The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  The Rue de Ham wasn’t a slum but it hovered on the brink of poverty. A row of small terraced houses in the English manner, with white-washed doorsteps and cheap curtains facing outwards, led up a hill from the dusty square of St Job. Evening commuter trains rattled through a cutting behind the terrace while trams ground slowly up the incline in front. The area had a pinched gentility, a forgotten nineteenth-century suburb condemned now to be always on the roads to somewhere better.

  I walked past Kovačič’s doorway on the other side of the road, crossed over higher up and then came down the hill back to it. The place looked innocent enough and I was certain no one had followed me.

  A thin-faced man, dressed in a too-smart shirt and Henry V hairstyle, opened the door. I heard a typewriter clattering away in the background. The youth smiled slightly, as though I were expected. ‘Oui?’

  ‘Monsieur Kovačič? Je voudrais parler avec lui. Si c’était possible …’

  The typewriter stopped and an older voice, with a permanent cold in the throat, shouted, ‘Qui est là?’

  ‘Sais pas. Quelqu’un pour vous.’ The wiry, sad-faced man spoke French perfectly, yet he didn’t look French. He looked queer, if anything. But he looked tough as well.

  ‘I’m Peter Marlow –’

  ‘C’est un anglais,’ he called back and then a man like a great tired bear ambled out in slippers from a room to the side of the hall – bushy eyebrows beneath a tangle of greying hair, as broad as he was big, in a fine blue silk shirt buttoned meticulously at each wrist – the face not yet collapsed with age but close to it, the rather sensuous flesh around the nose and lips about to fall away for ever.

  ‘Mr Kovačič? …’

  ‘Yes? You came about private lessons?’ He spoke slowly but in almost perfectly accented English, as if he’d been listening to the BBC World Service for many years.

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘You should have made an appointment.’ There was something of the pedant in his attitude, all right.

  ‘No, I came to see you – about something else. Can I come in?’

  Kovačič gestured to his friend, who closed the door with a thump behind me.

  ‘Yes. About what?’

  ‘About Lindsay Phillips.’ I was trapped now between the two men.

  ‘Who?’ Kovačič straightened his cuffs impatiently.

  ‘Lindsay Phillips – an old friend of yours.’ It sounded an unlikely description of their relationship, given its latter development. But I had to start somewhere.

  ‘Lindsay? Lindsay Phillips?’ Kovačič spoke now in angry astonishment, the skin tightening all over his old face. ‘Didi – see if he’s alone.’

  The man by the door opened it again a fraction and looked carefully up and down the street. They spoke rapidly in Serbo-Croat now.

  ‘I’m alone. This is entirely private,’ I said to Kovačič, before his friend came up behind me and frisked me from top to bottom. There was nothing. I’d left the little .22 revolver at the hotel.

  ‘Come in, then,’ Kovačič said at last. ‘This is Didi.’ We didn’t shake hands.

  The little front room might have been that of some poor scholars in a provincial town forty years before. Apart from a frozen winter landscape in the naïve Croatian style above a tiny fireplace, books filled all the available spaces between floor and ceiling. There were two battered easy chairs with a primus stove in between, and what seemed like a church lectern at one end with a typewriter sloped down across it. Kovačič went up and leant on this now, looking at me accusingly, like some hell-fire priest. The room had a dusty, remote quality. It was not part of the city; it smelt of exile – of chalk and old textbooks, and methylated spirits.

  ‘A friend of Lindsay’s?’ Kovačič asked. ‘I can’t say you are very welcome.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. I realise that –’

  ‘Did Lindsay send you? Or British Intelligence?’

  ‘No. Lindsay has disappeared. Three months ago. I came on behalf of the family – entirely a personal matter. I found your name in the directory.’

  Kovačič grunted. A train suddenly clattered past, loudly, almost in the next room it seemed. The house must have looked directly over the railway cutting at the back. And I’d had enough of trains just then. Didi was standing aggressively by the doorway. I realised I was thumping with fear.

