‘I don’t believe he’ll stand his new creed very long,’ I said.
‘He hasn’t stood it.’
‘But he was near the top.’
‘Yes. Dangerously near the top. And if he can carry the army with him he could be another Tito. He has gone too far to draw back. It has been win or lose for the last twenty-four hours.
Firefly’s voice made nonsense of fourteen hundred miles. We were in Bucharest, not London. Reception was perfect enough to hear the catch of her breath. She had never learned to breathe as a singer should, uninterested in packing reserves of air into a space already full of the pressure of genius. For the technique of Rumanian, Russian and Magyar songs it was not essential.
I asked him if he was in touch with Vitalianu.
‘Not directly. I just know what is going on – the timing, the personalities. But there will be nothing to tell me who arrests and who gets arrested till the news is made public. And I must know before that.’
There was a break for a propaganda flash. Before giving out the rest of Firefly’s programme, the announcer informed us that she was the world’s most moving interpreter of folk music because she herself was a peasant. She was not. She was the privately educated child of a small capitalist. But the legend was more convenient.
‘That’s why I need you,’ he went on. ‘She can’t hide her mood from me. If I can know that Vitalianu has failed as soon as she knows, there will be agents who’ll have time to cover their tracks. It’s so important that transmitters are standing by to warn them. But we must both be sure. All alone, I might not be – well, objective enough.’
I found his theory far-fetched. Unless she broke down in tears – which would be utterly unlike the Firefly I remembered – it was impossible to judge her mood.
No, it was not, he insisted, not if one had lived for the voice. The outer mood of the entertainer could of course be simulated; the inner mood of the woman could not be. He assured me that any of Firefly’s lovers – how he hated that plural! – could distinguish.
‘But will Vitalianu tell her?’
‘I used to know him very well. Yes, very well. It was through him that I first met her. When he returned from exile, both of them were often in my flat. I became the hopeless lover, straight out of Italian opera’, he added ironically, more to himself than to me. ‘He was such a brilliant, generous fellow. We knew then that war was inevitable. A peasant revolt might have been useful. Vitalianu was too young, but the only leader they would have followed.’
He lectured me on the mentality of traitors. Not the little ones. The real big shots with two loyalties. The kind that terrify governments with the mere thought that they might exist.
‘Think of the strain on him!’ he went on. ‘Given his character, he must hate himself. There’s no piece of himself that he can trust. So he would tell her the main issue. Not details. What would she want with details? But the sharing with her is essential to him. If he couldn’t relax with her and trust her instinct, he’d lose patience, start taking reckless short cuts.’
He underlined Vitalianu’s exhaustion at the end of his politician’s day. Then he would go home to Firefly – his home or hers, with a discreet security agent outside the door – and hang up all his intricate deceptions with his hat. Those two must have been living month after month in that fever of heightened sympathy which the rest of us only experience on the last night before some parting which threatens to be for ever.
The programme ended. I seemed to hear from the echoing studio two light, rapid footsteps before synthetic applause covered the sound.
‘She is impatient to be off,’ he said. ‘Vitalianu is waiting for her – if he is still about.’
That was gross sentimentalism on the doubtful evidence of two steps, and I said so.
‘No, she’s on twice every Wednesday,’ he answered. ‘She will sing again at one our time, eleven their time. Between the two shows they always dine together. That’s the sort of useless little fact I do know. Confirmed by two reliable sources.
‘He would find time for her in a crisis?’
‘If he were sure of army support and winning, he mightn’t. But if he suspected it was his last chance to say goodbye – yes, he would find time.’
He switched the radio off and poured some drinks. Freed of the soft, excitable language, we were back in the world of commonsense geography without any duty to be present at that far-off supper table where the low, urgent voices of Firefly and Vitalianu spoke only for each other. We did not discuss them at all, looking the other way from delicacy, as it were.
Only once did he intrude. We were talking about the unavoidable conflict between economics and liberalism, when he suddenly remarked.
‘There’s no one else like Mihai Vitalianu.’
It fitted; but I suspect that he was not thinking of politics at all, that he meant that no one was so well suited as Firefly to be his consort.
‘Better turn the damned thing on,’ he muttered at last. ‘They don’t always run to schedule.’
We listened impatiently while a dance band played pre-war music. In some other studio Firefly and her gipsy fiddler, the cymbalo and the double bass were standing ready. The announcer, looking at her through his sound-proof window, failed to make his introduction long enough, or else she did not come in on her cue. There was a moment of complete silence.
She opened with a lingering, wavering cry and whipped from the top note straight into a song from the Banat of astonishing speed and vivacity. My companion sat up sharply and insisted that I must notice shrillness in the voice. I couldn’t. I reminded him that he wanted me to tell him when his imagination was out of hand. The song called for excitement and she seemed to be acting it efficiently. Perhaps she was not on full form, but I never appreciated her in music which showed Magyar influence. She was at her best when she tore the heart out of the Rumanian plains.
