The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (19 page)

The light grew, showing a considerable expanse of grey water ahead without a stand of long rushes anywhere. To
the west this lake or backwater looked as if it joined the Vedea, in which case there was no way round it; the eastern end was dotted by a few cottages where suspicious movements were bound to arouse curiosity. He woke Nadya and hurried towards the water. At the worst she must sit in it wherever there was a patch of vegetation to hide her head. In another half hour a standing human figure would be seen a mile away. The black raft of duck floating well out from shore was perfectly safe from gunners when they took off.

A muddy path led westwards, apparently going only into a network of waters although deep prints of heavy boots showed that it was used. One set of prints turned off to the left. Bernardo ignored them for there was nothing in that direction but a small scattering of brushwood which would not have hidden a rabbit. He plodded despondently on, only turning round at a shout from Nadya. She wasn’t there. She had vanished. He walked up to the brushwood—since she could not be anywhere else—suppressing comment on childish and futile pranks in an emergency and found a pit with a foot of water at the bottom. Nadya looked up at him, her eyes luminous with her usual air of finding something already prepared for her. It was a hide for duck-hunters, she said, and a safe spot till the evening because it was too late for anyone to walk out and get into position for the morning flight.

It was also a perfect lady’s fitting-room if one threw down turf and twigs to keep shoes and skirt hem out of the soup at the bottom. Bernardo guessed at her height and length of leg, but waist was a problem. The front of the fat boy had to have an even slope all the way. The obvious solution was to use her skirt as extra padding. He fussed over how she could fold it and tie it while she listened patiently, at last reminding him that she was not inexperienced and that he should remember to buy a packet of pins.

It took him an hour to get into town, following the shore of the lake and entering the first street from nowhere via a rubbish heap. No one had reason to be inquisitive about his
presence there, for the rubbish heap was also a popular public lavatory. A back-street café provided breakfast and a place to wait till the shops opened. Choice from their windows was far from easy; anything would do to get her as far as the railway station in safety, but he had to think of the future as well; in case money ran out, whatever he bought must allow her to circulate in Bucarest without being noticed.

A ship chandler’s on the waterfront offered some cheap, rough clothing, and he collected shoes, socks and trousers but could find no suitable coat. Passing up the main street, he came on a shop with a window assigned to children’s outfitting in which was a dummy dressed in a high school tunic which buttoned up to the neck, with a peaked cap on its smug head. That would save buying collar and tie. Yes, they thought they could fit his little brother. Yes, in their experience all that precocious development would disappear in a year or two. Ah, and a packet of pins. He damn nearly forgot that.

With the two parcels under his arm and a thick sandwich for Nadya in his pocket he walked back along the lake, now sunlit but still deserted except for a flashing pair of kingfishers. He was utterly unable to think of any story to account for what he was doing there and kept nervously searching the horizon until he dropped into the pit and could unwrap his purchases.

‘My God, your hair!’ he exclaimed when he came to the schoolboy’s cap. ‘What are we to do?’

‘But you told me I’d be a fat boy, so I took my scissors from the cart. Cut it off for me!’

All that luscious pale gold. He felt that it was an outrage, a crime like plucking the blue iridescence of the kingfishers. He said he was sorry he had to do it as if he himself had insisted on it.

‘I hate my hair.’

Of course. All one with the grubby crimson cloak and the
Turkish trousers. Just another of Stepanov’s stage properties. He had already forgotten that brutal vulgarity and the pity which overwhelmed him. There was no time for the past of either individual in this urgent present.

He chipped away inexpertly. The back and sides were tolerable; the top was a mess, but the cap would cover it till one or both could have another go at leisure. She stamped all the cuttings hard down into the mud at the bottom of the hide, asking him to get rid of the two long plaits and come back when she called him. Obediently he kicked out a trench at the lake side and buried them. Indignation returned in a rush as he imagined her combing out that Slav glory and hating it.

