‘Should I take him to the barracks?’
The voice rose a little in emphasis. ‘No. As few people must see him as possible . . . On the spot.’
‘But really,’ Major Petkovitch protested, ‘we haven’t the accommodation here. What can we do with him?’
‘. . . a few hours only.’
‘By court-martial? It’s very irregular.’ The voice began to laugh gently. ‘Myself . . . with you by lunch. . . .’
‘But in the event of an acquittal?’
‘. . . myself,’ said the voice indistinctly, ‘you, Major, Captain Alexitch.’ It fell lower still. ‘Discreet . . . among friends,’ and then more clearly, ‘he may not be alone . . . suspects . . . any excuse . . . the customs. No fuss, mind.’
Major Petkovitch said in a tone of the deepest disapproval, ‘Is there anything else, Colonel Hartep?’ The voice became a little animated. ‘Yes, yes. About lunch. I suppose you haven’t got much choice up there. . . . At the station . . . a good fire . . . something hot . . . cold things in the car and wine.’ There was a pause. ‘Remember, you’re responsible.’
‘For something so irregular,’ began Major Petkovitch. ‘No, no, no,’ said the voice, ‘I was referring, of course, to lunch.’
‘Is everything quiet in Belgrade?’ Major Petkovitch asked stiffly. ‘Fast asleep,’ the voice said.
‘May I ask one more question?’
Major Petkovitch called, ‘Hello. Hello. Hello,’ in an irritated voice and then slammed down the receiver. ‘Where’s that man? Come with me,’ and again followed by Ninitch and his dog he plunged into the cold, crossed the rails and the guard-room, and slammed the door of his room behind him. Then he wrote a number of notes very briefly and handed them to Ninitch for delivery: he was so hurried and irritated that he forgot to seal two of them. These, of course, Ninitch read; his wife would be proud of him that evening. There was one to the chief customs officer, but that was sealed; there was one to the captain at the barracks telling him to double the station guard immediately and to serve out twenty rounds of ammunition per man. It made Ninitch uneasy; did it mean war, that the Bulgars were coming? Or the Reds? He remembered what had happened at Belgrade and was very much disturbed. After all, he thought, they are our own people, they are poor, they have wives and children. Last of all there was a note for the cook at the barracks, containing detailed instructions for a lunch for three, to be served hot in the major’s room at one-thirty; ‘Remember, you’re responsible,’ it ended.
When Ninitch left the room, Major Petkovitch was again reading the out-of-date German book on strategy, while he fed his dog with pieces of sausage.
II
Coral Musker had fallen asleep long before the train reached Budapest. When Myatt drew a cramped arm from under her head, she woke to a grey morning like the swell of a laden sea. She scrambled quickly from the berth and dressed; she was hurried and excited and she mislaid things. She began to sing light-heartedly under her breath: I’m so happy, Happy-go-lucky me. The motion of the train flung her against the window, but she gave the grey morning only a hurried glance. Lights came out here and there, one after the other, but there was not yet day enough to see the houses by; a lamp-lit bridge across the Danube gleamed like the buckle of a garter. I just go my way, Singing every day. Somewhere down by the river a white house glowed; it might have been mistaken for a tree trunk in an orchard, but for two lights in ground-floor rooms; as she watched, they were turned out. They’ve been celebrating late; she wondered, what’s been going on there? And laughed a little, feeling herself at one with all daring, scandalous, and youthful things. Things that worry you Never worry me. Summer follows Spring. I just smile and . . . Quite dressed now except for her shoes, she turned towards the berth and Myatt.
He was uneasily asleep and needed a shave; he lay in rumpled clothes, and she could connect him with the excitement and pain of the night only with difficulty. This man was a stranger, he would disclaim responsibility for words spoken by an intruder in the dark. So much had been promised her. But she told herself that that kind of good fortune did not come her way. The words of elderly experienced women were brought again to mind: ‘They’ll promise anything beforehand,’ and the strange moral code of her class warned her: ‘You mustn’t remind them.’ Nevertheless, she approached him and with her hand tried gently to arrange his hair into some semblance of her lover’s. As she touched his forehead he woke, and she faced with courage the glance which she feared to see momentarily blank with ignorance of who she was and what they had done together. She fortified herself with maxims: ‘There’s as good fish in the sea,’ but to her glad amazement he said at once without any struggle to remember, ‘Yes, we must have the fiddler.’
