When We Fall

by Carolyn Kirby

  The sour smell of the suitcase catches at Vee’s throat as she picks her way across canvas bracing straps to the cockpit. The thin padding of the pilot’s seat still seems to hold her shape. As she sits, her hands go instinctively to the panel through the pattern of routine checks: Hydraulics – DOWN, Flaps – UP, Fuel mixture – RICH, Column control – UNLOCKED. And then she sets the compass to W. Numbers glow green on the panel clock. Quarter to six. She flicks the first ignition switch.

  The seat shudders. There is a sound from the engine like the squeak of chamois leather on glass and petrol vapour needles through the cabin. Then the port-side propeller booms into the roots of Vee’s hair. She flicks the second magneto switch and the thunder thrills through her from both sides.

  For a second, her eyes close. She will tell them at Gatow that poor vis stopped her journey to Pilsen and she will have to try again tomorrow. But she can imagine the look they will give her. So this might be the last time that she will ever have control of a war plane, the last time that she will feel the elation and power of the cockpit, the last time that she will ever feel quite so alive.

  The windscreen panels carve black lines on to the yellow field. Vee reaches behind her for the straps. And at the edge of her vision something dark drops. The straps fall loose as she stands to check both sides of the windscreen for one last time. But there is nothing. And then the Anson gives a lurch. The cabin door is still closed but the handle is moving. Someone is outside. Hairs stiffen on the back of her neck. Is it Stefan? Or Tomasz? Or someone else? On the instrument panel, the needles on the temperature and pressure gauges are hovering in the middle of the dials. The Anson is ready to go. Then the door bursts open.

  ‘Stefan!’

  He falls into the plane, his head lolling forward on to the dirty floor. Blood seeps from his jacket. He gives a low moan.

  ‘My God, Stefan. What’s happened?’ She is on the floor beside him. Her hands are already covered in his blood. ‘Are you all right?’

  Stupid, stupid question. What is she saying? But the muscles in Stefan’s face are moving as he tries to speak. His hot breath is on her cheek.

  ‘Berlin…’

  ‘Stefan, you need a doctor.’

  His face is paper white but his eyes are clear.

  ‘No. Berlin.’

  ‘Stefan. I can’t fly with you like this. I’ll turn off the engines and get help.’

  ‘No… fly, Vee, fly now.’

  Her chest is pounding. What should she do? The nearest hospital must be in the city. But how can she move him? Perhaps in the village… but how can she even ask for help? She hasn’t a single word. Her mind gallops. If she does fly, it is less than an hour to Gatow. There is a clinic there and RAF medics. Perhaps he is right.

  She takes hold of his hand and shouts into his ear. ‘All right, Stefan. I’m going to fly you to Gatow. Quick as I can. We just need somehow to stop the bleeding.’

  Her boot slips on the wetness as she stands, eyes casting around the hold. And then she sees her overnight bag in the cargo area wedged between two tea chests. How did it get there, in a place that she would never have stowed it? And the clasps are open. The flask seems to be missing but her clean white shirt is still crisp with starch.

  ‘Here.’

  Folding her shirt into a pad, she pulls open Stefan’s jacket. One side of his shirt is sopping red. The revolver is still tucked into his waistband and a sheen of blood reveals the cross-hatching on the grip. She puts two fingers on the sticky handle and pulls it free. Then she presses her clean shirt on to Stefan’s wound as hard as she dares. Above the blare of engines, he yelps like an animal.

  ‘Sorry, Stefan, I’m sorry. But I need to tie you in as well.’

  Reaching out, she takes hold of a loose end of bracing strap and eases it under Stefan’s spine. He groans but she pulls the strap tight around the improvised dressing. At least he is now bound, if loosely, to the fuselage. She must fly the Anson faster and more smoothly than she ever has.

  Stefan’s eyes are closed and he is not moving or making any sound. Only breathing. Vee takes the barrel of the gun in her fist and pushes up the safety lever with her thumb. Then she stands up, fastens the door handle and, with a gulp of sour air, scrambles back to the cockpit.

