The Pathfinder (11 page)

Somehow they had carried on. They had cleaned up the mess and combed the ruins again for pieces of usable furniture and utensils. Clothing and blankets had been very hard to come by and the worst problem had been finding food. There was almost nothing to eat except a meagre ration of potatoes and bread dispensed to long queues by surly Russians. They had gnawed at mouldy carrots and made soups out of weeds and nettles and tree bark. Finding fuel for warmth and cooking was another impossibility. Nearly all the trees in Berlin had been either destroyed in the bombing or chopped down for firewood. Every branch and stick and twig had been gleaned. Dirk had walked miles out into the country with an old wheelbarrow to look for more.

Sometimes he came back with a few potatoes too, or some swedes, and, once, a whole cabbage. One day a loose horse had come clip-clopping down Albrecht Strasse. Before it had reached the end of the street it had been surrounded and caught. A man who had worked in a butcher's shop had cut its throat and skinned it, and the crowd that had quickly gathered from nowhere had fallen onto the carcass with kitchen knives and hacked it into bloody hunks of meat. Within minutes the dead animal had been stripped to bones – nothing left but head, tail and ribcage. She had managed to grab a hunk of the thigh and carried it home in an enamel washbasin, slopping around horribly in a pool of crimson.

But Rudi had grown thinner and frailer and Grandfather had become more and more senile. And the Russians were no less brutal. Whenever she had gone out of the apartment she had made herself look as ugly as possible – rubbed dirt into her face, painted herself with false blemishes and dressed in old women's clothes or worn Dirk's trousers, done anything to escape the notice of the Soviet soldiers. It had worked – until the time when she had been carrying buckets of water back home from the standpipe and a group of them, drunk as lords, had come staggering down the street, seized her and dragged her into the ruins. Hours later, Dirk had found first the upturned, empty buckets and then her, lying where they had left her unconscious. The bruises had faded and the deep cut on her forehead had healed but the nightmare had never gone away and never would.

And then, at the beginning of July, the British and the American troops had arrived in the city. They had brought with them law and order, doctors, medicines, employment, and food. Most important of all, they had brought hope. Hope of a future where there had been almost none.

For a while, life had seemed a little brighter, but Rudi was still no better. Each day he seemed to grow thinner and weaker. There was no fresh milk or eggs or fruit for children and the Russianrun hospital had no vitamins or supplements to spare.
Take Rudi. Look after him, whatever happens.
Her mother's last words to her: a sacred trust.

She was at her wits' end when one day, when she had been working in the ruins, a young American soldier had stopped to photograph her and then started talking. He could get fresh food, he'd told her, smiling a white-toothed, easy-going sort of smile – if she was nice to him. After him, there had been other American soldiers and, when Rudi had been so close to death with polio, an army doctor who had provided medicine and vitamin pills. Always Americans because she'd learned that they had the most food and supplies. The British were too poor, the French too mean. Compared with the Russians, the Americans were decent human beings. It was not
frau komm!
but
hi, fräulein!
She had learned how to be nice to them and she had taught herself to see it as a simple business deal. The daily toil in the ruins, digging and shovelling, carting and scraping, helped her not to think too much about anything else.

Nico had not stubbed out his cigarette properly; she could smell it still smouldering away. She got up and, reluctant to touch with her fingers what had touched his lips, carried the ashtray to the open window and tipped the cigarette end out.

Then Dirk came into the room. By the swagger in his step, she knew he had made some black market deal that had pleased him very much. He was cock-a-hoop, as though he had achieved something wonderful. Once, long ago, there had been talk of him going to university to become a lawyer; of herself studying languages to become a teacher. Such plans. Such dreams. All come to dust. She was glad that her mother could not see what they had both become. ‘Nico was here,' she told him. ‘He came to warn us that the Russians are going to blockade Berlin.'

‘It was bound to happen.'

‘The British and Americans will have to leave, he thinks.'

‘I told you so.'

‘Then we're lost.'

