[4] The supposed circuit of fashionable night-spots by Russian grand dukes.
[5] At the time of PLF’s writing, Rumania was languishing under a brutal Communist regime, and naming people still alive might endanger them.
7. To Varna
After the un-Kim-like life of the past three weeks, the wooden seat and the dim light in the third class carriage, and the rain falling desolately over the plain outside, were a dejecting contrast. The train stopped at every station, sometimes with long waits by the deserted platforms of remote halts. There were only a few peasants on board, all with that bewildered refugee look that overcomes country people in trains: women with coloured kerchiefs and Anna Karenina bundles on their laps, and men with their hands – blunt instruments temporarily idle – hanging sadly between their knees, with the looseness of turtles’ fins. They didn’t know what to do with themselves, and I felt rather the same, fumbling my stick, so long abandoned, with the rucksack squatting on the seat beside me like a toad companion. I thought about Bucharest. Infected by all I had heard from Hungarians and Bulgarians, I had dreaded it, in spite of the fascination that had tugged me there: how unbelievably kind they had been! I could hardly believe that all those faces and rooms and streets had been packed into so short a span. I wondered sadly if I would ever meet any of them again. The country outside the window seemed so remote and shapeless and without landmarks.
Much later, we were all shaken from our fitful dozing and herded out. The name of the station came as a bit of a shock. Giurgiu on the north bank! I had somehow thought we would cross the Danube much further downstream by the great Cernavoda Bridge, and so down the Black Sea coast through Constanţa, Mangalia and Babadag, and here we were on my old route!
I was the only passenger on the ferry boat. As we crossed the river towards the lights of Rustchuk and the familiar quay, things seemed to cheer up. I made a dash for the hotel, with the idea of staying the night and telling Rosa all my adventures over another lovely meal on the cliff’s edge next day. At last an unknown, sleepy woman came clip-clopping down the stairs. No, Gospodja Rosa was in Sofia for a week. I left a note with her stand-in, and wandered glumly to the station to sleep on a bench till the train started, and at last climbed into the carriage like a somnambulist and back into a slow and jolting limbo, and a cold one. I felt terrible. Could it be a delayed-action result of the whole string of tremendously late nights and heaven knew how many drinks of every different kind, hammered home by the Rubinstein party and the Stirbey ball, a whole century ago? Thank God, I was usually and most unjustly spared the full retribution of katzenjammer and gueule de bois, like a foot soldier with a charmed life whose friends fall thick about him. Anyway, neither evening had come anywhere near the pace of the night after La Bohème; and surely hangovers should be plucked from one’s luggage like contraband when crossing the border from one sovereign state to another, even though undeclared?
Much later, I was woken by dawn rising along a navy-blue sierra of mountains and down ravines with threadbare poplars, pricking through the mist under a pure, watery sky of still unshed rain, shot with pale shafts of sunlight. The leaves shone with dew. Like Rumania, but a bit later, all the woods had burst into fire while I had been away. I ate some cold mititei saved from Giurgiu in a twist of greasepaper, and watched the Balkans much lower and more shapeless than further west, but beautiful nevertheless, curling towards us. This would be the third time I had crossed these mountains, and I began to feel I owned the range. I had just crossed the Danube for the tenth time (not, of course, counting the bridges across it between Pest and Buda): more than once, at Ulm, in its nonage; over and back at Bratislava; across it again from Czechoslovakia to Hungary at Esztergom; at Budapest; then from Orșova to Vidin on the steamer, and now Rustchuk – Giurgiu and back. The branching and reedy wonders of the Delta, bursting with birds, were still unknown, and the stream’s lovely beginnings at Donaueschingen; but I was beginning to have a sensation of familiarity with the tremendous river, the real hero, or perhaps the heroine, of our continent. These inklings about the geography of Eastern Europe were like the early fumblings of a blind person getting the hang of a complicated text in Braille, as though I were beginning to feel the asperity of ranges and the sinuosities of rivers under the palm of my hand.
The train lurched and clanked along the Balkan passes. In a few hours I was pacing along the main street of Varna and then gazing down at an expanse of pearly water, ruffled at the edge and crinkled with little waves as it expanded to infinity: the Black Sea!
