The Pathfinder

by Margaret Mayhew

  ‘Not enough, dear boy. Nowhere near, is it?’

  ‘Don’t be such a Jeremiah. I didn’t think it would really be possible at first, either, but now I’ve a feeling it just might be. It’d help if the bloody weather would improve. Rain, hail, fog. Christ, this is supposed to be midsummer.’

  ‘Wait until it’s winter. The winters here can make England seem positively tropical. What happens then? When we’ve run out of fuel? We can’t run the power stations on dried eggs.’

  ‘We’ve already begun flying in coal.’

  ‘I know, but you can’t dehydrate that, can you? A ton of coal is a ton of coal. And it’ll take a hell of a lot of tons to keep western Berlin going all winter. I still say we should do what General Clay wants – storm the ramparts.’

  He knew that Tubby had a point: the reality was that they were probably fighting a losing battle. The two airfields in western Berlin could barely cope as it was, and if they were to have any serious chance of success the number of aircraft had to be vastly increased. In the early days of the airlift there had been a frantic scramble to recruit more trained men and all stores had been ransacked for radios, spare parts, tools, ropes, steel planking, pots and pans – anything that could conceivably be put to use in any way. They’d rounded up lorries and jeeps and signed on thousands of German men and women as labourers and loaders.

  He knew the bald facts and figures. There were forty-three RAF Dakotas available from Transport Command and forty Avro Yorks. The daily RAF target had been increased to eight hundred and forty tons and the Americans were bringing in three thousand more than that with their C-47s and C-54s. This was the minimum considered necessary to support the three and a half million western Berliners and the Allied forces in their sectors. Apart from the basic food consignments, salt – apparently essential for the human body as well as for industry – had to be carried. Thirty-eight tons of it were needed every day. And salt corroded aircraft. Fortunately, the Sunderland flying boats, designed to get round this very snag, had come to the rescue, landing on Lake Havel, close to Gatow.

  The problem of carrying coal was an even bigger headache. First, it was heavy. Second, it took up a great deal of space. Third, it had to be carried in something and there was a serious shortage of sacks. Fourth, and trickiest of all, the black coal dust was not only unpleasant, it was dangerous. It leaked from the sacks and got into every nook and cranny of an aircraft, eroding wiring and jamming controls. Hosing down simply made matters worse, and the only way to keep the menace at bay was for every coal-carrying aircraft to be swept out by hand with brooms and brushes.

  But the biggest nightmare of all was controlling the constant stream of air traffic. The three air corridors across the Russian zone into Berlin were only twenty miles wide and the British and American aircraft were of disparate types and capabilities, flying at different speeds and heights. To prevent mid-air collisions they had to be spaced horizontally as well as vertically. There was no chance of flying in dense formations and the only safe and efficient way of bringing them down in a confined runway space was one at a time. In Flying Control they had worked out that theoretically it should be possible to allow an aircraft to land and another to take off every five minutes but in practice it was more like every fifteen minutes. The bad weather had hampered them too much. So had difficulties in loading and emergency repairs and teething problems with ground control. There had already been two RAF crashes involving Yorks, one at Wunstorf and one at Gatow. The Americans had lost three C-54s in one day, landing at Tempelhof in bad weather, and two other Skymasters had crashed on Berlin – one hitting an apartment block, the other landing in a street in the Friednau district. Men had died and would go on dying.

  He finished his beer and saw that Tubby’s glass was empty.

  ‘Same again?’

  ‘As long as it lasts. Mark my prophetic words, Michael, we’ll soon be drinking water.’

  Seven

  Lili opened the lid of her mother’s trunk slowly, half afraid that the hats might somehow have vanished. But they were still there, in all their glory. She lifted one or two out, trying them on in turn. No looking glass had survived in the apartment, but her mother had kept a silver-backed hand mirror in the trunk and she used this now to see her reflection.

