Sigh for a Strange Land

Summary

This is the story of a people who have lost their freedom, but not their character, behind the Iron Curtain. It is told by Resi, an appealing adolescent, not yet woman; she is sensitive, hungry for what life has not given her, resourceful in the face of the police. An orphan, she has been living since the war with her Aunt Natasha, once a beauty of the old order and still impervious to the discipline of the new. As the story opens, Resi is prowling the wards of the Racnik hospital searching for her aunt, whom she rightly suspects has been on a binge. On their way home they notice men running, they hear rifle shots and people shouting, the shops have all been closed up, and when they reach the block of their grim apartment, it is in flames.

Boris, Aunt Natasha’s dearest friend, has been searching for them, and he secretes them in his big truck with his three circus horses, which are his livelihood. That midnight they drive away from the revolution and cross the border into the free world; when Resi wakes, they are being installed by the Red Cross in a municipal dormitory. Now they are refugees in a land of unpurchasable plenty. In the intervals of their escape, Natasha has been telling Resi of her lifelong love for Boris and of the scandal which prevented their marriage. With Boris to guide them, they climb out through the lavatory window to examine the city in which they have taken refuge.

IT HAD rained earlier, but now the sun was shining, and green roof tiles, gilded shop signs, immaculate plate glass threw off sparks of refracted light, so that the air seemed to be alive with golden confetti. Neither Boris nor Aunt Natasha spoke at first, but tilted their faces to the cool bright sunshine with tentative enjoyment, like convalescents. Anxious to discover what was happening, yet dreading doing so, we walked circumspectly, trying to prolong this moment, to limit our attention to our linked arms and the sunshine on our faces.

Halfway down the next street, which was full of traffic — I’d never before seen so many motor vehicles in one place — we were attracted by a prodigious delicatessen store. The vast window’s centerpiece was a glass-fronted silver machine in which a chicken roasted on a revolving spit. Either side stood massive hams, their outsides neatly bread-crumbed, their insides the color of dark-pink roses. Spread around these in tiers were shallow white china dishes containing black and green olives, soft-fleshed tan mushrooms, smoothskinned coppery sausages, the harlequin colors of vegetable salad, artichokes with gray-green mauvetopped leaves firm as if sculpted, beetroots with their darkly crimson juice turned cherry color where it dissolved into a moat of sour cream, pies with richly glazed and crusted tops.

“What will it be?” asked Boris, with a look of modest triumph.

“We haven’t got any of this money,” I said regretfully.

Boris put his hand in his pocket, and produced a jingling sound.

“There’s something to be said for the habits acquired by a lifetime of looting,” said Aunt Natasha.

“You overestimate me, my dear. In fact I was paid the day before yesterday and had the money on me, and a jockey down at the stables changed it. What shall we have?”

“Pie’s best for eating with fingers.”

We bought three slices of pork pie, and two bottles of beer, to be kept for later. We ate the pie as we walked, chewing each mouthful as long as possible and not dropping a crumb.

“We’d certainly better spend this money.”said Boris, “otherwise it may be taken off us or devaluated. Refugees are pouring in.”

“And being sent where?” In spite of sunshine and pie, I was still full of dread.

“Nowhere. We’re not allowed to move for the moment. Otherwise,” Boris sounded apologetic, “this country would be overrun — we’re in the position of rabbits.”

“What ought we to do?”

“Stay put.” Boris looked from one to the other of us, almost accusingly. “Some who came across yesterday are already talking of going back.”

“What did they leave behind?”

“Their hearts. So they think now.” Boris spoke angrily, for him. “But I don’t want either of you listening to oratory. Insofar as in us lies, we three are going to stay together — and stay put. From now on they can count us out. You and I are too old, Natasha.”

“We’ve left our hearts across frontiers before,” she agreed.

“And Resi’s too young.”

“People younger than I am fight. I thought of that fifteen-year-old partisan whom they hanged in the forest.

“Do you want to fight, Resi?”

For a second I hesitated. One is often told that it’s difficult to speak the truth, but it seems to me that the difficulty lies in accepting the truth oneself before speaking. Dishonesty being contagious,

I should not have admitted at school that I dreaded fighting, hated and feared violence. But here, beside Aunt Natasha and Boris, I could accept my cowardice and admit that all I wanted right now was for us three to be left together, to be left alone.

“Just stick to that,” said Boris, anxiety in his voice and look. I took his arm. Presently he relaxed and said, “I suggest we find a café where we can read the papers. That will be our best way of finding out what’s happening. I seem to remember a big place in the center of town where no one pays any attention to anyone else.”

“Have you been here before?” I asked, surprised.

“A long time ago. When I was another person, and it was another country. But I dare say the café is still there. Cafés are likely to outlast governments.”

“One of the few facts that suggest man is not completely insane,” said Aunt Natasha.

She and Boris smiled at each other, and suddenly I saw a young girl skating with a young officer in a Russian city of glittering bulbous roofs. Their narrowly booted feet slid forward, leaving silver tracks on the ice’s powdery surface. They were as vivid to me as if my own memory had supplied the picture, and when I looked from them to Boris and Aunt Natasha in their present state, the latter were aureoled for me by the fact of owning pasts in which there had been enough love to allow for emotional extravagance. Knowing myself incapable of it, I particularly admired extravagance, and this admiration gave my love for them a new dimension. They had always satisfied me; now they disturbed my imagination. I had always loved them as they were; now I was falling in love with what they had been.

