The old woman picked the antler off the grass and asked me something I could not understand. When she saw how little Rumanian I knew, she placed her finger and thumb on either side of her flat silver wedding-ring, twiddled it to and fro and then pointed to me enquiringly: was I married? No? She murmured something to the others that had them all in stitches and as their exchanges went on with growing hilarity, several racy and comic interpretations began to dawn on me too. Soon they stood up and hoisted their striped woven sacks on their heads. The old woman handed the antler back, wishing me a happy journey and good luck in the town. Still exchanging jokes, they set off for their high sheepfolds. One of them was spinning as she went, and in a little while a green-leaf song was mounting the hillside and then slowly fading out of earshot.
[1] In the Mitylene brothel scene in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, it is the other way about:
Pandar: “The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage.”
Boult: “Ay, she quickly pooped him.”
[2] Taken to the war, this little book disappeared six years later when an aerial torpedo sank our escaping caique on the east coast of the Peloponnese. The lost kit was just too deep for diving. The fish in the little scala of Leonidion must have crowded round it for a time, nibbled at the pages, then left it to fall to pieces and dissolve in the Aegean.
[3] ‘Who loves not wine, woman and song remains a fool his whole life long!’ The innkeeper’s attribution was quite right. I’ve just looked it up.
[4] The mountains to the left of the road were the Banat, too, as far as the line of crests which forms the western edge of the Retezat, which is part of Transylvania still. I am not sure if, or how far, I crossed this dotted line during the erratic zigzag of the following days. This is the stretch where I feel the sequence of memories is most in peril of confusion; but not too seriously, I hope.
[5] I think some classical authorities connect this prehistoric technique with the legend of the Golden Fleece. Transylvania was the oldest source of gold in the classical world, and the ancient treasures of Egypt may have been mined or gathered here. It was prized for its warm ‘red-gold’ hue.
[6] Fabio is the word Ausonius uses in the Mosella. But, from the Baltic to Macedonia, the Slav word is roughly the same, except in Russia where they call it Forel, obviously a borrowing from the German Forelle, perhaps owing to the lack of mountain streams in Russia proper, and thus of trout... They probably used to get them from the Carpathians, smoked, after the First Partition of Poland in 1772. Otherwise, the Urals and the Caucasus would have been the nearest streams.
[7] I have recently learned that they actually evolved something similar to Greek fire for attacking palisades. But all the same...
[8] Warning: There is another of these ‘black rivers’ later on. The area is confusingly repetitive in these matters.
[9] The only solution is to go there and climb it.
[10] See A Time of Gifts, p. 245.
8. THE END OF MIDDLE EUROPE
SUDDENLY, and without any warning, an ornate and incongruous watering-place called the Baths of Hercules rose from the depths of the wild valley. The fin-de-siècle stucco might have come straight out of an icing-gun; there were terracotta balustrades, palmetto-palms, spiked agaves in waisted urns, egg-shaped cupolas, leaden scales ending in stickleback ridges, and glimpses through the glass double-doors of hydrangeas banked up ornate staircases that wandered away into kursaals where taps and fountains gushed with healing waters. Sovereign against a rogues’ gallery of external and internal ills, these had made the place famous in Roman times; legates, centurions and military tribunes had wallowed and sipped here while Hercules and half a dozen minor gods presided over them, and the Victorian statue of the lion-pelted and muscle-bound bruiser, which dominated the centre of the town, showed that the ancient glory had returned. The ailing burghers of Eastern Europe, in crinolines and stovepipe hats, sabretaches and czapkas, or mutton-chop sleeves and boaters had been haunting the resurrected site for over a century.
In its provincial way, the place was everything that the words ‘spa,’ casino’ and ‘villeggiatura’ conjure up. Circular and heart-shaped beds of cannas and begonias burst out of the gravel like an industrial carpet; yellow, scarlet, orange, purple, pale blue and brick-red were so blindingly juxtaposed that the flowers could have all been artificial and the grass viridian drugget. A more knowing traveller might have caught a whiff of Offenbach and Meyerbeer, a hint of Schnitzler, an echo of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at its farthest edge, elaborated more recently by stout white plaster columns with alternating spirals, heavily moulded arches and wide eaves: this was a Rumanian neo-Byzantine style derived from the monasteries of Moldavia and seventeenth-century palaces in the reign of Constantine Brancovan of Wallachia.
