Life in the West (33 page)

It was difficult to decide on Rugorsky’s meaning. An idle joke. Or perhaps a positivist Soviet rejection of the poet’s negative remarks. Possibly even a threat of some kind. People did die, and that wasn’t pleasant. As Selina’s Serbian father had died…

Inner vision could fly northwards, away from the Mediterranean, over the Alps and France, across the Channel, across England, to Pippet Hall in the heart of the Norfolk countryside, could enter there undetected and find its way up to the children’s playroom, the old wooden room now painted white which — in the days when it was stained with brown varnish — had been home for Tom, Adrian, and Deirdre.

Striking in through the windows in the room’s brown varnish days, the sun had lit it till it glowed like the interior of a honey-pot. Each worn yellow floor-board had an individual character and an individual role. In winter, a coal fire burned in the grate.

Next to the grate was a cupboard with a lock mechanism which worked only with difficulty. Inside the cupboard was a secret compartment where Tom stored a few personal possessions. At the back of the compartment was a large tin box with its own lock. The box contained, along with precious things like cigarette cards and postcards and a penknife with bone sides, a fat red notebook on which was printed the one grave word, ‘MEMORANDA’.

To the playroom one day, impelled by grief, together with a certain sense of dramatic intensity, Tom had gone, removing his red notebook from the recesses of the cupboard, and writing in it in black crayon, ‘March 12th, 1937. Daddy Died.’ From then on, the words being so desperately final, he wrote nothing more in the notebook.

The notebook still existed. So did that entry. So did the death.

John Matthew Squire had bestowed on his eldest son a love of arts and shooting and the countryside which lasted all his life. John Matthew Squire’s death had bestowed on the son who found his body a sense of violence and frustration which equally had never worked itself out of his system.

The arrival of the refugee Normbaums, like crows gathering at a battlefield, had proved the herald of a great violence, the war. The war. Growing up, going to school, knowing always that tremendous actions involving courage and hardihood were taking place not a hundred miles away. Hearing the planes roar over the rooftops at night — all of Norfolk was an aerodrome. The intense love for Rachel Normbaum. Puberty. Fondling her in a quiet room, an erection flaming against her thigh and the intense astonishment, mingled with pride and annoyance, when, at the touch of her fingers, semen spurted over his grey trousers. Something to do with being a soldier. Preparing to join the struggle, to leave school, to get into Europe, to taste that traditional harsh life of war — waiting, fighting, killing, marching, winning, going hungry, enjoying the fruits of conquest — women, booze, good companionship, self-glorification. Then Berlin was taken and the war collapsed.

Tom Squire was just too young to fight. He had missed the biggest initiation rite of the century. The allied armies were being disbanded. Detumescence had set in.

On the surface, he was relieved. Below, frustrated, disappointed. Oh, to have liberated Paris!

Only to his Uncle Willie did he make his real feelings known. Uncle Willie had friends in London, connected with the county. Young Tom Squire was on National Service, and completing his preliminary square-bashing at Aldershot, when he was posted for special training at a camp near Devizes. After some tests, he was transferred to M16 to a department specializing in overseas operations. The Cold War was tightening its grip on the world. Men like Squire were needed.

He was given leave. A friendly man drove up to Pippet Hall; later, Squire met the friendly man in Whitehall. Following a hot tip, Squire applied for a job with a consortium of manufacturers who were interested in new export markets. He got the appointment and went to night school to learn Serbo-Croat.

War-battered Europe was putting itself together again. The Americans, with a gesture of unique generosity, launched the Marshall Plan. Britain, its overseas investments exhausted after paying for the war, set to work cheerfully on an export drive. The war had been won; now they were to win the peace.

The frontiers of the peace were already established. The Iron Curtain had descended across Europe, and the luckless nations of the Continent found themselves either on one side or the other; with one exception. The nation of Yugoslavia.

Although Yugoslavia was communist, there were remarkable differences between it and the other communist countries. Their leader, Tito, was a national hero and had conducted a formidably courageous war against the Nazis; he became a popular peacetime leader, and was not imposed on the country by the Soviet Union. Britain had supported Tito during the war; Churchill had made wise decisions there; so a friendship of sorts remained possible across barriers of ideology.

