Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  * * *

  These mornings were soon over. Storks presided over them and cuckoos sounded from different woods as long as the light lasted. Three days in a row were singled out by the arrival of birds I had never seen before: the first, with dazzling yellow and black plumage and a short haunting tune, was a golden oriole; next day was marked by the blue-green-yellow flash of bee-eaters; and the third by two hoopoes walking in the grass and spreading and closing their Red Indian head-dresses, then fluttering aloft and chasing each other among the leaves, their wings turning them into little flying zebras until they settled again.

  Tibor’s sister and some friends arrived from Vienna and there was much festivity and dressing up and picnics and finally a midnight feast on the very summit of the vine-clad hill. A bonfire was lit: a carriage disgorged four Gypsies—a violin, a viola, a czembalom and a double-bass—who assembled under a tree. The amber-coloured wine we drank as we leant on our elbows round the flames was pressed from grapes which had ripened on the very slopes that dropped away all round. The vine-dressers climbed up, forming an outer ring, and when we had run dry they fetched fresh supplies from their cottages, filling all glasses until a cockcrow from an invisible farmyard spread an infectious summons through the dark; other cocks awoke; then the end of the Great Plain glimmered into being underneath us and everything except the Gypsies began to grow pale. Their strings and their voices kept us company all the way downhill, then through the gates and along the grass path through the trees. Our footprints showed grey in the dew; and when we reached the pillars along the front of the house, the sound of startled nests and birds waking up and the flapping of a stork from the pediment showed it was too late to go to bed.

  These were the daily waking sounds. Soon they were joined every morning by the swish of scythes right up to the house-walls and the voices of the mowers singing to themselves; when one of them broke off for a minute, there was the clang of a whetstone along a blade. The scent of hay filled the house, haymakers peopled the landscape and spread their windrows in stripes of silver across the pale stubble. My room gave on a field where a big rick was going up, the layers ascending and radiating clockwise round the tall centre pole. Women with pitchforks knee-deep in a cart tossed up the hay while the men on the tapering cone fixed it like the whorls on an ammonite. The waggons creaking along the lanes were piled so high that wisps of hay entwined with dead poppies and wild flowers were caught up in all the low branches.

  I spent much of the day with Tibor in the fields and walked in the hills for miles, picking up fragments of Rumanian. But I gave up keeping my diary for a while on the principle, I suppose, that these static intervals were irrelevant in a record of travel. I wish I had been less proud: these gaps make it easy to lose count of days and even weeks; but odd items and a few sketches scattered at the back help me reconstruct them and one of these fixes this particular lapse of time beyond question. Tibor, as though on a sudden cheerful inspiration, had said he would drive me to Arad—he remembered he had some things to do there—and then on to my next halting place, where we were all to meet later on. After tea a touring-car, only used for journeys out of carriage range, was brought out to the front with some solemnity. Tibor was a little mysterious about our trip.

  Arad was about the size of Guildford and, unlike the countryside, I had the impression there of hearing more Magyar than Rumanian in the streets. There were many Hungarian names over the shops and many Jewish and a multitude of ordinary German ones that belonged to Swabian settlers. The place was made famous in Hungarian history by the Austrian execution of thirteen Hungarian generals at the end of Kossuth’s great rising against Habsburg rule in 1848. (I had just been reading about it.) There was little time to see much, however; Tibor’s task was a protracted visit to a tall, dark and very pretty girl called Ilona, a great favourite of his, who lived in a discreet and leafy street leading down to the river Mures. She had summoned a friend called Izabella who was equally pretty in a different way, for my sake, I think. She had very fair hair and dark blue eyes and spoke no word of anything but Hungarian, but this didn’t matter at all. (I wonder if her extreme fairness came from a dash of Slovak blood: I had seen similarly blond descendants of northern settlers in the neighbourhood of my penultimate Hungarian halt at O’Kigyos: not very far away as the crow flies.) Anyway, here she is, pressed like a petal in the back pages of my journal, carefully drawn, with her head leaning on her forearm and gazing out under arched brows, and, by a stroke of luck, looking nearly as pretty in the sketch as she did in real life. ‘Iza, Arad. May 16 1934’ is pencilled in at the top.

