The civil power swaggered away, and that was the end of it—except for some painful first aid and the welcome contents of my picnic basket. The affair was kept very quiet, but Rob thereafter was free of the country, the court and the regimental messes as few foreigners ever had been. Romanians adore a dangerous jest. It soon got round that he had never handled a sabre in his life except to learn the salute.
Magda practically did not speak to me at all until I had to give her away in church. She said that my behaviour had been unforgivable. So it was. But I never told even her why I thought so.
THE COOK-RUNNER
‘I exchanged,’ he used to say, ‘a foot for a stomach. I have no regrets.’ He said it rather too often, perhaps, but that could be forgiven to so jovial and so excellently served a host. And it was true that he had no regrets. He looked contented. That, when you come to think of it, is a rare quality in our contemporaries: to look contented, to give out, even, a feeling of contentment.
The marked limp bothered him little—a deal less than if it had been caused by gout or any of the other ills that befall a man in his late fifties who has been generous to his body and allowed his soul to sit in at the entertainment. Devenor could afford to be generous. Between the wars Romanian oil had so rewarded him that the loss of concession and capital equipment was more annoyance than disaster. He was the younger son of a younger son, but he had made more money than all the rest of his distinguished family put together.
‘Twenty years of merry life,’ he would say. ‘Twenty years of near heaven. All very wrong by our present standards. All very immoral. I was most certainly a parasite. Ah, but a parasite has duties!’—he chuckled with ironical self-satisfaction—‘And the most important is to appreciate.
‘To appreciate! Wasn’t there a school of philosophy—in quieter days—which maintained that nothing could exist unless there were an observer to observe it? Well, there you are! The first duty of a parasite is to observe and enjoy. And if he isn’t around to do it, there won’t be anything to enjoy.’
His Romanian heaven had been in miniature, confined to a few thousand individuals of, by international standards, quite moderate wealth. They liked their women to be decorative and of a warm delicacy, and gave almost equal importance to their food. They were determined to enjoy the best of two traditions—the Parisian and the Byzantine.
Their supreme achievement, the seventh seal of their culture of the palate, was the Gradina Restaurant. It was unique. No kitchen in the world, Devenor insisted, could give such a variety of fare. Through its hundred odd years of life, the Gradina had collected the most self-indulgent recipes of three empires—the Russian, the Austrian and the Ottoman—and refined them by careful attention to French craftsmanship. In summer Devenor had placed his stomach and both feet—all heartily intact—under a garden table, where he could look up from lights and linen and silver into the cascading branches of a willow. In winter he had his corner seat near the entrance to the long, narrow dining room that smelt freshly of tarragon and white wine.
The utility food of post-war London was hard to bear. It had deprived him, said Devenor, not only of nourishment but of ambition. What was the use of money when the utmost luxuries obtainable were an old goose or a slice of dead cow with the same gravy poured over both? True, he might have lived in Paris, but he had spent too many years in looking forward to retirement, his friends, his club and London, for him to return to exile gladly.
He dreamed of Bucharest as a man dreams of his once passionate enjoyment of poetry. Yet he was careful to distinguish the ingredients of regret: youth, freedom, women, food. Youth and freedom had gone beyond recall. Women—well, he had for them a tender and sentimental affection, as for a superb bottle that might at any moment be opened but had much better be left in the cellar to mature still further. There remained food.
For long he could get no news of his Gradina. Then at the club he met a diplomat, all fresh from his expulsion from Romania, who told him that the beloved restaurant was reserved for workers’ recreation.
Devenor, still living with his memories, was almost turned into a communist on the spot. To open that supreme flower of luxury to any of the masses who could appreciate it—that, if you like, was a justification of revolution. He said so, and his generous dream was instantly shattered.
‘A tenpenny lunch, old boy. Soup and one greasy course.’
