The Brides of Solomon (11 page)

We took the middle track north of the marsh. The going was good, and Rosalinda didn’t hold us back. She was not even shocked by all this savagery. Murder didn’t count when it was
right. Just another example of her extraordinary innocence. She had kicked off her shoes and was running as free as a little twelve-year-old. Her education had not lasted long enough to soften the
soles of her feet.

But it was the shoes which gave us away. The police troopers spotted them, lying bang in the middle of the right track. They did not have to split up and do a bit of scouting. They came on
behind us like a charge of cavalry.

There was a small patch of open plain by the side of the track, and we dropped flat on it. When the pursuit—six of them—had thundered past, I began to have hopes of getting clear.
The obvious move was to return to the head of the creek and try one of the other two routes. We had just reached the junction when back came the police. They must have reached some point—a
customs post, I think—beyond which we could not have passed. Three of them were riding south of the marsh, and three north—at the same time quartering the narrow strip of plain where we
had lain down and covering the third track to the sands.

In the direction of Posadas were more lights, carried by such of the sporting citizenry as were attracted by the chance of a free shot at human game. No hope for us there, either—so we cut
down into the angle between the creek and the Paraná where our first dash from the town had landed us.

The whole of the hunt gradually converged upon our corner. I thought this was an unfortunate accident until a launch drifted down from Posadas and began to search the water’s edge with its
light to prevent us swimming away. The police knew exactly where we were. Long experience and elimination of all the possibilities.

‘Why do they not bring nets?’ Hilario whispered bitterly. He was hurt at being treated as something only fit for the taxidermist. After all, he knew that he was a harmless and
honourable boy on all occasions when convention did not call for murder.

The advancing line, with one flank on the Paraná and the other on the creek, became shorter as it approached us. There was not a hope of breaking through. To judge by the lights, the gap
between man and man was about forty yards and rapidly lessening. It was then that I began to see stars, and ascribed them to the crack I had received over the skull. It’s not what a man
really feels which finishes him, but what he thinks he feels. Just because there was a sickening, patternless mess of lights in front of my eyes, I was ready to pass out. I told Rosalinda and
Hilario to slip through the line if they saw the remotest chance, and leave me.

They were whispering excitedly in Guarani, and seemed unreasonably hopeful.

‘But why? Why give up now?’ Rosalinda asked me.

There was a sob of disappointment in her voice, just as if I had refused her something which she had set her heart on, when all the rest of her world agreed.

I tried to pull myself together, and noticed that some of the lights, instead of dancing in front of my eyes, were stationary in Rosalinda’s hair.

Then I understood. There had been a hatch of fireflies on the river flats. The muggy weather and the hot north wind had brought on the one day in twenty-eight that I was telling you about. They
might have been ants or flies or these savage-looking fellows which you seem to have forgotten about for the moment; but they happened to be beetles—fireflies.

Beautiful? I don’t know whether it was or not. It was mad. I tell you that there wasn’t a cubic foot of air—literally—without a firefly in it. You couldn’t see. No
wonder I thought I was fainting! It was like—well, I’ve often tried to describe it to myself. Imagine yourself infinitely small and suspended in a cylinder of gas! Imagine the hot
molecules rushing about and cannoning into each other. No, it wasn’t beautiful.

The three troopers on the left of the line had been following the bank of the creek. They were now so close that we didn’t dare whisper. Not that they would have heard us. They were
cursing and damning and waving their hats about. Quite useless, but it’s a human instinct to try and clear a space in front of the eyes. Their horses were nervous and giving any amount of
trouble. I doubt if they were in the least bothered by the fireflies; they had caught the exasperation of their riders, as horses always do.

Hilario started to squirm forward foot by foot, and Rosalinda and I followed. You couldn’t tell where the police troopers were going, fighting their horses in that damned silly way instead
of showing confidence. One of the poor beasts was just about to tread on me when it saw me. It shied, and its rider’s language was worse than ever. He did not look at the ground. He was
trying to pierce the intolerable flickering on a level with his eyes.

