The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (15 page)

At the top of the fair on a cross alley serving both peasants and more moneyed townsmen were some slightly superior booths with fat ladies, acrobats and the odd crocodile or dancing bear. One shabby tent had an announcement of ‘Interesting Deformity’ over its arched entrance and a coloured placard of a vaguely oriental beauty which underlined the adjective. ‘Interesting’ in that trade—or his, for that matter—invariably implied some sexual abnormality.

Double canvas flaps with the pay-box between them prevented any onlooker seeing what was inside. The public were admitted a dozen at a time. Bernardo observed the merry faces which went in and the more solemn faces which emerged. Whatever deformity was being shown was so grotesque, so unacceptable to the sub-conscious that it changed the mood even of a rich peasant being supported by his fellows. He was so mystified by the reaction of the public that he paid the ten lei demanded—five times the price of a five-legged calf—and went inside.

A young girl, looking about fifteen, sat on a divan behind a red rope, quiet and expressionless like some sexless guardian angel in a nursery picture. She had an oval Slav face with huge, grey eyes and fair hair in long plaits. Below the waist she was dressed in floppy trousers which conformed to the popular idea of an inmate of a Turkish harem and justified the placard outside the booth. Over her shoulders she
had a short, crimson cloak held together by one hand—a slender hand which fitted the delicacy of her face.

When the requisite number of voyeurs were assembled in front of the rope she threw open the cloak twice in quick succession: once to startle, once for a rather longer interval so that the audience could believe their eyes. She had four breasts, all normal except that the lower pair were slightly fuller and irregular.

Bernardo exclaimed: ‘Good God!’—half from surprise, half from indignation, for the quality of that glorious, stained-glass face descending from high cheek-bones had fascinated him. It was withdrawn, but one thought of it as alive and accepting rather than apathetic. The grey eyes, set wide apart, looked straight into his own.

‘I can’t help it,’ she said in English.

‘Of course you can’t, but....’

‘There was nothing else.’

As he went out he glanced back at her. She was still motionless in her absurd costume but responded with a slight half-smile. English? He thought not. He had detected in her few words a slight accent. What then? And how? And what were the police doing to allow it? Or did anything go at the Moş so long as the exhibition was limited to a second and five seconds? He walked off in a rage, aware that it was a form of the same reaction as that of those too solemn spectators emerging from the booth and arguing. He should not have been shocked. After more than two weeks of living in a colony of apes his view of the erogenous zones of the female was as clinical as any doctor’s. But this hit at something deeper; there was more to it than the pity and indignity of the exhibition. A degradation of motherhood, perhaps. Apes? But presumably they would not notice the deformity at all, such curiosity being the very essence of humanity. ‘Know thyself’ was without limits—though, thank you very much, he’d had about enough of it down in the stews.

The Englishman in him recommended calm, reminding him
that the exhibition of deformities was certainly in the worst of taste but no business of his. How about cripples showing their sores on the steps of a church? The Spaniard replied furiously that the cripple was an opportunity for Christian charity and a reminder that there, but for the Grace of God, go I. The position of this unfortunate child was entirely different and an outrage and something must be done about it. That something might well be easier for him, at the bottom of the dregs of society, than for a more respectable citizen using respectable and probably futile methods. At least he knew the full bitter meaning of ‘there was nothing else’.

It was going to be difficult to talk to her. There must have been a number of kinky people, satiated with normality, who wanted to talk to her. But she did not look as if her proprietor sold her services at the market price for curiosities, whatever that was. Her passivity was not that of a prostitute, nor had she the drawn face. He had by now a theory that the recognisable features of a hard-working whore were not in the least due to supposed licentiousness but to sheer boredom, together with the effort and the cosmetics necessary to disguise it.

Bernardo, being no innocent, put himself in the confessional box and enquired whether he himself was not attracted by two extra breasts. He easily gave himself absolution on that score; his sin, if any, was in being revolted by them. No, he was not thinking of the girl in any way as an object of desire. The nursery-angel face made him feel more like a father than a lover. Preposterous! Well, say, an elder brother.

