The Lieutenant's Lover

by Harry Bingham

  For the rest of the meal, Rodyon stayed in that mood: witty, brilliant, delightful. Tonya laughed and laughed. They ate more than they could manage and far more than they could afford. When they finally walked home, Tonya kissed her companion lightly on the lips.

  It was true. She had always loved him. Not like Misha, but in some other way altogether. She didn’t bemoan her fate. In some ways, she was happy.

  FOURTEEN

  1

  June 1950.

  The Russian attempt to strangle Berlin had failed. The little airfields of the western sector had been improved and rebuilt. The Allies had poured aircraft into the region. In Britain, the RAF had provided its entire available stock of transporters, then increased capacity yet further by hiring in commercial transports too. The Americans had all along owned enough aircraft capacity, they had just hesitated to commit it to Berlin. But perhaps the British example stiffened them. Or perhaps the example of the Berliners themselves. In any case, they did it. In October 1948, President Truman had authorised the dispatch of a further sixty-six C-54s to Germany. The airlanes had become a steel pathway, constantly roaring, leading from the western zones over a hundred miles and more of Soviet territory into Berlin itself.

  Even so, things had been desperately close. Food stocks were never more than a few weeks away from exhaustion. Fuel supplies were bitterly low and the entire city was left colder than it had been even in the darkest days of the war or its immediate aftermath. A hard winter would have finished things.

  But the snow never came. The winter was the warmest in memory. Even through the darkest months, the aircraft continued to fly. Coal came in. Also food. And it was enough. As spring came, the Allied flights made the most of the reviving weather. The tonnage of food and supplies crept up month by month, even week by week. For the first time in Russian history, winter hadn’t come to the rescue. The weather gods had turned against the Soviets. The Allies had won.

  But in truth, the battle hadn’t been won by the aircrews of the RAF and the USAF, but by the people of Berlin themselves. For years, they had been bullied, bribed and blackmailed by the Soviets. For an entire year, they had lain under siege. Adults had gone hungry to feed their children. A whole city had survived on dried potato and powdered egg. Families had shared cellars to eke out the tiny quantity of coal available. After more than fifteen years of rule by dictatorship and foreign occupation, the democratic passion of the German people had blazed out so strongly that the entire Soviet empire had been unable to quench it. The Berliners had won. Germany had won. Europe and the world were the beneficiaries.

  But, although it was a victory, it was a sad one. Germany, that great country at the heart of Europe, was split in two. The Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic – an utterly undemocratic police state, riven by spies, party officials, and informers. The Allied zones joined together to become the German Federal Republic, a country that stood set to become the most powerful force for peace and prosperity in that war-torn continent. The Soviet empire might have been checked in its westward expansion, but that still left a vast population imprisoned behind an ideology in which no one now believed. And Berlin remained a city of two halves. The dividing line between the two parts was still open, but it couldn’t stay open for ever. Refugees from the east zone drained over to the west; the clearest possible example of what its people thought of the government that ruled in their names. People muttered that one day a wall would be built to divide the city in two. It seemed impossible to imagine it; but some days it seemed impossible not to.

  2

  Some of this Tonya knew, and she guessed more than she knew.

  It was a Saturday evening in June. The sea was as smooth as rippled silk, stretching out to the horizon in pale blue, deep green, and gold. The line where sea joined sky was so faint as to be almost not there at all, as though some artist had thought better of the division and rubbed the original mark out with his thumb. The sun, of course, was dipping towards the land horizon to the west, not the ocean to the east. Tonya, who remembered her Petrograd childhood and the great sun dipping below the Gulf of Finland, still found it a strange inversion of the natural order that the sea should give birth to the sun and the land should swallow it. It was just one more way in which this far eastern existence felt like the exile that it was.

  Tonya sat on a wooden jetty with some fisherman’s nets spread over her lap, like a Siberian peasant’s apron, Rodyon had moved from the docks to work on an ocean-going fishing vessel now. It was a move he’d long cherished. When the chance had come up, he’d jumped at it.

