by Ann Bridge
“How long did that go on?” she asked abruptly.
“Oh, till I was thirteen, after the end of the War and Versailles, when Poland was free again. Later, before that, when I had already gone to school and learned to read—in two languages!” he said with a little grin—“my Mother taught us Polish history. From Sienkiewicz, and others. We had to learn it all by heart, for we understood by then that it was not safe to take notes, though she always managed to keep a few books tucked away somewhere. My Mother knew a great deal of history, and of literature too—she taught us to say masses of poetry by heart.”
“I expect learning things that way, you paid a lot more attention than most children do in school,” Hope mused.
“Yes, I am sure we did. Everyone loves forbidden fruit, and especially children.”
They went on strolling to and fro in the gallery beyond the flower-stalls, Hope questioning and listening, Stefan talking about Poland, till a clock somewhere out of sight boomed out the hour of noon.
“Gracious goodness, it’s 12 o’clock, and I haven’t bought a thing!” the girl exclaimed. “And I have to lunch with my parents out of town today. I must hurry and get something.” She turned back towards the flower-stalls—but her sudden sense of time and urgency brought all her distress and vexation at his delayed departure, which she had forgotten for the time being, flooding back on her.
“Well, I suppose you’ll let me know when you do go—if ever you do!” she muttered with asperity, pausing before a stall and beginning to pick over the small bunches on it, with fingers that trembled a little.
“But of course—Litka can ring you up, or one of us can leave a note. Just once more I think it would be safe for you to come round. We will combine something,” he said.
Those words “just once more” brought the tears to her eyes, and that in itself increased her irritation. Just once more, to sit in that dim shabby room and talk to them all! Who would ever have thought that this would come to mean so much to her, to be sitting with people who had been, only a little while ago, some vague Polish strangers?
“Well, it’s normal to say goodbye,” she said bitterly—continuing, he noticed, to bargain with her usual competence even through her distress. She moved on to another stall before he could answer, piling bunches into her basket: so pretty, so skilful, so sweet—and so manifestly unhappy. The young man was greatly moved, greatly drawn to her, as he followed her charming and elegant figure from stall to stall. Only what had he to give or to offer, to someone like her—rich, used to luxury and ease, affronted by the very aspect of danger and duty? No, that was unfair; Stefan was no fool, and he guessed, rightly, that her anger was not simply due to American “hustle”—his own heart told him its secret cause. But still, what had he for such as her—a homeless, propertyless expatriate on the run? Nothing—nothing at all! It was all folly, this loudness with which his heart spoke at the sight of her: the Winter Princess in the grey fur coat and cap, her basket rapidly becoming as full of flowers as Blessed Saint Elisabeth’s kirtle.
All the same he had to make some reply to that last bitter crack of hers; and he was too emotional, really what the French call too émotionné, to make it as calmly as his reason and his sense of the facts dictated. As she put the last bunches into her basket—at the stall where the old woman had originally greeted her—and moved on towards the head of the iron staircase, he came up and put his hand on her arm.
“Very dear Miss Hope—” and then he halted, held up for lack of anything suitable to say.
“Well, what?” She still spoke tartly.
“Do you not think that I, too, shall wish to say goodbye?—and yet wish that I need not say it, that I need never say it?”
That was altogether too much for Hope, just then.
“Oh, don’t!” she said, on a note that was almost a sob. “Oh dear Stefan, don’t. What’s the use? And I must rush. Oh, the Hell with everything!” she exclaimed, with a sort of childish helplessness, and turned to go. But now his hand tightened on her arm, and held her fast.
“No—not the Hell with us; and never the Hell with you! You do not know yet what you are, nor how good you are. But I know, because I am older. Heaven with you, now and always! I shall pray that for you as long as I live.” He took her hand, peeled back the soft glove a little way, and kissed her on the wrist.
“God bless you. You will hear from me,” he said, and turned and ran ahead of her down the iron stairs. Slowly, she followed, dabbing at the tears which ran down her face. She was checked by another hand on her arm.
