by Andrew Eames
By Kozloduj we crossed paths with a proper paddle-steamer, the Radetsky, thumping along on a day trip, filled with shrieking and waving Bulgarian teenagers. I made a mental note to tell the owners of the Schönbrunn, back at Linz, that theirs wasn’t the only paddler still in action on the Danube.
After a day or so the Bulgarian bank began to gather its skirts and twirl like a dervish into gentle hills tonsured with wheatfields, so golden that they were crying out for harvesting. Occasionally there’d be a small terrace of vineyards, or a small ruined fortification of some sort, and it all looked fairly well organized. Meanwhile the Romanian side remained a tree-lined blank, except now the first rank of poplars had started to pitch drunkenly forward, face first into the river, executed by a firing squad of spring floods and wind. Presumably as the front row faltered and failed in this way, so another new row was being planted somewhere at the back, in an attempt to prevent the Danube from leaving its proscribed bed. If I had been trying to assess the character of Romania from this riverbank I would have come away deeply unimpressed, but I knew better thanks to Leigh Fermor’s account of walking across Transylvania, which I now wanted to emulate more than ever, if just to contradict all this emptiness.
For its part the river seemed to sense it was on its final run, and it set a fairly straight course for the Black Sea. It even accelerated, and we were regularly doing 17 or 18 kilometres an hour. When I enquired, Vlado found the extra speed hard to explain. It was possible, he said, that we were on a hydrowave, the release of a large amount of water by one of the big Iron Gate dams. It was a novel idea, surfing down the Danube on a 1,400-ton barge.
The river deviated only once from its task, turning back on itself into the wind, whipping up waves that crashed across the walkway to the stern and isolating me up on the foredeck. I was not unhappy to be alone up there, because after the drama of the Iron Gate a great lassitude had descended on the boat, the mood flattening out under the oppressively empty sky, and no one had much desire for anyone else’s company.
To occupy myself I started to time our progress from one kilometre post to the next in order to calculate the boat speed and work out how much further to go, but the results were ludicrously variable, and I had to conclude that the river authorities hadn’t been particularly diligent when they positioned the markers.
Milia wasn’t much more help. On a rare visit to the bridge, and during a rare attempt at conversation, I asked him where we were.
‘Europe,’ he said, with a grimace.
I saw little of Ivica during these last two days, and I was beginning to understand why. The bottle of brandy I’d donated to crew supplies had suddenly started emptying itself. The level had started to drop with the arrival of Milia on board, so initially I’d assumed it was the newcomer, but a captain risked everything if he was caught drunk in charge, and besides, Milia barely moved from the bridge. Ivica, on the other hand, had had dismay written across his face from the moment Milia arrived. My suspicions were confirmed when he missed a meal altogether, leaving it to Vlado to turn out a creditable spaghetti bolognaise, the signature dish of every male between Cape Wrath and Constantinople.
Vlado was the only person who didn’t seem adversely affected by the change in crew dynamics. He grew into all those spaces vacated by Attila and not occupied by Milia, and looking after me seemed to have become part of his brief. We would talk of this and that, of languages, relationships, book-writing and marriage. And although he looked like a cross between a pirate and a Bond-movie hitman, he was surprisingly romantic.
‘My wife is the most beautiful woman in Europe,’ he said, showing me a photograph (she wasn’t). ‘I always tell her exactly what I feel. That I love her. I’m like that. Not like you English, I know for you that money is number one important, the chasing of money. For me, it is family.’
I protested, but he was not convinced.
‘You have so much divorce in the West. I stood before God and vowed to stay with my wife, so I will stay with her, whatever happens.’
In return I showed him the pictures on my digital camera of my journey thus far, starting right back at the source in Donaueschingen. He was amused that the Danube could look so small, and even could actually disappear. He was particularly entertained by the images I’d taken of Passau from the castle high above, showing the confluence of the Danube and the Inn. Also by the elegant church tower at Dürnstein, which he said he’d noticed many times. He knew most of the riverside locations by sight, but he’d never stepped ashore.
