The Lieutenant's Lover

by Harry Bingham

  He rested his forehead against the wall again. He still had the receiver in his hand, but held it down by his side, where the guard’s voice sounded tinny and faint. Why his sister?

  Then, as though suddenly drenched by something freezing, he jerked upright. His sister had stolen the car and left the camp without authorisation. That was not only forbidden. Given her past, any such move could only be because she was hoping to flee to the arms of her bourgeois in the western half of Berlin. Or had Malevich himself come to get her out? The Soviet part of the camp wasn’t so strongly guarded that the thing would be impossible. Pavel literally shook with terror. What would Lieutenant-General Lukyanchenko say if he heard of this? He would blame Pavel’s negligence, for sure. But what if Pavel himself was thought to have helped her? Conspired with her? Indeed – he accused himself – he had conspired. He knew that Tonya had been trying to escape to the west when she’d been picked up under the Brandenburg Gate, yet he’d told no one. He’d protected her. He was guilty of conspiracy against the state. Either the Gulag or Novaya Zemlya awaited him. Pavel felt a wave of fear so strong, he almost fainted.

  Somewhere, though, he knew what to do. He lifted the receiver and, still with his head against the wall, he heard himself giving instructions to the guard.

  ‘Summon five men to help you. Take torches and search the camp perimeter. Not the section for the prisoners, but the section for staff. Look for any damage to the fence. Do it now. Don’t hang up the phone. I’ll wait while you do it.’

  Down the line, Pavel could hear a bit of shouting, the crashing of boots, the loud report of a door closing, then silence. For a minute or two, nothing happened. Pavel’s certainty drained away from him as he waited. Perhaps there was a reasonable explanation for all this. Perhaps Tonya would indeed be arriving to collect him in just a few moments. The guards would find nothing wrong with the fence, then laugh behind his back the next day. He felt anger tightening in his throat. Unreasonably, he held his sister accountable. If she had anything to do with all this, he’d make her pay.

  Another minute drifted by. Then, somewhere on the other end of the line, a door smashed open and the guard’s voice, highly excited, returned.

  ‘You’re right, sir. There’s been a break-in. Kornikova’s nowhere, sir. Whoever it was must have come in by the hole in the fence, then left with her in your car. We’ve sent out an alert…’

  Pavel heard his voice without quite consciously guiding it. Like most drunks, he had a way of operating on automatic that served him well enough most of the time. It served him remarkably now.

  ‘Phone the NKVD barracks at Eberswalde, Finow, Tiefensee, Bernau… Have them close the roads to everything coming from this direction. Inspect every vehicle. They’re not just looking for the limousine, but everything that moves. Detain everyone, even those with proper papers… Do it now.’

  The guard at the other end repeated the instructions with something like awe in his voice. Pavel noted the tone of voice and loved hearing it. He held his own superiors in the same awed respect. He admired and loved the men who held the east zone in their grip. Today the east. Next year Berlin. Thereafter, the rest of Germany and as much of Europe as they could swallow. In the meantime, he, Pavel, would prove his loyalty by foiling his sister’s escape, by catching the bourgeois who had provoked it. He felt a savage joy in his task.

  He hung the phone back on the hook, picked up his hat and settled it squarely on his head. A roar of laughter from the room he’d just come from tempted him briefly, but not for long. For him that night, one sort of party was over. A second one was just beginning.

  13

  Misha reached Bad Freienwalde without a problem. He navigated the back streets, and headed out on the main road to Eberswalde. The route through Tiefensee was more direct, but the road surface would be worse and, in any case, his Kübelwagen would be less likely to attract attention on the major roads.

  He passed through Falkenberg, Hohenfinow, and Tornow. The starlight was beginning to vanish under a thick grey pelt of cloud, but the weather made no difference to anything. Misha’s car ate up the miles. At this rate, he’d reach Berlin well before dawn.

