The Balkan Trilogy

by Olivia Manning

  On their first morning, as he chose an armful of books to take to the public gardens, Harriet said: ‘But can’t we go for a walk?’

  ‘Later,’ Guy promised. ‘Let me break the back of this first.’ She, he suggested, might visit the famous confiserie, the farseeing owner of which had laid in vast stocks of sugar in early summer. Now people came from all the large cities to eat his cakes.

  Harriet was surprised to discover how greedy this fact made her feel.

  Guy took a seat in the small ornamental garden where the grass, damply green in the mild, misty sunlight, was scattered over with russet leaves. There was nothing to see here but some beds of small, brick-coloured dahlias. Harriet wandered off through a neighbouring market where the ground was heaped with apples, tomatoes and black grapes. Some of the notorious Laetzi gipsies stood about – wild, bearded, long-haired men who eyed her as though they were cannibals.

  The confiserie was crowded. The inside tables were all taken and the counter was tightly packed about with people who had to hold their plates above their heads. Outside there were chairs vacant near the rail. Harriet soon discovered why. The beggars were at her elbow even as she sat down. There were three children, their bones hung with scraps like greasers’ rags. One, with a withered leg, hopped with his hand on the shoulder of a smaller boy. The third, a girl, had lost the sight of an eye. Perhaps she had been born that way, for the eyeball remained in its socket, blankly white, like a filling of lard. The children were urged forward – not that they needed much urging – by two teen-age girls who now and then stopped their whine of ‘Foame’ to titter as though this persecution of the foreign woman were too funny for words.

  Harriet handed out her small change, but it was not enough to buy release. The children went on jigging and whining beside her. While waiting to be served, she watched a small green and gold beetle crawling towards a hole in the rail beside her. If it went to the right, they would get away. It went to the left and it suddenly seemed to her that their danger had become acute. Her appetite had gone. She ordered coffee. While she waited she stared out at the road and watched a peasant leading a horse and cart out of a lane opposite. The horse, its bones straining against its hide, stumbled when it reached the main road cobbles. At once the peasant flung back his whip and lashed the creature about the eyes. The blows were given with savage deliberation as though the man wanted no more than an excuse to vent a chronic rage.

  She leapt to her feet with a cry, too appalled to care for the surprise of her neighbours. By the time she reached the pavement, the assault was over. Horse and peasant had turned the corner and were away down the road. She knew, if she pursued them, her Rumanian was not good enough to make her protest effective. Anyway, it would be ignored.

  She gave up all thought of cakes or coffee and hurried back to the public garden. When she reached Guy, she could scarcely speak. Surprised by her agitation he said: ‘Whatever is the matter?’

  She sat down, exhausted, and gulped back her tears. Seeing the peasant vividly, his brutish face absorbed and horribly gratified by the outlet for his violence, she said: ‘I can’t bear this place. The peasants are loathsome. I hate them.’ She spoke in a convulsion of feeling, trembling as she said: ‘All over this country animals are suffering – and we can do nothing about it.’ Feeling the world too much for her, she pressed her face against Guy’s shoulder.

  He put his arm round her to calm her. ‘The peasants are brutes because they are treated like brutes. They suffer themselves. Their behaviour comes of desperation.’

  ‘It’s no excuse.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but it’s an explanation. One must try to understand.’

  ‘Why should one try to understand cruelty and stupidity?’

  ‘Because even those things can be understood: and if understood, they can be cured.’

  He squeezed her hand, but she did not respond. He talked to distract her, but she remained withdrawn as though violated and unable to throw off the shock.

  After a while he picked up his books again. ‘Why don’t you take a proper holiday?’ he said. ‘We’re quite well off at the present rate. Wouldn’t you like to take the boat to Athens?’

  Her expression lightened a little. ‘You mean you would come with me?’

  ‘You know I can’t. Inchcape doesn’t want me to leave the country. And I have to prepare for the new term. But that’s no reason why you shouldn’t go.’

  She shook her head. ‘When we go, we go together.’

