Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  Back in those days the reception of visitors was a fulltime activity for established Transylvanian families like the Mikes. As with their close cousins in Hungary, they had little need actually to do any work, relying instead on their large landholdings and teams of managers to relieve them of day-to-day issues, so that they themselves could concentrate on the likes of hunting, or horse-breeding, or library-building, or throwing great parties. These lifestyles (the rump end of which was experienced by Leigh Fermor) were chronicled by a Transylvanian aristocrat called Miklos Bánffy, writing at much the same time as Leigh Fermor came wandering through and staying for lunch, tea, dinner and several days thereafter.

  Bánffy is the George Eliot of Transylvania, and he chronicles archaic society life in a trilogy of books that doesn’t spare on the sumptuous detail and which could belong to any of the last three or four centuries. The image he creates is of an endless round of grand balls, of family visits to big houses, of gargantuan meals and of romantic intrigue. Households of that era were surprisingly Anglophile, often sending sons and heirs to British public schools – as the Wenckheims had done with Ampleforth – using spoken English in clever asides in conversation, and adopting English fashion trends. They even had an institutionalized teatime, when ladies sat waiting for visitors around plates of hot muffins and thin sandwiches, dressed in loose flowing tea-gowns ‘in the English fashion’, with necklines and sleeves sewn with festoons of old lace. These women were far from emancipated; many wives were unhappy in their marriages, cooped up in remote manor houses while their husbands had affairs with women in town and in the villages. Meanwhile their daughters vied spitefully with each other for the hand of the most eligible of the bachelors who came calling, so desperate were they to leave home.

  The men, meanwhile, would do a bit of studying in their youth, although it was unthinkable that they would ever prioritize exams over the likes of the first pheasant shoot of the season. So there was a succession of tutors and governesses (usually from France or England) who despaired of ever teaching them anything. Mind you, every house was invariably proud of its library, which would contain essentials such as the works of Voltaire and dissertations on Palladian architecture, printed on vellum and encased in the family’s own leather bindings.

  The position of these families in Transylvanian society was nothing to do with personal achievements or wealth, but all about the quality of their bloodline. Thus the descendants of conquering Magyar warlords had higher social standing than the children of a Greek banker who had spent all his life polishing the seat of his office desk and had become very rich as a result. The true old crusties considered politics to be shoddy muck-raking, and they adhered rigidly to family tradition in their voting habits. Bánffy describes how one old fossil ‘managed to overlook the fact that Balint [his main character] was an MP only because … he knew that the Abady’s first ancestor had been a Bessenyo chief from the Tomai clan, who had settled in Hungary as long ago as the reign of Prince Géza.’

  These honourable gentlemen would move from banquet to banquet, race meeting to race meeting, being waited on by liveried footmen in tailcoats. Bánffy describes these manorial social occasions with great relish. How, on sitting down at table, an awed silence would descend on the gathering to give the food, the wine and the well-trained staff due respect. ‘Not a plate clattered, not a glass tinkled; the solemn hush was broken only as the butler or head footman poured wines with a soft murmur of mysterious words. “Chateau Margaux 82?”’ Then would begin the avalanche of dishes. Capercaillie, venison, turkey stuffed with herbs, hare pâtés, home-cured hams and whole pike without bones (regarded as a great culinary tour de force). Battleships of fish platters, sauceboats of gravy and relish, and snippets of gossip. This would be followed by towering cakes, compotes and tarts, piled with whipped cream, after which the elder gentlemen would adjourn to cigars on the terrace and then gambling in the basement, while the younger men would drink until they vomited.

  At the larger occasions there’d be dancing: waltzes, square dances, stately French cotillons, and traditional Hungarian czardas, starting slow and getting quicker and quicker, to music provided by a gypsy band. Then there’d be a light supper at 1.30 a.m. to maintain the momentum and help the party through till dawn.

  Male conversation on these occasions invariably rotated around each others’ hunting stories, and a good estate always made sure that the guest of honour had the best shots standing on either side of him, to ensure that a good bag would be placed at his feet. That tradition continued into the communist years, where the likes of Ceauescu and Honecker were regularly pictured standing triumphantly over the carcass of a giant bear or a twenty-pointer stag. There’d be no mention of the fact that some of Honecker’s stags had only just been defrosted before being propped against a tree, and Ceauescu’s bears had been slowed down by secret agents who’d pre-doped them with pots of honey laced with Valium. On one day in the autumn of 1983 he shot twenty-four.

  On his journey, Leigh Fermor got a whiff of the tail-end of this lifestyle, which had only half a dozen years to run before it was swept away. At Zabola I did too, because such elaborate socializing must have been a priority on the estate, given the sheer size of the guest villa and the elaborate tunnel arrangements. Years of misuse (variously sanatorium, school and children’s home) had effectively wrecked both buildings, and everything of value had been removed, even down to the rows of sinks wrenched off the wall in the schoolboy bathrooms. So now the family guests were reduced to staying in the Machine House, a third building down by the lake which had once contained generators and a small textile factory, but which had been converted into high-ceilinged accommodation and decorated in post-colonial shabby chic by the returning family. The result looked like a coming together of Indian hill station, Tudor-beamed British cottage and Austrian lakeside villa, which was a fairly close reflection of its creators: two brothers with an Indian father, who’d grown up in Austria but who’d attended British public schools.

