Patrick Leigh Fermor

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The place was miles from anywhere, & it was pouring cats and d., no taxis till an hour later. I fell asleep in a wicker chair in the janitor’s lodge, pitch dark by now. I had a jolly Transylvanian dinner in R. and D.’s flat, sat up ages, then back to the Metropole, slept till 4.30 a.m., then taxied to the airport.

  *

  At Sofia airport, they said my visa was only valid for twenty-four hours – they directed a taxi to the Min. of Foreign Affairs. I paid the fare with 1 dollar (officially 1 dollar = 1 leva, unofficially 3 or 4). He buzzed off, I tried to leave my luggage with the security guard, while I went in; but it wasn’t the right place, the British Consulate was, so I had to leave my bags on the pavement, while I ranged in search of a taxi, found one at last, went to the Consulate, where the polite but apathetic staff said I should go to the Aliens’ Office – no, it was forbidden to leave luggage. They advised me to stay at the Sofia Hotel, perfectly reasonable; so I clocked in, and utter hell began.

  The Aliens’ Office is a Black Hole of Calcutta, two girls dealing, through niches in a frosted glass screen, with 100 Arabs, Angolans, Namibians, citizens of Niger and the Haute Volta, scores of Africans, many of them conversing with each other in Fr. or English; woolly heads à perte de vue [as far as the eye can see], all here on crash destabilisation courses, perhaps. It took an hour, nearly fainting, to wrestle to one of the cubby holes, where the harassed girl, speaking a bit of English, took my passport, kept it an hour, then gave it back and said ‘Come back at 2.’ I did, then was told, come back at 4, and just before the place closed, got it back with a chit to the bank, where I could buy a prolongation to allow me to stay ten days and change money at a very slightly less extortionate rate. ‘Take it to the bank tomorrow morning.’ She had forgotten it was Friday night; for when I went next day, it was shut till Monday, so was the Aliens’ Office. It looked strange without its swarm of Africans.

  Meanwhile this hotel was getting crusty about my staying on with my papers still not right. A period in limbo began. I could do nothing till Monday. I retired with Radetsky March [2] to my claustrophobic room, where most of the floor space is taken up by an empty mini-bar full of spiders’ webs; the lights weak but elaborate; there was a downpour outdoors. I set out to buy a paperback novel; went to twenty bookshops, not a single foreign book except Russian. Bulgarian-English phrasebook? Not one. Oh, for the P. Highsmith, Mrs Gaskell and Huxley, which I had left with Elemér! – he’ll never read them (we had reverted to German). There’s only Radetsky, so I am spinning it out. Every official is gruff and unfriendly – except with sudden shining exceptions – I think through political fright of hobnobbing with pariahs from the West. Some ghastly National Day is in the offing. Acres of scarlet hoardings are going up with the faces of the Zhivkov president [3] and Gorbachev, larger than tennis courts. Pilgrims buy single gladioli, and troop in Indian file into Dimitrov’s Lenin-style Mausoleum, [4] and out again, schoolchildren are dragooned about in noisy troops, all with red flags. I got thoroughly demoralised and trod on my specs in the dim bedroom – fortunately, only bust one lens, so I can read with my head on one side – better so, perhaps, for I mustn’t rush the only remaining pages. I know, if I still smoked, I would have set the building on fire. Still, I can always leave the bath on and forget it. . .

  On Sunday morning I went to the Victorian Byzantine Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky, well remembered and rather fine. There was an Orthodox mass of great splendour – infinitely better than anything on our journey, infinitely better than in Greece, all booming in Russian-style bass voices; troops of deacons in green & gold dalmatics, all blue with incense; but not many people there, and half of them foreigners. I suspect it’s half a tourist-draw, and half a cover-story. Most of the foreigners were Unesco delegates who fill this, and all the other hotels: the scum of the earth, they seem to me. Mooching about outside the cathedral, I was approached by an affable chap; any dollars to change? 3 leva a dollar. ‘Traveller’s cheque?’ ‘No problem.’ I signed one for fifty on the rump of a marble lion. He gave me 150 leva for 50 dollars. He had no change for a 200 leva note, so I gave him 50 levas and went on my way rejoicing; but I only rejoiced until I tried to pay for lunch: 200-leva-notes were all withdrawn in 1980; nothing higher than 20 leva is legal currency now . . . Vai de mine [woe is me].

