by Andrew Eames
These resettlement villages all tended to follow a similar pattern. There’d be a crucifix at the village entry, marking the beginning of a thin metalled road which had yet to be widened for traffic (because there wasn’t any), and which deteriorated to rutted track again once it reached the village limits. On either side of it ran a wide green sward with benches in the shade and the occasional ancient Trabant becalmed in a rising tide of floribunda. Most of the houses were squat and square, with shuttered windows, gardens full of roses, vines above the terrace, chickens out the back, and doves, swallows and wood pigeons in the fruit trees. The main street would invariably be called Petöfi utca or Kossuth utca after Hungary’s national heroes, and the big event of the day was the early minibus to town and the mid-morning visit of the gas-cylinder man or the haberdasher’s van, when women in housecoats would emerge to exchange the news in mid-street. ‘These women,’ said Tamas, ‘if you do something tomorrow, they know about it today.’
There was also usually a single village shop, identifiable more by the open door and the crates of empty beer bottles than by any sign or window display, with a cavernous drinking den next door, probably called a Büfe or possibly, more pretentiously, an Etterem, which might also have sandwiches and crisps in case the beer drinkers forgot to eat. And somewhere along the road’s length would be the village hall, identifiable by the little flag sticking out from the wall and the big-bellied old gent sitting outside, staring at passersby and staying close to the seat of power, in case the mayor needed his advice. The mayors in these places were key figures, democratically elected, and a good mayor adept at securing government (and now EU) grants could make the difference between a flourishing community and one that was dying on its feet.
We’d been going a couple of hours when Tamas, who always rode up ahead, turned in his saddle and asked whether I was willing to try a canter. Whether I was ready or not turned out to be immaterial, because no sooner had he said the word than Laguna was off, at buttock-pummelling speed. ‘Give her long reins, let her run,’ called Tamas over his shoulder, but it was all I could do to hold myself on with my knees, let alone think about any form of horse control. The fact that I was on top and she was underneath was more a matter of historical precedent than expertise, and I thought it sensible to try to keep it that way. I couldn’t hope to try to steer as well as keep my feet in the stirrups, but Laguna really didn’t need me to do anything, even when it came to stopping, because when Tamas held up his hand after a couple of minutes she slowed instantly to a walk again. I was trembling from head to toe, but at least I hadn’t fallen off.
In Gyötapuszta we had lunch of brown bread and körözött (a mixture of cottage cheese, sour cream, paprika, garlic and onion), a delicacy that indelicately repeated on me for much of the rest of the afternoon, especially during the rising trots. We pushed on further, trying a couple more canters through woodland where the sunlight danced from tree to tree, but all I could think about was the pain in my knees, the ache up my spine and the damage that I was undoubtedly doing to Laguna’s back. By the time we’d reached our first overnight stop, in a hunting lodge near Somogyfajsz, I was truly concerned about my ability to continue. The distance we’d covered had been little more than 25 kilometres, and much of it at a walking pace, but we’d have to do far more cantering and even galloping in order to complete some of the longer days that lay ahead. I wasn’t sure I could.
Lying thinking about it that night, I saw myself jogging the remaining 125 kilometres, with Laguna as a pack pony by my side. Next morning, sore in all sorts of unfamiliar ways and feeling far worse than Tamas’ ‘quite second-hand’, I resolved to make some changes. I’d been to see Laguna the previous evening and noticed that Tamas had sprayed bits of her back with a green dye. Over breakfast he confirmed that this was what I thought it was: antiseptic, to stop her wounds becoming infected.
‘Can we go on?’
Tamas shrugged. He wasn’t giving much away. ‘I think so.’
I told him my plan. I was abandoning the American-style, sit-deep-in-the-saddle cantering that I’d been taught at scandalous expense in Richmond Park, and instead planned to stand up in the stirrups over the horse’s neck, like jockeys do. Tamas seemed to approve, although with him it was hard to tell.
We started out slowly, across open grazing with a herd of grey, long-horned cattle to our left and traditional racka sheep to our right. There was a cowherd with the cattle and a shepherd with the sheep, and as we came abreast of them these two men were standing in the no-man’s-land between the two herds, shouting at each other. They included Tamas in their heated debate.
