When Paddy felt the time had come to leave, his host presented him with a little edition of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry, some cigars and tobacco, and a fine series of large-scale, pre-war Austrian staff maps reprinted by Freytag & Berndt in Vienna. He then walked with Paddy as far as the village of Kissujfalu, and bade him goodbye. Paddy never saw Pips Schey again, though they corresponded a little. Schey left his homeland for ever at the time of the Anschluss. With his second wife he settled in Ascona, on the western shore of Lake Maggiore, and died in Normandy in 1957.
Paddy left Pips Schey on 28 March. In the coffee house in Nové Zámky where he spent the night he was approached by a prostitute called Mancsi; a man who played the violin urged him to have nothing to do with her. But on hearing that Paddy was heading for Budapest, he urged him to visit the Maison Frieda where every man could be ‘a cavalier’ in safety, for five pengoes. ‘This sort of advice has been very frequent, ever since the polyglot beckonings from the windows of the Schlossberg, and the head waiter at the Astoria asking Hans and I which of the ladies we would like.’8
The following night he spent in a little village called Köbölkut, where a Jewish baker, seeing him looking lost, suggested he spend the night in his bakery; the baker helped him make up a bed of straw and blankets on the floor. He spent the next morning talking and smoking with his host, who insisted he stay to lunch. Reaching the bank of the Danube at the village of Karva, he followed the river eastwards into a remote landscape of watermeadows, populated by waterfowl and reverberating to a million croaking frogs. Early evening by now, it was balmy as summer, without a breath of wind, and Paddy suddenly realized with a surge of excitement that he was about to spend his first night in the open. He made his bed three yards from the river in a hollow among the willows, and watched the moon and stars until he fell asleep.
He was rudely awakened in the middle of the night by two frontier guards shining a lantern in his face. They hauled him off at gunpoint to a hut where they tipped his rucksack on to the floor and went through it, item by item. He could speak no Hungarian, so there was no means of explaining himself until a third guard appeared, who spoke German. It turned out that the other two suspected Paddy of being a celebrated saccharine smuggler, despite the fact that the latter was well over fifty. They all had a good laugh and a smoke and then the guards made Paddy comfortable in a stable, although he would rather have spent the rest of the night outside.
Walking through southern Slovakia towards the Hungarian border, Paddy had begun to get some inkling of the ethnic tensions in this part of the world. They were not new, many being based on historical grudges that had been perpetuated for generations. He had met a group of Hungarians who bitterly resented the fact that their country’s ancient borders had shrunk, and that their children were being forced to learn Czech in school.
The following day, Paddy crossed the Danube into Hungary via the great bridge which took him from Parkan in Slovakia to the cathedral city of Esztergom. He stood for some time on the bridge, and his recollection of that moment marks the end of A Time of Gifts: ‘I found it impossible to tear myself from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now: a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear but because, within arm’s reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels.’9 It was Easter Saturday, 31 March 1934. The evening drew in as the bells pealed, summoning the citizens to mass.
The Burgomaster, to whom Paddy had a letter of introduction, put him under the care of a group of men all dressed in the magnificent furred and brocaded court tunics of Hungarian noblemen. ‘Best of all’, Paddy wrote excitedly in his diary, ‘were the curved sabres they wore, more like scimitars, with eastern silver hilts, the scabbard covered with black velvet and the silverwork all along studded with gems.’10 (The amiable, stork-loving, monocled figure whom Paddy describes in A Time of Gifts is an amalgam of them all.) By staying close to this group he enjoyed a ringside view of the Easter ceremony and the procession that followed it, during which the cardinal-archbishop walked through the candle-lit streets just behind the sacred monstrance under its golden canopy.
Before the war, most of Hungary had belonged to a handful of great families whose wealth was the product of their enormous estates. When not enjoying the pleasures of country life, these families were totally assimilated into fashionable Europe. Sons were educated in England, daughters finished in Switzerland, and they were just as much at home in Paris and Vienna as they were in cosmopolitan Budapest. This Magyar oligarchy kept a firm grip on power, even though non-Magyars (Rumanians, Slovaks, Croats and Jews) made up more than half the population. At the same time, the contrast between the landowners’ way of life and that of the peasants was immense. Although serfdom had been abolished in the mid-nineteenth century, the Hungarian peasantry were among the poorest and least emancipated in Europe.
