The Lieutenant's Lover

by Harry Bingham

  Was he here in Berlin? Just miles away? Looking for her?

  It seemed impossible and all too likely, both at once. Tonya didn’t know what to think. But the art of living without hope that she’d once learned in the Gulag was lost to her now. Hollinger had started her on her new course, Valentina had confirmed it.

  She had begun to hope, begun to trust. She washed her face, tied up her hair and went to bed, tremulous with fear and hope, love and anxiety.

  4

  Marta Kappelhoff, Tonya’s piano teacher and ‘handler’, had her day job working in one of the construction crews in Prenzlauer Berg. The phrase ‘construction crew’ was the one favoured by the city authorities, but rubble-clearance not construction was their primary task. Marta herself was too slightly built to be of much use carrying buckets or pushing barrows, so she passed her day using a small hammer to chip mortar off bricks, so that the bricks could be reused. It was slow work. Slow and cold. At the end of the day, Marta either went directly back to her apartment or went shopping for food in one of the street markets that thrived alongside the old Zeiss Planetarium.

  But today was Tuesday, and every Tuesday and Thursday she visited her mother who lived on the edge of Berlin, out at Neukölln, not far from Tempelhof airport. Her way took her through one of the most comprehensively damaged parts of Berlin, where the Soviet Eighth Guards Army and the First Guards Tank Army had battered their way through German defences. In that fighting, buildings already wrecked by Allied bombs had been further pounded. Ruins to rubble; rubble to powder.

  Marta’s shoes crunched on gritty mud. Recent wet weather had made the roads stream with dirty grey. The sun had just set, and the sky was violet streaked with red. One of Marta’s shoelaces was loose, and needed retying. She came to a corner, glanced ahead and behind her, saw nothing, then stepped lightly into a ruined doorway and thrust her hand into a pocket-sized gap in the masonry. When Hollinger wanted to get a message to her, he left it here. When she wanted to communicate with him, she did it the same way. But today the gap was empty and the doorway wasn’t.

  ‘Marta.’

  Harry Hollinger moved silently in the gloom, holding his finger up to stifle any involuntary exclamation. The exclamation came, but very quietly.

  ‘Thompson! You shouldn’t be here!’

  ‘No, not exactly. But don’t worry, we checked the place very carefully before I stopped off.’

  ‘What is it? Bad news?’

  ‘No, no, nothing like that. Information for Kornikova, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘We’ve looked for Malevich and we’ve got news, some good, some bad. The good part is that Malevich is certainly alive or at least he was a few months ago. The Soviets found out about him, tried to grab him, but failed. The bad part is that he’s no longer living at his old address. I guess he’s tried to run from Berlin into the Allied zones, maybe under an assumed name. That’s certainly what I’d do if I were him. You can tell Kornikova all that, and you can promise her that we’ll continue to look.’

  Marta stared furiously at the Englishman.

  ‘You came to tell me that? You could have written it. You didn’t need to come here. You shouldn’t have come.’

  Marta lit a cigarette and retied her lace – her excuses for using the doorway. Glaring again at Hollinger, she left, moving briskly and angrily up the street.

  Hidden away in the fold of some tumbled masonry, Ekaterina Ershova, junior sergeant in the NKVD, hesitated. Her instructions were to follow this woman, Marta Kappelhoff, but they were also to note and pursue anything out of the ordinary that happened along the way. But what did ‘out of the ordinary’ mean? Kappelhof had stepped into a doorway to light a cigarette and retie a shoelace. Why not? Ershova might have done the same thing.

  Only two things bothered her. Kappelhoff didn’t smoke much. Only two or three cigarettes a day, according to the report she’d seen. And it was a still night. It would have been easy to light up here on the street, there was no need to find the shelter of a doorway. And why the delay? Ershova couldn’t help feeling that Kappelhoff had spent just a few seconds too long out of sight of the street.

  Ershova continued to hesitate. If she were going to continue following Kappelhoff, she would need to do so at once, or give up altogether. But the woman was surely on her way to her mother’s. Ershova reasoned she could always catch up with her later.