Devenor used to swear that inspiration, there and then, had come to him. Very possibly it had. Shock is a stimulant. He retired behind his newspaper to think it out. What had happened to the Gradina’s cooks—any of them who hadn’t been commandeered for official banquets? Surely a Gradina cook must have the artist’s horror of communism? Surely he would be glad to leave? Rescue was a duty.
From that moment in the club, Devenor, converted to the possibility of heaven, went at his task like any fanatical missionary. He saw the parallel. ‘My intention,’ he said, ‘was to save two human souls from destruction. And I don’t see that it matters a damn if one of them was my own.’
He had friends enough alive in Bucharest, and even a worthless and affectionate godson. Cautiously he wrote to them all, but received only a few picture postcards of greeting in reply. He tried for his Gradina cook through consuls and labour exchanges and refugee organizations and old pals in the Board of Trade. He told the truth and was laughed at. He told ingenious lies and was obstructed. At last he lost his temper with all this paper and politeness. It was plain that there was nothing for it but to have a look at the frontiers, and possibly do the job himself. It would be an occupation, a joyous return to his early days of adventure. He loved and understood Romanians, but all his life he had refused to take them seriously when they told him what he had decided was impossible.
He made no plans at all for his penetration of the Iron Curtain. It was impossible to make any. Romania might be visited by students or delegates who were prepared to wait six months for a visa, but Devenor, a former oil magnate, would have to wait for a revolution. As for illegal entry, that no doubt was possible to some lean and hardened desperado. Devenor, however, was neither hard nor lean; he was only desperate. He hadn’t had a decent meal in his own house for five years, and worse outside it.
For a start he flew to Istanbul. He did not confide his business to anyone, least of all to Romanian refugees. He listened; he enjoyed his holiday; and never for more than ten waking minutes did he forget his objective. But he could take no action beyond the patient acquisition of large sums in Romanian and Turkish bank notes. He considered himself, he said, entirely justified in breaking the currency laws of his own and any other country for so worthy a cause. After all, had he intended to rescue a scientist or politician, his illegalities would have had general approval. It was not his fault that government officials could not see the superior importance of a cook.
He tried out, in imagination, many a plan. Most of them involved crawling through barbed wire, for which he was quite unfitted, or jumping overboard in darkness, which, though of buoyant belly, he intensely disliked. He was perfectly well aware that he might have to risk his liberty, but he wished to do so without avoidable discomfort. Finesse was his game, not youthful exercise. It was just a matter of waiting for an opportunity which would allow him to use his perfect knowledge of the Romanian language and character.
He had to wait a month. Not idly, he insisted, not at all idly. Hotel bars, obscure cafés, frontier villages, the docks—he frequented them all as assiduously as any spy. Then, in the course of one of his morning patrols, he found on an unguarded quay, awaiting shipment to Constantsa, the topmost section of a fractionating column. It was familiar, friendly, a section not only of steel but of the continuity of his life. He knew the refinery that must have ordered it, the route it would take, and could even guess at the accident which had made so urgent its delivery.
This gigantic cylinder of steel was labelled and scrawled with injunctions for speed—speed in handling as deck cargo, speed in unloading, spe
ed in railing to Ploesti. The very written word ‘Ploesti’ comforted him. Even in that tough and smelly oil town there had been a restaurant where the proprietor, if you gave him warning, would joyfully attempt the standards of the Gradina.
To Devenor the cavernous, complicated tube was home. It wouldn’t be the first time he had explored the interior of a fractionating column. And he knew its journey so well—twenty-four hours to Constantsa and, in the merry evening of capitalism, not more than two or three days on the docks, provided his agent had dealt generously with customs officers and stationmasters. Those minor bureaucrats would certainly do a better job now—would rail the column at once to Ploesti in a real Romanian panic, for fear of being accused of sabotage.
He admitted that it was entirely illogical to treat a strange section of fractionating column as an old friend, and that a journey inside it was likely to be just the sort of adventure he wanted to avoid. Still, there it lay—about to be transported into the heart of Romania like a prince’s private railway coach. It was even divided into compartments by the bubble trays, with, as it were, a corridor down the middle.
