Flights of steps, arched and roofed-in like slanting cloisters, zigzagged downhill from this eyrie and I always seemed to be out of breath from toiling up them or rushing down full-tilt and haring across the Széchényi Bridge, late for some appointment in Pest; in one particular case, for luncheon at 7 Joszef tér, just the other side.
My hostess at the Schloss[4] in lower Austria where I made such a fool of myself on my nineteenth birthday belonged to a Trieste family of Greek origin. She had written to friends and relations in Budapest. One of them was the former Prime Minister, Count Paul Teleki, and he belonged to a famous, rather romantic Transylvanian family. One recent but fairly distant member, exploring Ethiopia, had discovered Lake Rudolf and named it after the ill-fated Archduke; and the volcano at its southern tip was called Mount Teleki (but perhaps no longer). Mine—Count Paul—was a famous geographer too. He had mapped the whole Japanese archipelago and, across the table, he told us stories of travel among the Turks and the Arabs when he was helping to draw the frontiers of Mesopotamia. He broke off for lively descriptions of Abdul Hamid and Slatin Pasha, that strange Anglo-Austrian for years the prisoner and running-footman of the Mahdi. The Count’s alert, pointed face behind horn-rimmed spectacles, lit by a quick, witty and enthusiastic manner, had an almost Chinese look. It is hard to think of anyone kinder. As Chief Scout of Hungary, he took my travel plans to heart, spread maps, indicated passes and routes, traced rivers, suggested alternative approaches and enlivened everything as he did so with anecdotes and asides. He had been Foreign Minister and later Prime Minister for a little less than a year, resigning to return to his geographical work when Horthy sent soldiers to stop the return of King Karl. He asked me back a couple of times and all his family were kind to me in various ways; and when I left, he recommended me to his relations in Transylvania. He even gave me a letter to an old Turkish pasha living on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus which suddenly made my journey’s end seem something more than an abstraction.[5]
As Annamaria, the pretty girl I made friends with at the ball, was studying art history, she knew every picture-gallery and museum by heart; thanks to her I haunted them all. It must have been she who pointed out (but where?) a remarkable and untypical wrestling match by Courbet; and she acted as Open Sesame to a private house with a long room which was empty except for half a dozen tremendous El Grecos. I met a lot of people and the tempo of life quickened. One exploratory foray into high life led to the drawing room of an ex-reigning beauty equally famous for her looks and her exalted rank. Afterwards, when Berta asked what I thought, I said that she was wonderful looking; but wasn’t she a shade precious? Berta laughed; “When we were nurses in the War,” she said, “Ella insisted on working only in the blind wards, saying ‘I have to, you see! In the others they all fall in love with me and I mustn’t add to those poor boys’ sufferings.’”
Every day Tibor used to drive out to some military stables beyond Pest to exercise a favourite charger. One morning he asked me if I would like to come: he had got hold of another horse, so we trotted and cantered round the track and went over a few easy jumps; then we headed for a paddock where I watched him put his horse through the most arcane and mysterious paces in a silence as rapt and with a skill almost as perfect as those experts in the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. I think the outing was a mild vetting and I must have scraped through, for on the way back he said they might be able to fix up a mount for some of my eastward journey, which would pass the estate of a friend who had plenty of horses—perhaps she would lend me one for two or three days. “It’s the right way to see the plain.” I was so excited by the prospect I hardly dared to speak.
* * *
Trivial things light fuses in the memory. A flower-woman on the Danube Quay was always calling “Virágot! Szép virágot!”—“Flowers, lovely flowers!” (the plural of virág, a flower)—whenever I passed her. Two years later, reading Ulysses for the first time, I came on the words ‘Nagyságos uram Lipóti Virág,’ which is Magyar, more or less, for ‘Leopold Bloom Esq.’ In the book, Bloom was a Jewish immigrant from Hungary; Virág is a typical Magyarisation of Blum; and the spelling must have changed to ‘Bloom’ when the author re-settled his protagonist in Dublin. I feel sure that Joyce, as quick at languages as Borrow, must have picked up some Hungarian when he was teaching at the Berlitz School. Pre-war Trieste was still an Austro-Hungarian city with plenty of Hungarians to instruct him. (A few of them live there still.) He was sometimes thought, but probably wrongly, to have coached Admiral Horthy in English, when the future ruler was last k. und k. Commander of the Naval Station at Pola; and at the same time, I have just discovered, he made considerable progress in demotic Greek.[6] This enthralling port, which I visited for the first time three years ago, keeps cropping up in these pages. Literary ghosts abound there: not only James Joyce and the Burtons, but also Italo Svevo. Perhaps d’Annunzio’s phantom biplane zooms inaudibly overhead on the way to Fiume while the shade of Rilke glides Duino-wards along the Adriatic shore, where they caught a last glimpse of Waring.