  What has Stefan done? Is someone coming after him? If they are, the engines have been booming across open countryside for at least ten minutes. Everyone nearby must know that the plane is here. But nothing outside seems to move except the shimmer of leaves in the breeze. Vee places the revolver within her reach in the pouch beneath the side window.

  She sits and fumbles with the seat straps, hands smeared with Stefan’s blood. But the engines are warm and as soon as she touches the rudder pedals and opens the throttle, the Anson spins on its tail-wheel. The plane begins to bump over the grass. Vee’s eyes flick across the instrument panel to the fuel gauge: tail on ground – 25 gallons. Had it not been less than that when they landed? Twenty-three gallons, she could have sworn. She puts her finger on the glass circle and taps on the dial. But the needle stays on 25. The fuel level cannot have gone up. As with the overnight bag, she must be mistaken.

  Vee puts the Anson in the furthest part of the field. Still no one is about. Behind her, Stefan is quiet, as if asleep. Ahead, the field looks flat and inviting. She pulls back the throttle. Is there a slight cough before the engine responds? But it does not matter, the Anson is gaining speed.

  Wheels judder, wings vibrate. Faster now. Vee feels the slight tilt from behind as the tail-wheel leaves the ground. She glances at the speed. 85. About right. Then the shaking in the cockpit ceases and the wings are still. The ground falls away. The trees start to do that thing that she loves, becoming miniature, like accessories for a model railway. Undercarriage – UP, red light on. Good. The plane seems to leap and lighten as the wheels fold themselves away.

  Treetops blur and beyond them roofs appear. Vee can see the muddy main street of the village and a crowd of people gathered outside the biggest house with the orange roof. Tomasz’s house. But then that too, shrinks. The cloud is well clear of the cockpit’s glass roof. Vee glances at the compass. Time to bank now, and to get on the right course. West.

  She turns to glance at Stefan. He is still, perhaps asleep. She must tell him, as soon as he wakes, that she has no doubt the Polish female pilot would have understood perfectly that Stefan had no choice about what he did. The poor woman would have certainly forgiven him just as Vee, in the same place, would too. She wouldn’t think twice.

  Vee turns the steering yoke and pulls back on the control column. As it always does on a turn, the Anson slows. But then there is a bang. It is loud, close, unfamiliar and it makes her flinch. Instinctively, she glances through the side windows at each propeller in turn, but they have not slowed. Already though, the Anson is losing height. Vee pulls back harder on the column, pushing up the throttle. She checks the gauges because she cannot think what else to do. The port wing is tilting now. Trees, fields, barn roofs are getting closer. She looks up to the sky. Not so long ago the cloud had been very close. Now it seems impossibly far away.

  No matter. If one of the engines fails, she’ll find a place to land. She can land without both engines at a push. She has done it before. Not in an Anson, mind you, but others have, and lived to tell the tale over a gin in the mess. It should not be too hard, should it? The fields are big here and some have been harvested. People are cutting the square cornfield directly below. The ground looks flat and hard. She can land somewhere near one of those hamlets. Maybe there will be someone there to help Stefan. He is losing blood after all and Berlin, on one engine, would be a stretch. Perhaps a forced landing will end up being for the best.

  The Anson is still dropping and there is still no reason for it that Vee can understand. Each second seems to lengthen. Her eyes swivel across the instruments and the windows. Cornfields, dark woods, the lake.
And yes, over there, to the north, an unfenced stubble field, not too rough. To the north. Turn towards it. Please turn. Treetops are just below. Sycamores and oaks and birch are all rising up. A branch brushes one of the wings. A birch branch. But that field is not far, over there, just beyond these trees. Not far. Almost there.

  Poznań, Polish People’s Republic

  November 1945

  Ewa has been boarded out on the wrong side of the river as the people there are less fussy about who they will take. The hospital doctor, a Russian woman, insisted to the wife in very bad Polish that Ewa was no longer infectious, if indeed she ever had been. It can’t have been Tuberculosis, the doctor said, or Ewa would certainly be dead by now. The family are suspicious though. They have rigged up a curtain between Ewa’s truckle bed and the grandfather’s, and they will not let her cook any of her food in their pan. Ewa does her best not to let them hear her cough.

