The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown

by Geoffrey Household

  It was going to be difficult to talk to her. There must have been a number of kinky people, satiated with normality, who wanted to talk to her. But she did not look as if her proprietor sold her services at the market price for curiosities, whatever that was. Her passivity was not that of a prostitute, nor had she the drawn face. He had by now a theory that the recognisable features of a hard-working whore were not in the least due to supposed licentiousness but to sheer boredom, together with the effort and the cosmetics necessary to disguise it.

  Bernardo, being no innocent, put himself in the confessional box and enquired whether he himself was not attracted by two extra breasts. He easily gave himself absolution on that score; his sin, if any, was in being revolted by them. No, he was not thinking of the girl in any way as an object of desire. The nursery-angel face made him feel more like a father than a lover. Preposterous! Well, say, an elder brother.

  Could the showman be her father? He had only noticed the top of the man’s head at the pay-box and a round face when he drew the curtain. All he remembered was that the chap, unlike most Romanians at that hour of night appeared very clean-shaven. Had there been any other woman about? Not at the booth, but possibly in the caravan or whatever vehicle they used for travelling. He was tempted to go back in the early morning while Susana slept. The Moş without its roar and excitement would be worth seeing.

  Next day he walked down the interminable length of the Boulevard Elisabeta against the stream of packed trams and pedestrians going to work. He could smell the Moş half a mile away—an odour of dust and animals and rotting straw. The main alley was fairly empty with the air of a night club or café being cleaned up on the morning after. The side alleys, however, were busy with buying and selling in the cattle markets and the shops. It was the time of the peasants, rich and poor, some of them with steps already unsteady after too much tsuica for breakfast.

  He joined a thin crowd of onlookers round the horse market, where he could keep an eye on the front of the ‘interesting’ exhibition deserted and sordid in the morning sun. For half an hour there was nothing to see except the collection of undersized animals which were being sold—a wretched lot to the eye, though any pair of them were able to draw a laden peasant cart through a long day on a diet of maize stalks. All heads turned as a cavalcade of Bessarabian horse-dealers cantered out of the main alley, well-mounted and flaunting cloaks of black and red which reminded him of those left behind in the station restaurant of Oradea Mare. The owner of angel-face popped out of his booth and exchanged greetings with one of the riders. The language, melancholy on one side, hearty on the other, was Russian.

  The man’s high voice drew Bernardo’s closer attention. The face was not clean-shaven; it had no hair at all and was spider-webbed with fine lines. A eunuch, by God! He would have been recognised for what he was by all Bucarest since the town was proud of its sect of cab drivers whose smart trasuras and well-paired horses stood in the rank outside the royal palace. The drivers belonged to a heretical sect of the Orthodox Church who were so appalled by the sins of the flesh that a man was only allowed two children from his marriage. He then submitted to castration, thus preserving his soul from the devil, the family from extinction and himself—Bernardo thought bitterly—from the hell of a lot of misery.

  The discovery confirmed his opinion that it would be fatal to appear in the guise of a pimp. Whatever the beliefs of these pervertedly pious fellows, it was most unlikely that they would sell their daughters. But she couldn’t be his daughter. One surely didn’t learn English in remote Bessarabian villages.

  He tried to open conversation with the showman in his very limited Romanian.

  ‘Beautiful!’ he exclaimed, pointing to the riders.

  ‘Blestemat!’

  Bernardo knew that word—damned—for it was a common curse. Possibly the chap was using it literally.

  ‘Why?’

  Some of the answer was unintelligible except for nouns with Latin roots. Bernardo gathered that he was being lectured on the iniquity of horse-dealers who would all go to hell. Dear old Kovacs would have agreed, but for different reasons.

  ‘I do not understand. I am English.’

  An impulsive bit of lunacy that was from David Mitrani, Sephardic Jew! But it worked.

  ‘Come inside!’

