The Good Pilot, Peter Woodhouse

  The major laughed. “I wish I had your certainty. Mind-reader, are you?”

  “It’s all there on that piece of paper,” pointed out the interpreter. “He seems to be confirming it.”

  The major turned back to Ubi. “We are sending home a number of prisoners,” he said. “They are either very sick or very deserving – mostly sick, although heaven knows what they can do for them back in Germany. A smaller number are men who have done something to help us – men like you. There are very few of those, I might add.”

  Ubi listened.

  “You live in Berlin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to go back there? The Soviets . . .”

  “But you are there too, I hear.”

  The major nodded. “The Americans, yes. The British and the French too. You can go if you wish.”

  He collected his few possessions – a kit bag, a spare shirt that he had tried to launder in cold water.

  “Don’t tell the other men you’re leaving,” the major had warned him. “Say that you’re being transferred to another prisoner-of-war camp. They might not take it too well.”

  When he went back to the major’s tent, he was told to take off his clothes and change into a new set of clothing they provided for him. The trousers were too large, but he was given an old tie to serve as belt. They were at least clean, as was the shirt they gave him. There were even fresh underclothes, fastened with drawstrings because elastic was hard to come by. His old clothing was picked up by a Canadian corporal, his face distorted with unconcealed distaste, and thrown on the ground outside.

  “Burn all that,” snapped the major. “Don’t leave it there, for God’s sake.”

  The corporal went outside and gestured to a soldier to fetch a can of petrol. A few drops were sprinkled on the clothing and a match applied. Ubi was surprised at the size of the flames that enveloped his abandoned clothing, and the smoke too. It was his past that was in flames, he thought, and he was grateful. He was cleansed. He had fresh clothing and was being taken back to Germany, taken home, to find out whether his mother and sister were still alive.

  “You’re a fortunate man,” said the major.

  Ubi knew he was right. He wanted to thank the officer for what he had done, but he could not get the words out. Words, it seemed, had deserted him, as if his brain sensed that there was no point in trying to express the immensity of what had happened. Only two reactions to war seemed possible: a silence, as of horror, or a wail of anguish.

  “You’re fortunate because you’re no longer in uniform,” the major went on. “These men . . .” He gestured to the corporal and a guard standing at the entrance to the tent. “These men are still in uniform.”

  Now Ubi found his voice. “You are very kind, sir.”

  The major sighed. “Doing my job, that’s all.” He gave Ubi a piece of paper impressed with an official stamp. “You are no longer a prisoner of war,” he said. “You are demobilised, as of now. You are a civilian again.”

  They took him away with two other men. One had a bandaged head and looked dazed and unsure what was happening. The other seemed to be uninjured, but muttered incessantly under his breath in a heavy, unfamiliar dialect. They were driven to another army post, where they waited several hours before being loaded, with other men, into an army truck just as night was descending. The back of the truck was closed, and they saw nothing. One of the men started to sing one of the songs they had been taught, the Westerwaldlied, but this was greeted with scowls, and he stopped halfway through a line, awkward and embarrassed.

  They were transferred onto a train late at night, into an open wagon into which a few blankets had been tossed. They were not told where the train was going, other than Germany; they would have to make their way home from wherever it was that it stopped. After what seemed like an interminable wait, the engine started its journey; he tried to settle, lying down on one of the blankets, but the train jolted and squeaked and sleep eluded him. Lying awake, he looked sideways through a gap in the slats that made up the side of the wagon, watching such lights as the battered towns possessed. There was an acrid smell; the train had been used for transporting lignite, and his new clothes were soon discoloured with the dust of the cheap coal. He did not care. He was returning to Germany, and whatever had happened to it, it was still Germany; it was still his country.

  ❖ 19 ❖

  With his release document in his hand, Ubi considered himself lucky: others lingered far longer than he as prisoners or forced labourers, and many succumbed, particularly those who fell into the hands of the Russians. Yet he had a feeling of being cast adrift, at the beginning of a journey that would be long, complicated, and beset with bureaucratic obstacles. The original release paper, so potent in getting him on that train back to Germany, would have a great deal of work to do, and he feared it would soon lose its power. There were just too many displaced persons; there were just too many ration books and travel passes to be issued for much time to be spent on the claims of one young man who had been released early and simply wanted to get back to a home that probably no longer existed. A whole country had been uprooted and turned upside down; everybody was looking for somebody, and the ether was full of echoing, plaintive cries: ich suche meine Frau; ich suche meinen Sohn – I am looking for my wife; I am looking for my son. Scraps of paper were pinned on notice boards, half obscuring one another like the over-abundant leaves of trees in full foliage, each a record of a desperate attempt to find out what had happened to sons, to brothers, to husbands. Do you know anybody who was at Stalingrad? Did anybody ever mention a Sergeant Kurt Muller from Hamburg, who was posted there?

