IT IS EVENING, in my memory, as we grind to a halt in Mandalay station. Mandalay! It was the last royal capital of the Burmese kings, the city of Kipling and Orwell. In 1885 its heart – the royal palace – had been looted by the invading British, and its library burnt to the ground. Then the Japanese occupied it in World War II, and the allies bombed it to a wasteland.
Pandemonium broke out in the station as the bleary passengers descended. A horde of bicycle rickshaw drivers was waiting to transport us through the city, and I was encircled by bellowing cries for custom. I remember no faces at all, only the clamour of these voices rising in a raucous plea from men whose lives might last only as long as their stringy bodies held up.
Suddenly, at the back of the crowd, a quaintly pedantic suggestion floated: ‘Excuse me, sir, would you care for a rickshaw?’ I hunted for the source of this, and saw a face whose gentle features were inexplicable among those around him: the hair curly and barbered, the bones more delicate. He bowed slightly. ‘My name is Tun.’
He pedalled me out into the city whose markets and monasteries seemed scattered at the end of the world. Mine was the only white face. Tun recounted the town’s history in soft, studious English. He wore an immaculate sarong and a skimpy vest. I felt guilty for using him.
Beyond the moated palace – brick palisades pierced by flimsy gates and turrets – lay the wasteland left by the British. It looked pathetically vulnerable – a medieval world levelled by aircraft. I wandered through it with uneasy fascination at what had been lost. Some weed-glazed canals survived among the overgrown terraces, where humps and ridges marked the course of vanished passageways and rooms. A harmless-looking cannon pointed at nothing. I remembered illustrations of Burmese soldiers in quilted armour and leather helmets. But Tun spoke only with hardy irony that he and I – Burmese and British – should be walking here at peace. ‘Things were different then. Those were cruel times.’
I thought: but he is still living in such times. His government was a tyranny. His city was poor and decaying, its infrastructure collapsed. Its streets were tracks. Yet he retained this curious refinement. As we emerged through one of the toy-like gates and over the moat, he said: ‘Will you come home with me? I will learn good English.’
‘You already have good English.’
I was waiting for him to explain why – was he a disgraced teacher, a journalist? – but he only said: ‘It’s too long forgotten.’
HIS HOME LAY behind a stockade spiked with palm trees: a wooden house with a flaking white balcony and a roof of falling tiles. Three small, fat children sat in its entrance, dressed comfortably in woollen jumpers, cramming their mouths with rice out of an aluminium bowl. Their sleepy eyes looked at me in mute bewilderment. Their mother might have belonged to another race from Tun’s. Her furious cheekbones and jutting teeth gave her a look of inadvertent wildness. She smiled an artless welcome at me.
Their home held almost nothing. A watchdog crouched under the steps. The inner walls were woven palm leaves. The bed where I slept that night was a wooden frame clouded by mosquitoes. A single shelf held mildewed books, which might have been salvaged from somewhere grander. I noticed Dickens’ novels, Alistair Maclean’s The Dark Crusader and the stories of Rudyard Kipling.
No, Tun said, his wife did not read. She was illiterate. ‘She is not very clever, but she is very good.’ After a while he said: ‘Will you meet my other relatives?’
I imagined them living as he did, in modest suburban poverty. Instead, to my astonishment, he bicycled me to a ponderous Edwardian mansion. Without knocking, we entered dust-filled rooms lined with teak furniture, where his aunt and uncle – inscrutably old and courteous – rocked in padded chairs and mewed out greetings.
Walking in their garden, lost under honeysuckle and weeds, my pent-up curiosity at last spilled over. Why was Tun not living like them? What had happened to him?
Momentarily he winced, then settled into a story that filled him with self-wonder, as if he were talking of somebody else, or of somebody long ago.
He came from a good family, he said, old Burmese aristocrats. Some years ago he had started his career as a soldier, and was one of a handful selected to go to England for officers’ training. There, with his quick ear, he had picked up the language.
