Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

  In those days, with Yugoslavia’s sharply controlled currency and economy, life in Zagreb was ridiculously cheap for a foreigner with sterling to convert into dinars. For the equivalent of ten pence each Marija and I had the best cinema seats, and twice that sum took us out dancing, at the University Club or a student café, with spicy kebabs, wine and accordion music.

  We were joined by her friends and I became a part of the city, an almost invisible foreigner (for there were no tourists in the city then), picking up some of the language as the autumn came, leaves falling lemon yellow in the light – embarking on a love affair and a political conversion at the same time, the first very much part of the second.

  But this was not quite so as far as Marija was concerned. Neither she nor her parents were Titoists. Quite the opposite. Like the majority in the north they were Catholic and Croatian – and strongly nationalist in the latter cause, for the family had come from the old Hapsburg Catholic bourgeoisie, when Croatia had been a province of the empire and Zagreb had always looked north to Vienna for its religious, intellectual and material sustenance. And even farther north to England. Marija’s parents, for instance, when I sometimes went with her in the afternoons to their dark, heavily furnished flat overlooking Strossmayer Square, always served up an English tea with Earl Grey’s best.

  Thus it was Marx and Cupid rampant, so that at first I wasn’t conscious of it at all; I began to deviate from Marija, praising this great new socialist society while she mocked it gently and, when I persisted in my praise, condemned it roundly. ‘Everything in Yugoslavia is run by the Serbs,’ she told me rather bitterly, out walking one day over the crunchy leaves in the Tuscanatz woods. ‘And they have no ambition but to dominate us up here, feed themselves on our wealth and hard work.’

  I was unaware then that Marija, like many Croatians, regarded most Serbs, with their Turkish colouring and Orthodox faith, as rough and dangerous peasants – vile bedfellows, forced upon them most recently by Tito and his godless social order. I argued her points like a commissar.

  ‘But Marija – surely you and the Serbs and all the other smaller republics here are in this together: for the sake of national unity, the greater good, sink or swim.’ This was my sort of response; hers was of bitter laughter.

  ‘If the Serbs really believed that themselves we wouldn’t mind so much. But they don’t. They simply want to use this enforced national unity as another opportunity to crush us.’

  It finally dawned on me that Marija’s antagonism towards communism and the wicked Serbs was rather stronger than her affection for me. The affair waned on her side, and I reacted by trying to save it with more specious Marxist argument – by pointing out to her, among other things, that appropriate emotion between people could only bloom in an appropriate society. For me that autumn love affair depended on the personal and political going hand in hand, and so I persisted in propagating this dubious equation.

  Ah, that I might have kept my commissar’s mouth shut! It all came to a head one day between us when, passing through the lovely candlelit shrine to the Virgin in the old city gate, I mocked the superstitious, outmoded values perpetuated there, in a world where there was now so obviously a new and caring God, the Socialist God. Such shrines would inevitably disappear, I said, just as nationalist antagonisms would in the coming Balkan millennium. After this spiel Marija was not available for any further political or emotional education.

  Shortly afterwards I left for Belgrade, in the wicked south lands of the Serbs. I had already read some of the classic fictional texts on the city and the Balkans – John Buchan, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, Agatha Christie and others: they evoked a land of rough adventure and revolution, of plum-pudding bombs, the Orient Express and Stamboul Train, a land of seedy spies and revolutionaries lurking in third-class carriages, nursing all sorts of mayhem. And wasn’t it somewhere down there that the Lady Vanished and Hercule Poirot, waxing his moustaches, pondered the grisly wagon-lits murder? I was looking forward to all this mystery and derring-do. Belgrade at the time, as I saw on my way from the station, still had a lot of shabby Serbo-Turkish wooden houses and old stucco mansions near the centre, just the sort of houses for revolutionary assignations and bomb plots.

  There were half a dozen of these houses on the street where my hostess Mrs Petnicki lived, and as the taxi drove along I hoped she might live in one of them. She didn’t. She was a thoroughly modern communist woman and lived in a new apartment block at the other end of the street, just round the corner from the parliament building – Mrs Petnicki, wife of Zvonimir, Hubert’s Yugoslav diplomat friend, from whom she was separated, living with her teenage son Petar who was to come to Maidenhall later.