The BIA (British Industries Abroad) opened an office in Belgrade and attempted to develop trade with the Yugoslavs only a comparatively few months after the official cessation of hostilities. On their staff was a young secretary, Thomas Squire, with a briefing to travel to all regions of Yugoslavia looking for trade. He had the perfect job for undercover work.

‘You may not like Yugoslavia very much until you settle in,’ Squire’s head of department said. ‘After that, you’ll hate it.’

Squire loved it. There was something in this mountainous country — particularly in Serbia — in its songs, in its turbulent history, which corresponded to the violence trapped in his own nature. Moreover, a war was still going on, a war of minds. As an impoverished and broken economy picked itself up, the nation fended off its enemies. The Yugoslavs were intensely nationalistic, intensely suspicious. Foreigners were constantly watched.

Belgrade, the Serbian and national capital, was at that time a city in ruins. Of the housing that remained, much was old and substandard; the energetic rebuilding was new and substandard. Greyness and cold prevailed. Filth, disease, misery, mud, flowed like blood through the ruptured veins of the capital. Food was short. It was all that Squire desired; here was the harshness and challenge of the world war he had missed.

A Serbian girl called Roša came his way. He knew she was an agent. He embraced her as eagerly as he did his new life. In her pallor, her treachery, her nakedness, she was a paradigm of her country.

‘Obey your operating orders, whatever they are,’ he said — he rapidly became fluent in Serbo-Croat, ‘but make me part of you. Let’s do everything. Be extreme. Involve me, involve me!’

He thought she loved him in a way. She tried to dye her hair blonde, with disastrous results. They both laughed; then she fought with him and wept. Her parents had been shot by Nazis for some petty offence. The country was an armed camp. The army built roads, bridges, bicycle factories. Ferocious drink- parties took place in which people fell out of windows and died. Roša got drunk and sang folk songs about the centuries of Turkish tyranny, the beauty of Serbian hills, and red wine spilt on white tablecloths. Her voice was like zeppelins crashing. It made him weep.

Squire travelled down to wild cities in the south, Titov Veles, Kumanovo, Bitola, Prilep, Skopje. He passed on some information in Skopje, and two Russian agents were arrested. He saw how one of them was beaten up; he only just managed not to vomit, ashamed of his own weakness.

Back in Belgrade. Roša had earned a rare holiday, she said. She took him on an old steamer down the Danube, brown with all the corpses of history. They stopped at Smederevo. Smederevo Fortress was one of the places Roša sang about when drunk. In its time it had been the largest fortress in all the Balkans. Its gigantic and ruinous towers stood against the Danube. It was a cold, depressing place; the wind blew from Russia. Masses of peasants had been forced to pile stone on stone, to erect this monstrous stronghold against the Ottoman Empire.

There was no defence against history and the Turk. When Smederevo fell in 1459, the medieval state of Serbia was quenched like a torch in the river.

A man was waiting for them in Smederevo. He was big and black-bearded. His name was Milo Strugar, and he became Squire’s friend. On that first occasion, he was hostile. He drove Roša and Squire away in an old black German car to a wooden-tiled house in the woods. There Squire was made privy to some of the plans of Yugoslav counter-intelligence.

He never saw Roša again after that occasion. The bastards had sent her away, just to show him that you did what you were told. He learned the lesson.

Long before the war, the Yugoslav and Soviet communist parties had forged close links; they were brother Slavs. But Stalin had offered Tito little support in his struggle against German invasion. The old channels of communication were now being obliterated. Yugoslavia had to stand on its own legs or fall under Soviet domination.

Squire saw evidence of how ruthless both sides were. In this corner of Europe, in the broken towns and forests, the Cold War was real. Yugoslavia stood between East and West, mistrusting both; the fight was not merely of words, but of guns, fists and boots.