It was perfectly safe to stand up and run as soon as we were past them. At the head of the creek we took the track down to the sands, and reached Hilario’s canoe by swimming and
wading.

Of course I can never go back to Argentina, but who cares? Three thousand acres I farm here. When Hilario showed me this place and its own private river with a flow of 300,000 gallons a minute
and an even drop of twenty feet in half a mile, I saw what could be done in the way of power plant and refrigeration. It wouldn’t suit everyone. But we often have visitors like yourself. And
they are very welcome whether they have two legs or six. Hilario himself always preferred mining to farming. He has done very well at it.

Rosalinda? Well, they get a bit full in the figure, you know. But does that matter when the only face you ever want to look at is on top of it? Our boys made her go out fishing this afternoon.
They’ll be back any moment. Certainly before the mosquitoes start. Well, yes, if you look at it that way, I suppose they have started. But don’t go slapping at them! Round here nobody
has ever died of fever since her poor mother and father.

M
ARGIT
was an island like the rest of us. In the set of complicated currents she kept her shores intact only by loyalty to what was best in herself. She
had not much else to be loyal to.

She was a Hungarian peasant who had earned her lonely living as a servant in Budapest ever since she was fourteen years old. Social democracy and a husband with a bit of land—those were
her desires, political and personal. Towards the present regime she was dully neutral, for it snatched away with one hand what it gave with the other.

She took pride in her skill, and as much in her employers as they permitted. For the last six months she had worked for a middle-aged consulting engineer, respectable and law-abiding. He seldom
laughed, and his ready smile seemed to spring from a natural courtesy rather than any personal interest. He left no doubt, however, that he appreciated her cooking, and that was enough for
Margit.

She used to day-dream—failing a better subject—that he had asked her to be his wife, though any woman could see that he was dedicated to something, perhaps the memory of a former
love, more distant than marriage. The dream never lasted longer than the washing-up of two plates and a coffee cup.

Margit knew very well that she hadn’t the beauty to revive a dead heart. All her mirror told her was that she was squat and thick and brown; it could not reveal that her eyes were gay and
that she moved with light feet and a provocative swing of the skirt. That touch of gallantry had been born of the czardas danced in the village of her girlhood, and was kept alive by the barrel of
excellent wine in the kitchen.

The barrel was a present from her brother, who had inherited the little family vineyard and contrived to hold back enough of the harvest to supply himself and her. The rest went to the state
cellars for export. Margit was puzzled that wine should have become so scarce and expensive. In the days before the war a generous employer would no more have thought of reckoning up what was drunk
in the kitchen than of counting the potatoes.

So Margit treasured her hundred-litre barrel. She wasn’t a heavy drinker. At the moderate rate of a big glass for lunch and another for supper, there was only enough to keep her morale
more gay than grim for about two hundred days. The barrel, too, was a symbol. It brought into the worried city a sense of solidarity with her village—a spiritual rather than political
class-consciousness. She felt for her hundred litres the welcome that a business woman would give to a hamper of flowers from the garden of her first lover.

Some of her treasure, of course, she had to share; but that, too, was joy. She was enabled to be gracious and to indulge the aristocrat that lived in her peasant heart. So, when she received a
visit from the well-dressed gentleman who had recently begun to sit outside the café at the corner, it was hospitality rather than fear which made her draw a jug for him.

She knew what he was. Among the humble there was unspoken alliance for the recognition of secret police. The porter of the block, who that very day had been ordered by the well-dressed gentleman
to give him a weekly bulletin of information, had dutifully kept the secret, but handed out broad hints to chosen friends.

The policeman in Margit’s kitchen was a very superior specimen of the breed—not at all the type which normally collected information from porters. She greeted him with the politeness
reserved for a class above her own, and hovered hospitably over him.

‘Good wine, this!’ exclaimed the gentleman from the café at the corner, stretching his legs under the table. ‘Is your employer rich?’

