The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (12 page)

The only handy cover was a sparse hedge of shrubs surrounding the garden of a house which seemed to have its entrance on one of the first side-streets of the town. He waited till the road was clear, half circled the garden and took refuge in a dry ditch under arching branches. It was a good spot in which to sleep and wait for darkness. His way on was clear enough and convenient; one of the usual earth tracks, more a boundary between fields than a road, passed outside the houses and ran westwards.

He was woken up by music. The garden was full of coloured lights which twinkled through the hedge. He saw a long table at which a dinner party was just sitting down, and other diners in a few dim corners under trees. A birthday or a christening was being celebrated at the town restaurant and—if it was anything like Spain—all the notables would be there. They might ask him to join the party, and half of them were sure to speak some French. What would happen if he limped in and ordered a meal? Hell, but he was too tired and dirty to account for himself! He lay in his ditch, listening to the wail of the leading violin and the speed of the cimbalon. Lawless music and of infinite pity. Hungarian music had been on the whole happy, suggesting wine and dancing, wild in triumph of what is to-day; but these Romanian gipsy melodies were an aching for what never was. They tore the physical body out by the roots leaving a spirit, lonely as his own, with no comfort but bird-song.

Bernardo cautiously followed the hedge round to the lane at the front of the establishment, prowling in hope of food which could be bought and eaten without committing himself to a table. Over the gate was a string of lights. A path led to the front door which opened into an empty passage with a lot of shadowy activity at the end of it. He saw no chance of getting anything to eat unless he appeared in the full light of the kitchen.

Just inside the gate was a horse, saddled, bridled and hitched to a tree by the reins. Temptation was overwhelming. The respectable shipping clerk contemplated his first crime. Old Mr. Brown insisted that his fall from grace was due to the mood of self-pity induced by gipsy music even more than to the pain of his blistered feet.

In any case he was learning quickly, as Toledano said he would. Since he had no existence, it would be nearly impossible to trace the thief once the horse was abandoned. He patted its neck and unhitched the reins, keeping one eye on the house. Everybody seemed to be busy with the party on the other side of it. The lane was empty and his partner in crime was a docile gelding, not caring who rode him or whether he was ridden or not. Bernardo led him quietly away, ready to jump into the saddle at the first sound of any excitement. As soon as he was on the track to the west and the beat of hooves over dust was unlikely to be heard he mounted and cantered off, hoping that with luck and the help of a half moon he would have covered a good twenty miles by dawn and that the first foot-hills would be in sight. Mountains obsessed him. There he would never be far from woods and water and free of the suspicion that he was being watched.

He kept riding westwards till well after the sun was up—an amateur criminal on edge with the risk he was taking. It was now time to get rid of the horse, but there was never a convenient patch of cover where it could be left while he himself continued on foot and unremarked. At last he saw ahead of him a tumble of mounds and ridges uncultivated and dotted with bushes. There seemed no obvious geological reason for its existence: no connection with other high ground, no rocks, no water. As he rode closer he was sure that such a barren, untidy mess could never have been made by nature. It must once have been a town of this melancholy Moldavian plain swept clean by one invasion after another.

Over the first rise was a long, shallow depression. Its sides
gave the impression of a rubbish heap with old tarpaulins and tattered carpets spread out to dry in the sun. At the bottom were a few canvas shelters over hoops, showing that the place was after all a ragged human settlement though lacking even the comparative cleanliness and order of aboriginal huts.

As he appeared on the skyline there was a clamour of dogs; the rags suddenly pullulated with men, women and children as if a fork had disturbed the riper depths around Nepamuk’s feet. Some of the men, much darker than Romanians, ran up the slope to meet him, at first whining and respectful, then for no apparent reason aggressive. One seized the bridle and led him down to the dry bottom.

It was a gipsy encampment. Bernardo recognised the familiar race of Spain, but this branch of the family were still demoralised scavengers from Asia, rejects of civilisation rather than decorative strangers within it. However, gipsies in his experience always had something nourishing to eat and some of the men were fat. Bernardo smiled, chattered hopefully in a fair imitation of Spanish gipsy dialect and pointed to his mouth. There was no response whatever.

