Idly I inspected the circular electric light plugs that were sprinkled at random over the café walls, or gathered here and there in huddling constellations, and the number of prongs and loose ends of flex projecting from the plaster like whiskers: proud emblems of victory, all through the Balkan peninsula, over the bad old days of oil and wax. (The abandoned riot and borborygmus of exposed piping, and the unhealed scars of its entries and exits, through the rooms of every plumbed house, even if it had been rusting there since the reign of Czar Ferdinand, tell similar tidings of modernity.) Here, too, overhead, hung the opaque white globular lampshades – in the smarter cafés they were clouded alabaster bowls hanging from three metal chains – darkly blurred at the bottom by a decade’s worth of dead flies. I had spent unnumbered happy hours reading and writing in these havens during the last few months and was well versed in their details and degrees. I looked for another invariable adjunct: an enlarged Victorian photograph of the founder, and there it was, with high unaccustomed collar and lacquered moustaches with a Kaiserish twist, also the hanging portraits of Queen Joanna and – sad, primly moustached and sympathetic in a white uniform with his hands resting on his sword hilt – Czar Boris.[2] (It always came as a surprise when knowing Bulgarians reminded me that their royal house – Saxe-Coburg-Gotha – is, in the male line, the same as ours. Czar Boris was immensely popular, and rightly so by all accounts.)
Two card games were in full swing, and each card in its turn was flung like a gauntlet: dominoes were shuffled and dice rattled, the cards smacked from spike to spike, and waiters summoned by brisk salvoes of masterful claps. It was clearly the hub of Rustchuk café life, the resort of merchants and the smarter retailers, of doctors, lawyers and chemists and officers. There was a table full of young naval officers with hanging, gold-mounted dirks and there was a vladika with a silver-topped pontifical staff and a gold pectoral ornament, his raven habit a-billow, delivering a homily to – I learnt – the mayor and the town clerk; his white beard gushed from his ears, his nostrils, his cheeks and almost out of his eyes, which fulminated under a mobile and hoary brow. As he underlined the flow of his rhetoric with a huge and eloquent forefinger, I could almost see the words that rolled from his mouth, in line upon line of Cyrillic script illuminated on the vellum of a missal’s page. I was filled with admiration, as I had been in contemplation of the high clergy in Sofia and Rila, by the enormous height of this prelate. Later on, in Greece, I formed the idea that Orthodox bishops might be promoted by height; metropolitans are all tall, archbishops taller still and patriarchs, enormous. A friend deeply versed in these matters thinks the height comes later, in spiritual stature: preferment pulls them out like telescopes. Their long hair and all those voluminous beards seem to represent strength, as with Samson, turning them into hairy athletes of God; the opposite of the monastic humility that the shorn jowls and the stubbly scalps of the West portend. It must be on this principle that even the clergy of the Catholic Mirdites of northern Albania all grow beards. For these beards in the Greek Orthodox world suggest majority and divine majesty like the cloud that enveloped Zeus on Tenedos.
Many of the newspapers in their stiff racks were German and their readers conversed together in Austrian accents. The Armenian readers argued in Armenian, and the Sephardim ravelled their way in Ladino Spanish. All, as dealers or local agents, were connected in some way, I imagine, with the Danube trade. A sort of trance overcame me in these places. It seemed impossible to wrench myself from the lulling influences of this slowly developing continuum, the tentative permutations and exfoliations, the conjectural biographies and the hidden rapports implicit in the almost eventless flux. It had once or twice taken as long as half a day – worse than Horace’s river-gazing yokel leaning over a bridge – but I had to find a hotel. The wrench was made.
• • •
‘You look like a drowned rat!’
Already pretty wet, I had rashly set out coatless in a lull in the rain and had been caught in a cloudburst. The words were uttered with friendly concern, in German, and a few moments later, the time to fetch a towel, my head was being briskly rubbed, to an accompaniment of commiseration, with half-scolding clicks of the tongue.
I had determined to stay the night somewhere that was a bit grander than my usual squalid style, and have a bath at last, the first place I alighted on. The Czar Ferdinand? Christo Boteff? The Bulgaria? The Balkan? I found a small hotel, not far from the river, but the name has vanished. A nice-looking woman in a clean starched apron was sewing in a wicker chair in a small office room with a postcard of Archduke Otto on the wall. She switched her enquiries into German. Where had I come from? It had been raining all day. What I needed was a hot bath. She would light one at once. ‘Just look at you!’
This was a rare event; the furore which demands for a bath usually aroused, were more than it was worth. This was marvellous. I had left my rucksack at the café while I hunted for a hotel, and she said the hot water would be piping hot by the time I got back with it. I set off jubilantly through the soaking streets. I soon had to wipe the smile off my face. The rucksack had gone. I had left it by a hatstand near the door. Nobody had seen it disappear, though it had attracted notice when I first splashed in with it. All enquiries were in vain, and finally the proprietor insisted on coming to the police station with me; details were given, my address recorded, general pessimism expressed, and I went back to the hotel in a gloomy frame of mind.
