The Balkan Trilogy

by Olivia Manning

  When the snow stopped falling at last, the city was revealed white as a ghost city agleam beneath a pewter sky. The citizens crowded out again and the beggars emerged from their holes.

  Beggars now were more plentiful than ever. Hundreds of destitute peasant families, their breadwinners conscripted, had been driven by winter into the capital, where, it was believed, a magical justice was dispensed. They would stand for hours in front of the palace, the law courts, the prefecture or any other large, likely-looking building. They dared not enter. When cold and hunger defeated them at last, they would wander off in groups to beg – women, children and ancient, creeping men. Lacking the persistence of professionals, they were easily discouraged. Many of them did no more than crouch crying in doorways. Some sought out the famous Cişmigiu, that stretched from its gates like a vast sheeted ballroom. Some slept there at night beneath the trees; others took themselves up to the Chaussée. Few of them survived long. Each morning a cart went round to collect the bodies dug from the snow. Many of these were found in bunches, frozen inseparable, so they were thrown as they were found, together, into the communal grave.

  On the first morning that the air cleared, Guy and Clarence were called by Sheppy to the Athénée Palace. At mid-day, when they were expected to leave the meeting, Harriet, anxious and curious, crossed the square to join them in the English Bar.

  Wakening that morning she had seen the white light reflected on to the ceiling from the snowbound roofs. Emerging with a sense of adventure, she had been met by the crivat, blowing on a wire-fine note. In the centre of the square the snow was heaped like swansdown, its powdery surface lifting in the wind, but at the edge, where the traffic went, it was already as hard as cement. She walked round the statue of the old King, a giant snowman, shapeless and wild. The snow squeaked under her boots.

  The cold hurt the flesh, yet even the most cosseted Rumanians had ventured out for the first sight of the city under snow. They trudged painfully, making for some café or restaurant, the men in fur-lined coats and galoshes, the women wrapped in Persian lamb, with fur snow-bonnets, gloves and muffs, and high-heeled snow boots of fur and rubber.

  Outside the hotel the commissionaire stood, obese with wrappings, but the beggars were, as ever, half-naked, their bodies shaking fiercely in the bitter air.

  As she passed the large window of the hair-dressing salon, Harriet saw inside, lolling on long chairs among the chromium and glass, Guy and Clarence having their hair cut. She went in to them and said: ‘Your meeting could not have lasted long.’

  ‘Not very long,’ Guy agreed.

  ‘Well, what was it all about?’

  He gave a warning glance towards the assistants and to deflect her interest said: ‘We are going to give you a treat.’

  ‘What sort of treat? When? Where?’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  When they left the salon, Guy put on a grey knitted Balaclava helmet lent him, he said, by Clarence. It was part of an issue of Polish refugee clothing.

  Clarence said: ‘Of course it must be returned.’

  ‘Really?’ Harriet mocked him. ‘You imagine the Poles will miss it?’

  ‘I am responsible for stores.’

  ‘It’s a ridiculous garment,’ she said, dismissing it, and returned to the subject of Sheppy: ‘Who was he? What did he want? What was the meeting about?’

  ‘We’re not at liberty to say,’ said Guy.

  Clarence said: ‘It’s secret and confidential. I’ve refused to be in on it.’

  ‘But in on what?’ Harriet persisted. She turned crossly on Guy. ‘What did Sheppy want with you?’

  ‘It’s just some mad scheme.’

  ‘Is it dangerous?’ She looked at Clarence, who, self-consciously evasive, said: ‘No more than anything else these days. Nothing will come of it, anyway. I think the chap’s crazy.’

  As they would tell her nothing, she decided she would somehow find out for herself. With this decision she changed the subject.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘For a sleigh-ride,’ said Guy.

  ‘No!’ She was delighted. Forgetting Sheppy, she began hurrying the pace of the two men. They were approaching the Chaussée, that stretched broad and white into the remote distance. At the Chaussée kerb stood a row of the smartest trăsurăs in town. The owners had removed the wheels and fitted them with sleighs. The horses were hung with bells and tassels. Nets, decorated with pom-poms and bows, were stretched over the horses’ hindquarters to protect the passengers from up-flung snow.

