The Pathfinder (27 page)

She was still staring in awe at the bone china cup with its delicately painted pale yellow flowers and green leaves. ‘It's so beautiful. Is it English?'

‘Yes.'

‘It came with you from England? You bought it there?'

He shook his head. ‘You can't buy anything like that in England now. It's all for export only. Actually, I got it in the Malcolm Club at Gatow. There's a kind of shop there, selling all sorts of things. Don't ask me how
they
got hold of them.' He looked at her with misgivings. ‘Perhaps I ought to have brought food instead. Chocolates, or something.'

‘No. Not at all. It is very wonderful to have something beautiful like this.' She turned the cup over. ‘It's called Spring.'

‘The flowers are primroses. The English countryside's full of them then. They grow wild everywhere.'

‘So pretty. Thank you for such a wonderful present. I will use them at once.' She took out another cup and two saucers, set them ready on the table and smiled at him. ‘Cups
and
saucers. We are very grand.'

They sat down on opposite sides of the battle-scarred table. The flowery cups, designed for dainty English teas on lace cloths in English parlours, looked absurdly out of place among the shrapnel hits. He offered a cigarette and lit it for her. The small intimacy pleased him, as it had done once before. He lit his own cigarette and put the lighter away in the breast pocket of his uniform. The music played on softly from the wireless – another wartime song that he knew well. There was another sound – a scuffling noise from the shadows. ‘A rat,' she said calmly. ‘There are many of them.' She lifted the teacup and gazed at it again. ‘My mother had cups a little like these. They were German, of course, but they had flowers on them, too. The Russian soldiers broke them all.'

‘Were you here in this apartment when they came?'

‘Oh, no.' She looked away from him. ‘We were hiding in one of the U-Bahn tunnels. We hid for many days – Grandfather, Dirk, Rudi and me – until we thought it might be safe. When we came back we found that they had been here. Almost everything was destroyed, or stolen.'

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘It must have been awful.'

‘It was awful for all Berliners. I told you, the Russians hate us.'

With some reason, he thought, wondering what version Goebbels's propaganda machine had churned out of the Wehrmacht's brutal advance across Russia and the siege of Stalingrad. ‘This room must have looked very different once.'

‘Oh yes. It's hard to imagine, I know, but it was a very nice room, before the bombing. And, of course, there were other nice rooms in the apartment that were completely destroyed. This was our
salon
, you know, and on Christmas Eve all the family would be in here together – my parents, my grandparents, Dirk and I. Rudi was too small then to stay awake. My grandmother would sit over there on the sofa, my grandfather beside her. There was good furniture and velvet curtains at the windows, and pictures on the walls and a Bechstein piano. My father had many shelves of books. The Russians spoiled most of them but others escaped, as you see. So did my mother's hats.'

‘Hats?'

‘A whole trunkful of them – there in that corner, against the wall. She was a milliner and she made wonderful hats. Very French sort of hats. Very chic. Very expensive. She had a lovely little shop in the Dessauer Strasse. Rich Berlin ladies went there – until the war went badly for Germany and nobody bought hats any more.'

At what point exactly had the doubts started and the penny eventually dropped that the sainted Führer had got things horribly wrong? After the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1942? Or when the heavy bombing Allied raids had begun in earnest in 1943? Or had the hat-buying gone on even longer than that? Lili herself would have been around nine or ten at the outbreak of war – too young to have understood everything that was going on and yet old enough to have some clear memories. ‘Do you remember what Berlin was like – in those days?'

She frowned. ‘It's very difficult for me to think how it was. Berlin has been like this for so long – or so it seems. When I walk down a street I cannot remember what it looked like before the bombing. I pass the ruin of a shop and only if I try very hard can I sometimes think what it was. I remember perhaps that the window was full of beautiful boxes of chocolates with coloured paper, tied up in shiny yellow and pink ribbons. Or that another window had red meat and big, fat sausages hanging from hooks. Or in another there were elegant clothes on plaster models. I walk past the empty hole where I remember that there was once a restaurant which had a long glass case showing all the wonderful things to eat inside – big hams, lobsters and crabs, pies and pastry, cakes with coloured icing . . . So much of everything. And so much colour. And so many lights. That is what I remember most. Colour and lights. When the war started it went dark for years and years.'

