The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Back in the main room I made the treacherous suggestion to Ivancho that we should take the bus to Rustchuk and get out of the rain: I would pay for the journey. Would he please buy the tickets, I said, handing over the money, as my Bulgarian was so bad? He assented eagerly and volubly. There was a hitch at the bus door: he insisted I should get in first. We struggled and the driver shouted impatiently. I managed to shove him in and the driver pulled the lever that slammed the door, and moved off. I could see Ivancho gesticulating and shouting but all in vain. He shot me a harrowing glance from his hare-eyes, I waved, and the rain swallowed them up. In a few minutes, I took a side-path through a field of damp sunflowers. Taking no chances, I followed a wide loop far from the dangers of the main road. The guilt implanted by Ivancho’s reproachful glance almost managed to mar the ensuing feelings of relief and liberation, but not quite. Not even the bitter wind from the east, as steady as an express train, could do that.

  One of the rare attacks of gloom and doubt that now and then tempered the zest and excitement of these travels, smote that night. Though some of it was caused by remorse about my slightly discreditable escape from the racking eternity of Ivancho’s company, the falling depression had been hammered home by the unbroken downpour, lashed into a spiteful anti-human fury by the unrelenting north-east wind that felt as though it was blowing without let or hindrance, as it probably was, direct from Siberia. (After all, now that the barrier of the Balkans lay away to the south, there was no windbreak this side of the Urals to thwart its onrush.) The angry rain-bearing blast had cursed every step of my plod down the glutinous byways till long after dark.

  And what about being suspected of being a spy? This general dejection prompted me to turn and rend the Bulgarians in general and in vacuo. All their obvious qualities, their courage and scrupulous honesty, their frugality, their doggedness and diligence and the passion for literacy (I had been told again and again that Bulgaria, of all the Balkan countries, was the one with the lowest percentage of illiteracy) – all this was forgotten or discounted, and with it, their hospitality and their odd and beautiful songs and their gift for music and, in many cases, a certain attractive, rather melancholy seriousness. Gatcho, whom I really liked, and Nadejda, whom I adored (anyway, she was half Greek, I would have argued), were set on one side as exceptions, and with them, on lower thrones, the many Bulgarians I had liked or who had been amusing or kind, or both. Stripped of all this, how heavy, boorish and sometimes bloodthirsty they seemed (though I didn’t, in my romantic idea of the Balkans, mind this last characteristic, which is common to all Bulgaria’s neighbours, as much as I should, and their political role as Europe’s villains had a certain dark glamour). I made no allowances for the stunting and stifling damage of barbarous occupation for half a millennium, gave no pat on the back for the compensating break with mediaeval feudalism – reproach rather, for lack of its relics and traditions; similarly, no pity for their exclusion from the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, nor congratulations because there had been no Bastille to besiege or Industrial Revolution to undergo. Instead I reproached them for their unilluminated literalness: a bread without yeast, a jokerless pack. Perhaps unjustly, this last accusation is the only one that still seems to me, out of all this railing in the dark, to have some substance.

  The theatre of these ill-tempered and gloomy thoughts only exacerbated them, thanks to my masochistic passion for ungracious living – a passion which is still not quite extinct. Back on the main road, I had made a dive through the soaking darkness, like an outlaw claiming sanctuary, towards the first lighted window on the edge of the first village. (It might have been signposted Dolni Pasarel – I remember this name, and its neighbour Gorni Pasarel, the Upper and the Lower Village, but which one was it? I daren’t risk it.) I had sloshed through a yard full of pigsties and offered, perhaps, out of wetness and fatigue, rather rudely, to pay for a night’s lodging. It was accepted with a touch of ill-grace, probably because no payment was needed or asked for; and here I was in the most primitive village house I had so far seen. Through the rain all the houses had looked curiously squat, as though they were sinking into the ground under shocks of bedraggled, thatch-like, ill-kempt fringes. They were socketed in the earth for about a third of their height, so that on entering one went down several steps into a single, semi-troglodytic and windowless room, with a damp earthen floor and a ledge all round. The walls were of wattle, whitewashed outside but with the uncovered mortar and straw and wicker bare and bulging within. The low ceiling was of bamboo laid across heavy beams, cocooned in cobwebs and black and oily with decades of soot. No chimney was visible: standing, one’s head disappeared in a pendant layer of smoke from which one stooped again red-eyed and coughing: a limitation which imposed a more bear-like gait than usual on the room’s seven denizens. (For the hundredth time, in rustic dwellings in Eastern Europe, the thought of the lack of privacy arose. Nobody is ever alone, whether engendering, giving birth or dying; dark nocturnal tussles and Neolithic midwifery and death rattles and dirges are all, at the very least, within earshot.) We had swallowed a fasting supper of boiled spinach, cheese like concrete, and water, in semi-silence, a silence probably cast – a fresh cause for later guilt – by my scowling mood, and then retired.

