The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Later I saw Gatcho lurching between the tables arm in arm with half a dozen other students; they were whisking off the tablecloths with a cascade of whatever glass or cutlery had survived and tying them round their heads like turbans, singing a song that held all the youth of Bulgaria, that year, in its grip. ‘Piem! Peem! Pushim!’ they bawled, ‘Damadjani sushim! Da jiveyet tarikatite!’ ‘Let’s drink and sing and smoke till the demijohn is empty! That’s the way the lads do it!’ The manager, concerned at the breakage, was hustling towards them, but a still graver diversion made him change course. One of a party of peasants had found a fully-laid table by the balcony. Grasping it by two legs, he had lifted it above his head. The manager dashed forward, but he was too late. With a shout and to massed clapping and cheers, the peasant hurled it over the edge, where it turned over and over in a falling nebula of knives, forks, spoons, jugs, glasses, cruets, sliced sausage and anchovy and rolls till it hit the rock face a long way below and bounded disintegrating into the ravine.

  • • •

  A few days later I was heading north across the rolling autumnal hills between Tirnovo and the Danube, not due east to the Black Sea as I had planned. Roughly working out my eastward route on the map with Gatcho in Tirnovo, I had seen the tempting line of the Danube to the north, and, beyond it, the irresistibly beckoning triple cartographic circle of Bucharest. Again, this loop was hundreds of miles off my itinerary and, quite literally, diametrically opposed to my goal of Constantinople; but why not? Gatcho was against it: he was going back to Varna in a week or so; why not come too and stay in his rooms there, and then push off south to Turkey? But I could do this, I argued, after I had left Bucharest, and had walked south again across the Dobrudja. The real reason was his hatred of Bulgaria’s northern neighbours. The Rumanians were a terrible lot, he said: liars, robbers, thieves, villains, immoral. I said they couldn’t be as bad as all that. ‘They stole the Dobrudja,’ he said with a contorted frown. ‘All the land between the Danube delta and the Black Sea. It’s pure Bulgarian.’ I said that I wanted only to see what they were like, on their own ground, not as I had seen them, through Hungarian eyes, in Transylvania. ‘They stole that too!’ he cried. I wasn’t a political observer, I went on; races, language, what people were like, that was what I was after: churches, songs, books, what they wore and ate and looked like, what the hell! Surely he, who was interested in foreign literature and the republic of the arts and wanted to see the outside world too – just like me – could understand that? Monasteries, temples, paintings, I went on, mountain ranges, art, history. ‘This is history!’ he interjected hotly, and scored an important point.

  We sat in silence. I had to gain lost ground. ‘Suppose the King of Rumania was murdered,’ I asked, ‘would you have cheered and danced as you did last night about King Alexander of Yugoslavia?’ Gatcho laughed. ‘Of course I would. And I’d have rung the church bells too.’ Things were building up my way. ‘And’, I said, with the insidious quietness of somebody laying a trap, ‘the King of Greece?’ Gatcho laughed snortingly. ‘There isn’t one. Not at the moment. You ought to know that. But of course I would.’ The trap had fallen apart. ‘I know why you are asking all these questions. England is France’s ally. You’re on the side of France, on the side of the Little Entente.’ I protested hotly that I loved France, that we all needed her if we weren’t all to be barbarians, but that I didn’t care a damn about France’s policy in the Balkans, or England’s either; surely one isn’t necessarily committed to one’s country’s policy? ‘Oh yes, one is,’ Gatcho replied. ‘It’s all right for you in England, with your huge Empire. You’ve never been invaded or conquered. Thanks to being an island.’ ‘Yes we have!’ ‘Oh? When?’ I gave the date rather lamely. ‘Nine centuries ago! There you are!’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you hate all your neighbours, Greece, Rumania and Yugoslavia anyway. What about Turkey?’ They were the worst of the lot, he said, the ones who ruined Bulgaria in the first place. Nearly six centuries of occupation. Indeed, this enormous span, stretching from Chaucer to Dickens and embracing almost half of the country’s history since it emerged as a nation, was a sombre thought. ‘But we’ve beaten them once, in the First Balkan War.’ ‘With the help of the Rumanians, the Serbs and the Greeks,’ I put in; he brushed these ex-alliances aside, ‘and we could beat them again. Why, we nearly took Constantinople!’ After a pause for brooding I asked him if there was any foreign country that he did like. After another long pause, he said, ‘Russland.’

