Wunderbar, wunderbar! What a perfect night for love.

Here am I, here you are — why, it’s truly wunderbar!

COLE PORTER

Fred materialised out of nowhere one foggy evening. She arrived in King’s Cross, sat down at the table in the drawing room, and asked if she could get something to eat. Simultaneously overwhelmed with joy that her beloved had returned and outraged at her chutzpah in simply bursting in and demanding a hot meal, Amy hurried to the kitchen herself, as both the cook and the maid had the day off, and prepared Fred a lavish supper. Then she sat at the other end of the table and watched her eat, as if she were a child with a poor appetite who had finally announced that she was hungry.

Guitar chords drifted down to them from upstairs, and Fred, her mouth full, cast her eyes to the ceiling.

‘I bet you haven’t heard about my new girlfriend yet,’ Amy began cautiously. She chose the word ‘girlfriend’ very deliberately. Fred shook her head and replenished her plate.

Amy spoke of Kitty with enthusiasm, watching closely to observe her lover’s reactions. She was hoping for jealousy, but all she saw was curiosity. Nonetheless, she instantly relented when the flame-haired Fred came over and began to caress her, whispering words in her ear that testified to her desire and concomitant suffering.

It wasn’t long before they ended up in Amy’s bedroom.

A melody had been playing in Kitty’s head the previous night, and all day she had been torturing herself with the new song, which wasn’t coming to her as effortlessly as usual. She set aside the guitar in irritation and went down to ask Amy’s advice. Amy really did have a remarkable feel for the right melody, and even if Kitty didn’t for one second hope that she could actually help her establish a music career, as she was always claiming, she had at least convinced her to believe in her own music.

But there was no one in the drawing room: the remains of a meal were the only indication that Amy was in the house. Kitty felt uncomfortable sitting there in her absence, and had just retreated to her attic again when she heard furious shouting on the ground floor. And an unfamiliar woman’s voice. Then she heard Amy swear, and the front door opening.

‘Do what you want, and see how you get by. I’m not your bloody cook; that’s not my mission in life, thank you very much!’ And Kitty heard the front door slam.

Cautiously, she opened her bedroom door and peered down into the hall. She quietly crept down a few steps and saw the figure of a woman going into the drawing room. The woman stopped when she noticed Kitty, then walked up to her and held out her hand. Kitty couldn’t move, didn’t know where to look, because the stranger was stark naked.

‘I’m still hungry. Would you like to keep me company?’ the red-haired woman asked casually. She went on into the drawing room, where she got stuck in to the remains of the food. ‘I’m Fred, by the way,’ she added.

Kitty didn’t want to appear rude. In her homeland, it would be outrageous to leave a guest to eat alone. But she was no longer in her homeland, and besides, in her homeland the guests weren’t naked. She followed her into the drawing room, silently, head bowed, like a faithful servant, positioned herself at the window, and looked out at the little front garden in order to escape the strange woman’s nakedness.

Fred smacked her lips noisily, wiped her mouth, and fetched herself a whisky from the drinks cabinet — clearly well acquainted with its precise location. She came up behind Kitty and offered her a glass.

‘Come on, what’s wrong with you? Haven’t you ever seen a naked woman before? I was in a hurry and couldn’t find my clothes. If you lend me your cardigan, darling, you won’t have to endure the sight of my divine body any longer.’

Kitty immediately removed her cardigan and handed it to her without looking round.

‘Thank you, darling.’ The red-haired stranger laughed and set Kitty’s whisky down on the window sill. ‘Cheers!’

Only now did Kitty dare to turn round and look at the guest. The woman was standing close to her; too close. She smelled Amy on her; she smelled Amy’s fury on her. The red-head smiled. But her smile was different from the friendly smile of the West that Kitty had come to know. It was cheerful, but cheerful despite, not because. The woman’s green eyes glowed unhealthily. Her thin lips were an artificial red, although she wasn’t wearing make up. She gave the impression of someone who wants too much and gets too little.

These red lips reminded Kitty so forcefully of the dark apartment on the Holy Mountain, the blood flowing from the cut throat, that she knocked back the burning liquid in one gulp and squeezed her eyes tight shut because she didn’t want to lose her equilibrium in front of this peculiar creature.

The proximity, the smell, the hand with which she propped herself up on the windowsill, the other hand holding the whisky glass: it was all too close, too disturbing. Perhaps it wasn’t even her nakedness that had so unsettled Kitty; perhaps it was this alarming intimacy. The moment was too much for her; it was dangerous, because here, standing in front of her, for the first time since she had left her country and her life behind, was a person who confronted her as an equal. Demanded that she look her in the eye, instead of up at her from below. It was not a look that wanted to change her.