“Lady! Lady! Your flowers!—you were leaving them behind. Here they are”—and an old woman thrust two pots into her hands. In the stress of their parting Hope and Stefan had both entirely forgotten to pick up the freesias.
7
During the next three days Hope again heard nothing. She found herself living now in a curious secret world, based on Stefan and the other inmates of the Penzio: a world of danger and emotion, where “straight miracles” happened; a world whose intensity made her daily life and occupations seem colourless and insipid. Her parents, she felt, and all her American friends lived on another planet to the world she shared with the Moranskis. But on the following Tuesday those two worlds suddenly merged, there in her parents’ flat, in a most unexpected fashion.
Mrs. Kirkland was giving one of her small luncheons—very popular, always, because she was so friendly, Hope so pretty, and the food and drink invariably so good. Bill Hershey was there, the Counsellor from the French Legation with his wife, a couple of Hope’s Hungarian schoolmates, rather unfledged and giggly little Countesses; two almost equally unfledged secretaries from the American Legation, and Count Tibor. As usual they had drinks in the little morning-room, and then moved in to lunch, where the table was still gay with the flowers which Hope had bought, with unseeing tear-blinded eyes, at the Central Market with Stefan. She had, by persistence, taught the servants to keep the dining-room radiators turned off between meals, so that her flowers should last—Mrs. Kirkland complained that this made the room chilly, and usually came in, as today, with a little mink cape over her shoulders; but Hope got her way.
Over the meal the talk, to begin with, followed the usual line of diplomatic-American exchanges: concerning dancing at the Arizona, and the latest exploits of Mme Arizona’s fox; concerning other dances on the Margit-Insel, and what the Germans had written with their partners’ lipsticks on the curved wall behind the bandstand, past which one danced on a revolving platform—anti-British slogans, which the more daring pro-British Hungarians crossed out with their partners’ lipsticks. It was all very youthful and harmless, and a month before it would have amused Hope and held her interest, it would have been her world; now, with that other secret world of her own to live in it seemed jejune and pointless—lipsticked slogans weren’t so much, compared with the realities of police dogs on the Green Frontier. She sat rather silent, only talking when she had to, comparing the faces about her with the faces in the Penzio, with Stefan’s face, and thinking again how much less alive they seemed.
But towards the end of lunch her attention was caught by something the Frenchman was saying across the table to her Father—the Kirklands followed the continental habit of the host and hostess sitting in the centre, not at the head and foot of the table, so that the diplomat seated on Mrs. Kirkland’s right, was almost opposite Mr. Kirkland.
“Yes, there was quite an affray yesterday near Eger, where one of those Polish internment camps is situated. A camion full of Poles was shot at, and I understand that several people were wounded.”
“What on earth were they shooting up Poles for?” Mr. Kirkland asked in surprise. “It’s been their policy all along to wink at that. I heard the other day that the figure of the ones they’ve let slip out since those 50,000-odd officers and men were interned here in the winter of ’39 is around 35,000.”
One of the American secretaries put in his oar.
“It was a Deuxième Bureau police c
ar, Mr. Kirkland—at least that’s what I was told.”
“It could only be them,” said Count Tibor. “Our own people would not do it.”
Mrs. Kirkland found that she too had a small oar to put in, and did so.
“But if people, soldiers I mean, are interned by a neutral country, don’t they have to stay interned? I’m surprised at what you say, John; do you really mean that thirty-five thousand Poles”—she gave the figures great emphasis—“have been allowed to escape? I can’t understand that. And where did they go?”
The Frenchman answered her.
“Till last June, they went to Italy, and on to France—to form Polish divisions to continue the fight for their country’s freedom. But since Italy came into the war—” And then he paused, discretion at last breaking in. His new chief had been appointed by the Vichy Government; he had to be careful what he said.