He wasn’t, however, complimentary about Bulgaria, now on our southern shore. The Bulgarians had been too happy with the Turks as their masters, he said.
‘We had them in Serbia, the Turks. I hate them, they were bastards. Don’t let them join Europe. They killed thousands of my ancestors.’
Outside these conversations it was a dull, indolent passage along a section of big, wet highway that hadn’t been part of my original plan, and which I’d had no real desire to see. I wished that I’d had a proper function on board that I could have got on with, but Vlado insisted that there was nothing I could do, in a way that a host insists his weekend guests relax, not realizing that ‘relaxing’ is the very thing that makes some people feel most uncomfortable.
In the absence of outside stimuli, one’s thoughts turn inwards. Reduced to insignificance by the indifference of an unblinking sky, I began to get cranky with my own company. I began to feel lonely, tired of the smell of hot oil, cigarettes and diesel fumes, of the mesmerizing uniformity of the riverbanks and of the endlessly thrumming clippety-clop of the engine. For the first time since Esztergom I started to become homesick, after nearly two months away, and the increased frequency of text messages exchanged with a certain London address only served to make it worse.
And then it occurred to me, as Ruse finally hove into sight, that I could go home if I wanted to. There was nothing to stop me. There were no rules in this travel-writing lark that stipulated the journey had to be all of one piece. I’d never intended going all the way to Ruse by boat in the first place, and I still wanted to walk through Transylvania, as Leigh Fermor had done, and that would mean doubling back on myself anyway. So why not double back a great deal further, via a set of European flight paths and that certain London address?
And so it happened that, three hours after the Argo finally came alongside at the Bulgarian port, I said a quick round of farewells, listened intently to Vlado’s earnest warnings about how tricky the Bulgarians could be, and stalked up the metal pontoon on to dry land with a mixture of elation and relief. And somewhere between the river and the railway station I received the message on my phone I’d been waiting for: a flight was booked. All I needed to do was find a train to Bucharest.
17
Restart: the Countess and
the Communists
Mark was being very cogent. ‘The problem is a value vacuum. They’ve gone from communism to materialism, with nothing in between. It’s too big a swing, from one extreme to another. Somewhere in the process there’s a morality that’s gone missing. Like I say, it’s a value vacuum.’
He looked at both of us in turn to check we were following his logic.
‘You can’t blame them,’ he continued. ‘For decades they’ve had their thoughts and values dictated by the state. Now they have to subscribe to a voluntary moral code. They have to come up with their own goods and bads, rights and wrongs. That’s something the government used to do for them.’
‘It is very confusing,’ agreed the countess, ‘especially when being good gets you nowhere, but being bad can be very rewarding. Personally, I think for many of the adults it’s too late, but children can regain some sense of moral responsibility.’ Which was what she was trying to do with her prayer meetings.
Disappointingly, Mark and Countess Jeanne-Marie Wenckheim Teleki were getting on like a house on fire. I had been hoping for some sparks to fly at this meeting of the communist and the aristocrat, but both were finding a g
reat deal of common ground. And now here we were having breakfast in the countess’s kitchen in the former village rectory, discussing the plight of the modern Hungarian.
Jeanne-Marie was a handsome hurricane of a woman in her early seventies. She lived alone, but that didn’t prevent her from agreeing to have two strangers as house guests. She’d met us off the train at Békéscsaba, the last substantial Hungarian town on the main line from Budapest to Bucharest, given us a whirlwind tour of aristocratic properties and dynasties in the vicinity (‘Round here you couldn’t count the counts’), and now we were in the rectory in the village of Doboz which she rented from the church. Her family manor house, just along the road, had been subdivided to become (amongst other things) the school, the village bar and the supermarket. She expressed pleasure that it was so, and although she always looked across at her former bedroom window when she passed, she had no regrets that she no longer lived there.
