The Balkan Trilogy

by Olivia Manning

  Harriet could now read enough in the Rumanian papers to realise how rapidly Rumania’s too distant allies were passing out of favour. No one had been reassured by Chamberlain’s declaration that ‘Hitler has missed the bus’. If it were true that England was now an impregnable fortress, then ‘tant pis pour les autres’ said L’Indépendence Romaine. The fact that Germany, without making any move, was now receiving seventy per cent of all Rumanian exports was not, said Timpul, any cause for self-congratulation. Germany’s demands would increase with her needs. What she was not given she would come and take. Universul wrote slightingly of those who used Rumania in time of peace but in war-time not only abandoned her defenceless, but sought to sabotage her resources. When, oh when, they all wanted to know, could the great, generous-hearted Rumanian people, now left to buy off the enemy as best they might, again look forward to those summers of joyous frivolity they had known before this senseless war began?

  Harriet, a member of an unfavoured nation, felt shut out from Guy’s world to face the painful situation alone. With little else to do, she often dropped in at the Athénée Palace to look at the English papers. They were exceptionally dull, concerned usually with some argument about mine-laying in Norwegian waters.

  The hotel was as dull as the papers. It was an inert period between seasons: a time of no news when the journalists were elsewhere. Nothing was happening in Bucharest. Nothing, it seemed, was happening anywhere in the world. And, despite all the apprehension, it was likely enough nothing would happen.

  But in Bucharest, anyway, apprehension was not groundless. The political atmosphere was changing. A notice appeared under the glass of the café tables to say it was forbidden under threat of arrest to discuss politics. And arrest, it was said, might lead one to the new concentration camp being organised on the German model by Guardists trained in Dachau and Buchenwald. People said the camp was hidden somewhere in the remote Carpathians. No one could say exactly where.

  One showery morning, as she came from the hotel, Harriet was struck by the appearance of a young man sheltering beneath the lime trees that over-reached the garden wall.

  The rain had stopped. The young leaves flashed their green against a sky of indigo cloud. The cloud was breaking. A gleam touched the wet tarmac. The young man, although neither beggar nor peasant, remained by the wall with nothing to do apparently but stand there. He was dressed in the city grey much worn by the middle classes, but he was unlike any middle-class Rumanian Harriet had ever seen. He was hard and thin. His was a new sort of face in this town. Looking at his hollowed cheeks, meeting his unfriendly gaze, she told herself he must be one of the Guardist youths newly returned from Germany. He looked at the moment not so much dangerous as ill-at-ease. Here he was, returned to a city grown unfamiliar to him, a destroyer, perhaps, but for the moment powerless.

  After she had seen this one, she began to see others like him. They stood about the streets, their pallid, bony faces sometimes scarred like the faces of German duellists. They watched the pampered crowds with the contempt, and uncertainty, of the deprived. They were waiting as though they knew their day would come.

  To Guy, Harriet said sombrely: ‘They’re a portent. The fascist infiltration.’

  ‘They’re probably not even Guardists,’ Guy said.

  ‘Then what are they?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  He was cutting down Ulysses’s speeches in his copy of Troilus and Cressida, giving all his mind to the job, determined not to let outside things distract him.

  Harriet had been comforted a little by Clarence’s indignation when he found she was no longer in the cast. He left a rehearsal to telephone her, vehemently demanding: ‘Harry, what is this little bitch doing in your part? Have you walked out of the show?’

  ‘No, I was put out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Guy said he couldn’t work with me. He said I didn’t take him seriously.’

  ‘Why should you? It’s only a footling end-of-term show, anyway. If you’re not in it, I don’t want to be in it.’

  Harriet reacted sharply to this. It was important to her that Guy’s project should succeed. ‘You must stay in,’ she insisted. ‘He will need everyone he can get. And it will probably be quite good.’

  Clarence, who had been given the sizeable part of Ajax, did not argue about this, but grumbled: ‘It’s awful having Sophie around. She’s beginning to queen it insufferably.’ He said he had no intention of attending all the rehearsals. Between his work for Inchcape and his work with the Poles, he was much too busy.

