The Escape Read online

  I am guiltily relieved that the man with the blue scarf beat me to it. Incidents like this remind me of my father, that winter evening, when I came home from school to find him. I remember the feel of the telephone dial: three nines. I remember his slack-jawed drooling mouth, and the eyes rolled up, unseeing. I remember the guilty relief as the woman on the end of the telephone line told me not to touch him, just to wait for the paramedics. I remember phoning Mum at work to tell her he’d been taken away, and her saying not to worry, he’d be fine. It would all be fine.

  An ambulance appears, a red pulse in the gloom. The casualty is taken away and the Good Samaritan evaporates into the night. I can’t help but wonder what Quill would have done, if he’d been here. Would he have sat with the youths, undertaken emergency first aid, seen them safe on the ambulance, or would he have carried on walking on the opposite side of the street, muttering about ‘useless Berlin junkies not knowing when they’ve had enough’? I think I know the answer. I leave the dregs of my Coke and go. I rejoin the crowded pavements and start walking again.

  Just before dawn I reach the Brandenburg Gate, see the water canons spewing upwards on the Eastern side, still trying, vainly, to stop the drunken clamberers. An American news anchor is broadcasting from a dais; TV cameras snout over the Wall behind him. Quill and I are not the only ones who had a hunch about Berlin, it seems. A well-wisher thrusts an open beer bottle into my right hand, assuming I’m from the East. I trail my left hand along the Wall, tracing the texture of graffiti like Braille as I go, swigging from the bottle. For a while I manage to be part of the picture, just another face in the extraordinary night.

  At Checkpoint Charlie the crush is like a mosh pit. A US soldier leans against the uplifted barrier: white teeth and cigarette, surrounded by girls – as if he’s a rock star, not a border guard. I am drawn to Cafe Adler, thinking vaguely of sitting down, but inside the cafe is even more crowded than the street.

  I am about to leave when I see the flash of blue. It is Petra’s coat. She has her arms round someone; her toffee-apple bob falls back over the fake fur. Figures jostle past and I lose sight of her. There’s a shout from the bar: ‘No more beer! We’re out of beer!’

  ‘Then let us drink wine!’ A returning bellow from a latter-day Marie Antoinette – a huge man in a sheepskin coat to my right. The cafe erupts into laughter. I realize who the wine-demander is.

  ‘Dieter!’

  He turns and engulfs me in a bear hug. ‘What a night, what a night!’ We laugh, and when he puts me down I catch sight of Petra again. Quill stands next to her, swigging from a magnum of champagne. He has his back to me, but Petra turns, sees me, touches Quill on the arm. His head swivels, his white teeth show. He rubs a finger across his nose, and thrusts the bottle at Petra.

  ‘Miranda!’ He pushes his way towards me through the throng. ‘You’re here.’ His arms are around me. His lips are on mine: the taste of champagne on his breath as he kisses me. He pauses. ‘You okay, baby?’ He looks into my eyes. ‘I was worried about you, going off on your own like that.’

  ‘Yeah.’ When I blink, I can blank him out, just for a split second. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Did you get good shots?’

  ‘I think so. I’ve run out of film, now, anyway, so . . .’

  ‘Well done. Good girl. We’ll get them couriered off ASAP. I’ve already faxed my copy.’ He gestures round at the packed cafe, the open checkpoint outside. ‘This – this is history in the making, isn’t it? This is everything we wanted!’ He takes a step back into the crowd to hold me at arm’s length. His handsome fists dig into my upper arms, and I imagine the rose-coloured fingerprints on my flesh. ‘And it’s just the beginning,’ he says, mouth breaking into an even wider grin. ‘For Germany, and for us, Miranda!’ He pulls me towards him, crushing me close. But the camera is between us, like a fist in my solar plexus, and the line of his jaw is hard against my skull.

  Over his shoulder I glimpse Petra gazing at me with a mixture of envy and sympathy. I shut my eyes, and wait to be released, thinking of the crowds chanting for freedom, as Quill holds me tight to his torso. Slowly he lets go. I open my eyes, letting his face swim back into focus: the lock of black hair, smudge of five o’clock shadow, dancing green eyes – the face I fell in love with, and now I’ve begun to fear.

