The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Other chattels dug out by Rosa strewed the table: the prazdnik-divining kalpack, a roll of red-patterned braid belt from Arad, a shepherd’s flute from Transylvania, unplayable by me except for two blurred and doubtful notes, a broken Austrian tobacco pipe with a perched chamois, and a Bulgarian one with a thin earthenware bowl and a bamboo stem like a short calumet that I had self-consciously puffed at for a week or two, a Maria Theresa thaler, a carved round wooden flask for slivo, a couple of penknives and the Bulgarian dagger in its sheath, a small compass, sketchbooks, writing materials (pencils from HH to BB), and the two wonderful Freytag’s Viennese maps of Eastern Europe. (One, in shreds, is in front of me at this very second, the sole survivor of this random hoard. I had not noticed at the time that they must have been just pre-war, as Bosnia and Herzegovina were included in the Austrian frontier. Bulgaria’s frontiers, too, showed one of their brief bulges.) Then apart from the notebooks, there were one or two pocket dictionaries, and some maps that I got rid of when finished. On top of these now was Crime et châtiment. I think that’s the lot. All this was fairly bulky. That wonderful Bavarian rucksack not only held a lot, but, with its padded frame and its wide straps, seemed light. No need to stoop. Anyway, one of the rewards of this kind of travel was the tremendous health it brought with it. I felt sweated and sunburnt to the bone, thin, muscular, tingling with strength and energy and capable of absolutely anything, a sense of such well-being and vigour that even vast smoking and lack of sleep seemed to have no effect at all.

  This being so, I felt a fraud wallowing in bed, and told Rosa. But why not? She said it was still raining, and it was nice for her to have something to do for a change. While she was wrestling with the washing, I luxuriated in the recovery of my effects and scribbled away in the notebook; and when she’d finished, she brought in a dress she was cutting out, and worked at it on the table, more fascinating stories coming out as she snipped and sliced the cloth with huge scissors. I think she liked having company in this rather forlorn building, and I revelled in this marvellous return to nursery spoiling, and the delight of Rosa’s conversation and kindness as a just-wrecked traveller might in an unexpected oasis. She had to go out after lunch and I began Crime and Punishment against a patter of rain and an occasional siren from the Danube. Sitting up I could see the river grey and cheerless in the rain, but magnificent nevertheless, with strings of barges and log rafts floating downstream. It seemed to have widened enormously since I had last seen it at Lom Palanka a century ago, though the Jiu and the Olt were the only two big rivers which had joined since then, both from the Rumanian shore. On the far side lay the Rumanian town of Giurgiu and the flat plain with a few scattered trees. I had seen the great river so many times since that first narrow river at Ulm that I felt I had a share in it.

  Feeling restless, I got up and wandered down to the quays by the warehouses and then back into the town. I was intrigued by the number of Armenian names over the shops, not only because I have always liked them, but for a special reason. Michael Arlen[3] was born here, under the name of Dikran Kouyoumjian. I asked in an Armenian ship’s chandlers if they knew anything about him. ‘Yes – yes – yes – let me see,’ the old chandler murmured, ‘Kouyoumjian . . . of course! There used to be some! But not for many, many years . . .’ Yes, he had heard one was a great writer in Europe, yes, yes . . .

  The Sephardic Jews were another minority group in Rustchuk. They had prospered in Ottoman times, and the Turks, I think, used to do much of their business through them; they were thought more reliable than the disaffected Bulgars; like the Jews of Plovdiv, they spoke Spanish and had every reason to be grateful to the Turks, as the Ottoman Empire, and Tuscany, were about the only places which welcomed them after they were expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella. The most distinguished member of this little community is Elias Canetti, the author of Crowds and Power and Auto-da-Fé; but he, like Rosa, had gravitated to Vienna at the age of six, and became Viennese. (I met him two months before writing this, staying under the same friendly roof in the island of Euboea that is sheltering me at this very moment. We talked of Rustchuk, but very understandably my memories were fresher than his.)

