The Lieutenant's Lover

by Harry Bingham

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You, the engineer, the bourgeois, the businessman. The man who’ll fix anything, make something of nothing. And Willi. The democratic spirit, the freethinker, the journalist. The sort of person to put an end to any number of Hitlers.’

  ‘Yes, and Rosa, the future, the one who gives hope to all the rest of us.’

  Rosa had finished her peaches and rolled over on hearing her name. Misha smiled at her and pulled her over onto his lap. The three of them played and chatted until the sun went down, and Rosa couldn’t keep from yawning.

  Hollinger stood up, ready to go. He spoke in French one last time.

  ‘Your Antonina, she was very special. She did a lot for us. I didn’t know her well, but what I did, I liked very much. I’m sorry we couldn’t get her out. God knows, if anyone had deserved it, she did.’

  Misha nodded, and found himself repeating Hollinger’s last sentence.

  ‘Yes. If anyone deserved it, then she did.’

  They used the past tense. Both men knew they were never likely to see or hear from her again.

  3

  Half a world away, Tonya’s life began again.

  Rodyon had taken her back to his apartment, a single room really, with a communal toilet at the bottom of the stairs, and a small cooking stove crammed into the corner of the room. There was no chair, but a bed big enough for them both to sit.

  He didn’t apologise for the accommodation – how could he, when the apartment had never been of his choosing? – but Tonya didn’t mind it anyway. Of all the futures that Pavel could have arranged for her, this one was the least bad by a long distance.

  That first night they sat together and talked until dawn. Rodyon told his story: prison camp in Siberia; the harshest of conditions only barely survived; then war in a shtraf battalion; his pleasure at the idea that he might at least die in the fight against fascism, rather than waste away in prison. After the war had ended, his remaining prison sentence had been cancelled. He had been posted here, to Preobrazheniye, and given a job as a warehouseman down at the docks. He liked the sea, he said. He found it peaceful.

  Then Tonya spoke about herself. Her imprisonment. Her wartime experiences. At times, it appeared the two of them had been located on the same part of the front, just a dozen miles or so away from each other. But it could have been a million miles for all the difference that it had made or could have made. She skipped over her time as interpreter in Berlin and then Oderbruch quickly enough. She didn’t mention Misha or her attempted escape.

  They spoke about their daughters of course, Yuliya and Yana. Neither of them had heard what had happened to the girls. Even if they were alive, they would be best advised to make no attempt to contact their parents, political outcasts as they were. Tonya realised that the girls had somehow come to mean more to Rodyon than she did. She accepted his feelings. She had never fully given herself to her husband. It was only right that he had now managed to pull away from his long-standing obsession with her. He told her that she was to be given a job in a fish-packing factory close to the waterfront. ‘It’s not the nicest work, but it’s not the worst. Maybe in time they’ll let you move to an office job somewhere.’

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe. In time.’

  Only late on that night, when a huge pink sun had reared itself from a pale blue sea so smooth you couldn’t tell where water ended and sky began, did Rodyon mention Misha.

  ‘You saw him,’ he said.

  Tonya wasn’t sure if it were a statement or a question. She didn’t know how much, if anything, he knew. But she wasn’t going to lie. She was too old for that now, and too much had happened.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In Berlin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course you must have wanted to go and…’

  ‘I tried, yes.’

  ‘But you were caught, I suppose. So that’s why they sent you here.’

  ‘Not they. Pavel.’

  ‘Pavel?’ Rodyon was genuinely astonished. He’d had no idea. ‘Really? You know that brother of yours… There was always something not quite right about his political convictions. I used to think in those early days, that he might … well, perhaps…’

  Tonya nodded. She knew what he was saying. ‘He denounced us. First you. Then me. Why, I don’t know. I think I never understood him at all.’

