Stamboul Train (24 page)

Colonel Hartep lost interest. Dr Czinner was losing the individuality of the grey wool gloves and the hole in the thumb; he was becoming a tub orator, no more. He looked at his watch and said, ‘I think I have allowed you enough time.' Major Petkovitch muttered something under his breath and becoming suddenly irritable kicked his dog in the ribs and said, ‘Be off with you. Always wanting attention.' Captain Alexitch woke up and said in a tone of great relief, ‘Well, that's over.' Dr Czinner, staring at the floor five yards to the left of the guard, said slowly, ‘This wasn't a trial. They had sentenced me to death before they began. Remember, I'm dying to show you the way. I don't mind dying. Life has not been so good as that. I think I shall be of more use dead.' But while he spoke his clearer mind told him that the chances were few that his death would have any effect.

‘The prisoner Richard Czinner is sentenced to death,' Colonel Hartep read, ‘the sentence to be carried out by the officer commanding the garrison at Subotica in three hours' time.' It will be dark by then, the doctor thought. No one will know of this.

For a moment everyone sat still as though they were at a concert and a movement had ended and they were uncertain whether to applaud. Coral Musker woke. She could not understand what was happening. The officers were speaking together, shuffling papers. Then one of them gave a command and the guards opened the door and motioned towards the wind and the snow and the white veiled buildings.

The prisoners passed out. They kept close to each other in the storm of snow which struck them. They had not gone far when Josef Grünlich seized Dr Czinner's sleeve. ‘You tell me nothing. What shall happen to me? You walk along and say nothing.' He grumbled and panted.

‘A month's imprisonment,' Dr Czinner said, ‘and then you are to be sent home.'

‘They think that, do they? They think they are damned clever.' He became silent, studying with close attention the position of the buildings. He stumbled on the edge of the line and muttered angrily to himself.

‘And me?' Coral asked. ‘What's to happen to me?'

‘You'll be sent home tomorrow.'

‘But I can't. There's my job. I shall lose it. And my friend.' She had been afraid of this journey, because she could not understand what porters said to her, because of the strange food, and the uncertainty at the end of it: there had been a moment as the purser called after her across the wet quay at Ostend when she would gladly have turned back. But ‘things' had happened since then: she would be returning to the same lodgings, to the toast and orange juice for breakfast, the long wait on the agent's stairs with Ivy and Flo and Phil and Dick, all the affectionate people one kissed and called by their front names and didn't know from Adam. Intimacy with one person could do this—empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting. Even the doctor did not matter to her as he stalked along in a different world, but she remembered as they reached the door of the waiting-room to ask him, ‘And you? What's happening to you?'

He said vaguely, forgetting to stand aside for her to enter, ‘I'm being kept here.'

‘Where will they take me?' Josef Grünlich asked as the door closed.

‘And me?'

‘To the barracks, I expect, for tonight. There's no train to Belgrade. They've let the stove out.' Through the window he tried to catch a view of the peasants, but apparently they had grown tired of waiting and had gone home. He said with relief, ‘There's nothing to be done,' and with obscure humour, ‘It's something to be at home.' He saw himself for a moment facing a desert of pitch-pine desks, row on row of malicious faces, and he remembered the times when he had felt round his heart the little cold draughts of disobedience, the secret signals and spurts of disguised laughter threatening his livelihood, for a master who could not keep order must eventually be dismissed. His enemies were offering him the one thing he had never known, security. There was no need to decide anything. He was at peace.

Dr Czinner began to hum a tune. He said to Coral Musker, ‘It's an old song. The lover says “I cannot come in daylight, for I am poor and your father will set the dogs on me. But at night I will come to your window and ask you to let me in.” And the girl says, “If the dogs bark, stay very still in the shadow of the wall and I will come down to you, and we will go together to the orchard at the bottom of the garden.”' He sang the first verse in a voice a little harsh from lack of use; Josef Grünlich, sitting in the corner, scowled at the singer, and Coral stood by the cold stove and listened with surprise and pleasure because he seemed to be younger and full of hope. ‘At night I will come to your window and ask you to let me in.' He was not addressing a lover: the words had no power to bring a girl's face from his dry purposeful political years, but his parents bobbed at him their humorous wrinkled faces, no longer with awe for the educated man, for the doctor, for the almost gentleman. Then in a lower voice he sang the girl's part. His voice was less harsh and might once have been beautiful; one of the guards came to the window and looked in and Josef Grünlich began to weep in a meaningless Teutonic way, thinking of orphans in the snow and princesses with hearts of ice and not for a moment of Herr Kolber, whose body was borne now through the grey city snow followed by two officials in a car and one mourner in a taxi, an elderly bachelor, a great draughts player. ‘Stay very still in the shadow of the wall and I will come down to you.' The world was chaotic; when the poor were starved and the rich were not happier for it; when the thief might be punished or rewarded with titles; when wheat was burned in Canada and coffee in Brazil, and the poor in his own country had no money for bread and froze to death in unheated rooms; the world was out of joint and he had done his best to set it right, but that was over. He was powerless now and happy. ‘We will go to the orchard at the bottom of the garden.' Again it was no memory of a girl which comforted him, but the sad and beautiful faces of the poor who promised him rest. He had done all that he could do, nothing more was expected of him; they surrendered him their hopelessness, the secret of their beauty and their happiness as well as of their grief, and led him towards the leafy rustling darkness. The guard pressed his face to the window, and Dr Czinner stopped singing. ‘It's your turn,' he said to Coral.

‘Oh, I don't know any songs that you'd like,' she told him seriously, searching her memory at the same time for something a little old-fashioned and melancholy, something which would share the quality of a sad idyll with the song he had sung.