  A film poster arrested these strollings: a badly painted picture of a fair-haired girl in a man’s tailcoat with a cigarette and a top hat at a dashing angle. Underneath, the huge capitals said ‘THE BLUE ANGEL’ with Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings. It was the first night, and starting in an hour. I rushed home and overrode Rosa’s objections. There was no time to waste. I was rather impressed by my authoritative tone. She blushed with pleasure at the plan, cooked an omelette at high speed, and changed. I put on my beautifully ironed coat and we set off. The film had been out several years. I knew all the songs and all about it, but strangely, considering my passion for the star, whose only competition was Greta Garbo, I had missed it. Rosa had seen it on a trip to Frankfurt-am-Main when it was first released, but longed to see it again. We were just in time.

  On the way back, transported by the film, half depressed and half elated, we passed the rucksack café. I said, ‘Come on, a drink!’ She said, ‘No, no, no. Please! Out of the question. This isn’t Vienna. It’s where all the Hochbürgertum of Rustchuk go.’ I insisted. It was the first time I’d seen Rosa anything but completely self-possessed. She sat very straight with her hands deep in her overcoat pockets, looking better and more quietly dressed, I thought, than anyone else. We drank three brandies and were the last to leave, and returned to the hotel singing the songs out of the film. I thought I would try out on her my ridiculous trick of singing backwards: Falling in Love Again was my favourite standby; I’d never tried in German. I worked it over in my head as she talked and then said: ‘It’s much better like this. Listen:

  Chi nib nov Fpok sib Ssuf

  Fua Ebeil tlletsegnie

  Nned sad tsi eniem Tlew!’

  Rosa was puzzled. We stopped under a lamp. English or French or Russian: she knew what they sounded like. Was it Swedish? Finnish? Latvian? I told her. ‘Sing it again, very slowly, please,’ she said. I did so and she listened intently. When I’d reached sthcin again, on a languorous note, she let out a great laugh, gave me a pitying look, tapped her temple with a forefinger, and said, in a purposely exaggerated Austrian accent: ‘I fear you’re completely cracked.’ (She said, ‘Leider, ganz deppert.’) ‘Now once more at the ordinary tempo . . .’

  • • •

  When I had sat down, been offered a cigarette and a Turkish coffee and signed for the receipt of the rucksack and its contents in the chief of police’s office, I tried to find out what had happened. He was plainly embarrassed that such a thing had occurred in Bulgaria, and apologized elaborately. There were bad people everywhere . . . It was all a mistake . . . His hands fluttered into the air. Rosa’s line about my being a MAN OF LETTERS seemed to have borne fruit, to judge by the confused deference. In the middle of these puzzling explanations, there was a sound of people passing through the outside room and the officer broke off to tell them to shut the door. In the middle of the outer room was an unmistakeably familiar face. No mistaking those hare’s eyes and red hair! I had felt stricken with guilt about my treacherous conduct on the Rustchuk road ever since. I waved and shouted a hearty and insincere greeting: ‘How goes it, Ivancho?’

  ‘Do you know him?’ the officer asked in a bewildered voice. I told him we were old friends, and got up to greet him. Never too late to mend. I saw he was wearing handcuffs. The whole thing slipped into place.

  I imagined, thinking with unaccustomed speed, that he must have seen me going into the café or through the window of the café, and the whereabouts of the rucksack, and when I had left, nipped indoors and carried it off. No wonder he was less voluble than usual now!

  He looked terrible, pale green in the face and with a bad cut on one lip and what looked like the beginning of a black eye. I had heard about automatic police roughness, not in Bulgaria only but in nearly every country hereabouts. His appearance was so utte
rly woebegone, and there was something rather sinister about his silence. I remembered that I had long ago come to the conclusion that he was off his head. The rucksack was safely mine again and I was having a marvellous time. I also felt that I had so often been in the soup and that he was up to the neck in it, that my presence in the ranks of established authority had a trace of farce; especially of an authority that mistreated its prisoners. In the space of a second I found myself on his side.

  I pretended for once to speak even worse Bulgarian than I really did. I took up the officer’s words about a mistake. There’d been a strashni mistake; a terrible one! I pointed in bewilderment to Ivancho’s handcuffs and looked from face to face with outrage. The officer and the two policemen with Ivancho looked equally bewildered. I kept saying he must have been going to the wrong hotel with it, forgotten the name, and frowned meaningly at Ivancho hoping he would take the cue. Then, saying it was a shame I couldn’t speak better Bulgarian, I left, after a friendly and ostentatious slap on Ivancho’s shoulder, and told them all to wait till I got back with someone who could explain better.

