Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The way from Ötvenes that morning had run south-east until the wooded hills fell asunder about twenty miles east of Arad, where my path joined the beautiful valley of the Maros; and then, a little way upstream, the bronze cupolas of the Maria Radna caught the afternoon light. The Abbey was founded in 1520, but nobody, at a glance, would have connected this High Baroque pile with the Franciscan Order. Destroyed in the sixteenth century by the army of Mustafa II, it was re-built in its new shape when the Ottomans were routed a hundred years later. Then a wonder-working image of Our Lady made it famous; patronage accumulated, and the church filled with pilgrims and ex votos.

  Dappled with the shadows of chestnut leaves, a wide staircase climbed between the tall baroque statues of St. Francis of Assisi and St. John Nepomuk. At the top, I fell in with Brother Peter setting up an array of skittles. He was looking for someone to play with, so my arrival was well-timed and we played all through the late afternoon, happily incommunicado except for our occasional cumbrous Latin. It needed some strength to send the heavy balls clashing and scattering among the giant ninepins: we were both in a muck-sweat when the bell for Vespers put an end to play and it was after helping him collect the skittles that the foregoing colloquy took place. Vespers over, he led me to a guest cell and later to the refectory, where about forty monks sat down to supper while one of them read aloud from a pulpit, first in Latin and then in Magyar.[1] I met him again in the cloisters after Compline and asked him, “Dormitum ibant omnes?”—I had been ready for it!—but he only smiled and put a finger across his lips: it was the first time I had stayed under a monastic roof and the magnum silentium had begun.

  Next morning, 2nd June, was a Sunday, and he was busy with visitors, so I waited as bidden, fearing he might have to play non possum; but he arrived in a flurry of cord and homespun, and when we had finished our game, I tried to leave some money; he waved it aside—I was a stranger, a viator and a pelegrinus; so I dropped some coins through a slot in the church with a face-saving jingle. Helping me on with my rucksack, he said, “May God go with you,” in Latin, and then, “Quoniam angelis suis mandavit de te, ut custodiant te in omnibus viis tuis.” Impressed by the words, and rather puzzled, I started down the great staircase towards the river; they had been spoken like a quotation and I wondered where they came from.[2]

  * * *

  When the river Danube had fallen behind a month earlier, then the Tisza and finally the Great Hungarian Plain, I had felt I was saying goodbye to famous landmarks. I had never heard of the Maros.[3]

  It is the great river of Transylvania and its tributaries spread like a fan of nerve-ends across the whole western slant of the Carpathians where they rush downhill and cohere in a great stream that wends south-westwards through minor ranges, sweeps past the Abbey, and then rolls on into Hungary. At Szeged it joins the Tisza about seventy miles south of the bridge that Melek and I had clip-clopped across at Szolnok; then the united waters drop deep into Yugoslavia and enter the Danube; soon the Sava, swollen with tribute from Slavonia and the Alps, joins the great river under the walls of Belgrade and then, with all their individualities drowned in the Danubian currents, they advance on the Iron Gates and head for the Black Sea.

  Hills enclosed the north bank of this particular reach and the monastery was hardly out of sight before the tapering ruins of the castle of Solymos jutted on a pedestal of rock; it was a stronghold of the great John Hunyadi but much older than he. Then the trees of the foothills began to pile up in waves, with sprays of wild lilac scattered among the branches. The hills on the other shore stood aloof, and between the two ranges the great river lazily unwound. Sometimes it looped away for a mile or two, then meandered back and the clouds of willows and aspens that marked its windings were interspersed with poplars tapering in spindles or expanding like butterfly nets. The women in the fields wore kerchiefs on their heads under hats of soft plaited straw as wide as cart-wheels; leaves like broken assegais plumed the tall maize; an occasional breeze ruffled the wheat; the vines, all sprayed with sulphate, climbed in tiers. Pale cattle with wide, straight horns grazed by the score and the fens and water-meadows that lay about the river were wallows for buffaloes; lustrous as seals, or caked in dried mud as armour against insects, they were sometimes only to be spotted in the slime and the swamps by bubbles or an emerging nostril. Wherever horses and mares with their foals moved loose about the grass, a few ragged tents were sure to be pitched. Everything in these reedy windings was inert and hushed under a sleepy spell of growth and untroubled plenty.

