Judgment on Deltchev

by Eric Ambler

  ‘Then you see the need for caution. Will you answer the question, please?’

  ‘The reply is not as simple as you try to suggest. The Committee was aware that a proposal was made, but it was not aware that you hid instructions from your Anglo-American friends to make it appear that the proposal came from the Committee.’

  ‘Your answer is that I was authorized by the Committee to make the proposal.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘Let me continue, Minister. If the Committee authorized the proposal and if, as you say, the Anglo-American representatives wished it to be made, will you explain then why they did not immediately accept it?’

  ‘Do not please ask me to explain the actions of the Anglo-Americans.’

  Laughter.

  ‘It is not the actions of the Anglo-Americans I am asking you to explain, but your own account of them.’

  Vukashin turned angrily to the judges. ‘I am here to give evidence, not to answer political riddles. That is enough.’

  ‘You have been very patient. The court thanks you, Minister. The prisoner will be silent.’

  Vukashin left the witness box and sat down. As he did so, Deltchev turned with a pale smile to face the courtroom. ‘The Minister is afraid to answer,’ he said.

  It was at that point that Dr Prochaska made a foolish mistake. He had been standing there impotent and forgotten during this exchange. He was irritated. He was the Prosecutor and yet matters had been taken out of his, the responsible, hands, and an important battle of words had taken place without him. More serious still, the Minister, whom he should have protected, had had the worst of the battle. Now he saw his chance of retrieving not only his own dignity but that of the Minister as well. Never once since the trial opened had Deltchev taken his hands from his pockets, and Dr Prochaska had found the fact irritating. He suddenly thought he saw just how he might humiliate the prisoner.

  ‘Afraid?’ he exclaimed derisively. ‘The Minister is afraid to answer?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘It is not the Minister who is afraid. It is you, Deltchev! No wonder you seek to accuse and discredit the witnesses against you. You are in fear of your life. No wonder you tremble. No wonder you keep your hands in your pockets. Do you think we do not notice? Ah, but the people have eyes, Deltchev. You cannot deceive them for ever. You may disguise your fear in other ways, but your trembling hands you dare not let us see. Come, show us your hands, Deltchev. Or else be silent while justice is done.’

  In the breathless hush that descended, there was one single quickly suppressed giggle and then no sound but the fluttering of the cameras. The Prosecutor had a hard, ugly little smile on his lips. At that moment he was not absurd. Vukashin looked down at his own hands, frowning. Deltchev stood quite still, his face expressionless. He was making up his mind.

  Then he took his hands out of his pockets and held them out, palms downward, in front of him. They shook with a coarse tremor that must have been visible at the back of the court.

  ‘The prisoner’s hands are more truthful than his tongue,’ said the Prosecutor.

  Without a glance in his direction Deltchev put his hands back in his pockets and raised his head.

  ‘I speak,’ he said loudly, ‘to the members of the Diplomatic Corps present here and to the representatives of the foreign press.’

  There was another commotion in the front of the court, and the Prosecutor began to protest to the judges. The interpreter began to translate the protest and I took my earphones off. Others beside me were doing the same. Deltchev had spoken in German.

  ‘You may have formed your own conclusions,’ he went on, ‘about the quality of the evidence that will be given by the Prosecution in this court. In case you are in doubt, this demonstration will convince you. The evidence of my own hands has now been offered against me. I will explain what it is worth.’

  With an elaborately satirical bow in the direction of the diplomatic and foreign-press sections, the Prosecutor abandoned his protest and stood, his arms akimbo and an unsuccessful attempt at a smile on his face, looking up at the ceiling.

  ‘I make no defence of myself in offering this explanation,’ Deltchev was saying. ‘My defence is in the safe hands of the prosecution.’ He smiled faintly. ‘But perhaps you will be interested in this fact. I give it to you merely as a point of interest.’