Could the showman be her father? He had only noticed the top of the man’s head at the pay-box and a round face when he drew the curtain. All he remembered was that the chap, unlike most Romanians at that hour of night appeared very clean-shaven. Had there been any other woman about? Not at the booth, but possibly in the caravan or whatever vehicle they used for travelling. He was tempted to go back in the
early morning while Susana slept. The Moş without its roar and excitement would be worth seeing.

Next day he walked down the interminable length of the Boulevard Elisabeta against the stream of packed trams and pedestrians going to work. He could smell the Moş half a mile away—an odour of dust and animals and rotting straw. The main alley was fairly empty with the air of a night club or café being cleaned up on the morning after. The side alleys, however, were busy with buying and selling in the cattle markets and the shops. It was the time of the peasants, rich and poor, some of them with steps already unsteady after too much
tsuica
for breakfast.

He joined a thin crowd of onlookers round the horse market, where he could keep an eye on the front of the ‘interesting’ exhibition deserted and sordid in the morning sun. For half an hour there was nothing to see except the collection of undersized animals which were being sold—a wretched lot to the eye, though any pair of them were able to draw a laden peasant cart through a long day on a diet of maize stalks. All heads turned as a cavalcade of Bessarabian horse-dealers cantered out of the main alley, well-mounted and flaunting cloaks of black and red which reminded him of those left behind in the station restaurant of Oradea Mare. The owner of angel-face popped out of his booth and exchanged greetings with one of the riders. The language, melancholy on one side, hearty on the other, was Russian.

The man’s high voice drew Bernardo’s closer attention. The face was not clean-shaven; it had no hair at all and was spider-webbed with fine lines. A eunuch, by God! He would have been recognised for what he was by all Bucarest since the town was proud of its sect of cab drivers whose smart
trasuras
and well-paired horses stood in the rank outside the royal palace. The drivers belonged to a heretical sect of the Orthodox Church who were so appalled by the sins of the flesh that a man was only allowed two children from his marriage. He then submitted to castration, thus preserving
his soul from the devil, the family from extinction and himself—Bernardo thought bitterly—from the hell of a lot of misery.

The discovery confirmed his opinion that it would be fatal to appear in the guise of a pimp. Whatever the beliefs of these pervertedly pious fellows, it was most unlikely that they would sell their daughters. But she couldn’t be his daughter. One surely didn’t learn English in remote Bessarabian villages.

He tried to open conversation with the showman in his very limited Romanian.

‘Beautiful!’ he exclaimed, pointing to the riders.

‘Blestemat!’

Bernardo knew that word—damned—for it was a common curse. Possibly the chap was using it literally.

‘Why?’

Some of the answer was unintelligible except for nouns with Latin roots. Bernardo gathered that he was being lectured on the iniquity of horse-dealers who would all go to hell. Dear old Kovacs would have agreed, but for different reasons.

‘I do not understand. I am English.’

An impulsive bit of lunacy that was from David Mitrani, Sephardic Jew! But it worked.

‘Come inside!’

The eunuch had not recognised Bernardo as one of the quickly passing spectators of the previous night. He led the way through the exhibition booth and out at the back into a canvas extension with a divan, a table and a chair in it. The girl was there, dressed out of business hours in embroidered peasant blouse and skirt. She only appeared to have a clumsy figure, very round with puppy fat. She knew him at once, but was careful not to give it away. Her eyes met his with no more than a light-house flash of intelligence, almost mischievous intelligence.

The eunuch made a commanding speech to her in Russian.
She looked at him with eyes which were now abstracted, wide and luminous like those of a cat withdrawn into its own thoughts.

‘Mr. Stepanov wants me to explain to you that no one can be a Christian who does not avoid the sins of the flesh, and that one must feel pity for riders who only want to attract women. Now, we must talk very seriously as if you believed it,’ she added without any change of tone.