She clapped her hands together in relief: ‘And don’t forget the doctor.’ She sat down on the edge of the berth and slipped on her shoes. I’m so happy. He remembers, he’s going to keep his promise. She began to sing again: Living in the sunlight, loving in the moonlight, Having a wonderful time. The guard came down the corridor knocking on the door. ‘Budapest.’ The lights were clustered together; above the opposite bank of the river, apparently dropped half-way from the heavy sky, shone three stars. ‘What’s that? There. It’s going. Quick.’
‘The castle,’ he said.
‘Budapest.’ Josef Grünlich, nodding in his corner, started awake and went to the window. He had a flashing glimpse of water between tall grey houses, of lights burning in upper rooms, cut off abruptly by the arch of the station, and then the train slid to rest in a great echoing hall. Mr Opie at once emerged, brisk and cheerful and laden, dumping two suitcases upon the ground, and then a golf bag, and a tennis racket in its case. Josef grinned and blew out his chest; the sight of Mr Opie reminded him of his crime. A man in Cook’s uniform came by leading a tall crumpled woman and her husband; they stumbled at his heels, bewildered, and unhappy through the whistling steam and the calling of strange tongues. It seemed to Josef that he might leave the train. Immediately, because this was something which concerned his safety, he ceased to think either humorously or grandiloquently; the small precise wheels of his brain went round and like the auditing machine in a bank began to record with unfailing accuracy the debits and credits. In a train he was virtually imprisoned; the police could arrange his arrest at any point of his journey; therefore the sooner he was at liberty the better. As an Austrian he would pass unnoticed in Budapest. If he continued his journey to Constantinople, he would run the risk of three more customs examinations. The automatic machine ran again through the figures, added, checked, and passed on to the debit side. The police in Budapest were efficient. In the Balkan countries they were corrupt and there was nothing to fear from the customs. He was farther from the scene of his crime. He had friends in Istanbul. Josef Grünlich decided to go on. The decision made, he again leant back in a dream of triumph; images of revolvers quickly drawn flashed through his mind, voices spoke of him. ‘There’s Josef. Five years now and never jugged. He killed Kolber at Vienna.’
‘Budapest.’ Dr Czinner ceased writing for a little more than a minute. That small pause was the tribute he paid to the city in which his father had been born. His father had left Hungary when a young man and settled in Dalmatia; in Hungary he had been a peasant, toiling on another man’s land; in Split and eventually in Belgrade he had been a shoemaker working for himself; and yet the previous more servile existence, the inheritance of a Hungarian peasant’s blood, represented to Dr Czinner the breath of a larger culture blowing down the dark stinking Balkan alleys. It was as if an Athenian slave, become a freed man in barbarian lands, regretted a little the statuary, the poetry, the philosophy of a culture in which he had had no share. The station began to float away from him; names slipped by in a language which his father had never taught him. ‘Restoracioj,’ ‘Pôsto,’ ‘Informoj.’ A poster flapped close to the carriage window: ‘Teatnoj Kaj Amuzejoj,’ and mechanically he noted the unfamiliar names, the entertainments which would be just opening as the
train arrived at Belgrade, the Opera, the Royal Orfeum, the Tabarin, and the Jardin de Paris. He remembered how his father had often commented, in the dark basement parlour behind his shop, ‘They enjoy themselves in Buda.’ His father, too, had once enjoyed himself in the city, pressing his face against the glass of restaurants, watching, without envy, the food carried to the tables, the fiddlers moving from group to group, making merry himself in a simple vicarious way. He had been angered by his father’s easy satisfaction.
He wrote for ten minutes more and then folded the paper and slipped it into the pocket of his mackintosh. He wished to be prepared for any eventuality; his enemies he knew had no scruples; they would rather see him quickly murdered in a back street than alive in the dock. The strength of his position lay in their ignorance of his coming; he had to proclaim his voluntary presence in Belgrade before they knew that he was there, for then there could be no quick assassination of an unidentified stranger; they would have no choice but to put him upon his trial. He opened his suitcase and took out the Baedeker. Then he lit a match and held it to the corner of the map; the shiny paper burned slowly. The railway shot up in a little lick of flame, and he watched the post-office square turn into tough black ash. Then the green of the park, the Kalimagdan, turned brown. The streets of the slum quarter were the last to burn, and he blew the flame to hasten it.