  After tea, Guy felt he had done enough for the day and was willing to take a walk. When they reached the forest, he looked in through the aisles of pines, all intent and silent as though each tree held its breath, and refused to enter. He said that within living memory it had been a haunt of bears. ‘Let’s keep to the road. It’s safer.’ The road carried them above the trees into the bare rock fields where the cold was keen. The sky was mottled with a little cloud and here and there a chill hung on the air like powdered glass. At first Harriet thought it was ash blown from a bonfire, then she found it was melting on her skin. She said with wonder: ‘It is snow.’ When they reached the first white pool of snow, she pressed her hand on it, leaving the intaglio of her palm and fingers. Much lighter and surer on her feet than Guy, excited by the rarefied air, she climbed at great speed until she was alone amid the silence of the topmost slopes. She heard Guy shout and, looking back, saw him standing a long way below, like an unhappy bear, defeated by the shifting rubble of the path. She sped down into his arms.

  They returned to the hotel, which stood by a dimpled meadow that was covered with small flowers. Some cows had been driven on to the grass during their absence and Guy paused, unwilling to cross among them. He saw all the animals as potential enemies. He distrusted the Bucharest cab-horses and had even been frightened of Harriet’s red kitten. She took his hand and led him towards the nearest cow, which lifted its head to stare at them but did not cease to chew. Watching its mouth slipping loosely from side to side, Guy said: ‘These beasts are probably dangerous.’

  Harriet laughed. ‘I love them,’ she said.

  ‘What, these frightful creatures?’

  ‘Not only these. All animals.’

  ‘How could you love something so totally different from yourself.’

  ‘Why not? I don’t simply love myself. I think I love them because they are different. They are innocent. They are hunted, harried, slaughtered by human beings who imagine they have a God-given right to destroy whenever it’s in their interest to destroy.’

  Guy nodded. ‘You want to protect them. I can understand that. But why this extraordinary love for them? It doesn’t seem reasonable to me.’

  She did not try to explain it. Guy, she knew, believed that man’s compassion for his own kind was the only true compassion to be found in this cold universe. She longed for proof of a more disinterested compassion; a supreme justice that would avenge all these tormented and helpless innocents. Trembling with her own excess of feeling, she stretched out her hand to the cow, but at the threat of her approach it moved warily backwards.

  After supper, Guy lay on the bed propped with pillows and gave himself up again to his books. Harriet, drowsy from the mountain air, lay in the crook of his arm, happy in his warmth and contact. He paused in his reading to say: ‘You do not see much of Bella these days. Or Clarence either. You have made so few friends in Bucharest! Don’t you feel the need of people?’

  She said: ‘Not when I have you – which isn’t often.’

  ‘You’ve quite enough of me. If you had more, you’d be bored.’

  She glanced up at him, realised he believed this and smiled in denial, but he was not looking at her. She closed her eyes and slept.

  When they came down to breakfast on Sunday and found Dobson sitting at one of the tables, Guy gave a great cry of ‘Why, hello.’ He would, Harriet knew, have been equally delighted had the newcomer been almost anyone known to them: and it might have been someone worse than Dobson who seemed ch
armed by the sight of them. He had driven up late the previous night ‘for a breath of air’, and would have only one day in Predeal. He suggested that after breakfast they should go for a walk together.

  Harriet left it to Guy to make his excuses, but the invitation was too much for him. It was not only that he was a little flattered by it: he could not refuse the diversion of fresh company.

  As they left the hotel, Dobson suggested they should visit a Russian church a couple of miles away, saying: ‘We might hear something interesting. I was enormously fortunate last time I went there. They were singing the Cantakion for the Dead.’

  Dobson spoke on a note of such breathless anticipation that Guy paused only a moment before saying: ‘All right.’ At the same time he looked at Harriet as though she might save him, but she, a little piqued, said she would like nothing better.

