by Paul Bailey
‘Aren’t you?’
‘We are not. It is my belief, if I may be serious, that Communism is an impossible concept – an impossibly good concept. Mere human beings cannot be trusted with it. It is too good for them.’
‘I assume you have escaped from Romania. How did you get out?’
‘Ways, means. There are ways and means, not all of them ingenious.’
‘And yours were?’
‘Mine were ordinary. Mine were simple-minded.’
‘No details? Or is that going to be sufficient, sufficient Virgil?’
‘No details. Sufficient, yes.’
‘Take some nourishing salad.’
The appearance, minutes afterwards, of an apple pie, warm from the oven, caused Felix Crozier to exclaim, ‘Your masterpiece, Derek. This is your quintessentially English masterpiece. This is what I’ve denied myself for most of my life. And with lashings and lashings of cream as well. How could I have lived without this?’
‘The time for the evacuation of sheer nonsense has come round again, alas. You lived without apple pie with lashings of cream because you very sensibly understood that your willowy shape was your fortune, along with your profile and the various enchanting attributes that were yours, Crozier, and yours alone.’
‘I have a scrapbook upstairs, Kitty darling, that Derek’s helped me put together. It’s very bulky. It contains the best pictures of your terrible daddy from way back when. There I am, the epitome of the English gentleman, in naught but the smartest magazines and more often than not on the cover. And all my women are in it, except Eleanor.’
‘Why isn’t Nelly included?’
‘Two reasons, Kitty dearest. One is that I don’t seem to have a photograph of her, and the other is – and I’m serious, I’m serious – I respect her too much to place her in their company.’
‘That’s considerate of you. She’s in Egypt at present.’
‘Is she? Rather her than me. No, Eleanor isn’t in. It kicks off with my Muriel days, then there’s my Linda days – dear God, the ballets and operas and art shows and plays and concerts I had to endure for Linda – then it goes on to my Joan days and into my Carol days. Susan and Peggy are in there somewhere, but they were briefer –’
‘Their days were numbered, Crozier?’
‘In a manner of speaking, Derek. The fortnight with Barbara merits a few beach snaps and it ends, the scrapbook, with a picture Derek says gives him the shivers. It’s one of the last woman, and she is the last, I involved myself with – the dreaded ST, who killed off the old Adam in Felix Crozier after a single night of love.’
‘S and T are not the lady’s initials, Kitty. They represent an abbreviation of Silicone Tits, the sobriquet Crozier gave her when he had recovered from the shock of encountering them.’
‘They were cold to the touch, I swear to you, Kitty. I thought I was fondling light bulbs, gigantic light bulbs. They bruise a person, too.’
‘ST is responsible, in a circuitous fashion, for the Crozier and Harville partnership. I had agreed to spend a year in California factoting for a Mr Landau, the least parsimonious of men, at his opulent mansion in Bel Air. ST and her ageing beau were among those invited to Mr L’s summer ball – their first and last public appearance together. We soon identified ourselves, Crozier and I, he by observing “You’re the so-and-so who winked at me”, I by responding “The very same”. Over lunch the following Sunday I told him that I had purchased a quasi-Tudor cottage in the rolling English countryside. He expressed envy. I was persuaded, the longer we chatted, that he would make passable company for me – and that is why the recently bejowled Crozier is sitting where he is, waiting to be offered another portion of apple pie.’
‘I tell you what I’m looking forward to, dear darling Kitty – well, no, not exactly looking forward to, “looking forward to” sounds too gloomy in the circumstances; “looking forward to” isn’t quite right, and yet I am looking forward, in one sense, to it, and that’s dying in England. There’s a part of me that’s looking forward to being boxed up in solid English wood and lowered into English earth. I shan’t be able to hear them, of course, but the thought of good old hymns like “Abide With Me, Fast Falls the Evening Whatsit” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” being sung by the choir and congregation is very reassuring and heart-warming. Yes, and heart-warming. There’s a lovely country church across the fields yonder with a peaceful churchyard full of family graves, some of which have been standing for centuries, and that’s where I’ve decided I want to take my eternal rest. I shan’t be able to hear him, of course, but the vicar, who has a pleasant – not to say melodious – voice, will send me off with the ashes to ashes, dust to dust speech, and I’m sure he’ll deliver it, from what I’ve heard of him, quite, quite beautifully. I visit the churchyard when the weather’s fine, and I sit on the wall and I think to myself how I’ll be lying there, in my own precious plot, with the four English seasons coming and going, going and coming.’