  The eunuch had not recognised Bernardo as one of the quickly passing spectators of the previous night. He led the way through the exhibition booth and out at the back into a canvas extension with a divan, a table and a chair in it. The girl was there, dressed out of business hours in embroidered peasant blouse and skirt. She only appeared to have a clumsy figure, very round with puppy fat. She knew him at once, but was careful not to give it away. Her eyes met his with no more than a light-house flash of intelligence, almost mischievous intelligence.

  The eunuch made a commanding speech to her in Russian. She looked at him with eyes which were now abstracted, wide and luminous like those of a cat withdrawn into its own thoughts.

  ‘Mr. Stepanov wants me to explain to you that no one can be a Christian who does not avoid the sins of the flesh, and that one must feel pity for riders who only want to attract women. Now, we must talk very seriously as if you believed it,’ she added without any change of tone.

  Bernardo realised without the need for more analysis what it was which had forced him to return. Not her startling beauty. Not curiosity. Not even her impulsive recognition of him as a person to whom some explanation was due. It was her youth. One couldn’t call it a radiant youth when, under the circumstances, it was only able to radiate into itself; but, seeing her dressed with the normal gaiety of a Romanian girl, the sordidness of the show and the abnormality no longer disturbed him. Youth triumphed over the lot and held out some sort of invisible hand for companionship. He was young enough himself to receive the message and old enough to respond considerately. She was in no way comparable to charitable objects on the steps of a Spanish church. It was evident that she expected a social equal—leaving out for the moment whether the Crucea de Piatra or a Jesuit College was responsible for the equality—to have some manners, neither repelled by unfortunate accidents of birth nor stickying the place up with spilt milk of human kindness.

  ‘Hallelujah!’ Bernardo answered piously. ‘What are you?’

  ‘Russian.’

  ‘A refugee?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Can I help? I didn’t come back because ...’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘But what is a girl like you doing here?’

  He could have kicked himself for the appalling banality of the compliment. She must have heard it dozens of times before.

  If she had, she ignored the futility of it as irrelevant.

  ‘I told you. There was nothing else for me.’

  Stepanov broke in suspiciously and she replied to him at length.

  ‘What was that?’ Bernardo asked.

  ‘He wanted to know what your religion was. I said you were a Lutheran.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘My governess told me all the English were Lutherans.’

  ‘Tell me quickly—how can I see you again? He’s not going to be taken in by this much longer. I am very poor and out of work, but I will try to do something.’

  ‘The Moş is over on Saturday and then we go to Craiova. Perhaps you can find us on the road. He may go out drinking. What is your name?’

  ‘David.’

  ‘I am Nadya. If I never see you any more, God be with you, David!’

  Old Mr. Brown remembered how easily that could have been that. He dared not risk taking to the road penniless and drawing attention to himself by bad Romanian. It only needed one policeman suspicious enough to check the antecedents of David Mitrani, and then the trail led straight back to the station of Pascani, the crossing of the frontier and Bernado Brown, assassin and assaulter of diplomats.

  No, he was not as mad as all that. He might have committed any folly for another sight of Mag
da, but his quixotic impulse to get young Nadya out of there had not the drive of sex behind it. His helplessness emphasised indignation. To that extent she was an extra spur. He had to re-start his life landing any honest job on the way towards Mitrani & Co., Merchant Bankers.

  He spent a further two weeks in Susana’s attic, bullying her into conversation, reading his old newspapers and getting by heart a Romanian grammar which had been kindly stolen for him by a colleague.

  ‘I got on all right with the other fellows,’ he said. ‘A flashy lot of bullies they were. Living on a woman gives a man such a vicious inferiority complex that he has to dress and behave like a professional thug with a dummy gun. Very understandable. Proof that we find it right and natural that a woman should be supported by a man. If it ever comes to real equality of the sexes we’ll be paying the head-shrinkers overtime.’

