The Lieutenant's Lover

by Harry Bingham

  She advanced closer.

  The man’s uniform was perfectly pressed, including even the backs of his trousers. Rodyon had had that ability once: the ability to work like a Trojan all day and still to look crisp and fresh at the end of it – not that this new man was Rodyon, of course. He was too short and too young. The man hadn’t advanced more than six or seven yards beyond his car. He had his thumbs hooked into the side of his belt and he stood with his shoulders back and his chest puffed out. His voice had a nasty, carrying tone. The soldiers he was speaking to were plainly being reprimanded, perhaps even being told off for punishment. There were certainly privates included in his audience, but there were officers too, a captain even. Tonya suddenly wished she had taken the time to polish her boots. She realised that her plan for getting down to the canal in Bad Freienwalde tomorrow might have to be called off. There was something frightening, even disastrous in the mild September air.

  She came closer.

  The officer was a podpolkovnik, a lieutenant colonel in the NKVD. Tonya sidled round to join the group of soldiers he was addressing. As he heard her approach, his head changed direction slightly to indicate that he’d noticed her. She sprang to attention. She was no parade-ground soldier – never had been – but she could pull off a smart salute, when called for. She stood stiffly, her chin up, her eyes with that unseeing middle-distance focus beloved of inspecting officers. She saw the man only as a shape, an impression of a head balding from the front, mid-brown hair and that impeccable uniform.

  A second or two passed.

  The man wasn’t instantly acknowledging her salute. She held her pose, waiting. The man had stopped talking. He was coming over towards her. He was smiling, but Tonya knew that smiles didn’t always betoken warmth. The man was standing in front of her now, but for some reason she still didn’t look at him properly. She kept her eyes blank, her gaze unfocused. He stopped.

  ‘Well, well, well, Antonina Kirylovna Kornikova.’

  She almost jumped in surprise. Her blank look suddenly concentrated itself on the man’s face. She saw the puckered skin, the blue eyes, the loose, full-lipped mouth. It was her brother, Pavel. She hadn’t seen him for ten years.

  ‘Pavel!’ she exclaimed in shock. Her brother’s smile broadened and his eyebrows lifted. She realised he was waiting for her to acknowledge his rank. ‘Sir!’ she corrected herself.

  He acknowledged her salute with a brief gesture of his hand and he allowed her to stand at ease. He looked her up and down. His gaze lingered on her boots, but he said nothing. Then he gave a short nod. He turned back to the men he had been addressing. He had been reprimanding them for a slackness in saluting him on arrival. It should have been a short matter, but he went on haranguing the men, privates and officers alike, for a full eight or ten minutes.

  Tonya remembered those first revolutionary years. Pavel had been so eager to copy Rodyon. He had so much admired the older man’s force, purpose and energy. But he’d understood nothing; nothing that had mattered. Rodyon’s drive had always come straight from his sense of injustice, his determination to do things better. Pavel hadn’t cared for any of that. He’d liked the power, the power to command and the authority to punish.

  And Tonya suddenly realised something else. She’d never known who had denounced her to the authorities that time in 1936. In that paranoiac decade, suspicion had crept in everywhere. Friends denounced friends. Family denounced family. The kind old lady who helped you with your washing turned out to be a paid informant for the NKVD. So Tonya had never spent much time wondering who had denounced her or why … and yet now that she saw Pavel again, like this, she remembered that in the weeks before her arrest, he had made a rare trip from Leningrad to Moscow where he had spent a few days staying in Tonya’s apartment. On one evening, Pavel had produced a bottle of lemon vodka and the two of them had got a little drunk together. Tonya now remembered that she had grumbled about the kind of communist party that could send a good man like Rodyon to Siberia for imagined crimes. She’d remembered Pavel grinning, nodding, egging her on. But seeing his face now, in its NKVD uniform, with so much delight in its own rank, such willingness to inflict hurt, she realised that she had been drinking vodka that night with her own betrayer. Her brother, the traitor.

  Pavel finished his harangue. The camp staff went about their duties, Tonya included. Pavel showed no desire to talk to her. Apart from that first use of her full name, he had shown no indication that he acknowledged a connection with her.