It was the worst thing that could have happened. I had my passport and money, the loss of the clothes would be a nuisance, the sketchbook, in which the entries had been growing scarcer, was more easily written off than it would have been a few months earlier. But it was the ten months of notes that mattered. Why on earth hadn’t I posted them back to England? They weighed little enough. Why hadn’t I handed the rucksack over to the clerk in the café? Why hadn’t I . . . the numerous alternatives were infuriating and distressing. In a way, my whole life had seemed to revolve round these stiff-covered exercise books; keeping them up to date had acquired the charm and mystery of a secret religion, solemnized daily, and sometimes several times a day; and the books themselves had become cult objects containing the detailed log of every day’s travel, flowery descriptions, conversations, rough notes and elaborate essays, verses, ‘thoughts’, addresses, sketches of costumes, buildings, tools, weapons, saddlery, patterns, sketch maps, plans, glossaries, first steps in German, Hungarian, Rumanian and Bulgarian, fragments of Romany and Yiddish, the words of lots of songs, attempts at verse translations from French and Latin, limericks, private puzzles and word games – all the telling but temporarily unemployable data put by for a rainy day (but almost never used), all the scribbled by-products that solitude and leisure and paper and pencil throw up. I used to gloat over these volumes, spread them out on beds, weigh them alternately in my hand and stroke their mottled bindings. The loss of the other rucksack in Munich had seemed irreplaceable at the time, but then only a month’s alluvium of notes had had time to silt up. How fiercely at first I had guarded its replacement! This second loss was an amputation.
My reappearance at the hotel must have been even more woebegone than the first. The white-aproned woman at once saw that something was badly wrong. She understood this at once. ‘Never mind. You’re sure to get it back.’ She insisted that I was shivering and, feeling sorry for myself, I willingly fell in with her solicitude. She produced a bottle of Austrian schnapps and made me swallow a couple of glasses, while I moaned with obsessive despair about my lost books. How I would have enjoyed the waiting bath at another time! It was filled from one of those tall Central European cylinders of hammered bronze, and a special fire had to be kindled for each bather. When I padded to my room – towel-swathed, clothes in one hand – I couldn’t believe my eyes: there was a bedside lamp! Usually there was only a bare bulb in the middle of the ceiling. But here was a majestic reflected mahogany wardrobe, and a great Biedermeier bed with – never found in my usual humble hotels and khans –
gleaming clean sheets, the top one buttoned, Mitteleuropa fashion, on to a bright red eiderdown. On the wall hung oleographs of an Alp at dawn and Lake Maggiore with the Borromeo Islands (stirring childhood memories for me) and a lute-playing love-scene from Orlando Furioso. Laid out across the eiderdown was an old-fashioned white nightshirt. I donned it, and slipped in. The soles of my feet met the surface of a giant earthenware hot water bottle. It was unbelievable! All passion spent, I lay back, stripped of possessions, in a floating condition of melancholy peace. There was a touch of the relief and impotence that might overcome an outlaw in the prison infirmary apprehended after a long chase over the moors. But only a touch; the rest belonged to the Arabian Nights.
I was roused from it by the pressure of a tray: ‘Sit up, drink it while it’s hot.’ She was off again. There was some delicious soup, a jug of wine and a hot roll wrapped in a napkin, butter, pepper, salt. In five minutes this wonderful woman was back with some eggs scrambled in butter and a pear. She sat down and folded her hands in her lap. ‘I went to the police while you were in your bath,’ she said, ‘and told them you were a famous English author, in spite of your youth; weltberühmt like John Galsworthy, only younger. They’ll try their best.’
My benefactress (she was called Rosa) was the head maid in the hotel, in fact at present the only one, and really the manageress too. The place had seen better days, the owners took no interest in it; she did her best. It was often empty, as it was at the moment (except for me) so she’d been able to put me in the best room. Otherwise, it was rather a sad, echoing place. These bare passages! No carpets! All the repairs that needed doing! ‘Ayi, mayi!’ she sighed, pulling her sewing in her lap. ‘If only they’d let me do it up! You’d see!’
Rosa was from Rustchuk, but had gone as a maid with the family of a tobacco representative to Vienna at the age of seventeen and stayed on when they returned, doing various jobs in service in Austrian families, ending as lady’s maid for a number of years to the wife of a Viennese banker. She had married an Austrian who drank heavily and eventually died, not before – I gathered by implication rather than statement – he had spent nearly everything. She had returned to Bulgaria only a year ago, when her employer had also died in America, where she had been planning to join her. She had travelled all over Central Europe with her mistress, and had even been to Milan and Paris. The easy manners, the style, the efficiency, the unfussy neatness were all explained. She was about forty, rather plump, with her hair in a neat round coil at the back of a fine head with an expression of slight severity in repose, disarmingly open when she talked, when her whole face was lit by amusement and interest.
