Yet the youth encountered in these pages is recognizably the protagonist of A Time of Gifts or, for that matter, of Mani. The mature man’s interests and obsessions are already in place: his fascination with the dramas and quirks of history and language, the delight in costume, folklore, ritual, the excitement at changing landscapes. However uneven the text, there are passages that are as purely characteristic as any he wrote. Who will forget the dog that trots beside him in the Bulgarian dusk, barking at the moon as it rises again and again over the switchback hills? Or the migrating storks that cloud the Balkan skies, or the gabbling barber’s apprentice who plagued him through northern Bulgaria, or the fantasy – a conceit which only Paddy could fashion – of an intermarried human and mermaid people surviving the second Flood?
Paddy’s exuberance, of course, was not reflected in the Europe through which he was walking. The Austro-Hungarian empire had disintegrated only fifteen years earlier, and its old rival, the Ottoman empire, was still a living memory in the southern Balkans. The post-war Paris peace treaties had left a tinderbox in their wake. Bulgaria, ‘the Prussia of the East’ (as the Greek premier Venizelos dubbed her), had fought alongside Germany, and was now so stripped of territory as to feel dangerously bereft. A land of rural poverty, whose independent Orthodox Church was rife with nationalism, it retained an old Slavic bond with Russia. Rumania, on the other hand, had sided with the Allies, and had been rewarded with a huge extension of its frontiers as a bulwark against the Bolsheviks.
These two countries where Paddy’s journey ends – Bulgaria and Rumania – were culturally very different, but they were both agrarian and poor, largely composed of small-holdings, and their ruling classes were no longer landed aristocracy. In Bulgaria this class had scarcely existed, while the Bucharest haut monde with whom Paddy fraternized were increasingly beleaguered in a world which was passing to a young and fragile bourgeoisie.
In retrospect it seems as if the whole continent through which he travelled was sleepwalking towards disaster. The Balkans were still in the grip of the Great Depression, and of deep peasant misery. The twin behemoths of Nazism and Bolshevism were already looming huge. In Germany Hitler had come to power the January before, and many of those whom Paddy encountered – the dashing aristocrats, the Rumanian Jews, the Gypsies – seem marked, in retrospect, by foreboding.
Although it was Paddy’s intention to end his journey at Constantinople, his only writings on the city were diary jottings with no mention, inexplicably, of Byzantine or Ottoman splendour. His real love and destination became – and remained – Greece. Just eleven days after reaching Constantinople his surviving diary records him leaving for Greece’s religious heartland, the monastic state of Mount Athos. On 24 January 1935 this diary ceases to consist of impressionistic notes and becomes a fully written record, which ends only as he leaves the Holy Mountain. And here – beyond Constantinople – we have chosen to end the present volume.
Uniquely the Athos narrative was written virtually on the spot. Paddy was just twenty years old at the time of its composition, and later he corrected and recorrected it more persistently than he did ‘A Youthful Journey’. Even towards his life’s end he left wavering marginal directions (perhaps to himself): ‘Cut all these pages fiercely’, for instance, and once enigmatically: ‘Keep my eyes open.’
More than ‘A Youthful Journey’ the diary gives us the author’s earliest voice: the guileless pleasures and misgivings of a youth. It betrays his insecurities, even his panics, as well as his delight in grappling with a Greek world of which he was later to become so knowledgeable and so fond. In our choice of the diary’s corrected versions – there were sometimes at least four – we have tried to preserve its raw freshness, while cleansing it of some repetition. Rarely, when his corrections in old age seem less sure than earlier ones, we have kept the original.
In the end, of course, we have had to confront the difficult question: would Paddy have wanted these two records published? While he was alive, the answer might have been No. But there were signs, in his last months, that he was relinquishing their editing to half-imagined others. There were pieces he wanted cut, he said, and some impressions he wanted modified (and these of course we have done). A contract for the book, signed with Murrays in 1992, was among his papers. By the time of his death, he had expended so much labour and thought on the texts that their relegation to an archive seemed sad and wrong. The Broken Road may not precisely be the ‘third volume’ that so tormented him, but it contains, at least, the shape and scent of the promised book, and here his journey must rest.
Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper
Spring 2013
1. From the Iron Gates
At Orșova, there was the Danube again. It was nearly a mile broad now, but immediately west it swirled and boiled through the narrow mountain defile of the Kazan – the Cauldron – which is only one hundred and sixty-two yards across. Since I had turned my back on it at Budapest, this insatiable river had gorged itself with the Sava, the Drava, the Tisza, the Maros, and the Morava and a score of lesser known tributaries. A little way downstream from Orșova, in the middle of the river, the small island of Ada Kaleh divided the current. Plumed with poplars and mulberries, the line of the wooden roofs was suddenly broken by a shallow dome and a minaret, and in the lanes strolled curious figures in Turkish dress; for the island still remained ethnically Turkish – the only fragment in Central Europe, outside Turkey’s modern frontiers, of that huge empire which was halted and driven back at the gates of Vienna. The steep low mountains that form the opposite bank were Yugoslavia.
Early next morning I found a letter from Budapest waiting in the poste restante[1] – I had been writing letters and firing them off in volleys dropped in hopeless-looking post boxes, ever since saying goodbye at the railway station at Deva – and I boarded the Danube steamer in a state of excitement. We set off under a flicker of darting swifts. Soon the mountains soared on either side in precipices, and rushed towards each other to form the winding canyon of the Iron Gates. The river suddenly swelled and boiled in protest. Our siren echoed booming down the great causeway. In a few miles the mountains subsided and the Danube fanned out to its normal width. On the Rumanian bank, after the large town of Turnu Severin – the Tower of Severus, where the emperor overcame the Quadi and the Marcomanni – the flat plain of Oltenia, often edged with reeds, and mournful and malarial-looking swamps, slid featurelessly away. The Serbian mountains wavering along the right bank were the beginnings of the Great Balkan range. The river meandered along the Serbian headlands in wide loops. Suddenly, the mountains had ceased to be Yugoslavia and became Bulgaria. Now and then we threaded our way through enormous tree-trunk rafts and overtook dark processions of barges a mile long. I had realized at Orșova, with a moment of shock, and then of delight, as my passport was being stamped August 14, that I had been dawdling in Transylvania for well over three months. Rightly, I thought, rereading the morning’s letter for the tenth time.
These cogitations were distracted by the walls and towers on the south bank, of the old fortress town of Vidin. Clamorous boys crowded the landing-stage, selling watermelons. I chose one, then, rather crestfallen, had to give it back, as I had only two English pound notes in my pocket and a handful of Rumanian lei. A fellow passenger, a tall girl with fair straight hair, whom I suddenly realized was English, offered me some of her Bulgarian leva, so we slashed the green football open in bloody and black-pipped slices and then shared it.
It was strange, after these months, to be talking to someone English, and rather exciting. She was called Rachel Floyd and she became a treasured companion. She was on her way to stay with the British Consul’s wife in Sofia, who was an old Oxford university friend. We exchanged life histories mingled between cool, gory munchings, and when, in the afternoon, we disembarked at Lom Palanka, we arranged that I should look her up when I reached the capital. She set off by train, and I began to mooch about in my first Bulgarian town.
• �
� •
All through Central Europe, from the snowy Rhine, through Bavaria and Austria, the old kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary and even in the forested confines of the principality of Transylvania, the aura of the vanished Holy Roman Empire and of the realm of Charlemagne and the mysteries of western Christendom hung in the air. The Turkish overlordship of the eastern regions had ended long ago and few traces remained. But here, on the southern bank of the Danube, the mountains were haunted by the ghost of a different sovereignty. So recently had the yoke of Turkey been shaken off that Bulgaria seemed less the south-easternmost corner of Europe than the north-westernmost limit of a world that stretched away to the Taurus mountains, the deserts of Arabia and the Asian steppes. It was the Orient, and clues to the recent centuries under the Ottoman Turks lay thick and plentiful on every side; plentiful, too, was the evidence of the rugged Slavo-Byzantine kingdom which the Turkish wave had submerged. These different elements flourished their data everywhere: in the domes and minarets and the smoky tang of kebabs cooking on spits, in the jutting wooden houses and the Byzantine allegiance of the churches, in the black cylindrical hats, the flowing habits, the long hair and the beards of priests, and in the Cyrillic alphabet on the shop fronts which gave a fleeting impression of Russia. The Bulgars themselves, thickset, blunt-featured and solid, suggested a yet remoter past, the wild habitat beyond the Volga from which they had migrated to settle here, centuries ago, in a fierce Asiatic horde. Rough-hewn and tough, shod and swaddled in the same cowhide footgear as the Rumanians, they padded the dusty cobbles like bears. Thick and scratchy homespun clad them, sometimes dark blue but more often an earthy brown, adorned here and there with a stiff flourish of black embroidery: big loose trousers, crossed waistcoats, a short jacket and the waist enveloped in thick scarlet sashes a foot wide in which knives were sometimes stuck. They were hatted with flat Cossack-like kalpacks of brown or black sheepskin.
