The Balkan Trilogy

by Olivia Manning

  Harriet, standing now gazing through the French-windows at the snow-crowned palace, imagining herself abandoned by Guy, felt for the kitten a passion of tenderness as though it were the only love left to her. She said to it: ‘I love you. I love you with all my heart.’ The kitten seemed to take on a look of serious enquiry. ‘Because you are wild,’ she added, ‘because you are warm; because you are living.’ And, of course, because Guy had turned against her.

  She reflected that he had asked Klein to try and discover what had happened to Sasha Drucker and because of this was meeting him with David at the Doi Trandafiri. He had never, as she felt inclined to do, let the matter drop. He was faithful to his friends, but (she told herself) indifferent to her. All these people – David, Klein, the Druckers, Dubedat and a host of others – were his faction: he bound them to himself. She had no one but her little red cat.

  Almost at once, she revolted against the situation. Putting the cat down, she dialled Clarence’s number at the Propaganda Bureau and said to him: ‘Guy was taking me for a walk in the park, but he has had to go to a meeting. Won’t you take me?’

  ‘Why, yes of course I will.’ Clarence sounded only too glad of an excuse to leave his office. He came round at once for her and drove her to the park.

  It was the beginning of March. The wind was relaxing a little. More and more people were walking abroad, and once again nurses were bringing children to play in the open air. No new snow had fallen for two weeks, but the old snow, blackened and glacial, lingered on. It was lingering too long. People were tired of it.

  As Harriet walked with Clarence along the path that lay under Inchcape’s balcony, they looked up and saw the summer chairs and flower-baskets heaped with snow. Icicles hung firm as a fringe of swords from every edge. Yet there was a smell in the air of coming spring. Any day now rain would fall instead of snow, and the thaw would begin.

  When they reached the dove-cotes, they stopped to watch the apricot-coloured doves that were already perking up their bedraggled tail-feathers, dipping their heads and languishing their soft, gold-glinting necks from side to side. The air was full of their cooing. Behind them the snow was sliding from the branches of a weeping willow. A false acacia, buried all winter, was appearing again, hung over with pods that looked like old banana skins.

  Under the chestnut trees by the lake some children were feeding the pigeons. A solitary salesman, with nuts and sesame cakes, stood with his hands under the arms of his short frieze jacket, and slowly raised one knee at a time in a standstill march, his feet so bound with rags he seemed to have gout in both of them. The children were bundles of fur. The little girls wore ear-rings; they had necklaces and brooches over the white fur of their coats and bracelets over the cuffs of their fleecy gloves. A little boy with a gold-topped cane struck the ground authoritatively, agitating the pigeons that fluttered up and, after flying a half-circle of protest, settled down quickly before the food could disappear. Between bites, they moaned and did a little love-making.

  Suddenly excited by the coming spring, Harriet felt her quarrel with Guy was of no importance at all. As they crossed the bridge, from which they could see the dusty ice of the waterfall, she paused and leant on the rail and said: ‘Everything is wonderful. I want … I want to be …’

  Clarence concluded smugly: ‘What you are not?’

  ‘No. What I am. The “I” that is obscured by my own feminine silliness. In some ways, I suppose I am just as absurd as Sophie or Bella.’

  Clarence laughed. ‘I suppose you are. Women are like that, and one likes them like that.’

  ‘No doubt you do. But I don’t imagine I exist to enhance your sense of superiority. I exist to satisfy my own demands on myself, and they are higher than yours are likely to be. If you don’t like me as I am, I don’t care.’

  Clarence was unruffled. ‘You mean, you do care,’ he said, ‘that’s the trouble. Women want to be liked. They can never be themselves.’

  ‘And you, my poor Clarence, can never be anything but yourself.’ She moved to the other side and looked to the widening lake, from which the snow had been swept. The restaurant was now no more than a cape of snow, but someone had crossed it – the footsteps were cleanly cut – and brought out the wireless set. It was playing across the ice. The music was a Russian waltz and there were half a dozen skaters pressing forward against the wind, turning and lifting feet to the waltz rhythm. This end of the lake was so overhung with trees that it seemed enclosed, like a room. The branches, lacy with frost, glimmered an unearthly silver-white against the pewter colours of ice and sky.

