The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  I had just got the sack from my preparatory school (which was why I was hanging about in Italy in the middle of the spring term, with my father, for once, having to put up with the second of these recurring calamities), but not soon enough to have escaped the indoctrination of prep schools, which, unlike public schools, turns children – all of them, till then, near-geniuses trailing clouds of glory – into frightened, insufferable little conformist prigs. (It is in these children’s Potsdams, not in public schools, that old England’s sociological winding sheet is woven. If these beastly places were all blown up, the humanistic liberation, which is, unexpectedly, latent in public schools, would be given a chance at last.) When we were in the street and the hat in position, with the Lombardic sun shining on the broad-arrowed hammer-head, I lagged behind, miserably hoping that nobody would think there was any connection between us, longing to be demolished by a merciful lightning flash, until I was reproached for dawdling in kindly, sepulchral tones. I smiled, while thinking of this in the café in Varna, and of how closely my outfit now approximated his.

  My father, at that time, was Director-General of the Geological Survey of India, and remained so for many years, responsible for the mineral welfare of the whole subcontinent, and constantly travelling, when he could get away from Calcutta and Simla, all over it (always, I imagined as a child, from a faded photograph, sitting gravely solar-topeed behind an aukus-wielding mahout, on an enormous elephant, through landscapes of jungle and mountain). Letters would arrive from Bangalore, Ceylon, Sikkim, Waziristan . . . A true Darwinian naturalist, the whole physical world absorbed him. I used to boast at school how he had discovered a snowflake and a caterpillar with eight hairs on its back and a mineral called Fermorite, a claim which would often bewilder and silence other boasters by its oddity. For one of these feats the Royal Society had made him a Fellow. Somehow we always failed to click. I think I found him too austere, remote and frugal, and his naturalist’s instincts ensured a scientific passion for classification: for instructing me, later that day for instance, whether the gentians we found just below the snow line on Monte della Croce were bicotyledons or monocotyledons, without a word about the colour. I called for wilder music and for stronger wine . . . I dread to speculate what he thought of me, a permanent long-distance nuisance and source of perplexity and expense. He had been rather tolerant otherwise about the misdeeds that I have darkly hinted at now and then; and he had accepted with philosophy the reversal in his plans implicit in my present travels. Perhaps he felt that they were the beginning of the dissolution of our remote link, which, in fact, they turned out to be.

  About our only common ground was the fondness of both of us for puns, which, if they are long and elaborate enough, is not dead in me yet. A great and rather unexpected talent of my father’s, and one which seems to belie the impression I have written, was a wonderful gift for storytelling. Night after night, in the hotels of Devonshire, Switzerland or Italy which were our habitat when he was on leave, these complex and exciting serial-sagas would hold us and the other children staying there (all of whom, disguised under intriguing names, were woven into the narrative) silent and spellbound on the floor in pitch darkness.

  I put the two letters back into their many-stamped envelopes, each with its conflicting redolence, so different one from the other, and both so unconnected and remote from the Black Sea and Balkan scene that lay all round.