  On the afternoon I arrived the thirty-something Gregor Roy Chowdury of Ulpur, the elder of the two brothers, presided over afternoon tea set out on linen-covered tables on the summer lawn outside the Machine House. Despite the name, he looked more Italian than Indian, and his English was measured and stately, as befitting nobility, although technically he wasn’t titled at all. I couldn’t see him raising his voice at the cook, the maid, the butler or the underfootman, as his forefathers must have done, but he plainly had inherited a certain steely determination to put Zabola back together again.

  His father, Shuvendu Basu Roy Chowdury, had been from a Bengali family that had lost its landholdings in the partition of India, and had met his mother, the Countess Katalin Mikes, at Graz University, where they had both been students. Two dispossessed people coming together from two very different cultures. They’d had two sons, Gregor and Alexander, who’d spoken German to each other, Hungarian to their mother and English to their father. With a young family to feed, the countess had become a university librarian, while her husband had become an oil trader, shuttling back and forth between Austria and London. It was the latter’s death that had precipitated the family’s return to Romania.

  The Countess Katalin, whom I guessed to be in her mid-sixties, had plainly been very attractive in her prime, but she’d had a tough start to life that must have rocked her self-confidence. The communists had burst into Zabola in the middle of the night when she’d been just three years old, and loaded her and her mother, the only remaining residents, into the back of a truck. Her mother had ended up working in one of the labour camps in the Danube Delta – camps for enemies of the state who were tasked with creating rice fields, and where the expectation was that many inmates would die. Her mother had indeed nearly perished in the harsh conditions, and eventually her health had become so chronically bad that after a couple of years she was released. Many other relatives were not so lucky.

  Meanwhile the little girl Katalin had been removed from
the Delta-bound truck at the last minute and taken in by villagers in Zabola, from where she’d eventually been moved to Cluj to live with another branch of the family. Even there her background had excluded her from all but the most basic education, but her family connections meant that, when Ceauescu started doing deals with outside nations over ethnic minorities, relatives in Germany were able to produce sufficient quantities of Deutschmarks to ‘buy’ her and get her out.

  The family were to come back regularly to Transylvania over succeeding years, but it wasn’t until after the Romanian Revolution that they started to think about making a claim to all the property they’d once owned and looking for relevant land-registry papers.

  ‘When we were children we used to spend hours sitting in mayors’ offices all over the region,’ remembered Gregor, ‘while my mother asked the same questions over and over again. Papers would appear and disappear, and to get the originals sometimes required going to court. As kids, we didn’t understand a lot of what was going on.’

  Eventually the countess’s persistence was rewarded, and the parkland and houses were officially returned in 1997 – in theory. In practice it was to be another eight years before the sanatorium patients and staff finally left, before the meadows could be used for horses again and before the woodland emptied of its wandering lost souls.

  The burning question for the Mikes/Roy Chowdury family was what to do next. What could be done with it all, now that they’d got it back? There was no time for eccentricities: two massive buildings in a poor state of repair represented a cash-flow bottomless pit. The deceptively languid Gregor, who’d been the first to come and live here permanently, had taken the initiative and converted the Machine House into upmarket guest accommodation to stem the losses. Although the family was slowly getting land back, revenue from forestry and agriculture to support the buildings was a long-term solution, which was why I found myself at dinner that night with two international bankers – one Dutch and one Argentinian – and their assorted families and nannies, plus a Romanian public relations entrepreneur and her journalist partner. They were representatives of the new capitalists who were profiting at the heart of Romania’s emerging democracy, and they were invaluable to the Mikes estate, because they had the inclination and the spending power to escape the heat and the soullessness of Bucharest and treat Zabola as a weekend retreat. No doubt eventually they’d secure themselves country cottages elsewhere, but meanwhile Gregor, Alexander and Countess Katalin could once again play at being host.

  So the estate that had once welcomed floods of important personages, and which had had a long intermission in the company of the young, the destitute and the insane, had once again become a sanctuary for Romania’s elite. Only this time they were paying.

  22

  Bucharest’s Royal Pretender

  In Transylvania my route diverged from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s to the point of no return. After his whirlwind romantic motorized tour of the likes of Deva, Sighioara and Cluj he’d hastily escorted the glamorous ‘Angela’ back to her married life, lest scandal should catch up with them, and then resumed his solo journey on foot, heading due south across the Carpathians from Deva until he eventually hit the Danube again at Orova. This was where he was to make his final crossing of the river before heading on to Constantinople through Bulgaria.

  I’d already sailed through Orova on the Argo, so following the Leigh Fermor trail any further would have only had me doubling back on myself. And besides, my book was about the Danube, not about a journey to Constantinople, so I cut my metaphorical ties with him and left Transylvania in a far more mundane way: by train, following a literary path of my own. I had a river to finish and an appointment with a royal family to keep – an appointment which was to be the last of my aristocratic encounters and one which had a pleasing symmetry with my very first. That first encounter had taken place in a castle on a rock in the pretty town of Sigmaringen, some 2,000 kilometres upriver and 90,000 words ago, in the early weeks of early spring; this one was to take place in one of Europe’s most charmless capital cities in the torrid humidity of late summer, with 400 kilometres to go. But both men were Hohenzollern.

