The Balkan Trilogy

by Olivia Manning

  To start him talking she asked if he were busy, though she knew he was not. He answered, rather sullenly: ‘No,’ and added after a long pause: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here at all.

  ‘Since Dunkirk the Bureau’s been at a standstill. That doesn’t worry Inchcape, of course. He never did do much. What have we ever had to propaganda, apart from the evacuation of the Channel Islands and the loss of Europe?’ He laughed bitterly.

  ‘What about the Poles?’

  ‘They’re practically all gone. I’ve worked myself out of work.’

  ‘Why not come back to the English Department? Guy needs help.’

  ‘Oh!’ Clarence sighed. She could visualise his face drawn down with guilty dejection as he said: ‘I loathe teaching. And the students bore me to tears.’

  ‘Then what are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I might get some decoding at the Legation.’

  ‘I thought you despised the Legation and everyone in it.’

  ‘One has to do something.’

  Clarence, keeping his distance as they walked on the narrow path, was putting up a show of detachment from her; an unconvincing show. From sheer need for distraction she was tempted to make a gesture to regain him, but she did nothing. A romantic, he was never likely to be content with the prosaic companionship which was all she had to offer.

  They were approaching the park gate and could hear the traffic of the main road. Clarence slowed his pace, unwilling, now that he had started talking, to leave the park’s encouraging cover for the interruptions and buffetings of the street.

  Sighing again and saying reflectively: ‘I don’t know!’ he let his thoughts wander into the metaphysical byways that skirted his self-pity and self-contempt. ‘How much easier life must be when one has that little bit of extra something that tips one to the manic rather than the depressive side.’

  ‘You think it’s just a matter of chemistry?’

  ‘Well, isn’t it? What are we but a component of chemicals?’

  ‘Surely something more.’

  Not wanting to leave the particular for the general, he said: ‘The truth is, I’ve been frustrated all my life. I’ll die of it. But I’m dying already. The beginning of death is ceasing to desire to live.’

  ‘Oh, we’re all dying,’ Harriet answered him impatiently.

  ‘Some of us are alive – anyway, for the moment. Look at Guy!’

  They both looked ahead at Guy whose white shirt could be seen glimmering through the darkness. His voice came to them. He was on to his favourite subject – the sufferings of the peasants, the sufferings of the world. Sufferings, Harriet thought, that would remain long after Guy had talked himself into his grave. Catching the word ‘Russia’, she smiled.

  Clarence had caught it, too. On a high, complaining note of inquiry, as though the question had never occurred to him before, he asked: ‘What is the basis of his love affair with Russia?’

  She said: ‘I think it’s the need to put his faith into something. His father was an old-fashioned radical. Guy was brought up as a free thinker, but he has a religious temperament. So he believes in Russia. That’s another home for little children above the bright blue sky.’

  ‘In fact,’ said Clarence, ‘he’s simply what the psychologists call “a rebel son of a rebel father”.’

  This idea was new to Harriet. She might consider it later but was not prepared to let Clarence dismiss Guy so easily. She said: ‘There’s more to it than that,’ and there probably was more to it. When Guy was growing up the mills and mines were idle. The majority of the men he knew, his own father among them, had been on the dole. He had watched his father, a skilled man, highly intelligent, decline and become, through despair and the illness brought by despair, unemployable. He had resented this waste of human energy and became absorbed in the politics of the wasteland and the welfare of the wasted.

  Mildly scornful, Clarence went on: ‘And David’s another one. They both imagine that life can be perfected by dialectical materialism.’

  She said: ‘David is more realistic, and probably more rigid.’

  ‘And Guy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It was true, she did not know. She had discovered, but still could not elucidate, the resolute impracticability of Guy’s way of life. She said: ‘I told him once that when I married him, I thought I was marrying the rock of ages. I pretty soon found he was capable of absolute lunacy. For instance, he once thought of marrying Sophie just to give her a British passport.’

  Harriet’s tone of criticism at once caused Clarence to change his attitude. He said reprovingly: ‘Still Guy is not like most of these left-wing idealists. He doesn’t just talk, he does things. For instance, he visited the political prisoners in the Vacaresti jail. Quite a risky business in a country like this.’

  ‘When did he do that?’ Harriet asked, alarmed.

  ‘Before the war. He took them books and food.’

  ‘I hope he doesn’t do it now?’

  ‘I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me.’

  He did not tell Harriet either. She realised he resented her intervention in his activities and could be secretive. She felt resentful, too, thinking that when he was out of the flat – which he often was – he might be up to anything.

  ‘He’s an idealist, of course,’ Clarence said.

  ‘I’m afraid he is.’

  ‘You’re becoming critical of him.’

  ‘It’s not that I’m no longer grateful for his virtues, but they extend too far beyond me. He’s too generous, too forbearing, too easily called upon. People feel they can call on him for anything, but he’s always somewhere else when I need him.’

  ‘Yet what better could you find?’