  People were bargaining for sleigh-rides and about them were sightseers, and beggars battening on everyone.

  ‘The important thing,’ said Harriet, ‘is to choose a well-kept horse.’ When they had found one rather less lean than the rest, she said: ‘Tell the driver we have chosen him because he is kind to his horse.’

  The driver replied that he was indeed a kind man and fed his horse nearly every day. Waving his rosetted whip in self-congratulation, he turned out of the uproar of the rank and sped away up the Chaussée to where the air was still and the sleigh made no sound. In this crystalline world all was silent but the sleigh-bells.

  On either side of the road the spangled skeletons of the trees flashed against a sky dark with unfallen snow. Across the snow-fields, that in summer were the gradinas, the wind leapt hard and bitter upon the sleigh. Its occupants shrank down among old blankets into a smell of straw and horse-dung, and peered out at the great plain of snow stretching to the lake and the Snagov woods.

  They passed the Arc de Triomphe and came, at the furthest end of the Chaussée, upon an immense fountain that stood transfixed, like a glass chandelier, among mosaics of red, blue and gold.

  As they reached the Golf Club, the driver shouted back at them.

  ‘He says,’ said Clarence, ‘he’ll drive us across the lake. I doubt whether it’s safe.’

  Excitedly, Harriet said: ‘We must cross the lake.’

  They slid down the bank to the lake, that was a plate of ice sunk into the billowing fields, and the wind howled over their heads.

  ‘Lovely, lovely,’ Harriet tried to shout, but she was scarcely able to breathe. Her ears sang, her eyes streamed, her hands and feet ached. Her cheeks were turned to ice.

  The ice creaked beneath the sleigh and they were relieved to mount the farther bank and find themselves safely on solid ground. They had reached one of the peasant suburbs. The houses were one-roomed wooden shacks, painted with pitch, patched with flattened petrol cans, the doorways curtained with rags. Despite the antiseptic cold the air here was heavy with the stench of refuse. Women stood cooking in the open air. They waved to the sleigh, but the driver, unwilling that foreigners should observe this squalor, pointed his passengers to the cloudy whiteness of the woods and said: ‘Snagov. Frumosa.’

  They came out to the highway at the royal railway station, which stood by the roadside, painted white and gold, like a booth at an exhibition. The road turned back to the town, so now the wind was behind the sleigh. The singing died in their ears. The horse was allowed to relax and they returned at a slow trot to their starting point.

  When they reached the rank, Harriet noticed a young man, too large for a Rumanian, standing head and shoulders above the crowd and observing with an amused air the excitement about him.

  Guy cried: ‘It’s David!’ and, jumping down from the sleigh, made for the young man with outstretched arms. The young man did not move, but his small mouth stretched slightly more to one side as he smiled and said: ‘Oh, hello.’

  ‘When did you arrive?’ Guy called to him.

  ‘Last night.’

  Harriet asked Clarence who this new arrival was.

  ‘It’s David Boyd,’ said Clarence, rather grudgingly.

  ‘But you know him, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes. But I expect he has forgotten me.’

  Guy swung round and commanded Clarence forward: ‘Clarence. You remember David?’

  Clarence admitted t
hat he did.

  ‘He’s been sent out by the Foreign Office,’ said Guy, ‘the best thing they’ve ever done. At least there’s someone to counteract the imbecilities of the Legation.’

  Harriet had heard that Guy and David Boyd looked remarkably alike, but their difference was apparent to her at once. They were large young men, identical in build, short-nosed, bespectacled and curly-haired – but David’s mouth was smaller than Guy’s, his chin larger. He wore a pointed sheepskin hat that had settled down on to the rim of his glasses so that the upper half of his face was snuffed out while the lower looked larger than it probably was.