It was the hour of the post-siesta promenade. A band was playing in a frilled bandstand and a slowly strolling throng from Bucharest and Craiova was meandering along the main street, through the gardens, over the Cerna bridge and slowly back again. Murmurous with gossip and detonating with holiday recognitions and greetings, the promenaders were dressed to kill: heels of dizzy height, heady scent and dazzling make-up were escorted by post-Rudolf Valentino patent-leather hair and co-respondent shoes. A scattering of officers in tall boots and jingling spurs—from Turnu Severin, I think—added their bright cap-bands and tunic-facings to the many-coloured scene.
Dusty, travel-stained and probably reeking of sheepfolds, I might have been pitchforked into Babylon, Lampsacus or fifth-century Corinth and as I picked my way through the smart promenaders, bewilderment was further compounded by an onrush of bumpkin anxiety. Thank God, the antler was disguised in the twisted greatcoat on my rucksack!
Gritting my teeth, I charged through the revolving glass doors of an hotel and asked the hall-porter if I could telephone. Heinz Schramm, a schoolfellow of István’s who lived a few miles away, was summoned to the other end; it had all been fixed by telephone from Lapușnic before I set out. The porter told me to wait in the hall and in a quarter of an hour István’s cheerful and rubicund schoolmate was jumping out of a gleaming Mercedes and we were soon spinning out of the town and down the valley; it was restored, once the town was out of sight, to the inviolate beauty of woods and apricot-coloured rocks with flaring magnesium shadows and falling twilight. There was the glimpse of a Turkish aqueduct, then arrival by lamplight at a large and comfortable house, quickly followed by sybaritic immersion. How incongruous my stuff looked, scattered about the spotless bathroom beyond the clouds of steam! Dusty boots, dog-eared papers, a jumble of books, broken pencils, dirty linen, a confusion of puttees, crumbs, tangled string, an empty flask, an antler, and a forgotten apple which had been going rotten at the bottom of my rucksack; but on a chair lay a jacket and trousers that weren’t too badly crumpled, a clean shirt and gym shoes at last, instead of hobnails. Using a toe, I let in more hot water and wallowed in transports of luxury.
* * *
Heinz Schramm had inherited a family timber business and obviously made a go of it. (I wondered if the Szatmár logging team had anything to do with him, but forgot to ask.) Lumberjacks felled in the forests and enormous tree-trunks were continually arriving at sheds and saw-mills along the valley; there, with the clang of circular saws and the rhythmic fall of planks, they were sliced up by spectres toiling in clouds of sawdust. As Heinz’s family were offshoots of the eighteenth-century Swabian settlers in the Banat, conversation was in German, except with Heinz’s father, a retired admiral in the old k. und k. Navy, whose fluent and marvellously antiquated English was of an even earlier vintage than Count Jenö’s. He was a lean, keen-eyed widower who had grown up when English was a sort of naval lingua franca all over the world. At the mention of Admiral Horthy, he said, “We were snotties together! A decent sort of chap, though, mind you, I never thought he had much in the top storey.” He recalled balls in Fiume—“learning the bunny-hug and the cake-walk from visiting flappers”—and happy anchorages in Toky
o and Saigon, “We had a whale of a time and were very upset when we had to skedaddle.” Happy reminiscences would unfold in the evening on a terrace looking down the valley. A great admirer of the Royal Navy, he had been seconded to it for a time in some sort of semi-diplomatic capacity; he liked the general style as well as the seamanship and he could never forget seeing the Fleet dressed overall for Edward VII’s birthday in the roads of Pola or Trieste. He had especially fond memories of Lord Charles Beresford when he was Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet: “You could tell the cut of his jib a mile off!” (The name of this stormy petrel always cropped up when Triestinos recalled pre-war days. Berta, my hostess in Budapest, had remembered being dandled on his knee as a small girl in Fiume, when her father was Governor.)
