The Pathfinder (3 page)

Grandfather was asleep in the armchair, head sunk on his chest, and Rudi was lying on the couch, reading a book. He was always reading – any book he could lay his hands on, whether he could understand it or not. He had gone through all the ones that had survived the bombing raids and the Russian soldiers – novels, essays, poetry, plays, Father's heavy philosophy tomes, travel books, the English novels of Charles Dickens that Father had so admired, dictionaries, even Mother's fashion magazines. It had helped to make up for all the schooling that he had missed. Today, it was an old atlas. He looked up.

‘Sumatra and Java have an annual rainfall of three thousand millimetres, did you know that, Lili?'

‘No. I'd no idea.'

‘So does Borneo. It's because of the monsoon, you see.'

She took off her jacket and untied the cotton scarf from around her head. Her back and arms were aching, her hands bleeding, her fingernails broken and filthy. It seemed a very long time since she had sat in a classroom and learned about such things. ‘Yes, I suppose it would be. What else have you found out?'

He turned some pages. ‘This is interesting too. Siberia has lots of forests with all kinds of trees. Fir trees, spruce, larch, oak, elm, maple, walnut, wild apple, stone pines, pitch pines, Manchu pines . . . I never knew that, did you?'

‘If I did, I've forgotten.' She went over to the couch. It was a huge old thing with plush upholstery and scrolled mahogany ends that had once stood in her mother's shop and had somehow survived with only a few bayonet swipes and slashes. She looked down at her brother. ‘Are you feeling better?'

‘Yes, much.'

He didn't look it. He was still very pale with dark rings under his eyes. They were all thin, but Rudi's arms and legs were like sticks. She felt his forehead, which was quite cool.

‘See, Lili? I'm fine now. I'll go to school tomorrow.'

‘Perhaps.' She drew the blanket up to cover his bare legs. ‘You must keep warm.'

‘I
am
warm. It's not winter. It's April.'

‘The air is still cold. Has Grandfather been asleep for long?'

‘All the afternoon, I think.'

‘I'll wake him soon, when I've started the supper.'

‘What is there?'

‘We have some potatoes and carrots and a little sausage. We'll have soup and bread. You must eat all you can.'

The room had once been the formal
salon
, now it was simply the room where they lived. One part was the kitchen, another the part where they ate and sat; the couch in the corner where Rudi was lying was also her bed at night, with a tattered screen dragged round it. Her grandfather and brothers all slept in the second room; the third was a bathroom. For a long time after the bombing there had been no running water, but now there was cold water at least. And electricity where there had been only candles, if they could find them.

She tied an apron round her waist and began peeling and dicing the potatoes and carrots. When they were cooking in the saucepan on the stove, she went over to her grandfather and shook his shoulder gently. He stirred and looked up at her in his confused way. ‘Irma?'

‘It's Lili, Grandfather. Time for you to wake up. Supper will be ready soon.'

His eyes were sad. ‘I thought you were your mother – just for a moment.' He had grown more and more muddled in his mind over the past year – sleeping long hours and retreating into a world of his own. At other times, though, he was still clear-headed and like his old self. ‘What time is it, Lili?'

‘Past seven o'clock.'

‘In the evening?'

‘Yes.'

He began to struggle up from the armchair. ‘We must listen to the wireless . . . the news . . .'

The black and red
volksempfanger
– one of Goebbels's thousands of people's receivers manufactured to spread the Nazi propaganda into every home – stood on a high shelf. He reached up to switch it on and fumbled clumsily with the tuning wheel. After a moment, when it had warmed up, a blast of American swing music filled the room, then loud squawks and more crackles, and then a flood of Russian from Radio Berlin. ‘But where is the BBC? We must know what is really happening. Find it for me, Lili. It is very important.'

She leaned across and switched off the set. ‘The war is over, Grandfather, don't you remember? Three years ago. That's only the Russians talking their stupid nonsense. Come and sit down at the table.'