The red lips and the dead baby. The birth that should have been a celebration of life, pledged instead to death. The hair curlers on the floor and the urge to vomit. Mariam, Mariam, Mariam, Mariam.

Kitty wanted this woman to leave right away. She hated her for her penetrating gaze. Hated her nakedness. Hated her presence in this peaceful house, which was like a declaration of war. She hated the role of museum exhibit that she, Kitty, had to play in this house, because this woman saw it for what it was. They were silent, and the red-haired woman’s face changed. It grew serious: the corners of her mouth turned down, her cat’s eyes narrowed to slits.

Kitty wanted her to leave, and at the same time she wanted her to stay. Wanted to claim this sincerity for herself. Wanted this woman to hold up a mirror to her, a mirror in which she could see herself in the woman’s pitiless light. Without false hopes. Without false aspirations and expectations.

Life had betrayed her; or she had betrayed life, it was more or less the same thing. In the mornings, in her attic room, listening to the city as it woke, Kitty would ask herself whether she was still human. Whether it still made sense to going on living. And whether all her songs were nothing more than failed, pathetic attempts to justify her existence.

Now she was even starting to wonder whether these months, these people, these streets, these places and hopes were perhaps all just a daydream. Perhaps she didn’t even exist any more. Perhaps she was just a body, forcing itself to go to the Underground station each day, and everything that she had ever been, that had ever made her who she was, had died: on the stretcher in the classroom, in the dark apartment on the Holy Mountain, or at the moment she received the news of Mariam’s death.

Perhaps the most tragic thing about exile, both mental and geographical, was that you began to see through everything, you could no longer beautify anything; you had to accept yourself for who you were. Neither who you had been in the past, nor the idea of who you might be in the future, mattered.

Fred had sat down on the window seat, her bare legs dangling. There was something profoundly childish about her as she sat there, looking at Kitty. She reached for the bottle and refilled Kitty’s glass. Kitty found this physical proximity uncomfortable, but didn’t dare break the moment. Because like this she could simply breathe, drink, be silent, look out at the foggy day. Not have to do anything else. The woman radiated a playful nonchalance that Kitty found reassuring. She could have gone on sitting there even if there had been an earthquake and the whole house had collapsed. She was just opening her mouth to say something when they heard the door open downstairs and Amy’s footsteps in the corridor.

Kitty turned abruptly and hurried out of the drawing room, shamefaced, as if she were afraid of being caught doing something forbidden. As she left, the red-haired woman threw the cardigan after her; it was as if she had guessed what Kitty was thinking, and was playing along.

*

Fred stayed in the house for the next few weeks. They all ate together and listened to music. Fred and Amy went out in the evenings, and only came back in the early hours of the morning. Amy seemed happy; she was making an effort to look more attractive than usual. She seemed rejuvenated, playful, joking, ready and willing to anticipate her beloved’s every desire.

At first, Kitty could barely overcome her embarrassment when she was asked to join the two of them for meals: in part because it was a scandalous thing for her, this openly expressed passion between two women, but also because she could not forget that first, wordless encounter in the drawing room. Fred played the charming, gallant, interested lover. Whenever Kitty entered the drawing room to borrow one of Amy’s many records, she would find Amy sitting on Fred’s lap, lost in a deep, warm ecstasy, running her hands through her lover’s hair or kissing the tip of her nose. Kitty would lower her eyes, excuse herself repeatedly, dash to the large cabinet where Amy kept her record collection, and vanish from the room again as quickly as possible. Amy seemed unconcerned; she asked her if she wouldn’t like to stay, play a game of cards, or go with them to the cinema. Each time, Kitty thanked her and declined. After work, she preferred to wander the streets of the East End in the dark rather than head home, just so she wouldn’t cross paths with the strange couple.

*

It was Kitty’s day off. She had decided to stay in bed and learn vocabulary for her first English exam. She was excited because she knew that her nameless friend would be calling the following day: he would call her here for the first time, on her own private number. Amy had had a separate telephone line installed for her protégée. From now on, Kitty would no longer have to run to the telephone box; she would lie on her bed with the receiver pressed firmly to her ear, forming words in her mother tongue. She would be quiet, intimate; she wouldn’t have to keep turning round to make sure no one was watching them, that their words were safe.

