The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (14 page)

He cheated hunger by a roll of bread and a slice of sausage at an unswept underground tavern and allowed himself half a litre of coarse wine. The problem now was where to spend the night. It was warm enough and a doorstep would do, but he was afraid that vagrants might be picked up by those sallow policemen occasionally glimpsed under the lights. Some kind of description of him must by now have been given by the Legation. It could only say that he had dark hair, brown eyes and a black suit too small for him: a description which covered a good half of the citizens. However, it would also emphasize that the wanted man almost certainly could not speak Romanian, which meant that he must avoid the Law until he did.

As he moved aimlessly onwards, this senile quarter of Bucarest began to decompose. The drains smelt. Here and there houses were decayed, just habitable or half empty.
Often a two-horse cab trotted into the district with a man and a woman in it. He noticed more couples on foot. Evidently this was a colony of prostitutes—not beckoning from doorways or hanging out of windows to attract custom, but carrying home to their nests the prey they had scavenged in the gayer centre of the city.

He heard the trade using scraps of French. The language always turned up—an inheritance from cultured circles of the Ottoman Empire reinforced by the French divisions which had liberated Bucarest. He entered into conversation with a motherly-looking soul who had just got rid of a blue-uniformed officer—the cab had waited—and was slinging a basin of water into the street. Was there anywhere near, he asked, where he could stay the night? She had the experience of her profession and after a glance at him must have known that this shabby clerk meant what he said and no more.

‘Entrez done, mon petit, et on parlera.’

She had one room on the ground floor where a weak electric bulb under a worn, red velvet shade gave just enough light to show the colour of an expensive, purple wallpaper of the nineteenth century, its cracks forming an imperial home for the bed-bugs which had blotched her arms. There were a mahogany wardrobe, a tousled bed with a half-filled piss-pot beneath it, a full-length mirror and a table smeared with the filth of years of heavy make-up. Sordid, yes; but at the same time the light, the paper, the rugs on the floor and the cover of the divan bed which lay crumpled on top of them gave an impression not—God help us!—of any romance but of some cavern where a destitute refugee had left the remains of wealth to rot.

‘What are you?’ she asked.

‘I come from Africa.’

‘A Jew?’

He could not guess how she had jumped to the right conclusion, or temporarily right. Perhaps the half-starved wage-slaves of Romanian offices usually were, especially in that
district which was some sort of distant relative of the business quarter.

Bernardo said that he was.

‘Me, too.’

She tried him with Yiddish, apologising for speaking it badly. She had been brought up as a servant in a Gentile family, she said, omitting all other details.

‘I do not speak it at all. In Africa we speak Spanish.’

‘There are not many of you here. But I know one.
Tiens!
she could use you if you’re a decent fellow and as strong as you look.’

All this while she had been busy with repairs, having removed the red velvet shade. It was a hasty job with powder, mascara and lipstick in order not to be late for further business. Out of it all emerged a woman with at least magnificent hair and eyes—presentable if the next customer liked a reasonable amount of fat and had drunk enough not to care how it was distributed.

‘This is the Crucea de Piatra. Turn right into Strada Bradului and opposite the church of St. Spiridon is Number 52. One goes up a ladder at the back. Ask for Susana, but wait at the church till she is free. Tell her that Eva sent you.’

Bernardo thanked Madame with great respect and found the church of St. Spiridon—a solid, little home for him with a green, onion dome. From the dark angle of the apse he watched the narrow front of No. 52. Nobody came out. Nobody went in. It was impossible to guess whether Susana was at the moment earning her living or not. He decided to risk it and entered a passage under the house. This gave on to a courtyard where he saw Eva’s ‘ladder’ which turned out to be an outside stair with carved balusters leading to a balcony with a single door on it.

He went up and knocked. From within there was an alarmed squeak and somebody double-locked the door. Bernardo explained in Spanish—good, pure stuff without the heartiness of Basque ports—that Eva had sent him and that
he begged a moment of Susana’s distinguished presence.

The door opened. In the half light the girl, clinging to a green wrap, was an attractive vision. She had red hair, fine, high breasts, a wasp waist and the most exaggeratedly wide hips, though fairly slim before and behind.

