The Europe That Was (7 page)

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 Romanian 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 Romanian, 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 light-hearted, 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 Romanian 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 fractioning 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 Romanian 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 Romania, 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 subdirector 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 Romanian pride and Romanian love of a jest. A plan swiftly emerged from the 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 marshalling 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-storeyed 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 splendour 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 cheques 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 Romania, 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 moustache 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 Romanian 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.

‘And look at him now,' Devenor invited, ‘when he brings in the brandy! I have to let him do something, you know. Oh, and he'll take a glass with us, too—but I can't make the old fool sit down to it when there are guests.'

Traian's son was collected straight from bed, and packed into the car. He had no objection to any change, however immediate and revolutionary, so long as it took him out of the sausage factory and included his father. He was on his way to the marshalling yards before
he had really got clear of a nightmare that he was making his palate into sausages; his palate, he said, had appeared to him as a large, white lump of lard.

The column had left for Constantsa. So insistent were the instructions of Railways, Mines and Marine that the yardmaster had presented it with a powerful, fine locomotive of its own. That fractionating column was going to be on board by dawn, all ready to be returned with ignominy to the corrupt capitalists who had sold it. The yardmaster expected a pat on the back from the ministry. No doubt, when he got it, it was a hard one.

Ion's driver did what he was told without question; he knew what happened to undersecretaries' chauffeurs who talked out of turn. They crossed the plain like a pair of headlights on the wind, but always the column kept a little ahead—for at intervals they had to bump over rutted country roads to the railway, or show Ion's credentials to saluting police.

They caught up with their flatcar at last, halted in the sidings before the bridge over the Danube and now with a train at its tail. A more awkward place couldn't have been found for a return to the safe recesses of the column, but they had no choice. It was their last chance, the absolute last chance. One side of the cylinder was flooded by the arc lights of the yard, as if some monstrous camera were about to take a farewell picture of it; on the other side was much coming and going of officials, and of the sentries who would ride every truck across the Cernavoda bridge.

Godson Ion told his driver to return to Bucharest if he did not come back in half an hour. He did not seem unduly alarmed.

‘Of course he wasn't! Of course he wasn't!' Devenor crowed indignantly. ‘That dam' pup had a perfect right to go wherever he wanted. As for the rest of us, we were just a problem to be shelved.'

In ten minutes godson returned for Nicu, who went with him unwillingly. But there was no object in protesting against Ion's plans; he controlled their fate. Devenor didn't know what he intended, and couldn't make head or tail of his explanations; he was only rendered thoroughly suspicious by a lot of high-flown nonsense about the young clearing the way for the old.

Traian and Devenor occupied a patch of darkness whence they could watch both the car and the column. They saw the two shadows of Ion and Nicu dive under the train. Shortly afterwards they saw the sentries posted. They waited for five more anxious minutes. Then the train started, and they watched its red tail-light swaying down the track towards the bridge and the impassable Danube.

After a journey of two hundred yards the train stopped. Devenor was so angry that he marched Traian straight up the line after it. He intended, he said, to get hold of the sentry and consign the whole
heartless bunch of undersecretaries to Siberia, even if he had to endure their company on the way.

The sentry was on the platform of the flatcar, just outside the manhole. He was hidden from his fellows by the bulk of the column and the tender of the locomotive. Within the column there was the silence of steel; there couldn't be anything else from the moment the sentry was posted. That excused Nicu's behaviour. He dared not make sound or protest for fear of getting his deserted father into incalculable trouble with the police.

It was sheer anger which gave Devenor his inspiration. He informed the sentry that a man was hiding in the fractionating column, and told him to winkle the fellow out with his bayonet while he kept him covered.

‘I knew my Romanian soldiery well enough to risk it,' Devenor said. ‘An air of authority. A little mystery. And they'll do what you tell 'em. There was the button, too, in my lapel—that seemed to impress him. I can't tell you what it was. I meant to ask Ion. But thereafter I was rather painfully occupied.'

As soon as the sentry was inside, Devenor put his head and shoulders after, and gave his orders. They were obeyed on the instant, and with only one quick rumble of sound. That unfortunate sentry—no, no, now living peaceably in America—was buried under desperate politicians leaping from the corners of the bubble trays. Then Devenor told his graceless godson to put on the sentry's uniform and take his place on the platform.

‘Dam' play actor! He stayed on guard till the cranes hoisted us off the Constantsa water front, without anyone suspecting him of worse than obstinacy, and then managed to slip inside. That was that. They discharged us on to a deserted wharf at Istanbul, and all seven of us just walked out through the gates. Or rather, six of us walked. I was carried by Nicu and the sentry.' At this point it always pleased Devenor to expand and beam and wait for questions.