The Balkan Trilogy (25 page)

‘Were you thinking of taking a sleigh-ride?’ Harriet asked him.

‘No.’ Looking at her from under his eyelids, he explained that Albu, the barman, had heard Domnul Pringle and Domnul Lawson enquiring if the sleighs were out. Guy was delighted by this intimation that his friend had actually been searching for him. He said: ‘Let’s all go and have lunch somewhere.’

‘I’ve arranged to meet a man …’ began David.

Guy interrupted gleefully: ‘We’ll all go and meet him.’

David looked doubtful and Clarence, taking this fact to himself, said: ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m going to a party being given by the Polish officers.’

Guy swept on ahead with David while Harriet followed behind with Clarence. As they crossed the square, the two men in front, looking over-large in their winter wrappings, talked with an intimate animation. Guy was wanting to know what David had been sent out to do.

‘Anything I can to help.’ Now that this first shyness had passed, David was voluble. His voice, rich, elderly and precise, the voice of a much earlier generation, came back to Harriet and Clarence in the rear: ‘I saw Foxy Leverett this morning – that fellow with the big red moustache. I said: “When’s this war going to begin?” And what do you think he said? “Oh,
things’ll hot up soon. We’ll give the Huns a biff. We’ll give ’em a bloody nose.”’

Guy was stopped in his tracks by his own laughter. Harriet and Clarence, who had to step aside to skirt him, now walked ahead. When they reached the Calea Victoriei, the talk of the other two was lost in the noise of the traffic.

David was meeting his friend in an old eating-house in a back street. When they reached the corner of this street, Clarence said: ‘I go straight on,’ and paused with Harriet, waiting for the others.

A barrel-organ stood at the street corner. A white-bearded peasant, bundled up in a sheepskin, was turning the handle, producing a Rumanian popular tune of the past, haunting and sad. Harriet had heard the same organ playing this tune several times before and no one had been able to tell her what it was called. Now, as they stood in a doorway sheltering from the cold she asked Clarence if he knew.

He shook his head. ‘I’m tone deaf,’ he said.

Harriet said: ‘That’s the last barrel-organ in Bucharest. When the old man dies and there’s no one to play it, that tune will be lost for ever.’

Clarence stood silent, apparently reflecting, as Guy would never reflect, on the passing of things. ‘Yes,’ he said and as he smiled down on her his rare and beautiful smile, they touched, it seemed, a moment of complete understanding.

David and Guy came up, both talking together, exuding an air of engrossment in larger issues. David’s voice rose above Guy’s voice as he firmly said: ‘Although Rumania is a maize-eating country, it grows only half as much maize as Hungary. So we have here the usual vicious circle – the peasants are indolent because they’re half-fed: they’re half-fed because they’re indolent. If the Germans
do
get here, believe me, they’ll make these people work as they’ve never worked before.’

‘Clarence is going a different way,’ said Harriet when she got a chance.

‘
No!
’ Guy protested, not having grasped that Clarence was bidden elsewhere. He caught Clarence’s arm, unwilling to let
anyone pass from his sphere of influence. When Clarence explained where he was going, Guy demanded: ‘How long will your party go on for? Where will you be afterwards? We must meet again this evening.’

Clarence, not yet recovered from the defensive disapproval with which he faced each new situation, murmured: ‘Well, it’s a luncheon party. I don’t know … I can’t say,’ but before he left them he agreed to come to the Pringles’ flat that evening.

Now Harriet had joined Guy and David, their conversation halted and started again on a more personal plane. David began asking about the people he had known when he was last in Bucharest. He spoke of each with an uncritical, indulgent humour, as though all human beings were for him more or less of a joke. Guy, not given to gossip, had not much to tell. Harriet was silent, as she tended to be with strangers.

‘And how’s our old friend Inchcape?’ David asked.

Guy said: ‘He’s fine.’

‘I hear he’s risen in the world. Gets invited to Legation parties.’

Guy laughed and said he believed that was true.

‘When I was last in Cambridge,’ said David, ‘I met a friend of Inchcape – Professor Lord Pinkrose. They were up together. He was asking me about him. He said that Inch had been a remarkable scholar: one of those chaps who are capable of so much, they don’t know what to do first. In the end they usually do nothing at all.’

The restaurant was housed in an early nineteenth-century villa, with a front garden where bushes like giant heads set their chins upon the snowy lawn.

