The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  • • •

  The town, under cloudless sky, was transformed. More advanced than Bulgaria, the leaves were golden, and the whole place wore a sunny and charming aspect. A troop of mounted lancers on fine black horses and in white uniforms, plumes of white horsehair streaming from their helmets, breastplates and pennanted lances, were trotting down the Calea Victoriei.

  There were several letters at the poste restante and a magic canvas envelope with some money. I carried them off to a bar. Things were getting better and better. I had written a couple of letters from Giurgiu to people I had met that summer in Transylvania, staying with a neighbour and relation of Paul Teleki’s cousin. This sounds rather complicated. This relation, a rich Hungarian country gentleman and, I think, diplomat before the war, had bethought himself after the war of the remote Rumano-Transylvanian origins of his family; alone among Hungarian magnates in Transylvania, he had not only accepted the fait accompli of the new frontiers, but had broken out of the self-imposed isolation and boycott of other Transylvanian landowners and, to the disapproval of his neighbours, accepted an important function at the Royal Court of Bucharest and become a power in his new country. His houses, both here and in Transylvania, were always full of diplomats and well-known guests. Two of those had asked me, with – I thought – more than perfunctory hospitality, to let them know on reaching Bucharest in case I needed a bed. Both had answered welcomingly, one – Josias von Rantzau – telling me to ring up the moment I arrived. I rang him up and was bidden to move in at once. This was perfect. But I put it off till next morning, in order to have another twenty-four hours of absolutely independent life in the town, as I always tried to do (usually all too successfully) and also because I thought too abrupt a departure from my present abode might have looked, after their kindness, a bit unfriendly.

  I spent a nice afternoon mooching about the town and turned up at the café of the previous night and waited for my opera-loving journalist acquaintance. The denizens of the café were roughly the same as the night before. Significantly my outlook had changed considerably. They now looked merely flamboyantly Latin and picturesque, quite possibly – I thought patronizingly – perfectly all right. In spite of Tania’s favourable verdict, I was still concerned about my own appearance; but my journalist friend, when he dashed in wearing a neat blue suit and yellow satin tie, reassured me. ‘Quand on est jeune, vous savez! D’ailleurs nous serons tous très bohème – comme il sied.’[2] It seemed all right in his box, which I think was full of journalists and their wives or girls, though the rest of the auditorium was much more dressed up. What was it that seemed so overpoweringly odd and stirring about all this? The noise of voices, the waves, the elaborate clothes, the greetings and meetings and hobnobbing, the blazing lights and – what seemed to my untutored eye – the blinding luxury of the Opera House itself? The sound of the orchestra tuning, the inhibited rumble of double-basses and the scores of detached bow-strokes, the tentative thumps, the squeak of a reed, the hushed zing and gasp of a cymbal, the quickly muted thud of a drum, all converged into the murmur of a muzzled and muffled zoo. I hadn’t been inside a theatre since leaving England. The whole performance, which seemed amazingly good, passed in a mood of trance-like fascination and slight anxiety which was slowly dissipated by the flask which my friend circulated in the box’s penumbra.

  The party afterwards began rather stickily with the cast arriving amid salvoes of claps, the prima donna still embracing a quantity of bouquets, and interminable introducing and hand-kissing; but it soon became a great deal more easy-going. With my journalist friend and about a dozen others, I soon found myself eating, off a plate balanced on my knee, what turned out to be a helping of caviar spooned there as though it were mashed potatoes. All, after a while, melted into an agreeable flux. We were sitting with several girls, a splendidly dressed young officer and a visiting French journalist, and one or two others. The journalist asked me where I was staying, and I said at the Savoy-Ritz. He nodded respectful approbation and I remember I thought what an advantage it was to have a good address. My sponsor had to leave to write his piece at the Dimineaţa, and disappeared for ever. When the party began to languish, the group to which I belonged in the corner moved on to somebody’s flat. It must have belonged to a painter, to go by the properties that filled it and the lights hanging in lobster pots. Brandy in large quantities pumped in a fresh impetus, which was hardly needed by this time, and we danced and sang. All began to blur and smudge deliciously, the lobster pots turned into drowned underwater suns while everyone – but chiefly a high-spirited red-haired girl, the officer (he was somebody’s ADC, reckless, funny and looking scarcely older than me), the Frenchman, who was a human dynamo, and I – launched into an orgy of competitive showing-off in singing and dancing. Two noisy Bulgarian songs scored an exotic success. The high-spirited girl was improvising a violent solo dance when bangs on the door from a neighbouring flat reduced the noise to long, very urgent, very enjoyable and very garbled and I suspect rather repetitive arguments about art, literature and history against a musical background softened by two pairs of socks thrust into the gramophone.