  Clarence crossed over to her. Staring down at the scored and riven surface of the lake, he said soberly: ‘There are things one can never leave behind.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘One’s childhood. One can never recover from that.’

  As they turned back on their tracks, she knew he wanted her to question him, and asked, not very willingly: ‘What sort of childhood had you?’

  ‘Oh, a perfectly ordinary one – at least, it would have seemed ordinary to anyone outside it. My father was a clergyman.’ After a pause, he added: ‘And a sadist.’

  ‘You really mean that? A sadist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The wind was behind them now. Released from its stinging onslaught, they walked slowly, feeling almost warm. Harriet did not know what to say to Clarence, who looked sombre and in-drawn, possessed, it seemed, by the memory of childhood as by the memory of an old injustice. She would have chosen to say: ‘Don’t think about it: don’t talk about it,’ but, of course, the thing he needed was to talk. She had a pained sense that something was about to be inflicted on her.

  ‘But worse than that – worse than my father, I mean – was life at school. My father sent me there because the headmaster was a believer in corporal punishment. He believed in it, too.’

  At the age of seven, Clarence had been beaten for running away from the school. Afterwards, when he lay in bed ‘blubbing’, he did not know what it was he had done wrong. All he had known was that he wanted to return to his mother. Harriet thought of a child of seven – a child the same age, she imagined, as the boy who had frightened the pigeons with his gold-topped stick. It was scarcely possible to imagine anyone even slapping so young a child, yet Clarence insisted he had been savagely beaten, beaten with all the fury and vigour of revenge.

  After a while, he said, he had learnt to ‘put up a show’. He had hidden his fears and uncertainties beneath the front he had retained until now, but the truth was that, over the years, his nerve had been broken. His home had offered him no escape from misery. His mother, a gentle creature who feared his father more than Clarence did, had been merely an object of pity, a weight on his emotions – yet, he said, she had been someone to whom he could talk. She had died when he was ten and he felt she had made her escape. She had abandoned him. His happiest times had been those Sundays when he had been permitted to cycle out on the moors with a friend.

  ‘You got on well with the other boys?’ Harriet asked.

  Clarence looked sullen a moment, withdrawn from this question, then he answered it obliquely: ‘It’s always that sort of school where boys are bullied. It had a tradition of brutality. It was transmitted by the masters.’

  ‘But you weren’t actually ill-treated by the other boys?’

  For reply, he shrugged his shoulders. They were walking down the main path beside the tapis vert. In this wind-swept area, which they had to themselves, the snow had drifted so thickly it was impossible to tell where the flower-beds ended and the paths began. Clarence kept tripping on small hedges, keeping no watch where he went, as he described those evenings when, cycling back from the moors, he had grown sick at the sight of the school gates and the sunset reddening the bricks of the school buildings. In time he had acquired a desolate resignation to his position – the inescapable position of victim. Even now, he said, even here in Bucharest, the summer Sunday light, the closed shops, the sound of the bell of t
he English Church, could bring back that sick hopelessness. It filled him with a sense of failure, and that sense would haunt him all his life.

  They were nearing the Calea Victoriei. Harriet could hear the squeak of motor-horns, yet, as they walked isolated on the path, she had the sense of being in a limbo with Clarence. When she thought back on the scene, it seemed to her the snow had been reddened by the desolation of those sabbath sunsets. Though his story of childhood did not relate in any way to hers, its misery seemed altogether too familiar. As she grew depressed, he began to emerge from memory and to smile. She felt that by his confidences he had been making a claim on her. Involuntarily, she took a step away – not only from Clarence but from the unhappy past that overhung him. He had, she felt, been marked down by fear.

  He did not notice her movement. Still confiding he said: ‘I need a strong woman, someone who can be ruthlessly herself.’

