The mosque must have been half ruined for many years. The dome and the walls were almost intact but most of the plaster had fallen away and the minaret was broken diagonally near its base, exposing to the moon the twist of the stairs round their central pillar like the volutes of a smashed ammonite’s fossil. It seemed a strange place for a mosque, so far away from any village. Perhaps it was a tomb or the hermitage of a solitary dervish a couple of centuries ago. Once more there was a tantalizing marble slab embedded on the wall, inscribed with many lines of Arabian characters. A rusty horseshoe, wisps of hay on the moonlit floor, an old tin plate, a pile of faggots and the black smoke-marks on the walls suggested that the place sometimes sheltered mounted travellers for the night. It was a perfect lair for a band of haiduks, those Robin Hood-like bandits who played such a part in Bulgarian life under the Turks. I explored the small clearing. Half a dozen moss-grown monoliths, each topped with a turban and one broken in half with its pleated capital prone in the grass, were nearly swallowed up in bracken and weed and the brambles of the blackberries. A large flat stone jutted into the gleaming stream.
This wonderful place seemed to be miles from a village, so I slept there. I built a large fire inside with the welcome faggots and a few-half burnt logs that I discovered tucked away in the remains of the mihrab, and shared a Hungarian sausage and half a loaf with the dog – who, passant, sejant then couchant, settled by the fire as though he had never lived anywhere else – and then finished up with some pears and walnuts; setting out, afterwards, for the big stone by the stream to smoke. On the way there, we almost trod on an owl which must have been standing in the grass. It sailed into the trees without a sound. By the brook I put off going to sleep from cigarette to cigarette as the moon followed its journey through the sparse clouds. The place was holy and enchanted. This spell was only faintly disturbed by the black dog, mercifully inured by now to the phenomenon overhead, whizzing into the undergrowth with hackles like a clothes brush at the faintest rustle of nocturnal stirring, always returning panting, empty-jawed, and with tongue hanging out through the semblance of a smile, to fling himself down on the bank with a lunatic upward gaze of appeal for advice or approbation which pats on his pacified scruff seemed only partly to satisfy. The curl of his tail remained a dark symbol of interrogation. After sitting under these silver leaves and listening to the water running by for most of the moon’s journey, we returned to the mosque. Lying beside the crackling faggots with my head on the familiar billet of my rucksack and the dog stretched crusaderishly at my feet, soon deep in a sleep that no phantom quarry disturbed, I felt another access of one of the great and recurring delights of these travels: the awareness that nobody in the world knew where I was, and in this case not even I with any certainty. My hand outstretched over the bright thorns sent a giant shadow-hand clean across the flickering firelight in the hollow of the dome, ringed with concentric circles like the grooves on an oil-jar to the summit just above. The owl hooted from a tree nearby.
The dog had vanished when I woke. It was just as well since, if he had accompanied me any further, he might have lost his way back: but I was sorry. At that very moment he was probably bounding home. Outside the mosque a brilliant dawn was spreading down the valley, sweeping away the morning dew like the hounds of Hippolyta. A flock grazed across the meadow the other side of the stream, and the tufted ruin caught the morning light in a bright positive print of the dark and silvery negative of a few hours ago. Spreading long shadows on the damp grass, the almost level sunbeams revealed something that the deceptive glimmer of the night had hidden: a confetti of mushrooms, all round the mosque and in the field beyond, huddling in groups. I filled a big red bandanna with them before setting off.
