Between the Woods and the Water (12 page)

Lászlo's elder brother Józsi (Joseph), head of that numerous family, and his wife Denise were the only two of all my benefactors on the Great Plain I had met before. It had been at a large, rather grand luncheon at their house on the slopes of Buda and when they had heard I was heading for the south-east, they had asked me to stay. Another brother, Pál, a diplomatist with the urbane and polished air of a Hungarian Norpois, said, “Do go! Józsi's a great swell in those parts. It's a strange house, but we're very fond of it.”

Once through the great gates, I was lost for a moment. A forest of huge exotic trees mingled with the oaks and the limes and the chestnuts. Magnolias and tulip trees were on the point of breaking open, the branches of biblical cedars swept in low fans, all of them ringing with the songs of thrushes and blackbirds and positively slumbrous with the cooing of a thousand doves, and the house in
the middle, when the trees fell back, looked more extraordinary with every step. It was a vast ochre-coloured pile, built, on the site of an older building perhaps, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Blois, Amboise and Azay-les-Rideaux (which I only knew from photographs) immediately floated into mind. 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.

Great wings formed a courtyard and, from a terrace leading to a ceremonial door, branching and balustraded steps descended in a sweep. As I was crossing this
place d'armes
, several people were coming down the steps, and one of them was Count Józsi. Forewarned by Lászlo, he spotted me at once. He waved a greeting and cried, “You are just what we need! Come along!” I followed him and the others across the yard to a shed. “Have you ever played bike-polo?” he asked, catching me by the elbow. I had played a version of it at school with walking sticks and a tennis-ball on the hard tennis-courts; it was thought rather disreputable. But here they had real polo-sticks cut down to the right size and a proper polo ball and the shed was full of battered but sturdy machines. Józsi was my captain, and a famous player of the real game called Bethlen had the rival team; two other guests and two footmen and a groom were the rest of the players. The game was quick, reckless and full of collisions, but there was nothing to match the joy of hitting the ball properly: it made a loud smack and gave one a tempting glimmer of what the real thing might be like. I couldn't make out why all shins weren't barked to the bone; nor why, as one of the goals backed on the house, none of the windows were broken. The other side won but we scored four goals, and when the iron Maltese Cats were back in their stands, we limped back to the steps, where Countess Denise and her sister Cecile and some others had been leaning on the balustrade like ladies gazing down into the lists.

What luck those nuns turning up, I thought a bit later, lapping down whisky and soda out of a heavy glass! Someone took me
along a tall passage to my room and I found one of the young polo-playing footmen there, spick and span once more, but looking puzzled as he tried in vain to lay out the stuff from my rucksack in a convincing array. We were reciprocally tongue-tied, but I laughed and so did he: knocking one another off bicycles breaks down barriers. I got into a huge bath.

Countess Denise and Count Józsi were first cousins and earlier generations had been similarly related. “We are more intermarried than the Ptolemies,” she told me at dinner. “We all ought to be insane.” She and Cecile had dark hair and beautiful features and shared the rather sad expression of the rest of the family; but it likewise dissolved in friendly warmth when they smiled. Her husband's distinguished face, under brushed-back greying hair, had the same characteristic. (In a fit of melancholy when he was very young he had fired a bullet through his breast, just missing his heart.) He looked very handsome in an old claret-coloured smoking jacket. Dürer's family came from the neighbouring town of Gyula, the Countess said; the Hungarian Ajtós—‘doorkeeper'—was translated into the old German Thürer—then into Dürer when the family migrated and set up as gold- and silversmiths in Nuremberg. Afterwards in the drawing room, my footman friend approached Count Józsi carrying an amazing pipe with a cherry-wood stem over a yard long and an amber mouthpiece. The meerschaum bowl at the end was already alight, and, resting this comfortably on the crook of his ankle, the Count was soon embowered in smoke. Seeing that another guest and I were fascinated by it, he called for two more of these calumets and a few minutes later in they came, already glowing; before they were offered, the mouthpieces were dipped in water. The delicious smoke seemed the acme of oriental luxury, for these pipes were the direct and unique descendants of those long chibooks that all Levant travellers describe and all the old prints depict; the Turks of the Ottoman Empire used them as an alternative to the nargileh. (That sinuous affair, the Turkish hookah, still survived all over the Balkans and before summer was out I was puffing away at them,
half-pasha and half-caterpillar, in many a Bulgarian khan. But Hungary was the only country in the world where the chibook still lingered. In Turkey itself, as I discovered that winter, it had vanished completely, like the khanjar and the yataghan.)

