The Balkan Trilogy Read Free Page B

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, Yakimovdid 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 fa ç ade 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.