“Now they cross into Yugoslavia and get down through Greece or Turkey to Palestine, and then go on to Egypt—I gather the British have formed, or are forming, a Polish Division there,” said the American secretary who had spoken before. “Some still go on to England, too, don’t they Armand?”
The Frenchman confined himself to a nod in reply.
“But why has the Hungarian Government been winking at this? That’s what I can’t understand,” Mrs. Kirkland persisted. “Your people are usually so correct,” she said, turning to Count Tibor—really she spoke with a complimentary intention, but the young man frowned. Mr. Kirkland felt obliged to intervene.
“Look, Alice, what does this country owe the Germans? Nothing—not one damn thing! But the Hungarians have always had a friendship for the British, and they have it still, Versailles or no Versailles—and the British for them; weren’t they the first country in the world after England to have a proper Parliament, on the English model?”
“Yes—and so few people know how soon after,” put in Count Tibor, appeased. “It was only some sixty years later. People call us feudal; but democracy was an English invention, and we were the first to imitate it, with our elected Lower House.”
“That is so,” said Mr. Kirkland. “But a Parliament apart, I see no reason why this country should strain its economy guarding and feeding 50,000 men, when they want to go, and the British would be glad to have them, just to please the Germans; 50,000 mouths are a lot to feed—and there are all those civilian camps full of Polish women and children too.”
“It is a strain,” Count Tibor agreed.
“But what I’ve never been quite clear about is who does the actual running,” Mr. Kirkland went on. “Do you know, Spencer?” he asked of the young diplomat. “Not Hungarians, surely?”
“Oh, no, Mr. Kirkland, Poles. Poles with Polish trucks, terrible old things, tied together with knitting-wool! They drive in with what looks like supplies, vegetables or flour or something —maybe they do have some edibles on board—and then they shoot out, bouncing the gate-guards, with twenty or thirty men loaded up. How they get to the frontier with those crazy machines beats me; but they’re marvellous drivers, and they have the brass and the guts of the devil himself.”
Mr. Kirkland was still not satisfied.
“Yes, Spencer, but who are these Poles with Polish trucks? Why aren’t they interned themselves?—or are they all over military age?”
“Well, judging by what they do, I’d say they were not,” Spencer Westerman drawled, grinning broadly. “Maybe octogenarians could keep those trucks on the road, and drive them without lights at night to the frontier on dirt by-roads—but you’d hardly expect them to! No, this whole place is crawling with refugee Poles—perhaps some of them are really civilians, though they’d have a job to prove it, I fancy—and I gather they’re the ones who do it.”
“They couldn’t of course, unless it had been winked at,” said Count Tibor, who seemed quite complacent about his country’s un-neutral behaviour, which so worried Mrs. Kirkland.
“Yes, Tibor; but it isn’t so easy any more,” Bill Hershey now put in. “The Germans are beginning to clamp down on all that; they’ve started up their damned Deuxième Bureau, which is really just a branch Gestapo, mostly staffed by Arrow Cross boys, I gather; and the Bureau is making life pretty awkward for the Polish refugees here. It isn’t your Government’s fault; they’ve been very courageous, I consider, and they’ve done a swell job, but they can’t help themselves any more. The pressure’s getting too strong. I think Teleki has stood up to the Germans marvellously—but you must remember that his capital is only three-and-a-half hours’ car-run from what is, effectively, the German frontier.”
Count Tibor, who had used precisely the same argument to his host only a few weeks before, almost audibly purred. Hope was listening, with all her ears; she was alarmed by what she heard, and suddenly suspicious. This racket of getting Poles out of camps was news to her; were her Poles in on it? Was that perhaps the sudden “job” that Stefan and Jurek had gone off to do when they failed to come and meet her at the Sörözö after seeing Dr. Kraljic? Her disappointment that day had been so keen, the long wait so painful, that it had eaten deeply into her.
But Mrs. Kirkland’s thirst for knowledge was still insatiable. “Now Bill, what is this Arrow Cross you speak of? I never heard of that.”
