Kristina raised her head from the control column. She turned to look over at the petrol station. Petrol used for cars wouldn’t be as efficient in the RWD‑8 as aircraft fuel, but the sturdy little plane could run on it without damaging the engine.
A green car drove slowly past but didn’t stop. Nobody else was around. The scene seemed utterly untouched by the onset of war. But Kristina had seen the crowds, the queues, the tents – she knew what was coming.
Get some petrol and fly to France! Leopold’s voice told her.
“You need to get fuel while they still have some,” Julian said wisely.
Kristina climbed out of the plane. She faced Julian with her hands on her hips. The boy stood looking up at her, his green eyes sunken in his tired, pinched face. He was haunted by the deaths of his parents just the way Kristina was haunted by the death of her brother.
Julian spoke German and French. He had money – he could pay for fuel. He had maps – Kristina couldn’t navigate without them. He had a passport.
Kristina had nothing. She didn’t even have her silver Air Force pilot’s badge, the fierce white eagle of Poland.
All that she had was her plane.
If she kept flying – if they went over the queues and the camps, the checkpoints and the roadblocks – maybe they could avoid any registration until they got to France. After all, there was a Polish embassy in Paris too.
“All right,” Kristina said to Julian. “I bet they’ve never fuelled up a plane here before.”
Then, knowing what Leopold would have said, she added, “It’ll be fun.”
PART 3:
Exile
CHAPTER 16
The petrol station looked closed, but it had a small ice‑cream kiosk attached to it, which was open. It was run by a young couple, and the woman was able to understand a little German. Julian spun a story to them about how he was flying from Austria to Italy as a challenge for the Scouts. He told them he’d come via Budapest to avoid crossing the Alps, and that Kristina was a famous Russian (Russian!) aviator who’d been hired as his instructor.
Julian got away with it somehow. He made this unlikely story seem possible. He was an appealing small boy, so earnest and determined, with his neat blazer and tie and leather school satchel. Plus he really had arrived in an aeroplane that needed refuelling. The young man agreed to open up the garage for them.
When he’d paid for the fuel, Julian whipped out a notebook and got the man to sign and date it. Julian carefully logged the time and place next to his signature.
All Kristina had to do was keep her mouth shut and show the couple how to fill the tanks. They couldn’t get the plane right up to the pumps, so it had to be done by hand, and they made ten trips back and forth in total with a twenty‑litre fuel can and a funnel. But Julian’s fake story and real enthusiasm caught the couple’s attention and they both helped to get the job done.
Julian also managed to buy two car blankets (woven with the crest of the local football team) as well as a bag of fried dough piled with cheese, a winter salami and two bottles of milk. And he somehow arranged for the toilet in the back of the petrol station to be left open for them all night if they wanted it. The young woman gave them free ice cream.
Afterwards, Kristina and Julian sat at one of the picnic tables in the pavilion with their maps spread. They worked out the next leg of their journey in full view of everyone who came and went from the small park.
Every now and then someone would approach them and ask curious questions about the plane. One old man walking a huge deerhound paced around the RWD‑8 knowingly. He had a curious expression on his face and was shaking his head. Then he spent a long time chatting to Julian in German.
Kristina saw Julian growing more and more nervous as they spoke. His pale face became white and his eyes narrowed to green slits. His replies to the old man got shorter and simpler. Kristina couldn’t understand the conversation, but she could tell that the man was mining Julian for details that he didn’t know.
At last the old man turned to Kristina and shook hands with her cheerfully. Then he whistled to his dog and turned to go. He stumped away, muttering a name Kristina had never heard before: “Olga Shostakovich! Olga Shostakovich!”
“Why did you have to tell everybody I’m Russian?” Kristina asked Julian, when the man was too far away to hear. “The Russians are the invaders – our enemies! Allied with the Germans! I don’t want to pretend to be Russian!”
