THE WINTER CITY Page 2

  But even in the reconstructed area, the old city persistently intruded. Twisting, narrow streets, often evil-smelling, ran away from the broad new roads into some dark hinterland of their own. Side by side with the substantial new stores one came across tumbledown shops with low, narrow doorways, displaying in their dingy windows lace and embroidery, and a considerable amount of miscellaneous junk.

  Paul glanced about him. As Dr. Van Hals had predicted, to outward appearances things were much the same. On the placards the political slogans still stabbed out their message and the people walked by, unheeding, but passive, it seemed. At the corner where Martin Zinnemann Street ran into Government Square, there stood the old cathedral, its fabric gradually disintegrating. Posters outside still announced the monthly Party meetings which were held there to remind any who might be forgetful that a new religion had replaced the old. In the centre of the road, the statue of Stalin which faced Government Square was bedecked with the new flag which many people still referred to as ‘The Party’s Flag.’

  There was a group of soldiers standing outside the cathedral. Some of the passers-by eyed them resentfully, and two young girls to whom they called out continued on their way without turning their heads. When Paul passed the group, one of the soldiers was telling a funny story, but the rest were not laughing. As he crossed Government Square he looked back and saw the soldiers standing there, isolated and uneasy at the street corner. Mechanically, his mind registered this scene.

  He paused to light another cigarette beneath a group of bronze horses, moulded in the attitudes of a more virile and extravagant age. A policeman walking by gave him a hard look, and he realized that he was loitering outside the magnificent City Hall. He checked an unwise impulse to be witty at the policeman’s expense, and went on his way.

  Beyond Government Square the narrow, cobbled streets ran down to the river. In a turning off one of these streets, in the middle of a row of decaying stone houses, there was a café which Paul knew with an entrance through a long, tunnel-like passage. The passage was dark and smelt like a sewer. As Paul crossed the threshold he felt the muscles of his stomach tighten. His visits to this place were regarded by many people as a somewhat theatrical gesture, revealing him as ‘a bit of a showman.’ He was aware of this. As he hesitated in the dark hall, he thought grimly that this interpretation at least had the virtue of simplicity. In fact, the visits were a torment to him; they were also, as far as he could see, quite pointless, yet to have stopped would have seemed to him an act of desertion.

  The door to the café lay straight ahead, blanketed by a dark curtain; to one side a short flight of stairs went up to a door on a half-landing. Paul waited. Soon the curtain across the entrance to the café was drawn back and a woman came out. The passage was dim and her white, flat face seemed to float moonlike above a dark dress; her eyes were almond-shaped, set in folds of fat; she smelt of grease and sweat. Paul felt the familiar nausea rise in him: he was very fastidious about some things and he knew that he would have hated Luka, even if she had not seemed to him to be evil.

  ‘Has your father’s condition improved?’ he asked.

  ‘There will be no improvement.’ She spoke the words with flat insistence, as though repeating a ritual.

  ‘May I see him?’

  A smile creased the bloated face. ‘Yes. You can see him. But I don’t think the General will give an interview today.’ She began to laugh and phlegm crackled in her throat. Her laughter followed him up the stairs: the sound sickened him. He pushed open the door on the half-landing. The room was little more than a cupboard lit by a slit of a window; the only piece of furniture was a bed.

  The General was sprawled across the bed like some grotesque straw figure which has been flung on top of a rubbish dump, his massive shoulders against the wall, his huge, grizzled head sunk forward on his chest, one arm hanging down so that the hand trailed on the floor. Paul looked at him. His hair was like astrakhan, so thick and curled, and the curved moustache that almost hid the full sensual mouth was luxuriant still. His nose was the beak of a hawk, yet flaring at the nostrils, sensual again and cruel. Great jowls hung from his heavy jaws and thick black lines cut into the folds of flesh on either side of the mouth. From this coarsened, brutal face, the old man’s eyes stared out at Paul, blue and unfocused, with the untroubled innocence of childhood. As Paul looked into those unseeing eyes he had the feeling of being trapped. But it was a trap which, he sensed, had been sprung a long time ago when he first came up the stairs to this room.

