The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Ever since staying with a rabbi in the Banat, I had been bent on learning as much about Jewish history as I could, and I ransacked the encyclopaedias and reference books of Sofia in any language I could understand. I had already been, for too short a time, in an Ashkenazi synagogue in Bratislava, shepherded through the customs that must beset a stranger by a Jewish friend. In Plovdiv, after listening to a fascinating saint’s day Mass in the Armenian church, I had hesitated a long time outside the Sephardic synagogue, but, friendless, did not dare enter. (It was not till twenty years later, prompted by a fascination for Orthodox chant and Gregorian plainsong – and their probable descent, especially in the psalms, from the liturgy of the great temples of Antioch and Jerusalem in the time of the Apostles – that I heard Sephardic singing, beautifully executed, in the fine Carolean Portuguese-Dutch synagogue in Artillery Row, in London’s City.) So I knew a lot about it: why northern Jewry spoke a German dialect and bore names of German origin – Schwartz, Weiss, Abendstern, Weintraub, Blumenblatt, Goldberg, for instance, or names with Slav endings, like Moisky or Rabinovitch – instead of their ancient Hebrew ones. Domnul David, as we sat up talking in his general store-cum-inn after the others had gone to bed, was not much help in giving further information about the Maccabees, the Babylonian exile, the Fall of the Temple, the Diaspora and the Khazars; any more than an English grocer, it occurred to me, would know about Danegeld and the Witenagamot; but he was amused by my interest.

  But he said something before putting up the shutters, which has survived. We were comparing the Jewish and the Christian religions. ‘I’ll tell you the great advantage of our religion over yours: nobody can practise Christianity properly and lead an ordinary life. You Christians, unless you are saints, are always falling short of what you should be; you are never in the right for a second, always guilty, always miserable, always, try as you might, in disgrace. But the Jewish religion is made for human beings. There are a few easy rules we mustn’t break, that’s all. We can practise our religion faultlessly, and still live like ordinary humans. It’s easy to be a good Jew, impossible to be a good Christian. But Christians are no more virtuous than Jews, are they? About the same? So what’s the odds? And the result? We are happy in our religion, you are all miserable, that’s all. We’ve lots of other troubles, but not religion. Gott sei dank. It doesn’t attack us in the back, like it does the Goim.’

  • • •

  A bracket of explanation is needed just about now, and this brief caesura, in an iron bed under the fly-pocked and leafless calendar of Jacob Bercovici, grain merchant of Galatz, illustrating Judith before Holofernes, is the very place for it.

  During the last dozen pages there have been a number of references that hint at a longer acquaintance with Rumania than my summer months, exclusively among Hungarians, or the brief span of this trans-Danubian loop, could possibly warrant. What happened was this. During the five years between the end of this journey and the outbreak of war, I returned several times to all the countries we have so far crossed, with the single exception of Bulgaria, which, after the close of this year, purely by chance, I never visited again. But of all these countries, Greece (which, although it doesn’t come into this account, looms beyond the last page) and Rumania were the two that I visited, and lived in, most often. In Rumania I made two sojourns of about a year each. (I might have stayed much longer had not the outbreak of war suddenly tolled like the end of a wonderful summer holiday and dragged me back to what seemed like the spiked railings of a long winter term on the clanging, stamping and shouting squares of the Guards Depot.) Settled in the dales of High Moldavia, I travelled all over the country to the Delta, Bukovina, back to Transylvania, the Dobrudja, Bessarabia and to Bucharest many times. My first memories, therefore, are overlaid by many more, and it is hard to exclude the inklings gleaned later when writing of these first encounters: to attempt to do so would be akin to assuming a spurious naivety. It will be hard to keep subsequent experience out of these earliest irruptions into the Regat. I am almost irresistibly tempted to slip in one or two balloons from a later date in the pages that lie ahead. It is a risky process, but, if I see an apt occasion – a likely paragraph ending or a beckoning gap in the rough and ready joinery of this book – I may, but not without warning the reader, let it rip. After all, I am not likely to pass this way again in print, and there are later impressions of this extraordinary country that I would like to try and recapture. I shall see how it goes.