‘Come in,
señor
! Eva is a good woman and very wise.’

Bernardo was inclined to agree—leaving aside her profession and her taste in interior decoration. Susana’s room was bare and clean, reminding him faintly of the inn at the junction. It was possible that the image she wished to create for herself and her clients was that of a modest girl from the country, whereas Eva had gone for the Balkan
femme fatale
. They would have been more in character the other way round.

He gave some account of himself, making his birthplace Morocco. Feeling too tired for any original invention, he stuck to his story of delivering a horse, saying that he had come by ship as groom to an Arab stallion, that nobody would have anything to do with him when he arrived and that he was penniless.

‘You know what I am?’

‘Very beautiful,’ Bernardo answered.

‘That’s as may be. But original, true? So there are difficulties. I ask you, what do they expect for their money? I am not an animal.’

Bernardo did not altogether understand and played for time.

‘That can be seen,
muy señorita mia
,’ he replied very courteously. ‘Where do you come from, if I may ask?’

‘Galatz. But I was born in Salonica. The family of Marguliesh.’

‘It would be an honour to serve any of them.’

‘It’s that I need a protector—one I can trust of our own people.’

A ponce, Good Lord! Bernardo was appalled but preserved his formal manners.

‘I am very innocent. Tell me a little more!’

‘Look! Some men are brutes. And there is something about me—’ she patted her strange body ‘—which sends them mad. The things they want me to do!’

He could vaguely see it. From the front her figure-of-eight shape had some resemblance to that of a stone-age goddess. Apparently tastes had not changed much in twenty thousand years.

‘There is an attic. You can sleep there. And if you hear me call for help....’

‘But I am no
valiente
!’

‘Who wants you to be? Show yourself. That will be enough. Remember that a man without his trousers is at a disadvantage! Stay with me, David! I will give you a share of what I earn and myself when you wish.’

Bernardo considered the proposal. He was at the very bottom of society and ready to think kindly of others who could never leave it. After all, the only revolting thing about a ponce was that he shared his woman with the town and lived on her earnings. Leave out all that, and he might manage—with an effort—to think of himself as a poor knight errant up in the attic.

‘Look, dear Susana! I accept on condition that you speak Romanian and nothing but Romanian with me and give me a meal on days when I cannot pay for one. I will not share your money, and I am your cousin from Africa so it would be wrong to sleep with you.’

‘Well, man, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to,’ Susana replied touchily. ‘I’ve enough of it without you. But you must come down when I call and look fierce and swear if a client says he has no money.’

‘I will swear in French, and they will think I am an Apache. That will give us both a position in society.’

Bernardo moved into the attic where he became the owner of an old bed, a dirty blanket and a basin to catch drips from the roof; it could also be filled at the tap downstairs for
washing. He needed no more; a week was enough to accustom him to medieval poverty. As for the business of protecting Susana, it was seldom pressing. He extracted a watch from a Bulgar who wouldn’t pay and was too full of liquor to do more than goggle at the blast of French, and he escorted down the stairs as far as the nearest cab a very respectable old gentleman whose tastes had proved too exotic for Susana. He had to wait many minutes listening to reminiscences of far-off youth in Paris, together with complaints of the callowness of the younger generation, and received a handsome tip for his courtesy. He gathered that his behaviour was in the finest tradition of the ponces of the Second Empire.

Susana was really too innocent for her profession. She demanded speed and simplicity and was offended by any attempt to add a bit of artistry to the proceedings. For this Bernardo was thankful. As it was, the straightforward sounds from below poisoned his memories of Magda. Meanwhile by the light of a candle he read old newspapers scavenged from the street and during the day held Susana to her part of the bargain so that he learned Romanian fast. Only one sound gave him trouble until he realised that it was identical with the murmur which the English used for almost any vowel, itself exceedingly difficult for a foreigner to imitate. If you spoke with mouth open instead of Englishly shut, you had it.

The local policeman interviewed him and accepted his identity card without question, showing no surprise that a Moroccan Jew, though born in Roman, should speak Romanian badly. A pious member of the Orthodox Church, he only interfered with the activities of Christian ponces and obtained his occasional satisfaction only from Christian whores. So long as Susana paid him a small weekly subvention and Bernardo caused no complaints, he was uninterested in both of them.

