The Balkan Trilogy (52 page)

‘She wouldn’t hurt you, would she? She wouldn’t give you away?’

‘Please don’t tell her anything about me.’

His tone was a complete rejection of his stepmother. So much for her. Then what about the possible friends? She said: ‘You must have known a lot of people in Bucharest. Isn’t there anyone who would give you a better hiding-place than this?’

He explained that, having been at an English public school, he had no friends of long standing here. She asked, what about his University acquaintances? He simply shook his head. He had known people, but not well. There seemed to be no one on whom he could impose himself now. Jews did not make friends easily. They were suspicious and cautious in this anti-Semitic society, and Sasha had been enclosed by a large family. The Druckers formed their own community, one which depended on Drucker’s power for its safety. His arrest had been the signal for flight. If they had hesitated, they might all have suffered.

Watching him, wondering what they were to do with him, Harriet caught Sasha’s glance and saw her questions had disturbed him. He had again the fearful, wary look of the hunted, and she knew she was no better than Guy at displacing the homeless. Indeed, she was worse for, unlike Guy, she had been resolved and had failed. When it came to a battle of human needs, her resolution did not count for much.

Glancing away from her, Sasha saw the dog, stick in mouth, patiently awaiting his attention. He put out his hand to it.

The extreme gentleness of his gesture moved her. She suddenly felt his claim on her and knew it was the claim of her lost red kitten, and of all the animals to whom she had given her love in childhood because there had been no one else who wanted it. She wondered why Yakimov had not moved her in this way. Was it because he lacked the quality of innocence?

She said to Sasha: ‘There’s someone living with us in the flat, a Prince Yakimov. We have to keep him for the moment, he has nowhere else to go, but I don’t trust him. You must be careful. Don’t let him see you.’ She slid down from the wall, saying as she left him: ‘This is a wretched hut. It’s the best we can do for the moment. If Yakimov leaves – and I hope he will – you can have his room.’

Sasha smiled after her, his fears forgotten, content like a stray animal that, having found a resting-place, has no complaint to make.

Next morning only
Timpul
mentioned the ‘trickle of riff-raff in green shirts that provoked laughter in the Calea Victoriei’. By evening this attitude had changed. Every paper reported the march with shocked disapproval, for the King had announced that were it repeated the military would be called out to fire on the marchers.

The Guardists went under cover again, but this, people said, was the result not of the King’s threat but an address made to the Guardists by their chief, Horia Sima, who was
newly returned from exile in Germany. He advised them to leave off their green shirts and sing ‘
Capitanul
’ only in their hearts. The time for action was not yet come.

Their leading spirits again hung unoccupied about the streets, sombre, shabby, malevolent, awaiting the call. These men, whom it seemed only Harriet had noticed in the spring, suddenly became visible and significant to everyone, giving rise to fresh excitements and apprehensions, and renewed terror among the Jews.

^*
Acknowledgements are due to Mr Edgell Rickworth for kind permission to print his lines.

PART TWO

6

The next time Harriet went up to see Sasha she took with her a bowl of apricots and a copy of
L’Indépendence Romaine
. The paper contained the date on which Drucker’s trial would begin, an announcement overshadowed by the news that the Hungarian premier and his foreign minister had been granted an audience with the Führer. What were the Hungarians after?

Harriet, eating her supper alone, made her way through the leading article on Transylvania: ‘
le berceau de la Nation, le coeur de la Patrie
’. No mention was made of Hungary’s old claim to this territory, but at the end the article asked: Had the Rumanian people not suffered enough in their efforts to preserve Balkan peace? Was yet another sacrifice to be demanded of them? And answered: No, yet again no. If rumours of such a sacrifice were circulating they must be instantly suppressed.

The Pringles had been invited to dine that evening with a Jewish couple who, granted a visa to the United States, wanted to know how to conduct themselves in the English-speaking world. Invitations of this sort were frequent. Though Guy knew no more about the States than he had learnt from American films, he was always happy to give advice, but Harriet was becoming bored with listening to it. She said:
‘You go. They don’t really want me,’ for at the back of her mind was the intention to see Sasha again.