• • •
Loitering through the town about lamp-lighting time, I was wondering where to find Gatcho when I heard a shout from the other side of the road and a familiar figure charged across. We seized each other like Orestes and Pylades. A familiar figure, but only just. His cap, tilted at a killing angle, was one of those shallow pillboxes worn at German universities, with a narrow black and white band round the edge and a small shining peak. He saw my look of amazement and raised the cap with a comically woebegone look to reveal a totally shaven pate. Nothing of his unruly black shock remained. He couldn’t stop laughing. I had noticed several chaps similarly shorn and capped since my arrival and hadn’t realized that they were fellow alumni of Gatcho’s at the Handelsschule. Words showering out of us, we headed for a café and exchanged our adventures. Not much had happened to him, he said, he had come back to Varna soon after I had left: and what about my doings? I told him all about the theft of the rucksack and Rosa’s wonderful intervention. ‘I bet they beat him up,’ Gatcho said, ‘and a good job too.’ I short-circuited the argument about this (too early for a clash), and moved on to Bucharest. My stay at the Savoy-Ritz was a great success. Gatcho grinned from ear to ear as I told him. Remembering his prejudices, I underplayed all my worldly goings-on, but stuck up for the Rumanians: they were not at all the ogres the Bulgarians thought they were. I had done the same thing, vice versa, in Rumania, like the mouse that helped in Aesop’s fable. To little effect, though. ‘Savages,’ had been the dismissive Rumanian comment, and ‘Robbers!’ was Gatcho’s. After an exchange of fruitless argument, I slithered off into demands about our acquaintances in Tirnovo. Two of them were here – but not Vasil the spy-hunter, Gatcho said with a smile. In fact, we all had dinner together, and I slept on a camp-bed in his digs at the outskirts of the town. Why didn’t I stay on and return with him to Tirnovo for Christmas? ‘Turkey awaits!’ I said importantly, pointing down the coast.
Thanks to the word ‘student’ on my passport, a rather agreeable life began, and I had all my meals at a students’ restaurant frequented by Gatcho and his friends, with even my own napkin in a ring. A pre-Advent fast was in progress, which the students and the people who ran the place took rather seriously, and the food consisted mainly of spinach-like herbs, mache lettuces, cabbage, cauliflower, and two of my favourite things, bean and lentil soup, eaten with wonderful black bread, and plenty of wine. When Gatcho was free, we wandered about the town, and into the fascinating quarters where the Tartars and Circassians had lived their primitive lives. These Tcherkesses had been brought here by the Turks in the middle of the last century, and had taken root. There was nothing remarkable about the town, except its marvellous position poised above the sea, with cliffs running north and south under a fleece of woods and the waves lapping on shingle and sand immediately below.
North of the town, among tall trees, stood the Stanchoff villa, and beyond it, Evksinograd, half villa and half rustic palace, where the royal family spent their holidays in summer. About twenty miles north, along the same coast and the other side of the border, Queen Marie of Rumania[1] lived off and on in her romantic oriental retreat at Balchik. I wondered if these two sets of Coburg cousins ever defied the prejudices of their subjects and slipped across by motor boat for tea.
Gatcho and his friends gave a lot of thought to the studentkas, the girl students, who, like them, had come to study in Varna. They, too, wore student caps very like the boys’ ones; th
ey looked terrible on some heads, rather dashing and Apache-like on others. These romances were nearly all, I think, platonic, owing to two things: the close chaperoning of the girls, who were nearly always lodged under the Argus-eyed vigilance of kinsmen, and the pan-Balkan attitude to technical virginity. Its absence in peasant circles was a matter of repudiation and bloodshed, and the prejudice is just as deeply rooted in the intelligentsia. It is much less a question of morality or ethics than of tribal feeling, and it must be largely an heirloom of the fierce seclusion of their women which prevailed for centuries among the occupying Muslims. This strictly localized physiological fixation, and the rough and ready tests by which a bride’s inviolacy is gauged, must have led to boundless injustice. Gatcho told me that the terror of lost maidenheads tormented both their owners and their potential destroyers with the dread of family retribution (and perhaps gunshot weddings – though girls had been known to act in bad faith here). The would-be seducer might naturally be diffident, even without these sanctions, about landing his momentary benefactress in the soup for life. Love affairs, then, even the most innocent ones, had to be conducted with great secrecy to avoid even the appearance of danger; the rare occasions when they were less innocent called for as much strategy and resource as the capture of a city. Even so, when the lovers had outwitted all the hazards, drugged the watchdogs, as it were, bribed the guards, and talked the duenna round, the gloomy tribal veto lay between them like a sword: a curse only to be exorcized by the physiological equivalent of a mediaeval theologian’s device to transgress the spirit of a text while keeping the hallowed wording intact.