  The truth was, as Harriet knew, he did almost nothing at the Propaganda Bureau and very few Poles remained. The camps were almost empty. Of the officers who had entertained him on several wild occasions, scarcely one remained. They had all been smuggled over the frontier to join the fighting forces in France. Clarence, who had organised these escapes, had worked himself out of work. He needed distraction. He invited Harriet to have dinner with him next evening. There was in his giving and her acceptance of this invitation a certain revolt against Guy and the importance he gave to his production.

  Next morning at breakfast, when Guy announced another day of rehearsals, Harriet asked: ‘Must you keep at it like a maniac?’

  ‘It’s the only way to get it done.’

  His method revealed to her what she least expected to find in him – a neurotic intensity.

  She said: ‘I’m going out to dinner with Clarence tonight.’

  ‘Oh, good! And now I must get Yaki up.’

  ‘When can we hope to get rid of that incubus?’ Harriet crossly asked.

  ‘I expect he’ll find a room when his remittance comes. Meanwhile, he must be fed and housed and accepted, like a child.’

  ‘A pretty cunning child.’

  ‘He’s harmless, anyway. If the world was composed of Yakimovs, there’d be no wars.’

  ‘There’d be no anything.’

  It was the morning of the 9th of April. Guy and Yakimov had just left when the telephone rang. Lifting the receiver, Harriet heard Bella crying to her: ‘Have you heard the news?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Germany has invaded Norway, Sweden and Denmark. I’ve just heard it on the wireless.’ Bella spoke excitedly, expecting excited response. When Harriet did not give it, she said: ‘Can’t you see! It means they aren’t coming here.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean they won’t come.’

  Harriet, though disturbed, imagining any move to be a danger signal, understood Bella’s relief. The blow had fallen elsewhere. For Rumania there was, if not a reprieve, a stay of execution. Standing by the balcony door, Harriet could see the square and roofs pearl-white beneath the vast white misted sky. From different points miniature dark figures were converging on the newsboys like ants on specks of food. She could hear the mouse-squeaks of the boys calling a special edition. Wanting to share the situation with someone, she said to Bella: ‘Let’s meet at Mavrodaphne’s.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t,’ said Bella. ‘Guy has called a rehearsal. I must go. Rehearsals are such fun.’

  Harriet went out and bought a paper. The invasion was announced in the stop press with a statement made by the Minister of Information to the effect that the news need rouse no apprehension in Rumanian hearts. Carol, the Great and Good, Father of Culture, Father of his People, had nearly completed the mighty Carol Line and soon Rumania would be surrounded by a wall of fire that would repel any invader.

  People stood in groups about the paper-sellers talking loudly. Harriet could hear the agitated staccato of their voices as they called to one another: ‘Alors, ça a enfin commencé, la guerre?’ ‘Oui, ça commence.’ Her own fears renewed, she crossed the square and started to walk up the Chaussée. As she went, the sun that had been inching its way through the mist, broke out, suddenly resplendent, unrolling light like golden silk at her feet. All in a moment, the sky became cloudless and blue with the blue of summer. Piccolos were running out with poles to pull the blinds down over D
ragomir’s windows. All over the façades of buildings striped awnings were being lowered – red and yellow, blue and white, fringed, tasselled and corded – while windows and doors were opening and people were coming out on to balconies. The balcony plants could be seen now to be swelling and spreading and growing green. Already there were little bowers of tender shoots that would, by late summer, become bedraggled tangles of coarse creepers. The cement walls, blotched and grey when the sky was grey, now gleamed like marble.

  Up the Chaussée, where the women, unprepared for this sudden brilliance, were holding up handbags to shield their eyes, people were distracted from the war news. The cafés were putting chairs out in gardens and on pavements. Even as the chairs were placed in position customers were sitting down on them, beginning, without delay and with a new gaiety, the outdoor life of summer.

