The Europe That Was (6 page)

‘Pretend nothing has happened yet!' he ordered.

I helped the pair of them on with their coats while they tried not to yell. The other second, back by now, wiped the sabres and laid them out ready for use. Then we hurled the surgeon's implements and bandages back into his black bag, and kicked sand over the clots of blood.

It was the colonel second-in-command of the national police who descended majestically from the flood-bank, followed by two lieutenants of gendarmerie. They were all gorgeously uniformed and medalled. A distinguished foreigner and a captain in a crack regiment, rumoured to be so brave and angry that they insisted upon sabres, deserved the best costumes in the wardrobe for the third act.

‘Gentlemen,' said the colonel in formal French. ‘I observe that I am fortunately in time to prevent a scandal.'

It certainly looked as if he was. Rob and I stood arm in arm, with his hand dripping into his pocket and my thumb gently compressing the artery. By heaven's grace the captain's point had skated alongside without puncturing it. The captain and his second, also arm in arm, fiercely patrolled their own territory of sand. The surgeon, in the centre, caressed his beard and seemed to be meditating upon the mysteries of his craft.

It was up to me. I played the exquisite young aristocrat, reluctantly handed over the sabres to the police, raised my hat and made a little speech—after which I returned hastily to Rob in case blood should begin to show through his jacket. The captain's second barked a few bluff words. The colonel of police saluted both parties and gave a third speech, exhorting gallant men and allies to compose their differences.

Rob and the captain, unable to shake hands, pretended to be deeply moved and kissed each other. It was astonishing how quickly that man could adopt local customs when they suited him.

‘Gentlemen, I shall not intrude upon you further,' said the colonel—and prepared to make off with the confiscated sabres and his lieutenants.

‘One moment, sir!' the captain's second very formally insisted. ‘I trust, Count Stephen, that you do not consider that we gave information to the police?'

‘I am as certain of your honour as of my own,' I replied gallantly.

The colonel poured some hasty oil on that lot of waters.

‘Let me assure you all that we acted upon a report received only an hour ago from an entirely independent source. You will understand that it is our duty, detestable though it may be, to make use of such agents as we can find.'

The civil power swaggered away, and that was the end of it—except for some painful first aid and the welcome contents of my picnic basket. The affair was kept very quiet, but Rob thereafter was free of the country, the court and the regimental messes as few foreigners ever had been. Romanians adore a dangerous jest. It soon got round that he had never handled a sabre in his life except to learn the salute.

Magda practically did not speak to me at all until I had to give her away in church. She said that my behaviour had been unforgivable. So it was. But I never told even her why I thought so.

THE COOK-RUNNER

‘I exchanged,' he used to say, ‘a foot for a stomach. I have no regrets.' He said it rather too often, perhaps, but that could be forgiven to so jovial and so excellently served a host. And it was true that he had no regrets. He looked contented. That, when you come to think of it, is a rare quality in our contemporaries: to look contented, to give out, even, a feeling of contentment.

The marked limp bothered him little—a deal less than if it had been caused by gout or any of the other ills that befall a man in his late fifties who has been generous to his body and allowed his soul to sit in at the entertainment. Devenor could afford to be generous. Between the wars Romanian oil had so rewarded him that the loss of concession and capital equipment was more annoyance than disaster. He was the younger son of a younger son, but he had made more money than all the rest of his distinguished family put together.

‘Twenty years of merry life,' he would say. ‘Twenty years of near heaven. All very wrong by our present standards. All very immoral. I was most certainly a parasite. Ah, but a parasite has duties!'—he chuckled with ironical self-satisfaction—‘And the most important is to appreciate.

‘To appreciate! Wasn't there a school of philosophy—in quieter days—which maintained that nothing could exist unless there were an observer to observe it? Well, there you are! The first duty of a parasite is to observe and enjoy. And if he isn't around to do it, there won't
be
anything to enjoy.'

His Romanian heaven had been in miniature, confined to a few thousand individuals of, by international standards, quite moderate wealth. They liked their women to be decorative and of a warm delicacy, and gave almost equal importance to their food. They were determined to enjoy the best of two traditions—the Parisian and the Byzantine.

Their supreme achievement, the seventh seal of their culture of the palate, was the Gradina Restaurant. It was unique. No kitchen in the world, Devenor insisted, could give such a variety of fare. Through its hundred odd years of life, the Gradina had collected the most self-indulgent recipes of three empires—the Russian, the Austrian and the Ottoman—and refined them by careful attention to
French craftsmanship. In summer Devenor had placed his stomach and both feet—all heartily intact—under a garden table, where he could look up from lights and linen and silver into the cascading branches of a willow. In winter he had his corner seat near the entrance to the long, narrow dining room that smelt freshly of tarragon and white wine.

