• • •
Wallachia, in spite of its name in Rumanian – Muntenia, the mountain country – is, on the whole, plain land. Further north, ranges of hills wander across it which finally rear into the steep, high and grand range of the Transylvanian Alps, the southernmost westward swing of the Carpathians, on the other side of which lay Transylvania, where I had dallied so long earlier in the year. But these southern Danubian marshes were unlike the Bulgarian side where the land sinks to the river in a slow staircase of ledges and breaks off at the bank in a cliff. The river ends, the plain begins, and quite often in this uncompromising flatness, the middle distance was blurred by stretches of marshland, busy with water birds, that looked exactly like the conventional signs for them on maps.
The main road, along which I trudged – there was no point in branching off – ran straight as an arrow from horizon to horizon. Enormous flocks grazed across it. The peasants and the herdsmen were shod in the familiar rawhide footgear – opinci in Rumania, tzervuli in Bulgaria – but the rest, as it had been in Transylvania, was all white, with belted white tunics jutting almost to their knees like untucked-in shirts. Again, they were all wearing cojocs, those jackets of sheepskin, shaggy-side in, smooth-side out, a jigsaw of patterns and seams; and instead of the flat, hussar-like kalpacks of the Bulgarians, they wore caciulas, lopsided cones of black and brown sheepskin. Every few miles there was a tumbledown village of whitewashed houses and reed thatch, the assembly points of long wagons drawn by horses or buffaloes, then the plain. ‘Left’ and ‘right’ in Rumanian are stinga and dreapta. I think that it was on this road that I first noticed the Rumanian peasant words for them when they are addressing buffaloes or oxen. ‘Hooisss!’ they utter, in a deep and long-drawn note – and the beasts slowly lurch to the left; ‘tchala!’ – and they turn right. Gypsy caravans were much more frequent than on the other side of the Danube, and there were many encampments by the road. I several times kept company with the nomadic ones, but usually defected after a mile or two. I always seemed to draw a blank, which was all the more humiliating when I remembered with what ease other Balkan travellers seemed to get on hobnobbing terms. I did get to know several Rumanian Gypsies fairly well a year or two later in Moldavia, but these were static communities, Romany-speaking but settled in villages where they had lived for many generations – ever since the abolition of feudal serfdom on large estates in the middle of the last century. With the nomads, I seemed unable to break through the begging barrier which they feel in honour bound to maintain.
Further east this plain turns into the real steppe in the Baragan, which lies in the great northward loop of the Danube, and overflows across it into the Dobrudja the other side: utterly barren and desolate, and in its sinister way very beautiful. Nothing but thistles grow there and these wither and blow about the surface of the steppe, joining with others until they form great globes of moving stuff, like giant thistledown. I only crossed it once, in a car in midsummer. The wind had set these globes racing, and as it grew stronger, gathered them up, with the surrounding dust and whatever sticks and rubbish had fallen from the carts that wend their way across, with a few rotten bits of planking. They twisted into whirling spirals of debris that climbed and spun at a bewildering rate to become thick dust-devils hundreds of feet high, dark with plucked-up rubbish and twirling in ever-varying girths like irregular barley sugar till they frayed out at an enormous height. All the debris which had been plucked into this gyre and rushed up its ascending whirls was then scattered loose along the wind. Three others had sprung up at the same time and all of them whirled mopping and mowing with a loud rushing noise across the wilderness, all leaning in the same direction and appearing to gesticulate wildly with the loose ends of their fraying and widening summits. The plain was still alive with mirages; these four pillars careered across a sunset that the hanging mantle of dust refracted into a vast and tragic drama of orange and amber and blood red and violet, and came to bits in the distance. There are tales of whole wagons being gathered up by these twisting demons, with sheep and buffaloes. The peasants talk of lonely shepherds running across the plain pursued by them, overtaken and spun into the sky and discovered later as smashed and mangled scarecrows. No wonder these things lend themselves to legend; if they are legends . . .
