THE WINTER CITY Read online

  The doctor’s face was white. ‘I have memories, too. The cry beneath the jackboot.’

  The elderly man turned away.

  A few people were standing on the pavement. The boy with the gypsy looks was climbing a lamp-post to get a view of the square; a woman called out to him, her voice sharp with fear, but he ignored her. In the restaurant a man in a check suit said angrily: ‘For God’s sake close that window. It’s bloody cold!’ No-one took any notice of him.

  Several men were coming out of the shops now that the special police had gone. They stood around in the street, a little aimlessly, looking towards the square. A child, squatting in a dark archway, jeered at the soldiers hunched in the back of the lorry. The soldiers did not move. A waiter called to the men in the street from the doorway of the restaurant; he pointed towards the square, his face anxious. The men in the street shook their heads, shrugged their shoulders. One of them pointed at the soldiers in the lorry and called out something, his voice bitter; other voices followed in a ragged, half-hearted echo and the child began to jeer again. One of the soldiers lit a cigarette, elaborately unconcerned, and flicked the match away. A boy of about twelve picked up a stone: it rattled against the side of the lorry. A young soldier leant out of the back and his rifle slipped forward. He bent quickly to steady it. A woman screamed in sudden hysteria and the people near the lorry backed away. The soldier stared at them, puzzled.

  The gypsy boy looked down on the scene from the top of the lamp-post. He shouted to the men in the street, his voice, high-pitched and brittle, splintering the uneasy silence. Faces were raised towards him. Intoxicated by his momentary power, he shouted again, stabbing his finger towards the soldiers; words gushed out in a wild, uncontrolled torrent of emotion. A feverish excitement vibrated in the street. Other voices were raised, men’s voices, deep-throated. More people came out into the street. The driver of the array lorry got down from his seat and walked slowly round to the back, his face expressionless. A stone clattered at his feet. From the square there came a long, angry shudder like the distant echo of a storm. The gypsy boy began to shout louder. More stones clattered around the lorry. Windows above the street opened.

  ‘Shut that ruddy window!’ the man in the check suit snapped.

  ‘Why?’ asked Helen. ‘It will only give them something to break.’

  An officer jumped over the flap at the back of the lorry, calling out angrily. The driver let down the flap and one or two of the soldiers jumped out. The noise from the square was louder now, and at the other end of the avenue the siren of an approaching car could be heard. The gypsy boy began to climb down from the lamp-post. A stone caught the driver of the lorry in the small of the back. He swung round sharply and another stone hit his arm. With a quick, involuntary movement, he bent down and, grasping the stone, hurled it back. There was a scream and a sudden huddle of people bending down in the gutter. The soldier took an impetuous step forward and the officer pushed him back. The siren of the car sounded nearer.

  Dr. Van Hals was in the street and Helen had followed him. As he knelt on the pavement and people moved away on either side of him, Helen had a glimpse of the still face of a boy, a jagged scarlet line drawn with fantastic irrelevance across the smooth, white forehead. With dismay she recognized Ilya, the son of Maria Anas. Dr. Van Hals picked up the boy who lay heavy in his arms. A little way down the avenue the car with the siren had stopped and officers of the special police were walking towards them. The people in the street hesitated, aimless and unsure again. The officer in charge of the soldiers shouted out, his voice authoritative, but without anger. The gypsy boy thrust himself forward, catching at the arms of the men as they turned away, trying to persuade them to stand their ground. They took no notice of him, and soon he was alone, a slightly ridiculous figure in the middle of the street.

  The doctor had carried the injured boy into the restaurant. As Helen turned to follow him, she saw the soldier who had thrown the stone standing near-by. She saw the sickness in the young, grey face and impulsively she said:

  ‘You didn’t meant to hurt him, did you?’

  He looked at her, uncomprehending, and turned away. A great despair at her inability to communicate welled up within her, a tremendous, terrifying isolation. She went into the restaurant. The gypsy boy followed her, his face stiff with humiliation. The proprietor shut the door and stood peering anxiously through the glass panel at the group of special policemen who were talking to the soldiers.

