Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  “How quickly they get up in the air!” Angéla said. “No fuss, like swans.”

  “Ah!” István said, “that’s because they have air-pockets in their bones,” and we watched it growing smaller in the distance.

  We picnicked under an oak. The mountains that rumbled away to the north and the east were a mass of canyons and forests: full of bears, István told us. Crown Prince Rudolph and his circle—or was it the insatiable Franz Ferdinand?—had shot sixty during his various sojourns there. István, when we asked him if any were left, said, “It’s teeming with them.” He too had stalked in those never-ending conifers. There were wolves too. The cubs would be growing up just about now.

  Finding we had run out of cigarettes, István shook off his postprandial torpor and drove back to the town. We wandered down to the river and bathed and dawdled there, lying on the grass, dallying and embracing and then watching the dragonflies darting through sunbeams which the willow branches caught and split into threads while our sleepy lashes re-fragmented them in prismatic sheaves. We got back to the oak tree at the very moment the car came snorting uphill. István told us he had run into an old fellow-hussar and couldn’t get away, and we teased him about being so popular. He said he wished he’d been down to bathe; then murmured to me, “Not much point, though, now the reaping’s finished.”

  * * *

  We gave a lift to an old woman who was gingerly carrying a large covered pudding-basin. I asked her, through István, if she were a Szekler, and she said, “No, just a Magyar.” Her face, mobled in a widow’s coif under an enormously wide hat of plaited straw, was like an axe. When Angéla asked what was inside the basin so carefully poised on her knees, she said: “Feel,” and lifted a corner of the cloth. Angéla knelt on the seat, faced backwards, slipped her hand in and gave a small gasp of surprise. The old woman laughed toothlessly and they both told me to try, so I did and discovered with a start a mass of fluffy warm moving bodies which became audible when the cloth was taken off. The basin was full of newly-hatched ducklings and when she got out she offered us a few in thanks for the lift, but dashed indoors and came back with three glasses of szilvorium instead.

  It was getting late. We left the river, struck south and followed a vile road upstream beside another river—the Kokel?[5]—then south again through pastures and stubble fields where gleaners were stooping among low sunbeams and shadows. It was a pacific Samuel Palmer land of hills and woods and fields patterned with sheaves; pyramid-hayricks threw spears of shadow downhill; cattle and flocks were going home haloed in dust. Once more, there was something different about the landscape and villages, it was hard to say what. Tiles were taking the place of thatch; walls, with a gabled farmhouse along one flank, enclosed wide yards, and gateways pierced them with flattened arches tall enough for laden carts to drive through. Order and trimness prevailed.

  Beyond the mountains to the north and east, clouds had been arranging themselves in a disturbing array, flocculent and still at first, then fidgety with summer lightning. The electricity dancing about among these heaps of vapour turned them blue-green and silver and mauve and in a shudder and a split second they would become transparent or bulbous or as thin as stage wings: scenic effects like magnesium, as though an atmospheric clown or a harlequin were loose in the hills. This restless sequence of scene-shifts began with nightfall; then the rising of the eighth full moon of this journey made an hallucination of the sky and up into the middle of it, straight ahead, a vertiginous triangle of steep roofs, spikes, tree-tops and battlemented cliffs rose like a citadel in an illuminated psalter.

  “Look!” István and Angéla exclaimed. “Segesvár!” A Rumanian would have cried “Sighis, oara!”; but a descendant of the builders of that high place would have said “Schässburg!”

  * * *

  Like Transylvania in the West, the Magyar and Rumanian names of the province—Erdély and Ardeal—both mean something to do with forests. But the German name is Siebenburgen, and the word conjures up seven fortresses, each with three names; I shrink from inflicting the full twenty-one.

  What happened was this. When the early Kings of Hungary, notably Géza II in the twelfth century, found this region—according to the Hungarian chronicles—deserted, they summoned colonies of ‘Saxon’ settlers from the Middle and Lower Rhine, some from Flanders, and others, it is said, from the Mosel, and even a few Walloons. They tilled the land and built the towns, often, as here, on ancient Dacian sites; these are the Burgen in question, and in time the growing constellations of their farms and villages dovetailed with the regions of the Szeklers and Hungarians and Rumanians. A century later, threatened by the westward sweep of the Cumans, Andrew II summoned the Crusading order of the Teutonic Knights from the Holy Land; he granted them a stretch of country round Kronstadt; but when the Knights sought to make it independent and then present it to the Pope, the King drove them out. Moving north they settled along the Vistula and founded the warlike state which later turned into East Prussia; and soon they were breaking lances beside the Masurian lakes and harrying Lithuanians among the Baltic floes.