  By this dubious phrase I mean that two main problems beset the very curious and enjoyable task of compiling this private archaeology. The first is a sudden blur, when exact memory conks out and a stretch of itinerary looms eventlessly ahead and no pencil mark on the map comes to my help. This has occurred on several occasions and will again, no doubt. At first these blackouts filled me with distress. I would gaze from page to map with growing misery as the minutes passed and nothing, absolutely nothing, surfaced. Not now. I interpret this blank as an indication that there was nothing, for my private purposes, memorable there. No reflection on the landscape, the villages, towns even – or their denizens. Often I must have wandered through, or just missed, or completely failed to remember, owing to some private defect, buildings of tremendous interest (that I would give perhaps a great deal to see now), whole mountain ranges teeming with history and with natural wonders, political trends and events of momentous importance. This last consideration prompts the thought that even after such a long time-lag, this must be one of the unscoopiest travel accounts ever to see the light. My private let-out here is that this is neither a cultural handbook, a guide, nor a political or military report. (It is impolitic to dwell any longer on these shortcomings.) The cheerful obverse of all these lacunae is that they save us both from drowning in the indiscriminate flood of total recall.

  The second problem is the opposite of all this: while piecing together fragments which have lain undisturbed for two decades and more, all at once a detail will surface which acts as potently as the taste of madeleine which made the whole of Proust’s childhood unfurl. The haul of irrelevant detail, interlocking trains of thought and associations, and the echoes of echoes re-echoed and ricocheted, is overwhelming, and in the hopes of attaining some redeeming shadow of symmetry and balance, a lot of this irrelevant catch must be thrown away again to swim back to the dark pools where it has been lurking all this time. This, for a writer who is his own worst subeditor, is a harrowing task. At such moments, it almost seems as if the pile of empty foolscap on my left contains what I am about to write in invisible ink, and that each sheet darkens into a concatenation of detail, forgotten until that very second, as soon as it is in front of me, as though the nib-tip were fed by a developing chemical rather than ink; and by the time it joins the stack of manuscript on the right, the balloons of afterthought added to the text are large enough to carry the paper to the whitewashed Greek island ceiling overhead, and many or most of them must be punctured or deflated if any sort of balance or harmony is to be achieved.

  A third problem crops up: the anxiety to present an impression of a country which is true, and by this I don’t mean a true picture by any absolute standards, should such things exist, but true to the overall impression into which, on any final departure, the innumerable fragments of experience have cohered: a highly personal synthesis which would only be of use to anyone in search of a hypothetical absolute if full allowances were made for the writer’s blindness, bias and half-knowledge. But I feel that if I limited these pages to the experiences of this first visit, I would end up wide of the mark. Hence the temptation to slide in one or two post-dated wedges. But this need not worry us for the moment. Whatever hovering compulsion may skulk in the different strata of my memories of Rumania, the details of my arrival in Bucharest are sharply defined; so off we go.

  [1] King Carol II (1893–1953), the scandal-ridden ruler of Rumania from 1930–40. While heir apparent, he had surrendered his future crown to his son, Prince Michael, following an illicit liaiso
n, but returned to oust him five years later. In 1940 General Ion Antonescu forced Carol to abdicate, and Michael returned to the throne.

  [2] Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere (1868–1940), founder of the Daily Mirror, was a supporter of Hungary’s claim to revise the 1920 Treaty of Trianon and readjust the country’s boundaries. A statue to him survives in Budapest.

  [3] Contrary to PLF’s dismissive description, the Semi-Gotha was an unbiased survey of those families of Jewish ancestry who were members of the European nobility. The Nazis later used it to identify them.

  6. Bucharest

  Bucharest floated above the level horizon in the late afternoon, a sprawling irregular mass which soon lost whatever shape or skyline it possessed in the fall of night, and in a sense, vanished again. The distant suggestion of a skyscraper or two and a scattering of tall chimneys sank below the rising darkness of its outskirts, and its amorphous aspect became vaguer still through the light, steady rain. Never had the frontier between country and town, always a gradual transition to foot-travellers, been more indistinct. Vague habitations loomed. The mud of the highroad changed by stealthy degrees into a halting, deckle-edged thoroughfare of asphalt, reticulated by wide and planetary craters filled with water. This maze of puddles and the rainy network of tarmac broke up the jagged reflections of fires and flames and windows; then, all at once, everything would be almost dark for a while until, through a clump of dripping acacias, a tier of lights would soar in a small skyscraper, and a bit further on would come the windows of a factory and a suggestion of dynamos pounding away in bright empty halls. Bare rafters and plaster fallen from brickwork, and branches growing through fissured walls and windows, spelt ruination. From a wobbly hamlet hammered together out of kerosene drums, the dim wicks within them shedding a turnip-lantern glow, half-built modern houses would ascend and cease, their angular skylines whiskered with a jungle of rusting metal rods from ferro-concrete already zebra-striped with cracks and auburn stains. Huts and tents, a noticeable increase in disorder, and the tumble and click of forges, indicated Gypsies.