  Mrs Petnicki, ensconced as she was in her large new flat in a city with great housing shortages, was clearly a favoured member of the Party, and after my conversion to the Titoist cause in Zagreb I should have got on well with her. I didn’t. She was a real virago – a small intense short-fused woman, who had been a brave partisan fighter with Tito in the war. I soon realized what the Wehrmacht had had to put up with when, swapping guns for words, she came to deal with me in a series of vehemently executed verbal attacks, ambushes, feigned retreats and vicious counter attacks. A guerrilla war broke out between us, with her son Petar acting as a spy for her.

  The casus belli lay in the fact that, through other Belgrade friends of Hubert’s, I met a number of dissident students – painters, poets and musicians who were not just against Tito but against everyone and everything. They were Serbian anarchists in the great Balkan tradition, these half-dozen Byronic souls and some equally headstrong, dark-haired, arrogantly beautiful girls. Despite my earlier political conversion in Zagreb I soon took to them, attracted by their vagrant spirit, talent, wit and idealism.

  It was this that came to infuriate Mrs Petnicki, dedicated hard-line communist that she was. She attacked me, condemning me and my new friends as anti-social, anti-state and enemies of the people. She stormed at me that I was abusing her hospitality, consorting with criminals.

  At first, since I’d told her nothing of these new friends, I wondered how she’d found out about them. Things became clear the next day when I spotted Petar, the wily son, following me secretly as I crossed town for one of my ‘antisocial’ meetings. Pretending ignorance of Petar’s tailing me, I stopped at a shop window, watching his reflection in the glass as he paused across the street from me. Then I doubled back, mixing among the crowds in the main Terazije Square, before going in the front door of the old art deco Moskva Hotel and slipping out of the back entrance, losing Petar entirely. That was my first exercise in the art of espionage, mimicking the role of hunted spy. I wasn’t unaware that afternoon that, by slipping my tail, I’d lurched into Greene-and-Ambler land, taken a first step into the shadowy world of spies and counter-spies.

  A Serbian friend of Hubert’s – a Mr Radovic as I’ll call him here – the representative of a big western multinational company, had an office in this same Moskva Hotel. Shortly after the incident with Petar I used my introduction to him.

  A number of western businesses had offices in the Moskva Hotel – a sort of safe house at the time when Tito’s relations with the Soviet Union were going through a very rocky stage and a Soviet takeover was possible. Mr Radovic’s suite, reflecting the clout of his company, was spacious, typical of the extravagant but now tawdry décor of the hotel: a flashy suite with Tiffany-style lamps and Balkan-Gothic stained glass windows, rather like an upmarket Turkish brothel.

  Mr Radovic, middle-aged, withdrawn, professorial, seemed at odds with these louche chorus-girl surroundings. He took me down to the diningroom, offering me a tasteless lunch of meatballs and watery gravy, eating meagrely himself, diffidently and soberly peering at nothing in particular through heavy-lensed spectacles.

  But he was friendly in a punctilious manner, spoke perfect English, and seemed wise and understanding of westerns ways. So I told him of my difficulties with Mrs Petnicki. He commiserated with me t
actfully, but offered no other comments or advice. We finished with an inedible Serbian pudding – a prune or two in an ersatz chocolate sauce. And that, I thought, was the last of Gospodin Radovic. I resumed my by now very surreptitious meetings with the students.

  These devil-may-cares, given the acute housing shortage in Belgrade and their generally anti-social attitudes, had created an extraordinary camp for themselves out of tin huts and sack tents on a marshy spit of land hidden by reeds and willows, by the banks of the Sava river across from the ramparts of the old town. Here they pursued their ‘anti-social’ activities.

  In the daytime, the revolutionary paysagistes painted rather conventional views of the willows and the pearl-grey, misty water beyond. At night, in the warm autumn, things were much livelier, the encampment lit by dozens of candles by which some of the new arrivals still painted in the half dark. Indeed one of the students, an emaciated, tow-haired, most morbidly refined Serb, sunken- and wild-eyed, would only paint at night and on only one theme: corpses in open coffins surrounded by keening, witchlike women; macabre studies of orthodox funerals. The others simply chatted, played the mandolin, smoked, drank a little and canoodled in the velvet shadows. It all seemed very daring to me at the time.