He looked bewildered and then nodded. ‘Ah yes, of course. It's all over. Finished. I forget these things when I have been sleeping. So many dreams, you see, so many . . . and so real.'

She led him to the table and he sat down, staring vacantly into space, still wrapped up in his dreams. She served the soup and the bread, urging both him and Rudi to eat. The vegetables had been old and had a musty taste and the bread was stale but they were well used to that, and the sausage helped. Dirk's share of the soup had been left in the pan and they had almost finished theirs when he came in. By the look on her brother's face, she could tell at once he had been up to no good.

‘Where have you been, Dirk?'

As usual, he was airily evasive. ‘Here and there.'

‘Doing what?'

‘This and that.'

‘I thought you were going to try and get some work.'

He shrugged. ‘There is only labouring. They pay nothing, you know that. Look at the pittance you get. I can do better. Make much more money other ways.'

‘You mean on the black market? You know how dangerous it is. If the Russians catch you, you could be put in prison.'

‘They won't catch me. I'm very careful. Look what I've got for you.' From the deep pockets of his old raincoat he produced items like a magician and laid them all triumphantly on the table, one after the other. ‘Tinned beans, Spam, cigarettes, chocolate, and something specially to please you, Lili – soap. American soap. There!'

She stared at the haul. ‘Where did you get all this?'

‘Some American soldiers over by the Gate. I traded a couple of my watches – not the very best ones, but they liked them. Just smell the soap.' He picked it up and thrust it under her nose. ‘Feel it.' It was very smooth with a silky sheen, not dull and gritty like German soap, and it smelled of spring flowers. ‘Here Rudi, have some chocolate.' He unwrapped the bar and broke off a big piece for his brother, who crammed it into his mouth eagerly. ‘You too, Grandfather. And you, Lili.'

She shook her head. ‘No, Dirk. I don't want it. I want you to stop doing this. It's not worth the risk.'

‘It's no risk, I told you. I take care.' He met her eyes. ‘Besides, it's a lot better than some other sorts of trading, isn't it? And we need these things. The rations are a joke and there is nothing in the shops to buy anyway.'

‘But we survive.'

‘That's all we do. Survive. We don't
live.
And we don't enjoy anything. Come on, Lili. Everybody's doing the black market.'

‘In the western sectors, maybe, but not over here with the Russians. I told you, it's much too dangerous to bring stuff back. You know what they are like.'

‘Of course I know. We all do.' He looked away from her. ‘You, of all people, know it. They're peasants. The scum of the earth. Animals. We have seen that.' He opened the pack of American Camels, tapped one out and stuck it at a jaunty angle in his mouth, feeling in his pocket for his prized American Zippo lighter – the one thing she knew he would never trade for anything. It had a dent in one side that someone had told him had been made by a bullet, which, unlike many black market fairy tales, was probably quite true. He held out the pack. ‘Try one. They're good. Let's enjoy them. Enjoy something, for once.
Please
.'

He was seventeen years old and at fourteen he had been manning a machine gun at the end of their street when the Russians had entered Berlin. He was right about surviving, not living. She could remember something of the good days of peace, but, like Rudi, Dirk had known little else but war and deprivation. She took the cigarette and bent her head towards the Zippo flame.

Three

RAF Gatow lay in the British sector, fifteen miles from the centre of Berlin on the south-westerly edge of the city. The Havel See, a large inland lake that connected to the River Spree and the Berlin canals, was close by and the border with the Russian zone only half a mile away. Harrison, who had pictured a collection of war-battered tin huts in mud, was pleasantly surprised to see an impressive arched entrance to solid pre-war buildings with rendered walls, shuttered windows and tiled roofs, all laid out in a way very similar to peacetime RAF stations in England. There were paved roads, lawns, trees, shrubs, tennis courts, an indoor swimming pool, badminton court, gymnasium, cinema . . . no expense had been spared. He discovered that it had been the Luftwaffe equivalent to the RAF College, Cranwell. Goering had boasted of it and, apparently, the Führer himself had opened it in 1934. The station operational headquarters was sited at a considerable distance from the living and messing area, near a group of hangars, crewrooms, storerooms and workshops. The ops room was on the first floor, a huge map of northern Europe occupying one wall. The control room was one floor higher. Above that, a flat roof gave a panoramic view of the whole airfield.