Devenor bought an inflatable mattress and a hamper of nourishing food. He entered the column through the manhole in what would be the top when it was erected at Ploesti. The hole was large enough to admit his stomach, but too small to light the recesses of the interior, the forbidding labyrinth of trays and take-off legs and leads. The other end of the section was shored with timber and effectively plugged.
He took only water to drink. He prided himself on that. It was proof of a disinterested missionary spirit. ‘I thought,’ he would say, ‘that in the heat I must expect as deck cargo even wine and water might reduce efficiency.’
It was hot. He chose a part of the column which was shaded by wood and sacking, but he could not avoid the heat of the Black Sea sun on steel. He had lost pounds in his Romano-Turkish bath when the cranes lifted him off the deck and dropped him on to the waiting railway truck. The drop was uneven. He used to protest, with professional indignation, that the fools must have strained every joint in the section.
He anchored himself firmly in his corner seat between bubble tray and take-off leg, while the great flatcar was violently shunted up and down the yard. At last he felt himself moving purposefully in one direction, and relaxed upon his mattress with all the self-satisfaction of a traveller who had successfully cheated the customs.
‘But I was frightened,’ he admitted. ‘Yes, sheer panic underneath. There wasn’t a minute when I didn’t wish I had stayed in London. Still, when the train started, I couldn’t help feeling proud of myself.’
He looked cautiously out of the manhole. The flatcar was at the tail of the train with only the caboose behind it. On the platform of the caboose a sentry was settling down to sleep. He was glad to see that the Romanians still posted their unemployable military on trains to prevent pilfering. It was a comforting reminder that the national character had not changed.
The train rumbled over the Danube, and idled across the starlit Wallachian plain. Whenever it halted, Devenor, kneeling at the manhole, heard the dear sounds of his second homeland: the barking of dogs in distant villages, the sigh and swirl of the streams past their willows, the croaking of frogs. Frogs fried Colbert—that was the way the Gradina used to do them. He dozed uneasily until shaken up by renewed shunting. When that was over, he could not resist deep sleep.
The discomfort of his own perspiration awoke him a little before midday. He poked head and then shoulders out of the top of the column. He was in the shadeless, dusty marshalling yards to the south of Bucharest. So long as he drew no attention to himself, there seemed no reason why he should not walk out into the city. He did so, greeting with an air of genial authority the casual groups of railway workers who were munching their loaves in the open doors of unloaded wagons.
Devenor did not want to show himself in the centre of the city. There were too many people who knew his face and liked it well enough to cross the road with outstretched arms and a whoop of welcome. His tentative plan was to get in touch, as unobtrusively as possible, with Traian, a former headwaiter at the Gradina and a staunch friend. He wandered through the suburbs until he came to a garden café, dirty and barren, but large enough to possess a telephone.
Traian no longer had a number, but there was one in the name of Devenor’s godson Ion. He was not at all surprised to find that Ion had not only ridden out the storm but provided himself with an excellent address. As an irresponsible youth of twenty he had had a police record of dangerous socialism. True, his opinions were a pose, adopted merely to annoy his intolerably correct relations at court, but those of his set who could have given him away were dead or in exile. Devenor was prepared to bet that war and revolution had only changed godson into an irresponsible youth of thirty.
‘He treated me as if I’d just dropped in from the fields,’ Devenor said, ‘as if there were no reason in the world why I shouldn’t be in Bucharest. He even sent his car round to the cafe for me. He just told me that of course he had a car—how the devil did I think he was going to live without a car?’
Over lunch in Ion’s luxurious flat, this show of idle riches was explained. Godson was an undersecretary—for he had always enjoyed yachting—in the Ministry of Marine.
Devenor asked if he were a genuine communist, and got himself rebuked for indiscretion.
‘My good Uncle,’ Ion had said, ‘you really must learn not to ask such frank and English questions. Do you suppose I want to be shot by your venerable side?’