  He paused and then went on very deliberately, ‘Gentlemen, I am a diabetic and have been so for several years now. That has meant, of course, a careful diet balanced with injections of insulin. The amount of insulin I need is not great — twenty units in the morning and twenty at night. I can, of course, call medical witnesses to prove this. When I was first arrested, the prison doctor was authorized to supply me with insulin. He even increased the injections slightly to compensate for the change in diet. Five weeks ago I was moved to another part of the prison and was not allowed to see the prison doctor. For just over four weeks I have been without insulin. The symptoms of diabetes have therefore returned — thirst, fatigue and other disagreeable manifestations, which I shall not trouble you with. The trembling of my hands is part of my general weakness and debility. If the Prosecutor had asked me to show you my knees, you would have seen that they also tremble.’ He looked round at the prosecutor for a moment and then turned back to us. ‘I think that if he had known of this illness he would not have drawn your attention to it in this way. It is no part of his task to create sympathy for me. I merely ask you to note that he makes wrong deductions even from facts. The fantasies that he will create from the falsehoods his case rests upon I leave to your imagination.’

  Then he sat down.

  The Prosecutor said something quickly to the judges. The centre judge said something in reply. I put the earphones on again and caught the translation.

  ‘The presiding judges rule that the remarks of the prisoner shall not be entered in the record, as they were made in a foreign language not intelligible to the court. The case is adjourned until tomorrow.’

  The court rose.

  When the judges had gone, Deltchev stepped down from the rostrum and with his own guards walked slowly toward the glazed doors. Nobody else in court moved. They watched him. At the door he paused and looked back. Then with a small, friendly nod he turned away again and went on through the doors.

  I looked at Pashik. He was standing stiffly and awkwardly as if caught in the act of rising. He did not seem to notice his discomfort. He looked at me rather strangely. ‘A good man, Mr Foster,’ he said softly, ‘in his way, a great man.’

  But I did not pay much attention to him. Even now I can remember everything I thought during that next half-hour. I was very shocked by what I had seen and heard and full of hatred for the People’s Party regime. I think that if I had met Dr Prochaska in the corridor outside the courtroom I should have hit him. But soon I began to think more reasonably.

  Nobody, I thought, could share the experience I had just had without also sharing my passionate indignation at what was being done in that sunny courtroom. If I could convey the scene with even a tenth of the impact it had in reality, I would arouse a storm of anger that might damage the regime appreciably. And then an idea began to form in my mind of how I might write about the Deltchev trial.

  This, I thought suddenly, was more than just the crooked trial of a politician by his more powerful opponents. Here, epitomized, was the eternal conflict between the dignity of mankind and the brutish stupidity of the swamp. Deltchev, sick and alone, knowing that nothing could save him from a verdict and a sentence already decided upon, was yet prepared to go on fighting for the truth he believed in. Dimitrov at the Reichstag fire trial had fought for his life and won. Deltchev’s life was already forfeit, but he was fighting nonetheless and might win a greater victory. And the fight was of his own choosing. Months back he could have escaped abroad and made the Government’s task easy. He had not done so. Long-forgotten sentences began to run through my mind.

  Will you then flee from well-ordered cities and virtuous men?
And is existence worth having on these terms? Or will you go to them without shame, and talk to them, Socrates? And what will you say to them? What you say here about virtue and justice and institutions and laws being the best things among men? Would that be decent of you? Surely not… Will there be no one to remind you that in your old age you were not ashamed to violate the most sacred laws from a miserable desire for a little more life?… This, dear Crito, is the voice I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of a flute in the ears of a mystic…

  I was deeply moved. I was also beginning to enjoy myself.

  And then I got back to my hotel, and Petlarov was waiting in the corridor.

  We went into my room and I told him what had happened.

  He nodded coolly when I had finished. ‘Oh yes. Poor Yordan. He is certainly not strong. But how foolish of them not to tell Prochaska how the victim was being prepared! But we may expect foolishness. You see, they have always been able to rely before upon the folly of others. Now that they have to rely on themselves, their deficiencies are revealed. Of course an incident like that will make no difference to the outcome of the trial.’

  ‘No, but it will make a great difference to the comments on the trial in the Atlantic countries.’

