The Pathfinder

by Margaret Mayhew

  She said uncertainly, ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Bullying. That age-old custom that the strong majority perpetrate on a weak minority. It’s by no means exclusive to English public schools, to be fair. The Nazis, one could say, were the bullies to end all bullies. The supreme masters of the art. In England it’s carried out in a variety of much lesser ways. Quite amateur by comparison. I won’t go into it – all rather boring – but Michael Harrison stepped in and put a stop to it in my case. The irony is that he can’t even remember doing so, but I’ve never forgotten. And I never will.’ Another wry smile. ‘He doesn’t like me, of course, and never has, but that didn’t prevent him from saving my bacon. Fair play, you see, is another fine old English principle. Standing up for the underdog. Doing the decent, honourable thing at all costs. No wonder Hitler misjudged them so badly.’

  ‘He admired them.’

  ‘Indeed. But he never understood them. Most people don’t. But they understand themselves very well.’

  To her relief, when he had finished the cigarette, he put on his hat and the pigskin gloves and got up to leave. At the door, he paused. ‘To the English you and I are both foreigners, Lili, and nothing can ever change that no matter how hard we may try. Do remember.’

  She went on stirring the turnips and potatoes. He’d been warning her in his devious way – not that she needed it. With Nico, one never knew the reason for his actions.

  Dirk came back soon after. He looked cold and fed up. ‘Nico was here, wasn’t he? I can smell his cigarette. Did he bring us anything?’

  ‘Some corned beef. Some soap. Raisins. I hate him visiting.’

  ‘Why? He’s never tried anything on with you, has he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then you’ve got nothing to worry about. Just take the things and be polite to him. It’s worth it.’ He flopped down at the table. ‘God, I’m tired. I’ve been heaving bags of cement around all day.’

  ‘Is it still snowing?’

  ‘Yes, and if it goes on it’ll ground the planes, that’s for sure.’

  She served the soup and slabs of black bread. Dirk hunched over the bowl, wrapping his hands round it for warmth. ‘I’m thinking of giving up at Tempelhof. It’s slave labour and for what? A pittance and a few scraps. A mug’s game.’

  ‘It’s steady work. You’d be crazy.’

  ‘Steady? For how much longer? Remember what it was like the winter before last? If that happens again, the Allies are finished here. Unless they can keep on bringing the stuff in at the rate they’re doing now, they might as well give up and go home.’

  ‘And leave their Berliners to starve?’

  ‘It could be their only chance of survival. Once the Allies are out, the Russians will take over and feed them. Let’s face it, it’s probably a losing battle.’ He tore at the bread fiercely. ‘We’ve got to look out for ourselves, Lili. Find other ways.’

  ‘Hank’s ways, you mean?’

  ‘Don’t look at me like that. You needn’t worry. I won’t be seeing him any more. He’s gone back to America. Look, he gave me this as a farewell present.’ He groped in his raincoat pocket and flourished a cigar aloft. ‘Havana. The real thing.’

  The snow had stopped, thank God. It had settled across the airfield, covering the hardstands and the runways a couple of inches or so deep, and every available man and woman on the station, wielding every available broom and shovel, had cleared it within a few hours. There had been barely a pause in the flow of air traffic. Next time, Harrison thought, they were unlikely to be so lucky. Snow, though, wasn’t as much to be feared as fog. Snow could be cleared away somehow, but nothing could be done about fog which had kept forming over the swampland round Gatow since the beginning of November, reducing visibility to almost zero. Planes could be guided down to earth by radar, but they still had to taxi about without crashing into each other or anything else. Twice the airfield had had to be shut down completely when pea-soupers had forced everything to a halt.

  Christmas was five days away. Plucked and drawn turkeys had been flown in to provide a proper Christmas Day lunch in the station Messes, together with sacks of fresh potatoes for roasting and puddings and mince pies. A mouth-watering feast after months of dehydrated, tinned, salted, pickled food. And there wasn’t a single person at Gatow, Harrison reckoned, who didn’t thoroughly deserve it.