  ‘I’m sorry, Quill, but I can’t stay in Berlin any longer,’ I say, emboldened by the events I’ve witnessed this extraordinary night. ‘I want to go home.’

  Chapter 3

  January 1945, Nazi Germany

  Tom

  His fingers scrabbled at his chest, but there was nothing here. No ripcord. He cried out, but his voice was lost in the suffocating rush of air and he was falling, into the blackness, twisting and falling. God. Oh, God.

  Awake. Shivering and sweat-drenched, eyes staring unseeing into the darkened room, chest bellow-pumping, breath loud and fast in the quiet air – the familiar nightmare. Tom pushed his hands over his forehead and into his hair, wiping away the cold sweat.

  He stared out into the darkness of the sleeping hut, mind scrabbling just as his fingers had been just now, trying to find something to clutch, remembering the aftermath. He remembered the remains of the plane plummeting ahead of him, orange flames extinguished by the inky sea. He remembered the wind pulling him shorewards, landing in a hollow in the dunes, pulling the chute in, expecting at any moment to hear the roar of military jeeps, or tramp of jackboots, but there being nothing but the distant crash of waves and swish of wind through the marram grass. Then, noticing the dampness on the flight suit – at night-time, blood isn’t red, it’s the same dark grey as the North Sea. Crawling up the dune, seeing the distant blur of a supine figure at the shoreline, still attached to the billowing chute. He remembered calling out, voice snatched and hurled away inland, and nobody answering.

  No. Don’t think about it. Why dwell on it? How could you possibly have got back to Blighty from that: an amnesiac and a shot-up cripple, even had the locals had links to the Dutch Resistance, even had there been safe houses. It was hopeless from the moment Gertie took a hit. Think about something else. Anything else. Even Hitler. No, not him. Stalin? Yes. The Russians, think about the Russians.

  Tom exhaled. His own breath felt warm in the chill air. Uncle Joe is coming. Soon he’d be free. Within weeks he could be back home at the rectory. He thought of the smell of roasting meat, the silky feel of an eiderdown, dark-green monkey-puzzle tree branches glimpsed through a sash window, and the distant sound of church bells. He forced his breathing to slow, fumbling fingers re-buttoning the pyjamas where he’d torn them open in an attempt to pull the invisible ripcord. He’d lost a button. Never mind. Hunt for it in the morning. There’d be all day to find the bugger and sew it on, nothing else to do except sit and wait. Ever since they’d heard the Russian artillery the other day, all camp activity had stopped: amateur dramatics, language classes, art, even the footballers seemed less eager to start a game. All they did was listen to the thunder of the guns, trying to calculate how close the front was, how soon they’d be liberated.

  He listened. The rumblings of the Russian guns were silent for now – even soldiers had to sleep at some point, he supposed. He imagined high-cheeked blackbeards in their T-34s, curled up like hibernating bears. Did any of them have nightmares, he wondered? Won’t we all have nightmares by the time this sorry mess of a war is over?

  Instead of distant ordnance, he could hear the faint sound of rhythmic breathing from the other men in the hut. His own bunk wobbled a little as Gordon grunted and turned in his sleep. The hut was windowless as a crypt, so he could only guess whether there was a frost-shrouded moon above the trees and a diamond-studded sky outside, or whether the clouds were a silent pillow fight, dousing the camp with fresh downy whiteness.

  Nightmare banished, sweat dry, Tom suddenly felt the cold, and lay back down, dragging the blanket over his head and pulling himself into a foetal knot, to hug in as much warmth as possible. He could relax now.
It was rare to get the dream twice in a night. If he could just get warm again, he might be able to sleep through until morning roll call. And tomorrow he’d find the blasted button and sew it on. It would give him something to do, at least.

  It was only because he was still awake that he heard: footfalls running across the parade ground, guards being called down from watchtowers. What was that all about?

  Two sets of footsteps passed right by the side of the hut. Tom strained his ears to catch the muffled German. ‘Shit,’ said a voice. ‘But we haven’t prepared for this.’

