The Other Side of Love (54 page)

One of the young GIs fed the jukebox, and

“Dig You Later”

blared. Gulping his drink, Wyatt went outside to scan the overcast sky. Eventually the battered Flying Fortress landed and military passengers stepped down the aluminium ladder. He was wondering whether she’d missed the flight when a pair of burly Military Police emerged. Kathe followed. Immediately after her came another hefty MP. Surrounded by her guards, holding back strands of pale hair whipped by the propellers”

wind, she looked entirely too fragile breakable, even. It’s those godawful clothes, Wyatt decided.

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I

j

t

!”

i

He was handed an outsize official envelope with the detainee’s papers, and the trio of MPs hurried across the airfield in the direction of the Quonset bar.

“How is Grandpa?”

she asked. Her eyes were reddened: obviously she had been crying on the flight from Frankfurt. He wished she hadn’t wept; those reddened eyes smudged his official portrait of the family Nazi.

“He can’t be in great shape if they’ve sprung a dangerous war criminal.”

He could hear the flatness of his attempt at humour.

“Since Aubrey lined all this up I haven’t had any bulletins, so I guess the sweet old guy’s holding his own.”

“That’s good,”

she murmured.

The fatigue-clad ground crew, unloading freight from what had been the bomb-bays, darted stares, then bent their heads together, yakking and sniggering, doubtless about the officer and his illegal

“fraternazi’.

“Listen,”

Wyatt said,

“there’s a minimum of three and a half hours before we take off. What say we head over to the Tiergarten and get you something new to wear?”

She gave him an odd, hopefully appraising glance. After a lengthy pause, she said:

“Wyatt, I do appreciate all you’re doing.”

II

The Tiergarten’s bustling black market, the centre of commerce in Berlin, was located between the burned-out husk of the Reichstag and the lambasted Brandenburg Gate. The pitiless final battle had been fought here in the once beautiful park. Tacked to the burned tree-stumps were warnings printed in Bflglish, Russian and French that it was a criminal offence to sell or oiy PX or NAAFI goods.

As soon as Wyatt and Kathe left the jeep, they were besieged by cries of

“Zigaretten!”

Some people bartered goods for goods, a few counted out Occupation Marks or foreign currencies, but for the most part the bargaining was done in Germany’s new medium of exchange: cigarettes. The victors held out packs of Lucky Strikes, Camels, Craven-As, Gauloises, even the terrible-odoured Russian cigarettes. The defeated stood bundled with layers of clothing or sat beside a variety of merchandise that ranged from eighteenth-century landscapes, bits of antique Meissen which somehow had survived a thousand air raids, heirloom jewellery, Leica cameras, battered household objects. A blind veteran held open his Wehrmacht tunic to display a Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves. Two shrewd-eyed little girls - they couldn’t have been more than eight - haggled over the price of a diamond ring with a Russian colonel. The frenzied commerce was not slowed by a cruising jeep with its four military police: French, American, British and Russian.

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A shivering woman held up a baby’s christening dress.

“Handmade lace,”

she said to Kathe.

“Zweihundert Mark.”

“No, thank you,”

Kathe murmured.

The woman followed them a few steps.

“The silk’s excellent quality. Bitte?

Kathe fished in her pocket, coming up with a pack of Camels. Tm sorry, but this is all I have. Will it do?”

The woman gave a sigh of relief, nodding. As they moved on, Kathe folded the infant’s dress into her purse.

Wyatt cocked an eyebrow.

“A bit small for you.”

“One of the WACs in Ober Tappenburg gave me the cigarettes. As far as I can tell, the rate of exchange is five dollars a pack. That woman was well brought up; she never would have taken so valuable a gift.”

“It won’t work,”

he said.

“What?”

“Putting me on the defensive.”

“Wyatt, don’t ever think I’m ungrateful. You’re being very generous, taking me to see Grandpa, buying me clothes. I’m just not very good at kowtowing.”

“Hey, there you go again.”

“Oh my God!”

she cried.

“Can’t you see what this park is now? They should put photographs of before and after in every school primer with the caption This is what war does’.