  Tonya went back to her hut that night. She knew she wouldn’t be going to Bad Freienwalde in the morning. She knew that the world had changed again, changed very much for the worse.

  TEN

  1

  Weeks passed.

  Autumn drew in and with it, the promise of winter. The last winter, the one of 1945–46, had been bad, but people had somehow expected that. It was the first winter of peacetime. The country was occupied. Things were hard. What no one then had expected was that nothing would have changed a year later. Berlin was still a ruin. Yes, rubble was being cleared, but even so it was estimated that, at current rates of progress, it would take thirty years to finish the job. There was virtually no new construction. There were no tools to do it, no machinery, no materials, no cash. People were still hungry, and now they had a whole year’s worth of extra hunger to contend with. No one had enough fuel, or enough cash to buy it. For the black-marketeers and the prostitutes, business was still strong. For everyone else, things were shifting from bad to desperate. Patience was running out. Grumbles against the occupiers had become a constant background noise, like the rumble of summer thunder.

  And the coming winter would be awful. No one spoke about it, but everyone knew it.

  2

  Hollinger had been as good as his word to Misha.

  In the last year or so of the war, Allied bombers had been able to pass more or less freely over the skies of Germany. Every inch of the country had been photographed from the air. Old pictures and charts had been pulled out and old sites re-examined. It wasn’t long before Hollinger’s analysts had identified a further six possible Special Camps. Misha had strongly wanted to go and check them out himself, but Hollinger had kept him back.

  ‘You aren’t a trained agent. Your memories of Antonina are almost thirty years old. You aren’t skilled in this kind of observation.’

  They were sound arguments, ones that Misha was finally forced to accept. But though Hollinger swore that he had put plenty of manpower into observing the camps, he came up with nothing. ‘She isn’t there. We’re sure of it, as sure as we can be. But there are still other camps. There must be. We’ve found seven camps in all, but one of them is numbered Camp 12. There are at least five others. We just need to find them and check them. We’ll do what we can.’

  Hollinger possibly spoke the truth, but Misha also knew that there were bureaucratic limitations to what he could do. How much time and effort could the British really put in to locating one, now-useless, agent? Misha knew that Hollinger cared about Tonya, but Hollinger was one thing, the system was another. More and more Misha felt that he would have to do the job himself.

  But how? To that question, he had no answer. Except eventually one, and that from a most unlikely source: Willi.

  Misha’s gift of a camera had been inspired. It was as though all Willi’s experiments with ink and pen and brush had been simply preparation for this. The boy instantly secured a series of commissions from an American newspaper (thanks to an impressive but wholly fabricated resumé of his previous work) and used the cash to buy himself a fully-equipped darkroom. He continued to work off and on for the Americans, but most of his work now was freelance. He specialised in taking photos of Soviet officers as keepsakes for them to send to their loved ones back home. The officers paid in Reichsmarks or dark Russian cigarettes. Pleased with the results they got, they recommended him to their brother officers all across the east zone. Willi had papers that permitted him to travel freely, and
made the most of his privileges. His particular trick was to capture his subjects in arrogant, almost imperial poses – like the Roman conquerors of a barbarian land. The Soviets liked them, because they only saw flattery. Willi was willing to do them, because of the bitter satire that propelled him.

  And Willi had made a discovery – or so he claimed. He wouldn’t say what it was, just summoned Misha and Rosa into his tiny darkroom. Misha hoisted Rosa up onto the workbench, and leaned back against the wall himself. Willi – carefully showing off, while pretending not to – bustled about, then, when he was ready, pulled the light cord. The room went completely dark, except for a dim red lamp above the sink.

  ‘Now tovarishch,’ he muttered.

  Beside Misha, negatives hung in long, seemingly random, celluloid loops on a piece of washing line. Discarded prints sat in the dustbin or in a scatter of rubbish all over the floor. But despite the apparent disorder, Willi seemed to know just what he was doing and he moved with the accuracy and expertise he displayed whenever he was doing something he loved. Rosa sat cross-legged on the end of the workbench, missing nothing.