  Lying on the ledge in this shadowy room, with the wind and rain outside competing with the stertorous polyphony indoors – a chorus which was startlingly varied every so often by a change of key or by one of the seven sleepers abruptly falling silent – I could just discern, by the ikon’s glimmer and the diminishing glow of the logs, in front of which my boots and coat and festooned puttees were steaming, a few, detached landmarks on the ledge and the floor: a jutting whisker, a gaping mouth, the upturned cowhide canoe-tip of a moccasin at the end of a rawhide, cross-gartered and outflung leg. There can have been little change since Omurtag’s day. It was the world of Gurth and Wamba, a Saxon swineherd’s hut just after curfew. It can’t have been later than ten, and here I was fumbling for the track of a flea, or possibly two, under my damp shirt, and as far from sleep as I was from any familiar geographical or psychological landmark. (I have only said so little about vermin in this narrative because Balkan travellers enlarge on them so exhaustively. They wrecked many nights.) But the trouble wasn’t this, or even the related thought of all these weeks without a bath, apart from an occasional slosh in ponds and streams; or the weather, or the petty vexations of the road, or the fug and the claustrophobia.

  Nor again, was it the dissimilarity of my habitat from Chenonceaux or Chatsworth, or the anguish which at certain seasons among the ruins of Luxor, in the Atlas passes or on the very slopes of the Parthenon, suddenly halts more sophisticated travellers than I was, catches them by the throat and mists their eyes with a faraway look: the thought of missing the young peas, new potatoes in early summer, and raspberries and cream, or – at this time of the year – partridges, before all their brief spans are over; or, less compellingly, because their seven-month lease is not so sharp a reminder of the fleetingness of time, oysters.

  My dejection was not as specific as this, but, in one way, it was akin, and it was incurred by two things. One of these is easy to explain. It is this: ever since I could remember, my boredom threshold had been so high that it scarcely existed at all. With the exception of a minute handful of physical and mental types, surroundings and landscapes and atmospheres and orders of conversation, I was unboreable, like an unsinkable battleship. I seemed to be unequipped with the saving instrument that enabled everyone else to segregate from random circumstances whatever would stimulate, entertain and reward them intellectually, concentrate on these and discard the rest. My trouble was that practically everything, not only the most disparate, contradictory and mutually exclusive things and people, but many others that everyone else found repellent, painful, unrewarding and above all tedious, filled me with the same wild fascination. I think it was the confusion brought about by all these indiscriminate and concurrent and totally undisciplined en
thusiasms that had landed me in the soup so often. They would boil over; the sack followed. (Like many young I also suffered intermittently from the conviction, which puzzling reverses fail for a long time to dispel, that had they time and inclination they could confute philosophers, command armies, rule countries, compose operas, paint and sculpt better than Michelangelo, beat the record up Everest, write a sonnet sequence in a fortnight that would make experts reassess Shakespeare, and then, after discovering the cure for cancer and winning the Grand National steeplechase, break out into metres and thoughts that would fix the mould of poetry for several generations.)

  This calamity-ridden anti-boredom was extremely active before I started this journey. The moment the Channel was crossed, it had broken into a gallop and unbelievably without mishap: so far, at any rate. It would be impossible to exaggerate the passionate excitement and delight that infected every second. My mouth was as unexactingly agape as the seal’s to the flung bloater. There was hardly anything detectable by the five senses which was not sharpened and transformed, and which, strangely and miraculously, did not increase in intensity of enjoyment with familiarity and repetition. In spite of countless rustic sojourns, this half-subterranean abode, instead of seeming as it did tonight, a den of squalor and doom, could have been as thick in marvels as Aladdin’s cave. I might, judging by my response to phenomena for most of these thousands of miles, have been a serious drug addict. This euphoria is bound, thanks to the time lag, to be one of the things that elude this narrative. But it intensified tastes, transformed smells, studded faces and landscapes with illusory lights and facets, gave extra resonances to sounds, complicated surfaces, shapes, textures and consistencies, and stepped up the voltage to a degree that must sometimes have given the impression of a screw loose.