  I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been at Gatcho’s exemption of Russia from his general aversion, in spite of his dislike of Communism, which was intense. There was no hope of solution to Bulgaria’s irredentist problems there. Indeed, although he had no sympathy for the present regime in Germany, he would sometimes wonder in a speculative tone whether, in terms of what he called realpolitik, Bulgaria should look Germany-wards for rectification. (This is, of course, exactly what Bulgaria did a few years later; and for a short-lived year or two, as Germany’s ally, Bulgaria was suddenly swollen by huge slices sawn off her neighbours.) But, quite apart from political leanings, there existed throughout mystical Bulgaria a deep-seated, instinctive, almost fondness for the idea of Russia. As the champions of Slav Orthodoxy in the past, she had been a counterweight to the hated Greek ecclesiastical supremacy at Constantinople under the Turks. It was the Russia of Alexander II that delivered them from their long slavery and, as it were, created modern Bulgaria; and Bulgarian and Russian, of all the Slav languages, were the two which were closest kin. The present Soviet Union’s bitter hostility to the Russia of the Czars which had showered down all these benefits was, in some curious fashion, no bar to this deep-rooted sympathy. Except among communists, where the ambiguity would not arise, political aversion and racial attraction coexisted in the teeth of all ordinary logic; the great Slav lodestone made Bulgaria react and deviate from the true north in the same way that allowance must be made on a compass for the magnetic. It was a case of le coeur a ses raisons. This instinctive bias, however, was no bar to Bulgaria siding in the First World War, impelled by short-sighted opportunism, against her old benefactors, and with calamitous results for the country. (The same reasons again placed them on the wrong side in World War II, and the results were worse still; though the final disaster would perhaps have come – as it did, alas, to the other Eastern European countries – regardless of which camp they were in.) Bulgarians have a perverse genius for fighting on the wrong side. If they had been guided more by their hearts and less by their political heads, which usually seem to have lacked principle and astuteness in equal degrees, their history might have been a happier one.

  I said nothing of all this – all, that is, that could be said at that date – because a rather strained silence had fallen, like angels flying overhead. Gatcho was leaning in the café with his hands in his pockets, a frown on his stubborn handsome face, his eyes fixed on the table and his black hair falling on his forehead. The same glance-avoiding awkwardness had haunted the rest of the day. But it thawed in the evening. I asked him if it had been prompted by anything I had done or said. No, he answered, nothing at all. It was merely one of the black moods under which I had seen his family writhing. He apologized with real distress. Later as we were discussing Gatcho’s companions and contemporaries who had been our messmates for the last days, ‘What do you think of Vasil?’ he asked, mentioning the last of them all. ‘I don’t like him much,’ I admitted. ‘Nor do I,’ Gatcho said. ‘And he doesn’t like you either.’ ‘Why?’ ‘He thinks you’re a spy.’

  My first reaction to this was a loud and incredulous laugh. Gatcho joined in. ‘He must have got the idea from seeing you always poring over the map,’ he said, pointing to the tattered Freytag’s Reisekarte open on the table in front of us. ‘But surely I don’t look like a spy,’ I protested. ‘Ah!’ Gatcho answered, ‘they never do.’ I wondered if Vasil’s idea had started the same suspicion in Gatcho, and began to think that I had noticed a hint of withdrawal in our
companions during the last day or two, a trace of coldness. ‘Of course I don’t,’ he said with vehemence, ‘nor do any of the others.’ Then after a pause and most unhelpfully, he added, ‘Anyway, why shouldn’t you be?’ Seeing that I was beginning to work myself into a state of outrage, distress and puzzled disclaimer, he put his hand on my shoulder and shouted for some more wine. It was my turn to fence myself round with injured sulkiness and to return to the theme with fresh, though dwindling exasperation, which I really felt, between songs, for the rest of the evening.

