The Balkan Trilogy (4 page)

‘They’re not all Rumanians,’ said Guy. ‘There are a great many stateless Jews; and there are, of course, Hungarians, Germans and Slavs. The percentages are …’ Guy, his head lifted above the trivialities of conduct, brought out statistics, but Harriet was not listening. She was absorbed in warfare with the crowd.

The promenade was for her a trial of physical strength. Though leisurely, the Rumanians were ruthless in their determination to keep on the pavement. Only peasants or servants could be seen walking in the road. The men might, under pressure, yield an inch or two, but the women were as implacable as steam-rollers. Short and strong, they remained bland-faced while wielding buttocks and breasts as heavy as bladders of lard.

The position most fiercely held was the inner pavement beside the shop windows. Guy, too temperate, and Harriet, too light-boned, for the fray, were easily thrust out to the kerb, where Guy gripped Harriet’s elbow to keep her from slipping into the gutter. She broke from him, saying: ‘I’ll walk in the road. I’m not a Rumanian. I can do what I like.’

Following her, Guy caught her hand and squeezed it, trying to induce in her his own imperturbable good humour. Harriet, looking back at the crowd, more tolerant now she was released from it, realised that behind its apparent complacency there was a nervous air of enquiry, an alert unease. Were someone to shout: ‘The invasion has begun,’ the whole smug fa
ç
ade would collapse.

This unease unmasked itself at the end of the Calea Victoriei where the road widened in a no-man’s-land of public buildings. Here were parked a dozen or so of the Polish refugee cars that were still streaming down from the north. Some of the cars had been abandoned. From the others women and children, left while the men sought shelter, gazed out blankly. The well-dressed Rumanians, out to appreciate and be appreciated, looked affronted by these ruined faces that were too tired to care.

Harriet wondered what would be done with the Poles. Guy said the Rumanians, once stirred, were kindly enough. Some who owned summer villas were offering them to Polish families, but stories were already going round about the refugees; old anti-Polish stories remembered from the last war.

Near the end of the road, near the cross roads where the turbaned boyar, Cantacuzino, pointed the way to the Chicken
Market, a row of open
tr
ǎ
sur
ǎ
s
waited to be hired. Guy suggested they drive up the Chaussée. Harriet peered at the horses, whose true condition was hidden by the failing of the light.

‘They look wretchedly thin,’ she said.

‘They’re very old.’

‘I don’t think we should employ them.’

‘If no one employed them, they would starve to death.’

Choosing the least decrepit of the horses, the Pringles climbed into the carriage, which was about to start when commanded to a halt. A tall, elderly man was holding out his walking-stick with an imperious air.

Guy recognised the man with surprise. ‘It’s Woolley,’ he said. ‘He usually ignores “the culture boys”.’ Then his face lit with pleasure: ‘I expect he wants to meet you.’ Before Woolley could state his business, Guy introduced him to Harriet: ‘The leading English businessman, the chairman of the Golf Club’, enhancing from sheer liberality of spirit such importance as Woolley had; then, turning with tender pride towards Harriet, he said: ‘My wife.’

Woolley’s cold nod indicated that duty not frivolity had caused him to accost them. ‘The order is,’ he announced in a nasal twang, ‘the ladies must return to England.’

‘But,’ said Guy, ‘I called at the Legation this morning. No one said anything about it.’

‘Well, there it is,’ said Woolley in a tone that implied he was not arguing, he was telling them.

Harriet, exasperated by the mildness of Guy’s protest asked: ‘Who has given this order? The Minister?’

Woolley started, surprised, it seemed, not only by the edge on her voice but by the fact she had a voice at all. His head, hairless, with toad-mottled skin, jerked round and hung towards her like a lantern tremulous on a bamboo: ‘No, it’s a general order, like. I’ve sent me lady wife home as an example. That was enough for the other ladies.’

‘Not for me, I’m afraid. I never follow examples.’

Woolley’s throat moved several times before he said: ‘Oh,
don’t you? Well, young woman, I can tell you this: if trouble starts here, there’ll be a proper schemozzle. The cars and petrol will be requisitioned by the army and the trains’ll be packed with troops. I doubt if anyone’ll get away, but if you do, you’ll go empty-handed, and it won’t be no Cook’s tour. Don’t say I haven’t warned you. What I say is, it’s the duty of the ladies to go back home and not to be a drag on the gents.’