  The town is unrecognisable: ghastly Russian-style blocks, Balkanic back streets with gap-toothed cobbles, yawning manholes, façades under repair, all masked with cardboard. There are endless trudges for everything, ending in total failure to get it. On Saturday, I took a bus to a village on Mt Vitosha, a splendid well-remembered range above the capital, for a solitary lunch – slivovitz, kebabs – then to the Golden Bridge, a huge glacier-moraine in the forest, like a river of granite boulders, each the size of a bus, an extraordinary sight. Went for a marvellous windy trudge through the steep beech woods (also birch, oak and poplar). The wind – west – was so strong it tore leaves down by the thousand. I saw exactly what Shelley meant. ‘Beech leaves, when driven along in thousands, seem to stand another time and scuttle in chaotic mobs’? – ‘stricken multitudes as from an enchanter fleeing’ [5] – (what is the adjective? ‘Calamity’? Can’t be ‘panic’ – torture). I spent most of Sunday (after my reverses) in the museum, which is splendid. Saw all the gold rhytons, heads, etc. from Panagyurishte, [6] with more time and elbow-room than in London, and countless other wonders. They have a large statue of Cybele the size of ours, tho’ headless, armless and Lion-less. But the robes and girdle are identical, also the throne and one give-away lion’s paw; so I wrote to Dimitri’s Thracological professor [7] here (now Minister of Education – more later) saying that the present label – ‘Statue of a seated woman’ – can be removed, and ‘Cybele’ put there instead. I sent off Dimitri’s letter (it is now Wednesday), and on Tuesday got a message asking me to call later in the week).

  When Monday came, I went to the bank and paid what I had been told to pay for an extension – $40 – and then back to the Aliens’ Office, which was a Zulu kraal once again. I gave my passport to a different lady. After an hour, she told me to come back at 2 p.m. I flung up my arms in such despair that she finally had pity, and I was given a grudging card, allowing me to stay and change money for a fraction more. Two surprises back at the hotel. (A) The ‘down’ charge for the hire of a car, the daily fee, all to be paid for in dollars, with coupons obtained in the suburbs, would have amounted to 100 dollars for a 200 kilometre day; 8 or 900 for the trip I had in mind; and (B) the girl at the Consulate had said the hotel was cheap. I asked how much when I got to the hotel, and understood to my delight, it was 8 levas – cheap for propaganda purposes, I assumed, and said ‘Eight?’ The doorman said – ‘No. Eighteen’ or so I thought. I now learnt it was eighty. . .

  All this was something of a relief. I realised that, what with the weather, the general charges, the reserve, the unhelpfulness, the fright of the officials, and the expense, that I’d have to wash the whole thing out and come back (with you, if you could face it) by car, which apparently is easy. Then, the problem was I felt I couldn’t go back to Kardamyli before my nameday. So I have decided to go to Salonica and see if I can go to Mt Athos for a few days, but I believe permission is difficult. Might try through the museum, staying the night at last year’s hotel, telephoning you at Graham’s meanwhile, and to Barbara and Niko. There are no Olympic flights from Sofia, only infrequent Bulgarian ones, the train takes eleven hours (several of them waiting at the frontier) but I found a bus left on Wednesday for Salonica, leaving at 3.30 p.m., arriving at 10 – about the distance of Passau to Linz – so hope to leave on that.

  On Monday night I took a taxi to a restaurant they had recommended at the Consulate. It was miles out in the country, given over entirely to tarted-up folklore, sharp yells, shouts, stamps, twirled handkerchiefs – dances that I’m sure have never been danced. Ate from hand-made knobbly plates, drank out of earthen mugs, rubbing shoulders with Cubans and North Koreans and anti-Solidarity Poles. I couldn�
�t help wondering how Graham would have liked it. Last night I went to Rigoletto at the Opera. Sung in perfect Italian to my surprise (scarcely any foreign word is spoken here, except Russian) – and very good indeed. This was a great joy. Sustained by it, I went back to my room, poured out some whisky from my Vienna bottle – there was none there. I thought those buggers in the hotel had pinched it; then remembered I’d filled the plastic half-bottle [with whisky] once or twice – perhaps more often than I thought – so perhaps they were innocent after all. The elderly maid was one of the only nice people I have seen for what seems like eternity, so was relieved.

