Judgment on Deltchev Page 2

  ‘I see. Well, now you’ve told me how it can’t be done, what’s the answer?’

  He was rocking again. ‘There is no answer, Mr Foster. Other ways have been tried. The crews of foreign airliners were used as couriers for a while, but no longer. It is too dangerous for them. I have tried to make all this clear to the head office, but what is real here does not seem so in New York and London.’

  ‘In fact, you think it’s a great waste of time my being here at all.’

  ‘No, I do not say that.’

  ‘In effect you say it.’

  ‘You misunderstand me. I am in favour of these articles. This trial is dramatisch… er-’ He broke off, feeling for the word.

  ‘Theatrical?’

  ‘Yes, theatrical. Thank you. The trial of a political leader on ideological grounds is most theatrical to Western ways of thinking. So I say that to have a distinguished playwright, such as you, Mr Foster, write matter about the Deltchev trial is a very cute editorial idea. I am myself looking forward to reading the series. But — ’ he leaned forward impressively — ‘you cannot write it here and send or take it out of the country; that is, not unless you paraphrase the Propaganda Ministry’s official matter and get every page stamped by the censorship. You must resign yourself to that.’

  ‘But-’

  ‘See the trial, Mr Foster, memorize’ — he stabbed his forehead with a finger to show me where — ‘and then go home and write your articles. That is what you must do.’

  For a moment or two I did not answer.

  I had been in a train for four days and had had very little sleep on the journey. I had arrived at seven o’clock that morning in a strange city under a hot sun and in a sticky, enervating atmosphere. I had left my luggage in a hotel that might, for all I could remember of the geography of the streets, be a hundred yards away or three miles from where I was now; and even if I found the hotel and remembered the room number, I would not know how to ask for the key. I had trailed round cafes and government offices, listening to conversations that concerned me conducted in a language I did not begin to understand, at the heels of an aggrieved, self-important eastern European with fat hips and a bad smell. I had a blister on the sole of my right foot and a grimy face. I was also hungry and well on the way to wishing I had not come. Now I was being told that the fact that I had come at all was a pity, but that if I behaved myself and cared to waste my time, I might stay and see the fun. Or so it seemed to me then. I felt myself losing my temper and then managed to wait until the moment had passed before replying. I tried to keep my voice level.

  ‘Mr Pashik, you know as well as I do that these articles are meant for publication during the trial as a commentary on it. They’d be useless afterwards.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ He looked knowing. ‘Deltchev will be condemned to death. Your articles will be part of the campaign against the sentence.’

  ‘That’s not what I was told. I was asked to send the stuff in as I did it.’

  ‘And why?’ He threw up his hands, smiling with teeth like salted almonds. ‘In case you, Mr Foster, the distinguished playwright, should find time to enjoy yourself on the expense account, or get an idea for a new play about life behind that sinister Iron Curtain and forget your commission. Editors treat us all like children.’

  ‘Nevertheless, the articles are expected.’

  ‘No, Mr Foster, they are not. I sent a cable to head office saying that they will not be available until you return.’

  ‘I think you should have consulted me before you did that.’

  ‘I am responsible, Mr Foster.’

  There was a thin-lipped silence. Then I said, ‘Mr Pashik, are you a member of the People’s Party? I didn’t think to ask you before.’

  He smiled again, but the American accent became more pronounced. ‘Ah, Mr Foster, you are mad at me. I don’t blame you. I will be frank with you.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘If there is any trouble with the censorship over anything that goes out of this office, it will be closed up. That means that I will be closed up, finished. I am responsible.’

  ‘Then you’ll still be responsible if the articles are published after the trial.’

  ‘Ah, no. If the Propaganda Ministry admits you to the country, it is their affair if you produce hostile matter when you leave. While you are here the responsibility rests with this office that you should not prejudge the trial by sending hostile matter.’ He shrugged. ‘It is no doubt for them an expedient. For myself, I am hostile to the regime; but I have been expelled for my opinions before, and Pan-Eurasian, representing twenty-seven foreign newspapers, has a responsibility to others besides your editor. So you see I must play ball with the regime, Mr Foster.’