“Doubtless you’ve forgotten,”

he said,

“but the Tiergarten was not such a fantastically happy place for some of us.”

Her downcast eyes and what he perceived as her flicker of shame gave him no satisfaction. Turning, he craned his neck. Taller than most of the four thousand or so bargainers, he spotted a blonde holding open her fur coat to display a beige suit. The outfit was far too large for Kathe, and he should have let her decide if it could be belted to fit. He was incapable, though, of transacting the deal under her humiliated reddened gaze.

“Wait here,”

he said, pointing to the plinth of a fallen statue.

“Wyatt …”

She hesitated, apparently searching for words.

“For once don’t argue, OK?”

he said.

“Just sit.”

She perched on the marble.

“Don’t move. Be back in a jiffy.”

He moved around swirling knots of buyers and sellers to the blonde, a hard-faced Valkyrie who shed her fur and the jacket. Below her suit she wore a pretty pink sweater and skirt which were far smaller. He bought the outfit, and when the blonde took them off he bought the dark silk afternoon dress she had on underneath. He paid her what she asked in American dollars. Without bargaining, the transaction didn’t take long.

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But when he returned to the ruined statue Kathe no longer sat there. She wasn’t in any of the nearby groups.

Climbing on the broken plinth, he had a view of the crowd. With a grunt of relief, he spotted her in the direction of the Landwehr Canal. He shoved his way through the crowd.

It wasn’t Kathe but a plain teenager with similar beautiful hair. He thrust the clothes at the startled girl.

” … And then the bitch disappears!”

Wyatt shouted over the longdistance line.

“Just takes off!”

Aubrey, wearing a too small dressinggown from his school days, leaned against the wall gripping the receiver.

“Gone?”

“Vanished.”

Why didn’t it occur to me? Aubrey asked himself. The deal he’d struck with Major Downes had been intended to give Kathe a holiday, a little time to recuperate. The penicillin must have dulled his mind. He had seen the desperation in her eyes. How could he not have considered she would make a run for it? Even drugged, he should have known that she would search across the tormented German landscape for a fiveyear-old called Erich, surname unknown.

“When?”

“Three fucking hours ago. Since then I’ve been scouring the Tiergarten with a couple of MPs. The miserable cunt! Not a care about Grandfather!”

“She’s heading towards Frankfurt am Main.”

“Frankfurt? What sort of bullshit iswhat? She just came from fucking Frankfurt.”

“She’s looking for … somebody.”

“Yeah, some hotshot Nazi bastard she’s been shacked up with all during the war.”

“Wyatt, don’t waste your time looking for her with a man; she’s not with a man.”

“For once open your goddam eyes about her. She’s in Berlin with him. They have a grapevine, these Nazis. Christ, I could shoot myself, letting you talk me into playing her patsy!”

“You’ve got to find her.”

“Damn right! It’s my ass that’s in a sling.”

“She’s on her way to Frankfurt; she’s going through the Russian Sector. You know how they treat German women”

The line had gone dead.

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A noise like the beating wings of a mighty formation of snow geese woke Aubrey. During the night the tyrannical north wind had torn the curtain nailed across the glassless window, and the brocade was twisting and flapping. Three Russian officers snored with undisturbed gusto in the big double bed. Aubrey had been dealt the hard pallet on the floor - and was lucky to have it. Eighty-five per cent of the buildings in the outlying Berlin suburb had been destroyed, and this was the only surviving hotel. Beyond the swooping fabric a hint of light showed. He peered at his watch. Seven thirty-five!

Kathe had been missing nearly three days. She was without papers in a country where ration-books and identity-cards determined one’s right to survive.