‘And friendly Master Robin Redbreast will call on you every winter, and the cheery cuckoo will serenade you with a special rendering of his song each spring, and nary a pigeon will shit on your stone. What a mawkish outpouring, Crozier. Heart-warming? In your case there isn’t one to warm. Why is it that the most egocentric of our benighted species are so often the most – the most repellently – sentimental?’
‘Yes, why is it?’ Felix Crozier chuckled as he spoke. ‘Why oh why oh why?’
Soon Derek Harville was chuckling too, and then the companions were joined in hooting, honking laughter.
They are like a pair of satyrs, Kitty Crozier thought, and had a vision of them both with horns and furry legs and cloven hooves. It was scarcely more fanciful than the reality her startled ears and eyes were hearing and seeing, and telling her she must believe.
He journeyed at night, when sleep was elusive, spurred on by the prospect of reaching Italy; by the possibility of talking easily to strangers in a language as familiar to him as his own. He craved those familiar words, the words of streets and squares and public gardens, the words of the quotidian life he tried to celebrate and honour in his poetry. He often rushed towards them.
He had few words in this country.
On the third morning of his seeming freedom he was almost lured into a village by the smell of newly baked bread. His stomach announced its state of emptiness to him with a noise that signalled happy anticipation of being quickly filled and silenced. He watched the red-faced woman arranging the loaves on a rickety table outside her modest one-windowed house. His hunger, the hunger he had not assuaged by feeding on tufts of wild herbs or bitter red and black berries, advised him to approach her. He would have no difficulty making her understand that he needed to buy a loaf, but what money could he use for the purpose? It was too risky, this early in his travels, to offer her one of the notes Radu Sava had amassed for his escape. She might look askance at an American dollar, and grow suspicious and alert her customers to his presence.
He went back into the woods, away from the still tempting, still powerful aroma, away from the loaves gleaming golden in the sunlight. Although he was hungrier now he walked on with a willed determination.
He heard the stream before he saw it. He stopped and drank. Then he squatted nearby, and noticed that the stool the berries and sage had formed was coming out of him in tiny pellets similar to those left everywhere by the forest’s nocturnal animals. If there were trackers on his path they would not be led to him by his droppings, which constituted – he smiled at the notion – his sole means of disguise. He was indistinguishable, for the time being, from the rat, the weasel, the mouse, the stoat.
He drank again, and took off the shirt, the trousers, the underpants and the runner’s shoes he had borne with him across the Danube. He doused his tired body in the cool, trickling water. He washed his blistered, blackened feet. He found a spot the sun was warming and, using his bag as a pillow, lay down and attempted to rest.
When he awoke his f
lesh was burning. He assumed he had slept for two or maybe three hours, since it was now the middle of the day. He put on his clothes, slaked the thirst that sleeping had induced and set off in the direction suggested by the crude map his troubled but envious friends had prepared for his benefit.
He knew there was a town ahead, which he would be foolhardy to enter. He was not yet far enough from the border, from the men – and women – who were eager to do business with the guards whose lights had failed to pick him out as he swam to Yugoslavia. Perhaps the shot that surprised the catchable falcon had met its target: another swimmer, perhaps, whose successful capture, half-alive or dead, might ensure the present safety of the renegade poet. Perhaps, perhaps: perhaps allowed of no certainties; perhaps was not to be trusted.
He came to a clearing and realised he would soon be at the very edge of the forest. He slowed his pace and moved cautiously. Then, as he left the protective trees behind him and took several wary steps into the field, there occurred the second of those events that Dinu Psatta, in Rome, would deem his miracles. A man was sitting on a stone, calmly looking at him.
The man greeted him in words Virgil Florescu could barely understand. I shall have to run, he thought, I shall have to turn round and dart off like a hare. But he didn’t run, even as his brain was insisting that he should. He remained transfixed instead, because the man was inviting him to eat.