  Wednesday

  All packed; bill paid; and D.V., Salonica tonight. The place glows in my mind like Eldorado or Avalon. Thelema [8] and Cockaigne. [9] I’ve got five pages of Radetsky to go. I hope it’s end of Lucky Jim week. . .

  Thursday

  I sat beside the nice driver and the road followed the Strouma river – poplars, tobacco, vines – till it got dark at the frontier and it started raining over No-Man’s-Land. The toothcomb treatment of luggage in both frontier posts took two hours, but at last the joyful moment of leaving the Iron Curtain came, and we crept on through the dark. It was much further than I had thought – getting to Salonica at 11, after a 3 o’clock departure in Sofia. No taxis, owing to a strike, but I found a rather nice dilapidated hotel (‘Pallas’) next to the bus station, and v. close to our last year’s hotel. . .

  I’m in a taverna on the waterfront, lovely sunny day, glittering sea, bus in half an hour to Ouranoupolis in the Chalkidiki, then by boat tomorrow to the little Athonite port of Daphni, unseen by me for fifty-one years. . .

  Tons of love darling and hugs too. I long to see you.

  xxx Paddy

  P.S. Forgive incoherence. No time to reread. I bought a small knapsack and some serious boots this morning. If it’s not too much of a bore an anorak like yours is my present dream.

  [1] An exhibition from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.

  [2] Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (1932).

  [3] Todor Hristov Zhivkov (1911–98), General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, 1954–89.

  [4] Georgi Dimitrov Mikhaylov (1882–1949), General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, 1946–9.

  [5] ‘O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

  Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

  Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

  Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

  Pestilence-stricken multitudes’

  Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819)

  [6] Thracian treasure dating from the 4th–3rd centuries bc excavated in 1949 near the town of Panagyurishte.

  [7] A contact given to PLF by Dimitri Obolensky.

  [8] A set of religious beliefs, tabulated by the occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), allowing the believer to ‘do what thou will’.

  [9] The land of plenty.

  To Xan Fielding

  3–4 December 1985

  Kardamyli

  Messenia

  Xan παιδί μου [dear boy ],

  Shattering news about poor old Manoli. Changebug [George Psychoundakis] rang me up and said had I heard anything, then broke the news that he had fallen in the mountain above Koustogerako and got killed. So I rang up Manoussos [Manoussakis] and learnt that the funeral was next day, dashed to Kalamata, got the plane, and flew to Canea next day, where Manoussos met me at the airport. He drives v. slowly, so we went in the taxi which was taking a gigantic wreath from Kosta Mitsotakis, and got there in one and a half hours. (They knew we were coming, and held things up.) There were about 100 cars and trucks in the village, which was packed. Poor old Manoli was laid out in his coffin in the house, top of head covered in a white cloth, obviously rather bashed, but face all right, and looking very calm. Eleni, and all the family were swollen with weeping, the house crammed. M. and I put our bunches of flowers with the others, kissed Manoli’s brow (cold as the clay), and then climbed to the churchyard. Lots of Resistance movement wreaths on ribboned poles. Outside the church, just before the burial, someone made a short speech, and Geo. Psych. recited a marvellous short poem hastily written the night before. Afterward, when we went to condole in the receiving line, Eleni and all the others seized me like bears and hugged and hugged, all in floods, and in the end I felt myself shoved in the receiving line too, like a relative, receiving the condolences of scores of people I’d never met. It was all very moving and harrowing. I said I was there on behalf of all allies & friends and especially you. Afterwards, under a walnut tree, Kosti and Antoni told us what had happened.