  I found a clump of alders full of buttercups, poppies and dandelion-clocks, ate bread and cheese and gave way to the prevailing lethargy; then woke up with greenfinches and a cloud of gnats fidgeting in the twigs overhead. I hadn’t far to go. It had been arranged that I should stay the night at Mr. v. Konopy’s. I learnt that I had passed the kastély a few miles back, so I got a lift on a hay-waggon and the driver soon pointed out a country house jutting from the wooded hillside.

  * * *

  It might have been a rural deanery, and Mr. v. Konopy, with his mild manner and silvery hair, could easily have been a clergyman; there was a touch of Evensong about him. His hobby was wheat-breeding and the two Swedish colleagues staying with him were as soft-voiced and as quiet as he. Wheat-ears covered the furniture and one of the Swedes, well versed in the English terminology of his passion, explained as we strolled from specimen to specimen the differences between turgid ears and the common bearded kind; then we surveyed the Polish variety and appraised the spikelets and the awns, the median florets and the glumes. He had brought Mr. v. Konopy a German edition of The Story of San Michele, which had been all the rage in England a few years earlier. Two calm days drifted while he read it aloud. It was all very different from the recent ambience of antlers and hooves and Tibor’s memories of champagne out of dancers’ slippers.

  * * *

  The hills along the north bank grew higher and as the trees multiplied, I had the feeling of plunging inextricably in deep and unknown regions. By mid-afternoon I got to Soborsin,[4] where a Nádasdy château lay secluded in the woods, and crossed a bridge to the other bank. Although this region south of the river was Transylvanian in feeling, strictly speaking it was the north-easternmost corner of the old Banat of Temesvár, named after its capital—Timis, oara in Rumanian—which lies to the west. Lost by Hungary to the advancing Turks in the sixteenth century and largely depopulated, it was reconquered by Prince Eugene and Count Pálffy two centuries later, and re-settled. The largest single element of the modern province was Rumanian, as it had been all along my itinerary, but it was said that the newcomers were of such varied origins that a chameleon placed on a coloured population-map of the Banat would explode.[5]

  After an hour or two, I loped exhausted through long shadows to the kastély at Kápolnás. Double flights of steps mounted to a balustraded terrace, where people were sitting out in the cool moment before the sun set; there were glimpses through french windows of lighted rooms beyond. Count Paul Teleki, my kind geographical benefactor in Budapest, had written to the owner, who was his first cousin, and I had telephoned the day before. He was called Count Eugene of the same name—Jenö in Hungarian—and he got up and ambled hospitably across.

  “So you managed it?” he said kindly; then, rather surprisingly, “Come and sit ye doon.”

  He was a tall, spreading, easy-going middle-aged man, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a remarkably intelligent, slightly ugly and very amusing face; like his cousin’s, it had a remotely Asiatic look. I knew he was a famous entomologist and a great authority on moths, especially those of the Far East, and he was said to keep two insect-hunters permanently busy, one in China, the other in Japan, sending him back a steady flow of specimens. Lepidoptera were on parade in glass cases all over the house. Some of them were large and furry and brightly coloured, some drab or stick-like or transparent and some almost too small to see. Apart from this, he had all the instincts of a polymath: everything aroused his curios
ity and sent him climbing unwieldily up the library steps. He delighted in gossip and comic stories, and he had a passion for limericks, the racier the better. He would reminisce for hours: one fascinating anecdote would lead to another; many of them depicted famous or venerable figures in an absurd but always amusing light. He thirsted for similar stories and success was rewarded by overmastering though nearly silent laughter, upheavals of inaudible hilarity that left him carefully wiping his spectacles with his handkerchief as composure returned. He was much travelled and knew the British Isles well; his English was nearly perfect and a nanny from the Highlands had left him with a stock of Scotch sayings uttered with just a hint of inverted commas: asked what he thought of a neighbour, he said, “I hae me doots”; and, toying with some dilemma, “I’ll dree my own weird.” (Before the war, it would have been hard to exaggerate the sway of British nannies among some Central European children; toes kept count of pigs going to market before fingers learnt to tell beads and Three Blind Mice rushed in much earlier than inklings of the Trinity). His wife, Countess Catherine—Tinka—was tall, dark-haired, fine-looking, very kind and very intelligent, and widely read in quite different fields from his. In one particular, she was literally unique in this marooned Hungarian society: she was Rumanian; but of an unusual kind. A number of Hungarian families in Transylvania had, in fact—however fervently Hungarian they became when they rose in the world—once been of Rumanian stock. The Countess’s ancestors were from exactly this mould, except that, though they were Hungarian nobles, they remembered their origins and supported Rumanian aspirations. Magyar may have been their earliest language for generations; but, as MPs, they always expressed heterodox views in the Budapest parliament. Count Jenö, scion of one of the great Hungarian houses of Transylvania, was as deeply rooted in post-war resentment as any backwoods squire, though he was not emphatic in expressing it; while Countess Tinka, when occasion arose, was discreetly eloquent on the opposite side; and when one of them uttered controversial views, the other would later make it privately clear to a guest that they were nonsense. (“What a pity! Jenö’s such a clever man, but so biased,” and, “Well, I’m afraid Tinka was talking through her hat again...”) They were extremely fond of each other and far too civilised for public contradiction. There was a nice looking, rather spoilt son called Michael and his Hungarian tutor at the castle, and a moving population of visitors; and one was aware of the Countess’s recently invalid mother in one wing of the building. “She’s not feeling quite the thing,” the Count said.