The utility food of post-war London was hard to bear. It had deprived him, said Devenor, not only of nourishment but of ambition. What was the use of money when the utmost luxuries obtainable were an old goose or a slice of dead cow with the same gravy poured over both? True, he might have lived in Paris, but he had spent too many years in looking forward to retirement, his friends, his club and London, for him to return to exile gladly.

He dreamed of Bucharest as a man dreams of his once passionate enjoyment of poetry. Yet he was careful to distinguish the ingredients of regret: youth, freedom, women, food. Youth and freedom had gone beyond recall. Women—well, he had for them a tender and sentimental affection, as for a superb bottle that might at any moment be opened but had much better be left in the cellar to mature still further. There remained food.

For long he could get no news of his Gradina. Then at the club he met a diplomat, all fresh from his expulsion from Romania, who told him that the beloved restaurant was reserved for workers' recreation.

Devenor, still living with his memories, was almost turned into a communist on the spot. To open that supreme flower of luxury to any of the masses who could appreciate it—that, if you like, was a justification of revolution. He said so, and his generous dream was instantly shattered.

‘A tenpenny lunch, old boy. Soup and one greasy course.'

Devenor used to swear that inspiration, there and then, had come to him. Very possibly it had. Shock is a stimulant. He retired behind his newspaper to think it out. What had happened to the Gradina's cooks—any of them who hadn't been commandeered for official banquets? Surely a Gradina cook must have the artist's horror of communism? Surely he would be glad to leave? Rescue was a duty.

From that moment in the club, Devenor, converted to the possibility of heaven, went at his task like any fanatical missionary. He saw the parallel. ‘My intention,' he said, ‘was to save two human souls from destruction. And I don't see that it matters a damn if one of them was my own.'

He had friends enough alive in Bucharest, and even a worthless and affectionate godson. Cautiously he wrote to them all, but received only a few picture postcards of greeting in reply. He tried for his Gradina cook through consuls and labour exchanges and refugee organizations and old pals in the Board of Trade. He told the truth and was
laughed at. He told ingenious lies and was obstructed. At last he lost his temper with all this paper and politeness. It was plain that there was nothing for it but to have a look at the frontiers, and possibly do the job himself. It would be an occupation, a joyous return to his early days of adventure. He loved and understood Romanians, but all his life he had refused to take them seriously when they told him what he had decided was impossible.

He made no plans at all for his penetration of the Iron Curtain. It was impossible to make any. Romania might be visited by students or delegates who were prepared to wait six months for a visa, but Devenor, a former oil magnate, would have to wait for a revolution. As for illegal entry, that no doubt was possible to some lean and hardened desperado. Devenor, however, was neither hard nor lean; he was only desperate. He hadn't had a decent meal in his own house for five years, and worse outside it.

For a start he flew to Istanbul. He did not confide his business to anyone, least of all to Romanian refugees. He listened; he enjoyed his holiday; and never for more than ten waking minutes did he forget his objective. But he could take no action beyond the patient acquisition of large sums in Romanian and Turkish bank notes. He considered himself, he said, entirely justified in breaking the currency laws of his own and any other country for so worthy a cause. After all, had he intended to rescue a scientist or politician, his illegalities would have had general approval. It was not his fault that government officials could not see the superior importance of a cook.

He tried out, in imagination, many a plan. Most of them involved crawling through barbed wire, for which he was quite unfitted, or jumping overboard in darkness, which, though of buoyant belly, he intensely disliked. He was perfectly well aware that he might have to risk his liberty, but he wished to do so without avoidable discomfort. Finesse was his game, not youthful exercise. It was just a matter of waiting for an opportunity which would allow him to use his perfect knowledge of the Romanian language and character.

He had to wait a month. Not idly, he insisted, not at all idly. Hotel bars, obscure cafés, frontier villages, the docks—he frequented them all as assiduously as any spy. Then, in the course of one of his morning patrols, he found on an unguarded quay, awaiting shipment to Constantsa, the topmost section of a fractionating column. It was familiar, friendly, a section not only of steel but of the continuity of his life. He knew the refinery that must have ordered it, the route it would take, and could even guess at the accident which had made so urgent its delivery.

This gigantic cylinder of steel was labelled and scrawled with injunctions for speed—speed in handling as deck cargo, speed in unloading, speed in railing to Ploesti. The very written word ‘Ploesti' comforted
him. Even in that tough and smelly oil town there had been a restaurant where the proprietor, if you gave him warning, would joyfully attempt the standards of the Gradina.

To Devenor the cavernous, complicated tube was home. It wouldn't be the first time he had explored the interior of a fractionating column. And he knew its journey so well—twenty-four hours to Constantsa and, in the merry evening of capitalism, not more than two or three days on the docks, provided his agent had dealt generously with customs officers and stationmasters. Those minor bureaucrats would certainly do a better job now—would rail the column at once to Ploesti in a real Romanian panic, for fear of being accused of sabotage.