  ‘Shut up,’ came the response. ‘It’s the Fuhrer’s orders.’ The footsteps and voices moved away.

  Tom sat up again, wide awake. Something was about to happen, but what?

  Detta

  ‘Tell your mother I owe her – if there’s anything I can do . . .’ Frau Moll’s brow puckered as Detta handed over the basket of eggs. A uniformed man banged out of the Schloss door and ran down the front steps to the army truck that was idling on the gravel driveway below them. He hurled himself into the passenger seat and the truck skidded away. They paused to watch it veer and slip down the track, and onto the main road, where it slewed left towards Oppeln. Trudging in the opposite direction of the racing truck was the now-familiar sight of clots of refugees heading towards Breslau. Detta could just glimpse her mother at the doorway of the Deutches Haus Inn, opposite the church, ready with mugs of ersatz coffee for the passing travellers: she wouldn’t ask for payment, and none of them would stop for food or a bed for the night. It had been like this for days, ever since the trains stopped running and they heard the first bombardments.

  The army truck was out of sight, now, but Frau Moll still gazed at the patch of main road where it had last been. ‘They eat and eat,’ she said. ‘But how can I refuse them a decent meal, when it might be their –’ she didn’t finish the sentence, interrupted by another one of those angry artillery booms that had become a percussive accompaniment to their lives these last few days.

  ‘Mother says she’ll keep sending as many eggs as we have, it’s not a problem. The hens are still laying, despite–’ Detta cleared her throat, unable to say the words: despite the noise of artillery fire from the approaching front – because saying it out loud somehow made it more real. Instead, she let her voice trail off, touching the place where her scarf wound into her fur coat, beneath which the locket lay. ‘And in any case, we have no guests at the Deutches Haus at the moment, unlike you.’

  ‘Well, I’d hardly call them guests,’ Frau Moll turned away from the road and lowered her voice. ‘It’s not as if I had a choice, is it? But still, one has to make the best of things in these times.’ She attempted a bright smile, but succeeded only in showing a glimpse of her pearly little teeth, leaving lines of anxiety netting her eyes. She drew breath. ‘Feels like there’s more snow coming, don’t you think? Would you like to come out of the cold for a while? The children would love to see you.’

  ‘I should get back,’ Detta said, but she hesitated, feeling sorry for the older woman. Frau Moll’s high-ranking husband was a prisoner of war in England. The army had recently requisitioned the Moll Schloss, now the front was moving west, and she’d been living with her three children in just two rooms, whilst the rest of her palatial home was used as a field HQ and officer’s mess.

  ‘They loved it when you came and taught them those French nursery rhymes,’ Frau Moll said. ‘They get so bored without school, and it’s too cold to let them play outside for long. Maybe you could come and give them a little French tuition – I would pay you, of course.’

  ‘I have to take something to Father Richter, and I promised I’d go back and help Mother,’ Detta gestured in the direction of the refugees. Another boom of distant shellfire came, and Frau Moll winced. ‘Tomorrow,’ Detta said. ‘I’ll come over tomorrow morning and I’ll bring my big book of Perrault Fairy Stories for the girls.’

  ‘They’ll love that. And it’s always useful to know another language, you never know when you’ll need it; one can never start too young. Thank you, dear.’ Frau Moll held the basket of eggs in her right hand, but with her left she reached out and touched Detta’s cheek with her fingertips. ‘Thank you,’ she repeated, before turning away.

  Detta heard the Schloss door thud shut as she walked down the granite steps to the driveway. She was fond of Frau Moll, and of the flaxen-haired Moll girls, with their chubby knees and china-doll eyes. But why would Frau Moll want them to learn French at a time like this? It was irrational. But then, wasn’t everything irrational at the moment? Detta thought of the gunfire, the soldiers, the vehicles that sped through the village at all hours. There had been blood on the road by the baker’s shop yesterday morning. They said a Wehrmacht soldier was shot by the SS for trying to desert. Dead if you fight and dead if you don’t – none of it makes any sense, Detta thought. Her boots slipped through the thin crust of ice and into the deep snow underneath as she took the shortcut through the trees.