  • • •

  The café, my new headquarters on the cliff above the Black Sea, where nobody but me ever seemed to come, was little more than a hut among trees, with a single wide window. I used to gaze down through it at the Black Sea – bright blue in the winter sunlight, steely grey or cobalt, traversed by racing clouds, shivered by raindrops, churned by the wind in sudden angry waves, and once invisible under a twirling mist that turned all the trees and the beetling shrubs along the cliff’s rim into a ghostly forest – and repeat its names slowly and with delectation, over and over again, in English, then in German, Rumanian, Turkish: Schwarzes Meer, Marea Neagra, Kara Deniz, and, deepest and darkest of all, the Bulgarian Cherno Moré. It seemed that ancient Greek navigators changed their original name for it – the Pontus Axeinos, the hostile or anti-stranger sea – into its opposite, ‘Euxine’, ‘the welcoming one’, to placate sudden and terrible storms, on the same superstitious principle as the Furies were named ‘the kindly ones’. It is ballasted with thousands of wrecks. I would look north along the tufted cliffs towards the Dobrudja and Constanţa, the ancient Tomi, where Ovid was exiled by Augustus for writing the Ars amatoria. (If only in the Tristia he had written more about his surroundings!) Then came the vast flimsy wilderness of the Danube’s mouths fraying out like the unravelled strands at the end of a long cable, and Bessarabia, and then Russia. It all seemed very close. Odessa, the Crimea, the Sea of Azov – Krim Tartary and the whole sweep of the Scythian empire, the dark land of the Cimmerians – Novorossiysk, and, almost opposite my table, Colchis, where Jason stole the Golden Fleece: a long sail for the Argo from Mount Pelion. If my forefinger could shoot out like a telescope several hundred miles long it would strike the Caucasus, fumble its way through the valleys of Imeretia and Mingelia and into Georgia, through the Lermontoff world of Tiflis, touching the tip of Mount Ararat and dipping, on the other side, in the Caspian. The Elburz mountains, Azerbaijan, Persia – all this seemed suddenly close and accessible. A southern swing of the forefinger brought it in line with Trebizond, the ancient kingdom of Pontus and Paphlagonia, the coast of Asia Minor, all northern Turkey, and at last, south and a bit to the east, about a hundred and fifty miles away as the gull flies, to the Bosphorus and, on its bank, the many-named city I was heading for. A wild and fabulous spirit overhung these waves, as though this coast were still the end of the world, the forlorn ultimate border of reality beyond which a cloud of legend, rumour and surmise began.

  ‘I’ve tramped Britain and I’ve tramped Gaul, and the Pontic shore where the snow-flakes fall’[2] – the lines were seldom out of my head these days. Another literary association of the region, to set beside Ovid and Pushkin, was the tumulus marking the grave of Mazeppa, a lonely mound among the tangle of the Danube’s outlets. I had been told about this in Bucharest, and quickly read Byron’s poem, and my thoughts of the plain sweeping from the river and across the Ukraine to Kiev were incomplete thenceforward without the Géricault-vision of Peter the Great’s hetman of Cossacks lashed naked to the back of a wild horse galloping with streaming mane and wild eyes and nostrils across the crepuscular steppe.

  But Varna, and particularly the rolling wooded country inland from my lair, is especially singled out by a larger disaster. Here, in November 1444, the young King Wladislaw of Hungary and Poland, with the great Janos Hunyadi, Prince of Transylvania, and Vlad the Devil, Prince of Wallachia, advanced with their joint armies against Murad II: rashly, for, as Vlad told the young king, ‘the Sultan, when he goes hunting, has a greater retinue than the whole of your army.’ And so it turned out. The hosts of the second Amurath and of Wladislaw Jagiello (who was of the great Lithuanian dynasty that reigned over Poland, Hungary and Bohemia) fell upon each other. After a savage battle the Christian army was cut to bits. Dead knights and men-at-arms littered the slopes, among them two bishops and Cardinal Cesarini, the facilitator of the engagement, in spite of a truce, on the theory that it was no sin to break faith with infidels. Prisoners of note were ransomed, the rest butchered by the Ottomans. It was a defeat of tragic moment to the whole of Christendom, the last attempt of the West to block the advance of the Turks. The field was now clear for the Ottomans, and, nine years later, Constantinople was captured.

  The young king himself fell in the heart of the melee with his horse stuck full of arrows. A janissary called Hidja Hirdir – odd how these names have been handed down, like that of the first janissary to leap through the breached walls of Theodosius later on – struck off his head. It was put in a pot full of honey and Murad despatched a runner with it to his capital at Broussa to an
nounce the great victory; it was pulled out of the pot on the outskirts, washed in a brook, stuck on a pole and carried in triumph through the cheering streets.

  Outside all had turned different shades of glimmering, sunless blue. When the kafedji had lit a lamp and put it on my table – dusk started now about five – I could see its ghost on the inside of the windowpane and my own fragmented lamp-lit reflection and, through them both, like two scenes on the same photograph, the fading blues of the headland and the sea and sky. Loose in this void of darkening blue, the yellow pinpoints of a ship’s portholes advanced from the north-east, perhaps those of a Russian tramp-steamer; from Odessa, it might be, or Kherson, Yalta, Novorossiysk. The only bit of the Black Sea coast I knew nothing about at all was the stretch immediately to the south. I would soon find out, as I was setting off next day.

