The Pathfinder (17 page)

‘And as time goes by, winter will be upon us. A Berlin winter. That's going to be the rub.'

‘We'll have more planes by then.'

‘From thin air?'

‘No,' Harrison said. ‘From the Americans. They've got them. They'll have to send them over.'

‘No
have
to about it. The Yanks like to take their time about these things, as we know. I imagine that little demonstration the Berliners gave at the Brandenburg Gate the other day might help to impress them, though. A quarter of a million good citizens gathered together, all those rousing speeches:
Let us fight for Berlin's democratic rights and freedom . . . Berlin calls the world . . . help Berlin not just with the thunder of aircraft but with lasting common ideals
 . . . Then burning the Red Flag as a final grand gesture under a hail of Soviet bullets. All good stuff guaranteed to touch the heart of Uncle Sam, with any luck. They're rather a plucky bunch, our Berlin burghers.'

Nico Kocharian had called them a special breed and likened them to cockney Londoners. Harrison wasn't sure he necessarily agreed, but they certainly had one thing in common – guts.

He was waiting for her when she arrived at the Renaissance Theatre in the British sector. She caught sight of him in the foyer crowd, standing to one side, smoking a cigarette and wearing his stern expression. Lili almost turned and left. Her first instinct had been to refuse the invitation; her second, that the idea of going to see an English play in Berlin was something rather extraordinary to do; her third, that to do so with the squadron leader would be even more extraordinary. He greeted her in his stiff, polite way and she sensed that he was also uneasy. She noticed that the British had invited a great many Berliners as their guests and that the Berliners had made valiant efforts to dress up for the occasion: to put on whatever decent clothes were left to them, to wear whatever jewellery had not been lost or sold, to polish their worn-out shoes and dress their hair. Good for morale, he'd said, and she could see the sense in that. They could all pretend – just for a little while – that there was no blockade, no shortages, no terrifying uncertainty of the future. She wondered if this was how the British had behaved in their own country during the war – as though nothing whatever was wrong. Perhaps it was, in some way, a classic demonstration of the sang-froid, the stiff upper lip for which they were famous.

When they had taken their seats she looked at the programme and saw that the play was being performed by the Cambridge Marlowe Society. Her father might have known of them, perhaps been to see them act in England. Whoever they were, they were obviously not afraid to come to Berlin. She found that rather moving. Most people would want to stay far away.

The play's title was familiar to her from Father's big volume of Shakespeare, but the story was not. When she asked the squadron leader to explain the plot, he looked apologetic: ‘To be honest, I can't remember much about it. It's not one of Shakespeare's best-known plays. It takes place in Vienna and somebody's condemned to death. I think there's a duke who keeps disguising himself and some nuns and friars . . . all a bit of a muddle. Rather an odd choice, really, but still.'

‘I am afraid that I may not be able to understand it.'

He smiled. ‘Don't worry, you won't be the only one.'

She listened very hard to the old-fashioned English, to words she had never heard before but spoken so poetically by actors in such beautiful costumes that whether she understood or not didn't seem to matter much. It was enough to sit and watch and listen to something so far removed from the grim reality of her daily existence and to let herself be enchanted by it.

In the interval wine was served – good German wine that the British had somehow conjured up. She had never drunk wine of any kind before. A portly, older man in Royal Air Force uniform came up to them and was introduced.

‘This is Squadron Leader Hill. Also from Gatow.'

He bowed gallantly over her hand. ‘Delighted, Fräulein. How are you enjoying the play?'

‘Very much – except I don't understand everything.'

‘Nor do I, my dear. You, me and half the audience haven't the foggiest what's going on. Luckily, nobody seems to mind.'

Although he was very friendly and genial, she felt that he was studying her closely while they talked. He is suspicious, she thought. Perhaps he can tell what sort of fräulein I really am. Perhaps he has noticed the mended tear in my dress and guessed.