Ybl, the architect of the castle, had given himself free rein with armorial detail. Heraldic beasts abounded, casques, crowns and mantelling ran riot and the family's emblazoned swords and eagles' wings were echoed on flags and bed-curtains and counterpanes. The spirits of Sir Walter Scott and Dante Gabriel Rossetti seemed to preside over the place and as I had been steeped in both of them from my earliest years, anything to do with castles, sieges, scutcheons, tournaments and crusades still quickened the pulse, so the corroborative detail of the castle was close to heart's desire.

Wheat-fields scattered with poppies enclosed the wooded gardens and the castle, and when we got back from a ride through them next morning, my hostess's sister Cecile looked at her watch and cried out, “I'll be late for Budapest!” We accompanied her to a field where a small aeroplane was waiting; she climbed in and waved, the pilot swung the propellor, the grass flattened like hair under a drier and they were gone. Then Szigi, the son of the house, took me up the tower and we looked out over an infinity of crops with shadows of clouds floating serenely across them. He was going to Ampleforth in a few terms, he said: what was it like? I told him I thought it was a very good school and that the monks umpired matches with white coats over their habits, and he seemed satisfied with these scant items. Exploring the library, I was fascinated by a remote shelf full of volumes of early nineteenth-century debates in the Hungarian Diet; not by the contents—humdrum stuff about land-tenure, irrigation, the extension or limitation of the franchise and so on—but because they were all in Latin, and I was amazed to learn that in Parliament until 1839, and even in the county courts, no other language was either spoken or written.

The bicycle polo after tea was even rougher than the day before. One chukka ended in a complete pile-up and as we were extricating ourselves, our hostess called from the balustrade.

A carriage with two horses and a coachman in a feathered and ribboned hat was drawing up at the foot of the steps. Dropping his stick, our host went over to help the single passenger out, and when he had alighted, bowed. This tall, slightly stooping newcomer, with white hair and beard of an Elizabethan or Edwardian cut, a green Alpine hat and a loden cape, was Archduke Joseph. Living on a nearby estate, he belonged to a branch of the Habsburgs which had become Hungarian and during the troubled period after Hungary's defeat and revolution, he had briefly been Palatine of the kingdom—a sort of regent, that is—until the victorious Allies dislodged him. Our hostess had been coming down the stairs as the Archduke was slowly climbing them, calling in a quavering voice, “Kezeit csókólóm kedves Denise grófnö!”—“I kiss your hand, dear Countess Denise”;—and when he stooped to do so, she curtseyed, and, diagonally and simultaneously, they both sank about nine inches on the wide steps and recovered again as though in slow motion. When we had been led up steaming and dishevelled and presented, we leaped back into the saddle and pedalled and slashed away till it was too dark to see.

I was lent something more presentable than my canvas trousers and gym shoes for dinner. The Archduke joined in the chibook smoking afterwards and the memory of those aromatic fumes still enclouds the last night and the last house on the Great Plain.

* * *

Someone had said (though I don't think it was exact) that the Rumanian authorities let no one over the frontier on foot: the actual crossing had to be made by train. So all next day I threaded my way through cornfields in the direction of Lökösháza, the last station before the frontier: an empty region with a few farms and innumerable skylarks, where crops alternated with grazing. A compass forgotten in a rucksack-pocket kept me on a south-easterly course along a loose skein of byways. There were spinneys of aspens and frequent swampy patches and the sound of curlews;
goslings and ducklings followed their leaders along village paths. The only traffic was donkey-carts and long, high-slung waggons fitted with hooped canvas. Driven by tow-haired Slovaks, they tooled along briskly behind strong horses with fair manes and tails, harnessed three abreast like troikas. Crimson tassels decorated their harnesses and colts and fillies, tethered on either side, cantered along industriously to keep up. The plain rang with cuckoos.