  Rosa had just finished ironing. All my possessions stood in a crisp pile. She listened intently while I unfolded the curious tale, and put on her coat. She thought it silly to interfere. After all, he had stolen it. But as I seemed so keen . . . She knew the chief of police and said she would talk to him first, and then come and collect me. I settled in a café a couple of streets away. She was back in an hour. ‘Well,’ she said smiling, ‘it’s all right. I said you only spoke very little more German than Bulgarian, that he was a friend and that you had asked him to pick up the rucksack and that he had started out for the wrong hotel when he was picked up. I felt a bit of a fool – I’d been so urgent about their finding it the night before last. Your friend caught on to the idea and said the correct things – far too much. I pretended to be in as much of a muddle as any of them. I’m not sure how convinced the police were but they are certainly confused. I told them again how famous you are and I think they are glad to be rid of the whole business.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll let him go?’

  ‘Oh, he’s out already. I said I’d take him back to the hotel.’ Seeing my look of consternation, she laughed. ‘It’s all right. I got rid of him. I told him you had left. He’s on his way back to Pazardjik.’ She paused. ‘You are quite right about his being mad. When I told him I knew all about what had really happened, he looked at me in real astonishment. He was convinced, so I didn’t press the matter. He’s perfectly happy.’ We both laughed. She was amazing.

  I was catching the boat across the Danube that evening. The weather had cleared up. After packing my rucksack with all my reborn possessions, I paid my bill at the hotel. Rosa had tempered the wind to the shorn lamb to an almost indecently small total. We drove out in one of the Sherlock Holmes carriages to a tavern on a low cliff above the river in a clump of moulting poplars and Spanish chestnuts. Outside was a small concrete dance-floor, now choked with mud and leaves. It was shut for the season, but the driver went to fetch the owner from some nearby cottages, and we ate looking down at the Danube and the flat extent of the Wallachian plain beyond. The wind was shredding the clouds and sending shafts of sunlight and cloud shadows racing like a shifting map on the beautiful and sad prospect of the river and the woods. These gusts drew spirals of leaves past the plate glass window of the empty tavern. All the emotions of the morning and, once again, the imminence of departure, acted as a brake on talk at first, but it didn’t matter. I felt I’d known Rosa for ages. But after a couple of glasses of slivo which Rosa tipped down very fast and with a grimace as though it were some awful medicine, and long before we had got through those jugs of wine, mostly swallowed by me, we were talking and I was laughing more than ever. Afterwards we found and collected lots of chestnuts, which were bursting out of their felt-lined spiny caskets all over the soaking grass, and sat on a log, looking upstream and wondering how many days the Austrian share of the water flowing past below had taken since Passau, Linz, Krems, Vienna and Bratislava, and for that matter, from its source in the Black Forest?

  It was getting late, so we shouted for the driver. He stumbled up from the cottages, jumped on to his perch, cracked his whip, and set off at full tilt. We sang Austrian songs most of the way. The coachman pulled a bottle out of his pocket and waved it behind his back. ‘Just as well you’re going,’ Rosa said, ‘or I’d be in an alcoholic’s home.’ Wien was followed by Adieu mein kleiner Gardeoffizier, In einer kleinen Konditorei, Sag beim Abschied leise Servus, the Kaiserjägermarsch, Ich bin von K. u. K. Infanterieregiment, Gute Nacht, Wien and Zu Mantua in Banden der treue Hofer war.[4] ‘Do sing Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss[5] backwards,’ she said as we clattered into Rustchuk. The boat looked as if it were moving. I paid the driver as we pounded along, and we exchanged farewells as it drew up. It was nearly dark.

  We only got to the quay just in time. They waited a moment, complaining bitterly, while I clambered on board, and the coachman threw my rucksack over the widening gap. ‘Don’t lose it again!’ Rosa shouted laughing. She stood and waved and smiled, the other hand in the wide pocket of her blue overcoat, and I waved back until the little ship was amid-stream and we couldn’t see each other waving farewell. There was a greenish sky upstream as we dropped anchor on the Rumanian shore.