‘You imagine they’ll be safer in England? I can only say, you don’t know much about modern warfare. I think, Mr Woolley, it would be better if you set an example by not getting into a panic.’

Harriet poked at the coachman and the
tr
ǎ
sur
ǎ
, seeming about to break fore from aft, heaved itself to a start. As it went, Harriet looked back to give a regal nod and saw that Woolley’s face, under a street lamp, had lost what colour it had. He shouted after them, his voice passing out of control: ‘You young people these days have no respect for authority. I’d have you know, the Minister described me as the leader of the English colony.’

They were under way. Guy, his brows raised, gazed at Harriet, having seen an extra dimension added to the woman he had achieved. ‘I never dreamt you could be so grand,’ he said.

Pleased with herself, she said: ‘He’s an impossible old ass. How could you let him bully you?’

Guy laughed. ‘Darling, he’s pathetic.’

‘Pathetic? With all that self-importance?’

‘The self-importance is pathetic. Can’t you see?’

For a sudden moment she could see, and her triumph subsided. His hand slipped into hers and she raised to her lips his long, unpractical fingers. ‘You’re right, of course. Still …’ She gave his little finger a bite that made him yelp. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is in case you get too good to be true.’

They had returned down the Calea Victoriei, crossed the square and had reached the broad avenue where the German Embassy stood among the mansions of the very rich. This led to the Chaussée, that stretched, wide and tree-lined, into open
country. The trees, a row on either side of the pavements, were almost bare, what leaves that remained so scorched by the summer’s heat that they hung like scraps blown from a bonfire.

It was almost dark. The stars grew brilliant in the sky. The Pringles, sitting hand-in-hand in the old four-wheeler that smelt of horse, were more aware of each other than of anything else. Here they were, a long way from home, alone together in a warring world.

Made a little self-conscious by these thoughts, Guy pointed out an archway at the end of the vista. ‘The Arc de Triomphe,’ he said.

‘The Paris of the East,’ Harriet said, somewhat in ridicule, for they had disagreed as to the attractions of Bucharest. Guy, who had spent here his first year of adult freedom, living on the first money earned by his own efforts, saw Bucharest with a pleasure she, a Londoner, rather jealous of his year alone here, was not inclined to share.

‘What is it made of, the arch? Marble?’ she asked.

‘Concrete.’ It had been built previously by a fraudulent contractor who had used inferior cement. When it fell down, the contractor was put in prison and the arch re-erected to the glory of Greater Rumania – the Rumania that came into existence in 1919 when the Old Kingdom acquired, as a reward for entering the war on the side of the victors, parts of Russia, Austria and Hungary. ‘And so,’ said Guy, ‘like most people who did well out of the war, she is now a nice comfortable shape.’

While Guy talked, young men howled past the
tr
ǎ
sur
ǎ
in racing cars, each with a foot on his accelerator, a hand thumping up and down on the hooter. The horse – revealed by the street lights as a phantom horse, a skeleton in a battered hide – was not disturbed. Equally undisturbed was the coachman, a vast cottage loaf in a velvet robe.

Guy whispered: ‘A
Skopit
. One of the sights of the city. The
Skopits
belong to a Russian sect. They believe that to find grace we must all be completely flat in front, women as
well as men. So, after they’ve reproduced themselves, the young people hold tremendous orgies, working themselves into frenzies in which they mutilate themselves.’

‘Oh!’ said Harriet. She gazed in wonder at the vast velvet backside of the eunuch before her, then she gazed out at the dark reaches of the Muntenia plain, on which the city stood like a bride-cake on a plate. ‘A barbarous country,’ she said.

They had now passed the last of the houses. On either side of the road, adazzle beneath the dark, star-lighted violet of the sky, were the open areas owned by the restaurants that had no gardens in the town. Each spring, when the weather settled, they shut their winter premises and brought their chairs and tables up the Chaussée. Within these enclosures the limes and chestnuts, hose-drenched each morning, spread a ceiling of leaves.

When the
tr
ǎ
sur
ǎ
stopped at Pavel’s, one of the largest of the open-air restaurants, there could be heard above the traffic the shrill squeak of a gypsy violin. Within the shrub hedge of the garden, all was uproar.