When the map was quite burned he threw the ash under the seat, put a bitter tablet on his tongue, and tried to sleep. He found it difficult. He was a man without humour or he would have smiled at the sudden lightness of his heart, as he recognized, fifty miles beyond Buda, a sudden break in the great Danube plain, a hill shaped like a thimble and shaggy with fir trees. A road made a great circle to avoid it and then shot straight towards the city. Road and hill were both white now under the snow, which hung in the trees in great lumps like the nests of rooks. He remembered the road and the hill and the wood because they were the first things he had noted with a sense of full security after escaping across the frontier five years before. His companion who drove the car had broken silence for the first time since they left Belgrade and called to him: ‘We shall be in Buda in an hour and a quarter.’ Dr Czinner had not realized till then that he was safe. Now his lightness of heart had opposite cause. He thought not that he was only fifty miles from Budapest, but that he was only seventy miles from the frontier. He was nearly home. Instinct for the moment was stronger in him than opinion. It was no use telling himself that he had no home and that his destination was a prison; for that one moment of light-hearted enjoyment it was to Kruger’s beer-garden, to the park at evening swimming in green light, to the steep streets and the bright rags that he was journeying. After all, he told himself, I shall see all this again; they’ll drive me from the prison to the court. It was then that he remembered with unreasoning melancholy that the beer-garden had been turned into flats.
Across the breakfast table Coral and Myatt faced each other with immeasurable relief as strangers. At dinner they had been old friends with nothing to say to one another. All through breakfast they talked fast and continuously as if the train was consuming time, not miles, and they had to fill the hours with talk sufficient for a life together.
‘And when I get to Constantinople, what shall I do? My room’s been booked.’
‘Never mind that. I’ve taken a room at a hotel. You’ll come with me and we’ll make it a double room.’
She accepted his solution with breathless pleasure, but there was no time for silence, for sitting back. Rocks, houses, bare pastures were receding at fifty miles an hour, and there was much to be said. ‘We get in at breakfast time, don’t we? What shall we do all day?’
‘We’ll have lunch together. In the afternoon I’ll have to go to the office and see to things there. You can go shopping. I’ll be back in the evening and we’ll have dinner and go to the theatre.’
‘Yes, and what theatre?’ It was extraordinary to her, the transformation which the night had caused. His face no longer resembled that of all the Jewish boys she had known with half intimacy; even the gesture with which he gave and gave, the instinctive spreading of the hands, was different; his emphasis on how much he would spend, on what a good time he would give her, was unique because she believed him.
‘We’ll have the best seats at your theatre.’
‘Dunn’s Babies?’
‘Yes, and we’ll take them all out to dinner afterwards, if you like.’
‘No.’ She shook her head; she could not risk losing him now, and many of Dunn’s Babies would be prettier than she. ‘Let’s go back to bed after the theatre.’ They began to laugh over their coffee, spilling brown drops upon the tablecloth. There was no apprehension in her laugh; she was happy because pain was behind her. ‘Do you know how long we’ve sat at breakfast?’ she asked. ‘A whole hour. It’s a scandal. I’ve never done it before. A cup of tea in bed at ten o’clock is my breakfast. And two pieces of toast and some orange juice if I’ve got a nice landlady.’
‘And when you haven’t any work?’
She laughed. ‘I leave out the orange juice. Are we near the frontier now?’
‘Very near.’ Myatt lit a cigarette. ‘Smoke?’