  [1] ‘Good evening, ma’am.’

  [2] Czar Boris III married Joanna, daughter of Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, and succeeded to the Bulgarian throne in 1918. He died in 1943, perhaps poisoned by Hitler for his reluctance to enter the war in support of the Axis.

  [3] Michael Arlen (1895–1956), author of The Green Hat and other romances, much celebrated in 1920s London, where he lived. PLF had loved his novels at school.

  [4] ‘Vienna’, followed by ‘Farewell my little Guards officer’; ‘In a little café’; ‘When you part, say softly Goodbye’; ‘Kaiser’s Hunting March’; ‘I belong to the Imperial and Royal (kaiserlich und königlich) infantry regiment’; ‘In Mantua was the loyal Hofer captured’.

  [5] ‘I’m head over heels . . .’

  5. The Wallachian Plain

  It was strange at first to be addressed as domnule instead of gospodin, to switch back from inchoate Bulgarian to inchoate Rumanian, and to see, in lieu of a short slivo glass on the table, tzuika in a little triangular noggin with its cylindrical neck; on the newspapers and advertisements, instead of Cyrillic, lines of Latin characters with the hovering diacritics – a circumflex and an upside-down crescent that nasalized or muffled vowels, and below, strap-hanging cedilla-like subscripts that turned s into sh and t into tz. To clinch the changeover, were it needed – for the difference of atmosphere was discernible immediately with none of these giveaway indices – on the wall was the intelligent, rather puffy face of King Carol[1] under an appropriately Hohenzollern-looking helmet (sometimes with an eagle on top, sometimes with a waterfall of white horsehair) and below it a gleaming breastplate and over the shoulders the Order of Michael the Brave. Beside him, invariably, was a picture of Prince and ex-King Michael, whom his father, suddenly returning from exile, had displaced from the throne (remaining there until, a decade or so later, the positions once more reversed): a nice-looking soft-eyed little boy in a jersey or an open shirt and thick hair beautifully brushed.

  Sometimes, but seldom – owing, one was always being told, to a coolness between the King and his mother – the fine, rather full features of Queen Marie were displayed, whose immense and lustrous eyes were so incongruously set in her white, nun-like coif and the barbette under the chin that framed her face. But it did not need these emblems, nor the different tricolour over the customs shed nor the eagle on the lei in my pocket, which had replaced the leva’s rampant lion, to underline the changeover. There was something quicker, sharper, more brittle and more vocal – more glib perhaps – in the people all round, something very different to the rough-hewn, slow solidity of the ones I had just left. It was the change from the Slav to the Latin world. Th
e dark extent of the Danube outside, with the twinkling necklace of Rustchuk the other side (what was Rosa up to? Having supper? Reading? Polishing? Sewing?) with its dotted line of frontier down the middle, was a far wider gulf than its actual geographic span.

  A few dozen miles upstream on the opposite bank, on the same side of Rustchuk as the place where we had lunched, just about where the last of the daylight had vanished, was the site of the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, where Sigismond of Hungary, who later became Holy Roman Emperor, and a large force of French knights under Jean Sans Peur, son of Philip II le Hardi of Burgundy, campaigning eastwards to check the Ottoman menace, were defeated and captured by Bajazet the Thunderbolt, and held prisoner by him in Turkey till they were ransomed. (Six years later Bajazet himself was beaten at Ankara by Tamburlane and put in a cage, and thirteen years later still many of the same French knights fought at Agincourt.) It is seldom one comes across irruptions of the Western world into the strange and dim-seeming no-man’s-land of the Orthodox principalities and Slav czardoms that stretched between the frontiers of the Roman Empire of the Byzantine East and the Holy Roman Empire on the middle Danube. But a few hundred miles south, three centuries before, they became familiar enough from the Crusades, whose first advance took the north Aegean route across Macedonia to Asia Minor. That strange itinerary inaugurated a Western migration that eventually scattered the Levant with cloisters, tiltyards, belfries, kestrelled battlements and cloistered banqueting halls, and slowly turned the Norman paladins of Sicily into satraps among the jasmine: brocaded figures in turbans with hawks on their wrists, more fitting on a Persian miniature than the Bayeux tapestry.