The house was silent. Amy and Fred must have gone out for a late breakfast. Kitty sat up, picked up her guitar, and began to play, wildly, chaotically, plunging from one song into another without a break, singing along, stopping, starting again.

Suddenly, she heard a knock at the door. Amy never came up to her room. If she wanted her for something she would ring a bell downstairs; lately, she had even started calling her on the phone. So it must be the red-head who was at her door. She glanced cautiously in the mirror, pushed her hair out of her face, and threw on a dressing gown over her nightshirt.

‘May I come in? I’ve never been up here.’

She walked in without waiting for Kitty’s answer. She was wearing white linen trousers and a white vest. White suited her. Her red hair, which hung in waves across her forehead, contrasted beautifully with her white clothes.

She looked around, taking in the furnishings and the personal items. The rail with just a few items of clothing (Kitty refused to accept the clothes Amy tried to give her), the two pairs of polished shoes lined up neatly. The guitar case. The plates spread out to dry on a kitchen towel.

‘You don’t have to stop. I was standing on the landing the whole time, listening to you. You really do sing very well.’

Kitty said nothing. She hesitated a moment, then went back over to the bed, sat on it cross-legged, picked up the guitar, and began to play. Although she never refused when Amy made this request, because it was her rent, she never played as uninhibitedly as she did now.

Eyes closed, lost in her own world, she sang in Georgian. It was a long time since she had sung with such relish, had been so completely at one with her music. When she opened her eyes, Fred was kneeling in front of her. Her face was serious and concentrated, as if she had been studying Kitty’s features the whole time. It was an expression she never wore in Amy’s presence.

Kitty put the guitar aside, stretched out her legs, and turned her face away. She didn’t want to be looked at in such a penetrating way.

‘Is everything all right?’ she stammered, when the tension became too much for her. She started to get up. Suddenly the red-haired woman seized her wrist, forcing her to remain seated. Then she pressed her nose against Kitty’s, and stayed like that. Kitty didn’t trust herself to move her head. This closeness was not soothing; it was like the look they had shared when they had first met. Binding. It was a closeness born of knowledge, not of lust. And it was serious. They were so close, she couldn’t focus. The contours of the other woman’s face dissolved. Kitty didn’t know what she should say or, above all, how to say it. And it would have been the same even if she had been able to say it in her mother tongue. For the first time since her arrival in London, she didn’t feel that the foreign language was the crucial barrier.

But before she could formulate a sentence, Fred had pressed her lips to Kitty’s. She didn’t move; her tongue stayed in her mouth, and the kiss was dry and circumspect. As if they were two young girls, practising kissing for their boyfriends. Kitty reached out an arm and pushed Fred away, then shuffled back up the bed towards the wall.

‘I don’t think …’

Kitty interrupted herself. What was it she didn’t think? That it wasn’t right for Fred to kiss her because she was with the woman who provided Kitty with a roof over her head, or because she herself was a woman, and this fact was an insurmountable hurdle? Or simply because she thought that this woman would not be good for her; not because she was so brazen and uninhibited, so egocentric and inconsiderate, but because with all her splinters and scratches, her wounds and hopeful forlornness, the two of them were too alike? Kitty knew nothing of the path this woman had travelled, and she didn’t think she wanted to know, but there had certainly been a landslide in her life, a colossal, brutal landslide that had torn the ground from beneath her feet and taught her to fly. Of this, Kitty was convinced.

‘You’re close to me; that frightens me. I’ve been asking myself why that is. I’ve been asking myself that all this time and I can’t find an answer.’ Suddenly Fred was speaking German. The language took Kitty by surprise. It felt familiar to her, more familiar than English. It was a language she had studied in school; she had wanted to learn it with Andro. For Vienna. She didn’t know what to say.

‘You understood me, didn’t you? You understand German?’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you do. You know exactly what I just said.’

‘No.’

Kitty drew up her legs and wrapped her arms around them. She wanted the woman to go. She wanted the woman to stay. Perhaps right there, in this gap, in this intermediate state, she could escape herself. Not think of the house on the Holy Mountain. Not sing about death. Not miss the curls on Andro’s head. Not regret anything. Not hate her brother. Not hate herself for sacrificing Mariam. For surviving — for this survival, this miserable existence. Not think about her mother, her aunt; not have to worry about them, about those she had left behind. Not have only one nameless and faceless friend. Not be here. Not be there. Not be herself.

Fred came and sat with her on the bed. She wasn’t looking at her any more. She reached out her hand, took Kitty’s, and Kitty let her, didn’t pull her hand away. Fred’s hand travelled up her arm to her collarbone, then to her face, up into her thick hair, down to her neck. She was sitting beside her now, but not looking at her. It was better that way.

