Masaryk Station (John Russell) (12 page)

‘Oh, I know you don’t do that sort of thing anymore. I read an article about you in an American paper—that’s how I found who you really were—so I’m not expecting practical help. But I did think you might advise me, or know someone who could. The people I knew here are dead or gone, either to America or Palestine. But with
so many families still looking for relatives, there must be people who’ve learnt how to find them.’

Effi’s heart went out to her. She didn’t know of anyone, but maybe John would.

She explained that her husband was away, but that she would write and ask him. And maybe Ströhm could help—she would ask him, too.

Lisa thanked her for that and again for Effi’s help in the past, and they arranged to meet up once Effi had finished filming. After her visitor had gone, she heard Rosa call her name.

The girl, it seemed, had listened to the whole conversation. ‘My mother never left me,’ she insisted, as if she feared the opposite.

‘No, she didn’t,’ Effi confirmed. ‘And neither did your father. As long as they lived, they would never have done that.’

Stefan Utermann

I
t was almost one in the morning when Russell was jerked from a doze by the loud and angry rumble of his train on the Sava bridge outside Belgrade. He had left Trieste at seven that morning, looking forward to the three-hundred-mile journey, but a tortoise-like crawl up from the coast had been followed by lengthy waits at Ljubljana and Zagreb, and the long descent of the Sava valley had felt a whole lot longer when the restaurant car inexplicably closed some six hours short of the capital.

As he walked out of the terminus, the sight of a dozen hotels settled the battle between hunger and tiredness. He tried three before he found a conscious night clerk, and happily accepted a key without first checking the room. As far as he could see, no fleas were jumping for joy on the yellow sheets, and the sash window sprang open with only a modest application of brute force. Within a few minutes Russell was fast asleep.

He was woken by the sun streaming in through the curtainless windows, and lay there thanking the stars that nothing had bitten him during the night. He felt like a bath, but one look at the shared facilities down the corridor persuaded him to wait. After getting dressed he made his way down the rickety stairs, paid the exorbitant bill, and ventured out into the city. The sky was mostly blue, the air already warm for that time of the morning. The square in front of the station was busy, and the number of salesmen offering wares
seemed high for a communist country. Maybe Tito’s Yugoslavia really was different, the way Ströhm kept hoping it was.

On his last and only other visit to Belgrade two years earlier Russell had stayed at the Majestic, which had seemed more than adequate. He thought he remembered the way from the station, but the first landmark he recognised was the Royal Palace, which had been rebuilt since his last visit, though presumably not for royalty. A uniformed man loitering outside gave him a suspicious look, but then provided directions amenably enough.

It looked as if Belgrade was doing better than Berlin when it came to reconstruction—in 1946 every street had seemed full of gaps, but now they were few and far between. And the people seemed younger than they did in Berlin or Trieste, although why that should be he had no idea—among the Allied countries, only the Soviet Union had lost a higher proportion of its population.

He found the Majestic in its small corner square, and happily spent Uncle Sam’s money on a suite at the front with a bath. His rooms were clean and almost over-furnished, the water wonderfully hot. After consigning his travelling clothes to the laundry service, he went out in search of breakfast, zigzagging north towards the Marketplatz and a particular café he remembered. It was on the second zig that he realised he was being followed. A man in his thirties, in a grey suit, white shirt and black trilby.

The café was still there, with tables outside for the taking. After sitting there for a minute or so, he casually scanned the square, and found his shadow apparently reading a paper outside another establishment. The coffee, when it came, was surprising good, the ham and eggs quite excellent. And the general atmosphere seemed surprisingly relaxed, less gloomy than Berlin, less surreal than Trieste.

After paying his check, he walked on towards the Kalemegdan, whose surrounding gardens offered a pleasant spot for reflection,
and found the seat he had sat in two years earlier, in the shadow of the stone citadel, high above the confluence of the Sava and Danube. Then all but one bridge had been down, but another two had since been restored, and, like the two rivers, were busy with traffic.

