Child of the Ruins by Kate Furnivall

Author:Kate Furnivall [Furnivall, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781399713580
Published: 2023-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

ANNA

I was glad of the noise, the relentless roar of the aircraft, so loud it blasted all thoughts out of my head. I was glad of the leaden ache in my limbs. It dulled the grief. Tempelhof swallowed me up and silenced me. I became a cog, unfeeling and unthinking, while the wind that scoured the wide expanse of the airfield was piercing and I welcomed the numbness it brought me.

I love you, he’d said.

And I’d handed his words right back to him. I’d discarded them like my mother discarded an unwanted child, when all I longed to do was hold on to them, to wrap myself tight around them.

But could I believe him? Could I trust him?

This was Berlin, a city of lies, a city of spies. I must never ignore the fact that he was a Red Army officer. Did Major Timur Voronin already know when he walked into our apartment today with his bribes that I worked at Tempelhof? Is that why he came? To find out information and learn what was going on out here?

The night sky was a mottled charcoal black, streaked with dirty grey fingers because the fog that had plagued the city all month was rolling back in now that the rain had stopped. It clogged my lungs worse than the droplets of aircraft fuel that swirled across the runways. Originally there was only one runway, little more than a ragged strip of grass that wallowed in mud in the winter, but the American commanders, General Tunner and General Howley, had transformed it. They’d had three new steel and asphalt runways constructed and to build them the bulldozers had had to be brought in by plane. They were too heavy to be transported in one piece, so they were sliced into segments, then welded back into functioning bulldozers once in Berlin. It was Captain Noah Maynard, the American pilot, who had passed on that little gem to me. He was so proud of his country.

I envied him that.

‘You’re quiet tonight, Anna,’ my work companion grumbled.

The atmosphere on the base was even more tense than usual, everyone aware that the Russian MiG fighters were up in force, buzzing the incoming planes in the air corridors. No one wanted any more crashes. And the state radio station in the Soviet sector had been blasting out through loudspeakers in the streets that the Allies were preparing to withdraw from Berlin. It wasn’t true but morale was low.

Nevertheless, Magdalene, my coal-sweeping companion, was in a cheerful mood. Her uncle had brought her a basket of crisp russet apples and that’s all it took to make a Berliner happy these days. No one asked where he’d got them. She’d presented me with one and I’d tucked it under my hat which was tied on with a headscarf today to stop the wind ripping it off. While I laboured away sweeping out the planes, she chatted and rested her broad backside against the curved ribs of the aircraft whenever the urge took her.

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