  When Harriet reached the building that was supposed to be a museum of folk art, she saw some paintings were on show. She went inside. Rumanians did not express themselves well in paint. Indeed, there were no pictures in Bucharest worth looking at except the King’s El Grecos, nine in number, bought for a song before El Greco returned to fashion, and these were not on show to the public. The exhibitors at the salon were mediocre, imitating every genre of modern painting, but they were numerous. She was able to spend a long time looking at them. When she came out, she walked back across the square into the Calea Victoriei and, passing through the parrot-land of the gypsy flower-sellers, reached the British Propaganda Bureau. No one was looking at the pictures of British cruisers that curled and yellowed in the sun, but there was a crowd round the German Bureau opposite. Curiosity propelled her across the road.

  The window was filled with a map of Scandinavia. Arrows, three inches wide, cut from red cardboard, pointed the direction of the German attack. In the crowd no one spoke. People stood awed by the arrogant swagger of the display. Harriet, trying to look indifferent to it, made for the University building. It was now nearly luncheon time, so she might, with reason, call for Guy.

  The main door of the University building lay open but there was no porter inside. Term did not begin until the end of April. The vaulted, empty passages looked bleak and smelt of beeswax and linoleum. Harriet was guided by the distant sound of Guy’s voice saying:

  ‘“Indeed, a tapster’s arithmetic may soon bring his particulars therein to a total.”’ Cressida, he went on to explain, was making fun of Troilus. A tapster’s arithmetic being notoriously limited, the particulars could not be very great. ‘Now again,’ he said, beginning the speech in a bantering manner.

  The words were taken up and repeated in the same manner – this time by a female voice. Sophie’s voice. Harriet heard it with a pang of jealousy so acute she stopped in her tracks. She was about to retreat – but what point in retreating? Sooner or later, she had to face Sophie in this part.

  She went on slowly. The door stood open at the end of the corridor. She came to it silently, expecting a crowd of players among whom she could enter unnoticed, but only Sophie, Yakimov and Guy remained.

  The common-room, dark-panelled and without windows, was large and gloomy. It was lit by a central dome. The three stood under the dome. Guy had one foot on a chair and his script on his knee, the other two were performing before him. No one noticed Harriet as she took a seat by the wall.

  As Sophie and Yakimov went through speech after speech, with Guy interrupting and enforcing constant repetitions, she began to realise she could not have tolerated for long the tedium of rehearsals. She might not have required to be interrupted so often or to receive so many explanations of the words she spoke – but these interruptions and explanations were no hardship to Guy. He delighted in them. In fact he probably preferred a Cressida who would be entirely of his own making.

  As for the other two … Yakimov and Sophie? She realised that what would be tedium to her was to them self-aggrandisement.

  Sophie, of course, had never lacked vanity. She had the usual Rumanian face, dark-eyed, pasty and too full in the cheeks, but her manner of seating and holding herself demanded for her the deference due to a beauty. Now that her self-importance seemed justified, there was a flaunting of this demand. All the attention must be for her. When Guy gave it to Yakimov, she wanted it back again, interrupting the rehearsal every few minutes to ask: ‘Chéri, don’t you think here I might do this?’ or ‘Here, while he is saying this, I make like so? You agree? You agree?’ Posturing her little backside, imbuing all her moves and moues with a quality of sensuous and lingering caress. She seemed to be in a state of inspired, almost ecstatic, excitement about it all. She wriggled with sex.

  Although she could not refrain from flirting even with Yakimov, for Guy she kept a special look, inciting and conspiratorial, which did not, Harriet noted, appear to disconcert him. He accorded Sophie now exactly the same kindly but unemotional sympathy he had accorded her when she imagined herself neglected, injured and suicidal.

  While Sophie attacked direction, Yakimov responded to it. Though he appeared to have taken on size and substance, he did exactly what Guy required him to do. Harriet could imagine Guy’s satisfaction in producing from Yakimov the version of the performance he would have chosen to give himself. She could feel between the two men a warmth of mutual approval. Yakimov received the acclaim which Sophie sought, with the result that there was in her demanding interruptions a querulousness that roused Harriet’s sympathy. She, too, was beginning to feel excluded.

  Suddenly Guy picked up his script and said: ‘We’ll stop now.’