Pushing aside the table-top that served as a door, he picked his way around the Soviet noncoms, men and women, who sprawled in the corridor. The desk clerk explained that because the Russian guests slept late the diningroom did not open until eight-thirty; however, if the captain went into the kitchen, the cooks would prepare him breakfast. Impatience rode Aubrey, but he decided to take the time. Food alleviated the spells of lightheadedness that plagued him. Gulping down what was set before him, he used the hotel’s only functioning telephone. It took an hour to get through to Frankfurt and the headquarters of USFET - United States Forces, European Theater. Second Lieutenant Robby Lear, his American liaison, told

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him that the American Captain Kingsmith had just called in. So far, nothing. Though Aubrey hadn’t spoken to Wyatt since that furious longdistance conversation, he knew that by now his brother-in-law, having blown off steam, would be giving the search his all. But in Berlin. And Kathe was trying to get to Frankfurt.

Putting up the collar of his uniform topcoat against the wind, Aubrey left the hotel. A loud clinking rang in the street. A line of rubble women, Triimmerfrauen, were lugging bricks to other Trummerfrauen who sat with small mallets pounding away the mortar to make the bricks reusable. Aubrey directed his keen but undetectable observation to the women, then to the bundled-up female passengers bumping along on the horse-drawn flatbed truck that served as a tram. None remotely resembled Kathe.

An elderly man pedalling a bicycle rickshaw called out:

“Take you any place in Berlin for three cigarettes.”

Being propelled by another human being went against Aubrey’s grain. He was ready to say no when he saw that the man wasn’t so old, about his own age, and there was a desperate gleam in the deep-sunk eyes. Before Aubrey climbed into the makeshift vehicle, he held out his snapshots of Kathe, taken in the summer of 1939.

The German whistled.

“What a stunner! No, I haven’t seen her. But, if it’s a blonde you want, I know beautiful clean girls”

“She’s my cousin.”

The old-young face pulled into cynical lines of disbelief, but he nodded politely.

“Why not try the Bahnhof? At all hours there’s a mob trying to get a train.”

Since no German in any zone was permitted to move more than six kilometres without a travel permit, Kwhe wouldn’t be attempting the journey by rail, but would be trekking by Shanks’s mare.

“Take me to the Schonbeck road.”

Schonbeck was on the most obvious route for anyone travelling to Frankfurt.

“You haven’t been in the Soviet Zone long, have you? There’re no buses any more.”

“I’ll get a ride,”

Aubrey said.

“You’ll walk, Captain, you’ll walk.”

A ragged sentry wearing a Mongolian dog-fur hat demanded to see the British officer’s travel pass. Aubrey produced an excellent forgery made by a survivor of his Berlin network and was let through. He had passed another barrier and was well into open country when it began to drizzle. Just then a Mercedes with fresh-painted red stars on its punished khaki frame pulled up beside him, and a round-faced lieutenant smiled out of the window, gesturing that ned give Aubrey a lift. The lieutenant communicated in broken German that he was Sergei Vasilievich Novikov, engineer, from the

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city of Minsk. Aubrey, using his halting Russian, introduced himself, then showed his photographs of the old sweetheart for whom he was searching. Novikov dug out a bottle of vodka, insisting they toast Aubrey’s old love, his own wife in Minsk, his girlfriend Fraulein Brigid. They drank to Aubrey’s excellent grasp of Russian, to Stalin, Churchill, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Lenin and Queen Victoria, toasting until Aubrey’s head was spinning and the round Slavic face had turned crimson.

Kathe had avoided a road-barrier by detouring through a small wood and was back on the highway to Schonbeck when the fine rain started. Plodding through the drizzle, she brooded about Porteous, praying that he was recovering. She also arraigned herself for betraying Wyatt’s trusting custodianship. But what choice had there been? An opening to find Erich had been given her, and she’d snatched it.

The clouds had darkened to a mottled brown, and she realized that for some time she had seen no horse-drawn carts piled with belongings or families shoving possessions and young children in a wheelbarrow. Soon it would be curfew. At all costs she must avoid being picked up by the police: with no travel pass or identification papers, she’d land in gaol. Peering ahead for a barn or outbuilding to spend the night, she didn’t hear the engine. A dented Mercedes was barrelling from one side of the road to the other as if the driver were drunk. She dodged out of the way, sliding into the ditch. Ankle-deep in the chill mud, she used all her remaining strength silently to curse all drivers, particularly Russians.