Pavel & I (10 page)

It was ten or eleven before he rose again and faced up to what he had wanted to do ever since lunchtime. He was ill-equipped for the task. It was hard work even to get the trunk to open. Both its hinges and copper latches were frozen and he had to work on them with the ice pick. Eventually he managed to remove the lid and slid it onto the boy's bed. When he tried to lift out the body, his kidneys rebelled and he had to sit down in front of the oven and warm them up for half an hour. He tried again, this time by turning the entire trunk upside down and waiting for the corpse to roll out. There was no sound, and when he lifted the suitcase up an inch, he saw that the midget had become glued to its lining by his own frozen blood and hung suspended halfway between trunk and wooden floor. Exasperated, too exhausted to flip the whole thing over one more time, Pavel slid a knife into the leather from above and in this manner cut enough of the lining until it finally ripped and dropped the midget onto the floor. After another break in front of the oven, Pavel pushed the trunk aside and grabbed the body's wooden feet. He'd decided to drag him over to the front room, where the light was better. The head banged the floorboard both times he cleared the doors' elevated thresholds. By the time he finally had him in front of the coal oven, Pavel was so exhausted, he slipped to the floor next to it and nearly nodded off.

The opening of the door snapped him out of his lethargy. He could not believe he had forgotten to lock it. He expected the boy, of course, but in came Sonia in her heavy tweed dress, a glass of what looked like fruit juice in one hand. When she saw him sitting there next to the body she stopped dead in her tracks. The liquids that surrounded the midget were starting to melt in the heat from the oven and a heavy, livid smell had begun to spread through the room.
Pavel tried to speak, to make up some sort of explanation. His mind was a blank. All he managed to say was: ‘It's a midget. Dead.' It sounded so callous to him that his cheeks flushed with shame. Any second now she would scream, and dial for the Colonel.

‘You should put a blanket under him before all the blood starts running,' she said. ‘Otherwise it will seep into the floorboards. Here, have some juice.'

She crouched before him and passed him the glass.

‘It is important you drink a lot, now that you are on the mend.' When she smiled some of the pallor seemed to leave her face. Pavel drank the juice greedily, and pointed out a blanket they could use.

‘Wait,' she said, ‘I will fetch it for you.'

Without her help, he would never have managed to cut the clothing off the midget's body. It was she who fetched the scissors from her apartment and dared the first cut. They melted some water by the oven and patiently wiped down his body, first the front and then his back. There was less bruising than he would have predicted; his skin shone youthful and white. A hand's breadth above the buttocks Pavel discovered a slender hole, a quarter-inch across. Its edges were perfectly smooth.

‘He has been stabbed,' he said to Sonia. ‘Boyd told me he'd run him over. With his car. Cats licking at his blood.'

‘Your friend lied to you?' she asked, and he wondered whether she was teasing him for his naivety.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘He must have thought I would judge him.'

‘Would you have? Judged him?'

He thought about it.

‘Who knows,' he said. ‘It's hard not to judge murder.'

She bit her lip then and for a moment he was sorely tempted to reach out and stroke her cheek. His hand, he noticed, was encrusted with blood, especially around the fingernails. He dropped it and looked for words to explain himself.

‘Sonia,' he said, ‘I know this isn't fair on you, but I don't want the Colonel to know. About the midget. Not yet, in any case.'

She shrugged like it wasn't much to ask. All she wanted to know was: ‘Why?'

He looked down at the midget. ‘The truth is, I have no idea. No idea at all.'

They decided to remove the body to the attic. In summer it was used for hanging up washing; in these temperatures it would be deserted even by rats. They wrapped a blanket around him as one would around a dead child. He tried to lift him but found he could not. In the end it was she who cradled the corpse in her arms and walked it up two flights of stairs. The attic was enormous, the space cut up by wooden posts that helped support the roof. Washing lines hung taut between these posts, empty save for a single, hole-ridden sock that balanced an icicle off its stiffened tip. Sonia wedged the body into the utmost corner of the enormous room. Pavel watched her do it, holding a candle high above her shoulder. When they turned around in the doorway, they were no longer able to make out the bundle; it had been swallowed up by shadows. On the way back they snuck past the doors of the other tenants.
This is what it must feel like,
thought Pavel,
to be a thief.
It was a lonely feeling. He felt expelled from the brotherhood of men.

Back in his apartment, they struggled to clean the floor, then cut all the remaining lining out of the trunk and stuffed it in the oven. The trunk itself Pavel pushed under his bed. It was too big to burn. The smell of the corpse lingered and Pavel felt compelled to force open a window. The cold that blew in hurt him in his teeth, his lungs, the skin of his tongue.

‘Let's go to my place while it airs,' Sonia suggested. He followed her demurely, and accepted some cold coffee, along with a bread roll. She sat at the piano and played some music for him. At first he did not listen, but then the melodies drew him into themselves and he began to recognize various fragments.

‘Beethoven?' he asked her when she took a break to warm her hands.

‘Yes. Do you like him?'

‘I always thought him melodramatic.'

She shook her head in reproach. ‘Melodramatic? I just helped you hide a frozen midget.'

God, it felt good to laugh.

He stayed far too long and was conscious of doing so. Over a second cup of coffee she explained to him that the Colonel wanted her to lure him away to the doctor's the next day, so that he could search Pavel's flat.

‘He doesn't trust you,' she said. ‘He thinks you are hiding things.'

