Secret Kingdom (19 page)

Within a year he saw his hopes for their relationship race rudderless towards the rock of Harriet’s quest for seeking revenge for her past. She was using the haven of their marriage not as he had hoped, to cut herself free from all that was hateful in her life, but to settle new scores which had joined the old in the queue of wrongs to be righted. The role Pountney had seen himself playing was being written out of their relationship by her determination to pursue her own private battle. How cleverly she had concealed her nature from him for so long, and how single-mindedly now she pursued her own ends. Pountney watched his hopes disintegrate in slow motion before a fixation with which he could not compete. Far from the intimacy he had anticipated, the wish to build their lives together, he found that Harriet’s heart lay beyond his reach. So much for the power of love. They lived together but shared nothing on a deeper level as he had hoped they might. He said nothing of this, believing that, with time, her hurt might be healed and all would be redeemed. Be patient, he reminded himself. It was what he was good at.

*

Pountney’s children brought him little consolation. He was surprised how unsatisfactory he found his own offspring. His eldest, Polly, had a lumpy body and a squint, magnified by her National Health spectacles. When he asked if something could be done about it, he
was told dismissively: ‘It’s nothing more than a lazy eye, Gerry. She’ll grow out of it.’

Harriet, a victim by accident of birth of the deficiency of ‘being a woman’, refused to admit a flaw in her own child. James with his stammer and a mouth so crammed with pink plastic and wire that he had become virtually incomprehensible, communed in a coded language of grunts and hisses to which only Harriet held the key.

Making up for the rejection she had so bitterly experienced, her children were
her
project,
her
possession, and she nurtured them defensively, keeping Pountney at arm’s length. He was denied the chance to do more than pay lip service to the role of father because Harriet had usurped that position too. On reflection, it wasn’t a bad arrangement. Was it unnatural not to have much interest in your own children?

*

To his surprise, what distressed him most was Harriet’s subversion of his career prospects. She had liked her time in Copenhagen, which he had found a disappointment, nothing much doing there at all, because, in her words, ‘It was civilized. The Danes are like us, aren’t they? Always washing their hands and sweeping the streets. You could safely eat your meals off the pavement.’

The prospect of his next posting had been uppermost in her mind since the day they’d returned from Denmark. ‘Don’t think I’ll go to South America, Gerry, I won’t hear of it. It’s far too violent. The water’s not safe to drink in Mexico. No one in their right mind would bring up children in Asia, it’s simply filthy; China’s barbaric under that dreadful Mao, and India’s so full of diseases and horrid smells we’d probably all be dead within a week.’ Africa was clearly too awful to get a mention. ‘They must send you somewhere you deserve.’ What he deserved, according to her definition, was what she would accept as ‘somewhere clean’.

Was the career, for which he had worked so hard, now to be sacrificed on the altar of Harriet’s neurotic demands for hygiene, in a world he knew to be profoundly dirty? Shorn of the belief that had coursed through his veins so vigorously in the early days, he recognized that his hopes for the companionship on which his real life would be based and to which he had given up his youth were fading. He had a wife, children, a house, a good job, but in his heart
he concealed an emptiness that sometimes came close to tearing him apart. His patience was bringing him no reward. He was in danger of waiting for something that would never arrive. He was back on Harlow station.

The soup smelled disgusting and looked worse, and anyway he didn’t feel hungry. It was too hot to eat. He put the bowl down and lay back on his blanket. He’d not been let out of his cell today and the heat had built up until it was almost impossible to breathe. At one point during the afternoon he’d heard a faint tapping coming from somewhere, the primitive code of the prisoners’ communication system, but he’d felt too exhausted and desolate to do anything about it. He was depressed, miserable, and when he tried to sleep he was tormented by the nightmare that no one knew where he was, he would never be found, the rest of his life would be spent rotting in this jail.