At this point, to cheer Gatcho up, I told him of the Rumanian name for these fell diseases which had first caught my eye on a doctor’s plate in Arad: Boale Lumetși (the first word is a dissyllable, the second, Loomeshti: literally, ‘ailments of the world’ – ‘world’ is lume in Rumanian) – rather lyrical-sounding words for a thought to send a shudder down young spines. ‘Boale lumetși . . . boale lumetși!’ We uttered the syllables in slow, elevated and almost dreamy tones, as though they were a charm or an exorcism. Weltliche Krankheiten . . . the ills of the world . . .
Our talk wandered round these and kindred themes. He knew that the Bogomils had supplied the English language, at several removes, with the most widespread word for sexual heterodoxy. The practice was almost as prevalent, it seemed from what Gatcho said, as in Western Europe; perhaps slightly less. In the usual way of the Levant, whatever blame there was, and that not very severe, attached to passivity; not on moral grounds, but on the score of abrogation of virile prerogative in a world where toughness is prized. But the cruel hostility of England is absent. The idea of people being thrown into prison for sexual unorthodoxy, unless accompanied by factors which would equally put a heterosexual offender behind bars, seems to them as barbarous and atrocious as Balkan atrocities to us. All through the Balkan peninsula, homosexuality conjures up an image that sharply conflicts with Western symbolism. Instead of a sinuously fluting timbre of voice, the word evokes a tall and burly figure, often with a cudgel, talking in a slow bass voice, twirling vast bristling moustaches and surveying his fellow men with a burning, shrewd and speculative eye.
These platonic love affairs of the young, then, found their outlet in two ways. At the sunset hour, when all southern Europe pours into the main street to slowly promenade in the falling dusk, the sexes, except for family parties, are as sternly segregated as they are on either side of the nave in church, usually walking in opposite directions so that sweethearts are only within striking distance for a few palpitating seconds a mile. The two streams of strollers become a tangle of furtive oeillades, lovelorn glances, fluttered lashes, hungry looks and, when nobody is looking, of love letters hastily changing hands. These tightly folded billets were the only other means of contact. Gatcho was deep in one of these pen-friendships, and, since he made me his confidant as a complete outsider, I was able to marvel at the high-flown, euphuistic fervour on either side. Sighs, tears, pining away with love-longing, veiled or overt threats of suicide, sleepless nights with tear-sodden pillows (Gatcho slept magnificently) were the normal currency of these letters; and poetry, in which all nature – the swallow, the lark, lonely seagulls and nightingales leaning their breasts on a thorn until the heart itself was transfixed – was pressed into service. Gatcho, reprehensibly, was involved in three separate romances of this kind; two were stylistic exercises, but the heroine of the third, Ivanka, was more serious. She was pointed out during the evening promenade, a very pretty girl from Shumen, and Gatcho took me to have a formal coffee and slivo at her uncle’s house on her aunt’s name day, a perfect opportunity for letter-swapping.
The odd thing about all these romances is how seldom they end in anything, let alone marriage. Marriage is nearly always a matter of dowries and family arrangement in which neither party has much say, and sentiment, usually, very little. The same rule obtains in all these countries. It seems to work very well. All this puts the vast quantity of songs about love – I think it even outstrips war as a favourite theme – in a strangely theoretical, abstract category. These feelings, as it were, spin in the void, like an elaborate machine that cogs into nothing more solid than air. Gatcho admitted that it was so. But I rather envied him the excitement of the whole thing, the illicit correspondence, the hot-house Schwärmerei, the subterfuges and collusion, which can, in a way, be an end in itself.
There were signs indicating that the old order was beginning to relax, and, to weaken my sweeping thesis, Gatcho did actually marry Ivanka two years later, against considerable opposition by both families who had other candidates lined up, and lived happily ever after; at least, until I last heard from him a year before the war.
• • •
Many things lodge Varna in my memory. One was an old man who must have been picked off by the first cold of winter; at the end of a lane on the edge of the town, a long object was being thrust through a window; a coffin, as I saw, when it was safely on the shoulders of the bearers. I stood back against the wall as the vested priest and the mourners – a few of them, old women mostly, wailing piteously – thronged the narrow gulley. The coffin passed within a foot of me, open, containing an old man in a black suit with patent leather shoes, specially bought, as I learnt later, for the occasion, and probably smarter than any he had worn in his lifetime. A few flowers were tucked round him, and a satin ribbon bound his gnarled hands together. The head, with hollow cheeks, cavernous eyes, and a toothless mouth slightly agape, looked smaller than the head of a live person, as though death had shrunk it; and quite different. It rocked on its pillow with the bearers’ gait. The little group, with its tall candles blown out by the wind, turned the corner. The sad chanting and wailing died. Two small boys carrying a coffin lid that was too heavy for them brought up the rear, arguing importantly and possessively about which way up it should be carried.