  ‘Were you thinking of taking a sleigh-ride?’ Harriet asked him.

  ‘No.’ Looking at her from under his eyelids, he explained that Albu, the barman, had heard Domnul Pringle and Domnul Lawson enquiring if the sleighs were out. Guy was delighted by this intimation that his friend had actually been searching for him. He said: ‘Let’s all go and have lunch somewhere.’

  ‘I’ve arranged to meet a man …’ began David.

  Guy interrupted gleefully: ‘We’ll all go and meet him.’

  David looked doubtful and Clarence, taking this fact to himself, said: ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m going to a party being given by the Polish officers.’

  Guy swept on ahead with David while Harriet followed behind with Clarence. As they crossed the square, the two men in front, looking over-large in their winter wrappings, talked with an intimate animation. Guy was wanting to know what David had been sent out to do.

  ‘Anything I can to help.’ Now that this first shyness had passed, David was voluble. His voice, rich, elderly and precise, the voice of a much earlier generation, came back to Harriet and Clarence in the rear: ‘I saw Foxy Leverett this morning – that fellow with the big red moustache. I said: “When’s this war going to begin?” And what do you think he said? “Oh, things’ll hot up soon. We’ll give the Huns a biff. We’ll give ’em a bloody nose.”’

  Guy was stopped in his tracks by his own laughter. Harriet and Clarence, who had to step aside to skirt him, now walked ahead. When they reached the Calea Victoriei, the talk of the other two was lost in the noise of the traffic.

  David was meeting his friend in an old eating-house in a back street. When they reached the corner of this street, Clarence said: ‘I go straight on,’ and paused with Harriet, waiting for the others.

  A barrel-organ stood at the street corner. A white-bearded peasant, bundled up in a sheepskin, was turning the handle, producing a Rumanian popular tune of the past, haunting and sad. Harriet had heard the same organ playing this tune several times before and no one had been able to tell her what it was called. Now, as they stood in a doorway sheltering from the cold she asked Clarence if he knew.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m tone deaf,’ he said.

  Harriet said: ‘That’s the last barrel-organ in Bucharest. When the old man dies and there’s no one to play it, that tune will be lost for ever.’

  Clarence stood silent, apparently reflecting, as Guy would never reflect, on the passing of things. ‘Yes,’ he said and as he smiled down on her his rare and beautiful smile, they touched, it seemed, a moment of complete understanding.

  David and Guy came up, both talking together, exuding an air of engrossment in larger issues. David’s voice rose above Guy’s voice as he firmly said: ‘Although Rumania is a maize-eating country, it grows only half as much maize as Hungary. So we have here the usual vicious circle – the peasants are indolent because they’re half-fed: they’re half-fed because they’re indolent. If the Germans do get here, believe me, they’ll make these people work as they’ve never worked before.’

  ‘Clarence is going a different way,’ said Harriet when she got a chance.

  ‘No!’ Guy protested, not having grasped that Clarence was bidden elsewhere. He caught Clarence’s arm, unwilling to let anyone pass from his sphere of influence. When Clarence explained where he was going, Guy demanded: ‘How long will your party go on for? Where will you be afterwards? We must meet again this evening.’

  Clarence, not yet recovered from the defensive disapproval with which he faced each new situation, murmured: ‘Well, it’s a luncheon party. I don’t know … I can’t say,’ but before he left them he agreed to come to the Pringles’ flat that evening.

  Now Harriet had joined Guy and David, their conversation halted and started again on a more personal plane. David began asking about the people he had known when he was last in Bucharest. He spoke of each with an uncritical, indulgent humour, as though all human beings were for him more or less of a joke. Guy, not given to gossip, had not much to tell. Harriet was silent, as she tended to be with strangers.

  ‘And how’s our old friend Inchcape?’ David asked.

  Guy said: ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘I hear he’s risen in the world. Gets invited to Legation parties.’

  Guy laughed and said he believed that was true.

