Stamboul Train

by Graham Greene

  ‘Perhaps he can’t afford the time.’

  ‘He’ll telegraph to the British Consul.’

  She said, ‘Of course,’ without conviction. The events of the night, the experience of Myatt’s tenderness, swam back from her, like a lit pier, into darkness. She strained her memory in the effort to recover sight of him, but he soon became an indistinguishable member of a crowd gathered to say good-bye. It was not long before she began to question his difference from all the other Jews she had known. Even her body, rested now and healed, but the deep peace gone with the pain, was aware of no difference. She repeated, ‘Of course,’ because she was ashamed at her lack of faith, because it was no use grumbling anyway, because at any rate she was no worse off except for being a day late for the show. There’s as good fish in the sea, she told herself, but feeling none the less strangely tied to a memory which lacked all conviction.

  The German sat bolt upright in his corner, sleeping; his eyelids twitched, ready to rise at the least unfamiliar sound. He was accustomed to rest in strange places and to take advantage of any respite. When the door opened, his eyes were at once attentive.

  A guard entered and waved his hand at them and shouted. Dr Czinner repeated what he said in English. ‘We are to come out.’ The snow blew in at the open door, making a grey tidemark on the threshold. They could see the peasants huddled on the line. Josef Grünlich stood up and smoothed his waistcoat, and pressed his elbow in Dr Czinner’s side. ‘If we runned now, eh, through the snow, all together?’ ‘They would shoot,’ Dr Czinner said. The guard shouted again and waved his hand. ‘But they shoot anyway, eh? What do they want outside?’

  Dr Czinner turned to Coral Musker. ‘I don’t think there’s anything to fear. Are you coming?’

  ‘Of course.’ Then she implored him, ‘Wait one moment for me. I’ve lost my handkerchief.’ The tall thin form bent like a pair of grey compasses, went down on the knees and fetched it from beneath the seat. His awkwardness made her smile; she forgot her distrust and thanked him with disproportionate gratitude. Outside he walked with bent head to avoid the snow, smiling to himself. One guard led them and one walked behind with his rifle unslung and his bayonet fixed. They called to each other in a language she could not understand over the prisoner’s heads, and she was being taken she did not know where. There was a scramble and splashing of feet over the rails and the mud as the peasants came nearer, hungry for a sight of them, and she was a little daunted by the olive faces and her own ignorance of what it was all about. She asked Dr Czinner ‘Why are you smiling?’ and hoped to hear that he had seen a way to release them all, to catch the express, to put back the hands of the clock. He said, ‘I don’t know. Was I smiling? It is perhaps because I am home again.’ For a moment his mouth was serious, then it fell again into a loose smile, and his eyes as they peered this way and that through his frosted glasses seemed moist and empty of anything but a kind of stupid happiness.

  III

  Myatt, with his eye on the lengthening ash of his cigar, thought. These were the moments he cherished, when he felt alone with himself, and feared no rebuff, when his body was satisfied and his emotions stilled. The night before he had tried in vain to work; the girl’s face had come between him and the figures; now she was relegated to her proper place. Presently, as evening came on, he might need her and she would be there, and at the thought he felt tenderness and even gratitude, not least because her physical presence gone, she had left no importunate ghost. He could remember now without looking at his papers the figures he had been unable to arrange. He multiplied, divided, subtracted, seeing the long columns arrange themselves down the window, across which the transparent bodies of customs-officials and porters passed unnoticed. Presently somebody asked to see his passport, and then the ash fell from his cigar and he went back to his compartment to open his luggage. Coral was not there, but he supposed that she was in the lavatory. The customs-officer tapped her bag. ‘And this?’

  ‘It’s unlocked,’ he said. ‘The lady is not here. You will find nothing.’ When he was alone again he lay back in his corner and closed his eyes, the better to consider the affairs of Mr Eckman, but by the time the train drew out of Subotica he was asleep. He dreamed that he was mounting the stairs to Mr Eckman’s office. Narrow, uncarpeted, and unlit, they might have led to a disreputable flat off Leicester Square, instead of to the headquarters of the biggest currant importers in Europe. He did not remember passing through the door; the next moment he was sitting face to face with Mr Eckman. A great pile of papers lay between them and Mr Eckman stroked his dark moustache and tapped the desk with his fountain-pen, while a spider drew the veins of its web across a dry ink-well. The electric light was dim and the window was sooty and in the corner Mrs Eckman sat on a steel sofa knitting baby clothes.