  The boy was lying on the floor and the doctor was bending over him. One of the waiters had brought a bowl of hot water; it was already stained red. Helen knelt down and took one of the boy’s cold hands in hers. He looked up at her with great frightened eyes.

  ‘It’s all right, Ilya,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’ She went to his mother for language lessons and he had seen her often, but now he seemed not to recognize her.

  In the background, a man muttered: ‘Dangerous game in this country, throwing stones at soldiers,’ and Kate retorted passionately: ‘But he’s only a boy. All boys throw stones!’

  ‘You can tell that to the gentry outside . . .’

  The voice stopped abruptly. Helen felt the sudden chill rush of air as the door of the restaurant opened. Boots rang crisp on the hard floor; long boots, immaculately polished, striding towards her. She forced herself to look up. The waxen face was smooth as a girl’s, with full red lips and vivid blue eyes. He said something in a high, staccato voice, his lips curling pleasurably like a man giving orders to a dog whom he knows is afraid. But, surprisingly, she was not afraid for herself. Her one thought was for Ilya, and that seemed to give her strength.

  ‘There has been an accident.’ Her voice sounded quite calm and reasonable.

  He looked her up and down quickly, understanding only that she was a foreigner. Then he moved forward and stared at the doctor.

  Dr. Van Hals was bathing the wound. He did not turn his head, but he smiled gently at the boy. The policeman stood with his hands on his hips, his head tilted to one side, watching the doctor’s face. He watched for a long time, waiting for weakness to betray itself in the hairbreadth flicker of an eyelid, in the faintest twitch of a nerve; his nostrils dilated slightly and his full red lips were moist as he anticipated the scent of fear. The doctor’s face was calm, his hands moved, capable, tender, and very steady. The thread of sanity stretched taut between the two men. As she crouched beneath him, Helen was physically conscious of the policeman’s presence; something vibrated from him, a purposeless, marauding violence barely held in check. And the doctor opposed that violence with a tremendous act of will. In the background, people stood rigid and a man who wanted to cough pressed the palm of his hand across his nose and mouth. Ilya’s fingernails cut into Helen’s hand. He looked from one man to the other; his eyes were bright, like a fox when the hounds are near. The doctor placed his hand against the boy’s jaw and turned his face to the wall. He said to one of the waiters, in German:

  ‘I want more hot water, please.’

  The man hesitated.

  ‘I want it now. At once!’ His voice lashed.

  The special policeman watched the waiter scuttle away. Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed.

  ‘That is the way to talk to them!’ he said to the doctor in German, and turning on his heel he marched out.

  The doctor went on with his work quietly, but his face seemed to shrink as though strength had ebbed away. Voices surged up.

  ‘Nasty moment that!’ said the man in the check suit. ‘Didn’t know which way he was going to jump . . .’

  ‘Mind you, if he had tried to make trouble, I should . . .’

  ‘I’d like to kill them!’ There was hysteria in Kate’s voice. ‘I’d like to take a gun and kill them, every damn one of them!’

  ‘He is suffering from shock,’ the doctor was saying to the proprietor, ‘but he will be all right if you can keep him here for a little while . . .’

  Helen, who was bending over t
he boy, saw recognition brighten his eyes. But he was not looking at her, he was looking beyond her. The door of the restaurant had swung open and Doyle’s voice, exuberant, filled the room.

  ‘My God! Just for one moment, just for one glorious, moment, I thought . . .’

  He was talking to a man from one of the Press agencies. People gathered round them, waiters and diners, the proprietor, the cashier.

  ‘What happened?’

  Lying back on the rough couch which had been made for him, Ilya watched, his eyes burning with admiration.

