The Complete Flying Officer X Stories (15 page)

You would never have guessed there had been a morning victory.

There are not and never have been many Russian restaurants in England; but in a corner of a street in the town nearest the aerodrome the Malinovskys have a little eating-place with marble-top tables and huge silver handstand cruets and yellow cane chairs and a smell of fried fish that is the shadow of Russia. Mrs. Malinovsky is from the south, near Kharkov. She is thin and olive-skinned, with black-brown hair and large numb black eyes, and when she speaks she lets fly with excited kindly hands. “What you like? We got soup and hamburger and fried potatoes. Or you like fish? We got nice salmon wid cucumber salad. Is very nice.” And then: “But oh, please God when war is over I haff so nice food here, so nice, so nice, so nice, please God!”

When I first saw Mrs. Malinovsky I could not guess her nationality. She might have been Italian. The subject, however, was a delicate one and I did not know how to approach it.

“You haven't lived long in England?” I said at last.

“Oh, no! Oh, no! Where you think I from?”

“You might be from anywhere,” I said.

“Anywhere?”

“Well, you know,” I said, “almost anywhere. From some little country somewhere. From some little country like Lithuania.”

“Lithuania?” she said. “Lithuania?” She looked at me with wide still black eyes. “How you know?”

“I don't know.”

“How you know I from Lithuania?” she said. “How you know that? I was born in Lithuania! My mother is born in Lithuania! All my family is born there! How you know? How you know?”

I did not know at all how to account for that extraordinary piece of insight on my part.

“I just know,” I said.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” Mrs. Malinovsky said, laughing and crying. “Is wonderful! Oh dear, oh dear!”

From that moment Mrs. Malinovsky took me to her heart. “You come in Sunday and we have nice food. We have chicken and nice fish and beet soup —”

“Bortsch,” I said.

“Bortsch, yes! How you know?”

“Everybody knows bortsch,” I said. “Bortsch is Russia. Roast beef is England.”

“Oi! Oi!” she said, half crying, half laughing again. “Oi! Oi!” she called back in a loud excited voice into the kitchen behind the restaurant. “Here is a gentleman who like bortsch! You hear?”

“Oi! Oi!” Mr. Malinovsky called. “I hear!”

After that I became, to the Malinovskys, the man who liked bortsch. Whenever I went there Mrs. Malinovsky came into the restaurant wiping her hands on her apron and then throwing them excitedly up into the air and clasping them together. “Oi!” she would call. “Here is the young man from the Air Force! The young man who likes bortsch! You hear?”

“Oi,” Mr. Malinovsky would call, “I hear.”

But somehow, although I was always the young man who liked bortsch and although Mrs. Malinovsky always said there would be bortsch on Sunday, there never was any bortsch. Either there were no beets or the bortsch had all been eaten or Mrs. Malinovsky had decided to make something else after all. Similarly there was never any chicken; the salmon was always gone; and it was the wrong time of the year for cucumber. And so after a time, faced with nothing but the actual sausage and fried potatoes, I began to feel, as we say, that I had had it with Malinovskys.

Then one day Mrs. Malinovsky asked me a question.

“Do you know Mr. Markus?” she said.

“I didn't know him. I know all about him,” I said.

“All about him?” she said. “
All
about him? Then where is he? Where is he now? He used to come in here. Now he doesn't come.”

“No,” I said.

“Well, why doesn't he come? Isn't he on the station any more? Where is he?”

“We don't know,” I said. “He flew his Spitfire into the
Scharnhorst.”

Mrs. Malinovsky was very quiet, holding her hands.

“He was Lithuanian,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “the only Lithuanian.”

“He was so nice man. I don't believe nice man like that are killed. I don't believe that nice Mr. Markus was killed!” she said. “I don't believe it.”

I did not say anything. It is the thing they all say, the thing they all believe. In the eyes of those who love them, pilots are never dead. So when Mrs. Malinovsky said: “I believe that nice Mr. Markus is all right,” I thought it kinder not to speak.

