The Balkan Trilogy (18 page)

He had his car outside and offered her a lift, but she said she wanted to do some shopping.

As he was about to drive off, he said: ‘We don’t get a moment to breathe these days, and now H.E. wants us to help with the decoding.’ He exploded with laughter at the thought of this humble employment.

Harriet remembered she had, when she first met him, decided he was difficult to know. She now thought she had
been wrong. He was, she believed, as simply pleasant as he seemed.

She crossed over to a shop window in which she had seen an Italian tea-set of fine
sang-de-boeuf
china. She had suggested to Guy they might buy it with money given them as a wedding-present. Guy, who had no interest in possession, said: ‘Why waste money? When we leave here, we’ll probably have to go empty handed.’ Now, in a mood to compensate herself, she looked defiantly at the tea-set, but, reflecting that she had been abandoned for the best possible motives by a husband made unreliable only by his abysmal kindness, she went instead to the Calea Victoriei and ordered an electric fire.

The wind had grown harder and there were occasional flurries of snow. The sky, black and unrelenting as iron, hung like a weight over the roof-tops. Not wishing to return to the empty flat, she took a taxi down to the Dâmbovi
ţ
a. The market area around the river had a flavour more of the East than of the West. Guy had brought her here and shown her the houses, built in the style of Louis XIII, once the mansions of Turkish and Phanariot officials, now doss-houses where the poor slept twenty and thirty to a room. The windows were still barred against thieves and rebels. The Dâmbovi
ţ
a River, that ran between them, had no beauty. Once navigable and the heart of the city, it was now dwindling from some failure at source, leaving high banks of clay. It was unused and in places covered to make a road.

When she left the taxi, she walked through the Calea Lipscani, searching for a stall that sold decorated Hungarian plates. The area was primitive, bug-ridden and brutal. Its streets, unlike the fashionable streets, were as crowded in winter as in summer. The gas-lit windows threw out a greenish glow. The stalls dripped with gas flares. Harriet pushed her way between men and women who, wrapped to the eyes in woollen scarves, were bulky with frieze, sheep-skin and greasy astrakhan. The beggars, on home ground, rummaging for food under the stalls, did not usually trouble to beg here, but the sight of Harriet was too much for them.

When she stopped at a meat stall to buy veal, she became conscious of a sickening smell of decay beside her. Turning, she saw an ancient female dwarf who was thrusting the stump of an arm up to her face. She searched hurriedly for a coin and could find nothing smaller than a hundred-
lei
note. She knew it was too much but handed it over. It led, as she feared, to trouble. The woman gave a shrill cry calling to her a troupe of children, who at once set upon Harriet, waving their deformities and begging with professional and remorseless piteousness.

She took the meat she had bought and tried to escape into the crowd. The children clung like lice. They caught hold of her arms, their faces screwed into the classical mask of misery while they whined and whimpered in chorus.

Guy had told her she must try and get used to the beggars. They could be discouraged by a show of amiable indifference. She had not yet learned the trick and perhaps never would. Their persistence roused her to fury.

She reached the stall where the Hungarian plates were displayed and paused. At once the children surrounded her, their eyes gleaming at her annoyance, seeming to be dancing in triumph. She made off again, almost running, only wanting now to get away from them. At the end of the road she saw a
tr
ǎ
sur
ǎ
and shouted to it. It stopped. She jumped on board and the children followed her. They clung to the steps, wailing at her, until the driver struck them off with his whip. As they dropped down, one by one, her anger subsided. She looked back at them and saw them still staring after the dispenser of hundred-
lei
notes – a collection of wretched, ragged waifs with limbs as thin as sticks.

Heavens above, how did one settle down to life in this society that Doamna Teitelbaum had recommended for its comfort? The day before, she had seen a peasant slashing his horse across the eyes for some slip of the foot. Though she was so shaken she could have murdered the man, she had to recognise what deprivation lay behind his behaviour.

Before she left England, she had read books written by travellers in Rumania who had given a picture of a rollicking,
open-hearted, happy, healthy peasantry, full of music and generous hospitality. They were, it was true, mad about music. Music was their only outlet. They made themselves drunk on it. As for the rest, she had seen nothing of it. The peasants in this city were starved, frightened figures, scrawny with pellagra, wandering about in a search for work or making a half-hearted attempt to beg.