  ‘I admit everything,’ said Mr Eckman. Suddenly his chair rose, until he sat high overhead, tapping with an auctioneer’s hammer. ‘Answer me these questions,’ said Mr Eckman. ‘You are on oath. Don’t prevaricate. Say yes or no. Did you seduce the girl?’

  ‘In a way.’

  Mr Eckman drew a sheet of paper from the middle of the pile, and another and another, till the pile tottered and fell to the floor with the noise of falling bricks. ‘This affair of Jervis. Slim work I call it. You had contracted with the trustees and had only delayed to sign.’

  ‘It was legal.’

  ‘And this £10,000 to Stavrog when you’d already had an offer of £15,000.’

  ‘It’s business.’

  ‘And the girl on the Spaniards Road.

  ‘And the £1,000 to Moult’s clerk for information.’

  ‘What have I done that you haven’t done? Answer me quick. Don’t prevaricate. Say yes or no. My lord and gentlemen of the jury, the prisoner at the bar . . .’

  ‘I want to speak. I’ve got something to say. I’m not guilty.’

  ‘Under what clause? What code? Law of Equity? Law of Tithes? Admiralty Court or the King’s Bench? Answer me quick. Don’t prevaricate. Say yes or no. Three strokes of the hammer. Going, going. This fine flourishing business, gentlemen.’

  ‘Wait a moment. I’ll tell you. George. Cap. III. Section 4. Vic. 2504. Honour among Thieves.’

  Mr Eckman, suddenly very small in the dingy office, began to weep, stretching out his hand. And all the washerwomen who paddled in the stream knee-deep lifted up their heads and wept, while a dry wind tore up the sand from the sea-beaches, and flung it rattling against the leaves of the forest, and a voice which might have been Mrs Eckman’s implored him over and over again, ‘Come back.’ Then the desert shook under his feet and he opened his eyes. The train had stopped, and the snow was caking on the glass of the window. Coral had not returned.

  Presently somebody at the back of the train began to laugh and jeer, and others joined in, whistling and catcalling. Myatt looked at his watch. He had slept for more than two hours, and perhaps because he remembered the voice in his dream, he felt uneasy at Coral’s absence. Smoke poured from the engine and a man in dungarees with a blackened face stood apart from it, gazing hopelessly. Several people called to him from the third class and he turned and shook his head and shrugged in a graceful bewildered way. The chef de train walked rapidly down the track away from the engine. Myatt stopped him. ‘What has happened?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. A little defect.’

  ‘Are we stuck here for long?’

  ‘Oh, a mere trifle. An hour, an hour and a half perhaps. We are telephoning for a new engine.’

  Myatt closed the window and went into the corridor; there was no sign of Coral. He passed down the whole length of the train, looking into compartments, trying the doors of lavatories until he reached the third class. There he remembered the man with the violin and sought him through the hard wooden odorous compartments, until he ran him to earth, a small pinched fellow with a swollen eye.

  ‘I am giving a dinner tonight,’ Myatt said to him in German, ‘and I want you to play for me. I’ll give you fifty
paras.’

  ‘Seventy-five, your excellency.’

  Myatt was hurried; he wanted to find Coral. ‘Seventy-five, then.’

  ‘Something dreamy, melancholy, to bring tears, your excellency?’

  ‘Of course not. I want something light and cheerful.’

  ‘Ah, well, of course. That is more expensive.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why more expensive?’

  His excellency, of course, was a foreigner. He did not understand. It was the custom of the country to charge more for light songs than for melancholy. Oh, an age-old custom. One and a half dinas?—Suddenly, dispelling his impatience and his anxiety, the joy of bargaining gripped Myatt. The money was nothing; there was less than half a crown at stake, but this was business; he would not give in. ‘Seventy-five paras. Not a para more.’

  The man grinned at him with pleasure: this was a stranger after his own heart. ‘One dina thirty paras. It is my last word, your excellency. I should disgrace my profession if I accepted less.’ The odour of stale bread and sour wine no longer disturbed Myatt; it was the smell of the ancestral market-place. This was the pure poetry of business: gain and loss hardly entered into a transaction fought out in paras, each of which was worth less than a farthing. He came a little way into the carriage, but he did not sit down. ‘Eighty paras.’

  ‘Your excellency, one must live. One dina twenty-five. It would shame me to take less.’