After that, whenever I went into the Malinovskys', we talked about Mr. Markus. There were things about him that Mrs. Malinovsky did not know, and I told her them. There were things about him I did not know, and Mrs. Malinovsky told them to me. I told her how he was the only Lithuanian in the Air Force, a man from a country not at war. I told her how he had played international football and what a distinguished important diplomatic sort of flier he had been, before the war, in his own country, how he had flown important personages all over Europe and how he had been decorated in every capital, until his tunic looked like a coat of many colours. She told me in turn how he used to come into the restaurant with a young lady and eat the Malinovskys' simple food, and talk, as exiles always talk, of their own country. I told her how he had flown aeroplanes since he was a schoolboy and
how, when the war which was not his began, he had gone to France to fly for France, and then how, after France fell, he had come to England to fly for us. I told her what an engaging, temperamental, distinguished person he was, and she told me over and over again how she could not believe he had been killed.

We talked of him so often, she asking me again and again for news and I telling her and really knowing that there was no more news to tell, that I began to see the Malinovskys' handy little restaurant, with its actual sausages and fried potatoes and its bortsch that I never tasted, as a corner of Lithuania in England. I was sure that Markus was dead; Mrs. Malinovsky was sure that he was living. Whichever way it was, I used to get great satisfaction from the very fact that Markus had been with us at all: that as a free man, making a free choice, entering a war that he had no need to enter, he had made the choice he had.

But if I had great satisfaction in Markus, Mrs. Malinovsky had greater faith. And finally one day I was able to go down to the Malinovskys' and see that faith justified.

“I have come to tell you something,” I said. “Mr. Markus is all right!”

“Is — is what? Is
all right?
” she said. “Is
all right?
”

“He is a prisoner,” I said. “It has just come through.”

Now it was Mrs. Malinovsky who could not speak. She stood crying quietly, slowly clasping and unclasping her hands. Whether she was crying for Markus or Lithuania
or Russia or simply out of joy I could not tell. It was her great moment and she was very proud. I felt a great satisfaction too. I remembered the last anyone had ever seen of Markus: how he had taken the Spitfire down to nought feet over the
Scharnhorst
and had put her practically down the funnel and was never seen again. It was a great satisfaction to all of us to know that he had performed a miracle and was alive.

“Oh, please God,” Mrs. Malinovsky said, “when war is over we will have bigga celebration! So big, so nice! So nice food! So nice, so nice, so nice, please God!”

And, please God, we will.

“Would anyone like to see a picture of Brest?”

Loud laughter.

The group captain is large, rubicund, kindly; he looks like a sea-dog, from the days of other armadas, dressed in R.A.F. uniform. Intelligence room is not really very full; it looks like a class-room from which a few faces are missing. The air-crews that are to be briefed sit in rows, facing a white screen on a wall. Many are already wearing flying-kit — sheepskin boots, heavy cream sweaters under their blue battle dresses. Here and there a navigator has a torch, perhaps two, tucked in the top of his boots. At the back of the room stands the epidiascope, an apparatus for projecting pictures, and on the walls are many maps. The light of the winter afternoon is pale and the electric lights are on.

“All right. Let's have a look at the weather,” the group captain says. “Can you draw the curtains?”

The curtains are drawn; in the darker room, even now
not completely dark, the light of the projector comes on. Across the screen, ringed with chalky contours of mauve and pink and green, there is now a map of England, the Netherlands, and of France a little south of the occupied zone.

The Met official has a wooden pointer in his hand. He is young, a decent fellow; but because he is dressed as a civilian, in blue serge, he looks out of place. He begins to give us his little meteorological lesson, but I cannot tell if anyone is listening. Perhaps not. There is a difference between weather on paper, at two in the afternoon, and weather at eighteen thousand, in a Stirling, at ten at night.

“We are still in the centre of an anti-cyclone. The weather will be clear until you reach the coast. There will be a little light rain over the sea, but it will clear before you reach the target. Eight tenths cloud at first, clearing to five tenths. Base about five thousand. Coming back, conditions will be about the same. Except that there may be ground fog at base.”

Loud laughter.

