A Time of Gifts (38 page)

This was the point I had reached when Heinz came into the room. He was amused by the earthwork of books which the search had flung up on the carpet, and I explained my perplexity. After a thoughtful pause, he said: “Wait a moment!” He shut his eyes for a few seconds—they were grey with a hazel ring round the pupil—tapped his forehead slowly once or twice with a frowning effort of memory, opened them again and took down a book. “Yes, I thought so!” he said in an eager and cheerful voice as he turned the pages, “Bohemia
did
have a coast line once,”—I jumped up—“but not for long...” He read out the relevant passages: “Ottokar II... Yes, that's it... Victory over Béla II of Hungary in 1260...enlarged the frontiers of Bohemia... Kingdom expands over all Austria...yes, yes, yes...
southern border extended to both sides of the Istrian peninsula, including a long stretch of the north Dalmatian shore
...! Failed to become Emperor, perhaps owing to anti-Slav prejudice among the Electors... Yes, yes,... Defeated and slain by Rudolf of Habsburg at Dürnkrut in 1273, when the country shrank once more to its old frontiers...” He shut the book. “There you are!” he said kindly. “A coast of Bohemia for you! But only for thirteen years.”

It was a moment of jubilation! There was no time to go into detail, but it looked as though my problems were solved. (The lack of time was a boon; for, once again, disappointment lay in wait. None of the historical characters, even by the boldest feat of literary juggling, could be made to fit. Worse, I discovered that when Shakespeare took the story of
The Winter's Tale
from Robert Greene's
Pandosto, or the Triumph of Time
, he light-heartedly switched the names of Sicily and Bohemia! It was total defeat. I felt as though the poet himself had reached from the clouds to checkmate me by castling the pieces in a single unorthodox move. I understood at last what I should have divined at the outset: punctiliously exact in the historical plays, Shakespeare didn't care a
fig for the topography of the comedies. Unless it were some Italian town—Italy being the universal lucky dip for Renaissance playwrights—the spiritual setting was always the same. Woods and parkland on the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire borders, that is; flocks and fairs and a palace or two, a mixture of Cockayne- and Cloud-Cuckoo- and fairyland with stage mountains rather taller than the Cotswolds and full of torrents and caves, haunted by bears and washed, if need be, by an ocean teeming with foundering ships and mermaids.)

But, it was an instant of seeming triumph in which Heinz and his wife and Paul and Hans all joined. Heinz was soon filling glasses of celebration from a decanter cut in a nail-head pattern as bold as the façade of the Czernin palace. It was a valedictory drink as well, for the night train was taking Hans and me back to Bratislava and I planned to cross the Danube into Hungary next day.

The windows of the flat looked down on the whole of Prague. Towards the end of my search, the pale sun had set among those silver and purplish clouds and at lighting-up time all the lamps of the city had leapt simultaneously to life. Now, though the towers and pinnacles and the snow-covered domes were swallowed by the night, their presence was reaffirmed by the city-wide collusion of bells. Picked out by the embankment lights and the rushing headlamps of the traffic, the river was a curving band of darkness crossed by the many-beaded necklaces of the bridges. Directly below, between clusters of baroque lamp-brackets, the grouped statues dimly postured along the balustrades of the Charles Bridge. The lights grew scarcer as they climbed the citadel and dispersed round the steep dark wastes where the rooks had assembled for the night in the invading woods. It was a last glimpse of Prague which has had to last me from that evening to this.

 

[1]
They lost their kingdom forever when the Bohemian army was routed by Maximilian of Bavaria, Chief of the Catholic League, at the battle of the White Hill—only a mile from the citadel—on 8th November 1620.

Question
: Who is the most unexpected private soldier to be fighting as a volunteer in Maximilian's army?
Answer
: Descartes.

[2]
These were bad decades for religious toleration in Europe. They include the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford, the expulsions beyond the Shannon and Cromwell's resolute attempts to stamp out the Catholic Church in Ireland.

[3]
Other versions exist. There are several instances of defenestration in Czech history, and it has continued into modern times. The Martyrdom of St. Johannes is the only case of depontication, but it must be part of the same Tarpeian tendency.

[4]
The Waldstein Palace (as I learnt that it was more correctly called) was still owned by the family, and it harboured, among more usual heirlooms, the stuffed charger which had carried Wallenstein at Lützen. An eighteenth-century descendant befriended Casanova, who spent his last thirteen years as librarian composing his memoirs in Waldstein's Bohemian castle. Another descendant was the friend to whom Beethoven dedicated the Waldstein Sonata. He was the most interesting figure of the Thirty Years' War. Suspected by the Emperor of intriguing with the Swedes before actually changing sides—and perhaps planning, it was rumoured, to seize the Bohemian crown—he fled to a snow-bound castle near the Bavarian border. Four soldiers-of-fortune from the British Isles—Gordon, Leslie, Devereux and Colonel Butler of Butler's Irish regiment of Dragoons—cut down Wallenstein's henchmen over the dinner table. Then they sought out the great duke and Devereux ran him through with a pike. By far the best and most exciting book on the whole period is C.V. Wedgwood's
Thirty Years War
. Dame Veronica delivers an adverse verdict on the last part of Wallenstein's career; ruthlessness and megalomania and increasing trust in astrology had dimmed his earlier genius. He was tall, thin and pale with reddish hair and eyes of a remarkable brilliance.