David, without a glance about him, talked his way up the front steps and entered as though he had never been away. They passed from the icy outer air into a hallway over-heated and scented by grilled meat. A stream of waiters were clattering and grumbling in and out of the four rooms. One of them tried to direct the three to a back room, but David, without bothering to argue, led the way to the main front room. The tables and chairs were rough. On the walls, papered in faded
stripes, hung a few old Russian oleographs. From a dark ceiling hung a gilt chandelier laden with the grime of a decade. The place was noted for its excellent grilled veal.

When they were seated, David started at once to talk: ‘I saw Dobson, too, this morning – not a bad little chap. I always liked him, but the occupational disease is manifesting itself. I asked about the situation here. He said: “Quite satisfactory. The Sovereign is with us.” I said: “What if the people are not with the Sovereign!” “Oh, I don’t think we need worry about that,” said Dobson. When I asked him a few more questions, he h’md and hawed, then said, “The situation’s a bit complex for a newcomer!”’

‘He probably doubted your ability to understand it,’ Guy said, rousing David to a paroxysm of snuffling laughter.

When there was a pause in the talk, Harriet asked him where he was staying and learnt with surprise that he was at the Minerva. ‘But that is the German hotel!’

David said: ‘I like to practise my German.’ Turning to Guy, he said: ‘And one picks up useful odds and ends of information. In the bar there, where the German journalists congregate, you get the same stringmen that take the news to the English Bar. One version goes to the Athénée Palace another to the Minerva. In that way our Rumanian allies keep in with both sides at once.’

Guy, proud of his friend, now mentioned to Harriet that David spoke all the Slav languages.

David smiled down modestly. ‘My Slovene is a little rusty,’ he said, ‘but I can manage in the rest. I got through the first volume of
Anna Karenina
in the train. Now I find I haven’t brought the second volume. I’ll have to fly to Sofia to get it from the Russian bookshop. I’d like to know how it ends.’

‘Haven’t you read it in English?’ Harriet asked.

‘I scarcely need to brush up my English.’

If this were a joke, David gave no indication of the fact, but, sitting four-square on his chair, he stared down solemnly at the menu. His cap, when taken off, had left some snow in his curled black hair. As this melted and trickled down his
cheeks, he thrust out his lower lip and caught the drops. His brow, visible now, was as massive as his chin.

Putting the menu down he said: ‘This policy of backing the established order, whether right or wrong, is not only going to lose us this country. When the big break-up starts, it will lose us concessions all over the world. In short, it’ll be the end of us.’

When on his own subject, David’s manner lost its diffidence. He tended, Harriet thought, to address his listeners less like a conversationalist than a lecturer – and a lecturer wholly confident in the magnitude of his knowledge. His self-sufficiency was now evident. She remembered that his hobby was bird-watching. He was saying:

‘Those F.O. dummies can’t see further than the ends of their noses. For them the position inside the country is of no importance. The Sovereign right or wrong – that’s all they know and all they need to know.’

While David talked – and he talked at length – a waiter came and stood by the table. David was not to be interrupted, but when the man decided to move away, David seized and held him by the coat-tails while saying:

‘I learnt on the train that German agents have settled in all over the country. They’re working through the Iron Guard, buying grain, secretly, at double the usual rate. They said: “See how generous we Germans are! With Germany as an ally, Rumania would be rich.” But could I persuade H.E. of this? Not for a moment. The Sovereign says the Iron Guard has ceased to exist and the Sovereign
must
be right.’

The waiter, his patience exhausted, began to tug at his coattails. Turning irritably on him and shouting: ‘
Stai, domnule, stai
,’ David went on with his dissertation.

‘Let us give our order,’ Harriet pleaded.

David jerked round on her and snapped: ‘Shut up.’

‘I won’t shut up,’ she snapped back, and David, suddenly sniggering, looked down, all his diffidence returned. ‘We must order, of course,’ he said. ‘I suppose we’ll have
Fleic
ǎ
de Bra
ş
ov
.’ They gave their order and the waiter was released.

‘Tell us what is going to happen here,’ said Guy.

‘Several things could happen.’ David shifted his chair closer to the table. ‘There could be a peasant revolt against Germany, but we, of course, will see that does not happen. The Peasant Party is in opposition to the Sovereign, so it gets no support from us. I’m the only Englishman in this country who has met the peasant leaders …’

Guy interrupted: ‘I met them with you.’