‘Branko,’ said the man, pointing at himself. ‘Nom. Name.’
‘Virgil. Nom. Name.’
They shook hands.
His fear suddenly gone, his feeling of panic replaced by one of strange secureness, he sat down on the grass in front of the man called Branko.
Branko had salami, a piece of orange-coloured cheese and bread.
He indicated, with what he hoped was a clownish expression of distaste, that his belly would not be pleased with the slice of salami Branko had cut off for him.
Branko snatched at a clump of grass, pressed it into his mouth, chewed it, spat it out and said ‘Vous? You?’
‘Oui. Yes.’
Branko removed the slice of salami from the tip of his knife and ate it appreciatively. ‘Moi. Me,’ he said, pointing at himself again, at his own strong, sturdy body – by this means implying that his strength and sturdiness were the result of his liking for meat. He was proud of his chest and stomach, and glanced sadly, but not unkindly, at Virgil’s skinny, bony frame.
He acknowledged the regretful glance, with its implication that he, Virgil, ought to be stronger, healthier, by pulling a clown’s face. It’s my lot in life, Branko – this puny chest, this flaccid stomach; it’s what I have to bear, with humour, with patient acceptance, but mostly with humour.
Branko nodded and shrugged, catching the clown’s drift. ‘Virgil,’ he said, hacking at the loaf and passing him a chunk of it.
The bread was grey and stale, very much like that he had waited in line to buy each morning in Bucharest. It was bread, even so, and because it was hard he could not wolf it down. He broke the chunk into pieces, savouring them one at a time, softening them with saliva.
‘Vous. You,’ said Branko, handing him the cheese.
'Non. No,’ he replied, and had to resort to the limited language of signs and pulled faces and pointed fingers they had forged between them. His mime conveyed to Branko the message that they must share the cheese and Branko in turn was adamant that it was for him, Virgil, alone.
‘Vous. You. Oui. Yes.’
‘Merci. Thank you.’
The cheese was bland and lacking in flavour, a processed Communist cheese of the kind the Conducãtor and his consort would not have at their table – the table that was blessed with Brie, Gorgonzola, Camembert. No, this cheese was for them, the cake-eating mob beyond the gates. He ate it, though, with a delight he did not have to feign. It tasted good because of the generosity of the smiling man who had given it to him; it tasted of selflessness, of kindness.
‘Beer,’ said Branko, producing two bottles from his sack. ‘Bon beer. Good beer.’ There was a bottle opener attached to his versatile knife. ‘Vous. You. Virgil.’
It was good beer and he had to stop himself gulping it, from drinking it as he had drunk the water in the stream. He swallowed it as slowly as he could and chastised himself for wishing, fleetingly, that Branko had supplied him with a glass. He wanted to sip this beer, not have to swig it. Want, want: why should he want more from his benefactor? Had he slept longer in the forest, had he chosen a different path, he might not – no, might never – have chanced upon Branko, or, indeed, anyone like him.
Yet Branko, to Virgil’s astonishment, did have more to offer. There was a third bottle – the last, a sigh informed him. ‘Vous et moi. You. Me,’ Branko explained. They would drink it together; they would share now the ‘bon beer’. Branko drank first, then wiped the top of the bottle with his sleeve before passing it to ‘bon Virgil’, who copied ‘très bon, Branko’. The ritual once established, they continued until the beer was finished.
Branko stood up and mimed the act of digging, to tell ‘bon Virgil’ it was time to return to work. He put the bottles and the remainder of the salami in his sack, which he tied with string. He put out his arms and so did Virgil and the two embraced, Virgil’s stubble grazing Branko’s cheek.
‘Goodbye, Branko. Merci. Thank you.’
‘Vous et moi. You. Me.’ He pretended to eat, to drink. ‘Bon. Good. Beer. Bon beer.’
‘Goodbye. Au revoir.’
He watched Branko walk down the field towards a building in the distance he supposed must be a farm. Branko turned and waved, and he waved back. He waited for the gracious man to disappear from sight, and then he picked up his bag and resumed his journey.
‘Your father is not so terrible,’ he said, ending the silence that followed their love-making.
