‘Why, who was the first?’

  ‘Ludwika Śniadecka. She lived in the last century. She was meant to have been utterly beautiful. My grandmother saw her once, in a New Year’s dance in Dobrzyń. She said when she walked into the room, everybody fell silent. Nobody knows how many lovers she took. The young poet from Vilnius, Juliusz Słowacki, was mad about her, but he was just one of many. Michał Czaykowski was so in love with her, that even living hundreds of miles away, in exile in Paris, if somebody so much as mentioned her name, he would be transported. Adam Mickiewicz was another one besotted with her, but the only thing she promised him in his poverty-stricken exile in Constantinople was her friendship.’

  ‘What became of her? Which one did she marry?’

  ‘She died all alone, and was buried far away from Poland, in a lonely grave on the edge of Asia.’

  They gazed at each other.

  ‘But she was loved?’

  ‘More than any other woman who ever lived.’

  He kissed her shoulders and caught her eye in the mirror.

  ‘How long will we be together this time, Wisia?’

  ‘Forever, Alexei.’

  ‘That’s what you promised me the last time.’

  ‘This time, I mean it.’

  Every other day, Ludwika would receive a letter from her mother telling her about household matters, her husband’s health, and their social engagements. She always asked about Amelia. It seemed the family rift was healed. Ludwika read every letter intently, and kept nothing from Alyosha. This time, she promised, there would be no secrets between them.

  20.

  Plays, concerts and operas filled their evenings. Then, they often went on to a nightclub, to dance until the early hours. During the day, they liked to watch the motorcycle races in Plötzensee, or the horse racing in Grunewald, where Ludwika introduced Alyosha to one of the jockeys, an aristocrat by the name of Georg von Nałęcz Sosnowski, and some other Poles in his entourage. Günther Rudolf was one, tall of body but short of temper, with a big heart and little patience. There was also a young aristocratic German woman called Renate von Natzmer; she laughed at the least excuse, and although she had broken her leg and was hobbling around on crutches, she was more than ready to enjoy herself.

  Ludwika liked Alyosha to dress smartly, and she bought him clothes for various occasions. These days, he walked in a cloud of expensive Eau de Cologne, and the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket always matched the tie around his neck. He felt quite the dandy, and nothing gave him more pleasure than people’s readiness to admire them as a couple as they attended their parties and dinners. He couldn’t care less about the snide comments he knew people made behind his back, though everybody was pleasant enough to his face. The warmth of her love made him invincible. Compared with Ludwika, every other woman fell short in all respects – dress, appearance and intelligence. When other men bent their heads to lift Ludwika’s hand to their lips, she belonged to him and only him.

  One occasion where he thoroughly enjoyed himself was a dinner at the residence of Luis de Zulueta, the Spanish Ambassador. The Spaniard was a talkative man, and was highly critical of the restless spirit that seemed to possess so many of his countrymen. Workers’ rights, shorter hours and more pay, and strong anti-Catholic sentiments were starting to gain ground, as the young people in particular fell prey to the lure of socialism or anarchism. Mistresses were being harangued by demands for more wages by their maids, ruining their former good relations with their greed.

  ‘Very true, they tell me it’s becoming impossible to find a good maid in Zaragoza,’ added Señora Zulueta, an ivory-skinned woman with abundant black hair and large dark eyes.

  ‘And babies born out of wedlock everywhere,’ her husband said.

  ‘The country is becoming immoral through and through,’ she agreed. ‘We no longer hear the wings of angels beating on the wind in Spain’s dreams, but rather a proletarian clamour from the gutter, made up of the hoarse roars of covetous men who want to spit at the world.’

  Alyosha was placed next to Frau Drexler, a young woman (much younger than her husband, who was something important at the foreign ministry) originally from Amsterdam. Unlike her rather patrician husband, she liked to tease people, in a high voice which seemed to draw attention to itself.

  ‘Nothing’s ever as important as it seems, nothing, and nobody,’ she declared confidently.

  ‘How so?’ asked Alyosha.

  ‘For the simple reason that time slips by, people grow old, circumstances change, new ideas are born, technology comes up with a new toy, and everybody is sure to die some day.’

  ‘Very cheering,’ he answered smilingly.

  ‘But isn’t it true?’

  ‘I daresay it is.’

  ‘Of course it is. Just think. Where we used to be, there’s a younger generation now with their own preoccupations. Torturing themselves just as we did when we were young, but if they could only realise that nothing is ever as important as it seems at the time, because time keeps on slipping by. There’s nothing new under the sun. Life is constantly repeating itself.’

  The twitter of conversation continued round the table. There were several senior officers from the Reichswehr present, and two or three Spanish businessmen. A minister from the Belgian government expressed his concern at rumours that Germany was intending to go against the terms of the Versailles Treaty and re-arm. He spoke well and with authority.

  ‘The future of Germany is the future of Europe,’ he said, ‘and has been since it unified under Otto von Bismarck.’

