The Escape Read online

  Sod the family. I’m going to keep heading west until I meet the Tommies or the Ammies.

  How can you say such a thing?

  Only a fool would wait here for the Ruskis.

  You’re talking about joining the enemy – that’s treachery.

  But, dear lady, perhaps treachery means freedom?

  How can you say such things? It’s a betrayal of the Reich!

  All I’m saying is that betrayal could mean escape . . .

  ‘What about you. Where are you going?’ The woman had turned back to speak to Detta. Her daughter was sucking a thumb now, resting a sleepy head on her mother’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m just going home,’ Detta said, reaching up to fiddle with the chain at her neck. ‘I felt a little – a little strange at work, so I thought I should head off early. I usually take the 5.30.’

  ‘Lucky you did. There won’t be a 5.30 today.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘This is the last train across the Oder, dearie. There won’t be any more trains.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  The woman looked at her as if she were stupid. ‘Well, they’re hardly going to want the Red Army catching the 5.30 to Breslau, are they?’

  Tom

  ‘I’m telling you, that wasn’t thunder,’ Tom said.

  ‘Well, what was it then? Sounded like thunder to me.’ Gordon was intent on his task of turning an old corned beef tin into a cup, rubbing the metal warm-soft and turning the sharp edges inwards so that it wouldn’t cut the drinker’s lip. He’d got quite expert in putting old cans to other uses these past few months (since D-Day, the escape committee had given up asking for digging utensils). The other members of the hut were rehearsing an am-dram production. Except for Albert Ward, who was in sickbay with suspected pleurisy.

  ‘Artillery.’

  ‘No. Couldn’t be. The Reds couldn’t be this close. Clancy in hut fourteen said the last BBC report put them over one hundred miles away from Silesia.’

  ‘When was the last time Clancy’s lot managed to tune in?’ He put the tip of his finger out to touch the painting he had pinned to the wall by his bunk: dry, at last – he could send it home with today’s Red Cross post.

  ‘Well there’s been nothing the last couple of days – goons not keeping to their usual scheds, so it’s been impossible to get a safe spot of time.’ Gordon looked up from the half-finished cup. ‘D’you really think they could cover that much ground so quickly?’

  ‘I’m telling you, it’s Uncle Joe,’ said Tom, as another faint rumble reached them. ‘Right, that’s it. I’m going out to take a look.’ He’d been in the process of writing home. He hadn’t mentioned seeing the planes yesterday in his letter, didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up too soon. But if the Red Army were almost upon them – well, that really would be something to write home about. Tom dropped down from his top bunk, shoved his feet into his boots and began to lace them up. It was freezing out there, twelve degrees, apparently, but if something was going off, he wanted to know about it.

  ‘I’ll join you, pal,’ Gordon said, getting up and reaching to the lower bunk for his coat, which doubled up as an eiderdown these days.

  Tom pushed the hut door open and stepped out, blinking, into the sudden whiteness. It looked as if they weren’t the only chaps with the same idea. Men were streaming out of their huts as if it were morning roll call. The sun was already hidden beneath the pines. Occasional glimmers of low golden sunshine pierced the gaps in the trees, but the night was beginning to draw in. It was past four already – it would be dark soon.

  The men stood a distance from the perimeter fence, waiting and listening, but there were no more rumbling echoes, and Tom began to wonder if they really had heard what he’d thought. Perhaps it was just distant thunder, or a blast from a far away quarry.

  But as they stood, shifting from foot to foot, and rubbing their arms in a vain attempt to stave off the biting chill, they began to hear another sound, and see something moving in the trees. A memory ran through his mind: reading Macbeth at school, that bit where the witches warned of a moving forest. Birnham Wood, wasn’t it? The trees beyond the perimeter fence were like Birnham Wood: thick suddenly with encroaching forms, a column of men were trudging through the pines. The only sound was the swish of their strange striped clothes, and the crunch of footfalls on crusted snow. At the front was a soldier in a green-grey greatcoat, carrying a weapon with a fixed bayonet. He did not even glance up at the camp guards in the watchtowers. The stumbling queue of men didn’t come right up to the camp, but turned away, following a track through the trees that wound round behind, away from the road. Some wore caps, some had brown blankets slung overhead like shawls. Even at the distance of some thirty yards or more, through the barbed wire and the branches, Tom could see they were thin as skeletons. Many had no shoes. A stench drifted like putrid fog. The men inside the wire stood in silence as they passed by. As the last one disappeared, Tom heard a retching sound. He turned. It was Gordon – yellow bile streaming from sagging lips.

