Perfect Witness

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Cody.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 07/15/2022

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For V.M., M.C., and B.C.,

daughter and granddaughters

of the real Lithuania

Tyliau

Said Writer to Reader

A Preface

S omebody of the class of Somerset Greene or Graham Maugham once said that to write a sequel is always a mistake. But such an unignorable warning has never given me pause, either as reader or now as writer. Rupert of Hentzau (1898) may not have delighted me quite as much as The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), yet who would say that Anthony Hope’s having written the sequel was a mistake?—Only some reader with no time or taste for serial reading, or perhaps for the previous novel romantic itself. We all have our predispositions.

Long before I finished writing Neighbouring Eyes (2004), I knew that a sequel was indicated. No Ruritanian intrigue can ever properly be confined to an English setting alone, as it was in my Tale of 1951. So from its inception, this sequel, Perfect Witness, concerned a foreign country of the mind called Baltija, which had been touched on in a foregoing novel but not yet, as it were, visited. Baltija is, to my mind, by no means a representation of one or all of the real Baltic States, either in 1953-54 or before or since. It is, as a fiction, no more historically an account of the Baltics than Ruritania (in The Prisoner of Zenda) is of the Habsburg Empire.

When imagining Baltija, I have been prompted by suggestions gathered from a variety of sources. My wife for twenty-five years, a native of Klaipeda brought up in Vilnius, spoke Lithuanian before she adopted English; she would sometimes share with me one of her memories of the peace and war years, but not often: they were far too sad. It was she who first mentioned to me the fatal linguistic charm, the slippage, of Danzig>Gdansk>Gdainys. Those names!

From the news media and history books, I have taken the heroic figure of Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia and transposed him and his political situation to my Balto-Slavonic Ruritania. Last of the Habsburgs, A.J.P. Taylor called him in 1948. It was Tito’s ambition to annexe Trieste that suggested to me the annexation of Danzig by Marshal Tievas of Baltija, which, of course, never really took place. However, Tito was far too good a politician to impose the Serbs as people of state on Yugoslavia, as my Tievas imposes the Lithuanians on Baltija (well before his double takes office). In 1945, just as the USSR did not subsume Yugoslavia owing to its great Partisan War, so, as I imagine it, Baltija was spared Russification then, and for a similar reason.

There are several other such sources of Might-Have-Been which deserve to be mentioned here, but I will leave naming them to the curious reader, as their largesse becomes apparent in the novel—except for The Captive Mind (1953) by Czeslaw Milosz. Mentioning this exceptional memoir gives me the opportunity to confess that in a pastoral tragi-comedy of Baltija under national communism—an intrigue opera—the tragic truth about the real Balts, the real Poles, the real Jews, and their sufferings can never be told.

It proves one of the pleasures of reading or writing an intrigue novel, whether Ruritanian or Ambleresque, to be reminded by fiction of the faction of history. In inventing Baltija, I have sometimes drawn upon the highly realistic (yet unnamed) Balkan Peoples Republic brought to life by Eric Ambler in his fascinating Judgement On Deltchev (1951). Is it not inconceivable that this minor classic should always have been under some sort of cloud, critically, beginning with an instant charge of anti-Stalinism? Or could it have been because Ambler himself was never really in Bulgaria for the Stalinist show trials and only heard the details firsthand from Romain Gary who was?

Of the several reminders in Perfect Witness of fact by fiction, the one I find the most entertaining (because the most questionable) is Winston Churchill’s inadvertent guerilla against the Tievas regime in Baltija after the Marshal’s death. From time to time, as during the early war years, the Churchill of history could evidently be very romantic about the freedom of the Baltic provinces—at their own expense.

