The Good Pilot, Peter Woodhouse

by Alexander McCall Smith

  They waited in the unloading area. Ubi entertained the little boy with a toy he had brought with him – a small tin monkey on a string. He fed him pieces of chocolate and pointed out the stream of planes as they came in. The child watched wide-eyed, confused by the din of activity; at one point he wailed in fear, but was pacified by a particularly large piece of chocolate. Ubi watched the sky. It was a fine winter afternoon, with the sun painting the trees and buildings with gold. The aeroplanes appeared as specks of reflected light in the sky, grew larger and darker, and dropped down onto their perilous approach route through the buildings.

  He knew the identifying number of Mike’s aircraft, but he almost missed it as it did a balletic turn on the apron in preparation for unloading. But he saw it in time to follow the truck onto which his team would unload the cargo. He had already seen them and spoken to one or two of them.

  “Why are you here?” his deputy asked. “You were meant to be sick.”

  “I have to look after this boy today,” said Ubi. “I’ve brought him in to see the planes.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “Well, I have.”

  He stood aside as the cargo of rice was unloaded. When the last sack had been dragged and manhandled into the truck, he approached the loading bay door and began to clamber into the plane. Hands reached out to help him; others took the child from him and spirited him into the storage area of the fuselage.

  Mike said to him, “Everybody on board knows. They’re okay. I told them what you did.”

  He was aware that he was being looked at with interest by two other men in flying gear. One of them made a thumbs-up sign; the other smiled.

  “Sit down over there,” said Mike. “Hold onto the boy.”

  They were not refuelling, and they had to take their place in the line of aircraft readied for departure. The pitch of the engines rose, and in his terror Klaus clung more tightly to Ubi, who hugged him and tried to reassure him with half-remembered nursery rhymes, the words of which were lost in the roar of the engines and the rattling of the aircraft’s fuselage. Hänschen klein/ging allein/in die weite Welt hinein . . . Sieben Jahr/trüb und klar/Hänschen in der Fremde war . . .

  Eventually the terrified child fell asleep, and was still sleeping when the plane dropped down one hundred and twenty miles later to make a bumpy landing on American asphalt in the western zone.

  “Guess what?” said Mike to the control tower wireless operator. “I believe we have stowaways.”

  FOUR

  MOTODROM

  ❖ 25 ❖

  Ilse had prepared an attic bedroom for Klaus immediately above the room she occupied with Ubi. She had brightened up a counterpane by sewing onto it animal shapes cut from a bolt of red felt. She had been given the felt, a precious commodity, as a present and had been keeping it for some special purpose; this, she decided, was the moment to use it. There was an elephant, with trunk raised, a line of camels, and a bloated hippopotamus. She had not anticipated the small boy’s reaction to the sight of the quilt, which had been one of fear, and a terrified seeking of refuge behind Ubi’s legs.

  Ubi sought to reassure her. “He’ll get used to it,” he said. “Remember what children in Berlin have seen.”

  She understood. She had been surprised by the resilience of children, when she knew what they had witnessed. There were gangs of them everywhere, it seemed, groups of semi-feral youngsters who survived among the city ruins, living from hand to mouth, emerging to steal whatever they could lay their hands on before slipping back into the shadows. Theft was their lifeline, although some of them, boys as well as girls, knew that more money could be made in prostitution and took advantage of the fact, beyond the reach of the authorities, their tired, world-weary faces reflecting their loss of childhood and the daily pain of their furtive, degraded lives.

  At least Klaus had had a home and an adult to look after him. But now, having lost the security of the widow’s flat in Berlin and the familiar routine of his life there, he was uncertain and confused. Ilse’s advances to him were culinary, but the dishes she concocted herself, which included treats she was sure he would never have seen in Berlin, were often rebuffed without any explanation; questions addressed to him were rarely acknowledged, and he withdrew into a sullen and resentful private world.

  “Grief,” said a friend, a nurse, who had tried – and failed – to get through to him.

  “And there’s no cure for that,” said Ilse.

  The nurse shook her head. “Love,” she said. “And patience.”

  She added, as an afterthought, “Time.”

  Ilse knew her friend was right: she would give this child those three things and he would get better, just as Germany itself would recover from its nightmare. She could already see it happening around her; a factory had opened in their town and it was turning out furniture – functional items at first: beds and chests of drawers that were even being exported to France, people said – but that was just the beginning; there would soon be more expensive things. The inn itself was doing well; the British officers had moved on – they had their own buildings now – but Germans themselves were beginning to travel and look for places to stay. There was money again; not much, and there was a limit to what it could acquire, but the grinding poverty of those first few years was slowly being relieved. It showed in people’s demeanour: the broken, almost dazed look of defeat was no longer universal. People were smiling again; wearily, cautiously perhaps, but smiling nonetheless.

  Ilse and Ubi married. Their wedding was a quiet affair: there was no family to invite on Ubi’s side, apart from two cousins in Hamburg, who for various reasons were unable to make the journey; Ilse’s parents had recently divorced and were uncomfortable about attending together. It was simpler, she thought, for them to marry with the minimum of fuss, which is what they eventually did.