These caresses made Kitty feel melancholy. Fred’s caresses were easier to bear than her gaze. She stroked Kitty’s torso, her face, without stopping; as if summoning up heathen gods, as if driving the fear out of her body. It was as if her thoughts had been blown away. Kitty felt an inner emptiness that came as a relief; an emptiness that was completely calm. Her body merely sensed the gentle caresses without her head contriving to categorise, to judge them.

What happened next happened quickly and was shockingly easy. This red-haired woman seemed to be so shamelessly accomplished at what she was doing. There was something about the feeling of these hands all over her body that was like healing. Kitty asked herself how that was possible. Why her body wasn’t outraged at being touched in this way by a woman. Why nothing in her rebelled. Why she surrendered without a struggle, without a word. Perhaps her body believed that what this woman was doing was a healing ritual.

When Fred’s hand reached her crotch, she pressed her legs firmly together, as if protecting a secret, and turned her head aside. There was something unfamiliar to be celebrated, but Kitty had been unable to celebrate anything for a very long time. Certainly not anything unfamiliar.

‘It’s all right,’ said Fred, leaning over Kitty. It was a muggy morning, and the room was airless. They could hear cars driving past outside, pedestrians walking by. ‘My father was from Vienna. My mother from Stockholm. They met in Vienna. He was still a medical student at the time. Later, he became a psychiatrist. She was interested in psychoanalysis, which was why she’d come to Vienna, but then she fell in love, married, and got pregnant. I was born and grew up in Vienna.’ She spoke quietly, in German, leaning on one hand next to Kitty’s head while the other ran over Kitty’s skin. ‘I had a younger brother. A late arrival. Eight years after me. I think my parents were happy. Yes, they were, in their way. They weren’t religious. I mean, yes, we celebrated Hanukkah and Passover; my brother was circumcised; but that was all. The only thing they fought about was Vienna. She hated the city; he loved it. I loved it, too, but only because I didn’t know anything else; and Stockholm, where we sometimes went to visit my grandparents, frightened me, so northern and aloof.’

Kitty’s breathing grew calmer. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine Vienna; not her and Andro’s Vienna, but this woman’s city, this woman who was, at this very moment, embracing her. Kitty didn’t understand all the words, but she could follow the context; she could sense, feel the words she didn’t know, taste them on her tongue and draw out their meaning. As if a foreign language were no barrier between herself and this woman. As if it could not be a barrier.

‘At the same time, they must both have been unhappy in their own way, but on the whole they were more happy than they were unhappy; at least, I think so. Perhaps just because I want to think that. And they were good parents to us, they loved us in the way they thought we wanted them to. And perhaps they were right: this kind of balanced, composed, chastising yet gentle love. Perhaps it was the best love for us.’

Fred’s hand explored Kitty’s waist and slowly wandered lower. Kitty felt her stroking her scars. She didn’t want Fred to stop talking, to stop touching the hardened skin where once the stitches had been. Mariam’s stitches. Mariam, seared into Kitty’s body for ever and ever. The hand paused.

‘I still remember exactly how it began. How it started, with that nauseating Jewish star. With my father being barred from his job. With my mother’s panic attacks. She wanted to go to Stockholm, all along she wanted to get away, but he told her that was no escape. If they came to Vienna, they would come to Stockholm, too. He had no illusions about what awaited us, but neither did he make any attempt to leave the country, to flee. Many of his friends had already left. If he hadn’t waited so long, perhaps we too could have … But he simply didn’t believe there was any point in running away. My mother couldn’t understand it. I still remember very clearly what it was like when they came. Dressed all in black. Posturing with their guns. The sharp tone of voice. As if they were speaking a different language, not my mother tongue. The papers, the stamps, the train journey. First it was to the ghetto in Theresienstadt. Then we were split up — men there, women here.

‘My mother wouldn’t stop screaming. My brother wet himself as my father took his hand and pulled him away from Mother through the crowd. My mother had implored this SS man, hugged his knees and tried to kiss his hand, I still remember how ashamed I was of her, yes, even in those circumstances: I knew that my brother’s wellbeing was at stake, and I was ashamed of her for humiliating herself. She implored him, kept repeating that he was so little — so little, sir, she said, so little, he needs his mother.

