Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  * * *

  The kastély was much older than any I had stayed in so far. In aspect a mixture of manor house, monastery and farmstead, it stood on a tree-covered knoll overlooking the Maros, and the woods, rolling on beyond, climbed into the distance. A flattened arch through the massive ochre walls gave on a courtyard where gigantic chestnut trees still dropped their petals and the pigeons on the cobbles underneath would suddenly take off with a noise like the wind. Two sheepdogs and their puppies always bounded forward in greeting and the young storks nesting on a moss-covered barn were beginning to stretch their necks among the scarlet legs of their parents. Stables, granaries and coach-houses with carriages, waggons and sleighs lined one side of the yard and the other three were colonnades, like a cloister of square pillars sliced at the corners into octagons, and constantly traversed by the swish of the martins whose nests congregated there. Green and purple panes glimmered in a fanlight at the far end of an arcade, and the door beneath led to a loggia where we sat at night looking out over a wide vista of timber and water. Indoors, shaded paraffin lamps shed their lustre on the fine portrait of an ambassadorial ancestor and the familiar properties of a Transylvanian interior; the scutcheon scattered about the house and carved over the gate showed a bent bow with an arrow pointing skywards; at a venture, as it were.

  Withdrawn from life in a cloud of smoke, István’s elderly and heavily-moustached father puffed away testily behind the pages of a week-old Pesti Hirláp; but his mother, who spoke in French whenever I lagged behind in German, was quick and amusing, with a touch of severity and a clear glance like István’s and that of his sister Ilona, who was quiet and good and kind; and after dinner they would bring their sewing out of doors, while Sándor, a correct, elderly manservant, arranged the coffee and decanters and glasses. (Several old servants wandered about the kastély; another man looked after the horses and drove the ancient carriage; and frail and aged dependants lingered in the offing. There was little actual cash about, but plenty of everything else, and I think the staff—like the family, so to speak—were paid in kind. This was exactly how Moldavian boyars managed, further east.) Every night István chopped up some peppery tobacco leaves on the side-board and Ilona would arrange the flakes on a strip of linen between the two spools of a patent machine and turn out beautifully made cigarettes for all of us; and, when she and her mother retired, she left a heap of new ones ready. Once or twice we sat up over old maps: István had a passion for Napoleon’s campaigns; but usually we just sat and talked, sometimes till dawn. He hated going to bed as much as I did; when the supply of cigarettes ran out, he rolled them by hand with the careless skill of a cowboy (an art I mastered too) and sealed them with a flick of the tongue, then lit them at the lamp-chimney. I can still see the flame turning his face to a bright mask for a moment as he twisted up the wick.

  Just past its full, the moon laid a gleam of metal on the river and a line of silver wire along the tops of the woods. The July constellations and the Milky Way showed bright in a sky empty of vapour and as the moon waned, stars began to shoot, dropping in great arcs, sometimes several a minute, and we would break off our talk to watch them. They were the Perseids, meteors which shower down late that month and in early August, from the bell- or flower-shaped constellation of Perseus, where Algol blinks among minor stars with a restless flash. El Ghul—the Ghoul or Fiend—is the Arabian astronomers’ word for the Gorgon, and the starry hero, grasping the snake-locks, flourishes her head across the North and shakes these fragments loose; or so we decided after a decanter or two. If we were late enough, nightingales filled in the rare gaps in our talk; the Pleiades and then Orion followed the slant of Cassiopeia and Perseus above the trees.

  * * *

  Long before this, startling news from outside had reached our valley. In the middle of the night, Hitler, Goering and Himmler had rounded up and murdered many of their colleagues, and a number—perhaps several hundred—of the rank and file of the SA. Nobody knew how to interpret these bloody portents but they spread dismay and little else was spoken of for a day or two; and then the topic died, drowned by the heat and the weight of summer.

  A few days later, a telephone message announced the death of the Countess’s mother. A train, flying a pale feather of smoke and looking like a toy among the trees and the hills, travelled along the valley twice a day. It carried István and me downstream through fields of tall maize and wheat; we picked up Xenia, who was sheltering from the sun under the platform-acacias of Zám, and found the Kápolnás carriage waiting at Soborsin.