  Everyone in the Crucea de Piatra knew the pleasant-mannered Sephardic ponce who was forcing himself to speak the language decently. He was a joke, rather like the office clerk who takes business as a farce but is twice as efficient as anyone else when he puts his mind to it. He was often called in to interpret when there was some row with a foreigner flaming enough for a whore to screech and the cockroaches to take cover. That brought in a small personal percentage of any money extorted and occasionally a few tips, so that he was no longer dependent on Susana for a meal ticket and could sometimes take her out to a tavern and pay the bill. When he had to speak English, he said his few words in so uncouth an accent that no one could ever suspect it was his mother tongue.

  These diplomatic efforts to calm down excitement and oil the wheels of fornication led to the approval of the local cop who easily accepted Mitrani’s story that Romanian was coming back to memory from babyhood in Moldavia. It never occurred to him, naturally enough, that a well-trained mind stocked with two Latin languages could get on terms with a third in a matter of weeks.

  ‘Why doesn’t a decent fellow like you believe in Christ?’ he asked.

  Bernardo was quite prepared to put up a convincing defence of Jewry, but the technical terms of theology had not turned up in local conversation or the newspapers. The cop was unlikely to understand them anyway and content to leave spiritual matters to St. Spiridon.

  ‘One believes what one is brought up to believe,’ Bernardo answered. ‘There is no way out.’

  ‘There is, Mitrani. There is.’

  ‘When I pass your priest, he does not see me.’

  ‘Why should he? But English priests are different.’

  ‘What have the English got to do with it?’ Bernardo asked, alarmed.

  ‘There is a Mission to the Jews, so that they may go to heaven like the rest of us. But in my opinion that is not certain. Salvation is only through the Orthodox Church.’

  ‘Not the catholics, too?’

  ‘They worship images and are doomed in the next world.’

  ‘Then they’d better stick together in this one like the Jews.’

  ‘The Mission knows that, Mitrani, and sees that converts are looked after.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘My sister is the concierge.’

  He gave Bernardo the address of the Mission to the Jews, across the River Dâmbovitsa in a district of old-fashioned Romanians, tactfully secluded from the business quarter.

  Bernardo at once appreciated the possibilities. If he allowed himself to be converted, it would reinforce his identity, always assuming he could remain in the shadows and not a public pet of priests. It seemed probable that he could. The mission was one of the kindly eccentricities of the Church of England and of no interest to the Orthodox.

  He cautiously reconnoitred the place, was received by the sister with obvious distaste and directed up to the flat of the Rev. Jacob Polack. He expected some muscular and belligerent Christian, but found instead a neat little figure with a white pointed beard, himself a converted Jew and earnest as a hen sparrow gathering scraps for her nest. There was something odd and endearing about his Anglican dog collar above a dark grey suit. The Semitic features would have better fitted the robes and whiskers of an Orthodox papa, but could never have given such an air of sincere humility.

  The missioner was pleased to be asked for instruction by a Sephardic Jew. He said that they were normally too proud of their history; perhaps if he had spoken Spanish, not Yiddish, he might have had more success. His own background was the Lithuanian pale and Manchester. Seeing that Bernardo’s Romanian was faulty, he asked if he had any English. No, none at all. They settled for French which Polack spoke fluently with a strong German accent.

  Bernardo attended four times a week, pretending to be eager and in fact hurrying to get it over before he was caught out. Polack was shocked by his ignorance of Jewish religion and assumed it was the fault of Morocco and his parents. Bernardo, as a former pupil of Jesuits, was also shocked. His new teacher stuck closely to his evangelical brief, regarding as irrelevant the logic and mysticism of this most complex of religions. At home in the attic, as a distraction from Susana’s bed shaking like a honeymoon hotel with varying standards of skill and enthusiasm, he wondered what kind of traitor he was—at any rate no worse than the odd dozen of Polack’s other converts whom he strongly suspected of changing their beliefs for material advantages. He decided that Rabbi Kaplan would have doubtfully forgiven him, even smiled perhaps. That was a comfort.

