Restitution (22 page)

The conscripts returned to the important work of loading up their plundered goods. Vavilov met Gregor at the boot-room door. ‘You seem very at ease in this house, Smolinsky.’

‘We’ve seen many similar properties since we entered German territory. I’ve got to know how they’re laid out.’

‘A shame you didn’t use your knowledge to secure your prisoner.’ Vavilov reached up and stroked one of the antlers on the wall. ‘You’re right though, these places
are all fairly similar: the big entrance hall with the principal rooms opening off it, the grand staircase. Shame there won’t be many of them left by the time our troops have
finished.’

They’d already burned many of the old houses and blown up others. Gregor didn’t rate the chances of this one surviving. ‘Let’s take a walk outside,’ Vavilov went
on. He’d already put on his coat and gloves and gave the air of one planning a stroll in a fashionable Alpine resort.

Gregor looked up at the white walls. You couldn’t call it a beautiful building but its clean lines gave the house symmetry and a pleasing grace. As though reading his mind, one of the
soldiers pulled a stone off the terrace wall and sent it flying through the salon window. The glass shattered but the shutter held fast. Built to last. Gregor remembered playing with Alix on the
terrace in childhood summers. The grown-ups would drink their post-lunch coffees and talk theatre, politics and books. He and Alix would muck about in the fountain. Alix liked throwing in
coins.

Vavilov was saying something. ‘Sometimes one might almost imagine you were German yourself, Smolinsky, there’s something about you. I can’t pinpoint it but it’s
there.’

Gregor looked around. Nobody else in earshot. Not that it mattered. Suspicions like that could get him sent back east more quickly than you could spit, especially when connected to the escape of
a dangerous political prisoner. Suspicions all the time, anyway, no matter what you did, or who you were. They’d deported a lieutenant last week because someone’d seen him reading an
old French newspaper he’d found in an abandoned house.

‘I am German.’ The words seemed to fall out of Gregor’s mouth. He was so damn tired, tired of it all, the deception, the shame, the despair and the even more dangerous moments
of hope.

Vavilov stood back to examine the urn. His expression was as impenetrable as ever, but just for a second Gregor thought he’d seen a glimmer of surprise, almost of hurt.

‘You were right when you asked me those questions in Kolyma. I lied to you. My name’s Gregor Fischer. I was born in Berlin in 1927.’ He was speaking rapidly now. ‘My
father is, or was, Matthias Fischer the publisher. My mother is, or was, Eva Mauer, the Viennese actress. They drove us out in 1938.’ He felt like he imagined a Catholic would leaving the
confessional box.

Vavilov said nothing for what must have been a full minute. Then he turned very slowly and shouted at his driver to bring round the truck. ‘We’ve finished here.’

He signalled to Gregor to sit behind him. As they skidded down the drive towards the main road Gregor would have liked to take a last look at the house but dared not. As they
drove on through the last of the straggling line of German refugees, past the panje-wagons carrying food and water and the soldiers, always the trudging soldiers, Vavilov turned to stare at Gregor.
Probably deciding what to do with him. Send him east? Shoot him? Keep him for some future unspecified purpose? Gregor felt for the cyanide capsules in his pocket.

If only he knew where Alix was now. He examined each group of women they passed, looking for a tall, thin girl with a blond plait.

‘Very well, Fischer,’ Vavilov said finally. ‘Apart from this morning’s carelessness your work has been good – German or whatever you are. You’ll stay with me.
For the moment you’ll continue to call yourself Smolinsky.’

Gregor let out a breath. ‘Thank you.’

The women they passed turned their heads to avoid eye-contact with Russians. Gregor felt the now-familiar coldness in his stomach. And he was no better. For all his professions
of love, he’d taken advantage of a vulnerable girl, a friend, someone in his protection. He imagined the look on Peter’s face if he discovered Gregor had seduced his only daughter.
Shame heated his cheeks.
Alix, Alix, Alix.
Her name throbbed through his body.