  She did not attempt to answer this question. Her feeling was that she had been taken in, and too easily: perhaps because he was so unlike herself. In early adolescence she had been skinny and charmless. Feeling unwanted, she had been both aggressive and withdrawn, so her aunt had nagged at her: ‘Why can’t you make yourself pleasant to people? Don’t you want them to like you?’ Whether she wanted it or not, she soon learnt not to expect it. When she did make an effort to please, it seemed to her she aroused not liking but suspicion. Being unsuccessful in the world herself, she had to find someone who would be successful for her. And who better than Guy Pringle, that large, comfortable, generous, embraceable figure? But she should have recognised warning signs. There was, for instance, the fact that he had so few possessions. She had put this down to poverty, but quickly discovered that when he was given anything he promptly lost it. She began to suspect that he saw possessions as a tie. They revealed too much. They defined their owner and so limited him. Guy was not to be defined or limited or held in fee.

  There was, she admitted, an emotional shyness about him, but his elusiveness came from a deeper cause than that. And yet, as Clarence had asked, what better could she find? She envisaged a creature similar, but dependent; someone she could compass; her own possession; a child, she supposed. That might be permitted one day, but Guy insisted that at the moment their circumstances were too insecure for children. Was that a reason or an excuse? After all, children were possessions. They, too, defined and limited their possessors.

  Meanwhile, Clarence was saying: ‘I believe in Guy. I think you’re lucky to have found him. He has integrity, but I suppose that’s the trouble. You’re trying to destroy it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re filling him with middle-class ideas. You make him bath every day and get his hair cut.’

  ‘He has to grow up,’ Harriet said. ‘If he hadn’t married me, he’d probably have wasted his life as a sort of eternal student, living out of a rucksack. I think he was probably thankful for an excuse to compromise.’

  ‘That’s just the point. One is corrupted by compromise. And respectability is compromise. Look at me. I went to an expensive school where I was flogged like a beast. I wanted to revolt and I dared not. I wanted to fight in Spain
and I dared not. I could have entered any profession I chose: I chose nothing. That was my revolt against my own respectability – and it led to nothing. I compromised with respectability and was corrupted.’

  ‘I expect it would have been the same whatever happened. You offer yourself to be corrupted.’

  He considered this in silence for some moments, then concluded: ‘Anyway, I’m lost. I let everyone down. I’d even let Guy down.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Why are you so sure?’

  ‘You don’t mean enough to him.’

  ‘Hah!’ said Clarence in sombre satisfaction that she should diminish him in this way.

  The others had come to a stop at the gate. Seeing Harriet and Clarence appear, they were about to pass through when someone darted out of the shadows and accosted them. David and Klein went on, but Guy remained talking to the newcomer.

  Clarence distastefully asked: ‘What lame duck has Guy picked up now? Is it a beggar?’

  ‘It doesn’t look like a beggar,’ Harriet said. Despite their dissension, she and Clarence were at once united in disapproval of Guy’s readiness to encourage everyone and anyone.

  As soon as they were within earshot, Guy called excitedly to Harriet: ‘Who do you think this is?’

  Harriet did not know and she could see no reason for excitement. The man, about whom nothing was familiar, wore the decayed and dirty uniform of a conscript. When she had seen him moving in the distance, she had thought he was young. Now, in the uncertain light from the main road, he had an appearance of decrepitude found in poverty-stricken old age.

  He was tall, skeletal, narrow-shouldered and stooped like a consumptive. His head, that had been shaved, was beginning to show a greyish stubble. The face, grey-white, with cheeks clapped in on either side of a prominent nose, would have seemed the face of a corpse had not the close-set, dark eyes been fixed on her, alive in their apprehensive anguish of need.

  She was repelled by such misery. She wanted to go out of sight of it. She shook her head.

  ‘But, darling, it’s Sasha Drucker.’

  She did not know what to say. Sasha, when she saw him nine months before, had been the well fed, well dressed son of a wealthy man. Now he smelt of the grave.

  ‘What has happened to him? Where has he been?’

  ‘In Bessarabia. When his father was arrested, he was taken to do his military service. He was sent to the frontier. When the Russians marched in, the Rumanian officers just took to their heels. There was disorder and Sasha got away. He’s been on the run ever since. He’s starving. Darling, he must come back with us.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Too shocked to say anything else, she moved out of the aura of Sasha’s desperation and walked ahead with Clarence, wondering. When Sasha was fed, where was he going?

  As they crossed the square towards the Pringles’ block, Harriet, feeling the need of some other presence to share the burden of Sasha’s condition, asked Clarence to come in.

  ‘No fear,’ he said, rejecting responsibility.

  ‘What on earth are we going to do with this boy?’ she asked on a note of appeal, but she could expect neither help nor sympathy from Clarence that evening. He laughed. ‘Put him in with Yakimov,’ he said as he made off.

  There was nothing to eat in the kitchen except bread and eggs. In this heat, in a country where refrigerators were almost unknown, fresh food had to be bought each day. While she made an omelette, Harriet could hear from the cupboard-sized room next door the snores of Despina, the maid, and Despina’s husband.