  * * *

  Dense woods shot up steeply behind the house. In front, wavering meadows sank gently towards the Maros but the steep woods were echoed on the northern bank. “It’s only early nineteenth-century,” the Count said, referring to his house, “and perhaps a bit showy.” Rusticated ashlars formed the first storey, pilasters rose to a cornice and fluted Corinthian columns ran the length of a façade adorned with the masks of sibyls and nymphs and satyrs.

  The terrace was the Count’s afternoon and evening retreat. He would sit and talk in one of the wicker chairs for hours or stroll disquisitively under a grey linen sunshade lined with green. A more ambitious walk led to the stables. A loft there harboured fantails and a brood of tumbler pigeons which soared, hovered, turned back-somersaults, then dropped like stones and recovered in a flurry of snowy plumage that was entrancing to watch. Lilac shaded the homeward path. The peonies were dropping their last petals and the air was full of the scent of lime trees in flower.

  But the library, with its thousands of books and its nets and vascula and collector’s gear, was his favourite haunt. He led me there after breakfast and I would explore with the step-ladder while he settled down at his table with a sigh of pleasure. Unpacking parcels, covered with strange stamps and posted in the foothills of Fujiyama or at some river-port on the Yangtse, he would begin sorting out the contents with tweezers, inspecting them under a lens or a microscope and accompanying his task with a murmured multilingual commentary. “...Jól van...gyönyörü!... What a beauty. Look at this chap! Ah so there you are at last!...and here’s Euploea leucostictus...from Java, I bet...Hullo. What’s this?...I’ll look him up in Hampson...or Kirby...I dinna ken, I dinna ken...or in Breitenbach, perhaps...” It was impossible to think of anyone happier. As far as I was concerned, boundless treasures beckoned: rows of encyclopaedias in several languages, the cynical Latin verses of Janus Pannonius, a fifteenth-century Hungaro-Croatian bishop of Pécs, ‘the Martial of Hungary’; memoirs and prints of old Transylvanian life, letters-patent, transfers of villeins, parchment title-deeds with bulky red seals; genealogies gleaming with scutcheons tricked or illuminated in faded hues and the marvellous and many-volumed Geographie Universelle of Elysée Reclus. A score of temptations lured one to trifle the morning away.

  The Count was prone to abstruse prepossessions. At the moment he was much taken by Hugo v. Kutschera’s theory about the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe: could they really spring from the inhabitants of the old Khazar empire, whose rulers abandoned paganism for the Jewish faith in the Dark Ages? He was particularly interested by the evidence of correspondence between Itil—the Khazar capital near the mouth of the Volga, roughly on the site of Astrakhan—and the Hebrew scholars of Cordova: were the letters forgeries? Had King Joseph of the Khazars and the Andalusian Rabbi Hazdai-ibn-Shaprut really been in touch?[6] Once, following up some research on the runic inscriptions of the Goths, he got led astray and, looking up from a book, asked in a surprised voice what I thought the Huns used to wear. I said I should have guessed the hides of animals with some metal here and there. “So should I,” he said, “but we are wrong,” and he read out from Ammianus Marcellinus’ account of the mission to Attila: “They are clad in linen raiment or in the skins of field mice sewn together.”[7]

