‘Easter 1393, my lord.’
The Count made a choking sound in the back of his throat that signified exasperation and said, ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake!’
‘What happened at Easter 1393?’ asked Calamity.
‘Oh just a bit of harmless tomfoolery,’ said the Count. ‘One of my ancestors needed a new castle in a hurry, you see, so he organised an Easter party for the villagers. They all turned up in their Sunday best and there spread out before them were tables heaving under a feast the like of which they had never seen before in their sweaty lives. There was roasted ox and venison, chickens and partridges and all manner of dainty fowl, milk-fed veal and suckling pig, hedgehog pie and rabbit pâté, squirrel soufflé and pan-roasted field mouse, carp from their lord’s ponds, and real blancmanger made with lamb and almonds and for afters there was Turkish delight made with the tears of a virgin. All day they filled their red pox-scarred faces with my ancestor’s finest Burgundy; they danced and sang and partied and burped until sundown at which point they all learned a rather painful truth about there being no such thing as a free lunch. At an order from the Count they were all surrounded by soldiers while the blacksmith went from each to each putting fetters upon wrist and ankle. Then, still wearing their party clothes, the entire village was force-marched fifty miles north to a desolate windswept rocky promontory where they were told to start building a castle. As I say, it really is a rather droll tale. They worked from before dawn till late into the night, and were given just enough food to keep daily funerals in the single figures and ensure that work was not interrupted by excesses of weeping. Travellers who passed through the region nine months later related wonderful tales of seeing these workers slaving away almost naked because their clothes had rotted to rags and fallen quite away.’
‘Did they ever return to their village?’ I asked.
‘You know,’ said the Count thoughtfully, ‘I really can’t remember. I think they all died during the construction of the castle but it is possible the Count had them put to death. He would have been quite justified in doing so since the workmanship was appallingly shoddy. In fact, when the Count saw the finished castle he refused to set foot in it and used it instead to store his hosiery. But the moral is one of rank ingratitude: seven hundred years later and the locals still bang on about that castle but not one of them ever mentions the lovely party that preceded it.’
There was a short silence after the Count had finished his story, and the servants poured the coffees. The Count stood up and said, ‘Porphyria, take Miss Calamity off to play with your toys after dinner. Mr Louie, you will find port and cigars in the library. You must excuse me, I rather fancy an early night, we have a great day ahead of us tomorrow, is it not so?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was meaning to ask you about the arrangements. We need to catch the early train to Brasov.’
A mild confusion creased his brow and then he burst into a wide grin. ‘Ha ha ha! Early train to Brasov! Yes very good, very dry. Your sense of humour is apt to catch one unawares.’ He raised his glass. ‘And now, before I retire, why don’t you all join me in one last toast to our patron and provider, the great Mr Mooncalf!’
Later, as I sat on a wine-coloured chesterfield enjoying the Count’s port, Monsieur Souterain appeared looking flustered.
‘Where is Mademoiselle Calamity?’ he said.
‘She’s playing with the children.’
‘Oh no! No, this must not be! You must leave this place tonight.’
‘But we’ve only just arrived.’
‘You must flee, you are in great danger, you must flee tonight. And take me with you. I have arranged everything. A carriage will wait by the scullery door tonight at nine. From your room, follow the corridor away from the great hall and take the first left after you pass the triptych depicting the Impaling of the Mother and Child. There you will find a staircase that leads directly to the scullery. Look out for the maid with webbed fingers, she will show you to the carriage . . .’
‘Souterain!’ a voice rang out along the cold stone corridors. His eyes opened wide with fear. ‘I must go. Please, I beseech you, find Calamity, nine o’clock, remember!’ He ran away looking back. ‘Remember!’ he cried. ‘Nine o’clock.’
‘Webbed fingers,’ I shouted.
A few seconds later Porphyria appeared.
‘Have you seen Monsieur Souterain?’
‘No, not since dinner.’
‘I thought I heard voices.’
