Stamboul Train

by Graham Greene

  ‘Drive slower,’ Myatt gasped, but the driver turned and grinned at him and waved an untrembling hand.

  The officers sitting in a row at the table, the guards at the door, the doctor answering question after question after question receded. Coral Musker fell asleep. The night had tired her; she could not understand a word that was said; she did not know why she was there; she was frightened and beginning to despair. She dreamed first that she was a child and everything was very simple and very certain and everything had an explanation and a moral. And then she dreamed that she was very old and was looking back over her life and she knew everything and she knew what was right and what was wrong, and why this and that happened and everything was very simple and had a moral. But this second dream was not like the first one, for she was nearly awake and she ruled the dream to suit herself, and always in the background the talking went on. In this dream she began to remember from the safety of age the events of the night and the day and how everything had turned out for the best and how Myatt had come back for her from Belgrade.

  Dr Czinner too had been given a chair. He could tell from the fat officer’s expression that the lie was nearly done with, for he had ceased to pay any attention to the questions, nodding and hiccuping and nodding again. Colonel Hartep kept up the appearance of justice from a genuine kindliness. He had no scruples, but he did not wish to give unnecessary pain. If it had been possible he would have left Dr Czinner until the end some scraps of hope. Major Petkovitch continually raised objections; he knew as well as anyone what the outcome of the trial would be, but he was determined that it should have a superficial legality, that everything should be done in the proper order according to the regulations in the 1929 handbook.

  With his hands folded quietly in front of him, and his shabby soft hat on the floor at his feet, Dr Czinner fought them without hope. The only satisfaction he could expect to gain would be the admission of the hollowness of his trial; he was going to be quietly tucked away in earth at the frontier station after dark, without publicity. ‘On the ground of perjury,’ he said, ‘I have not been tried. It’s outside the jurisdiction of a court martial.’

  ‘You were tried in your absence,’ Colonel Hartep said, ‘and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.’

  ‘I think you will find that I must still be brought up before a civil judge for sentence.’

  ‘He’s quite right,’ said Major Petkovitch. ‘We have no jurisdiction there. If you look up Section 15—’

  ‘I believe you, Major. We’ll waive then the sentence for perjury. There remains the false passport.’

  Dr Czinner said quickly, ‘You must prove that I have not become a naturalized British subject. Where are your witnesses? Will you telegraph to the British Ambassador?’

  Colonel Hartep smiled. ‘It would take so long. We’ll waive the false passport. You agree, Major?’

  ‘No,’ said Major Petkovitch, ‘I think it would be more correct to postpone trial on the smaller charge until sentence—that is to say, a verdict—has been declared on the greater.’

  ‘It is all the same to me,’ said Colonel Hartep. ‘And you, Captain?’ The captain nodded and grinned and closed his eyes.

  ‘And now,’ Colonel Hartep said, ‘the charge of conspiring.’ Major Petkovitch interrupted, ‘I have been thinking it over. I think “treason” should have been the word used in the indictment.’

  ‘Treason, then.’

  ‘No, no, Colonel. It is impossible to alter the indictment now. “Conspiracy” will have to stand.’

  ‘The maximum penalty—?’

  ‘Is the same.’

  ‘Well, then, Dr Czinner, do you wish to plead guilty or not guilty?’

  Dr Czinner sat for a moment considering. Then he said, ‘It makes little difference?’ Colonel Hartep looked at his watch, and then touched a letter which lay on the table. ‘In the opinion of the court this is sufficient to convict.’ He had the air of a man who wishes politely but firmly to put an end to an interview.

  ‘I have the right, I suppose, to demand that it should be read, to cross-examine the soldier who took it?’

  ‘Without doubt,’ said Major Petkovitch eagerly.

  Dr Czinner smiled. ‘I won’t trouble you. I plead guilty.’ But if this had been a court in Belgrade, he told himself, with the pressmen scribbling in their box, I would have fought every step. Now that he had nobody to address, his mind was flooded with eloquence, words which could stab and words which would have brought tears. He was no longer the angry tongue-tied man who had failed to impress Mrs Peters. ‘The court adjourns,’ Colonel Hartep said. In the short silence the wind could be heard wandering like an angry watch-dog round the station buildings. It was a very brief interval, just long enough for Colonel Hartep to write a few sentences on a sheet of paper and push it across the table to his companions to sign. The two guards a little eased their position.

  ‘The court finds all the prisoners guilty,’ Colonel Hartep read. ‘The prisoner Josef Grünlich, is sentenced to a month’s imprisonment, after which he will be repatriated. The prisoner, Coral Musker, is sentenced to twenty-four hours’ imprisonment and will then be repatriated. The prisoner . . .’

  Dr Czinner interrupted: ‘Can I speak to the court before sentence is passed?’

