High Road to China

I turned my head to look behind me, following the direction of his gaze. Intent on watching Kern bring his plane down, I had not noticed before that the whole valley was one vast rose garden, split up the middle by the road. There were workers scattered throughout the fields; the closest were four women on the other side of the road. As Kern and I looked at them they flung their skirts up over their heads, hiding their faces; but everything they owned below the waist was exposed. Pubic hair and bare bottoms are common sights nowadays, but in 1920 we didn’t have the broadening education of television and only those with the fare to Paris or Port Said ever saw a blue movie. These women stood modesty on its head, but every woman to her own standards.

‘A charming custom,’ said Kern. ‘Purely local, no doubt.’

I looked at Miss Tozer, but she was staring up the road. In the distance there was a cloud of white dust, quickly coming closer. Then we saw that just ahead of it was a white horse galloping at full speed and a few moments later we recognized the rider of the horse as a woman sitting side-saddle. She came down on us like a Valkyrie, bringing the horse to a rearing halt only yards from us.

‘Good God, we must be in Roumania!’ said Kern. ‘It’s Queen Marie!’

But it wasn’t, though we didn’t know that at once. She quietened the prancing horse, sat elegantly in the saddle and looked us up and down. She said something in a language I didn’t recognize, then she spoke in heavily accented English. ‘You are English, yes? Those are English aeroplanes, are they not?’

‘We are English, American, German,’ said Miss Tozer and introduced us individually.

‘I am the Countess Ileana Malevitza.’ She had to be an aristocrat of some sort, or an eccentric; or both. She was wearing a bright red tunic, braided with silver and with silver epaulettes, over a royal-blue shirt and dark blue trousers tucked into riding boots that came above her knees. She had a black fur shako on her blonde head and a short sword swung in an enamelled sheath at her waist. Despite her coating of fine dust, the effect of her was striking. We’ve flown through that storm into Ruritania, I thought, and waited for the Drury Lane chorus, somewhere out among the rose bushes, to burst into song. I looked across the road again, ready to be bemused again by the bare bottoms and bellies, something I had never seen at Drury Lane, but the women had dropped their skirts now and stood watching us. That somehow made everything real.

‘You are welcome to my valley,’ said the Countess.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and found myself doing a Kern: I clicked my heels and bowed. ‘Where are we?’

‘In the Valley Malevitza. The border between Roumania and Bulgaria runs down the middle of this road, right through my house. You are in Roumania at this moment.’

‘And the young ladies are Bulgarian?’ Kern gestured towards the women standing among the rose bushes on the other side of the road.

‘Young? Your eyesight is not very good, Baron. Only one of them is young.’ The Countess gave them only a cursory glance, as if they were no more than thorns or faded blooms on the bushes.

‘I don’t think the Baron looked too carefully at their faces,’ said Miss Tozer.

The Countess laughed heartily: it came up out of her belly, like a fat man’s. ‘It is the custom among some of the women. They dare not show their faces to a strange man at first. What else they show is not an invitation. Their menfolk would cut the stranger’s throat if he thought it was.’

I saw the men standing further back in the rose fields. They had risen up from among the bushes; more women and children were also appearing. There must have been a hundred of them spread out through the fields on either side of the road, dark, silent figures among the blaze of red, pink and white blooms. Each man’s hand glittered: it was a moment before I realized each of them held a sharp pruning knife.

Sun Nan had got out of Miss Tozer’s plane. He looked pale and sick, but he put on his bowler hat against the fierce sun and stood holding on to the lower wing of the machine, doing a good job of looking dignified. The Countess glanced at him, but made no comment: like Kern she dismissed him as a servant. Nobody, in her book, would have an Oriental with him or her unless he was a servant.

‘Why did you land here in my valley?’

I explained the circumstances and pointed to the remains of Kern’s top wing. ‘I’m afraid the Baron can’t take off again until we repair that. Is there somewhere around here where we can stay, an inn or something?’

‘You will be my guests. Follow me.’ She swung her horse round. I wondered if we were supposed to gallop after her on foot.

‘Countess, I don’t want to leave the machines parked here with no one to look after them.’

I don’t know what I really expected to happen to the planes, unless I thought the rose-gatherers would attack them with their pruning knives. It struck me that none of these peasants, wild-looking and isolated in this mountain valley, had seen an aeroplane before, at least not on the ground and quite possibly not even in the sky. I had vague memories of reading of Balkan superstitions and there was no guarantee that these particular Balkans trusted the strange contraptions that had fallen down out of the clear hot sky into their midst. I had only a hazy idea where we were, but Dracula country couldn’t be too far away.

‘Bring them with you.’ She dug her heels into her horse and went up the road at full gallop, trailing a long thin veil of dust.

I shrugged, turned to the others. ‘She’s the hostess.’

‘I think she’s mad,’ said Miss Tozer. ‘Do you think we should stay with her?’

‘What choice do we have? Even if I can find some canvas and varnish right away, it’s going to take me at least two days to rebuild that wing.’

She hid her dismay, but I knew she had guessed it was not going to be a ten-minute repair job. Kern said, ‘You can go on without me and I’ll try to catch you up.’

I waited for Miss Tozer to give the decision, but she was looking at me. She was the boss, but with George Weyman’s departure I had become what I suppose one would call the technical manager. ‘I think it’s better we stick together, at least for the time being. We still have a few days in hand.’