  When he returned to this country, Paul had been interested in following the histories of the men who had been great figures in the days before the Party became all-powerful. In most cases these men were dead or in prison, but there remained the General. The General had been an heroic figure in the true traditions of his country, which meant that he was courageous, cruel, proud, and highly untrustworthy. He had never fitted comfortably into any liberal conception of a patriot—his enemies had called him ‘the old Boar’, a nickname which he had relished—but there had been, nevertheless, an undeniable grandeur about him. During the war years he had been the leader of a band of guerillas renowned for their savagery and bravery but not notably loyal to the Party. Immediately after the war it would have been difficult to touch him because his reputation had stood too high, and for a number of years this highly individual character had occupied an important position in the army where he threatened to become a disruptive influence; later, however, the net had seemed to be closing round him. But when the time at last came for his arrest, it was found that he had, once more, escaped his enemies. He had had a stroke from which it seemed that he was unlikely to recover. As there was no longer any point in arresting him, he was allowed to remain at ‘liberty’, an example to foreign powers of the Party’s benevolent tolerance of its critics.

  And Paul, who was collecting material for a book, had decided to see him. He had sat looking at the old Boar, wondering whether a spark would ever be kindled within the empty husk again, and then he had gone away. The encounter had not been particularly emotional, yet he had never really been free again. At the back of his mind there was always the thought of this terrible, yet magnificent creature, left to rot as though he had forfeited all claim to human dignity; there was, too, a growing fear that one day the daughter, Luka, perhaps at the Party’s instruction, would kill him. Paul knew that this was no concern of his, that he was, in any case, powerless to act; yet he found that he had to return.

  There was very little that could be done; the window could be opened, the bed straightened, the dust redistributed; but whether the General was ever conscious of these attentions in the twilight world which he inhabited, Paul had no idea. In any case, he thought savagely as he thrust open the window, the state of the room would probably worry the General less than most people. As he looked at the man on the bed he wondered whether, after all, it was the old Boar who, had trapped him, or whether it was something in his own nature which had betrayed him.

  ‘Leave the old man to die in splendid isolation,’ Doyle had advised once when he and Paul had been discussing the General.

  But Doyle believed in isolation and would have preserved his independence at any cost; whereas Paul was always dragged reluctantly, but inescapably, into the dust of human conflict. He could not stand aside. Which was a pity, because he was not ideally suited to the heroic rôle; a fact of which he was reminded when he heard steps pounding on the stairs and the door to the room flew back, almost hitting him in the face.

  The intruder, a boy of about seventeen, was every bit as disconcerted as Paul. Obviously, his first thought was of the police: in which case, it was rather surprising that he stood his ground so firmly. Paul was interested. He decided to let the boy make the first approach, with the result that for a full minute they stood staring at one another. The boy leant against the wall, one hand behind his back as though there was something which he wished to conceal. He was breathing fast and fear lent an added vividness
to a face which must always have been striking. His hair was black and curly, his skin swarthy; the mouth was wide, the lips deeply chiselled; the eyes were black with a kind of velvet smoothness which was not gentle. The eyes flicked over Paul’s face, then travelled slowly down, noting the bow tie, the cut of the dark overcoat, the well-made shoes. The boy relaxed, A trace of insolence came into his manner; he eased his shoulders against the wall and tilted his head speculatively to one side.

  ‘You must be the English journalist who comes here. Tell me, are you going to put him in a book?’ He jerked his head in the direction of the General.

  ‘Why should you think that?’

  The boy shrugged his shoulders. ‘That is what I would do myself.’

  ‘What kind of a book would yours be?’

  The boy resented the question; his interest in the General was obviously something about which he was sensitive.

