The Hidden War

by David Fiddimore

  The court reconvened at fourteen-thirty with the defenders’ pleas: the audience had got the hang of things by then, and drowned them with cat-calls. They never stood a chance. Molly pronounced guilt and sentences less than fifteen minutes later. He read it in Russian from a paper that Greg had given him earlier. His Russian sounded no better than mine.

  ‘Good,’ Greg said. ‘That’s finished. Let’s find a bar.’ The bar was a wrecked house about a hundred yards from the court. When Greg walked in, the half-dozen grubby soldiers there before us ran away . . . literally. The aged barman sniffed, wiped down a small round table for us, and produced a bottle of vodka and two glasses. After we had swallowed our first drinks the three judges trooped in. Greg waved them to a table the other side of the room, where the barman served them. I noticed that he failed to wipe the crumbs from their table, and the greasy bottle he put before them was only half full. No glasses.

  ‘They show promise, don’ they?’ Greg asked me. ‘But they must learn their place.’

  ‘Adam is the master now?’

  ‘You got it. I tol’ you. You get my job one day.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want it, Greg.’

  ‘I ask you again in ten years. In my office in London.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  He picked at his teeth with a sliver of wood he’d pulled from the table top.

  ‘No. Actually I don’. Also I don’t unnerstan’ why all those other Russians do.’

  We did what we were good at: we got drunk. I had forgotten Frieda. That was OK: she’d probably forgotten me. I know that at one point I asked him, ‘What happened to the defendants? What were the sentences?’

  ‘The pilot got Siberia. He thinks Siberia is better than death. Big mistake.’

  ‘. . . and the old man?’

  ‘Death by shooting.’

  ‘Will he appeal?’

  ‘No point, Charlie. Dead already. They shot him behind the courthouse ten minutes after we sat down here. One-bullet job.’

  ‘Who was he, Greg?’

  ‘I like you, Englishman. You’re very lucky for me.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  He waved his arm. I’d seen that gesture before. He was waving off an awkward question.

  ‘An old man, Charlie. Ol’ man called Spartacus. You safe now and you owe me.’

  ‘. . . pay you in your office, Greg, in ten years’ time.’

  ‘That will be in London.’

  ‘No it won’t, Greg.’

  I’d dropped my tobacco pouch on the floor and, bending to retrieve it, fell off the chair. Greg laughed. The three judges across the room laughed. Greg looked at them and they stopped laughing like the gramophone needle lifted from a 78. Then I laughed. The laugh was on everybody except me, and I’d just realized it.

  It must be something to do with my lack of height: I’m always in the company of people who think they can change my plans without consulting me. That’s why we flew further east instead of driving back to the West. Bollocks. Frieda had found an uncle registered in a town a long way to the east, and having trusted Greg to get us this far it seemed daft not to make the effort to go for a goal. He made out a different set of passes for us and got Molly to sign and stamp them. Then he gave the German some sort of ration card as a reward. I thought we were chancing our arm, although it didn’t feel like that: it felt as if I was chancing my neck.

  We flew into the winter’s sunshine from a farmer’s field, after passing through Greg’s ‘ring of steel’ close outside the old Berlin Ring Road. The field still had a couple of smashed tanks in a corner: one Russian and one German – locked head to head in an embrace of death, like dinosaur carcasses. How many men had died in them when they clashed? Eight? Ten? Greg hadn’t lied about the ring of steel because we passed through two more checkpoints, although I thought the attention paid to Greg’s papers was perfunctory at best. They had a good shufti at mine and Frieda’s though. The young officer commanding the second barrier reached into the car towards Frieda. I’ll swear he was going to squeeze her tit. Russian Greg slapped his hand away, and bawled the man out. Eventually he said, ‘Apologize,’ in German.

  The guard looked at Frieda hopefully, and spoke quietly in Russian. Greg exploded behind the wheel and screamed, ‘In German; apologize in good German!’ Entschuldigen Sie sich auf guten Deutsch!

  Frieda was gracious. She told him, ‘That’s all right. I like them myself. So does my husband.’

  The Russian officer looked at me and muttered an apology, but quickly broke eye contact. Russian Greg had the last word.