‘It's okay,' he shrugged, ‘I'm going out tomorrow anyway. Boyd told me to go look for a woman. If anything went wrong, he said, go look for Belle. One of his girls, you know. A prostitute. “
Find Belle!
” That's what I'm going to do.'

‘Find a whore in Berlin?' she asked him caustically. ‘Good luck.'

He fell asleep on her couch and Sonia woke him an hour before sunrise so that he could get ready before the Colonel showed up.

Anders slept over at Paulchen's, along with a handful of the other boys. It took them until well past midnight to settle down. Before that they sat around, huddled into blankets, and swapped stories about the city and about the war. Some were old and they had all heard them before, like the one about the thirteen boys who had stood around in the schoolyard toilets late in April '45, sharing a smoke.

‘Give me another week,' one of them had bragged, ‘and I'll give Gretchen a good old going over.'

‘One week,' he swore, ‘and she'll spread them like she's a gymnast doing splits.'

‘Right,' said his friends. ‘And Hitler's still got us primed for the
Endsieg.
'

They all laughed. A teacher who passed by the toilets just then overheard them. It was nothing but chance, but he heard them, both the comment and the laughter. One of those hyper-loyal types who had worn his party pin from before '33. He made a phone call, and the Gestapo came right over; didn't even need a car, the headquarters were two blocks down the road. They say they rounded up the boys in the yard and marched them back into the toilets. They had to line up by the piss trough, eyes to the wall, and then they were shot, one by
one, through the back of the neck. Shot for high treason and ‘demoralization of the German
Volk
'. Thirteen dead, mid-morning on the twenty-eighth of April, when bullets were already running thin, amongst the Germans that is – the Russkies had plenty, and mortars the size of God's fists. On the thirtieth of April, Hitler killed himself. Some said poison, and some said a bullet through the heart. Either way, thirteen boys dead, in the fucking toilets.

‘I swear to God,' said one of the Karlsons, ‘I was there when they carried out the bodies.'

There were other stories, newer ones. Stories about the Russians tracking down every German scientist and engineer in their sector. They would come into a man's home while he was away at work, pack up all his stuff in a truck, put his wife and kid inside, and then wait for him in the empty flat, with only a stool and a little wooden desk set up in the middle of the living room, and on it a piece of paper that said he kindly requested transfer of work to the esteemed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

‘And he signs off on that?' one of the boys asked incredulously.

‘His wife and child are already in the truck,' Paulchen reminded him. ‘A man has to do what a man has to do.'

Then there was one about the children's hospital down the road, how every morning a van stopped at its gates to load up all the babies that had died there that night, and how they put them into cardboard boxes because there wasn't any wood to be had. It was said that they kept them in a warehouse out in Zehlendorf somewhere until the ground got soft enough again to dig them graves. Or the one about the man they called The Butcher, who took children home and promised themcandy, then sold their meat by the kilo. He was said to dress in a white suit and carry a walking stick with a silver tip.

‘Probably another
ped-i-rast.
'

There were stories, too, that they never told, those that were too frightening to tell, or too personal. Anders had some stories like that,
and he knew most of the others did. Once, Schlo' had tried to tell him something about a giant prison out in Poland where everybody looked like a corpse. Had showed him the tattoo on his forearm and told him that they burned people there. ‘Smokestacks smoking night and day,' he had said, round-eyed and weepy. ‘Smoking with
people.
'

Anders had thought him full of shit. ‘Smokestacks smoking with people, eh?' It was important not to believe everything you heard.

The boys settled down eventually, after a final cigarette. Early in the morning Anders woke because Schlo' was crying. Making sure none of the other boys were awake to see him do it, he curled up next to him and rocked Schlo' in his arms until he fell back asleep. When dawn finally broke he helped Paulchen with breakfast, then set off to Pavel's.

He wanted to tell him that the fat man liked to fuck boys.

Sonia saw Pavel leave the building from out of her front window, a lonely figure, the body bent around his kidneys' pain, then got ready to leave herself. She did not want to run into the Colonel. At first her steps were aimless. She walked down neighbourhood streets and passed long queues of shoppers, felt their jealous glances upon her expensive coat. On Sophie-Charlotte-Platz a gaggle of schoolgirls passing around a cigarette butt; across from them two workers carting away rubble. Amongst the crowd, stolid talk of Christmas, and a man without gloves trying to sell a suitcase full of decorations. ‘Please,' he said to her, ‘for the celebrations.'

‘I have no tree,' she fobbed him off.

‘You could keep them for next year.'

She shrugged and quickly moved on.

The cold soon drove her underground. She had not been on the subway for a long time, had watched the streets from the reassuring
distance of a car window. Beggars huddled in corners as she made her way down, stretched forward cups baited only with buttons. The platform itself was packed with people: Germans, British soldiers, and a pair of transport police hunting for black marketeers. When Sonia boarded the train and saw icicles growing out of its ceiling, she almost laughed out loud. A child broke off one of its tips and started sucking on it. Evidently it tasted funny: the girl made a face and dropped it. Now that the doors were closed the air in the train quickly got worse, filled by the smell of unwashed bodies – it was too cold to bathe – and something worse: the gasses of indigestion. A bent old lady broke wind next to her and glanced at her apologetically. ‘You should smell the stuff I'm eating,' she murmured. Her breath stank as rancid as her fart. Sonia decided she would get off at the next station, but then she overheard a conversation between two of the Brits on the other side of the aisle.