‘You can’t! There’s no evidence!’ I protested as his hand crawled over the edge of the table on which the telephone was standing.
‘In a match box,’ he answered. ‘I wish I had! There is too much caution in us all. I know he’s finished, I tell you!’
He tore at his long, white fingers as instinct struggled with common sense. There might be too much caution, but the head of a department didn’t, couldn’t ring the alarm along the Danube because a singer was off form. I could not deny that the flames were out, but that was all.
The next song was a doina. She started so artificially that I assumed she was bored and impatient to return to Vitalianu. Up to the middle of the first verse I could see that the expert, too, was doubting his theory.
And then, I suppose, in spite of her armour of blind misery, she realised what she was singing: a lament. It is a thing we have forgotten in the uniformity of our urban life. Lament. There will be a soldier here and there who knows what it means. He may have heard the cry of the bugle, over a lonely burial, follow the spirit into the sharp, foreign air, or listened to the ‘Flowers of the Forest’ while tears, unnoticed, spread over the grim face of the piper.
That was the quality of Firefly’s doina, for she had found in it the expression of her agony. As the voice soared and wailed and broke, I heard – I was in no state to see anything – a meaningless string of code-words and code-names dictated into the telephone. They punctuated the terrible melody of grief, staccato as the sounds of men killing each other in the distance while still you stand by a grave.
Keep Walking
She strolled quickly away from the post box, knowing that the game was up. This was the end, and she was not prepared for it. She had always expected it to come – if it had to come – at home or in the course of some police check. But evidently they had not found out her name. They only knew about the post box and the timing. She would learn how they knew after her second or third interrogation. If she had then any curiosity left. There was nothing for it but to keep walking until those two security agents came alongside and gripped her arms.
She had not given herself away by any change of expression or sudden movement. She could count on that. After dropping the letter in the box she had continued on her way at an even pace. Behind her eyes remained a photograph of the scene. She had time to run it through memory and develop it as she walked.
On the opposite pavement, where usually there was only a handful of women scurrying home to prepare lunch, two men had been talking together. They were in no way remarkable. They might have been two door-to-door salesmen or canvassers comparing notes. It was the greatest luck that she knew one of them by sight; the most abominable luck that she had not spotted him before the letter was posted.
The photograph also showed two more men on her side of the street, looking in a shop window. They might be innocent passers-by but, if they were not, they fell neatly into the composition. One pair would wait until the collection was made from the box; the other pair would make the arrest.
She did not look round. She tried to believe herself a plain, respectable citizen so that neither her walk, her back nor her hands could possibly suggest guilt. Now, what would experienced police agents do? Their case could not yet be quite complete. It would be unshakeable as soon as that envelope at the top of the box was opened. But for the moment? Well, since their suspect appeared unworried and tripping along fairly purposefully, they would tail her; it might be profitable to find out where she was going and to whom she talked.
But they could take no risks of losing her. If she hailed a taxi or jumped on a bus, that would be the end. She could not be allowed to break contact. They would instantly obstruct any move which gave her the slightest chance of escaping.
So keep walking. A harmless human activity. She herself knew very well what a lot of evidence could be extracted from it. Tail a suspect who was walking, tail for an hour, and one could almost tell character, income, the working of digestion and the rising fears.
Her fears. God, it was difficult not to show any! Death was the least. Death was a companion just as present in her personal war as in any public one. What appalled her was the certainty that when at last she died she wouldn’t be recognisable to herself in body or mind. Well, she had always accepted that. Why? The answer was something neutral for half her brain to think about while she kept walking. Patriotism? Democracy? More words! No one ever risked death for anything that couldn’t be expressed in two syllables. Hatred. That was it.
Hardest of all was not to look round. If she did, they might arrest her at once. Her only chance of delaying the end was to show herself cleanly, absolutely unconscious that she was followed.
Having been trained herself in the secret police, she could imagine the messages going back to headquarters by walkie-talkie – or by telephone perhaps, if there were a third person who could leave the hunt to use it.
‘We have got her,’ they would say, ‘but it’s worthwhile finding out her name and where she is going. No, sir, no danger of losing her. She doesn’t know. Couldn’t know.’
Yes, they had to make certain that she was not merely returning to an office nor on any daily routine such as shopping or visiting a café. She very slightly quickened her pace, settling down, so far as pavement and people allowed, to a steady five-and-a-half kilometres an hour. She might be hurrying home, but, if she was, why not take her usual public transport instead of wearing out smart town shoes? So long as they were kept guessing, so long as they could not jump to any conclusion, they would follow.