BORIS’ café was still where he had left it and not, he said, much altered: a comfortable place with steamy plate-glass windows, damson-colored chairs plushily upholstered, shining spittoons, and potted plants. A tiny, yellow-eyed boy in a green baize apron was polishing leathery leaves with drops of liquid which he carefully shook onto a red cloth. Big gilt-framed mirrors, which gave the room visual extensions, had plump nymphs enameled over their surfaces, and no one seemed to be spying on anyone else. Which didn’t prevent our choosing the table furthest from everyone, just to be on the safe side. On it was a bowl half full of lumps of sugar, which we quickly divided and pocketed.

Boris and Aunt Natasha ordered beer, and I had chocolate, which came in a thin china cup. This tasted rather different from thick china, and very different from plastic. A little way behind where we sat hung a score of newspapers, each fastened into a chunky wooden stick with a metal hook at its top. Having fetched several of these, Boris gave us each one. Smiling at a Swiss paper, Aunt Natasha said, “Do you remember that day in Geneva? Resi must see Geneva sometime.”

She had never before spoken as if there were any likelihood of my traveling. Now here we were abroad, and, all at once, it was home that seemed foreign, the unfamiliar home evoked in big letters on the front pages of the unfamiliar newspapers drooping like flags at half-mast from their wooden spines. Reading the dogmatic headlines patrolled by exclamation marks, I could think only of details unmentioned here: a policeman smiling dreadfully on a doorstep where he was not welcome; a ragged toothless old woman mending a useless chair beside a wrecked tank; the smell of human sweat and of horses’, the former more acid, the latter more pungent; the crackling sound of burning and the sensation of smarting eyelids. From such fragments of confusion these papers had created a “long-expected uprising” about which everything was clear at a first reading — but less so at a second one. Long expected by whom? By “all thinking people” said one paper, in an article illustrated by a photograph of crowds shaking their fists. “That’s the spirit” was the caption under this. “The eyes of the world” were upon us, stated another paper.

Looking round the room I felt fiercely glad of the players’ absorption in their chessmen, of the look of complicity the barman gave his glasses, of the yellow-eyed boy’s careful polishing of the leaves — of all these evidences of private preoccupations. Boris remarked that we’d better check on happenings at our billets.

It was just after passing the royal stables, which Boris pointed out to me with pride — nothing concerning animals is alien to him — that we collided with Ladislaus, carrying a rucksack and looking wretched. Seeing us he turned first red, then white, and began shouting greetings and slapping our backs, “What’s happening?” we asked him, while he was asking us.

Shaking his head and running his hands over his elbows, Ladislaus said that on “that morning” — already these words held particular significance for us; until the next disaster we would date events in our lives as before or after “that morning” — on that morning, then, Ladislaus had stayed home late to watch his cactus, one that flowers only every four years and was due to do so around then. Ladislaus had for this plant the feelings of both a lover and a policeman, and when at last he had to go out, to pick up tickets for the Saturday football game, he’d run all the way. Yes, the streets had been a bit emptier than usual. But he hadn’t paid too much attention to this at the time, what with the cactus and the football game. Ladislaus paused, shook his head gloomily, said, “It’s probably flowering now,” tugged at his right ear, and added incredulously, “Saturday’s today, isn’t it?” Then he went back to yesterday, when he had found the ticket office shut, which it had no business to be at that hour, and as he ran home he noticed a shop with a broken window, so immediately crossed the street, because thanks to the current obsession with juvenile delinquency anyone under twenty needs to watch other people’s steps. On the way he had run into our chemistry master, who had collected half a dozen boys and urged Ladislaus to join them. At the time he hadn’t been quite clear what it was all about. But now here he was. “I always act without thinking,” he concluded sadly.

“Not this time, you didn’t,” said Boris.

OUR lavatory window was still open, and Aunt Natasha and I got back to the main room without our absence rousing more than a few suspicious glances from persons who feared we might have been securing advantages. Once one is a refugee, one starts developing an exaggerated form of queue mentality. I could already feel it in myself. I would have gone to any lengths to secure an advantage, however unfairly, for Aunt Natasha.

A Red Cross woman came and asked if we were all vaccinated. By chance, Aunt Natasha and I had been done recently and, before going to the Racnik, I’d put the certificates in my purse on the you-never-can-tell principle. Some people immediately bared their arms and held them out, others cried that it was not their fault, others simply cried. Although vaccination is compulsory at home, some of the peasants still try to evade it on the grounds that it is the mark of the beast. The dogs barked, and an old woman exclaimed in a plummy but resonant voice that God would punish them and us, nodding to herself as if she found this very satisfactory.