  ‘Be careful,’ he told the young man. ‘In future you be very careful.’

  ‘Jawohl, Herr Kommissar. Jawohl.’ He was so scared that he’d stayed in the language into which he’d been ordered.

  I began to breathe again. I’d noticed a word used in the incident. It was one I’d have to think about.

  The aircraft was a brand-new Me. 108. How did the Reds get a brand-new Me. 108 in 1948? – well, they’d made one. They’d just started making them in Czechoslovakia on old jigs taken from the aircraft factories in Germany. This one had that nice new smell inside, like a new car, and was flown by one of Frieda’s blonds, while the other one navigated. The Czechs had managed to cram four small passenger seats into an airframe originally designed for two I think. I sat alongside Frieda, and Greg sat behind us. He went to sleep. I looped an arm around Frieda’s shoulder and concentrated on not being airsick: I’ve never liked small aircraft.

  Frieda’s Uncle’s Heimat turned out to be a market town that looked, from the air, as if the war had passed it by. Most of the buildings still had roofs. Three big Russian Josef Stalin tanks stood in the market square. Their crews waved lazily to us as we circled them. A haze of exhaust smoke drifted up into the still air from one of them. It was obvious that Europe wasn’t going to be short of tanks for a long, long time. We landed on yet another field of short grass: the flattened brown wheel ruts we rumbled over said that we weren’t the first. We were met by a civilian in a requisitioned VW Kübelwagen. What surprised me was that Russian Greg turned down the immediate prospect of a lift. He pushed Frieda and me towards the little jeeplike car.

  ‘I will find the hotel,’ he told me. ‘We will wait in the bar.’ ‘Aren’t you coming to make the introductions?’ Russian Greg gave me a wise little smile, and whispered, ‘They will talk more freely I suspect, Charlie, if I am not there.’

  We scrambled under the canvas and into the rear seats of the little car. Its driver was pale enough to be an albino. He wore the ubiquitous black leather trench coat, clear rimless spectacles and a wide-brimmed felt hat. His plump lips smiled, but his eyes were expressionless. He turned and offered me his hand, saying in accented English, ‘Welcome to Free Germany, comrade. We are pleased to welcome a friend of the Free State.’

  Frieda told him the address she had found in the archive. His hand was still waiting for me, and when I grasped it it was cold and very soft, like a dead thing from the sea. When I get to the River Styx at last, Charon will be like this man. It was all I could do to mutter Gut! and wave him on before I threw up. He smiled again, as if he had won a point, and slipped the vehicle into gear. Behind us the air-cooled engine screamed as the car began to slip and slide across the grass.

  An ordinary house in an ordinary suburb. Untouched by war. A crazy-paving path up to the front door. Crazy paving: that’s a phrase you don’t hear often. A lot more crazy people wandering the streets thanks to Care in the Community, but not much crazy paving any more. Anyway, I thought that Crazy Eddie and his auntie would have been at home here. The man who opened the door for us was almost as small as me. Thick white hair, and rimless spectacles like the animal who had brought us, but who had stayed with the car. He was directly in front of Frieda, and for at least a minute he said and did nothing. Then he smiled and opened his arms. They stepped towards each other, and he said, ‘Frieda,’ and, ‘child,’ and began to cry. I didn’t cry, but I did turn away so
that they couldn’t see my face.

  Frieda said, ‘I have come for Elli,’ and he replied, ‘Of course. Please come in. Bring your companion with you. Is he an American?’

  ‘No. English.’

  The old man turned to me as we followed him into your everyday middle-class house.

  ‘You started this war,’ he told me. ‘Without the English everything would have been all right.’ Gut ausgehen.

  I could have told him a million things about the London and Glasgow Blitzes and the concentration camps, Tuesday’s Child and Bremen in 1945. Instead all I said was, ‘I know.’

  Frieda shot me a quick glance. It had a smile, and it had comradeship . . . and for the first time, I believe, it had gratitude. Everything changed right there. In that moment. It was as if a door had opened.