“And I don’t want to pretend to be Austrian,” Julian snapped. “They’re already part of Greater Germany. But if I say you’re all that’s left of the Polish Air Force and I’m a Jewish refugee, where’s that going to get us?”
Julian rubbed the backs of his itchy hands against the buckles of his schoolbag.
“Don’t scratch,” Kristina told him. “What did that man with the dog say to you? And who’s Olga … Olga what’s‑her‑name?”
“He wanted to know what your name was,” Julian replied. “So I had to make it up fast, something that sounded really Russian. The only surnames I could think of fast were all composers – that’s how I came up with Olga Shostakovich. He seemed impressed!” Some colour was coming back into Julian’s face now that the encounter with the man was over. “And he told us not to fly near the Polish border because Germany and Poland are at war.”
“Oh, thanks, mister,” Kristina said.
“He knew our plane was Polish because of the checkerboard flag on the side. I said my dad had won it in a card game. The man also said the Nazis banned the Scouts in Austria last year, and I think he might be right.” Julian rubbed his eyes with his red, chapped knuckles. “I thought my story was going to fall apart, so I said I was part of an international unit called the Young Explorers. The man had never heard of that, of course, because I’d made it up. I don’t know if anything like that exists.”
Julian lowered his hands, blinking. He took a deep, ragged breath and finished, “I told him we’re going to Italy tomorrow. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“I hope so,” Kristina said. Flying was exhausting, but dealing with suspicious strangers in an unfamiliar language was just as difficult in its own way. “From here, Trieste is about as far as we went today, and we have more mountains to cross. I wish …”
“You wish you had a decent bed to sleep in?” Julian asked.
Kristina thought of the alternatives to spending the night on a park bench under a car blanket. They could be in a military field tent full of people fleeing their homes, or on the pavement outside the Polish embassy in Budapest.
“I wish you’d teach me a little bit of French,” she said.
Julian gave her one of his rare real smiles. “I would love to.”
CHAPTER 17
For a few hours, Kristina slept without dreaming.
Then in the middle of the night, she was woken by the wind. It tossed the branches of the surrounding trees and shook pine cones down to drum on the cast‑iron roof of the pavilion. The sound of the wind was soothing, like the ocean’s surf crashing on a beach. Kristina lay awake, rolled up in her souvenir blanket, and listened to the rustling of pine needles.
Then she heard something else: quiet, muffled sobs that came from the bench that stood back to back against hers.
Listening to Julian’s private grief reminded Kristina of her own. Tears began to run down her face. And it was too much to bear alone.
Kristina reached between the slats of the bench, found Julian’s thin, cold hand and grasped his fingers.
After a while, the tears dried on her face, and she drifted off to sleep again. But she didn’t let go of Julian’s hand.
*
Kristina woke at first light with a feeling of dread in her stomach.
A thousand kilometres lay between Budapest and the French border, and it was another thousand to Paris. But it was the first thousand that worried Kristina. At least two full days of flight lay ahead of her, and negotiating for fuel and food in languages she didn’t s
peak. She was worried about crossing the high ground and steep valleys of the Karst Plateau in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Most of all, she was afraid of travelling across Italy, a Fascist country allied with Germany.
But Italy aren’t fighting with them, Leopold’s ever‑cheerful voice in her head reminded her.
“Not yet,” Kristina said aloud to herself. She and Julian would just have to keep up the dramatic act of being Russian and Austrian, and hope nobody questioned the proud checkerboard Polish Air Force flag painted on the plane.
Kristina knew they wouldn’t be able to stop at a real airfield until she got to France. She wasn’t going to be able to get a qualified mechanic to check the plane or even to fuel it. She was going to have to land in meadows and car parks, to organise petrol at car garages like a tourist on a holiday. Otherwise people would sooner or later ask her to produce official documents that she didn’t have.
