The Balkan Trilogy

by Olivia Manning

  A rumour had reached the Legation that Yakimov was working for the Germans, and Dobson, taking the matter up, had traced it back to Hadjimoscos. Dropping into the English Bar and inviting Hadjimoscos to a drink, he had remonstrated pleasantly: ‘This is a very dangerous story to put around.’

  Hadjimoscos, nervous of the power of the British Legation, protested: ‘But, mon ami, the Prince is a member of some secret service – he himself makes it evident. I could not imagine he worked for the British. They surely would not employ such an imbécile!’

  ‘Why do you say he “makes it evident”?’ Dobson asked.

  ‘Because he will take out a paper – so! – and put to it a match with fingers shaking – so! – then he will sigh and mop his brow and say: “Thank God I have got rid of that”.’

  Yakimov was ordered to the Legation. When Dobson repeated his conversation with Hadjimoscos, Yakimov was tremulous with fear. He wailed pathetically: ‘All in fun, dear boy, all in innocent fun!’

  Dobson was unusually stern with him. ‘People,’ he said, ‘have been thrown into prison here for less than this. The story has reached Woolley. He and the other British businessmen want you sent under open arrest to the Middle East. There you’d go straight into the ranks.’

  ‘Dear boy! You’d never do that to an old friend. Poor Yaki meant no harm. That old fool Woolley has no sense of humour. Yaki often plays these little japes. Once in Budapest, when flush, I got a cage of pigeons and went down a side street like this …’ As he lifted a wire tray from Dobson’s desk and moved with exaggerated stealth round the room, the sole flapped on his left shoe. ‘Then I put down the cage, looked around me, and let the pigeons fly away.’

  Dobson lent him a thousand lei and promised to talk Woolley round.

  Had Yakimov been content to eat modestly, he could have existed from one remittance to the next, but he was not content. When his allowance arrived, he ate himself into a stupor, then, penniless again, returned, a beggar, to the English Bar. It was not that he despised simple food. He despised no food of any kind. When he could afford nothing more, he would go to the Dâmboviţa and eat the peasant’s staple food, a mess of maize. But food, rich food, was an obsessive longing. He needed it as other men need drink, tobacco or drugs.

  Often he was so reduced he had not even the bus fare to and from his lodging. Walking back at night through streets deserted except for beggars and peasants who slept, and died of cold in their sleep, in doorways or beneath the hawkers’ stalls, he often thought of his car, his Hispano-Suiza, and plotted to retrieve it. All he needed was a Yugoslav transit visa and thirty-five thousand lei. Surely he could find someone to lend him that! And he felt, once the car was his again, his whole status would change. It was heavy on petrol and oil, of course, but they were cheap here. He would manage. And with this dream he would trudge through the black, wolf-biting night until he found refuge in the syrupy heat of the Protopopescus’ flat.

  There he was comfortable enough, though things had not gone so well at first. For several nights after he settled in, he had been bitten by bugs. Awakened by the burning and stinging itch they produced, he had put on the light and seen the bugs sliding out of sight among the creases of the sheets. His tender flesh had risen in white lumps. Next morning the lumps had disappeared. When he spoke to Doamna Protopopescu, she took the matter badly.

  ‘Here buks, you say?’ she demanded. ‘Such is not possible. We are nice peoples. These buks have come with you.’

  Yakimov told her he had come straight from the Athénée Palace. Not even pretending to believe him, she shrugged and said: ‘If so, then you have imaginations.’

  Having paid his rent in advance and being without money to pay elsewhere, he had no choice but to suffer. He produced one or two dead bugs, the sight of which merely increased Doamna Protopopescu’s scorn. ‘Where did you find such?’ she demanded. ‘In bus or taxi or café? In all places there are buks.’

  Aggrieved beyond measure, he set his mind to work and, the next night, threw back the covers and gathering the bugs up rapidly, dropped them one by one into a glass of water. Next morning, smiling and pretending to click his heels, he presented the glass to his landlady. She examined it, mystified: ‘What have you?’

  ‘Bugs, dear girl.’