Wing Commander Flying put him in the picture. ‘The situation's gradually getting worse, I'm sorry to say. We've got Dakotas flying in three times a day from Bückeburg up in our zone carrying food and mail, but that's not going to be near enough if the Russians step up their antics and there's no sign of them backing off at the moment.' He jabbed his pipe at the big windows looking out to the runway. ‘There's a Soviet army camp just outside our perimeter, beyond those trees over there where their zone begins, and they're making a thorough nuisance of themselves.'

‘In what way, exactly, sir?'

‘Anything they can think up. One of their latest wheezes is to lob dud shells over here. Then they send a party round to apologize, pretending it was all a big mistake, and have a good snoop to see what we're up to. A couple of weeks ago some of their soldiers set up a roadblock at a crossroads in our sector, if you please. Started stopping our vehicles and holding our drivers. We sent one of our chaps round to sort it out. He closed three of the roads so the only way they could go was back home. And we get their air force fighters buzzing around like bloody wasps.'

‘I gather they want us out of Berlin.'

The wing commander said drily, ‘So it would seem. And I think they'll get up to every devilment they can think of to achieve it. The worry of it is we're depending more and more on our supplies coming in by air and if the situation gets any worse we're in real trouble. They can make it impossible for us to stay, if they want, simply by blocking our overland supply lines. That way they'd starve us out. We're at their mercy. Nearly all the food has to be brought in and we have to feed ourselves, not to mention the German civilians in our sector. At the moment there are stocks of food for only forty-five days.'

‘Doesn't the Russian zone provide something? I saw crops growing as we came through.'

‘They've flatly refused to supply any food to the western sectors right from the very start. Made all kinds of excuses about the land being devastated by the fighting and being short themselves. They barely keep the civilians in their own sector alive: just subsistence rations. And it's not only food they won't help with. They won't let us have any of their coal so we have to bring all ours in from the Ruhr. Overland, of course. Rail or barge right across their zone.'

‘If we had to increase our air traffic considerably, could the system cope?'

‘Not a hope at the moment. Our new runway's making progress, as you can see, but it's a long way from being finished. Gatow was just a grass airfield when the Luftwaffe was here. We put down pierced steel planking on top but, of course, that won't take much weight or wear. The only plus is our radar and radio set-up. We've got the best there is and some first-class men and women to work it.' The wing co paused to relight his pipe and smiled at him. ‘Now, thank God, we've got some more.'

Harrison settled into the station routine quickly, familiarizing himself with the layout, the personnel, the names. There were over two thousand men serving at Gatow, occupying former Luftwaffe quarters which were luxurious compared with many he had endured in wartime England. There were also fifty WAAFs serving as radar operators, telephonists, clerks, nursing orderlies and cooks, as well as two flight WAAF mechanics – something he had never come across before. The Waafery had the ill luck to be sited not far from the Russian army camp and there were constant complaints that the Russian soldiers kept them awake with drunken singing at night. Apart from the British, a number of German civilians worked on the station, both men and women. The women were employed in the kitchens and as waitresses in the messes, and as cleaners; the men on the airfield worked as labourers. Quite a number of them, he noticed, were obviously well educated and must once have been accustomed to a very different kind of employment. All of them worked extremely hard, as though their lives depended on it. Which, he thought grimly, they pretty much did.

In the Officers' Mess bar he came across a squadron leader whom he'd known from his wartime service in England. Tubby Hill was an older man and had flown a desk in admin throughout the war. In the four years since Harrison had last seen him he had grown greyer and a little tubbier, but was otherwise unchanged. Tubby gave him a beaming smile.