  Colonel Hartep glanced quickly at the window: it was shut; at the guards: their disciplined faces were uncomprehending and empty. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Major Petkovitch’s face flushed. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘Quite impossible. Regulation 27a. The prisoner should have spoken before the court adjourned.’ The Chief of Police looked past the major’s sharp profile to where Dr Czinner sat, bunched up on the chair, his hands folded together in grey woollen gloves. An engine hooted outside and ground slowly down the line. The snow whispered at the window. He was aware of the long ribbons on his coat and of the hole in Dr Czinner’s glove. ‘It would be most irregular,’ Major Petkovitch railed on, while with one hand he absent-mindedly felt for his dog under the table and pulled the beast’s ears. ‘I note your protest,’ Colonel Hartep said, and then he spoke to Dr Czinner. ‘You know as well as I do,’ he said kindly, ‘that nothing you can say will alter the verdict. But if it pleases you, if it will make you any happier to speak, you may.’

  Dr Czinner had expected opposition or contempt and his words would have flown to meet them. Kindness and consideration for a moment made him dumb. He envied again the qualities which only confidence and power could give the possessor. Before Colonel Hartep’s kindly waiting silence he was tongued-tied. Captain Alexitch opened his eyes and closed them again. The doctor said slowly, ‘Those medals you won in the service of your country during the war. I have no medals, because I love my country too much. I won’t kill men because they also love their country. What I am fighting for is not new territory but a new world.’ His words halted; there was no audience to bear him up; and he became conscious of the artificiality of his words which did not bear witness to the great love and the great hate driving him on. Sad and beautiful faces, thin from bad food, old before their time, resigned to despair, passed through his mind; they were people he had known, whom he had attended and failed to save. The world was in chaos to leave so much nobility unused, while the great financiers and the soldiers prospered. He said, ‘You are employed to bolster up an old world which is full of injustice and muddle. For people like Vuskovitch, who steal the small savings of the poor, and live for ten years fast, full, stupid lives, then shoot themselves. And yet you are paid to defend the only system which would protect men like him. You put the small thief in prison, but the big thief lives in a palace.’

  Major Petkovitch said, ‘What the prisoner is saying has no bearing on the case. It is a political speech.’

  ‘Let him go on.’ Colonel Hartep shaded his face with his hand and closed his eyes. Dr Czinner thought that he was feigning sleep to mask his indifference, but he opened them again when Dr Czinner called out to him angrily, ‘How old-fashioned you are with your f
rontiers and your patriotism. The aeroplane doesn’t know a frontier; even your financiers don’t recognize frontiers.’ Then Dr Czinner saw that something saddened him and the thought that perhaps Colonel Hartep had no desire for his death made him again at a loss for words. He moved his eyes restlessly from point to point, from the map on the wall to the little shelf below the clock full of books on strategy and military history in worn jackets. At last his eyes reached the two guards; one stared past him, paying him no attention, careful to keep his eyes on one spot and his rifle at the correct angle. The other watched him with wide stupid unhappy eyes. That face joined the sad procession through his brain, and he was aware for a moment that he had a better audience than pressmen, that here was a poor man to be converted from the wrong service to the right, and words came to him, the vague and sentimental words which had once appealed to him and would appeal to the other. But he was cunning now with the guile of his class, staring away from the man at the floor and only letting his gaze flicker back once like a lizard’s tail. He addressed him in the plural as ‘Brothers.’ He urged that there was no shame in poverty that they should seek to be rich, and that there was no crime in poverty that they should be oppressed. When all were poor, no one would be poor. The wealth of the world belonged to everyone. If it was divided, there would be no rich men, but every man would have enough to eat, and would have no reason to feel ashamed beside his neighbour.

  Colonel Hartep lost interest. Dr Czinner was losing the individuality of the grey wool gloves and the hole in the thumb; he was becoming a tub orator, no more. He looked at his watch and said, ‘I think I have allowed you enough time.’ Major Petkovitch muttered something under his breath and becoming suddenly irritable kicked his dog in the ribs and said, ‘Be off with you. Always wanting attention.’ Captain Alexitch woke up and said in a tone of great relief, ‘Well, that’s over.’ Dr Czinner, staring at the floor five yards to the left of the guard, said slowly, ‘This wasn’t a trial. They had sentenced me to death before they began. Remember, I’m dying to show you the way. I don’t mind dying. Life has not been so good as that. I think I shall be of more use dead.’ But while he spoke his clearer mind told him that the chances were few that his death would have any effect.

  ‘The prisoner Richard Czinner is sentenced to death,’ Colonel Hartep read, ‘the sentence to be carried out by the officer commanding the garrison at Subotica in three hours’ time.’ It will be dark by then, the doctor thought. No one will know of this.

  For a moment everyone sat still as though they were at a concert and a movement had ended and they were uncertain whether to applaud. Coral Musker woke. She could not understand what was happening. The officers were speaking together, shuffling papers. Then one of them gave a command and the guards opened the door and motioned towards the wind and the snow and the white veiled buildings.

  The prisoners passed out. They kept close to each other in the storm of snow which struck them. They had not gone far when Josef Grünlich seized Dr Czinner’s sleeve. ‘You tell me nothing. What shall happen to me? You walk along and say nothing.’ He grumbled and panted.

  ‘A month’s imprisonment,’ Dr Czinner said, ‘and then you are to be sent home.’