  He was fearful of the future, but Herr Drexler brushed his concerns aside as nothing more than malicious lies, and reassured him that Europe had nothing to fear from Germany. But Monsieur François-Poncet, from the French Embassy, said that he, too, had heard the country would be re-arming. Under the formal courtesy, there was something in his manner towards Herr Drexler which was slightly contemptuous.

  ‘The Kurfürstendamm is nothing but a weak imitation of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées,’ he said at one point, when their exchange was becoming rather heated.

  ‘There’s far too much nonsense talked about Europe,’ was somebody else’s opinion. ‘America is the country to watch. What is Europe, after all, but a little inconsequential peninsular on the continent of Asia?’

  And everybody laughed, leaving him looking very pleased at his own brilliance.

  21.

  One morning, Ludwika wanted to go the Paul Cassirer Gallery on Viktoriastrasse for a vernissage. The gallery had kept its name, in spite of the fact that the man who established it had shot himself a couple of years ago when his wife, Tilla Durieux, divorced him. As Ludwika was applying her make-up, the telephone rang.

  ‘Can you answer that, Alyosha?’ she asked.

  He was knotting his tie.

  ‘Let’s leave it ring.’

  ‘But it could be important.’

  Alyosha sighed, and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  Captain Malinowski was bellowing at him, but he was slurring so badly, it took Alyosha a little while to understand that he was being ordered to report to the Hotel Adlon that second.

  ‘D’you hear me, you scoundrel?’

  Alyosha was all for not going, but Ludwika persuaded him that he should. She stuck up for her cousin, saying the poor man had been a slave to morphia for years, since his leg injury from the war against the Red Army in 1920, and the reason for all his drinking was to dull the pain. Of course, in drinking to the degree that he did, starting pretty much as soon as he was awake, on top of the morphia, he only made things worse for himself. She had seen him stay in bed for days, the curtains tightly shut against the world, too depressed to get up. There he’d be, until the crisis passed, smoking, drinking and playing his mouth organ all day long. He always blamed his old wound for these various indispositions, but she knew better.

  Captain Malinowski was standing in the middle of the room with a glass of Armagnac in his hand when Alyosha arrived. His eyes were red, his lump of a nose was purple, and he looked sluggish and irritable.

  ‘Must you stand there in my light? What’s the matter with you? Are you trying to annoy me?’

  He sat down heavily on the divan, and his dressing gown opened.

  ‘Listen carefully to what I’m going to say to you now,’ he began, then told him what he expected him to do, adding that, if he valued his life, he shouldn’t say a word to a living soul. ‘On pain of death,’ he repeated as he drained his glass, ‘you’re to tell nobody.’

  Alyosha told Ludwika at once. He wasn’t going to keep anything from her, because he was in love with her, and they had both agreed there were to be no secrets between them. He had already told her about his trips to Wannsee, to the twilight villa and the mute girl in the white scarf, who delivered the envelope before melting back into the woods.

  ‘But this time…’

  He hesitated.

  ‘This time what, Alexei?’

  He hesitated again.

  ‘He expects something else from me – something more.’

  She asked him what exactly he was expected to do, and he told her. When he had finished, she didn’t seem to share his doubts.

  ‘I don’t think you need to worry at all. I know Przemek well.’

  He always found it odd when Ludwika called the Captain by his Christian name.

  ‘The last thing he’d do would be to put your life in danger.’

  She soothed his fears to a degree, and he agreed to carry out Captain Malinowski’s instructions. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help feeling uneasy, because he was aware that it was not without its dangers – he could be imprisoned, or even executed. They still used the old-fashioned method of placing a man’s head on a wooden block and cutting it off with an axe in Plötzensee prison.

  22.

  He drove to Nehringstrasse in Captain Malinowski’s Mercedes. Or rather, to Pesotskistrasse, as the blue gothic letters high on the wall at both ends of the street now proclaimed. It was a sunny August evening, and Alyosha had barely locked the door of his motor car before one of the small boys of the Jungvolk was rattling his collecting tin under his nose. They were collecting for the Auslandsdeutschen, he said, and the smaller boy at his side held out his basket of little blue and white flags. Alyosha shook his head, and the two boys ran off.

  There were far more swastikas hanging from the windows now, though not from every one. He looked over to the Pesotski Barracks. In the wide window by the main entrance, there was a picture of Adolf Hitler, his arms folded, staring belligerently out at the world – though the frame had been decorated with colourful flowers.

  Alyosha walked to the tobacconist. Parked in front of the barracks were rows of motorcycles and two motor lorries. The building, recently repainted, gleamed in the late sun, and two members of the SA guarded the entrance. Alyosha lit himself a cigarette and made his way to the apartment. He hadn’t been there for a few days; everything was exactly the same as he had left it, and there was still no sign that Vicky had been there.

  He recognised the light knock as belonging to Frau Kempowska, and he invited her in. She looked completely broken, and he suspected she was finding it a struggle to provide for herself. She told him that Franz had been arrested, and she’d heard they were keeping him in the Barracks.

  ‘I went there to ask about him.’

  They’d said he wasn’t there, and were very flippant with her:

  ‘If he hasn’t come home, maybe he’s found himself some skirt. Probably got sick of living with his mother.’