  ‘I understand your feelings,’ I said brazenly. ‘You had some trouble with Lindsay. Just after the war – I know. But I thought you might be able to help. Apparently he’s been kidnapped by some exiled Croats –’

  ‘Has he, indeed? I’m not surprised.’ Kovačič came out from behind the lectern now. He was pleased with what I’d just said. The atmosphere relaxed a fraction.

  ‘Yes. His family have had a letter from him. The “Free Croatia” group.’

  ‘I wonder they’ve not executed him already. Some “trouble” you say I had with him: you know why I can’t sit down – why I have to use this stupid desk all the time? That’s because of him – what the Partisans did to me when he sent us all back over the border in May ’45. My wife didn’t survive at all – nor several hundred thousand others like us. Didi and me – we were among the few lucky ones. Trouble? Lindsay Phillips and his friends created a holocaust for us all.’

  ‘Yes. I heard that. I know what happened at Bleiburg. I’m very sorry.’

  Kovačič threw his hands abruptly in the air. ‘Well, you’re too young to have been involved. But if you know about it all, I’m the last person to want to help. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I suppose he was acting under orders then –’

  ‘Of course. But you don’t know the whole story. Some British officers actually helped many of us Croats escape – let us run away into Austria or Italy. But not Lindsay, who could have done that so easily in our case. After all –’

  ‘You were friends. I know.’

  Kovačič nodded. ‘Yes. We were. He rented my house in Zagreb before the war, you know. Oh, dear me!’ Kovačič put a hand to his brow, covering his eyes, so that I thought he was crying for a moment. But when he looked up I saw he was simply trying to hide some ghastly rictus of laughter. ‘Yes, we were friends: in Zagreb before the war – he and his wife, Eleanor. And her sister, Susan. I remember them all. Many good times at the Gradski Kavana … And the bees we kept together behind my house up in Tuškanac park.’ Kovačič wandered round the small room now as if he were trying to find an escape from it, back into some reasonable emotion, an understandable life.

  ‘But why,’ I asked, ‘why didn’t he help you?’

  He stopped his perambulations now and went over to a shelf, picking out a drum-shaped bottle from among the books – plum brandy, I saw. He poured himself a stiff glass, downed it and then shook his head at me. ‘What naïveté! I told his commanding officer in Bleiburg at the time –’

  ‘A man called MacAulay?’

  ‘Yes, the Brigadier there. You see, Lindsay wanted me out of the way. I knew by then he wasn’t the man he said he was – a British diplomat. He was an agent for the Soviets, the Comintern or the NKVD. That’s why he made sure I was sent back over the border, knowing I was very unlikely to survive.’

  ‘But how could you have possibly found that out?’

  ‘From his wife. From Eleanor.’

  ‘Who killed herself –’

  ‘I never believed the suicide story. Lindsay killed her.’ Kovačič started to walk again. ‘I was away from Zagreb just then. But I knew the hall porter at the Palace Hotel. He said there was something funny about it all. He saw it happen.’

  ‘I was told she ran out under a tram, just in front of the hotel.’

  ‘Yes – she did. But Lindsay was right next to her. The porter thought he pushed her.’ Kovačič drank again, considering the past as though turning over the pages of an old diary in his mind. ‘She didn’t die at once, apparently. Just lay there with her eyes open on the tram-lines.’

  ‘Died in hospital, I suppose.’

&nbs
p; ‘I wasn’t there. But yes, that evening or the next morning. There was an inquest – of sorts.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It wasn’t very thorough. Something was being covered up. The porter was never called as a witness, for example. I’m sure Lindsay killed her.’

  ‘But how did you learn he was with the Russians?’