  In some ways, the move was a good one for Tonya. They always had plenty of food now, fresh fish brought home from the catch. But the hours were long and irregular. Tonya often spent evenings and nights alone; and she felt lonely without him. All the same, she knew that he found peace and fulfilment out at sea. Since she hadn’t been able to offer him the marriage he had always wanted, she couldn’t begrudge him his fishing trips.

  Each man on the boat was responsible for his own nets, and Tonya had learned how to take care of Rodyon’s. It was work she enjoyed. She plucked the net over her lap, fold after fold. She found the places where the net was torn, and bound up the gaps with more twine, quickly and expertly knotted into place. Her fingers knew the work so well, she spent half her time gazing out to sea, watching the colours slowly change.

  The evening was very quiet.

  3

  A man walked down the beach towards the jetty.

  He saw the figure of the fisherwoman mending her nets, but couldn’t see much more than a back, and a face turned out to sea. He came closer, his boots making a soft crunching noise on the sand and seashells.

  As he got closer, the woman heard him coming. She didn’t turn. Rodyon was down at the harbour attending to some mechanical problem on the boat. He wouldn’t be home this evening until late. Whoever the man was, it didn’t concern her. She went on working.

  The man stopped at the base of the jetty. He didn’t speak. Tonya felt a crawling sensation at the back of her neck, like a slow prickle of anticipation that ran up her spine and into her scalp. Her breathing became shallow and watchful. But still she didn’t turn. The man behind her still didn’t speak. The golden ocean maintained its rhythm.

  Then the man moved. He stepped onto the jetty. She could hear the creak of the wooden boards, the ever so slight adjustment of the structure to its new load. Tonya wanted to turn, but couldn’t. Her breathing stuck in her throat like a fishbone.

  There was another long moment of silence. Then the man spoke.

  ‘Comrade Lensky? Is it you?’

  Tonya jumped. Every muscle in her body leaped and tightened. Though she stayed sitting, she was completely braced now, wired tight. She still didn’t turn, but her hands let the net drop back in her lap.

  ‘Maybe. Who’s asking?’

  ‘It is the comrade engineer Malevich, who’s asking.’

  ‘Then the comrade engineer is very late. He was wanted a long time back.’

  The man stepped a few feet further onto the jetty. He was now only ten or twelve yards from Tonya. She dropped her nets and stood up. She still couldn’t quite bear to look up, as though scared that she might find herself trapped in some terrible deceitful dream.

  ‘Comrade Malevich sends apologies for his unrevolutionary lateness. He attributes it to his fascistic bourgeois tendencies and class imperialism.’

  Tonya shook the nets away from her feet and walked down the jetty towards her love. She looked at his feet, his legs, his waist, but somehow she couldn’t yet bring herself to look on his face itself. She was crying, but her tears fell soundlessly and without meaning.

  ‘Does the comrade engineer still dance?’

  Misha took her in his arms – she felt the same as ever, as though they’d been parted only a minute – and he led her in a dance she didn’t recognise down the jetty towards the sea. The dance was very slow, more of a rhythmic sway than anything else,
but Misha as usual knew what he was doing. The dance was perfect for the moment and the whole enormous ocean kept time for them. They kissed, long and passionately; lips and tongues remembering the love of thirty years, and not a thing forgotten.

  They reached the end of the jetty. Misha gently pulled back from Tonya and the pair of them looked at each other properly for the first time in three decades. They had aged. Both of them had grey in their hair, new lines on their faces. But neither of them noticed the marks of age. She saw the true Misha: constant, imaginative, ceaselessly creative. And he saw the true Tonya: patient, courageous, ever-loving, strong. She had stopped crying now, and he brushed the marks of her tears away with the back of his hand.

  ‘How can it be true?’ she said.