On one of those nights when they’d sat together in a requisitioned house in front of a fire, Vavilov had warned him not to expect any kind of private happiness for years. And Gregor had
believed him. But then, only weeks after the fireside warning, Alix had emerged from the fur coats in the boot room and the feeble beam of his torch had illuminated that face, smudged, weary,
defiant, but possessing something that had made him miss a breath. Her mother had been a beauty, acknowledged and treated as such. But Alix . . . her face that wasn’t classically beautiful
like her mother’s but was even more heartbreaking because of its slight imperfections: a nose a little too long; a mouth a little too wide. Why? Why this woman? Because he’d known her
as a child and associated her with comfort and warmth. But it was more than that; she’d mesmerized him.

No man could have resisted her after all those years in Kolyma, not even a saint.

He’d loosened her plait and pulled her hair round her body like a curtain. Then he’d swept it back like a conjuror to reveal her breasts and her long neck. The sight of her had been
almost unbearable. Plunder. Not taken with force or threats, offered willingly, but plunder all the same. He was no different from the rest of the conscripts.

He remembered one of the first occasions he’d found himself under mortar attack, back in eastern Poland months ago. When the immediate danger had passed and he’d flopped, heart
pounding, behind a shattered wall to rest, he’d found himself in a state of arousal. A civilian woman had passed him, huddling against what was left of the masonry, face black with ash and
dirt, and his blood had raced at the sight of her begrimed female body. He’d felt simultaneously ashamed and elated. One of the medics had told him this was a normal physiological response to
danger. Perhaps the male body sought to reproduce itself while it could, before the threat returned. Perhaps none of them could exercise free will or hope to act with any decency, let alone
nobility; men were all just machines, driven by fear and hunger, just as Stalin believed.

The evening sun bathed the snowy countryside in crimson. On the road ahead of them a group of women staggered out of a hut, weeping, clutching bundles. Behind them strolled a couple of
conscripts, grinning, adjusting their belts.

Gregor turned his head from the sight.

Alix

Western Germany, March 1946

Alix wore the new shoes the Whites had given her for Christmas and the coat she’d brought with her from Pomerania, its rips darned and its buttons replaced. She almost
looked like someone Mami would have recognized.

Emily White stood at the front gate, holding the baby – Michael, as they’d decided to call him. ‘You’ve got our address back home?’

‘Yes.’

‘Write to us, tell us where you’re living. I’ll send photos.’

‘Yes.’

She knew she wouldn’t write.

‘Make sure you don’t lose those permits Joseph gave you and take care with the French, Alix. Some of them are . . . unforgiving.’

The Rhineland was under French occupation now.

‘I will. Thank you.’

‘No, we’re the ones who should thank you. You’ve no idea what Michael means to us.’

Alix nodded.
‘Auf Wiedersehen.’

She got into the truck and didn’t look round again as Frank took off the brake and they set off. Normally she enjoyed chatting to him; today she couldn’t manage more than the
occasional yes. ‘Sure is hard for you to leave that baby,’ he said at last. ‘But the Whites are good folk. I’ve seen them with the DP kids; they’ve got
hearts.’

‘Why didn’t they just adopt one of
those
children?’ The words burst from Alix.

Frank blinked. ‘They know you, they know about your dad – he was a hero, wasn’t he? Perhaps that makes your kid special for them.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Guess it’s personal for me,’ Frank went on. ‘I was adopted. Worked out fine for me.’ He broke off to negotiate a steep bend in the road. ‘You done the right
thing, honey.’

Alix looked out at the people they passed, old folk, boys and girls. Women in ragged clothes carrying babies, faces worn and grey, marching to some oppressive beat that kept them moving onward
and onward.

What exactly
had
she done? She thought back again to that dance without music in the shuttered salon and trembled.

Marie

Vienna, 1925

Marie couldn’t stop shivering at rehearsals for
Romeo and Juliet.
Her throat stung. Finally Georg, the director, sent her home, recommending honey and lemon
gargles and an afternoon in bed. From the wings, dressed in the stiff robes of Lady Capulet, Eva watched her, inscrutable.

By the time Marie reached the apartment her temples throbbed and perspiration soaked her dress. She could barely pull the key out of her bag to unlock the door. She reached her bedroom and threw
herself fully clothed onto her bed, too exhausted even to rifle for aspirin in the bathroom cabinet, and fell into a deep sleep.

