. . . Sirdish, ne dohojdash?
Dali konya namash, liubé
Ili drum ne znayesh?
It ends in mid-air in an oddly unfinished fashion. They sang beautifully the slow and complex tune, with many modulations: an entrancing and melancholy sound over this moonlit river. I wonder what has become of them all?
• • •
We fished all the costumes out of the chest again next morning and I made Nadejda dress up in the most resplendent and romantic of them: a wide crimson velvet skirt and a tight green, heavily embroidered bodice stiff with galloons of gold lace and edged with small gold buttons and with slashed sleeves which hung loose from the elbow like tulip-petals; then came a belt with huge silver clasps, and all the hanging gold coins and chains we could find; and finally a low, flat-tasselled fez trimmed with gold red askew over the thick, straight-combed mass of her fair hair. Then I arranged her in an odalisque pose, a chibouk held aslant in one hand and the other arm flung negligently along the back of the divan. The sun poured in from the many bright panes behind, and beyond them receded the treetops, the storky roofs, the domes and the mountains: a ravishing hybrid vision, half captured Circassian princess, half Byronic heroine: Mademoiselle Aïssé, Haidée or the Maid of Athens. When all was ready, a large and elaborate drawing was begun (I intermittently but doggedly persevered in this mistaken vocation for a few more years, sometimes achieving, by a slow and painstaking process, something that could just pass muster; more often not). I struck lucky this time – at any rate I’d managed to capture her splendid and deceptive scowl. After an hour it looked as if the result might be presentable – literally, as I wanted to give it to Nadejda, if it turned out all right, for a leaving present, as I was setting off next day. It was all a bit sad. She was an unexpectedly quiet and patient sitter. How marvellous it would be, I thought, as I drew the fez tassel falling on to her green shoulder and spreading there, in a dark silken cascade, to settle in this luminous and enchanting room, reading and writing and talking to Nadejda and hearing her recite Nous n’irons plus aux bois. She was so pretty, kind, funny, intelligent and good. With the passage of translated Homer that we had read the day before in mind, I thought: how lovely it would be to stay on here, like Odysseus in the cave of Calypso.
‘Wouldn’t it be lovely’, Nadejda said at that moment, breaking the long silence of her pose with a friendly smile that obliterated any traces of intensity, ‘if you could stay on here like Odysseus in the cave of Calypso?’
‘That’s exactly what I was thinking.’
Actually, my plans had changed radically since yesterday. I had been planning to continue down the Maritza valley, passing the Turkish frontier at Adrianople and then striking across Turkish Thrace to Constantinople. But when talking to Nadejda the night before about the Byzantine frescoes at the Preobajenski monastery, she had said they were nothing compared to those in Tirnovo, far away to the north the other side of the Great Balkan. Moreover, it was the capital of one of the old Bulgarian empires before the Turkish conquest, and as important in Bulgarian history as Rila; more important, even; whereas the Maritza valley was hot and flat all the way to Turkey, full of rice paddies and tobacco, all flies and dust. The students had, when we consulted them, all backed her up. So we spread my maps on the divan and plotted a much more enterprising route: it swooped over the mountains, threaded its way through Tirnovo, then struck east till it reached the Black Sea and moved south along the coast to Tzarigrad. This would add several hundred miles to the journey, but it sounded well worth it, and I hated the idea of missing the Black Sea. After all there was no hurry. The scheme was a stirring and revolutionary deviation.
Boldly flouting convention, we went to the dancing place by ourselves that night and danced till the place shut, and then wandered about the moonlit town from hilltop to hilltop, looking down on the glimmering roofs and empty lanes, sometimes sitting and talking on doorsteps, and got home in the small hours.