  A fluid region; nothing was static; everything was vestigial or inchoate. A smart street of shops would shoot a brightly lit ruler of radiance through the dark, and die away in a faintly discernible cemetery, a midden or a wood.

  A panther-like cat peered into a tin and plunged his head in to lick the bottom as though he were trying on a tilting-helmet. The geometry of a brickyard, a kiln’s glow, six tethered horses under a dripping wing of leaves. Then it was a question of weaving a path through the carcasses of a hundred dead cars, a thousand tyres, a million bicycle wheels, and suddenly the lighted habitations would recede to the circumference of a vast maidan, which the road bisected in a ragged diameter, with shops and taverns glimmering round the edge in a widening arc of rain-reflecting flares, resembling from the dark centre – across which a random dribble of trucks and cars (one or two of them incongruously smart) as well as the long country wagons, were pitching from shell hole to shell hole like barques in a choppy sea – the lights round a lagoon.

  Sharp in the glare of the city behind them, a group of skyscrapers sprouted on the further shore among the syncopated sky signs. At the very centre, in the middle of the road, was a flickering pinpoint which grew, as I approached it, into a camp fire, hopefully kindled in the waning drizzle, and round it, cross-legged, each figure sheltered by a shaggy triangle of sheepskin cape and with their heads topped by tall and bulbous cones of fur, some drovers were quietly supping, their odd silhouettes radiating spokes of shadow across the shell-shocked asphalt, the mud and the flanks of their slumbering buffaloes. As I tramped by, a claxoning Packard with a chauffeur’s peaked hat glinting above the wheel, veered cursing and skidding behind the sway of his headlights in the wayside slime, conjuring them in a scream to fornicate with the Devil’s mother – ‘mama Dracului!’ – while the flame-lit faces munched on with the unruffled ruminance of their charges, as though they had settled for the night in the heart of the Pamirs or the Gobi. These southern tentacles of the capital seemed to belong to a mixture of Samarkand and Detroit.

  I headed, moth-like, for the beckoning metropolitan glare, but I must have lost direction, for though the streets were lighted now, the indeterminate maze was still dark and ramshackle. A tram would clank past a crossroads, but never when I was near. I would stick my head into a grocer’s or a drinking hole and ask the way to the centre of the town: ‘la centru de oraș, ma rog?’ But I always seemed to lose the way and become deeper involved in the tumbledown wilderness. At last I crossed a bridge over a river which can only have been the Dâmboviţa and came upon a long and busy street, but of equal dilapidation. (Could it have been the Calea Moșilor?) There were frequent shop names in Hebrew characters and a few in Armenian script, among the Rumanian ones, a clanking of trams and a sudden swarming of people. It was getting late. Famished after a long trudge, I settled in a smoky eating-house that looked promising: it was called La Pisica Vesela, At the Merry Pussy-Cat. Most of the soaring smoke came from a stove where spindle-shaped croquettes were cooking in the flat iron top, after being deftly rolled in the enormous palms of a mild-looking cook.

  I swallowed some tzuika, and then a large number of those mititei and a lot of wine. They were delicious, and there seemed no reason ever to stop eating them; or, for that matter, drinking wine. There was one place in Bucharest, I learnt later, where their excellence was attributed to the Gypsy cook rolling them, it was rumoured, on her thigh. The two most intriguing figures in the room were two bulky men drinking tea. Their bulk was chiefly caused by their thick-padded kaftans of ribbed black and dark blue velvet, caught in with belts at the waist and then expanding voluminously and spreading to the ground from innumerable gathered pleats, from which elephantine knee-boots jutted, and fastening from neck to hem, as closely as an abbé’s soutane, with metal buttons. One wore a tall fur hat, the other a black cap with a little peak. The whips leaning against the wall at once connected them with two hooded, high-slung and wide carriages behind waiting horses in the mud outside. But it was not so much their garb that drew scrutiny. Their crass little blue eyes were embedded in wide, soft, smooth faces covered with tiny creases and wrinkles. They conversed in oddly high-pitched voices in a language that sounded at first like Bulgarian but soon turned out to be – judging by its shifting vowels and its liquid sounds – Russian. When they left and bowled away, I exchanged an interrogatory look with the cook. He smiled and said, ‘Muscali’ – Muscovites – and the sizzling and the smoke swallowed him up.

