without asking if I wanted it.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘I must look a sight in this stupid hat. I bought it for my kid brother, but I’m freezing cold. They don’t have much heat on these trains.’
I tasted the coffee. It was made with canned condensed milk and was very sweet. I suppose she liked it like that. I said: ‘I’ve done this lousy journey a million times and I’ve never had the brains to bring a vacuum flask of coffee with me.’
‘I brought six of these flasks,’ she said. ‘Vacuum flasks were about the only thing I could find in the Moscow shops that would make a useful gift for my aunts and uncles back home. And they all expect a souvenir. Can you believe that they don’t even have fridge magnets? I was looking for something with the Kremlin on it.’
‘Moscow is not a great spot for shopping,’ I agreed.
‘It’s a not a great spot for anything,’ she said. ‘Lousy climate, stinking food, surly natives. Getting out of there early was the best thing that happened to me in a long time.’
‘Not everyone likes it,’ I agreed. ‘Personally there are quite a few towns I’d be happy to cross off my itinerary. Washington DC for a start.’
‘Oh, don’t say that. I worked in Washington DC for over a year. What parties they have there! I loved it.’
‘By the way, the comrades who come climbing aboard at the frontier can be difficult about jewellery. I would tuck that sapphire brooch out of sight, if I were you.’
‘Oh, this?’ she said, fingering it on the lapel of her coat. ‘Mr Prettyman gave it to me. I wanted to wear it, to show him I appreciated it.’ Maybe she saw a question in my face, for she quickly added: ‘It was a little present from Mr and Mrs Prettyman. His wife was on the phone. She asked him to give it to me. They are determined to believe I saved his life.’
‘And you didn’t?’
‘I stopped the night-duty man cutting his appendix out, that night when he was admitted. It was a crazy diagnosis but I guess he would have lived.’ She paused. ‘But that night doctor was very crocked. And he was going to try doing it himself. The things I saw in that hospital, you would never believe. When I think about it, maybe I did save his life.’
‘How sick is he?’
‘He’s bad. These kind of infections don’t always respond to drugs … The truth is no one knows too much about them.’ Her voice trailed away as she fiddled with the pin of her brooch, concerned that she had revealed too much about her patient. ‘But don’t worry. If anything happened suddenly I could have him taken off in Berlin. The embassy people said Warsaw was not a good place.’ She held the brooch in the palm of her hand and looked at it. ‘It’s a great keepsake. I like the kooky daisy shape; I’ve always loved daisies. I really appreciate it, but do you really think some Russkie is going to risk his career? He’d look kind of crazy, wouldn’t he: snatching from a tourist like me a little silver-plated brooch with plastic sides and coloured brilliants?’ She grinned mischievously. ‘Want to look closer?’
‘I don’t have to look any closer,’ I said, but I took it from her anyway. ‘It’s not a flower, not a daisy, it’s an antique sunburst pattern. And that’s not black plastic, it’s badly tarnished silver, with yellow gold on the back. The big, luminous, faintly blue stone in the centre is a top-quality sapphire; maybe thirty carats. It’s been neglected: badly rubbed with scratches, but that could all be polished away. All those “coloured brilliants” that punctuate each ray of it are matched diamonds pavé set.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘The fastening is a simple pin, without safety catches. It’s antique … well over a hundred years old. It’s worth a pile of money.’
‘Golly. Are you sure? Where did you learn so much about jewellery?’
‘Back in the Sixties, in Berlin, they were tearing down some old houses in Neustadt. The bulldozer pushed a wall down and found a secretly bricked-up part of the cellar. It was full of crates and metal boxes. My father was Berlin security supremo for the British. He had to take charge of it. He tried to get out of it but some of the valuables were marked with labels from the Reichsbank. That opened a whole can of worms …’ I stopped. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being a bore.’ I gave her the brooch.
‘No, you’re not. I want to hear.’ She was examining the brooch carefully. ‘I don’t know anything about the war and the Nazis, apart from what I’ve seen back home in movies.’
‘Gold, silver, coins, foreign paper money including pounds and dollars. And boxes of jewellery and antique cutlery and stuff; most of it solid silver. The Reichsbank labels made it political. The SS had stored their loot in the Reichsbank. So did Göring and some of the others. It could have been the property of the Federal Republic, or it might be claimed by the governments of countries the Nazis took over in the war. Some of the jewellery was thought to be part of the family jewels of the House of Hesse that were stolen by American soldiers in 1945. In other words no one had the slightest idea what it all was. The first job was to have it all listed and itemized, so the descriptions could be circulated. My father had three experienced Berlin jewellers going through it. It was in the old swimming hall in Hauptstrasse in Schöneberg. A big barn of a place, made of shiny white tiles, derelict at that time but still faintly smelling of chlorine and bleach. Folding tables from the army canteen were set up in the drained pool; the jewels and silver and stuff were all arranged on them and there were big printed numbers marking each item. I can see it now. There were cops sitting on the three-metre diving board looking down at us. My Dad told me to keep my eyes open and make sure the jewellers didn’t steal anything.’ I drank some coffee.
‘And did they steal anything?’
‘I was very young. I’m not sure if they did or not, but in those days Germans were scrupulously honest; it was one of the aspects of Berlin I took for granted until I went elsewhere. These old jewellers showed me each piece before they wrote out the description. It went on for four and a half days. For me it was an intensive course in jewellery appraisal. But I’ve forgotten half of it. That stone is cut as der Achteck-Kreuzschliff. I only know the German word for it. I suppose it means an octagonal crosscut. The sapphire is a cushion cut; quite old.’
‘What happened to all the treasure?’
‘I’m not sure. What I remember is having to decipher the handwriting – some of it in old German script – and type it out, with eight carbon copies. It took me a week. And I remember how happy my father was when he finally got a signature for it.’
‘That’s quite a story,’ she said. ‘I’ve never owned real jewellery before. Now if you would kindly turn around and avert your eyes, I shall tuck my valuable brooch into my money belt.’
The express slowed as we neared the frontier, and then, after a lot of hissing and puffing of brakes and machinery, crawled slowly into Soviet Russia’s final western outpost, where floodlamps on tall posts swamped the checkpoint area with dazzling light. Like foamy water, it poured down upon the railway tracks and swamped the land. A freight train, caked in mud, was still and abandoned; a shunting engine was steamy and shiny with oil. At its shadowy edge I could see the barrack blocks of the local frontier battalion and their guard towers. Under the fierce lighting, star-shaped shadows sprang from the feet of the sentries, railway officials, immigration and customs men. The lights illuminated every last splash of icy sludge on the army trucks that were awaiting the Soviet draftees. The soldiers alighted