Direction had been decided for her on leaving the post box. She must not change it too abruptly; she had to appear intent on something. Well, her present course would do. It led straight to the inner suburbs on the east of the city. After twenty minutes she thought it wise to offer them a little diversion. A taxi was approaching. She hesitated as if about to stop it. When the driver began to pull in, she shook her head and walked on. That would give them some conjectures to think about if they were still behind. Were they? She dared not find out. One single suggestion that she was suspicious, and they would no longer take the risk of losing her.
She wondered if they could tell that she was armed. That was not an urgent matter yet, nor likely to be. Still, it was worth a thought. Certainly they could be sure, after such long, detailed observation, if the gun had been in a shoulder holster or a pocket. She doubted, however, if an automatic nestling across the navel could be spotted from behind. They might reasonably assume that someone who might be searched would not be such a fool as to carry one. They would be on their guard of course, but not keeping the question continually in the forefront of consciousness. That might be important.
They had been following for six kilometres now, tiring and inclined to say to hell with the contact to whom she might be leading them. Their keen sense of duty, their strong instinct against running her in at once, ought to be revived. She decided to show more caution as if she were nearing her destination. It would be the first quick glance over her shoulder that they had seen, and therefore important. It would no longer be connected with the post box, left so far behind.
She looked round. She could not spot any followers at all. Had the walk and the discipline been all for nothing? Careful! That could not be assumed yet. She reminded her agonised feet of what was going to happen to them if she allowed herself to be too confident.
She chose a long residential street. There were very few pedestrians. If the hunters were still determined to take no action and stick to the trail, they would have to be very careful. However casual they appeared, they were bound to be out of place and conspicuous. Her experience had taught her how they – if they existed – would arrange that one. It was going to show how relentless the pursuit really was. If they knew their job (and no one knew it better) there ought to be a car moving more or less on parallel lines. As soon as her two shadows were forced to fall too far behind, they would signal the car to take over.
She spotted the car. It drove past in the same direction and parked on the other side of the road. She could not really have said why she was certain it was the car. Perhaps because it did exactly what it should, covering the road she was in and two side streets into which she might turn; perhaps because nobody opened the door at which the driver was ringing or pretending to ring; perhaps the instinct of the hunted.
It was oddly comforting to get her fear back. Now she knew that she had not imagined they were after her. Also she had proof that so far she had decoyed them into believing her movements significant. That report collected from the post box must already have been read. Her guilt was beyond question. Yet they still thought it worthwhile to see where she was going before they struck.
She continued eastwards. She was now passing through a local shopping centre, and the two could safely close up. She longed to confirm that they were still on her trail, but every trick she knew for seeing who was behind her was equally well known to them. Show absolute unconcern, and they would wait. Keep walking, and they had to know the reason why. The view of her steadily moving back must be beginning to hypnotise them.
All the same it was tempting to make a dash for it. Through a house or shop? Into a back garden? The bushes of a park? But she hadn’t a hope and knew it. There would always be a car or two on that parallel course and uniformed police somewhere in the background.
Nearly two hours now. Ten kilometres more or less. To do more in a straight line might not be convincing. They would accept it as normal that she should not take a taxi all the way to her rendezvous, but why not take one part of the way? The weary conversation behind her must have become a debate, one of them in favour of picking her up without delay, the other protesting
against such a waste of the long grind.
So it was time for another sweetener. She looked at her watch and began to stroll more gently. Round two blocks and back to her starting point. She saw the car again. That was careless of them. It confirmed that they had never detected any hint that she was on her guard.
Again she looked at her watch and made a gesture of impatience, hardly perceptible but they wouldn’t miss it. She started to stride out at a good six kilometres an hour towards the outskirts of the city, and allowed that hypnotising back view of her to show some anxiety.
She knew where she was going and when she meant to arrive. There might be a hope, just a slight hope, if the same two obstinate men continued on the job. Probably they would. After all their trouble, they would ask permission to carry on. Headquarters would be very impressed indeed if they could follow their suspect across the whole city and out of it and discover her contact in the end. There was little point in substituting fresh agents for the two who by now were familiar with her character.
The real difficulty was not these two, but their unknown colleagues. The field. The rest of the hunt. Some occupation must be found to delay them. There was a newspaper seller ahead on the other side of the road. That would do. A shop would not. If she entered any sort of shop, it would break the spell. She crossed the road, bought two papers almost without slowing her stride and walked straight on, feeling sorry for the newsvendor who was sure to be investigated in case more than a coin had passed between them.
She rolled the papers up as she walked, but had trouble in keeping them rolled. She needed two rubber bands or strips of gummed paper. She hadn’t got either. A couple of stamps were the only available means. And who the devil would take something from a handbag and stick it on rolled newspapers without stopping? Well, but she must not stop, not on any account. They would have to work it out for themselves. Perhaps she was in a tearing hurry. Perhaps it was all a part of some new, interesting technique which would fascinate their curiosity.
Days of Your Fathers Page 4