The Alien (7 page)

Boris accepted the challenge. It was the only thing he could do. They waited together for a taxi and when they got into it the general followed.

Scziliekowicz lived in an attic flat in a large, old-fashioned house between Hammersmith and Shepherd's Bush. There were a great many stairs to climb but the flat itself was comfortably furnished, suggesting that the old man was not so badly off as the neighbourhood and type of dwelling might indicate. The furniture in the sitting-room was heavy, but good. There were some well-polished silver and brass ornaments, an abundance of books lining two walls, plain dark crimson velvet curtains at the window, falling to the floor, and several well-placed, shaded wall lights, besides a reading-lamp on a wide desk and a standard lamp beside the fireplace. Through the unscreened, closed window-panes the late evening blue dusk was cut by a sharp silver crescent moon.

Scziliekowicz urged the two others to be seated, then fussed about switching on lamps, drawing the curtains, finding glasses and a decanter of brandy in a small ornate cupboard against the wall near the desk.

“For you, count,'' he said to Sudenic, coming close to his guest. The general, who had not yet sat down, came forward to receive a glass and then moved away with it to look at the bookshelves.

“That is the second time tonight I have been addressed by that title,'' Boris said, steadily, looking up. “Are you breaking certain news to me?''

“If you interpret correctly.''

“My father is dead?''

“Yes.''

Boris sat without moving, still looking up at the kindly face above him.

“And the others? My mother – my sisters?''

“The same.''

“I have never allowed myself to hope. But I find I have always done so.''

Scziliekowicz's hand went out for the second time to press the younger man's shoulder. He seemed to be very much moved, for he took away his hand a moment later to find a large handkerchief which he pressed to his face in unashamed grief.

Boris stood quite still, looking now at the floor between his feet. A flood of memories assailed him, tearing him apart, swamping his mind, stopping the questions he most wanted to ask, nearly drowning his heart, choking his breathing, above all washing away his new-found confidence. He struggled to keep back a purely animal cry of pain. Four months free from daily fear, secure from physical punishment, had weakened him, he thought bitterly, struggling now with tears that would not be held back.

He let them fall. He gulped his brandy, drew the back of his hand across his eyes and at last looked up, still seeing in place of his father's friend, his father's own form and face, his mother's gentle questioning eyes, his younger sister's thin beauty.

“How?'' he asked, in a low harsh voice. “Why? When?''

“It has not been established exactly when or how. During the upheavals of the Russo-German pact. Your estate lay on the border of the two zones. The border was disputed, naturally. Not least on the spot. The German side was occupied territory – brutal, Teutonic, uncompromising occupation. The Russians were careful and busy with their propaganda. Their political agents were everywhere with promises of land. They found willing ears among certain of your father's peasants.''

“It was the Russians then? They took them—''

“No. Worse than that. Your own peasants, in your own house.''

“No! No, that is too much!''

The general turned from the bookcase when he heard this cry and moved quietly forward until he could see Boris's face. He stood there, watching, while the revelations continued.

“That is the report I had, but years later, from your head groom, Vassili, I think his name was.''

“Vassili was in the stables. Ivan Fedorowicz was head groom, with Voliniak. But Ivan came away with me when the war broke out. He was lost in the retreat. Where did you find Vassili?''

“In Egypt. Let me tell you, from the beginning. In the retreat – I was in the government service, you may remember – I was put in charge of certain archives, to get them out of the country. I set off with a small party. The route I planned, through Rumania to Greece and so to France, would pass near your estate. I determined to take your parents and sisters with me. I had resources and a guard of a sort. I went to the house and found them gone.''

“And then?''

“There was no time to delay. The Germans behind in the west, the Russians coming in from the east. I had to travel south in the narrowing corridor between the two enemies. The two traditional enemies. Alas for Poland!''

There was a silence. Boris waited.

“Well, I got through. It took a long time. The frontiers were closed. It was a matter of bribes and bargaining and sometimes naked escape, without explanation, fortunately without trace. We reached Rumania in mid-winter and spent it among friendly peasants. The next summer France fell and our future seemed to have been swallowed up too. But we followed our plan to Greece and when the next threat came, to Egypt, to the British in Egypt. There I found more of my countrymen and among them, your Vassili.''

Boris lifted a pale face.

“Go on.''

“Your father had received a message to leave his house, to hide in a certain place and to wait there until he was rescued. He obeyed the instructions. Nothing happened. After a week he went back to the house. He found it was taken over by his peasants. They had broken in, destroyed, desecrated, were still enjoying a drunken orgy on stolen wine from the cellar. A Russian was in charge. All the servants left behind, except Vassili, had fled.''

“They murdered my father, my mother, Anna, Nadia? Their own people murdered them?'' Boris raised haunted eyes. “I sent that message,'' he said. “For their safety. I had been carried in the retreat far behind the line of the Russian zone. We knew nothing about the pact until three days after it was signed. We were surrounded and virtually made prisoner. But they were in a hurry, the Russians. They could not delay just then to dispose of us. We escaped massacre. I had a plan to get away from them, I and two others and my batman, Ivan. As we got nearer to my home, into country Ivan and I knew as well as our own faces, I managed his disappearance with a message to my father. That they should leave and hide and I would meet them.'‘

“You! It was you who should have got them out? Vassili did not know that. He managed to get away after the killing.''

“My father will have told no one. Not even my mother.''

The old man nodded, understanding very well the desperate secrecy needed in those appalling times.

“And then?''

“Our direction was changed. For no reason or for very good reasons. Ivan never came back. Perhaps he never delivered my message—''

“He must have done so, since they were gone the day I passed through.''