‘So what was all that?’ I asked when we’d ambled on out of earshot.
‘The shepherd had fallen asleep and his sheep had moved into the cattle’s land, so the cowherd had brought them back.’
‘That’s kind of him.’ I wasn’t sure why it was such a cause for concern.
‘That cowherd knows lots of bad words,’ mused Tamas. With a bit of further prodding it turned out he knew these men, who were out every day in the same pastures. The shepherd had a reputation as a heavy drinker.
‘When he sees a glass of wine, he drinks it. And in our pubs we have very cheap wine, some of it not even made with grapes.’ Tamas shuddered, but didn’t elaborate. Anyway, it turned out the cowherd always took the moral high ground and was forever complaining about the shepherd’s drunken state, but the latter, during his waking and sober moments, was a good herdsman and the sheep were in good condition. It would not be easy to find a good replacement.
Another hour further on we watered the horses at a sweep-well, a cross between a nodding donkey and a medieval siege machine with a giant counterbalanced beam that was surprisingly easy to handle once you’d got the general idea. And shortly afterwards we came across more old technology in the form of a rusty Soviet-made 4x4 waiting at a crossroads of sandy tracks. The driver leant out of the window and said something surly to Tamas which I could tell wasn’t good news.
‘Ah.’ Tamas turned to me with an awkward grin. ‘We need to go fast now or they’ll shoot us.’ My heart skipped a beat; was this the Cold War come alive again?
‘They’re hunting here,’ he continued. ‘And they don’t always shoot straight. In any case, my horse is faster than a bullet. But Laguna might need the stick.’ I think that was a joke, but he’d careered off before I had a chance to check.
For an hour he pushed the pace hard. Whereas before we’d been mainly walking with the occasional canter and trot, now we were mainly cantering with the occasional walk. Laguna pushed on doggedly, trying hard to keep up with Sandor, and I hung on grimly, holding hard to her mane in my new position with my head just behind her ears, as I’d seen it done at the races. Initially this new stance felt perilously unsafe (where exactly were we connected?) but gradually I also began to feel more at one with what the horse was doing, and I found myself whispering imprecations – mainly to myself to get it right – into her ear. I had no idea what sort of landscape we passed through in that hour ; each canter felt like it started in one country and ended in another. Each time Laguna kicked ahead I felt as if I was entering another tunnel, with daylight a long way away, but each time was also very slightly easier than the last.
Eventually we reached another sandy crossroads and Tamas slackened off. ‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘we’re clear of it now. You OK?’
When I got my breath back I said I was. I even ventured to suggest that I thought I might be getting better, not doing so much damage to rider or horse. Tamas nodded gravely. He’d been looking back regularly to make sure Laguna and I weren’t too far behind, and he seemed to approve. ‘We couldn’t have done that yesterday.’ It was tantamount to praise.
At the edge of the woodland were rows of shooting platforms on stilts, designed not as hides but to get the hunters substantially higher than their quarry. That way, if a bullet missed its target, it thudded harmlessly into the ground and not into one of the distant beaters or
gamekeepers. Nevertheless every year brought its casualties. ‘These hunters have money, big cars and run big international companies, so they don’t obey the rules we Hungarians set for them,’ said Tamas. He added that, in Germany, Hungary is promoted as ‘the country where you can go to do what you like’. Including wounding gamekeepers.
‘Besides, many of the clients are old and their eyesight is not so good.’
Irresponsible though these hunters’ behaviour may be, the forest couldn’t exist without them. If it wasn’t for their revenue the trees would have to be chopped down for timber and the land turned to fields. The luxury hunting lodges provided welcome employment, and even the local deer farms prospered from the hunting business.
‘How so?’
‘The hunting companies order extra animals from the farms and release them into the woods a month before the season starts.’
‘Doesn’t that make them a bit of a pushover?’
Tamas grinned. ‘When you’ve paid all that money you need to kill something. You don’t ask where it was brought up.’