  Bucharest is a brutal, soulless, insipid, traffic-filled city with a pestilential summer climate whose merciless heat cracks the concrete and turns the tarmac to soup, and then proceeds to fill its buckled bowls with occasional torrential rain. It has a huge stray-dog problem that creams the ground with turds and results in several maulings a year, and biblical plagues wouldn’t be out of place. Guidebook authors and brochure writers do their best, trotting out the clapped-out cliché about ‘Paris of the East’ and then struggling to find anything interesting to say thereafter. The city may have been stylish once, but it sure isn’t now, not unless you count the swanky modern estates to the north where the new rich live, to escape city-centre strangulation-by-concrete. In most Romanian towns you can penetrate through grim suburbs and find something rewarding nestling inside, but not here; Ceauescu saw to that, sweeping away the old city centre to make way for massively egotistical urban planning, the whole purpose of which was to emphasize the power of the state and render the individual totally insignificant. As a front door to a country it is totally unrepresentative and it saddens me to think that visitors might come here, judge the nation on the basis of Bucharest and never come back again, missing out on the whole bewitching panoply of Transylvania.

  It is edgy, too. All the way through Eastern Europe I’d been warned about the dangers I’d face in Romania, dangers which had never actually materialized, provided you don’t include dogs and bulls. But I felt most at threat in Bucharest.

  The unease started on the train into town, a modern double-decker of considerable sophistication whose guard examined my ticket, which I knew to be bona fide, and then tried to enter into a discussion with me about it. After he’d gone, leaving me not a little bemused, someone across the aisle took a look at it for me and explained why: the printing of the date was sufficiently indeterminate, he said, as to be easily altered. I’d thought I was being accused of doing something wrong, but the guard had been offering to buy it off me, for re-sale.

  Bucharest’s Gara de Nord was full of hungry eyes. It was one of those places where you need either to march straight through looking like you know exactly what you’re doing, or else to make a beeline for the nearest wall and stand with your back against it whilst you ponder your next move. Hesitate and stop uncertainly in the main concourse and you risked becoming a victim, because the bouncers on the entrances were susceptible to the occasional bribe to let in the more organized pickpockets. At least the hazards were more visible on the forecourt outside, where packs of dogs and gypsy children swilled around the doorways of ropey casinos, side-stepping the spivs who worked the crowds by first asking you something obvious like the time, but whose real interest was to probe your composure and assess your vulnerability, to see what you might want, or what they might be able to get for you or from you. Not a place to come unless you’ve got an appointment with a man who would be king.

  I’d called Prince Paul prior to arriving in Bucharest and had ended up making all my arrangements with Princess Lia, who sounded like a character out of Star Wars. We’d arranged to meet in the foyer of the Athenee Palace Hotel, once notorious for the quantities of spies who’d openly stayed here, and for the extensive bugging, drugging and phone-tapping of its guests. Variously home to British spies, the Gestapo, and the Securitate luminati, it had had a corrupt staff who had been ever ready to procure prostitutes and change money at black-market rates – at least they were until the government re-staffed the whole place with informers and installed a Securitate colonel as the director. The secret police even peopled the hotel with free-speaking bon vivants and supposed intellectuals, to create an atmosphere that would encourage indiscretion. Ultimately the Athenee Palace witnessed some of the worst violence of the 1989 Revolution, which took place in the small square outside, but since then it has had a makeover by the
Hilton group and become a gathering place of people who need to be seen at the best and most infamous address in town.

  Princess Lia was unmistakable when she swept in out of a summer thunderstorm. Cloaked, gloved and in a black felt hat, rakishly angled, which never left her head whether we were inside or out. Under it was a strong face, once beautiful and now heavily made up in late middle age, from which issued an incessant, gracious and practised stream of words simultaneously expressing interest, concern and welcome. She was American to the (invisible) roots of her hair, had the aura of a movie star who was not getting quite enough work any more, and she spoke with the deliberate articulation of someone who habitually uses her own language amongst those who have difficulty understanding it.

  I gathered, by the way I was swept up and escorted to a shiny black chauffeur-driven Range Rover outside, that the hotel had served its purpose as a rendezvous only, and that I was to be taken to meet the prince in ‘the Home’, as Princess Lia called it. There followed a short, twisty ride down various shortcuts that, if I’d been more suspicious-minded, I would have concluded was deliberately intended to confuse. Eventually the massive electronic gates of a nineteenth-century townhouse clanged shut behind us and I found myself in a high-ceilinged room cluttered with portraiture, formal French-style antique furniture, and a grand piano whose main purpose seemed to be the bearing of serried ranks of photographs of HRH Prince Paul in the company of various important personages. They reminded me of the official plaques at the source of the Danube, and they performed the same function. Through them, he existed, he was a prince. Unfortunately, in every one of them he mugged at the camera in a way he presumably thought was princely, but which I thought made him look like a satisfied badger.