As a Pathfinder, he had looked down often enough on a blacked-out Berlin – on a blanket of total darkness that had concealed a whole city and its three million or so people until the sudden brilliant flare from the coloured target indicators he'd dropped for the bombers following him.
Bomb on the green, bomb on the green.
He said, ‘Where did you go during the raids? Was there a shelter here?'

‘There is a cellar underneath. We used to go down into it. It seemed safe until one night the bombs hit the building directly.'

‘But you got out?'

‘Dirk and I did, with Rudi. My mother gave me Rudi and I carried him. The whole street was in flames and we ran down to the river bank to be by the water.'

‘Your mother?'

She looked down at her teacup, tracing the outline of a primrose. ‘She could have got out too, but my grandmother was completely hysterical and she could not make her move. So she stayed with her and they were both suffocated by the fire. Grandfather was found wandering about in the streets, out of his mind. We don't know exactly what happened with him. He could never remember.'

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘Very sorry.'

She lifted her head. ‘Your sister and her two sons were killed. By German bombs. Nico told me. I am also very sorry about that.'

Harrison was silent for a moment, smoking his cigarette. ‘What about your father? Was he with you in the cellar?'

‘Oh no. He had died the year before. He had been arrested by the Gestapo. He was put in prison in their headquarters here, interrogated and tortured.'

The quiet way she said it was more affecting to him than any number of tears or lamentations. ‘Why did they arrest him?'

She shrugged. ‘They didn't need an excuse. He did not believe in Naziism and he was not afraid to say so. That was enough. He was a professor at the university, you know, and a social democrat. He would speak out openly against the Führer and the regime and he refused to make the Nazi salute. Of course, he was reported to the Gestapo. At that time people would betray their own brothers. Everybody was afraid for their own skins. That's how the Nazis ruled, you see – by terror. Everyone was terrified. And everything was in secret. Secret police, secret arrests, secret lists . . . It was horrible.' She looked away again. ‘There were many people in Berlin like my father, though perhaps you do not believe it. Many people were against Hitler from the very beginning but, in the end, they could not stop him. And most of those who tried were murdered.'

‘Did your father die in prison?'

‘No. After two months he was taken to Sachsenhausen – a concentration camp close to Berlin. It was a terrible place.'

He pictured the newsreels he'd seen of camp liberations by the Allies. ‘I can imagine.'

‘The Nazis sent anyone there who opposed them – not just Jews. Nobody was safe. Nobody. And, you know, the Russians are doing just the same in this sector. The newspapers and the radio are run by the Communist Party, all the officials and the lawyers and the administrators are appointed by the Party, so are the police. Instead of being bullied by Fascists, it is now the Communists. There is not very much difference.'

It was a truly wretched city, he thought. So little hope. So little chance for the future. ‘What happened to your father?'

‘They hanged him.'

The brutality shocked but it did not surprise him. What could he say to her? Sorry, was useless. He was sorry. She was sorry. To keep repeating it was pointless. He was silent for a moment. He began to understand something of what it must have been like to make a lone stand against the Nazis. ‘Your father must have had great integrity.'

She nodded. ‘Oh, yes. Not everybody was like that. Only the very strong. Only the very brave.'

And yet, he still held the German people collectively responsible for allowing them to come to power in the first place. He doubted that he would ever be able to change that view.

‘After this building was bombed, you and Dirk came back to live here, with Rudi and your grandfather?'

‘Yes. Some days later, when the fires had stopped at last. We found that it was still possible to live in these three rooms. We cleaned them and saved everything we could. And we looked for things on bomb sites to use – like the stove. We managed. Until the Russians came.'

The victorious Red Army storming in to take their grim and grisly revenge. Massacre, torture, rape.

He nudged the ash carefully off his cigarette into the tin lid on the table. ‘What did you do then?'

‘We hid. In one of the railway tunnels. We waited there for days until it was safe to come out. Then we came back here again. The soldiers had taken everything they wanted and destroyed almost all the rest so we had to start over again.'

