The Pathfinder

by Margaret Mayhew

  ‘Actually, it wasn’t Dirk I came to see. It was you.’ His German was very fluent, almost unaccented.

  ‘Me? What about?’

  ‘I have brought you a present.’

  ‘I had much rather you hadn’t.’

  He smiled at her. He had a smile like a toad, she thought; or how one imagined a toad would smile – wide and thin-lipped, the lower lip always moist and smooth and shiny – slightly open, as though his tongue might dart out suddenly to catch some insect. ‘My dear Lili, it’s my pleasure. A lovely girl like you should have nice things. May I come in?’

  He followed her into the big room. Both Grandfather and Rudi had gone to bed which meant that she was alone with him, and Dirk might not be home for hours. He produced the present out of a pocket of his flashy suit. ‘From Paris, Lili. The French make the best.’

  It was scent. A small bottle of Chanel No 5 contained in an elegant white cardboard box with black lettering. Her mother had worn the same kind. She could go on refusing but he would go on insisting. ‘Thank you, Nico. However did you get it?’

  ‘Ways and means. I know how to get almost anything in Berlin.’ He often boasted of that and it was probably true. He was that kind of person. He offered a cigarette from his gold case – the Turkish brand that he always smoked.

  ‘No, thank you.’ She could, at least, refuse a cigarette; he could hardly insist on her smoking it. She watched him fit the cigarette into his ebony holder and flick the wheel on his gold lighter with his thumb. It was always gold with him. Gold case, gold watch, gold pin to his tie, gold nib to his pen, gold fillings in his teeth, the flashy gold ring on his finger. The very first time that she had met him she had disliked and distrusted him. He was too smooth, too glib, too Mr Know-All. Dirk had brought him home late one evening in the summer of the year after the war had ended. ‘This is Herr Kocharian,’ Dirk had said. ‘He is British.’ She had taken one look at Nico and known that if he was of British nationality then it was only by adoption. If things had been different she would have forbidden Dirk to bring him home again, but at that time they had been desperate for any extra food they could get and Nico had given them things – tins of American Spam and corned beef and powdered milk and eggs. And Dirk had gone from doing a little bartering here and there to becoming a fully fledged black marketeer.

  The smoke from the Turkish cigarette was almost nauseating. She sat down by the table, at a distance, and Nico took Grandfather’s chair. His dark eyes, black as olives, gave away nothing of his thoughts. ‘I also came to warn you, Lili.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The Russians are going to blockade the western Allies at any moment. They will close all roads, all canals, every access in and out of Berlin. It will be impossible for the British, Americans or French to bring supplies into their sectors and there will be a big crisis.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘You don’t need to know that – just to know that it will certainly happen. The Russians are very angry about the new western Deutschmark. They want only their own currency to be used for the whole of Berlin but the other Allies will not agree. At all costs, Lili, you must stay here. There will still be food for everyone in the Soviet sector but not in the western sectors.’

  ‘What will happen to those people?’

  ‘If the Allies do not get out the civilians will starve. And they will be starved of raw materials, as well as of food, and what products they can still manage to manufacture for export will be unable to leave the city. Everything will be affected. Everything will collapse. But so long as you stay here in the Russian sector you will survive.’

  Survival. Überleben. She knew too well exactly what that meant. To survive was to stay alive somehow. Somehow to find enough food and water and warmth to sustain life, to struggle through each day until the next. ‘Squadron Leader Harrison says the British will never leave.’

  ‘They may have no choice. You have seen Michael again, then?’

  ‘He came back to buy the Hanhart pilot’s watch from Dirk.’

  Nico smiled. ‘I rather thought that he might. What do you think of him?’

  ‘He’s a Royal Air Force bomber pilot. What should I think?’

  ‘You mustn’t hold that against him. He’s a jolly decent chap.’

  ‘He has killed hundreds of innocent people. Perhaps thousands.’

