The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Among the younger ones, two seemed to stand out as paragons: Nicky Chrisoveloni and Constantine Soutzo, both fortunately out, one of them in Athens (I saw him a few days ago). What astonishes me in these reunions over two decades is not the changes that the interval has wrought, but the lack of them, especially as one pieces together the terrible vicissitudes which have intervened on their side. They are heartening instances, in the teeth of all probability, of physical and mental indestructibility. Nicky was half English and had been at school in England, and both he and Constantine had recently come down from Oxford, where Constantine, I learnt with delight, had not taken a valet in high Edwardian style, but, to everyone’s wonder, a Rumanian chambermaid. In different ways – Nicky, tall, dark and soft-voiced, and Constantine fair, blue-eyed and extrovert – they seemed spirited and infectious examples of energy and uninhibited enjoyment of life. Both flew aeroplanes – for not everyone, I am glad to record, had been entirely broken by the agrarian reforms. Nicky owned and managed a family bank. Constantine lived in one of the rather charming old houses I had admired on my first exploration of the city, called the Palais Soutzo, where I stayed when my bed at Josias’s flat was needed for a family visitation. (The room I occupied, filled with Empire furniture, was entirely circular, the only one I have ever slept in, except a bell tent, a hut in the French Cameroons, a converted oast house and one in the Hôtel de la Louisiana in Paris.) I first remember Nicky Chrisoveloni, late at night, at a young and wild party where everyone was searching for a word in charades. ‘J’y suis’, he said – all of our side had dried up – ‘concupiscence!’ It was acted out in French with very funny improper elaboration. Another early memory is of Nicky leading a sudden fierce spontaneous sârba in double time round the fast-emptied floor of the Arizona, with the Gypsies on their rostrum going mad. That’s the way bankers ought to be.

  I had slightly guilty feelings, as in Budapest, at accepting so much kindness and hospitality; but perhaps not as guilty as I should have. It was different in people’s houses; but what about nightclubs, where evenings often ended? Or meals at Capșa, with caviar flying about and that splendid Danube fish called sterlet? (The food in Rumania was amazing, a very original native nucleus, to which all that was most exciting in Russia, Poland, Turkey, Austria, Hungary and France had contributed their influences.) Everything, fortunately, cost about a quarter of its equivalent in Western Europe. Pricked by conscience at moments like these I would make a frantic flourish with two thousand-lei notes; always, thank God, in vain. These two bits of paper sank to the symbolic role of stage currency.

  • • •

  Sinaia. The three syllables send up a wave of bewilderment. I gazed out of the centrally heated room of the villa at the drive and the roofs and the treetops of the other smart villas. I felt as torpid as an autumn fly, weighed down with depression. Somewhere beyond the leafy trimness outside lay golf links and then green Alpine meadows sloping to a blaze of autumn beeches and then the tiers of Christmas trees. A mountain Sunningdale. Nor was there much consolation when one turned indoors: the modish drawing room, bookless except for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and, on a sideboard between two carved chamois, The Story of San Michele, Ashendon and a French translation of Precious Bane; a hanging print of Vigée le Brun’s Marie Antoinette with the Dauphin in her arms and another of Fragonard’s L’Escarpolette; and, from the two lamp-lit tables a twitter of twilight conversation. ‘Deux piques.’ ‘Passe.’ ‘Un drink?’ ‘Oh, que vous êtes malin!’ ‘Un petit high-ball.’ ‘No bid.’ ‘Scotch?’ ‘Tiens, partner?’ ‘Très faible – assez, assez!’ ‘Comme j’adore la campagne!’ ‘Et beaucoup de soda . . . encore!’ ‘Est-ce que vous bridgez chez Julie mardi?’ . . . ‘Oh, merci, vous êtes un ange . . . ! Trois trèfles . . . turni tome.’ In a few hours the smart tailored suits would be replaced by black and pearls, and after another of the slow and delicious meals that acted as breaks between rubbers, the real evening’s work would begin. The players were Rumanian, French and English. It was wonderfully tame and restful . . .

