Tales of Adventurers (2 page)

He took only water to drink. He prided himself on that. It was proof of a disinterested missionary spirit.

“I thought,” he would say, “that in the heat I must expect as deck cargo even wine-and-water might reduce efficiency.”

It
was
hot. He chose a part of the column which was shaded by wood and sacking, but he could not avoid the heat of the Black Sea sun on steel. He had lost pounds in his Roumano-Turkish
bath when the cranes lifted him off the deck and dropped him onto the waiting railway truck. The drop was uneven. He used to protest, with professional indignation, that the fools must have
strained every joint in the section.

He anchored himself firmly in his corner seat between bubble tray and take-off leg, while the great flatcar was violently shunted up and down the yard. At last he felt himself moving
purposefully in one direction, and relaxed upon his mattress with all the self-satisfaction of a traveler who had successfully cheated the customs.

“But I was frightened,” he admitted. “Yes, sheer panic underneath. There wasn’t a minute when I didn’t wish I had stayed in London. Still, when the train started, I
couldn’t help feeling proud of myself.”

He looked cautiously out of the manhole. The flatcar was at the tail of the train with only the caboose behind it. On the platform of the caboose a sentry was settling down to sleep. He was glad
to see that the Roumanians still posted their unemployable military on trains to prevent pilfering. It was a comforting reminder that the national character had not changed.

The train rumbled over the Danube, and idled across the starlit Wallachian plain. Whenever it halted, Devenor, kneeling at the manhole, heard the dear sounds of his second homeland: the barking
of dogs in distant villages, the sigh and swirl of the streams past their willows, the croaking of frogs. Frogs fried
Colbert
– that was the way the Gradina used to do them. He dozed
uneasily until shaken up by renewed shunting. When that was over, he could not resist deep sleep.

The discomfort of his own perspiration awoke him a little before midday. He poked head and then shoulders out of the top of the column. He was in the shadeless, dusty marshaling yards to the
south of Bucharest. So long as he drew no attention to himself, there seemed no reason why he should not walk out into the city. He did so, greeting with an air of genial authority the casual
groups of railway workers who were munching their loaves in the open doors of unloaded wagons.

Devenor did not want to show himself in the center of the city. There were too many people who knew his face and liked it well enough to cross the road with outstretched arms and a whoop of
welcome. His tentative plan was to get in touch, as unobtrusively as possible, with Traian, a former headwaiter at the Gradina and a staunch friend. He wandered through the suburbs until he came to
a garden café, dirty and barren, but large enough to possess a telephone.

Traian no longer had a number, but there was one in the name of Devenor’s godson Ion. He was not at all surprised to find that Ion had not only ridden out the storm but provided himself
with an excellent address. As an irresponsible youth of twenty he had had a police record of dangerous socialism. True, his opinions were a pose, adopted merely to annoy his intolerably correct
relations at court, but those of his set who could have given him away were dead or in exile. Devenor was prepared to bet that war and revolution had only changed his godson into an irresponsible
youth of thirty.

“He treated me as if I’d just dropped in from the fields,” Devenor said, “as if there were no reason in the world why I shouldn’t be in Bucharest. He even sent his
car round to the café for me. He just told me that of course he had a car – how the devil did I think he was going to live without a car?”

Over lunch in Ion’s luxurious flat, this show of idle riches was explained. Godson was an undersecretary – for he had always enjoyed yachting – in the Ministry of Marine.

Devenor asked if he were a genuine communist, and got himself rebuked for indiscretion.

“My good Uncle,” Ion had said, “you really must learn not to ask such frank and English questions. Do you suppose I want to be shot by your venerable side?”

The excellent lunch was entirely unreal. Devenor seemed to himself to have moved back ten years in time, and not at all in space. Bucharest was going on – at any rate in the flat of a
government official – exactly as before. At street level the June air was thunderous as ever and, six stories up, the geraniums of Ion’s window boxes stirred in the light breeze.
Devenor’s favorite white wine was on the table and cool in the decanter. There were rather less cars on the boulevard below and paint was needed and the inhabitants were shabby – but no
shabbier than in the early nineteen-twenties.