By now he had met a few of his fellow prisoners, and in stolen moments in the washroom or when they exercised under the eyes of their armed guards, he had heard horrifying stories of what might be in store for him. They tortured you, he was told, until you invented your own crimes, forcing you to trade your innocence for an end to the pain. They beat you up, denied you sleep, confused your sense of night and day. He saw the evidence of what they told him in the blackened marks on faces and bodies and the wild, demented eyes, emptied of all feeling except terror and relief. For the first time he was frightened.

This was by far and away his worst day so far.

*

‘Can you see anything?’

He stood under the cover of trees and looked through the borrowed binoculars. He saw a flat plain, so typical of the landscape here, illuminated by a patchwork of sunflowers, lined by narrow trodden paths, with groups of single-storey whitewashed houses clustered together in the distance. Blue hills lay beyond. A clear sky, no movement anywhere, a scene which can’t have changed in hundreds
of years. This was the Hungary he had dreamed of, a serene landscape, untouched and unchanging.

‘Nothing, no. Nothing at all.’

Except there were no people. No animals. No birds. The stillness was eerie, inhuman. There was a sense of desolation about the place he found disturbing. The rotting carpet he’d trodden on as he walked through the forest reeked of death, not the summer scents of life.

‘Wait.’ His companion looked at his watch. ‘Any minute now.’

He shuddered. It was cool under the trees, the branches keeping out the sunlight. He had welcomed the respite after their trek but now the sweat was drying on him and he felt cold. He swept the panorama before him once more but there was still no sign of movement anywhere. This place was devoid of life.

‘There. Look.’ A touch on his elbow. A harsh whisper. ‘Over there.’

He swung the binoculars to his right. He saw huge black leviathans rising out of the dead ground, massive machines of destruction plunging across the plain, their sudden presence destroying the peace of the afternoon. One after another in an unceasing procession, the Soviet tanks climbed over the skyline and entered his field of vision. He counted thirty in all, racing across the fields. He watched mesmerized as tank after tank spread out and then advanced menacingly on the village, clouds of blue diesel smoke everywhere, but there was no sound, no roar of straining engines. They were too far away to be heard, that was what made it so eerie – he could hear nothing. It was as if he was watching a silent film. Then he saw bursts of smoke appear from the barrels of the guns. He heard a dull but distinct
crump
as the shells exploded, and he felt the air smack against the trees with the force of the explosions, making the branches sway and rattle above him.

‘There aren’t any people in that village, are there?’

‘No. It’s deserted. No one’s lived there for years.’

Plumes of smoke and dust rose as walls and roofs were demolished, reduced to rubble by shellfire. A dirty grey shroud hung over the village. He saw troops emerge from behind the cover of their tanks to fan out across the field, advancing at a run under cover of smoke, surrounding the wrecked buildings. He observed their rehearsal of street-fighting, moving from house to house, securing each ruined building before moving on to the next. He heard the crack of their
rifles as they fired blanks at imaginary enemies in empty rooms. He saw their commanders, flags flying from their cars, as they raced around the mock battlefield, encouraging, directing, and when it was all over, consulting.

The smoke cleared, the dust settled. The tanks and troops had gone. He saw the hills in the distance once more, the yellow sunflowers, the flat plain crossed by paths no one had stepped on for years, but no whitewashed houses now: the village that only a few hours ago had stood in the plain was gone. Only a wreck remained, sharp-edged, smoke-stained ruins, bricks, torn beams and broken glass. There was silence once more and a smell of fire and destruction that wouldn’t lift, burning diesel fuel, cordite, the dust of centuries. The village was obliterated, as if it had never been.

He turned to see the girl, little more than a child really, her legs and arms were so thin, holding her rifle and smiling at him. He wanted to cry then, to go down on his knees and beg her to leave, to run away, to save herself before it was too late. Couldn’t any of them see what they were up against? He said nothing because he knew it was hopeless. The girl would not have listened to him. Her eyes told him she was already far away in a world of her own.

‘Now do you see?’ she asked. ‘Now do you understand?’