Never having myself been in Gdansk, let alone Dzūkija, perhaps I shall be more plausible if I now put forward as one of the pleasures of reading the intrigue novel its reminders, not of history or geography but of other and better fictions. I should like the reader (rare as he or she may be) to be reminded by my post-Stalinist Gdainys of post-Napoleonic Parma in Stendhal’s incomparable novel, and by Medintiltas of the chateau of the same name in Mérrimée’s unforgettable story Lokis. However, the most profound of my hommages (as the French New Wave used to say) must be to the traditional folksongs of Lithuania and Latvia, which I quote briefly in translations by Uriah Katzenbogen, Algirdas Landsbergis, Clark Mills, Adrian Paterson, and Peter Sears; and which I have come to admire greatly, thanks to an essay of introduction by Marija Gimbutas.* To any reader of Perfect Witness who happens to admire or love the real Lithuania, I can only bow my head and repeat regretfully that Baltija signifies no more or less than any other Ruritania of fiction, though it may at times remind us of reality.

In closing, let me return for a few words more to the curious matter of sequel writing. Common sense says that a sequel is written and read in order to repeat, if not deepen, some original pleasure (putative as this may in any particular case be). Think of Antony Powell’s A Buyer’s Market (1953) following his delightful A Question of Upbringing (1951). It is our second cup of morning tea or coffee. But then there is always the reader who happens to have come upon the sequel first of all. It is to him or her that I feel this whole preface is chiefly owed.

In the case of Perfect Witness, I determined from the first that it should be, not only as independent of Neighbouring Eyes as I could make it, but also as different in design as possible. To this end, where the latter was written in the received, preferred form of a participant narrator (as in Rupert of Hentzau), even to the extent of having its narrator John Offord named as author, I have made Perfect Witness an exercise in the omniscient authorial voice, where there is nothing, presumably, that cannot be known objectively. This early determination of mine accounts for the perhaps cryptic device of telling all by way of three divergent media: letters, files, and converse about faith or trust which the reader is invited to put together as a romantic tale. These are denoted in the text Epistolary, Documentary, and Fiduciary, and they reappear several times in order to constitute the action—as do the three Witches in Macbeth. I was encouraged in this no doubt whimsical self-indulgence by the memorable and superior example of Charles McCarry’s The Miernik Dossier (1973), a triumph of documentary realism.

The Catch-22 of sequel writing is that it has to make succinct sense to both a reader who has read the previous novel and a reader who has not. So it remains for me now to make one of those familiar personae narrationis so handy to the English reader of Russian novels (though not, for some reason, of The Charterhouse of Parma).

R. C

Persons Of The Novel,

Etc.

Marshal Jurgis Tievas, President of the Baltic Peoples Republic, beginning in 1945, accidentally killed in 1951 and secretly replaced by his double, Jurgis Didelis.

Professor Jurgis Didelis, educated at Tartu and Cambridge, Ben Jonson scholar, translator, actor, Professor of English at the new University of Gdainys, BPR, supposedly dead since 1951, poses as President Tievas with covert British support.

Panelė [Miss] Valija Didelyte, niece of Jurgis Didelis, English language scholar educated at the Universities of Gdainys and London, appointed to the Chair of English at Gdainys early in 1953; then she first learns for sure that her uncle is not dead but posing as President Tievas.

Michael Brenan, BA London University (UC Northfleet), chance witness to the kidnapping of President Tievas in Greenwich in October 1951, college friend of Valija Didelis (as she was called in England), sequestered by Special Branch at the University of Mississippi, USA (Ole Miss), visiting English assistant at the University of Gdainys in 1953, son of William and Bessie Brenan of Blackheath, London, England, elder brother of Patrick Brenan.

Marianne Hollis, Fulbright student at University College, Northfleet in 1950-51, beloved of Michael Brenan, college friend of Valija Didelis, returned to her home in Alabama before the Tievas affair, first brought Michael and Valija together in Northfleet, graduate student of English, intending teacher.

Elizabeth née Rawlings, Lady Templeton, wife of Sir Marcus, devotee of Lithuanian folksong (daina), in 1951 entertained President Tievas at her house in Lincolnshire without knowing that he was really Jurgis Didelis, the impostor.

