disorder of his life. He spun the shade again, but slowly this time, solemnly.

  ‘And how do we do that?’

  Misha shook his head. ‘No, Willi. Not we, you.’

  13

  It was three weeks later, dinner-time on a Sunday evening.

  Misha always sought to provide meat for them all at least once a week, and Willi, whose stomach was bottomless, was almost never late. But on this occasion he was nowhere to be seen and had left no word as to where he was. Misha kept the stew heating for a while, then decided to eat anyway.

  Rosa, reading his thoughts as ever, said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s only Willi being late.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ he told her, worrying anyway.

  They ate. Rosa was having a phase of not enjoying vegetables, and it took her twenty minutes to finish her red cabbage, which she ate by picking out one long strand at a time and dropping it into her mouth from above. Misha told her that the cabbage would make her grow big and strong. Rosa rolled her eyes at him, in scepticism.

  Then, at last, there was the clattering outside which signified that Willi had arrived on his push-bike and had flung it up to rest against the metal dustbins. Rosa clapped her hands, and Misha too felt an immediate lightening of worry.

  Willi entered.

  ‘Food! I’m not late, am I? I’m starving. I had to go to Rudi’s to get some proper ink. My inks were getting too faint to use.’

  Beneath his arm, he held a long tube of paper. Misha, knowing what it was, was excited about seeing it, but Willi insisted that the paper was frozen and that it needed to thaw out properly before it could be unrolled. He warmed it through over the stove. Misha cleared a space on the table and moved the lamp back to make room. When Willi was finally happy, he unfurled the paper – a big, poster-sized sheet of it – and laid it out.

  Misha caught his breath.

  There were six cartoon strips, each four or five frames in length.

  Each strip revolved around a single invented character, an ordinary Russian soldier, a Red Army frontovik, endearing, tipsy, accident-prone. The character had a pot-belly, an expression of happy and peaceable mystification, and a short wooden rifle that could threaten no one and nothing. The little soldier was an appealing sort – slow-witted perhaps, but charming. The sort of man anyone would take a liking to in an instant, befriend in a moment.

  The cartoons were excellent. Funny and touching at the same time. Rosa, who didn’t entirely understand the point of them, chuckled at the friendly, dumpy little chap. Misha too was struck by Willi’s talent for these things. The cartoon strips told of the little man’s adventures in all the situations that so baffled, enraged and exasperated Berliners. No one could read these cartoons and not laugh at the humour, smile at the accuracy.

  But their true genius lay elsewhere. Because the good-natured frontovik was called Comrade Lensky – the name which gave the cartoon strip its title. Lensky’s best friend, who featured in every cartoon, was a brilliant caricature of Misha himself and was called Mikhail Kuletsky. And every single cartoon, every single story contained buried references to a past that only Misha and a certain female Red Army interpreter could understand. There were references to hunting lodges, waltzes, an empty safe, railway repairs, the hot white nights of Petrograd, a woman and boy making an escape under piles of grain …

  Misha scrutinised the cartoon that lay immediately in front of him. This one, the first, was making a series of well-aimed jokes about the pitiful rations handed out by the Western Allies. The cartoon was pithy, well-drawn, funny and likeable. But there was something missing. Misha sat and pondered without getting anywhere. Willi, with a sudden impatient movement, signified that he was waiting for a reaction.

  ‘They’re brilliant, Willi. You have a natural genius for these things…’

  Then he got it – the thing that was missing. The cartoon, of course, had its title in German: Kamerad Lensky. That was fine, of course, but Tonya would never have seen her name written that way. Why would she? Misha took the sheet and, beneath the main title of the first strip, he wrote the same thing in Russian: He put pen and paper down. The ink dried from glistening black to a dark grey-purple.

  Misha breathed slowly through his mouth.

  He felt strange, a feeling of warmth spreading outwards from his chest to reach every part of his body. And though he’d never encountered the feeling before, he understood it instantly. It was a sense of certainty, a recognition of when something was absolutely right. Because this cartoon was exactly that. If Tonya saw the cartoon, she couldn’t help but understand its message: the names, the buried references, Misha’s own pet name for her written in his own handwriting. And at the bottom of every strip was a name and address: Willi Nichts, the Nothing Factory, Leipzigestrasse, Charlottenberg.

  ‘They’re perfect, Willi, perfect.’

  Misha added the same title, to the remaining strips, then stepped back, almost shocked at how good his idea was proving to be. Willi hung out with a group of journalists, satirists and artists who produced (very irregularly) a free newspaper called Die Trümmerzeitung, ‘The Rubble Gazette’. In return for a few cartons of cigarettes, Die Trümmerzeitung would print Willi’s cartoons. Misha and Willi would paste them up over Berlin, the Soviet sector especially, using the sides of buildings, trees, burned-out vehicles and anything else by way of hoardings. Such posters were fairly common these days. The Soviet authorities destroyed anything they didn’t approve of, but the Kamerad Lensky strip was endearing, funny – and consistently mocked only the Western military authorities. The Soviets, hopefully, would leave the cartoons up, till rain and ice destroyed them. Then they’d print more strips, paste them up again, and so on.