“Perhaps he was killed – or captured – or turned traitor – to either enemy. We shall never know. The plan failed. I was taken into Russia. You know the rest.''

“Ivan was killed with the rest of your family.''

It was the general who spoke. He had been so quiet since their arrival that Boris had almost forgotten his presence. His harsh voice, stating a harsh fact, struck a sudden flush into Boris's cheek. His own voice was harder than usual as he answered, “What evidence have you for that?''

“The word of a brother officer, now dead.''

Scziliekowicz, aware of the sudden tension in the room and suspicious of its cause, took refuge in the decanter.

“Let me fill your glass, general,'' he said, quickly interposing himself between the other two as Boris rose slowly to his feet. “Count?''

“I shall never use that title,'' said Boris, grief and anger mixed in his tone. “It died with my father and with the land stolen from him. I am Boris Sudenic, without any prefix, to you and to all my friends.''

The general's eyes gleamed with sudden amusement, but he said nothing, turning away with his drink in his hand to sit down for the first time since he entered the flat. Scziliekowicz also sat down near Boris, who slowly followed the example of the others.

Their death-laden revelations, their sharp emotions, had exhausted all three. Now they could only sit, cut off by the long crimson velvet curtains from the happy lights and moving London crowds outside under the warm summer sky, each turning over the sad pages of a cruel history, stunned by its excessive horror, its indecisive, lamentable sequel. They saw the scenes of their childhood, the country of their love and allegiance, as it were through a coating of transparent ice, a thick, terrifying icicle of slow-dropping perpetual frost, a never-ending winter of imprisonment.

Boris rose at last, quiet, polite, with apologies for staying so long and for being the cause of so much distress to his host.

“Not at all, my dear Boris,'' Scziliekowicz assured him. “I hope to see more of you. Much more. We cannot expect any immediate change – you understand me – but any up-to-date detail from behind the Curtain – I am in a position to pass on – If you understand me?''

“I will do my best,'' said Boris, gravely.

The old man showed him out, but did not go downstairs with him to the door of the house. He watched from his top landing until he saw Boris reach the hall at the foot of the stairs. Then he went inside and closed and chained the door of his flat.

“Well?'' he said to the general. “He is indeed the son of my old friend.''

The general said, “Yes. ‘I am Boris Sudenic,' he said, ‘to you and all of my friends.' He has other names, you know. Or perhaps you don't know that.''

“He spoke freely.''

“But we have learned nothing. His feelings seemed to be perfectly sincere. All that he said was true. Except—''

“Except what?''

“I will bring someone else to see you. Then you will know. But Sudenic will of course deny anything unfavourable to himself.''

“He is my friend's son. I think he spoke the truth to us tonight.''

“He always does.'' The general laughed and held out his glass again. “He always does. He always has.''

The offices of the Baltic Trading Company took up one corridor, a quarter of the square building's fourth floor. The lift-shaft was central. The four corridors went off diagonally from it. This made the rooms leading from them a peculiar shape which charmed or maddened visitors according to their various temperaments. Some, of course, noticed nothing because they never did take any interest in their surroundings. About a third of the Baltic Trading Company's clients were like that. They dealt in wood.

The rooms in the B.T.C. corridor opened on either side of it in a staggered pattern so that secretaries and messengers rushing out on an errand could not collide with one another. All the first six rooms had half-glassed walls on to the corridor, but those farther along, where the higher executives worked, and the two rooms of the managing director's working suite at the very end, had plain surfaces of enamelled paint. In the sharp angle of the two outer walls where they met at one corner of the building a large pseudo-classical urn in concrete sustained a very large arrangement of leafy branches and heavy flowers, spot-lit from below and at the sides. This arrangement, taken with the fact that the wood-tiled surface of the first part of the corridor here gave place to a thick, grey carpet, never failed to impress the casual visitor or the new-comer, though regular customers, as also the managing director himself, had long ago ceased to be aware of it. The flowers were renewed by contract with a local florist and watered, except at week-ends, by the managing director's principal secretary, who also looked after the smaller, scented flowers on his desk.

A few days after Boris's dinner-party with the free Poles he found himself engaged upon a particularly heavy trayful of letters for translation. Most of them were in German or French, one or two in Norwegian, which he laid on one side. It was not one of his five languages. Two were in Polish. These he also laid aside. When he eventually took them up he spent considerably more time over them than he had done over all the others.

Margrethe Olsen, the secretary, came into his small room a few minutes before the lunch break. Boris was leaning back in his chair staring at a calendar on the wall.

“All ready for you,'' he said, without turning.

She saw that he was looking at her in the glass of a small mirror that hung above the calendar. She smiled and he smiled back.

“I can never catch you out,'' she said, in a low voice, “however quietly I open your door.''

“My hearing is good,'' he answered, quite seriously, “and I have had much practice.''

“Yes, I suppose so.''

Margrethe's fair skin flushed a little, for his eyes in the mirror were still resting on her, with quite undisguised approval.

“You should always make your coiffure so,'' he said. “Straight and smooth with the long end twist on top.''

“Twisted on top.''

“Twist-ed. What a language! Few rules of grammar but those – absurd.''

“I agree, but one must observe the rules.''

She moved forward and Boris swivelled his chair to meet her, turning slowly back as she reached the desk. She stood there, waiting, but noticing all the same the groups into which he had divided the mail.

“These,'' he offered her, “are for Sørensen direct. His translated copy is on top of each letter as usual. These,'' he handed her the Norwegian letters, “I cannot do. I wonder you sent them to me.''

They exchanged a long look, questioning on her part, closed on his.

“I do not understand – Norwegian,'' he repeated, softly.

“Very well.''

With a slight frown Margrethe picked up the letters.

“But you do,'' Boris went on, in the same tone.