She was a born storyteller. Before a couple of hours had past, I knew the names of her employers and of all their sons and daughters and friends and the exact atmosphere of their house in the Ringstrasse and their Styrian country house, and the various characters in the servants’ hall, and the details of a fascinating network of quarrels, love affairs, flirtations and crises in both regions. She was full of confidence and kindness. I could have watched her deft sewing and listened to her fascinating tales for ever. Many of them were so funny that I could hear the hotel reverberate with my laughter. She told them with just the right amount of burlesque and mimicry. She had been very fond of these people, especially her mistress, who sounded delightful; but her sense of the absurd presented them, inevitably, in comic roles. After an hour or so, she rolled up her work, straightened the sheets and tucked me in with a matron-like competence. I begged her to go on telling me these stories. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘bedtime now. Don’t forget to turn off the light.’ She went out with the piled tray, shutting the door with a long-practised half hook, half flick behind her with one foot, a shoulder skilfully applied as a buffer to stay it from slamming. I was still so engrossed in the adventures and tribulations of Hansi, Max, Friedrich, Konrad, Teresa and Liselotte, and wondering what the sequels would be, that I didn’t think about the day’s disaster till I was nearly asleep. She gave me a bound volume of Max and Moritz to look at. Perfect.
• • •
I woke up to see a large policeman beside my bed. My rucksack. It had been found! A thief had been apprehended with it hastening along the Dobrudja road. He knew no details. When I got up, would I please come to the station and sign certain documents and make a statement. ‘Not now, he’s ill,’ Rosa said from behind him. ‘There you are, you see?’ she said to me triumphantly. The policeman went out and came back lugging the familiar burden that I had carted round so many months. I was to check the contents. The last-minute dread was allayed in a moment: there all the notebooks were, tucked down the sides to take up less room. The thief, whoever he was, must have been in too much of a hurry to jettison them. I extracted them with excitement and relief. The policeman saluted and left. While I exulted over this recovered hoard, Rosa was ransacking the rest, flinging out one dirty and crumpled trophy after another with clicks of horror and holding a grimy shirt or fetid sock full of holes between finger and thumb with cries of ‘Pfui!’ and ‘I ask you!’ ‘Ich frage Sie!’ The things at the bottom, which I hadn’t seen for weeks, emerged in a cascade of walnut shells, half rotten apples, dried herbs for making tea, an aluminium egg with salt in one end, red pepper in the other, an onion or two, dismembered garlic cloves (never used), pencil stubs, india rubbers, dust, crumbs, broken cigarettes and tobacco leaves; also, a marvellous trove, a bent but smokeable packet of Nadejda’s cigarettes. She finally swept out in a resolute manner with a great bundle.
The contents were slightly varied all the time by a slow process of discard and acquaintance. But now, I think, they were roughly the following. One pair of pyjamas, two grey flannel shirts, a couple of blue short-sleeved ones, two white cotton shirts that could be worn with a tie at a pinch, two pairs of grey canvas trousers, one kept for best, some socks, one dark blue tie and one red one mostly used as a belt, a thick soft white pullover with a high neck, and quantities of different and brightly coloured handkerchiefs, starting with red and white spotted ones that navvies carry their dinner in. The great sartorial treasure among all this was a thin, light, beautifully cut grey tweed jacket. It had been fished out of a wardrobe and bestowed on me in Transylvania by a compassionate Hungarian lady whose grandson had been in the Argentine for ten years (‘He’s getting so rich, he’ll never miss it’). It had been made by a very good Budapest tailor and I felt different the moment I put it on, ready for anything almost. With the best pair of trousers properly ironed, I could become almost presentable, though I wished I had a very thin blue suit to cut a dash with in smart urban circles, on the rare occasions that I ventured into them. All this was let down at the lowest level by the ghastly canvas shoes I had bought in Orșova, to which, apart from a pair of gym shoes, my heavy boots were the only alternative footgear.
My outfit was completed by the bad-weather stuff I had been wearing: the brown leather jacket, which had become wonderfully weathered and soft, the comfortable breeches which had also borne the strain well, already a year old when I set out, their strapping, too light at first, long indistinguishable from the rest; and a wide, rather dashing leather belt with a brass buckle that I was very attached to. Those studded boots, the heroes of this walk, resoled and patched, could go on for ever. The puttees probably had a slightly silly and pseudo-military look, but they were wonderful for weather like this, and gave one a feeling of untiring solidity. There was the private soldier’s greatcoat hanging on the door, proof against anything. I had always been meaning to get it dyed. (But what colour?) Lastly, in the corner, leant the heavy, beautifully balanced Hungarian walking-stick, given me on the Alföld, carved all over with a twisting pattern of oak leaves: a bit showy, but better than the lost ashplant from Sloane Square that I had set out with, encrusted by shiny aluminium Stocknägel, those little figurative plaques that stationers in all German and Austrian towns supply to Wanderer. It would have become a glittering and embarrassing wand by now, of which I would have been thoroughly sick
but sentimentally unable to discard. I had a great fetishistic regard for its supplanter. The only other article of wearing I owned was the old, rather soft silver medal, the size of a penny, that Nadejda had found at the bottom of the chest and tied round my neck with a leather bootlace. It had a sailing ship tossing in a storm on one side, and on the other an equestrian saint driving his spear through a dragon: St George or St Dimitri. (It was impossible to tell which – they are distinguishable in Byzantine iconography only by the colours of their steeds: a grey for one, a roan for the other.)
The Broken Road Page 14