  She introduced me after I had met the other people who lived in the house: a woman the man’s age, another a lot older, and a teenaged girl who might have been a maid – it was that sort of place. There weren’t supposed to be any servants in the East any more – that’s what the propaganda told us, but old habits die hard.

  Frieda said, ‘Charlie, this is my Uncle Matti. We always called him Beppo in the family, after a famous clown.’

  Uncle Matti wasn’t clowning now. He shook his head. He took both Frieda’s hands in his and said, ‘Elli is dead, little one. I’m very sorry. She died in 1946. In the spring . . .’

  Sometimes I get it right. I think that I did this time. I told her, ‘I’ll just go out to the garden, and smoke a pipe. You and your family have a lot to talk about.’

  I smoked two pipes through, and was beginning to get cold and nauseous when they remembered me, and called me back into a big kitchen that smelled of smoked meats. They gave me a glass of sweet wine, and I followed them in heavily watering it to make it last. Russian Greg had given me a quarter of a pound of coffee beans to give them as a present. You would have thought the paper poke had been full of gold.

  Frieda told them, ‘Charlie smokes far too much, but he’s going outside to smoke his pipe again. I will stay with him, and smoke a cigarette.’ The old folks exchanged knowing glances which weren’t exactly appropriate.

  When we were outside I noticed that I had been right the first time: the temperature was dropping. I said, ‘Who was Elli?’

  ‘My sister. My little sister.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She had a Russian baby. It killed her.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK, Charlie. I think I always knew it.’ She had her arm through mine, and I hugged her, because that was what she really wanted.

  Back in the kitchen I said clumsily to Beppo, or whatever his name was, ‘I’m sorry about what happened to your niece. It must have been very hard. The bloody Reds were undisciplined when the war ended. I met some then . . .’ If you believed everything people told you the Reds had raped anything that moved.

  The old man looked at me, and shook his head. He must have been good at shaking his head. ‘You know nothing, Englishman.’ It took a moment for him to decide to tell me any more. Then his lip stiffened and he said, ‘Elli’s young man was an honourable officer. He did everything he could to look after her. The baby grew in the wrong part of her womb, or somewhere else . . . that was all. He took her to the Russian hospital and they fought for her for days . . . for the life of a German girl remember. Then the baby killed her; it would have killed anyone.’

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘. . . and if it wasn’t for the Russian doctors the baby would not have lived.’

  ‘Did he take it away with him?’

  ‘No, he did not go anywhere. The day after Elli was buried he shot himself. Such a waste. Romeo and Juliet. Poor little baby . . .’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  As if on cue a thin crying came from a room somewhere above us. The old man shrugged.

  ‘Little Elli. She’s just two.’

  Frieda looked at me, and I knew what was bloody coming next.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The two blondies made a great fuss over the child, and flew us as gently as if they’d had a cargo of finest porcelain. Once we were in the back of the GAZ again they insisted on tucking a greatcoat around her before we set off. The first checkpoint was OK because the same young officer recognized Russian Greg and jumped like a doomed jackrabbit. The second one took longer. We kept the engine ticking over to keep some heat in the vehicle but it all blew out around the canvases.

  I got out and flapped my arms about, and jumped up and down on the spot, to get warm. A couple of the Russian guards looked on with amusement. Greg had an earnest conversation with the captain of the guard, who made a couple of earnest telephone calls. Then I think that some earnest money changed hands, and we were driving into the US Zone. The American white-tops weren’t in the slightest bit interested in us once they spotted Russian Greg riding shotgun. They looked over their shoulders to see that their officer wasn’t watching, and waved us through – there wasn’t anywhere on our side that he hadn’t an entry to.

  We pulled chairs close to one of the pot-bellied stoves in the Leihhaus, and held our hands to the heat. There was a heap of coal in the corner that could have kept a family warm for a month . . . for once I didn’t feel bad about it. Russian Greg leaned towards me and held out his hand for a manly shake. I obliged. He said, ‘That was my side of the bargain, English.’

  ‘More than your side,’ I admitted. ‘We came out with one more than we went in.’ The child had a chair of her own between Frieda and me: she was still swaddled in a Russian greatcoat and looked a bit bewildered. I suppose that I’d feel the same.

