The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (20 page)

Started they were; but the corridor which still connected the Caspian with Moscow was narrowing all the time. The Turks were advancing; the Germans were in the Ukraine; and the Whites were threatening the Volga and already into the Crimea. In spite of their government pass, the family spent nearly a month on the way, sleeping rough, arrested, released, always trying to keep clear of officials and the military. Her brother, five years older than Nadya, wanted to try the adventure of joining the Whites, but the mother would not hear of it. She insisted on keeping to territory firmly controlled by the Government where at least there was no fighting.

When at last they did reach Moscow ragged and halfstarved, no one took them for anything but members of the proletariat. They found shelter with their former cook: a formidable woman whose word ran in her street. She swore that Mrs. Andreyev was her daughter from whom she had been parted ever since the war began and obtained for them rations and a permit to live with her. Nadya said she might still be there if her mother, now desperate for the future of her children, had not listened to an old friend.

He was in hiding after the attempt of the Social Revolutionaries to take over Moscow, and had a plan for a mass escape to Finland. It must have sounded convincing to her mother. Nothing so dangerous as slinking across the frontier or rushing the wire was involved. The plan depended partly on bribery and partly on political sympathisers among the guards who would themselves escape.

The first move was to a village near the shores of Lake Ladoga, dressed as peasants. Their social revolutionary friend was sure of his organisation, but there were other strangers in other villages and presumably the discreet movements into the area were noticed by the police. When the party was united in the forest and very near the frontier, it was surrounded. The young children were taken out and marched away. Before they had gone very far they heard the machine-gun and the isolated shots which followed. They did not belong to anybody any longer. Back at Leningrad they were questioned but obviously knew so much less than their interrogators that they were turned loose to live or starve as they liked.

Nadya and her sister continued to exist, joining a gang of children who scavenged and slept and died as casually as young wolves after the poisoning of the main pack.

‘But did nobody care?’ Bernardo asked.

‘Only the police.’

‘What did they do?’

‘When they could catch us they beat us and let us go again.’

‘Without food?’

‘If I cried, they gave me tea.’

Inexplicably her eyes were dancing. Bernardo, appalled at the sufferings inflicted on a cultured, eager, little girl, could not account for this dash of humour in a nightmare. He supposed that it was due to sheer pride in staying alive or perhaps that she was re-living the secret ambition of every child to make fools of the police—real police or just the policeman-like qualities of clumsy adults.

But details were unobtainable. She was reticent over this part of her history, jumping to the first signs of winter when their only hope of life was to get back to their old cook in Moscow. They hung shivering around the railway station, feeding on any scraps they could steal or were given.

Jammed and unnoticed in a stampede of Russian skirts, trousers and baskets, they were swept on board a train. It was a good train. They even had room to sit on the floor. But unfortunately it was bound south and not going to Moscow at all. They stayed on it because it was a better home than unknown stations, and were well on their way to Kiev when the police threw them off in spite of the efforts of a peasant family to claim them. They were pitied and protected by those who were more used to suffering. Nobody seemed to believe that children who once belonged to the capitalist class had only got what they deserved.

Anywhere was the same as nowhere. The railwaymen had no advice to give and could only point out the road to Moscow. So they took it, shuffling on with bare feet through mud which had not yet frozen until they ran into the Red Army in the form of a company of engineers bivouacked around their trucks in the open. They showed themselves cautiously, ready to turn and run for their lives; but instead of being machine-gunned or beaten up they were stuffed with good soup from a field kitchen and kindly asked what they were doing. They always had the same story which left out politics. Father had been killed on the Turkish front and mother had died of typhus and they wanted to reach Moscow where they had relations.

The soldiers were sorry they could not help, for the detachment was going to the Ukranian front—if the battered trucks held out and if there were no patrols of White cavalry out across their route. Having a passion for pets like any other army, they took the two sisters along with them in the back of a truck, deloused them, fattened them and kept them warm until ordered to get rid of them in the course of incompre
hensible advances and retreats across the western Ukraine. Nadya remembered that they had a cousin at Balta which was not far away. Yes, they could be driven to Balta. The two proletarian cherubs were delivered to the cousin by a sergeant-major with the warning that he had better take care of them or else.