  They went behind the village, climbing steeply among small châlets and villas. The path was dusty, slippery with flints and overhung by old chestnut trees, their leaves ochred and reddened, forming parasols of colour that set the shade aglow. The ground beneath them was stained with trodden nuts and leaves. In one garden stood a giant rowan, weighted and bronzed with berries. Many of the villas were shuttered, their gardens overgrown as though they had been unvisited all summer.

  The path dwindled, the houses were left behind, and they came out on to a plateau that stretched away into remote upland hills. They walked silently on the grass that was short, greyish and set with harebells and wild scabious.

  Dobson talked easily and pleasantly. Harriet found his presence in Predeal reassuring. It was true that as a diplomat, especially protected, he had less to worry about than they had, but it was unlikely he would leave Bucharest if danger were imminent. Harriet, nearly two days away from the tensions of the capital, was beginning to feel like a patient propped up for the first time after an operation; Guy asked if anything had happened since they left Bucharest.

  ‘Well,’ said Dobson, ‘Friday, as you probably know, was the anniversary of the death of Calinescu. The Guardists spent the day marching about.’

  They were in sight of a hollow from which the golden domes of the Russian church rose among trees.

  Abruptly changing from the subject of the slaughtered Calinescu, Dobson said: ‘This convent was started by a Russian princess, an abbess who came here after the revolution with a following of nuns. Queen Marie gave them the land. They collected a crowd of refugees; a lot of them are still living. Some dark tales of intrigue and murder are told about this community. What a novel they would make!’

  The Pringles had known Dobson as an agreeable man who treated them and their orders to leave the country with a vague serenity. Now that he felt more was expected of him, they were experiencing the active charm of his attention and they found it delightful.

  Watching him as he walked before her with his plump, incurved back, his softly drooping shoulders, his rounded backside rising and falling with each tripping step, Harriet wondered why she had once decided he would not be easy to know. Who would be easier? And here, it occurred to her, was opportunity to intercede for Sasha! Yet, she hesitated – she scarcely knew why.

  She had felt an instinctive trust of Foxy Leverett. Reckless and casual though he had been, he seemed a natural liberal. Dobson, for all his geniality, was something apart. Supposing the diplomatic code required him to betray the boy? Feeling no certainty he would not do it, she kept silent and was fearful Guy might speak. Guy, however, made no mention of Sasha and probably did not give the boy a thought.

  They were descending into the hollow where the atmosphere was humid and warm and the tall feathery grasses were still soaked with dew. Dobson led them into the shade of a vast apple orchard where there was no sound but a ziss of wasps and the creak of boughs bending beneath their weight of fruit. They walked through a compost of rotted fruit.

  Beyond the orchard was a flat field and a river running level with flat banks. The church stood amid silver birch trees, the leaves of which were yellow as satinwood. To Harriet it seemed that not only the church, but the river reflecting the light among birch trees, and the trees massed around the buildings in a mist of reddish gold, all had a look of Russia. The place was not unfriendly, but it was strange. ‘A distant land,’ she thought, though distant from what she could not have said. In this country, wherever they were, they were far from home.

  They crossed the bridge and took the path to the convent. The church and main buildings, of stone, were surrounded by dismal wooden hutments, the living-quarters of the lay community. Four women in black, heads tightly bound up in black handkerchiefs, were approaching the church along a path, each keeping her distance from the others. As the first of them, a very thin, old lady, stared with interest at the visitors, her dark, wrinkled, toothless face, eaten into by suffering, took an expression ingratiating and cunning. She gave a half-bob at them before turning into the church.

  Guy came to a stop, frowning his discomfort, but Dobson went on without glancing round and entered through the heavy, wooden doors.

  Harriet said: ‘Come on, darling, let us look inside,’ and led him after Dobson. She received, however, no more than a glimpse of the candle-lit interior where a priest, hands raised, was making gestures over two nuns who lay on the ground before him like little, black-clad, fallen dolls. Guy gave a gasp, then bolted, letting the door crash behind him. The old women of the congregation started round, the priest looked up, even the nuns stirred.