I went to say goodbye to Nadejda’s grandfather next day. He had insisted that I should do so although it was hardly dawn (I had been to see him often during my three days’ stay). He gave me an old leather-bound copy of Fauriel’s Chants populaires de la Grèce and asked me to greet the Parthenon for him when I reached Athens. He had never been there, ‘et maintenant je ne le verrai jamais . . .’[3] He uttered this with the sadness of a Muslim speaking of Mecca. Nadejda kept me company as far as a little wood about three miles to the north of the town, walking arm in arm. Here she gave me a parcel of bread, halva, cheese, boiled eggs, apple, a circular wooden flask full of slivo and, as a parting present, some six packets of English cigarettes which she must have slipped out and bought in secret. The bearded bluejacket’s head on the packet was hidden under band upon band of import-duty stamps; she could no more afford them than I could. I was deeply moved. We were both overcome by emotion; we parted only after many long and only half twin-like hugs. Slowly and very reluctantly we turned away at last to our opposite directions, feeling suddenly forlorn, and looking round to wave: hoping that, from a distance at any rate, these flourished arms looked more cheerful than their owners felt.
• • •
Goodbyes like these were the only sad aspect of this journey. The whole itinerary was a chain of minor valedictions, more or less painful ones, seldom indifferent, only occasionally a relief. There was something intrinsically melancholy, a sudden sharp intimation, like a warning tap on the shoulder, of the fleetingness of everything, in bidding goodbye to people who had been kind, as nearly everyone was, and knowing that, in all likelihood, I would never see them again. But when, through some natural affinity, fostered by the demolition of the wonted barriers that their preordained transitoriness imposed, these encounters plunged deeper and spread their quick roots of friendship, affection, passion, love – even if it were unavowed, the electrical flicker of its possibility – these farewells became shattering deracinations; as they had been in Transylvania and as they were now.
Voici l’herbe qu’on fauche – in the words that I had been listening to often recently – et les lauriers qu’on coupe.[4]
[1] In Between the Woods and the Water PLF encountered a family of Ashkenazi Jews in the Banat, a multi-ethnic region largely in western Rumania.
[2] PLF was always fascinated by languages. He transmits his youthful attempt throughout this journey (occasionally with more enthusiasm than accuracy).
[3] ‘And now I’ll never see it.’
[4] See, the grass is cut down and the laurels are felled.
3. Over the Great Balkan
Now for a burst of speed that drove me due north, across a hot plain pronged at random with swing-wells, each with a sprinkled population of men and women breaking up their baked fields. They had wooden ploughs and adzes, scraping, planting and irrigating in allotments and tobacco fields: a thirsty and, somehow, distressing scene of Georgic diligence. In the distance there were occasional patches of eerie green. Were they swamps, a mirage, or the rice fields I had heard about? Hard work in hot plains fills one with confused sentiments of malaise: joy that one isn’t hard at it oneself, guilt about this joy. Visually plains are only tolerable if they are absolutely barren, like deserts, tundras, or steppes, just fit for grazing; though it is hard to deny splendour to an ocean of wheat. But these visions of pettifogging and grinding prosperity strike the observer with sorrow, and hamstring its practitioners. They are never much good at anything else.
But the redeeming and beautiful line of the mountains sailed across the northern horizon. I pounded towards it, heading for the notch that marked the pass between the Sredna Gora on the west and the Karadja Dagh on the east. Finally, to hoist myself faster out of the plain, I followed a track that led up the side of the Sredna Gora, and, after finishing most of Nadejda’s supplies, slept in an abandoned shepherd’s lean-to of branches. It was higher and colder than I thought. I woke up to watch the dawn, as I lay luxuriously smoking one of the precious cigarettes. To the north spread a deep gre
en valley about a dozen miles wide, and on the other side of it soared the tall golden brown range of the Great Balkan. A new world! After a drink and a wash at an icy spring trickling into a broken trough hollowed from a tree trunk, bright with green weed and surrounded by an almost fossilized humus of droppings, I struck downhill munching the last of Nadejda’s apples. The cloud shadows sliding along the flanks of the Stara Planina were buckled by the scarps and the ravines. I reached the other side by late morning and crossed a river, reduced by the drought to a winding thread of pebbles which carried me to the town of Karlovo.