Rumors began spreading like circles round the spot where a stone has dropped into a pond. The room grew stuffy with fear. People hurled questions at their neighbors but went on talking through the answers. Someone said they were burning everything, someone else that, on the contrary, they had been taught a lesson. An emotional voice expressed a wish to go home and spoke of rats and sinking ships, whereupon an even more emotional voice flared up and said, “Speak for yourself,” and the words “Huns, Mongolians, Tartars, barbarians” flew through the air like shapes of things to come. Just then a siren went off, making us jump and clutch each other. Feeling in her pocket, Aunt Natasha found a piece of bread and pressed it into my hands.

“Have you noticed that one’s appetite grows as food gets scarcer? I don’t know why people are constantly extolling nature’s way.”

“But we’ve had a lot to eat here.”

“That won’t last.”

“Why not?” I asked stupidly, trying not to listen for the bombs I expected to follow the siren.

“Because people soon get tired of refugees. The pattern seldom varies. First welcoming looks, eager handclasps, food and drink, all sincerely offered. They not only mean but want to wash our feet. But if crises last too long, if there are too many of us for existing charitable organizations — and there always are — then refugees are suddenly discovered to be ungrateful and given to intrigues. And of course we often are. We start by bringing out the best in some people, and end by bringing out the worst in everyone. I didn’t tell you this before, because back home it would have caused you nothing but nagging regret, but do remember now that whenever they close frontiers and stop individual travel, voluntary travel, which produces pleasure and commerce, then the next thing is mass involuntary travel — refugees — which produces only trouble. Look at us.”

The siren was mute now, and no bomb had fallen within earshot. Suddenly a door was slammed, footsteps rattled down the passage, hands were clapped, and a harassed voice said, “All together, please! Together. Don’t let’s have any stragglers. We want everyone out of here in half an hour.”

The voice continued explaining, but I stopped listening. Aunt Natasha was right. They were tired of us already, and although they were not responsible for our plight I felt angry, which I hadn’t yesterday: angry and frightened, and therefore eager to be unfair. The first stage of our outward journey was accomplished, and I was no longer an innocent traveler.

HUDDLED outside was a crowd of people in clothes that, though of different shades, now looked predominantly dun-gray. White-knuckled hands clutched nervously at suitcases, bundles, rucksacks, and baskets, and distress made every face angular. An official voice, as rational as its owner’s uniform, explained that we were only being transferred to the other side of town because these premises were actually needed for incoming refugees; things must be organized in stages, the screening process, buses will be provided, now will everyone just cooperate? But the voice’s moderation was powerless against the tornado of rumors.

Next to me an old woman, crying almost silently, whispered, “They’re going to send us back.” Immediately, a long-chinned neighbor contradicted her. “To a camp, more likely,” she said, then added briskly, as if deriving gratification from her own bitterness, “I knew we shouldn’t escape. All my family’ve died in camps. We’re intended for the crematorium, all right.” At the word “crematorium" the weeping woman gave the beginning of a thin scream, but quickly popped her rheumatism-twisted hand over her mouth. “Nothing personal intended,” grumbled the woman whose family had died in camps. “What kind of talk is that?” asked a dog owner. “Why exaggerate? So ungrateful. Enough to provoke destiny.”An argument started. But instead of spreading, as it usually does in crowds — those who know nothing about the matter under discussion being the most vociferous — this was restricted to half a dozen voices. The rest of us merely pressed closer together, trying to oppose destiny to calamity.

There were lampposts all along the street, and I told myself that if I could count them before the return of the uniformed woman, who had gone indoors to look for a missing number, then everything would be all right. I knew nothing could make everything all right, but this did not prevent my being relieved when I won my bet with myself. At last two big blue autocars drove round the corner, stopping in front of us. Instinctively we all drew back, as if these vehicles were dangerous animals crowned with luggage racks. Along the autocars’ smooth blue sides were metal letters, the words “tours” and “Venice” catching the light. As we climbed into the second one I asked Aunt Natasha if she had ever been to Venice, and she nodded. “One’s eyes are never hungry there; churches like great pearls, trees springing out of marble, the sound of water lapping against stone and, in the autumn, the taste of mushrooms and walnuts and cheese — the Venetians used to call tourists ‘the autumn people.’ ”

Squeezing her hand, I whispered, “Maybe we’ll go there together one day?”

“We’re moving in the right direction. But,”looking worried, “Venice is not a good place for horses. Even the fire engines are motorboats.”

We were driving through what seemed to be back streets. There was scarcely more traffic than at home and, here and there, fingers of grass showed between cobbles, wisps of straw blew out from wooden doorways, and a group of children stopped singing “Ringel, Ringel, Rosenkrantz” to stare as we passed. Then back to macadamized surfaces, traffic stagnant between clifflike warehouses. Next came more shops, well-covered women carrying baskets, and the road widening into a huge statued platz with a great church spiring up on the other side, its roof grass-green.

Sunlight had made way for grayness, and it was evening when at last we stopped in a narrow street of brick houses, old-fashioned rather than old, with nibbled stucco around doors and windows. We climbed out into a snow-carrying wind and were marshaled into a hall decorated with photographs of men in frock coats and commanding attitudes. There were also several notice boards. Even without these, one would have known this was a school from the smell of chlorine, chalk, and stale clothes.

