The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  At one point all this coming and going of humans and livestock was effectively dammed by a long wagon slanting across the street outside a wine shop. This cart was a sort of rough wooden trough on wheels and inside it two men, naked to the thighs, were treading and stamping in a tangled slush of grapes. Others were constantly tipping in fresh loads and catching the streams of juice that gushed from a tap in tin cans which they carried indoors and poured into the waiting barrels and jars. A little further on, men in blood-stained aprons were busy with knives and cleavers on the carcase of a pig whose death throes, not long before, must have deafened the neighbourhood. A rather sinister little boy, squatting among the scarlet cobbles and the cats and the flies, had been given the intestines as a task or a toy. With cheeks expanded, he was inflating one: each puff blew up another sinuous length of gut until the whole thing was buoyantly uncoiled like the serpent in the band of an old-fashioned village choir. From the side lanes nearly horizontal stripes of mealy evening sunlight slashed across all this hubbub. There are moments (and this was one) when hill towns in the Balkans seem as remote as Tibet.

  A cloud slightly dimmed all these details. I had only the equivalent in leva of a few shillings in my pocket, and my boots, though no longer the instruments of torture they had been in the Shipka pass, were coming to bits. I had written from Plovdiv giving Tirnovo as the next address for money to be sent from England, several pounds this time, as I had not sent an address since Sofia. I used to try and let these weekly pounds mount up as long as possible, in order to get them all in one dollop, rather than hang about each time in some town chosen at random on the map in the hopes that it would coincide with my vaguely forecast itinerary. Better by far to wait till the registered envelope on the ledge of the poste restante yielded three or four of those brown pound notes – this had seemed, before setting out, the most sensible way of transferring these small sums, and so it proved. (Not once during this entire journey, did any ever go astray.) The thin calligraphic and richly crinkling white tissue of a fiver was a larger sum that had to be changed all at once and evaporated all the quicker, so it was better to spin out each note as far as it would go before turning another into guilders, marks, schillings, pengos, leis or levas – but not in the banks of Rumania or Bulgaria; for the black market rate, which any grocer or baker or street corner money changer would supply, was almost double the official one. It was a charitable bank clerk who, seeing me gullibly on the brink of a huge financial blunder, first whispered this secret to me across the counter. For somebody travelling as modestly as I was – I enjoyed smoking but could (how improbable it now seems) do without it painlessly, and drink (equally enjoyed and equally dispensable and equally incredibly so today) – life cost almost nothing. It was getting too late to sleep out of doors much longer – no more rolling up under a tree or a bridge – but the humble quarters I haunted were anything but dear, and how often I seemed to end up under some friendly roof scot free! The pound, before the war, was worth three times its value nowadays, perhaps more. Add to this the amazing cheapness of life in the Balkans then – a normal traveller could live comfortably on three or four shillings a day and one could eat a monster meal of many courses for sixpence – and it will be seen that my plight, living at a cost not far removed from that of a mediaeval palmer, was not nearly as much to be pitied as it sounds. Getting by on a pound a week had been something of a pinch in Western and Central Europe, even at my low level; but here, a strange and very relative sort of plenty showered over me, a queer cornucopia.

  But it was on the point, at this very moment, of drying up. Only about two shillings remained, and so recent had been my letter asking for more, that the delay of Bulgarian postage threatened a lean wait. But it was not only this looming shortage and the state of my boots that weighed on me tonight. I kept thinking of Plovdiv and the kindness and fun of Nadejda. There had been something a bit sad about Mr Crane’s expatriate contentment. The churlishness of the inhabitants and the wagoners of the Shipka pass, trivial enough, had left a taint of gloom behind and something rueful and lowering had infected the soft-voiced charm of the White Russians in the monastery. The twilight talk with the ailing Yorkshire woman in Gabrovo was weighted with unavowed distress. The defection of the storks, more than anything, spelled a season’s end. The days were still bright and summery but there was a thread of autumnal pallor in their gold. The sum of all these minor considerations united into a general depression and robbed my step, as I climbed that romantic thoroughfare, of some of its wonted lightness.

