They gave me a bed and I slept until it was dark. Then, after a huge meal by the warmth of the kitchen stove, I said goodbye to the Kleffmanns. ‘In a night or two,’ I told them, ‘I will be back with a plane and we’ll get him away.’
‘Gut! Gut!’ The farmer nodded. ‘It is better so. He is very bad, I think. Also it is dangerous for us having him here in the farm.’
Frau Kleffmann came towards me. She had a bulky package in her hand. ‘Here is food for your journey, Herr Fraser — some chicken and some bread and butter and apples.’ She hesitated. ‘If anything happens, do not worry about your friend. He is safe here. We will look after him. There has been war between us, but my Hans is in Russia. I will care for your friend as I would have others care for Hans if he is sick. Auf wiedersehen!’ Her gnarled hand touched my arm and her eyes filled with tears. She turned quickly to the stove.
The farmer accompanied me to the door. ‘I try to arrange for you to ride in a lorry who go once a week to Berlin with potatoes. But’ — he spread his hands hopelessly — ‘the driver is sick. He do not go tonight. If you go three miles beyond Hollmind there is a cafe there for motor drivers. I think you will perhaps get a ride there.’ He gave me instructions how to by-pass Hollmind and then shook my hands. ‘Viel Gluck, Herr Fraser. Come soon, please, for your friend. I fear he is very sick.’
More snow had fallen during the day, but now the clouds had been swept away by a bitter east wind and the night was cold and clear. The moon had not yet risen, but the stars were so brilliant that I had no difficulty in seeing my way as soon as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness. High above me the airlift planes droned at regular three-minute intervals — I could see their navigation lights every now and then, green and red dots moving steadily through the litter of stars and the drift of the Milky Way. The white pinpoint of their tail-lights pointed the way to Berlin for me. I had only to follow them through the night sky and I should arrive at Gatow. For them Gatow was twenty minutes flying time. But for me….
I turned south on the hard straight road that led to the town of Hollmind, wondering how long the journey would take me. The snow was deep and crisp under my feet. Kleffmann had given me an old field-grey Wehrmacht greatcoat and a Wehrmacht forage cap; Hans’s cast-off clothing. For the first time since I’d landed in Germany I felt warm and well-fed.
Nothing stirred on the road. The snow seemed to have driven all transport off it. My footsteps were muffled and I walked in a deep silence. The only sound was the drone of the planes overhead and the hum of the wind in the telegraph wires. I reached the fork where the road branched off that I was to take in order to by-pass Hollmind. There was a signboard there — Berlin 54 km.
Fifty-four kilometres isn’t far; not much more than thirty miles. A day’s march. But though I had had a good rest, I was still tired and very stiff. I was wearing shoes and my feet were blister-sore. And there was the cold. For a time the warmth of exercise kept it out, but, as I tired, the sweat broke out on my body and chilled into a clammy, ice-cold film, and then the wind cut through my clothing and into my flesh, seeming to blow straight on to my spine. God, it was cold! For miles, it seemed, I walked along by-roads through unmarked snow and there was no traffic. I must have missed the turning back on to the Berlin road, for it was almost midnight when I finally found it again and I saw no transport cafe — only dark woods and the illimitable miles of white agricultural land, flat and windswept.
Several times I tried to thumb a lift. But each time the heavy, long-nosed German trucks ignored me, thundering by in a shower of snow that spattered icily on my face. However the fourth truck I waved to stopped and a voice called out,’ Wohin, Freund?’ ‘Berlin,’ I shouted.
There was a pause and then a Red Army soldier clambered down from the cabin. He was sleepy and he’d left his rifle in the truck. That was the only thing that saved me. He asked me in vile German for my papers. Fortunately the edge of the road was wooded. I dived into the dark shelter of the pines, ignoring the branches that lashed at my face, running until I was exhausted.
Dawn found me trudging through powdery snow along a narrow side road flanked with trees, following blindly the drone of the airlift planes. It was a blood-red dawn, wild and violent and full of cold. The sun was a misty red disc above the pines. I staggered into the shelter of the woods, ate Frau Kleffmann’s chicken and bread, wrapped myself in pine needles and slept.
All that day I slept, if you can call it sleep. It was more like a bone-chilled coma. I suppose I was suffering from mental as well as physical exhaustion. At all events I found the present and the past inextricably mixed in my mind, so that the urge to reach Berlin became confused with the urge to get out of Germany and I was back in those cold, wretched, starved weeks of escape.
Night came at last, cold and black. There were no stars. I stumbled to the road and headed south-east, the drone of the planes my only guide. I passed through a small town, not bothering to note its name, joined a broader road where the snow had been churned up by traffic, and the first truck that came along stopped beside me. In the headlights I saw that the country bordering the road was flat. If there had been woods I should almost certainly have dived into them. But it was bare, open plain. ‘Wo wollen Sie bin, mein Lieber?’ the driver called.
‘Berlin,’ I heard myself answer in a cracked, trembling voice. Any moment I expected the brown, tunic clad figure of a Red Army man to jump out and face me. But all that happened was that the driver called, ‘Kommen Sie rauf, Kamerad. Ich fahre auch nach Berlin.’ It was almost too good to be true. I hauled myself up into the cabin. The driver was alone. There was no mate with him. The gears ground and the old vehicle lurched forward, wheels spinning in the snow. The cabin was hot and stuffy and smelt comfortingly of exhaust fumes. ‘Was wollen Sie in Berlin?’ the driver asked.
‘Work,’ I answered him gruffly in German.
‘Out of Russia into the Western Sectors, eh?’ He grinned at me. He was a small, hard-bitten little man with ferrety eyes. ‘Well, I don’t blame you. If I thought there was a trucking job for me in the Western Sectors I’d be across the border in no time. But I have a wife and family up in Lubeck. Every night I come down this same road. Sometimes I wish I was up there flying the. I was in the Luftwaffe, you know. Radio operator. Had a little radio business before the war. But now, of course, it is finished. There are so few radio sets. It is better to drive a truck. But those bastards up there get to Berlin a lot quicker than I do. My wife always tells me …’
He went on and on about himself and the drone of his voice merged with the engine and the eternal distant hum of aircraft throbbing through the clouds. My head nodded, sleepy with the sudden, unaccustomed warmth of the cabin. His voice lost itself in the engine. I slept fitfully, conscious of the lights of a town, of a signboard caught in the headlights that said Berlin 27 km, of the unending dirty yellow of hard-packed snow slipping away beneath us.
And then finally he was shaking me. ‘Aufwachen! Aufwachen! Berlin!’ I opened my eyes blearily and surveyed unlit, slush-filled streets flanked by the empty, blasted shells of buildings which had not been touched since we’d smashed them to rubble five years ago. So this was Berlin! ‘Where are you making for?’ I asked him.
‘Potsdam.’ He peered at me out of the corners of his eyes. ‘That’s in the Russian Zone. Don’t imagine you’ll be wanting to go there.’ He laughed mirthlessly, his breath whistling through broken front teeth.