His first impression was right. This had once been a town. There was a well of good masonry and it was in use. Here and there fox holes had been burrowed between scraps of stone walls, as likely as not leading to dry, paved dens. A couple of appalling old hags shoved their heads under the flapping entrance to one of these holes and screamed.

A most unexpected personage crawled out. He was dressed in a white shirt and black trousers with a red sash at the waist. His round, yellowish face was completely devoid of expression. He lounged up to Bernardo, took a close look at the horse and said something. Bernardo was at once dragged to the ground and held there when he tried to get up. He protested. Gipsies, as he knew them, were consummate petty thieves but never went in for open robbery. Nobody paid the least attention to his remarks. Meanwhile the leader in
the red sash picketed the horse and returned at leisure.

Finding that his captive spoke no Romanian, he broke into passable French. It was more astonishing than ever to hear the language of decent society in such a setting.

‘You stole this horse last night,’ he said.

‘It’s yours?’ Bernardo asked, for it was no use denying.

‘It is the mayor’s. We spent the night looking for it.’

‘Then how did you get here before me?’

‘You think we cannot afford a taxi?’

‘Monsieur, I am a foreigner in Romania for the first time,’ Bernardo said politely. ‘I would not know how or where to sell a horse. I only borrowed it to go on a little faster. I was going to leave it here among the mounds and walk.’

‘Leave it here? So that we would be accused of stealing it?’

‘But I did not know you were here. How could I? One cannot see your camp.’

The blank, dark brown eyes considered this while never leaving Bernardo’s face.

‘True,’ the gipsy said. ‘But I must hand you over to the police.’

‘Couldn’t you let me go and say that you just found the horse?’

‘No.’

The man in the red sash had a point; it would certainly be better for the clan’s reputation if they handed over the thief as well as the horse. Bernardo shrugged his shoulders and accepted the position. The men and women were gathered round, listening to the foreign language. Wild hair, wild clothes, eyes without meaning. He felt that the sooner he was in the hands of police, the better, and that meanwhile polite conversation should be kept moving along.

‘Where did monsieur learn French?’ he asked.

‘In Bucarest. From foreigners and soldiers.’

‘So you don’t live here?’

‘When I wish.’

‘And the rest of the time?’

‘I have my band.’

It all became clear—all, that is, except for the fact that a musician who had played in international society often enough to speak some French should ever desire to return to this revolting squalor.

‘Was it your violin I heard last night in the restaurant where I permitted myself to borrow a horse?’

‘That could be.’

‘Maître!’ Bernardo exclaimed, his sincerity inspiring a stroke of genius. ‘Never in my life have I heard anything so moving. And to think it was you who spoke to me with your violin when I was lying in the ditch! In the salons of Bucarest they are too occupied to listen with the heart as I did.’

‘Have you no money?’

‘A little, but not much.’

‘Take it off him and send him on his road!’

Bernardo understood.
Drumul
—the road—was already a familiar word. And gipsies—well, one couldn’t expect them to leave a man his cash when there was no chance of being accused of taking it.

They stripped him of every cent. Bernardo turned to the violinist of two lives.

‘Will you give me at least a pair of peasant shoes?’ he asked.

Yes, willingly. For some reason the request aroused crazy laughter—perhaps because middle-class clothes and rubber sandals with their thongs crossed outside the trousers were so incongruous or because the foreign horse-thief was so innocent that he had set out to tramp the road in shoes too small for him. Two of the men led him out of the camp and indicated that he should take a cart-track to the north and hurry. Why the north? Why anything? He obeyed.

It served him right. Stealing the mayor’s horse was nothing, but he accused himself of never even thinking that somebody else might be charged with the crime. He trudged on, his feet not so eased as he expected. Why he had been directed
north was understandable. There was a dark line of forest on the horizon. Those homeless nomads were all right in the open plain themselves but recognised that for a solitary outcast the shelter of trees was the answer.