  * * *

  Back again north of Arad, the wavy line of hills next morning had drawn back a few miles and the low, ranch-like manor house of Tövicsegháza, for which I’ve searched the map in vain, lay among cornfields under a clump of elms.

  The moment we were shown into the billiard room, Tibor spotted a double-barrelled gun which was propped across the window-sill. He quickly broke it open and two cartridges jumped out of the breech. “Look at that! I ask you!” he said, laughing and putting them on a shelf with a sigh. “Polnische Wirtschaft! There’s Polish housekeeping for you!” Jasš, pronounced ‘Yash,’ our host, came in at that moment and said he always kept it loaded and handy for the rooks, “Otherwise they wouldn’t leave an ear of the young wheat for miles.”

  In these circles, it was considered a boorish oversight to withhold from newcomers certain details about anyone they were about to meet. No English circumspection or studied vagueness hampered these utterances, still less the fear of seeming worldly or impressed by the boast of heraldry and the pomp of power. “Jasš?” someone had said. “He comes from an excellent family in southern Poland, eight thousand acres, not far from Cracow. His great-grandfather was Austrian Ambassador to St. Petersburg and their Turk’s head crest was granted after capturing three Tatar standards in the Ukraine.”

  “His wife Clara? From an old, old, old...uralte”—here the speaker’s eyelids would almost close as though in a dream at the thought of such antiquity—“family in the High Tatra mountains. They live in one of the most ancient castles in Hungary—Slovakia now, more’s the pity! Counts since the reign of King Mátyás. They carry a double chevron dansetty between three salamanders quartered with five pikes hauriant; arms parlant, you know, after the river that rushes by, and the fish that swim in it.” (When armorial fauna were mentioned, for a moment the room or the lawn would seem to fill with fork-tailed lions looking warily backwards with blue claws and fangs; unicorns, mouldywarps, cockatrices, griffins, wyverns, firedrakes and little dragons covered with stripes; hawks and eagles were let loose and the air filled with corbies and martlets and swans with gold chains about their necks in spirals.)

  Only after dealing with these essentials were minor points like character, looks or capacity allowed to crop up. In spite of some territorial difficulties, the Hungarians had an undoubted sympathy for the Poles; what a relief to find an exception to the usual East European hatred of neighbours! These feelings were rooted long ago in shared enmity to the Germans, the Turks and the Muscovites and had been signally marked in the late sixteenth century when the Poles elected Stephen Báthory, the Hungarian Prince of Transylvania, to the Polish throne. He routed all their enemies, captured a score of Russian towns and drove Ivan the Terrible out of the Kingdom.

  Jaš was slender and fair-haired with a high-bridged nose, hair cut en brosse, bright blue eyes behind very thick horn-rimmed spectacles, and an air of vagueness and goodwill. Ideas about archaeology, history, religion and physics seethed in his mind and he was said to be full of expert theories (prone to break down in practice) on economics, rotation of crops, the training of animals, winter fodder, forestry, bee-keeping, sheep dip, and how best to fatten ducks for the spring market. He welcomed eccentric notions and we had not been there five minutes before he asked us what we thought of the idea that the earth might be hollow, with a small sun at the centre and a much larger moon circling it whos
e shadow was the cause of night and day. Millions of stars about the size of Vienna or Warsaw rotating solar-centrically at different distances and speeds? That morning’s post had brought him a trilingual pamphlet from the inventor of this theory and his pale eyes were alight behind their lenses. “Die Welt ist eine Hohlkugel!” he read out from the cover; “Le monde est une boule creuse! Ze vorld iss a hollow ball, my dear!” he explained, laying a hand on my forearm; then, turning the pages with emotion, he read out the most telling passages. Tibor, as we said goodbye, gave me the ghost of a wink.

  * * *

  Practice may have fallen short of theory in other matters, but Jasš was a phenomenal shot. The gun was soon loaded again and every so often, in mid-sentence and seemingly without aiming, he would fire out of the window and into the air, often single-handed and with hardly a break in his discourse; and a second later, like a heavy parcel, down on the lawn crashed a bird from the enormous rookery that overshadowed the house. I was sorry; all that wheeling and cawing brought homesick thoughts to mind. Haphazard bangs punctuated every hour of daylight.