  ‘Buks!’ She peered into the glass, her face sagging further in its bewildered exasperation, then, suddenly, she was enlightened. She flew into a rage that was not, thank God, directed at him. ‘These,’ she cried, ‘are Hungarian buks. Ah, filthy peoples! Ah, the dirty mans!’ It transpired that, in order to accommodate a lodger, the Protopopescus had bought a bed in the seedy market near the station. The salesman, an Hungarian, had sworn it was a clean bed, as good as new, and now what had been discovered! ‘Buks!’

  Doamna Protopopescu’s usual movements were indolent. Her body was soft with inertia and over-eating, but now, in her rage, she displayed the animal vigour of her peasant forebears. She turned the bed on its side and glared into the wire meshes beneath it. Yakimov, looking with her, could see no sign of bugs.

  ‘Ha!’ she menaced them, ‘they hide. But from me they cannot hide.’

  She bound rags to a poker, dipped it in paraffin and set it alight. As she swept the flames over the springs and frame of the bed, she hissed: ‘Now, I think no more buks. Die then, you filthy Hungarian buks. Ha, buks, this is for you, buks!’

  Yakimov watched her, impressed. That night he slept in peace. The incident drew them together. It broke down the barrier of strangeness between them – a process maintained by the fact that Yakimov had to pass through the Protopopescus’ bedroom to reach the bathroom.

  The Protopopescus had probably imagined that, at the most, a lodger would require a bath once or twice a week. They had not allowed for his other bodily needs. When, directed by the maid, Yakimov first found his way through the bedroom, the Protopopescus were still in bed. Doamna Protopopescu lifted a bleared face from the pillow and regarded him in astonished silence. No comment was made on his intrusion then, nor at any other time. If they were in the bedroom when he passed through, the Protopopescus always behaved in the same way. On the outward journey they ignored him. As he returned, they would suddenly show awareness of him and greet him.

  Often Doamna Protopopescu was alone in the room. She spent much of her day lying on her bed dressed in her kimono. Yakimov was delighted to observe that she did everything a woman of Oriental character was reputed to do. She ate Turkish delight; she drank Turkish coffee; she smoked Turkish cigarettes; and she was for ever laying out a pack of frowsy, odd-faced cards, by which she predicted events from hour to hour. He sometimes stopped to watch her, amused to note that when the cards foretold something displeasing, she would snatch them all up impatiently and, in search of a more acceptable future, set them out again.

  She entered his repertoire of characters, and at the bar he told how coming out of the bathroom and anticipating recognition, he had said: ‘Bonjour, doamna and domnul lieutenant Protopopescu,’ only to realise too late that, although on the chair lay the familiar padded uniform and the grimy male corsets, and on the floor were an officer’s spurred riding boots, the figure beside Doamna Protopopescu was that of a man much younger than her husband.

  ‘So now,’ he concluded, ‘I merely say “Bonjour, doamna and domnul lieutenant”, and leave it at that.’

  The flat, its windows sealed for the winter, smelt strongly of sweat and cooking. The smell in the Protopopescus’ bedroom was overpowering, yet Yakimov came to tolerate it, indeed to associate it with the comforts of home.

  One morning, when he paused to watch his landlady laying out her curious cards, he essayed a little joke. He handed her a leu, turned to the side imprinted with a corn cob and said: ‘A portrait of our great and glorious Majesty, King Carol II. You, dear girl, may not recognise the likeness, but there are many dear girls who would.’

  Doamna Protopopescu’s immediate reaction was to display the blankness with which Rumanian middle-class women ou
tfaced impropriety, then her peasant blood got the better of her. She spluttered, and as she handed back the coin she made an ‘away with you’ gesture that encouraged him to relax at the hips until he was sitting, or nearly sitting, on the bed-edge. When he did reach the point of sitting down, she gave him a swift, calculating glance and said: ‘Tell me now some sinks about Inklant. Do I say it right: Inklant?’

  A sort of friendship grew up despite the fact Yakimov was very nervous of his landlady. A few days after his arrival in the flat, he had been awakened by an uproar outside his door. Protopopescu’s batman, sent to the house to do some chores, had been caught stealing a cigarette. Doamna Protopopescu was beating him with her fists while he, doubled up and shielding his head with his arms, howled like a maniac: ‘Don’t beat me, coănită, don’t beat me.’ Ergie the maid, standing by, caught Yakimov’s startled eye and laughed. The scene was a common-place to her.

