Stamboul Train (20 page)

He wrote for ten minutes more and then folded the paper and slipped it into the pocket of his mackintosh. He wished to be prepared for any eventuality; his enemies he knew had no scruples; they would rather see him quickly murdered in a back street than alive in the dock. The strength of his position lay in their ignorance of his coming; he had to proclaim his voluntary presence in Belgrade before they knew that he was there, for then there could be no quick assassination of an unidentified stranger; they would have no choice but to put him upon his trial. He opened his suitcase and took out the Baedeker. Then he lit a match and held it to the corner of the map; the shiny paper burned slowly. The railway shot up in a little lick of flame, and he watched the post-office square turn into tough black ash. Then the green of the park, the Kalimagdan, turned brown. The streets of the slum quarter were the last to burn, and he blew the flame to hasten it.

When the map was quite burned he threw the ash under the seat, put a bitter tablet on his tongue, and tried to sleep. He found it difficult. He was a man without humour or he would have smiled at the sudden lightness of his heart, as he recognized, fifty miles beyond Buda, a sudden break in the great Danube plain, a hill shaped like a thimble and shaggy with fir trees. A road made a great circle to avoid it and then shot straight towards the city. Road and hill were both white now under the snow, which hung in the trees in great lumps like the nests of rooks. He remembered the road and the hill and the wood because they were the first things he had noted with a sense of full security after escaping across the frontier five years before. His companion who drove the car had broken silence for the first time since they left Belgrade and called to him: ‘We shall be in Buda in an hour and a quarter.' Dr Czinner had not realized till then that he was safe. Now his lightness of heart had opposite cause. He thought not that he was only fifty miles from Budapest, but that he was only seventy miles from the frontier. He was nearly home. Instinct for the moment was stronger in him than opinion. It was no use telling himself that he had no home and that his destination was a prison; for that one moment of light-hearted enjoyment it was to Kruger's beer-garden, to the park at evening swimming in green light, to the steep streets and the bright rags that he was journeying. After all, he told himself, I shall see all this again; they'll drive me from the prison to the court. It was then that he remembered with unreasoning melancholy that the beer-garden had been turned into flats.

Across the breakfast table Coral and Myatt faced each other with immeasurable relief as strangers. At dinner they had been old friends with nothing to say to one another. All through breakfast they talked fast and continuously as if the train was consuming time, not miles, and they had to fill the hours with talk sufficient for a life together.

‘And when I get to Constantinople, what shall I do? My room's been booked.'

‘Never mind that. I've taken a room at a hotel. You'll come with me and we'll make it a double room.'

She accepted his solution with breathless pleasure, but there was no time for silence, for sitting back. Rocks, houses, bare pastures were receding at fifty miles an hour, and there was much to be said. ‘We get in at breakfast time, don't we? What shall we do all day?'

‘We'll have lunch together. In the afternoon I'll have to go to the office and see to things there. You can go shopping. I'll be back in the evening and we'll have dinner and go to the theatre.'

‘Yes, and what theatre?' It was extraordinary to her, the transformation which the night had caused. His face no longer resembled that of all the Jewish boys she had known with half intimacy; even the gesture with which he gave and gave, the instinctive spreading of the hands, was different; his emphasis on how much he would spend, on what a good time he would give her, was unique because she believed him.

‘We'll have the best seats at your theatre.'

‘Dunn's Babies?'

‘Yes, and we'll take them all out to dinner afterwards, if you like.'

‘No.' She shook her head; she could not risk losing him now, and many of Dunn's Babies would be prettier than she. ‘Let's go back to bed after the theatre.' They began to laugh over their coffee, spilling brown drops upon the tablecloth. There was no apprehension in her laugh; she was happy because pain was behind her. ‘Do you know how long we've sat at breakfast?' she asked. ‘A whole hour. It's a scandal. I've never done it before. A cup of tea in bed at ten o'clock is my breakfast. And two pieces of toast and some orange juice if I've got a nice landlady.'