Sir Marcus Templeton, Vice Chancellor of University College Northfleet, Lecturer in English, man of letters, poet, confidential aide to Winston Churchill, in 1943 emissary to Marshal Tievas in Baltija, in 1951 key conspirator with his brother-in-law Stephen Rawlings and Professor Didelis in the unfortunate Tievas affair (see Neighbouring Eyes), absent from the Didelis affair of 1953 on a mission to Teheran.

Captain Šiauliu Čiabuvis, 1st armoured cavalry, BPR, alias of Antanas Baltrušaitis, protégé of Jurgis Didelis, known to his long term acquaintances as Baltrus, one of the seven persons in Gdainys who know Jurgis’ secret.

Lieutenant Jaan Antsoras, GGG (Ginkluota Gynybinė Grupė, Baltic counterpart of the Waffen SS), alias of Juozas Draugiski, protégé of Jurgis Didelis, known to his long term acquaintances as Drauga, one of the seven persons in Gdainys who know Jurgis’ secret, responsible for the death by overdose of the true President Tievas at Merewell, Norfolk, England, in October 1951.

Captain James Ingraham, RN, commander of the Presidential yacht Dolphynas, British control for Jurgis Didelis on his Gdainys mission, reports directly to Churchill in Westminster.

Lieutenant Ian Frazier, RN, second in command of the Dolphynas, in charge of communications.

Elzbieta Sisi Vassilevska, only surviving daugher of an aristocratic Czarist family, brought up in Dzūkija during the Lithuanian Republic of 1918-1940, spent the war years in Germany, recruited by President Tievas for his Gdainys secretariat not long before his visit to England in 1951.

General Gedmin Blaivas, Commander in Chief of the Armoured Corps and Air Force, Minister of War, mentor of Jurgis Didelis since Lithuanian Division days under the Germans, one of the seven persons in Gdainys who know his secret.

General Julius Marcinkus, Commander in Chief of Infantry and Supply, old comrade and friend of General Blaivas, supporter of Jurgis Didelis and keeper of his secret, married to Marija Marcinkiene who accompanies him to Medintiltas for Kalėdos in 1953.

Victor Hercogas, Prime Minister of the BPR under President Tievas since 1945, whose fall he anticipates, Muscovite in outward show, well-connected with the Warsaw Cominform.

Ponia [Mrs.] Helga Hercogiene, wife of the Prime Minister, formidable political activist on her husband’s behalf.

Julius Greičius, Minister of Information and Intelligence under President Tievas, an adept negotiator, cooperates both with the President and with his rivals, the Hercogas faction.

Verpėjas family, hosts of Michael Brenan in Gdainys: Algirdas, father, customs officer; Agate, mother; Tekla, daughter, age seventeen, tutored in English by Michael Brenan; Birute, daughter, age seven.

Mrs. Margaret Tydeman, travelling companion to Lady Templeton, housekeeper to her brother Stephen, ex-WRNS, romantically attached to Lt. Frazier.

Mr. James Morpurgo, British Council representative in Gdainys, wife Enid.

Sir Derek Smythe, British Consul in Gdainys.

Profesorius Jonas Niaulis, Chairman of Anthropology, University of Gdainys.

Lieutenant Arvydas Fermeris, 1st armoured cavalry, comrade and friend of Captain Čiabuvis, fellow member of Free Officers Corps and the forbidden KKB.

KKB (Karininkų Korpusas Broliškumas), secret terrorist society formed in 1905 against Czarist government, its cell members have Arthurian aliases, e.g., Brastias, Iordanus, Ūkvedys, and are otherwise unknown to one another, except for the armoured corps trio Čiabuvis, Fermeris, their driver Eruikas, and for Antsoras, Čiabuvis being known to the cell as a whole as Balin.

Seaman Tvirtas Pumpuras, third engineman of the Dolphynas, killed when ashore one night, probably a victim of the KKB. His fate and the sorrows of his fiancée, Gracija, are made much of by Helga Hercogiene in the Party Youth journal Pergale (Victory).