About ten minutes later a more prosperous group was moving along the main street. Passers-by stopped, uncovered and crossed themselves. Acolytes carried processional crosses radiating a forest of gold and silver spokes which they gyrated slightly on their staves, so that the metal rays jangled together with a sound like shaken tinfoil. In the middle, carried slowly and at a slant that was almost perpendicular, a small, flower-lined coffin contained a pretty little girl of about four in a stiff white party dress with a wreath of white flowers round her carefully combed black hair in which big, white satin bows were tied. Her pallor gave her the look of a wax doll on display in a window where everything had been remembered except the pink on the cheeks. The chanting this time was in Armenian and the whole company disappeared at last into the Armenian church. (The hats of the Armenian clergy only differed from the cylinders of the Orthodox at the summit. The latter were flat on top; the Armenian katimankia were roofed by a fluted cone.)
Gatcho was dumbfounded when I told him, soon afterwards, that I had just seen corpses for the first time in my life. How could I have possibly reached th
e age of nineteen without having seen dozens? I explained about closed coffins. What an odd idea, and what an unreal life we must lead. I had felt rather shaken.
Mr and Mrs Collas, the British consul and his wife, lived in a house high up with a wide view of the Black Sea. I had several cheerful meals there, borrowed their books and received many kindnesses from them. After a few days Judith Tollinton, whom I had stayed with in Sofia, came to stay for a day or two, and we went for walks along the cliffs, playing analogies and other elaborate guessing-games while the falling leaves blew about in the cold sunny air. One evening, when we had all sat up late, I think playing paper games, I set off for Gatcho’s after a final whisky and soda, as usual clutching a couple of those round tins of Player’s bestowed by the kind Collases.
Now something very odd occurs; so peculiar indeed, and so unfinished, in that I still don’t know what it was about, that I hesitate to set it down. But it is hard to leave out. I walked back to Gatcho’s house where I was staying. It was about midnight. The key wasn’t in its usual place. Obviously Gatcho had forgotten it. The light was on, so I called his name once or twice, then threw some gravel at the window. There was no answer: he must have gone to bed with the lights on. So I shinned up a drainpipe – Gatcho’s room was on the second floor – opened the window and lowered myself inside the room on my tiptoes as quietly as I could. Gatcho wasn’t in bed, but sitting on the edge of it fully dressed, glaring at me with a brow clouded with histrionic thunder. I cheerfully asked what had happened about the key. Gatcho shouted: ‘Go away! I hate you!’ He said this so dramatically that I thought it was some elaborate joke, started laughing and walked to the middle of the room. He stood up and shouted still louder: ‘Ich hasse Dich!’ And then louder still, ‘What are you laughing at?’ I clapped and said, ‘Bravo, Gatcho!’ At this Gatcho picked up the huge Bulgarian two-edged knife that was lying on my bed with a lot of other stuff, pulled off the sheath and stood under the lamp, with the knife-grasping arm flung out wide, at right angles to his body, the raised tip pointing at me. His eyebrows were painfully high, his eyes wide and fixed and his lips so tightly pinched together that they scarcely showed. At last I understood that there was no question of a joke at all and seized his right wrist with both hands. There was a moment of deadlock. He made no effort to attack with the knife, but resisted my forward thrust. This sent us both crashing to the floor and the knife clattering across the room. I extricated myself, picked up the knife and flung it into the garden through the still-open window. In this sudden violence, we had upset the mangali, a huge brass brazier with heavy rings used for heating the room. The floor was covered with burning charcoal. Without saying a word, we set about collecting this scarlet scattering with whatever was handy and pouring it back into the righted mangali. Meanwhile a din of feet pounded up the stairs. Kiril and Veniamin, the two Tirnovo friends who lived below, burst in and asked what the noise was about. ‘Only the mangali,’ we said, our eyes fixed on our task, ‘Come and help.’ When the coal was all restored and the others had gone, we both sat down on our beds saying nothing, and Gatcho sank his cropped brow in his hands. There was a long silence. Then we looked at each other in bewilderment. When we were more composed, I asked him what on earth had happened. Gatcho answered, ‘I don’t know. I truly don’t know’, then after a pause, ‘Please forgive me.’ We shook hands ceremoniously. ‘I wouldn’t have done you any harm. Please don’t ask me any more.’ It seemed hopeless to do so just then. We went to bed, wished each other a forlorn goodnight, and blew out the light.
The Broken Road Page 22