Bernardo realised without the need for more analysis what it was which had forced him to return. Not her startling beauty. Not curiosity. Not even her impulsive recognition of him as a person to whom some explanation was due. It was her youth. One couldn’t call it a radiant youth when, under the circumstances, it was only able to radiate into itself; but, seeing her dressed with the normal gaiety of a Romanian girl, the sordidness of the show and the abnormality no longer disturbed him. Youth triumphed over the lot and held out some sort of invisible hand for companionship. He was young enough himself to receive the message and old enough to respond considerately. She was in no way comparable to charitable objects on the steps of a Spanish church. It was evident that she expected a social equal—leaving out for the moment whether the Crucea de Piatra or a Jesuit College was responsible for the equality—to have some manners, neither repelled by unfortunate accidents of birth nor stickying the place up with spilt milk of human kindness.

‘Hallelujah!’ Bernardo answered piously. ‘What are you?’

‘Russian.’

‘A refugee?’

‘Of course.’

‘Can I help? I didn’t come back because ...’

‘I know that.’

‘But what is a girl like you doing here?’

He could have kicked himself for the appalling banality of the compliment. She must have heard it dozens of times before.

If she had, she ignored the futility of it as irrelevant.

‘I told you. There was nothing else for me.’

Stepanov broke in suspiciously and she replied to him at length.

‘What was that?’ Bernardo asked.

‘He wanted to know what your religion was. I said you were a Lutheran.’

‘How do you know?’

‘My governess told me all the English were Lutherans.’

‘Tell me quickly—how can I see you again? He’s not going to be taken in by this much longer. I am very poor and out of work, but I will try to do something.’

‘The Moş is over on Saturday and then we go to Craiova. Perhaps you can find us on the road. He may go out drinking. What is your name?’

‘David.’

‘I am Nadya. If I never see you any more, God be with you, David!’

Old Mr. Brown remembered how easily that could have been that. He dared not risk taking to the road penniless and drawing attention to himself by bad Romanian. It only needed one policeman suspicious enough to check the antecedents of David Mitrani, and then the trail led straight back to the station of Pascani, the crossing of the frontier and Bernado Brown, assassin and assaulter of diplomats.

No, he was not as mad as all that. He might have committed any folly for another sight of Magda, but his quixotic impulse to get young Nadya out of there had not the drive of sex behind it. His helplessness emphasised indignation. To that extent she was an extra spur. He had to re-start his life landing any honest job on the way towards Mitrani & Co., Merchant Bankers.

He spent a further two weeks in Susana’s attic, bullying her into conversation, reading his old newspapers and getting by heart a Romanian grammar which had been kindly stolen for him by a colleague.

‘I got on all right with the other fellows,’ he said. ‘A flashy lot of bullies they were. Living on a woman gives a man such a vicious inferiority complex that he has to dress and behave like a professional thug with a dummy gun. Very understandable. Proof that we find it right and natural that a woman should be supported by a man. If it ever comes to real equality of the sexes we’ll be paying the head-shrinkers overtime.’

Everyone in the Crucea de Piatra knew the pleasant-mannered Sephardic ponce who was forcing himself to speak the language decently. He was a joke, rather like the office clerk who takes business as a farce but is twice as efficient as anyone else when he puts his mind to it. He was often called in to interpret when there was some row with a foreigner flaming enough for a whore to screech and the cockroaches to take cover. That brought in a small personal percentage of any money extorted and occasionally a few tips, so that he was no longer dependent on Susana for a meal ticket and could sometimes take her out to a tavern and pay the bill. When he had to speak English, he said his few words in so uncouth an accent that no one could ever suspect it was his mother tongue.

These diplomatic efforts to calm down excitement and oil the wheels of fornication led to the approval of the local cop who easily accepted Mitrani’s story that Romanian was coming back to memory from babyhood in Moldavia. It never occurred to him, naturally enough, that a well-trained mind stocked with two Latin languages could get on terms with a third in a matter of weeks.

‘Why doesn’t a decent fellow like you believe in Christ?’ he asked.

Bernardo was quite prepared to put up a convincing defence of Jewry, but the technical terms of theology had not turned up in local conversation or the newspapers. The cop was unlikely to understand them anyway and content to leave spiritual matters to St. Spiridon.