The Balkan Trilogy (9 page)

When they had exposed and laughed at his long, fragile body, his assailants rejoined the circle and pulled him into it. With the woman behind thumping his buttocks and the woman in front complaining of his lack of enterprise, he spent the rest of the night trudging dismally round, dressed in nothing but his socks and one black shoe and one brown.

5

In front of the University steps, where Harriet waited at noon next day, the gypsies were conducting their flower-market. The baskets were packed as high as hay-cocks with the stiff, tall flowers of the season. Among all this splendour of canna lilies, gladioli, chrysanthemums, dahlias and tuberoses, the gypsies, perched like tropical birds, screeched at the passers-by ‘
Hey, hey, hey, domnule! Frumos
ǎ
. Foarte frumos
ǎ
. Two hundred
lei
… for you, for you, only one fifty! For you, only one hundred. For you, only fifty …’ As the passers-by went on, unheeding, the cry followed, long-drawn, despairing as a train-whistle in the night: ‘
Domnule … domnule!
’ to be plucked back with new vitality as a newcomer drew near. The bargaining, when it started, was shrill, fierce and dramatic. If a customer chose, as a last resort, to walk away, the gypsy would usually follow, looking, among the pigeon-shaped women on the pavement, long, lean and flashy, like a flamingo or a crane.

The gypsy women all trailed about in old evening dresses picked up from second-hand stalls down by the river. They loved flounced and floating chiffons. They loved colour. With their pinks and violets, purples and greens, their long, wild hair, and shameless laughter, they seemed to have formed themselves in defiant opposition to the ideals of the Rumanian middle class.

While watching the traffic of the gypsies, Harriet saw Sophie arrive among them and start bargaining sharply at one of the smaller baskets. When the deal was completed, she mounted the University steps, pinning one bunch of parma
violets into the belt of her dress and another into her bosom. She started an animated waving, and Harriet, standing aside and unseen, looked and saw that Guy had appeared in the doorway. Sophie hurried to him, calling: ‘I say to myself I shall find you here, and I find you. Is it not like old times?’ Her grievance, whatever it was, and the war – both were forgotten.

Guy, seeing Harriet, said: ‘Here’s Harriet.’ It was a mere statement of fact but Sophie chose to take it as a warning. She gasped, put a finger to her lip, looked for Harriet and, finding where she was, took on an air of elaborate unconcern. As Harriet joined them, Sophie gave Guy a consoling smile. He must not, said the smile, blame himself for the mishap of his wife’s presence.

She said: ‘You go for luncheon, yes?’

‘We were going to walk in the Ci
ş
migiu,’ said Guy. ‘We might eat there.’

‘Oh, no,’ Sophie cried. ‘The Ci
ş
migiu is not nice in this heat. And the café is too poor, too cheap.’

Guy turned doubtfully to Harriet, looking to her to change their plans, but Harriet merely smiled. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing the park,’ she said.

‘Won’t you come with us?’ Guy asked Sophie. When she complained that she could not, the sun was too much, she might get a headache, he took her hand consolingly and said: ‘Then let us meet for dinner tomorrow night. We’ll go to Cap
ş
a’s.’

As they crossed the road to the park gates, Harriet said to Guy: ‘We cannot afford to go to expensive restaurants every night.’

‘We do so well on the black market,’ he said, ‘we can afford Cap
ş
a’s once in a while.’

Harriet wondered if he had any idea of what he could, or could not, afford on a salary of two hundred and fifty pounds a year.

A peasant had brought a handcart laden with melons into the town and tipped them out at the park gates. He lay among
them, sleeping, his arms crossed over his eyes. The melons were of all sizes, the smallest no bigger than a tennis ball. Harriet said: ‘I’ve never seen so many before.’

‘That is Rumania,’ said Guy.

Repelled by their profusion, she had an odd fancy that, gathered there in a flashing mass of yellow and gold, the melons were not really inert, but hiding a pullulating craftiness that might, if unchecked, one day take over the world.

The peasant, hearing voices, roused himself and offered them the biggest melon for fifty
lei
. Guy was not willing to carry it about so they went on, passing out of the aura of melon scent into the earthy scent of the park. Guy led Harriet down a side-path that was overhung by a block of flats and pointing up to the first floor, that had a terrace before it, he said: ‘Inchcape lives there.’