  Rodyon nodded. He got up from the bed to make a fire in the stove and put on a pot of water to boil. He had some coffee beans from somewhere, which he ground by putting them into a cloth bag and thumping them with the end of a stick. Tonya realised he must have gone to extraordinary lengths to find coffee for her. As the stove grew hot it leaked gritty smoke and coal fumes into the room because the chimney joints fitted poorly. It was the sort of problem Misha would have sorted out on his first day, with his long fingers and incessant, deft creativity. Tonya missed that beloved man more than ever now, useless though that feeling was.

  Rodyon went downstairs to shave, politely leaving the room for her to change in if she wanted. She didn’t bother to change, just untied her hair, combed it out, then tied it again. The water boiled and Tonya made coffee.

  All through the night, sitting side by side together on the bed, they had held hands. Once, Rodyon had brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. She had let him. And that had been it. He had made no attempt to take her to bed and, she realised, he never would. Though they would sleep side by side of course – the room had only one bed in it and no room to fit a second – they would never make love again. Tonya felt a little sorry for him: Rodyon, who had only ever been good to her.

  At seven o’clock that morning, she went down to the fish-packing factory and reported for duty. The air smelled of fish guts and warm tin.

  4

  Months passed and, little by little, Hollinger’s prediction began to prove itself right.

  The Western Allies had finally chosen to rebuild Germany from the rubble. The decisions were timid at first. The vast bulk of American aid under General Marshall’s scheme was to go not to Germany, but to her former enemies or conquests. The money had to be spent on American goods, shipped in American vessels. But a change had been made, and the change proved unstoppable.

  And the Soviets knew it.

  In March 1948, American trains were prevented from entering Berlin. Twenty-four barges were prevented from moving because of some nonsense about permits. The Allies protested, and the Russians softened their stance.

  But nobody was fooled. If the Russians had tried something successfully once, they’d try it again in full force before too long. And so it began: a war of pinpricks, none of them too bothersome in themselves, but cumulatively painful and threatening for the future.

  In April, fifty barges were held up. The Allies made their protests. The barges moved again. In May, there was another spat over the arrival of parcels into Berlin. And this time, there was no instant loosening. On the roads, traffic restrictions were put in place and then administered by nit-picking Soviet officials, immune to reason. Goods piled up in warehouses and factories, unable to reach their buyers. Berlin began to wither, like a flower left too long on the stalk.

  In the meantime, in the western half of Germany,. progress towards something like an independent state was growing all the time. A currency reform was being talked about. Any such move would be interpreted by the Soviets as a breach of their wartime agreements, and an immediate response was certain.

  Rumours spread.

  It was said that the Americans were making plans to evacuate all their women and children from the city. It was said that the British were about to halve their garrison. The Americans were lazy, the British feeble, the French cowardly.

  It was 17th June 1948,

  5

  Tonya walked to the refrigeration area and heaved another crate of fish from the waiting stacks. The chilled area was closed off with heavy rubber doors and large signs in red paint. But the refrigeration plant itself was defective and wo
rked only sporadically. Today wasn’t one of the good days and the stacks of fish smelled high.

  Tonya took the crate to her work station on the packing line. A large red sign above her head said, ‘FISH PACKERS! YOUR WORK IS FOR PEACE AND TO FEED THE RUSSIAN HOMELAND!’ In smaller letters, the sign added thoughtfully, ‘The Soviet trade is our immediate concern.’ Maybe so, but the factory manager’s immediate concern was meeting quota, and everyone in the factory knew that four months into the plan, they were already four weeks behind it. Tonya’s job was, in theory, to gut and descale the fish, then remove head, tails and fins before sending them down the line for boiling and packing. But, because of the pressure to fill the quota, the factory foremen (all men) were constantly patrolling the line shouting at any of the packers (all women) who spent longer than about ten or fifteen seconds on a fish. Time after time, Tonya was being forced to send fish down the line that still had their heads hanging half-on, half-off; fish with a thin spill of guts trailing from their open bellies, even fish that were obviously diseased, with grey eyes and dull, lustreless skins. This crate wasn’t too bad, but even so, Tonya cut corners to keep up. She wasn’t thinking about fish, however. There had been a storm the day before. Fishermen’s boats had been feared lost. Rodyon, a reserve lifeboatman, had been called out when the seas were at their highest and the winds at their angriest. He should have been back within two hours, but hadn’t been back after twelve. Tonya wanted to wait for him down at the docks, but had been obliged to come into work as normal. She had heard nothing and was acutely worried.

