After looking at the rather new and ugly interior of the church, and at ikons from Russia studded with brilliants, we joined a group of veterans sitting round a samovar in a long grey room decorated with pictures of Czar Nicholas II, of Kolchak and Denikin, and of Moscow and St Petersburg, the Nevsky Prospekt under snow, the battles of Plevna and Shipka and the Crossing of the Beresina. The conversation, in varying kinds of French for my benefit, revolved around their old regiments and past wars and especially those desperate White Russian campaigns in which they had nearly all taken part. The overt assumption of their drift was that the present phase was a transient one and the Soviet regime a tempor-ary madness rife with the germs of its own dissolution. Another turn of the wheel would place Grand Duke Cyril[3] on the throne and set the double eagle fluttering once more over Peterhof and Tzarskoe Selo and the Winter Palace and translate them all, by magic, to honourable retirement in their homes in Kiev, Tamboff, Odessa and Ekaterinoslav. Deep sighs punctuated this talk, and sudden giveaway silences. Autumnal sadness filled the long room.
• • •
I met nobody else on the remainder of the road to the top except a few carts. Sturdy horses drew them and the shafts on either side of them were bridged by curious curved swingletrees which arched over the horses’ withers in wooden semicircles. A treacherous nail in my right boot soon began to inflict pain; by the time I reached the pass, which is really not a pass at all as there is scarcely a dip in the line of the watershed, this had become so tormenting that I sat down under the huge lion that commemorates the battle and did my best with stones and a jackknife to locate and flatten this excruciating spike; one of my toes was raw and bleeding. This was unsuccessful, however, as when I tried my boot on again, the invisible nail felt not only longer and sharper, but, when I attempted to walk on it, red hot.
The famous battle had raged all round this windy saddle. Somewhere nearby a skilled geographer would have been able to put his forefinger on some sharp stone on the precise edge of the watershed and know that, should a raindrop strike it and divide in half, the northern half-drop would in time flow into the Danube and eventually into the Black Sea, while its fellow, heading south downhill, would reach the Tunja and then the Maritza and at last drift through the wide Hebrus’s mouth and become part of the Aegean and the Mediterranean seas.
The approach of dusk was beginning to blur the detail of the hollow worlds that glimmered with steadily waning light on either side of the pass. The descending night and the plight of my foot prompted a twinge of concern. I hobbled on through the twilight with my ears pricked for the welcome rumble of a cart. At last, an empty cart with two peasants on the bench bore down. It was driving in the right direction. The driver reined back in answer to my supplicating wave, and I asked if he was heading for Gabrovo. He was. I explained that I had a bad foot and demonstrated it by limping stagily for a few paces: could he give me a lift? The kalpacked rustic looked me up and down and then said: ‘Kolko ban?’ Astonished, I asked him what he meant, though I understood perfectly well: ‘how much money?’ He repeated the question, grinning and rubbing the thumb and forefinger of an extended hand together, as though fumbling a dream banknote. Thinking he was joking, I said, ‘Edin million’, and joyfully prepared to climb in. But I was stopped by the hand that held the whip and the question was repeated. I had plainly misinterpreted the grin. He proposed to give me a lift to Gabrovo for the equivalent of ten shillings. As I had only one pound left, I urged poverty, lameness and strangeness in these parts. The colloquy was curtailed by a negative click of the tongue and backward tilt of the head, and with a crack of his whip off he clattered into the night. Before I had recovered from astonishment at conduct so unprecedented on any of the roads of Europe, my ear was struck by the noise of another cart approaching. All was not lost! But a few minutes later the sound of wheels was dying away again after an almost identical exchange with another surly wagoner. (This passion to make money out of chance trivialities, like giving a pedestrian a lift in an empty cart, is a phenomenon I met several times in Bulgaria, but nowhere else in Europe, before or afterwards. One hears of cases in Italy. Such conduct in Greece, especially if it involved a stranger, let alone a lame and benighted one, would call down life-long shame.)