‘We must pass the time somehow,' he said, and suddenly she began to sing in a small clear voice like the tinkle of a musical box:

‘Is this Subotica?' Myatt shouted, as a few mud cottages plunged at them through the storm, and the driver nodded and weaved his hand forward. A small child ran out into the middle of the road and the car swerved to avoid it; a chicken squawked and handfuls of grey feathers were flung up into the snow. An old woman ran out of a cottage and shouted after them. ‘What's she saying?' The driver grinned over his shoulder: ‘Dirty Jew.'

The arrow on the speedometer wavered and retreated: fifty miles, forty miles, thirty miles, twenty. ‘Soldiers about,' the man said.

‘You mean there's a speed limit?'

‘No, no. These damned soldiers if they see a good car, they commandeer it. Same with the horses.' He pointed at the fields through the driving snow. ‘The peasants, they are all starving. I worked here once, but I thought: no, the city for me. The country's dead, anyway.' He nodded towards the line which disappeared into the storm. ‘One or two trains a day, that's all. You can't blame the Reds for making trouble.'

‘Has there been trouble?'

‘Trouble? You should have seen it. The goods-yard all in flames; the post office smashed to bits. The police were scared. There's martial law in Belgrade.'

‘I wanted to send a telegram from there. Will it get through?' The car panted its way in second gear up a small hill and came into a street of dingy brick houses plastered with advertisements. ‘If you want to send a telegram,' the driver said, ‘I should send it from here. There are queues of newspaper men at Belgrade, and the post office is smashed and they've had to commandeer old Nikola's restaurant. You know what that means; but you don't because you are a foreigner. It's not the bugs, nobody minds a few bugs, it's healthy, but the smells—'

‘Have I got time to send a telegram here and catch the train?'

‘That train,' the driver said, ‘won't go for hours and hours. They've sent for a new engine, but nobody's going to pay any attention to them in the city. You should see the station, the mess—You had better let me drive you into Belgrade. I'll show you the sights, too. I know all the best houses.'

Myatt interrupted him, ‘I'll go to the post office first. And then we'll try the hotels for the lady.'

‘There's only one.'

‘And then the station.'

The sending of the telegram took some time, first he had to write the message to Joyce in such a way that no action for libel could be brought by Mr Eckman. He decided at last on: ‘Eckman granted a month's holiday to start immediately. Please take charge at once. Arriving tomorrow.' That ought to convey what he wanted, but it then had to be put into the office code, and when the coded telegram was handed across the counter, the clerk refused to accept it. All telegrams were liable to censorship, and no coded messages could be transmitted. At last he got away, only to find that nothing was known of Coral at the hotel, which smelt of dried plants and insect powder. She must be still at the station, he thought. He left the car a hundred yards down the road in order to get rid of the driver who was proving too talkative and too helpful and pushed forward alone through the wind and snow.

He passed two sentries outside a building and asked them the way to the waiting-room. One of them said that there was no waiting-room now.

‘Where can I make inquiries?'

The tallest of the guards suggested the station-master. ‘And where is his office?' The man pointed to a second building, but added gently that the station-master was away; he was in Belgrade. Myatt checked his impatience, the man was so obviously good-natured. His companion spat to show his contempt and muttered remarks about Jews under his breath. ‘Where can I go then to make inquiries?'

‘There's the major,' the man said doubtfully, ‘or there's the station-master's clerk.'

‘You can't see the major. He's gone to the barracks,' the other guard said. Myatt absent-mindedly drew a little nearer to the door; he could hear low voices inside. The surly guard became suddenly angry and brutal; he struck at Myatt's legs with the butt of his rifle. ‘Go away. We don't want spies round here. Go away, you Jew.' With the calm of his race Myatt drew away; it was a superficial calm carried unconsciously like an inherited feature; beneath it he felt the resentment of a young man aware of his own importance. He leant towards the soldier with the intention of lodging in the flushed animal face some barb of speech, but he stopped in time, aware with amazement and horror of the presence of danger; in the small hungry eyes shone hatred and a desire to kill; it was as if all the oppressions, the pogroms, the chains, and the envy and superstition which caused them, had been herded into a dark cup of the earth and now he stared down at them from the rim. He moved back with his eyes on the soldier while the man's fingers felt round the trigger. ‘I'll see the station-master's clerk,' he said, but his instinct told him to walk quickly back to his car and rejoin the train.

‘That's not the way,' the friendly guard called after him. ‘Over there. Across the line.' Myatt was thankful for the storm that roared along the line and blew gustily between him and the soldiers. Where he stood there was no prevailing wind, for it was trapped in the alleys between the buildings and sent swirling round the corners in contrary directions. He wondered at his own persistence in staying in the empty dangerous station; he told himself that he owed the girl nothing, and he knew that she would agree with him. ‘We're quits,' she would say. ‘You've given me the ticket, and I've given you a nice time.' But he was tied by her agreement, by her refusal to make any claim. Before so complete a humility one could be nothing else but generous. He picked his way across the line and pushed open a door. A tousled man sat at a desk drinking wine. His back was turned, and Myatt said in what he hoped was an intimidating authoritative tone, ‘I want to make an inquiry.' He had no reason to be afraid of a civilian, but when the man turned and he saw the eyes grow cunning and insolent at the sight of him, he despaired. A mirror hung above the desk, and in it Myatt saw the reflection of himself quite clearly for a moment, short and stout and nasal in his heavy fur coat, and it occurred to him that perhaps these people hated him not only because he was a Jew but because he carried the traces of money into their resigned surroundings. ‘Well?' said the clerk.

‘I want to make an inquiry,' Myatt said, ‘about a girl who was left behind here from the Orient Express this morning.'