But God, according to Nadya, decided that they were too fortunate.

‘Fortunate? You?’

‘Well, we had lived through the winter. Fresh fish, David! Lots of it! And we were so used to death, like the soldiers.’

So it was time for her to face her third frontier. The cousin, appalled by terror and counter-terror now that the defeated Germans had gone home leaving a vacuum behind, was determined to escape to Romania. He had useful friends down the River Dniester at Tiraspol. The French were holding the right bank of the river. The Reds, having abandoned Bessarabia, were in force on the left. Both were bogged down by the March rains and leaving each other in peace. While that lasted, any local man who knew the reed-beds and backwaters should be able to get across unchallenged.

The cousin, the two children, a fisherman and his friend managed to cross the main stream in darkness and pouring rain, and were poling silently down a narrow channel between tall reeds. They were very near to the Romanian side when a star shell went up. Nadya remembered thinking how beautiful it was and how the boat and faces were suddenly striped by the black shadows of the thin screen of rushes—too thin or else the French only spotted the bending and waving of their tops. A blast of fire, first from the right bank then from the left, hit the supposed raiders before they could jump into the water. Nadya was the sole survivor. When all was silent she swam ashore and must have passed between French posts without ever seeing them. Her luck was nicely balanced. On the one hand she was unhurt; on the other, if anyone had made out a Russian girl crawling out of the mud into Romania
she might have become a pet again and eventually joined her compatriots in Paris.

Not that Romania treated the new arrival badly. When a kind-hearted family, ten miles back from the river, found her on their doorstep, she was hardly distinguishable as human except where the interminable rain had washed her. How she could have got that far without dying of shock and exposure she did not know. Her saviours quickly nursed her back to health and would have kept her if their own children had not been faced with hunger, for nothing but bits of men and horses had been sown on their land the previous autumn. Through the village priest a place was obtained for her at an Orthodox convent which was caring for the waifs and strays of Bessarabia. In that remote province which had been Russian and was now Romanian the bankrupt state had to leave it to charity to clear up the aftermath of war. The rescued girls were all alike in speaking Russian as their first or second language. What had happened to their parents it was pointless to ask.

The Orthodox nuns sounded to Bernardo more worldly than Catholics but more distant. In their stiff, well-bred way they were equally kind to all their orphans within the limits set by crowded plank beds and scanty food. Education was severely practical. Those who could sit still were taught to sew and embroider; those who couldn’t tended the garden. Nadya and a few others into whose houses somewhere had come governesses and spectacled professors were taught by the Abbess herself, a tall, unbending lady of Byzantine family who in the vanities of the world could justifiably have called herself a Princess. Later on, Nadya was encouraged to give simple lessons in French and English.

‘And were you happy?’ Bernardo asked.

‘I was grateful. And it wasn’t bad among ourselves till I was twelve.’

‘Yes, I see. Your mother must have known?’

‘Of course. But the doctors were sure they would not grow, so we had no need to worry.’

‘And the nuns?’

‘They were distressed, David, and whispered. And if they didn’t, I thought they did. They wanted me to stay with them and become a nun. It’s hard to explain to you. As if I were a cripple. I was no use and could only serve God.’

‘Not much of a compliment to God!’

She stared at him as if trying to work out this little squib of impiety where there should be none.

‘I could give praise like anybody else,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean hymns. There was so much in the open air I loved.’

And not much inside the nunnery, he supposed. He could fill in a lot of what she had felt and was trying to express. At her age he had not been aware of missing anything of value. But in Spain why so much lonely and sometimes ecstatic walking over coast and mountain when he had plenty of friends with whom to appreciate a rich, very ordinary life?

‘How did you get out of the place?’