Part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Hungary had been on the German side in the war and had had to pay the price. Its borders began to shrink in October 1918, when Croatia unilaterally joined the new Yugoslavia. In 1919, the Rumanians and Czechs invaded – the Rumanians at one point occupying much of the country and looting Budapest. The Allies called everyone to order, but Hungary was the loser. The Czechs united with Slovakia, formerly northern Hungary, while the Rumanians took Transylvania.
The dominant political figure in Hungary between the wars was the Regent, Admiral Horthy. (Hungary was still a monarchy, though there was no king.) Horthy suppressed the short-lived Communist government of Béla Kún in 1919, and the early years of his regency saw limited attempts at land reform; but Horthy was fundamentally conservative, as were those surrounding him. Political power remained where it always had been: in the hands of the great families, the Church, and the financial and industrial oligarchy surrounding the Regent.
As for the peasants, their lot had not changed much. Paddy’s walk to Budapest took him through the woods and meadows of the Pilis Hills, and one evening he joined a couple of swineherds in their reed-thatched hut. They had no language in common, and had no idea what he meant when he described himself as ‘Angol’; but when he produced a bottle of barack, their faces lit up. It was an infallible way of making friends, particularly when combined with Paddy’s appetite for words. His attempts to communicate, by sign language and pointing, touched and amused his hosts who often descended into helpless laughter.
Bálint and Géza, as Paddy called his companions, may not have known where England was, but they knew what had happened to Hungary, and how those changes had affected themselves and their families. Yet what excited Paddy was that, as swineherds, they were living a life and dressed in clothes that would have been recognizable in the Bronze Age. ‘They were cloaked in rough white woollen stuff as hard as frieze. In lieu of goads or crooks, they nursed tapering shafts of wood polished with long handling and topped with small axe-heads.’ On their feet were moccasins he had seen before, on Slovaks in Bratislava:
pale canoes of raw cowhide turning up at the tips and threaded all round with thongs which were then lashed round their padded shanks till half-way up the calf of the leg; inside, meanwhile, snuggly swaddled in layers of white felt, their feet were wintering it out … The firelight made them look like contemporaries of Domesday Book and we ought to have been passing a drinking-horn from hand to hand instead of my anachronistic bottle.11
The contrast between this evening in the forest and the ten days he spent in Budapest could not have been greater. A letter from Tibor v. Thuróczy, one of the ‘breezy Hungarian squires’ he had met in Bratislava, opened a series of hospitable doors, the first being that of Baron and Baroness Berg (Tibor and Berta). The Baron had done wartime service as a captain in a regiment of horse artillery; he and his family lived in an eighteenth-century house among the winding lanes of the citadel of Buda, next to Trinity Square. They gave Paddy the use of a large room, lent him some evening clothes, and secured an invitat
ion for him to attend a dance given by friends nearby. There he met a girl called Annamaria Miskolczy, who was studying history of art: more doors opened, invitations multiplied; suddenly Paddy was swept up into a new crowd of ‘dashing, resplendent and beautiful new friends’. There was a restaurant called the Cuckoo where gypsies played, and a spectacular nightclub called the Arizona with a revolving dance floor. ‘Who paid for all this?’ asked Paddy. ‘Certainly not me – even a gesture towards helping was jovially brushed aside as though it were not worth the waste of words.’12
Through the Trautmannsdorffs at Pottenbrunn (where he had spent his uneasy nineteenth birthday) he met the ex-prime minister Count Paul Teleki, who must have been one of the most interesting men in Budapest. Paddy listened to him ‘talking about old Turkey, the Levant and Africa, of his travels as a geologist, of his share in the leadership of the counter-revolution against Béla Kún, and his time as Prime Minister’.13
In Between the Woods and the Water, the next passage takes Paddy on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain – the Alföld, in Magyar. The ride begins in mid-April, and the horse is provided by a shadowy member of the Szapáry family whom he had never met. Described as a very fine creature, it shared many of its rider’s characteristics: ‘Malek’s alert and good-tempered ears, his tireless and untiring gait and the well-being he radiated, meant that we infected each other’s mood …’14