She did not call. She came out and paraded herself in front of him with the impersonality of a mannequin. He was beginning to understand her now. She was not going to smile until he did—or until she saw the quality of his smile. She must have found nothing but admiration and amusement in it, for she giggled happily. She looked more like a Salvation Army bandsman recovering from alcoholic dropsy than a schoolboy but the disguise would pass.

‘A bit too pink and white,’ he said. ‘What about a streak of mud?’

‘Wait till we come to some dust, David.’

When they did, she rubbed a handful into her face and brushed it off. The result was definitely more masculine. They had no trouble with the only person they met: a fisherman with a net over his shoulder who asked where they had come from.

‘This little bastard ran away from school,’ Bernardo said.

‘People who have enough to eat,’ the fisherman replied, looking pointedly at the well-filled tunic, ‘owe it to the rest of us to learn their lessons.’

‘You speak Romanian well,’ Nadya said as they continued on their way to Giurgiu and its railway station.

‘Enough for us to speak it together, I hope. And we can
always use French. But we must never, never speak English from now on.’

‘Aren’t you English?’

‘I am David Mitrani and I was born in Roman. I only know a few words of English.’

She switched to Romanian then and there without question. It was far more fluent than his own, spoken with a slight accent which slurred the clarity of Latin vowels. She would probably be recognised as coming from the former Russian province of Bessarabia and it was credible that she could be his brother or cousin.

‘But you could not have done anything wrong.’

‘Not to start with. I’m improving daily.’

‘So I shall make everything more difficult for you.’

‘No, you won’t. I think you are lucky like Joan of Arc.’

‘Why Joan?’

‘She always did the right thing and then said that God told her to.’

‘Well, if he hadn’t, it would not have been the right thing, would it?’

By four in the afternoon they were in Bucarest unremarked and unquestioned. He gave her a solid meal with what was left of his money and then took her straight to his room at the Principesa. That would be all right for a day or two since their times for sleeping did not coincide. He was not allowed to bring in women but a boy was permissible. The highly heterosexual Romanians did not jump easily to scandalous conclusions.

Having comb and mirror now, they made a respectable job of the hair. When it was brushed back from the centre parting she had always had, Bernardo found that he had given her the fashionable cut of the time, right for a Romanian officer but not a schoolboy. He let it stand. There soon ought to be some way of returning her to her own sex without risk. Nadya Stepanov was undoubtedly dead and nobody was going to look for her in Bucarest.

He asked her what her real name was. Nadya Philippovna Andreyev, she answered and then, as if to prove it, undid the top of her tunic and pulled out what she had called her wallet: a small, flat box of soft leather with traces of gold and red stamping now worn away by sweat and friction. She extracted a black-creased document and two photographs: one of a tall, robust man in his forties so bearded that it was hard to distinguish any features but large, kindly eyes, the other of a lovely young woman in ancient Russian costume.

‘My father and mother,’ she said. ‘And that is my birth certificate. I have nothing else.’

She was seventeen, older than he had thought.

‘Tell me how you came to Romania.’

‘All of it?’

‘What you like.’

‘I want you to know everything, but there is so much. Little bits will come out day after day. You must fit them in.’

Day after day. Put like that, the prospect of being stuck indefinitely with an adopted sister disquieted him. Yet any breath of permanency was somehow soothing when he could not even use his own name and had no real existence outside himself.

She sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on knees, her hands clasped under her chin, trying so earnestly to preserve a sequence of time when all that mattered most came last or in the middle. It was, with personal variations, the story of hundreds of thousands—the beginning, old Bernardo pointed out, of our Age of the Refugee. Those Russians had been the flower of the people, indistinguishable from the rest in blood and religion. A diseased flower, certainly, when it came to the Bobos. But the vast majority was of squires and merchants and government servants passionately in love with the great sweep and culture of their country, eager to reform its society and guilty only of hesitation.