  • • •

  ‘These’, Gatcho said, pointing to a just discernible zigzag of trough-like hollows, ‘are trenches from the war, when they thought the Russian Black Sea fleet might try a landing.’ They were choked with threadbare brambles and bracken, a wavering blur along the cliff’s edge. It seemed a long time ago, just about a year after we were all born: eighteen years of dust and mud nearly effaced them. Somewhere out at sea, the mutiny on the Potemkin had taken place. It was Sunday, a brilliant, cloudless, but freezing cold day, and Gatcho and the other two Tirnovo boys who lived below, Kiril and Veniamin, had accompanied me about ten miles on my southern journey. We had slunk out of the town like malefactors long before daybreak. The misty jets of our breath in the wintry air, shooting from the heads of our silhouettes, had been the first symptoms of dawn. We had just finished some bread and cheese and drunk a bottle of wine under a hawthorn bush. I had been puzzled by Veniamin’s name – it turned out to be the Orthodox version of Benjamin (the B turning to V and the J to I): a fat, sleepy, nice boy who had brought a pistol with him and surprisingly succeeded in shooting a hare, an enormous one, now grasped and dangling by its hind legs, its ears sweeping the ground. It was time for them to start back. All had been well after Gatcho’s and my lunch together, better than ever, as it sometimes is after a row. The night before, all of us had sat up till late in a deep wine-cellar, drinking by candlelight in a narrow alley between enormous shadowy barrels.

  We had been arrested on the way home for singing arm in arm in the street – by two policemen, who were, it turned out, far drunker than our merely cheerful selves. The officer in charge of the police station, when he turned up and found us quietly droning Die Lorelei on the bench in a cell, let us out at once. Immediately after we had left, a policeman friend of Veniamin’s told us, on our way out of the town, that our two captors were flung into the cell we had just vacated, which sent our spirits soaring.

  It was time for them to turn back. We all embraced and waved many times as I watched the red crowns of their three student caps and the trailed hare dwindle along the dunes. We exchanged letters intermittently until the war, but I never saw Gatcho again.

  [1] Queen Marie (1875–1938), wife of Ferdinand I and later estranged mother of Carol II. She was a powerful ambassador for Rumanian post-war interests. The royal houses of Rumania and Bulgaria were related to one another (and to Queen Victoria) through the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family.

  [2] The line is from an imagined Roman marching song in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill.

  8. Dancing by the Black Sea

  It was the first day of December. Treading along this windy rim of the continent, I saw that much had changed since the last bit of my journey between the northern mountains and the Danube. I ate up the miles at a great pace. Inland to the north-west the Balkan range rose in milder slopes than those I had crossed – three times, now – but far away, at the other end of this brilliant morning, I could just see those western heights now gleaming with an ice-bright and blue-shadowed line of snow, and, to the south-west, a faint and a faraway shimmer of the Rhodope. (Perhaps it was just about here, at the end of the wide funnel between the two ranges, that those migrating storks had struck the Black Sea coast on their way to Africa.) All the tiers of slopes, the soft hills and valleys that rolled away inland, were now feathered with young green grass and some frothier vegetation leaping out of the ground with the abruptness and the optimism of mustard and cress from a flannel. The hammer-blow of the Bulgarian winter, although the late autumn had come to an end at last, had not yet fallen, and these pale emerald or moss-bright sweeps across the damp russet earth spread a fiction of early spring. The hills seemed empty of men though I caught rare glimpses of perched villages inland, their chimneys balancing above them floating veils as thin and blue as un-inhaled tobacco smoke. Into the still, cold air an occasional tall thread rose swaying and expanding from distant bonfires, as though Hurons were signalling from range to range. A steep, ploughed hillside would uncoil symmetrical waves of damp and dark red furrows, all of them hispid with young green between their ridges, sometimes reaching to the very edge of the cliff. A few cataleptic kraals of muffled hives were scattered in the undergrowth, silently waiting for the spring heather. Slow landslides of flocks streamed across the slants of pasture, only the travelling clink of their bells across the clear air hinting that they were on the move, grazing their way across Bulgaria at a glacier’s pace. Some of the fields were white with gulls, peacefully standing in the grass or among the furrows, bent on a brief inland holiday. In this open country, the only other birds were magpies of which one at least was usually fidgeting in the middle distance, standing in a field or flapping across the path. The cliff track would sink every so often into a deep combe where a stream wound into the sea over a crescent of sand or shingle, the valleys twisting upward in long hollows, often filled with woods, bald now except for a few threadbare patches of foliage, the pewter and pearl-barked walnut trees and the spidery distaffs of the poplars dominating the others. The ground underneath was deep in dead leaves which a gust of wind from the west would send flurrying downhill and out over the water.