  On the spot, meanwhile, their peaceful ‘Saxon’ forerunners flourished. And there they had remained, over two hundred thousand of them, and they soon became the most advanced community in Transylvania. They cultivated the land round their walled farmhouses and their manifold crafts brought prosperity. Gothic churches rose, steeples soared, vaulted cellars burrowed the rocks and battlements girded them about. Their spoken dialect strayed a little from that of their countrymen in the West, but no further than a regional dialect should; and later, when the Reformation found its way to the Carpathians, feelings of tribal solidarity prompted them to adopt Luther’s teaching. (It was a recoil, too, from the Socinian dogma, which had begun to affect the Hungarian Calvinists.) To a remarkable degree, these settlements followed the line of evolution of the German towns and villages in the West: the same burgher and artisan way of life prevailed, very different in style from Magyar dash and vainglory and the self-sufficient stubbornness of the Szeklers and the smouldering pastoral diligence of the Rumanians. Seemly, and in tune with the sober assiduity and substance of the inhabitants, a solid and sometimes splendid provincial baroque architecture sprang up; theologians and teachers emerged; and I wonder if I was right (on later visits) to compare them to Puritan settlers in the New World? Anyway, the blue eyes, flaxen hair and Teutonic speech that I met in those arcades and market-places could just as well have belonged a thousand miles to the west. Nobody has ever confused them with later Germanic settlers in re-conquered Hungary—the Arad Swabians, for instance. It seemed a miracle that they and their towns and hamlets and their skills and their language should have weathered the past eight centuries of commotion with so little damage. They are called ‘Transylvanian Saxons’—‘Sassen,’ in dialect. Nobody quite knows why, for they had nothing to do with Saxony. Could it have been the loose regional word for ‘German’ at some stage of the Middle Ages; in the time of the Saxon emperors, perhaps—Henry the Fowler, the Ottos, or Henry the Saint? Or later, under Richard Coeur de Lion’s brother-in-law, Henry the Lion?

  I had always known the name of this region from hearing as a child, when the Pied Piper of Hamelin was read aloud, how the children of Hamelin were piped into a mountain chasm to re-emerge in the Carpathians:

  In Transylvania there’s a tribe

  Of alien people who ascribe

  The outlandish ways and dress

  On which their neighbours lay such stress,

  To their fathers and mothers having risen

  Out of some subterranean prison

  Into which they had been trepanned

  Long time ago, in a mighty band,

  Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,

  But how or why they don’t understand.

  The very cleft, the Almasch cave from which they emerged at the other end, is still pointed out. It is a bat-haunted cavern about forty leagues due east of Schässburg as the crow flies. The story def
ining the children as Brunswickers would make them specifically Saxons.[6]

  It was too far from Angéla’s and István’s haunts for danger of chance meetings, so we strolled instead of skulking about the high-perched streets of the citadel. We gazed down at the moonlit landscape and up at the metalled and shingled spires and watched the hands of an old clock over an archway where a jerky figurine emerged and struck the hour. The town blazed with moonlight but beyond the glimmer of the distant ranges, the eastern sky was still restless with summer lightning. We put up at an inn with gables and leaded windows in a square lifted high above the roofs and the triple cincture of the town wall and dined at a heavy oak table in the Gastzimmer. The glasses held a cool local wine that washed down trout caught that afternoon, and every sight and sound—the voices, the wine-glasses, the stone mugs and the furniture shining with the polish of a couple of centuries—brought it closer to a Weinstube by the Rhine or the Necker. When István retired, Angéla and I sat on in the great smokey room holding hands, deeply aware that it was the last night but one of our journey. There are times when hours are more precious than diamonds. The gable-windows upstairs surveyed a vision of great unreality. The moon had triumphed over the mute fireworks to the east and the north and all the dimensions had been re-shuffled. We leant on the sill and when Angéla turned her head, her face was bisected for a moment, one half silver, the other caught by the gold glow of lamplight indoors.

