The Balkan Trilogy (57 page)

Harriet had no doubt who these young men were. They were members of the Iron Guard. The Guardists did not wear uniform or march in formation or sing ‘
Capitanul
’, but they had started to possess the streets. Having noted the first insecure few who had come from Germany after the spring amnesty, she marvelled at the numbers who were crowding back with all the confidence in the world and gathering adherents – the indigent and the afflicted. Once lost in the back streets, these men now swaggered through the Calea Victoriei while timorous passers-by stood aside to let them pass.

The speech over, Harriet decided to take a closer look at the Guardist banners. The sun stood overhead. The square was clearing under the onslaught of midday heat, but the
young men remained steadfast. Harriet, long-sighted, stopped near the statue and saw that one banner called on the King to abdicate. Another demanded the arrest of Lupescu, Urdureanu, the Chief of Police, and other despoilers of the country. The third promised that once the King and his followers were cast out, the Axis would return Bessarabia to the Rumanian people.

Harriet was not the only one who chose to read these demands from a safe distance. People about her were murmuring in amazement and trepidation. And she, too, was amazed that this demonstration could proceed in full view of the palace without a movement from the guards.

Inside the palace someone was pulling down the creamcoloured blinds, masking the windows one after another – perhaps against the sun, perhaps against the sight below. Nothing else happened.

Before returning, Harriet walked past the young men to receive a pamphlet – a manifesto headed ‘
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
’ – which she hurried home to read while awaiting Guy’s return. She settled down to it with a dictionary.

The truth (said the manifesto) could now be told. Codreanu had not been shot while trying to escape. He had been assassinated by order of the King. His death had come about in this way.

The Iron Guard, also called the Legion of the Archangel Michael, had gained sixty-six seats at the election of 1937. The King, insanely jealous of Codreanu’s power, had at once dissolved all parties and declared himself dictator. At this, Hitler had said: ‘For me there exists only one dictator of Rumania and this is Codreanu.’ Codreanu had won the love and confidence which the King, corrupt instigator of a corrupt regime, had lost. Young, noble, saintly, tall, of divine beauty, Codreanu had been directly inspired by the archangel Michael to redeem his country by forming the Iron Guard. He possessed a mysterious power which was felt by all who approached him. When he appeared, dressed in white, on his white horse, the peasants at once recognised him as the
archangel’s envoy on earth. His purpose was to unite all Rumanians in brotherhood, not only the living but the souls of the unborn and the dead …

Harriet hastened on to the tragic end. Skipping the suppression of the Iron Guard, the evidence of the forged letter and the farcical trial in which Codreanu was found guilty of high treason, for which he was imprisoned, she reached the cold November night on which Codreanu and his thirteen comrades were taken in trucks, bound and gagged, to the forest of Ploesti, where each in turn was strangled with a leather strap. At Port Jilava, acid was poured over the bodies; they were burnt, and what remained was buried in a grave which was sealed with a massive slab of concrete.

Yet all these precautions had been in vain. Codreanu was an immortal. Even now his spirit was moving through the land, regathering forces … inspiring … exhorting … leading … and so on.

Harriet had read enough. Her imagination excited by this romance of a young leader murdered by a jealous King, she thought of the men who had handed it to her in the square. Bare-headed and dark-skinned, wearing singlets or cheap shirts without collars, they may have been artisans. They were scarcely more than peasants. Guy, seeing the Guardist groups pushing through the streets, had said: ‘How rapidly they are gathering in their kind: the hopeless, the inadequate, the brute.’ And yet, she thought, they were the only people in this spoilt city whose ideals rose above money, food and sex. Why should the brute not be infused with ideals, the hopeless given hope, the inadequate strength?

She was stimulated, too, by the revelation of a mystical strain in this pleasure-loving people. It was easy to see how a visionary like Codreanu could excite half-starved and superstitious peasants, but one supposed that the townspeople would find the King, with his mistresses, his chicanery and his love of money, a more likely projection of themselves. Or were all people at variance with themselves? Anyway, it had been here in Bucharest, during the funeral of Guardists killed
in Spain, that people had given Codreanu so frenzied a welcome that the King determined to kill his rival and stamp out the whole Guardist movement.

