Pavel & I (30 page)

I left early that evening, pleased with the day's work. Mrs Fosko was in the back garden, smoking a cigarette out in the cold. I waved to her, but she didn't see me. It did not matter. I would tell her in the morning. Right then, I needed to get home and start packing up my things. I had made the decision that afternoon to move in with Pavel for as long as it would take for the Colonel to come back. We should become cellmates, sharing air, food and buckets, the works. Something had begun that day, and I was keen to see it through. The first glimmer of companionship.

Oh, I know what you will say: that I was a fool. That Pavel's new-found willingness to engage with me was founded on little other than his need for information. That it was a change of strategy, for which he chastised himself before the ghosts of his friends. What of it? It gave us a chance to sit and talk and exchange our views. Time would take care of the rest. The soul is a porous thing: it leaks and betrays itself. I left for home that evening, eager for its drippings, and flattered that Pavel should be hunting for my own.

I moved in the next morning and slowly, gradually, Pavel and I started speaking with greater ease. We played game after game of chess and changed to draughts or backgammon whenever he had beaten me once too often to sit well with my pride. I made him little presents from time to time, mostly of the culinary variety: fresh rolls with butter; apricot jam; Italian coffee from the Colonel's personal stash. Used the good tableware too, English silver and cloth napkins, that I had to pilfer from the display cabinets and smuggle past a watchful Mrs Fosko who might not have approved. Pavel never made explicit his appreciation of my efforts, but I could tell he was pleased. They spoke to his breeding. We smoked a lot as the days unfolded, unhurried now, giving full attention to the rich American tobacco. To help Pavel keep order in his cell, I gave him an ashtray, though nothing heavy enough to use as a weapon. Once, he asked me for a razor, to scrape off his stubble, but this I had to refuse. I relented as far as the toothbrush was concerned, despite disquieting visions of its pointy handle buried in his throat – or mine. A man has a right to freshen his breath. Whenever one of us had to answer his bodily needs, the other turned politely away. He gave me no trouble when it came to retrieving the dishes and buckets from his cell; he'd step back a few yards and lock his hands around the bars so as to make my gun
redundant, though habit still bid me draw it from its holster on these occasions. Much of the time we simply sat and talked, always keen to take the other's measure. Our talk turned on violence, more often than not. It was as though there were things in our lives that we had to first clear away before there could be any semblance of genuine understanding.

‘This doesn't suit you,' he told me late one morning, his disapproving gaze upon the long workbench with its leather restraints, and the butcher's apron that hung off a hook not far away. ‘How did you get mixed up in this?'

I shrugged, weary of another diatribe about the baseness of my profession. ‘Same way everybody did,' I said. ‘The war.'

He made to argue, then swallowed it, his face falling in on itself in an expression I could only read as grief.

‘The war,' he repeated, speaking past the hand that had risen to shelter his mouth. ‘It leads one down some curious paths.'

I studied him for a while with all the sympathy my single organ could afford. Imagine a cup brimming to its fill. Red-rimmed and a little greasy. But still.

‘You fought and killed,' I said. ‘In the war. Didn't you?'

‘Oh yes.'

‘It haunts you.'

He lowered his lids and turned away. ‘Let's talk about something else.

‘Churchill,' he said. ‘We could talk about Churchill. I picture him fat and hard like your good Colonel upstairs, stroking his gut while making speeches about a battle on the beach.'

All that day we talked about the war. First we talked about strategy: soldier stuff, about the bomb in the east, and whether it might have been possible to take Fortress Europe via the Balkans; why the Canadians had failed in Dieppe in '42. Then we turned to life on the front, the coarseness of it, the company of men. ‘I looked at these men and thought they were assholes,' he confided during a rare foray into vulgarity. ‘I had been asked to go to war and die with assholes. It was a difficult thing to stomach.'

