Free The Europe That Was by Geoffrey Household Page B

way the Gradina used to do them. He dozed uneasily until shaken up by renewed shunting. When that was over, he could not resist deep sleep.
    The discomfort of his own perspiration awoke him a little before midday. He poked head and then shoulders out of the top of the column. He was in the shadeless, dusty marshalling yards to the south of Bucharest. So long as he drew no attention to himself, there seemed no reason why he should not walk out into the city. He did so, greeting with an air of genial authority the casual groups of railway workers who were munching their loaves in the open doors of unloaded wagons.
    Devenor did not want to show himself in the centre of the city. There were too many people who knew his face and liked it well enough to cross the road with outstretched arms and a whoop of welcome. His tentative plan was to get in touch, as unobtrusively as possible, with Traian, a former headwaiter at the Gradina and a staunch friend. He wandered through the suburbs until he came to a garden café, dirty and barren, but large enough to possess a telephone.
    Traian no longer had a number, but there was one in the name of Devenor’s godson Ion. He was not at all surprised to find that Ion had not only ridden out the storm but provided himself with an excellent address. As an irresponsible youth of twenty he had had a police record of dangerous socialism. True, his opinions were a pose, adopted merely to annoy his intolerably correct relations at court, but those of his set who could have given him away were dead or in exile. Devenor was prepared to bet that war and revolution had only changed godson into an irresponsible youth of thirty.
    â€˜He treated me as if I’d just dropped in from the fields,’ Devenor said, ‘as if there were no reason in the world why I shouldn’t be in Bucharest. He even sent his car round to the cafe for me. He just told me that of course he had a car—how the devil did I think he was going to live without a car?’
    Over lunch in Ion’s luxurious flat, this show of idle riches was explained. Godson was an undersecretary—for he had always enjoyed yachting—in the Ministry of Marine.
    Devenor asked if he were a genuine communist, and got himself rebuked for indiscretion.
    â€˜My good Uncle,’ Ion had said, ‘you really must learn not to ask such frank and English questions. Do you suppose I want to be shot by your venerable side?’
    The excellent lunch was entirely unreal. Devenor seemed to himself to have moved back ten years in time, and not at all in space. Bucharest was going on—at any rate in the flat of a government official—exactly as before. At street level the June air was thunderous as ever and, six storeys up, the geraniums of Ion’s window boxes stirred in the light breeze. Devenor’s favourite white wine was on the table and cool in the decanter. There were rather less cars on the boulevard below and paint was needed and the inhabitants were shabby—but no shabbier than in the early nineteen-twenties.
    â€˜I couldn’t believe it was possible to be shot,’ Devenor would declare. ‘It was just as improbable as my godson being a communist undersecretary.’
    Over the coffee he explained how he had arrived in the country and why. His godson followed the story with irreverent laughter and keen questioning. Then, at the end, he asked the most devastating question of all.
    â€˜Uncle John,’ he said, ‘how many of us would it hold?’
    Devenor couldn’t understand that at all. He asked Ion why in the world he should want to go to Ploesti by fractionating column instead of by car.
    â€˜Not Ploesti, Uncle. Turkey.’
    â€˜It isn’t going to Turkey.’
    â€˜But why shouldn’t it?’
    Godson Ion accused him of becoming intolerably insular, of wholly underrating the lively genius of the Romanian character and the powers of the people’s ministries. He