  Petar still followed me, but I’d become adept at giving him the slip and had told Mrs Petnicki that I was occupying myself daily at the British Council library over Serbo-Croatian grammars, which was partly true. It was here one afternoon that I spied Mr Radovic, fiddling among the books on the far side of the room. I went over, greeting him, and he jumped.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I was just looking to see if the new Herman Wouk had arrived, The Caine Mutiny. They say it’s very good.’ The shelf he’d been fingering through contained nothing but non-fiction. He then suggested we walk back together to the Moskva Hotel.

  ‘How are all those wicked student friends of yours?’ he enquired lightly as we strolled across the Terazije. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Of course they are all artists,’ he remarked. ‘Or do they talk politics as well?’ ‘No, not really. Just bohemians.’ He seemed disappointed. We were approaching the entrance to the Moskva Hotel when, seeing something or someone at the doorway, Mr Radovic suddenly stopped, taking my hand. ‘Do come and have lunch again,’ he murmured, before, quite absent-mindedly as it seemed, he noticed the book he’d been carrying in his other hand. ‘My goodness,’ he said, ‘how careless. I took this book away from the Council library without having it checked out.’ He passed it to me quickly. ‘I have to go, an important appointment. I wonder if you’d be so kind as to take the book back to the library for me? And return it in my name to Mrs Moore. Make sure you say it’s from me, won’t you?’ Then he was off, and I had the book in my hand – a copy of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. It didn’t seem his sort of book. I couldn’t return it that day, the library being closed. So I took the book down to the charmed encampment among the reeds and willows on the Sava. And there, horror of horrors, I lost it, somewhere in the candlelit dark that evening.

  I went back next morning to the Moskva to tell Mr Radovic what had happened with the book, and asked for him at reception. The clerk denied all knowledge of any Mr Radovic living at the hotel, as did the manager when I pressed him. ‘No, you are mistaken. There is no such person here, or such a business company either. Try the Balkan Hotel opposite.’

  My friend Mr Radovic had become a non-person overnight. I was puzzled. Something was up and it didn’t sound good. That evening, when I got back to Mrs Petnicki’s flat, still without the book, I knew the worst. I found her with a stolid, grim-faced man. Mrs Petnicki translated his questions to me. ‘You have been meeting with a Mr Radovic at the Moskva Hotel?’ ‘Yes,’ I said casually. ‘You were seen receiving a book from him yesterday,’ she went on. ‘What have you done with it? This gentleman requires it.’ ‘I’m afraid I lost it, careless of me, left it down somewhere.’

  She translated this back to the sour-faced man, who posed another loaded question. ‘He asks if you lost it down by the river Sava last night, among your friends. You and your other counter-revolutionary friends,’ she added ominously.

  The fat was in the fire. They shot counter-revolutionaries in communist countries, didn’t they? The secret police, and the grim-faced man was surely one of them, were looking for Mr Radovic’s Virginia Woolf book, which must have been a code book, the pages marked in some special way, intended for the British Secret Service when it was deposited back with Mrs Moore at the Council library. And I had lost the book, down by the Sava, but clearly neither Mrs Petnicki nor the secret policeman believed this. The code book had been given to me by Mr Radovic, so I was clearly in league with him. We were both counter-revolutionary spies. The man, with Mrs Petnicki, searched my room and didn’t find the book. The two of them then talked together. It seemed I was about to be taken off for more severe interrogation. But Mrs Petnicki, who, as a partisan heroine, must have had more clout than the secret policeman, prevailed on him to let me go. After the man had left, she said to me, surprisingly, ‘You think you are Jesus Christ! You must leave, tomorrow. At once. You must get out of Yugoslavia at once.’ I was very ready to comply.

  There was only one problem. To get out of Yugoslavia in those days you needed an exit visa stamped by the police, and in the circumstances they were unlikely to comply. I was trapped. There was only one thing for it. At the time the British represented Irish interests in Yugoslavia, so next morning I packed my suitcase and went straight round to the British Embassy, and explained things to the duty officer, who passed me on to a middle-aged, sandy-haired man, and I told him all that had happened with Mr Radovic, Mrs Petnicki, the secret policeman and the students by the river.