They are all old friends: Brest, the target there, the cloud, the drizzle, and naturally the fog at base. We have been to Brest so many times that it occurs to us that after the war conducted tours to Brest, in comfort of course, would be what is known as a remunerative proposition. Worth thinking about anyhow; since we may even come to that.

“I think that's about all,” the Met official says.

“Will somebody draw the curtains?”

The curtains are drawn back; the pale winter light streams in on coloured maps, white walls, white faces.

“The Wing Commander has something to say.”

The Wing Commander is standing at the side of the room; we turn instinctively to look at him. Except for his eyes, which look old, diffused, distant, he looks quite young. If ever there was a tough one this is the man: cold, slightly ironical, calm except for his hands, which he keeps putting in and out of his pockets; the master of tactics, whose only difficulty is the tactical handling of words.

“Sergeant O'Brien will lead the first formation. You will take off at 17.30 hours. Billington, you will follow at 17.45.” As he talks he develops a slight habit of nervousness, looking down at his shoes and then up again. Sometimes he pauses, not knowing quite what to say. “And when you come back — if you come back —”

Loud laughter.

This too is an old joke, one at which, for various reasons, all must laugh very heartily. When the laughter has died away the Wing Commander finishes speaking. “Don't let them do to you what they did last time. Watch that. Remember that lesson.”

No loud laughter this time. Everyone remembers what they did to us last time.

In a moment the Wing Commander has finished speaking. He turns to read a signal brought up to him by an orderly. There is a short hush. But the orderly goes; the signal is not read out.

“Is that all, Wing Commander?” the group captain says.

“That's all, sir. Thank you.”

“Any questions?”

Nobody speaks. The air-crews sit with their hands between their knees, holding their caps, like small boys ready to rush out of school. It is something like the end of a lantern lecture in childhood, long ago: the pointer travelling across the map, the strange countries, the laughter, the lesson, the silence, the eagerness to go.

“No questions? Thank you, then,” the group captain says. “Have a good trip.”

We file out, crowding in the doorway, down the stairs. There is a muffled tramp of flying boots on concrete, many voices, more laughter. I look into the faces of the crews for a sign of tension, expectation, courage, great events, but the W.A.A.F. orderly coming upstairs, trying to be dignified, trying not to laugh but laughing at last, is the only thing reflected there.

“As you see,” says Williams, as we walk back to the mess, lifting our eyes instinctively to the windy sky, “a very dull affair.”

All that spring and summer we lived in a big old cream house surrounded by trees that lay under the downs within sight of the sea. The walls of the mess were bright green, but it was never a green like the green of the fresh-mown lawns of the house, or the new leaves of the limes, or the green of the summer meadows under the hills. On hot clear days the sea-light over the sea made the high clouds like ripples of snow and the barrage balloons of passing ships melted into the sky like big bubbles of shining cloud.

Neither Anderson nor Auerbach got up till twelve. Because they were night fighters their night was day, and part of their day was night, and in this and a few other simple facts they were alike, doing the same things. The few simple facts were that they flew Hurricanes, belonged to the same squadron, were very volatile, and had shot down very many aircraft by night. But in everything else it seemed to me they had nothing in common at all.

Anderson was English; Auerbach was Czech. Anderson was about six feet two, but Auerbach was a little man about five feet and a half. Anderson had gone practically straight from school to fly, but Auerbach had first to escape from Czechoslovakia down into the Mediterranean and through North Africa and so to France before he was able to reach England. Anderson, very fair and fresh-faced, with a small corn-brown moustache, looked rather aristocratic in a manner that could not have been anything else but English. His moustache alone was an emblem, plain as the Union Jack. But Auerbach did not look particularly Czech or, though his ancestors had been notable military people, particularly aristocratic. He did not look particularly anything. He had in him something of the element of the anonymous peasant. In his tender, crafty, smiling blue eyes there was a profound watchfulness. It was the sort of look that might have been inherited from generations of people perpetually wondering how long the things they possess are going to remain their own. They are watching to see that they are not cheated. That look sometimes made Auerbach, in spite of a sort of cunning vivacity, look quite old.