‘I look back with reasonable tolerance,’ Mr. Brown said, ‘but when I do I can still smell the Crucea de Piatra. Never mind the drains! One gets used to last year’s urine. It was
a smell of unaired rooms and spilt, trodden food and the female animal. All half-lit. Always. The cheerfulness of a brothel is far less shaming—I’m talking of the shamefulness of poverty, not the false shame of sex—than those women fornicating away for a living, swabbing themselves with drugs and disinfectants which had gone rotten and calling in the old midwife with her knitting needle when all else failed. I was celibate as a hermit. That crawling of randy maggots from flesh to flesh between one street lamp and another—it put me off. I wonder if a continuous, insistent, sexual environment isn’t nature’s way of reducing over-population.’

Susana was attractive enough for an afternoon stroll in the fashionable Calea Victoriei which sometimes resulted in an invitation to spend the night in bachelor apartments. She insisted that she could act a show of reluctance convincingly. A really conscientious ponce should, Bernardo felt, persuade her to display her stone-age allurements in a town where she was less well known and to get herself set up in a flat by some mature merchant or local politician who would be quite content with her modest accomplishments. Whenever he knew she would not be home he was free to explore the city, always careful to be part of a moving line of ants, never loitering by himself and avoiding contact with any sort of public servant, even a tram conductor. The loneliness of it all did not greatly affect him. He was sensitive to the life of Bucarest just as he had been to the sea and mountains of his home.

On one of those days when he knew his services would not be required he set out through the straggling suburbs into the meadowland of Wallachia—richer and more welcoming country than the blank and endless spaces of the northern province of Moldavia. He could not stride out as steadily as in days when he had plenty to eat and more than plenty to drink but covered enough ground to get the flavour of this greener land of streams and lakes, willows and buffalo, all basking in the heat of September.

He returned after sunset. In the distance, above the scattered shanties and desert spaces where the main road entered Bucarest, dust hung like a thunder cloud, its underside lit by red flares. Out of it came a faint, inexplicable racket in which he could occasionally distinguish the hooting of a cornet or the boom of a euphonium. The noise suggested the practice ground of a municipal band but was too all-pervading for anything of the sort.

It was Bucarest’s annual fair, the Mos. Bernardo, like some ten thousand of his fellow citizens, was primitively excited by the size of it, the deafening row and the ceaseless activity. The wide central alley, half a kilometre of it, was lined on both sides by tented shops, shooting galleries and amusement booths, separated by bars and cafés each of which had its own band of musicians. Bernardo fortunately had something left of the tip given him for his poncial assistance to the aged, and the cheap quenching of thirst seemed to be the main industry of the place at night. He sat down and ordered a large glas of
pelin
, a delectable Romanian drink with which he was temporarily in love, consisting of new white wine treated with much the same herbs as vermouth. One ear enjoyed the traditional violin, double bass and cimbalon of gipsies while the other was blasted by a village band playing what might be Lehar on leaking instruments including two brass-bound leather serpents. A cross-section of Romania paraded gaily through the dust, from peasants in their best embroidered shirts to Bucarest society monopolising the shooting galleries and hoop-la stalls, paying a band for the loan of instruments during the rare intervals and trying to do better until incapable with laughter.

Bernardo had no money to waste on side-shows, none of which, any way, could have given him so much entertainment as merely watching. He realised that he had moved back a hundred years to the time when there were few shops in rural communities, when a man’s need for hardware or a woman’s for soft ware could only be satisfied by setting out
with horse and cart to the nearest fair. He wandered off into the narrower alleys where the booths were smaller and poorer and the peasants did their shopping within sight of their carts. Here the side-shows were tuned to an agricultural community: gipsy fortune-tellers, small circuses and monsters, of which he could manage to catch a glimpse without paying whenever the curtains of sacking or canvas were pulled aside. A calf with an extra leg, a piglet with two heads—stuffed, that one—and sheep with spectacular deformities were carefully kept for exhibition. They stood in their straw, tame and apathetic.