The Good Pilot, Peter Woodhouse

  Stoffi shrugged. “They’re surrounded too – at least in Berlin. They say the Russians are already making it more difficult for them to reach us here. They say that bridges are being repaired, or railway lines need work – that sort of thing.” He paused, to make a strangling motion with his hands. “They could squeeze us just like that, you know.”

  At least the streets were now clear of rubble. The burnt cars had been removed and rebuilding had long since started. There were people on the streets and they seemed to have proper shoes – or many of them did – and the trams and trains were running. The furtiveness that he had noticed in the early days of defeat seemed less common here; people walked, rather than scurried; they looked one another in the eye, rather than shiftily, warily; there were political notices and newspapers. There were still echoes of hopelessness – that indefinable air with which he had become so familiar – but there was something else now, something quite different: a sense of a future. People were doing things purposively; they were doing things that seemed to matter to them; Germany was making things again and these things were beginning to appear in shops.

  Stoffi allowed him to sleep on the floor of the basement room he occupied. He gave him food and accompanied him when he went to look for the widow whose address he had been given.

  “People move a lot these days,” Stoffi warned Ubi. “Don’t be too disappointed if you find this woman has gone.”

  But she had not. She answered the door in a neat apron, her hands covered with flour. She had been kneading dough.

  He told her who he was, and for a few moments she stared at him in confusion. Then, as she made sense of what he had said, she raised her hands to her face. When she lowered them, there were traces of flour on her eyebrows and cheekbones. She sat down heavily on a chair in the entrance hall and shook her head.

  “I thought you were all gone,” she said. “All of you.”

  He told her that he had been taken prisoner and had been released early. He told her how he had obtained her address.

  “I thought I should see my nephew,” he explained. “I think my sister would have wanted that.”

  “Of course, of course. Your nephew . . .”

  He waited. Children had died too, many of them from malnutrition. Was he too late?

  She stood up. “Your nephew will be coming back very soon. A friend of mine has taken him to the shops. He won’t be long.”

  She invited them in. The flat was neat, but spartan in its furnishing and decoration. Poverty manifested itself in the absence of anything of any value; people had sold their possessions in difficult times. A family heirloom might have been exchanged for a few loaves of bread; an item of jewellery – a ring, a brooch – could have brought in a few kilos of donkey meat.

  As he waited, he tried to make conversation. He asked about what had happened to his mother and his sister, but she was able to tell him very little. She had been somewhere else when his mother’s flat had been hit; and his sister, whom she did not know very well, had died rather quickly. She had taken the child in because there did not seem to be anybody else and it was her duty, she said, as a Christian. She did not know where either of them was buried; so many people, she said, had shallow graves that were either unmarked or only temporarily recorded. He asked the widow about the days after the Russians had arrived, but she clearly did not want to talk about that. She shuddered, though, involuntarily, and then started to discuss a Russian film she had seen the previous day. It had been beautifully filmed, she said, and if it had been propaganda, then that side of it had been lost on her, as she had no Russian.

  The friend returned with the boy half an hour later. She was carrying a large paper bag into which groceries had been stuffed; at her feet, clinging onto her skirts, was a small boy of about three. He was wearing a tight-fitting cap that failed to cover his ears and a shabby red coat, and he stared at Ubi and Stoffi with the unembarrassed curiosity of the very young.

  The child was dark-skinned, his black hair knotted with small curls.

  Ubi smiled at the boy, and then looked at the widow. She held his gaze, almost defiantly, as if she were daring him to say something.

  “What’s his name?” he asked.

  “Klaus,” she said.

  Ubi stepped forward and bent down to address the child at his level. He reached out for the boy’s right hand, and held it briefly in his own. “So you’re Klaus,” he said. “And I’m your uncle.”

  The boy looked at the widow, as if to ask permission to respond. She smiled encouragingly, but he was too timid to say anything.

  Ubi stood up again. The widow stepped back; she had been about to whisper something into his ear. “An American father,” she said.

  He looked at the child again. “I see.”

  She nodded. “It was not easy for your sister,” she said. “People abused her because of the child’s being mixed race. Some people actually spat at her.”

  His chest felt tight. “This man . . . the father . . . was she . . .”

  The widow knew what he was trying to ask. “No, don’t think that. She said he was kind to her. And people had to make whatever arrangements they could in those times, you know.”

  He let out his breath slowly. “Did he know about the child?”

  The widow shrugged. “He may have – I don’t know. Your sister told me that he had been sent somewhere else. He was a sergeant. She showed me a photograph.”

  The child was watching him with widened eyes. He reached into his pocket and took out a small bar of chocolate, which he unwrapped. He offered it to the small boy, who hesitated, and then took it from him.

  “We need to talk,” said Ubi.

  The widow nodded. “I would appreciate it if you were able to help in some way.”

  “I’ll take him,” said Ubi. “If you don’t mind letting him go, I’ll take him back with me. I have a place to live, and I’m going to be getting married. We shall look after him well.”