It was hard to believe I had only been in Budapest ten days. After a final party, long after midnight, I climbed the steps of Buda with Annamaria and we sat on a wall and gazed down at the bridges looped across the Danube in sparkling necklaces. I asked her yet again to repeat a song which had been running in my head ever since the ball. Some Hungarian music is almost as different to a stranger as the language and nearly as hard. I found the song impossible to get by heart. It tells of a swallow flying low over a field of ripening wheat. She began,
“Érik a, érik a búza kalász”
and went on to the end. But it was no good. The tune escaped yet again, and it is still just out of reach.
[1] See A Time of Gifts, p. 207.
[2] See A Time of Gifts, pp. 111–112.
[3] This Holy Roman honour surfaced again generations later when his remarkable and equally courageous descendant, Isabel Arundell, wife of Sir Richard Burton the explorer, cut a dash in Trieste by using her rank as geborene Gräfin—quite in conformity with Austrian custom—when Burton was Consul there. She was running a sort of local RSPCA, and, as the town was Austrian still, it was probably a shrewd move. Her other pursuits were swimming, riding and fencing with her husband. It is a pity she burnt his papers.
[4] Pottenbrunn, near St. Pölten. See A Time of Gifts, p. 188.
[5] Count Teleki became Prime Minister again at the approach of war, in the hopes of rescuing something from the tightening toils of Hungary’s horrible predicament. Profoundly pro-British at heart, but forced by the imperatives of the situation into the postures he would least willingly have chosen, he committed suicide in Spring 1941 rather than condone Germany’s attack on Yugoslavia across Hungarian territory after Hungary had signed a pact of friendship with the Yugoslavs.
[6] See his notebooks, published in Manto Aravantinou’s Ta Ellinika tou James Joyce (Hermes Press, Athens, 1977).
3. THE GREAT HUNGARIAN PLAIN
MALEK, a fine chestnut with a flowing mane and tail, one white sock, a blaze and more than a touch of Arab to his brow, was waiting by a clump of acacias on the Cegléd road. The boy who had ridden him over told Berta he had been newly shod and he would be no trouble except for a short stretch near his stable. We stowed my things in the saddle-bags and tied my rolled greatcoat across the pommel. Berta drove off with Micky and Tim to drop the boy home and I hadn’t trotted more than half-an-hour along the same road before they were back. We picnicked under an oak then set off in opposite directions, they for Pest, I for Constantinople, looking back and waving until we were all out of sight.
It was the thirteenth of April. The few clouds in the clear, wide sky were so nearly motionless they might have been anchored to their shadows. The Great Hungarian Plain—the Alföld, in Magyar—is the westernmost steppe in Europe, a last outpost of the Pontic and Caspian wastes. Influenced by pictures of the wilder Hortobágy a hundred miles further east, I was disappointed at first to see ploughl
and and fields green with young wheat and a taller crop with pointed pale green leaves which turned out to be Indian corn; there were rows of tobacco plants, then orchards and farms set about with trees, and the plain between these tracts of husbandry was dotted with herds. Sheep and swine and troops of cattle grazed across the middle distance, with a village every few miles. The one I had been warned about was Alberti-Irsa;[1] this was the difficult stretch. Malek tried to turn down a track which led to a gateway and outbuildings and barns, with a glimpse beyond them of a château half-hidden among trees, where his own stable beckoned. When I insisted on going straight on, there were aggrieved backward glances; I knew other horses were at grass there but his passionate whinny went unanswered—perhaps the groom had led them out of earshot—and after a brief tug of wills we were clip-clopping along as briskly as before.