There was no question of spending the night in the pass, as a fast and biting wind was sweeping across it. There was neither shelter nor cover. It was as bleak as a desert. After walking a couple of miles I espied with joy a wayside house in the rising moonshine. My approach unleashed a frenzy of barking from a white sheepdog. As I reached the front door, the line of light went out under the shutters. I knocked on the door and the shutter, explaining myself in Bulgarian as lame as my foot. ‘I am an English traveller, my foot is bad. There is a big cold wind (gulemo studeno). May I come in please?’ I could hear whispers indoors where there had been talk before; then there was silence, except for the barking and snarling of this slavering hell-hound only a few precarious feet away. The repetition of my dismal litany gradually lost all conviction. At last when all hope had drained away, I lurched on northwards and downhill, swearing, comminating and shouting aloud, blinded with tears of fury and frustration. None of Nadejda’s phrases seemed adequate to the occasion. This cursing and gesticulating figure might well have struck terror. But bewilderment was my chief emotion. What passion of xenophobia, predatoriness or timidity lurked in this horrible mountain range? Did they think I was a bandit or a murderer masquerading as a wandering foreign student and talking pidgin Bulgarian to corroborate his disguise? Or a djinn, an afreet, a demon, a werewolf or a vampire, ravening in the same odd livery, or some other of the many wicked supernatural denizens that infest the Balkan darkness?
After an hour’s tormenting crawl through the windy moonlight, I spied a gleam of light in a wide hollow to the left of the road. The wind dropped as my track, sinking below the trajectory of its flight, dipped into a quiet dell full of beech trees. At the end, on the edge of the spinney, tall dark pyres smouldered and an aromatic tang of woodsmoke hung on the air. Light radiated from the doorway of a hut. It was cleverly woven of branches, a leafy cave, and inside it, three satanic figures, their rags showing a dusty black by the light of an oil dip, were sitting cross-legged on a carpet of leaves and playing cards with an upturned sieve for a table. They were charcoal burners. How different was the welcome here! All three leapt up, led me to a place in their midst, helped me off with my blood-filled boot, washed the damaged foot with slivovitz and wrapped it in a clean handkerchief, then plied me with slivo for internal use and then with bread and cheese. Finally, after commiserating over my reverses, they made me a leaf-bed of freshly cut branches and bade me goodnight as they rolled over to sleep. One of them blew out the light and went out into the moonbeams to see to the stoking and the damping down, among the white-gashed sapling stumps of the ravished wood, of their three great smouldering cones.
One of these Samaritans located the nail in my boot next morning and cunningly hammered it flat by using an adze blade as a combination of last and anvil. Axe blows rang through the glade, interrupted every so often by the report of a falling tree trunk. Billhooks lopped off the branches, and the dismembered limbs were packed into place on the dark cones and heaped over with ashes; sinister fumaroles of smoke leaked through the charcoal like a brittle volcano’s surface about to erupt at a score of places. Clambering up the sides of these smoking pyres and poking at them with forks and staves, my black benefactors bore the aspect of stokers in hell. We waved goodbye and I climbed out of the glade up to the road and, after a long day of unwinding downhill, reached Gabrovo.
• • •
A long day of unwinding downhill. This is easily written and rightly succinct; because, unlike the southern flank of the Great Balkan range and the climb from Kazanlik, of which each detail remains clear, I can remember nothing whatever about it.
This brings up the whole question of piecing together things which have happened a number of years ago – twenty-nine in
fact – and I ought to have tackled the whole question earlier on.
Bad luck dogged my notes and my sketches all through this journey. The first lot of diaries and papers was stolen in Munich. I started a fresh lot immediately, in German stiff-covered notebooks and drawing pads, and kept them up, at least the notebooks, until the end of the journey that these pages cover, and later on, in Greece. The sketches – rightly, as they were never much good – became scarcer and died out. The notebooks I had with me five years later, when the outbreak of war overtook me in High Moldavia, in the north of Rumania.
