The Hidden War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘How about if I take it easy for a few days. Go for some walks with Frieda to strengthen my foot – then spend another couple of days setting the schedules up – I’m worried about the maintenance programme and engine hours: we’re overflying the aircraft.’

  ‘So is everyone else.’

  ‘. . . and then I’ll hop a flight home. I’ll call Chiefy and Elaine this morning.’

  Frieda looked as thrilled as a bucket of blood at the prospect of walks in the park. Her eyes went blank, but Halton agreed. ‘Fine, Charlie.’ Have you noticed that some words become catching: like measles? ‘I’ll expect you back in a week.’

  ‘How long are you staying this time, boss?’

  ‘I’m not. I’ll trot soon after the funeral – not stay for the party if that’s all right? There’s a debate on the Airlift in a couple of days, and I promised to brief a committee of their Lordships.’

  ‘Do you do much of that sort of stuff?’

  He coughed, and finished with a wry grin. ‘Where did you think our contracts came from?’

  Fergal put on a horrible expression of suffering innocence. ‘Is that what they call corruption in some untutored circles, sir?’

  The old man was up for it. ‘No, Father, they call it grease: greasing the wheels of commerce. You know what grease is, don’t you? Isn’t that what you called your pilot during the war?’ and he chuckled. Again I asked myself, How the hell did he know that?

  A big armoured-looking staff car with an armoured-looking driver came for them half an hour later. Halton was taking Fergal out to inspect the chapel and the grave site. They would return for me before the event. One of the last things he told Fergal to do was provide me with a shopping list for the orphanage. He was good at shopping lists: I was in no doubt that it would be filled. I was also in no doubt that none of us would know where the stuff came from. It was the way the Old Man worked.

  Frieda looked at me and I looked at her. Across the table. That’s what we were getting quite good at. She let out a long breath with a low hiss. Maybe I should introduce her to Alice.

  ‘So: I am to take you for walks, like a dog?’

  ‘Looks like it. Sorry.’

  ‘You are serious?’

  ‘No. I just said it to buy myself some time. There are things I have to do before I go back.’

  ‘With your crooked friends?’

  ‘My crooked friends have the lists of survivors in the Soviet Zone that you wanted so badly to see. It’s time to see if I can get something right.’

  There’s no pleasing some folk: she stood up without another word, flung her napkin among the breakfast crocks and stalked out.

  The telephone didn’t help me much. Red Greg was out of town. The Leihhaus barman said that Marthe and Lottie had taken Moppo to see a doctor out near the lakes somewhere.

  I called Tommo’s bar. He was upstairs with his whore and a do not disturb sign on the door. I tried that in my language box and it came out as bitte nicht stören. I’d have to ask Frieda when she was speaking to me again. After that I told the barman at the Klapperschlange to dangle the receiver into Alice’s box, and heard her warning rattle when I spoke to her. It was good to know that someone still loved me.

  At Gatow Bozey Borland yawned, and told me that we had only two deliveries, the Lancastrians, due in for the day: they had flour, powdered milk and powdered egg – and after that he was going back to bed: the boss had kept him up half the night, he said.

  That’s why I ended up standing on the top step outside the front door with my stick in my hand, wondering where to go. It was a sharp, late autumn already, it seemed, and the sun was weak in a sky streaked by high, thin cirrus. Autumn is my season: I always have the edge in autumn. I’d only made a half-turn at the sound of the door opening and closing behind me before Frieda’s arm was through mine – on my good side. She said, ‘You want to walk? We walk.’ Wir gehen. Well, that’s what I thought she meant.

  She’d put a light mackintosh on over her clothes. We patrolled in angry silence up one side of the road and down the other: her heels rattled on the cracked pavements like rifle shots. Just like any other happy couple weathering a squall. We were as tense as springs, and I pushed away her helping hand going back up the steps.