  That night he attended the Christmas Dance in the Officers’ Mess. A German band played their brass-pumping version of American swing and he danced with several WAAFs and diplomatic wives. Tubby, forced to do his seasonal duty, trundled gallantly round the floor. He could remember him at other Christmas dances on wartime England airfields, doing his stuff. Paper chains, tarnished tinsel and soft-eyed WAAFs who had imagined, with some justification, that it was every pilot’s last evening alive.

  One of the wives reminded him a little of Celia. She hadn’t written for a while and a recent letter from his mother had provided the probable explanation. Celia was home last weekend. We saw her at church on Sunday with her parents and she had some man with her. He’s something at the War Office, apparently. Quite a bit older than Celia, by the look of him. He seemed pleasant enough but I don’t think her parents are all that keen. Which meant that his mother had decided it might be nothing to worry about. He hoped, for Celia’s sake, that the man, whoever he was, was rather more than ‘pleasant enough’.

  There had been a time when he had thoroughly enjoyed Christmas. As a child he had looked forward to it for weeks. Later, he had enjoyed it all over again with Harry and Benjy, reliving it through their eyes. For the rest of the war, after they were gone, it had been a day much like any other, in spite of all the valiant efforts with paper chains and carol-singing. He had spent one Christmas bombing Essen, another Cologne. Men had died as on any other day.

  On Christmas Eve he took one of the Volkswagen taxis into the city. The driver, an elderly man, was eager to be friendly with his few words of English. ‘The RAF is wonderful! Berliners thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. The RAF is our good friend.’ The man’s outpourings embarrassed him. Unreasonably, he had almost preferred the pre-airlift sullenness. In the same way, he disliked the offerings that arrived at the station in a constant stream of gratitude. The flowers, the hand-made, home-made gifts, the cards and letters all expressing German thanks. Heartfelt as they undoubtedly were, he was not ready to be a friend of the enemy.

  The British sector was in the middle of one of its power rations and there were lights burning in windows. Berliners would be cooking, ironing, listening to the wireless for as long as the electricity supply lasted. No Christmas turkey or roast potatoes for the vanquished, though. Instead, boiled cabbage, reconstituted Pom, margarine scraped thinly onto bread. The taxi took him down empty streets. Snow still covered the city. It could be a bloody nuisance but it could also be merciful. Berlin, like an ugly woman wearing a thick veil, looked almost beautiful.

  The Russian sector was as dimly lit as ever. The district might once have been the heart and soul of Berlin but it always struck him as infinitely grimmer and more depressing than the western sectors. It was not only the fact that the Russians had made so little effort to restore anything, it was also the inhabitants themselves. They seemed bowed down, resigned, defeated, as though they had abandoned all hope.

  At Albrecht Strasse, he used his torch to show the way across the inner courtyard, holding the box he was carrying under his other arm. The wolves’ heads’ snarls were softened by their mantle of snow but when he tugged at the bell pull there was no response. He waited for a while before trying again. There was no glimmer of light from inside, no sign of life. He tested the iron handle. It turned stiffly and when he pushed, the door swung open.

  The hallway was in pitch darkness, everything still and cold as a morgue. She’s gone, he thought. Now that Rudi and the old man are looked after, she and Dirk have got out. How in hell am I going to find her? And then he heard the music: faint music. Guided by the torch,
he found the door to the big living room and opened it. The room was in darkness, too. The music, he realized, was coming from the wireless up on the high shelf: Goebbels’s propaganda-spewing volksempfanger broadcasting American swing instead. He even knew the tune. He traversed the torch beam slowly until it fell on Lili fast asleep in her grandfather’s chair, wrapped up in a rug, her head resting on one hand. She looked like a child, with a child’s vulnerability, and his heart ached with love and pity for her.