  Villages and farmhouses passed by in the darkness. There were no lights visible anywhere except the towns, but he occasionally saw a flash of light where his headlamps caught a window pane. He could see the humped black shape of forests, the occasional silver gleam of water. He was neither calm, nor anxious. Rather, he was in some middle state between the two, where he simply wanted to get through the minutes more quickly than they were prepared to come. If he could, he would simply have wound forward the hours to his arrival in Berlin, wound forward to the time when Tonya would be in the western sector, presenting herself to the authorities, searching for him. Until then, he was in a limbo, doing nothing but eating up the minutes.

  Then Eberswalde.

  Eberswalde and catastrophe.

  There were cars, trucks, lights. Sandbags thrown across the road. The trucks were military, showing one red star against the khaki. The line of sandbags was only two or three high, and couldn’t have been more than an hour or two old. Misha slowed abruptly. He looked in his mirror. There was another army truck and a jeep pulled up off the road seventy yards back. He was trapped.

  He brought his car to a halt.

  The bright lights, a combination of car headlamps and floodlights raised on poles, drenched the area. Misha could see a limousine parked there, a black one, its roof still frosted with snow. Was that the same car he’d seen leaving Oderbruch just two hours ago? If so, then he knew who’d been driving it. A sudden agony of despair gripped him so hard, he could barely breathe.

  A soldier, NKVD not regular army, approached, requesting papers. Behind the NKVD man, a pair of sentries held rifles at the ready. Misha wound down his window and presented his papers. The man took them, but looked at them without interest. Whatever was about to happen had already been decreed. Misha was told to get out. He and the car were quickly and efficiently searched. There was nothing there for them to find. The only questionable items had been the wire cutters and the iron bar, and Misha had jettisoned both a long way back.

  The soldier who had first approached him took the car keys and drove the car around the sandbag barricade to a siding where three other cars, including the limousine, were already parked. Those arrested were led off towards a pair of trucks, men in one, women in another. From the back of the women’s truck, he saw a pale face peering out.

  It was Tonya. He had seen her and she had seen him. Her face was full of love, and full of tears.

  14

  Through the night, the clouds thickened. When morning broke, the clouds lay piled up as thick and impenetrable as a pile of wolf furs. When eventually it managed to filter through, the first light of day appeared greenish, like ladlefuls of pea soup. It was still cold.

  Pavel hardly bothered to look out of the window, but when he did, the livid skyscape only suited his mood. He could still feel the vodka inside him, but he’d been drinking coffee and water for four hours now and his head was starting to clear. He knew that Tonya had been arrested, and felt sure of having snared Malevich too. He now felt both the hunter’s glee and the hunter’s slight depression. When he tried to focus on his next steps – what to do with his sister and her one-time lover? – his mind turned away in rebellion.

  And he had other things to think about. Bigger things. For every five minutes he spent thinking about Tonya, he spent fifteen thinking about his conversation with Lukyanchenko. The camp would take a thousand extra prisoners. He’d need more land, more huts, more bedding, more supplies… Only then again, such materials were scarce and needed elsewhere. It wouldn’t do to be soft on reactionaries and criminals. Pavel began to ponder the logistics of his new arrivals. How little could he get away with? And not only that, but the deeper implications of Lukyanchenko’s words sank in. Once again, it was being proved that only Russia was strong. Only Russia had the necessary determination t
o do what needed to be done. Sooner or later, Russian strength would force the Western Allies to leave Berlin. Italy would waver. Austria would crumble. The western half of Germany would totter and fall. To Pavel, these seemed like the big facts of the night. The little subplot involving a Red Army translator and a German-Russian bourgeois seemed irrelevant by comparison.

  Or so he wanted to think. But he noticed in himself a restlessness that he couldn’t explain away. He had himself driven back to the camp, but couldn’t rest, or even sit at ease. Instead he issued a stream of instructions about things ranging from minor to the utterly inconsequential. With subordinates, he was irritable and snappish. Before long, the whole camp knew their commander’s mood. People were summoned from their beds, given orders to be fulfilled immediately, reprimanded for some trivial offence committed a day or two before. Those who were not involved, sat on their beds wearing greatcoats pulled over their under-shorts, scratching their heads and wondering what was up.