He kept his remarks brief and was elusive as to any specifics. The closest I got out of him to an actual war story was a narrative about sitting aboard his transport ship, approaching the English Channel, and waiting for the U-boats to sink him. Watching the sister ship go down not two hundred yards away, destroyers dropping off depth charges, a thousand seamen standing on deck, waiting to drown in black ocean and the wind so stiff one couldn't light one's cigarette. He could have made more of it – it's a nice picture after all, but kept to a brittle skeleton of facts. It was disconcerting this, his distrust of story.

We talked about women, too, here and there; how they stood by the side of the road in France, then Holland, then Germany, watching the soldiers' march. And about the soldiers' hunger for women; the violence of their language; the way they reached into their crotches and promised copulation. It led us to atrocity, naturally enough, and from there back into more interesting waters.

‘Why did you stop making lists?' I asked him. ‘About the things that happened after the war, I mean. You said you stopped. Why?'

He thought about it. A closing of the eyelids, the mouth stretched into a line.

‘They weren't true. Everything had happened just as I wrote it down, but they were lies nonetheless. The dead people, the children betrayed, women raped – it didn't mean anything to me.'

Pavel licked his lips and studied my face. I am sure he found in it the sobriety he was looking for. For once he was making perfect sense to me.

‘It was as though,' he said, ‘I'd put my pen to an outrage I never even felt. And in the war –'

‘Yes?'

‘I shot at people in the war. I mean I shot them. Shot them dead. I was very good at it. They gave me medals.'

‘Did it bother you? The killing?'

‘I remember doing it the way one remembers a scene from a book. Anna Karenina jumping under the train. God, how I sobbed when I first read it.'

‘Yes,' I sighed. ‘I've always loved Tolstoy.'

It didn't sit right with the image I had formed of him, this confession of callousness; did not befit the man I saw slumped before me, with his tousled, unkempt hair and his long fingers cupped over the stub of yet another cigarette. A man delicate down to the fibres of his bones. All through lunch I sat mulling him over, trying to make sense of him.

‘You cried over Boyd,' I reminded him, my fork listless amongst the peas. ‘I was told that you cried. Down in the morgue; cried like a little baby. The Colonel made a joke of it.'

‘Yes,' he said, without looking up from his food. ‘I cried all right. Only then, afterwards,I set to wondering whether it had just been my kidneys.'

‘You don't like yourself,' I whispered.

In truth I was surprised.

He shrugged, as though what I had said was too banal for words. ‘Whosoever does? One would be a fool to.'

‘How about Sonia? You feel something for her, don't you? The Colonel says she's in love with you. It bothers him, I think.'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I feel something for her.'

He did not say anything further. He did not need to. It was stamped into his face.

‘Then tell me what I've been asked to find out. Where's the merchandise? Once we have it, I may be able to let you go.'

He shook his head.

‘No. I thought I might, but now I won't.'

‘Not in a thousand years?' I mocked. ‘Proud words.'

He flicked a pea at me through the bars. It bounced off my forehead and plunged straight into my glass of beer, sinking, rising, swimming in a cloud of bubbles. I don't know why, but we both started laughing and didn't stop until I thought I'd bust my gut.

‘You are like me,' I told him later, as we embarked on the first of the afternoon's games of chess. ‘Just like me.'

‘How so?'

‘Down here,' I confided, ‘we hurt people. I have seen some terrible things, let me tell you. Some of the boys, they go crazy with wire clippers. Men beaten till the bones in their faces start wandering. Burns, the smell of burned skin, it lingers in your hair for days on end. But the truth is – it doesn't really bother me. When I go home at night, I shrug it off like a coat. Inside' – I thumped my chest – ‘I am unmoved.

‘Besides,' I explained, ‘most of these people we pick up – they're bastards. I mean
real
bastards. With some of them, I think they enjoy the torture. Christ, for them it's like a journey to the promised land.'

Pavel gazed at me thoughtfully and moved a pawn. Three moves in, and things were already looking pear-shaped for my queen.