  ‘Dear Lili, that applies to countless men, on both sides. He was only doing his job. In war, one obeys orders. He was extremely brave, that’s how he earned his medals. Haven’t you noticed them? The ribbons on his uniform?’

  ‘They don’t mean anything to me.’

  ‘He won the DFC twice as well as the DSO. That’s quite impressive, I can tell you. And that gilt eagle badge he wears under them is a Pathfinder’s badge. That’s even more impressive. Amazing bravery and outstanding devotion to duty – I believe that’s the description generally used where they’re concerned.’

  ‘A Pathfinder? What is that?’

  ‘What it says. Literally. He found a path for the bombers. Went ahead of them and dropped coloured flares on the target to show them precisely where to release their bombs.’

  ‘My God! He did that? Made very sure they didn’t miss?’

  ‘Well, they were usually trying to hit vital targets – factories, railways, docks.’

  ‘And often they did not care what they hit, so long as they destroyed a city and killed as many Germans as they could. They were barbaric.’

  ‘The Nazis were not exactly civilized.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said bitterly. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

  ‘Poor Lili.’ He spread his hands, the smoke from his cigarette curling up from the ebony holder slotted between his fingers. ‘It was a terrible war. Everyone suffered. The Germans, the British, the Americans, the Russians. Everyone.’

  Except you, Nico, she thought. Somehow I think you have escaped it all. You have learned how to turn everything to your advantage; how to tiptoe a path through the middle of all the misery. She stood up. ‘If you don’t mind, I’m rather tired . . .’

  He stubbed out his cigarette in the tin lid ashtray and got to his feet. ‘Of course, Lili. Of course. But you will remember what I said? Don’t leave this sector, whatever you do.’

  She went with him to the front door. He stopped there for a moment and she kept her safe distance. She could smell the smell of him – Turkish cigarettes mingled with musky cologne and whatever oil he used on his slick black hair. He had never touched her, or even tried to, but because of the gifts there was always the dread that he might expect – even demand – her to allow it.

  ‘If there is ever anything you need, you have only to ask me.’

  She said, ‘I wish you would stop Dirk from what he is doing – that’s what I ask. It’s so dangerous. The Russians arrest black marketeers. They are dragged away and never seen again. I live in fear of this happening to him.’

  ‘It would be very hard to stop him. Dirk will do as he wants, you know that.’

  ‘But you have encouraged him.’

  ‘I have not discouraged him, that’s all. This is a cruel city and only those who help themselves will survive. But I will urge him to be more careful, if you like.’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘If Dirk gets into any trouble, let me know at once.’

  She couldn’t keep the scorn from her voice. ‘What could you do?’

  ‘Something.’ He smiled his toad’s smile at her. ‘I can always do something. Goodnight, Lili.’

  She went and sat in Grandfather’s chair and closed her eyes, feeling very tired and very afraid. She had no doubt that what Nico had warned was true; he always knew everything that was going on. The Russians would blockade the city and the British, Americans and French would eventually have to leave and when that happened Berlin would be lost. It would be even worse, if possible, than living under the Nazis. The whole city would be put under Communist rule with brutal commissars and a Secret P
olice force, without freedom or justice or mercy. They would be allowed only the barest necessities for existence and they would live in constant fear. The Russians hated them and had a mountain of scores to settle. She had not forgotten – how could she ever – the terrible days when the Red Army had reached Berlin at the end of the war. She covered her face with her hands at the memory of it.