  The greenish dawn was still wrestling with the solid mass of cloud, seeking admittance, when the first truck pulled into the camp yard. Pavel heard the crash of a tailgate, the bark of orders, the heavy steps of soldiers moving in excitement and triumph. Pavel tweaked aside the curtains and saw that the first truck had brought the male prisoners. He waited impatiently, pacing up and down until he heard the expected knock at his door. He shouted admittance.

  An NKVD man he didn’t recognise, from Eberswalde presumably, opened the door and reported that the prisoners had been brought. Pavel asked for Malevich to be brought in, only to be told there was no Malevich.

  Impatiently, Pavel asked for the list of prisoners. The NKVD man produced a list. Whoever had drawn it up was obviously uncomfortable with Roman lettering, because the German names had been written out, letter by letter, in a childish, careful hand. Pavel scanned the list. There weren’t many names. There was only one with the first name Michael. The man’s surname, Müller, was obviously a cover for Malevich. Pavel asked for that man to be brought to him immediately. The escaping private, Kornikova, was to be brought in as soon as the truck of females arrived. The rest of the prisoners could be released, unless their papers betrayed any irregularity, in which case they could be sentenced as appropriate.

  The man left. Pavel jumped to the window again to see what was going on, but the light was still poor and he couldn’t tell much about the commotion in the yard. He put his hand to his belt, found that he’d loosened it at the Party the night before, and now re-tightened it a notch or two. He snatched up his uniform cap, put it on, tore it off again, then changed his mind and jammed it back on. His palms were moist.

  There was a second knock. Gaining control of himself, Pavel walked carefully to the door and opened it. There was a man in handcuffs, flanked by two soldiers with more behind. The prisoner was clearly Malevich. In the poor light of early dawn, with the lamplight from within blocked by Pavel himself, Malevich looked hardly changed at all from a quarter-century before. It was as though some impatient artist had taken an earlier drawing, sketched in a couple of lines, thrown a dash of grey into the hair, then pushed away the revised sketch as though it were finished. In a rough voice, Pavel told the soldiers to remove the prisoner’s handcuffs and to remain outside while he conducted the interrogation. The men did as he asked. Pavel turned his back on the prisoner and brusquely directed him to a sofa with a jerk of his hand. Malevich sat down as instructed, clearly bewildered, perplexed at what kind of interrogation would take place in surroundings like these.

  Pavel kept out of the lamplight, taking the opportunity to study Malevich before he himself was recognised. In the brighter light of the room, Pavel could see that his first impression wasn’t precisely right. Malevich had aged. Those weren’t simply ordinary lines on his face, they were the lines of a man who had experienced a lot, suffered a lot. Pavel digested the information slowly, taking his time. Then he said, ‘So, Mikhail Ivanovich, aren’t you going to say hello?’

  Misha looked up, startled, almost as though he’d been struck. Then his face changed. He smiled what seemed like a smile of genuine pleasure. He sprang to his feet.

  ‘Pavel Kirylovich! Pasha – may I still call you that? – Good Lord! What a surprise!’

  Pavel’s expression changed three times in as many seconds. He showed pleasure, annoyance, superiority, coolness.

  ‘You may call me Lieutenant-Colonel Lensky.’ Pavel found himself swinging his shoulder around so that Misha could read the message of the stars on his epaulette. ‘May I remind you that you are under arrest for the abduction, if I may put it like that, the attempted abduction, of a member of the Red Army? Right here from this camp. A most serious offence, if I may say, not to mention any crimes that may have been committed back in the first days of the Soviet time.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  Misha sat down again, defeated in his first impulse of warmth, but also baffled. What an extraordinary coincidence that it should be Tonya’s own brother to foil their escape and capture him! But the whole thing was strange. If Pavel really wanted to be a stickler for rules, then why conduct the interrogation here, in Pavel’s own bungalow, just the two of them alone? Misha looked around at the furnishings, the fat black-and-gold cigar-box, the looming portrait of Karl Marx. He thought about Pavel as a boy – Pavel on their fishing trips at Petrozavodsk – about what Pavel must have done to rise as far as he had, and in the NKVD, of all detestable institutions. But he couldn’t think straight. His head was too full of images from the night: the camp under snow and starlight, the car ride, the road block, Tonya’s face gazing at him from the back of a prison-truck. He thought of Tonya, of course, but also of Rosa. He hated himself for putting her through what could easily prove to be a second orphanhood.