  ‘Now then. I took this in Bernau,’ announced Willi, clearly enjoying his audience and simultaneously threading a strip of film into his enlarger.

  He flicked a switch and the image displayed itself on the enlarger board in reversed black-and-white. The image was of a Soviet officer leaning up against a truck. He shaded the enlarger light and threw a sheet of photographic paper under the lens. He exposed the image again, counted silently, then cut the light. The paper went straight in the bath of developer, which Willi rocked from side to side to keep the liquid moving. Rosa craned forwards, then suddenly, the image began to spring from the paper. Rosa gasped. Another few seconds, then Willi washed the page, fixed it, and washed it again.

  Satisfied, he jerked on the light, and displayed the print.

  ‘NKVD,’ said Misha.

  ‘A captain, yes. But look. The newspaper.’

  Willi pointed to a newspaper that was just visible through the truck windscreen. Misha peered. He couldn’t make it out.

  ‘It’s Polish,’ said Willi impatiently. ‘Look. Who else could produce a language like that?’

  He handed Misha a magnifying glass so he could see better. The headline came into focus. Something about the city of Szczecin – Stettin in German.

  ‘Willi, I don’t understand.’

  The boy had brought him in here because he’d said he had something vital to show him. Misha didn’t know what and he felt exasperated by Willi’s insistence on coming at the subject sideways.

  ‘That truck has been in Poland recently. Probably only a day or two back.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘This officer wasn’t stationed in Poland. He reported to the SMAD. He told me so.’

  Misha shrugged. ‘So?’

  ‘So the man is an NKVD captain based in Germany, but stationed close enough to the Polish border to get that newspaper.’

  ‘Still, Willi,’ said Misha, patiently. ‘There’s no shortage of NKVD men in Germany. Just because…’

  ‘He was in charge of prisoners.’

  ‘He told you that?’

  ‘Yes. Nearly. As good as.’

  Misha raised his eyebrows. It was hard to know how seriously to take the boy. Willi was still such a mixture of contrasts. He was young in years, but old in experience; prideful, but competent; too quick to draw conclusions, but often exceptionally shrewd where it most counted.

  ‘He had a truck driver with him. The truck was loaded with potatoes. Bad ones. Soft. I laughed at the load, and said that was no food for a conquering hero. The captain told me that the food wasn’t for him, it was for pigs.’

  ‘Maybe it was.’

  ‘You know it wasn’t.’

  Willi was right. The NKVD were an elite. Their commanders reported directly to Beria, bypassing all the normal military routes of command. No NKVD man, still less a captain, would be sent to buy food for farm animals. The pigs in question were human ones for sure.

  ‘You’re right. So there’s a camp on the border somewhere. Maybe Schwedt an der Oder, somewhere like that.’

  Willi shook his head, enjoying his moment. ‘Not Schwedt.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I asked him.’

  ‘You asked him?’ Not for the first time, Misha was shocked by the boy’s sheer cheek.

  ‘Sort of. Not exactly. Even I… But I thought the same as you. What is there on the border? Nowhere much bigger than Schwedt. So I asked for a ride there.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He said no. He wasn’t going that far. He dropped me at Eberswalde, before taking the road south.’

  ‘Jesus, Willi! You’ve done well.’

  Rosa’s eyes widened in the lamplight. If Willi ever blasphemed in front of her, Misha was quick to check him. Misha himself had never used strong language in front of her before. But Misha didn’t notice or, for the moment, care. The cold thrill of certainty had prickled through him once again. After a barren summer, he felt like a hunting dog, who had just picked up the scent of prey.

  3

  Pavel, now in charge of Oderbruch Special Camp, had stiffened things up in every respect. There were regular parades for all soldiers, including Tonya. Uniforms were made to sparkle. Any lapses on the part of one individual would mean a compulsory dawn parade for the entire unit. Sleeping quarters were inspected. All decorations, such as Tonya’s magazine photograph, had to be removed from the walls. The only pictures permitted anywhere were portraits of Marshal Stalin and other propaganda emblems.

