Between the Woods and the Water (16 page)

* * *

Practice may have fallen short of theory in other matters, but Jasš was a phenomenal shot. The gun was soon loaded again and every
so often, in mid-sentence and seemingly without aiming, he would fire out of the window and into the air, often single-handed and with hardly a break in his discourse; and a second later, like a heavy parcel, down on the lawn crashed a bird from the enormous rookery that overshadowed the house. I was sorry; all that wheeling and cawing brought homesick thoughts to mind. Haphazard bangs punctuated every hour of daylight.

Clara, the child of those hoary battlements in the High Tatra, had a wild look and her hair was seldom combed. She loved horses and her life revolved round two beautiful black creatures which a dour and one-eyed groom called Antal kept sleek and trim—“unlike me,” as she truthfully said, skimming into the saddle. She was as light as a jockey, rode beautifully and sailed over tremendous fences. JasÅ¡ had given it up—“no time”—so we went for far-flung rides in the cool of the evening.

During the hot midday hours, iced soda was splashed into the deep golden wine I keep mentioning. This has a barbarous sound, but it was delicious—
Spritzer
they called it in German, and, in Magyar,
hoszú lépés
, ‘a long step,' one of the many terms for the degrees of dilution. Generically, all these wines were unmistakably from that particular region, yet each one seemed to change with the roof under which it was to be drunk. It was ready for drinking from the moment the vintage had settled from fermentation, and after years in cool cellars, it was beyond praise. At dinner, decanter on decanter was emptied, undiluted now, by the light of candles in tall glass tulip-shaped shields. Jasš liked sitting late after dinner when rash and varied talk ranged far into the small hours. When he lifted a forefinger, we would fall silent and listen to the nightingales for a minute. A restless geometry of fire-flies darted about under the spatulate volume of the chestnut trees, and getting up one night to go to bed, we found emerald-coloured tree-frogs smaller than threepenny-bits clinging to the leaves like miniature green castaways on rafts.

On my last afternoon, Clara and I lay about talking on a bank at the end of the lawn. Indoors, Jasš was playing complicated
fugues rather well, breaking off for a few seconds now and then and rushing back to the piano after a bang and a thud, so there was a perturbed circling of rooks above the house. All along the lawn, the chestnut candles had begun to shed their blossom and occasional discs of pink showed among the white petals which scattered the grass. At the end of this vista we could see the two horses, unsaddled a few minutes earlier, rolling in ecstasy before finding their feet again with a snort and a shake, then grazing and idly swishing their tails against the gnats. In the morning, with the bangs of the rook-rifle growing fainter, one of them carried me to my next halt.

* * *

Ötvenes was the last of this particular concatenation of friends and houses and, like all the others, I had met the inhabitants that first evening at Tibor's. The family were Swabians who had settled here when these territories were regained from the Turks, and the spread of their acres had soon enrolled them into the dominant stratum. Can the preceding centuries of conflict be compared to the long process of the
Reconquista
in Spain, with Ottomans instead of Moors? The earlier campaigns, with the victories of Hunyadi and Báthory and Zrinyi, bear a distinct affinity: but the energies of later Transylvanian heroes were spent in making the Principality, for a time at least, and under Turkish vassaldom, a bastion of Magyar liberties against the Habsburgs. Shrewd connubial skill in marrying the Hungarian royal heiress, and then declaring the crown hereditary instead of elective, had enabled the dynasty to swallow up Hungary; and when the Emperor's armies at last advanced downstream, the Imperialists had come to look on the liberated Hungarians as a conquered race. Hence the foreign settlements and the quantities of non-Hungarian names that suddenly scattered the redeemed lands. Strangers were summoned from abroad; during the last three centuries the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary became cosmopolitan, and
in nothing so much as in the commanders of their armies; but their offspring had been assimilated long ago. As though to illustrate this, two brothers who came over from a nearby estate bore the famous Genoese name of Pallavicini. Were they descended from the margrave who murdered Cardinal Martinuzzi, the saviour of Transylvania, half-Venetian himself? I had just been reading about him, but didn't dare to ask. Another guest, a tall princess, married to an erudite naturalist landowner called Béla Lipthay, from Lovrin in the Banat, was a descendant (not direct, I hope) of Pope Innocent IX of the famous house of Odescalchi, lords of Bracciano.
[7]

Georgina, the daughter of the house, looked like a fair-haired Englishwoman on safari, and she was as good a horsewoman as Clara. Separated from a long-absent Czech husband, she was striving without much hope for an annulment in order to marry an even better horseman than either. He was sun-scorched, lean, delightful and stone deaf. Full of misgivings, her kind-hearted parents, and especially her mother, took the hazards of my journey very seriously. A son of hers had been in Brazil for fifteen years and if I had let her, she would have stuffed the whole of his wardrobe in my rucksack.

I can remember every detail of this house, and of all the others; and the inhabitants, the servants, the dogs and the horses and the scenery are all intact. Perhaps being a stranger in this remote society knocked down some of the customary barriers, for I became an intimate of their lives, and feelings ran deeper and lasted much longer than anything warranted by the swift flight of these weeks in the marches of Transylvania. This particularly joyful sojourn was made even more so by the arrival of Ria for the last few days. We watched the building of an enormous rick and cantered through
the woods on a paper-chase; and on my last day we discovered some rockets in a woodshed and sent them all up after dinner.