As she climbed up the iron ladder to roof-level, she was startled by the grandeur of the sky from which plumes of puce and crimson had been pulled downwards by the setting sun. The concrete glowed like marble, but for all the richness of the light the air was heavy, almost thunderous, though thunder was rare here.

Sasha was sitting on the parapet, an intent and solitary figure, scribbling on something. As she stepped up on to the roof, she saw him lift his head and stare towards the cathedral which, built on high ground, overlooked the city. Its golden domes were afire now and the whole building stood like an embossed enamel against the luminous darkness of the lower sky.

At the sound of her step, he jerked his head round and his face brightened at the sight of company, so she ceased to feel any need to account for her visit.

She asked where the dog was.

He said: ‘It didn’t live here. Despina was keeping it for someone. Now it has gone home.’

‘Do any of the servants sleep on the roof?’

‘No, there’s no one but me.’

As she had thought, these advertised ‘second servant rooms’ were merely an attempt to smarten the jerry-built, ill-planned block. No one needed or could afford the extra staff.

She felt sorry for the boy alone up here. She put the apricots on the parapet and said: ‘Those are for you,’ then she looked at his sketch of the cathedral done on the concrete with a lump of rough charcoal Despina had found for him somewhere. She said: ‘It’s quite good.’

‘Is it?’ he asked eagerly. ‘You really like it?’ so surprised and trusting of her judgement that she felt ashamed of her unthinking praise, and looked at it again. It was boldly done, the rough surface of the parapet giving the lines a comic distortion.

‘Yes, it is good,’ she confirmed her own judgement and he smiled in naïve pleasure.

‘If you like this,’ he said, ‘you’d like some things I saw in Bessarabia. They were super.’

As she hoisted herself on to the wall, she asked: ‘Where were you in Bessarabia?’

He had been on the frontier, in a fortress that was as bare, cold and ill-lit as it would have been in the Middle Ages. There was nothing at all in the district but a village that comprised two rows of desolate huts with a pitted mud track running between. The whole area had been raided so often, it was like the environs of a volcano: only the most desperate would make a home there. In winter it had been swept by gales and blizzards and in spring, when the snow melted, it became a quagmire.

‘The village was jolly queer,’ he said. ‘All the people living there were Jews.’

‘Why did they live there, of all places?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps they’d been driven out of everywhere else.’

She had imagined she would have difficulty in persuading him to talk about his experiences, but it seemed he had already put them at a distance. He had adopted Guy and Harriet in place of his family so, feeling protected again, he could chat away as though nothing had ever happened in his life to check his confidence. While he talked, she wondered at the simplicity of a nature able so rapidly to regain itself.

‘And what about these things you saw? Were they drawings?’

‘No. Paintings. They were shop-signs.’

He described the Jews of the villages – the men gaunt wraiths in their tattered caftans, the women wearing black woollen wigs over heads shaven because they suffered from some skin disease which had died out elsewhere. They were sly and obsequious, and Sasha, who had always known Jews who were the richest members of the community, had been amazed to find any as debased as these.

‘They couldn’t even read,’ he said. ‘They were terribly poor – but they could do these paintings.’

‘What were they like?’

‘Oh – sort of fantastic. People, animals and things, in the most super colours. I’d always go and look at them when I could.’

He spoke as though the shop signs had been his only entertainment and she asked: ‘Did you have any friends in the army?’

‘I knew a boy in the village. His father kept the place where the soldiers went to drink
ţ
uic
ǎ
. It was just a room, very dirty, but all the soldiers said the man was an awful crook and making lots of money.’

Sasha described the boy, thin, white-faced, in a black skull-cap, knickerbockers that fastened below the knee and black stockings and boots. Tufts of red down were appearing on his glazed white cheeks, and red ritual curls hung before his ears. ‘You never saw anyone look so funny,’ Sasha said.

‘But all the Orthodox Jews look like that,’ Harriet said. ‘Surely you’ve seen them down the Dâmbovi
ţ
a?’

Sasha shook his head. He had never been near the ghetto area. His aunts would not allow him to go there.