‘I didn’t understand any of it. I couldn’t grasp any of it. I wasn’t that young any more, I should have understood, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t conceive of what it meant: labour camp, concentration camp. Camp, camp, camp. It was only hunger that brought me closer to these terms. Hunger was the road to understanding. Yes, I believe that without the constant hunger I would have gone on refusing to understand what was happening.’ She paused for a moment, looked up at the window as if she needed to draw breath, to prepare herself for what she still had to say.

‘It’s so ironic that my father and my brother stayed in Theresienstadt, and my mother and I were sent back to Austria. She never wanted to go back there. We arrived in Mauthausen. Do you know this place? No, you don’t; better that way. Mauthausen had a lot of satellite camps. The earthworks, the stone quarries, the granite quarries, work for heavy industry. And it had a lot of brothels. It was a Category III camp, meaning extermination through labour. The only camp in this category within the territory of the German Reich, incidentally. People categorised as anti-social — criminals, ex-convicts, people with behavioural problems — were concentrated there and were supposed to work themselves to death. Why my mother and I were considered anti-social, I can’t tell you. Mother was assigned to work in the quarry. At first I was assigned to the maintenance and disinfection of the brothel barracks, as I couldn’t do the very heavy work on account of my weight. These were the only barracks that weren’t ridden with lice and disease. The brothels were actually intended as an incentive for prisoners to work harder, but pure-bred German dicks often saw action there, too, even though it was forbidden. I saw everything. From the back and the front. From above and below. Most of the women who worked there came from Ravensbrück, and after a few weeks in Mauthausen most of them wanted to go back. At least there they could wait for death without having to sell their bodies at the same time.

‘They didn’t even send me out when they started going at the women. It didn’t bother them that I was there, that I was watching them. Some of them even liked it, and every day I waited for it, every day I expected it — expected them to call me over, say lie down, pull up your shirt, spread your legs, suck my dick. I think it was the women’s glances that protected me. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s what I believe. I’m certain — absolutely certain. As the men were mounting them they would turn their heads towards me and look at me, as if to say: I’m doing this so you don’t have to.

‘Then along came Martin. Pure-bred Martin was a popular man in the brothel because he didn’t want anything unusual; he didn’t want them to stand on their heads and spread their legs, or crawl around the barracks on all fours, he didn’t want them to hold their arse cheeks apart or grunt. He didn’t want anything like that. He wanted to lie down, sleep with them, get up, and leave. Sometimes he would even hug one of them, if he felt inclined and let himself go. I even saw a tear roll down his cheek once when he came. Yes — good old Martin had a sentimental streak. And Martin stared at me. The whole time. From the moment he first saw me, he stared at me. Hesitantly at first, only when he thought I wasn’t looking at him, then more and more blatantly. Until he only ever looked at me, just at me, while he mounted the other women. I was scared. I didn’t know what it meant. I hadn’t yet learned to interpret his look. The other men looked at me in order to affirm themselves. To see, in my eyes, what unparalleled lechery or perversity they were capable of. They wanted affirmation. And I learned to give it to them. I learned to look at them in such a way that they thought I was impressed. I learned to suppress my sympathy with the women and ally myself with them. With the murderers, rapists, sadists, masochists, with the sick and the impotent. I looked, and my eyes told them I admired them for their sick, uninhibited lust. I learned to do this. Over time, it came more and more easily to me. But Martin was different. His looks were different. I didn’t know what they signified.

‘Sometimes he looked at me fearfully, as if he were afraid of me and my presence; sometimes he looked at me just as lecherously as the others, with the same demented, glazed expression; sometimes I even thought I saw in his eyes a cry for help, as if he wished I would go to him, grab his gun, and release him from himself.

‘We had been in the camp for four months and twelve days when he spoke to me for the first time. He arrived at daybreak, as I was starting work, on my own. Suddenly, there he was, as if from nowhere, standing in front of me. He asked me if I was a virgin. I nodded. I didn’t know whether that was my death sentence or a free pass. He smiled at me and asked if I would be prepared to go with him. I asked him where to. He grinned from ear to ear and brought his neck close to me. There was the skull, emblazoned on his collar patch. I’d never have thought that Martin — such a normal man — was one of them. He told me he had been assigned to supervise the Wiener Neustadt SS labour camp. The Raxwerke plants were manufacturing goods for the armaments industry; I think by then they were already working on the V2 rockets. He told me he could take me with him, that I wouldn’t have to work as hard there. That I was his personal protégée. That I would have my own room and enough to eat. And he would visit me at night. But only him. There wouldn’t be anyone else I would have to … A fellow soldier had caught a nasty venereal disease; he couldn’t risk that, the hygiene in the camp was a disaster, he would like to have a ‘normal’ love life. Yes, that’s what he said, a normal love life — and I was so beautiful, and my red hair, and …’

Now Kitty seized the back of Fred’s neck with both hands, pulled her head down and kissed her. She wrapped her legs around Fred’s body and clung to her tightly, like a little monkey. But Fred could no longer stop; she kept on talking, the words seeming to pour from her mouth despite herself.

