The Collaborator (27 page)

K
irill sits at my table, drinks the last drops from the bowl. ‘Thank you, Vivienne. Thank you.’ I light our cigarettes. He leans back in his chair, with a sigh.

There’s a question I feel a little frightened to ask: yet something in me knows he wants to tell his story.

‘How did you come here, Kirill? Tell us what happened,’ I say.

For a moment he is quiet. The liquid whistle of birds floats in through my open window, and the languorous scent of my roses, that smell so sweet you can never smell them enough.

He clears his throat.

‘I lived in a village in the forest, as I told you,’ he says slowly, in his high, starved voice. ‘Yes.’

Millie pulls her chair closer to mine, presses up against me, as she does when I’m reading to her: it sounds like the start of a story from one of our fairytale books.

Kirill’s gaze is on us—but I’m not sure how clearly he sees us. His eyes burn, as though with a fever.

‘One morning in the darkness, the Germans broke down our door. It was four o’clock. They shook me and Danya, my wife, awake. They dragged us outside, and onto the road that led to the next village. Then we were tied together like this …’

He reaches out, presses the back of his hand against mine. His skin is so cold, his touch startles me. ‘Hand to hand?’ I say. He nods.

‘We were tied together hand to hand, and they made us spread out in a line across the width of the road. We were told to start walking, taking very small steps … My wife, who came there after me, was at the end of the line.’

I hear the rawness in his voice. A judder of fear goes through me. I know this matters somehow, that his wife was walking at the end of the line.

I glance at Millie. Her eyes are fixed on his face. I wonder if I should tell her to leave us, if I should protect her from hearing this. But something stops me—some sense of the strength of their friendship: a sense that Millie has the right to hear the story he tells.

‘We walked, and the Germans followed some distance behind,’ he tells us.

I can picture it—but I don’t understand, don’t know what causes the horror I see in his face.

‘The Red Army partisans were fighting the Germans,’ he tells us. ‘They lived in the woods around us. The partisans had been planting mines.’ Millie frowns.

‘I don’t know what a mine is,’ she whispers to me. Kirill answers her.

‘A mine is a secret weapon that is hidden under the earth. If you step on a mine … He throws his hands in the air, to mime an explosion. ‘If you do that, it is over for you,’ he says.

Millie’s eyes widen.

‘The Germans were using us to search for mines,’ he tells us. ‘Whatever we did, we would die. We would die if we stepped on a mine. And if we stepped over a mine, and the German behind us blew up, they would shoot us because we had missed the mine. So we walked without hope, because either way you would die.

‘We did the little we could. We walked in the tracks of horses. We tried to avoid those places where the earth had been disturbed. Because death by explosion seemed worse than death by shooting. From fear, my mouth dried up. I was weeping, all of us wept. Our tears falling half blinded us. That was what it was like …’

He is silent for a moment. I can feel my heart pounding. Millie sits quite still, very pale, her wide eyes on his face.

‘I remember the sudden shake, the noise. I had never heard such a sound. We were thrown to the earth,’ he tells us. ‘Then afterwards, the silence. For a little while, our ears were stopped, we could hear nothing at all. There was blood and soil all over us. I knew even before I turned, I knew that Danya was dead. She lay still, her body torn open. The Germans cut the rope on her hands that tied her to the next person. They left her lying. They made those of us who were still alive walk on along the road …’

His voice fades.

I look at him, but I can’t see his face any more. While he has been talking, dusk has come to my room, and the shape of him is black against the window. Behind him, the sky is a profound blue, and in the Blancs Bois a nightingale is singing its rapturous song. I don’t understand how these things can exist in the same universe—the nightingale, the soft blue of dusk: and the pain that drenches his voice.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, but my words sound all wrong, too loud for the small, quiet room. ‘I’m so sorry about Danya.’

He nods slightly.

‘That night,’ he says, ‘they locked us in a store room in the village. I wept for my wife. I thought that it should have been me at the end of the line, that I should have died, not Danya. That it was my fault. That if I had let her join the line first, then she would not have died. I still think this …’

I open my mouth. I’m about to say,
It’s not your fault, you couldn’t have stopped any of it …
But I know that wouldn’t comfort him. There is no comfort for him.

‘The night before she died, we had quarrelled. She said that I was always working and had no time for her.’ There’s a choke in his voice—I have to lean forward to hear. ‘I was not always a good husband to her. I was not a good man. My last words to her had been angry words.’

I can tell from the anguish in his voice, that this torments him above everything, all the brokenness, the unfinished business of their parting.

‘I would have died to save her,’ he says. ‘But I wasn’t given the choice.’

I have heard how people will blame themselves, if others die around them and they are left alive. Of the guilt you can feel for having lived. I see this written in his face.

‘There was nothing you could do,’ I say. ‘Nothing.’

My words are empty.