When the play was over the squadron leader insisted on taking her in one of the Occupation Forces taxis back to the apartment. The Russian guard at the sector border tried to make some silly difficulty over her papers but the squadron leader spoke to him sharply and he backed down. He switched on a torch and walked with her through the courtyard as far as the front door. It was a long time since she had felt so safe. She held out her hand to shake his. ‘Thank you for the play. I enjoyed it very much.'

‘I'm sorry it wasn't something a bit easier.'

‘It didn't matter at all. It was a very good idea. Everybody had a wonderful time.' It was perfectly true. The applause at the end had gone on and on as though nobody had wanted the evening to finish. ‘Good night, Squadron Leader.'

‘My name's Michael,' he said. ‘Please call me that.'

‘In Germany we are always very formal – until we know somebody better.'

‘Yes, of course. I'm sorry.' He let go of her hand. ‘Good night Fräulein Leicht.'

Dirk had his suitcase open on the table and looked up as she came into the room. ‘So, how was it?'

‘The play was very well done. It was a lovely evening. They even had wine to drink.'

‘And the squadron leader? How was he?'

‘Quite well, I think.'

‘I didn't mean his health. How was he with you?'

‘Very polite. Very correct.'

‘Are you going to see him again?'

‘He says he will try to bring more pictures for Rudi.'

‘That's just a good excuse for him. I told you, he likes you. But he is an English gentleman, so he will behave very properly. Not like the others. You don't need to worry about that. If you are clever, you will make him like you even more and then you can marry him and escape from Berlin for ever.'

She was angry and upset now; the pleasure of the evening spoilt. ‘You said that before, Dirk, and it's so silly.'

‘Is it?' He stared at her over the open lid of the case. ‘I wasn't joking, Lili. You always say that this is our home, but if you get the chance to leave, why stay here? Berlin is a doomed city. You know that. Whatever happens – whether the Allies go or stay – there will always be trouble. You should go, if you can. Take Rudi. I can look after Grandfather. It's all the same to him where he is.'

She put her hands over her ears. ‘Stop it! I won't listen to you any more.'

He shrugged and closed the case lid, snapping the locks shut. ‘Well, I'm off.'

‘Now? At this time of night?'

‘I have some business.'

‘I thought you'd stopped all that – now that you have the work with the Americans.'

‘It's not enough. And this is very good business.'

‘What sort?'

‘I can get things here in the Russian sector that they do not have any more at all in the west – not since the blockade started. People will pay big prices.'

‘You'll get caught. They are stopping people now. Searching them. There are road blocks. Police everywhere.'

‘Stop worrying so much, Lili. I use the back streets and I'm like a shadow. Nobody notices me.'

It was useless to try and stop him; all she could do was beg him to be careful and pray.

Grandfather and Rudi were both asleep and she undressed and lay down on the old couch in the corner of the living room, the tattered screen pulled around her, the crumbling ceiling above her head. She thought about the squadron leader. She was not sure if he had asked her to go to the play because he was sorry for losing his temper or whether Dirk was right – because he liked her. He had never shown her that he did anything of the sort. He had been very polite to her and very kind to Rudi, but that was all, and if it was hard for her to like him, then it must be equally hard for him to like her. All Germans were seen to be guilty, Dr Meier had said. All guilty of those unspeakable Nazi crimes. And if he knew everything about her – the whole truth – then he would never want to see her again.

To think of going to live in England was absurd. An impossibility. She would like to see it, though, one day. Her father had talked about it a great deal. He had described the greenness of the countryside, the softness of the landscape, the antiquity of the buildings, the gentleness of the people. And he had admired the English way of life very much – liberal thinking, tolerance, politeness and humour. But they were not so gentle. Father had been deceived in that. Very deceived. Look what they had done to Germany. They had been completely ruthless. And the squadron leader, for all his good manners, had shown that underneath he was not gentle at all. She had seen that very clearly when he had spoken about the bombing. Nor had he won his fine medals for being gentle.
It was war. Total war
.

