The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  Two men were carefully tending a casket in the middle of the room, I saw, when my eyes took to the shade; one of them polishing it, the other fixing screws. Two others in the wood mist beyond were stripping elm planks in a rotary sander – and there were other, unidentifiable thumps behind them in the invisible gloom at the end of the workshop. To my right was a glass partitioned office with an old man inside, like a pre-war Soho waiter, leaning over sheaves of paper – a man from the true Balkans, with a droopy white moustache, heavily lined peasant’s face and eyes sunk like dark stones deep into his skull.

  He came out at once, agreeing that he was Josip Radja. I showed him the music box and for a minute or two we stumbled through a variety of languages without getting anywhere. But he understood what I was getting at.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last in halting English. ‘I have you one girl,’ and without knowing what he was up to I followed him right down to the end of the workshop and out into a tiny sunny courtyard at the back. And there, sitting at a table beneath a stand of huge sunflowers, was a pretty schoolgirl, dark-haired, thin-faced, in a linen school smock, eating lunch from a tin canteen – a watery mix of cold rice and peppers, dipping hunks of fresh bread into it. She must have been fourteen or fifteen – an attractive girl, slim, in long pig-tails, her hair parted severely in the middle. But when she stood up, at the old man’s bidding, and looked at me, I saw that her beauty was marred by an awkward squint in one eye, a flaw in her vision, so that she gazed askance at the world.

  ‘Is Enka. My big daughter. English! English!’ The man waved his hands about, speaking to the girl in Serbo-Croat then.

  ‘I speak English – leetle,’ she said in a shy way. ‘I learn now school. This is my grandfather,’ she said slowly. ‘We help you?’

  ‘Well, I just wondered …’ I showed her my music box. ‘I wanted to know how these were made here. I’m very interested. Who makes them here?’ I turned to the old man.

  ‘I make it.’ I turned back in surprise. The girl was examining the box carefully. ‘This one – I make,’ she added confidently.

  ‘Yes?’ I queried.

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ The old man waved his hands vigorously in the air again, encouraging the girl like a boat-race coach. ‘She make him!’ He laughed out loud in pride now, pointing towards another rickety wooden doorway on the far side of the postage-stamp garden. They brought me over. Inside, in a space as big as a lavatory, was a small work-bench, a selection of wood veneers and match strips, fret-saws, chisels and several medical scalpels: a complete miniature workshop. The old man picked up a little tissue packet and unwrapped it. Inside was the spring mechanism for the music boxes. ‘Nematchka,’ he said.

  ‘It is from Germany,’ the girl explained. ‘But everything other we make here.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ I said, looking at a half completed box in a vice. ‘But how did you learn – where did you get the idea of making these?’

  ‘Pardon?’ The girl looked at me queerly.

  ‘How – did – you – start – making – these?’ I almost spelt the sentence out, holding up one of the music boxes. ‘Who taught you?’

  ‘Take me?’

  ‘No – taught you.’

  ‘Please?’ Still she didn’t understand and she looked over to her grandfather now for help. He spoke to her in Serbo-Croat, a slight note of urgency in his voice, I thought.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ the girl went on much more confidently now. ‘I am learn it in my school. In woodtechnic studies.’ She smiled happily and the old man smiled too, so that I decided to risk the next question then, both of them seemed so friendly and willing to help.

  ‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘if you remember a man here in Zagreb years ago – before the war – who collected these music boxes? A Mr Zlatko Rabernak.’ I repeated the gist of the sentence again, even more slowly.

  But the girl looked quite blank. ‘I don’t know –’ She turned to her grandfather again.

  ‘Rabernak?’ he said. ‘No – who is? No …’ He spoke haltingly, shaking his head. I’d obviously come to an end; with the language problem there was no other real progress I could make. We’d come out again into the dazzling little concrete square and I’d started on my thanks and goodbyes when the old man patted me on the shoulder and said ‘Slivovitz’ several times, gesturing me to take a chair beneath the huge sunflowers. He spoke to the girl in their own tongue and then said, ‘Chekai, chekai,’ to me, in great good humour – and I felt I could hardly refuse his hospitality, though the heat was uncomfortable in the enclosed space and I needed a cold beer far more than plum brandy.