In the trellised outdoors eating-house in the little square where I settled down to a rather good, very oily stew of mutton, potatoes, tomatoes, paprika pods, courgettes and ladies’ fingers, all ladled from giant bronze pans, I noticed that one or two young men at the next table had let their left little fingernails grow, emblematic of their emancipation from the plough and almost as long as those of mandarins. Three white-moustached and moccasined elders puffed in silence over the amber mouthpieces of their hookahs, toying indolently with strings of amber beads, allowing the grains to drop one on the other with a lulling click, as though to scan their leisurely cogitations. A group of officers, in white tunics buttoning under the left ear in the Russian style, with stiff gold epaulettes, black, red-banded, Russian caps with short peaks, and high-spurred soft-legged boots, sat smoking and talking, or strolled under the trees with the hilts of their steel-scabbarded sabres in the crooks of their arms. No women. Dogs wrangled over a sheep’s jawbone. A row of skinned sheep’s heads gazed piteously from a shelf outside a butcher’s shop, livers, lights and decapitated carcasses dripped, and entrails were looped from hooks in a baleful festoon. The wireless played rousing marches interspersed with the intriguing wail of songs in the oriental minor mode. The scent of jasmine was afloat. Mosquitoes zoomed and zinged.
It was a grave moment. I realized that everything had changed.
• • •
The way lay south through the roll of the Danubian hills and plains. They were tufted with woods. Here and there a green blur of marsh expanded and the road was plumed with Lombardy poplars. Let us stride across this riparian region in seven-league boots and up into the Great Balkan range. This immense sweep – the Stara Planina, as it is called in Bulgaria, the Old Mountain – climbs and coils and leapfrogs clean across northern Bulgaria from Serbia to the Black Sea, a great lion-coloured barrier of lofty, rounded convexities, with seldom a spike or a chasm: open, airy sweeps and rounded swellings mounting higher and higher to vast basin-like valleys and hollows where one could see the white road paying itself out ahead for miles and twisting among copses and hillocks and past the scattered flocks until it disappeared over the ultimate khaki slope. Now and then I would fall in with long caravans of donkeys and mules – their place was taken by camels in the south-east, towards Haskovo – and strings of carts. The lighter of these were drawn by horses – tough little animals and gangling, hollow-flanked jades – and the heavier, laden with timber, by black buffaloes that lurched stumblingly along under heavy yokes, their eyes rolling and their moustache-like and crinkled horns clashing against their neighbours. The wooden saddles of the horses, ridden side-saddle with moccasins dangling, looked as unwieldy as elephants’ howdahs. Watermelons were the chief merchandise, and giant basket-loads of tomatoes and cucumbers and all the garden stuff for which the Bulgarians are famous throughout the Balkans. Each village was surrounded by tiers of vegetable beds and every drop of water was husbanded and irrigated through miniature aqueducts of hollow tree trunk. ‘Where was I from?’ the fur-hatted, horny-handed men would ask. ‘Ot kadè? Ot Europa? Da, da’, from Europe. ‘Nemski?’ No, not German: ‘Anglitchanin.’ Many seemed vague about England’s whereabouts. And what was I? A voinik, a soldier? Or a student? A spion perhaps? I got my own back for these questions by extorting in return, with the help of interrogatory gestures, a basic vocabulary: bread, chlab; water, voda; wine, vino; horse, kon; cat, kotka; dog, kuche; goat’s cheese, siriné; cucumber, krastavitza; church, tzerkva. These exchanges carried us many miles.