  The widow hesitated, but not for long. “I would have been happy to continue,” she said. “I would never have turned him out, but it’s such a struggle to get by . . .” She looked at him hopelessly. It was a miracle, it seemed to him, that people managed to continue. From somewhere within themselves they found the will to persist, to scrape a living, to patch and mend, to find small ways of expressing their sense of beauty – a few flowers plucked and put in a cracked egg cup serving as a vase; a printed picture cut from a magazine and pasted on cardboard; a splash of colour in a threadbare dress.

  He reached out and touched her arm. “I understand,” he said. “And I’m very grateful to you – I really am.”

  “You have work back there?” she asked. “Real work?” The labour draft had sucked up able-bodied men for construction, but the pay was minimal.

  He told her about the inn. “My fiancée” – it was the first time he had used the word of Ilse – “my fiancée owns it.”

  “Ah.”

  He noticed a change in her expression. Was it envy? When most had nothing, the possession of something had to be concealed. So he said, “It’s not a big place. It’s a very modest concern. Just a few rooms.”

  He was right; it had been envy, because the look disappeared.

  “Klaus will be well fed,” he said.

  She prickled with resentment. “I’ve done my best on what I get.”

  He was quick to reassure her. “I’m sure you have. And he looks very healthy, doesn’t he?”

  He did not, and they both knew it. But she accepted the compliment, and then turned to Stoffi and asked him where he lived. Ubi bent down again to speak to the child, who continued to look at him with his wide, dark eyes, wondering whether to trust him. The chocolate had gone, leaving a smudge on the boy’s upper lip. Ubi reached into his pocket and took out another bar, handing it over with a flourish. This brought a shy grin to the small face as his nephew reached out to take possession of the treasure.

  They agreed that Ubi would leave the following
week, once the child had had the chance to get used to his company. He would visit each day, and familiarity – and chocolate – would do its work. But as the day of departure approached, so its possibility receded. The boy had no papers, and the widow, at whose address he was registered for ration purposes, lived in the Soviet zone. Just as Stoffi had said, road and rail transport between Berlin and the outside world was now being deliberately cut by the Russians, as were transfers of food from the countryside to the non-Soviet zones of the city.

  “Stalin has two big weapons,” said Stoffi. “Starvation and isolation. Watch him use them. Just watch him. There is nothing that man would not do.”

  They attended a meeting – an impromptu gathering of neighbours addressed by a local liaison official. Somebody, a thin man wearing horn-rimmed glasses, brandished a French newspaper, with its headline Berlin crisis: a challenge for the West. “They say here that America’s going to give up,” he said. “That’s what the French think. Listen.”

  He read out a few sentences, which he translated into German.

  “The French!” called a woman from the back of the crowd. “What do they know? They’re defeated, just like us.”

  “Not quite,” said the liaison man. “But the Americans are not going to abandon us. There’s an agreement.”

  This brought laughter.

  “No,” shouted the official. “No, you’re wrong. General Clay isn’t going to let it happen.”

  “What can he do?” someone shouted.

  “They can force their way in.”

  “With tanks?” That’ll be a war between America and Russia. And we’ll be in the middle.”

  A voice at the front said, “The way we were not all that long ago.”

  Other views were expressed. “General Clay won’t risk that. He knows what the Russians are like.” And “There’s not much he can do. Look at the number of Russian tanks – they say they’re bringing more in every day. Piling them up. America’s a long way away. How can they compete?”

  The official was becoming irritated. “We shouldn’t talk about things that haven’t happened yet,” he said. “We need to keep calm. The whole situation will probably be sorted out soon enough. The roads will reopen.”

  “Says who?” a man called out.

  “We’re finished,” said the man with horn-rimmed glasses.

  “The Russians have got us. We’re finished.”

  The following day, when Stoffi came back to the flat, he had managed to buy half a large cured sausage and a loaf of crusty bread. They shared this, adding to the feast a piece of cheese that Ubi had bought from a woman on a tram – a mobile black marketeer selling her goods between stops.

  Stoffi had news. He was an electrician and his job was at Templehof airport, which meant that his finger was on the pulse. “They’re going to do it,” he said. “They’ve already started.”

  “There are so many rumours,” Ubi sighed. “How can one tell?”

  Stoffi shook his head. “No, this is true. This is happening. They’re going to airlift everything in. The Russians can’t close the air corridors.”

  Ubi looked doubtful. “Everything?”

  “Yes,” said Stoffi. “Everything the city needs.” He told Ubi that his boss at the airport had been briefed. They would be busy, he said, because the planes would be coming in non-stop.

  Ubi said that he thought it would be impossible. “There are too many people,” he said. “Think of the amount of food you’d have to bring in. Think of it.”

  “A lot,” agreed Stoffi. “But then the Americans have lots of planes. And the British too.”

  “And coal,” said Ubi. “You can’t fly electricity in.”

  “Coal too,” said Ubi. “My boss said it would be everything – including fuel.”

  It seemed impossible, but Stoffi assured Ubi that the planes were already coming in. “Tomorrow,” he said. “Come to Templehof tomorrow. Come and see for yourself.”

  “I need to think about getting back,” said Ubi. “I need to go home.”

  Stoffi laughed. “Too late, Ubi,” he said. “The roads, the railway – they’re not going to open them. We’re surrounded by Russia now. And that means you’re in Berlin, I’m afraid, until . . . until all this ends.”