  It was the first of many times, since an incident on the Czechoslovak border, that I had struck the hazard that every now and then, and more especially in time of trouble, plagues travellers in the Balkans, not excluding Greece. The anger it arouses in the accused is all the more hopeless by its impotence. Fortunately, the charge seems to evaporate with the same frivolous ease that it arises, blowing away like an idle speculation. It takes some time to perfect the weary sigh and the pitying smile which is the correct completion of the gambit. But at first, even after its retraction, it always leaves a disagreeable trace behind, like the itch after the removal of a sting. Gatcho was truly upset because I was so obviously so. When I set off next day, he made me promise again and again to stay with him in Varna on the way south.

  [1] From the early seventeenth century, for some two hundred years, brothers of the Ottoman sultans were confined in palace quarters known as the kafes, or ‘cage’, to ensure their loyalty. If a sultan died childless, his brother might emerge to the sultanate from this confinement, often unfit to rule.

  [2] Admiral Kolchak (1874–1920), supreme leader of the White Russian forces from 1918 until his execution by the Bolsheviks in 1920.

  [3] Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich (1876–1938), grandson of Czar Alexander II, and controversial claimant to the Russian throne from 1924 until his death.

  [4] The Reichstag Fire Trial (21 September–23 December 1933). The fire that broke out in the Berlin Reichstag on 27 February 1933 was blamed on both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. To Hitler’s fury, the High Court convicted only a single suspect, the (possibly insane) Marinus van der Lubbe.

  [5] The June Purge (30 June–2 July 1934), the so-called ‘Night of the Long Knives’, in which Hitler eliminated the SR Brownshirts, as well as more liberal opponents.

  [6] The so-called February Uprising in Austria (12–15 February 1934) saw factional fighting between socialist and conservative militia, at its fiercest in Vienna.

  [7] Engelbert Dollfuss (1892–1934), dictatorial Chancellor of Austria from 1932 until his assassination by Nazis on 25 July 1934. PLF had glimpsed him in procession in Vienna earlier in the year: a tiny man in a morning coat, ‘hurrying to keep up’.

  [8] The poor fellow.

  [9] ‘What a shame you’re not a girl.’

  [10] Vasil Levsky (1837–73) and Ivan Vasoff (1850–1921) were celebrated Bulgarian revolutionaries against Ottoman rule.

  [11] King Alexander I of Yugoslavia was shot by a Bulgarian revolutionary named Vlado Chernozemski, who was instantly cut down by a policeman’s sabre, then beaten to death by the crowd. Barthou died of wounds, a few hours later.

  [12] The Little Entente, created in 1921–2, saw an alliance between Czechoslovakia, Rumania and the future Yugoslavia, backed by France, as a check to potential Hungarian or German aggression. The Treaty of Neuilly (1919) had drastically reduced the borders of Bulgaria, in favour of Greece, Serbia and Rumania.

  [13] ‘March! March with our general! Fly to war and crush the foe!’

  [14] King Alexander I Obrenovitch of Serbia and his unpopular queen were assassinated by an army faction in 1903. He was replaced as king by Prince Peter, head of the royal house of Karageorgevitch, which had a long-standing feud with the Obrenovitch dynasty.

  4. To the Danube

  The region I was crossing bore an illusion of no change, but insidious forces had been at work. All trace of summer haze had been driven from the sky, and the glare was tempered to a thin lemon-coloured clarity, with frailer shadows. The distant ranges to the south were chiselled and veined with valleys and the spread of the Balkans, stretching northward and then veering east of my track, was distinct to the smallest rock. On some of these uplands, red patches of flames and trailing smoke showed where shepherds were setting fire to the undergrowth to strip the ground for next year’s grazing. The sky was seldom without a cloud: cauliflowers sailing overhead, towing their shadows twisted and bent by the ravines, like ships’ anchors, across the whale-shaped undulations, or hovering in the high mountain passes as lightly as ostrich feathers, or slanting along the horizons in pampas plumes. The setting sun turned each of these into the tail of a giant retriever. Whenever the slopes slanted nearly horizontally to the eye, the rain had fledged them with a green froth of tender herb. Young blades sprouted in the dark earth, which was scattered with cyclamen and autumn crocus. But the leaves were still green and undiminished in the branches; only a faint tinge of gold in the vines gave the season away (where they had been sprinkled with copper sulphate, entire hillsides were now the colour of verdigris): these and the walnut trees that were beginning to show their steely grey limbs, and the poplars by the stream beds, which were to shed their green-gold leaves from their roots upward till they were tall spectres with a last bright puff at the tip like a candle’s flame.