  Tom put out a hand to touch his hunched shoulders. Gordon picked up a handful of snow, wiped his face and straightened up. They both turned away from the trees and began to walk back to their hut. The other men were all silently drifting inside, too. Once inside, they sat down together on Gordon’s bunk. Gordon slumped forward, face in his hands. Neither spoke, but their proximity was comfort enough.

  Nobody who’d known them from 29 Squadron back in West Malling would have expected to see them like this. Tom had kicked up a ruckus when Gordon was selected to pilot Dirty Gertie, their Beaufighter. Tom was an RAF regular, had qualified back in ’38, had seen it through the Battle of Britain. Gordon was a conscript, still wet-behind-the-ears (at least, that’s what Tom told their CO). But the answer came back that Flight Sergeant Harper was a promising pilot who needed the experience, so Tom’s choice was navigator on night fighter sorties, or being posted to a training regiment in the Midlands. Tom had put up and shut up for the sake of his career, but there remained an undercurrent of resentment: he’d rather have been at the fighter’s controls than twenty foot back in a Perspex bubble.

  But afterwards they’d become known as the Siamese Twins, he and Gordon: Tom was Gordon’s memory, and Gordon was Tom’s left leg, each the other’s crutch, for months into their incarceration, until they both began to mend. How many times had he told Gordon about their last sortie together, going over the details again and again? Reminding him how they’d set off on that frosty February night, flying with the other two Beaufighters, coddled between layers of cloud above the Channel, then cutting their engines and diving down to the target, sending up that final, guilty prayer in the rush of descent. But although the shrapnel wound in Tom’s leg healed, and he could walk again, Gordon still remembered nothing of that night, or the immediate aftermath. Each time Tom retold it, Gordon immediately forgot, the memory erased like a sandcastle with high tide.

  Now Tom patted Gordon’s back. ‘I know, old man,’ he said, swallowing down his own grief at what they just witnessed. A moment later two of their fellow inmates returned, still in the costumes they’d been wearing at the dress rehearsal.

  ‘Bastards,’ said Edward, his greasepaint smeared, revealing pale stubble beneath.

  ‘But why are they moving them?’ Oliver began to loosen his paisley cravat. ‘Why not just leave them to the Russians?’

  ‘Evidence.’ Edward sagged down on the opposite bunk.

  ‘Evidence?’ Oliver slung the cravat over a nail in the wall.

  ‘Of what’s been going on in the concentration camps. Don’t want the Allies to know what utter evil shits they’ve been.’ Edward put his head in his hands.

  ‘But we’re prisoners of war, Geneva Convention and all that, they wouldn’t evacuate us, would they?’ Oliver said, still standing, rumpling his blonde hair and frowning. The thudding rumble sound came again, louder this time. Tom thought: that’s not thunder, that’s heavy artillery
. The Red Army is closing in.

  Oliver carried on talking, raising his voice above the barrage: ‘They wouldn’t evacuate us. They’ll all just do a bunk and leave us here to be liberated by the Russians, won’t they?’

  But nobody answered.

  Chapter 2

  November 1989, West Berlin

  Miranda

  I lift the camera to my face. Through the lens I see the crowds of East Berliners push towards the barrier, looking like an audience at a gig, waiting for the main act to come on stage. They have been massing for hours in the cold glare of the security lights. But the red-and-white striped bar, the wire-mesh fencing and the miles of concrete wall stay put.

  I am exactly where I want to be. It is for this that I extended my overdraft, skipped my dissertation tutorial, and left a note for my housemates saying I’m not sure when I’ll be back. This – being in the right place at the right time – will more than make up for it when it comes to the shots I’ll get for my portfolio and degree show.

  If it happens.