It was built up a gentle staircase of rock above the river in layers of wooden roofs and coloured walls – white, green, ochre and red with an overflow of treetops and a crown of pinnacles, and beyond it, the wooded slope of the mountain. Cobbled lanes climbed into it among willow-shaded brooks, and houses enclosed in tree-filled courtyards with tall wooden gates. The lanes turned into staircases sagging in the middle from long use. They were lined with climbing tiers of shops where saddlers, smiths, tinkers and carpenters were at work, and primitive hatters with blocked sheepskin kalpacks lined up in the sun on truncated wooden columns. Next came white groves of moccasins, overlapping in pyramids and hanging in garlands: Turkish slippers, loose and easily shed for devotions, or for lying on divans; then after that, crimson shelves of fezzes.
These sloping lanes converged on a raft-like square with a large mosque on one side standing among its minarets. Turks in turban and fez were everywhere, and trousered women with their heads and torsos obscured in black ferejes that left only their eyes visible: top-heavy figures balancing baskets and pots on their heads or bearing yokes across their shoulders from which hung swaying bronze water-cauldrons.
It was the first time I had seen a gathering of more than half a dozen of this astonishing race. The evidence of their vanished empire had been steadily thickening for the last few hundred miles and I gazed at them with wonder. They were the westernmost remnants, the last descendants of those shamanist tribes of Central Asia, kinsmen of the all-destroying Mongols, who had surged westwards, turned Muslim, founded the Sultanate of Rum and then conquered the Roman Empire of the East, and finally, by capturing Constantinople, inflicted the greatest disaster on Europe since the sack of Rome by the Goths a thousand years earlier. Their empire spread deep into Asia and Africa and covered three quarters of the Mediterranean shore. It stretched to the Pillars of Hercules and reached north to Poland and Russia and westward to Vienna; one extraordinary sortie had even plunged as far west as Ratisbon, only a day’s march from Munich. When we remember that the Moors of Spain were only halted at Tours, on the Loire, it seems, at moments, something of a fluke that St Peter’s and Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey are not today three celebrated mosques, kindred fanes to Haghia Sophia in Constantinople.
The capture of the city fell on a Tuesday and that day of the week is still deemed a day of ill-omen by the descendants of their Orthodox subjects: an inauspicious one on which to start a journey or launch an enterprise. Could the unluckiness of green throughout Europe (but not in Asia, where it symbolizes descent from the Prophet) spring from the colour of the Turks’ conquering banners? I have often wondered. If one blesses the names of Charles Martel and Sobiesky for rescuing western Christendom from Islam, one must execrate the memory of the Fourth Crusade, and the greed and Christian sectarian bias that sacked Constantinople, destroyed the Byzantine Empire and called down the doom of Christendom’s eastern half. It is as vain to blame the Turks for spreading westwards over the wreckage as it would be to arraign the laws of hydrostatics for flood damage.
Their armies advanced across Europe. It must have been a daunting sight: Anatolian infantry, wild Asian troops of horse, Bedouin cavalry, mounted archers from eastern deserts, contingents of Albanians, Tartars and Tcherkesses, Negroes from Africa and, under their strange emblems and their fan-plumed helmets, the Janissaries. These last were mostly Christians abducted as children, converted into fanatic Muslims and drilled into merciless warriors: a corps whose martial music, furnished by beating the sides of their giant bronze soup-cauldrons, blended strangely with long horns and kettledrums. Then came half-mad dervishes, endless strings of camels and gigantic dragon-mouthed cannon, and, rocking overhead, the banners of the pashas – the number of horse-tails fitting their different degrees – and, everywhere, under spiked brass half-moons, the baleful green flags. At their head, in early centuries, would be the Sultan himself, a ruthless or magnanimous paladin. Later on, when the names of Bajazet the Thunderbolt, Mohammed the Conqueror, Suleiman the Magnificent and Selim the Grim were retreating into myth, the standard of the Grand Vizier, the Seraskier or a three-tailed pasha led the host, while the Sultan himself, who, until his accession, perhaps had lived all his life in a cage,[1] would be far away in the kiosks and arbours of the Grand Seraglio: checkmating plots, spending his days with his wives and concubines and minions, cultivating tulips, writing quatrains in Turkish and Persian and Arabic, or – passions so absorbing that by default of attention to anything else they nearly ruined the empire – amassing ambergris or sables. The Sultan was not only the Emperor but the Caliph as well. When his distant followers stormed a Christian fortress, they were engaged in a holy war. If a warrior fell in battle and his giant white turban – one of those vast pleated globes depicted by Bellini and Pisanello – rolled away, an unshorn tassel of hair would uncoil from his razored scalp, giving purchase for the twining forefinger of a celestial hand, which would twirl him aloft and set him down among the cool streams and the doe-eyed girls in paradise.
