Restitution (25 page)

In a kitchen cupboard he found cans of potatoes and carrots, and asparagus spears of all things. With all those mouths to feed, Dieter’s mother must have found these hard to resist. He
wished she’d taken them. It would make him feel less . . . Less what? Guilty?

He opened the potatoes and found a plate and fork. Silly to stand on formality but he was damned if he was going to eat his first meal back in his home from a can. He ate at the kitchen table,
remembering all those meals his mother had served him here. No running water, washing up could wait. It was getting dark and he knew the electric lights wouldn’t work. He found a candle stub
in a drawer and went into his old bedroom to change into Dieter’s clothes. Tomorrow he’d burn the Polish uniform. Or cut off the insignia and buttons, at least. Perhaps he could swap it
for a civilian coat. He’d have to do something about his gun, too; risky to keep it.

On his bedroom wall John Wayne and Gene Autry still aimed pistols and glowered, eyes clear and uncompromising under their Stetsons.
Hi,
Gregor greeted the yellowing posters silently.
What would you have done?
He looked away. His bed was made up, and despite their film of dust the sheets smelled reasonable. He hadn’t slept in it since October 1938 but he recognized
the quilt and the linen sheets with their blue edgings, now so thin they were almost transparent. Someone had left a small fluffy dog on the pillow. Gregor didn’t think it was one of his. He
was going to throw it onto the floor but something made him place it on the window sill above the bed before he went back into the sitting room.

Vavilov could chase him here if he wanted. He wasn’t going to run any more. At least he’d have a day or two at home. Perhaps more if he was lucky. He’d keep the cyanide with
him at all times. A patrol might not notice the tablets. The cattle wagon wouldn’t take him very far east.

Something else was bothering him, something was missing from the room. Gregor peered at the furniture and photographs under their veil of dust and couldn’t work out what it was.

A tap on the door roused him from his contemplation. He checked for the gun and then remembered that was the most dangerous thing he could produce.

‘It’s just me, Co—, Sabine.’ Dieter’s younger sister. He opened the door and blinked. Sabine wore large sunglasses, even though it was almost dark, slouchy trousers
and a tight, short-sleeved blouse with low neckline. Her hair was long and slightly waved. Her lips were cyclamen red. Her neck bones protruded, but like her mother she didn’t smell of
chronic hunger. In her arms she held a gramophone player. ‘It’s very heavy, can I come in?’

He opened the door.

‘I was only borrowing it.’ She flicked the sunglasses back onto her head in a gesture that was pure Hollywood.

Of course, the missing object in the sitting room. ‘Let me.’ He held out his hands, trying not to think of that other gramophone player back in Pomerania.

‘I put on a new needle last week.’ She handed it over.

God knows where she’d found
that.
The mahogany case smelled of beeswax. ‘You’ve certainly looked after it.’

‘We loved it. We used to come up here and play jazz. One night when the bombers didn’t come we sat down in the
Hinterhof
and danced. Frau Schiffer didn’t like it. But
she lost most of her hearing in one of the raids so she didn’t bother us much.’ Sabine permitted herself a small grin. ‘But when the Ivans came, Mutti thought it would be safer to
bring the gramophone to where we used to keep the coal.’

Clearly she didn’t regard him as one of the enemy. Feeling touched, Gregor put the gramophone player down on the oak cupboard where it belonged. ‘Jazz, you said?’

The girl’s lipsticked mouth opened up into a grin. ‘Swing. Benny Goodman, mainly.’ She peered at him as though to see if he’d recognize the name.

‘I’ve heard of him but I haven’t heard a note of swing since about 1939.’

‘Didn’t mean anything to most people here. If they caught you listening the police could cart you off to a camp. They said it was antisocial, that we were all promiscuous or
homosexuals.’ Sabine grinned. ‘Or both.’ Then her expression grew more serious. ‘We used to pretend we lived in New York or Chicago and all of
that,’
she nodded
at the window, ‘didn’t exist.’

Gregor pointed at the sofa. ‘Tell me about it.’ He’d imagined Berlin had shown him everything, but this was new. He’d been too young to appreciate jazz when they’d
been in Warsaw. Reuben had sometimes frequented a cellar bar before the Germans arrived to listen to American music. Gregor thought he remembered him whistling the melodies he’d heard there,
tapping his hand on the dining-room table to the strange rhythms that made you want to sway.