  The corollary of this was a nightmarish gloom of an equally exaggerated pitch, usually arriving without warning, but fortunately not often, and for the last months, more seldom still. The blow had fallen tonight. I lay and scratched in the dark, loathing my surroundings. What a godforsaken place. Even if I spoke the language properly, instead of a voluble smattering, what would there be to talk about with the noisily hibernating rustics swathed all over this stifling hell-hole? Crops? Wars? Pig-raising? Vegetable marrows? Werewolves? Vampires? Surely I’d heard enough about them during the last few months? Brittle alternative fantasies, and very conventional ones, began to glow and proliferate in the shadows, each with the wavering shape, the shimmering colours and the lifespan of a soap bubble: Oxford or Cambridge now harbouring so many schoolfellows and friends, where an effortless virtuosity in Greek, Latin, history and literature went hand in hand with a marvellous time on the lines of Sinister Street. Heidelberg for a term or two, surrounded by stained glass windows, lidded mugs, conifers and scarred Junkers with names like distant cannon fire? Perhaps, but more beckoningly than these, the Sorbonne, talking half the night with dashing and brilliant companions all about how to bring out books of verse, and beautiful girl students at café tables under trees or in studios modelled on illustrations? A hunting scene would wobble briefly towards the ceiling and pop inaudibly.

  I noticed that I had transformed such scenes into a curious hybrid. The protagonist of these fleeting and absurd success stories was a sort of super-me ten years older or more, with the worldly poise of a Moss Bros advertisement (a young commodore on leave?) but also with a European and cosmopolitan polish: lolling at ease under tiers of gilt-backed books softly lit from below, just out of a bath, deep in an armchair by a fire, lifting a heavy cut-glass tumbler of whisky and soda. He would appear again – it was half-past ten in this dark cottage now – at the end of dinner in a thin film of cigar smoke, amazing old and young with acumen and omniscience and wit in a constellation of candle flames and brandy glasses – balloons within balloons – pausing on the way down a staircase into a candelabra-forested ballroom beside a cool and shadowy beauty, while, from below, volleys of longing glances sailed towards her along a hundred radii, bouncing off like arrows from a buckler into the bright air. With lowered lids, silent, expert and aloof, they began to float rather than to dance; the longing glances wound themselves like numberless threads on the slow revolving spindle of the two dancers, until at last they gyrated anti-clockwise towards the French windows, and the unwound threads dropped loose again as they glided out of sight among the trees. By this time the semi-stranger had become so insufferably suave that he had lost all identity with his part-owner and inventor; to such an extent that I was left behind, part of the jealous press of faces against the panes. I had noticed, anyway, with some surprise as they vanished, that he was a foot taller than me, with black hair, a narrow moustache and a mole on his left temple. I revenged myself by annihilating him.

  There was much thought of these unmet women. At moments like now of revulsion against Balkan rawness, the dominant abstract figure would, by reaction – like the abolished alter ego before he got out of hand – tend towards urbanity and sophistication, her clothes slightly rustling when in motion. All were beautiful and all romantic; at one end was a rather wild girl, interested at the very least in literature or painting or one of the arts, knowing about as much – not a very hard task – or, ideally, slightly less than me. At the other end was someone of the same order who knew a great deal more; much calmer and more worldly-wise, probably several years older, the one in the ascendant at the moment, but with enough in common with the other to be the same person separated by a number of years; both had a similar laugh.

  As the night advanced these or similar thoughts replaced the initial gloom, and the excitement of this wholly imaginary relationship with somebody whose face I never saw, was too great: too great and too anxious; for it was no longer any good smiling dismissively in the dark and trying to go to sleep; the accumulation of data had lifted the situation clean out of hypothesis and installed it somewhere very close to reality. (And as it turned out, not wrongly, as six months later, long after the end of this book, it miraculously happened.)

  The inevitable dismantlement was swift and painless. As dawn approached, the frontiers of Western Europe, which had merged in a confusion of homesickness and so tortuously prompted the familiar thoughts of the last hours, and marked them with their geographic setting, were back in their places, the capitals disentangled, the provincial cities with their bridges and embankments shining in the water. There, most of them still unknown, they waited at the other side of the night. The distance seemed enormous. Would this Scythian wind, which was still slashing the wattle walls with rain, cross the intervening plains and ranges, and with a thousand scattered creaks, set all the weathercocks of the West on the move?