• • •
A difficulty crops up here. The distance on my map from Tirnovo to Rustchuk could easily be covered on foot in under a week. There are, in fact, only five pencil crosses on this journey indicating where I slept. Perhaps I forgot to enter some. Yet according to two of the bare dozen only exactly ascertainable dates on this journey – the assassination of King Alexander and a customs stamp on the Bulgarian frontier – the journey took thirteen days. There is nothing unusual here; there was no hurry, and in Transylvania I had taken a great deal longer sometimes to travel far less. But in Transylvania there had been every reason for dawdling – exciting company, libraries, horses, friends and sentimental involvements, and every room with its furniture and books and the view out of the windows, and every face and every name, including those of neighbours and servants, horses and dogs, I can remember as if I had seen them three minutes ago. But not here. Why was I so slow? Perhaps something tremendous occurred to hold me up, which will burst on me in an illuminating thunderclap the moment these pages are irrevocably out of my hands. But for the moment, concentrate as I may, all is dim, except a few lucid alcoves of memory scooped out of these nebulous kilometres. But in the case of these surviving cartouches of memory, such as those of the last few pages where each detail, like a torch held up to a bas-relief in a cave, suddenly juts, I can still taste the blackberries and recapture the owl’s note and the texture of that black dog’s coat. Indeed considering how often since, and at the expense of a thousand others, I have thought of those eventless hours, prompted by an affinity of wood or out of the blue in the middle of a dinner or waiting for a train, the space allotted them here is a great feat of compression.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the vagueness of the following days lies in the contours of the country. Unlike the sharp southern descent, all Bulgaria north of the Balkan watershed descends in a succession of waving ledges that tilt gradually down to the Danube’s bed in plateau after plateau, each wide step of the shallow staircase becoming tamer until the lowest merges imperceptibly with the diligent lowlands; and with each downward tread the line of the watershed falls further south: no diamond peaks at hand to incite the mind, hills and recollection growing blunter pace by pace, and both merging at last in the tabula rasa of the plain.
The moonlit ruin might have had some crucial significance in a fairy tale and so might the next surviving apparition, the last of the wonderful Ottoman bridges on this journey, flying over the water – probably over the same flow that turned the mill-wheel, further downstream – in a steep semicircular loop of cobwebbed grey masonry. The mood of folktales pervades the blur of these days. The imminence of a village was often announced by meeting a crippled and toothless crone picking up firewood and bent in two under a vast burden of sticks, identical with folk-tale figures who, had I been the third feckless son and shouldering her burden, might have granted me three wishes and made my fortune. But our exchange was confined to ‘dobro vetcher, gospoja’,[1] on my side, or ‘dobro den’ on theirs.
Another moment: an ikon of St Irene behind glass in the recess of a wayside store ikon-stand, and a bird hovering and fluttering before pecking with loud taps as though bent on breaking and entering. It may, I think now though I wouldn’t have known then, have been a wheatear, for each upward beat showed a brilliant white flash of tail and body which the downstroke of its more sober-coloured wings obscured. The old candle-end inside must have looked like a bit of bread or a slug. It was ten minutes before this pecking and fluttering siege was raised and the besieger sheared off empty-beaked. The next lantern slide to drop into its slot is a village dairy, where I was finishing a small earthenware dish of my favourite food in Bulgaria: yaourt. (It seems in retrospect that I almost lived on this stuff, sprinkling sugar on the dimpled crust and then spooning away. I had yet to learn how to squeeze lemon on top until the sugar is soaked, in the manner of some cunning Athenians. I was further still from the delicious Cretan method: pouring in a circular helping of honey from a rotating spoon-tip and then scattering the chryselephantine whorls with fragments of peeled walnut. It is indescribably good.) Bulgarians are held to be the best yaourt-makers in the Balkan peninsula; in fact, their skill as dairymen is second only to their mastery of market gardening. Oddly, though, the w
ord ‘yaourt’ is never used in Bulgaria; they call it kissolo mleko, ‘sour milk’.
A party of six settled at the next table, all countrymen in homespun, rawhide footgear and sashes, but two in broad-brimmed hats of plaited osier, the others in cloth caps. They seemed of a finer grain than the ordinary Bulgarian peasant and quiet-voiced, eyes wide with different but friendly openness, untroubled smiles and good-humoured wrinkles round their eyes and the corners of their mouths. An indefinable presiding charm emanated from them. Anyone would have felt calm and happy in their neighbourhood. Appropriately, as I divined – more from their giveaway gear than the unfamiliar words of their eavesdropped discourse – they were a party of itinerant beekeepers travelling up and down the region and tidying up the hives for the winter. I wondered how they dealt with those curious cones of mud I had seen; they looked proof against apiarists. A fallout of the manna of their calling, as gentle as pollen, touched me with grace – a change in this fiery kingdom with its ‘talk of peace that always turned to slaughter’ (in the words of the poet Kapetanakis); to think of them, armed with nothing more harmful than a smoke-gun, going about their Georgic business; dealing with nothing but bees, and wax for sculptors and cobblers and candles, and honey for everyone; mobled in muslin, calm-browed comb-setters and swarm-handlers of the scattered thorps.