‘Yes, it seems to be a peculiar property of this castle; we heard children’s voices just now from an empty room.’
‘Those would be the little twins.’
‘Will we be meeting them?’
‘I hardly think so. They died in a fire ninety years ago. Do not be alarmed, the appearance of this particular apparition signifies good fortune unless accompanied by the sound of a music box.’
‘Have you seen Calamity?’
‘I last saw her in the nursery admiring the statue of Pan!’ She walked off giving a silvery laugh. Moments later I heard her shout, ‘Souterain, on your knees, you dog!’
I abandoned my port and went to find Calamity. I wandered along the many corridors calling her name, but I saw no one. The nursery was empty and my attention was drawn to the sound of a commotion outside. I walked over to the casements. The mob of villagers beyond the moat had gone but within the grounds of the castle there appeared to be some form of chase involving men with dogs and torches, in pursuit of a man running across the ornamental lawns. I returned to my room and found Calamity changed back into jeans and T-shirt, packing my case. ‘We’re leaving,’ she said. ‘Igor has told me everything. I’m due to marry the Count tomorrow.’
‘There must be a misunderstanding,’ I said.
‘Why? How do you think Mooncalf got the tickets so cheap?’
‘He’s got contacts in the trade.’
‘You can say that again. Did you take a look at the doll’s house in the nursery? One of the rooms in it has the charred corpses of two little babies in bed.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘We’re leaving.’ She looked at me, her eyes sparkling with fear. ‘Please, Louie.’
From outside the noise of the chase grew suddenly louder. The barking of dogs rose to a pitch of intoxication that suggested their snapping jaws were only inches now from the tailcoat of their quarry; and rising above their incessant yapping there came the loud clear call of a man falling followed by what sounded like a splash.
I changed back into my travelling clothes, picked up the bags, and we ran. In the scullery, we were met by a girl in a ragged dirndl carrying a small shovel and box of cinders. There were sooty smears on her cheeks. She smiled, put the shovel down and splayed the fingers of her hand before us. They were webbed. She led us through the kitchen and out of a side door to where our coach was waiting. The mob of villagers stood on either side holding their torches aloft. When they saw us they cheered and rushed forward to guide us into the carriage.
‘What about Souterain?’ I cried.
‘It is too late for him,’ a voice answered. ‘There is no time to lose.’
The coach door was slammed and the whip cracked in the night. We were jolted forward and the villagers cheered again. As we raced off into the night, lightning flashed in the night sky. High above us, on a grassy slope falling away to the moat, the servants of the Count were gathered, and seemed to be dragging something wet and heavy and man-shaped from the moat. Just then lightning flashed once more and picked out three little girls who burned like Roman candles in their gowns of taffeta. They stood erect, and proud, like marble statues unmoved by the pitiful scene being enacted before them. Three little girls who would not be having lute lessons the next day.
Chapter 20
Calamity returned from the samovar with two glasses of black tea. ‘We still owe the provodnitsa three gryvnia for the bowl of cabbage soup we had at breakfast,’ she said.
‘That was goo
d soup.’
‘It sure was. Of the fifteen bowls of cabbage soup we’ve had on the ferry and this train, this provodnitsa’s was definitely the best.’
I warmed my hands round the hot tea. This morning had started quite chilly, and the carriage had still not warmed up. Last night’s soup had been in Odessa, and the five bowls before that had been on the Black Sea ferry from Istanbul.
‘I can’t believe Mooncalf would promise me as a bride like that,’ said Calamity.
‘We don’t know for sure that he did.’
‘That’s what Igor said.’
‘It might have been a misunderstanding, English isn’t his first language.’
‘Oh sure! What about the wedding dress, and the empty envelope? And . . . Monsieur Souterain.’
‘That was a terrible accident, I don’t see what that has to do with Mooncalf.’
‘We ought to report him to Llunos.’
‘He’d just say Transylvania was outside his jurisdiction.’
