The Lieutenant's Lover

by Harry Bingham

  Secondly, she realised that Pavel needed her company. Much as he liked to exercise his authority, it left him without close friends. His only real companionship was with his opposite number in the tank regiment down the road in Bad Freienwalde. Several times a week he took a car down there and spent an entire evening eating and drinking.

  And lastly, she realised this. Pavel was a drunk. She had seen it first in his eyes: greeny-blue, like hers, but less intensely coloured. But the whites of his eyes were crowded with red-veined blood vessels, and his focus was often loose and slow. Once she’d understood the message of his eyes, all the other evidence fell into place. Most evenings she was there, she watched him consume a full bottle of wine. But often enough, she realised that he opened another one after she had left. He had also often begun drinking, vodka usually, in the time before she arrived.

  Though she’d never accompanied him to his friend, the colonel of the tank regiment, she had once seen his car return. She witnessed it quite by chance. She was already in bed, and was only up because she’d needed to go to the loo and had to cross to the toilet block in order to do so. It was after midnight and windy, and a full moon stared out from wildly moving clouds. The car, the ZiS limousine, swirled in through the camp entrance, with a blare of headlamps and a howl of tyres. Instead of parking in the yard, the car drove right across the grass to Pavel’s bungalow. Fascinated, Tonya hurried over keeping to the shadows, watching to see what followed.

  The car came to a stop by the bungalow’s entrance. Two burly tankists, warrant rank, no more, got out of the front seats. They opened a side-door and pulled Pavel out, taking him by the boots first, then the belt; handling him as roughly as a sack of turnips. In a flash of moonlight, Tonya saw her brother’s head loll backwards like a deer she’d once seen shot at a hunt. Then the two men rearranged their load and bundled it up the three little steps and into the house. They were inside just a few minutes, before emerging again. Then they got back into the car and drove away, back to Bad Freienwalde, she presumed.

  Tonya went to the loo, went back to her hut, back to bed.

  But not to sleep. She’d seen enough. Her alcoholic brother. That loose swaying head. She knew how she was going to make her escape. She knew how she would make it to Berlin.

  For five solid hours she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, her heart pounding with excitement at the size of her future.

  ELEVEN

  1

  It was December 1946. It was two in the afternoon. The sky was a whitish blue. Not cloud really, just a thick haze, almost but not quite penetrated by the distant sun. There was no wind, not even a breath. A white duck’s feather, which happened to have fallen on the roof of the guard post by the main gate, just stayed there, a little speck of white on the tarred wooden roof. It didn’t move, didn’t even quiver.

  It was very cold.

  2

  In the fields beyond the camp, Misha lay with his belly against the icy ground, his face pressed up against the long grass that sprouted in wintry hummocks all along the little culvert. He was stiff and cold from lying so long, but didn’t want to move now, for fear of being seen. He put his binoculars down, turning them sideways, so that the glass lenses wouldn’t catch the light and reflect it on into the camp. He lifted his belly and stretched his spine, shifting his boots back, keeping his shoulders forward, and giving his vertebrae room to unlock from their long afternoon’s ache. The stretch helped, but only for a moment. As soon as he dropped back into position, his back settled into the same dull cramp, as though it hadn’t shifted for a moment.

  He put the glasses back to his eyes and continued to gaze.

  3

  Tonya left the quartermaster’s office with a stack of papers, a confused mass of receipts, usage statements, inventory reports, and requisition slips. Pavel had been haranguing the quartermaster for sloppy management and he in his turn had come to Tonya to beg for help.

  Tonya crossed the yard to her office holding the papers against her chest. Because of the cold, she wore a rabbit-skin hat and a woollen scarf. Her hands were ungloved, but she liked the feeling of the cold air on her fingers. She liked the huge white sky and the way that any sounds seemed to carry for ever in the silence. She walked diagonally across the yard, altering her course only so as to avoid the elegant black shape of Pavel’s ZiS limousine. As she passed it, she put a hand out to touch the cold metal of its bonnet. She knew, because he had told her so, that Pavel was going down to Bad Freienwalde that night, visiting his friend, the tank regiment colonel. Pavel had implied some major party and Tonya had seen his alcoholic pleasure at the idea of a night spent drinking.