“I couldn’t believe it was possible to be shot,” Devenor would declare. “It was just as improbable as my godson being a communist undersecretary.”

Over the coffee he explained how he had arrived in the country and why. His godson followed the story with irreverent laughter and keen questioning. Then, at the end, he asked the most
devastating question of all.

“Uncle John,” he said, “how many of us would it hold?”

Devenor couldn’t understand that at all. He asked Ion why in the world he should want to go to Ploesti by fractionating column instead of by car.

“Not Ploesti, Uncle. Turkey.”

“It isn’t going to Turkey.”

“But why shouldn’t it?”

Godson Ion accused him of becoming intolerably insular, of wholly underrating the lively genius of the Roumanian character and the powers of the people’s ministries. He ordered his
godfather back to the column, insisting that it was by far the safest place for him, and told him to keep quiet and see what happened.

“But I want to talk to Traian.”

“You leave it all to me.”

Devenor disliked leaving anything to any Roumanian, and especially to his godson; but there was really nothing else to do. Godson sweetened the pill by giving him an imposing button for his
lapel, a basket of food and drink, and a car to return him to the outer suburbs.

The button aided bluff. He had no difficulty in returning to his comfortable and now well-furnished seat between the bubble trays. About six in the evening he heard a good deal of fuss around
the column. The curved plates transmitted the sounds of the outer world like a telephone receiver. He could not mistake orders, arguments, excitement and the slapping-on of labels. At dusk a
locomotive came to fetch the flatcar and dragged it ceremoniously – like, said Devenor, a choirboy walking backwards before a bishop – along the loop line round Bucharest. The
locomotive then steamed off, rocking and lighthearted, leaving the column on a remote siding in the middle of a belt of trees.

Devenor ventured out. He and his column were alone, except for the frogs and a nightingale, upon the soft Roumanian plain. There was just enough light to read the labels on the car. They were
even more urgent, menacing and precise than before; but the destination was Constantsa instead of Ploesti. The waybill in its frame at the side of the car was resplendent with new red ink and
rubber stamps.

“It was quick work,” Devenor admitted. “They have plenty of energy for anything utterly crazy. But it looked to me as if my damned godson had consigned us both to the salt
mines. I very nearly cleared out.”

He didn’t, however. He got back into his refuge and had a drink from Ion’s basket, and then another. The effect was to make him less disapproving when Ion and a friend arrived, and
shoved two suitcases through the manhole.

Uncle John was formally presented to George Manoliu of the Ministry of Mines, and was compelled by every convention of courtesy to refrain from saying what he thought. Indeed he found himself in
the position of host, extending with proper flowers of speech the hospitality of his fractionating column and showing the two undersecretaries to their rooms between the bubble trays.

Godson Ion and George Manoliu spread out their blankets, and arranged a third compartment for the subdirector of Roumanian State Railways who would shortly join the party. Devenor began to think
that his chance of escaping death or Siberia had improved. These two young men and the third to come, able to administer between them – at any rate for twenty-four hours – the
refineries, the railways and the shipping of the State, presumably had the power to order the column to be returned to Istanbul, to move it at the expense of any other traffic, and to direct the
same or another ship to stand by at Constantsa to load it. And from what he knew of Roumania, communist or not, he was certain that the respective ministries wouldn’t catch up with what had
happened for at least the better part of a week.

He said that while they were waiting for the sub-director of railways he would see about his cook.

“Don’t bother, Uncle John,” Ion assured him. “That’s all arranged.”

He hoped that it was; but the more he considered the character of his godson, the more sure he was that in the excitement of organizing his influential colleagues there could have been no time
for a visit to Traian or the Restaurant Gradina.

Ten minutes later the subdirector of railways arrived, with no baggage but a bottle and what looked like an official cashbox. He announced that in another hour they would be on their way to
Constantsa.

“And my cook?” Devenor asked again.

“Look here, Uncle John, we’ll write for him,” said Godson Ion.