  I did not know quite what to say. My impulse was to take the trial permit from my pocket, put it on his desk, and say that I would leave in the morning. Certainly that is what he hoped I would do. It was only my awareness of disliking him for a poor reason that made me hesitate. He pushed the cigarettes toward me.

  I shook my head. ‘When did you send that cable?’

  ‘Four days ago, Mr Foster.’

  ‘Why not before?’

  ‘It was not certain that you were coming.’

  ‘It was settled three weeks ago that I was coming.’

  ‘I did not know that.’

  ‘Have you had a reply?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Foster.’

  ‘May I see it, please?’

  ‘Certainly.’ He opened a drawer in the desk and brought out a cable and put it in front of me. I read:

  Your 109 of 6 June understood advise Foster and arrange air passage London soonest close trial.

  ‘You could have shown me this before,’ I said.

  ‘I did not realize that you did not trust me, Mr Foster,’ he replied gently. ‘The cable only says to advise you of something and secure an air passage for you. It does not explain what I have been telling you. You still have to believe that I am telling you the truth.’

  His smile said that this was the moment when I should feel silly and apologize. Perhaps it was the smile that prevented my doing so. Instead, I said, ‘I take it that the other foreign correspondents will be under the same restriction?’

  ‘If they are hostile to the regime they will have to be equally discreet.’

  ‘That story about the American who tried to go to Greece for the weekend — I suppose you made that up in case I thought of the idea myself and didn’t tell you.’

  ‘It was a way of warning you that the method was known.’

  ‘You go at things in rather a roundabout way, don’t you?’

  He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘One gets in the habit of it, Mr Foster,’ he said, and then paused. ‘Roundabout ways are sometimes safer. However’ — his expression changed and he stood up expansively, his smell billowing around him — ‘it is good to meet a person who cares for frankness. We can understand one another.’ He smiled cheerfully. ‘We shall get on well, Mr Foster. We can help each other, and that is as it should be. I will show you.’

  He went over to a filing cabinet in the outer darkness, opened one of the drawers, and began to search through it.

  ‘You know, Mr Foster,’ he murmured as he picked through the files, ‘being expelled from a country is not dignified and not at all rewarding. For a few hours you are the brave man who dared to tell the truth. But the next day, when the handclasp of friends is forgotten, you are just another reporter without a job.’

  He came back to the desk with an untidy bundle of papers and a large envelope.

  ‘When did it happen to you?’ I asked.

  ‘Italy, 1930. I was a married man then, too,’ he said. He hesitated for an instant, then stuffed the papers into the envelope and handed it to me with the rueful smile of a rich uncle for the rascally nephew whom he likes.

  ‘The office file on Yordan Deltchev, Mr Foster. It will help you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Please.’ He put up a protesting
hand. ‘I want to help you, Mr Foster. And I want you to know that I want to. And that is frank. Avanti! Now we go to dinner, eh?’

  That night I was too tired to sleep. For a while I tried to do so; then I gave up, switched on the light, and began to read the file Pashik had given to me.

  At that point I still had the illusion that I could report the Deltchev trial.

  CHAPTER THREE

  This is what I learned from the file.

  Until the spring of 1940, when his country had joined two of its Balkan neighbours in coming to terms with the Axis, Yordan Deltchev, although an important figure in the councils of the Agrarian Socialist Party, had had no popular following. Originally a lawyer by profession, he had been deputy for a provincial manufacturing area and then, having served the monarchy and later the Republic in various subordinate capacities, had become Minister of Posts and Telegraphs.