  He put the box down on the table, went closer and spoke her name softly. Her eyes opened, blinked in the torchlight and she leaped to her feet with a scream of terror. When he tried to reassure her she only screamed louder, shrieking in German, clawing at him wildly. He dropped the torch in order to grab at her hands and protect himself. ‘It’s only me. Michael Harrison.’ She stopped screaming at last. The torch had gone out but he could hear her breathing hard in the darkness and feel her trembling in his grip. ‘It’s Michael Harrison,’ he said again, very clearly. ‘The squadron leader. It’s all right. It’s only me.’

  After a moment, the breathing slowed and the trembling stopped. He let go of her.

  Out of the darkness, she said, ‘You gave me a very bad fright.’

  ‘I’m most awfully sorry. I couldn’t get any answer at the door so I let myself in. I found you asleep. I didn’t mean to startle you like that.’

  ‘It’s all right. I couldn’t see you properly behind the torch and I thought . . . I thought it was someone going to attack me.’

  ‘It was damned stupid of me. I’m so sorry.’ He groped around on the floor. ‘I think the torch is probably broken.’

  ‘I’ll turn on the light.’

  She moved away from him and presently there was the click of a switch and the two overhead bulbs came on. They stood looking at each other across the squalid room. The music was still playing softly on the wireless. ‘Are you OK now?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Yes, thank you. I was listening to the wireless, you see, and then I must have fallen asleep. I was a bit tired.’

  ‘You were working today?’

  ‘A lot of work.’ She brushed a strand of hair away from her forehead. ‘I’m glad you came. I wanted to thank you for what you did for Grandfather and Rudi.’

  ‘Corporal Haines told me everything went OK.’

  ‘Yes. Everything went OK. Except that the Soviet guard at the barrier took Rudi’s model Dakota – the one that you gave him. They do things like that. Take what they want.’

  ‘I’ll try and get him another one – for when he comes home.’

  ‘Please, you mustn’t bother. You have already done so much. Is the torch broken?’

  ‘Afraid so. The bulb at least.’

  ‘I’m sorry for that. It was all my fault.’ She hugged herself, shivering. ‘And I’m sorry that it is so very cold in here. The stove must have gone out while I was asleep. I’ll light it again and make hot coffee, if you would like some.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘But it’s so cold. And I should like some coffee anyway.’

  ‘Let me give you a hand, then.’

  There was a stack of good logs in a corner, which surprised him. ‘Dirk got them from the country,’ she told him. She didn’t say how.

  The stove was very similar to the ones he had known in RAF Nissen huts and he soon got the fire going. ‘We found it on a bomb site,’ Lili said. ‘It works quite well. We did have a real kitchen once, with a proper stove.’ She fetched water from the bathroom and put it to heat in a saucepan. ‘We have American instant coffee. Dirk brought it back, of course. He has gone out this evening – to a dance hall near here. He wanted to have some fun.’

  ‘Not you?’

  She shook her head. ‘Russian soldiers go there.’

  ‘Not much of a way to spend Christmas Eve – alone here, in the cold and dark.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But it’s better than dancing with Russians.’

  ‘You don’t like them?’

  ‘I hate them.’ She said it quietly, almost under her breath. ‘As much as they hate us.’

  She started to get out the saucerless cups, one with a handle, one without. He said, ‘I brought you a Christmas present. It’s on the table.’

  ‘A Christmas present?’ She sounded completely astonished. As though it was the very last thing she expected. ‘What is it?’

  He fetched the cardboard box from the table. ‘Open it and you’ll find out. I’m sorry it’s not wrapped properly. It should have paper and ribbon but there wasn’t any.’ She took the box from him and opened the lid warily. ‘It won’t bite you,’ he told her, smiling. ‘You’re quite safe.’ He watched her feel among the wood shavings, playing lucky dip. She brought out one of the cups and stared at it. ‘There are six of them,’ he said. ‘And saucers. And plates to match. It’s a tea set really, of course, but I thought they’d do for coffee as well. You might as well use them now.’

  She was still staring in awe at the bone china cup with its delicately painted pale yellow flowers and green leaves. ‘It’s so beautiful. Is it English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It came with you from England? You bought it there?’

