A Man Without Breath

I drove out of the gates and east, along the main Smolensk road. About halfway there I saw Peshkov again, his coat flapping in the stiffening breeze. I didn’t stop to offer him another ride. I wasn’t in the mood to drive Hitler’s doppelganger anywhere. I didn’t go to the castle either. Instead I kept on going. I suppose you might say that I was distracted, although that would have been an understatement. I had the distinct feeling that I’d lost so much more than the regard of a lovely woman – that in losing her good opinion of me I’d also lost the slightly better opinion that lately I’d formed of myself; but her good opinion was more important, not to mention her smell and her touch and the sound of her voice.

I had half an idea to go to the Zadneprovsky Market on Bazarnaya Square and buy another bottle, like the chekuschka that Dr Batov had bought for us, although I would have been just as satisfied with the more lethal brewski he had warned me about – possibly more so: complete and lasting oblivion sounded just fine to me. But a few blocks before the market, the field police had closed Schlachthofstrasse to all traffic – a security alert, they said; a suspected terrorist who was holed up in a railway shed near the main station – and so I turned the car around, drove a few metres west again, pulled up and just sat there, smoking another cigarette, before it dawned on me that I was right outside the Hotel Glinka. And after a while I went inside, because I knew they always had vodka in there and sometimes even schnapps and a lot of other ways to take a man’s mind off what is troubling him.

Without a doorman since the Rudakov brothers had left Smolensk, the Glinka’s madame was now in charge of the temple entrance as well as the girls inside; she was little more than a babushka with a rather obvious wig possessed of long, Versailles-style locks. Gap-toothed, with too much lipstick and a cheap black peignoir, she had the face and faux demure manner of a corrupted milkmaid and was about as greedy as a hungry fox, but she spoke reasonable German. She told me they weren’t open yet, but let me in all the same when she saw my money.

Inside the place was decorated like the Blue Angel, with lots of tall mirrors and chipped mahogany and a little stage where a bespectacled girl wearing just a Stahlhelm was seated on a beer barrel pumping out a tune on a piano accordion that covered her rather obvious nakedness, or at least just about. I didn’t recognize the tune, but I could see she had nice legs. Over the fireplace there was a large portrait of Glinka lying on a sofa with a pencil in his hand and a score on his lap. From the dark and painful expression on his face I guessed he’d disappointed a woman he was keen on and she’d told him it was over between them; either that or it was his music being squeezed to death on the accordion.

The madame led me to a high-ceilinged corner room with a view of the street and an evil-smelling bed with a green button-back headboard and a little tin cup for tips. There was a green carpet on the wooden floor, pink sheets on the bed, and some chocolate-brown wallpaper that was almost hanging on the wall. The chandelier on the ceiling was made of barley-sugar glass with a shard missing as if someone had tried taking a bite out of it. The room was every bit as depressing as I needed it to be. I handed the madame a fistful of occupation marks and told her to send me up a bottle, some company and a pair of sunglasses. Then I took off my tunic and put the only record on the gramophone player – Evelyn Kunneke was always a local favourite on account of all the concerts she gave for soldiers on the eastern front. I pressed my face against the grimy windowpane and stared outside. Half of me was wondering why I was there, but it was not the half of me that I was listening to at that moment, so I unlaced my shoes, lay down, and lit a cigarette.