  Back inside the apartment she unbuttoned her coat as soon as the door closed behind us . . . but that’s as far as she got before I threw the stick away, pushed her up against the wall and kissed her. Her body seemed to relax completely, as if her bones had suddenly become rubbery. That’s how mine felt. She leaned into my neck and said, ‘You can’t even wait for him to leave town, Charlie.’ I got the feeling that what she had just said about me, she was saying about men in general. Then she pushed me off and walked away without a second glance. She must have known that I was watching her until she disappeared. Even then I couldn’t move. I could still hear the clack of her shoes on the wooden floors.

  I bloody hate bloody funerals. It’s something my generation is good at because we’ve staged so bloody many. It’s what happens when half the bloody world goes to war. The first funerals I attended were with my mum and dad. They were of relatives: men, whose deaths in the First War had been long-drawn-out affairs – bullets that killed them ten years later. I clearly remember a neighbour saying of me, Poor little mite: he doesn’t know what’s happening. What did she know? Even at six I recognized that if you put a favourite uncle in a wooden box and buried it, you weren’t going to see him again. Not unless you were unlucky that is.

  By the time we buried Ed a fine cold veil of rain had blown down from the Baltic. Fergal and the Old Man picked us up in the four-wheel-drive staff car – some kind of big Chevy. They were as grave as the situation required, but their pink cheeks betrayed the fact that they had drunk lunch. The driver was a full lieutenant from the Gloucesters – which I mention just to show you the sort of pull Halton had. Frieda wore a black wool coat which fell to below her knee, and carried an umbrella. I let her get aboard first, so I was a little damp by the time I squeezed in alongside her. We were all quiet for the twenty-minute drive – lost in our own thoughts I guess. Like them or not, there’s nothing like funerals to concentrate the mind.

  My leg worked all right going up the path to the small makeshift chapel across the road from the war cemetery: I could almost have managed without the stick. Some people from the bar were there, and Marthe, Lottie and Moppo. And Dave Scroton with Magda, and a dozen of the REME guys I’d met partying at the Leihhaus the last time I’d been there. The service was short – nothing like the mumbo-jumbo Fergal was accustomed to – and he led us through it at a merciful trot. The chapel door remained open, and the damp in the air seeped around us. There was only one hymn, ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past’, chosen, I suspect, because most of us knew it: Marthe’s voice, singing the refrain in German, rose above the rest like an angel’s. I was the one who didn’t know the words and la-la’d along with the tune. When Frieda realized that she turned and gave me a little glance; it was the first time she’d looked at me since our close encounter. In the early days she had this knack of making me feel judged and found wanting. She also sang in German of course, and her voice was lower – perfect counterpoint to Marthe. Eddy would have been proud of us. Fergal invited us to say a few words about Ed, but only Scroton took him up on it. He shuffled forward, his old pilot’s cap twisting nervously in his hands, turned to face us and said:

  ‘Ed was a great engineer.’ He paused and then added quietly, ‘He shouldn’t have died like that.’ That was all. The corporal with the REME crowd said Amen, very loudly, and we all copied him. The odd thing was that Dave’s words, and our echoing responses, sounded almost like a threat.

  The corporal led the coffin, borne by six of his engineers, across the road and into the graveyard. The road was potholed, and one of the pallbearers stumbled. The others were practised at this sort of thing and held him up. We followed; I brought up the rear with Fergal . . . Halton was with Frieda. Marthe’s family, Magda a
nd Dave were in front of them. Marthe and Magda had cried but they were very restrained about it: most of the women in Berlin in ’48 were just about cried out. Marthe and Moppo were wearing old grey Wehrmacht greatcoats, and had found scraps of black material to twist into armbands. Lottie walked between them like a bridge, holding on to their hands as if she would never let go again.

  Then we did the business all over again at the graveside. No flowers. No flowers in Berlin since the Airlift had started: even the great parks had been dug up and replanted with scraggy vegetables. There was no bugle either and no rattling volley of rifle fire. That seemed wrong. Fergal handed Halton a trowel of muddy earth to sprinkle on the coffin. His mouth made soundless words as he did so. Frieda reached across him, took some earth with her fingers and dropped it onto the coffin. It made barely a sound. That seemed the right way to do it to me, so I copied her when my turn came round, and murmured, ‘Goodbye, Ed.’