  My drive for the town’s centre had lost some of its momentum. After another rambling and dilapidated furlong or two, the streets grew lighter for a few acres, and I soon saw – from the lighted doorways, the figures that loitered there, the hesitant strolling of civilians and soldiers and the doors in tumbling wooden fences leading into other lighted courtyards with figures leaning on windowsills under the trees – that I was in a brothel quarter of a humble and unsophisticated kind. Yet even so, the intriguing atmosphere which haunts such quarters hung thick in the air. The muddy street and ramshackle boards of the fences contrasted strangely with the lighted rooms where naked bulbs fell on shiny dresses the colours of boiled sweets and an occasional peroxided head of hair with its indigenous darkness beginning to creep back. One courtyard had a festoon of coloured bulbs looped across it through branches. The visiting half of the population strayed rather vacantly past the lights and the beckoning figures, with the indecision of fish in an aquarium, moodily buying walnuts from a blind seller who squatted by his brazier under the acacia. With an intermittent passion for low life, I rather longed to charge in and loiter there too, but felt, with my rucksack and stick and coat, too conspicuous a stranger for the role of auditor – rather than actor – that I aspired to: an observer in a helmet of darkness, a literary Siegfried or Perseus invisible among hempen homespuns. Anyway it was getting late, time to dump all these impedimenta and get to the heart of this new city.


  A little further on I saw a small hotel that looked about my level, in spite of its daunting name. It was called the Savoy-Ritz, spelt on the wooden board below the lamp-bracket over the door, Savoi-Ritz. A hawk-nosed, elderly woman showed me to a room that was surprisingly cheerful and snug for this down-at-heel quarter. Hot and cold water: confort moderne! Astonishingly, she spoke French with what I had learnt to discern as a Russian accent. I asked her where she came from: Kishinev, she told me, the capital of Bessarabia, which, though formally Moldavian, had been ceded to Russia for over a century. ‘What!’ I said – trotting out something I had learnt in a reference book in Sofia – ‘the town where Pushkin was in exile?’ ‘That’s it,’ she said, looking rather impressed. I was washing and combing my hair at high speed, suddenly hell-bent on the bright lights of the town centre. ‘Un merveilleux poète, madame!’ I said warmly: I hadn’t read a word of him. ‘On le dit,’ she said, ‘Je l’ai très peu lu . . .’ I asked her the best way to the middle of Bucharest. She looked rather hurt: ‘So soon.’ She asked me to stay and chat. ‘On s’amuse bien ici!’ Surely I would like some company? ‘No, no, I am awaited,’ I said, untruthfully. She looked puzzled and amused, but set me on my way. A few streets further I stopped one of those elegant cabs. The driver was one of the Muscovites of the Merry Pussy-Cat.

  I was amazed when I found myself strolling at last along the pavement of the Calea Victoriei. Amazed, excited, dazzled and rather nonplussed. The smartness of the inhabitants, the grandeur of the cars, those sleek taxis all with a band of yellow and black dicing painted round their glittering black coachwork, the shop fronts with dashing modernistic lettering over them – one of them ultra-chic, containing a single gleaming scent flagon poised on a softly lit pyramid of dove-coloured velvet against a back-drape of ruched, lemon-yellow silk – the ferro-concrete façades, the rainbow tangle of electric signs, the blazing kiosks with their polyglot flutter of periodicals, shallow and softly carpeted steps leading through the turning crystal doors of hotels into interiors of unimaginable splendour, the brightly lit populations of large and luxurious cafés, the massed hooting of a traffic block, a Rolls-load of dinner-jacketed diplomats, with – I observed with an un-analysable pathos – the lion and unicorn fluttering from a metal wand on the mudguard: all the headlamps, the shop front and café windows and electric signs shedding on to the tarmac and paving stones their reflected washes of colour – all this streamlining and glitter and the look of watertight and Olympian security, was overwhelming. I had forgotten about all this. Sofia is so small; the overshadowing mountain, the low buildings and the glimpses of open country at the end of long streets make the newcomer feel that he is in the middle of a country town rather than a capital city. Otherwise the last big town I had seen was Budapest, in April. It was the last week of October now. Seven months and over a thousand miles ago – a stretch which seemed psychologically a great deal more – had been spent among trees and mountains, much of it sleeping out or staying in peasant houses: an utterly different rhythm of life and one which, in spite of my occasional ill-tempered protests, like the sudden onslaught on the way to Rustchuk, I had adored. Now, suddenly landed in the middle of this urban hubbub, I felt alien and uprooted, and filled with the feelings of dazzled bewilderment, uncouthness and solitude that must overcome a peasant in a similar plight.