The Balkan Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page B

velvet backside of the eunuch before her, then she gazed out at the dark reaches of the Muntenia plain, on which the city stood like a bride-cake on a plate. ‘A barbarous country,’ she said.
    They had now passed the last of the houses. On either side of the road, adazzle beneath the dark, star-lighted violet of the sky, were the open areas owned by the restaurants that had no gardens in the town. Each spring, when the weather settled, they shut their winter premises and brought their chairs and tables up the Chaussée. Within these enclosures the limes and chestnuts, hose-drenched each morning, spread a ceiling of leaves.
    When the tr ǎ sur ǎ stopped at Pavel’s, one of the largest of the open-air restaurants, there could be heard above the traffic the shrill squeak of a gypsy violin. Within the shrub hedge of the garden, all was uproar.
    The place was crowded. The silver-gilt glow from the globes set in the trees lit in detail the wrinkled tree-trunks, the pebbled ground, and the blanched faces of the diners that, damp with the excitement of food, gazed about them with deranged looks, demanding to be served. Some rapped with knives on wine-glasses, some clapped their hands, some made kissing noises at the waiters, while others clutched at every passing coattail, crying: ‘ Domnule, domnule! ’ for in this country even the meanest was addressed as ‘lord’.
    The waiters, sweating and disarranged, snapped their civilities and made off before orders were complete. The diners shouted to the empty air, sometimes shaking their fists as they seethed in their seats, talking, gesturing, jerking their heads this way and that. It was an uproar in which there was little laughter.
    ‘They all seem very cross,’ said Harriet, who, caught into the atmosphere, began to feel cross herself.
    A waiter, flapping at the Pringles like an angry bird, conveyed to them the fact they were blocking the way to the kitchenbuilding. They stood aside and watched him as he rushed to an open window and bawled into the kitchen’s bang and clatter. The cooks, scowling in the heat from the giant grill, ignored him. The waiter brought his fists down on the sill, at which one of the cooks lunged at the window, flinging himself half from it as an enraged dog flings himself the length of his chain. He struck the waiter, who fell gibbering.
    ‘It’s all just Rumanian animation,’ said Guy as he led Harriet to an alcove where the foods were displayed beneath a canopy of vines.
    The heart of the display was a rosy bouquet of roasts, chops, steaks and fillets frilled round with a froth of cauliflowers. Heaped extravagantly about the centre were aubergines as big as melons, baskets of artichokes, small coral carrots, mushrooms, mountain raspberries, apricots, peaches, apples and grapes. On one side there were French cheeses; on the other tins of caviare, grey river fish in powdered ice, and lobsters and crayfish groping in dark waters. The poultry and game lay unsorted on the ground.
    ‘Choose,’ said Guy.
    ‘What can we afford?’
    ‘Oh, anything. The chicken is good here.’ He pointed in to the grill, where spitted birds were changing from gold to deeper gold.
    As he spoke a woman standing nearby turned, looked accusingly at him, and said in English: ‘You are English, yes? The English professor ?’
    Guy agreed that he was.
    ‘This war,’ she said, ‘it is a terrible thing for Rumania.’ Her husband, who was standing apart, gazed away with an air of non-participation. ‘England has guaranteed us,’ said the woman, ‘England must protect us.’
    ‘Of course,’ said Guy as though offering her his own personal guarantee of protection. He glanced over at the husband, smiling to introduce himself, and at once the man started into ingratiating life, bowing and beaming at the Pringles.
    ‘Even if we are not attacked,’ said the woman, impatientof this interruption, ‘there will be many scarcities,’ she looked down at her high-heeled