Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Following the muted anniversary of the Nazi–Communist Pact, two million Balts are massed in the Human Chain, unbroken for four hundred kilometres across the three republics, prepared to face Red Army invasion. The dedicated, courageous, reckless, obstinate. Initiates wresting freedom from Fate; coppersmiths beating out pure lines.

We watch the lilac horizon for a swirl of dust, blur of tank or bomber. A shout rises, loudening along the front,’ Hakka Astuma … Russians Out … Keep Standing …’ At intervals bells clang, slowly, solemnly, kneading the warm air. They still, then resume, faster, merry, almost syncopated.

Other names flutter. Heldur, Armo, Pille, Leenia, mostly forgotten, mere growls to the numerous children brandishing toy pistols, flags, darting for buns and lemonade. All are part of the revolt, daily expanding, enflaming Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, after the spontaneous, exultant heave that toppled the Berlin Wall. The jokes, slang repartee, sharing of pastries, chocolate, vodka, kvass , the hymns and patriotic choruses climax a week rhetorical, resounding, purposeful. From this heath of brown sedge, sallow scrub, Ivask’s verse rebounds:

The days succeeding loss of Nadja were a flurry of instincts, disconnected images, a tearing mish-mash sustained by Alain’s supply of valium. Fenris swallowed the sun, Meinnenberg children savagely fought to devour a magazine illustration of cake, an egg dissolved into a sneer, red petals to Katyn Woods, John Wayne folded into rubber. Daytime was dream, nights sleepless. I lived in metaphor: empty highway, polluted waters, abortionist’s table.

At first I had struggled against suspicion of abduction or amnesia. Wilful desertion was unthinkable. She must be delayed by a Phoenician maze or Ligurian shrine. Certainly not swept off by some soft, seductive Prince Florizel or Duke de Morny. Mean betrayals and complaints were not her way; neither of us treasured grudges or smouldered with unuttered resentment. We enjoyed the stable, unhurried, disliked the sensational. Wherever she was, she would leave our intimacies intact.

I soon knew, without wholly accepting, that she would not return. She had vanished without fuss, on no inauspicious date, staging no lachrymose letter on the mantelpiece, no dramatic telegram. As if after burglary I began noticing certain absences: notebooks, a favourite miniature, a few discs.

Attempts to track her would be futile, also insulting. The Fête, riot, explosion might have probed some shrouded trouble, started as a strange gamble. Or none of these, but something deeper, darker, in which I was intruder, a comrade loved but, in the last coil of a labyrinth, useless.

Already I was thinking of her in the past tense. Still seeking clues, I reconsidered her Etruscan studies. Mesmerized by particular numbers, these people apparently became obsessed with conviction that a blessed period had ended, another, grimmer one beginning, so that they lost will to resist upstart Rome. A tiny incident now swelled, blotting out all else – in an afternoon of gaiety she had, with no warning, murmured a Hungarian line: The aspen sheds leaves, I part from my lover.

I had assumed too much. We subsist on belief that cars will halt at the red light, train drivers obey signals, the correct stamp guarantees delivery, the referee’s whistle prevails. But there is the famous uncertainty principle. A Baldur is killed for no cause, merely from spite. Serial murderers may lack definable motive. Events can be haphazard, results unforeseen. What should occur often does not. Marvellous are thy ways, O Zeus.

We had both jested about lingering too long in gardens. But I was penalizing myself uselessly. Reading a book backwards, finding happiness misting, silences deepening, the plot crumbling. Explanations could only mislead. Chance or Fate? But Hector was dead, Anna Karenina lay under the train. Bombs explode, planted by the crazed or bleak; lovers start noticing each other as furniture; a girl runs, urging herself towards whatever, perhaps not knowing why.

Unweeded, uncut, the garden was overweight, as though she had taken its evanescent marvels with her. I found, in one of her abandoned notebooks, By all the favours enjoyed by mortals, the gods are stirred to jealousy and vengeance.

People come, stay a while, depart. The twitch of a curtain. They love, yawn, are unfathomable. A brief exchange with a stranger can provide more understanding than the Haylocks’ lifelong marriage. Dick sees Daisy as beak and feathers; she regards him as the gentleman who mistakes the road. Knowledge too often, yet enticingly, hinges on perhaps .

Nadja had once remarked that our true intimates are amongst the dead. Everything, she added, has its time, then the mandate of heaven is withdrawn.

My lack of resentment dismayed me. I could find no treachery in the pale face under dark, floppy hair, the eyes and mouth more changeable than weather and the infinite strategies of bed. We would achieve final intimacy, though by revisions, speculations, sudden convictions from the other side of the air.

In too many lurks fear of safety, sometimes a desire to be hanged. In the Turret I had been startled by reading that during the French Revolution people had denounced not only friends and relatives but themselves, begging for Sainte Guillotine.

All was provisional, ending with semi-colons. The garden was dying, life a matter of loose ends, horribly tangled.

I sold the house, sidled away without farewells or plans, travelling through dim towns with standardized hotels, identical cafés, and crossed meaningless frontiers. People were faceless, cinemas blank screens. Weeks had the sameness in which Nadja consigned all Vivaldi. Women were bundles of lard. With everything featureless, I had sunk to an underworld, which remote forebears called Nifelheim, third realm of the dead, permafrosted, with walls achingly high, gates frozen, in neither night nor day but unbroken dusk in which to scratch at remorse, imperception, lost chances. Losing curiosity, I had no purpose. Suffering, a few maintained, completes the soul. I did not find this so.

In such impasse I shrank from slinking to England as another asylum seeker. My imagination remained pictorial, haunted by a Goya, in which a midnight hand rises from a tomb to write Nothing on a stone cross. To jump from a train, volunteer for the Congo, would be no escape from fears of street corners, sooty tunnels leading backwards. In all beds, thin sleep, if it came, was perforated with sights of blocked stairways, streets filled with nettles and fallen masonry under a cracked dome. Here I hurried in panic through fog, past unnamed tube stations, or was trapped in traffic jam, desperate for a house I would never reach, where Mr and Mrs H.G. Wells awaited me for dinner. In this realm suburban mediums groaned disaster, a French rationalist saw the Flying Dutchman. Hallucinations were superimposed on each other like geological plates, which only sha could demolish.

Shying from clarity, I dropped the explicit and sensible on the cutting-room floor. What had remained only distressed: Nadja, wide-eyed at the broken mirror, fondling a girl at the Stockholm party, was slipped into an album with Suzie, head back and laughing, with Wilfrid in his fez. Also, a wayward light abruptly revealing a face at a high, obscure window, Stalin watching Bukharin’s trial, with perhaps in his pocket the accused’s last note, ‘Korba, why do I have to die?’ Ribbentrop’s collar tightening. Chinese horror in a Malraux novel. McCarthy accusing Einstein of plotting a Red coup. Six children at play, summoned by their parents, Magda and Josef Goebbels, for a drink, the poison already tested on the Gutter King’s dog. Hess, life-sentenced, endlessly studying the moon.