So it might have been, temporarily, for an individual able to return to the herd whenever he wished. But Bernardo had no herd. He was stripped of morale as he had been of money. He lost his courage, his assurance, his sense of past and future. For two days he lived on blackberries, preferring the privacy of the woods to the shame of being a pariah who could not communicate intelligibly with his fellows. He despaired of reaching Bucarest or of finding an end to his troubles if he did, certain that no consul could help him, that a Romanian gaol would be followed by a Spanish gaol and that it would not make two hoots of difference to Kalmody if the father of his grandson—and God damn eternally that lovely obsession of a girl for whom he would be perfectly willing to die!—were garotted by the public executioner for the murder of Bobo who, if there were any justice, should have had his skull blown in by the Bolsheviks.

‘I also had dysentery,’ old Bernardo said. ‘Nothing like that for the final destruction of a respectable shipping clerk! Continuous wiping of my arse with leaves and wandering nowhere looking for something more solid than blackberries.’

Sheer misery was its own cure. He could stand no more of it and padded off through the forest, sometimes in circles, until he came out into the open not knowing or caring where he was. The midday sun, before it was swallowed by towers of cumulus, showed him that he was walking east not west. It didn’t matter.

He was out on bare, rolling swells of ground when the storm caught him—a thunderstorm of the hot steppe rejoicing the earth and itself by a display of Old Testament ferocity. The only shelter was an unharvested patch of maize where he was instantly as wet as if he had fallen in a river
but the stalks were useful to hide his nakedness—Romanians presumably had a law against it—while his clothes were spread out to dry. The storm returned as he was about to put them on. When that happened a second time he gave up and flapped through the rain regardless. His feet began to give trouble again in spite of the rubber shoes. It occurred to him that peasants wore some kind of foot-cloth wrapped around their feet, not the silk socks of the Hungarian aristocracy.

In the last of the sunset he came to the banks of the River Moldova. His aimless, obstinate plodding to the east stopped there—a final destruction of his will to keep moving, leaving such a blank that he could only concentrate on trying not to faint from exhaustion. He must have done so, for he found himself lying on the path with the light fading. Ahead of him a large town on a hill fortified the sky; beneath it he could make out a peculiarly compact and isolated waterside village, close to the town but entirely separated from it without any connecting suburb. He dragged himself towards the dimly lit windows, perhaps towards a fire. At least in a Christian country he would be fed and given some kind of roof over his head. They could send for the police in the morning if they liked.

He collapsed on a bench under the shelter of a walnut tree. Villagers gathered round him at a safe distance. Another lot of grotesque Romanians. Some were dressed more or less as peasants; some had beards, whiskers in ringlets, black hats and frock coats. He could not imagine what he had landed in this time—presumably an odd sect of the Orthodox Church. The men seemed to treat him as something unclean, which indeed he was. They questioned him in Romanian and what sounded like German. On top of his weakness the mental effort of trying to understand was the last straw. He rolled off the bench.

When he came round he was cradled in the arms of a big man who was speaking with all the authority of his grey
beard to the dubious villagers. With only the stem voice to go on, Bernardo expected to meet the uncompromising stare of a hard-boiled village headman who would do no more than open the parish lock-up for him, but the face when he looked up to it was more like that of a kindly headmaster in the flower of his age with very gentle eyes and a generous twinkle in the corners of them. He had at last a feeling that language was unnecessary.

The headman took him home, helped him to wash his feet, undressed him and put him to bed. After feeling his forehead and taking his pulse he assured Bernardo with smiles and a gesture that there was nothing wrong which food and rest would not put right. Bernardo thanked him in Spanish which his saviour obviously recognised but could not speak. Two motherly women came in with porridge and wine and a pot of broth with a wing of chicken in it. He thankfully resigned himself to this confident charity and slept.

In the morning his host and doctor allowed him to sit in a chair but not to move around. It still seemed remarkably easy to talk to him without words. There would be breakfast shortly, he said, and after that an interpreter. He was to put his trust in God that all would be well.