Carts drawn by horses and oxen easily outnumbered the motor-cars. Gypsies were on the move in long, jolting waggons that made all their gear clatter. Branching off the road to the left, I followed lesser tracks where the farmsteads and cottages soon began to scatter the country more thinly. A few, thatched with reed and maize-trash and fenced about with woven sticks, had a dishevelled look, but most were clean and trim with thick walls newly whitewashed, for Easter perhaps, and painted all round with coloured dados. A handily planted tree like a prehistoric dresser had pots and pans stuck on its lopped branches and a family of white hens and a speckled cock roosted in another. Shallow platforms lifted the houses above the plain and women busy with household tasks sat there and gossiped. On one of them a length of cloth, with a red and white pattern suddenly dividing in two, stretched over a long loom and a kerchiefed crone sent a shuttle flying through the taut warps; shifting them through each other with a clack of the treadle, she beat the new weft home with the comb-like reed, and stopped and looked up at my greeting and answered with “Isten áldjs” (God bless you). Understanding I was a foreigner, she asked “Német?” (German?). My answer “Angol” induced a look of polite vagueness: an Angle meant as little to her as a Magyar might in the middle of Dartmoor. As the other side of the house was noisy with mooing, she shouted through the windows and in a minute a grand-daughter brought a foaming glass of milk: they both smiled as they watched me drink it. I sipped it slowly and thought: I’m drinking this glass of milk on a chestnut horse on the Great Hungarian Plain.
By the approach of evening, all trace of the capital and the western hills had vanished. We were in the middle of a limitless space, scattered with woods, and pronged here and there with the solitary and, at first, enigmatic perpendiculars of sweep-wells. These primordial devices (called shadoofs in the Egyptian desert) have two posts erected side by side crossed by a bar six feet up—or the branches of a tree lopped until only a fork remains—which is pivot for a cross-beam several yards long. Weights—usually boulders—are lashed to the short end, until the yards of beam beyond the pivot tilt upright; from this lofty tip hangs a pole—or, if necessary, two linked together—from which a bucket hangs. This is sent down the well-shaft by hauling hand over hand while the weighted end of the beam swings aloft: hold is then loosened and the weight sinks, lifting a full bucket to the surface, ready for pouring into a cattle-trough like a dug-out canoe. These lonely uprights give an air of desolation to the plain: they resemble derelict siege-engines by day and the failing light turns them into gibbets or those wheel-topped stakes in pictures by Hieronymus Bosch where vultures wrangle over skeletons spreadeagled in mid-air.
The evening was full of the see-saw creak of their timbers. At one of them, by a ruined farmhouse with a stork’s nest in the rafters, two dismounted drovers were toiling; their wide, white linen trousers, worn loose outside black knee-boots, came half-way down the calves of their legs. They had finished watering a large herd of remarkable pale cattle with nearly straight horns of enormous span that filled the air with trampling and lowing and dust. When the drovers had remounted, I waved a greeting. They lifted their black hats with ceremony and wheeled their horses round, then, abetted by rough-coated white dogs, they spurred after the herd, trotting or cantering on the outskirts and whirling long goads to keep strays from wandering. The declining sun outlined all their silhouettes. Haloed in dust and trailing long shadows, they moved westward with a noise of harsh cries, dogs and a jangle of horns and bells. A stork joined its mate in the rafters, probably after swallowing a last frog captured at some quieter oasis and I trotted east towards the darker end of the plain. The clouds had flushed an astounding pink.
But this was not to be compared with the sky behind. The flatness of the Alföld leaves a stage for cloud-events at sunset that are dangerous to describe: levitated armies in deadlock and riderless squadrons descending in slow motion to smouldering and sulphurous lagoons where barbicans gradually collapse and fleets of burning triremes turn dark before sinking. These are black vesper’s pageants...the least said the better.
* * *
Whenever he got a chance, Malek broke into a canter, and one of these bursts turned into a long twilight gallop; he may have thought we were far from home and ought to get a move on; and when we had settled to a milder gait, falling dark gave lustre to a thin new moon. A distant string of lights, which I knew must be the town of Cegléd, was behind us to the right, and, here and there as it grew darker, lights of farmsteads showed across the flatness like ships. I had planned to seek shelter at one of them but suddenly there were none, and by the time night had really fallen only a single glow was left. It was hard to tell the distance but the nearer we got the less it resembled a farm, except for the barking of half a dozen dogs that finally rushed forward in a frenzy.