  The passes in the mountain barrier outside were perhaps the funnels through which, in 1241, the hordes of Genghis Khan had swarmed on their way to tear Europe to bits. I felt rather like one of them. The only thing to see nearby was the royal castle of Peles, about a quarter of an hour away, a mass of battlements and half-timbering and acute-angle turrets, a bold Carpathian Balmoral. Next day I contrived to borrow from my hosts (who were very nice) the enormous Packard in which we had driven from Bucharest, with its tall chauffeur in pale grey livery and leggings, and drive over to Brașov, a romantic and serpentine mountain drive through forests so brilliant that they looked on fire, ending in the little mediaeval Saxon town built in one of the deep passes in the mountainous fender separating Transylvania from the Regat. Very strange it seemed, too, to be surrounded by thick Germanic arches supported on stout pillars, onion cupolas and shingled towers with tangles of deutsche Schrift over the shops and the sound of a German dialect in the cobbled streets; strange, too, to feel that I was in Transylvania again, the eastern edge of the mountain principality where much of my idle summer had slipped by.

  These Germans, who have been romantically connected with the children of Hamelin, were really Rhinelanders, and some of them Flemings, summoned and settled here early in the twelfth century by the kings of Hungary in seven fortresses of the Carpathians to guard the eastern borders; hence the German name for Transylvania: Siebenburger. (In the middle of the century they were followed by the turbulent Teutonic Knights, who were dismissed again a few years later, to move north and eastwards and found the military might of Prussia.) When the new doctrines of Calvin and Luther began to travel eastwards, taking permanent root in parts of the Magyar countries, these towns became outposts of Protestantism, and have remained so ever since: the easternmost wingtip of the Reformation. Further north inside this westward curve of the Carpathians, the Hungarian kings placed another strange population of settlers, even earlier than the Saxons, to defend Transylvania’s north-eastern march: the Szeklers. These, though Magyar by race, have been separated from their fellow Hungarians for so long – isolated in an overwhelming sea of Rumanians – that many old tribal customs and an idiosyncrasy of speech survive which their kinsmen lost long ago in the great national Hungarian block further west. They are different enough for people to have thought, in the past, that they were the descendants of Attila’s original invading Huns. Like the Saxons, these frontiersmen enjoyed many privileges and exemptions. They were ruled by the Count of the Szeklers, just as the Germans were ruled by the Count of the Saxons; but unlike these, they were ennobled to a man, which freed them from all taxation. These groups, with the Hungarian population much further west, were the three elements which – first under their counts, then under the Hungarian princes of Transylvania, then the kings of Hungary, and then under the dual monarchy, the Habsburgs – ruled Transylvania from the thirteenth century to the twentieth. (It is these arbitrary lumps of population which made the ruling of Rumania’s frontiers so difficult and unsatisfactory a task.) During all this immense tract of time the Rumanians, who outnumbered all the others put together and now ruled the country, had not only had no say in the running of Transylvania but no official existence at all; the yoke of serfdom both here and in Hungary proper was even heavier on the Hungarian and Rumanian peasantry than it was in the principalities east of the mountain chain.

  The towns here all have three names, the Rumanian, the Hungarian and the German. For the former two, the steep little town all round me was called Brașov and Brasso; the Saxons clung jealously to its first Teutonic name of Kronstadt. Not only the name and the architecture of the town were German, but its speech and the looks of the citizens. It seemed hard to believe that the owners of these florid complexions and blond hair, of the bodices and waistcoats and the felt hats, had had no contact with their distant relations for seven centuries. I wandered about the lanes and dived into bars and taverns, almost rejecting the evidence of my
eyes and ears. Beautiful Turkey carpets in the massive and spotless churches reminded one of the important position of the town in the passes through which the eastern trade to northern and western Europe used to flow. But after the market place it was the bars and the back streets that drew one most. How I wished, as I hobnobbed with two cowherds in a pub in the outskirts of the town and listened to their curious dialect, that I had arrived on foot, dumped my kit, and was now deep in one of those unhurried, groping, temperature-taking, gazing and eavesdropping private surveys which always began my solitary sojourns in a new town! Whenever I turned a corner or slunk out of a Gastwirtschaft, wondering what next, there, in front of the smart Schwarzer Adler hotel, behind the wheel of that vast limousine, the dove-grey chauffeur yawned. It was getting late. I felt a tremendous fraud as the chauffeur leapt from his seat, saluted and then tucked me in with a fur rug and drove the purring, scarcely audible oblong away over the cobbles. On the way out, we dawdled, in the wake of the car’s too melodious horn notes, through a herd of cattle. The drover was one of the ones I had been drinking with an hour before. His blue eyes rounded with astonishment as we drew clear. I waved guiltily, Haroun-al-Raschid unmasked.