‘I said yes. But I said I couldn’t go alone. I could see my mother wasting away; every day I saw a little piece of her disappear, saw her being broken down. I knew she wouldn’t last much longer. For a moment he was angry, and I thought it was all over. First he cursed me, called me an ungrateful whore, a Jewish pig, but then he calmed down, as if nothing had happened, and he said he’d see what could be done. And before he left he asked me again whether I was sure about my hymen. Whether I really hadn’t let anyone near me. I swore to it.

‘He kept his promise. We were housed in an external barracks. My mother and I. She knew exactly what price I had to pay for it, but we never spoke about it. Only that in the nights when my SS man stayed away, she would come to me, stroke my hands, and kiss my temples.

‘Every night, as he lay on top of me — that was how he liked it, how he liked it best — he declared that he loved me. And sometimes he even wept when he came. He told me we had to stay together, no matter what happened. That he couldn’t let me go. That he had to stay with me.

‘When the air raids started, he put us in his car, at daybreak, in a cloak-and-dagger operation. We drove to Vienna; I remember clearly how my mother threw up when we reached the sixth district. The area where our apartment was, where we had lived. My father, my brother, she, and I. And Martin scolded and cursed her. Looking back, I think he was always a little afraid of her; perhaps he sometimes imagined that one day she would plunge a knife into his back as he lay on top of me.

‘We had to stay in the car. He had found us some civilian clothes specially for the journey. Everyday clothes. Perfectly normal. Yes — we could have passed for a perfectly normal family. My blonde mother, her red-haired daughter, and blond Martin. The three of us could have passed for a perfect family. To some, we might even have looked like a loving brother and sister out with their mother.

‘Mother and I spent two days hidden in an insurance-company building that had been evacuated. Then he took us to Mödling, a tiny backwater outside Vienna, to a deserted farmhouse. We had nothing to eat, but suddenly we had hope again.

‘He drove back to Vienna. The city was being carpet-bombed, and they needed all their forces to secure the fuel depot. Even when people were saying that the Reds had taken Wiener Neustadt, that it was only a matter of time before Vienna fell to the Allies, he still came to me and lay on top of me. Still talked about a future together in Germany. Said he loved me. Deep down, I was still afraid he might shoot us both like a couple of animals. To cover his tracks.

‘And then I said it to him. I told him that I loved him, and that I was looking forward to our German future. Yes: I said it to him. I said it in my mother’s presence. I still remember how she froze, but I was afraid we wouldn’t survive those final days. He kissed me before he drove off, promising he would be back within the week to take us to Germany. I’d gained us a couple of days to prepare our escape and try to reach the Reds or the Allies. I don’t know whether he returned to the farm. I ran away.

‘My father and my brother did not return. They both died in that first year in the concentration camp. My father of typhus, and my brother of starvation. My mother …’

Fred abruptly fell silent, as if she had run out of words. She buried her face in Kitty’s neck and took off her trousers. Kitty now wanted her to go on talking; she asked her, pleaded with her, but Fred said not another word.

Love was a slow, creeping poison, love was treacherous and insincere, love was a veil thrown over the misery of the world, love was sticky and indigestible, it was a mirror in which one could be what one was not, it was a spectre that spread hope where hope had long since died, it was a hiding place where people thought they found refuge and ultimately found only themselves, it was a vague memory of another love, it was the possibility of a salvation that was ultimately equivalent to a coup de grâce, it was a war without victors, it was a precious jewel amid the broken fragments you cut yourself on: yes, Brilka, in those days, that was love.

Kitty felt Fred kiss her out of her poisoned sleep with her words; felt that someone was holding her, with black tears and trembling eyelids, someone who had the urgency of a survivor.

*

The grey light of the last day of February shone through the flimsy curtains into the room. Fred had risen and was doing stretches, pulling in her legs and extending her arms. Her skin was a translucent white. Blue veins shimmered through in places. The triangle between her legs glowed provocatively red. Eyes squeezed shut in contentment, she stretched in the light.