When Guy came in, Harriet was impatient to talk about Codreanu, but he showed no interest. He had heard all the stories before.

‘You must admit,’ she said, ‘that the Iron Guard concepts are not so very different from your own.’

Guy glanced up sharply and, with a gesture, indicated that here and now, in the absurdity of this statement, he could pin down the root trouble of the world. ‘Codreanu,’ he said, ‘was a murderer, a Jew-baiter and a thug. He had a following of nonentities who wanted only one thing – power at any price.’

‘But if, having power, they could remake the country …’

‘Do you imagine they could? The incompetence of Carol’s set would be as nothing compared with the incompetence of Codreanu’s bunch of thugs.’

‘Well, one could give them a chance.’

‘Before the war there were quite a lot of sentimentalists like you. They did not realise that while they were being mesmerised and misled by the romantic aspects of fascism, they were being made to sell their souls …’

Having used this phrase inadvertently, he paused, and Harriet, feeling ignorant and something of a fool, leapt in with: ‘If the fascists make you sell your soul, the communists make you deny it.’

Guy grunted and picked up a newspaper. She knew he had no use for religion, seeing it as part of the conspiracy to keep the rich powerful and the poor docile. He was prepared to discuss very little that did not contribute towards a practical improvement in mankind’s condition. Harriet’s own theories, of course, were too simple-minded to matter.

At the moment he held up the paper to screen him from any more of her nonsense. She said to provoke him: ‘Clarence says you’re merely the rebel son of a rebel father.’

‘Clarence is an ass,’ Guy said, but he put the paper down. ‘In fact I could say I reacted against my father. The poor old
chap was a bit of a romantic. He imagined the moneyed classes were the repository of culture. He used to say: “That’s their function, isn’t it? If they don’t safeguard the arts, what the hell do they do?” When I began to meet rich people I was shocked by their ignorance and vulgarity.’

‘Where did you meet these rich people?’

‘At the University – the sons of local manufacturers. They weren’t aristocrats, it’s true, but they were rich. And not first-generation rich, either. They were the country-house-owning class of the Midlands. They were always talking about “parvenus”, but even the most intelligent of them preferred the fashionable to the good.’

She laughed. ‘They’re much like everyone else. How many people do love the highest when they see it? They just about tolerate it if they’re told often enough that it’s the right thing.’

He agreed and was about to go back to his paper when she said: ‘But did you know these people well? Did you go to their houses?’

‘Yes. I suppose I was taken up by them – in a way. At first they wouldn’t believe I was a genuine member of the proletariat. I was too big and untidy. According to them I should have been a bony little man in a dark suit, permanently soul-sick. When they found I was quite genuine, they adopted me as their favourite member of the working class.’

‘And you didn’t mind? You liked them? You liked the Druckers?’

He had to admit it was true. He could not help liking people who liked him. They became, and remained, his friends.

‘But,’ he said, ‘I know that humanity’s superiority depends on a few persons of intellectual and moral structure: people like my father, for instance, who almost never have money or power, and have no sense at all of their own importance.’

With that, Guy went back to his students; and Harriet, as soon as the heat began to relax, took herself up to the roof to talk to Sasha.

Guy had said once that, although she was nearly twenty-three, she still had the mentality of an adolescent. Perhaps her
relationship with Sasha was a relationship of adolescents.

Guy’s all-knowingness, his lack of time for any sort of fantasy, was frustrating her. She felt gagged. Sasha, on the other hand, had unlimited time. He did not say much himself, but he listened to her with the intent interest of someone new in the world. He was delighted to be entertained, watching her with warm, attentive eyes that made her feel whatever she said was pertinent and exciting. He believed – or rather, his silent extrusion of sympathy led her to believe he believed – that he, as she did, related life to eternity rather than to time.

Now when Guy was out she had somewhere to go. During the day, she had occupation enough. It was in the evening, the time of relaxation, when the changing light, giving a new spaciousness to the city, induced a sense of solitude, that she thought of Sasha who was lonely, too.