‘I have a cousin who comes here occasionally, and it makes her ill to see all the land and the castles in someone else’s hands. So I tell her – don’t come. If it makes you ill, don’t come, it’s as simple as that.’
The countess even professed herself to be ‘grateful to the Russians’. ‘I really am. Running from them gave me my freedom, and freedom is more important than material possessions.’ She didn’t want the headache of repairing the roof on a property that size. ‘Besides, what would I have become if they hadn’t marched in? I would have married a cousin, as we all did in those days, just so that the property stayed in the family. I would have been stuck out here in the sticks, and he would have gone off with his mistress. And then I would have been stripped of everything by the communists. Not much of a life.’
Instead she’d followed a very different trajectory, from countess to English country wife and back again, a trajectory which had involved half a century as plain old Mrs Dickens, of The Vicarage, Spofforth, Yorkshire. Actually it was not quite so plain, because Mr Dickens had been Charles Dickens’s great-great-great-grandson. It’s fair to say that Jeanne-Marie had landed on her feet.
It had been three weeks since I’d left the Argo, and I’d picked up my journey again, feeling refreshed. I was back on my Leigh Fermor trail, and this time I was heading east from Budapest overland, not south along the river. Mark was escorting me to the border, curious to meet a countess.
The Wenckheims had started out as humble Danube Swabians from Ulm, just as Frank Flock’s ancestors had done. They’d been given their title, plus swathes of cussed, mosquito-rich land, by the Austro-Hungarian court as a reward for helping to provision the imperial army. Hard work and crop innovation worked its magic and by the time Leigh Fermor met Countess Jeanne-Marie’s father at Doboz and admired the great bustards he kept in the back garden, the family was very prosperous. So much so that work was no longer a priority, being mostly entrusted to the hard-working Slovaks and Serbs that the Wenckheims had encouraged to settle in the area.
Leigh Fermor’s description of her father the count – slow-talking, with an anguished expression – was accurate enough, agreed the countess. She added that he had been ‘a bit of a naughty boy’, rather too keen on gambling for his own good. Her mother had been one of two sisters from the Teleki dynasty famous for its two prime-ministerial suicides, and her father had tossed a coin to see which one of them he would marry, not necessarily a formula for a long and loving relationship. But the children had been much cherished.
By her own admission her father hadn’t been a particularly popular figure in Doboz. He’d had a bad temper, and one of his kitchen staff had even had the effrontery to slap him for being rude to her. So when the family had fled in front of the Russian advance in 1944, it’d been as much out of fear of locals taking advantage of anarchy as of what the Russians might do to them. They’d left hastily with three wagonloads of possessions and crossed into Austria, where the government had billeted them in Vienna’s Hotel Bristol along with lots of other fugitive Hungarian aristocrats. Then her father contracted Parkinson’s disease and her mother was killed in a railway accident, so a guardian took over the children’s parenting, hiring a very strict Austrian governess who became the rock in their lives during the difficult years that followed.
She told us the next chapter as we walked around the grounds of the Wenckheim Kastely at Szabadkigyós. This was where her uncle and aunt had lived, and this was where Leigh Fermor had played his ‘disreputable’ but exhilarating bicycle polo, along with various Wenckheims and their footmen. The author describes the house, set in a forest of huge exotic trees, as a ‘vast ochre-coloured pile … there were pinnacles, pediments, baroque gables, ogees, lancets, mullions, steep slate roofs, towers with flags flying and flights of covered stairs ending in colonnades of flattened arches.’ All were still in situ, in a fantasia of a chateau, as were the magnolia trees and the biblical cedars in the grounds, but the family had long gone and no one played bicycle polo on the lawns any more. Szabadkigyós was an agricultural college.
Jeanne-Marie could remember her cousin, one of the bicycle-polo-players, flying off to private school – Ample-forth – in England in his own plane, which took off from the front of the house. That cousin had been killed piloting fighters in the war, and her other cousin, his brother, ended up as a lorry driver in Algeria. The remnants of the family had joined him there, and eventually Jeanne-Marie had, too, when she’d finished at school in Austria. She’d got a job in a restaurant in Algiers to learn French, moved to Paris to work as an au pair, and then to Scotland to work as an assistant for friends of friends who took in international lodgers.