  Maybe she heard me. She made eye contact again. There was nothing angry in there this time.

  The Old Man dropped Fergal and me off at the Leihhaus; Frieda went on with him. If she was going back to Blighty she hadn’t said. Fergal didn’t stay. He gave me a written list of stores – mainly food and blankets – swallowed a couple of glasses of cheap schnapps and pushed off. He said that he didn’t like leaving his kids for so long.

  It wasn’t a bad party, but not one that you would remember. Dave Scroton got horribly pissed and Magda took him away. The REME guys enjoyed themselves; they’d only come because someone had paid them to be pallbearers, and they’d been promised a party afterwards. I found the whole thing vaguely depressing. The radio churned out incongruously optimistic music from the American Forces Network. Marthe sat on my lap and gave me a smacker when Moppo wasn’t watching, but I could tell that her heart wasn’t really in it. I think that it was just a thank you for all the things that might have been. In the middle of it all I recalled again that I’d once met someone Ed called his ‘aunty’, and if I could remember where she lived I’d find out what to put on his headstone. Then I felt sorry for myself, and had that flat feeling of another day of your life wasted, so I tried to get drunk. That didn’t work either, so I sloped outside and hopped on the first tram I saw.

  It was the last one of the evening, even although the evening hadn’t become night yet, and it took me near enough to Halton’s place for me to limp there. The last mile was the worst. I had taken a wrong turning, and the ruined city had suddenly a brooding, threatening air. I could feel unseen people watching me stumbling along in the gloom. My ankle had started to ache again, and felt weak, and along a smashed-up, unlit, cobbled street I became aware of shadowy shapes moving around me, like a pack of wolves. When I stopped, turned and challenged them with a shout, they froze – and I began to wonder if I’d been imagining them. Then one of the shadows moved before I did, so I pulled my small pistol and put a shot a couple of feet over its head. That dislodged a small fall of bricks in the wrecked house the bullet struck. I kept moving, limping with some urgency now . . . aiming for the end of the street dimly illuminated by a couple of domestic windows. All I managed to do was keep them at bay . . . they must have sensed my weakness from my gait.

  I stopped at the light, and leaned against a house wall – momentarily blown: I needed to get out more. Shadows moved into the light, about six or seven of them, and stopped about ten feet away. They were children. The eldest, a raggedly dressed boy with a soldier’s grey forage cap, was only about twelve, the youngest, a girl with a torn dress and a bruised face, was no more than four. For Christ’s sake! The leader spoke a word in Berliner which sounded like, ‘Spicer?’ Probably Speise – food.

  ‘Nein.’ No. I kept my pistol in my hand, and visible to them. I felt incredibly tired. A girl of about eight shuffled into the light; she was carrying a bundle which whimpered. A baby. Where in hell had they got a baby?

  ‘Kindernahrung, bitte.’ Babyfood, please. Then she began to cry big tears, but made no sound. It was the stuff of nightmares, believe me.

  I told the older boy, ‘I have dollars. If I give you money, could you buy food for the baby?’

  ‘Yes. Of course, if it is enough.’

  ‘Of course it’s enough!’ I threw a handful of US dollars on the ground before him, maybe fifty. Probably a small fortune for them. The boy bent slowly and picked them up, straightened them, folded them and put them in a pocket. Then he said, ‘Thank you, mister,’ paused, and asked, ‘You are injured?’

  ‘Just a little.’ I felt my hand tighten on the revolver butt.

  He said, ‘You will not need that. Where are you going now?’

  I could actually see the checkpoint at the end of Frieda’s road: two jeeps huddled under a storm lantern they’d fixed to a dead lamp post. I used the pistol to point.

  ‘There.’

  ‘This is a dangerous road; many bandits. We will walk with you. You will be safe with us.’

  That was the second time in a year that kids had seen me home, wasn’t it? I suppose that I just went on a hunch: I put the pistol away, and moved to lean on his shoulder.

  ‘OK, chum, lead on.’

  The Canadian patrol was on duty again. The big senior asked, ‘These little bastards bothered you, sir?’