  Though, after that, he often heard the howls of the batman or Ergie or Ergie’s consumptive daughter, who slept in the kitchen with her, Yakimov could not get used to these rows. While closeted with Doamna Protopopescu, Yakimov would often look at her little beringed paw and reflect upon its strength.

  At first, he saw the bedroom as something of a refuge from the English Bar, where he spent so many hours standing about, hungry, thirsty and often tired. In Doamna Protopopescu’s room he could sit down; and, by sitting long enough, by gazing with the concentration of a hungry dog at everything that went into her mouth, Yakimov could obtain from her a piece of Turkish delight, a cup of coffee, a glass of ţuică, or even, but rarely, a meal. Doamna Protopopescu was not generous. Whatever Yakimov received, he had to earn by an hour or more of what she called ‘English conversation’.

  He did not object to chatting to her. What he found intolerably tedious was the fact that he was expected to pick up her errors of grammar and pronunciation, and wrestle for their correction. If these corrections were not frequent, she became suspicious. She would let him talk on indefinitely without reward.

  Her pronunciation he found beyond mending. She had no ear. When she repeated a word after him, he would hear for an instant an echo of his own cultivated drawl, then, at once, she would relapse. Like many members of the Rumanian middle classes, her second language was German. Yakimov complained in the bar: ‘Bloke I know says English is a low German dialect. Since I’ve met Doamna P. I’ve come to believe it.’

  The ruthlessness with which she kept him to his task soon deprived the occasions of charm. Yakimov was driven to reflect how cruelly he was required to labour for the sustenance that was, surely, a human right.

  Fortunately no more than tuition was required of him.

  Doamna Protopopescu’s kimono was of black artificial silk printed over with flame-coloured chrysanthemums. It was a decayed and greasy-looking garment, smelling of the body beneath. Sometimes one of her big breasts would fall out and she would bundle it back with the indifference of habit. Clearly – thank God! – she did not see Yakimov as a man at all. His comment at the bar was: ‘That dear girl exists only for the relaxation of the warrior.’

  When she talked, it was usually about herself or her husband, who was, she said, impotent. ‘But here,’ she explained, ‘all men are impotent at thirty. In youth, they know no restraint.’ She never spoke more openly of the fact that she had acquired a second bed-fellow, but frequently said: ‘Here it is not nice to have more than one lover at a time.’

  Occasionally she complained, in the usual Rumanian fashion, of the country’s two despised components – the peasants and the Jews.

  ‘Ah, these peasants!’ she said one day, after a particularly furious fracas with the batman, ‘they are but beasts.’

  ‘So little is done for them,’ said Yakimov in the approved English style.

  ‘True.’ Doamna Protopopescu sighed at the magnanimity of her agreement. ‘The priest, who should do all – he does nothing. He is the village bull. The women dare not refuse him. But were he other, would they learn? I doubt. It is the nature everywhere of the workers that they are the dregs, the sediments.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Yakimov. ‘Some of them are rather sweet.’

  ‘Sweet!’ Aghast at the word, she looked at him so that he feared she was about to strike him.

  As for the Jews, they were, according to Doamna Protopopescu, to blame for all the ills of the world. They were particularly to blame for the war, that was causing the rise in prices, the shortage of artisans and the stagnation in French fashions.

  Attempting to lighten the tone of the talk, Yakimov said: ‘Ah, dear girl, you should have met my dear old friend, Count Horvath. He had the finest Jew-shoot in Hungary.’

  She nodded. ‘So, in Hungary they shoot Jews! They have wisdom. Here they do not shoot them. In Rumania it is always so – the nature is too soft.’ As she spoke her whole face drooped with greed, inertia and discontent.

  Yakimov, disconcerted, said: ‘They do not really shoot Jews. It was only a joke.’

  ‘A joke, heh?’ In her disgust, she thrust into her mouth a piece of Turkish delight so large it left round her mouth a fur of sugar.

  He had been in the house some weeks before he dared venture into the kitchen. Then, returning supperless one night to a silent flat, he opened the door and switched on the light. All about him the walls heaved as cockroaches, blackbeetles and other indigenous insects sped out of sight. He was tip-toeing towards a cupboard, when a movement startled him. He saw that Ergie and her daughter were lying on a pallet wedged between gas-stove and sink. Ergie had raised her head.