For the previous four years, this had been my base in Eastern Europe, and I had spent half my time there and half in the Greek islands, varied by one rather dull year’s return to England, and by sojourns of varying length in Paris, the Île de France and Provence, and by the slow return train journeys across Europe (made slower still by halts to visit old friends in Vienna, Hungary and Transylvania). Obviously, I had little grasp of what the war entailed and still less prophetic flair, for when I set off for England in September 1939 to join the army, I left all my books and papers in this house in Moldavia. I had planned to return there when the war was over. But when the war ended, this house, like most of the places in this narrative, was out of bounds beyond the Iron Curtain. It had been smitten by fire and earthquake and its inhabitants scattered, imprisoned and driven from their homes – but, alas, not over the frontiers of Rumania into the free world.
The only tangible data that remain from my actual journey are two tattered maps and a thin pencil-line marking my itinerary, punctuated by a cross-bar for every overnight sojourn. These are largely, but not entirely, unnecessary, as during this walk I pored so often over the various stages of the journey and repeated the place-names that spanned it so often that I can reel them off, even today, almost without a break. The only other contemporary document to survive is the passport trustingly issued in Munich to replace the one which had been stolen. It fixes the date of each frontier crossing. This sparse calendar is augmented by the memory of my whereabouts on important days like Christmas, Easter, famous local saints’ days publicly celebrated, and private anniversaries like family birthdays; still further by remembering where I was when I heard the news of some striking political event: the verdict of the Reichstag fire trial,[4] the June purge,[5] the February Revolution[6] in Vienna, the murder of Dollfuss.[7] (It was a record year for assassinations.) In a year when something new was happening to me nearly every day, either geographically, psychologically and often both, these sparse data help to narrow the field yet closer. Undated events can usually be located, by deduction, to within a week of the day when they must have occurred, sometimes even less.
All these dispersed fragments cohere in a jigsaw which is far from complete; but, by driving my memory back, by coercing and focussing it on one particular gap, I find that the missing pieces often slide to the surface and dovetail. Perhaps the fact that I have already recorded this particular tract of the past in a notebook, even though the records are lost, has helped to fix much of it several strata deep. Tones of voice, moods, lighting, details of landscape or costume, streets, castles, mountain ranges, warts, eyelashes, gold teeth, scars, smells, the arrangement of a room, a line of a song, the taste of food or drink tried for the first time, the name of the book left open on a bench, a paper headline or, quite often, some irrelevant object on sale in a shop window that I neither admired nor coveted, a bowler-hatted or trilby-shaded face under a lamp-post or in a bar that I never met or conversed with or wanted to, but merely observed – how distinct from the galaxy of Baudelairian passing strangers I longed to know, like the figure in A une passante! – come running or lounging or sidling out of the cobwebby dark that has been harbouring them for close on three decades. But there are some gaps that no feat of concentration can fill: the missing piece is lost for good.
There are plenty of these gaps. Gabrovo is one. I remember that it is a textile manufacturing town on a small scale – did somebody call it ‘the Bulgarian Manchester?’ – but I can’t remember (though there must have been several there) a single factory chimney; or indeed, anything about it at all, except – and this is why it is odd: how did I get there, and who led me? – that I was leaning at dusk over a half-door, rather like that of a stable, and the top half was open. It was in a back street sloping down to a tree-reflecting river, with the mountains, which I had just crossed, piling up behind. Here I leaned, talking to the occupant of the room. She lay in bed, in the further corner of the room, under a patchwork quilt, propped up on several pillows in a long-sleeved white cotton nightgown with a wide collar, her long fingers stroking a tabby cat that dozed on her lap. She was an English woman married to a Bulgarian, and, like Mr Barnaby Crane, from the North, but this time from Yorkshire, as her most soft voice soon made clear. She was recovering from some infectious disease: hence my relegation to the threshold. Was it measles? Or scarlet fever? I can’t remember, any more than I can remember who brought me there. She was called Betty and was in her early twenties; her cheeks were hollow from illness and her eyes were the palest blue, her fair hair was long and straight. She was as pale as a water sprite or an etiolated Rossetti heroine. How very peculiar it seemed, in the depths of the Balkans, to be listening to these charming, faint Yorkshire syllables through the twilight. We talked for hours, and exchanged brief autobiographies. She was a farmer’s daughter from a remote farm in the Dales, so far from everywhere that in bad weather they were sometimes snowed up and out of communication with the outside world for a week or a fortnight on end. She seemed eager for talk. ‘You get a bit lonely like, only talking Bulgarian for months on end, and I haven’t learnt it properly yet.’ Her father sounded a splendid chap: everyone was fond of him for miles around: a great one for racing whippets, expeditions on foot to Wensleydale and Swaledale and Fountains Abbey with other children. I have forgotten how she met her husband (who was away for a few days in Sofia). I think he had been studying the textile industry in the nearest town. Her father was opposed to the marriage at first, but he gave in in the end; and here they were. She liked the Bulgarians; though, she said, they were a funny race: terribly superstitious. An animal terror of illness of any kind haunted them, not only infectious ones.