She turned over restlessly. And now Dirk was up to his tricks again. Something else to worry about when it took all her strength and will power to keep going from day to day. She felt swamped by the hopelessness of it all and almost ready to give up. And yet that was another impossibility. She had to keep going. Getting up, going to work, labouring away with an aching back and lacerated hands, coming back, queuing for hour upon hour for a loaf of bread, a few potatoes, a half-rotten cabbage, a tin of this, a small bag of that. Contriving some sort of meal for them to eat, washing their clothes when there was neither soap flakes nor hot water, mending and patching when there was no wool nor thread for darning and nothing to patch with, tending to Grandfather, nursing Rudi, fretting about Dirk . . . the days followed each other in an unending and exhausting struggle.

And there was no escape.

Nine

In early October the Russians cut the electricity supply to Gatow airfield. The supply came from a power station in the Soviet sector and although back-up supply cables had been installed from another source in the British sector, these were not powerful enough to provide more than a weak and intermittent current. In the Operations Room there was much grinding of teeth and despair until somebody pointed out that the Russian airfield at Staaken as well as the Radio Berlin building and its transmitters, spewing out non-stop Soviet propaganda, were supplied by power from the British sector. This was also pointed out, in turn, to the Russians who quickly restored the supply. Everybody at Gatow breathed again.

To Harrison, the episode demonstrated that they were fighting a war of nerves, as much as anything else. Unlike the kind of warfare he had known, this fight wasn't about might or strength; it was about beating the Russians at their own game. A psychological struggle. The Soviet fighters kept up their own particular game of buzzing the British and American planes flying up and down the air corridors and their air force kept staging mock battles over the city and carrying out target practice in the corridors. There had been anti-aircraft exercises by the Russian army on the airfield perimeter, firing away so heavily that the windows at Gatow rattled in their frames.

More flying accidents had happened. The Americans had lost six more aircraft and a York had crashed on a night take-off from Wunstorf, killing all five of the crew. But it was remarkably few considering the constant stream of aircraft flying backwards and forwards to Berlin – one landing and taking off every three minutes now, twenty-four hours a day. If, for any reason, a pilot couldn't land in his appointed turn the new rule was that he had to go round and fly back to his base with the load still on board. In that way there were no hold-ups and less risk of collision. The procession kept going. Practice was making it, if not perfect, a whole lot better than the shambles there had been at the start of it all.

Even Tubby was cautiously optimistic.

‘We might be in with a chance, Michael. Just a slim chance. I'll say no more than that.'

‘That's a lot better than none at all.'

‘Mind you, there's still the one thing we can't do much about.'

‘What's that?'

‘The weather. Winter's round the corner. Fog, snow, ice. It goes down to minus twenty and more in these parts, you know. We'll never keep up with the supplies in bad weather conditions. I hear there's a store of food and coal stocks for thirty days. That's running it damn close. How are the Berliners going to survive a bad winter with no heating and nothing to eat? They won't think we're quite so wonderful by next January.'

‘Haven't you heard, Tubby? The Americans have promised another sixty-six C-54s. They're due next month, and they can carry nearly ten tons each. That makes a hell of a lot of coal.'

Tubby raised his glass. ‘God bless America! Jolly good for them. Without Uncle Sam there wouldn't be a hope. But I still say the weather could defeat the whole thing. And General Winter's always been on the Russians' side – if you'll recall from your history books.'

‘We'd better start praying for a mild one, then.'

‘Personally, I don't have a lot of faith in prayer, dear boy. We'll just have to hope that Dame Fortune is on
our
side, against the general.'

Harrison had paid several more visits to the apartment in Albrecht Strasse, taking cut-out pictures of planes for Rudi as well as bars of chocolate. He had stopped trying to persuade himself that this was his only reason. He liked the kid and he was sorry for him because he'd had a pretty raw deal in life, but it was Lili he went to see, though he was convinced that she only tolerated him for her brother's sake. He was the enemy: one of those who had bombed her city to dust, killed thousands of her fellow citizens, including some of her family. For his part, though he might regret the killings, he could never regret the role he had played in defeating the Nazis. Or apologize for it. On the contrary, he was proud of it.