The Balkan Trilogy (29 page)

Harriet, sitting up in bed, red-eyed, limp and relieved, said: ‘You shouldn’t have gone off with Dubedat without leaving a message. You should have known I’d be worried.’

‘Surely you weren’t worrying about me, darling? You know I’m always right.’

She said: ‘If the fifth columnists came for you, I’d murder them,
I’d murder them
.’

‘I believe you would, too,’ he said indulgently as he pulled his shirt over his head.

17

It was a winter of unusual cold in Western Europe. The cinema newsreels showed children snowballing beneath Hadrian’s Arch. Rivers were transfixed between their banks. A girl pirouetted on the Seine, her skirt circling out from her waist. The Paris roofs spilled snow in puffs, like smoke. The Parisians carried gas-masks in tin cylinders. An air-raid warning sounded and they filed down into the Métro. The streets were empty. A taxicab stood abandoned. Then everyone came up again, smiling as though it were all a joke. (‘And perhaps it is a joke,’ Yakimov thought, ‘perhaps this will go down in history as the joke war.’) St Paul’s appeared briefly with a feather-boa of snow. A glimpse of Chamberlain and his umbrella gave rise to a flutter of applause. At once the film was interrupted and a notice appeared on the screen to say public demonstrations of any kind were forbidden. The audience watched the rest of the film in silence.

Yakimov, in the cheapest seats, was reminded by these pictures of the fact that he would sooner or later have to return to the streets of Bucharest, where the hard ridges of frozen snow bit through his shoes and the wind slapped his face like a sheet of emery paper.

He had taken to the cinema when finally prevented from bedding down at the Athénée Palace. He had managed at first to maintain not only some sort of social life there, but a semblance of residence. Unwilling to take the long journey each afternoon back to his lodgings, he would slip upstairs when the bar closed and settle himself in any bedroom he found with a key left in the lock. If there was a bathroom attached, he would take a bath, then sleep the afternoon away.
When caught, as he often was, by the room’s rightful owner, he apologised for having mistaken the number. ‘All these rooms look alike,’ he would explain. ‘Your poor old Yaki belongs on the floor below.’

But suspicions were roused; complaints were made. He was caught, and recognised, by one of the porters who knew he had no bedroom on the floor below. The manager warned him that, caught again, he would be forbidden entry to any part of the hotel. After that, he was found stretched out on one of the main room sofas. He was warned again. He then tried sleeping upright in an arm-chair, but the guests objected to his snoring and the waiters roughly awakened him.

Hounded, as he put it, from pillar to post, he went, when he could afford it, to the cinema. When he could not afford it, he walked to keep himself awake.

Morning and evening, he joined the mendicant company of Hadjimoscos, Horvath and Cici Palu, and stood with them on the edge of one or the other of the groups at the English Bar. Sometimes, ignoring insults, stares of disgust, excluding backs and shoulders, they had to stand about an hour or more before someone, out of embarrassment or pity, invited them in on a round. They expected nothing from
habitués
like Galpin and Screwby, and got nothing. They had most to hope for from the casual drinker, an English engineer from Ploȩsti or a temporary American visitor elated by the black-market rate in dollars. When Galpin, seeing the three at his elbow, said ‘Scram’, an American newspaperman said: ‘Oh, I guess we owe the local colour a drink.’

Sometimes, to encourage patronage, one of the group would offer to buy a round, then, the order given, would discover he had come out without any money. It was surprising how often some bystander would lend, or pay, out of shame for the tactics of the group. Albu refused to pour these drinks until the money was produced, but what he thought of it all, no one knew. While the pantomime of pocket-patting and consternation was going on, he would stand motionless, his gaze on a horizon not of this world.

Something in Albu’s attitude disturbed Yakimov. Not the bravest of men, he was often painfully upset by the audacity of the others, and yet he clung to them. It was not that they welcomed him – it was simply that he was not welcomed by anyone else. He, who had once been the centre of Dollie’s set, was now without a friend.