  Myatt offered the man a cigarette. ‘A glass of rakia, your excellency?’ Myatt nodded and took without distaste the thick chipped tumbler. ‘Eighty-five paras. Take it or leave it.’ Smoking and drinking together in a close understanding they grew fierce with each other. ‘You insult me, your excellency. I am a musician.’

  ‘Eighty-seven paras, that is my last word.’

  The three officers sat round the table, which had been cleared of the glasses. Two soldiers stood before the door with fixed bayonets. Dr Czinner watched Colonel Hartep with curiosity; he had last seen him at the Kanetz trial marshalling his lying witnesses with a graceful disregard of justice. That was five years ago, but the years had done little to alter his appearance. His hair was a fine silver above his ears and there were a few kindly wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. ‘Major Petkovitch,’ he said, ‘will you read the charge against the prisoners? Let the lady have a chair.’

  Dr Czinner took his hands from the pockets of his mackintosh and wiped his glasses. He could keep emotion from his voice, but not from his hands, which trembled a little. ‘A charge?’ he said. ‘What do you mean? Is this a court?’

  Major Petkovitch, paper in hand, snapped at him, ‘Be quiet.’

  ‘It’s a reasonable question, Major,’ said Colonel Hartep. ‘The doctor has been abroad. You see,’ he said, speaking gently and with great kindness, ‘measures have had to be taken for your safety. Your life would not be safe in Belgrade. People are angry about the rising.’

  ‘I still don’t understand your right,’ Dr Czinner said, ‘to make more than a preliminary inquiry.’

  Colonel Hartep explained. ‘This is a court martial. Martial Law was proclaimed early yesterday morning. Now, Major Petkovitch.’

  Major Petkovitch began to read a long document in a manuscript which he found often illegible. ‘The prisoner, Richard Czinner ... conspiracy against the Government . . . unserved sentence for perjury . . . false passport. The prisoner, Josef Grünlich, found in possession of arms. The prisoner, Coral Musker, conspiracy with Richard Czinner, against the Government.’ He laid the paper down and said to Colonel Hartep, ‘I am uncertain of the legality of this court as it stands. The prisoners should be represented by counsel.’

  ‘Dear, dear, that is certainly an oversight. Perhaps you, Major . . . ?’

  ‘No. The court must consist of not less than three officers.’

  Dr Czinner interrupted. ‘Don’t trouble yourselves. I will do without counsel. These others cannot understand a word of what you say. They won’t object.’

  ‘It’s irregular,’ said Major Petkovitch. The Chief of Police looked at his watch. ‘I have noted your protest, Major. Now we can begin.’ The fat officer hiccuped, put his hand to his mouth, and winked.

  ‘Ninety paras.’

  ‘One dina.’

  Myatt stubbed out his cigarette. He had played the game long enough. ‘One dina, then. Tonight at nine.’ He walked rapidly back to his compartment, but Coral was not there. Passengers were scrambling from the train, talking and laughing and stretching their arms. The engine-driver was the centre of a small crowd to whom he was explaining the breakdown with humour. Although there was no house in sight two or three villagers had already appeared and were offering for sale bottled mineral waters and sweets on the ends of sticks. The road ran parallel to the line, separated only by a ridge of snow; the driver of a motor-car honked his horn and shouted again and again: ‘Quick car to Belgrade. A hundred and twenty dinas. Quick car to Belgrade.’ It was an exorbitant rate and only one stout merchant paid him attention. A long wrangle began beside the road. ‘Mineral waters. Mineral waters.’ A German with cropped head paced up and down muttering angrily to himself. Myatt heard a voice saying behind him in English, ‘There’s going to be more snow.’ He turned in the hope that it might be Coral, but it was the woman whom he had seen in the restaurant-car.

  ‘It will be no fun to be stuck here,’ he said. ‘They may be hours bringing another engine. What about sharing a car to Belgrade?’

  ‘Is that an invitation?’

  ‘A Dutch one,’ Myatt said hastily.

  ‘But I haven’t a sou.’ She turned and waved her hand. ‘Mr Savory, come and share a car. You’ll pay my share, won’t you?’ Mr Savory elbowed his way out of the group of people round the driver. ‘I can’t make out what the fellow’s saying. Something about a boiler,’ he said. ‘Share a car?’ he went on more slowly. ‘That’ll be rather expensive, won’t it?’ He eyed the woman carefully and waited, as if he expected her to answer his question; he is wondering, of course, Myatt thought, what he will get out of it. Mr Savory’s hesitation, the woman’s waiting silence, aroused his competitive instincts. He wanted to unfurl the glory of wealth like a peacock’s tail before her and dazzle her with the beauty of his possessions. ‘Sixty dinas,’ he said, ‘for the two of you.’