  ‘No. These little bastards rescued me I think. If I gave you an address could you arrange a lift for them? It’s to a kind of shelter.’

  ‘Y’re a pal o’ Tommo’s, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Then I guess it’d be in order.’

  I turned to the older boy again, and moved back into Kraut. ‘I have a friend who will take you in. The baby will die if it is not cared for.’

  ‘We can care for it.’

  ‘I know. You can care for it even better with my friend.’ I showed him the address on the top of the shopping list Fergal had given me.

  ‘Is that the Irish priest?’

  ‘Yes: the Irish priest.’

  ‘He has no room: his school is full.’

  ‘He will take you if I ask him. He has babyfood. I promise he will take you.’

  He turned back and consulted the others. They were shadows again, on the edge of a circle of light. Every child had its say. When he came back he nodded, and asked, ‘You want your dollars back?’

  ‘No, keep them.’

  I waited until a one-tonner arrived, and saw them lifted into the back. I gave the driver a message for Fergal, and the orphanage address: he knew it anyway. The kids waved as it pulled away, talking animatedly. The word food seemed to crop up in every sentence. You’d have thought they were going on holiday.

  ‘How many of them are there?’ I asked the Canadian.

  ‘Thousands.’

  ‘Where are their parents, relatives?’

  The Canadian didn’t answer. He shrugged. He could have said Killed by people like you, I suppose. I still couldn’t let it go. ‘What about the baby? Where would they get a baby? There wasn’t one of them old enough . . .’

  ‘Abandoned probably. The twelve- and thirteen-year-olds are dropping them now. We hand one in to the hospital at least once a week. They probably heard it crying and picked it up . . .’

  ‘Christ! What a city!’

  ‘It was once, sir. Would you like a lift up the road?’

  I nodded, and by the time I stood at the front door waiting for Hanna to let me in I was no longer sorry for myself. I suppose that that was something.

  Frieda’s kitchen was an exercise in futility. It was the largest, most luxurious kitchen I had ever seen. My mum would have thought she had died and gone to heaven. That was a bad thought, because she had, of course, and I kept on forgetting that. It was a futile place because it was almost empty of food. I helped myself to some of her black bread, and drank a glass of water. I was stone-cold sober. In a couple of hours, unless I kept my socks on in bed I would be just stone cold.

  I set off to find my bedroom anyway: Wee Willy Winkie carrying a candle. There were draughts in the a
partment, so I had to cup a hand around the flame, which meant that I couldn’t use my stick. My ankle felt not so bad again, but I still lurched along like a drunken sailor. I remembered the words of the song and they made me smile. I may even have been humming the tune. There was one long gallery room, which had probably been full of furniture once and had pale rectangular patches all along one windowless wall where pictures had hung. I wondered what they had been. Halfway along that wall there was a panelled door I hadn’t noticed before, and before the door the stub of a candle gleamed in a jamjar. I moved it carefully to one side with my foot, and opened the door.

  The room was high-ceilinged – the whole apartment was – but small; it must have been an antechamber or serving room in headier times. There was a small tiled stove which still radiated the heat of its last burning. On the floor on one side of the room, close to the wall, was a candle in an old-fashioned candle holder. On the other side was a comfortable three-quarter-sized bed, half in shadow. It had rich covers and heavy pillows . . . and it had Frieda, of course. The flickering light of the candle didn’t reach far into the room, so she was part of the light and part of the darkness. The candlelight gave her body a million shades of colour . . . she was half upright, propped against the pillows. Her face was in shadow. I could see her shoulder, a breast, her hip and her splayed-up knee and leg . . . and the arm and hand which held a cigarette. The smoke was blue-grey against the dark.

  I muttered the first stupid thing that came into my head. ‘Frieda, I’m paralysed. I don’t know what to do.’

  She did: ‘Idiot,’ popped out with a low-level laugh. It was probably the first time I heard her laugh at something which genuinely amused her. ‘Take off your clothes and come over here. I’m getting cold.’

  It wasn’t a dream because she was still there in the morning. We underlined the memory with a rematch.