While Julian still slept, curled like a kitten again on his park bench, Kristina gave her plane as much attention as she could. She checked the control lines and all the moving surfaces of the wings and tail. Everything seemed fine. There wasn’t any reason it shouldn’t be fine. The plane was often in the air five hours every day.
The sun rose in a mass of rosy pink clouds – a beautiful start to another beautiful September day. The weather had been so good during Germany’s invasion of Poland that Kristina had begun to hate the sun. A cloudy sky over Warsaw might have stopped the Luftwaffe from bombing it so easily; rain might have slowed down the German Army.
But the fluffy pink clouds piling up in the west were making Kristina uneasy. Rain, now? She didn’t want to have to fly into bad weather.
She woke Julian. They each ate half a stale dough cake, trying to save some for later, but the boy wouldn’t touch the salami.
“There’s still plenty,” Kristina said. “Go ahead and have some.”
“I got it for you,” Julian answered. “You’re the one doing all the hard work. And I don’t like salami anyway.”
Kristina and Julian took off in the plane before the garage opened up, meaning they couldn’t get any more food.
You know, the kid probably doesn’t eat pork, Leopold’s voice told Kristina. He’s Jewish.
Of course Julian didn’t eat pork.
But he hadn’t made a fuss about it. He’d just gone hungry.
I wonder what else he’s hiding from you, Kristina’s brother teased in her head.
*
Kristina flew south of Lake Balaton. It was a good navigation marker – a long body of water that was easy to spot from far away. There were more of the refugee camps here as well. Kristina didn’t want to land anywhere near them.
She broke the journey near a small farm in Yugoslavia, to rest and eat a bit more before she tackled the dramatic hills and valleys of the Karst Plateau. The sky was now grey and overcast, and Kristina didn’t trust it.
She was right to be worried. After another hour’s flight, the little RWD‑8 was surrounded by storm clouds.
The wind increased without Kristina being aware of it at first. Then it worsened and the little plane was buffeted, lifted and tossed about like a scrap of newspaper. Kristina couldn’t fly in the straight line she’d planned – she had to avoid the black clouds that kept rising ahead of her, hiding the horizon.
Kristina didn’t have the flight instruments or the training to fly without being able to see the ground. She would rather face a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt than fly into a black cloud twice as high as the Carpathian Mountains, sizzling with flashes of lightning.
The RWD‑8 swooped and bucked. Behind her, Julian grabbed Kristina’s shoulder. She shook him off – she needed her full concentration to control the plane.
Big ice‑cold raindrops stung her cheeks as she flew. She glanced back at Julian and saw that he was being sick over the side of the rear cockpit.
Kristina felt sick too – not just with the way the plane rocked in the wind but also with fear. Trying to fly through a storm like this could only end in disaster. But there was no place to land: below her she saw nothing but rocky slopes and dark trees bending in the wind. The bottom of the clouds kept forcing her to fly lower and lower, driving the plane towards the treetops. She was sandwiched between blinding clouds and unforgiving forest and rock.
Kristina didn’t even know which country she was flying over. It might still be Yugoslavia; it might be Italy. She didn’t care any more: she just wanted to be safely on the ground.
Then, suddenly, the ground dropped away below her.
It happened so quickly it was confusing. One moment the trees were rising to meet the wheels of the RWD‑8, and the next moment Kristina was sailing five hundred metres above a great green plain.
She’d made it over the Karst Plateau. She’d made it to the Italian border.
The clouds ahead were too thick and too low for Kristina to be able to see the Adriatic Sea ahead of her. There was no sign of the city of Trieste either. But she didn’t want to land close to the city anyway. She descended fast, looking for somewhere like the friendly park they’d left back in Budapest that morning, before the storm.
CHAPTER 18
Kristina landed in the middle of a crossroads, close to a petrol station and small tourist campsite. Everything was shuttered against the rain. She parked at the edge of the turning circle for the petrol pumps, off the road, with the plane facing into the wind. She found a couple of rocks to wedge the wheels with. She wished she could tie down the wings, but she didn’t have any rope.