  Ubi had acquired a motorcycle – a battered machine that he spent long evenings restoring. They used this for their honeymoon trip, three days of meandering through countryside so untouched by the war that it might never have happened. Klaus was looked after by one of the maids in the hotel who had become fond of him, and spoiled him with treats of marzipan animals she made from sugar and almonds acquired from her black-marketeer lover.

  Klaus started to call Ilse Mutti. She cried the first time he did this, struggling to contain her sobs. Ubi asked her what was wrong, and she whispered her reply to him. He stroked her hand. They had been trying for a child of their own, with no success, and he feared it would never happen. She said to him, “I think that he loves me now,” and he replied, “He does; of course he does.”

  Two years passed. Klaus began school, and showed an aptitude for anything requiring manual skills. His teacher praised him for his politeness, and rewarded him with gold stars on his exercise books. He was happy enough at school, although from time to time he was bullied because he looked different from the other children. He said one day, “Why is my hair like this? Will it change?”

  Ilse said, “It’s lovely hair, Klaus.”

  “They laugh at me.”

  “Who? Who laughs at you?”

  “Some boys.”

  She wanted to find the perpetrators and shake them, but Ubi persuaded her that Klaus would have to fight his own battles. “Things will change,” he said. “Germany is going to be different. Nobody is going to torment anybody again.”

  Ubi finished the restoration of the Motodrom. He had as yet no plans for it, although he had taken to practising riding it – tentatively at first, making quick forays from the angled lower section to the vertical wall, before dropping back to the safety of the lower level. Then, emboldened, he completed his first full ride, soaring higher until he sped around just below the level of the raised viewing platform. Ilse and Klaus came to witness this, and shrieked with admiration as Ubi waved to them with one hand while steering with the other.

  “One day,” said Ubi, “we’ll start this thing properly. We’ll open it to the public.�
�

  Ilse smiled. “Perhaps.”

  “But we must,” insisted Ubi. “What’s the point of having a Motodrom if you don’t use it?”

  “Perhaps,” she repeated.

  Early in 1950, Ubi decided to write to Mike. They had not met again since Mike had flown him from Berlin; Ubi, though, had thought of his friend from time to time and had wondered whether he was still stationed in Germany. There was a certain embarrassment for him in contacting Mike – he felt that it could be seen as an attempt to ingratiate himself, which he was reluctant to do. People like Mike had every reason to dislike Germans, and he felt that he did not wish to press himself upon him. Yet he wanted him to know about Klaus, and how he had settled, and how their lives were getting better. He wanted to express gratitude for what Mike and his fellow Americans had done. The Russians had wanted to punish Germany, and had done so; their plan was to transform the country into one giant potato farm, people said, a feudal empire given over to the growing of food for Russia. America had been different; it was helping them back on their feet, and he wanted to say thank you, again, for that.

  He addressed his letter to Mike at his base in Wiesbaden. In it, he told him what had happened since his return. He put in a picture of Klaus, standing beside Ilse, holding the small wooden figure of Pinocchio Mike had found abandoned in a Berlin ruin – a dead child’s toy, he thought. Pinocchio’s nose had been broken, and was half its original size, but the paint on his cheeks was still bright and rosy. He told Mike about the improving fortunes of the inn, and about the restoration of the Motodrom. He invited him to visit them if he ever had the chance to travel their way. He signed the letter, Your grateful friend, Ubi.

  He received no reply. After a few weeks he wrote again, a shorter note this time, in which he asked whether his original letter had been delivered. This time there came a response – a brown envelope, on which his name and address were typed. Ilse handed it to him in the office at the inn.

  “He’s answered you now,” she said. “Your first letter must have been lost.”

  Ubi opened the envelope. The letter within was typed, on paper that had a printed military heading. Glancing at the signature before he read it, he saw that it was not signed by Mike.

  Dear Herr Dietrich, the letter began, I am writing in reply to your recent letter addressed to Lieutenant Michael Rogers. I regret to inform you that Lieutenant Rogers lost his life in an aircraft accident in May 1949. This incident occurred in Berlin, during the airlift. I have forwarded your letter to his widow, who is now living in England.

  Ubi read the letter several times before passing it on to Ilse. He was mute. She read it and shook her head. “One more,” she said.

  He nodded, and reached out to take the paper back from her. “I feel very sad,” he said.

  “Of course you must,” she said. “Perhaps you can write to his wife. This major . . .” She gestured to the letter. “You can write to this major and ask him to forward a letter to his wife.”

  “Yes,” said Ubi. “I shall.” He paused. “It would have been a landing accident, you know. It was so dangerous – all those planes circling above Berlin, round and round, and then having to drop down over the buildings. No wonder they crashed.”

  She was watching him. “Do you think there will come a time when we stop hurting one another?”

  He was surprised by her question. “Hurting one other?”

  “Yes. The Berlin blockade: what was that but an attempt by the Russians to hurt Berlin – to hurt all of us.”

  He sighed. “The Russians are full of anger. But then . . .” He sighed again.

  She waited for him to continue.

  “But then there is such a thing as righteous anger, don’t you think?”