  In one of these inlets, close to the sand’s edge, a man was sitting on the doorstep of a lopsided wooden hut with a little boat beached under the bushes beside it. His flat and high-cheekboned face was a skeleton leaf of benign wrinkles. We smoked a cigarette together and talked of the coldness of the day and the brightness of the sun, and beamed between our stilted clauses. He was an old Tartar fisherman living by himself, the only human being I saw all day. But the bare branches were dark and bowed under the weight of many hundreds of hooded crows, looking baleful and ragged and filling the air with their croaking and cawing. A clap of the hands would send them spinning into the air in a sudden clamour as the released branches sprang upwards, whirling overhead like a load of flung soot, and then, with one accord, streaming up the valley and over the hills in a long blur for a league or so, before swinging back to put the naked spinneys in mourning again. Somebody had told me, probably wrongly, that these birds – suddenly ominous by their enormous numbers – lived for a hundred years or more. If it were true, some of them could have feasted on the fallen during the Crimean War; perhaps a few Methuselahs, I thought rather fancifully, might have flown south across the Ukraine after following the retreat from Moscow . . .

  As the miles mounted up, the scene grew emptier. Then rising woodland blotted out the interior. The dark slope of trees sank to the sea’s edge and the path snaked through them halfway up, easily climbing and falling and running across small tilted glades full of white and red anemones, and white ones streaked with mauve.

  Attuned for nearly a year to nothing but hinterland prospects of plain and mountain, my eyes, alighting now like a stranger’s on the stepped woods and the shore below, found something so improbable and extreme in the beauty of this interlock of vegetation and sea that it appeared an illusion. The cold air was afloat with the smell of herbs.

  Myrtle and bay and arbutus, with dark green leaves interspersed with big, soft berries as scarlet as strawberries, climbed downhill through thickets of lanceolate eve
rgreen leaves and others as round and flat as the sea-grape; and tall trees jutted among them – could they have been ilexes? – roots looped in plaited arches from the slope like those in Japanese paintings, and blue-black boughs heavy with shade. Downhill at the end of plunging tunnels of trunks and branches and over the foliage of the ledges, the lowest stems of which seemed almost rooted in the sea, the European continent fell to fragments in spikes and small tufted islets far below, standing in translucent, pale green water, which darkened as it receded from the rocks to bottle green and the blue of a peacock’s neck feathers and fled away to the skyline. The almost still water was stirred by incoming creases as slight as a breath on silk, just enough to hem the join of rock and water with a thin bracelet of white, but too little to interfere with the symmetry of the semi- and three-quarter circles that the rocks sent spinning slowly out to sea again. Only the ghost of their sigh floated up through the mews and the wheeling sunlit wings of the seagulls. Headland followed headland, each pair of them enclosing their secret bay in a south-westerly recession of plumed capes, dwindling at last to dim threads that either the sea or the sky could claim. Late in the afternoon, sunbeams penetrated the wood at an angle exactly parallel to the slant of the coast, filling the clearings and striking the tree-boles and the foliage with layers of wintry gold, hanging rafts of light in the leaves, falling through the wood in long spokes and breaking up the loops of shadow over the surface of the water with horizontal windows of radiance. Celestial light floated under the branches: evening in the Hesperides. The solitude, the peace and the hush were complete. Was this quiet ecstasy that roved the air a murmur of promise, at this cold north-easternmost corner of Thrace, of what – beyond the Black Sea and the Bosphorus and the Propontis – were waiting in the Aegean: of what Greece and those remote islands held in store?