‘After I came back I was a favoured cadet, of course, and in time I found myself serving as a captain on our north-east frontier. In those days it was filled with Chinese bandits, and we were trying to eliminate them.’ These bandits, he explained, were the remains of Chinese Nationalist armies who had fled the Communist victory of 1949. At first they had lingered on the frontier, hoping to reoccupy their homeland, but were each time repulsed. So at last they became little more than outlaws and drug traffickers, and the Burmese army moved against them.
‘I was young then. I was in charge of a platoon dug in above a ridge near the Chinese positions. I confess I was frightened.’ He was walking fast along the weed-sown paths, almost marching. ‘One night our sentries had fallen asleep. But I was still awake, reading an Alistair MacLean novel in the moonlight. It was very bright. Suddenly I heard a clink in the silence, and I looked up to see the slope below swarming with Chinese. They were climbing towards us and already so close that I could see their teeth gleaming in the moonlight, smiling.’
His expression on me was one of faded horror. He said: ‘I managed to wake up my platoon in time. Then we mowed them down. All of them. It seemed like hundreds. We were concealed above them and they didn’t stand a chance.’
I said lamely: ‘So you did your duty.’
He shook his head. ‘Then something happened inside me. Something I don’t understand. In those days officers wore long swords. I pulled mine out and climbed down the slope.’ He lifted a ghostly sabre. ‘Then I went mad. I started hacking at the dead and wounded, the dying. I couldn’t stop. It was a kind of frenzy. On and on, in their blood. Slashing …’
We had arrived back at the gate now, where his rickshaw stood comfortingly with its twin wheels and padded carriage.
‘After that I wasn’t the same. I was revolted at myself.’ He turned towards me. ‘Was this myself? I decided to leave the army. I tried to resign. But they had spent too much money on me, and wouldn’t let me go. It was only later that General Ne Win demanded all army officers sign an oath of allegiance to him. I took my opportunity and refused, so they sacked me. And no other employer would touch me then, of course.’
He mounted his bike, while I sat behind, wondering, ashamed again that he was toiling for me. He ended: ‘So I became a rickshaw driver in Mandalay.’
IN THE DAWN LIGHT I woke to catch the steamer south to Pagan, and Tun pedalled me unspeaking to the wharfside. He may have regretted his sudden intimacy, I don’t know. He looked quiet and worn. Only as the tottering, two-storey steamer pulled from the quayside, he raised his hand at me departing over the flood-waters, and went on waving for a long time, as if he were saying farewell to something else, until the swell of the river took him from sight.
A Cave on the Black Sea
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR (born London, 1915) is widely regarded as ‘Britain’s greatest living travel writer’. At eighteeen, he set out to walk across Europe to Constantinople, a trip recalled in the masterful A Time of Gifts and continued in Between the Woods and the Water. But Paddy had made his mark on travel and literature long before their publication, notably with his books on Greece, Mani and Roumeli. As an SOE officer, he was, famously, parachuted into Crete in World War II, where he led the capture of the German commander, General Kreipe. Knighted in 2001, he lives mainly in Greece.
A Cave on the Black Sea
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR
A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water tell the story of Paddy’s youthful walk ‘from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople’, but the latter ends at the borders of Romania and Bulgaria, and a third book remains unfinished. This story – which might form a part of it – takes place in December 1934, when Paddy wa
s travelling down the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. Istanbul was less than 110 miles away to the south but somewhere between Varna and Burgas the path petered out just as night was coming on.
This was Europe’s easternmost rim; but it was hard to remember that the ocean-like sweep that flashed from the cliffs of Bulgaria to the bare horizon was inland water: Tcherno More, Kara Su, Marea Neagra, the Euxine, the Black Sea … Constantza, Odessa, Batum, Trebizond, Constantinople … the names were intoxicating. Due east, the Caucasus lay; Asia Minor to the south; north, the Danube and Rumania, and north-east, the Ukraine and all the Russias. The chill that crackled in the December air was a hint to a traveller of those limitless impending snows.