  It was the end of the day now. The storm had passed and evening light leaned up against the grimy windows. The smell of fish had thickened and thickened until it came to feel like some solidly physical artefact. The voices of the foremen buzzed like wasps.

  A whistle blew for the workers to stop. But no one was released until the last crates of fish were tipped straight from the refrigeration unit onto the line, heads, tails, guts and all. There was a rush of women towards the washrooms. Tonya followed, found a basin, and scrubbed at her skin until it was pink and raw. But she didn’t spend as long at the tap as usual. She hurried out of the factory, taking the crooked road down the hill towards the docks. The air was rosy and warm, quite unlike the sea air she’d known in her youth.

  She turned a corner and saw the dock lying spread out in front of her. She tried to find the white and blue lifeboat with her eyes, but the port was crowded with fishing and she could see nothing. But she was looking in the wrong place. Rodyon’s lean figure, tired but smiling, dressed in his old black suit and dark tie, was there climbing the hill towards her.

  ‘Hello, dreamer,’ he said.

  Tonya jumped at the nearness of his voice, then ran towards him. ‘Rodya! I was so worried! They said you only had fuel to be out a few hours, and then you were gone so long…’

  He kissed her cheek and took her hand – the most physical intimacy they shared these days. ‘We were low on fuel. Just as we were turning to come back, we saw one of the boats in distress. We thought we could go to it, take off the men and drain some of the fuel for our tanks … well, we got the men but getting the fuel was another thing altogether. With what we had left, we decided to head on out to sea, rather than risk getting caught up against the shore in the storm. Our radio had packed up somewhere along the way, which didn’t help.’

  ‘You went out to sea?’

  ‘To Japan almost. Can you imagine? We were picked up by a Japanese trawler fishing for sea bream and horse mackerel. They were nice. They didn’t have spare fuel, but they radioed for some.’

  They began walking home, but then Rodyon was struck by an urge to do something different. ‘Let’s not go back just yet. Let’s go to Smirnov’s.’

  Smirnov’s was a restaurant famous for its cream cakes and fruit jellies. It was patronised mostly by party officials and those whose jobs gave them a second income through bribery. Rodyon and Tonya certainly couldn’t afford it. She objected, saying she didn’t feel hungry, but Rodyon insisted and took her there anyway.

  They got a table quickly, even though the waiter looked daggers at Tonya’s working clothes and her faint but persistent smell of fish. Feeling uncomfortable, she stole a lemon from a fruit stand and went off to the toilets to rub her hands and arms with the juice. By the time she came back, Rodyon, looking like a man utterly used to these exclusive surroundings, had ordered tea for them both and a tray of cakes. Tonya protested mildly, but her protests were waved away. In his present mood, she glimpsed again the charismatic young commissar of Petrograd some thirty years before. He was commanding and charming; smiling but purposeful.

  They talked inconsequentially for a while. Then Rodyon changed the subject.

  ‘On the boat, they had a newspaper. A Japanese one.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘One of the men on the boat spoke a little Russian. Enough to translate for me.’

  ‘The newspaper?’

  ‘It talked about Berlin. The Western powers have brought in a new currency. Stalin – well, he must have been furious. So he’s ordered Berlin to be cut off. There’s no traffic permitted by either land or water. He wants to starve the Western half into submission.’

  Tonya stared at him in shock, wordlessly.

  ‘The Americans and British have started to fly in supplies by air, but I doubt if they’ll even be able to feed their own garrisons like that. The city’s airports were never intended for heavy use.’

