The Good Pilot, Peter Woodhouse

  The shape, the writing: of course.

  “I know what a Motodrom is,” he said. “I’ve seen one before.”

  “Well, that’s what that is.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “You have a Motodrom . . .”

  “It’s pretty decrepit. It hasn’t been used for years.”

  He looked out of the window towards the barn. “Amazing. A Motodrom. You know, when I was a boy there were fairground people who came to Berlin. They must have been from somewhere deep in the south, because they spoke with a very broad Bavarian accent. You’d think they were singing half the time. They had a Motodrom. I used to spend my pocket money on tickets to watch them. I loved it.”

  She looked at him indulgently. “I suppose that when you’re a boy, something like that is very exciting.”

  “It was. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen.”

  “I can imagine that,” she said. “Noise. Danger. Speed. The things that boys like.” And men, she thought; hence this war.

  “I thought then,” Ubi continued, “when I was a boy, that is, that I’d give anything – anything – to have a Motodrom. I thought it would be the finest thing in the world to own a Motodrom.”

  Ilse laughed. “I’ll sell you mine. Not that you – or anybody else – would want to buy it.” Then she said, “You know what the English officers call it? It’s called a wall of death over there, they told me. One of them was interested in it. The fat one with the moustache. He said he’d seen one in England and that’s what they called it.”

  Ubi asked where it came from.

  “It belonged to my husband’s uncle. He had no children and he left it to him. My husband said he’d get it going again one day. The uncle always said there was good money in it.”

  “He’d ride it himself?”

  She came back from the window and looked at him in a way that conveyed that she did not wish to talk about her husband.

  The knowledge that he had somewhere to stay – and the sense of security this brought – meant that the fractured, fitful sleep patterns that had been with him since his conscription were fading, and his nights becoming restful once again. He began to look forward to the moment when he finished the washing up after the evening meal – a task that Ilse had been eager to off-load – and he could go up to his room, throw off his clothes, and sink into the haven of laundered sheets and a down mattress. It was unfathomable luxury for him after army beds, and then no bed at all. The dreams that came to him were vague and confused: he was in Holland, then he was somewhere else altogether, in a landscape he did not recognise; he was back at school, writing in an exercise book, dimly aware that he was being tested in some way; he was in the company of his brother who had gone missing, who in his dream embraced him and told him that everything was all right, even though he was dead.

  In a vivid dream that recurred from time to time he was in the presence of someone powerful. They were walking somewhere and the other person was singing some little song under his breath, chopping at wildflowers with a walking stick. And he knew his name – that was the astonishing thing; he called him Ubi and asked him if he had anything he wanted to say to him. Was this the Führer himself? Surely not, because he knew Ubi’s name and he looked different, although he was wearing something that looked like a uniform.

  He told Ilse about these dreams one day and she said that it was very common to dream about their vanished leaders. “So many people have told me this happens to them,” she said. “It’s because they penetrated our lives so deeply. You dream of things like that, you know.”

  “And you?” he asked. “Do you dream about them too?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I know of. But then they say, don’t they, that everyone has his particular nightmares.”

  “And yours?” he asked.

  She hesitated before answering. “The Jews,” she said. “I dream about the Jews.”

  He watched her. He saw her lower her eyes.

  “We murdered them,” she said. “We took their houses, their businesses, everything. Then we sent them away to be killed.”

  He did not say anything. People were only just beginning to talk about these things, and many simply refused to believe them. How could so many people be disposed of in that way? Surely it was impossible.

  But he knew it was true. “It happened,” he said.

  She met his eyes. “It’s our fault,” she said. “We all became murderers. And it was not just the Jews – it was the Gypsies and the insane and all sorts of people. All marched off to be killed.”

  He wanted to do something for her evident pain. “You didn’t do it personally,” he said. “You’re only accountable for things you do personally.”

  She wanted to believe him, but it seemed to her that the crime was just too big; it required a whole nation to commit something on that scale. “There were some Jews here, you know,” she said. “The party people painted signs on their doors. They broke their windows. I saw some of them doing it; I saw them from my kitchen window. And what did I do? Nothing. I stood and watched.”

  “You would have got into trouble if you’d tried to do anything,” Ubi said. “People were sent to prison for less.”

  “Oh, I know that,” she said, suddenly sounding weary. “But the fact remains that I did nothing. And now we’re paying for that. All this hardship is because of what we started.”

  “We can begin again,” said Ubi. “They might make us pay, but they can’t make us all pay with our lives.”

  She was staring at him. “You’re ready to start again?” she asked.

  “Of course. And Germany will start up again. You watch.”

  “I’m watching,” she said wearily.