  The next fragment of memory – a morning beam falling across half-empty glasses and a disorder of records – filled me with a hollow feeling of distress and calamity; morning all over again . . . But the light also rested on two spurred feet projecting from the end of a divan covered with peasant rugs that indicated a warrior taking his rest, then two crossed and gleaming black cylinders with small gold rosettes at the knee, tight dark blue breeches embroidered with foliating black galloons of braid, scarlet braces, a white shirt, and finally the sleeping and dishevelled head of the young officer; and, in another armchair, the crumpled frame of the French journalist. When the red-haired girl, who seemed to live there, emerged with coffee, it transpired that the hard exhibitionist core had all stayed the night, which made things a bit better. When Pierre, the young officer, returned from shaving, I watched him with some envy, slowly and painfully reassemble: struggling shakily with the hooks and eyes of the high astrakhan collar of his astrakhan-cuffed blue tunic, flattening the hussarish soutaches across the chest, arranging the fall of the empty sleeves of the black and blue pelisse he slung on heavy cords across his left shoulder, and correcting the diagonal slant across his back.

  He polished his beautifully cut boots with a cushion, and then peered in a looking-glass at the fragile, resplendent cornet reflected there and shuddered. ‘Do you think’, he asked sadly and slowly in English, ‘that I look like an officer and a gentleman?’ I said he did indeed. ‘Let’s hope so,’ he murmured lugubriously. He was half Scottish; his mother, he told me, had been a Miss Douglas; rather surprisingly he had an Everyman copy of the Pickwick Papers in the pocket of his pelisse.

  In the blinding Calea Victoriei, returning salutes was almost too much for him. ‘This is terrible,’ he groaned. I could understand the torment only too well. But haven was in sight. He turned into one of the side gates of the Palace. After the ordeal of answering the butt-salute of the bearskinned sentry, he was safe. He shot a rueful smile of deliverance over his shoulder through the bars and clinked with dignity across the empty parade ground . . .

  Back at the Savoy-Ritz, Tania knew just what was needed; an old, infallible nostrum from Odessa or Kishinev, based on two raw eggs broken into a glass, came to the rescue. She told me to swallow it at a gulp. The others clicked their tongues in commiseration. Their idea of me as a mug, capable of my initial blunder and returning in such a plight, filled them with a frenzy of protective concern. They were full of warnings about the dangers of Bucharest – much better to stay sensibly at home and keep out of harm’s way. I, too, was reluctant to leave them, and the harem-like seclusion and the filtered sunlight of late morning. I waved back over the lowered hood of the Muscovite carriage, and their arms fluttered from the open doorway like a sea anemone’s tendrils.

  • • •

  Josias von Rantzau, who had so promptly and hospitabl
y offered to put me up, lived in a quiet, comfortable flat abutting on the German Legation, where he was one of the secretaries. He was as different as it is possible to be from a foreigner’s idea of a German Junker. He belonged to a family that was as hoary as the annals of Holstein, famous in north German and Danish history, and distinguished ever since by a succession of statesmen, soldiers, courtiers and diplomats. One, an exact namesake, had been a marshal of France with Condé in the Thirty Years War. These facts, told me in summer by our Transylvanian host, had made a suitable impression on my socio-historical feelings, if the sentiment may masquerade under so innocuous a name. Tall, good-looking, civilized, gentle, with a quick charm that made him liked everywhere and speaking beautiful English and French, he represented a wonderful change of temperature and climate from the last few days. The only regional clue, should one have been a stranger opposite him in a train, was the pale diagonal of a fencing-scar across a chin already cleft by nature. I had wondered in Transylvania where it had been inflicted. At Heidelberg, I learnt, with the Saxo-Borussia – the Saxon-Prussian student corps – that Bullingdon Club by the Rhine. Josias laughed as he told me and I think blushed slightly as though I had indiscreetly raked up a youthful folly best forgotten. That night, to go to bed in the softly lit spare room with a row of books gleaming in a promising vista, and Harold Nicolson’s Some People and Peacemaking beside the bottle of mineral water on the bedside table, was balm indeed. A picture of Josias’s father, dressed as Chamberlain of the vanished Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, looked benignly down.