‘Not in the morning. I’ll leave you to it.’ She got up and at the same moment the train ground across a point and she was flung against him. She caught his arm to steady herself and over his shoulder saw a signal-box sway dizzily out of sight and a black shed against which the snow had drifted. She held his arm a moment till her giddiness passed. ‘Darling, come soon. I’ll be waiting for you.’ Suddenly she wanted to say to him, ‘Come now.’ She felt afraid at being left alone when the train was in a station. Strangers might come in and take his seat, and she would be unable to make them understand. She would not know what the customs men said to her. But she told herself that he would soon tire if she made demands on him; it wasn’t safe to trouble a man; her happiness was not so secure that she dared take the smallest risk with it. She looked back; he sat with head a little bent, caressing with his fingers a gold cigarette-case. She was glad later that she had taken that last glance, it was to serve as an emblem of fidelity, an image to carry with her, so that she might explain, ‘I’ve never left you.’
The train stopped as she reached her seat, and she looked out of the window at a small muddy station. Subotica was printed in black letters on a couple of lamps; the station buildings were little more than a row of sheds, and there was no platform. A group of customs-officers in green uniforms came down between the lines with half a dozen soldiers; they seemed in no hurry to begin their search. They laughed and talked and went on towards the guard’s van. A row of peasants stood watching the train, and one woman suckled a child. There were a good many soldiers about with nothing to do; one of them shooed the peasants off the rails, but they scrambled over them again twenty yards down the line. The passengers began to grow impatient; the train was half an hour late already, and no attempt had yet been made to search the luggage or examine the passports. Several people climbed on to the line and crossed the rails in hope of finding a refreshment-room; a tall thin German with a bullet head walked up and down, up and down. Coral Musker saw the doctor leave the train, wearing his soft hat and mackintosh and a pair of grey wool gloves. He and the German passed and re-passed and passed again, but they might have been walking in different worlds for all the notice they took of each other. Once they stood side by side while an official looked at their passports, but they still belonged to different worlds, the German was fuming and impatient, and the doctor was smiling to himself.
When she came near him she could see the quality of his smile, vacuous and sentimental. It seemed out of place. ‘Excuse me speaking to you,’ she said humbly, a little frightened by his stiff respectful manner. He bowed and put his grey gloved hands behind him; she caught a glimpse of a hole in the thumb. ‘I was wondering . . . we were wondering . . . if you would have dinner with us tonight.’ The smile had been tidied away, and she saw him gathering t
ogether a forbidding weight of words. She explained, ‘You have been so kind to me.’ It was very cold in the open air and they both began to walk; the frozen mud crackled round the tops of her shoes and marked her stockings. ‘It would have given me great pleasure,’ he said, marshalling his words with terrible correctness, ‘and it is my sorrow that I cannot accept. I am leaving the train tonight at Belgrade. I should have enjoyed . . .’ He stopped in his stride with creased brows and seemed to forget what he was saying; he put the hand in the worn glove into his mackintosh pocket. ‘I should have enjoyed . . .’ Two men in uniform were walking up the line towards them.
The doctor put his hand on her arm and swung her gently round, and they began to walk back along the train. He was still frowning and he never finished his sentence. Instead, he began another, ‘I wonder if you would mind—my glasses are frosted over—what do you see in front of us?’
‘There are a few customs-officers coming down from the guard’s van to meet us.’
‘Is that all? In green uniform?’
‘No, in grey.’
The doctor stopped. ‘So?’ He took her hand in his, and she felt an envelope folded into her palm. ‘Go quickly back to your carriage. Hide this. When you get to Istanbul post it. Go now quickly. But don’t seem in a hurry.’ She obeyed without understanding him; twenty steps brought her up to the men in grey and she saw that they were soldiers; they carried no rifles, but she guessed it by their bayonet sheaths. They barred her way, and for a moment she thought they would stop her; they were talking rapidly among themselves, but when she came within a few feet of them, one man stepped aside to let her by. She was relieved but still a little frightened, feeling the letter folded in her hand. Was she being made to smuggle something? A drug? Then one of the soldiers came after her; she heard his boots cracking the mud; she reassured herself that she was imagining things, that if he wanted her he would call, and his silence encouraged her. Nevertheless, she walked more rapidly. Her compartment was only one carriage away, and her lover would be able to explain in German to the man who she was. But Myatt was not in the compartment; he was still smoking in the restaurant. For a second she hesitated. I will go to the restaurant and tap on the window, but her second’s hesitation had been too long. A hand touched her elbow, and a voice said something to her gently in a foreign tongue.
Stamboul Train Page 15