  His thoughts, and those of his captor, were disturbed by the arrival of a second truck in the yard. Misha jerked his head up, but Pavel was already at the window.

  ‘It’s her all right,’ he commented. ‘My sister and your – I don’t know what to call her. Her husband is still alive, you know. Rodyon Leonidovich. He’s over in the east now. Near Vladivostok. I can’t understand why that plays no part in your plans, the two of you.’

  Misha said nothing, but something inside him turned a somersault, like a small beast turning in its burrow. Rodyon was still alive! Did Tonya know? And if so, what did she feel about it? Misha didn’t know how to take the news, couldn’t work out his feelings amidst the turmoil.

  There was some business outside, supervised by Pavel. Then Pavel came in with Tonya. He told her to sit, indicating an armchair away from Misha. But she sat down next to Misha and took his hand. The pair of them exchanged an endless glance that left Pavel out of things altogether. He had to cough and stamp for them to turn slowly and face him. They kept their hands locked together, as though able to transmit their innermost thoughts that way. They didn’t speak. They sat in front of Pavel, waiting for him to determine their fates.

  TWELVE

  1

  It was January 1947. A Tuesday evening.

  A thin cold wind blew down from the Baltic and sent a chill through everything. The snow which had been present ever since the night of the abortive escape had stayed hard and crisp for just two days. Then a temporary thaw had set in. The snow had subsided into heavy piles, thick and wet. Then the thick grey heaps dissolved into slush and trickles of dirty water that seemed to run everywhere through the camp. By now, even the slush had disappeared, and all that was left was endless mud, grey clouds, wet grass, and the present chill wind.

  Misha was a prisoner. Of all the places in the world to be held, he was being held in camp Oderbruch itself, on the other side of the fence from the area that had been Tonya’s home for the past eight months.

  Had been, because Misha no longer knew where Tonya was. For the first seven days of his imprisonment, he’d stayed close to the barbed wire on the edge of the prisoners’ enclosure, trying to catch a glimpse of her. He never succeeded. He was fairly sure that s
he no longer slept in the women’s sleeping hut. He guessed that she was either being kept captive herself or she had been transferred somewhere else altogether – perhaps back to the Soviet Union, perhaps to Siberia.

  He was still close to the barbed wire now, still looking for a sign of Tonya, but without any real hope. His feet had got wet earlier that day and they were still wet because he had no way of drying them. Over in the canteen hut, there was the banging of a metal spoon against an empty fuel tin – the sign that the evening meal was ready. Misha was too cast down to have an appetite, but made himself go over to get food anyway. He knew that if his imprisonment were to be long-term, then death from malnourishment-induced disease would become a real danger.

  He entered the hut, collected his food and sat down at a table with three others. There was almost no conversation. Misha had still not made the effort to make friends. He knew the names of almost no one there. The prisoners ate their slop – a watery stew made with potatoes and turnip. Misha had eaten no meat since his arrival. He had already lost about nine pounds in weight. Rumours spread that dozens, maybe hundreds, of new prisoners would be arriving before long.

  A gust of wind threw a sudden flurry of rain against the window. The window fitted poorly, and the rain seeped through, making a dark mould stain on the inside. The man opposite Misha looked sourly at the pane.

  ‘Verdammte Wetter,’ he remarked. He lifted his spoon and poured the watery gravy in a long spout back into his tin. ‘Verdammte Iwans.’

  Then, as well as the wind, there were noises from outside: a truck engine, the clash of gates, the sound of tyres carving through water, a skirl of brakes. Then other sounds: men, energetic and well-fed, stamping through the muddy ground. The door of the canteen hut burst open. Six Soviet soldiers stood there, armed and resplendent in their immaculate uniforms. The low hum in the canteen fell to an absolute hush. Visits such as these were rare – Misha hadn’t seen one in the ten days he’d been present – and they betokened either something very good or very bad. The senior officer, a captain, holding his chin so high in the air that he must have been seeing more of the ceiling than of the room itself, snapped out a short command.