Читать книгу Partner in Three Worlds - Dorothy Duncan - Страница 3

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THE paper somebody else is reading always appears to have more in it than one’s own copy. In Montreal, this is peculiarly true. So in these days and nights of the war when the trams in this Canadian seaport are crowded beyond belief, it is better to read the paper someone else manages to hold up than to try to unfold one’s own.

When the tram wheels ground against their brakes as Côte des Neiges began to level off to meet Sherbrooke Street, I got up and started on the slow journey toward the door. I steadied myself against the broad back of a man who was blocking my passage, gave a friendly nudge to a girl who hung on an air gunner’s arm, and then found myself halted for the moment as I peered over the shoulder of a little fellow who was absorbed in a late edition of the Montreal Daily Star. He held his breath and leaned forward into the lap of a tired munitions worker whenever passengers pressed against him, but he kept his balance with one hand on a strap and the half-folded newspaper in the other.

The car stopped with a vicious jerk and the bilingual French-Canadian conductor shouted “Ghee ... Guy ... Goy.” To make sure we all got it he added, “Guy Street.”

My eyes picked up headlines and subheads in the little fellow’s Star and saw vaguely a picture in the middle of the sheet. Then I found myself spilled onto the street along with a rush of fetid air and an assortment of humanity. That picture in the little fellow’s paper! I knew one of those faces. I knew it well!

The tram went on with a clanging of bells and I stood on the curb in the Montreal dusk. Had it really been Jan Rieger? Could it have been? But I had seen him, right there. I waited for the red light to change to green, crossed to pick up a paper at the corner stand, and tucked it under my arm as I hurried on my way.

“Hi, darling!” I called as soon as I unlocked the door. It was his day to get home first. “See what I’ve found.”

We spread the paper under the lamp on the table and leaned over it, trying to bring Jan’s face toward us through the convex lens of an old magnifying glass. It was only a commonplace news photo and its caption said it had been taken at an unnamed port. The uncommon thing about it was the subject matter. It showed German prisoners being transferred to a liner, guarded by soldiers wearing tam-o’shanters. The background had been retouched to remove all marks of identification. Well in the foreground was the open cargo port through which the prisoners were entering the ship, and there at one side stood Jan in British battle dress, watching his charges. His expression seemed to us a mixture of exultation and bitter irony.

We moved the magnifying glass up and down, trying to bring him forward into three dimensions, trying to remember him as we had seen him last. Almost a year had passed since then. We knew he had been transferred to the Intelligence Corps, and we understood why he was unable any longer to tell us where he was or what he was doing. It had been a long time since his last letter. And now here before us was that fine Czech countenance again, earnest, aloof and unmistakably alive. It could be no one else but Jan.

He had the face of a Roman statue with a sense of humor. The prematurely gray hair cropped close to his well-moulded skull gave his age as forty-odd. Two strong lines cutting down through his cheeks from a dominant nose to enclose full, mobile lips assured a rich humor that betrayed itself often in sudden warming smiles. But it was his passionately just and ever-judging eyes that held us now, as they had always done.

When we met him first he was serving as a private in the Canadian army. He had come to us through a chance introduction, in the way of so many wartime meetings in this seaport on the St. Lawrence. If we entertained him at first from a sense of duty, the duty was quickly forgotten. He wasn’t exactly messianic, though he appeared to have that effect upon many people who first encountered him in our living room. It was rather that he brought to the surface and intensified the underlying spirit of everyone he talked with, throwing the light of his mind on every subject and adding warm kindliness to every emotion. There were some, of course, who remained immune to his spell, but he nevertheless brought their innate spirit to the surface, as he did with everyone else.

For almost a year he came to us in Montreal as often as he could. Sometimes the army swallowed him for weeks at a stretch. Then the telephone would ring and a voice with a savory Czech accent would announce his return, and the next week or two would be filled with long evenings of conversation before our fire.

One of the first things we learned about him was the large inner pride of his race, the independence, and the politeness that bases itself upon a horror of intruding or being in the way. The nature behind that strong Roman face could be sensuous and almost delicate. Or it could be hard and suspicious, contorted with temper and a burning fury. In the presence of those he trusted his thinking was philosophical and wry. When he spoke of the age-old enemies of his fallen country his mind turned again, and became ruthless with the weight of justice behind it. But at its core it was an enduring mind. Everyone who encountered it felt its weight.

Yet it was only as we knew him better, and learned some of the convolutions of his strangely dramatic life, that we came to understand that his appearance and his intelligence were both masks for his heart. I mean by that the kind of heart a boxer has when he keeps on fighting with blood in his eyes and his knees shaking long after he should be stretched out cold on the canvas. I mean, too, the kind of heart possessed by an exile thinking of home.

We could only guess what he was doing in that picture with German prisoners. Did it mean he was on his way back to Canada with them? Had he seen action in Africa? At least one thing was certain; he had come into contact with his enemies at last, and they were prisoners under his guard at the moment the camera had caught him.

We had known him only as a private soldier, but we knew that a long chain of circumstances which started before he was born had led him straight through poverty, war, prominence, international fame and then disaster to this moment. Someday, he had said, we would know the rest of his story. Now he was a man submerged in a past so tangled with clues that it was difficult to tell which were important, which were not. For his relevant past went all the way back to an era which thought itself innocent and at least was guileless and very young....