He sits there for a long while, his cigarette held in front of his face, not speaking.

Millie pulls my head down towards her and whispers to me.

‘I want to know what happened next.’

As though, after what she has heard, she’s become suddenly frightened of him, afraid to speak to him directly.

He hears her, and stirs.

‘I will tell you the rest now,’ he says. ‘The next day we were taken by lorry to Minsk. That is our capital city. From Minsk we were sent to Germany. There was a big centre at Wuppertal, where there were many prisoners. The old and the weak were led outside, and we never saw them again.’

Millie looks up at me. A question floats in her eye.

‘What happened to them? To all the old people. What happened?’

‘Shh.’ I put my arm round her. ‘Shh.’

‘Then we were taken to a place by the sea. We were put on a ship to come here. I had never seen the sea before,’ he tells us. Millie murmurs to me, amazed. ‘But the sea is
everywhere.’
I hold her close against me.

‘The ship did not sail for a very long time,’ he says. ‘We had no food, and many died. The Germans poured water into the hold for the prisoners. We had to do this to catch the drops …’

He shows us—holding his mouth open, tilting back his head, cupping his hands as though to catch water.

‘Then we sailed here,’ he tells me. ‘That is how I came here.’

He stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray. He leans forward on the table, resting his head in his hands. He is exhausted: telling his story has used up what little strength he had.

We sit quietly for a long time. The clock ticks, the shadows reach out towards us. All words are taken from me.

‘You should go back now,’ I say at last.

‘Yes,’ he says.

I take him through the back door, and out through the garden to the lane.

‘Come to the barn tomorrow,’ I say. ‘Yes, Vivienne. Thank you.’ He vanishes into the blue dusk.

When I get back to the house, Millie is still sitting in the twilight of the kitchen.

‘You need to go to bed now, sweetheart,’ I tell her. She doesn’t say anything. I turn on the lamp.

She looks up at me, blinks in the sudden light. She’s been crying: her pale face gleams with the shiny tracks of her tears.

I put my arms round her. I hold her so close I can feel the fizz of her heart.

I’m expecting questions to tumble out of her. Why did these things happen to him? Why were they so cruel to him? Why did his wife have to die? So many questions to which there are no answers.

But she presses into me, and says nothing.

T
hat night I lie awake for a long time. And when at last I sink into a restless, fractured sleep, I dream about what Kirill told us.

In the dream, I’m walking along a lane between fields, the lane that leads to Elm Tree Farm. The trees in the hedgebank are leaning in, almost meeting over our heads. There’s a line of us tied together, stretched out across the lane—Millie and Blanche and Evelyn, and women from the school gate. I feel no emotion. There’s no fear at all in the dream—I just accept what is happening, don’t question it. All the colours are heightened—vivid, carnival colours—the sunlight yellow and sulphurous, the sky a clear, bright, suffocating blue. It’s very quiet.

There are soldiers walking behind us. I know they’re there, sense their presence: I can hear their voices, the click of their booted feet on the road. But I try not to look behind me. This is the one thing I know, that I mustn’t look back.

It comes to me that I recognise the voice of one of the soldiers. There is a sense of utter inevitability about this, that his presence here is confirming something that I have always known.

In the end, I can’t stop myself. I turn, and see it is Gunther. This is entirely unsurprising to me.

I wake, with a start. I sit up sharply, gasping: it’s hard to breathe, as though some great weight is pressing down into my chest. The first light of dawn is leaking under my curtains. I stare around at my room, trying to ground myself in all the solid, familiar things, the sturdy furniture, the cloistering walls of my home: struggling to leave the world of the dream behind me, to push away its meaning.
It was just a dream,
I tell myself.
It didn’t mean anything.
But the horror of it stays with me, like a stain.

I
t’s the day before Gunther is due back from leave. A storm is brewing: the sky is dark as a bruise. As I walk through the fields, a sudden wind pushes my hair in my mouth, and makes quick, small whirlwinds of the dust and dry leaves on the track.

Today Kirill has something for me—some hedgerow flowers he has picked, herb robert and toadflax tied together with wire, to make a posy.

He holds the flowers out to me, with a small, courteous bow.

‘For you,’ he says. ‘I have no other way to say thank you.’ ‘They’re lovely.’

I press the flowers to my face. They have a green polleny smell. I’m so touched—that out of all his poverty, he has found a way to give me a gift. And I know that this will matter to him—that he is a proud man. That his terrible neediness is hateful to him.

I take him back to my house, and Millie joins us in the kitchen. I feed him with soup I have made. As he eats, I put the flowers in a glass tumbler on the windowsill. They’re so
pretty, but fading already, their pinks and purples browning at the edges. Once picked, hedgerow flowers have only a short time to live.

When he has eaten, I sit with him at the table. Millie has her chair pushed close to mine; I put my arm around her.