‘Most of the Swing Kids – that’s what we called ourselves – were the kind that did well in the
Gymnasium
and gave their parents no trouble.’ She gave an
amused look round the apartment.

‘Sounds like me.’

She snorted. ‘But
not
like me. I only got into jazz when the raids got bad. Used to go to an unofficial cellar at the clothing factory with the slave workers who weren’t
allowed in the proper shelters.’

Gregor could only feel admiration.

‘Some of the kids brought records there in the raids. Some had their own instruments. At one stage we had a saxophone and a trumpet. I did vocals.’

‘You played jazz down there while the Americans and British bombed you?’ Gregor found himself smiling at the image at the same time as it almost made him want to weep.

‘It took our minds off it. That’s where I met Agneta and Tomaz.’

‘Agneta and Tomaz?’

‘She was a Lithuanian slave worker in the factory. Tomaz was her son.’

‘Was?’

‘The cellar took a direct hit one night. I was on fire duty so I wasn’t there.’ She sighed. ‘You’d think that would be more dangerous, out in the open. But not on
that night.’

‘Wait a moment.’ Gregor went into his bedroom and found the toy dog.

Sabine took it and swallowed. ‘We bought it for him for Christmas. It wasn’t new, but nearly. He must have left it here before his mother took him to the shelter.’

She sat the dog beside her on the sofa and stared down at her knees.

Gregor gave her a moment. ‘Do you have the records?’ he said at last.

She blinked.

‘Benny Goodman, you said?’

She stared at him for a few seconds, then her face broke out into a broad grin. ‘Hang on.’ At the front door she halted. ‘By the way, it’s Coca.’

‘What is?’

‘My name. The Swing Kids called me Coca.’

‘Coca. I like it.’ He really was sitting here having a normal conversation with this kid. But then he reminded himself that he wasn’t that much older than her.

She looked pleased. ‘We also had a Winston and a Teddy. Be back in a second.’ She shut the door and he heard her feet tripping down the stairs in her wedge-heeled sandals. She
returned in less than five minutes, clutching a pile of records. ‘I’ll start with some Goodman.’ She took off her sunglasses and put the records on the sofa. As she leaned over
them Gregor caught a view of the top of her breasts. He looked away. God, this was Dieter’s little sister. He and Dieter had once taken her to the park to feed the ducks. They’d removed
her from her pram and plonked her on the grass so they could use the pram as a racing car. Sabine – Coca – had crawled towards the lake and a policeman had rescued her, giving the boys
a roasting. A long time ago – before policemen stopped being benign and protective figures.

‘Gregor?’ She was frowning at him. ‘Am I boring you?’

‘No, no, sorry.’ He shook himself. ‘I was just reminiscing.’

‘You’re as bad as my mother, she’s always going on about this summer or that Christmas when we had such a large goose it wouldn’t fit in the stove.’ But the voice
was warm. ‘God, I hope I don’t go on about the good old days when I’m her age.’

‘Probably not something we need to worry about.’

A pounding on the front door made them both jump. ‘Gregor? Coca, whatever you call yourself, open up!’

Dieter’s mother. Coca ran to the door to let her in.

‘There’s a couple of drunk Ivans coming down the street.’ Her face was pale and the lines of exhaustion were even more marked. ‘Soon as they see the garage they’ll
be trying to loot something. But they’re like dogs the way they smell out women and—’

Deserters,
Gregor finished for her.

Sabine was bundling records together. ‘Take the gramophone player,’ she hissed at Gregor.

‘
U
rn
Gottes Willen
!’ her mother called from outside. ‘I can hear them on the forecourt, girl!’

Gregor strode to the cupboard and picked up the wooden box. He followed them out, locking the front door. The Russians could probably smash it down if they wanted to. He thought they’d go
down into the basement, but when they reached the ground floor, Frau Braun put a finger to her lips and opened one of the doors off the entrance hall. It must have been the concierge’s office
but was now empty apart from a pile of broken chairs. Frau Braun pulled open a rear-facing window and raised a leg over the sill. With surprising ease she climbed out, holding her arms out for the
gramophone player while Coca scrambled over. They were standing in the
Hinterhof,
now used for storing wood. ‘You can get down to our cellar from here,’ she whispered, pointing
to the apartment opposite. ‘Without going onto the street and through the garage.’ From the front of the building came the sounds of male laughter.