  The Countess was all in black. The service was held in the hall, where three Uniat priests, with short beards and clipped hair, quite unlike the flowing locks and the voluminous beards of the Orthodox clergy the other side of the Danube, intoned the funeral rite in Rumanian. (The coffin was open; it was the first time I saw anyone dead.) The ceremony ended at the family vault and, after luncheon back at the kastély where the last wisps of incense still lingered, the Count led us all to the library to show us some new specimens, “and while we’re about it, we’ll have a wee doch an doris afore ye gang awa’.” Travelling back, I felt I had known them all for ever.

  * * *

  When István was in training with his regiment of Honvéd Hussars in 1917, he won the third prize for dressage out of a hundred hussars, dragoons and uhlans, and came in second for jumping. “You should have seen us moving off for Galicia and Bukovina,” he said. “The uhlans in their square czapkas and red trousers, dragoons in long Waffenrocks, and hussars like us in pale blue.” He still had his uniform in a cupboard, and I drew him in it: a powder-blue frogged tunic and a fur-collared dolman to be slung loose over one shoulder—“an Attila, they called it,” he said, arranging the hang—Hessian boots, a shako with a white plume, and a frogged sabre. How strange this seemed, allied to that grim period of the war! I knew something about the campaigns of the Western Front; but those early mounted clashes with cossacks which led to terrible battlefields on the far slopes of the Carpathians were a matter of hearsay and dim conjecture.

  Many years later, I thought of these late-night talks with István when I read and heard about the poet Férenc Békássy from his sister Eva. He was the son of a surprisingly liberal-minded landowner in western Hungary who sent all his sons and daughters to Bedales. From there he went on to King’s, Cambridge, where his poems first became known. He was an Apostle, a friend of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey and especially Maynard Keynes, who went to stay with him in Hungary during a Long Vacation. His poems—one of them is a light-hearted skit on ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’—show great promise, and his last letters to friends in England, delivered posthumously when the war was over, reveal a sensitive and engaging cast of mind. Returning to Hungary at the outbreak of war, he was soon a Lieutenant in the 7th Honvéd Hussars. At the end of a letter to Nowel Olivier, dated in Budapest, May 1915, he wrote, ‘By the time I go, there will be roses and I shall go with a crest of three red ones on my horse’s head (but people won’t know the reason) because there are three over the shield in our coat-of-arms. This isn’t at all the letter I meant to write, but I can’t help it. I long to see you... And we shall meet again, shan’t we, one day?’ He was killed in a cavalry engagement in Bukovina on June 25th, 1915, at the age of twenty-two.[19]

  * * *

  One day when we were invited to luncheon by some neighbours, István said, “Let’s take the horses” and we followed a roundabout, uphill track to look at a remaining piece of forest. “Plenty of common oak, thank God,” he said, turning back in the saddle as we climbed a path through the slanting sunbeams, “you can use it for everything.” The next most plentiful was Turkey oak, very good firewood when dry, also for stablefloors and barrelstaves. Beech came next, “It leaves scarcely any embers”; then yoke elm and common elm, “useful for furniture and coffins.” There was plenty of ash, too—handy for tools, axe-helves, hammers, sickles, scythes, spades and hay-rakes. Except for a few by the brooks, there were no poplars up the
re but plenty by the Maros: useless, though, except for troughs and wooden spoons and the like. Gypsies made these. They settled in the garden and courtyard of the kastély with their wives and their children and whittled away until they had finished. “There is no money involved,” István said. “We’re supposed to go halves, but, if it’s an honest tribe, we’re lucky to get a third. We do better with some Rumanians from out-of-the-way villages in the mountains, very poor and primitive chaps, but very honest.”[20]

  In a clearing we exchanged greetings with a white-haired shepherd leaning on a staff with a steel hook. The heavily embroidered homespun cloak flung across his shoulders and reaching to the ground was a brilliant green. His flock tore at the grass among the tree-stumps all round him. Then a path led steeply downhill through hazel-woods with old shells and acorns crunching and slipping under the horses’ hoofs.

