Pavel & I (16 page)

While he sat thus, he forced himself to think about her, this woman whose bed he had shared, and the questions he must ask. He remembered how she had invited him to spend the night with her. She had said it calmly, and the blood had poured into his face. Then the ritual of preparing for bed, always conscious of her moving around him. In the bathroom, Pavel had found Fosko's things lined up on a porcelain shelf: nail scissors, razor, a scented bar of soap. Her underwear hung half-frozen from a washing line above the tub. Standing straight, holding out the pyjama suit she bid him wear, Sonia's nightshirt had covered her to mid-thigh; white legs, curvy in the calf. Her toenails were painted a dark shade of rose, a little chipped. Upon the night table, tweezers for the plucking of eyebrows, and a forgotten cup of water. Dust on the saucer. The core of an apple. A small bottle of cologne.

Pavel had taken it all in with a strange, childlike intensity. Indeed he felt thrown back to the age of sexual awakening, and remembered a similar bedroom, many years ago, and a young aunt – a widow – who had asked him to minister to her needs one weekend when she claimed to suffer from migraine. He had laboured then under the same sense of illicit desire, and had studied with the same intensity the many paraphernalia of adult life that littered her chambers. What was absent here, however, was that strange sense of being watched by a seducer's eye; Sonia seemed to barely notice him even as she offered
her bed to him. As dawn finally broke, it seemed to Pavel that she must despise him, and for a moment he wished he had stormed in last night and taken Boyd's death out on her hide.

He got up stiffly and gathered his things, putting on trousers, sweater and coat without bothering to remove the pyjamas first. All of a sudden he was in a great hurry; he wished to leave before she should rise. There would be time to speak to her later. His cold-stiff fingers had trouble with his socks, and he took the boots in one hand to avoid any further delay. The monkey, he noticed, was playing with the gramophone, deliberately sticking the needle into its own leathery paw. When it finally drew blood it screeched yet again, and began to tug violently at the turntable and buttons. Alarmed by the noise, Pavel ran to the door and rushed out. As he walked down the flight of stairs to his own flat, he thought for a moment that he'd spied somebody lurking in the shadow of the staircase down below.

‘Anders?' he called, but received no answer. Pavel stood by the landing for a few moments, the railing in one hand and his boots in the other, but was unable to ascertain whether his impression had been correct. In the end he gave up and turned to unlock his apartment door. He'd hoped that the boy would be there to greet him, but was disappointed. Inside the coal oven stood stone-cold, and he noticed some drops of dried blood on his sink that had eluded his notice the previous night.

He stood still, running a fingertip over the blood, and asking himself who had been hurt there, before his mirror's stare.

There you have it: Pavel's ‘morning after'. Cold feet and adolescent reverie; a fitting harvest for a night barren of consummation. The thought of it, that he should spend a night next to a beautiful woman (for she was, in her own way, quite beautiful), a woman experienced
in matters pertaining to the heart – in short, a whore – and somehow manage to walk away from it, undone. It boggles the mind.

If you ask me, the fault was all his. She must have been willing enough, if only to rid herself of all doubts that this man, Pavel, was any different from a dozen or so others whose bed she had shared, not always under any direct duress. And yet nothing had happened. Not a thing. A kiss – maybe! – in the depth of night: lips parched by the cold and briefly pressed together, too quick even to taste the other's sleep-soured breath. Ah, well. At least the monkey had some fun, tugging its Thomas late in the darkness, and smearing its own fur with the discharge. Nature will out, you see, even in this frigid age.

At the time, of course, I knew nothing of the night's chastity, and imagined (only to stay warm, mind) all manner of excess. You see, I had spent the whole of the previous morning on Pavel's coat-tails, shadowing his every step. It was me whom he saw tying my shoelaces in the street as he entered Sonia's former block of flats; and it was I who called Fosko – forcing coins down a public phone's frozen slot – when the Russians made off with Pavel. When he was returned to his flat late last night, the Colonel bid me resume my watch. I was to be relieved at dawn.

I spent a boring, freezing night, first in the stairwell armed only with a blanket and a large thermos, making quick runs out into the street when the coffee had worked its course. Out there I noticed a man slumped behind the wheel of a car and a cup of hot brew on the dash. After a few hours of sitting on the draughty stairs – I was frozen through to the bone – I decided to imitate him and got into my own car, hoping it would be warmer there. We were parked on opposite sides of the road, my fellow spy and I, the only cars in the road. I couldn't make up my mind as to who had sent him. Was he a Russian agent sent to keep an eye on Pavel? One of Söldmann's boys who had picked up Pavel's trail? Or perhaps Fosko had sent him, to keep watch on the watcher and ascertain whether I was as reliable as I claimed. To
be honest, without this second lookout I might have left the post for an hour or two, driven home for some more coffee, a bottle of gin, and a fresh shirt and collar. As it was, I sat there, dreaming up ways – scenarios, positions – of how those two might be making it, and trying to keep my teeth from chattering. My windows got so steamed up and frozen over, had Pavel decided to make a run for it, there is not a chance that I'd have spotted him. Nor would my fellow watcher; once, when I got out of the car to walk up and down the street, I found him drunkenly and ineffectually scraping at his windshield with the butt of a gun. I nodded a greeting, but he ignored me. I didn't care. Chances were he was just as out of coffee and cigarettes as I was.

