Yakimov was growing tired. His coat hung hot and heavy on his shoulders. He wondered if he could find some sort of lodging for the night, making his usual promise to pay next day.
As he went on, the quayside widened into an open cobbled space where a gritty wind sprang up and blew feathers into his face. On the further side, near a main road, stood several crates packed with live fowl. This, he realised, was a chicken market, the source of the pervading stench.
He crossed to the crates and took down one so that the others formed a seat. He sat protected by the crates behind him. The hens, stringy Balkan birds, stirred and cackled a while, then slept again. From somewhere in the market a clock struck nine. He had been wandering about for two hours or more. He sighed. His fragile body had become too heavy to move. Wedging his case out of sight between the crates, he drew up his feet, put down his head and slept.
When awakened by the long scream of a braking car, he murmured: ‘Unholy hour, dear boy’, and tried to turn round. His knees struck the wire of the coop behind him. The cramp in his limbs forced him to full consciousness. He scrambled up to see what vehicles could be passing, so erratically and in such profusion when it was barely daylight. He saw a procession of mud-caked lorries swerving and swaying on the crown of the road. One lorry dipped towards the kerb, causing him to jump back in alarm. As it straightened and went on, he gazed after it, shocked, the more so because he himself drove with inspired skill.
Behind the lorries came a string of private cars – a seemingly endless string: all the same mud-grey, all oddly swollen in shape, the result, Yakimov realised, of their being padded top and sides with mattresses. The windscreens were cracked. The bonnets and wings were pockmarked. Inside the cars, the passengers – men, women and children – lay about, abandoned in sleep. The drivers nodded over the steering-wheels.
Who could they be? Where had they come from? Aching, famished, racked by the light of this unfamiliar hour, Yakimov did not try to answer his questions. But the destination of the cars? Looking where they were heading, he saw tall, concrete buildings evolving pearly out of the pinks and blues of dawn. Beacons of civilisation. He followed the road towards them.
After walking a couple of miles, he reached the main square as the sun, rising above the roof-tops, flecked the cobblestones. A statue, heavily planted on a horse too big for it, saluted the long, grey front of what must be the royal palace. At either end of the palace workmen had started screwing pieces of pre-fabricated classical façade on to scaffolding. The rest of the square was, apparently, being demolished. He crossed to the sunlit side where a white, modern building proclaimed itself the Athénée Palace Hotel. Here the leading cars had come to rest. Only a few of the occupants had roused themselves. The rest slept on, their faces ashen and grim. Some of them had roughly bandaged wounds. In one car, Yakimov noticed, the grey upholstery was soaked with blood.
He pushed through the hotel’s revolving door into a marble hall lit brilliantly with glass chandeliers. As he entered, his name was called aloud: ‘Yakimov!’
He started back. He had not received this sort of welcome for many a day. He was the more suspicious when he saw it came from a journalist called McCann, who when they met in the bars of Budapest had usually turned his back. McCann was propped up on a long sofa just inside the vestibule, while a man in a black suit was cutting away the blood-soaked shirt-sleeve which stuck to his right arm. Yakimov felt enough concern to approach the sofa and ask: ‘What has happened, dear boy? Can I do anything to help?’
‘You certainly can. For the last half-hour I’ve been telling these dumb clucks to find me a bloke who can speak English.’
Yakimov would have been glad to sink down beside McCann, feeling himself as weak as any wounded man, but the other end of the sofa was occupied by a girl, a dark beauty, haggard and very dirty, who sprawled there asleep.
Leaning forward in an attitude of sympathetic enquiry, he hoped McCann would not want much of him.
‘It’s this!’ McCann’s left hand dug clumsily about in the jacket that lay behind him. ‘Here!’ – he produced some sheets torn from a notebook – ‘Get this out for me. It’s the whole story.’
‘Really, dear boy! What story?’
‘Why, the break-up of Poland; surrender of Gdynia; flight of the Government; the German advance on Warsaw; the refugees streaming out, me with them. Cars machine-gunned from the air; men, women and children wounded and killed; the dead buried by the roadside. Magnificent stuff; first hand; must get it out while it’s hot. Here, take it.’
‘But how do I get it out?’ Yakimov was almost put to flight by the prospect of such an arduous employment.
‘Ring our agency in Geneva, dictate it over the line. A child could do it.’
‘Impossible, dear boy. Haven’t a bean.’
‘Reverse the charges.’
‘Oh, they’d never let me’ – Yakimov backed away – ‘I’m not known here. I don’t speak the language. I’m a refugee like yourself.’
‘Where from?’
Before Yakimov had time to answer his question, a man thrust in through the doors, moving all his limbs with the unnatural fervour of exhaustion. He rushed at McCann. ‘Where, please,’ he asked, ‘is the man with red hairs in your car?’
‘Dead,’ said McCann.
‘Where, please, then, is the scarf I lent to him? The big, blue scarf?’
‘God knows. I’d guess it’s underground. We buried him the other side of Lublin, if you want to go back and look.’
‘You buried the scarf? Are you mad that you buried the scarf?’
‘Oh, go away!’ shouted McCann, at which the man ran to the wall opposite and beat on it with his fists.
Taking advantage of this diversion, Yakimov began to move off. McCann seized a fold of his coat and gave a howl of rage: ‘For God’s sake! Come back, you bastard. Here I am with this arm gone, a bullet in my ribs, not allowed to move – and here’s this story! You’ve got to send it, d’you hear me? You’ve got to.’
Yakimov moaned: ‘Haven’t had a bite for three days. Your poor old Yaki’s faint. His feet are killing him.’
‘Wait!’ Pushing impatiently about in his coat again, McCann brought out his journalist’s card. ‘Take this. You can eat here. Get yourself a drink. Get yourself a bed. Get what you damned well like – but first, ’phone this stuff through.’
Taking the card and seeing on it the picture of McCann’s lined and crumpled face, Yakimov was slowly revivified by the possibilities of the situation. ‘You mean they’ll give me credit?’
‘Infinite credit. The paper says. Work for me, you dopey duck, and you can booze and stuff to your heart’s content.’
‘Dear boy!’ breathed Yakimov; he smiled with docile sweetness. ‘Explain again, rather slowly, just what you want poor Yaki to do.’
3
The Pringles settled into a small hotel in the square, on the side opposite the Athénée Palace. Their window looked out on to ruins. That day, the day after their arrival, they had been awakened at sunrise by the fall of masonry. At evening, as Harriet watched for Guy’s return, she saw the figures of workmen, black and imp-small in the dusk, carrying flares about the broken buildings.
These buildings had been almost the last of the Biedermeier prettiness bestowed on Bucharest by Austria. The King, who planned a square where, dared he ever venture out so openly, he might review a regiment, had ordered that the demolitions be completed before winter.