Then, as now, he had come as a journalist, but this time appearances were more deceptive. These days the Yugoslavs would suspect any visiting pressman of working for an intelligence service, whether full-time or part-time hardly mattered. And since it was the Americans who had persuaded the Yugoslavs to let him in, the latter would assume that Washington employed him in some form or other. Which of course they did.

The Americans, as Youklis had explained at their last convivial rendezvous, wanted to know how things were going between Tito and Stalin. Were they about to fall out, or had they done so already? If and when they did, Youklis and friends presumably had no intention of supporting one group of communists against another. They would just dump as much oil on troubled waters as they could.

All of which was straightforward enough for a journalist of Russell’s experience. The American’s other request was likely to be more problematic, because Youklis didn’t seem to know that much about the man he wanted Russell to contact. Zoran Pograjac had fought with Mihajlović’s Četniks and survived—as Mihajlović had not—a post-war charge of collaborating with the Germans. He had apparently kept his head down since, but Russell found it hard to believe that someone with a history like Pograjac’s wasn’t being watched by the communist authorities.

The Soviets had been more reasonable in their requests. They simply hoped that Russell’s American backing would encourage the more anti-Soviet Yugoslavs to open up in private about their future plans. At their meeting in Trieste—convened in a small square beneath an unlikely statue of Aphrodite—Comrade Serov had
presented Russell with a list of those they wanted him to interview. All but one were possible traitors to the working class. The exception—Vukašin Nedić—was a friend of the Soviet Union, but he was being closely watched by the Yugoslav authorities. Russell should insist on interviewing Nedić, and if the Yugoslavs tried to refuse, he should say that he could only write his article if given access to all the different points of view. ‘They will be keen,’ Serov assured him.

When they eventually met, Russell’s use of the phrase ‘the weather’s been unusual today’ would tell Nedić that he could be trusted. Russell would then be given an up-to-the-minute estimate of the current situation, and the list that Nedić was compiling of those Yugoslav communists who could still be relied upon to see things from an internationalist perspective.

‘Don’t you have an Embassy in Belgrade?’ Russell had asked the Russian.

‘Of course,’ Serov had replied. ‘But we never interfere in a fraternal party’s internal affairs.’

Well, Russell would go and see Nedić if the Yugoslavs let him, hear what he had to say, and make damn sure he didn’t get caught with a list of would-be traitors, either by destroying it straight away, or voluntarily handing it in to the authorities. Hearing Shchepkin’s disappointed ‘tsk’ was much less painful than quarrying marble on Naked Island.

Mihajlović’s man needed treating with even more circumspection. The Soviets expected to be disappointed—the whole bloody world was against them, and they were used to it—but the Americans took it all as a personal affront. If he wanted to see Berlin anytime soon, he would have to make an effort, or at least give a decent impression. But oh so carefully. If Pograjac wasn’t just a CIC fantasy, if he really was a bona fide opponent of the regime, then consorting with him was asking for trouble. Russell could still remember the defendants at the
Moscow show trials falling over themselves to admit contacts with foreign agents. ‘Shoot the mad dogs!’ had been Prosecutor Vyshinsky’s catch phrase.

He glanced across at his shadow, who was gazing out at the river. The man turned his head, as if conscious he was being watched, and when Russell gave him a big smile, managed a wry one in return. A small triumph for humanity.

A young couple walked past deep in conversation, reminding him that he didn’t speak the local lingo. A significant handicap in this sort of work. He couldn’t even read the damn newspaper—for all he knew, the two parties had resolved all their differences while he was on his train, and Tito and Stalin were busy composing love letters to each other. He needed to talk to someone—there had to be some foreign journalists in Belgrade who spoke one of his languages. In 1946 the Majestic had been full of them.

He walked back there, shadow in tow. The desk clerk spoke enough German to understand his question, and told him that two other journalists were staying at the hotel, one from England and one from France. The former was called Ronald Hitchen, and the clerk thought he worked for
The Times
. Neither the name, nor, later that evening, the face, jogged Russell’s memory.

He was sitting in the almost empty hotel bar when a young man with tousled brown hair and a pleasant boyish face came up and introduced himself. ‘I’m Hitchen. I hear you’ve been asking for me.’