He could not understand why Hadjimoscos, Horvath and Palu were ‘horrid’ to him; why there was always a hint of derision, even of malice, in their attitude towards him. Perhaps the fact that he had once been in the position of patron had marked him down for all time. They had once deferred to him, now they need defer no longer. And there had been the incident of Hadjimoscos’s teeth. Returning drunk from a party, Hadjimoscos, sick in a privy, had spewed out his false teeth. Yakimov, in attendance, had flushed them away before he realised what had happened. At least, that had been Yakimov’s story – and he had told it widely, and unwisely, round the bar. Hadjimoscos could not contradict it because the teeth were missing, and remained missing until a new set could be made. He had no memory of what had become of them. Too late, Yakimov became aware of the displeasure in Hadjimoscos’s mongoloid eyes – a displeasure that gave them a truly frightening glint. He murmured: ‘Only a little joke, dear boy,’ but it was after that that Hadjimoscos refused to take him to parties, always giving the excuse that he had not been invited.

The trio also, it seemed, resented Yakimov’s attempts to repay drinks with amusing talk. In front of him, Hadjimoscos said with disgust to the others: ‘He
will
tell his dilapidated stories! He
will
insist that he is not what he seems!’

The second accusation referred to the fact that, when asked what he was doing in Bucharest, Yakimov would reply: ‘I’m afraid, dear boy, I’m not at liberty to say.’ In reply to someone who said: ‘I suppose it’s your own government you’re working for,’ he mumbled in humorous indignation: ‘Are you trying to insult poor Yaki?’

A rumour had reached the Legation that Yakimov was working for the Germans, and Dobson, taking the matter up,
had traced it back to Hadjimoscos. Dropping into the English Bar and inviting Hadjimoscos to a drink, he had remonstrated pleasantly: ‘This is a very dangerous story to put around.’

Hadjimoscos, nervous of the power of the British Legation, protested: ‘But,
mon ami
, the Prince is a member of some secret service – he himself makes it evident. I could not imagine he worked for the British. They surely would not employ such an
imbécile
!’

‘Why do you say he “makes it evident”?’ Dobson asked.

‘Because he will take out a paper – so! – and put to it a match with fingers shaking – so! – then he will sigh and mop his brow and say: “Thank God I have got rid of that”.’

Yakimov was ordered to the Legation. When Dobson repeated his conversation with Hadjimoscos, Yakimov was tremulous with fear. He wailed pathetically: ‘All in fun, dear boy, all in innocent fun!’

Dobson was unusually stern with him. ‘People,’ he said, ‘have been thrown into prison here for less than this. The story has reached Woolley. He and the other British businessmen want you sent under open arrest to the Middle East. There you’d go straight into the ranks.’

‘
Dear boy!
You’d never do that to an old friend. Poor Yaki meant no harm. That old fool Woolley has no sense of humour. Yaki often plays these little japes. Once in Budapest, when flush, I got a cage of pigeons and went down a side street like this …’ As he lifted a wire tray from Dobson’s desk and moved with exaggerated stealth round the room, the sole flapped on his left shoe. ‘Then I put down the cage, looked around me, and let the pigeons fly away.’

Dobson lent him a thousand
lei
and promised to talk Woolley round.

Had Yakimov been content to eat modestly, he could have existed from one remittance to the next, but he was not content. When his allowance arrived, he ate himself into a stupor, then, penniless again, returned, a beggar, to the English Bar. It was not that he despised simple food. He despised no food of any kind. When he could afford nothing more, he
would go to the Dâmbovi
ţ
a and eat the peasant’s staple food, a mess of maize. But food, rich food, was an obsessive longing. He needed it as other men need drink, tobacco or drugs.

Often he was so reduced he had not even the bus fare to and from his lodging. Walking back at night through streets deserted except for beggars and peasants who slept, and died of cold in their sleep, in doorways or beneath the hawkers’ stalls, he often thought of his car, his Hispano-Suiza, and plotted to retrieve it. All he needed was a Yugoslav transit visa and thirty-five thousand
lei
. Surely he could find someone to lend him that! And he felt, once the car was his again, his whole status would change. It was heavy on petrol and oil, of course, but they were cheap here. He would manage. And with this dream he would trudge through the black, wolf-biting night until he found refuge in the syrupy heat of the Protopopescus’ flat.

There he was comfortable enough, though things had not gone so well at first. For several nights after he settled in, he had been bitten by bugs. Awakened by the burning and stinging itch they produced, he had put on the light and seen the bugs sliding out of sight among the creases of the sheets. His tender flesh had risen in white lumps. Next morning the lumps had disappeared. When he spoke to Doamna Protopopescu, she took the matter badly.