He shrugged. ‘We have come through everything this far, Lili. What's the difference?'

Six

From the control tower windows at Gatow, Harrison watched the Dakota descending out of thick cloud. It was the last of the thirteen to fly in that day from RAF Wunstorf in the British zone of northern Germany and, between them, the Daks had brought in about forty tons of food. There had been a mad scramble, both by the British and the Americans, to organize the airlifting of supplies into west Berlin. Nobody was pretending that the civilian rations could be provided by air once the present food stocks in the city were exhausted; the general view was that it need only be a short-term affair – a ten-day operation, at the most, while negotiations took place with the Russians to open up the lifelines again.

Harrison was not so sure. So far as he could see the Russians had shown themselves to be obdurate and they had outmanoeuvred the western Allies at every turn. They held too many aces. Not only was it going to be impossible to feed three and a half million west Berliners by air, but other things, equally vital to the life of the city, would soon run out – coal, petrol, diesel, oil. The city's main power station lay in the Russian sector and its output to the west had been cut off as summarily as the roads and railways and canals. Extra generators were being flown in but eighty per cent of the electricity supply had been lost. The mayor, Ernst Reuter, had made a brave speech to a huge crowd of cheering people in a stadium in the French sector, rallying them to stand up to the Russian bully-boys. He'd called upon the world to help the Berliners in their fight for freedom.

‘Well, we're doing all we can,' Tubby had commented drily. ‘Jolly ironic, isn't it? Not so long since the RAF were popping over to kill all these people and now we're popping over to help them stay alive. Quite a volte-face. It takes some getting used to, don't you think?'

‘It's not just for the Berliners,' he'd said. ‘It's for everything we fought for. I'm damned if we'll let the Russians get away with it.' The thought of what the Soviets were doing – the sneaky, outrageous game that they were playing – enraged Harrison. Thousands of good, brave men had died in order to win the war against Hitler and tyranny and now it seemed that it had been in vain. Tyranny was not dead at all. It lived on and flourished in the shape of Stalin and Communism. Liberty was still far beyond the grasp of every man. Realistically, he held out little hope for Berlin; in the end, it would probably disappear into the Soviet zone. Be swallowed up and lost. There was only so much they could fly into the city. What would happen when the stocks of coal, for instance, ran out? No power, no electricity, no gas, no heat. The only sane hope lay in the Russians being willing to negotiate and kindly lift the blockade which he thought was about as likely as pigs flying.

He watched the Dakota touch down in the pouring rain, sending up a long wake of water, more like a boat than an aircraft. The wet weather was an added problem. The new runway was still unfinished and the alternative landing strip was made of pierced steel planking laid over grass which was not designed to withstand heavily loaded aircraft, especially in soggy conditions. The only other western airfield was Tempelhof in the American sector, a pre-war civil airport. A third was being built in the French sector, but how long would that take? A lot longer than it would take for all stocks to be exhausted. The Dakota had reached the end of the runway and turned off towards the unloading hardstands. It was carrying sacks of flour – three tons of the stuff, its maximum-load capacity. A drop in the ocean, as Tubby had so rightly said.

The Russians didn't hold
all
the aces, though. There was no shortage of either British or American pilots with wartime flying experience to call on and the Americans, particularly, had large numbers of transport planes. And one more thing – the trump card in their hand – was their first-class system of radar-controlled talk-down. A controller sitting out in a cabin on Gatow airfield had been able to direct the Dakota through heavy low-based cloud from the Frohnau beacon ten miles out and bring it safely down onto the runway. All thirteen aircraft had been landed that way, and there was no reason why controllers couldn't handle a steady stream of them. They could certainly increase the traffic by a hundred per cent and the long summer hours of daylight would help. Come to that, with radar there was no reason why they couldn't fly at night as well. All night. And all day. The logistics would be a nightmare, but seemingly impossible military rescues had been miraculously achieved before – Dunkirk, for one.