  The feel of the bonnet gave her a sudden race of excitement and fear. If all went well, she would escape tonight. If all went well, she would be with Misha in less than twenty-four hours.

  4

  From his position in the culvert, Misha could see the wooden door open, discharge a single figure, then close again. He put the glasses back to his eye, touched the focus adjustment, and watched the distant image leap to life.

  It was Tonya.

  Because of the way the binoculars enlarged and concentrated the image, it looked as though she had jumped out at him. She seemed so close that Misha was actually startled into making an exclamation, a low ‘Oh!’ that rolled away across the frozen ground. The way Tonya was headed, she was actually walking towards him, as though she could see him with perfect clarity and there was nothing more normal in the world than strolling over towards him with a bundle of papers against her chest.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d seen her through binoculars. Over the last three weeks he’d spent as many days as he could lying here, watching the camp, following her movements. He’d identified her office, the canteen, the interrogation block, and her sleeping quarters. He knew the approximate daily pattern of her life and movements. And yet, by odd chance, he’d only ever caught her in partial view. She had always been walking away from him, or had her head turned, or had been wearing a cap whose brim shielded her face. And this was different. Her face was turned directly towards Misha. It was as though she were looking at him.

  He’d often wondered what he would feel actually seeing her again. Would he still feel the same way about her now, or had he been in love with a dream all this time? A dream of Tonya as a young woman, clear-skinned and youthful? He needn’t have worried. The extraordinary thing was how utterly familiar she was. There was age in her face, of course, but Misha was more struck by how much had remained unchanged. The clarity was still there. The soft roundedness of her face was still the same, the slight slant to the eyes. Misha felt the old love surge in him again, just as it had done back in Petrograd and Petrozavodsk.

  He watched her cross the yard. She paused only once to touch the black metal bonnet of the commandant’s limousine. It was a curious gesture; something he hadn’t expected. Ordinarily, a lowly Red Army private wouldn’t think to touch the elevated luxury of a senior NKVD man’s car. But perhaps the commandant wasn’t entirely a brute. Or perhaps Tonya had seen some speck of dirt and had been cleaning it away. But no sooner had these thoughts formed, than they vanished. Misha didn’t have to speculate about Tonya as he would have done about anyone else. Tonya had seen the smoothness of the cold, black metal and she wanted to touch it. That was all.

  Her pace picked up a bit as she crossed the rest of the little yard. She was closer to him now and Misha had to adjust the focus of his binoculars one more time to keep her in view. She came to a second building – single-storey, wooden, tin-roofed – opened the door and entered. The door fell shut behind her.

  Misha put his glasses down. It was the confirmation that he’d needed. Not just the confirmation of her physical presence there, but confirmation that his own feelings were as unchanged, as strong, as utterly certain as ever. He hadn’t known that he’d needed that reassurance, but now that he had it, he was aware of the tiny doubt that had all this time been ringing away in his mind
.

  For some time – perhaps five minutes, perhaps fifty, he hardly knew – he lay on his belly with his head pillowed on the damp grass and the binoculars dropped on the ground beside him. He held the knowledge of Tonya’s presence to his heart, cherishing the feeling like nothing else.

  Eventually he looked up.

  For no reason in particular, he looked first at the guard post on the main gate. He saw its roof speckled with white. At first, he thought that some small bird had been mauled by a hawk or buzzard, and this scatter of white feathers was the result. But the thought was absurd, as he well knew. They weren’t feathers, but snowflakes, and the snow was being added to all the time. Nor was it only in the sky over the camp. It had begun snowing over Misha’s culvert too; he had simply been too tied up in his thoughts to notice. But now he rolled on his back, to look up at the sky. The snowfall would be a heavy one. The sky was already crowded with flakes. Looking up as he was, the flakes seemed black against the luminescent air. They were so dense, reaching right up as far as Misha could see, that it looked almost as if the sky were turning solid, darkening over with the falling snow. And the snow was settling. Before long, the drab greys and browns of the December landscape would be locked under a covering of solid white.