  There were ten officers billeted at the inn. Five of them spoke German – two of them with a facility approaching the fluency of a native speaker. One was an intelligence officer; the others were part of the military government for that part of the British sector. They were mostly concerned with mundane matters – transport and provisions, criminal justice; two had been lawyers in civilian life and now found themselves dealing with the crimes of desperate people – and with the control of disease. Theft had become an almost natural response to shortage; if you were hungry, you stole – there was a simple, inarguable logic to that response. People who were not prepared to steal died. But they perished, too, of typhus and dysentery, and of sheer neglect; they died because nobody cared very much for them, not even their fellow citizens.

  One of the German-speaking officers asked Ubi whether he would like to learn English. “I could teach you,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll be a quick learner. And, as payment, you can help me with my German – I still get things wrong from time to time. And people are always using colloquial expressions that I’ve never come across before. It would be helpful to learn a few more of those.”

  He readily agreed, and the lessons were conducted each day in the twenty minutes before dinner. Ilse liked to work in the kitchen by herself, and did not ask Ubi to help. “You’ll have plenty to do once the plates are cleared,” she said.

  He sat with the officer in the small parlour at the front of the inn. The officer had a book that he lent to Ubi; it had pictures of everyday things in it with the English nouns printed below.

  “A hat,” said Ubi, pointing to a picture of a man in a bowler hat, under which the word hat appeared.

  The man was looking towards the camera and smiling broadly. Ubi switched to German: “He doesn’t look guilty, does he?”

  The officer looked surprised. “Why should he look guilty?” he asked.

  Ubi shrugged. “I suppose it’s because so many people look guilty. I suppose I’ve come to expect it.” He paused. “But then the man in this picture is English, isn’t he?”

  “I think so,” said the officer. “Look at the red buses in the background. That’s always a giveaway, I find.”

  “The English have nothing to feel guilty about,” said Ubi.

  T
he officer smiled. “Nice of you to say that,” he said. “But we also have a history, you know.”

  Ubi stared at the officer. His face was unremarkable, although there was a certain pleasing regularity to it. His eyes were clear, and he looked straight at you when he spoke. That was an ability that came with never having done anything he was ashamed of, thought Ubi.

  There was a picture of a family drinking tea. Each person, and each item, was labelled with the appropriate English word: father, mother, son, daughter; cup, saucer, teaspoon; and so on. Through the window could be seen a tree and a hill. It was a world that seemed to suit the softer nature of the words, even if Vater and Mutter clearly came from the same place as father and mother. This was not a language to shout in, thought Ubi; this was not a language with which to articulate threats, or invade, or terrify others.

  He was a quick learner, and he was soon able to read the cyclostyled newsletters that the British prepared for their own troops. The officer helped him with this, encouraging and complimenting as he stumbled through the easily smudged text. There was piece about fraternization; a warning not to trust German civilians.

  “Do not talk to these people,” read Ubi, enunciating each word carefully. These people . . . Who were these people? Me?

  The officer looked apologetic and switched to German to explain. “They don’t really mean ordinary people. They mean people who might have been SS or something like that. People who haven’t accepted the outcome. That’s what this means.”

  “But it says ordinary civilians,” said Ubi.

  “We don’t follow rules in quite the same way as you people do,” said the officer. And then, as if to himself, “That’s the trouble. I mean, the trouble with you people, so to speak.”

  And then, looking out of the window, and as if talking to himself rather than to Ubi, the officer continued, “I don’t want to be here, you know. Like most people, I don’t want to be here at all.”

  “But if you weren’t here,” said Ubi, “wouldn’t it be even more terrible?”

  The next two years passed quickly for Ubi. He was kept busy in the inn, and soon became indispensable not only in the kitchen, but in the performance of a range of maintenance tasks. He became skilled in woodwork and in plumbing, and even managed to fathom and sort out the building’s antiquated electrical wiring. He generally kept to himself; the war had been a waking nightmare and now he wanted nothing so much as the peace and quiet of a modest, uncomplicated life. In April 1948 he had news of his family, thanks to the help of the officer who had been teaching him English. He used contacts in the British sector in Berlin to make enquiries on Ubi’s behalf, and came up with the address of the landlord who had owned the building in which they had lived. This man responded, and told him that unfortunately his mother had been killed when a mortar shell came through the window in May 1945. His sister had gone to live with one of the other residents – a widow – and had stayed there until quite recently. He was sorry to report that she had become ill – it was typhus, he believed – and she, too, had died. She had a young child, he said, and the widow had looked after the little boy. The widow had moved, but he had her address as she had done some work for him and he was still in touch with her. She had a small job and she was hard up, but the boy was still with her, he thought.

  Ilse found him in the kitchen with the letter on the table in front of him. There was a pile of onion skins beside it, and when she saw his tears she smiled. “Don’t you know what to do?” she chided. “When you’re peeling onions, you should have a tap running nearby. It stops you crying.”

  She laughed, and scooped the onions skins away to put in the compost. And then she realised her mistake.

  He gestured to the letter, inviting her to pick it up. She read the first few sentences and then dropped it back on the table. She put her arms around him. “Ubi, Ubi . . .” Somehow, in that moment, she felt that the sorrows of Germany had crystallised, and she wept too – not just for this woman and her daughter, who were just two amongst millions, but for everything, for all the hatred and injustice and revenge; for all the immeasurable pain.