  Frau Kempowska knew they were lying. Franz was locked up in the cellar, she was convinced of that. Then, the boy in the bakery confirmed it for her. He had been forced by his employer to join the SA. He told her he had seen Franz, and that he wasn’t looking too good. And the worst of it was that one of those responsible for his mistreatment was Paul. Had Alyosha not heard? Soon after his arrest, he went over to their side. Now, he was worse than any of them, as though he wanted to prove his total loyalty to the SA. According to the baker’s boy, he’d whipped poor Franz until his back was mincemeat. Sometimes, in the night, some of the tenants swore they could hear the screams from the prisoners. After all, the building was only two hundred yards away. They suspected that the SA wanted them to hear the screams, in order to intimidate them.

  He comforted Frau Kempowska as best he could, and pressed a little money into her hand. Before returning to his car, he climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, where Margarita shared an apartment with Kai-Olaf. He always called on her, but she was rarely in. This evening he was in luck, and when she saw who it was, her face broke into a wan smile, but she was very pale, and had dark shadows under her eyes. The summer sun hadn’t left much of a mark on her. She invited him in and made them some coffee, and although she asked him about his life, she seemed distracted and nervous.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’ he asked at last.

  Just after five in the morning, a week or so ago, there’d been the furious knocking on their door that they’d been dreading for some time. They’d been questioned by two detectives while two more had rifled through their things, and had been asked for their papers, of course. When Kai-Olaf had come to live with her, he hadn’t registered his new address with the police as he was meant to. When they’d discovered this, they’d become very suspicious, and when she’d spoken up for him, it had only made them suspicious of her as well. They’d asked her about her Nansen passport.

  Margarita had asked if they were going to arrest Kai-Olaf.

  ‘Who said anything about arresting anybody,’ one of the detectives had said to her smoothly.

  That’s exactly what they’d done.

  ‘Where are you taking him?’

  ‘For a ride.’

  Margarita had been informed that her passport would be returned to her within two or three days. Then they’d left, taking Kai-Olaf with them.

  Her cup of coffee had long gone cold as Margarita went on to say that, in that second, she had held out very little hope of ever seeing Kai-Olaf again. So she’d been stunned when, the next day around noon, he’d walked through the door with not a scratch on him, and with his papers amended with the correct address and stamped officially. He’d been clearly very shaken by the experience, and had told her he couldn’t believe he wasn’t already on his way to Dachau. She’d asked him if he’d brought her passport back with him, but he’d said they hadn’t given it to him. Without her passport, she wouldn’t be able to apply for a visa to work in Amsterdam.

  Kai-Olaf had told her he’d had no choice, it was time for him to leave Berlin. Margarita hadn’t had a choice either – she’d have had to go to the police, and ask for her passport back. But Kai-Olaf had advised her to wait a few days, in case they sent it back to her as they’d promised.

  ‘So, have you had it back yet?’ her cousin asked her.

  ‘I waited a couple of days, and then I went in person to enquire, but I was told they wouldn’t be returning my passport to me, “not for the time being, at least”. That’s what he said. They’re still making their enquiries.’

  ‘What enquiries?’ asked Alyosha.

  ‘I have no idea, he wouldn’t say. So now I’m terrified I’ll be stopped every time I leave the building, of course.’

  Alyosha felt anxious on her account.

  ‘In a café, in a shop, it happens all the time. People get arrested and dragged off for no reason at all. In the meantime, I’m meant to show this.’

  She showed him the temporary identity card she had been given.

  ‘Can you use that to apply for a visa?’

  She shook her head. A prison wall was being raised brick by brick around her, and the door out of Germany was locked. Margarita looked sad and old as she sat there hunched with misery.

  ‘So, where is Kai-Olaf now?’

  ‘We decided he should leave without me. He’s made it safely to Paris. We discussed whether I should try and get out without papers, but he thought it was too dangerous. I don’t want to put the other members of the group in danger by being caught.’

  ‘What group?’

  Margarita told him briefly about the work of the IKD – the Internationale Kommunisten Deutschland – a group Kai-Olaf had joined when he was expelled from the Communist Party. He’d been very bitter because of the way he’d been treated, especially after all the work he’d done for the Comintern. Hitler had smashed the KPD into the dust, and was fast doing the same to the SPD, but they had to fight on. Kai-Olaf was hoping that he’d be able to work for the International Secretariat with Trotsky in Paris.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked her. ‘Are you still in the KPD?’

  ‘Yes, officially, but for how long, I don’t know.’

  She, too, had been called before the Disciplinary Committee and questioned at length, but they hadn’t expelled her. Not yet, anyway, but she thought that was only because of Vicky, though she couldn’t be sure, as she hadn’t seen her for a while. In her heart, she felt more drawn to the IKD.

  The police must have their eye on her. Margarita was sure of that. Why else would they be keeping her passport? Perhaps they were waiting to see if they could arrest all the members of the IKD at once, though the group rarely met now; it was just too dangerous.