Leman’s heart was breaking. He found it impossible to reply.

*

The path led through the trees and down a gentle incline that flattened out into the floor of a valley. They walked for over two hours, the girl beside him. They said little to one another.

Students, Leman thought. In their early twenties mostly, though the youngest, the girl whose name he learned was Zsuzanna, can hardly have been eighteen. They should have been at their books or out in the hills camping. Instead of which, they carried rifles and revolvers and talked of revolution and freedom. That was what distressed him. He had heard them sing their songs and recite their patriotic poems (Petofi, Josef, Radnoti and others); he had absorbed the history lessons and he’d learned the importance of great nationalists like General Bem. He had listened to their excited discussions led by a young philosophy teacher from the university in Budapest on the impact of Kruschev’s secret speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, condemning Stalin’s crimes and
freeing the Party from the constraints of the past. He had experienced the emotional power of their demand for free elections and a withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact (would the East Germans make the same demand? they asked. If they did, then Hungary would join them). He had worried when they talked of the support for their cause promised by the American broadcasters they had listened to on Radio Liberty. He had suppressed his anger when they talked of their acceptance of death in the cause of their country’s freedom. He couldn’t question the nobleness of their ideals. God knows, what they wanted was right, he admired them for that, it was just that they were not the people to do it. That was what was wrong. They were children playing at being soldiers.

Martineau was right, there would be a revolution, the momentum was close to unstoppable now. Those he had talked to had travelled too far emotionally to be bought off with vague promises of social improvements in some distant socialist future. They were impatient, angry, aware of themselves as a nation. But Sykes was wrong when he saw this as a moment in history when the world might change. Any rebellion would be crushed, he was certain of that. For a day or two Hungary would fight its oppressors with courage and daring before the physical superiority of the Soviet occupying forces gained control once more. Then the Soviets would take their revenge.

There was something glorious about this small band. Even his weary heart was won over by the lack of complication of their belief. In that, of course, they were right. The regime they dreamed of condemning to history was evil. But these young lives should be looking forward. Instead, the only future they faced was the blank wall of their own extinction. When he had tried to talk to them about this, they had denied his position by reciting their poems and singing their patriotic songs to deaden the pain that would otherwise flood their tender hearts. That was their opium: the ideal of a freedom they had never experienced in their lives. It allowed them to outface the reality whose existence they refused to admit by repeating the words they knew so well. Or perhaps they did not believe in the possibility of their own death. They were immortal because of their youth and the rightness of their cause.

They were misguided, romantically in love with patriotism, heroics and death and glory. He looked at them in sorrow and in admiration, a lost generation, souls wandering in a mist, laying down
their lives for a dream they would never have the power to realize. He envied them their courage and beliefs.

*

If he had learned nothing else in his few days in this strange country, he was sure that in any conflict, the Soviets would win. There was no contest. Sykes’s idea that a citizen army, even one with the strength of belief he had encountered, could push back the Soviet army was nonsense. It would all be over before the West would have called a meeting of ministers to discuss the crisis. The Russians knew that; probably they were banking on it. Democracy is a process and that is its weakness. Processes demand time. The bully will always beat it to the draw.

All he would be able to tell Sykes was that he had seen Soviet forces practising their manoeuvres, and that he had spent time with the students who would face that military power armed only with a few rifles and the courage of their convictions. The battle might be glorious, probably bloody, certainly short. The cause would be lost before a shot was fired. It wasn’t, he knew, what Sykes wanted to hear, but he’d deal with that when he had to.

*

Their camp was a few tents in a clearing. The two groups greeted each other with embraces. More shining faces. Wherever he had been taken he had felt the same comradeship, the same commitment of these young people to each other. Their closeness emphasized his own isolation. If he had been one of them, how he would have shuddered from any such embrace. He had never found it easy to engage with his fellow students in the same uncomplicated rituals of friendship. He stood apart and watched them prepare something to eat.