  There were ways in which the snow would complicate his plans, but he was pleased all the same. For one thing, he was Russian. Snow was his element. He could never feel uncomfortable in an icy landscape. And there was one other thing. For some reason – why, he couldn’t say – but he Was reminded of that snowfall back in 1917, when he’d first read the newspaper headline that had announced the revolution. He remembered being on that station platform reading the article under the lamplight and the falling snow. The world had been turned upside down then. Perhaps it would reverse itself again now.

  Misha put the binoculars back to his eyes and rolled back into position. Not for long. The snow falling between him and the camp obscured his vision. But it didn’t matter now. She was there and he had come for her. That was all that mattered.

  5

  Tonya too welcomed the snow.

  When she was done with her paperwork, the light had been half-squeezed out of the day. The air seemed thick with the falling snow, as though a mist had come down and solidified. When she came out into the yard, lamps were on around all the main buildings in the staff quarters – the prisoners themselves had no lighting – but the light they threw out reached no further than a few yards. Tonya walked back to the quartermaster with her papers. Pavel’s car was still there, slowly disappearing from view beneath the white. When she drew level with it, she allowed herself to drop her topmost folder. She bent to pick it up. As she did so, she pulled a short kitchen knife from her pocket. She pressed the blade up against the tyre and pushed. The thick rubber resisted for a moment, then gave way. The air escaped in a rush, then died away with a soft sighing sound. The car settled an inch or two closer to the ground. Tonya stood up again and looked around. There was no one there, no one watching. She took her knife and threw it, as far as she could, over the wire into the prisoners’ compound. She didn’t hear it land.

  She wiped the snow off her knees, where she’d knelt to pick up her papers, then walked on towards the quartermaster’s office. She wasn’t breathing hard. Her pulse was normal.

  6

  Pavel Kirylovich Lensky, lieutenant-colonel in the NKVD and commandant of the Oderbruch Special Camp Number 11, dressed with care. His uniform didn’t give him much scope for elaborate dressing, but he was exacting about details. His calf-length boots were aglow with polish. His belt buckle and buttons gleamed. His royal blue cap with its band of red looked as though it had never seen a day’s wear in its life. He settled his cap with precision and smiled at his reflection. He had pale gums and eyes, but his lips were blood-red, almost like those of a woman wearing lipstick. When he finished smiling, his mouth didn’t quite close. He wanted a drink, but wanted even more to defer that precious first moment of the evening: the first drink clinking with ice, the first sweet bite of vodka.

  He walked from his bedroom to his living room. His driver stood with his back to the door, too uncomfortable in those strangely opulent surroundings to come more than a pace or two into the room. The driver saluted. It had become fashionable in parts of the NKVD to salute, Prussian-style, with a sharp click of the heels. Earlier in the war, such copying of the German enemy would have been unthinkable, but now, two and a half years after victory, the conquerors enjoyed any demonstration of their martial supremacy. In any case, Pavel liked the habit and gave it his tacit encouragement. He returned the salute, then indicated that he was ready to go to Bad Freienwalde.

  The two men went to the car. It had stopped snowing now – or at least the flakes that still fell were few in number and came down almost hesitantly. The driver opened the rear door for his commander, then took the driver’s seat for himself. He started the car and reversed it in a brisk curve, in order to bring its nose pointing towards the front gate. But the manoeuvre failed badly. The collapsed tyre was pudding-soft on the rear wheel and the car simply slid in a long, sideways curve. The slap of the injured tyre on the wheel was easily audible inside the car. The driver swore and jumped out. The damage was obvious and changing the tyre wouldn’t be the fastest procedure in the cold and darkness.