  Border guards look on, fingering their guns. But they neither speak to their fellow citizens, nor cock their weapons in warning. The half-moon rises higher in the clear sky, the crowd growing by the moment, as word gets out about Schabowski’s press conference, but still there is an impasse. The night is stretched: tense and full.

  It was Quill who got the tip-off. Some press contacts of his said there were rumblings in East Berlin. Then last weekend there was the huge Alexanderplatz demonstration, hundreds of thousands of frustrated ‘Ossis’ shouting for Gorbachev’s help: revolution was in the air. But the newspaper Quill works for – the Sunday Correspondent – didn’t have a Berlin stringer, let alone a photographer. Quill volunteered to cover the Berlin situation, and his editor agreed. I’ve come along as a freelance press photographer. The editor knows we’re an item, Quill and I, and he’s fine with that. What he doesn’t know is I’m still a student, that this is my first professional job.

  I lower my camera. The moment is yet to come. The throng of bodies on my side of the crossing shift and swell. It is freezing, even in the crush of humanity, and I shiver. I turn to look at the West Berliners. Some have started lifting lit cigarette lighters and waving them, causing a sparkling sheen on the shadowy mass, like a starling’s wing. The tension is palpable, air thick with anticipation.

  ‘Let them in!’ someone shouts from the back of the crowd.

  ‘Freedom!’ another voice calls out. The chant suddenly ripples through the crowds from West to East, crossing the barricades, a murmur that rises to a shout: ‘Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!’

  There is a scuffle by the barrier on the Eastern side. I lift my camera and zoom in. ‘Just let us through,’ a bearded man says to a border guard, and as he speaks he reaches out. ‘We’ll come back again. We just want to visit, that’s all. That’s what Schabowski promised!’ The guard lifts an arm to block the man, but as he does so, the man makes a lunge forward. I click the shutter. Is this it? The ‘Tiananmen moment’, when peaceful protest erupts into violence? I keep the viewfinder to my eye and hold my breath.

  ‘No violence!’ A woman pulls the bearded man back, and the soldier lowers his arm. ‘Freedom, not violence!’ she yells, and the crowd echoes her voice.

  ‘Freedom, not violence! Freedom, not violence!’ Chanting fills the air on both sides of the border crossing. And still we wait.

  Freedom, not violence: Quill likes to talk about the power of peaceful protest, of autonomy, of giving people their voice. I have seen him, pint in one hand, cigarette in the other, pontificating on the importance of self-determination to Dieter and Petra, our contacts and temporary hosts out here. He never picks up on the irony, the schism between the political and the personal. He can be talking about human rights and autonomy, then, if he notices me catching another man’s gaze, will, lightly but deliberately, touch my inner wrist with his lit cigarette tip. Afterwards he always apologizes, explaining it’s because he cares so much for me that he can’t bear the thought of other men even looking at me.

  Love and fear produce the same panic-surge of adrenaline: when I’m with Quill I’m not certain which it is I feel, anymore.

  The crowd moves, and I am pushed up against the mesh fence. I see an older border guard emerge from the security buildings, say something to his younger colleague, who strokes a gloved hand up and down the barrel of his weapon, as if calming a dog. What are they saying? I’m too far away to hear. What is the order? To open fire, to release water cannons? Bodies are shoving me against the fence and I struggle to keep my camera up to my face. The older border guard goes back inside.

  Then, through the wire, I see the red-and-white barrier begin to lift, and the East Berlin crowd surge forwards. A huge cheer goes up and the Ossis rush forward, faces like children on Christmas morning. The crowd on my side pulses, clapping, laughing, crying, as the first of the East Berliners are suddenly, without warning, allowed through to the West.

  I snap the faces as they cross. Each pauses just beneath the lifted barrier, even with the crush pushing them forward. They stop in nervous joy, and seem to check for permission, before taking a breath and stepping over into the West. And I capture their individual moments of release. History spills with a click onto celluloid. But even as I shoot their baffled ecstasy, I think: this isn’t it; this pelt to freedom is only half the story.

