Pavel & I by Dan Vyleta

Author:Dan Vyleta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2008-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

He woke and I was there, crouching low beside the bars of his cage, a pack of cigarettes open towards Pavel. He started and rolled to his knees. Sweat on his brow, and bruises running the length of him; one could see it in the manner that he moved. His shirt soggy on the chest and the back, and the trousers sticking to his thighs. I watched him cast around, trying to get his bearings, his breath invisible to him, in the winter of ’46. For a moment he may have thought he had lost his mind, until he remembered last night’s descent and the miracle of Fosko’s cellar. Its heat was generated by the giant hulk of a cast-iron stove that sat snug against the back of Pavel’s cage; sat low on four stubby legs, valved and levered like something from Jules Verne. To the cage’s front a plain wooden table; two chairs and a water jar, empty, and I his captor, waiting in a crouch. The smell was of dry rot; of earth and hot masonry; the copper tones of old blood.

‘Have a cigarette,’ I offered.

His hand barely shook as he reached for his first. I lit up myself and watched his eyes roam through the room, taking in the workbench with its wrist restraints; the tool cupboards with their straps and pipes and gardening tools; the vats of petroleum that stood piled in one corner. He took me in, too, stripped of my coat now, and my collar open to the second button, though he did not seem to notice the reassuring smile that marked my lips. The cigarette curled between his fingers. He kept scattering the ashes over himself, his drags fast and shallow, not tasting the smoke.

Oh, I know what he was so excited about. He had to be asking himself. When the hell is he going to start?

He ground out the cigarette, ran a hand over his face, his eyes wandering back towards the proffered pack. I remained where I was, watching him, gauging his soul.

‘Go on, take another.’

He did, too, and another after that, his eyes moist with his question.

I wondered had he ever been tortured before.

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