Many of their descendants in the square had a wild and uncouth look. They were all, like their Bulgarian neighbours, herdsmen and cultivators and they were clad in patched and pleated trousers, faded turbans and discoloured fezzes. Their general air – rather contradictorily – was one of inbred tiredness. Sitting cross-legged in the sunny loggia that ran along one wall of the mosque, they conversed quietly together, sipped their thimbles of minute coffee or bubbled away at their nargilehs or busied themselves at ritual ablutions. When a newcomer joined them and touched his heart, his lips and his forehead, the soft generous murmurs of answering salaams were accompanied by the same triple flutter of hands, ending with the palm laid across the bosom and an inclination of the head: an unperfunctory-seeming greeting of infinite grace and repose. I received this flattering salute when I asked the hodja – an old man with watery eyes of the palest blue, a white spade-beard and a gentle smile, a beautifully laundered turban bound flat round his fez – if I could look inside the mosque. We padded unshod into the carpeted and whitewashed penumbra. There, under the dome’s hollow, was the niche of the mihrab pointing towards Mecca and the flight of steps leading to the little platform of the mimbar, where at the appropriate times he would read aloud from the Koran. There was nothing else. After pointing these out, he left me to myself. Soon, after a slow sequence of ritual bows and tilting forward from his knees to touch the carpet with his brow, he recovered in a single rocking motion, and remained seated cross-legged and absorbed in prayer. From time to time he raised his hands, palms uppermost, on either side of his body for a few seconds, as though he were offering a light and invisible gift; then folded them again in his lap where the pleats of his voluminous trousers fanned out from the scarlet edge of his sash. I left him there, and with his permission climbed the minaret.
From the little walled parapet, hot as a flat iron and blinding after the shadowy mosque, I could gaze across the wooden roofs and the treetops of the town. Beyond them uncoiled the valleys and the long swelling cordilleras of the Sredna Gora and the Karadja Dagh. When I stepped down again from the dark helix into the mosque, the hodja was still sitting there, gazing into the air with his upturned palms still lifted. I tiptoed outside.
After a siesta under some mulberry trees, I walked to a deep cold cataract tumbling down the rocks’ face – the source of the willow-shaded streams that thread their cool veins through the little town – and arriv
ed back, just as I hoped, a few moments before sunset. For there, halved at the waist by the parapet with his hands raised level on either side of his face, fittingly outlined across the reddening sky, the hodja was standing in mid-air; and soon the slow, wailing, high-pitched Arabian syllables of the first affirmation of the muezzin’s call wavered across the evening air and fell silent. After a long pause, they were repeated. Another hush followed; and then the second and longer clause sailed slowly into the sky and stopped.
The long intervals of silence were like the spreading of rings across a pool; the last vibrations must die away and the surface of the sky be still again before the next phrase, of which each word is a pebble dropped into the void, can launch its new sequence of circles. The muezzin was shifting along his little walled platform to another point of the compass and the next sentence; when it reached the ear, his wail had sunk a little to a different key. He completed his circle and the final summing-up slowly spelled itself forth until a longer pause lengthened into ultimate silence. The last hoop of prayer had expanded to infinity. The famous words faded from the air and from these infidel mountains. The parapet – which swelled three quarters of the way up the pale shaft of the minaret, then tapered to a lance-tip topped by an upturned crescent – was empty; the invisible muezzin was already halfway down his dark spiral. The sun had dipped below the last blue stage-wings of the Stara Planina and the Sredna Gora, and under the mulberry trees the flit and swoop of the swallows filled my ears with a noise like the swish of scissors round one’s head in a barber’s shop.
The Broken Road Page 6