  ‘The comments of the West did not save Petkov or Mindszenty. I think it is interesting, however, in quite a different way.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Why do you think Yordan made this demonstration? What did he hope to gain by it?’

  ‘He saw an opportunity of hitting back and he took it. Surely, that’s obvious. It was splendid.’

  ‘He saw an opportunity and took it, certainly. What exactly did he say finally — the last two sentences?’

  I had scribbled down Deltchev’s words as he had said them. I read the last two sentences again. ‘ “I merely ask you to note that he makes wrong deductions even from facts. The fantasies that he will make from the falsehoods his case rests upon I leave to your imagination.” ’

  Petlarov showed his white teeth. ‘What a clever lawyer Yordan is!’ he said. ‘Do you not see what he has done, Herr Foster? Oh, certainly he has won the sympathy of the foreign diplomatists and press representatives, and that is very nice; but what else?’

  ‘He made the Prosecutor look a fool.’

  ‘He did more. Consider. He makes the speech in German. Why?’

  ‘Obviously so that he would be allowed to speak. The interpreters didn’t relay what he said, of course. As far as the public was concerned, he was unintelligible. Obviously it was the American and British representatives who mattered to him, and Vukashin and the judges and Prochaska didn’t want to antagonize them unnecessarily by shutting him up. If they don’t care much anyway about Western opinion, they could afford to let him talk.’

  ‘If it was the American and British who mattered, why did he not speak in English? Yordan speaks very good English.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The educated persons of most small nations need a second language to their own. With us it is mostly German. Many of the Party members in that courtroom speak German, and some of them are not unfriendly to Yordan. Those were the persons who interested him. What he wanted to do — and what he has done, perhaps — is to discredit the Prosecution’s evidence in advance.’

  ‘That’s not difficult. It discredits itself.’

  ‘So far, yes. But perhaps Yordan was wiser than we yet know.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘It is quite simple.’ He leaned forward with a chilling smile. ‘You see, Herr Foster,’ he said, ‘some of the evidence against him may not discredit itself. Some of it may be true.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Deltchev’s house was on the edge of the city in an old residential quarter behind the Presidential Park. Petlarov had drawn a sketch map for me of the way there, and after an early dinner I walked to it from the hotel. There was a slight breeze and the air seemed cooler. The main streets and cafes were full of people, the women in their shapeless dresses and cheap wedge shoes, the men in their cloth caps, with their jackets over their arms, and their shirts undone at the neck; but beyond the park, where there were few shops and scarcely any cafes, the streets were almost deserted and the only sounds came from the radios in apartment houses.

  I found the quarter without difficulty. It was off the Boulevard Dragutin; six quiet streets, paved for a short distance from the Boulevard and then ending casually in a hillside wasteland of scrub and tamarisks. The streets were lined with plane trees and with square, solid old houses, each isolated within its own courtyard by a high wall with a heavy wooden door in it. The spaces between the walls of adjacent houses formed narrow lanes, some of which connected parallel streets but mostly were shut off by tall iron gates and choked with wild vines.

  The numbers on the houses were on blue enamel plates over the wall doors, and when I came to the right street I saw that Deltchev’s house must be the last in it. But the setting sun was in my eyes and I did not see the guards outside the house until I was nearly upon them.

  They were standing in the shadow of the plane tree just by the door. The trunk of this tree was scarred and the lower branches were leafless; the grenade of American manufacture must have exploded just by it. The guards’ faces turned toward me as I approached.

  They were in the uniform of what I referred to in my own mind as the ‘military police’, though perhaps ‘gardes mobiles’ would have contained a more accurate comparison. They wore the same grey-green uniform as the courtroom guards; but these had rifles instead of machine pistols, and instead of tunics they had blouses bunched in at the waist by greasy leather belts with ammunition pouches. From a difference in their badges I guessed that they were a Corporal and a Private. They were young, bronzed, and rather stupid-looking. Our eyes met as I came up, and I nodded, but they did not reply in any way or make any movement to intercept me. I stopped by the door, looked up at the plate to confirm that I was at the right house, and then reached up to pull a bell handle bracketed to the wall.