  Since childhood, as a special treat, she had been allowed to try on the hats – exquisite, extravagant, beguiling concoctions following the Parisian styles and made with the finest materials and the greatest skill. Before the war in the Twenties and early Thirties her mother’s little shop in Dessauer Strasse had been patronized by some of the most elegant women in Berlin. When the Nazi Secret State Police had moved into premises just around the corner and begun their reign of terror, the shop had stayed open. It had remained open for the first year of the war, when the victories had come easily and Berlin women had worn the latest fashions from France and draped themselves in Norwegian silver fox furs, and when every streetcar had smelled divinely of French perfume. And then the bad news had started and the bombs had begun to fall and instead of the smell of French perfume there was the stench of corpses. The shop had closed. Nobody was buying such hats any more. It was thought profligate; wasteful; unpatriotic. In her mother’s opinion, though, the opposite was true. Beautiful hats on beautiful women would do more for morale, she had declared, than any nonsense that Herr Goebbels could think up. In times of crisis it was the duty of women to look their very best. One had only to follow the example of the French who had never allowed defeat and enemy occupation to lower their sartorial standards. The Nazis, though, had thought otherwise. Clothes had been strictly rationed: lists drawn up for men and women of the number of items permitted to be purchased and the points required for each. Materials were cheap and shoddy, the clothes ill fitting. Only two pairs of shoes were allowed and the Gestapo would visit homes to count them. If they found more the shoes were seized and a fine had to be paid.

  Apart from her wooden-soled shoes, Lili possessed only one other pair. They were of soft navy blue leather with high heels and had belonged to her mother and been made before the war. She had one good dress: a dark blue silk with a pattern of small black dots and a heart-shaped neckline. One of the hats in the trunk suited it perfectly: a little black cap of grosgrain, made to perch at the front of the head, with a wisp of black veiling to cover the brow and the eyes.

  Rudi had felt too poorly to get up that morning and lay on his truckle bed in the room he shared with Dirk and Grandfather. He had a book beside him but it was shut and he had his eyes closed. She knelt beside the bed.

  ‘I’m going out for a little while but I shan’t be long. Will you be all right?’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve been listening to see if I could hear the American planes landing at Tempelhof but it’s too far from here. I should so much like to go and watch them. And the RAF out at Gatow.’

  ‘When you’re better perhaps Dirk will take you on the back of his bike.’

  ‘He says he saw the big flying boats landing on the Harvel See. The British Sunderlands. There was a huge crowd watching on the banks and everybody cheered. They are bringing in salt, you know. The other planes are bringing food and even coal. It must make the Russians very angry, mustn’t it?’

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘They can’t stop them flying though, can they?’

  ‘Not very easily. Not unless they shoot them down and I don’t think even they dare do that.’

  He smiled faintly. ‘It’s rather funny, isn’t it, Lili? They thought they were being so clever shutting the roads and railways but they forgot all about the air.’

  ‘Yes, it doesn’t always go their way.’

  ‘Only Dirk says the British and Americans will never be able to fly in enough of everything. Do you think he’s right?’

  She said slowly, ‘I think it will be very difficult to do so for very long.’

  ‘But they might manage it?’

  ‘They might.’

  ‘What if they do
n’t? Dirk says the people who live in their part of the city will starve.’

  She ruffled his hair. ‘Don’t listen to everything that Dirk says. Don’t worry, something will be sorted out. Shall I fetch your scrapbook for you to look at?’

  ‘Not now. Is that one of Mother’s hats?’

  ‘Yes. I thought I’d wear a special hat today as it’s Sunday. Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s pretty.’

  ‘Do you remember how she used to make them? The little shop she had?’

  ‘No, not really. I can hardly remember her at all now. What was she like?’

  He had asked the question several times before and it was always hard to answer. Only one or two photographs had survived to show him – fuzzy snapshots that couldn’t really give him much idea. ‘Beautiful to look at and full of life and energy. Always laughing.’

  ‘I think I remember that – her laughing. And Father, what was he like?’

  ‘Much quieter. An intellectual. Rather serious. Very kind and also very brave.’