  Much shocked, Harriet hurried out after him. Before she could remonstrate, he turned on her: ‘How could you go into that vile place where that mumbo-jumbo was going on?’

  A few minutes later, Dobson came out, sauntering, his face bland, giving the impression that nothing could surprise him – but he had less to say on the way home.

  Harriet walked in complete silence, knowing that Guy might, by his action, have antagonised the whole powerful world of the Legation. Guy, too, was silent, probably in reaction from the scene that had so revolted him inside the church.

  They returned through a shabby area of untidy, uneven grass where flimsy châlets declared themselves to be pensions and private sanatoria. The road crossed a stream of clear, shallow water that purled over rusted cans and old mattresses. Harriet paused to look down and Dobson, perhaps conscious of her discomfort, leaned beside her on the parapet and said: ‘If you were some great lady of the eighteenth century, Lady Hester Stanhope for instance, you would be standing on the boundary line between the Austrian and Turkish empires,’ and as Harriet grew slightly pink at this analogy, Dobson smiled in reassuring admiration.

  He joined them at their table for luncheon and tea. After tea he invited them to drive with him to Sinai.

  When he brought his car out of the hotel garage, it proved to be Foxy Leverett’s De Dion-Bouton. Claret-coloured, picked out in gold, with a small, square bonnet, its large body opened out like a tulip to display claret-coloured upholstery of close-buttoned leather. The brass headlamps and large tuba-like horn were beautifully polished. Dobson eyed the car with a smile of satisfaction. ‘I think she’ll get there,’ he said. ‘She’s in spanking shape.’

  On the road to Sinai, he was as talkative as ever. Pointing across the plateau towards some bald, ashen hills, he said: ‘Did you ever see such mean hills? They look as though they had something to hide, don’t they? They’ve a bad reputation among the peasants here. I remember when Foxy and I came here to ski last winter, we thought we’d try out those hills. When we told our cook, Ileana, where we were going, she flopped down on her knees and gave an absolute howl: “No, no, domnuli, no one ever goes there. They’re bad lands.” Foxy said: “Get up and stop being an ass.” All the time she was cutting our sandwiches, she was snivelling away. She kissed our hands as though certain she’d never see us again.

  ‘Anyway, we drove over there and had a long climb up – they’re higher than they look. The snow was magnificent. When we got to the top, Foxy said: “It’s ridiculous to sa
y no one ever comes here. Look at all these dogs’ footprints.” Then it struck us. We strapped on our skis and got down that hill-side faster than we’d ever got down anything in our lives before. When we arrived back Ileana had all the cooks in the neighbourhood holding a wake for us. They screamed their heads off when they saw us. They thought we were ghosts.’ Dobson had been increasing speed as he talked and he now pointed with pride to the indicator. ‘Doing forty,’ he said. The car trembled with the effort.

  The conversation now was all about Foxy: Foxy killing bear in the Western Carpathians, Foxy shooting duck at the Delta, Foxy taking ‘a record bag of ptarmigan’.

  Harriet burst out: ‘I hate all this shooting.’

  ‘So do I,’ Dobson cheerfully agreed, ‘but it’s nice to keep a bit of bird in the larder. Something to peck at when you come in late.’

  They passed a cart-load of peasants who pointed at the De Dion, the men bawling with laughter, the women giggling behind their hands.

  Laughing with them, Dobson said: ‘How Foxy would have loved that,’ and he continued a threnody on his friend – sports-man, playboy and Legation jester: ‘The best fellow in the world! We shared a flat in the Boulevard Carol.’ He went on to tell how Foxy practised revolver-shooting, using a Louis XIV clock as a target. One night he shot at the ceiling and sent a bullet into the bed of the landlord, who said: ‘Anyone else but you, Domnul Leverett, and I would have told him: “This is too much.”’

  The road was lined with garden restaurants. It was all very urban, but as soon as the car turned off the main road they came into a wild region of stone peaks where the rock was patched over with alpine moss and there was no vegetation but a few dwarf juniper bushes. In every hollow among the hills a small lake lay dark and motionless.