  The next moment I received a violent blow on the shoulder. The shock of it made me gasp. I lurched against the door and twisted round. The Private had his rifle raised to prod me again. The Corporal had his rifle pointed at my stomach, and his finger was on the trigger. I raised my hands.

  The Corporal shouted something and took a pace backwards. I moved away from the door. I started to say in German that I did not understand what he was saying, but he shouted again, and this time I caught the word for ‘papers’. With the heel of my hand I indicated my breast pocket and said, ‘Papieren.’ The Private jabbed the muzzle of his rifle into my ribs. Then the Corporal, stepping forward, tore open my jacket, snatched out my wallet, and stepped smartly away from me.

  It all happened in a few seconds. I was absurdly shaken. I must have looked it, for the Private grinned at me then in quite a friendly way as if my discomfort were a tribute to his efficiency. The Corporal was frowning over my press permit. He looked at the photograph on it and he looked at me. Then he folded the permit, put it back in the wallet and, coming up to me, began to speak very slowly and distinctly, waving the wallet under my nose to emphasize what he was saying. It was clearly an admonishment. I nodded. Then he gave me back the wallet, saluted negligently, and moved away. Behind me the Private stretched up and pulled the bell handle. A bell clanged inside the courtyard. Then he, too, went back to his post under the tree.

  They watched me as I waited, the Private still grinning, the Corporal frowning coldly. My shoulder hurt abominably and I badly wanted to rub it; but a curious shame and perhaps, too, a fear of pleasing them prevented my doing so. I was disconcerted by these unfamiliar and, I could not help thinking, rather childish emotions. I had behaved stupidly and had been roughly treated and humiliated in consequence; but it was no use; my hatred of them welled up like a sickness.

  Then I heard footsteps crossing the courtyard inside: the clacking, slithering footsteps of wooden-soled sandals without heel straps. There was a p
ause and a rattling of bolts. Then the door opened a few inches and an old woman looked out. She had a face like a walnut shell, with woolly grey hair and bright little eyes very deep in their sockets.

  She looked past me to the guards.

  ‘I should like to see Madame Deltchev,’ I said in German.

  She snapped out a reply I did not understand.

  From behind me the Corporal shouted something. I looked round in time to see him raise his rifle threateningly. She snapped again, then very slowly she opened the door. I heard the Private laugh as I went inside.

  The wall of the courtyard was about fourteen feet high and decorated all the way round with big frescoes of pastoral scenes: peasants dancing, a young man wooing a dairymaid, a village wedding. They were crude and conventional like the decorations on Russian toys. The predominant colours were cobalt blue, terracotta and ochre, but in some places the paint had flaked so badly that only a faint discolouration of the stones showed where it had been. The floor of the courtyard was paved with square flags, on which stood potted plants of various kinds, some of them in brilliant flower. Out of a square space in the flagstones grew a big cherry tree. Beyond it, in a corner, there was a neat wood pile, with vine poles leaning against the wall by it.

  The old woman had stopped to bolt the door again, but now she straightened up and faced me grimly, her arms folded, her eyes bright and full of malice. She said something that must have been, ‘Well, now you’re in, what do you want?’ In German I replied that I did not understand. She did not understand that. I got out Petlarov’s letter addressed to Madame Deltchev and gave it to her. She took it in her clawed, arthritic hands and looked without comprehension at the writing. I guessed that she could not read. She looked up at me suspiciously for a moment, then held up a hand for me to wait and clacked away round the side of the house.

  I rubbed my shoulder and looked at the front of the house. It was about twenty feet from the wall, a blank symmetrical facade in grey stone with white painted metal shutters fastened over all the windows. Double steps curved up to the front door, which was flanked by potted azaleas and looked as if it were rarely opened. I heard the old woman’s footsteps on a bare floor inside and a distant murmur of voices. Then for a bit there was silence. I was a small boy again, calling for a friend with rich parents.