At dawn, I left the car and took up position two flights down from Sonia's flat. I was there, crouching in one corner, when Pavel came out, boots in hand, and hollered ‘Anders' at my shadow. A half-hour later my replacement came, sporting fur mittens and a thermos full of hot grog.

‘Get yourself home,' he said, after a quick shared cigarette.

‘There's another watcher,' I warned him. ‘Out in the street.'

He shrugged. ‘Better tell the Colonel.' And added, after another rueful shrug: ‘What does he want this one here watching for, anyway? We could just pull him in. Get him talking, like.'

I thought it better not to answer and made off after a quick handshake. With the Colonel, one was never sure when one was being tested. In truth, I'd had the same thought for much of the night. By this point, I think, there had awoken in me the desire to speak to Pavel face to face, and be done with these childish games of hide and seek.

Sonia woke the moment he began to stir. Long experience bid her not to speak; men, she thought, liked to wake lonely, gather their
thoughts, and admire their handiwork. She listened to his sitting up, the intake of breath when his feet met the floor. He was like a child getting out of bed, reluctant to accept the fact that it was cold beyond the bedding. When he finally made his way out of the room he promptly fell onto the piano. The monkey's shriek hid her giggles. Sonia remained in bed, enjoying its comfort, and piled his half of the coverlet on top of her. Her hair smelled clean around her, and she was glad now that she had washed herself the previous afternoon.

As she lay there, her mind was thrown back to last night's scene, Pavel talking while she pondered his lips. She thought of his earnestness, how important it had seemed to him that she should believe him. It made her smile in the darkness. And all that nonsense about Dostoevsky! ‘Sticky buds' indeed. A man who talked of his greed for life, and blushed when she unbuttoned her coat.

She wondered whether he had always been thus: a man carrying a schoolboy around in him, kept under buttons as it were, camouflaged with the help of army gestures and the odd word of slang. He was worldly enough, most of the time, to keep his mouth shut and live by the rules of man; until, that is, something broke in him and it all spilled out, all kinds of blather, and all true, no doubt. Then he became like a drunk who would shoot off his mouth at an official party, knowing full well that sooner or later there would be repercussions. He wouldn't even complain about it: two ushers would come up to him and take him by the scruff of the neck, throw him out by the back door, and all the while he would apologize for putting them to all this trouble. It was hard to believe that she should fall for a man like that. It was a charming trait, no doubt, and dangerous. It stemmed from a world she had left when she had first been raped.

She heard him leave, finally, and soon got up herself to heat a pan of water over the coal oven, using some for tea and the rest to scrub her face, feet and armpits. Invigorated, she fed the monkey, then crouched upon her chamber pot.
We live in a time,
she thought,
when
we bring out our waste by hand. Pellets of shit wrapped in tissue paper, up and down the sidewalk, the monkey's, mine, even the Colonel's
. How could a man like Pavel live in a time like this? Smiling, unaccountably merry, she fixed herself breakfast, then played and hummed Schubert lieder until the phone rang and brought an end to her joy. It was Fosko. His voice was full of honeyed good humour.

‘Are you alone, my dear?'

‘Yes.'

‘Did you have a nice night?'

‘He stayed over. Like you said.'

‘Splendid. How much does he know?'

‘The Russians got him. Last night.'

‘Yes, I know. I bailed him out. But does he know about you, my dear?'

‘About me?'

‘Don't be dim now. About you and Boyd. That you were – what's the term –
involved
?'

‘No. At least he didn't let on. I doubt he's any good at lying.'

‘Is he any good at anything else?'

She hesitated. ‘He – couldn't. Said his kidneys hurt. He wanted to be held.'

‘Ah, well. Some other time perhaps. I have the foolish feeling that he might fall for you yet. Damsel in distress. He's the type, don't you think? Any sign of the boy, by the way?'

‘No, no sign.'

‘Very well, then. I will call back later, or better yet, drop by. Sonia, my dear?'

‘Yes?'

‘I just wouldn't know what I'd do without you.'

She set the phone down without hurry and marvelled that she would dare lie to the Colonel. She knew it was an idiocy. There was nothing she could do that would protect Pavel from his wrath, and
nothing that Pavel could offer her that would have made it worth the risk. Inadvertently her gaze travelled down to the floor, and once again she found herself straining to divine what was going on in Pavel's rooms. There was no way to satisfy her curiosity. She knew him to be watched. Any move she made would find the Colonel's ear. Ill at ease, she sat down upon a kitchen stool and started to peel potatoes. They were cold and hard as stones.

Sitting there, her hands working mechanically on a tea towel spread over her lap, she asked herself – scrupulously, dutifully even – whether it could be that she was in love. She recalled the pallor of his skin and the angular cast of his bones when he had lain sick; how she had spied, below the nape of his neck, the spiky ridge of spine and thought it ugly. Nothing about him spoke to her body. She pictured them as lovers, entwined in some way she favoured, but no interest stirred in her; she could not recall the shade of his eye nor the build of his hands. Only his wedding band stuck in her mind, plain and loose upon his emaciated finger. She hadn't asked about it, had thought the question redundant. There was always a wife back home somewhere, waiting. In this he was no different. And yet she was impatient for Pavel's company, and longed to touch him, upon chin and arm. There was no happiness in her in this suspicion of love. She saw no way that it would not harm her.