That evening we stopped at the fish station at Boronka, a series of artificial lakes where carp were netted once a year and then trucked off to the fish-eaters of Italy and Spain. From the primitive fisherman’s cottage, colder inside than out, you could look out over a layered pondscape with flatlands of lilypads in the foreground rising through reed grasslands via foothills of alder bushes to mountains of Scots pine behind. Tamas scythed a barrowful of grass for the horses, lit a fire to keep the mosquitoes away, and we listened to the frog chorus start with the sound of someone swinging on an old rusty gate. They were still singing away deep into the night as I struggled to find a position in my sleeping bag which allowed me to forget my suppliant, supplicant, suppurating butt.
By the third day the sky was rag-rolled, the reeds sibilant and the lake scurrying endlessly northwards, carrying messages for the wind. The good news was that the wounds on Laguna’s back were not deteriorating, for which I whispered my thanks in her ear. Not being either of us in the first flush of youth, we both found it hard to get started in the morning, and she was easily distracted by potential snacks in the hedgerows, for which I couldn’t really blame her. Those grassed forest tracks were an eternal temptation for a horse, a bit like asking a hungry teenager to march up and down the biscuit aisle at Tesco’s.
As we were leaving Boronka Tamas pointed out a big dip in the ground by the last lake.
‘Couple of years ago we dug some sand there to reinforce the embankment, and found dead Germans. Seventeen of them.’
It had been part of the Eastern front. In the last months of the Second World War the Axis powers had made a futile last-ditch stand here against the advancing Russians, and in the hole the diggers had found bones, badges, tags, helmets, guns and grenades, all mixed together. One of the helmets had a small entry hole where the bullet had hit and a large exit hole where it had departed, and after a little searching they’d found the skull that had a similar small entry wound and large exit displacement. From the tags they could tell that the dead soldier had been only seventeen years old.
‘What did you do with them all?’
‘There’s an organization. We called them and they came and did all the proper things. They seemed pleased at what we’d found. Those dead soldiers, they had brothers and sisters who never knew what happened to them, so now they had their answers.’
For a while our route followed the visible line of the trenches, which twisted and turned amongst the trees, slowly drowning in vegetation. I imagined the tree roots growing downwards through the debris of war, through bones, shrapnel, belt buckles, bits of water bottle and broken families, never to be reunited. I wondered whether the father of that woman I’d stayed with in Donauwörth, all those weeks before, was somewhere down there in the cold earth – a fate you wouldn’t wish on anyone, whatever uniform they were wearing.
‘We didn’t have a good war,’ said Tamas, reflectively, after we’d been clipping along in silence for half an hour. ‘Very few people around this part of Europe did. The Russians freed us from the Germans, but they also freed us from everything else we had.’
An hour later the vegetation changed again and we were amongst clean-limbed tall aspens with grass snakes on the path. Then the trees fell back and we emerged on to a large area of open grassland carpeted with daisies and adorned with red-and-black butterflies. I knew what was coming.
‘So,’ said Tamas, grinning at me over his shoulder. ‘Now we see how fast Laguna can go.’
The rain started in the afternoon and continued for much of the next twenty-four hours in waves of thunderstorms, each one greeted by a chorus of enthusiastic treefrogs. Fortunately we’d already done the day’s travel by the time it started, covering the ground much more quickly now that I had the confidence to gallop. So we hunkered down in the reed-thatched hall at the Petesmalom Reserve, another complex of fishponds, and I unrolled my sleeping bag on a mattress in the loft. I took advantage of the rain to read and rest, treating my sores with arnica cream. Meanwhile Tamas put on a wide-brimmed hat, stuck a big piece of deer liver on a giant fishhook and hurled it out into the middle of one of the ponds to try to catch a monster. Around him the sleeting rain drained all colour away from the landscape, leaving him just another tree stump in a two-dimensional world of silhouettes.
By the morning of the fourth day the skies had cleared and there was a new freshness in the air, but back in the saddle again it didn’t feel as if I’d had a day of rest at all. My body ached all over, and the very first trot immediately undid any slight healing process that might have taken place. Laguna, on the other hand, felt frisky, at least by a plodder’s standards.