  At that time he had been regarded by the knowledgeable as a very able man and as either honest or so far insufficiently tempted. That he was not then even considered as potentially a great popular leader is understandable. His special talent was for organization; and while as a speaker he was not without force, the cool logic, dryly delivered, that made him effective in debate seemed unlikely ever to capture the hearts of audiences of peasants. That it did ultimately do so was a phenomenon produced by a peculiar combination of circumstances. Deltchev himself had very little to do with it.

  He had been one of the few deputies, and the only minister, who had opposed the alliance with the Axis at all vigorously; and during the summer of 1940, at the request of the German authorities, he had been interned. Towards the end of the year he was released, but kept under police surveillance. Two years passed before the surveillance became sufficiently negligent for him to embark on the underground political activity with which his name was to become associated.

  Before that time, opposition to the pro-German Government and its allies had been expressed chiefly by acts of sabotage against war-supply installations and by propaganda against the recruitment of divisions for the Russian front. This work had been done by groups led by militant People’s Party men, but containing a good proportion of Agrarian Socialists. Yet, although it was sometimes spectacular and always dangerous, the amount of inconvenience it caused the enemy was small and its effect on popular morale disappointing. To Deltchev’s way of thinking, the policy of the underground opposition should be to leave the winning of the war to those who could fight effectively and to concentrate on planning for the future of the country during the period immediately following the inevitable German collapse. He saw that her fate at the hands of the victorious powers would depend very much on the speed with which she could herself establish a provisional government sufficiently uncompromised to negotiate without cringing and strong enough to prevent civil war.

  The resultant Committee of National Unity was not created by Deltchev alone, but it was he who made it effective. Clandestine organizations are mostly recruited from among the dedicated, the romantic and the mentally ill-adjusted men and women of a community; and in them courage and devotion are more easily found than high-level planning ability and political skills. Because he was the clearest thinker the Committee had and the only member of it with any practical experience of government, Deltchev became in effect (though in fact he never held any specific appointment) its President, its Secretary General and, eventually, its spokesman. Hundreds of thousands of people who had never heard of Deltchev the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs now came to know of, and exult in, Yordan Deltchev the patriot. And when the time came for him to speak to them, the dry steady voice and the cool logic seemed, after the hysterical oratory of the war years, to derive from a special kind of sanity and goodness. They felt that he possessed the truth.

  If the Provisional Goverment of National Unity set up by the Committee in the spring of 1944 had done no more than sue for peace so promptly, it would have justified its existence; for by this action it saved all but one of the Northern frontier provinces from devastation and kept the minute army intact and available for police duties. Yet it did do more. It was able to secure recognition, qualified but sufficient, by the United Nations, and contrived, in those days of hasty negotiation and shifting authority, to confuse and postpone discussions of such matters as territorial claims and the dismantling of industrial installations. It ensured, at a minimum cost both to the national economy and to the national pride, that most of the vital decisions affecting the country’s future were made not in the heat of the newly won battle, but in the milder atmosphere of delayed peace conferences. The credit for these benefits was given to Deltchev. He began to be nicknamed, affectionately, ‘Papa’ Deltchev.

  Perhaps but for that nickname there would have been no People’s Party regime, and no Deltchev trial.

  When the Provisional Government came into power, it was said by neglected members of his own party that the motives behind Deltchev’s actions had all along been those of a shrewd, ambitious politician and that, while he could not be blamed for having had greatness thrust upon him, he should not now behave toward his old friends as if he had achieved it. They were soon to wish that they had been entirely right.

  One of the main articles of the Committee’s original programme had been that of insisting on the need for free elections at the earliest possible moment. Its inclusion and the sanctimonious style of its wording were concessions to Anglo-American susceptibilities, which, it had been felt, could hurt nobody. Not that the men of the Committee were cynically indifferent to elections; it was simply that, faced with the task of planning for a great emergency of which nothing was then known and only the worst could be expected, they found such talk unrealistic. A cultivated sense of emergency is not easy to discard and, later on, the early state of mind about elections tended to persist. When, therefore, the People’s Party members of the Provisional Government began to press for redemption of the election promise, their action was interpreted, and correctly interpreted, as a demand for more power; that is, a larger share of the important posts. Only to Deltchev, apparently, did it mean anything different.

