Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Other wonders lay hidden in that labyrinth of valleys. Deep in the heart of them were the remains of Sarmizegethusa, the old capital of the Dacians and the stronghold of King Decebalus. By the time he had reduced Domitian to paying the Dacians a kind of Dac-geld, Decebalus and his realm had become the most powerful force ever to confront the Empire; he was a great and noble figure, and when Hadrian invaded his mountains, it was almost a contest between equals. It took a bitter and laborious campaign and all the science and siegecraft of Rome to subdue him: skills which Decebalus himself had anyway half-mastered; and in the end, rather than surrender to be led fettered in a triumph, the King fell on his sword in the high Roman fashion. Sarmizegethusa became Ulpia Traiana, the stronghold of the Legio Tredecima Gemina, and the place was cluttered still with carved fragments recalling the Leg. XIII Gem., which sounds like a legion at double strength. Its eagles presided there as long as the province lasted. Stupendous walls and the ruins of an amphitheatre show the importance of the city; broken statues of gods and emperors and the great hewn ashlars of temples scatter the region; fallen shrines speak of Isis and Mithras, and fissured mosaics underfoot spread the mythological floors of old dining rooms.

  The most difficult parts of my attempt to keep to the western slopes of this range were avoiding loss of height and resisting the ways the grain of the mountains tried to impose; but upheavals, bands of rock, dejection-cones and landslides made this hard; it was often a question of zigzagging to the bottom of a ravine and up the other side, or of swerving into a hinterland where I was nearly bound to go astray. I did both; but, looking at the sun and my resurrected watch and the compass (only used, so far, on my last day in Hungary) I managed not to get irretrievably lost.

  I saw nobody all day; there were numbers of red squirrels, a few black ones, and innumerable birds; but the only larger creatures were hawks and, usually in pairs, languidly and loftily afloat round the jutting bastions of rock, golden eagles. Sometimes I was looking across wide bowls of tree-tops before plunging into them; at others, striding over grassy saddles or scrambling on those expanses that, from below, looked like bald patches; but most of the time I followed whatever dim woodland tracks I could unravel; breaking off, every so often, to side-step across unstable and irksome cascades of shale: then back under the branches. As usual, on lonely stretches, poetry and songs came to the rescue, sometimes starting echoes. I still had plenty of food; there were dozens of streams to drink from, many of them thick with watercress, and as I flung myself face down beside one like a stag at eve, I thought how glad I was, at that particular moment, not to be standing properly at ease on the parade ground at Sandhurst. Oxford would have been better; but this was best.

  The ledge I found for the night was sheltered by trees on three sides and, on the fourth, the tips of the pine trees zoomed into the depths. When the afterglow following a bonfire-sunset had gone and the bed-time pandemonium of birds began to quieten, I rugged up, lit a candle, fished out my book and for a few pages followed the adventures of Theodore Gumbril. The stars were unbelievably dense, to gaze up turned one into a multi-millionaire, and better still, the Perseids were still dropping like fireworks. I had travelled far and I was soon asleep, but when the chill of the small hours woke me, I put on another layer of jersey, swallowed what remained in the flask and found the late-rising moon had extinguished many of the stars, just as Sappho says she does. The last quarter scattered the woods with vistas and depths and the gleams of lit rock.

  Soon after setting off in the morning, I halted on a grassy bluff to tie up a lace when I heard a sound which was half a creak and half a ruffle. Looking over the ledge to a similar jut fifteen yards below, I found myself peering at the hunched shoulders of a very large bird at the point where his tawny feathers met plumage of a paler chestnut hue: they thatched his scalp and the nape of his neck and he was tidying up the feathers on his breast and shoulders with an imperiously curved beak. A short hop shifted the bird farther along its ledge and it was only when, with a creak, he flung out his left wing to its full stretch and began searching his armpit, that I took in his enormous size. He was close enough for every detail to show: the buff plus-four feathers covering three-quarters of his scaly legs, the yellow and black on his talons, the square-ended tail-feathers, the yellow strip at the base of his upper beak. Shifting from his armpit to his flight-feathers, he set about preening and sorting as though the night had tousled them. He folded the wing back without haste, then flung out the other in a movement which seemed to put him off balance for a moment, and continued his grooming with the same deliberation.

