‘Yes.’
‘You still have it? You have not already disposed of it?’
‘No. It’s yours. I’ll get it now.’
He sighed. ‘It is as well that my wife is not here,’ he said. ‘She would weep.’
Later, when he had gone, I sat by the window and had a whisky and water in the toothglass. I was beginning to feel perceptive and understanding.
That was the point at which I should have packed my bag and gone home.
CHAPTER SIX
In the afternoon of the second day of the trial the Prosecutor completed his opening address to the court and began to call witnesses.
The first was Vukashin, the head of the government. There was a stir as he went into the witness box.
He was one of those politicians who in their dealings with the public are like small-part actors who specialize in playing such things as shrewd lawyers, family doctors, and wise fathers; their mannerisms of speech and gesture have been cultivated to fit the stock characters their physical peculiarities suggest. He was square and solid, with a short neck, and he stood awkwardly in the witness box, his big hands clasping the ledge in front of him, the shoulders of his ill-fitting jacket hunched about his ears. He had blunt features, with a muscular jaw and full, determined lips. His forehead was low and permanently knitted in a frown of concentration. In the popular edition of his biography published by the Propaganda Ministry he was referred to as a ‘veteran front fighter in the class struggle’, and from the illustrations you received the impression that he had spent most of his life marching up steep hills at the head of fist-brandishing processions of angry revolutionaries. The role he affected was that of ‘simple workman’.
In fact he was not simple nor, strictly speaking, had he ever been a workman. His father had been a small but fairly prosperous tradesman, and Vukashin himself had been a bookkeeper in a timber warehouse during the early part of his political career. It had been a natural talent for accountancy and office organization rather than revolutionary ardour that had raised him first to the secretaryship of a trade union and later to leadership of the party. He had a reputation for the kind of wit that makes a political statement in terms of some excretory or sexual function. He was a powerful man physically and was said to have once made a brutal assault on a colleague who had opposed him. But it was also said that the victim had been alone in his opposition and unpopular and that the assault had been calculated quite coolly for its disturbing effect on the morale of other intransigent colleagues. He was a brusque, direct speaker and very effective with big audiences. ‘What are the real facts behind this problem?’ he would shout; and although he never answered such questions, the sturdy conviction with which he pretended to do so, and his way of enumerating his sentences so emphatically that they sounded like hammer strokes of logic, usually concealed the deception.
The Prosecutor’s self-effacing deference to him was so abject that it was not even amusing. From a ranting bully who at least existed, Dr Prochaska became suddenly no more than a disembodied, impersonal voice, a prompter who fed the witness with a short question and then waited until the speech in reply was over and another question was wanted from him.
‘Minister Vukashin, in March of 1944 when the armistice negotiations began, what was the attitude of the prisoner, Deltchev?’
‘Our policy was peace, immediate peace to save the country from devastation by reactionary led forces seeking to continue their losing battle with our Soviet ally. Every hour of it meant another cottage, another farm destroyed, every day a fresh horror for our peasant workers in the frontier areas. Who could have said “Go on”? Not a man with heart and bowels! Only a blood-maddened beast. But there was such a creature. His name was Deltchev!’
‘Minister Vukashin, in what ways did the prisoner Deltchev work against the peace?’
‘It would be easier, Public Prosecutor, to tell the court in what ways he did not work against the peace, for then I could answer shortly, “in no way”. From the beginning of the negotiations he used his position on the Committee to hinder their conclusion. You may ask why this was tolerated, why he was not immediately removed from his post. The answer to that is simple. We believed at that time that he was in misguided but honest doubt about the terms of the negotiations that were under discussion. We were a responsible group acting not for a defeated country — we were never defeated — but for a resurgent nation. The terms offered us by Russia, however, contained, as was natural in the circumstances, military clauses that involved our surrendering certain rights of government. The interpretation put upon them depended upon one thing and one thing only — whether or not Russia could be trusted. We of the People’s Party did trust Russia, and in the event we have been justified. All the rights surrendered by us then have now been restored. The prisoner took a contrary view — or said that he did, for we know better now — and it was this view that he urged upon us as a justification for delay and for continuing his negotiations with the Anglo-Americans.’
‘Did he contend that better terms would be obtained from them than from our Soviet ally?’
‘No. The terms were no different in essence. They had been agreed to by the Foreign Ministers at the Moscow Conference of ’43. According to the prisoner, what would be different was the way in which they would be enforced. Or so he said.’
‘Minister Vukashin, did the prisoner take part in the discussions with Soviet representatives?’
‘Very little. He was too busy licking the backsides of the Anglo-Americans.’
Laughter.
‘Minister Vukashin, in presenting his arguments for negotiations with them, what advantages did the prisoner claim would follow?’
‘He claimed so many advantages that you would have supposed us conquerors about to impose our will upon the defeated. But what were the facts at that time? First…’
The earphones softly droned out the translation, but above this sound his own voice persisted. It was loud and, in the harsh, penetrating quality of its lower notes, disquietingly aggressive. He claimed hostility as urgently as another might claim love, and to hate him was to submit to a seduction. In a way he was impressive.
The voice went on and the grotesque rubbish it talked was passively received in evidence. I watched the judges’ faces as they listened.
The floodlights for the cameras were on all the time now. The day was warm, and soon, as the afternoon sun poured in through the high steel-framed windows, those in the lights began to sweat. Most of them wiped their heads frequently and fanned themselves; but the judges, sweltering in their black gowns and biretta-like caps, seemed unwilling to acknowledge their discomfort before the eyes of the cameras. They had been judges before the People’s Party had come into power and it was known that all such appointments were under review by the government. Later, perhaps, in a cool cinema at the Propaganda Ministry, the film would be examined by subtle, hostile men able to construe the wiping of hands or forehead as gestures of disrespect to the Minister and his evidence. No momentary relief from discomfort was worth that risk to the judges. Two of their older colleagues had already been dismissed for showing reluctance to preside at this trial. Now, behind the sweating impassivity of those who had not shown reluctance, there was the terrible anxiety of men who, having sacrificed their principles, fear that the sacrifice may after all go unrewarded.
Only the prisoner did not sweat. He sat with his hands in his jacket pockets and his eyes closed, the back of his white head resting against the wooden rail which separated the lawyers’ tables from the body of the courtroom. His face was livid in the glare of the lights and he looked as if he might faint; but, incredibly, he did not sweat. But for the pricking of your own skin you might have fancied that the heat of the place was an illusion and that all the perspiration you could see was simply a visible manifestation of collective guilt.