‘Yeah, he’d say it served us right for going there, and for leaving our travel arrangements to someone like Mooncalf.’ Calamity looked at me and brightened as the truth of that remark sank in. We both knew that was exactly what Llunos would say, and he would be right. ‘I’m sure Hughesovka will be a lot better,’ she said.
‘That’s right, even Mooncalf wouldn’t try and marry you twice.’
Calamity grinned and punched me on the arm and we both gazed out at the countryside flowing by. The gently rolling farmland of the Western Ukraine slowly gave way to the outskirts of that longed-for Eldorado, Hughesovka. Some people said it didn’t exist, it was just a far-off, remote, hopeless land of dreamers, where every home was an ice-cream castle in the air for romantics and fools. We were about to find out.
A man wearing a plain grey two-piece suit stood on the platform staring intently at everyone who stepped down. He was holding a sign saying ‘Louie and Calamity. Croeso i Hughesovka’. When he saw us, his face burst into a grin, he put the sign under his arm and rushed forward to greet us. ‘Mr Louie and Miss Calamity! I’m delighted to meet you; I’m Jones the Denouncer. You are just as Mr Mooncalf described you.’ He stopped and peered up the platform beyond our shoulders. ‘But where are the spinning wheels?’
‘They are being sent on,’ I said.
He took us through the main ticketing hall, down the steps into Ploschchad John Hughes, and across the car park to a battered Lada. The buildings in the vicinity of the station had an impressive faded grandeur. Directly across from the station was the ornate portico with winged angels of the Hughesovka Ballet. Next to that there were the golden onion domes of the church. And in the centre, where the trams pulled up to turn around, there stood a statue to the great Welsh steelman who had made it all possible. Jones the Denouncer told me the streets had originally been laid out according to the street plan of Merthyr Tydfil.
We drove down Bulvar John Hughes, the main boulevard, flanked by chestnut trees and with a central reservation of trees and grass where young lovers and old ladies in head scarves sat on benches. The avenue terminated at the steps of the Hughes Mausoleum, a large building fronted by Doric columns. There we turned into Vulitsya Kreshchatyk and again into Prospekt Bakunina by which time we had left the centre and were entering the suburbs. The buildings got smaller, the tram lines ended, and we found ourselves in a wasteland of featureless modern apartment blocks.
‘Wow! It’s just like Penparcau,’ said Calamity for whom all new experiences were a source of wonder.
‘Where is that?’ Jones the Denouncer shouted above the din of the engine.
‘It’s a housing estate in Aberystwyth.’
‘You must write it down for me, I am thirsty for all knowledge about the Motherland.’
We stopped and got out at one of the tenements. The lift was broken, the common areas stank of urine. We climbed a dark, graffiti-covered stairwell to the fifteenth floor and were let into a barely furnished apartment: tattered linoleum floor, a few religious icons on the wall, a table covered with an oilcloth set with food. The table was laid with glasses and chipped, floral-patterned china. There were hard-backed chairs and no soft furnishings. There was a large group of people waiting and when we entered they cheered and ran forward to hug and embrace us. Music started up and Jones the Denouncer said, ‘Louie, you will be staying with the consumptive student one floor up and Calamnotchka will be staying with the public prosecutor’s clerk’s daughter. I will take you there in a while, but first we must celebrate.’
We ate slices of pig fat with chillis, gherkins, caviar, black bread and vodka. Jones the Denouncer introduced us to the company. Evans the Swindler, Morgan the Enemy of the People, Williams the Betrayer of the Proletariat, Jones the Deviationist heretic, Edwards the Fascist Wrecker, and Lewis the Pedlar of Nationalist Opiate under the banner of Proletarian Literature; together with their wives. It was difficult to keep track of all the names.
‘So this is the Welsh Underground.’ said Calamity.
There was an awkward silence after she said this. Edwards the Fascist Wrecker explained, ‘We don’t normally talk about our . . . our nature quite as openly, but, yes, I suppose that’s as good a term as any.’
‘What do you do?’