  He told her that he should get back to Berlin, even if only to see what remained of their home, which might be nothing but an empty space; in pictures, Berlin looked a wasteland, a place in which troglodytes eked out an existence in the basements of ruins. Ilse tried to dissuade him, but she knew that he had to go. She had heard that from so many others, who had said that they were drawn back to the place where it happened, to the site of their loss.

  “And there’s a child,” he added. “My sister’s child. I must see him.” He was virtually alone now; he had lost all his family and this unknown child was all he had.

  “Of course you must.”

  “I feel responsible, you see.”

  A few weeks earlier he and Ilse had become lovers, shyly and with very little being said about it. He had worked for her for over two years, and had become indispensable about the inn. He had repaired the roof – a task that took over eight months – and had replaced rotten timbers on the ground floor, scouring bombsites for wood, shaping each by hand. It was comfort and tenderness that lay at the heart of their relationship, rather than passion. It was as if they were children lost in a wood, holding onto one another in the darkness.

  “If you go to Berlin,” she said, “will you come back here?”

  She did not say “come back to me”, as she did not want him to feel trapped.

  He replied that he would. “Of course I shall.” And then he said, “And I’ll ask you to marry me then.”

  She hardly dared speak, but she managed to say, “Can I?”

  “Because of . . .” She hardly ever mentioned her husband, but he knew that he was called Erik. “Because of Erik?”

  She nodded. “I suppose he’s dead, but . . .”

  “I think he must be.”

  It was as if his words were an official confirmation. “Then in that case, I can,” she said.

  They left the discussion at that. He told her that he would be no more than a few weeks in Berlin and would be back before she knew it. She smiled, and kissed his forehead gently. She said a prayer, silently, because she believed in God and she thought that he did not.

  “You can bring the child back,” she whispered. “There’s room for a child here.”

  He stared at her, moved by her generosity. That had been evident from the very first day, when she had accosted him at the station, and it had continued: the soups, the comfortable bed, the laundering of his shirts, the bottles of Burgundy diverted from the supplies of the British officers. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t know anything about him,” said Ubi. “I don’t even know who the father is.” An unspoken word hung in the air between them: Russian.

  On the evening before he was due to leave, one of the British officers, a newly arrived one – they were always changing – removed the tarpaulin from the abandoned Motodrom. Several of his fellow officers joined him, some still in uniform, having just come off duty. They shouted to one another, and their laughter drifted back to the inn, where Ubi and Ilse were watching from a window.

  Ubi turned to Ilse. “Did they ask you?”

  She shrugged. “One said something about taking a look at it. Not that young one. The one with the bad skin – he asked me.”

  Ubi wondered what they intended to do, and was about to ask her when he heard the motorcycle. One of the younger officers appeared from round the side of the building, riding an army motorbike.

  He looked at Ilse. “Do you think . . .”

  “They’d be mad,” she said. “But then the British are mad – everybody knows that.”

  The officers had managed to open a door in the side of the Motodrom. The motorbike was now driven up to this and the rider dismounted and pushed it inside.

  Ilse opened the window at which she and Ubi were standing. She shouted out towards the officers. “Careful. That’s very dangerous.
”

  The officers waved back gaily, but paid no attention.

  They heard the sound of the motorbike engine reverberating inside the Motodrom, and then a thud, followed by silence.

  Laughter broke the silence, followed by raucous shouting, and then more laughter.

  “Boys,” said Ilse. And then she thought about the war, and she thought boys again.

  ❖ 20 ❖

  He had been prepared for the destruction he found in Berlin, although people he met there kept telling him how bad it had been a few years back, in 1945. “You wouldn’t believe it,” said the only one of his friends from school he managed to locate. Stoffi suffered from asthma and that had saved his life, as he had been given a wireless operator’s job that kept him far from the front line, almost up to the end. “You wouldn’t believe the stench, Ubi. Everywhere. Weeks, months of stench, because many of the Russians, the real peasants, came from places where there was no proper sanitation and they didn’t know. The other thing they didn’t know about was watches. They’d never had watches and so they stole every watch they could get their hands on. They wore them all the way up their arms – five or six under each sleeve. But you couldn’t laugh at them when they rolled their sleeves up and the watches appeared, because they could fly into a rage without any warning. Anywhere. Everywhere. You wouldn’t believe it, Ubi; you wouldn’t.”

  At first, he listened without making any comment of his own. Invasion – defeat – was a brute fact about which one could say very little, even if one was the guiltless victim. But in our case, he thought, we are far from guiltless and so can say even less. We did it to them, and now they’re doing it to us. Who could blame the Russians?

  “We’re surrounded,” said Stoffi. “And they’ll turn the screws. Of course they will.”

  “But what can they do? What about the others? The Americans? The British? The French?”