  But Pavel didn’t limit himself to spit-and-polish type reforms. The prisoners were counted. Their tally fell well short of the number for which stores were being drawn. The quartermaster was demoted to the ranks. (So too was his wife: a source of some pleasure to Tonya, who no longer had to bear her petty bullying.) Rokossovsky crept around for those weeks, eyes popping out of his head, terrified that his own role in proceedings would be found out, but it appeared that nothing further came of the investigation. Interrogations of the more important prisoners were suddenly taken up again with new vigour. Tonya was kept busy interpreting and typing up reports and transcripts. The whole camp had a busier, sharper, feeling to it. But it also became a jumpier place, nervy and tense.

  One evening, about a fortnight after Pavel’s arrival, Tonya was working alone in her office, typing up a big batch of prisoner interview transcripts. She worked by the light of a single overhead lamp. The evening was chilly and the window was closed, so that the clack of the typewriter was easily the loudest thing in her surroundings. She was already working late and had missed supper, but hoped that she would be able to get finished in time to beg some scraps from the camp kitchen. She kept her head bent over the keys, ignoring the ache in her frostbitten hand, working fast. As a consequence, she didn’t hear the door. It was only a sixth sense of a human presence that caused her to look up and when she did, she saw Pavel.

  She leaped up from her desk and sprang to attention. He looked at her for a moment with that slightly frightening loose-lipped smile. Then he relaxed into a more human expression. He acknowledged her own salute with a careless hand, and said, ‘That’s all right, Sister.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Have you had dinner?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘Not hungry?’

  Tonya wanted to say that she had been working, but somehow felt inhibited. Would he regard that as toadying, as seeking to gain some kind of advantage? She didn’t know. She was confused by her recent insight that it had been he who had denounced her. She didn’t know what to do with that knowledge, or how to think of him now.

  But Pavel correctly interpreted her confusion. ‘Ah, you’ve been too busy. Good. Come to my quarters at nine o’clock. We’ll have something to eat. We’ve a lot to catch up on, eh?’

  He smiled again. There was something curious in his look. Was it an acknowledgement that he had been the one
to do her so much harm a decade back? If so, his expression certainly didn’t seem to show any remorse. The look in his eye seemed to suggest that, if anything, he thought the whole episode had been a great joke, rather like the time once in childhood when Tonya had got into bed to find that Pavel had piled ice in thick layers beneath the covers.

  Tonya tried hard to concentrate on her work for the remaining fifty minutes. She wasn’t able to do it. Her fingers fumbled the keys and she made a mess of sheet after sheet. In the end, she left her desk and paced out the last ten minutes, watching two bluebottles chase each other around the bare light bulb, occasionally hitting it before spinning away in a fury of buzzing wings.

  Nine o’clock came.

  Tonya walked across camp to Pavel’s bungalow, an incongruously ornate affair, with gingerbread-style bargeboards and ornamental shutters. The whole thing would have looked more at home beside a Bavarian lakeside than here, inside the wire and watchtower camp perimeter. Tonya approached. A sentry on the door – one of Pavel’s wholly needless innovations – stamped his feet and presented arms. When the sentry saw who it was, he nodded and signalled for her to go straight on in.

  Tonya knocked, waited for an answer, then entered. Whatever Pavel had been up to these past years, he had certainly profited from it. His room was decorated in a mixture of what could best be described as occupation kitsch: oil paintings, carpets, a tiger-skin rug, brass vases, a stuffed and mounted antelope’s head, a huge gold-leaf and ebony cigar-box, a portrait of Marx and a portrait of Stalin. With the exception of the two communist portraits, the room could have belonged to any Nazi gauleiter, ostentatious, boastful, looted.

  Pavel seemed pleased to see her. He waved down her salute and called her sister, though he didn’t go quite as far as suggest that she could drop the ‘sir’. As promised, he’d provided dinner: a bottle of red wine and a pair of small birds that Tonya didn’t recognise – Pavel told her that they were wood pigeon – served with thick potato-flour dumplings and dark gravy. Tonya was hungry and ate greedily. Pavel appeared to have eaten already, though he took another plateful now, and he toyed with his food, quite happy to devote his attention to the wine.