  ‘Eleanor told me. That’s why he got rid of her – she’d found out about him. They were having terrible fights in those days: the woman was very unhappy – but not suicidal. She just wanted to leave him, get away from everything.’ Kovačič walked back behind the lectern. ‘That was the other problem: Lindsay had been unfaithful to her,’ he said sharply, the archaic term exactly reflecting the period he was describing. ‘You knew that, I suppose? With Susan, her sister. The year before. The child was born in Zagreb that spring, I remember: 1937 – a few months before Eleanor died. But it wasn’t her child. It was Susan’s. They arranged to pretend otherwise – that British taste for decorum in everything.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Susan told me. But wasn’t Eleanor pretty left-wing herself? Why should she complain if she’d found out Lindsay was with the Russians then? Many people were. It was a very common allegiance in the thirties.’

  ‘I asked her that myself – we’d had arguments before, she and I, about left and right.’ Kovačič rubbed his chin and picked at his ear, crinkling up his eyes as though the better to see into the past, into a time which, in his long exile, had obviously never ceased to concern or perhaps obsess him. ‘I was up at my house one morning – when they were renting it; Lindsay was at the Consulate. I had some books I wanted to pick up.’ He moved out from behind the lectern now, and suddenly he was gesturing vehemently, like a frustrated hot-gospeller. ‘She said he was cheating! That he’d lied to her, first about Susan and now about his politics. You see, Lindsay always made such a point of being very right-wing in those days. But she found him out. I remember – it was that same spring of ’37: Eleanor was out on the terrace at the back of our house, just in a thin dressing gown. She was sitting at the little bamboo table we had – doodling, you know?’ Kovačič looked at me; but really he was looking through me – the exact details of that morning forty years ago forming a drama in his eyes. ‘She was making circles on a newspaper, staring at the cherry trees at the end of the garden. She was – numb. But she insisted on staying outside and we had some coffee, sitting there in the wind, the blossom falling everywhere – it was like a pink snowstorm up on the hill that day – and she told me: “Lindsay is a Soviet agent” – just like that.’

  ‘How did she know?’

  ‘She’d had suspicions for some time. And then she’d caught him, she said, with his Soviet contact: walked straight into the two of them quite by chance in Strossmayer Square the previous afternoon. A Russian, she told me, pretending to be a friend of Lindsay’s, a Viennese businessman. But Eleanor wasn’t a fool. She spoke German perfectly, some Russian too – said his accent was all wrong for a Viennese businessman. But she’d come to realise Lindsay was a liar in any case – over Susan. I was very sorry for her. I’d liked them both, you see.’

  ‘But she may have been wrong about the man – just suspicious about everything then, since she’d found out about Susan.’

  ‘Exactly what I told her. But she insisted she was right – that it was something she’d felt about him for some time – that he was living a big lie, in his work as well as with her. He wasn’t “coming clean” – that was the phrase she used.’

  ‘Even so, you’d no real proof –’

  ‘No. No code books or anything like that. But aren’t people’s feelings some kind of proof? Strong feelings. And Eleanor was a very honest person. Very uncompromising. Besides Zlatko, who knew her far better than me – he told me the same thing.’

  ‘Zlatko?’

  ‘Rabernak – a friend of theirs. An antique dealer in Zagreb then.’

  ‘Of course. Susan mentioned him. He sort of took over Eleanor?’

  ‘Why not? Lindsay had left her in every way. Well, when I heard she’d died – I was up in Ljubljana lecturing that summer – and when I came back and spoke to the porter at the Palace Hotel, then I believed what she’d said about Lindsay. And I told him so. He denied it all of course. I didn’t see him again until I got over the border at Bleiburg eight years later. So – you can see now why he didn’t help me.’

  ‘And Zlatko – what happened to him?’

  ‘He went back to Vienna immediately after she died. He had his main family shop there. I never saw him again. I should think he died in the war.’

  ‘Did you ever tell anyone about Lindsay – after the war?’