  The hospital gives Ewa a small amount of light work in return for paying for her rent and board. It is nothing much – rolling bandages, sweeping the floors of the huts. She does not mind, although some days when she wakes and her chest feels bad, she wonders whether she will even have the strength to open her eyes.

  Several times in the summer that cough nearly saw her off, but there is no doubt now that Ewa is getting better. Her recovery seemed to start, in fact, on the afternoon that her husband visited with the foreign girl. Before that, Ewa’s world had shrunk to the size of her respiratory tract. Then, once they appeared, the horizon suddenly opened. Perhaps they re-ignited in her a spark of life. Who would have guessed that jealousy and rage could be so therapeutic?

  Ewa often thinks about their visit as she makes her slow daily trek to the hospital. From the collapsed bridge she can see the corner of the hut where the girl-pilot appeared. Ewa remembers her standing there, shocked and staring, with her gaze aslant, as if Ewa were a letter containing very bad news. The girl looked mousy and reserved, she was English after all, but she seemed tough too. As soon as Ewa noticed the foreign girl’s unseasonal sheepskin boots there could be no doubt about who she was.

  The marshy plain beneath the squashed bridge is webbed with brown streams. A great weight from above seems to have pressed down and left the bridge undulating between its stone arches. Metal tramlines rise up and down across it like a roller-coaster track. But the makeshift wooden walkway laid across the dips is busy with people.

  On her walks across the bridge, it is not long before Ewa sees someone she knows. Although it is November, the weather is not yet particularly cold but a young woman is clopping towards her in a fur coat. The coat has an old-fashioned cut but the richness of the sable is breathtaking. Ewa sees a twitch of the pencilled eyebrows and knows that the woman has recognised her too.

  ‘Good day, Alenka.’

  Ewa puts out a hand and it touches the fur sleeve as Alenka yanks her arm away. The feel of the coat makes Ewa gasp; its softness has an essence of luxury and beauty that she thought had evaporated from the world. Alenka does not look at Ewa as she clomps off but Ewa hears her parting words: Niemiecka suka.

  Ewa keeps walking. She had thought herself numb to any insult after enduring so many in the women’s camp at Ravensbrück, as if the receptors in her brain that used to convert words into pain had all been switched off. But here she is, on the collapsed bridge in her home town, feeling as if she might cry because a dolled-up liaison girl has called her a German bitch.

  The tears are not for herself, of course. As soon as she could stand up from her hospital bed and insist that she had simply been suffering from a chest infection, Ewa had picked her way to the old town and found the corner of the square where there used to be a guest house. Now there is not even enough of it left for them to daub on abuse in black paint.

  Ewa then went to the post office which was one of the places where people congregated to search for the missing. She blinked twice when she saw old Jabłoński still in a postman’s uniform although one with all of the badges pulled off so she could not tell which government had issued it to him. Through everything, he continues to deliver the post in the old town. His knowledge of its crevices and alleyways has been as good as a bulletproof vest.

  Jabłoński was reluctant to tell her, but she insisted. For her own safety, she said, she had to know. So he explained, perhaps leaving out some details, about how, when Ewa was arrested, the German occupiers had turfed her father out of the guest house. But otherwise they had left him alone. Some of the top brass must have been fond of him and had sympathy for an old soldier. He is dead now, though. In the end, Oskar Hartman’s Polish neighbours delivered his punishment for speaking the language of his grandfather too well.

  Ewa tried to press Jabłoński about what exactly had happened to her father but he would not say. And since then she has seen a corpse hanging from the lamp post outside the Hotel Bazar with a black swastika painted on its bloated belly. So she is glad that she does not know the whole truth. Alenka’s insult, like the final clank of a key in a lock, confirms what Ewa already knows, that sometime soon she must leave the city that has been her only home and never come back.