Her family was one of old-fashioned, prosperous merchants
with a house on the Povarskaia in Moscow. The Andreyevs were too content with their solid position in this life and assurance of the next to run after the landed nobility and the court of St. Petersburg. They imitated high society only in speaking French at home and English in the schoolroom—not that they despised their native language, but they were very conscious, trading as they did from Riga to Pekin, of the world of empires.

In 1917 they couldn’t believe it. Holy Russia could not behave like that. No, they couldn’t believe it until towards the end of the winter the Povarskaia house was invaded by anarchists and turned into a nest of murder and loot. Some of the servants were shot for no reason but sport; those who escaped barricaded themselves upstairs with the Andreyevs. The rioters collapsed, rolling drunk, before they could break in, and the Andreyev party were able to escape at the back of the house, lowering themselves by knotted sheets with all the jewellery and furs they could lay hands on.

Nadya’s recollections of the months which followed were empty. They lived with friends. Friends came to see them. But she was never allowed out of the house. And then, without warning, her father, mother, brother and sister were all in a boat going down the Volga with their papers in order.

Trotsky in April 1918 at last had the time to impose discipline on Moscow. The anarchists were cleared out of the Povarskaia by the army and their corpses removed. Though his house had been burned down in the fighting Andreyev called on Trotsky in person, saying that he knew he could never expect compensation but wished to congratulate the Commissar for War on the return to order. No, Nadya did not think it daring. Her father’s goodness and patriotism had always made him welcome in government offices. Bernardo could imagine Andreyev facing the great man with a sturdy innocence like Nadya’s own, idealist to idealist.

In that short interim when the Bolsheviks appeared to be firmly in the saddle commerce had to be restarted. Andreyev,
coming in like that out of the blue, must have presented himself—to the snap judgement of an exhausted man—as a gamble which would do no harm and might do good, for he was known to everyone and genuinely understood that the Government was going all out to restore administration. He was chosen to travel down to Astrakhan reassuring the merchants on his way, and allowed to take his wife and children with him.

They had not gone far down the Volga before her father saw that no reassurance was possible, and as often as not nobody was left to be reassured. Orders from Moscow were meaningless to the local Soviets on his route, feverishly organising nothing into less than nothing. Andreyev decided to get out and remake his life and business somewhere between Persia and Bokhara. They sailed in a lugger owned by an Armenian straight down the Caspian to the Persian port of Enzeli.

Nadya was then ten years old. She remembered the week on the empty Caspian as if it had been a glimpse of heaven between a past which was unintelligible and a future of terrifying helplessness. The Andreyevs were at last out of trouble and still together. She welcomed Enzeli, low-lying and warm, with longed-for fruit in the market. It was the first foreign land she had ever seen, the first of her three frontiers.

For one last day heaven carried on as they rode up the pass through the fresh green of the Caspian forest where the roadside was carpeted with fairy-tale flowers. Movement was all the other way, of straggling, hungry troops drifting without discipline from the Turkish front down to Enzeli. Most of them did not know what the Revolution was all about, but they had had enough of war and were going home.

Andreyev loved his fellow countrymen, right or wrong, and this jovial sense of fellowship compelled him to stop and talk with the soldiers they met. Though peace of a sort had been concluded with the Germans, he argued that Russian armies should still be defending Christian civilisation against
the Moslem. With one weary band of deserters near the top of the pass he might have been too positive. An officer, till then neglected and ignored, was suddenly overcome by this kindly voice speaking of duty and tradition. With Russian abandon he leaped into the discussion—if it was a discussion—and stood by Andreyev telling his men to listen. A bored soldier picked up his rifle and shot the pair of them dead.

Nadya, weeping over her father, appreciated little of what happened then and only knew what she was told afterwards by her mother who continually blamed herself for not taking the children on into Persia. The soldiers themselves were shocked. They had finished with killing, or thought they had, and this was so unnecessary a crime. When they had lightly buried Andreyev and their officer in the woods, they swore to look after mother and children and start them on their way back to Moscow.