‘My brother sent it me,’ she replied. ‘It has nothing to do with the master.’

‘And what does he drink himself over there?’—the visitor jerked a thumb towards the narrow passage which led, through a faintly delicious atmosphere of spices and onions, to
the office and dining-room of Margit’s consulting engineer.

‘Whatever he can get, sir.’

‘And plenty of it, eh?’

The visitor, determined to be a democrat, pinched her playfully. Margit’s reception of the compliment was cold. She knew from experience that her rotundities were eminently pinchable, and
she did not—for example, with the porter—take offence. But the caress of her visitor was incorrect; he made it appear a studied gesture rather than an irresistible temptation.

Margit dropped her best manner and answered him with a rough frankness. That was one good thing about the present regime. You needn’t—if you belonged to the proletariat—bother
with ceremony when you didn’t feel inclined.

‘How can anyone get plenty of it?’

‘Complaining of the regime, are you?’

‘Listen, I’m a peasant! Better off, worse off? I don’t know. Wait and see—that’s what we say.’

‘What about the visitors here? Is that what they say?’

‘Do you think I’ve nothing to do, cocky, but crawl up the passage and listen at the door?’

The visitor gave a hoarse chuckle, into which Margit’s wine and pleasant, broad accent had injected some sincerity. ‘We come from the same district,’ he exclaimed. ‘I see
that!’

‘Every district has some black pigs among the white.’

‘That’s the end, sweetheart,’ he said—quite tolerantly, but as if the inevitable time had come to exchange good-fellowship for his normal business attitude. ‘Sit
down!’

Resignedly she sat down opposite him at the kitchen table. He represented the limitless power of the state. There was no need for him to explain or threaten, and they both knew it.

He drew from his pocket three photographs of the same man: full face, right profile, and left profile.

‘Have you ever seen that one?’ he asked her.

‘No.’

‘Have you ever heard the name of Istvan Sarvary?’

‘No. Who’s he?’

‘An enemy of our country, my girl. A revolutionary and warmonger. And at last I’m on his track. Look at those photos, and take your time.’

Margit obeyed. The police photographs were clear, glossy prints, upon which every detail could be seen. The subject looked like an unwashed criminal, hollow-cheeked, sneering and obstinate. She
did not recognise the face. Then, in the left profile, she noticed the man’s glasses. They were round, old-fashioned, and of heavy tortoise-shell, and there was a home-made repair just in
front of the left ear, where the rivet or binding had been wrapped in some soft substance to prevent rubbing.

A possible identity for Sarvary at once occurred to her. Yet it was so unlikely that there was no sudden start of recognition in her eyes or mouth for the trained interrogator across the table
to leap upon.

‘You are interested?’ he suggested.

‘You told me to take a long look.’

‘And what do you see?’

What she saw in the eye of the mind was a drawer in the consulting engineer’s dressing-table, and a pair of old glasses with the left bar wrapped round by a neatly sewn strip of
wash-leather. Could they be the same glasses? Was it possible for a haggard, clean-shaven man with dark, wavy hair to turn into her employer with his well-rounded cheeks, his straight white hair
greased firmly back, and his white luxuriant moustache which looked as if it had been over his mouth for the last thirty years?

Then there was his nose. The man in the photograph had a strong, fleshy nose, quite ordinary. Her employer had a Roman nose with a marked and distinguished bump on its bridge. The shape of it,
she remembered—almost with a giggle—seemed to change in hot weather. No, of course it was unthinkable. Her kind master could not be a man wanted by the police, a barbarian trying to
bring about another war.

‘I’ve seen someone like him,’ she said at last.

She couldn’t tell how much her face had given away. Something, yes. The keen peasant game of buying and selling was in her blood. She knew, from the parallel of the marketplace, that her
hesitation had been too long and that she must explain it.

‘Who?’

‘The new notary of our village.’

‘They have a queer breed in your village,’ he remarked contemptuously. ‘Stop fooling, girl! When did this man come to see your employer?’