  ‘I’ll just go along,’ said Mr Savory, ‘and see the chef de train. He may know how long . . .’ The first snow began to fall. ‘If you would be my guest,’ said Myatt, ‘Miss—’

  ‘My name’s Janet Pardoe,’ she said, and drew her fur coat up above her ears. Her cheeks glowed where the snow touched them, and Myatt could follow through the fur the curve of her concealed body and compare it with Coral’s thin nakedness. I shall have to take Coral too, he thought. ‘Have you seen,’ he said, ‘a girl in a mackintosh, thin, shorter than you?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Janet Pardoe said, ‘She got out of the train at Subotica. I know whom you mean. You had supper with her last night.’ She smiled at him. ‘She’s your mistress, isn’t she?’

  ‘Do you mean she got out with her bag?’

  ‘Oh no. She had nothing with her. I saw her going across to the station with a customs man. She’s a funny little thing, isn’t she? A chorus girl?’ she asked with polite interest, but her tone conveyed to Myatt a criticism not of the girl but of himself for spending his money to so little advantage. It angered him as much as if she had criticized the quality of his currants; it was a reflection on his discernment and his discretion. After all, he thought, I have spent on her no more than I should spend on you by taking you into Belgrade, and would you pay me back so readily in kind? But the unlikelihood woke desire and bitterness, for this girl was silver polished goods, while Coral was at the best a piece of pretty coloured glass, valued for sentimental reasons; the other had intrinsic worth. She is the kind, he thought, who needs more than money: a handsome body to meet her own lust, and wit and education. I am a Jew, and I have learned nothing except how to make money. But none the less her criticism angere
d him and made it easier to relinquish the unattainable.

  ‘She must have missed the train. I’ll have to go back for her.’ He did not apologize for his broken promise, but went quickly while it was still easy to go.

  The merchant was haggling with the driver. He had brought the price down to a hundred dinas, and his own offer had risen to ninety. Myatt was ashamed of his interruption, and of the contempt both men must feel for his hasty unbusinesslike manner. ‘I’ll give you a hundred and twenty dinas to take me to Subotica and back.’ When he saw the driver was ready to begin another argument he raised his offer. ‘A hundred and fifty dinas if you take me there and back before this train leaves.’

  The car was old, battered, and very powerful. They drove into the face of the storm at sixty miles an hour along a road which had not been mended in a lifetime. The springs were broken and Myatt was flung from side to side, as the car fell into holes and climbed and heeled. It groaned and panted like a human being, driven to the edge of endurance by a merciless master. The snow fell faster; the telegraph-poles along the line seemed glimpses of dark space in the gaps of a white wall. Myatt leant over to the driver and shouted in German above the roar of the ancient engine, ‘Can you see?’ The car twisted and swerved across the road and the man yelled back at him that there was nothing to fear, they would meet nothing on the road; he did not say that he could see.

  Presently the wind rose. The road which had before been hidden from them by a straight wall of snow now rose and fell back on them, like a wave of which the snow was the white stinging spume. Myatt shouted to the driver to go slower; if a tyre bursts now, he thought, we are dead. He saw the driver look at his watch and put his foot upon the accelerator and the ancient engine responded with a few more miles an hour, like one of those strong obstinate old men of whom others say, ‘They are the last. We don’t breed that kind now.’ Myatt shouted again, ‘Slower,’ but the driver pointed to his watch and drove his car to its creaking, unsafe, and gigantic limit of strength. He was a man to whom thirty dinas, the difference between catching and losing the train, meant months of comfort; he would have risked his life and the life of his passenger for far less money. Suddenly, as the wind took the snow and blew it aside, a cart appeared in the gap ten yards away and right in front of them. Myatt had just time to see the bemused eyes of the oxen, to calculate where their horns would smash the glass of the windscreen; an elderly man screamed and dropped his goad and jumped. The driver wrenched his wheel round, the car leapt a bank, rode crazily on two wheels, while the others hummed and revolved between the wind and earth, leant farther and farther over till Myatt could see the ground rise like boiling milk, left the bank, touched two wheels to the ground, touched four, and roared down the road at sixty-five miles an hour, while the snow closed behind them, and hid the oxen and cart and the astonished terrified old man.