  So I sat down as the old man went back into the main workshop – and the girl watched me curiously, flirtatiously, it seemed now, flicking her pigtails over her shoulder, leaning against the wall a few yards from me, hands behind her rump.

  ‘“Chekai” – it means “wait”,’ she said, smiling like a much older woman. And we waited. She crossed her legs over as she stood there – indolently, asking to be admired, hands still behind her back, her small breasts pushing through her smock, arched away from the wall, never taking her eyes off me. But was she really looking at me? It was hard to be sure with her squint and the sun in my eyes whenever I looked up.

  The whirr of electric machinery stopped suddenly in the workshop behind me. And something warned me then – the tempting schoolgirl with the cast in her eye, perhaps – that I shouldn’t be here any more, that it was time to be up and away. I got to my feet quickly, making for the door.

  But the girl was quicker still: in a flash she was round to the other side of the little yard, barring my way, and now I saw what she’d been hiding behind her back, as the scalpel in her hand glittered in the sun.

  8

  The girl didn’t move, holding herself very firmly against the door, the scalpel at arm’s length, pointing it at my throat like a bayonet. Her knowing smile was gone but she wasn’t frightened and the smooth brick walls all round were impossible to climb. I was the one who was sweating. I hated knives anyway and here was a real tomato slicer. But there was the table, I saw, to keep me away from it. I picked it up and, using it as a shield with the legs outwards, I moved behind it towards her – before lunging forward with it, pinning her to the door, trapping her between its legs on all sides as she flourished about with the scalpel, narrowly missing my fingers. Then I gave the table a great thrust to one side, two legs catching her in the ribs and spinning her over onto the ground where she lay stunned.

  I was into the back of the workshop then, seeing nothing in the sudden gloom. And there was no sound either – the place deserted, the men put out for lunch, I assumed, by the old man, the machinery stilled and all the main lights turned off. I could hardly see my way forward at all. Suddenly I felt something soft coming round my legs – a pile of sawdust, I realised, as I fell into it. I moved to one side then, feeling my way gingerly along what I thought must be the wall.

  But my fingers came to a blank space almost immediately and I stopped. There was another room, it seemed, off to my right. Then I heard footsteps ahead of me. The old man, I presumed, was on the move – someone who knew the geography of the place intimately, a sure-footed walk towards me, between all the obstacles I remembered ahead.

  But I couldn’t see a thing, though my eyes had become used to the gloom by now. Then I realised why. The room I’d come into, off the main workshop, was a store room – and I was standing behind a tall pile of coffins, in all shapes and sizes, which had blocked my vision ahead.

  The footsteps stopped then. He was waiting for me to move. Then the door from the backyard opened: the girl with the scalpel was up and about again. There were two of them now, one on either side of the long workshop, waiting for me in the dark. I was trapped in the little store-room.

  A diversion was required and the material for it was readily to hand. I got behind a coffin on the top of the stack and pushed it suddenly, with great force, out into the main room – and then a second and a third, the light wood cas
ings speeding away like torpedoes. There were smaller missiles available, too – little white children’s caskets – and these I was able to pick up high in the air above my head and hurl like shot at my invisible uncharitable hosts. Soon there was pandemonium in the stuffy cave as the wood splintered again and again on the hard floor beyond me. Now that the stack of boxes in front of me was depleted, I could see through the gloom into the workshop. But there was no one there. I got my hands behind another large coffin and shoved. It didn’t move. I shoved again. Then I saw it was made of aluminium and had a lid on it. Someone or something was inside.

  I was damp with sweat and fear and the energy suddenly ran out of me, bile rising in my throat, and I sagged to my knees. Someone called then, standing in the doorway, open now onto the street.

  It was Stolačka, I saw, silhouetted against the light.