‘Here buks, you say?’ she demanded. ‘Such is not possible. We are nice peoples. These buks have come with you.’

Yakimov told her he had come straight from the Athénée Palace. Not even pretending to believe him, she shrugged and said: ‘If so, then you have imaginations.’

Having paid his rent in advance and being without money to pay elsewhere, he had no choice but to suffer. He produced one or two dead bugs, the sight of which merely increased Doamna Protopopescu’s scorn. ‘Where did you find such?’ she demanded. ‘In bus or taxi or café? In all places there are buks.’

Aggrieved beyond measure, he set his mind to work and, the next night, threw back the covers and gathering the bugs up rapidly, dropped them one by one into a glass of water. Next morning, smiling and pretending to click his heels, he
presented the glass to his landlady. She examined it, mystified: ‘What have you?’

‘Bugs, dear girl.’

‘Buks!’ She peered into the glass, her face sagging further in its bewildered exasperation, then, suddenly, she was enlightened. She flew into a rage that was not, thank God, directed at him. ‘These,’ she cried, ‘are Hungarian buks. Ah, filthy peoples! Ah, the dirty mans!’ It transpired that, in order to accommodate a lodger, the Protopopescus had bought a bed in the seedy market near the station. The salesman, an Hungarian, had sworn it was a clean bed, as good as new, and now what had been discovered! ‘Buks!’

Doamna Protopopescu’s usual movements were indolent. Her body was soft with inertia and over-eating, but now, in her rage, she displayed the animal vigour of her peasant forebears. She turned the bed on its side and glared into the wire meshes beneath it. Yakimov, looking with her, could see no sign of bugs.

‘Ha!’ she menaced them, ‘they hide. But from me they cannot hide.’

She bound rags to a poker, dipped it in paraffin and set it alight. As she swept the flames over the springs and frame of the bed, she hissed: ‘Now, I think no more buks. Die then, you filthy Hungarian buks. Ha, buks, this is for you, buks!’

Yakimov watched her, impressed. That night he slept in peace. The incident drew them together. It broke down the barrier of strangeness between them – a process maintained by the fact that Yakimov had to pass through the Protopopescus’ bedroom to reach the bathroom.

The Protopopescus had probably imagined that, at the most, a lodger would require a bath once or twice a week. They had not allowed for his other bodily needs. When, directed by the maid, Yakimov first found his way through the bedroom, the Protopopescus were still in bed. Doamna Protopopescu lifted a bleared face from the pillow and regarded him in astonished silence. No comment was made on his intrusion then, nor at any other time. If they were in the bedroom when he passed through, the Protopopescus
always behaved in the same way. On the outward journey they ignored him. As he returned, they would suddenly show awareness of him and greet him.

Often Doamna Protopopescu was alone in the room. She spent much of her day lying on her bed dressed in her kimono. Yakimov was delighted to observe that she did everything a woman of Oriental character was reputed to do. She ate Turkish delight; she drank Turkish coffee; she smoked Turkish cigarettes; and she was for ever laying out a pack of frowsy, odd-faced cards, by which she predicted events from hour to hour. He sometimes stopped to watch her, amused to note that when the cards foretold something displeasing, she would snatch them all up impatiently and, in search of a more acceptable future, set them out again.

She entered his repertoire of characters, and at the bar he told how coming out of the bathroom and anticipating recognition, he had said: ‘
Bonjour
, doamna and domnul lieutenant Protopopescu,’ only to realise too late that, although on the chair lay the familiar padded uniform and the grimy male corsets, and on the floor were an officer’s spurred riding boots, the figure beside Doamna Protopopescu was that of a man much younger than her husband.

‘So now,’ he concluded, ‘I merely say “
Bonjour
, doamna and domnul lieutenant”, and leave it at that.’

The flat, its windows sealed for the winter, smelt strongly of sweat and cooking. The smell in the Protopopescus’ bedroom was overpowering, yet Yakimov came to tolerate it, indeed to associate it with the comforts of home.

One morning, when he paused to watch his landlady laying out her curious cards, he essayed a little joke. He handed her a
leu
, turned to the side imprinted with a corn cob and said: ‘A portrait of our great and glorious Majesty, King Carol II. You, dear girl, may not recognise the likeness, but there are many dear girls who would.’