When she woke, the shadows on the bedroom floor told her she’d slept until late evening. Last night’s glass of water still sat on the bedside table. Marie drained it in a single
draught and knew she had to have more. They kept a jug in the cool kitchen pantry. She had to pour herself another glass, she’d burn to ashes if she didn’t. She rose, very slowly,
pushed her feet into slippers and stumbled into the corridor. ‘Eva?’ No answer. As Marie passed the sitting-room door, the sound of movements reached her and she stopped outside, her
feverish brain trying to grasp the image that confronted her. At first it seemed like one of the paintings she’d seen in a modernist exhibition: a jumble of unrelated shapes spelling out a
message she couldn’t interpret. The back of Viktor’s head. His back. Eva’s long legs and arms twined round him . . .

Eva was sitting in Viktor’s lap, her face buried in his neck. A lock of her hair dangled loose over the chair’s straight back. Eva made a sound like a cat’s purr and Viktor
answered it with a kind of exclamation and his back stiffened in response. They’d placed the straight-backed chair in front of a gilded mirror that usually hung above the chaise longue but
was now propped up against the wall. In it Marie saw the reflection of Viktor’s face. He gazed at her with blind eyes, his mouth curled in an expression of almost religious fervour as he
stroked Eva’s long cello-shaped back and buttocks, muttering something into her mahogany-brown head.

Then he gave a shudder.

Marie put a hand to her head and rubbed it to see if the image would dissolve. When it didn’t she turned back towards the bathroom without a sound.

So that was that. Eva and Viktor – a couple in the fullest sense. And she was on the outside, looking in.

‘Great promise.’ Lena nodded. ‘He’s right there. And he says your technique’s good.’

Marie looked at the article again. ‘He thinks I’m just a silly little girl up from the provinces.’

‘Where does he say that?’

‘It’s what he
doesn’t
say.’ Marie shrugged. ‘Anyway, what does it matter?’

Lena opened her lips as though to respond but then closed them again.

‘Come on.’ Marie folded the newspaper and left it on the café table. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

End of term at the Academy. Time to collect her things and take them back home for the summer break. They walked the short distance to the Academy, passing a number of Marie’s fellow
students who greeted her with smiles but said nothing about her review. Probably felt sorry for her. Georg, the director, hadn’t said anything to her after the performance apart from a quick
congratulations.

Lena watched her as she searched for hairgrips and character shoes in the dressing room, moving quietly among the chattering girls who leaned against lockers and exchanged home addresses and
promises to meet up. ‘You didn’t have to come with me today, Lena. There’s not much to take home.’

Very little, in fact. This was all she had to show for the years she’d spent at the Academy: a brush, a jar of cold cream, a scarf for tying back her hair during movement classes, and a
pair of rather battered black character shoes: worn at the toes.

‘Something scared you.’ Lena stood by the tall mirror in the dressing room and stared at Marie with those sharp eyes of hers. ‘You’ve been jumpy for weeks now. What was
it, Maria?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Marie spotted a pile of hairgrips on the dressing table and picked them up. ‘I’m missing one. Never mind.’ She closed her locker
door and turned the key.

Lena pointed at something on the tiled floor.

Marie picked the hairgrip up and dropped it again.

‘You haven’t been yourself since before the play opened.’ Lena stooped and retrieved the grip. ‘Something put you off. What happened?’

‘Es macht nichts.
Let’s go home, Lena.’

But something had happened, Lena was right and all those theatre critics who’d dismissed her as a silly girl who’d never felt anything for a man, they were all
wrong. She’d felt too much, for the wrong person, and only realized when she’d seen the irrefutable evidence that her feelings weren’t reciprocated. She’d seen Viktor and
Eva entwined on that chair and the discovery had shaken her. So this, the groaning and the awkwardly arranged limbs, the glazed eyes, this was sexual passion. This was what the poems and the plays
celebrated: this animal performance. That’s why Marie’s Juliet hadn’t convinced: she didn’t understand sex.