‘And when you haven't any work?'

She laughed. ‘I leave out the orange juice. Are we near the frontier now?'

‘Very near.' Myatt lit a cigarette. ‘Smoke?'

‘Not in the morning. I'll leave you to it.' She got up and at the same moment the train ground across a point and she was flung against him. She caught his arm to steady herself and over his shoulder saw a signal-box sway dizzily out of sight and a black shed against which the snow had drifted. She held his arm a moment till her giddiness passed. ‘Darling, come soon. I'll be waiting for you.' Suddenly she wanted to say to him, ‘Come now.' She felt afraid at being left alone when the train was in a station. Strangers might come in and take his seat, and she would be unable to make them understand. She would not know what the customs men said to her. But she told herself that he would soon tire if she made demands on him; it wasn't safe to trouble a man; her happiness was not so secure that she dared take the smallest risk with it. She looked back; he sat with head a little bent, caressing with his fingers a gold cigarette-case. She was glad later that she had taken that last glance, it was to serve as an emblem of fidelity, an image to carry with her, so that she might explain, ‘I've never left you.'

The train stopped as she reached her seat, and she looked out of the window at a small muddy station. Subotica was printed in black letters on a couple of lamps; the station buildings were little more than a row of sheds, and there was no platform. A group of customs-officers in green uniforms came down between the lines with half a dozen soldiers; they seemed in no hurry to begin their search. They laughed and talked and went on towards the guard's van. A row of peasants stood watching the train, and one woman suckled a child. There were a good many soldiers about with nothing to do; one of them shooed the peasants off the rails, but they scrambled over them again twenty yards down the line. The passengers began to grow impatient; the train was half an hour late already, and no attempt had yet been made to search the luggage or examine the passports. Several people climbed on to the line and crossed the rails in hope of finding a refreshment-room; a tall thin German with a bullet head walked up and down, up and down. Coral Musker saw the doctor leave the train, wearing his soft hat and mackintosh and a pair of grey wool gloves. He and the German passed and re-passed and passed again, but they might have been walking in different worlds for all the notice they took of each other. Once they stood side by side while an official looked at their passports, but they still belonged to different worlds, the German was fuming and impatient, and the doctor was smiling to himself.

When she came near him she could see the quality of his smile, vacuous and sentimental. It seemed out of place. ‘Excuse me speaking to you,' she said humbly, a little frightened by his stiff respectful manner. He bowed and put his grey gloved hands behind him; she caught a glimpse of a hole in the thumb. ‘I was wondering . . . we were wondering . . . if you would have dinner with us tonight.' The smile had been tidied away, and she saw him gathering together a forbidding weight of words. She explained, ‘You have been so kind to me.' It was very cold in the open air and they both began to walk; the frozen mud crackled round the tops of her shoes and marked her stockings. ‘It would have given me great pleasure,' he said, marshalling his words with terrible correctness, ‘and it is my sorrow that I cannot accept. I am leaving the train tonight at Belgrade. I should have enjoyed . . .' He stopped in his stride with creased brows and seemed to forget what he was saying; he put the hand in the worn glove into his mackintosh pocket. ‘I should have enjoyed . . .' Two men in uniform were walking up the line towards them.

The doctor put his hand on her arm and swung her gently round, and they began to walk back along the train. He was still frowning and he never finished his sentence. Instead, he began another, ‘I wonder if you would mind—my glasses are frosted over—what do you see in front of us?'

‘There are a few customs-officers coming down from the guard's van to meet us.'

‘Is that all? In green uniform?'

‘No, in grey.'