Inland, to the north-west, rose the Great Balkan range. At the other end of this brilliant morning I could just see the ice-bright and blue-shadowed snows and, to the south-west, a faint gleam of the Rhodope mountains. Perhaps it was just about here that the migrating storks I had seen pouring over the Stara Planina four months before had struck the Black Sea coast on their way to Africa. The tiers that rolled inland, so arid then underfoot, were feathered now with young grass. The Bulgarian winter had not yet begun and the emerald and moss-bright froth across the russet soil spread a fiction of early spring. The hills were empty. Glimpses of villages soared inland, their chimneys balancing above them veils as thin and blue as un-inhaled tobacco smoke. Slow threads rose swaying and expanding from distant bonfires, as though Mohicans were signalling. The hillsides uncoiled red scrolls of plough; beehives, muffled for the coming winter, stood in cataleptic kraals; and only the far-sounding bells told that the flocks were grazing their way across Bulgaria at a glacier’s pace. Magpies fidgeted about the landscape and an unstable confetti of gulls whitened the grass and the furrows.
When the track dipped steeply into a coomb, streams curled to the sea over a crescent of sand and the ravines that twisted inland were filled with bare, silver walnut trees and the spidery winter distaffs of poplars. Hundreds of hooded crows were settled along the boughs and a clap of the hands would shed them deafeningly into the sky as the branches sprang free, sending them up the valley in a drift of soot for a league or two; then back they swung to plunge the spinneys into raucous mourning again. Some people say that these birds – suddenly ominous by their numbers – live for more than a hundred years; a number of these might have pecked at the dead in the Crimean War; a few Methuselahs could even have flown south across the Ukraine after following the Grande Armée from Moscow.
In an inlet, close to the sand’s edge, an old man was smoking a nar-ghileh on the doorstep of a hut beside a little boat beached among the rushes. His high-cheeked face was a benign skeleton leaf of wrinkles. In faulty Bulgarian on both sides, we talked of the coldness of the day and the brightness of the sun. He was an old Tartar fisherman, the only human being I saw all day.
For, as the miles mounted up, the scene grew emptier until rising woods concealed the interior. Trees sank to the sea’s edge and the path curled across tilted glades full of white and red anemones. The smell of herbs filled the air. Myrtle, bay and arbutus – dark green leaves crowded with berries as big and scarlet as strawberries – sank seaward. Blue-black ilexes jutted among them, their roots looped in plaited arches like the roots of trees in Japanese paintings.
Downhill, at the end of plunging tunnels of evergreen, the European continent disintegrated in tufted spikes and islets standing in green water as translucent as glass, darkened, as it receded, to the blue of a peacock’s neck as it fled away to the skyline. Creases slight as a breath on silk stirred the almost still water just enough to ring these spikes with a bracelet of white. Headlands followed each other in a south-westerly recession of plumed capes dwindling at last to dim threads that could belong equally to the sea or the sky.
In the late afternoon, sunbeams filled the tilted clearings and struck the tree boles and the leaves with layers of wintry gold. Rafts of light hung in the leaves, fell through the woods in spokes and broke up the loop of shadow over the water with windows of radiance. The solitude and the hush were complete. A promise of the Aegean and the Greek islands roved the cold Bulgarian air, sending a hint of their spell across the Propontis and the Bosporus to the shores of this huge barbarian sea.
A trio of cormorants had flown across the Tartar’s cove and I had seen their craned necks, beaks swivelling like periscopes, sticking out of the water farther south. On the rocks a dozen were standing now with wings heraldically half-open, as though hung out to dry. I followed a path downhill towards them, but they took flight in an urgent wedge over the water, which was now patterned with streaks of zinc and lilac. The track grew thinner; by dusk all trace of it had vanished and I found myself climbing through undergrowth and rocks: leaping from slab to slab, dodging pools, bestriding fissures and ledges, hoping for a gap that might lead uphill again. When it was dark I went on by torchlight, negotiating the water and the steeper confusion of boulders, determined to turn back if it grew worse.