  She continued to hesitate, then decided to stay. She remained in position, hidden by the wall in front of her, watching the street turn slowly from grey to black.

  5

  The night proved as exhausting as the day.

  It wasn’t that Tonya couldn’t sleep. She did. But all night long, the cartoon haunted her. Or rather in her strange dream-state, it had seemed to her as though she were the cartoon, as though she herself were the little black-ink figure of Comrade Lensky, with his slight paunch, his bulging eyes, his air of slightly baffled mystification. In the guise of this comical little figure, she had spent the whole night wandering Berlin – or rather, the line-drawn, cartoon version of the city – searching for Misha. Every sign, every shop window, every notice was written in Cyrillic; handwritten; with those little flicked tails, once so characteristic of Misha, and now …? It hadn’t even been clear in the dream whether she was looking for Misha the person, Misha the cartoon, or Misha the artist who had drawn or dreamed the whole thing. The entire intense dream had lasted from the moment she had closed her eyes to the moment that she was physically pummelled awake by her neighbour in the dormitory, long after the reveille bell had sounded.

  And now? Well, Tonya knew she had to go directly to her Mühlendamm office. The work there had piled up. She was sure to be reprimanded if she were even a few moments late. But though there were limits on her freedom, she was no prisoner. She was a starshiy serzhant in the Red Army. She could come and go as she pleased. In her lunch hour, after work, while out on errands. Surely, surely, she would be able to find half an hour to walk the streets in search of another copy of that precious cartoon. And if all else failed, then it would only be another week before she had her next violin lesson with Marta.

  For now, though, waiting that week seemed like being asked to stand still while a century passed. She sped to work. After the night she’d just had, Tonya had expected to find work slow and difficult, but for some reason the opposite happened. She raced through her work like never before. The Russian sentences had formed themselves in her head before her eye had even reached the full stop in the German text. Her fingers flew over the typewriter. The thirty-two typebars of the Cyrillic alphabet danced like a small black cloud of angrily buzzing insects over the page. Time flew by.

  Then, at around eleven fifteen, Tonya got up to go to the toilet. There was no chance of finding that cartoon again here: the Mühlendamm office was used by a number of high-ranking officials and all the cubicles were stocked with plain grey toilet roll imported from a factory in the old East Prussia. She began to return to her desk, but in the hall outside her office, she encountered a group of senior occupation officials, including a number of the technical experts she had accompanied over the last ten days. She saluted the Red Army officers, then stood aside, not wanting to barge her way through the crowd to get back to her desk. She didn’t listen to the conversation, just waited quietly. A few minutes passed. Then the posture of the group in front of her suddenly changed. Tonya looked up. She saw General Sokolovsky himself stride down the corridor towards them. Tonya, and all the other soldiers present, braced themselves into a stiff, formal salute. Sokolovsky swept up. There was a brief conversation. An important meeting was about to take place in Karlshorst. Some of the technical experts were required to be there. Yes, there would be German-only speakers present also. Interpreters would be required. Sokolovsky jerked his head impatiently, not wanting to be bothered with details. One of the technical experts pointed at Tonya.

  ‘Sergeant Kornikova, there. She can interpret.’

  Sokolov
sky nodded and waved his hand. ‘Come.’ It was an order.

  6

  The thirty-six hours which followed that instruction were among the strangest of Tonya’s life.

  For one thing, she didn’t sleep, not even for a minute. For another, the meeting she was asked to attend – or meetings, rather, because one symposium rolled on into another, in seemingly interminable sequence – turned out to be of the highest possible importance to the future of the Soviet Union in Germany. All the most senior officials were there, Russian and German. The purpose of the meeting was to present Soviet plans for the east zone, and elsewhere in the emerging Soviet bloc. A succession of speakers from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia were there to survey the progress of the Communist Party in their home countries. The meeting rooms echoed with the sound of Russian triumphalism, Russian greed.