• • •
I usually got up at dawn or soon afterwards on this journey, except when I struck lucky by staying with someone, or in circumstances of unusual comfort; but not always. Occasionally I would lie in bed on squalid pallets reading till noon, and once all day until dinner time. Not that there was anything to complain of in my quarters in the little town of Boritza, where I had taken a room for the night in a sort of loft above a wheelwright’s. Looking through a trapdoor and down a ladder almost beside my bed, I could see the bald patch on the crown of the wheelwright’s head as, ankle deep in shavings and surrounded by a disorder of herbs, spokes, felloes and swingletrees, he hammered and planed or sawed his way through planks with a square and biblical-looking saw in which the blade was strung with thongs between a square wooden frame, or chipped and sliced at a block with a hammer-backed adze or thumped with a mallet. All his tools had a look of Nazarene antiquity. The sunbeams falling across this scattered gear danced with sawdust and the smell of the freshly sawn wood floated up the steps, a scent only bettered by a baker’s shop when they are shovelling the loaves out of the oven. Hoofs and wheels clattered and creaked over the cobbles under my window, and beyond them, a chorus of frogs.
But these impressions only penetrated intermittently: I was halfway through The Brothers Karamazov, which I had started the evening before and read all through the night: my first introduction to Dostoevsky, in a French yellow-back translation by Le Comte Prozor. Helplessly spellbound, I postponed getting up from half-hour to half-hour, in spite of the bright autumn morning outside. But at about eleven o’clock, the light lost its brilliance on the page. Clouds had collected and soon the sky dissolved. A steady downpour started. This lets me off, I thought with delight, settling down more comfortably to the doings of Alyosha, and only descending the staircase at two, rather shamefaced to seem so idle a lodger. I sat on in an eating-house all the afternoon, brushing away the lazy autumn flies that loitered across the print, only dimly aware of the steady patter of the rain, interrupted every now and then by the friendly bewilderment of the owner, who sat swishing the flies from his brow at the other window. ‘You read a lot,’ he would observe hourly – ‘mnogo [much].’ ‘Da,’ I answered faultlessly. The only other people there between meals were two frowning policemen who sat for an hour at the next table in silence with their rifles between their knees, fixing me with unsettling scrutiny. My heart sank. At last one got up, saluted, and asked me politely if I could spare two of those English cigarettes I had been smoking, for him and his pal. I bestowed several on them with relief. (I had recklessly bought two packets of Player’s Navy Cut in Tirnovo.) I had thought the police might have been tipped off by someone in Tirnovo to dog my footsteps, having heard Vasil’s suspicions about my being a spion at umpteenth hand. The book carried me all through supper until closing time and by candlelight until half-past three in the morning, when I finished it at last, exhausted and excited.
Dostoevsky ever since, and even the mention of his name, evokes a momentary impression of rain and fresh-sawn wood.
• • •
The following days were raining off and on the whole time, soaking the lowlands and an ever-thickening crop of villages. I stuck to the main road, watching occasional cars pass, and, more temptingly, buses, with РУССЕ plastered across the front – Russe, the Bulgarian name for Rustchuk. There was little else but carts, all with their semicircular yokes, and, inevitably, Gypsies, the many-flounced dresses of the women flapping round their ankles with the wet and their long hair glued to their cheeks. All were barefoot, with several babies in the backs of the wagons, stark naked among the pots and the half-woven baskets and the tent poles. At one point I found myself trudging through the middle of some large-scale army manoeuvres: platoons labouring through the downpour under enormous packs of matted cowhide with their bedding strapped round them. Horse-drawn cannons creaked past along the straight, flat road, and at one moment a troop of cavalry wheeled, trotted and then galloped across the road and away over the plain, scabbards dancing up and down against the flanks of strong and shaggy horses. They were rather impressive, reminiscent of those full-page drawings of the Balkan Wars in bound volumes of the Illustrated London News. The soldiers were now in winter uniform. I, too, had changed into my long-folded breeches and puttees – and even into my overcoat – out of commission for months except as a covering at night.