  Over the next few days, Ubi realised that Stoffi was right, and he was trapped: travel would be impossible, particularly with an undocumented three-year-old boy. He would wait it out; the blockade could not last forever, people said, and the Russians would soon realise how unpopular they were making themselves. Stoffi shook his head. “You don’t know these people,” he said. “They don’t think like us.”

  Ubi wrote to Ilse; mail was still getting through by air, although it took some days to be dispatched, and was sporadic. He told her that he would stay in Berlin for the time being, but would return when everything died down. Stoffi had said that he could get him a job at Templehof airport unloading planes. Flights were coming in now every few minutes, as the airlift began in earnest. People were needed to unload aircraft after they landed; the work was reasonably well paid and food was provided at the end of each shift. There were worse ways, he said, of spending what would be, he felt, the short days of a crisis that would surely blow over soon enough.

  “I look forward so much to seeing you again,” he wrote at the end of the letter. “I miss you more than I can say, my dearest one, my love.”

  He looked at the sentence he had just written. He had not told her that before; he had not told her that he was in love with her, not in so many words. I am no Goethe, he thought. But now he said it, and something deep within him shifted: an emotional barrier that had been in place ever since the day he donned a uniform; a barrier that had stood between him and the outside world, a barrier designed to show others how strong and self-sufficient he was. It was the same, he thought, with so many men, with all the soldiers of the world perhaps, who were made to seem what in reality they just were not.

  THREE

  IN FRIENDSHIP’S HANDS

  ❖ 21 ❖

  After their brief honeymoon, Mike returned to duty at the airfield and Val went back to work on the farm. Archie had pretended not to notice her pregnancy, but now, with a certain embarrassment, he asked her about her plans.

  “Your baby,” he said, looking anywhere but at the obvious bulge. “He’ll be an American, I suppose. Now that you . . .”

  She smiled. “His dad is, so, I suppose he’ll be too. I’m not sure how these things work.”

  Archie nodded. “And you too – you’ll be going over there?”

  “Eventually.”

  “With the baby?”

  “Well, I’d hardly leave him here, would I?”

  He smiled. “Of course. I wasn’t thinking.” He paused. “Which means you won’t be working here much longer.”

  She told him that she would work for a couple of months longer. She could do most things, but would probably avoid the heavier tasks, if he did not mind. “Then I’ll leave and wait for the baby.”

  “And what if they send your husband away?” asked Archie. “They won’t be here forever, what with the war ending, and all that. You don’t need all those planes now that them Germans have given up, do you?”

  “We’ll see,” said Val. “Mike says that they have to keep the planes somewhere, and he thinks they’ll probably keep his people here for a while. He said they might have to go to Germany itself.”

  Archie shook his head. “They don’t want to go over there,” he said. “Bad place, that. And bombed to pieces, judging from the pictures in the paper.”

  Something was still clearly bothering him, and he looked at her enquiringly. “He’s still over at the base,” he ventured, “but you’re at your aunt’s place. Haven’t they got housing for married couples?”

  She saw him blush.

  “No,” she said. “They haven’t. Not at the base. But we have a room at my aunt’s, and he can spend weekends with me there. We get by.”

  He quic
kly changed the subject. They would need to attend to the hens, he said. The fox had somehow found his way into the coop the previous night and taken the cockerel and two of his spouses. “More than he could eat,” Archie said, shaking his head. “I’m going to get my hands on that fellow one of these days.”

  She settled back into her routine. Archie was careful about giving her only light work, and he also insisted that she go home early each day. “You have to rest,” he said. “In your condition.”

  She had been concerned about Willy. She had been worried that he would be possessive, and that he would resent Mike’s return, but her fears proved unfounded. On the first occasion that Mike stayed overnight, Willy was quiet over dinner and she thought that it was through resentment. But when Mike addressed a few remarks to him – asking him whether he had ever flown – this brought forth a torrent of questions. What happened if one of your engines stopped – did the other keep the plane in the sky? What would happen if a wheel hit a rock on the runway? Could a plane fly upside down?

  Mike answered his questions patiently, and with good humour. He had seen enough of Willy in the past to know that even if he found it difficult to deal with things that were a bit complicated he was still kind, and loyal, and could hold down a job as long as it was not too demanding. He understood all that, he assured Val. “We had a guy like that in the store,” he told her. “He swept the floor and stacked the shelves, although he sometimes put things in the wrong place. His life’s ambition was to be one of the sheriff’s deputies – he used to wear a badge he’d picked up for a dime, but of course he could never be the real thing.”

  Val thought this was sad. “To want to be something that you can never be – that seems sad to me.”

  “And yet that’s what life is like for a lot of folks,” said Mike. “Not everybody has our luck.”

  She had not thought of it as luck, but now that he spoke of it in those terms, she could see that this was what it was. It had been luck that had brought them together, when they had been born into such different worlds. It was as a result of luck that his plane had come down on a field rather than a wood. It was luck that those Dutch people had hidden him, and it was luck that that German soldier had decided to do what he did. Everything was reducible to luck – right back to being born, and the circumstances in which that took place.