Three camp-fires, spreading spokes of light through the tree-trunks, lit up the canvas of tents and shapes of men and horses. A party of Gypsies had settled for the night by yet another sweep-well, and our arrival caused bewilderment. Except for the fires, there was no glimmer in any direction and I saw, half with excitement and half with a touch of fright, that we would have to spend the night there. I had heard many hair-raising stories about Gypsies recently and I was chiefly scared about Malek. When I dismounted they crowded about him and patted and stroked his neck and his flanks and scanned his points with eyes like shrewd blackberries. Shaggy and unkempt, they were the darkest Gypsies I had ever seen. Some of the men wore loose white Hungarian trousers, the others were in ordinary town clothes and black hats, all in the last stage of decay. Snotty mites and lithe tar-babies wore vests that came to their middles and some had nothing on at all, except one or two insecurely hatted in cast-off trilbies so loose they swivelled as they walked. Beautiful girls, flounced and bedraggled in green and yellow and magenta, stared with effulgent eyes. Beyond the fires there was a munching of unyoked oxen; horses were hobbled under the branches and a couple of mares grazed loose with tall foals beside them. Dogs bickered and snarled and the poultry, loosed from their travelling coop, pecked about the dust. Black and brown tents were stretched over crossed poles and the ramshackle style and the jumbled scattering of household stuff gave no hint of a thousand or two thousand years’ practice in pitching camp; except for the reeds and withies and the half-woven baskets on which brown hands were already busy, the whole tribe might have fled half-an-hour ago from a burning slum. I think they were heading for the banks of the Tisza to cut a new stock.
I escaped the hubbub for ten minutes by walking Malek up and down before watering him at the trough, where a man called György helped with the bucket. I had been wondering whether to tether Malek to a tree; there were some oats and a headstall in the saddle-bag, but the halter was far too short for him to graze. Best to hobble him as the Gypsies had done with theirs, but I had no idea how to set about it. György showed me, linking Malek’s forelegs with a neat figure of eight. I was anxious about this: Malek couldn’t have been used to it; but he behaved with great forbearance. I gave him some of his feed and some hay from the Gypsy, then took the saddle and tack and settled with the rest of them by the fire.
&nbs
p; Thank heavens, their informal supper was over! Apart from hedge-hogs, delicious by hearsay, the untoothsomeness and even danger of their usual food were famous. There was a sound of rattling metal: a dog was licking out a cooking-pot by the fire. Seeing my worried look, a girl of ten, who had just begged for a cigarette, hurled an accurate stone at the dog, which scuttled off with a surprised yelp; then, tossing up the vessel so that it caught on a convenient twig, she coiled to the ground again with an indulgent smile as she let the smoke stream lazily from her nostrils. The chief item of Berta’s supplies was a salami nearly a yard long, ribboned half-way down with the national colours. I made a good impression by cutting off a third and handing it over; it was the signal for a brief uproar of grabs and curses and blows. Then thirty pairs of eyes, accompanied by a soft chorus of whispers, watched raptly as I ate a sandwich and an apple. I took three fast gigantic gulps out of my wine-bottle before surrendering it. They seemed half-fascinated; also, and I couldn’t make out why, half-alarmed by my presence: perhaps all strangers, except as prey, boded ill. We were incommunicado at first; but I had been alerted by what the oldest man had said to György before he helped me give Malek a drink: the mumbled sentence had ended, I thought, with the word pani—immediately recognisable, to anyone at all in touch with Anglo-India, as the Hindi for water. When I pointed questioningly at the water-jar and asked what was inside, they said “Víz,” using the Magyar word; I cunningly answered, “Nem [not] víz! Pani.” There was a sensation! Bewilderment and wonder were written on their firelit features.[2] When I held up the fingers of my hand and said “Panch!”—the word for five in both Hindi and Romany (öt, in Magyar), the wonder grew. I tried the only other words I could remember from Lavengro, pointing to my tongue and saying “Lav?”; but drew a blank; tchib was their word for it. I drew another blank with “penning dukkerin,” Borrow’s—or rather Mr. Petulengro’s—word for ‘fortune-telling.’ But I had better luck with the word petulengro itself, at least with the first half. The whole word (‘horseshoe-master’ in Borrow, i.e. blacksmith) caused no reaction, but when I cut it down to petul, and pointed to the anvil, a small boy dashed into the dark and came back holding up a horseshoe in triumph.[3]
Between the Woods and the Water Page 5