He knew that she was only telling him a part of the whole story, but he had no right to probe further. On the wireless Bing Crosby had started crooning,
I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
 . . . He listened to it uncomfortably. The sickly sentimentality of the ballad with its visions of rosy-cheeked children, sleigh bells jingling and happy home-comings had a dreadful irony. The reality of a white Christmas in 1948 Berlin was rather different. And the Christmases that Lili used to know would never come again. ‘I'm surprised the Russians didn't take your wireless.'

‘They would have, but Grandfather carried it with him to the tunnel, under his arm. He refused to be parted from it. He was like a child with a favourite toy. In the war it was a great comfort, you see. He trusted the BBC. He could only understand a few words of the English broadcasts, of course, but he would ask us what they were saying.'

The old man had trusted the BBC. That was quite a piece of confidence-placing, considering everything. He said quietly, ‘You can trust me, too, Lili. I swear it.'

Her hand lay beside the English cup and saucer – the cut and callused hand of a
trummerfrau.
He reached out and lifted it to his lips and then turned it over to kiss the palm as well. He dared not look at her.

There was a loud noise from the hallway, the crash of the front door slamming, and she snatched her hand away. Dirk stumbled into the room and stood, swaying. He gave a sweeping bow. ‘
Guten Abend, gnadige Frau, mein Herr
.' He staggered forward and grinned foolishly at them. ‘
Frohe Weihnachten
. Happy Christmas.' Harrison moved fast to catch him as his knees buckled and he passed out.

‘Vodka,' Lili said sadly. ‘Cheap vodka. The Russians drink it like water. Can you help me get him to bed?'

He carried the youth into the small back room that he had shared with his grandfather and brother and laid him down on the bed. He'd weighed next to nothing – not more than about six or seven stone – and lying unconscious, bereft of his usual cocky bravado, he looked no more than a kid. A very skinny kid, dressed in shabby, too-large clothes, with big holes in the soles of his shoes.

Lili covered him with a blanket. ‘I'll look after him now. Thank you.'

‘Sure you can manage?'

‘Oh, yes. He has done this before. He will sleep now until morning and most of tomorrow.'

‘He'll have a frightful hangover.'

‘I know. He won't care, though. He'll say it's worth it for some fun.'

Harrison had had some bad hangovers in his time and they had seldom seemed worth it, but he could see how a few hours of carefree oblivion on Christmas Eve in post-war Berlin might outweigh a splitting headache. ‘I'd better go, then.'

She kept her head turned away. ‘Yes, it is very late.' He collected his cap from the table. ‘Be careful on the streets,' she told him. ‘The Russians stop people at night. They can be very unpleasant.' She handed him his torch. ‘I'm sorry this won't be any use now. Perhaps you can get a new bulb.'

‘Perhaps.'

She said anxiously, ‘Will that be very difficult?'

‘I don't actually know, but it's not important.'

‘But will you see your way?'

‘Yes, I'll be fine.' He hesitated at the front door, wanting to say so much more but afraid to lose the small step he had gained. ‘Do you mind if I come here again?'

‘No. If you want to, it's all right.'

He smiled down at her. ‘Good night, then.'

‘Good night.'

He put on his cap and gloves, walked a few steps across the courtyard, stopped and turned. ‘I almost forgot. Happy Christmas, Lili.' It was a ridiculous thing to say, of course. Almost an insult. But she answered him softly from the open doorway.

‘Happy Christmas, Michael.'

Without the torch it was hard going. There were few enough street lamps and not all of those were working. There was no moonlight to help him and he had to navigate a path round piles of rubble. Nobody was about. No cars, no people, no sound of anything except for the steady crunch of his feet on the snow and the eerie moan of a bitterly cold wind that had probably come straight from Siberia. He reached the end of the street, passed under the railway arch and turned onto the bridge that crossed the river. On the other side, he made his way down an empty Friedrich Strasse. On other Christmases, in the past, the long street must have been a vista of brightly lit shops and restaurants with jolly models of St Nikolaus and healthy, happy Berliners crowding the pavements.