  As Sasha ate the omelette with apologetic eagerness, a little colour came into his face. He looked, Harriet thought, like a sapling devastated by storm. She had remembered Sasha Drucker as a dark, gentle, protected youth, the darling of a large family, who had the gentle and unsuspecting air of a domestic animal. Now when he glanced at her, he did so with the wary look of the hunted.

  Opposite him, watching him, Guy’s face was constricted with concern for the boy. He was deeply hurt by Sasha’s condition. He turned to Harriet and said in the persuasive tone she had come to suspect: ‘We can put him up somewhere, can’t we? He can stay?’

  She said: ‘I don’t know,’ exasperated that Guy spoke openly in this way. She felt the realities of the situation should be privately discussed before any decision could be taken. Where, for instance, was Sasha to be put?

  Sasha himself sat silent. Ordinarily, he would surely have shown some reluctance to be forced on her hospitality like this, but now she was his only hope. When he had eaten, he looked at her and smiled with an agonised emptiness.

  Guy offered him the arm-chair. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

  Sasha shifted diffidently, not rising. ‘I would prefer this wooden chair. You see … I have lice.’

  ‘Would you like a bath?’ said Harriet.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  When she had given him towels and shown him the bathroom, she returned to the room free to confront Guy. ‘We can’t possibly have him here,’ she said. ‘Our position is insecure enough. What would happen if we were caught harbouring a deserter – especially Drucker’s son?’

  Guy stared at her and asked with a suffering expression: ‘How can we refuse? He has nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Has he no other friends?’

  ‘No one who would dare take him in. He’s at the end of his tether. We can’t put him out on the street. We must let him sleep here, anyway for tonight.’

  ‘Well, where?’

  ‘On the sofa.’

  ‘What about Yakimov?’

  Guy looked disconcerted. Blustering a little, he said: ‘Oh, Yaki’s all right,’ but he knew Yakimov was not all right. They dare not trust him.

  Seeing the consternation on Guy’s face, Harriet pitied him, but the impasse was of his own making. He had persuaded her to take in Yakimov much against her will; and she could not help feeling some satisfaction as she waited for him to offer a solution. He had none to offer.

  He asked unhappily: ‘Can you think of anyone who would give him a bed?’

  ‘Can you?’ There was a long pause while Guy’s face grew more troubled, then she said: ‘You could tell Yakimov to go.’

  ‘Where could he go? He hasn’t a penny.’

  During the silence that followed, Harriet reflected on their diversity. Guy, typically, wanted Sasha in the flat without giving any thought to the problem of having him there. She, perhaps, was over-conscious of difficulty. If it rested with Guy alone, there might be no difficulties. He would have trusted Yakimov and Yakimov might have proved trustworthy. She was annoyed at the same time, seeing his willingness to have Sasha here as a symptom of spiritual flight – the flight from the undramatic responsibility to one person which marriage was.

  Guy gave her a pleading look as though she could, if she would, reveal a solution. And there was a solution. Pitying him at last, she said: ‘There’s a room of some sort on the roof: a second servant’s bedroom.’

  ‘That belongs to us?’

  ‘It belongs to the flat. We couldn’t use it without telling Despina. She keeps some of her things there.’

  ‘Darling!’ In his relief, his face glowed with delight in her. He sprang up and threw his arms round her shoulders. ‘What a wife! You’re wonderful!’

  Which, she told herself, was all very well: ‘He can only stay one night. You must find somewhere else for him. I’m not sure we can trust Despina.’

  ‘Of course we can trust Despina.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘She’s a decent soul.’

  ‘Well, if you think it’s all right, you must go and wake her up. She knows where this room is. I don’t.’

  Guy, about to go happily off to tell Sasha that all was well, paused, blankly surprised at being given the onerous task of waking Despina.

  ‘You wake her,’ he cajoled her, but she shook her head.

  ‘No, you must wake her.’

  As he moved reluctan
tly towards the kitchen, she almost said: ‘All right, I’ll do it,’ but checked herself and for the first time in their married life stood firm.

  4

  Yakimov had played Pandarus in Guy’s production of Troilus and Cressida. The play over, his triumph forgotten, he was suffering from a sense of anticlimax and of grievance. Guy, who had cosseted him through it all, had now abandoned him. And what, he asked himself, had come of the hours spent at rehearsals? Nothing, nothing at all.

  Walking in the Calea Victoriei, in the increasing heat of midday, his sad camel face a-run with sweat, he wore a panama hat, a suit of corded silk, a pink silk shirt and a tie that was once the colour of Parma violets. His clothes were very dirty. The hat was brim-broken and yellow with age. His jacket was tattered, brown beneath the armpits, and so shrunken that it held him as in a brace.

  During the winter he had felt the ridges of frozen snow through the holes in his shoes: now he felt, just as painfully, the flagstones’ white candescence. Steadily edged out to the kerb by the vigour of those about him, he caught the hot draught of cars passing at his elbow. He was agitated by the clangour of trams, by the flash of windscreens, blaring of horns and shrieking of brakes – all at a time when he would ordinarily have been safe in the refuge of sleep.