Canon Timofy Veiksnys, of the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul in Kaunas, acquaintance and guest of the false President Tievas.

Marschallin Birute Tieviene, estranged wife of the true President Tievas, former partisan leader and national heroine, dies suddenly before she meets her late husband’s impostor in person.

Inspector Gilbert Vaughan, Special Branch, London Metropolitan Police, official witness to the Tievas affair in England, 1951 (see Neighbouring Eyes), acquaintance of Michael Brenan and his friend John Offord (who writes Neighbouring Eyes), author in the later years of his retirement of an article on the Didelis affair of 1951-56 which was not published by the Spectator weekly, does not otherwise appear in Perfect Witness.

Colonel Vytautas Garas, retired, Baltic Counter Intelligence (Baltijos Kontržvalgyba), instrumental (especially for Michael Brenan) in the Tievas affair but gone to ground in England since 1951.

Arthur Bresnahan, fellow student and friend of Michael Brenan, shot and killed in mistake for him by Antanas Baltrušaitis at University College Northfleet in 1951.

John Offord, Blackheath neighbour and old school friend of Michael Brenan, History student studying at the University of Dijon, France, during 1953-54, narrator many years later of Neighbouring Eyes.

One day tells its tale to another.

(Psalms 19:2)

Contents

PART ONE

Chapter One You and Me

Chapter Two How and Why

Chapter Three Here and Now

PART TWO

Chapter Four If and When

Chapter Five Done and Paid For

Chapter Six Then and Now

PART THREE

Chapter Seven Yes and No

Chapter Eight Sad and Sorry

Chapter Nine Now and Then

PART FOUR

Chapter Ten In and Out

Chapter Eleven To and Fro

Chapter Twelve There and Back

PART FIVE

Chapter Thirteen Us and Them

Chapter Fourteen Stop and Start

Chapter Fifteen And So On

Chapter I

Epistolary

i

Michael Brenan to Valija Didelyte

The University PO Box 929

Oxford

Mississippi

USA

Easter Saturday, 1953

Dear Valija,

You will perhaps be surprised to hear from me—at such length, and out of the blue like this. I hope not. You did write Marianne in Montgomery for Christmas; and she relayed to me your welcome greeting, your good news, and this address in Gdainys.

Congratulations on completing the English thesis and taking a London MA home with you. And on being given the appointment in your late uncle’s department at the University. No longer one of die Zwergen, eh, but a fully fledged faculty member?

I am delighted to know of your successes. Only yesterday, in the Lit Supp (yes, those dry voices do reach this shore), I caught an announcement of your forthcoming edition of Catiline—no less!—in the Cambridge New Jonson. I look forward with pleasure to having a copy in hand and seeing what you say about the rare Ben. You will become a name, panelė Didelyte, no doubt about it.

What a wonderful year this latest one has turned out to be for you, after the tribulation of 1951-52. I do not forget how empty and anxious it all felt when your uncle was found dead—to say nothing of the danger of those liaisons with your fellow students from der Fachbereit, and poor Arthur B’s mysterious end. But now you go forward again, with confidence, as I always knew you would, looking up.

As to me, deep in the American South, I am dazzled by one vivid day after another. It is summer already and nature is fierce: sky molten, earth red, vegetation lush, and such colours—everywhere in thunder. My only previous glimpse of anything comparable was one summer in Algeria, three years ago, before the troubles. This is a different planet from the one I—or even you, I feel sure—grew up on. Things here leave one with no time for looking backward. I find myself with nary a new poem for the slim volume forever in progress. Those who can, do; those who can’t . . . learn, i.e., take courses. Or give them.