The room where we were to sleep was very large, and contained army blankets as well as straw. Having arranged ours, Aunt Natasha and I sat down and did what Elsa’s father called casing the joint. Wooden bars striped the opposite wall, and in front of them stood a vaulting horse, a springboard, and a basket of Indian clubs. Ropes hanging from the ceiling were looped to the walls. I hoped we shouldn’t be awakened by gyrating athletes.

Suddenly my heart missed a beat. “Did we leave the schnapps in our broom cupboard?”

Aunt Natasha patted her coat. Reassured, my thoughts returned to her past. As we waited for cabbage soup, the smell of which was drifting into the room, I asked, “Darling, didn’t you see Boris again between your marriages?”

“But of course. I saw him again soon after my first marriage — and realized I had made a terrible mistake. But by then I had grown up enough to know my own foolishness was to blame, not my kind old husband, I had grown very fond of Anton. He allowed me to carry out all my plans for our peasants — which was more than they themselves did—and even took me traveling, which meant many sacrifices from a sportsman’s point of view, although of course our itineraries included a certain amount of animal slaughter.”

“But Boris?”

“Still in the army. We had parted sorrowfully yet pleased with ourselves. When one’s young, one can get a great deal of satisfaction out of an attitude, providing one’s not hungry. Later on it seemed impossible that I hadn’t missed Boris, but at the time I wasn’t dissatisfied with what I had. Inside the close quarters of marriage one is bound to love unless one hates — and I didn’t hate Anton. I came to have the tenderest feelings for him, and I shall never forget his gentleness when my mother died.”

“You mean my grandmother?”

“No, my father married again. Your grandmother was his second wife, Maria.”

“Did you know her?”

“Very well. As a girl I greatly admired her. She was the daughter of Czech friends of ours — their country was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire in those days, so you see one’s always in trouble of some kind — and she held views, which my mother considered unsuitable in a young girl. Maria was only a few years older than myself, tall and sallow, with beautiful yellow-flecked dark eyes, rather like yours. And there was something about her that suggested a captive — a fierce captive for whose imprisonment one was in some mysterious way responsible. She was a member of the intelligentsia, and made a point of speaking Russian.”

“Why not?”

“People of our kind usually spoke French. But Maria thought that wrong, like the way society was organized.”

“Did your father — my grandfather — feel that too?”

“Until my mother’s death, father sincerely believed everything a person of his class was expected to believe. Then loneliness made what amounted to a chemical change in him. He became a reading addict, discovering ideas as boys discover stamps; and Maria’s fierce young believingness was one of these stamps. Before he knew where he was, clandestine leaflets were as thick inside the house as autumn leaves outside and, shuffling eagerly among them, he became reacclimalized to love.”

“What was my father like as a child?”

“I didn’t see him after we’d left Russia. At the beginning of the 1914 War my husband had an honorary post at our embassy in Paris, and we stayed on. He died there just as the revolution was starting. Maria didn’t get in touch with me for several years.” She sighed. “I’d never seen your father when it all began, he was about five and they were living in the country then, near Moscow. One day a band of revolutionary soldiers arrived to requisition horses. Being pro-revolutionary, my father had no objection to handing over his horses. But the soldiers either thought his acquiescence suspect or were drunk — whatever the reason, they shot him, began to loot, then suddenly vanished without either explanations or horses.

“All Maria’s energy went to getting Vadim — your father —and herself out of Russia. San Remo was her goal. There was still a large Russian colony there, mostly people who had removed their money from Russia before the war, let alone before the revolution. Maria became gouvernante in a hotel there, and Vadim was sent to a good Italian school and became for all practical purposes Italian.”

“Did you see them often?”

“Not very. The world is a small place only for people with big incomes. Next time I went to Italy it was to see Vadim married.”

“Oh! What was my mother like?”

“You’re very like her.”

“Was she Russian too?”

“No, Italian. Well, French really. Her grandparents had been exiled from France after the Commune, and they had settled in Pisa. Your parents thought of themselves as Italians.”

“And that’s where I came in. But then, I was born a refugee.” I remembered Anna of the delicatessen store crying out, “ I always thought refugees were other people.” “It doesn’t say on my papers that I was born in Italy. Did they have to move on again?”

Aunt Natasha shook her head. “It was you that moved on, my darling, after they were dead —”

“Did they have natural deaths?”

Stretching out her hand, Aunt Natasha touched my face, running her forefinger over the bones’ outlines. A wave of useless longing swept over me. Mv parents were gone, and no matter how much I loved Aunt Natasha I could never have as a companion the young girl she had been; I had come too late. “I do love you,” I said, squeezing her hand and trying to thank her in kisses.

“Natural is such an ambiguous word, my pet,” she said softly. “Your mother’s death was natural — childbirth.”

“Of me?”

Aunt Natasha nodded.

“What happened to my father?”

“His misery look the forms of guilt, mysticism, of feelings that made him ill because his mind repudiated them. He became less and less capable of thinking what he was doing, or where he was going. In the end he was knocked down by, of all things, a tram. Here . . .”

Aunt Natasha dipped into a pocket and handed me a piece of bread, crumbs of wool clinging fluffily to it. I could taste tears and wool as well as bread, but the act of swallowing quieted me. “How did I get to you?” I asked.