  No greater solace in a strange capital, after rough or irregular travel, can be compared to staying in a bachelor diplomatist’s flat (though some archaeologists run them close), especially if they are as hospitable and welcoming as my present host. (‘Please get at all these,’ with a wave towards huge cigarette boxes and a glittering drinks table, ‘we get them practically free. Do for heaven’s sake smoke those cigars, too. I don’t know what to do with them all, and please tell Maria if you want anything – any washing, luncheon – she gets depressed if there’s nothing to do . . .’) Empty all day, it was the dreamed-of refuge for writing and reading, encyclopaedias piling up on divans in warm rooms overlooking the autumn leaves of the quiet street. I was bent on learning as much about Rumania as I could, and, considering the dashing social life, I got through quite a lot; all Seton-Watson’s history of Rumania, lumps of Nicolae Iorga and Alexandro Xenopol and for general atmosphere two utterly opposite writers: Princess Marthe Bibesco and Panaït Istrati: Isvor, Cathérine-Paris and Le Perroquet vert of the first, and Uncle Anghel, Les Chardons du Baragan and Kyra Kyralina of the other. (How jarring and unwelcome this juxtaposition of names would have been both to Princess Bibesco and to poor Istrati’s ghost! These two authors represented, the one in ravishing French, the uppermost layer of the Gallicized Rumanian world; the other, in a self-taught and much less accomplished language, the poverty-stricken miseries and subterfuges of the humblest. The territory between seemed, from a literary point of view, unexplored.) Rumanian, too (perhaps the easiest of the Latin tongues, in spite of the miraculous survival of Roman case-endings that have dropped away everywhere else), began to unfold its secrets. I struggled with the poems of Eminescu, Alexandri and Octavian Goga with dictionaries and grammars, and advanced on the French poems of Carmen Sylva and Hélène Vacaresco’s Le Rhapsode de la Dâmboviţa. Everything to do with Rumania began to cast a contradictory and powerful spell.

  The chief pleasure of this lotus-eating respite was the company of Josias himself: sitting by the fire talking when he got back from work, sometimes with other people, Rumanian, English and French more often than German, and late at night, returning from dinner parties, sometimes the same ones, listening to music or drinking whisky and talking. We became great friends.

  There was just a suggestion of sadness in his thoughtful and very good-looking face that disappeared when he laughed, but soon returned again. I wish now I had asked him about Germany and what he thought lay ahead, but, staying with him as I was, I felt reluctant to do so. Anyway, it is always rather ticklish asking diplomats such questions; whatever their private convictions, reservations or opinions, they are, after all, even in private conversation, in honour bound to put forward the official views of the country they represent; it is a question of filling in what is unsaid, never an accurate but always a fascinating process. He was very amusing about all prominent Bucharest figures, but too good-natured to be very damaging. With everyone else, he liked and admired our own minister (this was before the era of embassies everywhere), I was glad to learn. (I had soon met the kind incumbents of the Rolls-Royce with the royal standard I had seen on the first night of my arrival.) I asked him what the German minister was like. He hesitated and said, thoughtfully nodding his head: ‘Very intelligent indeed.’ Then, in quite a different tone, he began to talk of his predecessor, Count von der Schulenburg,[3] who had been minister when he had first been nominated to Bucharest. His former chief had since then been made Ambassador in Moscow. He had adored him, he said: they had been great friends and they had often sat up into the small hours talking, just like this. Josias had admired his enormous knowledge and reading and civilization and style – ‘another world’ – and his breadth of view about Europe and history and politics and diplomacy. He said all this rather sadly and I inferred that he was less happy under the present dispensation. I wish I had asked him how he felt affected, as a career diplomat of several years’ standing – Josias must have been thirty, or a bit over – by the momentous change that had taken place in Germany a year ago. (I forgot about Graf von der Schulenburg’s name – except a year or so later, looking at the seventeenth-century monument to the soldier of fortune in the Venetian service in Corfu – until during the war when his unconventional career emerged.)