  Many of the vines were still loaded with unplucked grapes. When I swooped down into a valley and the pale ribbons of smoke announced – before the chimneys and tiles and thatch had come into view – that I was approaching a village, I ate these grapes in quantities, with wonderful apples and pears. Women were filling their aprons with quinces for slatko, which they offered their guests in little spoonfuls. There were plenty of crab apple trees and wild pears, small, hard and with just enough sharpness to leave a faint prickle on the gums. Quantities of walnuts had appeared in the villages and I ate them with honey out of a spoon and filled my pockets, shelling and crunching them as I went. On the outskirts of one of the villages, I came across a peculiar bee garden where the hives were tall cones of mud, like the huts of certain tribes in the Cameroons. Sometimes on the thorn bushes and on the ground of these hamlet approaches there were bright blankets spread out to dry, covering an acre or so with stripes and zigzags in amazing colours. The calm scenery was dotted sparsely by figures, lopping, pruning, gathering, burning, yoking buffaloes, driving donkeys, or calling to their flocks and their dogs.

  The second equinox of my journey was over and this new northward leap across country which I had never planned to see, after the first purifying rains, seemed a long, limpid and peaceful reprieve among the far-tinkling flocks. Quietness dropped from the sky. The swallows had not yet left; they gyrated and now flew low in the villages; but in the hills, crossing and recrossing the path or standing on the dark furrows, magpies abounded. These, and the crows and the rooks, with an occasional owl, were the birds I most often saw or heard for the rest of the journey. Often, sitting or lying under a tree, I was startled out of my torpor by a whirring clatter and a huge grasshopper with bright eyes and twirling feelers would land on my knee. Night fell earlier now – these changes, although they are a continual creeping process, suddenly dawn on one and become, for a time, fixtures, like turning round in Grandmother’s Steps – but the stages of late afternoon and sunset and twilight were spun out into a longer and more elaborate ceremony thanks to the new presence of the clouds: gold, zinc, scarlet and crimson over the westward roll of the Great Balkan towards Plevna – leagues of gold wire, shoals and lagoons, berserk flights of cherubim, burning fleets and the slow-motion destruction of Sodom.

  To avoid the tedium of the main northward road, I followed tracks in the foothills to the east of it, or struck across open country. On the second evening, I found myself climbing and descending under just such a sunset along a narrow track on the slant of the mountain with a friendly black dog. It was no good telling him to go home. This happened several times on this journey; short of
company, they sometimes attached themselves for hours. An amazing sunset faded and a grey twilight deepened, and just before it became completely dark, a turn in this hill track confronted us with an enormous full moon. It loomed in a shock of white out of the steep hillside and if I had been on four legs, I would probably have let out a long howl of surprise like the black dog at my side. He galloped forward and then stopped, barking in his tracks as though to drive it away. But in a few minutes, as the path sank into a hollow, the moon sank with the hills. The dog grew quieter, only to burst out afresh when a dip in the landscape once more laid the moon bare. He rushed forward, followed by his enormous black shadow, frightening it below the skyline, as the answering slope blotted the moon out again, and then bolted back to me with wagging tail, gazing up for approval. During half an hour the moon rose and set a dozen times in this sharply altering landscape, each time with the same effect on the dog. When the moon was free in the upper sky at last, it took some time for my companion’s frenzied barks to sink to a disapproving growl. By this time the path led down into a wide wooded ravine through which curled a shining stream. We followed its windings through a glimmering leafy world. A mile or two along the stream’s course we came on a clearing surrounded by linden trees, and on one side of it, a small derelict mosque surrounded by blackberry bushes. I picked and swallowed here for half an hour accompanied by intermittent moonward wails.