“Your parents’ lawyer, Spiro, arranged things. I had told him to get in touch with me in case of trouble. I wasn’t going to have you in an institution. We could still travel then, you see.”

“Wasn’t it wartime?”

“The brink only. I got you home just before the Germans took us over. When that happened, Boris and I thought you had better have false papers.”

“Then I’m really Italian?”

“Really? Well, no. Technically you were, but really you’re a quarter Russian, a quarter Czech, a quarter French, and a quarter Italian.”

“No wonder you thought false papers were indicated.”

“It wasn’t so much that as the fact that your parents came under the heading intellectuals — and Vittoria, your mother, was half Jewish.”

Anti-Semitism was often discussed at school. Most people were against it, at least in theory. Reading about the war I had pitied Jews. Those poor people, I had said, seeing the star of David stamped into their flesh. Now they were no longer they. They had become we. For the first time I wondered why self-pity was generally deplored. It had been permissible for me to pity them as them. Why was it wrong for me to pity us? The situation was not radically changed by my participation in it. I understood now why Aunt Natasha had not spoken of this before. At home everyone has a police record, half of it secret, composed of other people’s denunciations, the other half a four-page questionnaire one fills in oneself or has filled in by one’s owner in the case of a child; and the most important part of this questionnaire concerns one’s origins: for example, artists are permissible, but teachers suspect, as are peasants if they ever owned more than twelve acres.

“Could we ever prove I’m me if we wanted to?” I asked.

“Your birth must have been registered at Pisa, though there’s been a lot of bombing there since. But if Spiro’s alive . . .”

“But, Aunt Natasha—”

“What, duck?”

“You were still in Paris. What had happened to get you here — at home, I mean — by the time you took me over?”

“An accident. One day I came out of that theater in the Champs Elysées where the Pitoeffs had just started acting, and jumped into a taxi. The driver kept craning round to look at me, but I took this as a tribute to my new hat, a cloche it was, all little blue-green feathers, how I loved it — never let anyone tell you, my pet, that there are better clothes than in Paris.

“Then suddenly, halfway down the Avenue du Bois — such a handsome avenue, smells of forests, and has a pink palace in it — suddenly the driver turned round and said in Russian, ‘So you are going to the Yusupovs, princess?’ and he stopped the taxi and it turned out that he had been a friend of my brother Yakov, so long ago it seemed, and we embraced and both sobbed a little.

“I discovered the driver knew Boris, too. He had got across the frontier to the nearest republic, where he found a job with a circus. Once I knew where he was, of course I had to join him.”

“How could you afford such a long journey?”

“I still had two pictures by Renoir. Anton had paid about five thousand francs for them, but by this time they were worth eighty thousand.” She sighed. “Though I was sorry to part with them. The people in Renoir’s pictures always seem to be having such a delicious time.”

“Wouldn’t it have been better for Boris to come to Paris?”

“He wanted to be near home, so as to cross the frontier if things changed. He always meant to go back. For years we lived as if in a station waiting room. In a way we still do. Though we know now that that particular train’s never going to come.”

From nearby came the rattle of plates. All round the room talk subsided, like gas fires popping out. Sitting there, I thought of my parents in the land where the orange tree grows, of Aunt Natasha in a cloche hat of blue-green feathers, of a taxi driver carrying news of Boris across Europe to a pink palace. I suddenly saw a picture of something that had happened to me at school. I was in the cloakroom, looking for my skating boots, when all at once Ladislaus, who wasn’t in my grade and had at that time not spoken to me more than twice, came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders, swung me round, and kissed me. At first I was angry, partly because I hate being taken by surprise, partly because Ladislaus obviously expected me to be flattered. Then he kissed me again, and although still annoyed, I was less so, and thought more of the kiss than of the situation, and then my annoyance melted into a new, an exquisite sensation that made me tremble and enjoy trembling. For several days afterward I longed to re-experience this sensation and, at first, was able to do so merely by remembering this kiss. But, perhaps because I employed it too often, this method soon lost its efficacy, and I began wanting other kisses, not from Ladislaus, yet I didn’t know from whom. But this phase didn’t last long.

I won a chess championship — this and geometry were the only school subjects at which I always did well — and soon forgot those few days of feverish longings. I hadn’t thought about them since, until now, when in a way I could not account for, they helped me understand Aunt Natasha’s story.

After we had drunk our soup, and I had told Aunt Natasha to finish the schnapps because she felt cold and the floor was drafty, we made ourselves comfortable and slept.

THE snore-filled room was still dark when I awoke, but the skylight had turned from black to gray. As I grew accustomed to the heaving sea of sleep around me, I realized that Aunt Natasha was breathing with a peculiar, light creakiness. I sat up and leaned over her. Her forehead was hot and dry, and she moved restlessly, as if trying to shake off a weight.