  And if Tonya saw them she would understand. The cartoons were a love letter, addressed to her. All she needed to do was to walk across town and be in Misha’s arms again.

  SEVEN

  1

  The first winter of occupied rule had been a bad one.

  The weather had been cold. In parts of the country, snow had drifted in places up to ten feet high. Old folk, living in cellars, had had their doorways sealed in by snow and only the determined rescue efforts of neighbours and friends had kept casualties down.

  In the meantime, the Allies, Western and Soviet, continued to struggle. The loveless peace between occupiers and occupied still held, but things were going downhill. The food rations were set far too low for an active population enduring bitter weather, but even those rations weren’t enough. There were shortages of meat, eggs, milk, potatoes, coal, electricity, clothing. The denazification process swelled until more and more ordinary Germans were lapped in its coils. Rumours about the living standards of the occupying forces swirled with increasing bitterness in the freezing air. The French were always drunk like pigs. Black American soldiers could buy a German girl for one bar of chocolate. The English were arrogant and treated Germany like a part of imperial India. The only industries which flourished were prostitution and the black market. There was no money that
meant anything, only cigarettes.

  And, in the meantime, the Soviets had continued to work towards a Germany that would be united under Communist rule. Their plan – bold in the extreme – was to merge the Communist Party with the pre-war Social Democrats. The intention was to use the new party to win democratic elections – then swallow the country. The whole country that is: not just the east zone, but the west zones too, bringing communist rule to the shores of the North Sea.

  But the plan was failing. Badly. Horribly. In the west, the Social Democrats were contemptuously refusing to have anything to do with the proposed merger. In the east, the merger was being forced through, by a combination of lies, bullying, thuggery and bribes. But even in the east, no one trusted the new party. That was good news of a sort – but dangerous too.

  How would Stalin react to the setback in the west? What would he do to harden his control over the east? And most of all, what of the original plan? What of the idea that Germany would remain one country, under joint four-power control? Most of all, what would happen to Berlin? The city was completely surrounded by the Soviet zone. If the Russians and the Western Allies finally fell out, what would happen to Berlin? Would Stalin take it, as he had already taken so much else? And if so, then what would happen to its people? Worse still, what would the rest of Europe think of an America and Britain so weak as to let it happen? If Berlin fell, what else might yet tumble? Austria? Germany? Italy? France?

  As so often before, there were a million questions and no answers. The mood was bad. It was late March, 1946.

  2

  In the schoolyards of Hancock County, Kentucky, a promise sealed ‘spit ’n’ shake’ was a promise that could never be broken. And Harlan Bauer kept his word. He’d sent urgent requests to the governor of every district asking them to search their records for a Mikhail, or Michael, Malevich. Negative answers had begun to pour in. But Bauer kept the pressure up. He told those who’d answered too quickly to check again. He told those who answered too slowly to speed up.

  And one day he got lucky.

  A thick-witted, fat-necked, gum-chewing, German-hating Yankee major from the subterranean reaches of a hopelessly over-tangled military bureaucracy came up trumps. He had met Malevich and interviewed him. A movement authorisation had been applied for, granted, then never claimed. The major was based just a few blocks away here in Berlin, so Bauer went to interview the man. The major blustered, denied, chewed gum and defended – then admitted that as well as processing the movement order, he’d made a point of handing Malevich’s details over to the Russians.

  Bauer had been furious.

  ‘You say the guy was a German citizen, who’d spent the war in camps? That he’d been persecuted by both the Commies and the Nazis? Then – Jesus – this guy’s life hasn’t been bad enough, you gotta go see if you can screw it up even worse!’

  Bauer was out of line. Both men were majors but the other man was the senior. All the same, Bauer was in the right, the other man was in the wrong, and the sheer force of Bauer’s personality made him intimidating.

  As soon as Bauer returned to his desk, he called Hollinger and gave him the news. Hollinger sent a man over to the address Bauer gave him, a ruined factory somewhere in Charlottenberg. The man Hollinger sent found a trio of women working some home-made weaving looms. The women told him that no one of the name Malevich lived there now, if ever. The only permanent residents were a man named Müller, a teenage boy who called himself Willi Nichts, and a little girl whom Müller had adopted. Questioned further, the women said that yes, they thought the NKVD had once raided the property. The boy, Willi Nichts, had been beaten and hospitalised. Perhaps there had been an abduction too; but if so they hadn’t heard about it.

  Hollinger’s man checked dates and names with the hospital in question. The facts all seemed to match up.

  The conclusion seemed inescapable. Malevich – the man whom Kornikova so badly wanted to find again – had been living right here under her nose in Berlin. A shamefully wrong-headed bureaucratic decision had allowed the NKVD to discover Malevich’s identity. Never ones to allow a supposed crime from twenty-five years back to be forgotten, the NKVD had come crashing in to try and snatch him. Perhaps they’d succeeded or perhaps they’d failed, but if so then Malevich had obviously gone on the run again, maybe changing his name, faking his papers. He could be anywhere now, under any name, impossible to find.