He had been too busy to get into the city since the crisis had begun but he'd heard that things were pretty bad already. There'd been big power cuts, down to only four hours of electricity a day, cuts in the gas supply, cuts in public transport, cuts in food rations, breakdowns in services . . . western Berlin was sliding back into its former miserable, desperate state. Tough luck on the civilians. Bizarrely, there was no restriction on moving about the city. The Russian soldiers, apparently, still goose-stepped several times a day to change their guard at the Soviet war memorial on the western side of the Brandenburg Gate, acting as though nothing had happened, and the Russian-controlled Radio Berlin, also in the British sector, continued to pour out a never-ending stream of Soviet propaganda from the
Rundfunkhaus
.

The Leicht family would be all right in the Soviet zone, of course. There would be electric lighting, the same ration of food as before, everything pretty much as usual. There was enough rubble left to provide Lili Leicht with manual labour for decades to come. And Dirk was a survivor. The Leichts would be all right, he thought dispassionately. They were lucky.

Somehow Dirk had got hold of an old bicycle. He had come back with it from one of his forays into the country and refused to give a proper explanation.

‘It was in an outhouse. Rusting away in a corner. I could see this old couple didn't want it any more.'

‘You mean you stole it?'

He looked injured. ‘It wasn't like that, Lili.'

‘Did you ask their permission?'

‘I didn't have to. They were past riding it and, anyway, it wasn't fit to ride. The chain was off and the brakes didn't work.'

‘Did you give them something for it?'

He shook his head, grinning. ‘Actually, they gave
me
something. Beetroots. A whole lot of them. Look.'

He produced the sack from behind his back – at least three kilos' worth. She didn't ask what he had given for them, or if he had given anything at all; he could easily have simply dug them up. But it was hard to find any fault when they needed the food so badly. For all the Russian promises of good rations and the propaganda comparisons to the stark situation in western blockaded Berlin, they had been without any meat or fresh food for nearly two weeks. They'd been living on old potatoes – green ones, sprouting eyes – and stale bread. The beetroots looked firm and must have some goodness in them – vitamins of some kind. Vitamin C, certainly, and perhaps others, too. They would surely help Rudi. She would grate the smaller, better ones and they could eat them raw, the rest she would turn into soup. She showed them to Rudi who was lying listlessly on the couch. He kept on coughing.

‘Look what Dirk has found for us.'

He turned his head to look, but without much interest. The plane that the English squadron leader had given him was still clutched in one hand; he had been making small swoops in the air with it earlier – but feeble ones. His pallor was frightening.

‘I have forgotten the name of that plane,' she said in an effort to cheer him up. ‘What is it?'

‘A Dakota. That's what the RAF call it. The Americans call it a DC3. It's funny, they often call the same plane different names.'

‘Do they? How strange.'

He lifted the plane up and let it flop down again. ‘Do you think the squadron leader will come back here again?'

She thought of their last bitter encounter. ‘I very much doubt it.'

‘I'd like him to. He was very nice. And he knows all about planes. He might even bring me some more pictures.'

‘I'm sure he would. But I don't think he'll have time to come back, Rudi. He must be very busy.'

‘Could you ask him?'

She hesitated, not wanting to disappoint him. ‘I really don't think so. In any case, I don't know how to get in touch with him.'

‘Nico would. He knows everything. We could ask him.'

She shook her head firmly. ‘No, I don't want to do that. It's better not. Look, we're going to have beetroots for supper. You like beetroots, don't you?'

‘I can't remember.'

‘Well, you must eat as much of them as you can. They'll do you lots of good.'

He turned his head away again and presently closed his eyes. She sat with him for a while until she saw that he had drifted off to sleep. She wondered what on earth to do. It was a risk to take Rudi to the hospital. She did not trust them there. The Russians ran it and they did not care if German civilians lived or died – or so it seemed to her. In fact, they much preferred them dead. She went to find Dirk who was in the hallway, tinkering with the bike. ‘I'm going to see that doctor who lives down the street, Dirk. Dr Meier. He might come and look at Rudi.'