  I bought half a loaf of warm bread at a baker’s and went into a grocer’s shop to buy a slice of that delicious white goat’s cheese they call siriné, and another of the yellow kind called kashkaval. (I suppose it is the same as the Italian caciocavallo – ‘horseback cheese’, though whether the Bulgar word is a slavicization of the Italian, or the other way about, I don’t know. Instinct says the former, but it is often wrong.) My plan was to carry this hoard off to some quiet corner, slice up a couple of onions in my rucksack with my huge dagger, sprinkle them with red pepper from a twist of peppercorn, and then sleep somewhere in the lee of one of the spurs outside the town, establishing a sort of rocky lair until my ship came home. The lights of the town were beginning to twinkle in every window, the sun had set, and the prospect of this St Jerome-like hermitage loomed rather bleakly, especially compared to the gleaming interior of the grocer’s: the barrels of anchovies, the hanging flitches, the lamplight refracting a battery of bottles, the dried figs impaled on skewers of bamboo, the kegs and crates and jars and the pyramids of wares from Germany and Austria, the scarlet bacon slicer with its flashing disc of blade, the huge cheeses and the cubistic mounds of halva. It glowed like Aladdin’s cave.

  But the shop was empty. A boy of about my own age who had been sitting reading a book on the doorstep got up and followed me in. Where was I from? Whither bound? Cheerful alacrity and a friendly glance accompanied these questions. When we got bogged down linguistically, which happened as soon as my shallow hoard of Bulgarian gave out, we shifted to German, which he spoke well, with a queer Slav accent. We were soon perched on the edge of barrels, clinking slivo glasses and exchanging autobiographies. Gatcho was the grocer’s son, and he was looking after the shop while his father was at some ex-officers’ anniversary celebration, a reunion of old comrades from the Balkan wars. Gatcho, rather prosaically, was on holiday in his home town from the Höhere Handelsschule in Varna; he had gone there after finishing his studies at the Tirnovo gymnasium, to prepare himself for a job in a thriving export-import business in Sofia owned by his great-uncle. This meant, perhaps, travel, seeing somewhere, anywhere, outside Bulgaria: Budapest, Vienna, Munich, Paris perhaps. Did I know these towns? Cologne, Düsseldorf, Rotterdam? It was my moment, and I waded in. Within an hour, my kit was dumped in his brother’s room (who was away doing his military service in Berkovitza, der arme Kerl)[8] and half an hour later I was sitting in a lamp-lit room behind the shop with Gatcho and his two little sisters, attacking a delicious stew cooked by Gatcho’s bulky and cheerful mother and learning about Bulgarian poetry, Hristo Boteff, the national bard, and Ivan Vasoff (‘The Bulgarian Wordsworth’). Everything had changed. No more thoughts of the cold hill’s side.

  I had struck lucky by going into the grocer’s shop. There was a bed, and, as often as not, a meal with Gatcho’s family. Also, one of his uncles was the best cobbler in Tirnovo. Gatcho carried off my battered and disintegrating boots and next day they were delivered back, scot free, looking brand new, the heels armed with miniature horseshoes, the soles a-glitter with businesslike studs that struck sparks from the worn cobbles and flagstones of Tirnovo. But they were better saved for the highways and mountains: gym shoes were the wear for these vertiginous lanes. Gatcho’s brother’s little room with an ikon to St Nicholas in the corner was a godsend. I lay there on the bed reading for hours every day, or squatting or lying prone – there was just room for it – on the minute balcony, propped on my elbows, an
d laboriously bringing my journal up to date.