He admitted that it was entirely illogical to treat a strange section of fractionating column as an old friend, and that a journey inside it was likely to be just the sort of adventure he wanted to avoid. Still, there it lay—about to be transported into the heart of Romania like a prince's private railway coach. It was even divided into compartments by the bubble trays, with, as it were, a corridor down the middle.

Devenor bought an inflatable mattress and a hamper of nourishing food. He entered the column through the manhole in what would be the top when it was erected at Ploesti. The hole was large enough to admit his stomach, but too small to light the recesses of the interior, the forbidding labyrinth of trays and take-off legs and leads. The other end of the section was shored with timber and effectively plugged.

He took only water to drink. He prided himself on that. It was proof of a disinterested missionary spirit. ‘I thought,' he would say, ‘that in the heat I must expect as deck cargo even wine and water might reduce efficiency.'

It
was
hot. He chose a part of the column which was shaded by wood and sacking, but he could not avoid the heat of the Black Sea sun on steel. He had lost pounds in his Romano-Turkish bath when the cranes lifted him off the deck and dropped him on to the waiting railway truck. The drop was uneven. He used to protest, with professional indignation, that the fools must have strained every joint in the section.

He anchored himself firmly in his corner seat between bubble tray and take-off leg, while the great flatcar was violently shunted up and down the yard. At last he felt himself moving purposefully in one direction, and relaxed upon his mattress with all the self-satisfaction of a traveller who had successfully cheated the customs.

‘But I was frightened,' he admitted. ‘Yes, sheer panic underneath. There wasn't a minute when I didn't wish I had stayed in London. Still, when the train started, I couldn't help feeling proud of myself.'

He looked cautiously out of the manhole. The flatcar was at the tail
of the train with only the caboose behind it. On the platform of the caboose a sentry was settling down to sleep. He was glad to see that the Romanians still posted their unemployable military on trains to prevent pilfering. It was a comforting reminder that the national character had not changed.

The train rumbled over the Danube, and idled across the starlit Wallachian plain. Whenever it halted, Devenor, kneeling at the manhole, heard the dear sounds of his second homeland: the barking of dogs in distant villages, the sigh and swirl of the streams past their willows, the croaking of frogs. Frogs fried Colbert—that was the way the Gradina used to do them. He dozed uneasily until shaken up by renewed shunting. When that was over, he could not resist deep sleep.

The discomfort of his own perspiration awoke him a little before midday. He poked head and then shoulders out of the top of the column. He was in the shadeless, dusty marshalling yards to the south of Bucharest. So long as he drew no attention to himself, there seemed no reason why he should not walk out into the city. He did so, greeting with an air of genial authority the casual groups of railway workers who were munching their loaves in the open doors of unloaded wagons.

Devenor did not want to show himself in the centre of the city. There were too many people who knew his face and liked it well enough to cross the road with outstretched arms and a whoop of welcome. His tentative plan was to get in touch, as unobtrusively as possible, with Traian, a former headwaiter at the Gradina and a staunch friend. He wandered through the suburbs until he came to a garden café, dirty and barren, but large enough to possess a telephone.

Traian no longer had a number, but there was one in the name of Devenor's godson Ion. He was not at all surprised to find that Ion had not only ridden out the storm but provided himself with an excellent address. As an irresponsible youth of twenty he had had a police record of dangerous socialism. True, his opinions were a pose, adopted merely to annoy his intolerably correct relations at court, but those of his set who could have given him away were dead or in exile. Devenor was prepared to bet that war and revolution had only changed godson into an irresponsible youth of thirty.

‘He treated me as if I'd just dropped in from the fields,' Devenor said, ‘as if there were no reason in the world why I shouldn't be in Bucharest. He even sent his car round to the cafe for me. He just told me that of course he had a car—how the devil did I think he was going to live without a car?'

Over lunch in Ion's luxurious flat, this show of idle riches was explained. Godson was an undersecretary—for he had always enjoyed yachting—in the Ministry of Marine.

Devenor asked if he were a genuine communist, and got himself rebuked for indiscretion.

‘My good Uncle,' Ion had said, ‘you really must learn not to ask such frank and English questions. Do you suppose I want to be shot by your venerable side?'

The excellent lunch was entirely unreal. Devenor seemed to himself to have moved back ten years in time, and not at all in space. Bucharest was going on—at any rate in the flat of a government official—exactly as before. At street level the June air was thunderous as ever and, six storeys up, the geraniums of Ion's window boxes stirred in the light breeze. Devenor's favourite white wine was on the table and cool in the decanter. There were rather less cars on the boulevard below and paint was needed and the inhabitants were shabby—but no shabbier than in the early nineteen-twenties.

‘I couldn't believe it was possible to be shot,' Devenor would declare. ‘It was just as improbable as my godson being a communist undersecretary.'