Late last August, when I first arrived in Alabama from the Pennsylvania Station, sweltering, Marianne met me at Tuscaloosa by the track in her Plymouth and took me to Montgomery, where her parents made me welcome enough. They were kind. But as a family, they all three seemed to be subject to bad moods. Between her and me there was none of the old unconditional intimacy. It was gone, not to be called back. Her father and mother had evidently said No to everything but a brief visit from one of their daughter’s former fellow students, who just happened to be on his way from England to Ole Miss for the year. Southern hospitality ruled. I was duly taken for a pleasant day or two to Sylacauga, where Marianne teaches school; and then put on the bus for Oxford, Mississippi, a hundred leagues to the west. She and I never once, even on trips alone in her car, really sat down and talked to one another about ourselves. Gatsby all over again.

For Thanksgiving, her brother and his wife asked me to visit them in Aliceville and go deer shooting, which I did and quite enjoyed doing. Marianne was there, too. And for Christmas, because there was nowhere else for me to go when the dorm here closed, I was invited back to the Hollises’ in Montgomery. Not a happy time. All this must have been extremely painful for Marianne, even more so than for me—the return of the non-native. But I really do not quite understand it. To go against her parents’ wishes in the matter of religion was finally out of the question for her, I suppose; and other good reasons for dishing me will not have been far to seek. To her dismay, as well as to mine, I turned out to be not the love of her life. Nobody was to blame.

Christmas was the last she and I saw of one another. From time to time, guardedly, we correspond. As you know, she is the letter writer and I am the diarist—whereas you, let us realize, are the one who can make things happen. I do not speak of Marianne now, Valija, without thinking of you. It was she who first introduced us, you remember, at one of her Highfield get-togethers, early in ’51, months before the hurlyburly began. When shall we three meet again I wonder.

Here at Ole Miss, graduate study in English means, first of all, not starting a thesis but taking a number of advanced lecture courses and seminars—lots of A’s on the transcript (if one has a clue at all). These are called one’s Credits. (Think of Indulgences.) I have spent most of this year, more or less contentedly, studying regional literatures and histories. What price the works of . . . William Gilmore Sims . . . Kate Chopin . . . Hamlin Garland? The fate of the tidewater aristocracy?

As luck would have it, Mr. William Faulkner of Yoknapatawpha County has not so far been much at home—or in the best of health. He injured his back falling from a horse last summer—in England, believe it or not, on a visit to Chatto and Windus, while you and I were still there! Then, back here, but still in pain, he took off for New York City. I gather he does not encourage people from the University to look him up at home. The long novel he has for some time now been working at is said to be set on the Western Front in the First War (!) and to have a Christ figure central to it. Her Privates We with knobs on, my father would say.

William’s brother John, who is also a novelist, has been kind enough to have me in for a drink and a talk at his home on the campus drive. But my dream of being received as Faithful Reader at Rowan Oak has yet to come true; and my doing the first monograph ever from a London publisher on the Great Man grows less and less likely. Lately, it is Robert Penn Warren whose novels have been keeping me turning the page and who strikes me as a genius, Nobel Prize or not. I must send you a copy of his latest, World Enough And Time, to see what you think.

In the Department here my advisor, a shrewd Faulknerian named Campbell, belongs to the Agrarians, a school of criticism based at Nashville in Tennessee. He tells me ironically that the future lies, not on this rural campus, but on an urban one a thousand miles away up the Mississippi. Minnesota, he says, Harvard of the Midwest, has become the power house of studies in contemporary American fiction. Putting me in touch with an old friend of his there, now the Department Chairman, he has found me an opening as English Instructor (part-time) and candidate for the PhD (more coursework, another thesis)—provided, that is, I can come by the necessary visa. Life and Contacts, Miss Didelis, as it says in that poem of EP’s you used to like to quote in your student days.

I have done no teaching here, given no lectures, though my seminar papers (and occasional tea time talk to a ladies’ club about the English) have been kindly received. But I feel as if leading a class in the study of an Author and correcting student composition would not now be beyond me. Mr. Campbell has warned severely against what he calls an insufficiently serious attitude towards my own future in teaching. Could one bring off what Graham Greene would never be caught dead even contemplating? Is not teaching an employment one may feel justified in?

To apply for the much