  The path took her past the French forced workers’ barracks. Usually by this time in the morning they’d all be at work, mending the tracks or oiling the points or whatever it was they did (she wasn’t sure – all she’d ever had to do was drop off occasional notices from the Reichsbahn head office that she’d translated into French, just lists of rules or information about meal entitlements or changes to working hours). But today, just like yesterday, and the day before that, they hadn’t even left their barracks, although some of them had Polish girlfriends who’d been working the land nearby, and they’d been seen coming and going, even after curfew. There had been no sign of Herr Frankel’s car, though – in fact, now she thought about it, his car hadn’t been there since she came home early on the last train from Oppeln. He was quite well-connected in the Nazi party – perhaps someone had tipped him off about the situation.

  The barracks windows were shuttered from the cold, but the building itself was a flimsy construction, shoved up in a rush a few years ago, when the French forced workers were moved into the village to work on the eastbound railway line. As Detta passed the plasterboard walls she could hear the curlicued vowels of the French workers from inside. She recognized them: Henri and Jean-Pierre, two of the men she often met when she brought round translated orders from the Reichsbahn. When they’d complained about having no contact with home, she’d managed to persuade Herr Meier to let them have paper and pens, and to cover the cost of posting their letters.

  Ah, they’re all bitches!

  Not at all, I’m taking mine with me, when the Reds get here.

  I thought you had a girl back home in Rouen?

  The war changes things, though, doesn’t it? Remember I had that anonymous letter saying that some Nazi boy had been sniffing round her . . .

  And you believe it?

  I don’t know. But I know I’m very fond of Ana, and I think we could make a go of things, if she comes with me. God, I can’t wait to get out of here.

  Not long now, JP.

  How long do you think? A week?

  Maybe less – haven’t you been listening? They’re definitely closing in.

  Perhaps you’re right. I’ll tell her to start packing her things.

  A week or less, Detta thought, carrying on past the barracks and joining the icy rutted track that wound down beside the church, parallel to the main road. Would the Red Army really be here so soon? And what would happen then? Some of the refugees had muttered about what had happened in Prussia. No woman is safe, they said. Detta didn’t want to think about what that meant.

  She looked up at the blue arch of sky. Mistletoe pom-poms burred the naked trees. The cold made the bones in her face ache, but at least there was still some sunshine glinting off the snow. There was another sudden rumble, as if the pale sun itself was belching ordnance. Detta hurried on. It was too cold to linger and remember the summertime walks she used to have with Rolf under these trees, more than a year ago now, before he too got sucked into the grey-green Wehrmacht machi
ne, and never came back. At least she hadn’t been in love with him, she thought. At least it had finished before it had properly started. They’d been spared that. She thought of Frau Moll struggling in the Schloss, and Oberst Moll locked up in a British prison camp. Yes, war was easier without love, she supposed.

  She squinted into the glare. But there were black clouds in the distance, piling up above the Oppeln road. Frau Moll was right: it would snow later.

  It had snowed that night they first heard the Russian guns, she remembered. Initially nobody had been quite sure what they heard. The lights had flickered, and the radio went dead. It must be an electric storm, Mother told the customers in the lounge bar. The lights came back on again, and people began to smile and chat, reassured. But then the radio stayed obstinately silent, nothing but a dull hiss where there should have been music. The thudding rumbles got louder until it was impossible to pretend that what they were hearing was just a storm. The snow settled into drifts outside and all the customers evaporated into the night. The next morning the soldiers arrived at the Moll Schloss and dawn light showed the first dark clump of refugees limping along the main road.

  Detta carried on walking. The barrack block was behind her now, and the church on her left. It was like something from a children’s picture book: the orange and white paintwork made it stand startlingly out against the bright blue sky, with its onion-shaped spire poking heavenward. She passed in front of the church, heading for the manse. Father Richter would be at home, and Mother had sent him a gift, a small bottle of homemade plum brandy, that bulged in her coat pocket (‘In times such as these, holy spirit might not be enough – Father Richter might need some of the real stuff,’ Mother said with a grim smile as she’d handed the bottle to Detta).