‘Is it?’ he asked eagerly. ‘You really like it?’ so surprised and trusting of her judgement that she felt ashamed of her unthinking praise, and looked at it again. It was boldly done, the rough surface of the parapet giving the lines a comic distortion.
‘Yes, it is good,’ she confirmed her own judgement and he smiled in naïve pleasure.
‘If you like this,’ he said, ‘you’d like some things I saw in Bessarabia. They were super.’
As she hoisted herself on to the wall, she asked: ‘Where were you in Bessarabia?’
He had been on the frontier, in a fortress that was as bare, cold and ill-lit as it would have been in the Middle Ages. There was nothing at all in the district but a village that comprised two rows of desolate huts with a pitted mud track running between. The whole area had been raided so often, it was like the environs of a volcano: only the most desperate would make a home there. In winter it had been swept by gales and blizzards and in spring, when the snow melted, it became a quagmire.
‘The village was jolly queer,’ he said. ‘All the people living there were Jews.’
‘Why did they live there, of all places?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps they’d been driven out of everywhere else.’
She had imagined she would have difficulty in persuading him to talk about his experiences, but it seemed he had already put them at a distance. He had adopted Guy and Harriet in place of his family so, feeling protected again, he could chat away as though nothing had ever happened in his life to check his confidence. While he talked, she wondered at the simplicity of a nature able so rapidly to regain itself.
‘And what about these things you saw? Were they drawings?’
‘No. Paintings. They were shop-signs.’
He described the Jews of the villages – the men gaunt wraiths in their tattered caftans, the women wearing black woollen wigs over heads shaven because they suffered from some skin disease which had died out elsewhere. They were sly and obsequious, and Sasha, who had always known Jews who were the richest members of the community, had been amazed to find any as debased as these.
‘They couldn’t even read,’ he said. ‘They were terribly poor – but they could do these paintings.’
‘What were they like?’
‘Oh – sort of fantastic. People, animals and things, in the most super colours. I’d always go and look at them when I could.’
He spoke as though the shop signs had been his only entertainment and she asked: ‘Did you have any friends in the army?’
‘I knew a boy in the village. His father kept the place where the soldiers went to drink ţuicǎ. It was just a room, very dirty, but all the soldiers said the man was an awful crook and making lots of money.’
Sasha described the boy, thin, white-faced, in a black skull-cap, knickerbockers that fastened below the knee and black stockings and boots. Tufts of red down were appearing on his glazed white cheeks, and red ritual curls hung before his ears. ‘You never saw anyone look so funny,’ Sasha said.
‘But all the Orthodox Jews look like that,’ Harriet said. ‘Surely you’ve seen them down the Dâmboviţa?’
Sasha shook his head. He had never been near the ghetto area. His aunts would not allow him to go there.
‘Did you speak to the boy?’ Harriet asked.
‘I tried, but it wasn’t much good. He only spoke Yiddish and Ukrainian, and he was very shy. Sometimes he’d run away when he saw me in the street.’
‘But hadn’t you friends among the soldiers?’
‘Well …’ Sasha sat silent for some moments, staring down and rubbing the palm of his hand on the rough edge of the wall. ‘Yes, I did have a friend.’ He spoke as though making an admission painful to him. ‘He was a Jew, too. He was called Marcovitch.’
‘Did he run away with you?’
Sasha shook his head, then after a moment said: ‘He died.’
‘How did he die?’
Sasha said nothing for some minutes, and she saw there was an area of experience, unnaturally imposed upon his natural innocence, to which he would not willingly revert. She said persuasively: ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Well …’ He spoke casually, like one old in knowledge. ‘You know what it is like here. If anything happens, they say: “It’s the Jews.” In the army it was the same. They blamed the Jews for Bessarabia. They said we called in the Russians because of the new laws against us. As though we could!’ He looked at her and laughed. ‘Just silly, of course.’ His self-conscious attempt at sophistication made her realise how young he was.
‘Did they ill-treat you?’ she asked.
‘Not very much. Some of them were quite decent, really. It was beastly for everyone, being conscripted. The barracks were full of bugs. When I first went there I was bitten so much, I looked as though I had measles. And every day maize or beans, but not much. There was money for food, but the officers kept it.’
‘Is that why you ran away?’
‘No.’ He picked up his charcoal and began darkening the lines of his drawing that had started to disappear with the light. ‘It was because of Marcovitch.’
‘Who died? When did he die?’
‘After we were ordered out of Bessarabia. We were on the train and he went down the corridor and he didn’t come back. I asked everyone, but they said they hadn’t seen him. While we were waiting at Czernowitz – we stayed on the platform three days because there were no trains – they were saying a body had been found on the railway-line half-eaten by wolves. Then one of the men said to me: “You heard what happened to your friend, Marcovitch? That was his body. You be careful, you’re a Jew, too.” And I knew they’d thrown him out of the train. I was afraid. It could happen to me. So in the night, when they were all asleep, I ran down the line and hid in a goods train. It took me to Bucharest.’
While they were talking, the sound of the last post came thin and clear from the palace yard. The sunset clouds had stretched and narrowed and faded in the sky, leaving a zenith of clear turquoise in which a few stars were appearing. The square below was lit not only by its lamps but by a reflection from the sky that was like a sheen on water.
She thought she had made Sasha talk enough and Guy might soon be back. She slid down from the wall and said: ‘I must go, but I’ll come again.’ Before she left, she handed Sasha the paper. ‘It says your father’s trial starts on August 14th. The sooner it is over, the better. After all, he may be acquitted.’
Sasha took the paper, which could not be read in this light, and said: ‘Yes,’ but his agreement was simply politeness. He knew as well as she did that the law required Drucker’s conviction before his oil holdings could be forfeit to the Crown. What hope then of an acquittal?
As she set out across the roof area, Sasha went to his hut. When she turned to descend, she could see he had already lit his candle and, kneeling, was bent over the paper that was spread on the ground before him.
7
Yakimov saw the great yellow car outside the Legation as soon as he turned into the road. The hood was down, hidden beneath a panel, so there was nothing to break the long, fine line from nose to tail. His eyes filled with tears. ‘The old girl herself,’ he said. As he added: ‘I love her,’ he scarcely knew whether he referred to the Hispano-Suiza or to Dollie, who had given it to him.
The car was now seven years old, but he had taken care of it as he had never taken care of himself. He opened the bonnet and examined the engine. When he closed it, he patted the stork that flew down-drooping wings from the radiator cap. He walked round the car, noting that the body was dusty but no worse, and the pigskin leather of the seats was in ‘good shape’. ‘Bless the old Jugs,’ he thought. ‘They haven’t treated her so badly.’