On one of these drizzly stretches, I fell in with a fellow wayfarer heading north like me, a young barber from Pazardjik called Ivancho, threadbare and urban and with a face like a hare’s. Where was I from? Anglitchanin? Tchudesno! – ‘Wonderful!’ This revelation was followed by a burst of talk that needed no answer. It was uttered at such speed that I could scarcely understand a word – at the same time eager, confidential and ear-piercing, and without the faintest trace of punctuation, accompanied by many gestures and with a fixed smile and those hare’s eyes projecting and rolling, as though loose in their sockets. It continued for mile after mile till my head began to swim and ache. I tried to detach myself and draw on inner resources, merely muttering Da or Nè when a pause occurred. But these were not always the right answers and my companion would begin again, catching me by the elbow and prodding me with his forefinger with redoubled urgency and a crab-like veer of his fast and tripping gait that always edged me across the road and nearly into the field, till I darted round the other side and into the middle again, only to be seized once more and harangued off the road on the other side with the same smiling urgency and with eyes peering mesmerically so that it seemed impossible to deflect them. Sometimes he was walking backwards in front, almost dancing along the road in reverse, the unstaunchable flow gushing unbroken from his smiling and gabbling lips. Once I turned round in a circle and he danced briskly round in a wider circle still talking faster and faster. I tried to counter-attack by resolutely bawling Stormy Weather, but it was too slow. He dived in between the bars, so I shifted to the Lincolnshire Poacher, Lillibulero, On a Friday Morn when we set Sail, and Maurice Chevalier’s Valentine, over and over again. Whenever he tried to hammer in a wedge of speech or when I paused for breath, I made more noise marching ahead with exaggerated resolution, faster and faster, glaring straight ahead. When I fell silent after a terrific crescendo to see if I had won, there was an outbreak of claps and high-pitched laughter and the tide of speech swept on. I was routed. After another hour, I stopped in my tracks, flourished my hands to the sky, shouting ‘Please! Please, Ivancho! Molya! Molya!’ At one moment I believe I actually seized and shook him by the shoulders, but laughter and a million syllables was the only response. I stumbled on like a sleepwalker or a condemned man with sunk h
ead and closed eyes, but the piercing spate broke over me unhindered. My head was splitting and I sighed for the tomb and the silence of eternity. People had often teased me for gasbag tendencies, especially when a bit drunk. If only they could see this retribution!
There was only one hope. Ivancho belonged to some kind of pan-Bulgarian barbers’ guild – he had showed me a dog-eared card with a snapshot glued to it – and in two nearby villages that we had passed before I realized how it worked, he had entered a barber’s shop, displayed his card and emerged with a handful of leva. In the next village we came to, I took discreetly to my heels and ran full tilt along the road. Looking back, I saw him emerge, catch sight of my diminishing figure, and set off in pursuit. But I had a good start and the distance widened. I pounded on like a stag with a lightening heart and finally, when the road stretched bare behind me, slowed down, free at last. But a few minutes later a northward-bound car slowed down and Ivancho, with a forefinger wagging in playful admonition, leapt from the running-board.
There was nothing for it. All the evening, and all through dinner, the torment continued till at last I lurched to bed, but not to sleep for any time. Fortunately, though, owing to lack of room, different roofs were sheltering us. After a few nightmare-ridden hours, I got up in the dark, paid, and slipped out before breakfast, and away. But I had not gone a furlong before a waiting shadow detached itself from a tree. A cheerful voice, refreshed by sleep, wished me good morning, and a friendly hand fluttered to my shoulder. Day broke slowly.
Stunned and battered, I saw my chance early in the afternoon. We were sheltering from the rain, drinking Russian tea an inch deep in sugar in the kretchma of a large village. How pungently the memory of those kretchmas sticks: the cubicle of wooden railing in the corner, where the bottles were lined on shelves, tin tables, rickety chairs, perhaps a hobbled ram in a corner and half a dozen live fowls trussed together by their feet, stertorous hawking and trajectories of spit, a Slavonic hubbub, the padding of swaddled feet across the puddles, wagoners drinking whip in hand and the smell of slivo, coffee, sweet tea, rank tobacco, damp homespun, sweat, charcoal, dogs, stable and cowshed. I rather liked them! There was always so much going on. A battered bus was drawn up outside, and the driver-conductor was drinking with some cronies at another table. I left the table with the excuse of the lavatory, and, outside, made a pleading gesture towards the conductor through the glass top of a door. He joined me, and I haltingly explained my case. He had heard and seen the social amenities rattling about my table; perhaps he could tell from my eyes that he was talking to a soul in hell.
The Broken Road Page 12