Then came the meeting with Christopher Dickens.
‘I was living in a flat in London with a couple of other Hungarian girls, when one of their brothers who worked in the Foreign Office brought a work colleague to visit. He was meant for Doreen, but he fell in love with me.’
So there she was, about to become a part of the British establishment as the wife of the great-great-great-grandson of one of the country’s greatest writers.
‘Of course Christopher couldn’t stay in the Foreign Office if he married a Hungarian. I was seen as far too much of a security risk; I could have been a communist. So he had to give up his career.’
He got a job instead as the area manager for a brewery and they moved north to the 700-year-old rectory in Spofforth, brought up two children, and then hosted paying guests – Americans who liked the idea of staying with the Dickenses – to help pay the bills. For years she also ran a business making Dickens furniture, but once her husband died she started revisiting Hungary, eventually deciding the time had come to move back.
‘There was no need to stay in the UK. I didn’t want to live alone in a place full of memories.’
Certainly there was no sign of anything remotely English in the interiors of her second rectory, at Doboz. No antimacassars, fabrics by Laura Ashley or pictures of tea parties on summer lawns. Like many of her fellow returnees, the countess had simply closed one chapter of her life and opened the next, an ability that her life story had forced upon her, as it had upon many others of her generation.
Not that coming back had been easy. Initially she’d stayed in Doboz for a few days at a time, working on the restoration of the rectory, and she’d not found herself particularly welcome. Unfortunately she’d returned to a corner of the country that still clung to its communist ideals, a village that still had the Red Star on a monument to Soviet Liberation right at the heart of the community. A village where one man told her it was lucky her father had left when he had, or else the villagers themselves would have killed him, and where the communist mayor had told her that ‘people don’t want you back, they don’t want to serve you again’.
That only made her more determined, and the sleepy village became something of a personal battleground. ‘They’d slash the tyres of my car and break the windows. And then when the snow came they’d come over the fence and leave footprints up and down the garden to show they’d been.’
But the countess was not to be deterred. She had a big crucifix installed on the rectory door.
‘Communism is the Antichrist. Communists tried to stop people going to church. So I feel like a missionary in my own village.’
Fired with missionary zeal, she made friends in the gypsy community, invited the poor in for coffee and cakes, started a weekly catechism class particularly for children, and funded a couple of economic initiatives to try to mop up some of the local unemployment. Politically, she’d bankrolled an opposition candidate in the mayoral elections and succeeded in unseating the communist mayor. And although her own man had not got in, getting the mayor out was satisfaction enough. ‘He was part of a paprika mafia that kept the price of paprika fixed, making sure the poor people stayed poor. Because if you’re poor, you’re timid, and you don’t dare question anything.’
She’d also succeeded in having the inscription on the Red Star monument changed. The text talked of the people’s gratitude to Russia for ‘liberation’ from the Germans in 1944, which she could just about accept, but then an additional line had been added after the 1956 Revolution, thanking the Russians again. For slaughtering tens of thousands of Hungarians. Everywhere else in Hungary the Revolution was regarded as a national tragedy, but not, it seemed, in Doboz. So she’d spoken to the village priest, who’d spoken to the newspapers, and ultimately the line about 1956 had been grudgingly erased, but the monument itself had stayed. And when she’d proposed wrapping it in the European flag on Hungary’s accession to the EU, the local policeman had advised her not to push her luck.
Before we left Doboz the countess took us across the small river that ran through the village to where her family mausoleum stood alongside her family church. Both had been built by her grandfather, and both were securely under lock and key for fear of vandalism. She opened the church and showed us the frescos, the inscriptions and the first iron arch in Hungarian church architecture. Spiritually and emotionally it was clearly very important to her.