While she was working, Julian managed to crawl out of the rear cockpit. He was sick again the moment his feet hit the ground. After that, he sat huddled against the plane, trying to stay out of the rain and waiting for Kristina.
Kristina didn’t feel sick any more, but her head ached with hunger and strain and exhaustion.
“Do you have any aspirin in your magic bag of tricks?” she asked Julian.
Just then, a burly man with the good looks of a film star came running out of a small wooden office building. He shielded his head from the rain with a newspaper and joined Kristina beneath the wing of the RWD‑8. He shook her hand and kissed her on both cheeks, welcoming Kristina with astonishment, and asked her a torrent of questions that she couldn’t understand.
“Olga … Olga Shostakovich,” Kristina said hesitantly.
“Ah!” the man exclaimed, as if he understood now who she was. He looked her up and down, smiled, and then gave her a wink and a gentle pinch at her waistline.
Kristina took a step away from him, feeling awkward and embarrassed.
Julian emerged from under the other wing, looking very pale indeed. He straightened his tie and reached into his schoolbag for his notebook.
Julian didn’t magically turn out to speak Italian. And the handsome man didn’t seem to speak any German or French or Polish. The entire transaction for fuel was accomplished by Julian drawing pictures in his notebook and the man marking prices next to them.
But in the end, in addition to refilling the plane with fuel, the man insisted on giving them one of the pretty little tourist cabins to stay in that night, along with bread and cheese and a jug of milk. The cabin was one tiny room made of rustic wood, which just about fitted a double bed and a dresser with a washbasin on it next to the single window. The bed was covered with a yellow gingham bedspread and the basin was full of clean water. Julian opened the shutters and leaned out – the rain had stopped.
“I don’t like that man,” Julian said darkly as he turned back to Kristina. “The fuel cost a lot more than it did yesterday, and I think he overcharged us. But he threw in the food and bed, so I didn’t argue.”
Kristina hadn’t liked the man either, with his winks and pinches. She was annoyed that she hadn’t been able to join in the negotiation. “Maybe you got the charges mixed up,” she suggested.
“It’s very clear on the receipt,” Julian insisted.
“Let me see.”
Julian showed Kristin
a, but she struggled to read the man’s writing. Her head was pounding. “You negotiate everything before I can ask you about it or check the figures,” Kristina complained.
Julian didn’t defend himself. He dodged out of the tiny room. “I’ll let you wash up first,” he said bluntly. “Take as long as you like.” Then he slammed the solid wooden door behind him.
For a moment Kristina hesitated, nearly going after him. She still hoped he might have some aspirin in his satchel.
The boy’s right, you know, Leopold said to Kristina in her head. You would feel better after a bath. Still, if you want to go on being grubby as well as hungry and tired and scared …
It was a silly argument to have with herself. There wasn’t any possibility of a real bath. But Kristina could wash up at the old‑fashioned china basin, with a matching china saucer on the washstand holding a sliver of orange‑blossom soap.
Kristina took off her tunic and blouse to strip to her underwear. She used a corner of the towel to scrub her arms and neck and face. The cool water was a blessing on her aching head.
She was in the middle of doing this, with her eyes squeezed shut and her face covered with soapsuds, when the handsome man came in quietly, without knocking.
Kristina heard the man bolt the door behind him as she frantically tried to rinse the soap from her face without getting it in her eyes.
CHAPTER 19
Kristina straightened up, her face and fringe dripping wet. A corner of the bed was between her and the man.
His expression was friendly, almost foolish, not a bit threatening – but Kristina was half naked and he’d locked the door, and she felt threatened anyway. She snatched up her blouse.
Shaking his head, the man quickly stepped around the bed towards Kristina, still wearing that foolish, friendly smile. He twitched the blouse from her hands, touching it gingerly as if he was offended at how dirty it was. To Kristina’s shock he tossed the blouse under the bed.
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