  Careful not to move an eyelash, I must have watched for a full twenty minutes. When both wings were folded, he sat peering masterfully about, shrugging and hunching his shoulders from time to time, half-spreading a wing then folding it back, and once stretching the jaws of his beak wide in a gesture like a yawn, until at length on a sudden impulse, with a creak and a shudder, he opened both wings to their full tremendous span, rocking for a moment as though his balance were in peril; then, with another two or three hops and a slow springing movement of his plus-foured legs, he was in the air, all his flight-feathers fanning out separately and lifting at the tips as he moved his wings down, then dipping with the following upward sweep. After a few strokes, both wings came to rest and formed a single line, with all his flight feathers curling upwards again as he allowed an invisible air-current to carry him out and down and away, correcting his balance with hardly perceptible movements as he sailed out over the great gulf. A few moments later, loud but invisible flaps sounded the other side of a buttress and a second great bird followed him almost without a sound. They swayed gently, with a wide space of air between them, like ships in a mild swell. Then as they crossed the hypotenuse of shadow which stretched from the Carpathian skyline to the flanks of the Banat mountains, the morning light caught and burnished their wings and revealed them both in their proper majesty. To look down on this king and queen of birds, floating there in aloof companionship, brought a long moment of exaltation. To think the Kirghiz used golden eagles for hunting! They carried them on horseback, a seemingly impossible feat, then unhooded them over the steppe to soar and spy out antelopes and foxes and wolves and then stoop on their quarry. Hereabouts, Radu had conveyed, they sometimes rivalled wolves in decimating flocks and, I learned later on, in wreaking havoc among the sheep and goats of the Sarakatsan nomads of the Rhodope mountains, and the flocks of Radu’s relations, the Koutzovlachs of the Pindus. They circle above the folds, hover, take aim, then fall like javelins and carry lambs piteously bleating into the sky.

  I wondered if these two had merely alighted on their morning rounds, or whether their nest were nearby. Better not to look! (I had a sudden vision of those blood-curdling front pages of the Domenica del Corriere, in cobalt, orange and sepia: a goalkeeper crushed to death by an anaconda under the eyes of awe-stricken teams: ‘Ofside! Un incidente in Torino’; three rhinoceroses chasing a Carmelite nun across a chaotic Apennine market-place: ‘Uno Sfortunato Incontro’; or, in this case, ‘Al Soccorso dei Bambini!’—a nestful of eaglets and two eagles tearing a marauder to bits, who desperately beats at them with an antler...)

  I could follow their motionless hover and their languid circlings for a long time as I headed south. The encounter, within twenty-four hours of that brief Altdorfer-vision of the stag, was almost too much to take in. I wondered how near to wild boars my path had gone, or might go; and to wolves and bears. They, too, were said to keep out of men’s way at this time of the year. I hadn’t seen any of them; but perhaps they had seen me as I crashed past. What about the famous passion of bears for honey and the bee-hives of those harvesters? I longed to catch a glimpse of one of them ambling bandy-legged across the middle distance or reaching on tip-toe, plagued by bees, into a hollow tree after a comb. There had been movements like an unquiet spirit in the branches during the night; larger than a squirrel, it had sounded: could it have been a wild cat or a lynx? Perhaps a pine-m
arten.

  Starting at dawn, ending at dark and only separated by light sleep, each day in the mountains seemed to contain a longer sequence of phases than a week at ground level. Twenty-four hours would spin themselves into a lifetime, and thin mountain air, sharpened faculties, the piling-up of detail and a kaleidoscope of scene-changes seemed to turn the concatenation into a kind of eternity. I felt deeply involved in these dizzy solitudes, more reluctant each minute to come down again and ready to go on forever. Thank heavens, I thought, climbing along a dark canyon of pines, no likelihood of it ending yet. But suddenly, very faintly and a long way off, there was the sound of an axe falling; then two or three. However far away, the sound struck a baleful note; it spoke of people from the lower world and the two days’ solitude since leaving the shepherds had installed feelings of unchallenged ownership of everything within sight or hearing.