  ‘Gospodin Marlow? Cease fire, cease fire!’ He came towards me, walking jauntily in his Windsor check through the splintered debris, in what seemed high good humour. I got to my feet, covered in sawdust, the wood sticking to my sweaty skin like breadcrumbs. He started to brush me down.

  ‘It’s good that we were following you all morning,’ he said easily. ‘I told you: not inefficient.’

  ‘The two people – an old man, a girl?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes – they tried to run. We have them. Outside.’

  ‘And there’s someone else,’ I said. ‘Here – in this box. Or maybe it’s just some more bricks.’

  And I thought: it’s Lindsay. It must be Lindsay.

  But it wasn’t. When Stolačka pulled the lid off I saw the dead features of Pottinger lying out flat in the bottom of the metal box – the keen bright face that I remembered like a dark negative now, the skin a rich plum-colour.

  *

  ‘It adds up,’ Stolačka said to me later, when Josip Radja and his impudent grand-daughter had been taken away. He had brought me to a workers’ buffet a little further down the lane and bought my cold beer at last. ‘This man who you call Pottinger,’ he said. ‘They put him in that metal box because he was wounded. In the chest, some days ago. So you must have got him with that little gun in Vienna after all.’

  ‘How? If he’d been wounded in Vienna – he’d have gone straight to the Russian Embassy there.’

  Stolačka shrugged. ‘Yes, maybe. So perhaps they killed him here then. Your friend Josip Radja. We will tell maybe for sure – if there is a bullet.’

  ‘Who is this Radja?’

  ‘They are checking now – on the phone.’

  ‘You see, the moment I started talking about Rabernak, that’s when he changed his mind about me. And of course – those coffins. That’s his business. Isn’t that how they managed with Eleanor Phillips? If that workshop was there before the war?’

  ‘Maybe. We will find out. Come, we will see.’

  We went back out again. The police had blocked the narrow street off now and Stolačka’s men were going through the workshop inch by inch. The place was brightly lit and there was a man on the phone in Radja’s little glass office. Stolačka spoke to him for a minute, before turning to me.

  ‘They have checked this Josip Radja against our files. There is nothing wrong with him – on paper. This workshop has been here for many years. Yes – since before the war. We will question him. But he has a brother – which may be of more interest to us – Dr Ivo Radja. He lives just up here above us, in the old town.’ Stolačka shook his head in surprise.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This man is distinguished; he is well known here for – what you say? – a picture fixer?’

  ‘An art restorer?’

  ‘Yes. Restoration. Wall paintings in the church –’

  ‘Frescoes?’

  ‘Yes. And he is expert in the baroque time as well’ Stolacka turned back to his colleague on the phone and took the handset from him, talking directly for a minute to some central registry, with long pauses as he jotted down various information.

  When he’d finished he read from his notes: ‘Dr Ivo Radja, Professor at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts: married to Liesl Radja – once Liesl Schlüsselberger – an Austrian woman, born in Vienna 1913, a naturalised Yugoslav citizen of course now. They have two children: Stepan and Stanka Radja. He is a research chemist – at the Scientific Institute here. And she, of course, is the pianist.’

  ‘Of course?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ He looked at me in surprise. ‘Stanka Radja – one of the best in Croatia.’

  The little office had become unbearably hot and we went outside into the road again. ‘Liesl Radja,’ I said. ‘Born in Vienna in 1913. That’s very close to Eleanor Phillips’ birthday. She lived in Vienna, too. And spoke German fluently.’ Stolačka had taken his glasses off, wiping them as I spoke. Now he looked at me carefully. ‘You are thinking what I think?’

  ‘I wondered. Is this Liesl Radja perhaps –’

  ‘Perhaps the woman who should have been in that grave?’ Stolačka interrupted.

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe. But it seems unlikely – if they’re all so well known here.’

  ‘Come.’ Stolačka spoke quickly. ‘We may make our enquiries. They live only up the hill here.’ He called to a colleague and together the three of us moved up the little alleyway back towards the old town, the red roofs peeking out from the chestnut trees high above us.