  ‘When I was last in Cambridge,’ said David, ‘I met a friend of Inchcape – Professor Lord Pinkrose. They were up together. He was asking me about him. He said that Inch had been a remarkable scholar: one of those chaps who are capable of so much, they don’t know what to do first. In the end they usually do nothing at all.’

  The restaurant was housed in an early nineteenth-century villa, with a front garden where bushes like giant heads set their chins upon the snowy lawn.

  David, without a glance about him, talked his way up the front steps and entered as though he had never been away. They passed from the icy outer air into a hallway over-heated and scented by grilled meat. A stream of waiters were clattering and grumbling in and out of the four rooms. One of them tried to direct the three to a back room, but David, without bothering to argue, led the way to the main front room. The tables and chairs were rough. On the walls, papered in faded stripes, hung a few old Russian oleographs. From a dark ceiling hung a gilt chandelier laden with the grime of a decade. The place was noted for its excellent grilled veal.

  When they were seated, David started at once to talk: ‘I saw Dobson, too, this morning – not a bad little chap. I always liked him, but the occupational disease is manifesting itself. I asked about the situation here. He said: “Quite satisfactory. The Sovereign is with us.” I said: “What if the people are not with the Sovereign!” “Oh, I don’t think we need worry about that,” said Dobson. When I asked him a few more questions, he h’md and hawed, then said, “The situation’s a bit complex for a newcomer!”’

  ‘He probably doubted your ability to understand it,’ Guy said, rousing David to a paroxysm of snuffling laughter.

  When there was a pause in the talk, Harriet asked him where he was staying and learnt with surprise that he was at the Minerva. ‘But that is the German hotel!’

  David said: ‘I like to practise my German.’ Turning to Guy, he said: ‘And one picks up useful odds and ends of information. In the bar there, where the German journalists congregate, you get the same stringmen that take the news to the English Bar. One version goes to the Athénée Palace another to the Minerva. In that way our Rumanian allies keep in with both sides at once.’

  Guy, proud of his friend, now mentioned to Harriet that David spoke all the Slav languages.

  David smiled down modestly. ‘My Slovene is a little rusty,’ he said, ‘but I can manage in the rest. I got through the first volume of Anna Karenina in the train. Now I find I haven’t brought the second volume. I’ll have to fly to Sofia to get it from the Russian bookshop. I’d like to know how it ends.’

  ‘Haven’t you read it in English?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘I scarcely need to brush up my English.’

  If this were a joke, David gave no indication of the fact, but, sitting four-square on his chair, he stared down solemnly at the menu. His cap, when taken off, had left some snow in his curled black hair. As this melted and trickled down his cheeks, he thrust out his lower lip and caught the drops. His brow, visible now, was as massive as his chin.r />
  Putting the menu down he said: ‘This policy of backing the established order, whether right or wrong, is not only going to lose us this country. When the big break-up starts, it will lose us concessions all over the world. In short, it’ll be the end of us.’

  When on his own subject, David’s manner lost its diffidence. He tended, Harriet thought, to address his listeners less like a conversationalist than a lecturer – and a lecturer wholly confident in the magnitude of his knowledge. His self-sufficiency was now evident. She remembered that his hobby was bird-watching. He was saying:

  ‘Those F.O. dummies can’t see further than the ends of their noses. For them the position inside the country is of no importance. The Sovereign right or wrong – that’s all they know and all they need to know.’

  While David talked – and he talked at length – a waiter came and stood by the table. David was not to be interrupted, but when the man decided to move away, David seized and held him by the coat-tails while saying:

  ‘I learnt on the train that German agents have settled in all over the country. They’re working through the Iron Guard, buying grain, secretly, at double the usual rate. They said: “See how generous we Germans are! With Germany as an ally, Rumania would be rich.” But could I persuade H.E. of this? Not for a moment. The Sovereign says the Iron Guard has ceased to exist and the Sovereign must be right.’

  The waiter, his patience exhausted, began to tug at his coattails. Turning irritably on him and shouting: ‘Stai, domnule, stai,’ David went on with his dissertation.