  ‘He didn’t tell you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your husband, Rodyon. He was caught out in a storm a year or two back. He was rescued by a Japanese trawler. Before he left them, he wrote a letter to me and asked the fishermen to see that it got to the British Embassy in Tokyo. Of course, he didn’t have an address. He knew from you that I had been in Berlin. That was all. Anyway, the letter took a little time to find its way to me, but it did. He said where you were. He asked me to come and find you.’

  ‘Oh, Rodya!’

  ‘He has always loved you very well.’

  ‘Yes.’ Tonya gathered up her nets. She didn’t know where they were going now, but years of thrift wouldn’t let her leave valuable nets lying around to be stolen. ‘Have you come to stay or…?’

  ‘No. I don’t think I’d be very welcome here. I’ve come to take you home.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve a little cottage in Berlin, a little girl called Rosa and a boy – a young man now, really – called Willi. You’ll like them both. And if we want more children of our own, younger ones I mean – well, it may be a little late for us, but we live next door to an orphanage. If we wanted to adopt some children, there are only too many to choose from.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Tonya was speechless. She had accustomed herself for so long to making do with very little, the sudden profusion of gifts was overwhelming. Her happiness had grown so large, it was like an almost painful physical pressure against her heart. In the midst of everything, she felt sudden fear, even terror.

  ‘How are we going to escape? Oh, Misha, we’ve come close so many times. I don’t think I could bear another disaster.’

  He kissed her again and they sat down on the sand.

  ‘We haven’t been very good at escaping, you and me. So I’ve called in the Royal Navy to do it for us. They’ve got a submarine waiting out there. They’ll send in a boat this evening.’

  ‘The Royal Navy? The British navy?’

  ‘It’s a little present from Harry Hollinger. You know him as Mark Thompson, I think. He’s a major now, still in Berlin, doing a very good job I expect. He sends love.’

  ‘Captain Thompson! Hollinger? A submarine!’ Tonya was still so shocked, she could do little more than repeat these stunning facts. The happiness inside her was still expanding, but it was becoming lighter and brighter as it did so. The pressure on her heart was easing with every second.

  She shifted position, so she was nestled right up against Misha, and every part of her body could feel his presence, his reassuring warmth. She had nothing to worry about any more. She let herself give way to the happiness within.

  EPILOGUE

  9 NOVEMBER, 1989

  l

  It was typical late November in Berlin. The sun shone, but without much warmth. The trees were mostly bare, but a few pale yellow leaves hung on like the last shreds of summer. The air was still.

  But, though the air might have been calm, the city was anything but. West Berlin, the old Allied sectors, teemed with people. And not just any old people, but Ossies, easterners, the long-suffering citizens from the Soviet-controlled East Germany.

  It had all happened so fast. That summer, thousands of East Germans holidaying in Hungary entered the West German Embassy and refused to return home. That autumn, crowds began to gather outside the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, in peaceful protest against the regime. Each week, the protests had grown. On November 9th, seventy thousand people marched through the streets of Leipzig calling for peace and an end to travel restrictions. The East German leader, Erich Honecker, ordered the armed forces to crush the demonstration. The army refused. Honecker stepped down. A new leader was chosen. In an emergency broadcast, it was announced that travel restrictions would be lifted ‘as from tomorrow’.

  But those listening to the broadcast ignored the phrase. In their tens of thousands, East Berliners turned up at the Brandenburg Gate. The border guards, long instructed to shoot anyone who tried to cross over the wall, had received no instructions. For decades now, East Germany had been a prison state. Now it was different, and no one knew what to do. Then, somebody, somewhere decided to open the border – and all of a sudden East Germans began to pour west. An impromptu party began – the wildest, happiest, most joyful party in German history. Something else happened that night too. Something astonishing. Young men brought hammers and chisels and began to smash away at the concrete wall.

  And nobody stopped them.

  The Berlin Wall was tumbling down.

  2

  Today was just nine days later, the 18th of November. In those nine days, the celebrations had settled down as though intending to be permanent. The government of West Germany offered a hundred Deutschmarks Begrüssungsgeld, or welcome money, to every citizen of the east who wanted to visit. It seemed as though every single Easterner wanted to do just that.