  * * *

  The axes had been hard at work. Oaks, beeches and alders stood about in solitude amid a disorder of shorn stumps, rings of chips and felled pine-trees. They had been cut nearly through with two-handed saws then finished off with axe, beetle and wedge, and even as I watched, the woodmen were banging their wedges into the last victim of the day. The impacts only reached me when the beetles were lifted for the next blow; and soon, with a splitting and a crash, down the tree came, and they fell on it, lopping and trimming the prone trunk with saws, axes and billhooks. When enough stripped timber had accumulated, a team of horses with grapples and hauling gear would be summoned and the trunks dragged to the edge of the clearing and tipped down a steep ride: a chaos of timber choked the grass all the way down to a point where waggons could load them. It reminded me of the stripes of snow I had seen in the forests round the Austrian Danube and the pine-trunks tumbling down them like spilt matchboxes: all to be sawn into deal planks or put together in rafts and floated downstream.

  I learnt all this in German from a burly man in a red-checked flannel shirt and a celluloid eye-shade like a journalist’s in a film. After leaving the team of woodmen, he had fallen in with me on his way to a log-cabin with a corrugated iron roof. Here, most incongruously seated at a table, a bearded man in a black suit and a black beaver hat turned up all round was poring over a large and well-thumbed book, his spectacles close to the print. In a few years’ time he would look exactly like one of the Elders in The Temple by Holman Hunt and this is exactly what he was. Two sons about my age, also dressed in black, were on either side of him, equally rapt. They too were marked for religion: you could tell by their elf-locks and the unshorn down which fogged their waxy cheeks. How different from the man in the check shirt; he was the Rabbi’s younger brother and his cast of feature might have been the work of a hostile cartoonist. He was foreman of this timber concession and he came from Satu Mare—Szatmár—a town in the Magyar belt to the north-west of Transylvania. The Rabbi and his sons were spending a fortnight with him and the loggers were mountain people from the same region.

  When the foreman led me to the group at the table, they looked up apprehensively; almost with alarm. I was given a chair, but we were all overcome with diffidence. “Was sind Sie von Beruf?” The foreman, anything but shy, looked at me in frank puzzlement. “Sind Sie Kaufmann?” Was I a pedlar? I felt slightly put out by the question, but it was perfectly reasonable. Nobody else was wandering about like this and I suppose the only itinerant strangers in these parts, if they were not beggars or out-and-out bad hats, must have been pedlars, though I had never come across any. (But a stranger in such a place obviously needed explanation. The shepherds and Gypsies had both shown a touch of misgiving at first: unknown figures in the wilderness bode no good. In the past, they were bent on rounding up laggards for feudal corvées; nowadays, it would be tax-gathering, census-compiling, exaction of grazing dues, the search for malefactors, deserters, or runaway recruits overdue for their military service—a whole range of vexatious interference with the freedom of the woods.) My interlocutors looked bewildered when I tried to explain my reasons for not staying at home. Why was I travelling? To see the world, to study, to learn languages? I wasn’t quite clear myself. Yes, some of these things, but mostly—I couldn’t think of the word at first—and when I found it—“for fun”—it didn’t sound right and their brows were still puckered. “Also, Sie treiben so herum aus Vergnügen?” The foreman shrugged his shoulders and smiled and said something in Yiddish to the others; they all laughed and I asked what it was. “Es ist a goyim naches!” they said. ‘A goyim naches,’ they explained, is something that the goyim like but which leaves Jews unmoved; any irrational or outlandish craze, a goy’s delight or gentile’s relish. It seemed to hit the nail on the head.

  The initial reserve of the other dwellers in these mountains had not lasted long; nor did it here: but the Jews had other grounds for wariness. Their centuries of persecution were not ended; there had been trials for ritual murder late in the last century in Hungary and more recently in the Ukraine, and fierce deeds in Rumania and pogroms in Bessarabia and throughout the Russian Pale. Slanderous myths abounded and the dark rumours of the Elders of Zion had only been set in motion fifteen years earlier. In Germany, meanwhile, terrible omens were gathering, though how terrible none of us knew. They came into the conversation and—it seems utterly incredible now—we talked of Hitler and the Nazis as though they merely represented a dire phase of history, a sort of transitory aberration or a nightmare that might suddenly vanish, like a cloud evaporating or a bad dream. The Jews in England—a happier theme—came next: they knew much more than I, which was not hard; and Palestine. Sighs and fatalistic humour spaced out the conversation.