The situation would have been simplified for her could she, like Guy, have seen the peasants not only as victims, but as blameless victims. The truth was, the more she learnt about them, the more she was inclined to share Doamna Drucker’s loathing of them; but she would not call them beasts. They had not the beauty or dignity of beasts. They treated their animals and their women with the simple brutality of savages.

Driving now down the long, deserted Calea Victoriei, it seemed to her she could smell in the wind those not so distant regions of mountain and fir-forest where wolves and bears, driven by hunger, haunted the villages in the winter snow-light. And the wind was harsher than any wind she had ever known. She shivered, feeling isolated in a country that was to her not only foreign but alien.

A few yards past the University, she saw Guy walking, rather quickly, and stopped the
tr
ǎ
sur
ǎ
. His face was creased and troubled. He said he was returning to Mavrodaphne’s to look for her.

‘Surely you didn’t suppose I should still be there?’

‘I didn’t know.’ He obviously had not supposed anything at all. His mind had been elsewhere.

As he took the seat beside her, she said: ‘Did you see Sasha?’

He shook his head. He had gone to the flat but no one opened the door. He found the porter, who told him that the whole family had left that morning with a great deal of luggage. The servants had gone soon after. The flat was deserted. Asked about Sasha, the man could not remember having seen him with the others. Guy had then gone to the University, where there were, as usual, students sitting about in the common-room for want of anything better to do. There
he learnt that the Drucker sisters, their parents, their husbands and the two girls had been seen at the airport boarding a plane for Rome, but Sasha and his step-mother had not been with them. There was a rumour that Doamna Drucker had gone to her father’s estate in Moldavia.

Guy said: ‘Perhaps Sasha has gone with her.’

Harriet said nothing but she thought it unlikely that Doamna Drucker would burden herself with Sasha.

‘Wherever he is,’ said Guy, ‘I shall hear from him. He knows I will help him if I can.’

Harriet was thinking of the panic that must have filled the household after Drucker’s arrest, the hasty packing, the hasty departure.

‘How did they get extra visas so quickly?’ she asked.

‘They must have been prepared. Drucker after all had been warned. If the arrest had not been made so quickly, he might have got away.’

Thinking of the household with its solid furniture, the family portraits in their huge frames, a setting designed as a background for generations of Druckers, she knew she had been envious of its permanence.

‘And yet,’ she thought, ‘that enclosed family was no more secure than we are.’

The
tr
ǎ
sur
ǎ
was crossing the cobbles of the square. The driver turned to ask for direction.

Guy said to Harriet: ‘Where are we going to eat? Shall we go back to the hotel?’

She replied: ‘Tonight we are going to eat at home.’

11

When Yakimov returned to the Athénée Palace after his conflict with McCann, he went to the English Bar and ordered himself a double whisky.

‘Chalk it up, Albu, dear boy,’ he said.

When Albu ‘chalked it up’, he knew that his credit was still good. His anxiety vanished. A problem that need not be faced straight away was no problem to him.

At the end of the week he was presented with a bill. He looked at it in pained astonishment and required the manager to come to him. The manager explained that, as Yakimov was no longer backed by McCann’s agency, he must settle a weekly account in the usual way.

‘Dear boy,’ he said, ‘m’remittance should be here in a week or two. Difficult time. Posts uncertain. War on, y’know.’

His quarterly remittance had, in fact, come and gone. Bored by the menu of the hotel, he had spent it on some excellent meals at Cap
ş
a’s, Cina’s and Le Jardin.

The manager agreed to let the account run on and it ran unquestioned until Christmas visitors began to fill the hotel. This time it was the manager who sent for Yakimov.

‘Any day now, dear boy,’ Yakimov earnestly assured him. ‘Any day.’

‘Any day will not do,
mon Prince
,’ said the manager. ‘If you cannot pay, I must now present this matter to the British Legation.’

Yakimov was alarmed. Galpin had told him: ‘These days you can be packed off under open arrest, third class and steerage, to Cairo, and there given the bum’s rush into the ranks
before you have time to say “flat feet”, “conscientious objector” or “incurable psychotic”.’