  ‘What was the name of the book that Mr Radovic gave you?’ the sandy-haired man asked. ‘Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own,’ I said. He nodded. The whole business now seemed to make sense to him. He went into the next office and there was a short murmured talk with someone else. When he returned, he wrote me out a diplomatic laissez passer and stamped it with the Royal Arms. I made a diplomatic exit on the Orient Express that same day.

  This was my first brush with the secret service world of letter drops, code books, and assignations in Balkan hotels and British Council libraries. Spotting trouble at the door of the Moskva Hotel, Mr Radovic had unloaded the dangerous book on me and done a runner just in time. I suppose now I ought to have done the Russian interpreter’s course at Cambridge and joined the service myself, without the meatballs and ersatz chocolate pud – dry martinis, shaken not stirred, instead.

  But I appear to have done nothing on my return to Maidenhall and the Butlers. Indeed it seems I did nothing – at least physically – so successfully that Hubert became alarmed, or annoyed, or both, and wrote to my grandmother believing me to be suffering from some physical illness. Then he wrote to his own doctor in Dublin, early in January 1956:

  Dear O’Brien,

  I think Vera Hone will have telephoned you by now about young Joe. I do hope you will be able to see him. I really don’t think there is anything wrong with him physically, but his inability to exert himself is so extraordinary that I don’t think one can just dispose of it by saying he is lazy. But I won’t write you an essay on him here; I enclose two letters I have received about him from his hosts in Yugoslavia, which are more valuable than anything I can say, as I think it fills in the picture. It oughtn’t by the way to be at all an ugly picture. Joe has plenty of admirable qualities and we are fond of him here.

  I dare say you will conclude that the case is ‘psychological’, but my wife and I are very unwilling that he should consult a psychologist; it would merely increase that preoccupation with himself which is already considerable. In any case a psychologist would probably only point to various causes for the instability in his background of which we are perfectly aware already, and are dealing with as best we can.

  If you find there is nothing physically wrong with him you can help him best by assuring him of
this very strongly. Several times I have hesitated to urge him to exert himself, sawing logs or something of the kind, because the prospect of having to do this has really almost made him look physically ill! And he argues so convincingly that it would be bad for him that he persuades us sometimes against our better judgement. There are plenty of ways in which he could entertain himself or make himself useful out of doors, but he has shrunk from them all on his last visit. This was very disappointing to us because we had made a big effort to bring off this Yugoslav trip for him; we have to take two children of his hosts here in exchange and we thought he would make it his duty to see that the experiment justified itself and that he shared some of our bother this end. I incline to think that in the long run he will have profited by it but in the meantime one is more conscious of all the bother and expense it was.

  I don’t want to persecute him. A friend of mine who is Foreign Editor of The Manchester Guardian has asked Joe to try some articles for him on Yugoslavia. And Joe is trying and is plainly quite a good writer who has to take time to think things out, but he is using his preoccupation with his writing as an excuse for avoiding every other obligation. But I promised not to write another essay and here is one!

  If you thought this a good idea and could prescribe to him some daily physical regimen, as strenuous as you thought he could manage, we would do our best to see that he carried it out.

  Yours sincerely,

  Hubert Butler.

  I don’t think I saw Dr O’Brien. Certainly I can’t remember his prescribing me any strenuous ‘physical regimen’. Perhaps I became more willing over the log sawing in Maidenhall? Certainly I was making notes for articles on Yugoslavia when I got back – as Hubert was very much encouraging me to write, and I was no doubt preoccupied with this, at the expense of pulling my weight in the household. It’s true that I was selfish then in my preoccupations with other aims, mainly at that point trying to get into the picture business. In fact I think my problem with the log sawing was psychological. I didn’t like it, and thought I was being press-ganged into ways that had no future for me. As Argyle at St Columba’s had earlier pointed out to Hubert, since my Hone family had failed me, and because of the awfulness of Sandford Park and my failure to take much benefit from St Columba’s, I was determined to rely on my own resources, to make a life for myself in my own way – which didn’t include sawing damp logs. A selfish way no doubt, but I could see no other.