  Those battered stiff-covered notebooks an inch thick in which I scribbled away so industriously – how I wish I had them at this very moment, to equip these sentences of memory with the sharp edge of immediate recording. But fragments remain nevertheless: the recession of the surrounding mountains and the twists of the river below and, closer by, the swoop of walls piling up one side, the sharp subsidence of housetops on the other, falling away below with the abruptness of the storeys of a house of cards. The tiles of many of them were bushy with empty nests waiting, like summer villas on modish coasts, for the spring return of their tenants. (Had they settled by now, I remember thinking, or were they still labouring southwards with the Equator already behind them, peering down at the forests and the great lazy rivers, swerving to avoid a hut-sprinkled clearing that recalled the whirr of arrows, pushing on till a disposition of roofs, the remembered geometry of woods and habitations and streams, and the final corroboration, on closer scrutiny, of last winter’s nests, told them that they were home? How long had the birds been shuttling like this between the two? How many stork-generations? The town had been inhabited a long time. It had been the imperial capital of the second Bulgarian empire in the twelfth century, but a town had thriven there much earlier. What about that horseman carved in relief on the rock face outside the town, dating probably from Alexandrian times? There must have been dwellings for them to perch on then; only twelve hundred eggs ago and more in the direct line. In its European stage alone, a dozen religions had ousted each other, a score of empires had soared and crumbled and a hundred wars been waged under the itinerary of these unheeding migrants. A formidable tenure! Gatcho’s indoctrination about the history of his town had not been falling on deaf ears.)

  Gatcho turned out to be a kind and a timely friend. He was a moody person, cheerful, excited and extrovert one moment, silent and brooding the next to a degree that rather intimidated his family; but not, fortunately, with me. There was a relaxed and holiday feeling about Tirnovo. I was woken up on the first morning by the trundling of empty barrels downhill with a noise like thunder. Peering from the balcony, I was just in time to see one break loose from its trundle and bounce from step to step like a runaway animal, frightening donkeys, capsizing fruit stalls and only just dodged in time by the citizens, and making a din that sounded like the fall of Jericho.

  This further reminder of the vintage season was followed up by a bicycle trip to a farm a few miles away belonging to yet another relation of Gatcho’s, for the wine pressing. The place was an old Turkish tchiflik, the dwelling of some vanished bey, surrounded by fields and vineyards and shaded by tremendous plane trees and a cool line of water-betokening poplars. Tufts of down from the withered thistles drifted in the air and skimmed across the surface of the stream. About fifty people were assembled here, and in the centre three men, like the ones I had seen the night before, unmoccasined, unthonged and unswaddled, were treading bare-legged and spattered round a tremendous shallow tub. Everyone took his turn, and the feeling of the grapes exploding and squelching underfoot – a feeling which I experienced again, whenever I got a chance, several times in Greece and Crete – was amazing. The stuff seethed round our ankles and almost up to the knees. It was a festive gathering. The new grape-must was started and gallons of the old were swallowed from demijohns. Kebabs smoked on their long skewers, and the treaders with hands on each other’s shoulders thumped the dust, soggy now with dropped grapes and spilt wine, in an unsteady and purple-shanked dance to the tune of a violin and a curious oval, thick-necked stringed instrument roughly hewn out of a single piece of wood, like a Neolithic fiddle, held beneath the chin or propped upright before the player’s body, and scraped by a short semicircular bow. (They called it a tzigulka or a gadulka; it was kin to the Montenegrin gûzla, as I later learnt, and a poor relation of the Cretan lyra.) Finally everyone settled on red and yellow rugs spread underneath a giant plane tree whose lower limbs were a-dangle, where they swung close to the ground, with the wooden flasks and knapsacks of the guests, for more eating and drinking and singing. Everything smelt of crushed grapes and was sticky to touch; flies, wasps and menacing brown and orange hornets abounded, but even this zooming tangle failed to blight the hilarity of the gathering or to ruffle the heavy slumbers that followed, as, one by one, we slanted wilting from our cross-legged session and snored where we lay.