Enviously, Harriet saw on the terrace some wrought-iron chairs, a stone urn, a trail of pink ivy geranium, and asked: ‘Does he live alone?’

‘Yes, except for his servant, Pauli.’

‘Will we be invited there?’

‘Some time. He does not entertain much.’

‘He’s an odd man,’ she said. ‘That edgy vanity! – what is behind it? What does he do with himself alone there? I feel there’s something secret about him.’

Guy said: ‘He leads his life, as we all do. What do you care what he does?’

‘Naturally I’m interested.’

‘Why be interested in people’s private lives? What they are pleased to let us know should be enough for us.’

‘Well, I just am. You’re interested in ideas; I in people. If you were more interested in people, you might not like them so much.’

Guy did not reply. Harriet supposed he was reflecting on the logic of her statement, but when he spoke she realised he had not given it a thought. He told her the Ci
ş
migiu had once been the private garden of a Turkish water-inspector.

Brilliantly illuminated on spring and summer nights, it
had a dramatic beauty. The peasants who came to town in search of justice or work saw the park as a refuge. They slept here through the siesta. They would stand about for hours gazing at the
tapis vert
, the fountain, the lake, the peacocks and the ancient trees. A rumour often went round that the King intended to take it all from them. It was discussed with bitterness.

‘Will he take it?’ Harriet asked.

‘I don’t think so. There’s nothing in it for him. It is just that people have come to expect the worst from him.’

In the last heat of the year, the greenery looked coarse and autumnal beneath a dust of light. The air was still. Noon weighed on everything. The great
tapis vert
, with its surround of leaf-hung poles and swags, its border of canna lilies and low bands of box, looked as unreal as some stage backdrop faded with age. A few groups of peasants stood about as Guy had described, but most of them had folded themselves into patches of shade and slept, faces hidden from the intolerable sun.

Everything seemed to give off heat. Harriet half expected the canna lilies, in great beds of sulphur, cadmium and red, to roar like a furnace. She stopped at the dahlias. Guy adjusted his glasses and examined the flowers, which were massive, spiked, furry, lion-faced, burgundy-coloured, purple and white, cinderous, heavy as velvet.

‘Fine,’ he said at length.

She laughed at him and said: ‘They’re like the invention of some ghastly interior decorator.’

‘Really!’ Accepting the visible world because he so seldom looked at it, Guy was at first startled, then delighted, by this criticism of nature.

They followed a path that branched down to the lakeside. The water, glassy still, stretched out of sight beneath the heavy foliage of the lake-fed trees. The path ended beside a little thicket of chestnuts beneath which a small, derelict summerhouse made a centre for commerce. Here the peasant who had any sort of stock-in-trade might begin a lifelong struggle
up into the tradesman’s class. One boy had covered a box with pink paper and laid out on it, like chessmen on a board, pieces of Turkish delight. There were not more than twenty pieces. If he sold them, he might be able to buy twenty-two. With each piece, the purchaser was given a glass of water.

‘One eats,’ said Guy, ‘for the pleasure of drinking.’

A man stood nearby with a weighing-machine. Another had a hooded camera where photographs could be obtained to stick on passports, or on the permits needed to work, to own a cart, to keep a stall, to sojourn in one town or journey to another.

At the appearance of the Pringles, some of the peasants lying on the ground picked themselves up and adjusted trays from which they sold sesame cakes, pretzels, matches and other oddments, and peanuts for the pigeons. Harriet bought some peanuts, and the pigeons, watching, came fluttering down from the trees to eat them. She was watched by some peasants standing near, whose eyes were shy and distrustful of the life about them. Newly arrived in the city, the men were still in tight frieze trousers, short jackets and pointed caps – a style of dress that dated back to Roman times. The women wore embroidered blouses and fan-pleated skirts of colours that were richer and more subtle than those worn by the gypsies. As soon as they could afford it, they would throw off these tokens of their simplicity and rig themselves out in city drab.