Frau Braun led them across the courtyard and opened a window, repeating her agile manoeuvre over the sill and waving them on. She pointed at a rear door. ‘It’s open.’ She
pushed them through. They were in an alleyway, beside the garage’s back office. He’d never come through this way with Dieter. Memories of that other cellar in Pomerania flashed through
his mind.
Oh Alix.
They hurried down the steps and Frau Braun shoved aside the hessian sacks in a corner. ‘Under you go, never mind your clothes now.’

Gregor tucked the gramophone player in beside Sabine. ‘Where’s Ute?’ He hadn’t seen the other sister yet.

Dieter’s mother looked away. ‘She’s out . . . seeing a friend.’ He knew what she meant; Ute had found herself a Russian protector. The soldiers had reached the garage
showroom upstairs now, he could hear them knocking over rows of tyres. ‘Too late to be worried now.’ She was trying to sound casual but her eyes told him something. She’d already
been raped. He hoped his face didn’t betray him.

‘Get in.’ He held up the sacks. ‘Quick.’

She hesitated. He pushed her down. A table crashed to the floor, followed by the clatter of falling bicycle chains and the liquid sound of hundreds of small nuts and screws sprinkling onto the
floor.

‘There are overalls hanging up at the top of the stairs,’ Frau Braun hissed from under the sacks. ‘Put them on and rub some oil into your face. There’s a can up there
too.’

He’d look more proletarian dressed as a mechanic. He ran up the steps and pulled on the rank-smelling overalls. The oil can was empty so he wet his fingers and ran them over the dusty
floor, rubbing the resulting mixture into his cheeks. He walked through the door and found himself standing in Dieter’s father’s office. He let himself look anxious but not so anxious
they’d guess about the hidden women.
‘Was ist’s
?’ he asked.

‘Gretchen
?’ asked the first soldier, raising his gun. ‘Where?’

‘Aus.’
He nodded towards the street. ‘Sick – she go for doctor. Bad sick.’ He dabbed at his cheek, trying to indicate spots. Perhaps the threat of typhus
would scare them off.

The second soldier approached.
‘Gretchen?’
He lifted his revolver and pointed it between Gregor’s temples.

Clearly they were unafraid of infection. Gregor thought quickly. ‘Officerski buy
Gretchens,’
he said. ‘Give them food.’ He patted his stomach. How much easier it
would have been to have explained this in his near-fluent Russian. But it seemed improbable that a Berlin garage-hand would speak the language. ‘Protection,’ he added in Russian. Just
that one word to make it clear. And perhaps some others were needed. ‘At headquarters. Chief comrade.’ It wasn’t unknown for German women to offer themselves to an individual
soldier to save themselves from multiple rape.

The first soldier pointed a revolver at Gregor. ‘You Wehrmacht?’

Gregor rolled up the leg of his overalls, tugged down a sock and showed them the Kolyma scar. ‘Invalid. No fight.’ He pointed at himself. ‘Socialist. Hitler . . .’ He
spat.

The Russian scowled. ‘Hitler.’ He spat too. Gregor offered his hand. The Russian stared at it. Gregor’s heart missed a beat. Then the first Russian was shaking it up and down
as though it were a pump handle and the second was thumping his back.

It took ten minutes of back-patting and grinning to persuade them there was nothing in the garage they needed to take. Gregor padlocked the door behind them, watched them leave and ran through
to the back and down to the cellar. Coca and her mother emerged from the sacks, faces black with coal dust.

‘Swing Heil!’ Coca winked at him but her face wore that glazed expression Gregor’d seen on women everywhere the Soviets went. She pulled out the gramophone player.

‘You keep it down here,’ he told her. ‘I’ll never use it.’

Gregor pulled open the curtains on another perfect Berlin spring morning. The swan still swam on the temporary lake. The water reflected a blue sky and puffball white clouds,
cut by the sharp outlines of bombed apartment blocks. The air reeked of dead bodies and burst drains.

Something was coming back to him. Peter von Matke had owned an apartment here in Berlin. Perhaps Alix was there this very minute. He grabbed his shirt and went to the bathroom. The water was
working for once, so he washed and flushed the lavatory. After throwing on his clothes he ran to the study to find a scrap of paper and a pencil so he could leave a message. If only he knew how the
hell one got to Woyrchstrasse. He must have known the way once. Outside he found an old man making slow progress up the street, an empty sack hanging on one arm. ‘Keep that church tower on
your left,’ the old man told him.