For a second I sat still, my heart thumping. Then I got up and crept out of the room to look for help: to look for people who weren’t strangers here themselves. In the entrance hall, between two large baize-covered notice boards, I spied a door marked “Porter.” I knocked, got no reply, turned the handle, and kept on rattling, muttering angrily to myself, “What are they paid for? just like an official. Oh, hurry, blast you, hurry, hurry, hurry.” Light appeared behind the curtained glass upper half of the door, and presently the curtain was pulled back by an elderly man in pajamas, his eyes bleary with interrupted sleep. I immediately began to grumble. At home I should have thought twice before doing this.

The porter patted my shoulders, first one, then the other, as if anxious to be fair to both. Then he tugged a uniform jacket over his pajamas, put a peaked cap over his few but tousled hairs, sat down at a rep-covered table, motioned me to do the same, and drew the two-piece telephone toward him.

When he laid down the receiver, he wiped his forehead and said, “Thank God, the ambulance will come. Perhaps it would be best to have the poor lady waiting here.” Shuffling in carpet slippers he opened a cupboard at the back of the room, tossed aside some flowerpots and half a dozen mousetraps, and produced a deck chair and an army blanket, with which we improvised a stretcher.

Daylight was seeping into the gymnasium by the time we crept back. But no one stirred. When we lifted Aunt Natasha onto the chair she only muttered in an odd, soft, clucking way, like birds’ talk. She was very flushed over the cheekbones, but I thought the empty schnapps bottle might account for that.

While we waited for the ambulance, the porter told me his name was Horst, that we were all in the Lord’s hands, but that this was no reason for not helping each other. Which didn’t prevent my worrying as to whether or not he would tell his syndicate what had happened. To my surprise he said he didn’t belong to a syndicate. He had this job because he was a veteran. I wondered if Boris would count as a veteran. This was when I began wondering if we three couldn’t find ourselves a porter’s lodge here, for a start.

Ten minutes later Aunt Natasha was in the ambulance, and Horst helped me climb after her. I begged him to look out for Boris and tell him where we were, and he reminded me to remember, should I forget his name, that he was Herr Chief Night Porter at the Empress Elizabeth Gymnasium.

At the hospital Aunt Natasha was taken through a door marked “Emergencies,” and a young man in a white overall led me round the building into a hall with a checkerboard floor of black-andwhite marble. Across it, at a large desk, sat an older man in a white overall. My escort went and spoke to him in a low voice. The older man shrugged his shoulders, took off his horn-rimmed spectacles, wiped them with a piece of yellow leather, and beckoned to me. “Good morning.” He cleared his throat as if I were an audience. “I take it you have your mother’s identity papers?”

For a second I stared at him. Of course I hadn’t my mother’s papers; but equally impossible demands have to be met every day. Then the young man said, “Probably her mother has them on her,” and I realized they meant Aunt Natasha. I also realized that, as we kept important papers locked in the tea caddy that once belonged to Olga Knipper, and as this tea caddy had almost certainly been burned along with the rest of our belongings, we could therefore say anything we liked about our identity without anyone’s being able to prove here and now that we were lying. For a second I had an exhilarating sensation of freedom, including freedom to fool these two men. Shaking my head regretfully, I said, “I’m afraid our papers were left behind.”

They asked our names and home address. I gave Aunt Natasha’s maiden name, thinking that if we had the same surname no one could doubt our being blood relations or deny me the right to visit her in the hospital. They also wanted to know when we had arrived, by which route, and if there had been any incidents at the frontier. When the man behind the desk had written all this down in triplicate, I asked in a propitiatory tone if I might join my mother.

Taking me by the elbow, one of them led me to an elevator and down a clean white-walled passage with numbered doors on one side, and on the other windows overlooking a park. At the corner we met a pretty young nurse in a starched cap and apron.

When my companion asked about Aunt Natasha, this nurse gave me a glance, dubious but amiable, and said that, as there had been no room in the appropriate ward, the patient had been put in a private room just vacated by an appendix case. She called my champion “doctor” and obviously liked him. Looking relieved, he told her I was the patient’s daughter, that the circumstances were unusual — here he paused, then said “refugees” in a hasty ashamed tone — so although he wasn’t, of course, asking her to break regulations, he did wish she would look after me. The nurse said of course, I could wait in her room until my mother was ready for me.

Her room was extremely elegant: white walls, uncracked ceiling, basin with running hot and cold water, shiny linoleum, bed with clean sheets and blankets, white chest of drawers, two cane chairs, and a desk. The nurse told me to try and relax, to wash if I felt like it, by all means to use her brush and comb, and she would be back presently.

On the desk was a framed snapshot of a young man, whom I recognized as the doctor, in white shirt and shorts, carrying a tennis racket. This cheered me. The toughest people can be induced to break regulations when in love. On the wall by the bed hung an ebony cross with a sprig of box tucked behind it.

Going to the basin, I saw myself in the glass. My face was pale and grubby, and my hair, which I’d grown in preparation for the permanent wave, looked untidy and worn out. Having found a pair of scissors, I very carefully gave myself a pudding basin cut, after which I looked as if I could get past most people without attracting notice — as was presently confirmed by the tone in which the nurse said, “That’s better,” trying not to sound surprised. But instead of leading the way to Aunt Natasha, she sat down and asked my name, which she had already been told.