  Prisoners of war were fed, but those, like Ubi, who were demobilised had to find work if they were to eat. He had no idea whether his mother and sister were still alive; he had not heard from them and he had found out that the street on which they lived in Berlin had been reduced to rubble. Stories of the atrocities suffered at the hands of the Russians had filtered through: whispered accounts of rape on an unremittingly brutal scale. They said that the bodies of those who were killed had simply disappeared under the broken buildings and would never be recovered. The rats grew fat on this hidden bounty – their tunnels reached places where the efforts of those clearing the ruins would never penetrate. People said that it was a place of silence, like a city of the dead, shocked by the fate it had brought upon itself.

  That first train journey had ended on a station in a small city that had got off fairly lightly in the bombing raids. Almost three-quarters of it was intact, and there was food too, as it was a market town for the surrounding countryside. Although there was no coal, the woods nearby provided wood for fuel, and people brought this into town each afternoon on hand carts loaded with bark and hand-sawn timber.

  The population was less dispersed than in places where the physical destruction had been worse. Yet even so, there were few men, and certainly not enough men of Ubi’s age to do the work that needed to be done. He had been intending to join the streams of people he had seen heading to a nearby larger city, but on his first morning he was approached by a woman at the railway station. She asked him whether he could help her: she owned an inn, she said; her husband had been on the eastern front and there was no word of him. “I don’t think he will be back,” she said. “I like to tell myself otherwise, but I am a realist.”

  He lowered his eyes. Was she blaming him, in some way, for what had happened? Her tone had been almost accusing, and he thought she might imagine him to be a party member, or an SS man, or something that he had not been.

  “In what way do you think I can help?” he asked.

  “I need somebody to help me at the inn,” she said. “I need somebody to do the man’s work. To fix things.”

  She mentioned that the person who helped her would get a warm room – it was above the kitchen – and his keep. “I have food,” she said. “My inn is being used by British officers who are billeted there. Not fighting people – administr
ators. They’re the new government, you see. I prepare their rations.” She looked at him meaningfully. “I prepare their rations,” she repeated.

  Hunger gnawed at his stomach. He had not eaten for eighteen hours, and from somewhere in the station there came the smell of soup. He was dirty.

  “I even have hot water,” said the woman. “Not much, but enough.”

  He met her gaze. “I want to get back to Berlin,” he said.

  She looked at him as if he had said something beyond comprehension. “Berlin is full of Russians,” she said. “And it’s surrounded.”

  “I’d like to go eventually.”

  “But not now?”

  “Maybe not now.”

  She smiled. “So you’ll work for me?”

  He nodded. He was tired.

  They walked back to the inn, which was not far from the station. A British military car was parked outside it, a Union Jack pennant limp in the lifeless air.

  “That’s the English colonel’s car,” said the woman. “He has an office next to his room. He prefers to work there.”

  He nodded. “Do they pay you?”

  “Not what I would like, but something. It means I can keep the inn open – most of the others have closed.”

  She showed him to his room. Her name, she told him, was Ilse Marten. Her father had been a Lutheran pastor, she said, and he had died four years before the war began. “I am glad he died then,” she said. “He was spared the worst of the monster who got us into this.”

  “This war?”

  She looked at him cautiously; she had spoken freely, but now ancient habit reasserted itself. There were still fanatics who had not changed their views and one had to be circumspect in what one said. He put her mind at rest. “It’s a pity they didn’t hang him,” he muttered. “They got the others – or a lot of them – but he cheated them.”

  She looked relieved. “Well, that settles that,” she said. “If you make a fire under the boiler you can have some hot water. I have a razor you can use, if you like – it was my husband’s.”

  He mumbled something. What was there to say, beyond the trite expressions of sympathy?

  As she had promised, his room was warm, the heat coming from the flue of the kitchen range directly below. This was exposed as it passed up through his room, and there was warmth, too, that came up through the floorboards, along with cooking smells. He later learned that there was coal – it was not meant for civilians, but the British officers were entitled to it and they passed it on to Ilse for kitchen use.

  He took off his socks and felt the warmth underfoot. It took him back to Holland, where they had enjoyed an ample supply of wood for heating their barracks. Defeat had been cold; it had been hunger and cold.

  “You may have a bath,” said Ilse. “I have run the water for you. And there is soap.”

  He had not seen soap for weeks and he handled it now as if it were something precious. In the bath he noticed that he was changing colour as the grime came off; it was as if he were shedding a skin.

  She entered the room with a towel, unconcerned at his nakedness. Nobody seemed to worry about such things any longer; modesty was unimportant when survival was at stake.

  The towel was clean and smelled of something he could not quite place. And then he remembered: it was lavender. It was one of the familiar smells that had simply gone from his memory, replaced by the overpowering smells of war: smoke, burning rubber, the stink of putrefaction. There was even a smell for fear – a sharp, uneasy tang that was something to do with the sweat of frightened men. And now the smell of lavender came back to him, and as he pressed the towel to his face he felt the urge to weep. There was so much to bring tears: the loss of those years of his youth when he should have been happy; his recruitment into a cause of rampage and killing; the pain of others; the humiliation of defeat. He was nothing: the conquerors were here, among them, and he and so many like him counted for nothing.