Living became more complex while its issues simplified. The remnants of the fascist Ustache in Croatia, once linked to Hitler, were allying themselves with the Soviet Union. Their plan was to kill Marshal Tito. They had to be smashed. There were weeks, months, when tank movements on the other side of the frontier suggested that Soviet invasion was imminent.

Squire thought much of his gentle father in those times. He thought of the dogs that had devoured his face. To some acts, there was no adequate response but killing. So in Serbia.

He slept rough, became familiar with the forest. War was not a natural activity of man, but the equations of life forced it on him.

He understood perfectly that the Yugoslavs had no alternative but to resist the Russians. Like tigers, they loved their freedom, and would defend it.

More important to the strategists in the West was the fact that here communist was fighting communist for the first time. It gave cause for hope. The struggle was of immense significance for the rest of the world. As he identified with the Yugoslav cause, he saw clearly a parallel between this lonely war at one end of Europe and the role played at the other end of Europe by Britain, only seven years earlier.

After Milo Strugar had tested him, the Yugoslavs began reluctantly to trust Squire. The Serbs preferred him to the Croats. In part, they trusted him because he was British. The label ‘Englishman’ was sweet in their mouths.

Early in the ill year of 1948. Countries of Central Europe like Czechoslovakia sinking further under Russian ice. Romania becoming more sovietized, and more hostile to Yugoslavia. The USSR beginning to hamper traffic between Berlin and the West.

The BIA sent Squire to the Yugoslav port of Rijeka, where mixed elements in the population caused unrest. Snipers still lurked in the hills above the city. Squire’s contact was a Serb called Slobodan, who ran a printing press as a cover for his other activities. Slobodan was a wild and unkempt man, extremely emaciated, who had lost his left eye in the mountains during his term as one of Tito’s partisans.

Over cigarettes and slivovitz, and through many curses, Slobodan in his little oily shop explained how a shipment of arms of British manufacture had arrived in Rijeka from the British Zone in Germany. It was delivered in an armoured freight train, and the train was hauled into railway sidings near the docks, where it was guarded by a Special Operations unit of the Yugoslav Army. Regulars, not conscripts, said Slobodan, spitting. After some delay, the officer commanding Rijeka Arsenal — sited some miles inland from Rijeka — arrived with a convoy of trucks to take charge of the shipment. The train was empty.

The major had immediately arrested the captain in charge of the guard unit, the driver and engineer of the train, the train guards, and just about all the officials connected with port operations. But the arms were not recovered.

A full-scale search of Rijeka was in progress when Squire arrived. Slobodan, a true anarchist, had no patience with the blundering military. With mighty curses, he told Squire that he had better ideas of his own.

‘I’ve got orders to contact the major i/c arsenal,’ Squire said.

‘Screw that, I have more genius in my arse than him in his head. Listen to my report.’

Slobodan had received a tip from an informant that a barge or barges had been sighted off-shore during the previous night, a few miles to the north. The barges were showing no navigation lights. All was obvious to Slobodan — you cut out the floors of the freight cars, remove the crates of arms, and steal them away by sea, not land. Sea is safer by night than land by day or night.

‘Barges don’t get far in one night. Come, we go see for ourselves in my fast car.’

Squire found himself packed into a tiny Zastava, bumping dangerously over the coast road, while Slobodan gave him an almost incomprehensible resume of his family history, in which dismemberment figured rather largely.

After making a few enquiries, they stopped at a small bay west of Opatia, under the humped slopes of Mount Ucka. A black-clad widow-woman who lived up the mountainside swore she could see from her window a newly risen rock or a newly sunken ship under the surface of the Adriatic.

They parked the car and went down to examine the situation. The waters of the Kvarner Bay lapped a line of beach rare on this rocky coast. There were fresh but confused marks in the sand — someone had obliterated tell-tale signs with a sack. The steeply shelving shoreline would allow a shallow draught barge to pull into the beach without trouble, and under cover of dark unloading operations could be effected with little risk of discovery: this region, Istra, was under dispute between Yugoslavia and Italy, with parts still administered by British forces; many of the inhabitants had fled, leaving the country almost deserted. The ravages of incessant warfare were plainly seen.