‘He’s terrible enough. That’s always been his word – “terrible”. He thinks that by using it, by making it plain that he knows how terrible he is, he is somehow apologising to me.’
‘He is not so bad.’
‘It’s as if I don’t need to see him again,’ she said brightly. ‘Now that he’s happy at last. Now that he has the devilish Derek to care for him.’
‘That man who is Derek is his own creation, Kitty. He speaks an English I do not hear on the lips of the people I work with or the people I listen to in London. He is presenting Derek to the world, which is his stage. He is not so bad either, whoever he is. He is diverting.’
‘I suppose he is.’
She lay there, with Virgil curled about her, and spoke no more of the father she felt she did not have to pity any longer. The vain daddy of the past – the elegant, handsome victim of demanding wives; the improbable husband and impossible parent who, on his rare meetings with his one fond daughter would send her flickering signals of the discomfort he was undergoing with the inevitable new woman – was hardly to be detected in the present Felix Crozier. He was vain still and would die vain, with a convenient mirror by his deathbed to reflect his last moments. But the slightly desperate man of the signals was gone and with his departure – this was the revelation that came to her there, in the dark – yes, with his departure went a measure of the pitying love he had inspired. It was only a measure, because the past of her daddy, his Pretty Kitty and Baby Cordelia, remained the past, not to be obliterated.
‘I might not even attend my father’s English funeral,’ she told her sleeping lover. ‘With the hymns and the sermon and the beautifully spoken words. I might even give it a miss.’
The afternoon heat and Branko’s beer were making him drowsy, but for the moment there was nowhere he could safely stop. He hadn’t completely skirted the town – the ruin of an ancient church was visible and he could hear, faintly, the excited noise of children at play. He walked on.
He walked till dusk, over fields and along country roads and lanes, with the curious energy an anxious mind bestows on a tired body. He was conscious of being stared at by the few people he passed and ke
pt his gaze averted whenever he saw someone approaching. But it was the concerted stare of a group of men, who had ended their conversation abruptly as he came in view, that caused him to feel terror. His hot sweat became instantly cold and a rank smell filled his nostrils. His feet were suddenly heavy beneath him and each step he took to get beyond the stare, beyond the sheer intensity of it, had to be calculated, planned. He knew he had achieved his immediate purpose when he heard their mocking laughter behind him. He guessed that they were calling him a lunatic.
(Dinu Psatta would be amused by this episode when his friend recounted it to him on one of the many steps leading up to Santa Maria d’Aracoeli. ‘Not one of your miraculous escapes, Virgil. You should have returned their stare. They were simple country folk, probably. They were harmless. They hadn’t seen your strange like before. That is my interpretation.’)
The light was already beginning to fade when he saw the dilapidated cattle shed by a bend in the road. He found himself being unwary, so acute was his desire for rest, and went inside. The door was gone, but most of the roof was intact and from the part that was least decayed there was coming a steady, gentle sound of snoring – barn owls, he realised, enjoying the last of their day’s sleep. He ought to have been afraid, for, as he prepared to lie down in a corner, he had to clear away innumerable cigarette stubs, a couple of cigarette packets and a used contraceptive. He was in a meeting place for lovers, and it was a warm evening and they might appear at any moment.
He awoke in darkness. The owls had left for work. He stood up and stretched his limbs. He was aware that he was filthy and dusted himself down as best he could with the backs of his dirty hands. He pissed on the grass behind the shed and renewed his walk to beckoning Italy.
As he walked that night, he spoke – in a quiet voice, under his breath – those poems, in a jumble of languages, he had memorised. He began with the white trees, the black trees of George Bacovia – a poet not admired by Constantin Florescu, nor by the young intellectual – and then the souls invoked by Blaga were briefly mingled, and here was Lorca sorrowing that his brain was stained with ink, and Ruth was standing in tears amid the alien corn, and the Arab without a country was dying in Paris, and suffering was taking place while someone else was eating, and Rimbaud’s Ophelia was beautiful like the snow, and Ovid’s Corinna was dressed only in a long, loose gown … The ghosts were gathering at Pascoli’s hearth in the morning light in a narrow village street and a man was addressing him.