She had fallen ill twice since settling in Gabrovo, and had felt an outcast both times: shunned, feared and sent to Coventry. ‘They’re a daft lot.’ Her laugh, coming faint and tired through the half-light, was very attractive, and her conversation, especially about the rainy and misty world she came from, sent sudden waves of homesickness rolling through the darkening room. One by one the details of this interior faded from view: the bookcase with Black Beauty, Pears Encyclopaedia, Jock of the Bushveld, Chatterbox, Precious Bane, Angel Pavement and Rupert Brooke’s collected verse; the upright piano, the sewing machine, the framed print of York Minster, the patchwork quilt and the sleeping tabby cat, until all that remained was the pallor of her nightgown and face and hair and the sound of our voices. It was quite dark when somebody came to lead me back to the lights of Gabrovo. I could just discern the valedictory flutter of a white-sleeved arm raised as she waved goodbye. I returned to the town under the wheeling bats and oblivion closes the scene.
• • •
The same forgetfulness covers the next day’s journey and the little town of Dranovo; a blurred pencilled cross on the tattered map, drawn there nearly three decades ago, indicates that I must have spent a night there. The view suddenly clears again in the late afternoon of what must have been the next day as I rounded a turn under a steep cliff. Between this sharp drop in the roll of the mountains and a tall monolithic pinnacle of rock on the other side of a road, and enclosing the view like something seen through a giant keyhole, the town of Tirnovo a couple of miles ahead was wedged. It rose from a canyon like an emanation, a sharp flight of houses hovering in ascending waves along the lip of a precipice which swung airily away and then back again in three quarters of a circle. The rock face, as the town gained h
eight, fell beneath it into a chasm of organ-fluted rock, all stressed and heavy with shadow, to the sinuous bend of the river Yantra. The tiled roofs of this winged insurrection of houses were plumed by belfries and trees, and the highest rocks at the farthest point of this all-but amphitheatre, after the town had died away, were scattered with churches. The airy town jutted with oriental balconies craning on diagonal beams above the gulf, and hundreds of windowpanes threw back the evening sun in tiers of square flaming sequins, as though fires were raging within.
I understood Nadejda’s enthusiasm at once. My own grew with every advancing step and overflowed into excitement when I found myself climbing the long, narrow staircase of a main street winding endlessly upwards. Vines, heavy with grapes, coiled over the doorways and under the jut of the wide eaves and leaned out across the flags and the cobbles on trellises. The lanes that branched off to the right on the valley side, where the almost Tudor-looking upper storeys of timber and plaster thrust forward as though striving to merge balconies with the opposite houses, ended like rocky diving-boards in the sky. Moccasins, scarlet sashes and sheepskin hats crowded the steps and intermingled with flocks, donkeys and mules, climbing and descending the steep thoroughfare like the traffic of Jacob’s ladder. An enormous priest with a spiralling beard was in difficulties with his horse; he clutched his umbrella and the reins, and the slithering and rearing of his mount on the slippery stones had jolted his cylinder hat awry and shaken his bun loose down his back in a long flapperish coil, nearly capsizing the tray of earthenware yaourt jars balanced on the head of a passing dairyman.
The Broken Road Page 8