  ‘There is no room for two of us here,’ he said in a surly voice. ‘If you are staying, I can come up later.’

  ‘No. I am going now.’

  As the boy moved aside to let him pass, Paul saw that he carried in one hand a bunch of flowers, deep crimson and luxurious; most certainly in this weather, they must have been grown under glass, and Paul wondered from where the boy had stolen them, and why.

  He went down the stairs slowly. There was a murmur of voices from the café and an overpowering smell of Turkish tobacco. This was not a country in which the stranger from Western Europe could mix easily with the people and he had never been in the café itself. But today, he was curious.

  The room which he entered was small and low-ceilinged with windows looking out onto a dim, enclosed courtyard at the back of the building. There was a stove in one corner of the room which gave out fumes but no heat. The furniture was sparse, a few plain wooden tables and a counter along one wall. At a table near the window there was a group of young people who looked like students. The only other occupants of the room were three middle-aged labourers who were huddled around the stove, and a man who was sitting in a chair behind the counter, his arms folded over his distended stomach, his shaggy head sinking forward on his chest.

  It seemed a pity to disturb his rest, to say nothing of his peace of mind. Paul asked for tea. He made his accent bad, guessing that the man would be less afraid of a foreigner than of the stranger among his own people. The reception even so, was hardly warm. The man shambled to his feet and went through a door at the back of the counter; after a moment, the door opened a crack and Paul saw Luka peering out at him. Paul wondered whether the man was her husband. She must have told him to serve Paul, for soon he came back carrying the tea, black and, doubtless, sickly sweet. He gave Paul the cup and a hard look; then he settled back in his chair. But this time he did not go to sleep. None of the other occupants of the room seemed disturbed by Paul’s presence. The students were talking, their heads bent over the table, their voices low. The labourers by the stove were staring apathetically in front of them, every now and again they rubbed their hands together and stamped their feet. The labourers, the students, the man behind the counter, they had the appearance of people who sit in their accustomed place, separate and distinct; probably every day they sat thus, each little island ignoring the existence of the other.

  Paul sipped his tea; it tasted foul and he pushed it to one side. Impatience suddenly flared up in him, as it did only too often. These people were stupid, spiritless, second-rate, how else could they have allowed these things to happen to them? The qualities which had once stirred him were dead, or simply an illusion of his own youth. His fingers drummed on the table, just as they did when he went to the British Embassy for information and Helen Jenner kept him waiting. He glanced out of the window. In the courtyard an old woman emptied a pail onto an already unsavoury heap in a dark corner, and a scrawny dog came cringing forward. He felt a sudden desire to thrust his fist through the window; at least it would be interesting to see the reaction. At that moment, however, a diversion was created by the entry of the boy who had visited the General. The man behind the counter looked up and said sharply:

  ‘Where have you been, Stefan?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘It isn’t healthy for you to spend your time up there,’ the man said uneasily. The boy laughed and spat on the floor, glancing slyly out of the corner of his eyes at Paul to see whether the gesture had been appreciated. The showman in Paul saluted him ironically.

  At the students’ table a young man with a square face and a ponderous expression was in the middle of a long dissertation; occasionally he tapped with his forefinger on the table, rather in the manner of a lecturer trying to bring home a point to a particularly backward class. Stefan sauntered across the room and stood behind him listening. One of the labourers was listening now, too; he was a squat, heavy-featured man with hard eyes and as he looked at the speaker a sullen flicker of anger distorted his face. The young man appeared to be defending the Party’s attitude to a recent disturbance in a factory. His companions sat in a circle round him, watching intently, their bodies inclined forward like animals tensed to spring. The door behind the counter creaked open and Luka slouched into the room; she stood watching the students, one hand smoothing her dress over her fat hips.