  He went downstairs, where she gave him a bowl of soup. He sat at the kitchen table and tried to control his hunger; it would not do to sink this in a single draught, which is what he wanted to do. He did not want her to think he was that desperate. But he was, and the soup took seconds to disappear.

  She was watching, half amused, half pitying. “Let your stomach get used to food,” she said. “They say that you can do damage if you eat too much too quickly.”

  He nodded. “I have been so hungry.”

  She smiled at him, and poured a small second helping of soup into the bowl. “They expect us to survive on less than half of what they get,” she said. “I’ve seen it in print – in black and white. Our ration is meant to be one thousand calories a day. We don’t get even that.”

  He stared into the soup bowl. Now it was all charity – every scrap came at the will of those put in authority over them. And yet, he thought, this is our payback. This is what we started, if it was indeed true that we started it. He could not remember. There were vague claims; had Poland provoked Germany? Had it been necessary to attack the Russians because of what they were doing to Germans who had the misfortune to live in the east?

  She was saying something to him about work, and he stopped thinking of issues of retribution. He apologised. “I’m sorry – I wasn’t listening.”

  She explained that if he felt strong enough, there was wood to be chopped. She had bought a load of felled oak from a man she knew but the pieces were too large to fit into the stove. And then there was a window that needed repairing. She had managed to get her hands on a piece of glass that should fit – it was probably stolen from somebody else, but if you started asking questions nowadays you would never get anything done. Everything was stolen, and had he heard: the Russians had removed everything, even things that were bolted down, and sent it back to Russia – whole factories, cranes, even small buildings that could be dismantled and shipped off. And people too, of course; they were easy to transport: you simply loaded them into the wagons of a train and then unloaded those who were still alive at the other end. Siberia, or somewhere.

  “Mind you . . .” she said.

  He waited. Mind you, what?

  “Mind you, the colonel has shown me photographs that you wouldn’t believe. Our people doing the same thing. Packing people off to camps in the east. They died there, you know.” She paused. “He had photographs. They’re making people – civilians – look at the photographs. Then they say: See this? See what you people did?”

  He looked away. He would never have allowed anything like that. If there was a stain, then it was not on his hands.

  He started work after the meal. At four o’clock that afternoon, some of the officers who were billeted on the hotel returned from work. One of them looked at him with distaste, and threw an enquiring look at Ilse. She shook her head.

  “He was never in the army or anything,” she said in English. She searched for the English word – was there one? “Asthma.” She pointed at Ubi’s chest.

  He did not understand, but the officer merely raised an eyebrow and went off to his room.

  Ilse turned to Ubi and told him what she had said. “It’s simpler that they don’t know,” she said. “Especially that one. He likes young men and it’s best for you if he thinks you’re . . .” She tapped her chest. “Understand?”

  He tried to work out Ilse’s age. Ubi was just twenty-three, and he thought that she must be somewhere in her thirties. But two days after he arrived she told him that she was coming up to her twenty-eighth birthday. She had married when she was twenty, and had experienced barely five years of marriage before her husband had been conscripted into the army. She had managed to run the inn by herself, with the help of the staff who had been there since before they bought it; but then those people had retired, or moved for various reasons connected with the war, and she had been obliged to work longer and longer hours. At length it had been only her and two part-time chambermaids, which was why Ubi’s arrival was so welcome.

  It did not take him l
ong to settle in. The regular meals, the security of being host to the occupying forces, and the warmth and comfort of his room made him happy to stay where he was and not think about going on to Berlin. Winter was approaching, and people said that it would be severe. They said that rations would be reduced and that the slow march of starvation would devour whole swathes of Germany. It was no time to be doing anything adventurous; far better to put up with the tedium of the wood-cutting and the other mundane tasks he was expected to perform. It would be madness to go to Berlin at this point, Ilse said; the Russians could seize him on any grounds, or no grounds at all, and spirit him off to a factory or a mine in the Soviet Union. That had happened to hundreds of thousands of Germans, they said; men who were now working in Soviet coal mines or on building sites, repairing the wrecked towns and cities. They would need more as these men, undernourished and badly housed, died in droves. If you go to Berlin, she said, then that will be you.

  He realised that there would be work to do on the inn itself. Little maintenance had been done for years, the neglect going back to a time well before the war. There was a barn at the back, full of old agricultural implements, and behind it, half covered by a frayed tarpaulin, some sort of round wooden structure that intrigued him. It was like a vast towering vat, a straight-sided wine barrel, perhaps, the height of at least three men, and of vast capacity. There was lettering on the side of it, but it was difficult, with the tarpaulin and the effect of weathering, to make out what this said.

  On the second day he asked her. “That thing out there. That big barrel.”

  They were standing in the kitchen, where he was drying plates before stacking them on the shelves.

  She smiled. “Big barrel? I suppose you could call it that.”

  He waited for the explanation. She had moved over to the window and was looking out towards the barn.

  “It’s a Motodrom,” she said. “It’s a fairground thing. You ride your motorcycle round and round and then you go up the wall and you carry on going round and round on that. You defy gravity. Fairground stuff.”