I slept out near a barn the first night, and the next two in the small towns of Ferdinand and Berkovitza: two nights plagued by vermin. By the fourth night we had surmounted the final and highest watershed, and joined a Sofia-bound caravan under a plane tree, which sheltered an old Turkish fountain. The spring gushed into its trough from slabs carved with a chipped and calligraphic swirl of Arabic characters which no one could read any more. They commemorated, it was said, a pasha long dead. We were joined at the fires by a party of shepherds, and, as a circular wooden wine-flask was slung from hand to hand, one of these shaggy men played a yard-long wooden pipe – kaval – and another a bagpipe – gaida. This was a blown-up sheepskin pelt with a wooden mouthpiece and the chanter was a cow’s horn wrapped in skin into which the stops had been burnt with a red hot skewer. Their favourite song celebrated the Hadji Dimitar from Sliven, a guerrilla leader against the Turks in the gorges of the Shipka Balkans. The cross-legged figures with their turned-up footgear, the fifty sheepskin hats, the broad-boned, firelit faces, the sashes, the shifting animals, the occasional clang of a sheep’s or a goat’s bell and the low glitter of a multitude of stars hinted at regions much further east than Europe, as though our destination might be Samarkand, Khorassan, Tashkent or Karakorum.
• • •
I got to Sofia the next day and made my way through a world of Gypsy shacks hammered together out of old planks and petrol tins, and then through a market with giant brass scales where all the livestock of western Bulgaria seemed to be gathered in a whinnying and braying hubbub. I passed by the dome, many metal cupolas and the soaring minaret of a fine mosque and under a network of tramlines reached the capital’s heart.
Permanent sojourn here might evoke a groan of dismay, but the aspect and atmosphere of the little capital is rather captivating. The light, airy ambience of a plateau town reigns here, and above it all rises the bright pyramid of Mount Vitosha, throwing the sunlight back from its many facets, a feature as noble and as inescapable as Fujiyama. Then came Czar Boris’s[2] palace with the rampant lion of Bulgaria fluttering from the flagpole, and then the Sobranie, where parliament sat, and a huge state theatre, gardens, trees and a small statuary population of Bulgarian heroes; then, presiding over the wide and leafy avenue of Boulevard Czar Ozvoboditel, the city’s axis, the equestrian figure of Emperor Alexander II[3] of Russia, the Czar Liberator himself; and beyond it, the golden dome and the painted stucco pillars of the Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky. Along this, resurrected from their siestas in the cool of the evening, all the inhabitants of the ci
ty slowly strolled in that ritual tide which ebbs and flows each dusk through every European town east of Budapest or south of Biscay. In the cafés, over many a thimbleful of Turkish coffee, the intelligentsia told their amber beads and discussed the leading article in the Utro. Beyond them, the street shot straight as a bullet into a leonine tableland, dotted with hamlets of Shopi, who are said to be the descendants of the Petchenegs, that appalling barbarian horde from beyond the Urals who pillaged and slew for centuries all along the limits of the East Roman Empire and finally came to rest here and mended their ways.
Thanks to Rachel Floyd, my melon-sharing countrywoman from the Danube boat, I was rescued next day from the hutch I had settled in near the market place, by the British Consul and his wife, Boyd and Judith Tollinton, who charitably put me up. These were happy and luxurious days. It seemed strange to be among English people and talking English again, as strange as being in the midst of foreigners after a prolonged stay in England, and as stimulating. How very agreeable it was to hear all about Bulgaria from my kind, competent Rugbeian host, and to get up from breakfast, Earl Grey in hand, to gaze down at the Royal Guard goose-stepping along the Boulevard Czar Ozvoboditel. The unlimited baths, the clean linen, the huge Russian butler, the terrace, the books, the view over the town to the looming flanks of Vitosha, all seemed marvellous. Best of all the Encyclopaedia Britannica; I leapt at it like a panther. What miracles such things appear after a primitive life! The Congress of Byzantine Studies was holding its sessions in Sofia that autumn. It was delightful to listen to the erudite and shrewish chat of Professor Whittemore,[4] that distilled essence of Jamesian Boston superimposed on the mosaics of Haghia Sophia. There too, suave and suede-shod, impeccably and urbanely clad in white tropical suits and decorously panama-hatted, were Roger Hinks[5] and Steven Runciman[6] – so kind, under his provisos and reservations and diverting regional prejudices, the one; so pleasantly feline the other. Most of their books were still unwritten, except, I think, Runciman’s First Bulgarian Empire. We were often to meet many years later. It is odd how lucidly first impressions engrave themselves in the memory. I only retain the details of a late, strange evening in a café, however, as through a glass darkly.
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