‘Well, we’re the only two Englishmen who have bothered to meet them: yet those men are our allies. They are our true allies. They would lead a rising on our behalf, but they are ignored and snubbed. We have declared ourselves for Carol and his confederates.’

‘Why are the peasants so despised?’ Harriet asked.

‘They suffer from hunger, pellagra and sixteen hundred years of oppression – all enervating diseases.’

‘Sixteen hundred years?’

‘Rather longer.’ David now set out upon a history of Rumania’s oppression, beginning with the withdrawal of the Roman legions in the third century after Christ and the appearance of the Visigoths. He passed from the ravaging Huns to Gepides, Langobards and Avars, to the Slavs and ‘a race of Turkish nomads called Bulgars’. ‘Then in the ninth century,’ he said, ‘the Magyars swept over Eastern Europe.’

‘Isn’t all this part of the migration of nations?’ Harriet asked.

‘Yes. Rumania is the part of Europe over which most of them migrated. There were, of course, intervals – for instance, a brief period of glory under Michael the Brave. That led to the most wretched and tragic period of Rumanian history – the rule of the Phanariots.’

The waiter brought them soup. As David emptied his plate, he followed the further misfortunes of the Rumanian people until the peasant revolt of 1784. ‘Suppressed,’ he said, putting down his spoon, ‘in a manner I would not care to describe during a meal.’

Harriet was about to speak. David raised a hand to
silence her. ‘We come now,’ he said, ‘to the nineteenth century, when Turkish power was waning and Rumania was being shared out between Russia and Austria …’

They had ordered the veal grilled with herbs. It was brought to the table on a board and there chopped into small pieces with two choppers. Silenced by the noise, David frowned until it was over, then started at once to talk again. He was interrupted by the arrival of a short, round-bodied, round-faced man who entered quickly and came quickly to the table, smiling radiantly about him.

‘Ah!’ said David, rising, ‘here’s Klein.’ Klein seized on both his hands and, talking rapidly in German, displayed an ecstatic pleasure in their reunion.

When introduced to the Pringles, Klein bowed from the waist, saying: ‘How nice … how pleased to meet you!’ but he looked unsure of them until David said: ‘It’s all right. They’re friends.’

The word ‘friends’ had, apparently, a special connotation. ‘Ah, so!’ said Klein, relaxing into the chair that Guy had brought to the table for him. He had the fresh, snub, pink and white face of a child. Had it not been for the fact he was bald and what hair he had was grey, he might have passed for a very plump schoolboy – but a super-subtle boy who, despite his smile of good humour, was assessing everyone and everything about him. He accepted wine, which he poured into a tumbler and mixed with mineral water, but he would not eat. He had come, he said, from the first meeting of a newly formed committee.

‘An important committee, you understand. It exists to discuss the big demand Germany now makes on Rumania for food. And what did we do on the committee? We ate, drank and made funny remarks. There was such a buffet – from here to here,’ he indicated some twenty foot of the wall, ‘with roasts and turkeys, lobsters and caviare.
Such food!
I can tell you, in Germany today they have forgotten such food ever existed.’

He laughed aloud while David, watching him, curled his lip in appreciation of this picture of the Rumanians in committee.

Klein gave Guy a smile, confiding and affectionate, and said: ‘I am, you understand, economic adviser to the Cabinet. I am called to this committee because each day Germany asks for more – more meat, more coffee, more maize, more cooking oil. Where can it all come from? And now she says: “Plant soya beans.” “What are soya beans?” we ask one another. We do not know, but Germany must have them. Every day come these requests – and each time they are more like demands. The Cabinet is nervous. They say: “Send for Klein, Klein must advise us.” I am a Jew. I am without status. But I understand economics.’

‘Klein was one of the best economists in Germany,’ said David.

Klein smiled and twitched a shoulder, but did not repudiate this claim. ‘Here it is very funny,’ he said. ‘They call me in to advise. I say: “Produce more: spend less.” What do they reply? They laugh at me. “Ach, Klein,” they say, “you are only a Jew. What can you know of the soul of our great country? God has given us everything. We are rich. Our land all the time produces for us. It cannot be exhausted. You are a silly little Jew.”’