She gave him the facts very honestly but was evasive about her motives. He had to put some solid flesh on her privacies when he was alone to think about them. There had been the usual black-robed, hairy, Orthodox priest wagging his whiskers at the nuns, and he had a son. Bernardo imagined—with little more than a scatter of exclamations to go on—a not too flashy, straight-haired Romanian youth with fine eyes and one of those wide, mobile mouths which could gain sympathy even for an irresponsible liar. He must have been fascinated by her face, for her shape was odd however tight the nuns packed her, or perhaps any sort of body would do and he was just taking advantage of her longing to be loved again. At any rate he got her away most romantically in a motor cycle and sidecar borrowed from a friend. When they were beyond easy recovery and on the willowed bank of one of those laughing Romanian streams, he made the first idyllic exploration of her body. Up to then there had been
only passionate words and brown eyes married to grey over the wall of the convent. He was shocked beyond measure. He panicked. He drove off and left her.

She stayed where she was. At least when she crawled ashore from the Dniester she carried with her the one certainty that she was a child who had been loved. Now she was a horror to herself. So far as the destruction of a human personality went she would, Bernardo thought, have been better off, for a time at any rate, if she had been a normal girl, seduced, abandoned and finishing up in the Crucea de Piatra.

Though ashamed of it, he found that he could understand that hysterical Romanian lad. Why on earth hadn’t she warned him that she was different from other women? Starry-eyed innocence? Or an assumption that he must know what all the convent knew? Or could she conceivably have thought that what was a slightly prurient indelicacy to silly nuns offered an extra richness to the love of a man? And one might fairly safely guess that, added to any one of these, her experiences of death and filth and starvation had taught her too thoroughly that the state of the physical body was unimportant where there was deep affection.

What happened then was that Stepanov found her. How did he find her? She couldn’t face that question. She said it was a coincidence. It was very obvious to Bernardo that the priest’s son, either from remorse or in hope of profit, had let Stepanov know of her existence and that the eunuch had at once gone off to search for her. At any rate Stepanov, who up till then had earned a poor living exhibiting foetuses in bottles, took her home to his village unresisting as if death had once more refused her.

When they started on the road together in the spring she was Stepanov’s daughter. His village headman must, like Rabbi Kaplan, have had the ear of a police officer who could not be bothered with the peculiarities of pious Jews and voluntary Russian eunuchs and was ready to hand over any papers required if the hand were greased.

‘He was kind to you?’

‘Yes. He used to say it was a punishment for the sins of the flesh.’

‘Yours?’

‘No. Lots of generations. It wasn’t my fault at all.’

‘You mean—it was almost as if he had caught a devil in a trap and was exhibiting it?’

Again she gave him her shocked look which this time brightened into amused comprehension.

‘Something like that. Yes, with a tail! We could have poked it down my trousers.’

For that night Nadya occupied his bed while he was on duty and then cleared off to buy clothes. Stepanov’s three days’ takings, she said calmly, would easily pay for her return to femininity as soon as she saw what townswomen were wearing. One wouldn’t have believed there was so much lecherous curiosity in Giurgiu.

Bernardo slept till midday and then jumped to his feet with a nagging sense of guilt before he had made up for his sleepless night. He did not know what the hell to do with his acquisition. He had no money to feed both of them; he was as irresponsible as her disgusting boy-friend; and he knew nothing about Russians except for a few second-rate dancers at the Principesa who claimed, often with truth, to have been trained at the Imperial Ballet School and were all big eyes and sorrow. Nadya was a bit like that herself, except that she never showed sorrow, only acceptance.

There should be a dying swan in her hotel bedroom at the moment. She never got up till the afternoon. Bernardo had no right to wander upstairs when off duty, so he waited in a bar at the end of the street till the clients began to drift out of the hotel alone or in couples. A damned flashy, vulgar lot, he decided. The Nyroubova was different. She looked like any young working girl going home from the office in a neat black coat, a white fur hat and a little scarf flowing at the neck. He bowed respectfully and asked if stars of the ballet
had any objection to taking a drink with the night porter. Not at all, she replied, with this particular night porter.