The place was crowded. The silver-gilt glow from the globes set in the trees lit in detail the wrinkled tree-trunks, the pebbled ground, and the blanched faces of the diners that, damp with the excitement of food, gazed about them with deranged looks, demanding to be served. Some rapped with knives on wine-glasses, some clapped their hands, some made kissing noises at the waiters, while others clutched at every passing coattail, crying: ‘
Domnule, domnule!
’ for in this country even the meanest was addressed as ‘lord’.

The waiters, sweating and disarranged, snapped their civilities and made off before orders were complete. The diners shouted to the empty air, sometimes shaking their fists as they seethed in their seats, talking, gesturing, jerking their heads this way and that. It was an uproar in which there was little laughter.

‘They all seem very cross,’ said Harriet, who, caught into the atmosphere, began to feel cross herself.

A waiter, flapping at the Pringles like an angry bird, conveyed to them the fact they were blocking the way to the kitchen
building. They stood aside and watched him as he rushed to an open window and bawled into the kitchen’s bang and clatter. The cooks, scowling in the heat from the giant grill, ignored him. The waiter brought his fists down on the sill, at which one of the cooks lunged at the window, flinging himself half from it as an enraged dog flings himself the length of his chain. He struck the waiter, who fell gibbering.

‘It’s all just Rumanian animation,’ said Guy as he led Harriet to an alcove where the foods were displayed beneath a canopy of vines.

The heart of the display was a rosy bouquet of roasts, chops, steaks and fillets frilled round with a froth of cauliflowers. Heaped extravagantly about the centre were aubergines as big as melons, baskets of artichokes, small coral carrots, mushrooms, mountain raspberries, apricots, peaches, apples and grapes. On one side there were French cheeses; on the other tins of caviare, grey river fish in powdered ice, and lobsters and crayfish groping in dark waters. The poultry and game lay unsorted on the ground.

‘Choose,’ said Guy.

‘What can we afford?’

‘Oh, anything. The chicken is good here.’ He pointed in to the grill, where spitted birds were changing from gold to deeper gold.

As he spoke a woman standing nearby turned, looked accusingly at him, and said in English: ‘You are English, yes? The English
professor
?’

Guy agreed that he was.

‘This war,’ she said, ‘it is a terrible thing for Rumania.’ Her husband, who was standing apart, gazed away with an air of non-participation. ‘England has guaranteed us,’ said the woman, ‘England must protect us.’

‘Of course,’ said Guy as though offering her his own personal guarantee of protection. He glanced over at the husband, smiling to introduce himself, and at once the man started into ingratiating life, bowing and beaming at the Pringles.

‘Even if we are not attacked,’ said the woman, impatient
of this interruption, ‘there will be many scarcities,’ she looked down at her high-heeled shoes, shoes that seemed too small for the legs above them, and said: ‘In the last war there were many scarcities. I remember my father paid for me two thousand
lei
for shoes of felt. I wear them to school the one day only, and when I return, no soles left. And food! How terrible if Rumania were short of food!’

Guy turned, laughing, towards the alcove. ‘Could Rumania be short of food?’

‘No? You think not?’ She paused and glanced at her husband. ‘It is true,’ she said, ‘we have much food.’ The husband shrugged and smiled again.

At last Guy was released. Harriet, who had been watching the activity of the restaurant, said: ‘There are no free tables.’

‘Oh yes, there are.’ Firmly, short-sightedly, Guy led her to a table marked ‘
Rezervat
’.

‘
Nu nu, domnule
.’ The head waiter pointed them to a vacant table beside the orchestra.

Harriet shook her head: ‘The noise would be intolerable.’ The man grumbled.

‘He says,’ said Guy, ‘we are fortunate to find any table in a time of war.’

‘Tell him it’s our war, not his. We must have a better table.’

The head waiter flung out his hands in a distracted way and called to an assistant to take charge of the Pringles. The assistant, dodging like a rugger player through the hazards of the garden, led them to a platform where half-a-dozen privileged tables were raised above the rest. He whipped a ‘reserved’ notice from one and presented it like a conjurer completing a trick. Guy handed him a bundle of small notes.

Now, seated as on a headland, the Pringles gazed across the surge at a wrought-iron cage, lighted with ‘fairy’ lights and hung with green branches and gilded oranges, where the orchestra laboured to be heard above the general din. Squeaking and pompomming at an insane pitch, the instruments produced an effect not so much of high spirits as of tearing rage.