the important party members and functionaries. Their occupants wore dark neat clothes and either sat with self- conscious, preoccupied frowns or conversed in busy undertones with their neighbours. Aware of being in the public eye, they were concerned to show that they had business there and were not merely favoured spectators. It was warm, and most of the women and many of the men had highly coloured paper fans.
At about ten o’clock the floodlights in the balcony were turned on and the fluttering sound of film cameras began. A buzz of anticipation went round the courtroom; then, as the three black-robed judges came slowly in, all stood up. The judges went to their places on the dais but did not sit down until the national anthem had been played through a loudspeaker. It was all curiously reminiscent of a royal visit to the opera. Even the low murmur of conversation which began as we sat down again was familiar. All that was different was that instead of the lowering of lights and the rise of a curtain somebody stood up and called out the name of Yordan Deltchev, and all eyes turned toward a pair of glazed doors beside the dais. Then there was silence except for the sound of the cameras and the distant throbbing of the generator which supplied the power for the floodlights.
After a moment or two the glazed doors were flung open and three men entered the court. Inside the door they paused for a moment blinking in the lights that poured down on them. Two of them were uniformed guards, tall, smart young fellows. Between them was an elderly man with a thin, grey face, deep-set eyes, and white hair. He was short and had been stocky, but now his shoulders were rounded and he was inclined to stoop. He stood with his hands thrust deep into his jacket pockets, looking about him uncertainly. One of the guards touched his arm and he walked over to the rostrum and stepped onto it. A chair had been placed for him, but for a moment he stood there looking round at the flags on the walls. He smiled faintly. He still had his hands in his pockets. Then, with a curt nod to each of the judges, he sat down and closed his eyes. This was Yordan Deltchev.
There were twenty-three counts listed in the published indictment against him. They charged (principally in count number eight, though the same charge was paraphrased in two other counts) that he had ‘prepared terrorist plots against the state and conspired with reactionary organizations, including the criminal Officer Corps Brotherhood, to secure, for financial and other personal advantages, the occupation of the motherland by troops of a foreign power’. There were other charges concerned with terrorist activity, the smuggling of arms, and plots to assassinate members of the People’s Party Government ‘in particular P. I. Vukashin’. Sprinkled throughout were dark references to ‘various confederates’, ‘notorious foreign agents’, ‘hired saboteurs and murderers’, ‘reactionary gangsters’ and so on, while the name of the Officer Corps Brotherhood recurred with the persistence of a typewriter bell. It was soon evident that the indictment was a propaganda document intended for foreign consumption. It said, in effect, or hoped to say, ‘He is the kind of man against whom such charges may seriously be brought,’ and, ‘He is accused of so much that of some he must be guilty.’
The public prosecutor conducted his case in person. His name was Dr Prochaska and he was one of the few members of the legal profession who had joined the People’s Party before it had come to power. He was an authority on questions of land tenure, and most of his practice had been concerned with cases involving them. He had had little experience of court advocacy of any kind and none at all in criminal proceedings. A stout, pugnacious- looking man with quick, jerky movements and a habit of licking his lips every few seconds, he seemed more concerned to defend himself against accusations of weakness than to present his case effectively. He made scarcely any reference to the official indictment and dealt with only two of the charges in it. If he could prove, or seem to prove, those, then Deltchev would stand convicted on the whole indictment. That, at least, was the impression I had of it. From the commencement of his long opening address he adopted a tone of ranting denunciation that carried little conviction and confused even the more reasoned passages. In spite of the earphones on my head, and the voice of the interpreter quietly translating the speech, I was constantly distracted by the sight and half-heard sounds of its originator.
His case, however, was dangerously simple.
It was generally known that at the time of the German retreat in 1944 Deltchev, who had been secretly in touch with both the Russians and the Western powers, had gone to great lengths to secure Anglo-American, rather than Soviet, occupation of the country. Against the wishes of a majority of the Committee of National Unity, he had at one point gone so far as to propose to the Western Powers that the national army should continue to resist the Russians in the north so as to give the Americans and British time to prepare an airborne invasion from Middle East bases.
It was now suggested by the Prosecution that this proposal had come in fact from the Western Powers themselves and that Deltchev’s support of it had been bought with the promise that he would have control of the reallocation of the German oil concessions. In other words, he had tried to sell his countrymen’s lives for money and power.
The other favoured charge was the one that had so amused my economist friend. It was that Deltchev had planned to assassinate Vukashin, the head of the People’s Party Government, and that he was, in fact, a member of the Officer Corps Brotherhood. If this could seem to be proved, he could quite legally and with full popular approval be sentenced to death. The case against Deltchev was designed to destroy both him and the Agrarian Socialist Party which had produced him for ever.
I left the court that day in a peculiar frame of mind. I felt as if I had been to the first night of what had seemed to me a very bad play only to find that everyone else had enjoyed it immensely. A Propaganda Ministry bureau had been set up in a room adjoining the court. On the way out Pashik stopped to get the official bulletin on the day’s proceedings. The room was crowded and I waited in the doorway. There were a number of tables, each signposted with the name of one of the official languages. As I stood there, I saw a bald young man whom I thought I knew coming away from the English table. I had noticed him earlier in the day and been unable to place him. Now as he pushed his way out we came face to face. He nodded.
‘You’re Foster, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. We’ve met before.’
‘Sibley, Incorporated Press.’
‘Oh yes.’ I remembered, too, that I had not liked him.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘Getting local colour for a new play?’
I explained. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Very nice too. Still, I expect you’ll make a play out of it sometime, won’t you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I should have thought that there were masses of material for you. It’d make quite a nice little paragraph, your being here. Do you mind if I use it?’
‘Yes, I do.’ I smiled as I said it, but not very cordially.
He laughed. ‘All right, I’ll spare you. But it’d be nice to send something even a little more interesting than these handouts.’ He waved the sheets in his hand. ‘I’m at our Paris office really. I’ve been lent for the trial. Why I can’t think. An office boy could file this junk for all of us.’ He turned his head as Pashik came up. ‘Hullo, Georghi, we were just talking about you.’
‘Good evening, Mr Sibley. We must be going, Mr Foster. I have to get to the office.’
‘That’s our Georghi. Always on the job!’ Sibley grinned. ‘Where are you staying, Foster?’
I told him.
‘We must have a drink together,’ he said.
In the car Pashik gave me the bulletin. I glanced through it. Most of it was composed of extracts from Dr Prochaska’s address. They were even more idiotic to read than to listen to. I put the bulletin down. The streets leading back to the centre of the city were narrow and crowded and Pashik was a driver who twitched at the wheel instead of steering with it. He squeezed his way none too skilfully between two carts.
‘Mr Foster,’ he said then, ‘there is a suggestion which I think I must make to you.’ He looked round at me soulfully. ‘You will not, I hope, be offended.’
‘Not at all. Look out.’
He twitched away from a cyclist just in time. The cyclist shouted. Pashik sounded the horn unnecessarily and put on speed.
‘It is a small thing,’ he said — the car swayed unpleasantly across some protruding tram lines — ‘but I would not, if I were in your place, be too friendly here with Mr Sibley.’
‘Oh? What’s the matter with him?’
‘It is nothing personal, you understand.’
‘But what?’
