Free The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown by Geoffrey Household Page B

far-away, white walls of a Kalmody village and, beyond it, the blue line of Transylvania and the foothills of the Carpathians. It was impossible not to be momentarily at peace in that isolated depository of handouts for horses.
    The sun was setting when he saw Nepamuk emerge from the line of trees coming towards them from the direction of the house, not the stables. Presumably he had news for Perico or was anxious about his prisoner’s absence at an hour when Bernardo should have been helping himself from the table of drinks at the end of the hall. The steward stumpedacross the paddocks with his usual air of a self-important government official, turning about to close gates as if on parade and continuing his march to the stacks.
    Ignoring Bernardo except for a nod, he stopped five yards from Perico instead of walking up to him and sharply beckoned to him to approach. He spoke at length and slowly so that Perico might understand. It was like listening to a couple of talking statues: Nepamuk commanding, Perico disregarding bad manners and occasionally responding with the coldness of a Spaniard standing on his rights.
    ‘He says I have no permit to be in Hungary and that I cannot work here,’ Perico explained. ‘I’ve no objection but he must pay my fare back to Argentina.’
    Bernardo repeated this in English, and thereafter both of them used him as interpreter.
    ‘Nothing abaht that in ’is contract, Mr. Brown.’
    Perico insisted that there was, but added that he would not mind taking another job until the Count came home.
    ‘No, ’e can’t.’
    ‘What is he to do then?’ Bernardo asked.
    ‘Go and eat ’orse turd for all I care.’
    Bernardo was so angry that he translated this exactly.
    Perico took two steps forward and let Nepamuk have it in Spanish. Roughly speaking, he had been born in a brothel where his mother had brought him up as a bugger boy and taught him to steal from their joint customers as he did to this day from the Count. Bernardo passed all this on with relish and at the full speed of a United Nations interpreter, adding a few personal details when he could not immediately jump on the English equivalent of the fighting language of up-country Argentina. Nepamuk slapped Perico’s face, still with dignity as if he were an insolent peasant of the estate.
    Bernardo grabbed his friend’s wrist as the knife blade glowed red in the last of the sun.
    ‘Careful, Perico! What you like, but not that in a foreign country.’
    ‘What I like? Good, then! What I like, and I go for ever.’
    Perico jumped back for his pitchfork and lunged at Nepamuk, stopping an inch from his broad stomach.
    ‘March! Or it goes in.’
    Nepamuk appealed to Bernardo, assuming that he must be on the side of property and stewards, just or unjust. Bernardo was not. His personal loathing of Nepamuk did not really count, for at that time he was still a mild-mannered fellow who could not approve of violence as an expression of dislike. What did count was his resentment of the indecent power of the man over these cheerful, kindly people like Perico and Kovacs. In the case of the latter the true culprit had not been Nepamuk, but he was in no mood for distinctions. He was finally revolted by the whole set-up—no money, no identity, no freedom and then being used as a Kalmody
    ‘You’d better march. He means it,’ Bernardo answered.
    There was no arguing with a bloodthirsty groom from South America and a political prisoner who was himself a possible assassin. Nepamuk marched, pricked onwards by Perico through the line of stacks to the manure heap.
    ‘Down on your knees!’
    Nepamuk obeyed, turning to Perico in the belief that he was being forced to apologise.
    ‘Other way round! Crawl in, bastard!’
    ‘I can’t.’
    ‘Use your hands; Dig! Dig!’
    This time the prongs went through the seat of Nepamuk’s breeches. He screamed and dug until the steaming trench was four feet deep.
    ‘Now get a halter from the shed, Bernardo,