  And that in turn led to the third strange aspect of the whole experience. A vital document, with the highest security classification available, needed to be translated into German. The document summarised the state of the Communist presence throughout Germany, east and west zones together. The longest single section was on Berlin itself. Tonya was ordered to carry out the translation. It was that task which kept her up the entire night, as all the others were either feasting or sleeping. Page after page swooped through her typewriter. The state of the Communist advance was carefully analysed. Key Communist sympathisers were named, as were the Party’s most important opponents. In the latter case, the individuals weren’t just named, they were evaluated for their susceptibility to bribery and blackmail. The weaknesses of the Western Allies were listed in precise and remorseless detail. Without question, the document was the most shocking, comprehensive and important information that Tonya had ever come across. She had been asked to type up three copies of the whole thing: three thin white sheets interspersed with flimsy black carbon papers. She typed in a trance, her fingers rubbery with tiredness, her mind spinning with the implications of the text in front of her.

  And automatically, almost without consciously choosing to do it, she changed the topmost carbon paper after every page of typing and retained it. By the end of the night, she had thirty-eight sheets of carbon paper. The dimpled black surface wasn’t possible to read with the naked eye, but each key stroke had made an impression which would certainly be visible under magnification. As dawn broke over the city, Tonya shuffled her carbons together into a stack and folded them twice. The package was too large to fit into her hollowed-out boot heel. So, silently borrowing some sewing things from the desk of a female worker, she slit her boot lining at the top, placed the papers inside, then sewed up the incision. She was a good seamstress and her work was practically invisible. She continued to work on lesser documents, until the meetings reconvened at around eight o’clock. By this time, she was so tired, so overcome, that she hardly felt the size of the risk she was taking.

  But the strangest thing of all was yet to come.

  At one point that morning, Sokolovsky was called away to the telephone. It was clear that he was speaking directly to Moscow. A whispered rumour went around the room that the general was speaking to Stalin himself. During the interval, people relaxed and joked. Cigarettes were lit and the air turned blue with the smoke. Over in one corner of the room, people began laughing and passing some printed poster-sized pages around. The pages circulated around the room. Wherever they passed, people bent over them, read them and chuckled. Then they reached Tonya.

  It was the cartoons again. Comrade Lensky, with his little pot-belly and his comical strutting walk.

  Tonya’s tiredness dropped away from her in an instant. She felt as fresh and clear as if she’d just bathed in ice melt-water. She scanned the cartoons with astonishment. Now that she had them in her hand, an entire page of them, their message was clear beyond doubt. There were references everywhere. To Tonya’s maiden name. To Misha’s mother and Tonya’s father. To Kuletsky Prospekt and the hunting lodge in Petrozavodsk. To waltzes and sleigh-loads of black-market logs and china figurines from Meissen. And the clinching thing was Lensky’s best friend, a perfectly drawn caricature of Misha himself. And at the bottom of the page there was a name, Willi Nichts, and an address in Charlottenberg. The entire page was an invitation addressed to Tonya.

  All that remained was for her to walk across town, and come home at last.

  7

  Konstantinov gave a short, sharp nod.

  Lieutenant Bezarin, a burly Siberian peasant, built short and square, gave the door a thundering kick about nine inches left of the lock. Nothing happened. Behind Konstantinov and Bezarin there stood a pair of NKVD men armed with axes. One of them made as if to step forwards, but Bezarin shook his head. He stood ox-like in front of the door, his big head slightly swaying on his shoulders. He collected himself, his small eyes narrowly focused on the part of the door that had resisted his kick. There was another second or two of silence, then Bezarin collected himself and crashed into the door again. The wood splintered and broke. The metal lock was torn from the frame. The door smashed open. Bezarin, tumbling forwards, lay happily smiling in the debris.

  ‘Harasho,’ he said. ‘Good.’

  The owner of the apartment, the German woman Marta Kappelhoff, was away at work. She would be gone all day. Konstantinov and his men moved slowly into the apartment, savouring the moment.