  He was duly re-baptised in the presence of a small congregation consisting of some hand-picked converts and ageless Englishwomen—governesses, secretaries and still unmodified wives of Romanians—triumphantly dabbing pale eyes with lace-trimmed handkerchiefs. His godfathers were Polack himself and a clerk at the Legation who had fortunately been busy behind his desk at the time of Bernardo’s visit. And now conclusively and officially he became David Mitrani. Rabbi Kaplan’s dubious identity card was surrendered to the Prefectura which—in these gratifying circumstances—did not question it and issued a new one stating that he was Christian and Romanian citizen by birth.

  He had hoped to keep his conversion secret in the quarter, but that was impossible. The cop, seeing himself as an Instrument of Divinity, proclaimed his success. Nobody else approved, the Jews being disgusted and the Christians resentful that an outcast had managed to get into the club by the back door. Susana did not care what he chose to call himself, but saw right through him as a ponce. He had despised her, she said, and all that stuff about not being her lover because he was her African cousin was as false as he was. She turned him out in a passion of tears and fury; he was temporarily put up in a bare and tiny hostel kept by the Mission for similar family troubles.

  The Rev. Jacob Polack in spite of his humility was no fool when it came to disposing of his converts. He had his lines out in many unexpected quarters, chiefly shops, where the energy of the Jew was most welcome provided he was Christian. The exact nature of Mitrani’s former employment had never been specified. Certainly he had been earning a living in a regrettable district, but a man does what he must. Both the cop and the priest of St. Spiridon—who now felt able to say good-morning—bore witness to his comparative honesty and good influence. On the strength of his languages and his experience—as Polack delicately put it—of certain social evils, Bernardo was offered the job of night porter at the Hotel Principesa. It was a hotel for cabaret artistes and—which Polack had not perhaps realised—of stern respectability. Gentlemen, unless themselves in the profession, were not admitted.

  IV

  Dniester to Danube

  Mr. Brown described his new employment as one step up in the entertainment industry. But no monkey business at all. Any enterprising night porter at the Ritz would have far more chance of making a bit of money by keeping his mouth shut. Still, it was useful experience, he said, and not without its lighter side.

  The artistes left the hotel about ten at night and back they came at four in the morning. What they did in the afternoon was nobody’s business but they couldn’t do it at the Principesa. Bernardo ga
thered from their squirts of conversation that most of them were neither more nor less respectable than a bunch of honest seamstresses saving up for an eventual husband and only unfaithful to that rather shadowy figure of the future when a customer became so infatuated that he might possibly be it.

  And he could become infatuated. They were a handsome lot on the top near-eastern circuit, passing from one Balkan capital to another, then on to Istanbul, Beirut and Alexandria and back on the same route to Budapest. That was the exchange station where the scouts were, the centre of a figure of eight. If a girl were really irresistible in person or performance she might be engaged for the western circuit—Vienna, Brussels, Paris, Madrid and other productive spots where the champagne was not white wine injected with carbonic acid gas and most of the customers would be wearing dinner jackets and stiff shirts.

  While in Bucarest many of these deliciously second-rate cuties stayed at the Principesa. They were of all nations, from Hungarians with the proud bearing and panache of the race to Russian refugees of exquisite manners and melancholy whom one longed to comfort. A most expensive process. So far as the floor show went, they were none of them remarkable; they sang or danced appealingly but the limit of originality was an English hornpipe or a Dutch clog dance, both appearing reasonably exotic along the lower reaches of the Danube.

  Male guests in the hotel were few: generally husbands or dancing partners. Occasionally there would be a well-paid entertainer from the western circuit engaged to pull in new customers who normally preferred a bird in hand to a bird at a cabaret table. The Romanian public did not think much of acrobats and comics but appreciated conjurers. The invisible transfer of property from one person’s pocket to another appealed to them.