  It was a boiling hot day. On the way back from a cheerful feast, we went down to the river to look at some wheat. Overcome by the sight of the cool and limpid flood, we unsaddled in a shady field about the size of a paddock, took off all our clothes, climbed down through the reeds and watercress and dived in. Swimming downstream with lazy breast-stroke or merely drifting in the shade of the poplars and the willows, we talked and laughed about our recent fellow guests. The water was dappled with leafy shade near the bank and scattered with thistle-down, and a heron made off down a vista of shadows. Fleets of moorhens doubled their speed and burst noisily out of the river, and wheat, maize and tiers of vineyard were gliding past us when all at once we heard some singing. Two girls were reaping the end of a narrow strip of barley; going by the colours of their skirts and their embroidered tops, braid sashes and kerchiefs, they had come for the harvest from a valley some way off. They stopped as we swam into their ken, and, when we drew level, burst out laughing. Apparently the river was less of a covering than we had thought. They were about nineteen or twenty, with sunburnt and rosy cheeks and thick dark plaits, and not at all shy. One of them shouted something, and we stopped and trod water in mid-Maros. István interpreted, “They say we ought to be ashamed of ourselves,” he said, “and they threaten to find our clothes and run off with them.”

  Then he shouted back, “You mustn’t be unkind to strangers! You look out, or we’ll come and catch you.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” came the answer. “Not like that, naked as frogs.”

  “What are these for?” István pointed to the branches by the shore. “We could be as smartly dressed as Adam.”

  “You’d never catch us! What about your tender white feet in the stubble? Anyway, you’re too respectable. Look at your hair, going bald in front.”

  “It’s not!” István shouted back.

  “And that young one,” cried the second girl, “he wouldn’t dare.”

  István’s blue eye was alight as he translated the last bit. Then without exchanging another word we struck out for the shore as fast as crocodiles and, tearing at poplar twigs and clumps of willow-herb, bounded up the bank. Gathering armfuls of sheaves, the girls ran into the next field, then halted at the illusory bastion of a hay-rick and waved their sickles in mock defiance. The leafy disguise and our mincing gait as we danced across the stubble unloosed more hilarity. They dropped their sickles when we were almost on them and showered us with the sheaves; then ran to the back of the rick. But, one-armed though we were, we caught them there and all four collapsed in a turmoil of hay and barley and laughter.

  * * *

  “Herrgott!” I heard István suddenly exclaim—much later on, and a few yards round the curve of the rick—smiting his brow with his hand. “Oh God! The Bishop! The Gräfin! They’re coming to dinner, and look at the sun!”

  It was well down the sky and evening was gathering. The ricks and the poplars and the serried rows of sheaves and haycocks were laying bars of shadow over the mown field and a party of birds was flying home across the forest. István’s hay-entangled hair was comically at variance with his look of consternation and we all laughed. Extracting strands of hay and the clinging barley, we tidied Safta and Ileana’s plaits disordered by all this rough and tumble, and set off hand in hand with them for the river, István and I on tiptoe. “Poor feet,” they murmured. After goodbyes we dived in and started the long swim back, turning many times to wave and call to those marvellous girls and they waved and answered until they were out of earshot and then, after a bend in the river, out of sight as well.

  The current was faster than we thought. Close to the bank it ran sluggishly but rushes and cress and duckweed were a hindrance, so either way our rate was much slower than our buoyant journey downstream. Swallows skimmed under the branches; a shepherd and some returning harvesters looked at us with amazement. After long toil, and trusting to nightfall, we got out and ran through thickening dusk and at last, thank God, found everything as we had left it. We dressed and saddled up, then cantered three miles home through the lit outskirts of the village and into the woods again, stooping under the low branches, racing each other the last half-mile until we hammered over the bridge and under the archway and leapt to the ground with pounding hearts, scattering the pigeons. We washed, changed and brushed our hair at high speed and were soon climbing the steps to the loggia.

  Dinner was laid at one end, and the guests, sitting or decorously standing glass in hand, were gathered at the other. The thin and jewelled fingers of the iron-grey shingled Gräfin were crossed in her lap and the purple sash of the Bishop glowed in the lamplight.