Three girls, resplendent in sugar-pinks, plum-reds and the green of old bottle glass, were posing for a photograph. They might have been dressed for a fair or a festival, but they drooped together as though sold into slavery. Seeing the Pringles watching them, the girls looked uneasily away.

As they passed among the peasants, Guy and Harriet smiled to reassure them, but their smiles grew strained as they breathed-in the peasant stench. Harriet thought: ‘The trouble with prejudice is, there’s usually a reason for it,’ but she now knew better than to say this to Guy.

The path through the thicket led to the lake café, which
was situated on a pier built out into the water. On this flimsy, shabby structure stood rough chairs and tables with paper tablecloths. The boards creaked and flexed when anyone walked across them. Just below, visible between the boards, was the dark and dirty lake water.

The Pringles, seated in the sun, breathed air that was warm and heavy with the smell of water-weed. The trees on the distant banks were faded into the heat blur. An occasional rowing-boat ruffled the lake surface and sent the water clopping against the café piers. A waiter came running, producing from an inner pocket a greasy, food-splashed card. The menu was short. Few people ate here. This was a place where the city workers came in the cool of evening to drink wine or
ţ
uic
ǎ
. Guy ordered omelettes. When the waiter went to the hut that served as a kitchen, he switched on the wireless in honour of the foreigners. A loud-speaker over the door gave out waltz music.

The café was, as Sophie had said, poor enough, but it had its pretensions. A notice said that persons wearing peasant dress would not be served. The peasants outside, whether they could read or not, made no attempt to cross on to the pier. With the humility of dogs, they knew it was no place for them.

There were a few other customers, all men. Stout and hot-looking in their dark town suits, they sat near the kitchen where there was shade from the chestnut trees.

Guy, exposed out in the strong sunlight, took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt-sleeves and stretched his brown arms on the table so that they might get browner. He stretched his legs out lazily and gazed round him at the tranquil water, the tranquil sky, the non-belligerent world. For some time they sat silent listening to the music, the lap from the rowing-boats and the ping of chestnuts dropping on to the kitchen’s iron roof.

‘Where is the war now?’ Harriet asked.

‘As the crow flies, about three hundred miles away. When we go home at Christmas …’

‘Do you really think we will?’ She could not believe it. Christmas brought to her mind a scene, tiny and far away like a snowstorm in a globe. Somewhere within it was “home” – anyway, England. Home for her was no more defined than that. The aunt who had brought her up was dead.

‘If we could save enough, we could go by air.’

She said: ‘We shall certainly have to save if we’re ever to have a home of our own.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And we can’t save if we’re going to eat all the time at expensive restaurants.’

Guy looked away at this unwelcome conclusion and asked if she knew the name of the piece they were playing on the wireless.

‘A waltz. Darling, we’ll …’

He caught her hand and pinned it down. ‘No, listen,’ he insisted as though she were trying to deflect him from an enquiry of importance. ‘Where have I heard it before?’

‘All over the place. I want to know about Sophie.’

Guy said nothing, but looked resigned.

Harriet said: ‘Last night she said she was depressed because of the war. Was it only because of the war?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Nothing to do with your getting married?’

‘Oh, no.
No
. She’d given up that idea ages ago.’

‘She once had that idea, then?’

‘Well,’ Guy spoke in an off-hand way, perhaps to hide discomfort. ‘Her mother was Jewish, and she worked on this antifascist magazine …’

‘You mean she wanted a British passport.’

‘It was understandable. I felt sorry for her. And, don’t forget, I didn’t know you then. Two or three of my friends married German anti-fascists to get them out of Germany and …’

‘But they were homosexual. It was just an arrangement. The couples separated outside the registry office. You would have been landed with Sophie for life.’

‘She said we could get divorced straight away.’

‘And you believed her? You must be mad.’

Guy gave a discomforted laugh: ‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t really believe her.’

‘But you let her try and persuade you. You might have given in if you hadn’t met me? Isn’t that it?’ She watched him as though he had changed before her eyes into a different person. ‘If anyone had asked me before I married, I would have said I was marrying the rock of ages. Now I realise you are capable of absolute lunacy.’

‘Oh, come, darling,’ Guy protested, ‘I didn’t want to marry Sophie, but one has to be polite. What would you have done under the circumstances?’