Naked and exposed like this, her body suddenly seemed so fragile. Kitty studied it closely, yet it seemed to reveal nothing to her, to tell her nothing, as if this body kept everything that mattered to itself, as if it wanted to be just a body, autonomous, without any visible history, just the pale, white body of a woman. Wearied by the morning’s lovemaking, nothing about it appeared vulgar or even seductive. It seemed to Kitty inconceivable that she had desired this body only a few minutes earlier. She buried her face in the pillow.

*

A secret conference took place in the commissariat of the Soviet Navy in Moscow to discuss the construction of the first nuclear-powered submarine, which bore the heroic name Leninsky Komsomol. Afterwards, the naval captain Konstantin Jashi was selected as the project’s deputy manager. He signed the document with pride, pledged to keep these official secrets, and went for a gourmet dinner with scientists and other representatives of the Navy.

That evening, the Generalissimus was sitting with his entourage in the Kremlin’s lavishly appointed cinema, forcing his men to watch (as usual) one of his beloved American cowboy films, or else a comedy.

His paranoia had reached unprecedented levels. The randomness with which he would lash out, like a dragon incapable of controlling its fire, was terrifying, and reminiscent of the despotism of the thirties. As if this despotism had been briefly interrupted by the war only to return again now in all its former cruelty. Overnight, he would change his mind; overnight, his generals would fall out of favour. At his dacha in Kuntsevo, a village on the western fringes of Moscow, he humiliated his ministers, made his men dance and sing, made them stuff themselves until they could eat no more and drink until they vomited. The atmosphere throughout the Kremlin, and thus in the entire realm, was wholly dependent on the way he smoked his pipe. If he smoked it cold, it meant arrests and firing squads; if he just held it in his hand without smoking it, he was about to fall into one of his dreaded rages, and one of the members of his court would lose his head. If he scratched his moustache with the pipe — then, and only then, would it be a good day. Turning down an invitation to a drinking orgy at the Leader’s dacha, or even failing to receive the invitation, meant you could be deported, arrested, or shot.

For some time now, even the Little Big Man had not been able to count on his favour. The Georgian party chairman had recently been deposed; his followers had been arrested; the Generalissimus had even decreed that the Little Big Man must investigate himself. Everything indicated that he wanted to weaken the Little Big Man’s undisputed supremacy in their homeland.

After the film screening, the Leader ordered cars for himself, the Little Big Man, and three other party functionaries, and they were driven to Kuntsevo. A lavish Georgian buffet was already laid out in his dacha, with copious quantities of Georgian wine on hand. During dinner they discussed the so-called ‘doctors’ plot’. The Generalissimus had just had the country’s leading doctors arrested, including the Kremlin’s own. The majority were Jews, whom he accused of being American agents conspiring to overthrow him.

It was four in the morning when at last he dismissed his entourage. He even permitted them the luxury of a little sleep. When the Generalissimus had still not appeared by midday, the guards became uneasy. But no one dared wake the Leader, for fear of paying for the disturbance with their lives. It was only towards evening that the senior lieutenant of the guard entered the room where the Leader normally slept on a pink sofa. He breathed a sigh of relief: the Generalissimus was in a normal state of mind; he gave him instructions and ordered him to fetch the post from the Kremlin. However, when the lieutenant brought him the post at around ten o’clock, he found the Generalissimus lying on the floor in his pyjamas, conscious, but unable to speak. He had wet himself.

His bodyguards carried him into the big dining room, hoping he would find it easier to breathe in there. Calls were made. No one knew who was responsible in such a situation: the Generalissimus had made no provision for it. The Little Big Man, Khrushchev, and Malenkov — the illustrious trio — were informed. However, the Little Big Man could not be reached at first, and no one knew which lady he was currently with. When at last he telephoned Kuntsevo, he ordered the guards not to inform anyone, not to make any more phone calls. Khrushchev, Bulganin, and Malenkov reached Kuntsevo around midnight. Without looking in on the Leader, they informed the household staff that he was merely drunk, and told them not to bother him in his sensitive condition. They then left the dacha.

It was only much later, in the early hours of the morning, that the Little Big Man also appeared and berated the guards. It was an outrage, he said, for them to be spreading panic. The Leader was snoring; everything was fine. But the household staff would not be reassured. They begged him to call a doctor. They protested that the state their master was in was not normal.