The doctor stopped. ‘So?' He took her hand in his, and she felt an envelope folded into her palm. ‘Go quickly back to your carriage. Hide this. When you get to Istanbul post it. Go now quickly. But don't seem in a hurry.' She obeyed without understanding him; twenty steps brought her up to the men in grey and she saw that they were soldiers; they carried no rifles, but she guessed it by their bayonet sheaths. They barred her way, and for a moment she thought they would stop her; they were talking rapidly among themselves, but when she came within a few feet of them, one man stepped aside to let her by. She was relieved but still a little frightened, feeling the letter folded in her hand. Was she being made to smuggle something? A drug? Then one of the soldiers came after her; she heard his boots cracking the mud; she reassured herself that she was imagining things, that if he wanted her he would call, and his silence encouraged her. Nevertheless, she walked more rapidly. Her compartment was only one carriage away, and her lover would be able to explain in German to the man who she was. But Myatt was not in the compartment; he was still smoking in the restaurant. For a second she hesitated. I will go to the restaurant and tap on the window, but her second's hesitation had been too long. A hand touched her elbow, and a voice said something to her gently in a foreign tongue.

She swung round to protest, to implore, ready, if need be to break away and run to the restaurant-car, but her fears were a little quietened by the soldier's large gentle eyes. He smiled at her and nodded his head and pointed to the station buildings. She said, ‘What do you want? Can't you speak English?' He shook his head and smiled again and pointed, and she saw the doctor meet the soldiers and walk with them towards the buildings. There could be nothing wrong, he was walking in front of them, they were not using force. The soldier nodded and smiled and then with a great effort brought out three words of English. ‘All quite good,' he said and pointed again to the buildings.

‘Can I just tell my friend?' she asked. He nodded and smiled and took her arm, leading her gently away from the train.

The waiting-room was empty except for the doctor. A stove burnt in the middle of the floor, and the view from the windows was broken by lines of frost. She was conscious all the while of the letter in her hand. The soldier ushered her in gently and politely and then closed the door without locking it. ‘What do they want?' she asked. ‘I mustn't miss the train.'

‘Don't be frightened,' he said. ‘I'll explain to them; they'll let you go in five minutes. You must let them search you if they want to. Have they taken the letter?'

‘No.'

‘Better give it to me. I don't want to get you into trouble.' She held out her hand and at the same moment the door opened. The soldier came in and smiled encouragingly and took the letter from her. Dr Czinner spoke to him, and the man talked rapidly; he had simple unhappy eyes. When he had gone again Dr Czinner said, ‘He doesn't like it. He was told to look through the key-hole and see if anything passed between us.'

Coral Musker sat down on a wooden seat and stuck her feet out towards the stove. Dr Czinner noted with amazement, ‘You are very calm.'

‘It's no use getting shirty,' she said. ‘They can't understand, anyway. My friend'll be looking for me soon.'

‘That's true,' he said with relief. He hesitated for a moment. ‘You must wonder why I do not apologize to you for this—discomfort. You see, there's something I hold more important than any discomfort. I expect you don't understand.'

‘Don't I, though,' she said, thinking with wry humour of the night. A long whistle shivered through the cold air and she sprang up apprehensively. ‘That's not our train, is it? I can't miss it.' Dr Czinner was at the window. He freed the inner surface from steam with the palm of his hand and peered between the ridges of frost. ‘No,' he said, ‘it's an engine on the other line. I think they are changing engines. It will take them a long time. Don't be frightened.'

‘Oh, I'm not scared,' she said, settling herself again on the hard seat. ‘My friend'll be along soon.
They'll
be scared then. He's rich, you know.'

‘So?' said Dr Czinner.

‘Yes, and important too. He's the head of a firm. They do something with currants.' She began to laugh. ‘He told me to think of him when I eat spotted dog.'

‘So?'

‘Yes. I like him. He's been sweet to me. He's quite different from other Jews. They're generally kind, but he—well, he's quiet.'

‘I think that he must be a very lucky man,' said Dr. Czinner. The door was opened and two soldiers pushed a man in. Dr Czinner moved quickly forward and put his foot in the door. He spoke to them softly. One of them replied, the other thrust him back and closed and locked the door. ‘I asked them,' he said, ‘why they were keeping you here. I told them you must catch the train. One of them said it was quite all right. An officer wants to ask you a question or two. The train doesn't go for half an hour.'