  It had been the day after her sixteenth birthday when their tanks had come rumbling like thunder through the streets. What little there was left of the city had been burned and pillaged. Men had been rounded up and transported to labour camps in the Soviet Union. Women of all ages had been raped and tortured, mutilated with bayonets, savagely murdered. The few treasures remaining to families had been looted by Russian soldiers and what they could not carry away, they had destroyed. She and Grandfather, Dirk and Rudi had hidden deep in a U-Bahn tunnel, living off bread and water for days on end, and when they had finally crept out they had witnessed a scene of hell. People were shambling about dressed in rags, scavenging like dogs for scraps of food in the still-burning ruins and queuing for water with buckets in long lines, numb despair on their faces. The most terrible thing of all had been the stench of the rotting corpses – a stench so sickening it made you retch and retch and retch. They had returned to the apartment in Albrecht Strasse and found it stripped almost bare of anything that had previously survived the bombing. Pictures, silver, ornaments, jewellery, clothes had all gone. The piano had been chopped to pieces, china smashed, books kicked about and hurled out into the courtyard, upholstery slashed and fouled, furniture wrecked beyond repair, even the taps in the kitchen and bathroom had been wrenched off and taken away by Russian peasant soldiers who had believed they would still provide running water. By some strange miracle, Mother’s hats, kept in the old trunk in a corner, had not been touched. She had lifted the lid to see them all still there, as beautiful as ever with their rich colours, their swathes of gossamer silk veiling and their glossy feathers. The sight of them had made her break down and weep.

  Somehow they had carried on. They had cleaned up the mess and combed the ruins again for pieces of usable furniture and utensils. Clothing and blankets had been very hard to come by and the worst problem had been finding food. There was almost nothing to eat except a meagre ration of potatoes and bread dispensed to long queues by surly Russians. They had gnawed at mouldy carrots and made soups out of weeds and nettles and tree bark. Finding fuel for warmth and cooking was another impossibility. Nearly all the trees in Berlin had been either destroyed in the bombing or chopped down for firewood. Every branch and stick and twig had been gleaned. Dirk had walked miles out into the country with an old wheelbarrow to look for more.

  Sometimes he came back with a few potatoes too, or some swedes, and, once, a whole cabbage. One day a loose horse had come clip-clopping down Albrecht Strasse. Before it had reached the end of the street it had been surrounded and caught. A man who had worked in a butcher’s shop had cut its throat and skinned it, and the crowd that had quickly gathered from nowhere had fallen onto the carcass with kitchen knives and hacked it into bloody hunks of meat. Within minutes the dead animal had been stripped to bones – nothing left but head, tail and ribcage. She had managed to grab a hunk of the thigh and carried it home in an enamel washbasin, slopping around horribly in a pool of crimson.

  But Rudi had grown thinner and frailer and Grandfather had become more and more senile. And the Russians were no less brutal. Whenever she had gone out of the apartment she had made herself look as ugly as possible – rubbed dirt into her face, painted herself with false blemishes and dressed in old women’s clothes or worn Dirk’s trousers, done anything to escape the notice of the Soviet soldiers. It had worked – until the time when she had been carrying buckets of water back home from the standpipe and a group of them, drunk as lords, had come staggering down the street, seized her and dragged her into the ruins. Hours later, Dirk had found first the upturned, empty buckets and then her, lying where they had left her unconscious. The bruises had faded and the deep cut on her forehead had healed but the nightmare had never gone away and never would.

  And then, at the beginning of July, the British and the American troops had arrived in the city. They had brought with them law and order, doctors, medicines, employment, and food. Most important of all, they had brought hope. Hope of a future where there had been almost none.

  For a while, life had seemed a little brighter, but Rudi was still no better. Each day he seemed to grow thinner and weaker. There was no fresh milk or eggs or fruit for children and the Russianrun hospital had no vitamins or supplements to spare. Take Rudi. Look after him, whatever happens. Her mother’s last words to her: a sacred trust.

  She was at her wits’ end when one day, when she had been working in the ruins, a young American soldier had stopped to photograph her and then started talking. He could get fresh food, he’d told her, smiling a white-toothed, easy-going sort of smile – if she was nice to him. After him, there had been other American soldiers and, when Rudi had been so close to death with polio, an army doctor who had provided medicine and vitamin pills. Always Americans because she’d learned that they had the most food and supplies. The British were too poor, the French too mean. Compared with the Russians, the Americans were decent human beings. It was not frau komm! but hi, fräulein! She had learned how to be nice to them and she had taught herself to see it as a simple business deal. The daily toil in the ruins, digging and shovelling, carting and scraping, helped her not to think too much about anything else.

