Territorial Rights by Muriel Spark Page B

something.’
    ‘He says you’re being followed,’ Robert said. ‘And that it’s dangerous for me to be seen with you.’
    ‘Being followed? Let them follow. I have asylum. I have residential rights, and my father’s grave is here in Venice. I will go to the police and complain. And I have to get a job because my refugee fund money isn’t enough. And nobody wants my paintings in Venice. I’m a defector and I have my rights. Maybe I get a job in a movie.’
    She walked around her little room, agitated but inhibited by the cramped space and the physical obstacles in the way of every step, the surfaces of which were moreover covered entirely by food-tins, paint-tins, crockery, her drawing-boards and her crayons, her bag of flour, her jar of salt, her folded clothes piled high, and Robert himself sprawling in the chair.
    But Robert wasn’t listening to her anyway. He was wondering whether to tell her, too, to go to hell, this being his mood of that day. He saw, from the washing-line extending from Lina’s little window, her green bulbous drawers hung out to dry; sometimes, so she told him, she found this garment useful for shoplifting in the grocery departments, when her cheque from the refugee fund in Paris was late in arriving, or when she ran out of money at the end of the month.
    He said, ‘Maybe you’d like to meet my father, too. He’s turned up in Venice with his mistress.’
    ‘With his mistress, are you saying?’
    ‘That’s right.’
    She was very shocked. There was no knowing what would shock Lina.
    ‘Why do they come to Venice when you come to Venice. It’s you that’s being followed, not me.’
    ‘Everyone,’ said Robert, ‘comes to Venice. Yourself, for example—’
    ‘But he has no right to bring his mistress to you.’
    ‘He brought her to Venice, not to me,’ Robert said.
    ‘Who is she? What a woman! How could she come to Venice? Is she a Jew?’ Lina had a stubborn phobia about Jews, a burden of her upbringing which had lost her most of her friends in Paris. On learning that Mary was not a Jew, so far as Robert was aware, Lina next enquired as to Mary’s profession.
    ‘She’s a cookery teacher, but that’s only a hobby. She’s rich. I rather liked the look of her,’ Robert said. ‘She was showy and flashy which I think is right for a mistress.’
    Lina started to cry. She said, ‘I don’t understand half the words you say, and now you want another woman, you have desire.’
    Robert repeated in French, which she could better follow, all he had said and more; he spoke quite slowly with a venom that had no bearing on the present occasion; except that, feeling in a bad mood, he saw no need whatsoever to control it.
    Lina said, ‘I will meet with your father. I will meet with Curran. I will tell them the story how I got away for a better life. It’s a great story.’ She was crying even more, as she worked herself up with the drama of her story.
    Robert started to feel enjoyment, and laughed.
    Lina Pancev, now aged thirty-five, had grown up in post-war Bulgaria. Her father had disappeared the year she was born, while Bulgaria was still under German occupation. Victor Pancev had been a minor official at the court of King Boris of Bulgaria; the king was a fairly silly man who had playmates rather than friends; Victor Pancev was one of these. The king collapsed and died one day, poisoned, it was said, at the instigation of the Germans. Victor Pancev disappeared on the day of the funeral, never to return. Some weeks later his wife, in Bulgaria, had a letter from a friend who had seen him in Venice where he was staying with a Bulgarian count at a house called Villa Sofia. She had a postcard from Victor himself, not in his usual style, to say he was well and busy. Shortly after this, Lina was born.
    Amid the chaos of war, when Russian liberators in Bulgaria followed upon German liberators, and in Italy the Allies finally liberated right, left and centre, the noble owner of the Villa