  Ewa cannot really argue with Alenka’s description, though. She knows herself to be a bitch; just look at how she treated her husband when she last saw him. And anyone who knows the various names she has answered to can have no doubt about her ancestry. She sees now, and with complete clarity, that anything she fought for in the war, any sacrifice she made, will, in this newly named country, simply count against her. She also realises, and the thought provokes a nasty hacking laugh, that the German occupiers actually saved her life by sending her to their women’s concentration camp. If she had been in Poznań when the war ended here in the spring, she would now be in the same place as her father.

  After the unpleasantness with Alenka, Ewa keeps a scarf around her mouth and her head down when she goes to the market. The trestle stalls stand on the same spot as the flower market but the square is unrecognisable. At the centre of the wasteland, a wrecked tank points its long-range gun at the sky. The tank has become a fixed point in a city of shifting rubble. It is almost a source of gaiety with garish posters pasted over the gun turret – a dancing couple in evening dress, a rosy-cheeked baby, an advert for toothpaste.

  Ewa stands in the potato queue wrapped in her scarf. The air is mild, though, which is just as well because she has no winter coat and no notion of how to get one. She shuffles forward and pushes the scarf back from her face, trying to see what is set out on the stall. The sparse produce is arranged in a diamond pattern. But one good potato will last her a couple of days. The woman in front of her in the queue has nothing on her head at all. And with a flutter of her stomach, Ewa recognises the out-dated hairstyle.

  Ewa stands for a moment wondering what to do. There is no doubt in her mind that saying anything to anyone about the AK is as good as buying a ticket to Siberia. But Ewa does not much care what happens to her next. Her desire to know what happened before is stronger. She taps Gertruda on the shoulder.

  Gertruda turns hastily and Ewa sees that she has been recognised. She also understands the look on Gertruda’s face; her nonchalance is masking terror.

  ‘Hello there.’ Ewa tries to keep her voice light. ‘Shall I see you in church sometime? I still go to St Adalbert’s.’

  Gertruda nods. ‘Saturday perhaps. For confession.’

  Then Gertruda loses her place in the queue as she scuttles away.

  The following Saturday, Ewa sits in the same pew for most of the morning. She does not mind. She has nothing else to do and compared to her room, the church feels quite warm.

  As the priest is leaving for his lunch, Gertruda comes in, genuflecting more deeply than is really necessary. She catches Ewa’s eye and beckons her to sit away from the altar where they will be in the shadows.

  As soon as Ewa kneels beside her, Gretruda starts whispering into her clasped fingers
like a prayer. ‘We never found out who it was but there was a traitor in the AK that is for sure. The Germans had their raid so well planned there can be no doubt.’

  Ewa bends her head and pretends also to pray. ‘Who do you think it was?’

  ‘Tomasz Puźniak.’ Gertruda’s words spit out. ‘Pah! Robak. The worm!’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘After the ambush, the Gestapo seemed to have no interest in him. And last February, when the Russians came, he ducked and dived too. The NKVD picked off all of our old AK comrades except for him. They even gave him Haller’s farm. He had learned how to suck up to whoever was in charge and tell them what they wanted to know. A born snitch. He was the only one who made it through the war.’

  Except for you, old woman, Ewa thought but did not say, and for me.

  ‘At least he got his justice in the end.’ Gertruda continues.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Murdered. In July. Executed, in fact. His wrists were fastened behind his back with wire and there was a single bullet hole in the back of the head. Pah! Good riddance!’

  ‘Did someone from the AK take revenge?’

  ‘No, no. It was the British.’

  ‘What? How do you know this?’

  ‘I was told about it on very good authority by a woman from the village who used to work for Jan Haller and held him in the greatest respect. She and her daughter were harvesting a cornfield when they saw a British plane land near the village. Then, a few hours later, it took off again. And in that time, Robak had been killed. The women saw his body. Assassinated. For sure.’

  A cold film of dread, such as she has not felt for many months, begins to wash down Ewa’s spine.

  ‘In July you say…’