  ‘Do you think he was afraid – before he died?’

  ‘I think he had a great inner strength which helped him not to be.’

  He stared up at the ceiling. ‘I’ve been thinking . . . when the bombs killed Mother and Grandmother it was at night, wasn’t it? So it must have been the Royal Air Force because the Americans only came by day.’

  ‘Yes. It must have been.’

  He was silent for a minute. ‘I still like the English squadron leader, don’t you?’

  She said obliquely, ‘It was kind of him to bring you the pictures and the model.’ She stood up. ‘Grandfather is snoring away in his chair. Try to sleep a little, too, if you can. It will do you good.’

  She took one more look in the silver hand mirror, tilting the hat further forward and adjusting the veiling over her eyes. It gave her the comforting feeling of being concealed: to be able to see without being wholly seen. As a final touch, she opened the bottle of Chanel No 5 that Nico had given her and dabbed the scent behind her ears and at her throat and wrists. Her mother’s hat, her mother’s shoes, her mother’s favourite scent. So strongly did she feel her presence that she might have been there in the room standing beside her. Look after Rudi, whatever happens.

  The sun came out as she walked down Albrecht Strasse but a cool wind made her shiver in the silk dress. The See was running fast, swollen from the heavy rain and dotted with all kinds of debris. When the zoo had been bombed and the cages damaged, the crocodiles had tried to escape into the river but had been hauled out and shot. She could remember how sorry she had felt for them: to have been so dose to freedom. As she crossed the bridge, she could see some poor dead animal bobbing along half-submerged. It could have been a dog or cat or perhaps a rabbit; it was impossible to tell from the glimpse of sodden fur. Few dogs and cats had survived so it was probably a rabbit. Berlin had once been full of them. They had run wild in the Tiergarten and hopped about courtyards and alleyways – until, like anything edible, they had become food.

  Now, instead of rabbits running everywhere, there were rats: thousands of rats that had fed off the corpses buried in the ruins and grown fat and strong. When she was working in the rubble, turning over stones and great lumps of masonry, they would run out; once one had scampered straight over her foot. Some of them had grown fearless and would sit at a short distance, grooming themselves and watching with their beady little eyes. Almost worse than the rats were the flies in summer – great shining green flies that nobody had ever seen before. They rolled around in horrible clumps on the pavements and warmed themselves in the sun on the broken glass. In the apartment, she could hear them rustling and humming in crevices and in the roof space overhead and sometimes they gathered on the window sills, fouling everything they touched. The only respite from them came with winter.

  She walked down Friedrich Strasse. Once, before the war, the street had been a beautiful place to stroll and window-shop and, if you had the money, to buy, and then to eat in one of the wonderful restaurants. Now it was a ghost street. She turned into the Linden towards the Brandenburg Gate where there were often American soldiers hanging around; it was where she had picked up the army doctor. Foreigners always wanted to see that Gate, to photograph it and be photographed standing in front of it. It fascinated them. Dirk said that some of them were so naive that you could offer to sell them Adolf Hitler’s watch and they’d believe you.

  She reached the Gate and walked through one of the archways to the open platz beyond and the boundary between the Soviet and British sectors. Before the blockade there had only been a white line painted in the road, now there were coils of barbed wire and a long striped pole. The Russian guard stopped her, demanding her ID papers. She took them out of her handbag and waited impassively while he examined them. Officially, there was no restriction against movement from one sector to another and thousands crossed in each direction daily, but the Russians always made trouble for German civilians if they could find the slightest excuse. And the fear was always there. He handed back her papers, thrusting them at her rudely, and raised the pole.

  She walked across the white line into the British sector. There were no American soldiers to be seen, only a handful of German civilians – an old couple walking slowly arm in arm, a mother leading a young child by the hand, some small boys playing with old piping on a piece of wasteland. The wind was worse here, sweeping up the broad expanse of the East-West Axis from the Tiergarten so that she had to hold on to her hat. She stood, pretending to admire the Gate, when in reality she hated the very sight of it.