This was the day I discovered her aversion to puddles. Previously we’d been travelling on dry, mostly sandy, tracks, but now the surface was liberally spattered with water and she would do anything to avoid getting her feet wet, even at a canter. Two days previously I wouldn’t have survived these leaps and swerves, but now I clung on, with Tamas looking back on the corners like an engine driver’s assistant checking the last coach was still attached to the train. I was still attached, even though I wasn’t yet good enough to be Laguna’s driver and force her to go straight.
The rain released the smell of wet acorns and dung, mixed with the musk of sweating horse. There were deer aplenty in the oakwoods, leaping away down the forest corridors, and I realized that I was now managing to notice my surroundings. At about midday we came upon a family of gypsies, collecting wood, but they didn’t look up at us, and we in turn said nothing to them as we passed. Tamas was reluctant to talk about them, aware that Westerners are far more sympathetic to the general idea of gypsies than the people who actually live with them. He did say, however, that the communists hadn’t wanted them wandering about and had forced them to settle in villages in order to absorb them into the system. In those days you were a threat to society if you were not working.
Despite the puddles we made good progress, reaching our next overnight stop, an empty schoolhouse in an abandoned village near Csokonyaviszonta, in the early afternoon. The village had grown up around an extensive farm once owned by the Széchényi family, but when the family went, the villagers had had to leave too. The grand farm buildings, plus a distillery that had manufactured vodka from potatoes, were all still there, but many of them were roofless and overgrown, a palace complex half hidden in shrubbery, an Angkor Wat of middle-European farming. Trees, instead of children, grew up inside the walls of farmworkers’ cottages. Inside the stable blocks the symmetrical arches of muscular brickwork repeated over and over into the gloom, now home only to bats and owls. The factory walls had gaping holes in them where the old copper stills had been removed, complete, for their scrap-metal value, and only blackened patches on the walls remained from where the furnaces had once stood. I could imagine the Széchényis – possibly even Count István himself, he who’d put the Chain Bridge across the Danube – striding around these m
assive buildings on a tour of inspection. But what the aristocrats had built, the communists had left to rot.
Maybe it had been left to stand as a symbol of aristocratic exploitation, a brickwork embodiment of the popular sentiment expressed by national poet Petöfi that the nobility had built their wealth on the back of serfdom, as in the refrain of his scathing ‘Song of a Magyar Nobleman’: ‘Peasants work until they die/A Magyar nobleman am I!’ It was a sentiment echoed by my old friend George Paloczi-Horvath, whose graphic account of peasant life at the turn of the century described endless drudgery in appalling conditions for the benefit of morally corrupt landlords. Tenants were treated like animals, masters were legally allowed to hit servants between the ages of eleven and eighteen ‘in such a way as does not cause a wound which does not heal within eight days’, and unmarried girls were fair game for estate managers and the idle sons of the manor. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the peasantry had started to talk about rights and freedom, they had had their villages razed to the ground and had been asked to leave on a scale which far outnumbered the Highland Clearances. Around 1.5 million emigrated to America in the two decades between 1890 and 1914.
It seemed appropriate, therefore, that we slept out in the open that night, although the real reason had less to do with a display of solidarity with evicted peasantry and more to do with the dank, mouse-filled interior of the schoolroom. We found a couple of bedsteads which we dragged out to the fire, and we took it in turns to keep the latter going, all night long, both for its warmth and its deterrent effect on large mammals and mosquitoes. In the early morning there was still enough heat to brew a cup of coffee by placing a mug directly on the embers.
It was my last day on Laguna, and it was quickly over after that early start. We crossed a couple of railway lines and plunged into the overgrown border zone between Hungary and Croatia along the banks of the Drava river, a territory so remote as to be, in Hungarian terminology, ‘beyond the back of God’. By the state of the wisp of a path it was plainly out of bounds for the usual forestry, hunting and wood-gathering activities. Eventually, after ducking through unkempt woodland and pushing through chest-high nettles, we were decanted on to a sandy spit of shore by the Drava itself, a surging, empty sheet of water, forested on either side as far as the eye could see, with no sign of either houses or boats.