  One evening when we had been talking for hours, Josias said, after a pause, rather seriously, fixing me with large, blue eyes: ‘Here’s a silly question. Do you believe in the English phrase “Right or wrong, my country”?’ It took me unawares, and I said I thought I did. (I suppose, though, the answer would be hedged by conditions: only in extremis, or in cases where sheer national survival is at stake. The question is far too general.) He nodded thoughtfully several times and the talk took a different turning. This, too, stuck in my mind later as a symptom of the conflicts that must be assailing many Germans like Josias at that time: the antithesis of people like him, honourable, kind, civilized, belonging, like Schulenburg, to a tradition of Western life and thought and a style and manner of being more akin to the time of the Congress of Vienna than to the Third Reich, led by a regime whose every manifestation must have seemed daily more abhorrent. I don’t know how they were resolved; when I returned next year, Josias had been shifted to a different post. Several times during this time we spent the evening with a girl called Marcelle Catargi, the daughter of a great boyar, as they were called, who was devoted to him. She committed suicide at the time of the last great and definitive shift of power in Eastern Europe.

  A few days after the end of the war, in command of a team of the Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force, bumping over the rubble and the cinders of Hamburg (a sight and a smell which made us all fall silent, and dimmed for a while the exhilaration of victory), I found myself at Flensburg in the north of Holstein. Marked on the map near the town of Itzehoe, was a point reading ‘Schloss Rantzau’, and I headed for it next day, arriving at dark, to see if there were any news, after so many years, of Josias. It was a large, thick-towered mediaeval building, more fortress than dwelling, standing in a wood. The owner, Graf Rantzau, an old man with cropped white hair, was having supper by candlelight with his family and servants and many people bombed out of Hamburg. He was only a second cousin. He got up and came out into the yard. ‘Dear Josias?’ he said sadly. ‘Yes, he was in Eastern Europe somewhere. We’ve no news of him for ages. Ich glaube, die Russen ihn geschnappt haben . . .’ He made a vague gesture towards the east. ‘I thi
nk the Russians must have snapped him up . . .’

  Nearly all the people in this book, as it turned out, were attached to trails of powder which were already invisibly burning, to explode during the next decade and a half, in unhappy endings.

  • • •

  In counterpoint to the sybaritic and bookish retreat of Josias’s flat, a life of considerable worldly activity began. Being ‘taken up’, spoiled and made a fuss of is always agreeable, and something of the kind happened to me now, and I think for three reasons: a) out of a deep and universal Rumanian hospitality to strangers within their gates, b) out of kind hearts, knowing how little cash I had; no chance, or indeed, point, in trying to repay them, and c) from genuine amusement at the whole project. There was a strong bohemian, anti-conventional and un-pompous strain in the section of the Rumanian world in which I now found myself, a leaven which mitigated, and at the same time, in its way, enhanced the pursuit of l’élégance and fastidiousness in other directions. Thanks to all these factors, I soon discovered that nobody cared a rap about individual shabbiness; my bourgeois lust for a new pair of shoes, though they still trod beckoning and gleaming through my dreams, died down. (I rather wish it hadn’t; somebody told me one could get some made for a pound. ‘But’, he said, ‘if you get a pair, beware of the squeak.’ ‘The squeak?’ ‘Yes indeed. In some circles it’s highly prized. A sign of smartness and opulence. Cu sau fara scartzait? – the bootmaker asks: With or without a squeak? The squeak costs more . . .’)