Spy’s Honour

43

To find the roots of a continental city, look for the easily defended: the high ground, or the river-as-moat. Or in Buda, both. The rambling flat-topped ridge of Castle Hill rose only a few hundred feet above the river, but it rose sharply, stiffened by thick walls that by now seemed to grow out of the rock. The wide river hurried past less than a quarter of a mile away below, and from the ramparts a single field gun would dominate the whole area of Pest on the far side.

Behind the walls was a city in miniature, complete in grandeur and squalor. The Royal Palace with its eight hundred and sixty recently refurbished rooms waited for the Emperor to recall that he was also Hungary’s King and drop in for a night, the Coronation Church (where he had dropped in long enough to be crowned, over sixty years ago) studded with needle spires like a startled hedgehog, a host of ministries, barracks, town houses originally built by Turkish merchants and alleyways that once housed the Danube fishermen.

And the Panna Tavern.

Hazay had met Ranklin’s request perfectly. They entered from a crooked alleyway through a door in an ironbound gate, already plodding against a frothing tide of violin music. And there ahead of them, at the end of a small courtyard crammed with tables, was a vine-roofed bandstand with a gypsy band sawing and strumming for dear life. Or cash.

A waiter, obviously familiar with, and primed by, Hazay weaved them through the crowd to a side table with chairs for six. Seeing Ranklin’s surprise, Hazay explained: “I thought Miss Hornbeam would like to meet some of my friends – poets, writers – who might come by. If not,” he shrugged and smiled, “they will go away.”

“Why, I’d just love to meet your friends,” Lucy smiled back, and Ranklin relaxed. Unless somebody found a cat bone in their chicken, the evening looked like being a success. He raised his wineglass and silently wished equal success to Hornbeam’s lecture – and the burglary of his room.

“Of course they are all real gypsies,” Hazay was telling Lucy. “Who will pretend to be a … an outcast, a wanderer, a thief? Myself,” he added wickedly, “I do not believe the stories in the country villages that they are also blood-sucking – vampires – and cannibals.”

Lucy was listening, wide-eyed, and Hazay was enjoying himself: gypsies were a journalist’s dream people since whatever you said about them somebody had said – and believed – before, so you were only reporting, not inventing. The music swirled about them, alternately wild tavern dances and slow melancholy tunes that the locals seemed to soak up and appreciate without for one moment stopping their eating and arguing.

“Czermak, he was a nobleman who took his violin and joined the gypsies,” Hazay was saying, “and Czinka Panna – this cafe is named for her – she was most rare, a woman violinist, that was nearly two centuries ago, and the great Bihari … who knows who was the best? Their music was never written down, nobody alive has heard them play, now it is only memories of memories …”

The band-leader violinist had worked his way towards them, playing a tune for each table that asked. He was authentically dark and swarthy, but short and tubby, too; Ranklin recognised his own unromantic shape. But when Hazay tore a banknote in two, licked one half (you’re a braver man than I am, Ranklin thought) and stuck it to the leader’s forehead and he began to play, he seemed to grow in dignity and even height. The music flowed out of him like a familiar tale from a natural storyteller. That was all it was, a simple retelling of simple musical emotions, and if the magic was in the ear of the behearer – and in the wine in the behearer, too – then Lucy seemed ready to settle for that.

The band-leader finished, got the second half of the banknote, and moved on with a deep bow to Lucy. Then they realised that two of the spare chairs were occupied, a new bottle of wine was on the table, and Hazay did the introductions. Miro was small, dark, with a thin face and jerky expressions, as if afraid he would be late with the appropriate one. Tibor was large, slow, bear-like, with what seemed like a fringe of fur rather than beard on his face. Both appeared to be that vague age of old students and young poets; Mitteleuropa cafe philosophers, Ranklin thought unkindly, not welcoming the effort of new acquaintances this late.

They greeted Lucy with great warmth, quickly establishing that she (a) thought Budapest was wonderful, and (b) didn’t know Tibor’s cousin in Brooklyn. But their real interest seemed to be in Hazay.

“Miro’s worried about the peace talks in Bucharest,” Tibor explained, as Miro and Hazay chattered quickly in Magyar. “Stefan knows all the latest news, and Miro is writing a poem.”

“A poem?” Lucy couldn’t see the connection; Tibor looked surprised at her surprise.

Ranklin intervened: “If he’d said a speech or an article, you wouldn’t have thought it odd. Well, here a poem does the same thing.”

Tibor beamed at Ranklin. “Yes, you understand. Why not a poem?”

“Why not?” Lucy agreed, smiling.