  When I awoke among the coiling roots, I couldn’t make out where I was. All had changed. Long shadows were streaming down the glade. Men, shod and hosed once more, but with their gait and their manoeuvring hindered by a giveaway clumsiness, were exhorting beasts in the middle distance and loading them with wineskins like the damp and bloated phantoms of goats, squelching and bald, for they were inside-out, with the lashed stumps of their legs distended in rigid gestures. There were many moths. Gatcho was shaking my shoulder. If we didn’t get back to Tirnovo, we would be late for a students’ party. We found our bikes and wobbled back to the town through the dusty and twilit vineyards.

  This particular season, once more, seemed to be crowded with holidays and parties and religious feasts, which kept us up late and beset the mornings with headaches. Gatcho demonstrated a way of finding out if the next day was going to be a feast day, by a method about as reliable as predicting a stranger’s arrival by tea leaves. He found my sheepskin kalpack among the heaped-up chattels on my bed; some dormant sense of ridicule had prevented me from wearing it for the last week or two, possibly some teasing comment of Nadejda’s. He pounced on it with glee, crying, ‘Let’s see whether tomorrow is a prazdnik’ – a feast – then lifted it above his head and flung it on the floor, which it struck with a dull thud. His brows knitted with vexation. He repeated it several times. If the hat hit the boards fair and square, he explained, it would give a loud report like the explosion of a paper bag. ‘There we are,’ he said. ‘All’s well. Prazdnik tomorrow.’ And so it was.

  In the small hours of one of these celebrations, we found ourselves with half a dozen of the blades of Tirnovo in a hut on the outskirts of the town, smoking hashish. The dried and powdered leaves were packed into the tube of a cigarette paper from which deft fingers had laboriously prodded the tobacco. Lit, and then solemnly passed from hand to hand until the clouds of smoke enveloped us with a sweetish vegetable reek, it brought on a faint dizziness and a gregarious onslaught of helpless laughter. The slightest word or gesture was enough to send us off into fresh paroxysms until we fought for breath and our cheeks were wet with tears. Bulgaria, it appeared, was one of the richest natural hashish gardens in the world. Cannabis indica thrives in embarrassing abundance. Its cultivation, which is scarcely necessary, and its smoking, my companions explained between puffs, were strictly forbidden: ‘Mnogo zabraneno. Ha! Ha! Ha!’ But the ban seemed about as effective as legislation against cow parsley or nettles. Regular smokers were few. It only came into play as an occasional lark. I longed for the opportunity to say ‘the party went with a bhang!’ The lack of opportunity to say so, however, didn’t stop me saying it, and dissolving in transports of hilarity at my own wit.

  This sojourn in Tirnovo, already enjoyable enough, took a still better turn with the arrival of the money. There, at the poste restante counter after a couple of days, was the anxiously awaited registered letter in its blue-crossed canvas oblong and – how far away it seemed in space and time and mood! – its Holland Park postmark; and inside, better still, the exciting accumulation of pound notes, still new and crisp. The repayment of some of Gatcho’s hospitality, a clear route to the Black Sea, a new shirt, a couple of pairs of socks, another notebook, papers, pencils, a rubber, cigarettes, tobacco, and a cake of soap to replace the thin wafer I had been husbanding, a new toothbrush, meals, wine, slivo – luxury in fact. I walked back to Gatcho’s father’s grocery on air.

  Thanks to all the festivities, three days had passed and the churches which were the pretext for this wide northern sweep in my itinerary were still unseen. Stocking up
with cheese, salami and sardines from the rich paternal counter, we set off in the late morning. The ridge on which the town was built continued climbing until the houses thinned out and dropped away, and swept in a curve to the hill where all the churches I had descried from the road before reaching Tirnovo were gathered. The remains of battlemented walls girt this almost inviolable rock and a Turkish bridge connected it to the ridge. From the windy raft of the hilltop, the rock face fell steeply into the valley, in some places as straight as a curtain. At one point on the rim of this precipice captives and malefactors used to be hurled, and from here one could see the round solitary tower in which Baldwin of Flanders, one of the four Frankish emperors of Constantinople during that strange Western rule that followed the capture of Byzantium at the Fourth Crusade, taken prisoner by the Bulgarian czar, had languished for many years and died.