  Kovačič shook his head ironically. ‘Who would have believed me? I was a displaced person – discredited too, since they believed, wrongly, that all Croats had been pro-Nazi. I had difficulties enough getting myself established in this small teaching job here. You don’t get involved with the authorities in such a position. I did nothing. But –’ Kovačič spread his hands out wide, signifying not mercy but an appropriate fate, ‘I’m not surprised he’s been picked up by my Croatian compatriots. Slow justice. But justice all the same. I know you think we are all just violent extremists – and at best why should you worry about us in any case? A lot of Croats who fought on the wrong side because they believed in their country? Well, we worry. We still do. And though I’m not one myself I understand those extremists very well. Our nation was put to the sword in May 1945 – and Lindsay, my friend Lindsay, was one of the instruments of that massacre.’

  ‘Yes. I see that.’ There was silence. There was little more I felt I could say. I was saddened by this awful account of someone I had admired, who had been a friend of mine, too – and more than that, who had long been for me an emblem of the good life, a man of honour as I and many others had thought – of great loyalty, sanity and familial affection. Kovačič’s story utterly contradicted all these known qualities. Yet it had a ring of truth in it; indeed much of what he’d told me was simply a confirmation of what I’d heard from Susan in Dunkeld a week before.

  As if sensing my thoughts Kovačič said ‘You’re not a relation of Lindsay’s?’

  ‘No. Just a friend of the family.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I should have offered you a slivovitz.’

  ‘I said I’d try and help them – his second wife and daughter.’

  Kovačič laughed, pouring me a small glass from the drum-shaped bottle. ‘He married again – of course.’ He turned away, still smiling. ‘Stanka, my wife – she was pushed into a lime quarry near Maribor. So was my son. Didi here – he’s not my real son. His father was killed too, killed at Maribor,’ he said as if describing a great battle and not a massacre. ‘We look after each other now.’

  Kovačič left it at that. The evening sun had slanted and the room was cut in half by a deep shadow. The warm air smelt of plum brandy – something like the perfume Rachel used. Another tram started its long grind up the hill outside, laden with homecomers, returning to these drab, forgotten suburbs. How many other lives, besides Kovačič’s, were lived out in quiet desperation here? Yet perhaps his was the worst, I thought. A fine house, in a park on a hill, with cherry trees surrounded by beehives, the spring singing with insects, infested with blossom, full of sweet purpose, good friends and merry evenings at the Gradski Kavana: and it had all come to this – a primus stove, an orphan, memories in a bottle of plum brandy. This was what the war had led to – as it never had for Lindsay; this was what Europe in the previous generation was all about: immeasurable losses which we knew little of – in our grand hotel down in the city or in those offices in Whitehall where Marcus still plotted, covering up some deeper plot of Lindsay’s. It all ended here, in an impoverished room on a dingy suburban street – in my disgust.

  ‘Will they kill him?’ I said at last.

  ‘I wouldn’t blame them – if they do.’

  ‘No.’ I paused. ‘We thought we might make a deal with them. Wi
th a man here called Radovič …?’ I added half-heartedly, and indeed I had no more appetite at all now for the search.

  Kovačič shook his head. ‘He’ll never see you. I should just – go home.’ He slumped once more over the lectern. His back must have been hurting him. ‘You understand?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. I understand.’ I stood up, finishing the warm slivovitz. But I realised when I got outside and walked away into the summer evening that I didn’t really understand at all: not yet.

  *

  A first secretary from the Embassy, a Mr Huxley, was with the two women in the lobby when I got back to the hotel. He was a careful man, like some insect discovered beneath a stone – pale-faced, nervously alert – with a very soft voice that made him appear all the more guarded. He spoke as if he was in a small room with a sick child. He said, ‘We’ve had confirmation – from your farm manager in Scotland. There’s been another letter this morning from your husband, postmarked Munich again. They have the text on the Embassy telex – if you’d like to come with me …?’

  The letter was shorter this time – and, according to the preamble, Lindsay’s signature was in a much firmer hand.

  ‘Am still well. But hoping very much that H.M. Government will proceed with arrangements as outlined in previous letter. Please have them indicate willingness to co-operate by placing notice to “Janko” in personal column of Times – with phone number.