Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  Although Paddy had the knack of rising to the top of any society he found himself in, the smart, French-speaking Bucharestis seemed particularly susceptible to his charm. He found them equally engaging, for reserve and self-control are not overrated virtues in Rumania. The fury of their quarrels, the ease of their wit and laughter, the exaggeration of their gestures, their deep respect for art, books and ideas, their love of gossip and their happy-go-lucky attitude to sex, all made him feel he could never tire of their company. They did not seem to mind his shabby clothes, nor the fact that he could not pay for anything.

  The only thing to which Paddy objected, though it was just as bad in Hungary, was their anti-Semitism. To Hungarians and Rumanians, a dislike of Jews was seen not as a prejudice but as a natural response. Paddy’s friends could not understand why their resentment of the Jews made him so unhappy (though he expresses this unhappiness in his later writing more than in the diary written at the time). They gave him anti-Jewish books to read such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whilst one Hungarian showed him a copy of the Semi-Gotha, as though its contents represented the cast-iron truth. Designed as a companion to the Almanach de Gotha which lists the aristocratic families of Europe, the Semi-Gotha’s purpose was to illustrate the deliberate infiltration of those bloodlines by the Jews as part of their scheme to dominate the world. Paddy tried to protest, but a grateful guest is always at a disadvantage. Looking baffled and sad, he would drop the subject long before the argument became angry.

  Paddy left Bucharest by train early on 14 November, re-entered Bulgaria and arrived at Varna on the Black Sea late that night. Varna he described as ‘a depressing place in winter, like all sea-side towns’.27 His friend Georgi from Tirnovo was delighted to see him again, their last disagreement quite forgotten, and they went out to celebrate with a crowd of friends.

  Georgi offered Paddy the use of his digs for as long as he liked, and arranged for credit at the local restaurant – Bucharest had taken quite a toll on his funds. Judith Tollinton had also put him in touch with the British Consul in Varna and his wife, Frank and Eva Baker. The hospitable Bakers invited him to lunch, lent him a pile of books and told him to visit whenever he liked. He borrowed T. E. Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert, which he had not yet finished, Peter Fleming’s One’s Company and Richard Oke’s novel Frolic Wind.

  Paddy came back to Georgi’s digs late one evening from a party at the Bakers’. Being very drunk he made a lot of noise coming in, and Georgi flew into a temper. Though he knew Georgi’s brooding nature, knew he could uncoil and lash out at the slightest provocation, Paddy found the situation so absurd he started to laugh. At that point Georgi ‘seized my dagger off the table and went for me, grazing my shoulder. Luckily I got him down. Then he was filled with remorse, and begged my pardon again and again … It was my fault really, though I was surprised about the dagger.’28

  Georgi’s action puzzled him. The two of them had parted at the beginning of the evening on good terms; there had been no rivalry over the studentkas (female students) whom Georgi was in love with. Had he said something stupid and tactless? Had he outstayed his welcome? Georgi assured him that he had done no such thing; he would not hear of him moving out. So they went out to lunch, got drunk and put the incident behind them. But Paddy held to the idea that Georgi’s rage had been provoked by some unpardonable thing that he had said or done, yet it seems more likely that Georgi was jealous of the time Paddy was spending with his smart consular friends.

  It was 1 December. Paddy had hoped to take a boat to the coastal town of Burgas but, not finding one, he prepared to walk down the coast instead. Determined to give him a good send-off, Georgi and twelve of his friends decided to accompany him. They walked along the rocky coast till sunset, when Georgi’s companions lit torches and sang through the woods. ‘We arrived at Fisherman’s hut, drank all evening, played peasant instruments, sang. Gaida, gadulka, caval, kazakduk, ratchiza, horo, kütchek.fn3 Grand firelight, read, peasant Bulgaria. Slept in a pile of fishing nets.’29