That evening, when she went to see him after tea, she spoke of Codreanu, saying: ‘He loved the peasants. He gave them this idea of a nation united in brotherhood. Surely the important thing was that people believed in him?’

Sasha listened uneasily. ‘But he did terrible things,’ he said. ‘He started the pogroms. My cousin at the University was thrown out of a window. His spine was broken.’

That was the reality, of course. ‘But why did the reality have to be that?’ she said. The ideals had been fine enough. They had been formulated to combat a corrupt regime in which the idle, self-seeking and dishonest thrived. Why then, she wanted to know, must they degenerate into a reality of blackmail, persecution and murder? Were human beings so fallible and self-seeking that degeneration was inevitable?

Guy, who had dismissed pretty sharply any suggestion of a flirtation with the Legion of the Archangel Michael, knew the answer to human fallibility: it was a world united under left-wing socialism. Sasha did not know the answer.

To please her, he was trying to consider the problem with detachment, but as he looked at her his soft, vulnerable, loving gaze was troubled.

She remembered the moment at the Drucker table when
one of his aunts had asked: ‘Why do they hate us?’ Drucker had sent the little girls out of the room, but he did not send Sasha. Sasha had to be prepared for reality. However much his wealth might protect him, he could not be protected from prejudice. But, of course, he had not been prepared. Enclosed and loved as he had been, he could not relate their stories of persecution to himself.

He said: ‘The peasants are very simple people. It wouldn’t be difficult to make them believe in Codreanu. They’d believe in anything,’ and he gazed appealingly at her as though to say: ‘Let that explain away the mysterious influence of Guardism and all that came of it.’ In short: ‘Let us talk of something else.’ He probably wanted to talk about the peasants who had shown him, at times, a rough kindness. They had respected him because he spoke English, though they could scarcely believe he had actually been to England. England they held to be a sort of paradise, the abode of titans.

He described how they stood, as patient as their own beasts, all day on guard in the midsummer heat, clad in winter clothing. Money was allotted for the purchase of cotton uniforms but it was misspent somewhere. Who were they to complain?

‘What did they guard?’ Harriet asked.

‘Oh, a bridge or a railway-station or a viaduct. It was silly. When the Russians came, the officers just piled into cars and drove away. We didn’t know what to do …’

She saw his face change as this mention of the army’s flight recalled Marcovitch. By now she had heard other stories – of the Orthodox Jew whose skull had been kicked in ‘like a broken crock’; and the distinguished folklorist who, having been beaten by his sergeant, had appeared next day wearing a medal. ‘So you have decorated yourself!’ said the sergeant. ‘No,’ replied the scholar, ‘the King decorated me,’ for which piece of impertinence he had been struck violently across the face.

Nothing very terrible had happened to Sasha himself, but, unprepared as he was, he had been appalled at this treatment of his scapegoat race. He had run away.

He said: ‘I can remember some of the songs the peasants sang. The folklorist used to collect them.’

As he talked, she looked over the parapet and saw Guy crossing the square on his way home. In the early days of their marriage, she would have sped down the stairs; now she leant still and watched him, thinking of Sasha’s theory that Guardism had grown not from the power of its founder but the credulity of his followers. She felt that the argument had, as arguments often did, come full circle. Wonders were born of ignorance and superstition. Do away with ignorance and superstition and there would be no more wonders, only a universe of unresponsive matter in which Guy was at home, though she was not. Even if she could not accept this diminution of her horizon, she had to feel a bleak appreciation of Guy, who was often proved right.

She broke in on Sasha to say: ‘I’m afraid I must go now.’

He smiled, as uncomplaining and unquestioning as the peasants, but as she went he said forlornly: ‘I wish I had my gramophone here.’

‘You should be studying,’ she said, for at her suggestion Guy had set him some tasks: an essay to write, books to read. The books lay scattered over the ground. He had opened them, but she doubted whether he had done much more. ‘Why not do some work?’

‘All right,’ he said, but as she turned to descend the ladder she saw he had picked up his charcoal and was scribbling idly on the wall.