  When they became aware of her, Harriet said: ‘You’ve heard they’ve invaded Norway and Denmark?’

  Oh yes, everyone had heard that by now. Guy had already discounted the news. ‘It was to be expected,’ he said. ‘Once we started mining Norwegian waters, Germany had no choice but to invade.’

  ‘Perhaps we mined them because Germany was planning to invade.’

  ‘Perhaps!’ Guy did not want to discuss the subject further.

  Harriet marvelled at his ability to turn his back on the news. For herself she always faced anxieties, believing that, unfaced, they would leap upon her and devour her. Perhaps Guy would not face what he was not in a position actively to combat. She should be glad, she supposed, that he had this production as a bolt-hole.

  What annoyed her was that Yakimov and Sophie, to play up to him, were echoing his unconcern. They were set apart from the implications of the invasion: they were people with more important matters in mind. Harriet felt particularly irritated with Sophie, who was, she knew, as liable to panic as any other Rumanian.

  Guy said: ‘We’ll go and have a drink.’ As they left the dark University hall and came out to the dazzle of day, he exclaimed: ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’

  Sophie laughed shortly: ‘How ridiculous the English are about the sun! In England they hold up their faces, so …’ she goggled absurdly up at the sky, ‘and say …’ she cooed absurdly: ‘“Oh, the sun, the sun!” Here, I can tell you, we get sick of the sight of it.’

  Harriet asked her how she was enjoying her part in the play. Her only answer was a shrug and a sulky down-droop of her full lips. Was it possible that, despite her advantage, she resented Harriet’s appearance on the scene? Had she imagined that, having displaced Harriet in the part, she might displace her altogether? ‘Really!’ thought Harriet, ‘the girl is ridiculous!’

  As Guy made to cross the road, Sophie paused and asked where they were going. He answered: ‘To the Doi Trandafiri.’ Fretfully, she said: ‘I don’t want to go there. It’s always so crowded.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Guy. ‘We’ll see you later.’

  As Sophie went off, looking angry, Harriet said: ‘If you don’t make a fuss of your poor leading lady, you’ll be losing her.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Guy spoke easily. ‘She’s enjoying herself too much.’

  In the café, he said: ‘I want to hear Yakimov in a few scenes.’ They read three scenes and between each Guy bought Yakimov a ţ
uică.

  At the end, Yakimov asked: ‘How was I?’ and there was in the question a tremulous anxiety.

  ‘Splendid,’ said Guy, his approval so whole-hearted that Yakimov’s cheeks grew pink.

  Gratified, Yakimov breathed: ‘Dear boy!’ and was for a moment bemused like a child becoming aware of its own qualities.

  Harriet noticed a change in him, not great, but radical. Guy had roused in him a will to excel.

  ‘You know,’ said Guy, ‘you have the makings of a great actor.’

  ‘Have I?’ Yakimov’s question was modest, but not disclaiming. He fixed on Guy eyes glowing with admiring gratitude.

  ‘But you must learn your lines.’

  ‘Oh, I will, dear boy. Don’t fear, I will.’

  As Harriet watched, it seemed to her this nebula of a man, so long inert, was starting slowly to evolve.

  23

  A week after the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, Inchcape displayed in the British Propaganda Bureau window a map of the Scandinavian countries with the loss of the German destroyers at Narvik restrainedly marked in blue. In time came the landings of British troops at Namsos and Andalsnes.

  In the window opposite, the red arrows of Germany thrust the Norwegians back and back. One day the Allies announced an advance, another the Germans announced an Allied retreat. Merely a strategic retreat, said the British News Service. The Germans, advancing up the Gudbranstal, claimed they had joined up with their Trondheim forces. The British admitted a short withdrawal.

  Every morning the passers-by, lured by these first remote moves in the war, crossed the road to compare window with window; but it was the blatant menace of the giant red arrows that held the crowd. The pro-British faction of the press predicted a British counter-attack that would finish the Germans once and for all. But even while this prediction was being made, the Germans reached Andalsnes. Four thousand Norwegians had surrendered; the politicians fled; the Allies took to the sea. It was suddenly a German victory.