  The voice droned on and the blunt forefinger stabbed at the table, emphasizing each laborious point. Suddenly, a fist crashed down. A voice, angry and contemptuous, over-rode the slow tones of the self-appointed lecturer. All eyes turned to Stefan. He spoke vehemently and at considerable speed for some minutes, nodding his head with violent emphasis so that strands of dark hair fell across his forehead. Then he shrugged his shoulders with exaggerated resignation and made an immense gesture of despair with his hands. He leant across the table, his face within an inch of the lecturer’s, his mouth twisted in mimicry while he snarled a few phrases dear to the Party’s heart. Other voices rose in a confused, angry crescendo. There was a savagery in the performance which stirred the other men in the room; just for a moment they had tasted blood and their enjoyment of it produced an unpleasant and unmistakable vibration.

  Paul found that his impatience had given way to a chill dismay. Across the room he caught a glimpse of Luka’s face: it was like a stone. She rapped out something too quickly for Paul to catch the words. Gradually, the babble of voices died down. Paul saw one or two people look across at him, their faces curious, impersonal, and without fear; considering the sentiments which had been expressed, the absence of fear startled him. They have reached the point where they feel they have nothing to lose, he thought, and that is always a danger point.

  But as he sat back in his corner, his head throbbing from the smell of the tobacco and the fumes from the stove, he wondered how real the danger was. He looked at the boy, Stefan. He had swaggered across to the counter and was now leaning against it, rolling a cigarette; his face was flushed with excitement and his eyes were brilliant, but the anger had gone. He has had his triumph, Paul thought, and already he is content. Before there was any real trouble something more would be needed than flamboyant gestures such as laying flowers in the room of a man who was already dead. The raw material might be here, but it was, as yet, an inarticulate, undisciplined thing; feeling had not crystallized into hard purpose, and there existed no conscious instrument of revolt

  Nevertheless, when he left the café and walked slowly down the street towards the old stone bridge across the river, he was disturbed. Images flashed through his mind; the desperation on the faces of the women outside the baker’s shop, the soldiers isolated and ashamed at the street corner, the passion of the boy in the café. And then, on the blank stone wall at the side of a ruined house, he saw one word scrawled: Matthias.

  IV

  In the distance a clock chimed twelve. Paul realized that he was cold and thirsty.

  ‘I’ll find Doyle,’ he thought. Doyle was a good man to find when one was thirsty.

  As he walked towards the bridge he saw a woman and a boy coming towards h
im. Paul recognized Maria Anas, the receptionist at his hotel. He waited as she came slowly across the bridge, while the boy ran ahead and leant over the stone parapet, throwing stones at the frozen water. When she saw Paul, she put her hand on the boy’s shoulder and led him forward. She spoke slowly, as though she found difficulty in communicating with strangers.

  ‘This is Ilya, my son, Mr. Daniels.’ There was pride in her voice. He was a dark, well-built boy of about twelve, who was trying unsuccessfully to hide his impatience at Paul’s intrusion. They talked for a few minutes of her husband and her son. Then Paul asked:

  ‘Is there a memorial of some kind at the crest of one of the hills? I seem to remember seeing one when I was here years ago, before the war.’

  She looked up at the hills, the faint breeze ruffling her dark hair, and seeing her face in profile, the ivory skin and the classical features, he thought, but without desire, what a lovely woman she was.

  ‘Yes, there was a memorial,’ she said, in her slow, deep voice, ‘to those who died in the rebellion which gave this country its independence. But it was smashed on the orders of Party Secretary Keltner.’

  ‘Why?’

  Her face was impassive. ‘Perhaps he felt that the dead sleep more soundly when they have no memorial.’

  ‘And that the things for which they died are best forgotten?’

  She did not answer.

  ‘Do you believe that?’ he persisted.

  But she would not answer.

  He went on: ‘It seems to me that there has been a change here recently. Would you agree?’

  She stiffened, and instinctively her eyes went to the boy who was bending over the parapet again, hurling stones at the frozen water.

  ‘No,’ she said, and her voice was harsh with anxiety. ‘No. There is no change.’