Devenor crawled out of the manhole, and from the safety of the outer air addressed the undersecretaries. He told them that he was going to get his cook, that if they wanted to stop him they
would have to catch him among the trees in pitch darkness, and that if they left without him he would go straight to the political police.

“They’re still accustomed to foreign exploitation,” he would explain. “There was nothing, really nothing, that they could do with a determined Englishman in a temper. No
doubt they would be equally helpless with a Russian.”

Ion quickly related the fanatical resolution which had brought his godfather to Bucharest. His two friends were delightfully sympathetic, enthusiastic indeed. This penetration of the Iron
Curtain merely to obtain a cook appealed both to Roumanian pride and Roumanian love of a jest. A plan swiftly emerged from committee. It was for Ion and his godfather to call on Traian – who
was still alive, and whose son might be the very man for Devenor – and then to catch the column in the marshaling yards or anywhere along the line to Constantsa.

Fortunately the trust of the three functionaries in one another was not so great that they had entirely burned their boats. Each of them had kept a car and driver waiting on a dirt road, beyond
the belt of trees, all ready for swift return to Bucharest in case of accident or treachery. Mines and Railways now dismissed their cars, and returned to the column in high spirits. As soon as the
road was clear, Devenor and his godson drove off in the third car.

Traian had been the headwaiter at the Gradina for twenty years, and had retired shortly before the war. If Devenor had known his address, he would, he said, have gone to see him at once, and
left his damned godson to the inevitable end of his career as a commissar. Traian was a man you could trust. In all the years of his highly civilized trade he had never lost his peasant
integrity.

He lived exactly where he ought to live: in the old eastern suburbs of Bucharest, where the streets of white, single-storied houses preserved something of the character of an untidy and once
prosperous village. At the back of a yard, where the dusty earth just kept alive a tree, a few flowers and a couple of hungry hens, they found Traian sitting under the eaves of his house in the
melancholy idleness of the old. He looked ill fed and disintegrating; otherwise he was the same Traian who had hovered for twenty years at Devenor’s shoulder, whose middle-aged wedding
Devenor had attended (and attended for a full riotous fourteen hours), whose retirement had been put beyond the reach of poverty by the subscriptions of Devenor and his friends.

Traian and Devenor embraced with tears in their eyes.

“And why not?” Devenor insisted. “Why not? Hadn’t we known each other at our best and proudest? We embraced the splendor of our past manhood.”

The old man – aged by undeserved and unexpected hardship rather than years – had no fear of godson Ion. To him gilded youth, whether it was communist or whether its checks were
frequently returned to drawer, was gilded youth. He talked freely. His wife was dead. His son, Nicu, trained in the kitchens of the Gradina and destined – for the Gradina thought in
generations – to be the next chief cook but one, was working in a sausage factory. Traian himself was destitute. He could no longer be sure that he even owned his modest house.

“The tragedy of communism,” said Devenor, “is that the State won’t help those who can’t help themselves. Even so, Traian wanted me to take his son. Yes, at an
hour’s notice. Nicu was asleep inside, before going on the early morning shift. Yes, he begged me to take his son.”

Devenor, of course, turned the offer down flat. There couldn’t be any question of taking Nicu’s support away from his father. Like a couple of old peasants, they talked the problem
out unhurriedly, with many mutual courtesies, while the precious minutes of the night slipped away. Godson Ion fumed with impatience. He told Devenor not to be a sentimental fool. He told Traian
not to spoil the boy’s chances. He was remarkably eloquent in pointing out that there was no future at all for Nicu in Roumania, or for any man of taste and ability who hadn’t, like
himself, had the sense to join the party.

Meanwhile Traian’s voice was growing firmer, and the ends of his white mustache began to twitch into life. Devenor remembered that Traian was only sixty-eight; he decided to take the
responsibility of abducting father as well as son. He felt, he said, damnably ashamed of himself for shifting such fragile cargo, but, after all, that well-fitted steel cylinder was little less
comfortable than a Roumanian third-class coach. He ordered Traian into the column regretfully and decisively, as if he had been sending back a Chateaubriand for another five minutes on the
grill.