  At no point in his original account did he walk down this stretch of coast alone, nor did he lose his footing and find himself floundering among freezing rock-pools after dark. But this evening in the fisherman’s hut, with another incident that took place on Mount Athos a few weeks later, were combined into one astonishing description. Later published in Holiday magazine as A Balkan Welcome, it describes how Paddy – half-frozen, bleeding and exhausted – stumbles into a cave occupied by some Bulgarian shepherds and a few Greek fishermen. Decades later, when he came to tell the tale to Ben Downing in the Paris Review in 2003, the two separate incidents had fused together to become one memory: ‘Slogging on south, I lost my way after dark, fell into the sea, and waded soaked into a glimmering cave full of shepherds and fishermen – Bulgars and Greeks – for a strange night of dancing and song. It was like a flickering firelight scene out of Salvator Rosa.’30

  The following morning, the company walked on. The path took them first across a country of entrenched headlands which gave way to marshland at the mouth of a river, where a man with a muzzle-loader was shooting duck. They walked upstream for a while, seeing wild boar and some shepherds. Most of Georgi’s friends decided to return home that afternoon, except for Cerno, who stayed on with Georgi. Long after dark the three companions reached a grim Turkish village, where they were allowed to sleep in the morgue.

  On the evening of 3 December they reached the peak above the bay of Nesebur, or Mesembria – Paddy preferred the old name. As they walked along the man-made isthmus into the ancient town, they watched a school of dolphins leaping out at sea. The following day Paddy walked around Mesembria, looking at its wealth of Byzantine churches and ‘wishing I knew more about them’;31 he noted their names and made a map of their positions in the back of his diary. After one long last drinking session, Georgi and Cerno took a boat back to Varna and Paddy was alone. It took him a day to reach Burgas, which he did on 5 December.

  Following a pattern that was becoming familiar, Paddy immediately looked up the British Consul. The Consul in Burgas was Tony Kendall, and as he advanced to shake hands with Paddy, he was conscious of an overpowering smell: his guest had been eating pastrouma, a dried meat heavily flavoured with garlic and herbs. But thanks to warm recommendations from the Tollintons and the Bakers, Paddy again found himself being asked to stay. Tony and Mila Kendall were as hospitable and gregarious as he had hoped, and as well as introducing Paddy to their local circle of friends, Tony Kendall took him boar shooting. On 12 December Paddy began to feel unwell, and within two days he was seriously ill: ‘Sweating till my pyjamas and the sheets were sodden rags, my teeth chattering and my temperature high.’32 He had caught malaria – a disease that was, and still is, common round the Black Sea.

  Once he had begun to feel better, Tony Kendall gave him Foreign Office reports to read which ‘set me wise about the Balkans a good deal’; and in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he read up on ‘Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania … Learnt lots that I ought to have known before.’33 Through the Kendalls he met people, both Bulgarian and English, who spoke of the Balkan wars, the Macedonian question, the political tensions of the region. He wrote long letters: to his mother, to Elemér von Klobusitzky at Gurászáda. His next batch of pound notes arrived on 23 December, and the Kendalls invited him to stay on for Christmas. He was still weak from his recent bout of malaria and, though a relatively mild attack, its repercussions may well have affected him over the coming weeks.

  Paddy resumed his journey after Christmas. He had hoped to take a boat south down the coast, but finding none, he went by train. This involved a long loop westwards to Nova Zagora, and after a night in the station buffet reading Edgar Wallace, he caught a train at six the following morning to Svilengrad. The train was full of soldiers, as was the next train he was obliged to take to reach Constantinople.

  The whole region was a sensitive demilitarized zone, supervised by an international commission
headed by Turkey. There was no question of his being allowed to walk the last few miles of his epic journey, and to judge by the tone of Paddy’s diary, this does not seem to have upset him at the time. But in later years, as the journey began to take on an artistic shape and significance in the story of his life, he seemed to mind it more. ‘I chafed bitterly’, he later wrote, ‘as we chugged across the rough Thracian plain.’34

  After a year and twenty-one days, having passed through seven countries and walked hundreds of miles, Paddy reached Constantinople in the early hours of 31 December 1934. He found a cheap hotel in the Taksim district called the Bensur, rambled round the back streets of the city, and in the Vienna café he made friends with a Greek woman called Maria Passo. With her he drank the New Year in, joining crowds of revellers as they sang in the streets. Then he went back to the hotel and slept. He did not wake up till the early evening at which point, thinking it was dawn, he rolled over and slept for another twelve hours – ‘so New Year’s Day 1935 will always be a blank for me.’