‘What can I get you?’

‘Oh, I’m cultivating an addiction to slivovitz.’

‘There are worse things.’

They introduced themselves. Hitchen, it turned out, was also a freelance, but found that people who thought he worked for
The Times
were generally more helpful than people who knew he didn’t. He had been in Belgrade for a week, and had already talked to quite
a few people. ‘I came with a lot of introductions,’ he admitted. ‘My uncle was part of the British mission to Yugoslavia during the war, and made quite a few friends among Tito’s people.’

Gold, Russell thought, I’ve struck gold. He already had a broad understanding of the differences between Moscow and Belgrade—they arose, like the differences between Moscow and the KPD back home, from a basic unwillingness on Stalin’s part to allow the so-called fraternal parties any responsibility for their own affairs. Like the KPD, the Yugoslav Communist Party knew better than Moscow what local conditions required, but it was much better placed to say so. Unlike the KPD, the YCP had largely liberated its own country, and those Red Army units that had passed through Yugoslavia had long since left. If not universally popular, the YCP could, alone in eastern Europe, count on the support of a clear majority. If the Soviets picked a fight with Tito, they wouldn’t find it easy.

It had, however, taken them a while to work this out. Russell knew from Shchepkin that late in March the CPSU had sent the YCP an official letter of complaint. According to Moscow, the Yugoslavs had been denigrating the Soviet Union with claims that it was no longer socialist. Which of course was the sort of nonsense you could expect from a party falling well short of genuine Bolshevism.

The YCP had responded on the 13
^th
of April. They were Bolsheviks, and they did love the Soviet Union, but they admitted to loving their own country, too. It had seemed to Shchepkin, and seemed to Russell, a fairly placatory missive, but what neither knew, and what Hitchen now told him, was that Tito was simply keeping things sweet until he pounced on the local fifth column. And that
had
happened while Russell was on his train—the Yugoslav version of the MGB had arrested a slew of Party members who put loyalty to Moscow above loyalty to Tito.

If Nedić had been one of them, Russell thought, then he wouldn’t
have to worry about the wretched list. But Hitchen didn’t recognise the name.

‘Are they really spoiling for a fight?’ he asked the young journalist. ‘It’s not just a minor squabble?’

‘Oh no. They’ve really had it with the Russians. First the Red Army raped its way across the country, then the Soviets insisted on setting up joint stock companies to steal them blind, and then they flooded the place with MGB to watch the locals. The last straw was claiming that the Red Army had done all of the heavy fighting, and that Tito and Co only played a minor role in defeating the Germans. Tito wasn’t having that. The medals he wears makes you think he’d liberated most of Europe.’

‘And they’re not afraid that the Red Army will make another visit?’

‘A little, perhaps. But I think the Yugoslavs have got it sussed—the Soviets must know it wouldn’t be a walkover, and they can’t afford a real fight, either politically or militarily. I think they’ll just give Tito the boot, and nail down the lid on the other satraps. They’re all easy to reach.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Russell conceded. ‘I don’t suppose the Soviets have commented on the arrests?’

‘Not yet. But I expect someone in Moscow’s trawling Lenin’s speeches for appropriate insults.’

The last remaining scenes of
Anna Hofmann
were shot on Tuesday morning, and lunch turned into a farewell banquet, which lasted most of the afternoon. There was enough alcohol on offer to refloat the
Bismarck
, and the hastily-erected picnic tables literally creaked under mounds of food. DEFA’s Soviet supporters were clearly keen to prove that its Hollywood-banked competitors hadn’t cornered the market in excessive rewards.

Effi, like almost everyone else, spent the afternoon surreptitiously
slipping delicacies into her bag for future family consumption. She was just hiding away a couple of particularly tasty almond biscuits when the Soviet Propaganda Minister loomed in front of her.

‘Fraulein Koenen,’ Tulpanov greeted her warmly in German. ‘They are good, aren’t they?’ he added with a twinkle.

‘I’m taking them home for my daughter,’ Effi explained, unabashed.

‘Of course. I was sorry to hear that you decided against
A Walk into the Future
.’