The excellent lunch was entirely unreal. Devenor seemed to himself to have moved back ten years in time, and not at all in space. Bucharest was going on—at any rate in the flat of a government official—exactly as before. At street level the June air was thunderous as ever and, six storeys up, the geraniums of Ion’s window boxes stirred in the light breeze. Devenor’s favourite white wine was on the table and cool in the decanter. There were rather less cars on the boulevard below and paint was needed and the inhabitants were shabby—but no shabbier than in the early nineteen-twenties.
‘I couldn’t believe it was possible to be shot,’ Devenor would declare. ‘It was just as improbable as my godson being a communist undersecretary.’
Over the coffee he explained how he had arrived in the country and why. His godson followed the story with irreverent laughter and keen questioning. Then, at the end, he asked the most devastating question of all.
‘Uncle John,’ he said, ‘how many of us would it hold?’
Devenor couldn’t understand that at all. He asked Ion why in the world he should want to go to Ploesti by fractionating column instead of by car.
‘Not Ploesti, Uncle. Turkey.’
‘It isn’t going to Turkey.’
‘But why shouldn’t it?’
Godson Ion accused him of becoming intolerably insular, of wholly underrating the lively genius of the Romanian character and the powers of the people’s ministries. He ordered his godfather back to the column, insisting that it was by far the safest place for him, and told him to keep quiet and see what happened.
‘But I want to talk to Traian.’
‘You leave it all to me.’
Devenor disliked leaving anything to any Romanian, and especially to his godson; but there was really nothing else to do. Godson sweetened the pill by giving him an imposing button for his lapel, a basket of food and drink, and a car to return him to the outer suburbs.
The button aided bluff. He had no difficulty in returning to his comfortable and now well-furnished seat between the bubble trays. About six in the evening he heard a good deal of fuss around the column. The curved plates transmitted the sounds of the outer world like a telephone receiver. He could not mistake orders, arguments, excitement and the slapping-on of labels. At dusk a locomotive came to fetch the flatcar and dragged it ceremoniously—like, said Devenor, a choirboy walking backwards before a bishop—along the loop line round Bucharest. The locomotive then steam
ed off, rocking and light-hearted, leaving the column on a remote siding in the middle of a belt of trees.
Devenor ventured out. He and his column were alone, except for the frogs and a nightingale, upon the soft Romanian plain. There was just enough light to read the labels on the car. They were even more urgent, menacing and precise than before; but the destination was Constantsa instead of Ploesti. The waybill in its frame at the side of the car was resplendent with new red ink and rubber stamps.
‘It was quick work,’ Devenor admitted. ‘They have plenty of energy for anything utterly crazy. But it looked to me as if my damned godson had consigned us both to the salt mines. I very nearly cleared out.’
He didn’t, however. He got back into his refuge and had a drink from Ion’s basket, and then another. The effect was to make him less disapproving when Ion and a friend arrived, and shoved two suitcases through the manhole.
Uncle John was formally presented to George Manoliu of the Ministry of Mines, and was compelled by every convention of courtesy to refrain from saying what he thought. Indeed, he found himself in the position of host, extending with proper flowers of speech the hospitality of his fractioning column and showing the two undersecretaries to their rooms between the bubble trays.
Godson Ion and George Manoliu spread out their blankets, and arranged a third compartment for the subdirector of Romanian State Railways who would shortly join the party. Devenor began to think that his chance of escaping death or Siberia had improved. These two young men and the third to come, able to administer between them—at any rate for twenty-four hours—the refineries, the railways and the shipping of the State, presumably had the power to order the column to be returned to Istanbul, to move it at the expense of any other traffic, and to direct the same or another ship to stand by at Constantsa to load it. And from what he knew of Romania, communist or not, he was certain that the respective ministries wouldn’t catch up with what had happened for at least the better part of a week. He said that while they were waiting for the subdirector of railways he would see about his cook.
The Europe That Was Page 6