“I’m afraid your mother won’t be up and about for a while. She’s tired, of course, after all you’ve been through. By the way, as you haven’t any papers, could you tell me her age? It would be a help medically.”

Fear pinched at me. Could they prove Aunt Natasha was too old to be my mother? Surely not. I had heard of women having children in their late forties.

“Is there no one else with you?”

Unprepared for this question, I hesitated. I didn’t want to deny Boris or make it difficult for him to gain admission to Aunt Natasha when he turned up, as I didn’t doubt he would; on the other hand, I could see the nurse was already sorry for me, and I knew I must make her even sorrier and therefore likelier to break rules in our favor. Looking her straight in the eyes to show I was speaking the truth, I said, “My father’s dead, and there’s no one else except my uncle Boris. We couldn’t find him — leaving so hurriedly — but he’s sure to turn up.”

“I see. You don’t think,” she sounded apologetic, “you’d better stay with the other refugees? We’ll let you know —”

“Suppose she needs me?” Suddenly I hated the nurse, the doctor, and the man behind the desk, hated the whole harassing world.

“Well, we’ll see.” She led me down several whitewashed passages hung with crosses and pictures of historical characters in halos, then put her finger to her lips and softly turned a doorknob.

There was Aunt Natasha, sleeping in a high white bed. She was still flushed over the cheekbones, and her breathing was very light and quick. A blank temperature chart was fastened to the bottom of the bed. Controlling myself, so the nurse would think I could be trusted here, I asked, “What is the matter with her?” The nurse looked at me thoughtfully, then said, “Pleurisy.” A wave of relief swept over me. Aunt Natasha had had pleurisy before, and Boris and I managed to nurse her through it, despite a cold winter and inadequate heating. So she was bound to recover quickly in a place like this.

“May I sit here awhile?" I asked, wishing the nurse would go away. She frowned, looked at her watch, then said, “Just for a little while. I’ll come and fetch you before the doctor starts his rounds.” She looked so uneasy that I pulled myself together and said, “If anyone should come in I’d say I slipped in without asking permission.” Putting her hand on my shoulder, she said, “Do try and relax.”This seemed to me a futile suggestion, so I said nothing.

After the nurse had left the room, I knelt by the bed and laid my head against Aunt Natasha. Her breathing was lighter than dried leaves skittering in the wind, and now and then she gave a harsh little cough. I was so frightened I couldn’t hold my tears; but I managed to keep quiet except for my breathing, which sounded gross in comparison with hers. Then I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth and hands and tried, until my ears tingled from the effort, to will all the love in my body out and into hers.

WHEN the nurse told me to leave, I knew it would be useless to resist. Also I couldn’t have spoken just then, and needed privacy in which to finish crying. Crying in the street might attract notice. Luckily there was a dark corner two passages away.

I was still crouched there, vaguely aware of distant footsteps, of doors being opened and shut, of a gust of music from a radio, and of a newly diffused smell of roast meat, when someone tapped past on high heels, stopped abruptly, came back, hesitated, and a clear voice said, speaking German with a foreign accent, “Is something the matter?”

As she stepped nearer, I saw that the voice’s owner was tall and slender, about Aunt Natasha’s build, and held the prettiest, cleanest curling white hair I had ever seen. As her skin was soft and smooth, this white hair didn’t make her look old, but did make it difficult for me to guess her age. She wore a gray frock and coat, black hat, gloves, and bag, had three rows of pearls round her neck, and was accompanied by a faint sweet smell of scent. “Can I help you?”

Wondering how to turn this incident to account, I heard myself say, “Would you let me walk with you to the exit, and if anyone speaks to you say I’m a relative? Because I ought not to be here now.”

“Very well.” She spoke briskly, as if she saw nothing unusual in my request, and immediately led me down the passage. Now that I had a protector. we met no one except a dwarfed maid pushing a trolley of shining soup tureens. Their domed lids offered us contorted reflections of ourselves, like ones in fun-fair mirrors.

Once we were outside I thanked her, holdingout my hand. But instead of shaking it, she held it between her hands and asked: “Where do you live, my dear?”

I pulled my hand away. For all I knew she might be an official in disguise. I had never before met an official who smelled delicious, but that might be part of the disguise. Resenting her, I named our billet.

“I see.”She looked at me speculatively. “There must be something I can do . . . whom are you with?”

“My mother’s in this hospital.”

“I see. Let’s get in the car. The street’s not the best place for talking.”

She led me to a small gray car and told me to sit beside the driver’s seat. Just then, to my horror, a policeman came up, tapping his notebook with a pencil in a suggestive way and eying us with the mixture of distaste and satisfaction that suggests one has been caught in the act. But the woman beside me seemed unmoved, barely allowed him to mouth a phrase about parking, and produced papers at the sight of which the policeman touched his hat, bowed, smiled, and removed himself.

“How did you do that?” I asked distrustfully.

“UNESCO still has its uses.”

After watching me for a second, she sighed, then said, “Listen, my child, is German your only foreign language?”

I admitted I could manage in French or English.

“Oh, well, that simplifies matters,” she said in English. “Now, my dear, you look brimming with alarm and despondency, and no wonder. Shouldn’t trust anyone an inch if I were in your place. So I’ll give you some data about myself, and you can decide if you feel like trusting me.”