  * * *

  “Petöfi was killed somewhere in the fields over there,” István had said. Tsar Nicholas I had sent an army to help the eighteen-year-old Franz-Josef when the Hungarians, rising in revolt under Kossuth, fought a war of independence which they very nearly won. The conflict moved to Transylvania. Segesvár was one of the last battles of the campaign. Petöfi, a devoted admirer of Shakespeare and Byron, was an attractive, passionate, bohemian figure and, many think, Hungary’s greatest poet. He was twenty-six when he fell after fighting with reckless bravery all through the war.

  But, in Rumanian annals, Sighis, oara is singled out, in the middle of the fifteenth century, by a strange and perplexing figure; except for one foible, he would have entered history as a hero. Vlad III of Wallachia, sprung from the great Basarab dynasty, was the great-grandson of Radu the Black, grandson of the warrior prince Mircea the Old and son of Vlad the Dragon—so called, it is thought, because the Emperor Sigismund, his overlord, ally and enemy, had hung the Order of the Dragon round his neck. Given as a hostage to the Sultan when he was a boy, the third Vlad mounted the Wallachian throne later on and fought against the Turks with energy and skill. Chastisement for his success lay with the Sultan, Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople. But the march of this punitive army was suddenly halted by an unspeakably terrible scene: a wide valley, that is, populated by many thousands of Turkish and Bulgarian corpses from the year before, transfixed on a forest of spikes and rotting in mid-air, with the Sultan’s general ceremoniously robed on the tallest spike of all. The Sultan, whose aquiline features and snowy globular turban we know from Bellini’s painting and the engraving by Pisanello, had been brought up on blood, like a falcon: he recoiled in horror—some say in respect for the ruthlessness of his rebellious vassal—and burst into tears. For Vlad’s lifelong foible was impaling. Many contemporary woodcuts show the Prince feasting in Carpathian glens, like a shrike in his larder, among groves of skewered foes.

  In Rumania he has always been known as Vlad Tsepesh—‘the Impaler’—but to foreigners, with his father, Vlad the Dragon (‘Vlad Dracul’) in mind, he was ‘the son of the Dragon.’ (‘Dragon’ in Rumanian is Dracu and the final ‘l’ is ‘the.’ Hence the outland ‘Drakola,’ ‘Drakule’ and the like, a word never heard on Rumanian lips, indeed, an improperly formed one based on the just-possible ‘Draculea,’ i.e. ‘Dragon’s son.’)

  It was the alien and dragonish trisyllable, coupled with a vague bloodthirsty aura, which gave Bram Stoker the idea for a vampire ‘Count Dracula,’ flying through the night in a white tie and tails and burying his fangs in his victims’ throats; and in recent decades, only Tarzan has outstripped him in film popularity. The fact that Transylvania is a region of castles, forests, counts and vampires, and that some confused strands of local history have managed to tangle themselves into the novel’s local colour, has always (for me) set it beyond charm’s reach. People who should know better exploit the confusion between the two figures and when ‘Dracula’s Castle’ is pointed out to a charabanc-load of tourists, I suspect that it is not the historical figure that appears before their minds’ eye—the Prince in his plumed head-dress: the exorbitant glance, the sweeping moustache, the bear’s fur and clasps and stars, the long hair and flanged mace and the palissade of cumbered stakes—but a natty Count in an opera-hat, a satin-lined cape and a queer look about his incisors; someone who might equally well be advertising after-shave lotion, teaching the tango or sawing a boxed lady in half at a matinée.

  Back to Sighis, oaraa! Back to Segesvár! Above all, here, back to Schässburg!

  * * *

  Many years later, climbing the marvellous covered stairway that leads to the first platform of the Shwe Dagon pagoda in Rangoon, I stopped half-way and tried to remember what this steep ascent called to mind; and, in a moment, I was back a couple of decades and climbing a windy staircase under beams and shingle and a steep wooden roof in Transylvania. The Saxon steps lifted us to the town’s grassy summit, whose battlements in the sky encompassed leaning gravestones, tall trees and an old gothic church. A roof as steep as a barn’s, with all the semicircular scales discoloured by lichen, rose from the mottled walls; and indoors airy space ascended to a mediaeval web of vaults. There were pointed arches once again and lancets, trefoils and cusps, and in the chancel, traces of fresco three-quarters flaked away, a crucifixion or a transfiguration, perhaps: the exact memory has dropped away too. Armorial tombstones were piled at random under the bell-sallies, and the organ must have broken down, for somebody practising on a harmonium rumbled and wheezed in the gallery. The theme of the Danube School altarpiece has dimmed as well. ‘A marvellous mixture of rough stone,’ my diary says, ‘faded brick and plaster, scalloped doorways, age piled on age, all first rate and all with that untouched, musty feeling one treasures.’ I thought it was a Catholic church at first, but the absence of sanctuary lamps and the Stations of the Cross hinted otherwise. So it was Lutheran, and much less bleak and stripped than Calvinist and Unitarian interiors. There were other hints. Pews, as opposed to chairs, seemed a distinguishing mark of the Reform.