Trembling slightly, Yakimov said to the manager: ‘Dear boy, no need to do that. I’ll go there myself. M’dear old friend Dobbie Dobson’ll advance me the necessary. Just a question of asking. Didn’t realise you were getting restless.’

Yakimov was given another twenty-four hours. He did not go at once to Dobson, who was becoming less and less willing to lend him money, but first approached the hangers-on of the English Bar. Hadjimoscos, Horvath and Palu, as usual, together. He spoke first to Horvath:

‘Dear boy, I have to settle a little bill. M’remittance is delayed. Never like to owe money. Wonder if you could manage to repay …’

Before he could finish, Horvath had spread hands so eloquently empty that Yakimov’s words died in his throat. He turned to Hadjimoscos: ‘Do you think I could ask the Princess …’

Hadjimoscos laughed: ‘
Mon cher Prince
, rather ask the moon. You know the Princess. She is so irresponsible, one is made to smile. And it is the Rumanian habit never to repay a loan.’

Yakimov moved his appealing eyes to Cici Palu, a handsome fellow who was said to do well out of women. Palu took a step back and glanced away with the air of one who sees and hears nothing that does not concern him. In desperation, Yakimov moaned: ‘Can no one lend me a
leu
or two?’ To encourage them, he tried to order a round. Albu shook his head. The others smiled, deprecating this familiar refusal, but their contempt was evident. Yakimov was now no more than one of them.

He was forced in the end to return to Dobson, who agreed to settle the bill on condition that he moved to a cheaper lodging.

‘I was thinking of trying the Minerva, dear boy.’

Dobson would not hear of the Minerva, or, indeed, of any other hotel. Yakimov must find himself a bed-sitting-room.

So, on the morning of the following Saturday, having been permitted a last breakfast in the dining-room, Yakimov departed the Athénée Palace. When he carried his own luggage through the hall, the porters looked the other way. Even had they been willing to attend him, attention would have been distracted from him by a new arrival who caused even Yakimov, burdened as he was, to pause and stare.

This was a white-haired, dark-skinned little crow of a man in a striped blue suit. He moved with a rattle of chains. One of his eyes was covered with a patch; the other swivelled about in keen and critical survey of all it saw. His left arm, with hand too small in its skin-tight glove, lay crooked across his breast. He wore a gold chain in a loop from button-hole to trouser pocket. Another heavier chain, attaching a walking-stick to his right wrist, struck repeatedly against the stick’s silver mounting. Clearly unimpressed by the hall and its occupants, he strode to the reception desk and rapped out: ‘Any letters for Commander Sheppy?’

Galpin, on his way to the bar, gawped, and Yakimov said: ‘Striking figure, that! Who can he be?’

‘Arrived last night,’ said Galpin. ‘Probably secret service. Nothing so conspicuous as your old-time member of the British Secret Service.’ Noticing Yakimov’s luggage, he added: ‘Not leaving us?’

Yakimov nodded sadly. ‘Found a nice little place of m’own,’ he said and went out to his
tr
ǎ
sur
ǎ
.

That morning the early snow hung like swansdown in the air. It was forming a gauze over the tarmac. The cold was intense.

The
tr
ǎ
sur
ǎ
took Yakimov in the direction of the station. The coachman was a lean and fierce-looking fellow, no Skopitz. The horse was a skeleton roughly patched over with hide. As it was spurred by the whip, its bones, stretching and heaving, seemed about to fall apart. Blood trickled down its flanks from several open sores.

As he watched the skittish jig of its pelvis, a tear came into Yakimov’s eyes, but he was not weeping for the horse. He
was weeping for himself. He was retreating, most unwillingly, from the heart of Bucharest life to its seedy, unprofitable purlieus. He felt injured by circumstances. The world had turned against him since Dollie died. Now he had not even the last relic of their life together, his Hispano-Suiza. He found himself longing for it as for a mother.

The appearance of the station reminded him of the evening of his penniless arrival. How short his period of fortune had been! His tears fell.

Hearing a gulp and a sniff, the coachman turned and gave Yakimov a stare of crude curiosity. Yakimov brushed his sleeve across his eyes.