  ‘But if they – if the city – if Berlin—’ Tonya began three times and stopped herself each time. It wasn’t only Berlin she cared about, it was Misha. If the city fell, then the Soviets would be able to settle scores with everyone inside it, Misha included. Tonya wanted to talk about it all, but held herself back. First, because she generally steered clear of politics with Rodyon. Despite all that had happened, she knew he still thought of himself as a good communist; a true follower of Marx and Lenin. And it wasn’t just that. This Soviet assault on Berlin felt like a direct attack on Misha, a last throw of the dice against him. If Berlin fell, would he be able to escape? Would he even try to? And if he didn’t escape, would there be any hope that he’d be left to live his life out in peace? Tonya didn’t think it likely. She wanted to cry, but felt inhibited by Rodyon’s presence and the restaurant’s cream and gold formality. She was sure she still smelled of fish, and stared straight ahead of her, her face and eyes stiff and unmoving. Rodyon examined her for a moment, a cream cake halfway to his mouth.

  He put the cake down.

  ‘If Berlin falls, then the Americans will lose face all across Europe. That’s a big incentive for them to do what they can.’

  ‘But food for a million people? And fuel? How will they bring in enough coal when winter comes?’

  ‘It’s thought they’ll need to bring in ten thousand tons a day when winter comes. But perhaps they’ll do it, all the same.’ There was a long pause. His voice was very gentle. ‘I sincerely hope they do.’

  ‘You do?’

  Rodyon had the cake in his hand again, on its way towards his mouth. He stared at it as though baffled as to how it came to be there, then put it down on the little white plate and pushed it away.

  ‘When I read Karl Marx, I find myself agreeing with every word. When I read about Lenin’s life, I find myself cheering every action. But when I look out of the window in the morning, I can’t recognise a single thing… Yes, I hope Berlin holds out. If it does, it won’t be because the Americans have flown in so many tons of food, or the British have carried so many tons of coal. It’ll be because the Berliners have seen the Soviet system – our system – up close and have decided they’d rather starve than submit to it. The system will never recover from that. It has always been based on the belief that given a fair choice, the people would choose it over the alternative. They haven’t done. If they don’t in Berlin, even under bullying of this kind, then they won’t anywhere else. In some ways, this is the end.’

  Tonya put ou
t her hand and took his. She couldn’t say she was sorry, because she wasn’t. But she felt for him and his sense of failure. They held hands in silence for a while. At a table a few yards away, a group of Party men looked over towards them, someone spoke in a low voice and there was a burst of laughter. Tonya felt sure they were laughing at her.

  Then Rodyon said, ‘It’s not just about Berlin for you, is it?’

  ‘No. There’s Mikhail.’ With Rodyon, Tonya never used Misha’s diminutive, only his full Christian name.

  ‘Do you… Did you ever love me?’

  ‘Yes. I love you now. I think I always have loved you. Only not like that. Not in that way. I can’t explain myself.’

  Rodyon’s eyes glittered. There was some surge of energy in him, but he kept it suppressed. He didn’t say what it was about.

  ‘If you could, you would go to him, I suppose?’

  ‘That’s a foolish question, Rodya.’

  ‘But if you could?’

  ‘Japan you mean? Escape in a boat? No. I’ve tried to run away twice already. I shan’t try again.’

  ‘But if it weren’t a question of escape. If you could just snap your fingers and be with him?’

  ‘Then I would. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, you mustn’t be sorry.’ Rodyon held her gaze for a few moments longer. The surge of energy was still there, still suppressed. Then something changed again, abruptly. Rodyon dropped his eyes and called for more tea, more cakes. His manner changed. He became once again a man of authority, the vigorous commissar of old. The tea came, but it wasn’t hot enough. Rodyon sent it back imperiously, had more fetched, picked out the best cakes for Tonya and insisted that she eat.

  ‘We can’t afford this.’

  ‘No. And why not? Three decades of socialism and a man still can’t afford cakes! I shall have to copy my fellow dockers and steal from the ships. Eh? That’s the way to do it! You know what capitalism is? It’s when the rich steal from the poor. And you know why communism is better? It’s because it’s fairer. We all steal from each other.’