  8

  One of the Moscow technical experts was describing the scope for further industrial reparations from the region about Leipzig. His Russian was dense with technical terms, unnecessary jargon, and mangled grammar. His pauses were too short for Tonya to translate effectively. Ignoring her difficulties, the expert ran on, as though deliberately making life hard for her. Tonya, already dazed with tiredness and the events of the previous twenty-four hours, began mumbling and getting her sentences confused. Sokolovsky, who was present at the meeting, banged the table with his fist and glared at her. The room went suddenly silent. Tonya swallowed nervously. Then Sokolovsky’s face changed. He had it in him to be genial and humorous, and something lit up in his expression now.

  ‘You were interpreting yesterday also?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘And this morning, since how early?’

  Tonya hesitated. How was she to answer that, since she hadn’t been to bed?

  ‘Well?’

  The general’s face was a curious combination of inviting and stormy. On an impulse, Tonya decided to trust him and speak the truth.

  ‘Very early, I suppose, sir. I was translating documents through the night. I haven’t slept.’

  The general’s face blackened and he turned to the technical expert. ‘You haven’t slept and now this blockhead who can’t even speak proper Russian makes your life hell! Idiot!’ The technical expert went pale and took a step or two back. The silence in the room continued, as people waited for Sokolovsky’s next pronouncement. The great man consulted his watch. It was five to twelve. ‘Lunch,’ he roared, adding in a quieter voice to Tonya, ‘eat well, finish this afternoon’s session, then get some rest. Well done.’

  His attention turned away from her, and towards the meal that would be awaiting them all downstairs: huge bowlfuls of soup, full of beans, cabbage, onion, beetroot, and ham. There would be black bread and the pale yellow butter of the local German creameries.

  But Tonya didn’t want food. In a daze, she began to walk downstairs, heading for the open air. The carbon papers in the lining of her boot formed a stiff band down the outside of her right calf. Although the actual physical pressure was very slight, the crashing significance of those papers suddenly seemed so intense that it was all Tonya could do to avoid walking with a limp. She was suddenly appalled at herself for the risk she was taking. What had she been thinking of?

  She knew the answer, of course. Quite simply, when she had taken the carbon papers, she had no real expectation of finding Misha again. Now, just a few hours later, she didn’t just know that Misha was alive, she k
new where he was living. She had read, that very morning, an invitation conceived by him and addressed to her, an invitation that asked her to find him, to live with him, to marry him… In contrast with the crashing importance of those facts, her own feelings on the German situation, on the importance of helping Mark Thompson, suddenly paled into insignificance, a candle flame in sunlight.

  She walked into the grandiose Karlshorst lobby, once adorned with Nazi flags, now spread with red banners and Soviet slogans. The blood seemed to pulse with strange forcefulness in her calf, as though her heart had slipped and was beating down there instead. She glanced outside. It was a brilliant day. It had snowed overnight, perhaps the last real snowfall of spring, and the bright March sunshine leaped from drift to drift, splashing brilliant reflections and the hard diamond glitter of ice in every direction. Outside a car stopped. An NKVD captain, recognisable from the royal blue splashes on his uniform, got out. Tonya recognised him. It was Arkady Konstantinov. There was something alert and bounding in his stride, something that reminded Tonya of a hunting dog at work. The captain, followed by two of his men, strode towards the front entrance.

  Tonya recoiled backwards. There was no logic at work that made her do it, just the thumping pressure in her boot. She bumped backwards through a side door, and found herself in a passage from which a number of low-level clerical offices opened. It was the lunch hour and most of the offices were empty. Tonya went into one of them and sat down. Her head was thumping. She missed Misha like a physical pain in her side. A small part of her wondered at the strangeness of seeing him again after so long, but not most of her. Mostly, she knew that after being with Misha for a single minute, it would be exactly the same as if they had never been apart. It was as though a fragile porcelain cup had been carried through the battlefields of the Eastern front, from Stalingrad to Berlin, and ended up exactly the same: unchipped, unbroken, uncracked. It might be a miracle, but if so, it was a miracle Tonya knew she could rely on.