The plain I was crossing was nothing like this; but the desolate tendency was latent in the monotonous, forlorn and rather beautiful champaign on either hand. A feeling of profound melancholy and hopelessness overhangs these plains. In the great tract between the river and the mountains, there is, beyond the wells, nothing to arrest the eye, no skeleton of rock to jut through the even surface, no hint of the variety that quickens the steep leafy world of Transylvania. It is better in summer when it is dressed in sweeping fields of wheat and maize, but even then the melancholy lingers. The villages jut from the surface with something of the uncertainty of mirages and there is a tame, passive docility in the voices and in the expressions of the inhabitants. It is as if history had knocked all the stuffing out of them. Ruled by Orthodox princes, who were often tyrannical and extortionate, and exploited by their own landowning countrymen, they had been deprived, except for occasional abortive agrarian outbursts, even of that stimulus of revolt against an alien conqueror that had acted as a spur and a salve on the mutineers of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and the Christian parts of the population of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Albania; and though the Christians of the Balkans were lumped together in common servitude by the Ottomans, they were all in the same boat, and they were spared the domestic serfdom that held sway north of the Danube, and which the landowners themselves, during the liberal trends of the nineteenth century, voted out of existence. There had been romantic Robin Hood-like figures – mostly in the mountains – but, here again, the pandours and haiduks, when they were something more than mountain robbers, were at war with domestic injustices rather than with the concrete, universal, other enemy in a turban, as the Klephts were, and the comitadjis further south. For direct Ottoman rule stopped at the river. But for centuries the two principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (which only since the mid-nineteenth century have been united under the collective name of Rumania) were vassals of Turkey, and one of the chief tasks of the elective princes who sat on the ancient thrones of Michael the Brave and Stephen the Great was to amass the huge yearly tribute to the Sultan and (a self-appointed duty) enrich themselves at the same time. It is hard to determine whether this subjection to Turkish greed at one remove was more or less onerous to the principalities in general than the more immediately galling Ottoman yoke on the napes of peasants of the Balkans.
When the two principalities were united in the mid-nineteenth century, their joint prince, Alexander Cuza, was succeeded, after a short reign, by Charles of Hohenzollern, who later became King Carol I. This, the old kingdom – as opposed to the new, which was formed by all the provinces awarded to Rumania after the Great War at the Treaty of Trianon – was the Regat: Rumania par excellence. The new provinces which were suddenly on ethnological grounds attached to this ancient core, many of which had been detached for centuries, were the Dobrudja south of the Delta, which the Bulgars claimed; Bessarabia, which had been Russian for a hundred years or more; Bukovina in the far north, which had been a far-flung wingtip of the Austrian Empire; Transylvania and the Banat in the south-west, formerly a part of Hungary – thus enormously enlarging the country, increasing its wealth and exciting the irredentist anger of its neighbours, more especially of Hungary and Bulgaria.
It was impossible to say how much the dismal last few centuries – or were they dismal all through history? – had contributed to the fatalistic melancholy that I thought I always detected in Rumanian peasants, and more particularly in those of the plains, or how much the many agrarian reforms, the fragmentation and refragmentation of the great estates, and their piecemeal distribution, had done to mitigate it. Apart from other causes of distress, Rumanian annals read like a catalogue of disasters: the biblical o
nslaught of insects, the destruction of crops, murrains, fearful plagues that again and again reaped entire populations, the passage of armies, loot, fire and rapine. Above all, in the huge and unannalled centuries before the first monks wrote their chronicles and after the last Roman legions (from whom, with the autochthonous Dacians, the Rumanians directly descend) had been recalled to Rome, these plains were the halting place and the camp, the vast vacant lot, in which all the barbarians, sweeping west from Asia, and through the Scythian wilderness north of the Black Sea – Goths, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Bulgars, Cumans and Petchenegs – drew rein before plunging south and south-west across the Danube to hasten the death of Rome, and then to batter at the walls of Byzantium, and perhaps take root in the Balkans; or to head west, clean through the mild, shifting flock of Slavs, to challenge western Christendom, threaten Paris, conquer and repeople Spain, or like the Magyars, take root in the Pannonian plain.