“Why Alice,” Mr. Kirkland protested, “you must have heard of the Szállascists, the Hungarian Nazis?”
“Yes dear, I have heard of them. Aren’t they those very disagreeable people who threw blood all over the front of the British Legation, not long ago?”
Everyone laughed, and Count Tibor exclaimed—“Too right, Mrs. Kirkland! And did you hear what the Minister’s wife said to the Chief of Police, when he went up to apologize? She stood in the street with him, looking at those horrible red stains—the Szállascists had filled their pockets with bottles of bullocks’ blood from the slaughter houses, you know, and then threw them at the house. There were six great smears on the façade, and she said, pointing—‘Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India—and that little one is England! They have mapped out the whole Commonwealth.’ Then she and her husband went off to the cinema. That is the English!”
“Tibor, you know a lot,” Bill Hershey guyed him.
“Yes, I do, I think it is fun to know—and educative, actually. It is the inside of history, the details of the way these things happen; and it is a pity to live in the middle of history and not to know all one can about it. And I like the English, they are so imperturbable: as we are not. Nor you!” he rapped out at Hershey.
“But still nobody has told me what the Arrow Cross really is,” Mrs. Kirkland complained. (She often found that complaint stimulated conversation.)
“Alice it’s just another name for the Hungarian Nazis, led by this man Szállasi, who is really an Armenian,” her husband informed her. “Their badge is a cross with barbs on the ends, like the barbs on arrows—that’s why it’s called the Arrow Cross. And the party, as Bill says, is mostly recruited from the Swabian Germans.”
“Who were planted here as colonists under the Empire, to people the districts that were depopulated by the Turks,” Tibor Zichy added. “You know that huge areas were left without a living soul in them.”
“I don’t know that it was so good putting in Germans; they still talk German of a sort, and they seem to feel German,” said Mr. Kirkland.
“No, it was not so good. But few people look three or four centuries ahead.”
The luncheon, as was usually the case in Budapest, was prolonged; to Hope it seemed interminable. The moment the last of her guests had departed Mrs. Kirkland went to her room to rest, assisted by two aspirins; forgetting for once—so exhausted was she by too much food and too much conversation—to ask what her daughter was going to do with herself. And Hope, too wrought up to pay any attention to Stefan’s warnings, pattered off at once to the Penzio; only at the last moment she did think to put on her dark cloth coat instead of the so “noticeable” grey lambskin, remembering the exhortations of the horn-faced
woman in the Sörözö.
Litka opened the door instantly, at her tap, an eager expression on her face; when she saw who her visitor was a look of disappointment took its place, too plain to be mistaken. “Ah, it is you,” she said, and called over her shoulder—“No, it is just Mademoiselle Hope—” to her Mother. Neither of the young men was there. Mme Moranska, who had risen as the door opened, greeted the girl with her usual courtesy, but it was plain that both she and Litka were upset about something, and the reason soon emerged.
“I thought it might be Jurek,” the old lady said, sinking back into her chair; “you will excuse me if I sit, I am a little tired today.” Indeed her small old face was pale, almost grey; she looked quite ill.
“I am so sorry,” Hope said. “Is anything the matter?” she asked gently, sitting down beside Mme Moranska.
“Jurek has not come back yet”—Litka answered for her Mother. “He was away last night—he often is, for his work; but usually he is back by breakfast-time, or soon after. But today he has not returned at all—and now it is after four.” Litka did not look ill, as her Mother did, but her face was equally disturbed.
Today for the first time Hope could make a fairly good guess at what the “work” was which frequently kept young Hempel away from home all night; driving 35,000 Poles along dirt roads to the frontier must have meant quite a lot of trips for someone! But a sharper anxiety made her ask quickly—“And Stefan? Is he away too?”
The use of the Christian name made Litka look rather keenly at the American girl—she had never referred to him as “Stefan” before.