  He shook his head. ‘You can’t buy anything like that in England now. It’s all for export only. Actually, I got it in the Malcolm Club at Gatow. There’s a kind of shop there, selling all sorts of things. Don’t ask me how they got hold of them.’ He looked at her with misgivings. ‘Perhaps I ought to have brought food instead. Chocolates, or something.’

  ‘No. Not at all. It is very wonderful to have something beautiful like this.’ She turned the cup over. ‘It’s called Spring.’

  ‘The flowers are primroses. The English countryside’s full of them then. They grow wild everywhere.’

  ‘So pretty. Thank you for such a wonderful present. I will use them at once.’ She took out another cup and two saucers, set them ready on the table and smiled at him. ‘Cups and saucers. We are very grand.’

  They sat down on opposite sides of the battle-scarred table. The flowery cups, designed for dainty English teas on lace cloths in English parlours, looked absurdly out of place among the shrapnel hits. He offered a cigarette and lit it for her. The small intimacy pleased him, as it had done once before. He lit his own cigarette and put the lighter away in the breast pocket of his uniform. The music played on softly from the wireless – another wartime song that he knew well. There was another sound – a scuffling noise from the shadows. ‘A rat,’ she said calmly. ‘There are many of them.’ She lifted the teacup and gazed at it again. ‘My mother had cups a little like these. They were German, of course, but they had flowers on them, too. The Russian soldiers broke them all.’

  ‘Were you here in this apartment when they came?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ She looked away from him. ‘We were hiding in one of the U-Bahn tunnels. We hid for many days – Grandfather, Dirk, Rudi and me – until we thought it might be safe. When we came back we found that they had been here. Almost everything was destroyed, or stolen.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It must have been awful.’

  ‘It was awful for all Berliners. I told you, the Russians hate us.’

  With some reason, he thought, wondering what version Goebbels’s propaganda machine had churned out of the Wehrmacht’s brutal advance across Russia and the siege of Stalingrad. ‘This room must have looked very different once.’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s hard to imagine, I know, but it was a very nice room, before the bombing. And, of course, there were other nice rooms in the apartment that were completely destroyed. This was our salon, you know, and on Christmas Eve all the family would be in here together – my parents, my grandparents, Dirk and I. Rudi was too small then to stay awake. My grandmother would sit over there on the sofa, my grandfather beside her. There was good furniture and velvet curtains at the windows, and pictures on the walls and a Bechstein piano. My father had many shelves of books. The Russians spoiled most of them but
others escaped, as you see. So did my mother’s hats.’

  ‘Hats?’

  ‘A whole trunkful of them – there in that corner, against the wall. She was a milliner and she made wonderful hats. Very French sort of hats. Very chic. Very expensive. She had a lovely little shop in the Dessauer Strasse. Rich Berlin ladies went there – until the war went badly for Germany and nobody bought hats any more.’

  At what point exactly had the doubts started and the penny eventually dropped that the sainted Führer had got things horribly wrong? After the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1942? Or when the heavy bombing Allied raids had begun in earnest in 1943? Or had the hat-buying gone on even longer than that? Lili herself would have been around nine or ten at the outbreak of war – too young to have understood everything that was going on and yet old enough to have some clear memories. ‘Do you remember what Berlin was like – in those days?’

  She frowned. ‘It’s very difficult for me to think how it was. Berlin has been like this for so long – or so it seems. When I walk down a street I cannot remember what it looked like before the bombing. I pass the ruin of a shop and only if I try very hard can I sometimes think what it was. I remember perhaps that the window was full of beautiful boxes of chocolates with coloured paper, tied up in shiny yellow and pink ribbons. Or that another window had red meat and big, fat sausages hanging from hooks. Or in another there were elegant clothes on plaster models. I walk past the empty hole where I remember that there was once a restaurant which had a long glass case showing all the wonderful things to eat inside – big hams, lobsters and crabs, pies and pastry, cakes with coloured icing . . . So much of everything. And so much colour. And so many lights. That is what I remember most. Colour and lights. When the war started it went dark for years and years.’