Uncle Rudolf. Paul Bailey
—You promise me?
—Yes, Uncle. I promise.
He embraced me then, and ruffled my hair, and said that the impossible country of Moldania beckoned. He would be exiled for three silly hours, during which distracted time he would inspire the peasants to revolt in a friendly manner – No bloodshed, I implore you! – before discovering he was their long-lost king.
—Oh, Andrew, will I never be freed from this nonsense?
Muraturi was the old word on my lips this morning. Why was I thinking of pickled vegetables – of cauliflower and carrots; of green and red peppers; of radishes and red cabbage? I hadn’t eaten the dish in a lifetime, not since…and then, with an involuntary cry of anguish, I pictured a lake, and clear blue sky, and saw my mother and me tickling my father, who is pretending to be asleep on the grass. The vegetables are glistening on little plates on that summer afternoon in 1936.
Why has this scene – of the kind so many English poets call sylvan – never come to me in dreams?
—I will have my revenge, you scamp, says my father, waking with a start, as if from a nightmare.
His revenge, his sweet revenge, is to tickle his son’s tummy, until the happy boy is weak with giggling.
I did not know you could kill hours until that afternoon in Bucharest.
—We have hours to kill, Andrei. We must think of something to do. Are you hungry?
—A little bit. How do you kill hours, Tata?
—By keeping busy. You kill time by forgetting about it. You pretend it doesn’t exist. Let’s see if Cina is open.
I have a memory of crossing a huge square in order to reach my uncle’s favourite restaurant. I see again a fat, bald waiter greeting my father as we enter Cina, stamping the snow from our boots. The waiter knows my father’s brother from the time he broke the hearts of every woman in the city. There was never a Danilo more wickedly handsome.
—How is the great Rudolf?
—He is well, Sandu. This young man is his nephew. Andrei is going to London to live with him for a while.
Sandu brings us the dishes the great Rudolf Peterson most enjoys and we eat as much as we can. My father drinks the red wine his brother loves and soon the hours we needed to kill have gone by, only to recur in vivid snatches, a whole lifetime later, in the dreams that beset an Englishman named Andrew Peters. The beaming Sandu is shaking my hand and saying:
—Tell your uncle, the moment you meet him, that he must come back to his country. Tell him that is Sandu’s command. We do not have many heroes, Andrei, but Rudolf Peterson is one of them. Remind him that he is a national hero.
I promised to pass on the message and did so, on the twenty-third of February, 1937, on the platform at Victoria Station. It was something to say to the man who had lifted me up in his arms till my face was level with his. Uncle Rudolf laughed, and kissed me on both cheeks.
—I am no hero, Andrew. I am a hero on the stage, but nowhere else.
The final part of my last, week-long journey with my father took three days. We crossed the Hungarian plains in darkness, with only the black shapes of trees visible from the window. Then there were the mountains of Austria and Switzerland to marvel at. The French countryside, which I would visit with Uncle Rudolf in the autumn of 1950, when he was intent on educating me in matters of the spirit, seemed dull by contrast.
The train stopped at each border. Soldiers carrying guns came aboard and examined everybody’s papers. I remember that one of them, an Austrian or perhaps a German, pulled a frightened face in mockery of my own. His feigned look of terror made me smile, but it angered my father, who muttered words the man understood, for he instantly reassumed his stern expression.
I wasn’t scared of the guns, in truth. It was the future, of which I had been unaware before, that caused me to be fearful. I knew this solely from the gnawing pain in my stomach, which spoke of things unknown. A similar gnawing pain would afflict me years later, with the recognition of a love that could neither be mentioned nor properly gratified – a love, paradoxically, that has sustained me for twenty-five years of solitude.
Here I was, in London, safely delivered by the French guard – who gained a small fortune in English money from my smiling uncle – looking about me, bewildered.
—You will be Andrew, Andrei. Andrew. For all the time you are in my care.
I was still in his arms. He was bearing me out of the station and into the chauffeur-driven car that was waiting for us.
—This is my nephew, he said to the driver in the new language I would soon be learning.
—Welcome to England, Andrew. My uncle translated Charlie’s greeting, and instructed me to say thank you, which I somehow did.
—Thank you. My first new words on that first evening.
I had never been in a lift, because we had no such modern thing in our town, but here I was, with my uncle’s hand on my shoulder, going up and up to his apartment on the top floor of Nightingale Mansions. That lift would become a golden cage in which I was happy to be imprisoned. I loved the way it clanked to a stop. In summer, when most of the Nightingale’s residents were on holiday in the south of France, I lived in my cage whenever I was free to play, working the magic handle that set it in motion, jumping in and out of it as the mood took me.
I heard the clanking sound for the first time that evening, and then here I was entering my uncle Rudolf’s London home. I was hugged and kissed by Annie, his housekeeper, who smelt of a soap I would discover was called carbolic, and who whispered Andrew, Andrew, over and over again, into my ear.
—You poor, lovely boy, she was saying, you poor, lovely boy. I heard affection in her voice, but with no knowledge of what she was really telling me. Annie would say to me later, as she poured porridge into my special bowl, that I was her poor, lovely boy from the moment she saw me on that cold February night. I was her clever boy, too, for speaking English so well.
My uncle’s flat was sumptuous. The word was unknown to me in 1937, for I had not been raised in anything like luxury. My parents had had no cause to use it, ever. Somptuos. Our house in the small country town – the house I was expecting to live in again – was humble, and humbly furnished. But Uncle Rudolf’s furniture was of a kind I could not even dream of, and had no words to describe until I became the English nephew he wanted me to be. Although I was tired and confused, my eyes took in the vast sofa, the shining mahogany table, the chaise longue, the grand piano, the chandelier, and the paintings and drawings that covered every wall. I gawped. I gawped in wonder, in utter astonishment.
I slept alongside my uncle that night. He sang me to sleep with a lullaby.
—Annie burns the toast to perfection, said Uncle Rudolf in the old language. I have trained her well.
It was at breakfast, on my third day in England, that he announced he had to visit Paris. Urgent business. A chance to sing, perhaps, at the Opéra. He wished he could take me with him, but it would not be fun for me, waiting in some lonely hotel room for an uncle who was engaged elsewhere. Annie and Teddy would keep me amused, and Charlie would drive me around London, showing me all of the sights, and he would call me on the telephone, speaking the words we both understood. I was not to be worried or upset. He would be back with me by Friday, at the very latest. I was in safe hands.
Those safe hands were Annie’s, Teddy’s and Charlie’s – my uncle’s doting servants. I sat in the kitchen with the perspiring Annie, watching as she prepared the food that was so different from anything Mama had cooked for me; and I walked with Teddy Grubb to the bank that was proud to have Rudolf Peterson’s custom, and where I was given a freshly minted pound note by the cashier, and then I was Charlie’s happy passenger for an entire rainy afternoon, seeing nothing of the promised sights but revelling in the fact – the unlikely fact – that I was in a car the like of which the people in our town would not have believed existed.