  Earlier on, these westward thoughts had raised another, a more general and far more disturbing problem, one which only assailed me at moments of depression and low resistance: what on earth was I up to? An embarrassing question, and one which I will try to answer between here and the last page. But now all had changed. Depression had vanished; the interior of the hut, pitch dark except for the twinkling light suspended in the corner, was harmonious and severe; or was that a line of watery daybreak surrounding the door? There was a faint stir among the sleepers and it would soon be time to get back to the road to Rustchuk.

  • • •

  It seemed, when I got there next evening, rather an exciting town, with its bright shops and electric lights, the multitude of cafés, the fiacres with their ribbed hoods raised, even a taxi or two, and, at the bottom of lamp-lit streets, the Danube with its landing stages, warehouses, cranes and anchored craft, including three gunboats which were the hard core of the Bulgarian navy.

  All this, to my unjaded eyes, supplied the little riverine port with an almost metropolitan aura. I have heard from other travellers that it is considered an ugly, charmless place. Nothing pre-Turkish and very little before the nineteenth century. But not to me. Parts of it had a dilapidated Victorian feeling; better still, thanks to the great river on which it was built, a slight, but distinct and ra
ther seductive alloy of Mitteleuropa tempered its Balkan consistency. There was even a bookshop and newsagents with foreign newspapers, mostly German and Austrian: Neue Freie Presse, Frankfurter Zeitung, Hannoverscher Anzeiger, Berliner Tageblatt, then the Pesti Hirlap – no good to me, alas – Le Matin, and, yes, The Times and The Continental and the Daily Mail. I wondered who these real and putative readers could be. Better still, a pile of unbought back numbers. I bought an armful of these, and, after an immense Viennese coffee, read through the whole fortnight-old drama of the assassination of King Alexander and Barthou. Nobody seemed to challenge Bulgarian claims. Gatcho would be pleased. Then, as the puddle of rainwater grew larger round my boots under the table, I sat back coughing happily over one of those nearly black Austrian cigars, savouring the lights, the dryness and the water, and the pleasant mixture of bustle and leisure. I felt like a seasoned traveller in the Balkans, Central Europe or Russia from the stories and novels of Saki. I gazed out at the bright street outside, liquescent and broken up like a pointilliste painting by the light-refracting raindrops that splashed and wriggled down the windowpanes, savouring the expanse of heavy marble-topped tables (that wonderful surface for covert drawing with a pencil, or, better still, a fountain pen) and, near the door, the flimsy architecture of ribboned chocolate boxes, so often and inexplicably surmounted by a celluloid baby or a powdered marchioness in satin panniers – for this was a Evropaiski establishment, reluctant to serve Turkish coffee and ready to faint should anyone suggest a nargileh. I had taken to these at once, and spent hours gurgling in their toils, mumbling quatrains of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (I had it nearly all by heart from a pocket edition sent by my mother) in humbler latticed cafés. But this one, alongside the elaborate tiers of western cakes and the puffed, shiny and cream-filled, poppy-seed and caraway-sprinkled crescents and Struwwelpeterish pretzels, was not so European as to exclude an array of oriental sweetmeats, notably kadaif, like a dish of sweet shredded wheat, and, far better, baklava. I had several times peered into warm vaults in the small hours to see pastry-cooks cross-legged in a ring on large, flour-dusted wooden platforms, stretching almost transparent membranes of pastry several yards in circumference, before folding them, layer on layer, each interval anointed with honey or syrup and chopped almonds and walnuts, into flat pans the size of Trojan shields and then, after a deft circular trimming with long knives, sliding them with long poles into dragon-breathed ovens. They emerge in crumbly brown discs, to be sliced up with trowels into delicious dripping shapes with the consistency, but not the taste, of millefeuilles. These triumphs of taste and sensory delight spread all through the Balkans and Levant, and though they are known as Turkish, they are probably, like so much that the Ottomans inherited from their forerunners, Byzantine in origin. I feel that they were known to logothetes and sebastocrators long before a pasha ever buried his teeth in them. They are invariably sliced up by intersecting strokes into a lozengy pattern; in fact, they have given their name, in demotic Greek among rustic joiners, to all forms of trelliswork. A Balkan businessman, slipping away from his office for a moment in the late morning, is far more likely to be heading for a quick baklava than a drink.