  The town seemed to him vibrantly alive and ‘full of a hundred sounds’. Yet for all its exoticism, Istanbul had died twice. The first time was in 1453, when eleven hundred years of Byzantine civilization fell to the Turkish conqueror, Mehmet II. What remained of Constantinople was absorbed into its new incarnation, Istanbul: the name being a corruption of a Greek phrase meaning ‘to the city’. As the Ottoman empire disintegrated, so did its centre. In 1923, Kemal Atatürk gave Istanbul the coup de grâce by moving the capital to Ankara, and the old city was left to crumble under the weight of its history.

  Over the next few days he ate at an Armenian restaurant, where the proprietor told him hair-raising stories of the Turkish persecutions; a German restaurant, where he enjoyed talking German to the eccentric proprietor; and a Jewish restaurant, where Spanioli Jews played the guitar and sang in Ladino. The only Turk he visited was Djerhat Pasha, a general to whom he had been given a letter of introduction by Count Teleki. The Pasha had a bristling moustache, ‘very English country gent – he spoke good French (and looked as if he might have massacred a few Armenians in his day).’35 Although Paddy had been offered a cup of coffee, nothing could pass the general’s lips till sundown for it was Ramadan.

  On 5 January, Paddy went to visit the Greek Consul, Dimitri Capsalis, and his wife Hélène, who were friends of Marcelle Catargi, Josias von Rantzau’s mistress. The consuls of eastern Europe seem to have had a particular weakness for Paddy. His magic worked yet again, and they happily swept him into their orbit. They took him to the bazaar and on walks round the city, introduced him to their friends, and best of all, put him in touch with the Ecumenical Patriarch, spiritual head of the Greek Orthodox Church, who in turn gave Paddy a letter of introduction to the Holy Synod of Mount Athos.

  Yet Paddy was in a strange mood, brooding on that sense of anticlimax and taking stock that the end of a journey brings. He wrote nothing in his diary between 11 and 24 January. He also never looked up the Byzantist Thomas Whittemore, though in his diary he had written, ‘Promise of rendezvous in Constantinople.’36 Looking back, Paddy thought it rather odd too. ‘I knew so little about Constantinople,’ he admitted. ‘I really needed a teacher, and [Whittemore] would have been perfect … I can’t think why I didn’t.’37

  On 24 January 1935, Paddy took a third-class ticket on a boat that picked its way round the northern coast of the Aegean to Salonika. The boat was a shambles, ‘with enormous banks of coal in the passages, and peasants lying in their blankets in despondent groups everywhere …’ Third class meant travelling, sleeping and eating on deck. Paddy was told by one of the officers that, as a foreigner and therefore a guest, he could move up to second class for which he was very grateful. Here he lay on a cushioned bench reading Don Juan, which he described as ‘grand stuff, though no poetry’38 – a verdict soon overturned.

  He was the only person on board to disembark at the little port of Dafni, on the western coast of Mount Athos, on the morning of 25 January. It was cold and snowy, the whole peninsula wrapped in the deep silence of winter. Spending the first night at Xeropotamos, he then walked eastwards over the spine of the peninsula to the little capital of Karyes. While there is nothing odd about a monastery being celibate, it was in Dafni and Karyes, filled with ordinary workmen, craftsmen and shopkeepers, that the lack of women struck him most forcibly.

  Tradition has it that the exclusively masculine character of the Holy Mountain was commanded by the Panaghia, the All-Holy Virgin. When the ship on which she had set out from Jerusalem was washed up on this spit of land, she declared it holy ground, dedicated to her: no other woman should set foot on it. The first holy men on Athos were hermits and ascetics, but by the early Middle Ages several monasteries had been established on the Mountain. The monks planted beans and onions, fish were plentiful, and they were supplied with wool and milk by the Vlach shepherds who were allowed on the peninsula to graze their flocks. Then, in the late eleventh century, word got out that the shepherds were also supplying their wives and daughters. From Constantinople, a scandalized Patriarch ordered the monasteries to be purged. The shepherds were banished, only male animals were permitted, while some of the most fertile land in Greece lies buried beneath dense woodland.