  My film runs out, and I move further away from the barrier, along to the point where the wire mesh of the crossing gives way to the concrete wall, to find space to change the canister. It is a fiddly operation, and I am shoved and shunted by the exuberant crowd. I fumble, cursing my freezing-numb fingers for not working quickly enough, for what if I miss it: the moment – the moment when the picture is the story. I wind the new film on, shove the empty canister in my pocket, and click the camera back in place. I shift the viewfinder into position. I can see the back of the customs office, below the watchtower.

  And there, through my lens, is a female border guard: blonde hair and pointed nose, mouth curving downwards. She stands next to an older, portly, male colleague – the one I saw giving the order to lift the barrier. He’s taken off his cap, and his grey-haired head is in his hands. As I watch, the woman reaches out to pat the man on his arm. He lowers his hands from his face. I zoom in and catch his anguished expression, and lip-read the words he shouts out at the passing crowds of ecstatic Easterners. ‘This is treachery. This freedom is a betrayal!’

  I see the mercury glint of a single tear on his cheek as he lets himself be pulled into his colleague’s embrace, with the sea of freedom seekers and the candy-striped barrier raised in the background. I click the shutter. That is the moment: the truth of it.

  Then the border guards go inside, and I take more photos of the reunited Berliners: the joyful, tearful reunions and gasping optimism of it all. I find myself smiling, then laughing, as a heady mix of emotion wells up inside.

  I join the crowd pushing through the late-night streets where the lights blink through pulled curtains and music spills through open doors. Cars chug past as if it’s rush hour, speeding west, spewing fumes and honking. All around is the sound of weeping, music, laughter as the bottleneck of the Berlin Wall checkpoints are unstoppered.

  I duck into a bar to use the bathroom. As I wash my hands, I catch my reflection in the liver-spotted glass above the sink: platinum-blonde cropped hair, red lips, black polo neck, denim jacket, camera swinging like a pendulum. I look every inch the ambitious photography student, taking her chances at the Berlin Wall. There’s not even a glimpse of the little girl who used to cry herself to sleep to the sound of her parents’ rows. I suppose they were trying to protect me by not arguing in front of me, waiting until I’d gone to bed. But sound travels in old houses: under ill-fitting floorboards and through rusting pipework. My childhood lullabies were the hissing volley of insults and occasional smash of glass. I frown at my reflection, slick on more lipstick, and banish the memories.

  I go ou
t into the packed bar, order a Coke, and perch on a high stool by the counter at the window to drink it. On a building site across the street yellow cranes stand idle like giant question marks. Through the smudged glass I see two lads stumbling from a side street. One shoulders the other, half-carrying him. Their four-legged stagger continues past my line of vision. Someone has been celebrating a bit too hard, I think, watching legs splaying at awkward angles, heads lolling. As I look, one of them falls, a slow-motion underwater tumble, landing with limbs slewed out over the kerb, one hand dangling into the gutter between two parked cars. The other pirouettes, wide-eyed, calling back over his shoulder for help, but nobody comes. He crouches next to his friend. The fallen boy’s pink-pale arms hang limply out from a khaki vest. I see a trickle of vomit slide from his gaping mouth.

  Crowds jostle the pavement, but nobody else seems to have noticed. They need help. I put down my Coke and jerk from my seat, but as I do so I see a man run across the road, dodging traffic and pedestrians, his long coat and blue scarf flapping out behind him. He must see me looking through the window, and makes an urgent gesture as he runs, staring at me, holding one arm to his face, little finger and thumb poking out: telephone – telephone for an ambulance.

  I turn and yell at the woman behind the bar, point out of the window at the enfolding scene, and she calls back to say she’ll phone right now. The man in the long coat kneels at the kerbside. As I watch, he pushes the fallen youth’s dirty hair from his face, lifts the chin and pushes a finger inside the lips to clear the airways, then tilts his body sideways, into the recovery position. He stands to take off his coat, covers the lad’s shivering torso. I check with the woman behind the counter, she says the ambulance is on its way. I knock on the window. The man looks up, and I give him the thumbs up, mouth Krankenwagen kommt: the ambulance is coming. I notice his eyes: twin blue sparks glimpsed through the dirty plate glass. He nods, then turns his attention back to the casualty. The curious and helpful have started to crowd round, and medical help is coming. I’m not needed.