  ‘They were all waiting, there in the square, packed tight and uneasy—like a herd of cattle that only needs one thing, a loud sneeze even, to start a stampede.’ Doyle was getting the maximum of drama, but his excitement was genuine. ‘And then the deputation came out of the Food Ministry. I don’t know what it was that happened; one of them made some kind of sign—a negative movement with his hand. There was silence. One moment of utter silence. Then someone started to shout. And that did it. It was chaos really; nothing organized or even dangerous, but it looked nasty. The deputation got pushed up the steps of the Ministry and they started pounding on the door, more because they were afraid of being trampled to death than for any other reason, poor devils. But the Ministry staff didn’t see it that way. Soon the special police arrived. Of course, the members of the deputation were God’s gift as scapegoats. All the special police had to do was to arrest them, the crowd would then disperse, and that would be that. Another triumph for the Party against foreign-inspired agitators. But just for one miraculous moment it seemed as though the crowd wasn’t going to play it that way. They just waited. I tell you, I shall remember that moment as long as I live, and I hope to live long! The spirit of rebellion hovered in the air, I felt the rush of its wings. Magnificent! It needed only a word from one of those men they were dragging away . . .’

  He stopped, and his hearers prompted him impatiently. He shrugged his shoulders with massive resignation. ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They just went quietly. Afraid, I suppose . . .’

  The doctor was watching him coldly. ‘It is possible the motive was less selfish. Even if it did you out of some excitement.’

  People were drifting off, and the remark passed unnoticed, save by Helen and Doyle himself. Doyle’s face darkened.

  ‘At least I was out there, not tucked away comfortably in here. And if anything had started, I can assure you I wouldn’t have stood by.’

  The doctor shrugged his shoulders wearily. ‘Oh, no one suspects you of cowardice.’ He walked away.

  ‘An unimaginative, phlegmatic race, the Dutch,’ said Doyle, to no-one in particular. Then he noticed Ilya. ‘Why, hello! What’s this?’

  Kate had gone to the door of the restaurant and Helen joined her without waiting to hear what followed. She was surprised that Doyle knew Ilya, but not particularly curious.

  People were coming back from the square. Above their heads the Party’s flag fluttered gently in the breeze. They came slowly, their heads down, their faces blank. To Kate, watching them as they walked past, they seemed like the remnants of a defeated army, but Helen saw them as men desolated by their impotence.

  ‘So it’s all over!’ Kate said, and tears came into her eyes at the thought of the splendid things which might have been done.

  But the anger was deep-rooted. As the men passed the army trucks lined up in the Avenue of the Republic they turned, some of them, and spat at the soldiers sitting there. And the soldiers sat unmoving, with bowed heads and hunched shoulders. The boy with the gypsy looks walked put onto the steps. As he passed Kate he said something slowly, and with great feeling.

  Kate said to Helen: ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said: “Next time, it will not end like this.” ’

  Chapter Five

  TUESDAY EVENING I

  I

  ‘ . . . Women and children trampled to death and the police opened fire on the crowd. You know what that’s going to lead to, don’t you?’ The man in the duffel coat paused to light a cigarette. His audience, which was largely better informed than he, stared at him apathetically.

  ‘Any sign of my vermouth, darling?’ the sulky brunette asked Paul Daniels who had been neglecting her for the last five minutes.

  ‘And what is the government doing about it?’ the man in the duffel coat demanded.

  Helen Jenner was at the other end of the bar, drinking with Jean Dulac. She glanced in the direction of the speaker and Dulac murmured:

  ‘He travels for Clyment’s. Lady Hilton was talking about him last night, remember?’

  ‘And what is the government doing about it?’ the whining voice repeated.

  Apparently it was the British Government with whose negligence he was concerned, for he produced his passport and waved it angrily in his companions’ faces.

  ‘I’m a British citizen, aren’t I? I’m entitled to travel freely abroad, aren’t I? “Without let or hindrance,” it says. But when I want to leave here, what happens? I’m told some cock-and-bull story at the British Embassy—the British Embassy mind you—about no trains leaving the capital for the West because some damned tunnel is supposed to be blocked. Not leaving for the West, mind you. I don’t suppose there would be any trouble if I wanted to travel East.’

  ‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,’ the brunette said, following the direction in which Paul Daniels was looking, ‘she’s not for the likes of you, darling.’