‘We meet when and where we can, in safe houses mostly. We also print our own samizdat . . .’ He pulled out a tattered and tightly rolled-up mimeographed pamphlet. It was called Hiraeth and bore on the cover an illustration of Barry Island pleasure park. A woman dressed in a dowdy red peasant dress and a sleeveless pullover stepped forward and spoke with a certain fiery passion that indicated that she and Edwards the Fascist Wrecker were engaged or married but she tired of his slow dithering ways and regretted that he could not apply himself with more fervour to the cause.
‘Our aim is to return to the Motherland for which we all ache so terribly in our hearts. But, of course, the authorities will never allow such a thing. And so we try to gather what scraps of information we can. Your visit to us today is a great and longed-for honour. Occasionally we organise an escape. But the authorities are cruel and cunning and thwart us at every turn.’
‘What do they do?’ I asked.
Lewis the Pedlar of Nationalist Opiate under the banner of Proletarian Literature replied soulfully as if he bore the pain of all the failures in his own heart. ‘They intercept our escapers and arrest them. We don’t see them for many months. What happens to them is not clear but we believe they are taken to a special psychiatric institution where they are re-educated. The doctors at this place are without mercy. They erase entirely the memory of the re-education and implant in its place the false memory of having reached Aberystwyth and found it a great disappointment. After the treatment they are released back into life in Hughesovka but they are not the same as they were before. They avoid their old haunts, shun their old friends and contacts. After many months, quite by chance, one of us will run into one of them in the bread queue or something, and say, “Hi, Boris, what are you doing here, I thought you’d gone to Wales?” And he will refuse to answer, look away and mumble something sheepishly, some absurd story about how he travelled to Wales and decided to come back because he didn’t think it was all that good.’ The people in the room scoffed in disgust at the absurdity of the notion.
‘So far,’ said the girl in the red peasant dress, ‘not even the strongest among us has been able to withstand the brainwashing technique.’
A hubbub of conversation broke out as they discussed their oppression. Edwards the Fascist Wrecker spoke up. ‘But tell us, Louie Eeyoreovitch, you have seen how we live here, you see how we ache and groan under the yoke, and you have seen the blessed town of Aberystwyth, is it possible that a man who had sampled the delights of which we read, such as Sospan’s ice-cream kiosk and the automated fortune-teller in a glass case in the Pier amusement arcade . . .’
The mention of the mechanical gypsy drew gasps of wonder.
‘And the kiosk selling whelks freshly scraped from t
he rocks on the beach,’ a voice piped up. More voices added their opinions:
‘And the funicular railway that shoots up the face of Constitution Hill at giddying speed . . .’
‘And the train of mules that offer rides to sick and weary children along the seafront . . .’
‘And bingo, the working man’s chess . . .’
‘And the rocks that line the seashore, many millions of years old, which are inlaid with a strange red mineral in configurations that some say resembles lettering . . .’
‘Some people even claim it spells out the name of Aberystwyth . . .’
‘And though many scoff at this notion, yet they cannot explain whence came the letters . . .’
The hubbub rose again as each turned to his neighbour to discuss this latest marvel. Edwards the Fascist Wrecker hit a glass with his fork to bring the room to order, and turned to me: ‘Is it really possible that a man having seen such things would willingly return to Hughesovka?’
I scanned the eager faces waiting breathlessly for confirmation that the myth by which they lived their lives was valid. ‘No, it is not possible,’ I said. ‘Only a madman would return.’
My words whipped up the party spirit and more vodka was handed out and many toasts were drunk including one to Comrade Mooncalf. And then they asked me about our business here and I described the case of Gethsemane and the strange photo of the imaginary friend and the levitated dog. The company expressed great excitement and demanded to see the photo. I reached into my jacket pocket but inexplicably the photo was no longer there. I apologised that I was not able to show them. ‘This is really strange,’ I said. ‘I had it on the Orient Express.’
From Aberystwyth with Love Page 20