  ‘They think that, do they? They think they are damned clever.’ He became silent, studying with close attention the position of the buildings. He stumbled on the edge of the line and muttered angrily to himself.

  ‘And me?’ Coral asked. ‘What’s to happen to me?’

  ‘You’ll be sent home tomorrow.’

  ‘But I can’t. There’s my job. I shall lose it. And my friend.’ She had been afraid of this journey, because she could not understand what porters said to her, because of the strange food, and the uncertainty at the end of it: there had been a moment as the purser called after her across the wet quay at Ostend when she would gladly have turned back. But ‘things’ had happened since then: she would be returning to the same lodgings, to the toast and orange juice for breakfast, the long wait on the agent’s stairs with Ivy and Flo and Phil and Dick, all the affectionate people one kissed and called by their front names and didn’t know from Adam. Intimacy with one person could do this—empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women’s kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting. Even the doctor did not matter to her as he stalked along in a different world, but she remembered as they reached the door of the waiting-room to ask him, ‘And you? What’s happening to you?’

  He said vaguely, forgetting to stand aside for her to enter, ‘I’m being kept here.’

  ‘Where will they take me?’ Josef Grünlich asked as the door closed.

  ‘And me?’

  ‘To the barracks, I expect, for tonight. There’s no train to Belgrade. They’ve let the stove out.’ Through the window he tried to catch a view of the peasants, but apparently they had grown tired of waiting and had gone home. He said with relief, ‘There’s nothing to be done,’ and with obscure humour, ‘It’s something to be at home.’ He saw himself for a moment facing a desert of pitch-pine desks, row on row of malicious faces, and he remembered the times when he had felt round his heart the little cold draughts of disobedience, the secret signals and spurts of disguised laughter threatening his livelihood, for a master who could not keep order must eventually be dismissed. His enemies were offering him the one thing he had never known, security. There was no need to decide anything. He was at peace.

  Dr Czinner began to hum a tune. He said to Coral Musker, ‘It’s an old song. The lover says “I cannot come in daylight, for I am poor and your father will set the dogs on me. But at night I will come to your window and ask you to let me in.” And the girl says, “If the dogs bark, stay very still in the shadow of the wall and I will come down to you, and we will go together to the orchard at the bottom of the garden.”’ He sang the first verse in a voice a little harsh from lack of use; Josef Grünlich, sitting in the corner, scowled at the singer, and Coral stood by the cold stove and listened with surprise and pleasure because he seemed to be younger and full of hope. ‘At night I will come to your window and ask you to let me in.’ He was not addressing a lover: the words had no power to bring a girl’s face from his dry purposeful political years, but his parents bobbed at him their humorous wrinkled faces, no longer with awe for the educated man, for the doctor, for the almost gentleman. Then in a lower voice he sang the girl’s part. His voice was less harsh and might once have been beautiful; one of the guards came to the window and looked in and Josef Grünlich began to weep in a meaningless Teutonic way, thinking of orphans in the snow and princesses with hearts of ice and not for a moment of Herr Kolber, whose body was borne now through the grey city snow followed by two officials in a car and one mourner in a taxi, an elderly bachelor, a great draughts player. ‘Stay very still in the shadow of the wall and I will come down to you.’ The world was chaotic; when the poor were starved and the rich were not happier for it; when the thief might be punished or rewarded with titles; when wheat was burned in Canada and coffee in Brazil, and the poor in his own country had no money for bread and froze to death in unheated rooms; the world was out of joint and he had done his best to set it right, but that was over. He was powerless now and happy. ‘We will go to the orchard at the bottom of the garden.’ Again it was no memory of a girl which comforted him, but the sad and beautiful faces of the poor who promised him rest. He had done all that he could do, nothing more was expected of him; they surrendered him their hopelessness, the secret of their beauty and their happiness as well as of their grief, and led him towards the leafy rustling darkness. The guard pressed his face to the window, and Dr Czinner stopped singing. ‘It’s your turn,’ he said to Coral.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know any songs that you’d like,’ she told him seriously, searching her memory at the same time for something a little old-fashioned and melancholy, something which would share the quality of a sad idyll with the song he had sung.

  ‘We must pass the
time somehow,’ he said, and suddenly she began to sing in a small clear voice like the tinkle of a musical box:

  ‘I was sitting in a car

  With Michael;

  I looked at a star

  With John;

  I had a glass of bitter

  With Peter

  In a bar;

  But the pips went wrong; they never go right.

  This year, next year

  (You may have counted wrong, count again, dear),

  Some day, never.

  I’ll be a good girl for ever and ever.’

  ‘Is this Subotica?’ Myatt shouted, as a few mud cottages plunged at them through the storm, and the driver nodded and weaved his hand forward. A small child ran out into the middle of the road and the car swerved to avoid it; a chicken squawked and handfuls of grey feathers were flung up into the snow. An old woman ran out of a cottage and shouted after them. ‘What’s she saying?’ The driver grinned over his shoulder: ‘Dirty Jew.’

  The arrow on the speedometer wavered and retreated: fifty miles, forty miles, thirty miles, twenty. ‘Soldiers about,’ the man said.