  ‘It’s your move now,’ he told me.

  I nodded to him. Something touched my left hand. I looked down to it – the child was trying to take hold of my little finger.

  Scroton and the Countess blew in. The cold blew in with them, into a momentary silence. Dave knew my complicated domestics in England. He took in the tableau and said, ‘Christ, boss: you’ve done it again, haven’t you? Another addition to your bleeding menagerie.’

  ‘No, Dave. This one already has a family of her own. Ask Frieda. We just have to get it back to Blighty.’

  Frieda said testily, ‘It is a girl . . .’

  Scroton ignored her. ‘Shouldn’t be too hard.’

  ‘Wanna hear the rest of it?’

  I told him what I’d planned. He said he was up for it. I may be wrong, but I fancied he was a shade or two paler by the time we were finished.

  I suppose that I was too: by the time we were ready to go I hadn’t slept for two days – I just hoped that my pilots were in a better state. They said they were, but you never can tell.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  It cost me five hundred Occupation dollars in bribes to get Fergal’s orphans airside at Gatow.

  Tommo had conjured up an American GMC six-wheeled truck from somewhere, and then let his tough-guy image down by offering to drive it himself, kitted out like a simple PFC. In the back we had thirty-eight kids, and two peculiarly glamorous nuns. I sat up front alongside Tommo, and Frieda sat alongside me. Elli was on her lap, swaddled in a blanket and already asleep. The night was cold, and frost glistened on the smashed pavements as Tommo gently rolled the big wagon through the city. We didn’t see a living thing on the streets the whole trip. He drove the truck as if he’d been driving things that size all his life, with an elbow resting on the window frame, a cigar in his mouth, and the peak of his soft olive drab cap angled up. The only thing he said to me as we rolled up to the manned side gate and killed the lights was, ‘Gimme the dough.’

  I passed him the plain brown envelope of dollars. He’d told me beforehand not to seal it. The barrier was up because we were expected, but the arrangement had been that we’d stop at the gate office. An English sergeant stood up on the GMC’s running board and carefully looked at neither Frieda nor myself. Tommo must have passed him the envelope upside down,
and they fumbled it, because the Englishman swore, hopped down, and I was aware that some banknotes were falling free. As soon as he was off Tommo killed the lights, hit the big lorry into gear, and we were clear. I could hear the Englishman swearing at our disappearing tailboard. Tommo whistled. I think that it was that American march they call ‘Dixie’.

  ‘They’re only kids,’ Tommo explained. ‘The bastard should‘a passed us through for nothin’.’

  We’d only done fifty yards in the dark before an unlit van pulled out in front and led us around the peritrack to the far side where the Witch and the Pig were waiting. It was the Countess, of course, driving the chow wagon the way she always did. Unlike Tommo she knew her way around the airfield in the dark, and all he had to do was follow her. We didn’t want lights showing near the Halton aircraft: I wanted our activity hidden from the tower for as long as possible. Magda never simply drove things, she wrestled with them, so not running into the back of the doughnut wagon was one of Tommo’s triumphs that night. Otto and Marthe were squeezed in alongside Magda – so in a way what followed was the Leihhaus’s finest hour. That drive through the dark seemed to take for ever.

  The kids had been briefed to be quiet, but there was that whispered excited buzz, and a couple of whimpers: you know what kids are like. They each had a small bundle, bag or satchel – all that was left of their lives in Germany. We put them all into the Witch. I think that Marthe kissed each one as they were lifted up. Dave had flown in the day before with sacks of coal, but somehow he had managed to get the Witch’s stomach as clean as a BEA passenger job. You could have eaten from her aluminium floor and sideskins . . . which was just as well, because there were no seats this time – the children sat on the cargo floor in short rows, shoulder to shoulder. When I looked in at them all I could see were rows of pale little faces: some scared, some excited. One of the nuns sat cross-legged in the middle of the foremost row; she was as beautiful as Jane Russell. The small girl I had last seen pushing a small pram at the orphanage was alongside her, holding her arm. The baby was against the nun’s shoulder: even now the girl and the baby hadn’t been parted.