But whatever the woes and vicissitudes of history may have been, it is hard to believe that these inert, seemingly limitless flatlands, with their parched and dusty surface in summer and their expanses of snow in winter and the vast sky and those beautiful doomed sunsets every day, could be an ambience for bursting optimism, high spirits or resilience. Rumanian is rich in words expressing shades of sadness; the long-drawn monosyllable of dor, meaning a vague, anxious, unfocussed unhappiness and longing (though it can be used in the specific sense of sad longing in love) captures it exactly: ‘mi e dor’, ‘I have dor’, ‘I long, or pine . . .’ with no stated object or cause: it is often on peasant lips. Another word always struck me as being the best word I had ever heard for irretrievable gloom: zbucium, pronounced zboochoum, a desperate spondee of utter dejection, those Moldowallachian blues. ‘Mi e zbucium . . .’ (Although there is no connection between the two words beyond a similarity in the ear, this word always conjures up another Rumanian word – bucium – which means ‘a long metal horn’, of four or five yards, upheld on dutiful shoulders, and turned up at the end – looking very similar to those in use among Buddhist priests and in lamaseries – which shepherds and cowherds blow to summon their flocks in the high Carpathians, sending long, sinister booms of amazing zbucium-bearing balefulness echoing down the valleys of the Olt and the Bistritza.)
All this is treacherous ground. We know all about the melancholy of the steppes and the sadness of the plains from many colourful travel accounts: the longing and Sehnsucht of open places, and the rustic soul finding its expression in music and things that many a fruity voice, keeping track with a silhouetted herdsman leading his flock into the sunset, has dog-eared beyond any acceptable limit of staleness. I wish it hadn’t, for here it is precisely and almost uniquely applicable. Much of Rumanian music and singing, which I loved, embodies all these things, and especially a kind of song called a doina. This has nothing to do with the gymnastic changes of tempo from languorous to breakneck in which Gypsies are expert, or the more oriental plangency and the different scale of the Balkans, or the high-pitched, quavering dirges of the Deep Mani. It is an emanation of villages and fields and plains, infinitely slow and with long pauses and unseizable tunes, transportingly beautiful, that one hears out of the window of a train or from behind a rick when harvesters have cut their last swathe or from a village at nightfall as one approaches it on foot, as I did now; stops and listens and understands that the order and scansion that these threnodies have imposed are the only way of making bearable a hovering frame of mind that says that all things to rive the heart are here, and all are vain.
• • •
The only place to sleep in the first doina-haunted village where I stopped that night was the Jewish grocer’s shop, which was also the inn. The grocer was a bustling, red-haired man, very dissimilar from the Sephardim of Plovdiv and Rustchuk: an Ashkenaz of the Ashkenazim, known to the villagers as Domnul David. He conversed with his family in Yiddish and with me in quaint nasal German, Judendeutsch. Alas, unlike the old rabbi of the Banat, he knew little about the scriptures. I longed to ask him about the exact difference between the Torah and the Talmud, which I was always getting confused, and about the Golem and the Hasidim. There were only little isolated communities here, he said. The place to go was High Moldavia, far away in the north, in towns like Botoshani and Dorohoi – Domnul David’s home town – which were almost entirely Jewish. (It is exactly what I did, a year or so later.)