  He was right, she thought.

  He turned away. “But I wonder how long we are going to be punished? How long will we have to hang our heads in shame for what we did? All our lives, do you think? All our children’s lives too?”

  She shrugged. “Perhaps for all of our lives.” The thought seemed impossibly bleak – a life sentence. “I don’t know. Unless they forgive us.”

  “They won’t,” he said. “The British will. The Americans and the French too. But not the Russians. I don’t see them doing that, do you?”

  He composed the letter to Val that evening. He had never met her, but Mike had told him a little bit about her during the conversation in the bar in Berlin. He had never written a letter of this nature before, and he decided to write it first in German and then ask Ilse to translate it into English for him. I have been told the sad news of your husband’s accident, he began. This causes me sorrow. Your husband was most kind to me. I shall remember him with great affection. He showed it to Ilse, who said that it was perfect. “The English do not like to make a big fuss,” she said. “They are very reserved. Such a letter will be a great comfort to an English person.”

  ❖ 26 ❖

  The air force was generous. As the widow of an officer killed in action, Val was entitled to a pension. She could go to the United States if she wished and would be assisted in finding accommodation and employment. She could go wherever she wanted to go, and efforts would be made to help her find her feet wherever she chose to settle.

  Mike’s family said that she was welcome to come to Indiana, where his grandparents would take her in and provide a home for Tommy. It would be on their farm, they said, but there was an elementary school quite close and Tommy could go there. Muncie was ten miles away and she might get a job in the town if she wanted one. They knew somebody in a local bank who could get her a job as a trainee book-keeper. You would never want for work if you were a book-keeper, they said.

  It was not an easy decision. She was missing Mike with an intensity that she had never thought possible. It was a feeling of emptiness, a dull ache, constantly present, impossible to subdue by any of the nostrums that people suggested – busying yourself, consciously thinking of other things, counting your blessings, and so on. None of this worked. In her view, their short marriage had been perfect; not once had she felt any irritation or anger; not once had the thought crossed her mind that this partnership between two people of such different backgrounds could turn out to be ill-starred. She had begun to be American, talking of Indiana as home, conversing with the other air force wives on their terms, wearing what they liked to wear, laughing at the same things, becoming a member of what seemed to be a large club of infinite possibilities. But now all that had turned to dust because her rationale for being like this had disappeared. The new person she had become was all to do with Mike, and now that he had gone, the new identity had gone too.

  She wrote to Mike’s family to thank them for their kindness, but explained that she would return to her aunt’s house. It would be easier to care for Tommy there, she said, although she did not say why this should be so. Their reply was one of disbelief. How could it be easier to care for a child in England, where there were still shortages and money was tight? Did she not think that she owed it to her son to bring him up in a place where there were opportunities? She could have written back to ask What do you know of England? But she did not do so; she realised that Mike’s grandparents simply wanted to have their grandson’s little boy, and that was something that he would have understood. She wrote back a conciliatory letter. Yes, she understood all the points they raised; yes, Tommy would have many opportunities in America, but she still felt on balance it would be better for him if she were happy too, and she had never been to America and could not be sure that she would be happy there. What if she did not like it? What if she felt lonely and cut off from her family back in England?

  She went home earlier than she had planned. The air force had been prepared for her to stay in the officers’ accommodation on the base, but she thanked them and said that this would not be necessary. She left everything behind – virtually all the possessions they had accumulated together, taking only photographs and clothing; she was ending a chapter and she did no
t wish to be cluttered with things of the past.

  After a day or two at home it was as if she had never been away. Annie was still running the post office, her room was as she had left it, and there were even clothes in her wardrobe that still fitted her. Annie had installed a cot at the end of Val’s bed; this was for Tommy, although he was now of an age to sleep in something larger. She had also bought him several new sets of clothes, although these were already too small for him; Mike had been tall, and Tommy was taking after him.

  One thing was different: Willy had moved into Archie’s farmhouse, where he occupied the spare room at the back of the house. Archie’s arthritis had become worse, and he now spent most of the day immobile in the kitchen, following what was happening on the farm with an old pair of army field binoculars. He did not need to watch too closely; Willy had taken the farm in hand, had clipped the hedgerows and cropped the patches of rank grazing land. New fruit trees had been planted, and new silos built. He had even managed to find the wire for new fences and had put these up himself, while repairing some of the older sections of fencing that went back fifty or sixty years.

  At first, Willy was shy. Tommy had forgotten him, of course, and Willy, puzzled by his reticence, kept his distance. But that soon changed, and it was not long before he was showing the boy around the farm and teaching him to look for eggs in the hen coop.

  “He loves being with you, Willy,” said Val. “He talks about you non-stop, you know.”

  Willy beamed with pleasure. “He has the makings of a farmer,” he said. “It shows.”

  Val smiled, but she had her reservations. When would Tommy realise that Willy had his limitations? And might not somebody like Willy hold back a child? She reflected, with regret, on the sort of father Mike had been, and on the fact that Tommy would probably have no recollection of him in later life. She would try, of course, to keep his memory alive, but it would mean little to a child of Tommy’s age.