Heinz was full of stories about István at school. He had been a general hero and favourite in spite, or because of, his countless scrapes—breaking out and painting Vienna red and so on. Heinz called him by a school sobriquet abridged from his surname. “‘Globus’ was a marvellous fellow!” he said. “He had only one fault: he was a bit too proud of his five-pointed coronet.” (“Er war ein bisschen zu stolz auf seine fünfzackige Krone.”) I laughed and said, “I bet he was!” and suddenly missed him acutely. “You may laugh,” Heinz went on, “but guess how many there were in my year at the Theresianum who were not noble? Two!” In Magyar, the equivalent of the German ‘von’ was indicated linguistically in a way I never quite grasped; but when a westward-moving Hungarian noble crossed the Leitha into Austria and reversed his Christian and surname from their Magyar back-to-front order, he immediately interposed the Teutonic prefix, later replacing it with ‘de’ when crossing the Rhine into France. But nobility meant much more than heraldic baubles and forms of address: it signified membership of a legally separate order with a whole array of privileges. These inequities had long ago been removed but a chasm yawned still and much of the ancient aloofness and awe hovered about the descendants of country dynasts and their heraldic emblems were seldom out of sight. Untitled noblemen like István had circlets with five pearls, barons seven and counts nine—except for the Károlys, who for some reason had eleven—and princes had handsome closed crowns turned up with ermine; they were scattered over houses, carriages, liveries, harness, linen and cigarette-cases with uninhibited profusion. The disasters of war, fallen fortunes, change of sovereignty and loss of estates had left the ascendancy, sometimes with resentment and sometimes with affection, improbably intact, and my balloonist and frogman course between four-posters and cowsheds had given a fair idea of the old status quo, especially in the country and not only in Austria, Hungary and Transylvania. I think it had been more or less the same in Bohemia, Moravia, Prussia, Poland and Russia, and, indeed, in pre- and post-war Rumania as well.
* * *
August was an excuse for picnics. We feasted in ruins and meadows and stalactitic caves in the Banat mountains and by the woods that lined the Cerna and its tributary the Bela—the black river, and the white—and one evening we drove to the Baths of Hercules for a gala night at the casino.[1]
The little town seemed utterly different now. It had the comic and engaging charm of an operetta: colour and vivacity stamped its denizens and the crowded tables, the dance band and the dancers filled the dining-room of the Casino with brio and Schwung. Helped by tzuika and wine and dancing, the evening spun itself into a golden haze. A flamboyant and slightly theatrical aura radiated from a large table next door and it was soon clear why. During a break in the dancing, the Gypsies had begun to move from table to table, halting in an attentive swarm to play ‘at the diners’ ears,’ as it is called; it was rather discreet and muted; but when they reached our neighbours, a sudden challenging crescendo sailed aloft and set the drops of the chandeliers tinkling. A florid and handsome man of about thirty had put down his knife and fork and let fly in a tremendous baritone; everyone stopped talking; then the others at the table answered him on cue in a very professional way until the place rang. Heinz said they were the Bucharest opera company on a summer tour, but the outburst was spontaneous; they had launched themselves into the arias and choruses of The Barber of Seville out of pure high spirits, and their final tutti was hailed by clapping and cries of bravo! and encore! When all requests had been granted, dancing began again, and our tables were soon companionably mingled.
I found myself dancing—to the tune of Couchés dans le foin, then Vous qui passez sans me voir—with a girl who was studying English in Bucharest; not that one could hear a word in the press of the dancing. When we sat down again she said, “I love English books very much. Wells, Galsworthy, Morgan, Warwick Deeping, Dickens. And Byron’s poetry, if...” she stopped, smiling thoughtfully. I waited, wondering what reservations were coming, and after a few seconds’ silence, ventured to say, “If what?” “If,” she said, “you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.”
* * *
Running about in gym shoes next day, my foot landed on an inch of nail sticking out of a plank in a dismantled woodshed and it went clean through. There was little pain and not much blood but it hurt to walk on, so I lay reading in a deck-chair under a tree, then hobbled about with a stick. It healed in three days and on the fourth I set off.