  The People’s Party had lately grown enormously in numbers and influence. The participation of the Agrarian Socialists in the formation and work of the Committee had achieved its object of enlisting wide popular support; but it had also had the secondary effect of making the Committee a powerful recruiting agency for the People’s Party. This mishap had long been a subject of complaints and bitter exchanges within the government, and on one occasion Petra Vukashin, the leader of the People’s Party men, had been too frank. ‘If,’ he had said, ‘you are fool enough to introduce your wife to a handsome young man with a bad reputation, you must not complain when you find them in bed together.’

  When, to the manifest discomfort of Vukashin and the rest of the People’s Party faction, Deltchev took the election proposal seriously and began to argue in favour of it, it was assumed at first by his pathetically gleeful colleagues that ‘Papa’ Deltchev was merely calling the enemy’s bluff. They knew, had known for some time, that the Provisional Government had the approval and support of the Western powers, who would not press for the promised elections while the country was in Soviet occupation. They had evidence that the Russians, not unimpressed by Deltchev’s efficiency, were content to let things stay as they were for the present. Some of its members had even wondered if the word ‘provisional’ might not be dropped from the title of a government with so rich an expectation of life. They could not know that their leader, Deltchev, had already numbered its days.

  Many attempts were made later to offer more reasonable explanations of Deltchev’s actions at that time than the one accepted by the simpler members of the public — namely, that he was a self-sacrificing patriot who had been directly inspired by God. Since, however, most of their other explanations relied on the assumption that he was monumentally corrupt, none of them was much more convincing.

  The material facts were simple.
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br />   After the meeting at which the election promise was discussed Deltchev seemed preoccupied and unwilling to pursue the matter in private conversation. To one persistent man, however, he said, ‘If we have clean hands they cannot accuse us.’ The man took this to be a comment on the strength of the government’s position and the absurdity of the People’s Party manoeuvre.

  That was on a Thursday. For the next few days Deltchev was at home in bed with a severe chill. On the following Tuesday he was due to make a radio speech about a national campaign then in progress for conserving winter foodstuffs for livestock.

  He came to the radio station straight from his bed, looking, according to the director of the station, ‘Like a man who has been fighting with devils’. In his speech he talked briefly about the conservation campaign and then, after a momentary hesitation, produced a handwritten script from his pocket and began to read a statement from it.

  Five minutes later the people knew that, in the considered opinion of ‘Papa’ Deltchev, the time had now come for the government to redeem the Committee’s solemn pledge to hold free elections at the earliest possible moment.

  At the beginning of the statement he had declared that he was speaking only for himself and not for the Provisional Government of National Unity. This declaration was both seized upon as evidence of his cynical contempt for his audience and pointed to as marking his absolute integrity. For the former view it was said that no one but a fool would suppose that, whether he wanted to do so or not, Deltchev could in fact dissociate his private opinions on such a question from those of the government he led; for the latter it was argued that if you accepted the fact of his honesty (and who could deny it?) you would see that his disclaimer was a simple statement of the truth, which he had been bound to make if he were not to deceive the public. As equally divergent constructions could be placed on every other sentence in the statement, neither side could score points. Deltchev himself had returned from the radio station to his bed and, having issued, through his secretary, the statement that the broadcast speech was ‘self-explanatory’, remained there, silent and inaccessible. But by the time two days had passed, it was clear that the storm over the speech, which raged with mounting fury among the politicians, was no longer of interest to the people. In their eyes the Provisional Government was now committed quite irrevocably to holding elections in the near future and anyone who attacked Deltchev was attempting to deny the fact. Yet it was the People’s Party which profited most from the situation.