  So Clarence believed her to be that sort of woman! She did not repudiate his belief but knew she was nothing like it. She was not strong, and she certainly felt no impulse to nurse a broken man. She would rather be nursed herself. At the gate, she said she was meeting Guy at the Doi Trandafiri.

  Clarence frowned down at his feet and complained: ‘Why does Guy go to that place?’

  ‘He likes people. He likes being pestered by his students.’

  ‘Incredible!’ drawled Clarence, but, as Harriet went on, he kept beside her.

  The café was as crowded as ever. Guy was nowhere to be seen. Harriet said: ‘He’s always late,’ and Clarence grunted agreement. They had to stand for some minutes before a table was vacated.

  Almost as soon as they had sat down, David and Klein entered. Guy came hurrying in behind them. Because of the estrangement, she saw him newly again: a comfortable-looking man of an un-harming largeness of body and mind. His size gave her an illusion of security – for it was, she was coming to believe, no more than an illusion. He was one of those harbours that prove to be too shallow: there was no getting into it. For him, personal relationships were incidental. His fulfilment came from the outside world.

  Clarence, meanwhile, had been talking to her, continuing his story as though there had been no interval between the park and the café. As he stared at her, resentful of her inattention, she knew he was one who, given a chance, would shut her off into a private world. What was it they both wanted? Exclusive attention, no doubt: the attention each had missed in childhood. Perversely, she did not want it now it was offered. She was drawn to Guy’s gregarious good humour and the open world about him.

  She watched him as he came up behind David and Klein and, stepping between them, put his arms about their shoulders. Klein glanced back smiling, at once accepting this as a normal greeting, but David, though he was Guy’s intimate, looked confused and, flushing slightly, began to talk away his own confusion. In a moment, Guy saw her and, leaving the others, came hurrying towards her between the crowded noisy tables through the hot and smoky air. He put out his left hand, smiled and squeezed her hand. The estrangement was forgotten.

  ‘Who is this Klein?’ Clarence asked, as though the approaching stranger brought intolerable tedium.

  ‘A source of information,’ said Guy. ‘One of David’s contacts.’

  When they were all seated, Clarence, doubtful and suspicious, made his usual defensive retreat into silence, but only Harriet noticed. Guy was eager to hear what Klein had discovered about the Druckers.

  He had not discovered much. He said: ‘It seems that Sasha was taken with his father.’

  ‘You mean he was arrested?’

  ‘One cannot say that.’ Klein’s face creased with amusement. ‘This, you must remember, is a civilised country. There was no charge against the boy.’

  ‘Then what do you think has happened to him?’

  ‘Who can say! He is not in prison. If he were, I think I would discover it. A prisoner cannot be totally hidden.’

  ‘Perhaps he is dead,’ said Harriet.

  ‘A body must be disposed of. Here secrecy is not so easy. The people are given to talk. Besides, why should they kill the boy? They are not such bad people. They would not kill without reason. All I can say is, no one has seen him since his father’s arrest. He has disappeared. But something I have discovered that is very interesting. Very interesting indeed!’ He leant forward, grinning. ‘I have discovered that the Drucker money in Switzerland – a great sum – is banked in the name of Sasha Drucker. Is that not interesting? So, I think he is alive. In Switzerland the banks hold very tightly to money. Even the King could not demand it. It can be withdrawn only by the authority of this young Drucker or his legal heirs. He is an important boy.’

  ‘He is indeed!’ David agreed. ‘Perhaps he is being held somewhere until he gives his authority.’

  Klein shot out his hands in delighted enquiry: ‘If so, where? Here we have not the Middle Ages. For our Cabinet the situation must be very difficult. Here is an innocent young man – a man so simple, young and innocent that no capital charge could be trumped against him. To hold him without a charge! That would not be civilised, not Occidental! Yet – a young man of such importance! How could they afford to let him leave the country?’ Klein sat shaking with laughter at authority’s predicament.

  Guy frowned to himself, perplexed and concerned. ‘But what have they done with him?’ he asked the table.

  ‘Why?’ Klein opened his pale eyes. ‘What do they matter to you, these Druckers? They have made much money – illegal money. They have lived well. Now they are not so well. Need you weep?’