The Maros had dominated the last months. Now the Cerna had taken its place and a few days earlier, just before dawn, I had ridden back upstream for a last look. The fleece of leaves soared to the watershed; underneath, the valley lay brooding and still in the half-light; it was a wilderness of green moss and grey creepers with ivy-clad watermills rotting along the banks and streams tumbling through the shadows; then shafts of lemon-coloured light struck down through the trunks into the vapour coiling along the stream-bed and into the branches. I might have been trotting through a world emerging from primordial chaos.
But today I was following a lower reach. Leaving its chasm and heading south, it joined a wide trough climbing north between two great massifs which narrowed steadily until the road reached the pass; then, many leagues away, it dropped the other side into the valley of the Timis, and still further along it lay the point from which I had launched my private attack on the Carpathians two weeks earlier.
Striking south, I pursued a sheep-track in the lee of the woods, wondering how much the valley might have changed since Roman times and, looking up at the eagles and the beetling forests, thought: hardly at all.
The winding osier-bed shared the valley with a road and a railway and every now and then the loose triple plait would unravel and then nonchalantly assemble again. Buffaloes floundered in the reeds, a breath of wind tilted the threads of the Gypsies’ fires and their horses, ranging loose among the flocks, grazed to the edge of the forest. There were fields of stubble and hundreds of sunflowers flaring yellow round their dark hearts; and the pale green sheaths of the Indian corn had withered long ago to a papery grey. Strings of waggons were returning empty upstream or labouring south loaded with tree-trunks to be lashed together and floated down the Danube; and when two of them crossed, ropes of dust lengthened in both directions and wrapped the road and its passengers in a cloud; it settled on the fruit trees that sometimes lined the road for furlongs on end, heavy with blue plums nobody picked that scattered the roadside in wasp-haunted rings.
Dipping to the river, the path crossed it again and again on wooden bridges. The sun splintered down through a colander of leaves and every so often, minor rapids twirled through the red and green rocks while mermaid-like water-weed streamed along the current. (Without knowing it, I must have stored up an almost photographic memory of this beautiful valley for when I travelled along it twenty years later, by the little train this time, forgotten landmarks kept recurring until I would begin to remember a stretch of flag-leaves, an islet with a clump of willows, a spinney, an oak tree struck by lightning or a solitary chapel a minute or two before they actually re-appeared; for suddenly, with an obliging loop of the river, there they were, drowned twenty years deep but surfac
ing one by one in a chain of rescued visions like lost property restored.)
An old man under a mulberry tree asked me where I was going. When I said “Constantinopol,” he nodded mildly and asked no more, as though I had said the next village. A spectacular bird I had never seen before, about the size of a crow and of a brilliant light blue while it was in the air, flew to a nearby branch. “Dumbrăveancă,” the old man called it: “the one who loves oak-woods.” (It was a roller.) Hoping to catch another glimpse of its wonderful colours I clapped my hands and it flew into the air from its new perch like a Maeterlinckian figment.
The old man picked up a fallen mulberry from the grass, and, in dumb show, crooked a forefinger as though embedding a hook and then made a feint at casting a line over the river. Did he mean they used mulberries for bait? Surely not for trout? “No, no.” He shook his head and said another name, his gesture indicating a much larger fish until his hands were as far apart as a concertina player’s at full stretch. A sterlet, from the Danube, perhaps. It was not far.
It was much closer than I thought, for all at once the sides of the valley fell apart and revealed the towers and trees of Orșova, then the troubled yellow and blue-grey waters of the Danube and the palisade of the Serbian mountains beyond. The vision was dramatic and sudden. The wide sweep of the river came on stage, as it were, through a precipitous overlap to the west; then, after dividing with a flutter round a feathery island and joining again, it pressed on to a scarcely less striking exit downstream.
* * *
Hastening into the town, I rushed to collect a clutch of letters from the poste-restante—and only just in time. I settled with them at a café table on the quay. One, full of geological advice, was from my father, posted two months before in Simla: ‘Everyone has moved here for the Hot Weather,’ he wrote. ‘I can see the western part of the Central Himalayan Chain from my window, and many of the snow-peaks of Tibet. It is a wonderful change from Calcutta...’
Between the Woods and the Water Page 25