Then I lost my footing on a ledge and skidded, with a screech of hobnails, down a slant like a barn roof. A drop and a jolt threw me waist-deep into a pool. Jarred and shaken, with a gash on my forehead and a torn thumb, I climbed out, shuddering with cold. At the bottom of the other end of the pool, about two fathoms down, the torch was sending a yellow shaft through sea anemones and weed and a flickering concourse of fish. I wondered what would have happened if in my rucksack and overcoat and heavy boots, I had followed the torch into the depths. Should I take off my heavy stuff and dive for the drowned light? I was shaking and my teeth were chattering. The sun had only just set: waiting till dawn meant twelve or thirteen hours in the freezing dark.
In case there were someone on this empty-seeming coast, I decided to shout. But what? I had forgotten, if I ever knew it, the Bulgarian for Help. All I could think of was the formal cry of ‘Good evening’ – ‘Dobar vecher!’ I shouted for a few minutes but with no reply. My stick was floating on the shallower part of the pool, so I retrieved it. With a reluctant look at the lost torch and the glittering mob of fish now going mad round that fallen portent, I began to fumble my way forward, tapping and feeling a way along the rocks: sliding, crawling on all fours, climbing ledges slippery with bladder-wrack, wading up to my armpits and sounding ahead with the stick for fear of a sudden drop. Now and again I sent up my cry of inappropriate affability. Stars dimly indicated distant masses in silhouette. After a long slithering advance, a few constellations, appearing in front where all had been black before, indicated that I was reaching the cape.
I crept on, preferring to wade now; the water was less cold than the night air. When I crawled on the rocks, the air embedded me in icy plate-armour. Within a few minutes of each other, as though by collusion, both my bootlaces broke; the boots became loose, dragging anchors under water and heavy fetters up and down the blades of rock. Breathless and exhausted, I lay on a ledge until spurred on by the cold. At last, lowering my half-shod foot on to what I thought was the surface of a pool, I felt the solidity of sand and the grate of pebbles. Another pace confirmed it; I was on the shore of an inlet. Round a buttress of cliff a little way up the beach, a faint rectangle of light, surrounded by scattered chinks, leaked astonishingly into the darkness. I crossed the pebbles and I pulled open an improvised door, uttering a last dobar vecher into the measureless cavern beyond. A dozen fire-lit faces looked up in surprise and consternation from their cross-legged supper, as though a sea monster or a drowned man’s ghost had come in.
Ten minutes later, in gym shoes, canvas trousers, two shirts, several layers of jersey and a shepherd’s hirsute cloak, with three or four slugs of slivovitz burning inside me, sipping a second glass of tea brewed from mountain herbs and two inches deep in sugar, I was crouched in front of a blaze of thorns stacked as high as a bonfire. I was still shuddering. One of the inhabitants of the place had washed the blood off my face and feet, another had plied a towel. Recovered from their surprise at the apparition of this sodden and bleeding
spectre, they had leaped to my help like Bernardine monks.
It took some time to focus and segregate the figures moving about in the firelight and the smoky shadows. They were wild-looking men. Six were dressed in the customary earth-brown or dark blue home-spun; patched, tattered, cross-gartered with thongs over their felt-swaddled shanks and shod in canoe-tipped cowhide moccasins. Knives were stuck in their wide red sashes and, like me, they were hatted in flat-topped sheepskin kalpaks that had moulted most of their fur. An old man with a tangled white beard seemed to be the leader of this group. Four others, equally torn and tattered, wore blue jerseys and seamen’s peaked caps set askew. Shepherds and seamen, in fact. The oldest of the sailors had only one hand, with a star tattooed on the back of it.
Gradually the surrounding firelit hollow resolved itself into a long cave, arching high overhead but not burrowing very deep. Blades of rock formed much of the outer wall, unmortared masonry filled the gaps, and branches and planks and flattened petrol tins stamped with Sokony-Vacuum in Cyrillic characters, completed it. The flames picked out fans of shrub springing from the rock and a high cluster of stalactites; they also summoned from the shadows a scattering of gear which told of the cave’s double function: a boat tilted on its side, oars, rudders, huge carbide lamps, long-shafted fishing spears, tall multi-pronged tridents with barbed spikes like eight-toothed combs, anchors, geometric fishing traps, creels, bait baskets, corks, gourd floats, wedges, coils, drooping russet festoons of net and links of rusty chain. A small anvil topped an embedded tree stump.
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