  ‘Sasha was a pupil of mine. The Druckers treated me kindly. They were my friends.’

  Klein smiled mockingly into Guy’s face. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how do you reconcile such friendship with your ideas on international finance?’

  David snuffled and sniggered at this question, his mouth curling up under his nostrils. With his head down, he looked up in ironical enquiry at Guy, but before Guy had found a reply, Klein, relenting, said: ‘All things, all people – all are so interesting.’

  Clarence leant towards Harriet, speaking to her as though she were alone: ‘I must say, I think Guy squanders himself on a lot of people who aren’t worth it.’

  ‘Well, you don’t do that,’ said Harriet with some derision.

  ‘Neither do you.’

  Harriet put up her hand, warding off this private controversy, so that she could listen to Klein, who had now left the Druckers and was talking of the country’s internal situation.

  ‘The King,’ he announced, ‘is granting an amnesty to the Iron Guardists.’

  David and Guy were astounded by this news. There had been no indication in the press, not even a rumour, that this would be possible.

  ‘The amnesty is already signed,’ said Klein, speaking quietly, ‘but not yet announced. Wait. Tomorrow or the next day you will hear of it.’

  ‘But why should he grant an amnesty?’ David asked.

  ‘Ah, it is interesting. The war is ending in Finland. Any day now the Russians will be free to advance themselves elsewhere. And where will they advance? Here the Cabinet is very nervous. To whom can they look for help? Would the Allies defend Rumania against Russia? If so, how would it be possible? But Germany! Germany could do it, and would do it, at a price. Already the question has been asked: What price? What does Germany demand? And she has answered: First, grant an amnesty to the Iron Guard.’

  Clarence drawled crossly: ‘But I thought there was no Iron Guard left.’

  ‘You believed that? My friend, there are many Guardists, but they are hidden. And in Germany, too, there are many. They fled there in 1938 after Codreanu and his legionaries were shot. In Germany they were made welcome. They have been drilled. They have been trained in the concentration camps. They have become more Nazi than the Nazis. The Germans wish them to return here, for here they will be useful.’

  ‘But surely,’ Clarence protested, ‘no one wants fascism here. Rumania is still pro-British. There�
�d be an uproar. There might even be risings.’

  ‘Britain is loved,’ said Klein. ‘The majority would choose a liberal Government if they had nothing to lose by it. But Russia is feared too much. Great fear can cast love out. Stay here and you will see it happen.’

  David said: ‘I told the Legation a year ago that we’d lose this country if we didn’t change our policy.’

  Clarence asked, sulkily: ‘What change of policy could make any difference now?’

  ‘Now, very little. We’ve left it too late.’ David’s agreement was heated. ‘But we need not play Germany’s game for her.’ Taking possession of the talk, David spoke with force and feeling: ‘We support a hated dictatorship. We snub the peasant leaders. We condone the suppression of the extreme Left and the imprisonment of its leaders. We support some of the most ruthless exploitation of human beings to be found in Europe. We support the suppression of minorities – a suppression that must, inevitably, lead to a break-up of Greater Rumania as soon as opportunity arises.’

  ‘Perhaps the opportunity won’t arise.’

  ‘Perhaps it won’t. It depends on the conduct of the war. The war will have to move sometime. The deadlock can’t continue and I don’t believe there is a chance of a truce. If the Allies could break through the Siegfried Line and advance into Germany, then they might, without particular injury to British interests, continue their policy here indefinitely. As it is we’re doing the fascists’ job for them. At the first indication of a possible German victory, the whole vast anti-Communist movement here would rise against us.’

  ‘Do you expect us to support the Communists?’ Clarence asked.

  ‘Certainly not. My complaint is that, when we could, we did nothing to establish a liberal policy that could save the country from either extremity – Left or Right.’

  ‘I think you take too black a view of things,’ mumbled Clarence.

  ‘You, I can see,’ said David, ‘would agree with H.E. The old duffer describes my reports as “alarmist” and files them away and forgets about them.’