  Everything took a different turn when scripture cropped up. The book in front of the Rabbi was the Torah, or part of it, printed in dense Hebrew black-letter that was irresistible to someone with a passion for alphabets; especially these particular letters, with their aura of magic. Laboriously I could phonetically decipher the sounds of some of the simpler words, without a glimmer of their meanings, of course, and this sign of interest gave pleasure. I showed them some of the words I had copied down in Bratislava from shops and Jewish newspapers in cafés, and the meanings, which I had forgotten, made them laugh; those biblical symbols recommended a stall for repairing umbrellas, or ‘Daniel Kisch, Koscher Würste und Salami.’[10] How did the Song of Miriam sound in the original, and the Song of Deborah; David’s lament for Absolom; and the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley? The moment it became clear, through my clumsy translations into German, which passage I was trying to convey, the Rabbi at once began to recite, often accompanied by his sons. Our eyes were alight; it was like a marvellous game. Next came the rivers of Babylon, and the harps hanging on the willows: this they uttered in unfaltering unison, and when they came to ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,’ the moment was extremely solemn. In the back of my diary are a few lines in Hebrew inscribed there by the Rabbi himself; as they are in the cursive script, utterly indecipherable by me; and underneath them are the phonetic sounds I took down from his recitation of them.

  “Hatzvì Yisroël al bomowsèycho cholol:

  Eych nophlòo ghibowrim!

  Al taghìdoo b’Gath,

  Al t’vashròo b’chootzòws Ashk’lon;

  Pen tismàchnoh b’nows P’lishtim,

  Pen ta’alòwznoh b’nows ho’arèylim.

  Horèy va Gilboa al-tal, v’al motòr aleychem...”

  Here it dies away for a moment, then resumes:

  “Oosodèy s’roomòws...”

  The few words that sound like proper nouns revealed what it must be: “Tell it not in Gath,” that is, “publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.” The next incomplete piece must be “Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew...” By this time the other-worldly Rabbi and his sons and I were excited. Enthusiasm ran high. These passages, so famous in England, were doubly charged with meaning for them, and their emotion was infectious. T
hey seemed astonished—touched, too—that their tribal poetry enjoyed such glory and affection in the outside world; utterly cut off, I think they had no inkling of this. A feeling of great warmth and delight had sprung up and the Rabbi kept polishing his glasses, not for use, but out of enjoyment and nervous energy, and his brother surveyed us with benevolent amusement. It got dark while we sat at the table, and when he took off the glass chimney to light the paraffin lamp, three pairs of spectacles flashed. If it had been Friday night, the Rabbi said, they would have asked me to light it; he explained about the shabbas goy. This was the Sabbath-gentile whom well-off Jews—“not like us”—employed in their houses to light fires and lamps and tie and untie knots or perform the many tasks the Law forbids on the Seventh Day. I said I was sorry it was only Thursday (the Sabbath begins at sunset on Friday) as I could have made myself useful for a change. We said good-night with laughter.

  * * *

  Stretched under one of the surviving oaks, I was brimming with excitement. I had thought I could never get on friendly terms with such unassailable-looking men. I had often caught glimpses of similar figures. The last time had been on the moonlit platform the night I entered Rumania; they had looked utterly separate and remote and unapproachable; I could as soon have asked a Trappist abbess for a light.

  I thought about the shabbas goy. I would not have been indispensable after all, for a little way off, gathered round a low fire of their own, the loggers were quietly singing in Hungarian. It sounded indefinably different from Rumanian singing, but equally captivating and equally sad.

  After I said goodbye next morning, the younger boy, who was wearing a skull-cap and carrying white prayer-shawls with black stripes at the ends, joined the other two indoors and as I left, I could hear them intoning their prayers in a harrowing lamentation while the foreman, no zealot, was pointing out a fresh stand of timber to the loggers.