  Pavel was angry. He didn’t like arriving in town in an ordinary Tatra car. On the other hand, he was all set up for that first drink of the evening and he didn’t want to delay it any further. His dilemma resolved itself in anger. Getting out of the car, he tore a strip off his driver, ordering him to report in full uniform every two hours through the night to the duty officer until further notice. The driver went still-faced and tense as he bore the rebuke. Then Pavel, still angry, indicated one of the Tatras. They would go to town in that, then the driver would return and fix the wheel. He would need to remain on-call, until Pavel was ready to be collected.

  The driver relaxed a little. He couldn’t understand why the wheel had gone flat, but these things sometimes happened. His punishment hadn’t been too bad. For a moment, he’d thought that his commander was going to strike him.

  The two men got in the smaller car and drove out into the night.

  7

  Misha waited in his car in the woods. The engine and lights were both turned off. It was eight in the evening, cold and becoming colder. He wore a heavy greatcoat, a khaki cap and scarf. The clothes weren’t technically identical to those worn by the Red Army, but they were so similar as to make no odds. Certainly, in the dark nobody would be able to tell the difference. On the seat beside him, he had a pair of heavy-duty wire cutters, some string, a short iron bar wrapped in cloth, a loaf of bread and a bottle of water. The iron bar was intended as a weapon of last resort. Misha had wrapped cloth around it to dull its impact in a fight, as he didn’t want to injure anyone more than necessary. With luck he wouldn’t have to use it at all. The loaf and water weren’t strictly necessary under any scenario, but some old instinct of hospitality made Misha feel somehow obliged to have food ready for Tonya when he got her out. Not that she would be likely to make much use of it. For one thing, they’d still have to reach Berlin before they would be safe. For another, both water and bread were well on their way to freezing solid.

  The forest was mostly silent. Every now and then, a rook cawed loudly, or some large bird suddenly tore from its perch with a sudden beating of wings. There was very little wind and the normal sighing sound of a pine forest was entirely absent, so that it was almost like standing by a waterfall without hearing the sound of water.

  Misha looked again at his watch. The tiny luminous dots which told the time hardly seemed to have moved since he’d last looked. He had determined that he wouldn’t make a move till midnight, and he forced himself now to abide by his earlier decision. Four hours to go.

  Time crawled.

  8

  The driver had taken Pavel into town, then come back to camp and changed the wheel on the ZiS
limousine, swearing softly to himself as he did so. It was long after dark by now, of course, and he was working in the light thrown by the headlamps of one of the little Tatras. Tonya came up to him with a tin mug of tea.

  ‘Here, comrade,’ she said in a friendly way.

  The driver looked at her with a slight jolt, recognising his commandant’s sister. He swallowed the swearword that had been on his lips, and said, ‘Thanks, comrade. No offence.’

  She shook her head, indicating that anyone was allowed to swear where her brother was concerned. ‘He’s a difficult one, that.’

  ‘Ach! These officers, they’re all the same. That tyre though, somebody stuck a knife in it.’

  ‘Well, this camp is hardly full of his friends. And I can say that, being his sister.’

  ‘Older or younger?’

  ‘Older. He was a handful, even as a youngster.’

  ‘Here, hold this a moment.’ The driver handed her his mug as he repositioned his spanner. Then, before applying pressure to the locking nut, he steadied himself. ‘Is it true he makes you call him sir?’

  ‘He’s a lieutenant-colonel. I’m only ryadovoy.’

  The driver shook his head and spat, then leaned on the spanner. The barrel nut resisted a moment, then gave way. The driver did the same to the remaining nuts, grunting with the effort.

  ‘What time do you have to collect him?’

  ‘Don’t know. He phones. This one’s a big night, apparently. I probably won’t get the call till three or four in the morning.’ The driver’s face contracted as he thought of it.