[5]
The cause of his downfall was a public demonstration of the device by which Trygaeus, the hero of
The Peace
of Aristophanes, flew to the crest of Olympus to beg the Gods to end the Peloponnesian War. As this vehicle was a giant dung-beetle from Mount Etna which the protagonist refuelled with his own droppings on the long ascent, the exhibition may well have caused a stir. I would like to have seen it.

[6]
She died young and her tomb is in Westminster Abbey. It is her successor, the French Princess Isabelle, who, in
Richard II
, overhears the gardeners talking of the King's fall as they bind up the dangling apricocks. She was only eleven when Richard was murdered. Back in France as a Queen Dowager, she married her cousin, the poet Charles d'Orléans, who was later captured at Agincourt by Henry V and held prisoner in England for a quarter of a century. She was only nineteen when she died.

[7]
Edmund Campion was also in Prague at the time, teaching at a Jesuit seminary. The two had long meetings and they liked and respected each other. Once, in honour of a state occasion, Campion wrote a long tragedy on the theme of Saul and the city produced it at vast expense; it was produced with great magnificence and although it lasted six hours, Rudolf ordered a special repeat performance. In England four years later, secretly ministering to harried recusants under the new penal laws, Campion was captured and after the customary tortures and a rushed trial, condemned to die at Tyburn. He endured the barbarous penalty with the courage of a saint.

M
Y ORIGINAL
scheme, on leaving Bratislava, had been to cross the Danube, strike south-east to the Hungarian frontier and then follow the right bank to the old town of Györ. This itinerary, which would have led across those beginnings of the puszta I had spied out from the castle, was the traditional entrance to Hungary.

But the plan had been changed at the last moment by friends of Hans. Gerti v. Thuroczy, who was married to one of the breezy Hungarian country-gentlemen I mentioned two chapters ago, suggested I should change my route and stay with her brother, Philipp Schey, on the way. The Barons Schey v. Koromla, to give them their full style, were an extremely civilized Austrian-Jewish family—friends of artists, poets, writers and composers and with kinsmen and ramifications in half a dozen countries—that had played an important part in the life of Central and Western Europe. They had once been very rich, but, like everyone else, they were less so now. I had met Pips Schey (as he was universally called) but only for a moment. He was a fascinating and many-legended figure and he lived about forty miles east of Bratislava. Telephones had rung and I was expected in two days.

So I headed north-east instead of south. I was still on the wrong side of the Danube and getting further from the river with every step and deeper into Slovakia. My new plan was to make a wide Slovakian loop, strike the Danube again about a hundred miles downstream and cross into Hungary by the Parkan-Esztergom bridge.

* * *

Meanwhile, an important change has come over the raw-material of these pages.

Recently—after I had set down all I could remember of these ancient travels—I made a journey down the whole length of the Danube, starting in the Black Forest and ending at the Delta; and in Rumania, in a romantic and improbable way too complicated to recount, I recovered a diary I had left in a country house there in 1939.

I must have bought the manuscript book in Bratislava. It is a thick, battered, stiffly-bound cloth-backed volume containing 320 closely-written pages in pencil. After a long initial passage, the narrative breaks off for a month or two, then starts up again in notes, stops once more, and blossoms out again in proper diary form. And so it goes on, sporadically recording my travels in all the countries between Bratislava and Constantinople, whence it moves to Mount Athos and stops. In the back of the book is a helpful list of overnight sojourns; there are rudimentary vocabularies in Hungarian, Bulgarian, Rumanian, Turkish and Modern Greek and a long list of names and addresses. As I read these, faces I had forgotten for many years began to come back to me: a vintner on the banks of the Tisza, an innkeeper in the Banat, a student in Berkovitza, a girl in Salonica, a Pomak hodja in the Rhodope mountains... There are one or two sketches of the details of buildings and costumes, some verses, the words of a few folk-songs and the alphabetical jottings I mentioned two chapters back. The stained covers are still warped from their unvarying position in my rucksack and the book seemed—it still seems—positively to smell of that old journey.

It was an exciting trove; a disturbing one too. There were some discrepancies of time and place between the diary and what I had already written but they didn't matter as they could be put right. The trouble was that I had imagined—as one always does with lost property—that the contents were better than they were. Perhaps that earlier loss in Munich wasn't as serious as it had seemed at the time. But, with all its drawbacks, the text did have
one virtue: it was dashed down at full speed. I know it is dangerous to change key, but I can't resist using a few passages of this old diary here and there. I have not interfered with the text except for cutting and condensing and clearing up obscurities. It begins on the day I set out from Bratislava.