  The city had been busy before, but this was the first Saturday when everyone had recovered their wits. West Berlin shops threw open their doors and let the Easterners come to witness what had been denied them for so long. On the Kurfürstendamm, the gleaming car showrooms of BMW, Porsche and Mercedes had given up any attempt to sell things, and simply allowed the Ossies to come and look at machines of a beauty and sophistication they had never seen in their lives before. Kids clambered over car seats. Dads stared in at open bonnets, open-mouthed in awe. The mothers looked out of the windows and saw a city cleaner, richer and more cared for than any place they’d ever lived, or seen, or dreamed of.

  But the traffic wasn’t all one way.

  In particular, one elderly couple walked hand in hand in the opposite direction, from the Brandenburg Gate through into the east zone. The gate had been completely restored now. There was no sign of the bomb damage that had once scarred it. Its shadow fell crisp and sharp across the pale autumn sunlight. At the border, the man and the woman were asked to show their passports. They did so. They had no visas or permits to cross, but with the world turned upside down, what use were permits? The border guard looked at the passports and stamped them.

  The old man said, ‘Danke sehr.’

  The border guard responded, ‘Bitte,’ but with a strong Russian accent, indicating that he was on secondment from some Soviet unit.

  The man smiled.

  ‘Spassibo,’ he said, with a faultless accent.

  The guard stared at him with pale eyes and said nothing.

  The couple walked on into East Berlin. On the wall behind them, young men and women were still struggling up onto the wall from the western side. As they watched, they saw a young man, fair-haired, haul himself up onto the rounded concrete top, followed soon after by a larger figure, also fair. They were joined by others. Then still others again. The top of the wall had become a party ground, a picnic place.

  The couple walked on. They were very close, very physically affectionate for an old couple. They walked hand in hand or, when their hands got cold, so close that their arms and shoulders were touching. It was a way of moving that neither one of the two appeared to think about. It was an instinctive thing by now, automatic.

  They walked through East Berlin. So many of its citizens were on the other side of the wall now, that the place felt
like a ghost town, depopulated and eerie. They walked mostly in silence, but every now and then the woman would point things out, saying, ‘That’s the Mühlendamm. My offices used to be there, that building. Top floor.’ Once she said, ‘Marta’s house. You remember. Harry’s agent. She died twenty years back. She was nice.’ She would have pointed out other things too: her barracks, the SMAD headquarters in Karlshorst, the prison where she had once been locked up. But the two of them were ninety years old now and not as energetic as they once were.

  Besides, like them, the city had changed. Brutalist concrete constructions had replaced the war-torn city they’d once known. They ended up at a café near Alexanderplatz. The place was deserted: a large yellow-painted room lit by fluorescent tubes, with sixty or seventy Formica tables and cheap wooden chairs. A single waiter took five minutes to come to them, then another fifteen to bring coffee and cakes.

  ‘Willi’s in his element,’ said Tonya.

  ‘Yes. He’s lived for this in a way.’

  Willi had led a happy-go-lucky sort of life. He’d worked variously as a cartoonist, an artist, a photographer, a journalist (probably the journalist with the worst spelling and the least concern for deadlines anywhere in the Federal Republic), and lately as a documentary filmmaker. Everything he did was touched with his own unique style. Right now, he was as busy as an ant, working twenty hours a day with his film-crew catching all the exhausting glory of the moment.

  Rosa was happy too. Married now, with three children, and a good job as an administrator with the Free University of Berlin. She lived not far from Tonya and Misha, and saw them most days. But that wasn’t all. On settling in Berlin in that long ago summer of 1950, Tonya’s only possible regret for the wasted years was that she hadn’t been able to have children with Misha. But as Misha had pointed out, why have kids when the orphanages were still so full? So they’d formally adopted another four children, two boys, two girls, and had the largest, happiest, youngest family they could have wished for. They had kept their cottage by the orphanage – twice extending it as their family had grown – and most of the orphanage children had treated the cottage as a second home.