They set off south-east, in the direction of the Rumanian frontier, spending the first night encamped with a band of gypsies. Sharing some food, he and the group laughed together at the words of Rumanian and Hindi which Paddy tried out in an effort to grasp some of their language. Yet lying awake with Malek hobbled close by, he could not believe he had been so foolish as to bring such a valuable beast among people renowned as the most skilful horse thieves in the world. But Malek was still there next morning, and soon they were on their way again. Strung out on the road were ox- and horse-drawn carts, straggling bands of gypsies, a few cars. The landscape of the plain was one of immense pastures dotted with herds of sheep and straight-horned cattle, occasional woods alive with birds, and farms where women in bright embroidered clothes spun wool on a distaff. Fields stretching out across the limitless steppe were watered by wells, whose counterbalanced poles looked like ‘derelict siege engines’. At a friendly farmhouse Paddy watches himself thinking: ‘I’m drinking this glass of milk on a chestnut horse on the Great Hungarian Plain.’15
In fact, Paddy walked the first part of the Alföld. It was only when he reached Körösladány, a hundred and twenty miles east of Budapest, that riding became more frequent. And since he was still on the Alföld, which spills into western Rumania, the claim was hardly a fabrication. Later, when asked precisely where and by whom he had been lent the horse, he admitted to having smudged the facts a little: ‘I did ride a fair amount, so I decided to put myself on horseback for a bit. I felt the reader might be getting bored of me just plodding along … You won’t let on, will you?’16
This is just one instance of the interplay of Paddy’s memory and his imagination. It is hardly surprising that in the act of transposing one part of the journey to another, different memories of being on horseback in Hungary were grafted on to his earliest impressions of the Alföld. This is what novelists do every day. But since Paddy was making a novel of his life – and his readership would expect the story to be true – he was also creating a new memory, shaped and coloured by his imagination, so perfect in every detail that he could say: ‘When I was riding across the Alföld’, meaning most of it, without a trace of self-consciousness.
The next few weeks mark a kind of hiatus in the journey, a sunlit upland of ease during which he spent every night in comfortable country houses. His hosts were a series of inter-related Hungarian landowners, who passed him on to each other like an enjoyable and rather unusual parcel. He did not even have to walk: they usually lent him a horse.
He stayed with the Merans, at single-storeyed Körösladány: a long, ochre-coloured eighteenth-century house with rounded baroque pediments. There he spent an idyllic afternoon under the trees, within sight of the river Körös, with Countess Ilona in white linen dress dispensing tea to Paddy and her family and friends. They had a good library, where Paddy read everything he could find about the Alföld. The children, Hansi and Marcsi, remembered him reading and writing at a Biedermeier table while their lessons went on next door.
Travelling south-east, his next stop was Vesztö with the wistful, bird-loving Count Lajos Wenckheim. The Count’s current preoccupation was a pair of great bustards, and he was waiting for their clipped wings to grow again before releasing them into the wild. He it was who gave Paddy a new stick, carved with leaves and the arms of Hungary.
The next stop was Doboz, with Lajos’s cousin Lászlo and his plump English wife. They were appalled at the idea of him going into Rumania. ‘“It’s a terrible place … They’ll take everything you’ve got, and” – voices sank collusively here – “whole valleys are riddled with VD, oh do beware!”’17 His hostess ran upstairs, and returned with a lady’s miniature pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle, and a box of small-bore ammunition. Paddy was intrigued by their warnings, but not particularly alarmed; the more he travelled in the Balkans, the more he found that every country was deeply suspicious of the morals and intentions of its neighbours.
His next halt was a spectacularly ornamented nineteenth-century house, O’Kígyós, near the town of Békéscsaba. Here lived Count Józsi Wenckheim, Lászlo’s elder brother, and his wife Denise. Paddy had met them in Budapest, and he was expected. ‘You are just what we need!’ cried the Count. ‘Come along!’ – which was how Paddy found himself playing four-a-side bicycle polo in the courtyard, with real polo sticks cut down to size. ‘The game was quick, reckless and full of collisions, but there was nothing to match the joy of hitting the ball properly: it made a loud smack and gave one a tempting glimmer of what the real thing might be like.’18 He was amazed that all the windows on the front of the house were intact.