Deliberations began as to which doctor they should bring in. The country’s leading doctors had been arrested; a Jewish doctor was definitely out of the question, but he had to be a professor at the very least. At seven o’clock in the morning, the team of doctors finally arrived. It is said that their hands trembled so badly during the examination that they had difficulty even taking his pulse. None of them knew whether they would leave the room alive. That morning, the doctors announced their diagnosis to the assembled Politburo: arterial haemorrhage in the left hemisphere of the brain. His condition was extremely serious.

Was it relief, fear, or consternation that spread among those gathered there? It was too long since each had discarded his own will, his own opinion, even his own feelings; now they sat like marionettes abandoned by their puppeteer.

The Little Big Man put himself in charge. His priority now was gaining time for the coming power struggle, although publicly he had to ask the doctors to do all they possibly could to try and save the Leader. Two men from his personal bodyguard were to keep watch at the sickbed; that would make it easier to monitor the situation, the Little Big Man said. To everyone else it was perfectly clear that, after all the years of torment, fears, threats, and humiliation the Generalissimus had inflicted, he believed his turn to wield the sceptre had finally come.

On the fifth day of his death throes, the millionfold murderer finally succumbed, surrounded by his weeping entourage — including the still-triumphant Little Big Man.

The Generalissimus would have approved of his funeral. Even dead, he still had the power to kill people. During the service on Red Square on 9 March 1953, hundreds were trampled to death or suffocated in the crowd.

Yet even inmates of the camps — whose lives the dead man had destroyed, who had been robbed of their futures, declared slaves, subhuman, whose families he had annihilated — hit their heads on bars and barbed wire in utter despair when they heard of the Leader’s death.

*

Somewhere between Camden High Street and Arlington Road, Kitty laughed out loud. A little earlier, she had spoken to her nameless friend on the phone and discussed with him Amy’s plans for her future.

‘If there’s any interest from the public you’re welcome to tell the press whatever you like, but not, under any circumstances, anything about how you came to this country, or which city you were in beforehand. That goes without saying,’ the nameless man had calmly replied.

‘I won’t,’ Kitty promised. ‘I don’t want to make any trouble for you, which is why I wanted to make sure … You’ve done so much for me.’

‘You won’t be able to put me in danger. Just look out for yourself. And if anyone from your homeland tries to contact you —’

‘I won’t respond; yes, yes, I understand.’

‘You sound very cheerful, incidentally, on this fateful day.’

‘What fateful day?’

‘Haven’t you heard? There’s been nothing else on the radio in London all day, and the newspapers are full of it.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Well … Our homeland is stricken with shock and grief.’

‘Just tell me what’s happened!’

‘The Generalissimus is dead.’

Kitty paused. Her mouth silently repeated the sentence. She let the words dissolve on her tongue. The Generalissimus is dead!

‘You must really be my guardian angel,’ she said suddenly, and sensed a slight confusion at the other end of the line. The person the voice belonged to cleared his throat; it sounded as if he were smiling, or trying to suppress a smile. ‘You always have fantastic news for me!’ she almost screamed.

‘I am definitely not allowed to hear such things. I’m going to hang up now, and we’ll speak again in two weeks. At the same time?’

‘Yes, yes, wonderful, let’s do that — thank you!’

Kitty ran out onto the street and started singing at the top of her voice. She skipped along the pavement, danced, pirouetted, applauded, laughed joyously at passers-by.

She started to recite the names of all the victims she could think of. First, prominent victims from the fields of art and science, from the intelligentsia. Then she remembered the parents of classmates who were no longer allowed to mention them; the grandparents of fellow students; she remembered doctors who had suddenly stopped coming to work; she remembered the lecturers and teachers who had abruptly disappeared; she remembered friends of her mother and aunt, all of whom were missing a husband, son, wife, mother, father. The list of names was endless. The whole of Arlington Road was not enough; she had to walk down side streets as well in order to say out loud, at least once, all the names that occurred to her.

Not until she reached the station did she say: Ramas, Sopio, Andro. She paused for a long time; then she said to herself, in a mere whisper: Mariam. My son.

The same day, Kitty Jashi gave a radio interview, accompanied by her patroness, Amy, who now also acted as her interpreter. There, Kitty had the chance to perform one of her most recent songs — in her mother tongue — and talk about the hardships of life as a Soviet artist in exile. Shortly afterwards, she received an offer to perform twice a week in a jazz club in Soho, which she accepted with delight.

After the interview had been broadcast, and recorded in the Lubyanka, Kostya Jashi was summoned by the Russian secret service. Following a lengthy interrogation, he was made to confirm in writing that he had no intention of contacting his sister, and to publicly distance himself from her — more: to denounce her as an informer against the Soviet state.