  Nico had not stubbed out his cigarette properly; she could smell it still smouldering away. She got up and, reluctant to touch with her fingers what had touched his lips, carried the ashtray to the open window and tipped the cigarette end out.

  Then Dirk came into the room. By the swagger in his step, she knew he had made some black market deal that had pleased him very much. He was cock-a-hoop, as though he had achieved something wonderful. Once, long ago, there had been talk of him going to university to become a lawyer; of herself studying languages to become a teacher. Such plans. Such dreams. All come to dust. She was glad that her mother could not see what they had both become. ‘Nico was here,’ she told him. ‘He came to warn us that the Russians are going to blockade Berlin.’

  ‘It was bound to happen.’

  ‘The British and Americans will have to leave, he thinks.’

  ‘I told you so.’

  ‘Then we’re lost.’

  He shrugged. ‘We have come through everything this far, Lili. What’s the difference?’

  Six

  From the control tower windows at Gatow, Harrison watched the Dakota descending out of thick cloud. It was the last of the thirteen to fly in that day from RAF Wunstorf in the British zone of northern Germany and, between them, the Daks had brought in about forty tons of food. There had been a mad scramble, both by the British and the Americans, to organize the airlifting of supplies into west Berlin. Nobody was pretending that the civilian rations could be provided by air once the present food stocks in the city were exhausted; the general view was that it need only be a short-term affair – a ten-day operation, at the most, while negotiations took place with the Russians to open up the lifelines again.

  Harrison was not so sure. So far as he could see the Russians had shown themselves to be obdurate and they had outmanoeuvred the western Allies at every turn. They held too many aces. Not only was it going to be impossible to feed three and a half million west Berliners by air, but other things, equally vital to the life of the city, would soon run out – coal, petrol, diesel, oil. The city’s main power station lay in the Russian sector and its output to the west had been cut off as summarily as the roads and railways and canals. Extra generators were being flown in but eighty per cent of the electricity supply had been lost. The mayor, Ernst Reuter, had made a brave speech to a huge crowd of cheering people in a stadium in the French sector, rallying them to stand up to the Russian bully-boys. He’d called upo
n the world to help the Berliners in their fight for freedom.

  ‘Well, we’re doing all we can,’ Tubby had commented drily. ‘Jolly ironic, isn’t it? Not so long since the RAF were popping over to kill all these people and now we’re popping over to help them stay alive. Quite a volte-face. It takes some getting used to, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s not just for the Berliners,’ he’d said. ‘It’s for everything we fought for. I’m damned if we’ll let the Russians get away with it.’ The thought of what the Soviets were doing – the sneaky, outrageous game that they were playing – enraged Harrison. Thousands of good, brave men had died in order to win the war against Hitler and tyranny and now it seemed that it had been in vain. Tyranny was not dead at all. It lived on and flourished in the shape of Stalin and Communism. Liberty was still far beyond the grasp of every man. Realistically, he held out little hope for Berlin; in the end, it would probably disappear into the Soviet zone. Be swallowed up and lost. There was only so much they could fly into the city. What would happen when the stocks of coal, for instance, ran out? No power, no electricity, no gas, no heat. The only sane hope lay in the Russians being willing to negotiate and kindly lift the blockade which he thought was about as likely as pigs flying.

  He watched the Dakota touch down in the pouring rain, sending up a long wake of water, more like a boat than an aircraft. The wet weather was an added problem. The new runway was still unfinished and the alternative landing strip was made of pierced steel planking laid over grass which was not designed to withstand heavily loaded aircraft, especially in soggy conditions. The only other western airfield was Tempelhof in the American sector, a pre-war civil airport. A third was being built in the French sector, but how long would that take? A lot longer than it would take for all stocks to be exhausted. The Dakota had reached the end of the runway and turned off towards the unloading hardstands. It was carrying sacks of flour – three tons of the stuff, its maximum-load capacity. A drop in the ocean, as Tubby had so rightly said.