  His family had always been immersed in travel and science and literature. One branch explored Central Africa and discovered lakes and volcanoes on the Ethiopian border; my Budapest friend had mapped archipelagoes in the Far East; Count Samuel Teleki, a wily Transylvanian chancellor in the eighteenth century gathered 40,000 books together in Márosvásarhély—Târgu Mures, in Rumanian—in a library specially built for them, and gave it to the town: it was crammed with incunabula and princeps editions and manuscripts, including one of the earliest of Tacitus. (He must be the same as a namesake who collected and edited the epigrams of Pannonius.) A Count Joseph Teleki, travelling in France with this bibliophile cousin, became a friend and partisan of Rousseau and launched a clever attack on Voltaire, which ran into three editions; and here it was on the shelf: Essai sur la Foiblesse des Esprits Forts, Leyden, 1760. My bedroom contained part of the library’s overflow: Henty, Ballantyne, Jock of the Bushveld, Owd Bob, The Story of the Red Deer, Black Beauty, The Jungle Books and the Just So Stories. There were any amount of Tauchnitz editions, industriously tunnelled by insects, faded by the last summers of the Habsburg monarchy and redolent of those peaceful times when, apart from the habitual ragged fusillade in the Balkans, scarcely a shot was fired between the battle of Sedan and Sarajevo: Ouida, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, The Dolly Dialogues, My Friend Prospero, The Cardinal’s Snuffbox, The Indiscretions of Ambrosine, Elizabeth and her German Garden; Maupassant, Gyp, Paul de Kock, Victor Margueritte, early Colette... But the most important and revealing trove was half a dozen historical novels by the Hungarian writer Maurus Jókai (1825–1904), translated in Victorian days: ’Midst the Wild Carpathians, Slaves of the Padishah, An Hungarian Nabob, The Nameless Castle, The Poor Plutocrats, Pretty Michael, Halil the Pedlar, Ein Fürstensohn—there were several more. The plots were laid in stirring times: the Kossuth rebellion, the wars against the Turks with the whole of Transylvania going up in flames; soaring castles, yawning chasms, wolves, feuding magnates, janissaries, spahis, pashas with six horsetails, sieges, battle-fields and last stands; stories involving all the great figures of local history: Hunyadi, Zrinyi, Thököly, the Rákóczi dynasty, Bocskays, Bethlens, Báthorys, Bánffys—B’s seem to
abound among Transylvanian leaders and princes; and Telekis, of course. The plots were a heady mixture of Scott, Harrison Ainsworth and Dumas père transposed to the Carpathians and the puszta. It was after dipping into these and asking about them, on the banks of the Maros where the Countess had taken us all to a bathing picnic, that the idea of an historical jaunt cropped up.

  It warranted the emergence of the car, a solemn event in these regions of bad roads. The Countess drove, and when a wandering buffalo held us up, the Count, with memories of Cowes, would lift his hand and murmur, “Sail before steam!” and we would wait while it lumbered over. We drove eastwards along the leafy north bank of the river, turned south under the steep, ruin-crowned hill at Deva,[8] and got out a few valleys further on, where precariously tall stone piers lifted a narrow bridge over a chasm.

  On the other side perched the castle of Vajdahunyad,[9] chief stronghold of the great John Hunyadi, a building so fantastic and theatrical that, at a first glance, it looked totally unreal. Like many castles, it had once been damaged by fire and built up again in its former shape; but it was perfectly genuine. The bridge led to a sallyport in a tall barbican which ended high above in a colonnade supporting a vertiginous roof that soared in a wedge, like the great barbicans in Prague: spikes of metal or shingle erected for the laming of infernal cavalry flying low after dark. Towers, clustering at different heights, some square and some round and all of them frilled with machicolations, were embedded in the steep fabric. The light showing between the pillars holding up the great angular cowl of the barbican gave the pile an airy, lifted, slightly improbable look, and the closely spaced parade of the perpendicular buttresses made the upward thrust still more impetuous. Beginning deep in the abyss, these piers of masonry ascended the curtain wall and the donjon and the outside of the banqueting hall in unbroken flight and then burst out high above in a row of half-salient and half-engaged octagonal side-towers, all of them lighted by windows which carried on a dominating line of mullioned lancets, and an interweaving network of late gothic tracery branched and flourished and linked them together with all the impulse and elaboration of the French Flamboyant style.