Her voice was higher in English than in German, and she spoke faster, in a kind of hilarious rush, so that although I understood the gist of what she said, I found keeping pace with her a strain.

“Well, I was in Venice when all this started, attending some film festival with my son, Joe. But the moment trouble started up here, Joe insisted he had to come and see for himself. By the way, what’s your name, my dear?” I told her, adding, “I don’t know yours.”

“Ruiz. Kitty Ruiz. Won’t you tell me a little about yourself?”

Remembering Aunt Natasha’s advice never to tell a lie, but not to tell everyone the truth, I gave a censored account of myself. Ever since Mrs. Ruiz routed that policeman, the idea had been growing in me that she might be able to provide penicillin or other black market products, should Aunt Natasha need them. So I described her symptoms in detail, ending with, “but the trouble is, she has no business in that hospital.”

“Why ever not?”

“Because they’re afraid we may bring infectious diseases. They’re going to set up a special quarantine camp for us.”

“How do you know that?”

“Horst, the porter, told me.”

“Well, but — how did your mother get into the hospital?”

“Because the girl who answers the emergency calls at the hospital is married to Horst’s son. They combined it between them. And there was a nice doctor. And once she was there, ill,” I stopped, misery rushing back over me. “Will it take her long to get over pleurisy there?”

“Possibly not. Now listen to me, my dear, there doesn’t seem much point, all things considered, in your going back to that school. Yes,” as I opened my mouth to interrupt, “we’ll stop by and see your porter so that no hue and cry is raised. Then I suggest you come back to the hotel and stay with us for the time being. They can easily put a camp bed in our sitting room, and why sleep on the floor when a bed’s available?”

I was so astonished by this offer that for a few seconds I said nothing. At home we are not allowed to accompany foreign visitors up to their hotel rooms. We may visit them in the lobby, under the porter’s eyes, but not go upstairs. Misunderstanding my expression, Mrs. Ruiz said, “I assure you it will be all right. My papers are in order; no one will think I’m kidnaping you.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone might kidnap me, since neither financial nor political benefit could be obtained by doing so; but it immediately struck me that kidnapers, like most people engaged in illegality, would be sure to have their papers in order.

“I must let Boris know.”

“Who’s he?”

I hesitated, not wanting to lessen the alone-inthe-world-ness of my situation in Mrs. Ruiz’s eyes before making sure of the penicillin. “An old friend and neighbor who helped us get away. He’s bound to turn up.”

“Then he’s bound to go to that school, and the porter will tell him where you are.”

Mrs. Ruiz stopped the car in front of a big hotel as full of lighted windows as a government building on a reception night. Although there were only a few drops of rain in the air, a large man in a frogged, plum-colored uniform held a large plumcolored umbrella over us as we walked to the revolving door, which was set in motion for us by a small plum-colored pageboy. Inside were a great stretch of thick, soft, plum-colored carpet and waterdrop chandeliers like the ones used in the Sleeping Beauty ballet. Upstairs, too, the carpet was so thick that our walk down the passage would have been made in silence if the radiators hadn’t been gurgling like hungry stomachs.

The sitting room into which we were shown was full of luxury: a large pneumatic-looking sofa, a low table of shining wood half covered by newspapers and magazines with glossy covers, a shallow black china bowl of anemones.

“We’ll have dinner up here, Resi, don’t you think?” said Mrs. Ruiz. “And you’d better have Joe’s room.”

“Won’t he mind?”

“Mind? My dear, he’ll be delighted.” Again, I was aware of something unusually persuasive about Mrs. Ruiz. Unlikely as it sounded, I could not help believing, for that moment, that a foreigner still unaware of my existence would be delighted to find himself obliged to sleep on a camp bed because I had his room.

I also — and this impressed me more — had the use of his bathroom, the like of which I had never seen outside Elsa’s magazines. I was still examining it, turning taps on and off and fingering the thick soft-ribbed paper on which men were requested to wipe their razors, when Mrs. Ruiz came in with a toothbrush, washrag, and cake of honeyed-smelling soap. She also brought a long white nightdress.

After I had bathed and dried myself on a thick towel, warm from having been spread over hot pipes, I got into Joe’s bed, the most comfortable I had ever been in, and was brought a tray laid with rolls and butter, a wing of chicken, lettuce, oranges, and a decanter of red wine. While Mrs. Ruiz was out of the room I wrapped a buttered roll and part of the chicken in a lettuce leaf, and the lettuce in a piece of the razor paper, and put that under my pillow. They might give Aunt Natasha enough to eat in the hospital, but I had no guarantee they would.

Then I ate and drank with concentration. The rolls were wonderful, soft white ones, quite fresh, with caraway seeds scattered over their golden brown outsides; and there was plenty of butter arranged in smooth curls, like tiny rolled-up golden fish, on a cockleshell of splintered ice. I began to feel as if there were a glass wall between me and the events of the last twenty-four hours. I half expected to wake up at home and find I had been dreaming of Mrs. Ruiz, smiling beside me.

(The third and final installment will appear in January)