Tonight, he talks again about his birthplace—the birch forest, the gentle rivers; the workshop where he made his violins. I imagine him—younger, his face not yet marked by suffering, his head bowed over his work, intent. I think of the complexity, the delicacy, of that work. As I imagine it, his hands are whole and healed again.

‘I will go back one day,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, you will, of course you will.’

And then we sit in the quiet—companionable, as though we have known one another a very long time.

As we leave, he glances at the picture that hangs on the wall of my kitchen, the Margaret Tarrant devotional print—the Christ Child in his crib, with angels all around, their wings vast and intricate, and coloured the soft, matt blue of bluebells.

‘Do you believe in all this?’ he asks me, pointing to the picture.

I don’t know how to answer. Do I? Not in the way that Blanche does. I remember what she said—
It must all be part of God’s plan. There must be a purpose to it.
But I can’t see it like that. Can’t see the purpose.

‘In a way,’ I tell him. ‘Some of it.’

‘My mother still believes—she keeps the family icons secretly in her attic,’ he tells me. ‘But I don’t believe any more.’ His voice is weary. ‘None of us in the camp believe. None of us. None
who have seen what we have seen. You cannot suffer as we have suffered and still have faith,’ he says. There’s nothing I can say to that.

‘I don’t believe in God, but I still feel angry with him,’ he says. He smiles slightly. ‘That makes no sense, does it, Vivienne?’

I take him out through my garden. A few brown leaves are falling, and the sound of the wind in the trees is like the sea, like the surge of shingle: the sound that Angie has told me presages rain.

In the shadow of the hedgebank, I put my hand on his arm.

‘Kirill—there’s something I need to tell you. I didn’t want to say this in front of Millie. But after today, it won’t be safe for you to come here any more.’ It hurts, telling him this—knowing what it must mean to him, to come and sit in our home. ‘One of the Germans at the house next door is coming back from leave. He comes to this house sometimes.’

I wonder if Kirill will be appalled that a German visits my house. If he will question me. If he will doubt me. But he just nods.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I tell him. ‘But I’ll bring you food in the barn, like Millie and Simon used to do. If you aren’t there, I will leave it under the tractor.’

‘Thank you, Vivienne,’ he says.

‘Take care,’ I tell him.

‘And you, Vivienne.’ He bows a little. ‘I am so grateful,’ he says.

He turns from me, passes into my darkening orchard. The bruised cloud presses down on the land. Soon the rain will begin.

S
aturday. I wake with a surge of happiness, the shiny festive feeling rushing in before the thought, before I know why I am happy. Then at once I remember why I feel this: Gunther is back from leave today. And with the realisation comes a little apprehension, misting over the gleaming surface of my mood, like breath that blurs a mirror. What would he do if he knew about me feeding Kirill? Would he betray us—Kirill and Millie and me? What would he do? I tell myself, Of course he wouldn’t betray us. He is a good man. I know him to be a kind man … But I hear Blanche’s voice in my mind.
How can you ever really know someone? How can you ever be sure what they’re like?
Her disingenuous blue eyes on me, searching my face.

When I’m out in my yard, I glance up at the big bay window of Les Vinaires, hoping for a glimpse of him. And now and then I go up to my bedroom and look out over their front garden. The world is bright and glittery, washed clean by last night’s storm, everything radiant, hopeful. But I don’t see him.

A good while before curfew, I take some food to Peter Mahy’s barn—bread and ham and apples, wrapped in a tea-towel in a basket. Kirill is waiting. He takes the food from me.

‘Thank you, Vivienne. Thank you so much.’

I don’t wait with him while he eats: it’s too risky being out here with him. I don’t want to draw any attention to us. What if someone saw me, wondered where I was going—followed me, even? But I feel a little tug of sadness, leaving him there.

I hear Millie’s prayers and tuck her blankets in. She reaches up, pulls my head down urgently towards her. She presses her mouth to my ear; her soft breath feathers my skin.

‘Kirill didn’t come,’ she says.

‘No, sweetheart. But I’ve fed him. I took his food to the barn. From now on, I’m going to have to do that.’

Lamplight bright as marigolds spills across her. As I bend down towards her, my shadow blots out her face.

‘Can’t he come here any more?’

‘No, I don’t think he can. It isn’t safe here now. And I don’t want you to come with me when I go to the barn—just in case somebody sees us.’ Moving on quickly, because I’m afraid of what she will ask.

‘But I really want to come with you.’ She’s outraged. ‘He’s my friend too. He was my friend
first,
Mummy.’

‘I know. But we have to be careful—you know that. We could be in danger, Millie. You have to do as I say.’

She frowns. She’s wondering whether it’s worth protesting—wondering if I’ll give in.

‘Anyway, your cold’s better now,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll be able to play with Simon again, after school.’