  After a while, one of the black Volkswagen Occupation Forces taxis drew up, and from the corner of her eye she saw that the man who got out of it was wearing an American uniform. She went on staring up at the Gate and he came and stood a few feet away from her, hands in his pockets, chewing gum: a sergeant with a striped chevron on his arm and wearing a forage cap, somewhere in his late twenties. She could tell, out of the corner of her eyes, that he was looking at her as well as at the Gate, and presently she turned her head and smiled at him. He smiled back and walked over. She saw that he carried a camera in his hand. ‘Say, Fräulein, you speak English?’

  Thank God she did because they never spoke German. ‘Yes, I do.’

  He nodded at the Gate. ‘Maybe you could tell me about this place.’

  ‘The history? It was built in the eighteenth century and is a copy of an ancient triumphal arch in Athens.’

  ‘Gee, that so?’

  ‘There were other gates in Berlin too, but this is now the only one.’ She pointed. ‘You see the statue of the chariot with four horses on the top, facing the other way, towards the Russian side?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘They are being driven by Victory.’

  ‘Sure seems like they got that wrong.’

  She smiled politely at the joke. ‘Napoleon thought so too. When he conquered the city he took the statue home to France with him. It was only returned after his defeat.’

  He chewed on the gum, staring upwards. ‘Guess I never thought about Napoleon havin’ anythin’ to do with it . . . just Hitler. This is where he’d hold those big Nazi rallies, that right?’

  ‘Some of them, yes.’

  ‘Spooky . . .’

  ‘What does this word mean – spooky?’

  ‘Give you the shivers . . . you know.’

  She knew exactly.

  ‘Tell you the truth, no offence, but the whole damn city does that. It’s a helluva spooky place.’ He fiddled with the camera. ‘Mind takin’ a shot of me in front of the Gate? My folks back home would be real interested.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He showed her how to operate the camera and when she had taken several pictures of him, posing in front of the Gate, he wanted to take one of her. She could imagine him showing it off to his family in America, pointing out the German fräulein he’d met – unless he was married, of course, in which case it would be shown only to other men wit
h much elbow-digging and mirth. Soon he would want to know her name and, sure enough, it was his next question. ‘Cute name,’ he said when she had told him. Cute she had learned already from the other Americans. It meant suss, more or less. Sweet. He grinned at her, still working away at the gum, jaws chomping steadily like an ox. He was not so bad-looking but somehow he repelled her. ‘Mine’s Donald but everyone calls me Bud. Say, can we take a walk, or somethin’?’

  She steeled herself. ‘The Tiergarten is very close, if you like.’

  ‘Suits me.’

  Once it had been such a pleasure to walk there; now to do so was only sadness. The lovely trees had been hacked to the ground and all that was left were scrubby bushes and mud and puddles. The famous Goldfish Pond had no fish and the beautiful tree-lined waterways where Berliners had gone boating in summer were bleak and bare.

  ‘This was a hunting place for royal princes before it became a park for the people. It was landscaped in the English style,’ she told him.

  ‘You don’t say?’

  ‘But I am afraid, of course, that it is not very nice now. All the trees have been cut down, the wood all taken for fuel.’

  ‘Well, I guess you needed it. You get some pretty cold winters here, that right?’

  She knew he would not really understand at all how terrible it had been. ‘Yes, they can be very bad.’

  ‘Where I come from, in Texas, our winters ain’t nothin’ to worry about. Summers are real hot, though. We have a big problem stayin’ cool.’ He looked around apprehensively. ‘This place safe?’

  Perhaps he suspected that she was luring him into some sort of trap where he would be robbed, even murdered. For all she knew, it was not so safe for an American who would be bound to be carrying cigarettes and dollars. ‘We will not go far, if you prefer.’

  A cold trickle of water had seeped through a hole in the sole of her left shoe; she prayed it would not get worse. ‘You are in the American army, Bud?’