‘Did you speak to the boy?’ Harriet asked.

‘I tried, but it wasn’t much good. He only spoke Yiddish and Ukrainian, and he was very shy. Sometimes he’d run away when he saw me in the street.’

‘But hadn’t you friends among the soldiers?’

‘Well …’ Sasha sat silent for some moments, staring down and rubbing the palm of his hand on the rough edge of the wall. ‘Yes, I did have a friend.’ He spoke as though making an admission painful to him. ‘He was a Jew, too. He was called Marcovitch.’

‘Did he run away with you?’

Sasha shook his head, then after a moment said: ‘He died.’

‘How did he die?’

Sasha said nothing for some minutes, and she saw there was an area of experience, unnaturally imposed upon his natural innocence, to which he would not willingly revert. She said persuasively: ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘Well …’ He spoke casually, like one old in knowledge.
‘You know what it is like here. If anything happens, they say: “It’s the Jews.” In the army it was the same. They blamed the Jews for Bessarabia. They said we called in the Russians because of the new laws against us. As though we could!’ He looked at her and laughed. ‘Just silly, of course.’ His self-conscious attempt at sophistication made her realise how young he was.

‘Did they ill-treat you?’ she asked.

‘Not very much. Some of them were quite decent, really. It was beastly for everyone, being conscripted. The barracks were full of bugs. When I first went there I was bitten so much, I looked as though I had measles. And every day maize or beans, but not much. There was money for food, but the officers kept it.’

‘Is that why you ran away?’

‘No.’ He picked up his charcoal and began darkening the lines of his drawing that had started to disappear with the light. ‘It was because of Marcovitch.’

‘Who died? When did he die?’

‘After we were ordered out of Bessarabia. We were on the train and he went down the corridor and he didn’t come back. I asked everyone, but they said they hadn’t seen him. While we were waiting at Czernowitz – we stayed on the platform three days because there were no trains – they were saying a body had been found on the railway-line half-eaten by wolves. Then one of the men said to me: “You heard what happened to your friend, Marcovitch? That was his body. You be careful, you’re a Jew, too.” And I knew they’d thrown him out of the train. I was afraid. It could happen to me. So in the night, when they were all asleep, I ran down the line and hid in a goods train. It took me to Bucharest.’

While they were talking, the sound of the last post came thin and clear from the palace yard. The sunset clouds had stretched and narrowed and faded in the sky, leaving a zenith of clear turquoise in which a few stars were appearing. The square below was lit not only by its lamps but by a reflection from the sky that was like a sheen on water.

She thought she had made Sasha talk enough and Guy might soon be back. She slid down from the wall and said: ‘I must go, but I’ll come again.’ Before she left, she handed Sasha the paper. ‘It says your father’s trial starts on August 14th. The sooner it is over, the better. After all, he may be acquitted.’

Sasha took the paper, which could not be read in this light, and said: ‘Yes,’ but his agreement was simply politeness. He knew as well as she did that the law required Drucker’s conviction before his oil holdings could be forfeit to the Crown. What hope then of an acquittal?

As she set out across the roof area, Sasha went to his hut. When she turned to descend, she could see he had already lit his candle and, kneeling, was bent over the paper that was spread on the ground before him.

7

Yakimov saw the great yellow car outside the Legation as soon as he turned into the road. The hood was down, hidden beneath a panel, so there was nothing to break the long, fine line from nose to tail. His eyes filled with tears. ‘The old girl herself,’ he said. As he added: ‘I love her,’ he scarcely knew whether he referred to the Hispano-Suiza or to Dollie, who had given it to him.

The car was now seven years old, but he had taken care of it as he had never taken care of himself. He opened the bonnet and examined the engine. When he closed it, he patted the stork that flew down-drooping wings from the radiator cap. He walked round the car, noting that the body was dusty but no worse, and the pigskin leather of the seats was in ‘good shape’. ‘Bless the old Jugs,’ he thought. ‘They haven’t treated her so badly.’

He spent so long rejoicing over the car that Foxy Leverett noticed him from a window and came out to give him the keys.