  Some young chap in the village had teased Manoli (not spitefully): Ἔ, μπάρμπα Μανώλη, δὲν μπορεῖς νὰ κυνηγᾶς τ’ ἀγρίμια ὅπως στὰ νιάτα σου! [‘Eh, Uncle Manoli, you can’t go hunting wild goat like you used to in your youth!’]! He said, you wait, took his gun next morning and set off for the high peaks. The others, following, lost sight of him, stalking high above, heard two reports, and went home, thinking he’d taken a different path. When he failed to return next day, a search party went up, couldn’t find him, only a large ibex with long horns on the edge of a deep cliff; and at last, spotted M’s body 200 or 300 yards below, at the bottom of a deep chasm – too steep to climb down. A helicopter was summoned from Canea, and M. was hauled up with a grapple at the end of a long cable – killed outright, thank God. He must have been hoisting the ibex on his shoulder, slipped or lost his balance – they are nearly as heavy as a small pony – and crashed into the void.

  I can’t get used to the idea that he has vanished, although we had a scare four years ago. The only thing is, he vanished in his own mountains, like an eagle, engaged on something dangerous and of course, forbidden. There is a sort of fitness . . . Manoussos wrote a very good piece about him – I’ll send you a Xerox, if he hasn’t.

  *

  I think Joan has told you my adventures in Hungary and Bulgaria and Mt Athos – especially the tracing of Elemér – my partner in chasing reapers on the banks of the Maros in Transylvania, called István in the book.

  The evening before I left Budapest, I was crossing a huge underground crossing, like Piccadilly Circus, under a square called Déak [Ferenc]tér, where about a million people, just having knocked off work, were milling in all directions. I wanted to go to a place called Vörösmarty tér, so timidly approached a young man in horn-rimmed specs and said, ‘Vörösmarty tér, kérem szépen’ (please). He said, ‘Do you speak English?’

  ‘I am English.’

  ‘Really?’ he was fluent, nearly perfect. ‘Do you know Kent? I’ve been there.’

  ‘Yes, a bit. Where?’

  ‘A village called Headcorn.’ (Costa’s village.)

  ‘Near Ashford?’

  ‘Yes, and a still smaller village called Grafty Green.’

  ‘I know that too. I even remember the name of the house I stayed in there.’

  ‘What was it called?’

  ‘Fermor Cottage.’

  ‘How do you spell it?’

  ‘F.E.R.M.O.R.’

  On this I produced my passport. We both remained rooted to the ground, and then made our way to Vörösmarty tér in a slightly haunted state. Admit it was odd.

  How marvellous, Magouche and you – and J [anetta] and Jaime! – coming for Christmas! I do hope it’s lovely bright weather, like today. We’ll go for some marvellous walks, work off the turkey and p.p. [plum pudding].

  We still haven’t fully digested our Barockfahrt [journey into the Baroque], but gloat over the p.c.’s and guidebooks like misers with their gold.

  Tons of love to you both

  Paddy

  also Joan

  P.S. When I got back and saw that Spectator piece, [1] I thought at first it was a leg-pull of some kind, and felt rather embarrassed. Then the next envelope revealed that it was by Patric
k Reade, my godson! God-filial piety, bless him.

  [1] ‘An Extravagance of Curiosity’, a profile of PLF in The Spectator, 7 September 1985.

  Early in 1986 PLF received a postcard, franked in Middlesex, which read:

  ‘Kind Sir!

  I was thrice fortunate on my trip to the erstwhile capital of the BRITISH EMPIRE. I discovered the velvety smoothness of Guinness, the exquisite taste of gourmet steak and kidney pudding and your magnificent magnum opus, A Time of Gifts. You will perhaps be surprised to hear that my late maternal grandfather Alois Schoissbauer figures in it. Indeed, he was none other than the pimply youth who ‘borrowed’ your rucksack rife with manna in Munich. [1] He is clearly recognisable for he often told me the tale. You will no doubt be interested to know that it (the rucksack) later concealed all his belongings when he fled across the Alps from Tyrol to Switzerland when the Nazis wished to incarcerate him in a KONZENTRATIONSLAGER, not as a Jew (which he was not, being a Bavarian and a Roman Catholic), but as an anti-social element. I later inherited the rucksack and carried it all the way across Asia to Peshawar where it was stolen by an Australian hippie, at least so I have been led to believe.