  We sat in one of these and Angéla idly picked a prayer-book from the ledge and opened it haphazard. “Oh look!” The dog-eared pages had fallen open at a passage marked with a skeleton leaf where the faded black-letter spelled out a prayer of intercession for ‘unser wohlbeliebter Kaiser Franz-Josef.’ But there was no mention of Elizabeth, his beautiful Queen-Empress. She must already have been assassinated at the landing-stage in Geneva; and no mention of their son, Crown Prince Rudolph who, after shooting all those bears in the mountains which we could just see through the diamond-panes, had kept the last round for himself at Mayerling. There was no date, only the owner’s name in faded ink. We wondered later whether it could have been published after his next heir, the Hungary-hating Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, had been murdered at Sarajevo. (1898, 1889 and 1914—mark these grim dates.) Nor, as far as I can remember, could we find the name of Archduke Charles, Franz-Josef’s successor and last Emperor of all. But for this, the closing date for the Prayer Book might have fallen just before the Emperor’s lonely death in 1916, when the requiems and the salutes and the tolling bells must have been drowned among the unceremonial gunfire of half a dozen battle-fronts: salvoes which two years later were to bring the diadem of the Caesars and the apostolic crown of Hungary and the sceptres and the crowns of Bohemia and Croatia—indeed a whole Empire—tumbling among the ruins. “Poor old man,” Angéla said, putting the prayer book back on its ledge.

  Beyond the gravestones out
side, the highest of the three town walls looped downhill with battlements spaced out between jutting towers, several of which were choked with storks’ nests. Swags of elderflower burst over the crenellations and we peered down and watched the swifts flying in and out of holes in the masonry. The level sward outside the west door of the church dropped in green waves of mingled forest and churchyard where the names of weavers, brewers, vintners, carpenters, merchants, and pastors—some of them ending in a Latin ‘us,’ like those of sixteenth-century humanists—were incised on generations of headstones and obelisks in obsolete German spelling. Under a scurry of clouds and suspended above hills and fields and a twisting river-bed, maintenance and decay were at grips in one of the most captivating churchyards in the world.

  The organist had come down to see who we were. He pointed out a sturdy tower at the bottom. “You see that?” he said, polishing steel-rimmed spectacles and putting them on. “Three hundred years ago, a Turkish army marched up the valley, bent on sacking the town. It was commanded by a merciless general called Ali Pasha, ein schrecklicher Mann! Some Schässburgers had barricaded themselves in the tower and one of them aimed his arquebus at him, and—boom!—down he came.” A looping parabola with his forefinger showed that somersaulting fall. “He was on an elephant.”

  “?”

  “Yes.” His spectacles flashed like window panes. “An elephant. The citizens fell on the attackers, the Turks fled, the town was saved.”

  Hardly were the words out of his mouth when a wind wrapped itself round the tall wooded cone. There had been a warning rush and a flutter. Then all at once the branches were banging about, hitting each other like boxers, and dust and pollen flew from the boughs in a twisting yellow cloud. Grass flattened twirling and forking into channels, every poplar in the valley shuddered from root to tip like a Malay kris and the loosened hay-ricks moulted in spirals. Husks, chaff, straw, petals, young twigs, last year’s leaves and nosegays scattered out of the jam-jars on the graves were rushing up the slope in a gale which tossed the dishevelled birds about the air. The clouds had darkened, a volley of drops fell and we and the organist sheltered from the downpour under a clump of chestnuts. It stopped just as abruptly and we found ourselves, as a rainbow formed and dissolved again in a momentary foxes’ wedding, looking down, as though through a magnifying glass, at a world of hills and meadows and the flash of a river and an upheaval of distant ranges. Outraged cawing and twittering filled the branches and the air was adrift with the scent of pollen, roses, hay and wet earth.