I fetched up at a hay-rick at the approach of dusk. A wide ledge had been sliced two-thirds of the way up and a ladder conveniently left. I was soon up it, unwrapping the buttered rolls and smoked pork and pears they had given me at O'Kigyos. Then I finished off the wine I had broached at noon. The sudden solitude, and going to bed at the same time as the birds, seemed abit sad after this week of cheerful evenings; but this was counter-balanced by the fun of sleeping out for the fourth time, and the knowledge that I was near the beginning of a new chapter of the journey. Wrapped in my greatcoat and with my head on my rucksack, I lay and smoked—carefully, because of the combustibility of my sweet-smelling nest—and gave myself up to buoyant thoughts. It was like my first night-out by the Danube: I had the same almost ecstatic feeling that nobody knew where I was, not even a swineherd this time; and, except that I regretted leaving Hungary, all prospects glowed. Not that I had seen the last of the Hungarians, thank Heavens: pre-arranged stopping-places already sprinkled the western marches of Transylvania; but faint worry, coupled with a hint of guilt, hung in the air: I had meant to live like a tramp or a pilgrim or a wandering scholar, sleeping in ditches and ricks and only consorting with birds of the same feather. But recently I had been strolling from castle to castle, sipping Tokay out of cut-glass goblets and smoking pipes a yard long with archdukes instead of halving gaspers with tramps. These deviations could hardly be condemned as climbing: this suggests the dignity of toil, and these unplanned changes of level had come about with the effortlessness of ballooning. The twinges weren't very severe. After all, in Aquitaine and Provence, wandering scholars often hung
about châteaux; and, I continued to myself, a compensating swoop of social frogmanship nearly always came to the rescue.

* * *

Scattered with poppies, the golden-green waves of the cornfields faded. The red sun seemed to tip one end of a pair of scales below the horizon, and simultaneously to lift an orange moon at the other. Only two days off the full, it rose behind a wood, swiftly losing its flush as it floated up, until the wheat loomed out of the twilight like a metallic and prickly sea.

An owl woke in the wood, and a bit later, the sound of rustling brought me back from the brink of sleep. Stalks and wheat-ears swished together and two pale shapes scampered into the open, chased about the stubble, then halted, gazing at each other raptly. They were two hares. Looking much bigger than life-size, motionless and moon-struck, they were sitting bolt-upright with ears pricked.

[1]
I can only find Irsa on my modern map, but names sometimes change, and this particular square of my old one, frayed and torn by too frequent folding and unfolding, dropped out long ago. But it is ‘Alberti-Irsa' in my rough diary notes, so I shall stick to that and risk it.

[2]
What makes it all the stranger is that the Hungarian and Rumanian Gypsy word for ‘water' is
pai
; the ‘n' has evaporated. And yet, that is how I heard it. I wonder if the vanished letter still hovers in the subconscious, like the atavistic and ghostly ‘s' behind a French circumflex.

[3]
Petáli
or
pétalo
—but I didn't know it then—is the modern Greek word for a horseshoe and it could have joined the Romany vocabulary during the century or two that the Gypsies must have halted in the Byzantine Empire. The Greek original means ‘a leaf' whence both petal and horseshoe, for donkeys in Greece, and all through the Levant, are still shod with a thin leaf-like layer of steel. The modern hollow crescent shape for horses and mules must be a later refinement, for the old term has stuck for all.

[4]
Lajos
in Magyar, pronounced Lóyosh, more or less.

[5]
They were called ‘Kipchaks' beside their Siberian home-river, the Irtish, and ‘Polovtzi' in South Russia, hence the
danses polovtiennes
in
Prince Igor
.

[6]
The house was Baleni, in the Moldavian region of Covurlui, not far from the Prut.

[7]
My friend R.F. has warned me about jumping to conclusions in this matter. Like many such things in Hungary, these are far more complex than they seem.

[8]
Esterházy, perhaps or Count Sándor, Pauline Metternich's father; and, later, though he was from Bohemia, the Grand-National-winning Kinsky.