  It was a magnificent old, two-storeyed baroque merchant’s house, finely restored, the stucco delicately veined with young Virginia creeper, set on the highest part of the hill, half-way along a narrow street of similar little palazzos. A graceful archway divided the building which was now an art gallery and museum, representing the entire history of this medieval hill town. Stolačka spoke to a woman inside at a ticket desk. ‘Of course,’ he said when he returned. ‘The Professor has an apartment at the back. But he is not here. They are away on holiday. Come.’

  We went through the archway, across a courtyard and climbed some circular wooden stairs, leading to an apartment above what must have been stables in the old days. At the top were two fairly large arched barn doors, beautifully restored with their original latches and studs – but firmly closed now, with some tactful modern locks. And there was no reply from a distant bell.

  Stolačka sent his colleague back for the caretaker and a few minutes later we were inside a long and wonderfully decorated attic room, running almost the length of the building, a stone-vaulted hay or grain store, I supposed, originally, but now converted with easy taste and skill into a richly ornamented salon. A row of dormer windows gave out onto a jig-saw of umber tiles and beyond that a vision of the city beneath us; a sylvan tapestry ran along the other wall; a big refectory table piled with art books ran down the middle of the smooth pine floor. There were silver icons and other odd bits of baroque ecclesiastical decor set about on shelves, in niches between more books and small pictures – Guardi architectural engravings and some naïve art from the Croatian countryside. Two twisting barley-sugar sticks, in yellowed wood, the remnants from some baroque pulpit, I thought, held up a mantelpiece over a grate at one end and there was a small piano in a corner, a Liszt concerto open on the lectern.

  We wandered round the salon, the other two looking in the neat bedrooms which led off it. The place was empty and wonderfully cool, a glittering treasure-house, edged in black and old gold with golden varnishes, set off with fine Dalmatian pottery and bright red peasant-weave chair-coverings.

  I shook my head when Stolačka came back. ‘It seems unlikely,’ I said. ‘It’s all too grand surely? People like this wouldn’t be the sort …’

  ‘The sort of? – what?’

  ‘To play tricks with graves – all that. To work for the Russians. Besides, there’s nothing English here. If she’d been Eleanor Phillips …’

  ‘You’d expect – what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Tea, marmalade – something.’ We’d come into the kitchen then and I was looking over the provision shelves. There was a great variety of bottled fruit
, pickles and red cabbage – with hams, and long bronzed sausages of old salami hanging down from hooks. But there was no Twinings Best Darjeeling or Oxford coarse-cut.

  A small study led off the salon. And there I saw the music box – just one, on a shelf above the desk – but a Fabergé of a music box, the sides ribbed in latticed gilt with an enamelled lid depicting an airy bunch of cherubs flying through a blue empyrean, each one puffing a golden horn. I lifted the top and a tune emerged: the tone was extremely delicate, precise – a mazurka. There was a list of half a dozen other tunes, written in fine copperplate inside the lid. It was a perfect object.

  But still I wasn’t sure – even when Stolačka’s colleague switched on a large transistor radio back in the salon. The crisp English accent immediately flooded through the room. It was the two o’clock news summary from London. ‘… British Leyland have again shown a net trading deficit for the year. The government intends to take steps to ensure that public money involved will be accounted for …’ The transistor had been tuned to the BBC World Service – and someone had been foolish enough to leave it on that wavelength; foolish, that is, if they were guilty of anything. But why should they be? And I disliked spying then: it was like wartime in occupied Europe and we were SS men wickedly on the move, searching out the innocent, tuned to freedom.

  I said ‘Lots of people listen to the BBC abroad. It doesn’t mean a thing.’

  ‘No. Perhaps not.’

  ‘Lots of Yugoslavs who want to improve their English –’

  ‘Of course. I did that myself. I know. But here – look at this.’ Stolačka had picked up a little red-covered book. ‘This is perhaps not so typically Yugoslav.’ It was one of Ward Lock’s Red Guides, I saw: The Highlands of Scotland, a fairly new edition, taken from the British Council’s library in Zagreb. ‘You told me this Eleanor Phillips was originally from Scotland, no?’