“He blames the warmongers in Vienna for urging Bulgaria into starting the war she has just lost …”

Miro broke off from Hazay to explain, found his English wasn’t quick enough for his thoughts and switched into German, with Tibor interpreting: “No, he blames Russia – I am sorry, he blames both. Both wanted the war … Vienna wanted Bulgaria to win, Russia wanted her to lose, why? … I understand, so Turkey would grab back Adrianople herself but it will cause less trouble to take it from Turkey, who has no friends – ”

“Except the Kaiser,” Hazay suggested.

“ – than from Bulgaria.” Miro muttered something, Hazay laughed and Tibor tried to translate: “He says to … to do something rude to the Kaiser. That will not be in his poem, I think.”

Miro said more.

“… so the Habsburgs and the Romanovs act in one royal conspiracy for opposite reasons … the sufferer is the ordinary soldier who has no illusions, who knows he will die on the battlefield … Pigshit!” Tibor bellowed. “The one illusion a soldier has is that we will live through anything! If he thinks he is going to die, he runs away!”

Nobody seemed to notice the shout except Lucy, and Ranklin who was thinking: so Tibor’s been a soldier. But with conscription, so had every man in the cafe except the gypsy band and, it seemed, Miro. Now he sat silent and frowning, presumably recasting a verse.

Ranklin took advantage of the lull to ask Hazay: “What is the news of the peace conference?”

Hazay put on his diffident smile. “The Great Powers want a part in the final decision …”

“Ha! Let them stay out,” Tibor grunted. “They were six months in London to make new frontiers and how long did they last? – six days. And if Miro is right, already two of your Great Powers worked to destroy the treaty before it is signed even.”

“Count Berchtold says …”

“Tbe Foreign Minister in Vienna,” Ranklin whispered to Lucy.

“I know,” Lucy didn’t whisper back.

“… he says that any agreement reached without Austria-Hungary can only be provisional.”

“Let the Balkans settle their own frontiers,” Tibor growled.

“That was what this last war was for, no?” Hazay said.

Ranklin felt he ought to say something; just sitting and listening could arouse suspicion. But he was pretty sure that anything he said would be wrong.

“No frontiers are ever going to be completely just,” he said cautiously. “Or where do you stop before every village, every house, is a nation? The Balkans need to start exporting things they can sell, not just nationalist fervour.”

Miro glared at him, pale-faced and dark-eyed; he obviously understood English better than he spoke it, and gabbled out an answer.

Tibor interpreted again: “He asks do you want a life of comfort or a road to travel? Do you want an armchair or a cause?”

Ranklin felt himself being dragged into the whirlpool. “Europe’s elephant country. If you startle the elephants in Vienna and Berlin and Paris and St Petersburg – ”

“And London?” Hazay suggested.

“Yes, and London, too – into a stampede, they won’t watch where they put their feet.”

Tibor leant his big arms on the table. “So, your fine grey men in London will tell these peoples that nationalism is dangerous, hey? These peoples whose nationalism has liberated them from four hundred years of Turkish rule? Come again in four hundred more years and tell them then – if you can also tell them how to untangle the flags of liberty and nationalism.”

Yes, Ranklin thought sadly, I was wrong. Oh, I was right, but so in his own way is Tibor – and so, in many ways, are so many others. And suddenly, before he realised why, he felt a terrible fear, as if the courtyard had vanished to leave him alone in a vast cold desert.

Until that moment, like anyone else thinking about a European war, he had wondered what might start it. But he should have been like the man in the story who, shown Niagara Falls for the first time and told proudly how many millions of gallons of water poured over it, had asked simply: “What’s to stop it?”

“Perhaps,” he said, looking over their heads, perhaps to reassure himself of the courtyard walls; “we all have this disease of war. Only we’re not showing all the symptoms yet and we haven’t started dying.” He looked at Tibor. “You and I could be enemies tomorrow.”

Tibor sat back, smiling uneasily. “You would be a soldier?”

“For my nationalism? Oh yes. As you would for yours.”

Hazay said: “Each on top of your elephant.”

They grabbed the silly image gratefully and roared with laughter, then poured more wine and Ranklin offered round his case of English cigarettes and everyone lit one – even Lucy.

But after one more glass, Miro had to get away to his poem, and Tibor decided to go with him. He shook Ranklin’s hand and then, on an impulse, hugged him. “So,” he said, standing back, “we must meet at Philippi.”

“Perhaps we’ll neither of us find the way.”

They took the evening with them. Ranklin paid the bill, watching Hazay’s expression to make sure he got the complicated division of the tip right, while Lucy asked: “Will he get his poem published?”

“Somewhere,” Hazay said. “Perhaps not in Nyugat, but in some magazine. I will help if it is needed. And,” he smiled at Ranklin, “if you wish to write a poem in answer, I will translate it for you.”

And even when it seemed I was being honest, Ranklin thought, I was just hiding the fact that I am already your enemy. That’s why I’m here.

“Thank you, but no. Poetry isn’t really my style,” he said.