  Clara, the child of those hoary battlements in the High Tatra, had a wild look and her hair was seldom combed. She loved horses and her life revolved round two beautiful black creatures which a dour and one-eyed groom called Antal kept sleek and trim—“unlike me,” as she truthfully said, skimming into the saddle. She was as light as a jockey, rode beautifully and sailed over tremendous fences. Jasš had given it up—“no time”—so we went for far-flung rides in the cool of the evening.

  During the hot midday hours, iced soda was splashed into the deep golden wine I keep mentioning. This has a barbarous sound, but it was delicious—Spritzer they called it in German, and, in Magyar, hoszú lépés, ‘a long step,’ one of the many terms for the degrees of dilution. Generically, all these wines were unmistakably from that particular region, yet each one seemed to change with the roof under which it was to be drunk. It was ready for drinking from the moment the vintage had settled from fermentation, and after years in cool cellars, it was beyond praise. At dinner, decanter on decanter was emptied, undiluted now, by the light of candles in tall glass tulip-shaped shields. Jasš liked sitting late after dinner when rash and varied talk ranged far into the small hours. When he lifted a forefinger, we would fall silent and listen to the nightingales for a minute. A restless geometry of fire-flies darted about under the spatulate volume of the chestnut trees, and getting up one night to go to bed, we found emerald-coloured tree-frogs smaller than threepenny-bits clinging to the leaves like miniature green castaways on rafts.

  On my last afternoon, Clara and I lay about talking on a bank at the end of the lawn. Indoors, Jasš was playing complicated fugues rather well, breaking off for a few seconds now and then and rushing back to the piano after a bang and a thud, so there was a perturbed circling of rooks above the house. All along the lawn, the chestnut candles had begun to shed their blossom and occasional discs of pink showed among the white petals which scattered the grass. At the end of this vista we could see the two horses, unsaddled a few minutes earlier, rolling in ecstasy before finding their feet again with a snort and a shake, then grazing and idly swishing their tails against the gnats. In the morning, with the bangs of the rook-rifle growing fainter, one of them carried me to my next halt.

  * * *

  Ötvenes was the last of this particular concatenation of friends and houses and, like all the others, I had met the inhabitants that first evening at Tibor’s. The family were Swabians who had settled here when these territories were regained from the Turks, and the spread of their acres had soon enrolled them into the dominant stratum. Can the preceding centuries of conflict be compared to the long process of the Reconquista in Spain, with Ottomans instead of Moors? The earlier campaigns, with the victories of Hunyadi and Báthory and Zrinyi, bear a distinct affinity: but the energies of later Transylvanian heroes were spent in making the Principality, for a time at least, and under Turkish vassaldom, a bastion of Magyar liberties against the Habsburgs. Shrewd connubial skill in marrying the Hungarian royal heiress, and then declaring the crown hereditary instead of elective, had enabled the dynasty to swallow up Hungary; and when the Emperor’s armies at last advanced downstream, the Imperialists had come to look on the liberated Hungarians as a conquered race. Hence the foreign settlements and the quantities of non-Hungarian names that suddenly scattered the redeemed lands. Strangers were summoned from abroad; during the last three centuries the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary became cosmopolitan, and in nothing so much as in the commanders of their armies; but their offspring had been assimilated long ago. As though to illustrate this, two brothers who came over from a nearby estate bore the famous Genoese name of Pallavicini. Were they descended from the margrave who murdered Cardinal Martinuzzi, the saviour of Transylvania, half-Venetian himself? I had just been reading about him, but didn’t dare to ask. Another guest, a tall princess, married to an erudite naturalist landowner called Béla Lipthay, from Lovrin in the Banat, was a descendant (not direct, I hope) of Pope Innocent IX of the famous house of Odescalchi, lords of Bracciano.[7]

  Georgina, the daughter of the house, looked like a fair-haired Englishwoman on safari, and she was as good a horsewoman as Clara. Separated from a long-absent Czech husband, she was striving without much hope for an annulment in order to marry an even better horseman than either. He was sun-scorched, lean, delightful and stone deaf. Full of misgivings, her kind-hearted parents, and especially her mother, took the hazards of my journey very seriously. A son of hers had been in Brazil for fifteen years and if I had let her, she would have stuffed the whole of his wardrobe in my rucksack.