  ‘A glass of water, dear girl,’ he whispered and, drawing a glass, was forced to drink the wretched stuff before going hungry to bed.

  18

  A few days after Harriet had told Inchcape of Sheppy’s sabotage plans, the Pringles quarrelled for the first time. Guy’s safe return had put all thought of Sheppy from her head. She was as surprised as Guy when one morning Inchcape entered their flat with a swagger and, stripping off his gloves and smacking them across his palm, laughed at Guy in triumph.

  ‘Well, I’ve just left your friend: the mysterious Commander Sheppy.’ Inchcape rapped the words out in Sheppy’s own style: ‘I think I’ve put him straight on a few points. I’ve informed him that, whosoever he may be, he has no jurisdiction over my men.’

  Guy said nothing, but looked at Harriet. Harriet looked out of the window.

  Inchcape, enjoying himself, swung half a circle on his heel and stretched his lips in an angry smile. ‘Our permits to live and work here,’ he said, ‘are issued on the undertaking we do not get mixed up in any funny business. I can well understand your wanting to do something more dramatic than lecturing, but the situation does not permit. It simply does not permit. Whether you like it or not, you’re in a reserved occupation. You’re here to obey orders. My orders.’

  Guy still said nothing, but took down the ţuică bottle and started to look for glasses. Inchcape held up his hand: ‘Not for me.’ Guy put the bottle back.

  Inchcape began fitting his gloves on again: ‘If you want to help out at the Legation with a bit of decoding or clerical work, no one will object. Clarence has his Poles. No objection. No objection whatsoever.’ His gloves on, he stood for some moments gazing in at the pleated white silk lining of his bowler hat, then added: ‘H.M. Government decided that our job is here. It’s our duty to do it, and to stay here, doing it, as long as humanly possible. I’m willing to bet that Sheppy’s outfit will be kicked out of Rumania before it’s had time to turn round. Well!’ He jerked his head up and his smile relaxed. ‘No need for you to see Sheppy again. I’ve dealt with him. You’ll get no more notices of his meetings. And I can tell you one thing – you’re well out of it.’ He put on his hat, tapped it, and, swinging round with grace, took himself off.

  Guy gave Harriet another look. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘I did tell him. It was that night you were out with Dubedat. I thought Sheppy had got hold of you. I was frightened.’

>   Guy, without speaking, went to the hallway for his coat. As she began to move towards him, he opened the door. ‘I must hurry,’ he said.

  Harriet was hurt by his coldness: ‘But aren’t we going to walk in the park?’

  ‘I won’t have time. I have a students’ meeting. David will be in the Doi Trandafiri at one. You can come there if you like.’

  When he had gone, Harriet, more desolate than at any time before her marriage, picked up a red kitten that was now her companion in the flat, and held it for comfort to her throat.

  The kitten had been a stray, found wandering one night in the snow. Guy thought it might be one of the wild cats that lived in the half demolished buildings in the square, but it had been a long way from the buildings. The Pringles took it home. It became at once Harriet’s cat, her baby, her totem, her alter ego. When anyone else picked it up, it turned into a mad little bundle of pins. Guy was frightened of it, and the kitten, sensing that it had the upper hand with him, would bite him savagely. When he was seated, forgetful of it, it would fly up the back of his chair and land, all teeth and claws, in the thickness of his hair. He would cry for Harriet to remove it.

  Guy applauded Harriet, who, picking up the kitten with all the confidence in the world, was never bitten or scratched. ‘The thing,’ she said, ‘is not to be nervous.’ To the kitten she said: ‘You may bite other people, but I’m different. You don’t bite me,’ and the kitten, fixing her with its curious stare, seemed to realise they met on equal terms.

  Guy, though he remained nervous of it, was proud of the little creature that changed into a fury in his hands. He admired its red-gold colour and the way it would hurtle like a flying cat from one end of the flat to the other. Despina, always eager to echo admiration, said it was a most exceptional cat in every way. If the Pringles had to leave Rumania, she would take it and care for it herself.