  When we were gliding through the incandescent forest once more – no potholes on this royal road – with the twilight sliding up the mountainside, I lit one of the splendid cigars Josias had bestowed on my departure. The headlights were soaring through stage wings of leaves and the engine made a sound like a never-ending sigh. Soon only the burning ring that divided the long and carefully husbanded ash at the end of its aromatic cylinder – held, I hoped, with easy nonchalance in the fading pallor of a hand hedonistically adroop over the soft folds of the fur – glowed in the Havana-and-pine-needle and sandalwood-scented shadows. A satrap’s progress, the agreeable weariness of a young billionaire. Perhaps this was the way to loll and ponder the beginnings of the Saxons and the Szeklers . . . Nothing had changed when I got back. The intermittent murmur and the chink of ice cubes still wove their lullaby: ‘Nous sommes en déroute, partner.’ ‘Tout est perdu fors l’honneur.’ ‘Deux coeurs.’

  Monday brought liberation. One of a small flotilla, the great equipage bore us down into the lowlands and through the oilfields between Campina and Ploești. For many miles, the oil derricks blazed forth their tidings of prosperity like a myriad beacons, and soon we were once more in the heart of the wickedness and delights of Bucharest.

  • • •

  Pricked by conscience about this sybaritic way of life a few days later, after being driven (yet again) to luncheon at a country club on the edge of Lake Snagov, some miles outside Bucharest, I set out to return on foot. It was a journey of some miles, at first through lonely woods, all of them a uniform autumnal blaze, then along the straight highway, past Baneașa aerodrome, and into the capital down a magnificent tree-lined boulevard, the Chaussée Kiselev. How very different from my ramshackle southern approach a couple of weeks before! As it approaches the town, this fine alleyway is lined on either side with large and prosperous houses in many conflicting and sometimes comic styles, leafy tabernacles of the spacious 1900s lying back behind commodious pillared gateways for the easy passage of four-in-hands, tilburies and victorias.

  • • •

  It was true about leaving in a couple of days. We were now well into the second week of November and, thanks to my northward swoop, Constantinople was as far away as ever, in fact a long way further off. At Plovdiv it had been almost within my grasp. I had no hard-and-fast plan and no time limit; but the idea of reaching Constantinople by New Year’s Day had been subconsciously taking shape as a suitable date for this momentous arrival – say, a month and a half ahead – perfectly feasible, but too short a span for my unhurried rate. I reckoned that I had come many hundreds of miles out of my way; this Rumanian trip was in the nature of a deviant escapade, like my Lustfahrt to Prague from Bratislava.

  The way on foot would run across the Baragan steppe and then the Dobrudja steppe the other side of the Danube, a flat, barren and sparsely inhabited tract (though a very strange and beautiful one, as I was to learn later on). In wet weather it was almost impassable on foot and there was scarcely anyone there to scrounge a horse from, as I had done in similar circumstances on the Great Hungarian Plain. So why not take the train to Varna, on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, just across the Rumanian border? The third class didn’t cost much and I would still be hundreds of miles in credit as far as distance covered on foot was concerned; not that I had any doctrinaire objection to getting lifts for short distances – after all, whatever else I was up to (ah, what?) I was not engaged on breaking a record or winning a bet; but I had taken so few lifts that I was starting to nourish a secret pride in the enormous mileage I must already have trudged. But this brief spring by train would only lop off a hundred and fifty miles or less: chicken feed in relation to the totals I had knocked up in my twisting track. I was secretly longing, at my journey’s end, to step out and add up each day’s march on a really large-scale map of Europe with a pair of dividers, to see exactly how far I had plodded. Happy about this important decision, I prepared to enjoy the two remaining days of unwonted luxury to the hilt.