Paddy had been told that the Rumanians would not allow anyone to cross their frontier on foot, so he spent his last day in Hungary walking towards a station and a train that would take him across the Rumanian border. It was almost the end of April. After the difficulties of Magyar, that sheer cliff of a language on which even Paddy failed to find much of a foothold, it was a great relief to be back in the familiar territory of a Romance language: a place where words sprang easily from Latin roots, where man was om and woman was femeie, and great skeins of words were instantly recognizable.
Transylvania, ‘the place beyond the woods’, once formed part of the Roman province of Dacia. It is a natural fortress, a high plateau surrounded by mountains, the highest of these rising to the south and east. The mountains are riddled with streams and natural springs, and secret lakes lie hidden among the crags. On the plateau, crops and fruit grow in abundance while cattle, buffalo and horses grow sleek on rich pasture. Below ground, salt has been mined here since Roman times, and Transylvania holds the richest gold mines in Europe. It is a place full of stories and superstitions, ably exploited by Bram Stoker, Anthony Hope and their host of followers. Even its name sounds enchanted, not quite real: Dervla Murphy called it ‘a one-word poem’.19
Paddy crossed the frontier into Rumania on 27 April, continuing his country-house progress. His hosts, mostly friends and relations of the people with whom he had just been staying, were not Rumanian but Hungarian. Transylvania had belonged to Hungary until the peace treaties of 1920, and had been ceded to Rumania because the majority of the population were Rumanian peasants. For the Hungarian landowners whose families had lived in Transylvania for centuries, it was like an amputation: a loss they could never get used to. Post-war agrarian reforms had broken up many of the old estates and redistributed them among the peasants. The Hungarians did not blame the peasants: it was the administration they hated, the bureaucrats above all.
His first stop was the house of Baron Tibor
Solymosy, who lived near Borosjenö (now Ineu), north of Arad, in a house ‘pillared and Palladian like the Haymarket Theatre in a sea of vineyards’.20 His bachelor host, another former horse-gunner, lived with a charming ex-mistress, a Pole called Ria Bielek. She was an inspiration to Paddy, who describes her with an affection that implies rather more than it reveals. Unlike the easy-going Tibor, Ria was a reader. She lent Paddy several French books, and seems to have encouraged his long hours in the library, stocked with works in Hungarian and German. He made no progress with Hungarian – even a song he loved, about a swallow sweeping low over a field, refused to stick in his memory. But he did improve his German over the days in Borosjenö, and with Ria’s help, read Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig over a couple of weeks.
The next house was Tövicsegháza, ‘a sort of hacienda among huge trees’, home of Jaš and Clara Jelensky. Jaš was full of eccentric ideas on every subject from agriculture to economics, and enjoyed exploring the wilder reaches of speculative science, while Clara was a brilliant horsewoman with wild hair that seldom saw a comb (a detail noted by the fastidious Paddy). Then, with the von Kintzig family at Ötvenes, he remembered ‘woodland paper chases and fireworks after dinner’.21 Almost everyone mentioned in Between the Woods and the Water was swept up into the war and the long disaster of Communism; but at Ötvenes, the whole family perished after the war in a fire.
He moved on to Kápolnás to stay with Count Jenö Teleki, first cousin of ex-prime minister Paul Teleki whom Paddy had met in Budapest. Count Jenö was a celebrated entomologist who had made a particular study of the moths of the Far East, a passion which (it was said) kept two insect-collectors permanently employed. His English was peppered with phrases such as ‘I hae me doots’ and ‘I’ll dree my own weird’, legacy of a Scottish nanny.22 While he unpacked and classified his specimens at a desk in his library, Paddy read historical novels by Maurus Jókai celebrating the heroes and legends of Hungarian history. But the Count’s wife was Rumanian, and it was through the couple’s occasionally prickly exchanges that he began to understand how deep the national rivalry ran.
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Page 8