Owing either to Jewish acumen or a general Rumanian inaptness for commerce, and probably both, nearly all village grocers were Jews, as was much of the trade in the towns, except in the Danube delta where the Greeks – notably in Constanţa, Galatz and Braila – were active in business concerns, especially in the barge trade on the Danube itself, where large Greek fortunes were founded. The agents and bailiffs on large estates were nearly always Greeks. Probably as a result of this, they were not always popular. But this was a mild foible compared to the deep-rooted and almost universal anti-Semitism of the Rumanians toward the million or so Jews that lived in the country. The prejudice was even more violent than in Hungary. It was not only that all the vices were attributed to the village innkeepers, grocers and traders; the sentiment had a nearly mystical intensity. The legends of ritual murder were still, at the peasant level, believed. But at a more sophisticated one, Hungarians seemed still more obsessed with the question than were the Rumanians. The books of Jean and Jérôme Tharaud – La Fin des Habsbourg, Quand Israël n’est plus roi, etc. – were constantly being given me to read in order to put me right about the part played by the Jews in the Bela Kun revolution. It was not at all uncommon to hear people talking of the plan for world domination – long exposed as a fraud – contained in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (This plot, according to one genealogically minded Hungarian squire, was being implemented, generation after generation, by Jewish infiltration by marriage of the entire aristocracy of Western Europe, with France in the lead and England as a runner-up. To press his point home, he showed me a rare volume which was often mentioned but seldom seen, called the Semi-Gotha. This squat, thick handbook compiled by someone who must have had the singleness of purpose of M. Galtier-Boissière, was of the same format and consistency as the three reference volumes published at Gotha which seemed to form the only reading of some squires who were barely literate in other branches of knowledge: the red-bound Hofkalender of royal, mediatized and princely families, the blue-bound Gräfliche, and the green Freiherrliches Taschenbuch. A privately printed fourth volume was bound in yellow; and instead of the appropriate crowns and coronets of the others, it was embossed by a gold Star of David. To illustrate the spread of world Jewry and the unlikely guises under which it lurked, the squire pointed, with a thin and armorial little finger and an expression of melancholy triumph, at name after name. ‘Winston Churchill’ was the first he pronounced, Lord Rothermere[2] the second: rather sadly, as the Lord Rothermere of the day was considered the white hope of Hungarian revisionism. So you can never tell, he said. He was puzzled and hurt when I doubted the importance and accuracy of his favourite book.)[3]
These hostile feelings were much more deeply rooted in the north, where the Jewish population had increased from about two thousand families to close on a million in a hundred and thirty years, most of them in flight from the appalling conditions in Poland and the Russian Pale, until in several large Moldavian towns, including Yassy, the Moldavian capital, they now outnumbered the Rumanian inhabitants and monopolized the commerce of the province. Small wonder that this indigestible explosion of people caused dismay, resentment and hostility among the inhabitants; there was nothing comparable here to the harmonious and long established position of the polished and much less numerous Sephardim of the Ottoman world; small wonder, too, that the Jews, denied full citizenship and with nearly every route to advancement or honour denied to them, should expand and excel in the only field that was not barred by prejudice. The remote principality in which they suddenly began to proliferate had no middle class; rural society knew nothing between th
e mediaeval feudalism of landowners – the great and the lesser boyars, many of whom seldom set foot on their accumulations of acres – and a vast and callously exploited peasantry. There was no urban middle class, and, in Moldavia especially, as the country expanded, the Jewish population became a semi-alien bourgeoisie of middlemen and retailers.
Everyone reluctantly admitted that the Jews were honest in their dealings, however ruthless, and faithful to their agreements. I also noticed that nearly everyone, however ill-disposed in general, had one Jewish friend who ‘was not like the others’, an array of exemptions that must have added up to an imposing total. It was only on later travels in Moldavia and Bukovina that I got to know, talk to and even make friends with Jews not isolated in a Gentile majority. Lack of any need to conform to alien ways had left their way of life absolutely intact: the long black kaftans, broad-brimmed black velvet hats, skullcaps, black, red and blond beards, corkscrew side-whiskers (like those of my host and his son in the woods of the Banat), and a Yiddish largely unalloyed by Rumanian, but embedded with Polish and Russian words as well as the Hebrew studied by the rabbis and divinity students. Here, too, one would hear the nasal intonations and observe the oriental gestures of hunched shoulders and mobile hands raised palm upwards, at their purest. It was in these regions, and particularly in Czernovitz, the capital of Bukovina (which was under the Habsburgs till the end of World War I) that much of the Jewish talent originated which, transplanted to America, has flowered so triumphantly on the stage, the screen, in music and the arts, laced with a humorous twist to be found in no other race, which amounts to genius and supplies the world with all its funny Jewish stories.
The Broken Road Page 16