  I can remember every detail of this house, and of all the others; and the inhabitants, the servants, the dogs and the horses and the scenery are all intact. Perhaps being a stranger in this remote society knocked down some of the customary barriers, for I became an intimate of their lives, and feelings ran deeper and lasted much longer than anything warranted by the swift flight of these weeks in the marches of Transylvania. This particularly joyful sojourn was made even more so by the arrival of Ria for the last few days. We watched the building of an enormous rick and cantered through the woods on a paper-chase; and on my last day we discovered some rockets in a woodshed and sent them all up after dinner.

  Every part of Europe I had crossed so far was to be torn and shattered by the war; indeed, except for the last stage before the Turkish frontier, all the countries traversed by this journey were fought over a few years later by two mercilessly destructive powers; and when war broke out, all these friends vanished into sudden darkness. Afterwards the uprooting and destruction were on so tremendous a scale that it was sometimes years after the end of it all that the cloud became less dense and I could pick up a clue here and there and piece together what had happened in the interim. Nearly all of them had been dragged into the conflict in the teeth of their true feelings and disaster overtook them all. But in this charming and cheerful household, the tragedy that smote in the middle of that grim time had nothing to do with conflict: a fire sprang up in the night and the whole family and the combustible manor house that contained it were turned to ashes.

  [1] See A Time of Gifts, p. 279.

  [2] ‘Pojekai, Hanka, tam u hrustu, tam u hrustu, tam u hrustu...’ etc.

  [3] Properly speaking, the region only begins about thirty miles east of the point I had reached. But the narrow tract between this and the post-war Hungarian–Rumanian frontier—the one I had just crossed—seems to have no specific name and, talking loosely, people often wrongly lump it in with Transylvania: it seems a handy name for all the territory which Hungary had lost to Rumania in 1920, and I sometimes find myself following this lax but convenient usage.

  [4] The late Roman historian Flavius Vopiscus in the Augustan Scriptors.

  [5] A Hungarian source, the Anonymous Notary of King Béla (1234–70), records a tradition that the invading Hungarians had to overcome the resistance of a ce
rtain Gelu, leader of the Vlacho-Slav tribes in central Transylvania, before he could subdue the region.

  [6] All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain,

  Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation...

  —the lines would often come to mind.

  [7] According to Sir Walter Scott (or Macaulay quoting him; I’ve searched both in vain and will probably come on the passage the day after this book is out), Bracciano, by its reedy lake, was the best example of a mediaeval fortress he had ever seen: clustering cylindrical towers soar into the sky of Latium and spread narcissistic machicolated corollas high above their still reflections many fathoms below.

  5. ACROSS THE FOREST

  “FRATER Petre, possumusne kugli ludere post Vesperas?”

  “Hodie non possumus, fili,” Brother Peter said. “Tarde nimium est. Cras poterimus.”

  “Quando? Qua hora?”

  “Statim post Missam. Expecte me ad egressum ecclesiae.”

  “Bene, frater, sed nonne ante Missam fieri potest?”

  “Velnon. Est contra regulam nostram.”

  “Eheu!”

  Easy to spot the odd man out in this dog-Latin! Kugli—Kegeln in German—is Magyar for skittles. Brother Peter was assistant guest-master in the Conventual Franciscan Abbey of Maria Radna, and the cheerful face and tonsured head, the sandals, brown hooded habit and the white cord knotted round his wide waist gave him a convincing look of Friar Tuck; and as we had no common tongue, Latin was forced on us. (My share of the conversation was less glib than it looks. I thought out each sentence in advance, hoping to place a supine in um; and I was struck by the use of velnon. I couldn’t find it in Latin dictionaries later so perhaps it was just the two words, a negative only used in church circles to take the place of the non-existent ‘no’; but it sounded single. ‘Yes’ was etiam.) Except for construing at school or spouting verse on the road, I had no more spoken Latin than anyone else, so all this gave an exhilarating illusion of slipping back to the time when Latin was the common tongue of literate Europe: it conjured up the world of the wandering scholars whom I had presumptuously thought of as models before setting out, and lately rather drifted away from.