Doubt swims in the dark of her eye like a little fish. I feel my blood flow faster. I’m waiting for her to ask, But
why,
Mummy?
Why
can’t Kirill come here?

Her frown deepens, as though someone has drawn on her brow with blue indelible pencil.

‘I wish he could still come to our kitchen,’ she says.

‘I know, sweetheart. So do I. But the thing is, we don’t want to put him in danger,’ I say.

She accepts this. She yawns as wide as a cat, stretches extravagantly, settles back on her pillows. She pulls her blanket up to her face.

‘Well—see you take good care of him, Mummy,’ she says.

At ten o’clock I hear a soft knock on the door to my yard. My heart pounds.

I open the door. Gunther is dark against the moonlight outside.

He has a bottle of brandy for us. I go to my kitchen to find glasses. He follows me. I feel suddenly awkward with him. It’s as though we’ve forgotten how to be with one another—as though there’s a rhythm we used to know, that we have to learn over again.

‘So how was everything in Berlin?’ I ask him.

It’s the kind of question you ask when someone has been away. But the question is fraught, complicated. My body feels clumsy, a bit too big for the room.

‘Berlin was much as usual. But in Cologne and Lübeck the bombing has been terrible. So much destroyed. I can’t talk about it,’ he says.

I don’t know what to think. Isn’t this what I should want? For German cities to be destroyed? But I see the distress in his face and I can’t feel any triumph—just a confused sadness. I don’t say anything.

‘This is a terrible world we live in, Vivienne,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

That at least I can agree with. I ask about Ilse, his wife.

‘She is the same as ever,’ he says. ‘She always keeps the house well. Though daily life is difficult, of course …’

I think how strange it is to be asking these things. Our love had seemed so natural before he went on leave—easy as air, as though it were the element I lived in. Now there’s a shift, a disruption.

‘Did you see Hermann?’ I ask him.

His face softens, hearing his son’s name. But he shakes his head.

‘No,’ he tells me. ‘He is in Africa, with Rommel.’

There’s a thread of fear wrapped round his voice. He turns from me, to hide the feeling—and his gaze falls on the flowers that Kirill picked for me, that are in a glass on my windowsill. The flowers are almost dead now, the petals crinkled like scraps of brown paper; but they were such a precious gift I can’t bear to throw them away.

‘Someone gave you flowers?’ he says.

There’s a slight edge to his voice. I realise he might think that I have another admirer.

‘Oh—that was just Millie,’ I tell him, with a little throwaway laugh.

But it comes out wrong: the laugh sounds forced. A shiver goes through me, cold crawling over my skin. For a brief, panicked moment, I fear he will read my secret in my face.

But then his mouth is on mine and his arms are all around me, and I feel myself open up to him as I always do. I have been so hungry for him.

I take him up to my bedroom. He has a bag of gifts for me; he shows me what he has brought. Silk stockings; French cigarettes; Guerlain L’Heure Bleu, in a cut-glass bottle that dazzles and catches the light. I open the bottle, breathe in deeply: the scent is wonderful, profound, smelling of almonds and melancholy. I touch the stockings delicately, feel their cobwebby fragility, afraid that they’ll be laddered by the calluses on my hands. I’ll have to wear gloves to pull them on. I wonder if these gifts are all too glamorous for me—if I’m too worn out, too used-up for such luxury now.

In his arms, I think of nothing but him. I feel the rightness, the sweetness, of having him here in my bed, where he should be. But afterwards the questions are there, insistent wings that beat at the darkened window-panes of my mind.

He can tell, of course.

‘You seem preoccupied, darling,’ he says. ‘Is something the matter?’

‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing,’ I say.

He traces out the side of my face with one warm finger. ‘I know there’s something,’ he says.

‘Well—just the usual things. You know—keeping everything going. With all the shortages. With Evelyn not quite right in her head …’

Kirill’s story is in my mind—the villagers tied together in the forest. I want to ask him how such things could happen, how people could be treated as nothing—used, discarded, thrown away. To see whether Gunther has ever heard of such inhumanity. But I can’t ask: because if I asked, he would wonder at once where I had heard this story.

‘And what about young Millie? Are you still worried about her?’ he says.

I wish he hadn’t said that. It’s too close to the things that weigh on me. I turn a little away from him, so he can’t quite see my face.

‘No, she seems fine. She’s settled down,’ I tell him. ‘No more ghosts?’ he asks me.

‘No, she doesn’t talk about all those things any more.’

‘It was just a stage. All children go through stages,’ he says.

‘Yes, I expect so.’

He exhales deeply, stretches, wraps his arms around me again. I rest my head on his chest. I can feel his heart beating. ‘It’s so good to be home,’ he tells me.

I can’t believe he meant that—when he called my bedroom ‘home’. I tell myself it’s just a slip of the tongue. But I still feel happy that he said it.