  He bit his lip and colour darkened his cheeks. God! she thought, with a shrug of her neat shoulders, the man was altogether too difficult to handle; one moment his humour was as ripe as anyone’s, and the next you found you had offended him.

  The man from Clyment’s leant forward and thrust his face towards Paul.

  ‘And what is the Press doing, may one ask? Are you going to tell the world that British citizens are being detained here? No, of course you aren’t! That wouldn’t be news, would it? Because British citizens are being pushed around all over the whole bloody world and no one cares any longer. You’ll fill your columns with a lot of claptrap about heroic resistance to the Communist menace . . .’

  ‘Really! One can’t compete with the man,’ Dulac exclaimed, conscious that Helen’s attention was centred at the other end of the room.

  ‘I’m sorry. You were telling me about the man you met in Prague . . .’

  ‘That was ten minutes ago.’

  His mouth shut with a snap. He looked, she thought, very French and very offended. They sat in silence while he brooded and the whining voice droned on at the other end of the bar. Helen glanced round her. She had never liked the Hotel Kapitol and tonight it seemed worse than ever. It was grandiose in a forbidding, mid-Victorian manner with large, heavy furnishings and subdued draperies, lofty ceilings and massive chandeliers. And it was draughty, too. Even now, a wind straight from Siberia was blowing down the long lounge.

  A shrivelled little woman who had paused by the bar to clean her misted spectacles, suddenly raised an anxious face to Helen and said:

  ‘Oh, I do hope he isn’t right. You don’t think he could be right, do you?’

  ‘About what?’ Helen asked, taken by surprise.

  The old woman glanced round the lounge, peering into the dark recesses. ‘I hoped my husband was going to be here.’ She put her glasses on with unsteady hands and peered again. ‘You don’t think he could be right, do you? About it being impossible to leave the country, I mean? My husband has been at the Embassy all the afternoon trying to arrange for us to leave and he hasn’t come back yet.’ Her chin quivered and tears misted the glasses so that she began to fumble with them again. Helen said gently:

  ‘There are so many rumours. I’m afraid I am no wiser than you.’

  Dulac stared in front of him, his face expressing his extreme displeasure at the intrusion. The brunette waved to him from the other end of the bar.

  ‘Let’s go and talk to Jean, darling,’ she said to Paul. ‘He looks as though
he needs some cheer.’

  She strolled down the length of the bar and insinuated herself onto a stool beside Dulac. ‘Tell Mona all about it, darling.’ Paul followed her, but stopped by Helen and the old woman.

  ‘We should never have come,’ the old woman was saying, ‘only my husband was so anxious to see things for himself.’

  ‘Is he with the Workers’ Peace Movement?’ Helen asked. Her eyes strayed towards Paul.

  ‘It means so much to him,’ the old woman rambled on. ‘Peace, I mean. He was a Congregational Minister, but he expressed his beliefs so strongly during the last war, and there was so much trouble because people thought he was a Communist, that he hasn’t had a church for a long time. And that makes him feel so useless.’ She saw that they were not listening to her, ‘Oh well,’ she said sadly. ‘I mustn’t detain you, now that your friend is here.’

  She was gone, and behind them Dulac and Mona crouched over the counter, their heads almost touching. There was no-one else at the bar now. Paul held out his cigarette case to Helen.

  ‘Tell me if you want to be alone.’

  Surprisingly, he did not look very sure of himself. She took a cigarette. It felt dry against her lips. Paul watched her. She had on a loose black coat and a small, close-fitting black hat with a velvet bow which glanced across one cheek. He liked the hat, but he wished that she would take it off. Her fingers curled round the stem of her glass, her wrist, supporting the heavy cuff of the black coat, looked incredibly fragile.

  ‘If you aren’t doing anything particular,’ he said. ‘I know a better place to drink.’

  He had said that kind of thing countless times before, but this time he stumbled over it. He was furious with himself for his clumsiness; and seeing him like that, a little off balance, she was touched.

  ‘That sounds nice,’ she said, to reassure him. Then, regretting the impulse: ‘I hope it isn’t too far, though . . .’ But he had already moved away to speak to Dulac and the brunette.