  As soon as he had received his laissez-passer from the Holy Synod at the Chapter of the Monasteries at Karyes, Paddy set off for the nearby monastery of Koutloumousiou whose walls he could see not far down the hill. It is a small monastery but the room he was put up in was remarkably luxurious, with tapestry cushions on the divan and rich curtains. They lit the stove, made up the bed, laid the table – and here Paddy was faced with the first of those monotonous plates of beans in oil that are the staple fare of every visitor to the Mountain. ‘Of this I could hardly eat a mouthful … so I ate lots of bread and sugar, and several oranges. Not wishing to offend the monks I wrapped most of it up in paper, and clandestinely disposed of it later.’39

  He felt very alone. ‘Later I could hear the deep plainsong chants and strange Orthodox antiphony and, with the last streaks of daylight fading behind the Byzantine cupolas and red and white masonry of the chapel, I felt suddenly terribly sad … At such times I nearly always remember England, and London and the hooting of cars in Piccadilly, or the soft English countryside, which becomes so blessed in memory …’40 He devoted much time adding to his small store of Greek, and the monks did what they could to help; but being in a monastery was not the same as being in a village. A monk’s work is to pray. Paddy attended a few of the lengthy periods of service and liturgy that punctuated life on the Holy Mountain, but when he saw his hosts file into church to begin their devotions, he knew he would be alone for several hours. The advantage was that he was able to spend far more time writing.

  On 27 January he reached the eastern coast and the monastery of Iviron, where he joined the monks for vespers. ‘To me there is something absolutely mystical, sinister and disturbing about the Orthodox liturgy,’ he wrote.41 Yet there was nothing sinister about the jolly supper he enjoyed with the monks in the kitchen, with Greek traders, lots of wine and peasant songs – a party that carried on in Paddy’s guest room afterwards.

  He spent two days at Stavronikita, and one at the Pantocrator. Then, after a lunch of oily vegetables which he barely touched, he set off for Vatopedi. The way lay uphill, but he missed a turn and the path became more and more overgrown. He was obliged to go downhill, and on a slope so precipitous that he had to cling to stones and branches to stop himself falling. Slithering down as best he could he ended up on the rocky shoreline, in a landslide of pebbles and boulders. For some time he made his way on hands and feet, scrambling from one boulder to the next by the sea’s edge, hoping to come across a path going back up; but when he met a solid overhanging wall of rock, it was obvious he could go no further.

  He found a place where the black cliff seemed a little less steep, and tried to climb up; but the slope grew steeper, and he lost his footing. ‘I slipped on a bit of wet rock and
skidded down the last 20 yards or so, getting bumped and bruised and battered, my wrist deeply cut, and finally ending up in a foot of water, where the tide had come in, soaking one leg to the waist.’42 He tied up his wrist, made his way back to the place where he thought he had gone wrong, and set off with fresh hope. When this way too became impassable, he determined to make his way back to Pantocrator. By now it was raining, and the light was beginning to fail. He was cold, hungry, and a strap on his rucksack had broken.

  Again and again the paths he hacked out through the thickets led back to the sea. ‘Then my guts seemed to drain right out of me and a fit of panic came, thoughts of passing the night there, without food in the rain …’ He began to yell for help, at six-second intervals, but no one heard. Then he gave up. He found himself praying, though expecting little response since he only ever prayed when in trouble. On the other hand it was God’s mountain, ‘so I felt he had some sort of responsibility’.43

  There remained one thicket to try, which involved crawling on his belly under some fallen yew trees, and then – ‘the thrill of relief was scarcely bearable’ – in the light of a match he saw the pathway winding up in front of him. ‘Getting my rucksack I started running uphill, shouting and singing at the top of my voice, anything, as an outlet. If I’d had my revolver with me I’d have emptied it into the air … however I stabbed savagely at the bushes and trees, sinking my dagger into them with wild shouts. A stranger meeting me then would have thought I was a dangerous lunatic.’44