  I struck very lucky. That night there was a marvellous and not very big party given by the Spaniards Perico and Lili Prat at their legation, for Artur Rubinstein. He was a great friend and always stayed with the Prats when he had a concert in Bucharest. After supper he played Chopin for a while, and then dancing and drinking set in at an uninhibited tempo. I thought I’d never seen anyone enjoy himself more, only knocking off dancing to talk at a tremendous speed and very funnily, his conversation scattered with marvellous imitations, abetted by his red hair and a pale, charming face. He seemed to infect everyone else with fun and high spirits. It was a memorable and glorious evening, and a very late one. The last thing I remember was expounding my views on literature with considerable urgency to Julie Ghika and Nouchette Gafencu.

  The next night, and my last, was later still. It seemed, during these days in Bucharest, and especially now, as if circumstances had plotted to condone and satisfy each of those fleeting and rather silly longings for a luxurious and dazzling contrast to hovel-dwelling which had suddenly swept over me on that rainy night on the way to Rustchuk. I hesitate to chronicle the enjoyment of surging from the bath and seeing all Constantine Soutzo’s lent magnificence laid out on the bed in the softly lit circular room. Borrowed studs gleamed in the stiff borrowed cuffs, and the efficient, black-browed cut-throat of a valet who must have succeeded the maid of Christ Church, pulled in and buckled the flimsy strap at the back of the flimsier waistcoat, while Constantine shouted for him next door, and I slid into the perfectly fitting tails. (It was only the third time in my life I had worn these things.) But then the entry of the cut-throat with a buttonhole carnation in either hand, while Constantine wrestled with the wine and tinfoil of a dark green bottle in the drawing room, seemed difficult to beat. Identical figures, we decided, of foppish robustness, we polished it off standing in front of the fire.

  The Palais Stirbey was much older and smaller than the great stucco one with the lions with the blazing eyes that I have mentioned; it was built, I should think, early in the nineteenth century, in a charming Regency style: long rooms with ceilings supported by white wooden free-standing pillars, I think with Ionic capitals, and adorned with lustres of many tear-like, glittering drops; and I remember that the parquet floors, during the few moments that these were empty of dancers, had a very slight wave to them, a faint and scarcely discernible warp, like the marquetry of a casket that age has twisted very slightly out of the true. This charm-enhancing blemish, an infinitesimal trace of some long-forgotten earthquake perhaps, gave a wonderful appearance of movement to the interior, something I have hardly ever seen since: a feeling of simultaneous stasis and flux. From the moment when Constantine put his arm through mine – how clearly one remembers kind gestures like this! – and abetted my beginnings with the friendly ease of wh
ich some people have the gift, the whole evening leaves a memory as though it had unfolded itself somewhere in the country, and not in a town at all.

  • • •

  A marvellous awakening, rather like an earlier one, with borrowed plumage scattered, coffee filling the round room with wonderful fumes, then a whiff of leaves burning damply on a bonfire, the muted sound of trams outside, horses’ hooves and claxons, the voices of Gypsies crying their wares, and finally the clash of rings along their rods and a swish of curtains letting in rainy light and a good morning murmur from Constantine’s cut-throat servant! Seton-Watson’s history of Rumania by the bed, Crome Yellow, finished yesterday for the third time, an overflow of maps . . . Of course! Now Ion, the servant, was laying out, as I had asked him to last night, leather jacket, breeches, puttees, those uncompromising boots, gaping rucksack, staff, scrip, cockle shell – all a palmer’s gear at the end of a stay in a castle – as carefully as if they were some exotic uniform. I could hear Constantine on the telephone, talking to a mechanic about the overhaul of an aeroplane, planning a boar-shoot, fixing a dinner date several days hence, a pause, loud laughter. End of the holidays . . . At lunch time, the rain was battering on the windows. After finishing the autopsy of the previous night, Constantine asked if I would really set out next day, to Bulgaria, if it were raining like that: why not stay on a bit?

  [1] Bistre: a brown pigment, best known for its use as painter’s ink.

  [2] ‘When one’s young, you know! Besides, we’ll all be very bohemian, as is fitting.’

  [3] Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg (1875–1944) used his diplomatic skills trying to strengthen peace between Germany and the Soviet Union. He was executed for complicity in the July Plot against Hitler.