  Hollinger’s normally sunny face grew cloudy, even brutal.

  The agent Kornikova was just about old enough to be Hollinger’s mother, but she never seemed that way to him. Quite the reverse. Despite the life she’d led, despite the suffering and loss, there was something youthful about her, something light but also strong and enduring. Hollinger admitted to himself that he was emotionally bound up with Kornikova – not in a romantic way, but not in a mother—son way either. He just cared about her very deeply. It mattered to him, to an excessive and unprofessional degree, that her life should turn out for the best.

  The first rule of sound intelligence is to avoid getting personally involved. Hollinger knew that. He believed in the rule. But he broke it anyway. He cared about Kornikova and his attachment blinded him.

  3

  Tonya had been busy.

  She’d been hauled off to interpret on a long tour of industrial sites that took in Frankfurt an der Oder, Guben, Cotbus, the terribly ruined city of Dresden, Leipzig, Dessau, Brandenburg, Potsdam. She had been interpreting for a party of technical experts from Moscow, and every day had been long and tiring, ending with feasts of vodka and wild boar that ran late into the night. On top of that, the weather had been difficult, a sudden thaw and heavy rain combining to make the roads heavy and often impassable. She ended the ten-day tour with a bad head cold and a mountain of paperwork.

  She worked till eleven o’clock that night, then walked back to her sleeping quarters, a former Wehrmacht barracks, a place of long concrete corridors, harsh lighting, echoing toilet blocks, and green-painted plywood doors. She reached her dormitory: eight narrow beds under high metal-paned windows. Between each bed, there was a gap of around twenty inches. Tonya was now starshiy serzhant, senior sergeant, and her rank had been recognised by the award of a corner bed and a small bedside table. She knew that her past would probably prevent her from rising further, but she liked the little privileges that she now possessed. She didn’t allow herself to think of that blue-and-gold passport, or Thompson’s rose-covered cottage. As far as possible, she didn’t even think of Misha, though that was like asking the bird not to think of the wind.

  She made her way to the toilet block to get ready for bed. She washed her face and hands. And she went to the lavatory, one of a row of six doorless cubicles.

  There was no lavatory paper, of course, just a pile of newspaper. The most easily available newspaper was the Krasnaya Zvezda, the Red Army publication, but most soldiers were scared of being caught wiping their bottoms on one of Stalin’s speeches and any alternatives were eagerly seized on. Today, at the top of the pile, there was a strip torn from one of the unauthorised single-sheet newspapers that were to be seen around Berlin. Tonya was just about to make use of the strip, when the drawing on it caught her eye.

  The cartoon itself was an excellent example of the genre – well-drawn, characterful, engaging – but it was the title that grabbed her attention. The cartoon strip was entitled Kamerad Lensky and beneath the title, in hand-written Russian lettering, the translation: .

  Tonya stared and stared and stared and stared.

  The name itself was not uncommon. It was similar in occurrence to the German ‘Schneider’, or the English ‘Wilson’. But the handwriting! Surely that was Misha’s own handwriting, with its characteristic flicked tail to the and the Tonya desperately wanted to see more – but the cartoon had been torn. She held not even half of it in her hand. The cartoonist’s name, or pen-name more like, was given at the bottom: Willi Nichts. Perhaps there was more – more handwriting, some further clues, an
address even? – but not in the scrap which was all Tonya possessed. She searched her own stall, then all the others, for further copies. There was nothing. She even went down the hall into the privates’ toilet block to search there. Still nothing.

  She went back to that first little scrap and interrogated it. The handwriting, which had first seemed so intensely familiar, dissolved into mystery. It wasn’t exactly the same as she had remembered it – but twenty-five years had passed since she had known Misha. Of course his handwriting would have changed. Then again, Tonya knew that she so strongly wanted the writing to be Misha’s that her judgement was hardly likely to be reliable.

  Was she crazy to be thinking of him again? What were the odds against such a thing? And yet, and yet … great as the odds looked, they shrank away as Tonya thought about it. She had always expected Misha to end up in Germany – he’d always said that Germany was the engineering capital of the world. And if he’d come to Germany, then why not Berlin? And if Berlin, then it was perfectly conceivable that he might have caught sight of her, or heard her name. And if he had seen her, still loved her, still cared about her, then how else could he find her, but by asking in code if she would return to him?

  Her heart crashed against her chest.

  Back in the sergeants’ and petty officers’ toilet block, she stood in front of the only mirror, a dingy, fly-spattered affair. She unfastened her hair, combing it behind her with her fingers. She had aged. Her hair – the colour of the forest floor, as Misha had once described it – was flecked with grey now. Lines had crept into her face. Her green eyes were still bright and clear, but she’d never liked her eyes, never quite accepting their slightly eastern look. She had grown thinner too, lost some of her old soft roundness. In the old days, Misha had always been the lean one. Perhaps, as she’d aged, she’d somehow taken on something of him, his energy, his leanness. She hoped so.