‘Where are we?’ I asked.
‘Oranienburg.’ He was still looking at me out of the corners of his eyes. ‘You are a Pole, no? You are not German. Not with that accent.’
I didn’t say anything and he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Na was, schadet es schon?’ He eased his foot on the accelerator pedal. ‘Well, where do you wish to go, eh? In a few moments I turn right. I have to keep inside the Russian Zone. But if you follow this road it will lead you to Frohnau. Frohnau is in the French Sector.’
Frohnau! Frohnau beacon! Frohnau meant Berlin to every airlift pilot. But the warmth of the truck held me tight in my seat. Frohnau was many miles from Gatow. I should have to walk right across Berlin, more than twenty kilometres. ‘Where do you go when you turn right?’ I asked.
‘Velten, Schonewald Airfield, Falkensee, Staaken
Airfield, past Gatow and then into Potsdam. Choose which you like. It’s all the same to me.’
‘You’re going near Gatow?’ I asked him.
His eyes narrowed. ‘What do you want Gatow for, eh?’ His voice was harsher. He braked violently and the lorry skidded as he swung right off the main Oranienburg-Berlin road. ‘Why Gatow?’ he repeated. And when I didn’t say anything, he added slowly, ‘Gatow is in the British Sector. It’s owned by die verdatnmten Tommies. Night after night they come. Die verfluchten Kerle! I have send my family to my parents in Hamburg. Night after night the English come. They flatten Hamburg and the Schweinehunde kill both the kids — the boy was nine and the girl five. They were crushed when the building they shelter in collapses.’ He stopped talking and stared at me. ‘Why do you want Gatow, eh?’
‘I have a job to go to in the British Sector,’ I answered.
‘What sort of a job?’
I thought desperately. Remembering the crowded Nissen huts at the edge of the off-loading apron at Gatow, I said, ‘Labour corps. I have a friend who is a checker at Gatow, unloading the airlift planes.’
His lips tightened. ‘You say airlift, when we always say. Why do you say airlift?’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Only die verdammten English and Americans call it airlift.’ For a long time there was a tense silence in the cabin. We were entering Falkensee now. Staaken aerodrome lay ahead, and then Gatow. ‘Please, your papers. I wish to see your papers.’
I hesitated. ‘I have no papers,’ I said. I felt empty and cold inside.
‘So! No papers, eh?’ He peered through the windshield, searching the road ahead with his eyes. There were few lights. Falkensee was asleep. Then, far ahead in the gleam of the headlights, I saw two figures in the grey of the German police. The driver’s foot checked on the accelerator and his eyes swung nervously to me. I knew what he was going to do then. I could see him working it out in his mind. There was only one thing for me to do. I felt with my hand for the handle of the door and pushed. It swung back violently and a stream of bitter air struck my face. I heard the door clang against the tin of the cabin, saw the rutted, slushy snow spraying up from the wheels, heard the driver shout as he leaned across to grip my arm — and I jumped.
I hit the snow with my feet and was flung down, striking the side of the lorry with my head. A sudden blackness enveloped me as the snow closed over my face. I could not have been out for more than a few seconds, for the lorry was still screeching to a halt, its horn blaring excitedly, as I lifted my head from the cold, gritty filth of the snow. I pressed myself upwards with my hands, feeling suddenly sick at the sight of my blood scarlet against the yellow, gravel-covered surface of the snow. Then I was on my feet and running for the shelter of a side-street, shouts echoing after me.
As I turned out of the main street, I looked over my shoulder and saw that the two German policemen were level with the stationary truck now and running towards me. Whistles shrilled. The side-street was narrow and flanked with the rubble ruins of shattered buildings. I scrambled over a pile of bricks and mortar and half staggered, half fell into a cleared space that had been the cellars of houses in the next street. An open doorway gaped black and I slid into the welcoming darkness and leaned panting against the wall almost oblivious in my fear of the nauseating smell of human excreta.
More whistles shrilled and voices shouted in the darkness outside. Boots climbed the mound of rubble up which I had scrambled. Mortar dust streamed down in a choking cloud in the open doorway. ‘Hier, Kurt. Hierlang ist er gelaufen.’ The voice was heavy and menacing. The man was standing right above my hideout. There was a clatter of dislodged bricks higher up the crumbling rubble and a voice answered faintly, ‘Nein. Komm hierlang. Hier kann er zur Friedrich-strasse durchkommen.’ The chase went thudding and slithering over my head and gradually faded into the distance. — ,. All the time I had been standing there rigid. Now my muscles relaxed. I wiped the sweat from my forehead. My hand was gritty and I winced with the pain of the grit on raw flesh. It was the old cut in my forehead that had opened up. My hand came away, wet and sticky with my own blood. The moon was shining opaquely through low cloud and the faint, ghostly light of the doorless gap showed my hand all red and dripping. The blood was trickling down my face, getting into my eyes and into the corner of my mouth the way it had done that first time I’d come to Membury. Only there was grit in my mouth now, sharp and hard, setting my teeth on edge as I clenched them.
I wiped my hands on the inside of my clothes and then tied my handkerchief over the cut. For a long time I just stood there, trying to stop the trembling of my limbs. It was very cold. It seemed as though my body had no warmth and the wind cut like a knife through the gaping doorway — nervous reaction and the shock of my fall from the moving lorry! I wished to God I had some liquor with me, something to warm the frozen guts of my belly.
I moved at last and went out of the nauseous cell. I was facing a cleared strip where demolition gangs had been working. There was a railway and a line of loaded tip trucks. The snow was a thin layer of powder that had deepened into windy little drifts in the corners of still-standing masonry. Behind rose a hill of brick and rubble over which the gaunt finger of a building pointed a broken chimney at the pale, luminous clouds. There was no sound except the distant rumble of the airlift rolling into Gatow. The pursuit had moved on and lost me.
I stood for a moment, getting my bearings. This was Falkensee, a western suburb of Berlin. The sound of the planes landing and taking off from Gatow drew me as something familiar, friendly and homelike. I could almost smell the coffee and cakes in the Malcolm Club. But if I went direct to Gatow I should all the time be in the Russian Zone. To the east lay the British Sector and I knew it couldn’t be far away. I faced into the wind and began to walk.
My left leg was very stiff and painful when I moved. I had grazed my knee-cap when I fell and had strained a muscle somewhere in the groin. But I didn’t care about that. My one thought was to get out of the Russian Zone and into the British Sector. The sight of another human being sent me scuttling into the doorway or into the shadows of the broken buildings that flanked the streets. And yet, not more than two or three miles away in the same sort of streets I should be able to stop the first person I met and demand his help.
I twisted and turned through narrow, broken streets, always keeping the sound of Gatow over my right shoulder. At length I came out on to a broad highway that led almost due east. It was Falkenhagener Chaussee and it ran straight like a ruled line towards Spandau — and Spandau I knew was in the British Sector.
It It was three o’clock in the morning and the Falkenhagener Chaussee seemed dead. Nothing stirred. The snow-powdered thoroughfare was deserted. The crumbling masses of the buildings were white mounds in the darkness marked occasionally by a still-standing wall, tottering skyward like some two-thousand-year-old tomb seen along the Appian Way. Somewhere in Berlin a train whistled like “an owl in a forest of dead oaks. There were no lights, no people — no suggestion even that anything lived here. It was all devastation and slow, timeless ruin.