  “Ah, there you are,” István’s mother said. We weren’t late at all; and in a few moments István was kissing the Gräfin’s hand in his polished and easy style, and then the Bishop’s ring. When we were settled at table, I couldn’t keep my mind on the conversation: the afternoon’s aura still compassed me about; my feet tingled from the prick of the stubble and it was hard to keep a private smile off my face. The Gräfin unfolded her napkin and shook it loose with a twinkle of sapphires.

  “Well, István,” she said, in the affectionate and rallying tone an aunt might use to a favourite nephew. “What have you been up to?” I avoided looking in his direction. If our eyes had crossed, we would have been done for.

  We went back to the fields two days later, but there was nobody there. All had been harvested and even the sheaves had gone. We never saw Safta and Ileana again and felt sad.

  * * *

  The summer solstice was past, peonies and lilac had both vanished, cuckoos had changed their tune and were making ready to fly. Roast corn-cobs came and trout from the mountains; cherries, then strawberries, apricots and peaches, and, finally, wonderful melons and raspberries. The scarlet blaze of paprika—there were two kinds on the table, one of them fierce as gunpowder—was cooled by cucumber cut thin as muslin and by soda splashed into glasses of wine already afloat with ice; this had been fetched from an igloo-like undercroft among the trees where prudent hands had stacked it six months before, when—it was impossible to imagine it!—snow covered all. Waggons creaked under loads of apricots, yet the trees were still laden; they scattered the dust, wasps tunnelled them and wheels and foot-falls flattened them to a yellow pulp; tall wooden vats bubbled among the dusty sunflowers, filling the yards with the sweet and heady smell of their fermentation; and soon, even at midday, the newly distilled spirit began to bowl the peasants over like a sniper, flinging the harvesters prostrate and prone in every fragment of shadow. They snored among sheaves and hay-cocks and a mantle of flies covered them while the flocks crammed together under every spread of branches, and not a leaf moved.

  Behind the thick walls and the closed afternoon shutters of the kastély, sleep reigned fitfully too, but resurrection came soon. The barley was already in and István was busy with his reapers and the last of the wheat. (In Hungary, the harvest began on the 29th of June, the feast of SS. Peter and Paul, but it was a bit earlier hereabouts.) When we set off, István’s mother called from an upper window, “Do take your hat!” She sent it skimming down and he dropped his
rein, caught it in flight and clapped it on, “You’re getting as black as a Gypsy.” After the long weeks of sickles and scythes and whetstones, it was threshing time. Old machines were toiling away and filling the valleys with their throbbing, driven by engines with flapping belts and tall Puffing Billy chimneys expanding in a zigzag at the top. Up in the mountains, horses harnessed to wooden sledges and rollers for shelling the grain trotted round and round on circles of cobble. Winnowing followed, when clouds of skied grain sparkled and fell and then sparkled again as the next wooden shovelful transfigured the afternoon with chaff. The sacks, carried off in ox-carts, were safe in the barns at last. If the waggoners were Rumanians, instead of crying “stânga!” or “dreaptă!” in their native tongue when they wanted their oxen to turn left or right (or “jobb!” or “bal!” in Magyar if they were Hungarians) they would shout “heiss!” and “tcha!” I had first noticed these arcane cries when buffaloes were being coaxed or goaded along. István thought that the Turks had first brought these animals here, probably from Egypt, though they must originally have come from India. But the words are neither Turkish, Arabic, Romany, Hindi nor Urdu.

  July brought a scattering of younger Transylvanians and their relations in search of refuge along the river valley from the heat of Budapest, which summer had turned into one of the great tropical cities of the world. There were parties and picnics and bathing, and tennis at István’s till it was too dark to see the ball, on a court sunk among thick trees like a shady well; and feasting and singing round pianos in those long disintegrating drawing-rooms, and sometimes dancing to a gramophone. A few of the records were only a year or two out of date, many much older: Night and Day, Stormy Weather, Blue Skies, Lazybones, Love for Sale, Saint Louis Blues, Every Little Breeze Seems to Whisper Louise. In case of need, István was revealed as a proficient pianist—“but only for this sort of stuff,” he said, vamping, syncopating, honky-tonking and glissandoing away like mad; then, spinning completely round on the piano-stool, he ended with a lightning thumbnail sweep of the whole keyboard from bass to treble.