Every part of Europe I had crossed so far was to be torn and shattered by the war; indeed, except for the last stage before the Turkish frontier, all the countries traversed by this journey were fought over a few years later by two mercilessly destructive powers; and when war broke out, all these friends vanished into sudden darkness. Afterwards the uprooting and destruction were on so tremendous a scale that it was sometimes years after the end of it all that the cloud became less dense and I could pick up a clue here and there and piece together what had happened in the interim. Nearly all of them had been dragged into the conflict in the teeth of their true feelings and disaster overtook them all. But in this charming and cheerful household, the tragedy that smote in the middle of that grim time had nothing to do with conflict: a fire sprang up in the night and the whole family and the combustible manor house that contained it were turned to ashes.

[1]
See
A Time of Gifts
, p. 279.

[2]
‘Pojekai, Hanka, tam u hrustu, tam u hrustu, tam u hrustu...' etc.

[3]
Properly speaking, the region only begins about thirty miles east of the point I had reached. But the narrow tract between this and the post-war Hungarian–Rumanian frontier—the one I had just crossed—seems to have no specific name and, talking loosely, people often wrongly lump it in with Transylvania: it seems a handy name for all the territory which Hungary had lost to Rumania in 1920, and I sometimes find myself following this lax but convenient usage.

[4]
The late Roman historian Flavius Vopiscus in the Augustan Scriptors.

[5]
A Hungarian source, the Anonymous Notary of King Béla (1234–70), records a tradition that the invading Hungarians had to overcome the resistance of a certain Gelu, leader of the Vlacho-Slav tribes in central Transylvania, before he could subdue the region.

[6]
All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain,

Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation...

  —the lines would often come to mind.

[7]
According to Sir Walter Scott (or Macaulay quoting him; I've searched both in vain and will probably come on the passage the day after this book is out), Bracciano, by its reedy lake, was the best example of a mediaeval fortress he had ever seen: clustering cylindrical towers soar into the sky of Latium and spread narcissistic machicolated corollas high above their still reflections many fathoms below.

“F
RATER
Petre, possumusne kugli ludere post Vesperas?”

“Hodie non possumus, fili,” Brother Peter said. “Tarde nimium est. Cras poterimus.”

“Quando? Qua hora?”

“Statim post Missam. Expecte me ad egressum ecclesiae.”

“Bene, frater, sed nonne ante Missam fieri potest?”

“Velnon. Est contra regulam nostram.”

“Eheu!”

Easy to spot the odd man out in this dog-Latin!
Kugli—Kegeln
in German—is Magyar for skittles. Brother Peter was assistant guest-master in the Conventual Franciscan Abbey of Maria Radna, and the cheerful face and tonsured head, the sandals, brown hooded habit and the white cord knotted round his wide waist gave him a convincing look of Friar Tuck; and as we had no common tongue, Latin was forced on us. (My share of the conversation was less glib than it looks. I thought out each sentence in advance, hoping to place a supine in
um
; and I was struck by the use of
velnon
. I couldn't find it in Latin dictionaries later so perhaps it was just the two words, a negative only used in church circles to take the place of the non-existent ‘no'; but it sounded single. ‘Yes' was
etiam
.) Except for construing at school or spouting verse on the road, I had no more spoken Latin than anyone else, so all this gave an exhilarating illusion of slipping back to the time when Latin was the common tongue of literate Europe: it conjured up the world of the wandering scholars whom I had presumptuously thought of as models before setting out, and lately rather drifted away from.

The way from Ötvenes that morning had run south-east until the wooded hills fell asunder about twenty miles east of Arad, where my path joined the beautiful valley of the Maros; and then, a little way upstream, the bronze cupolas of the Maria Radna caught the afternoon light. The Abbey was founded in 1520, but nobody, at a glance, would have connected this High Baroque pile with the Franciscan Order. Destroyed in the sixteenth century by the army of Mustafa II, it was re-built in its new shape when the Ottomans were routed a hundred years later. Then a wonder-working image of Our Lady made it famous; patronage accumulated, and the church filled with pilgrims and
ex votos
.

Dappled with the shadows of chestnut leaves, a wide staircase climbed between the tall baroque statues of St. Francis of Assisi and St. John Nepomuk. At the top, I fell in with Brother Peter setting up an array of skittles. He was looking for someone to play with, so my arrival was well-timed and we played all through the late afternoon, happily incommunicado except for our occasional cumbrous Latin. It needed some strength to send the heavy balls clashing and scattering among the giant ninepins: we were both in a muck-sweat when the bell for Vespers put an end to play and it was after helping him collect the skittles that the foregoing colloquy took place. Vespers over, he led me to a guest cell and later to the refectory, where about forty monks sat down to supper while one of them read aloud from a pulpit, first in Latin and then in Magyar.
[1]
I met him again in the cloisters after Compline and asked him, “Dormitum ibant omnes?”—I had been ready for it!—but he only smiled and put a finger across his lips: it was the first time I had stayed under a monastic roof and the
magnum silentium
had begun.

Next morning, 2nd June, was a Sunday, and he was busy with visitors, so I waited as bidden, fearing he might have to play
non possum
; but he arrived in a flurry of cord and homespun, and
when we had finished our game, I tried to leave some money; he waved it aside—I was a stranger, a
viator
and a
pelegrinus
; so I dropped some coins through a slot in the church with a face-saving jingle. Helping me on with my rucksack, he said, “May God go with you,” in Latin, and then, “Quoniam angelis suis mandavit de te, ut custodiant te in omnibus viis tuis.” Impressed by the words, and rather puzzled, I started down the great staircase towards the river; they had been spoken like a quotation and I wondered where they came from.
[2]

* * *

When the river Danube had fallen behind a month earlier, then the Tisza and finally the Great Hungarian Plain, I had felt I was saying goodbye to famous landmarks. I had never heard of the Maros.
[3]

It is the great river of Transylvania and its tributaries spread like a fan of nerve-ends across the whole western slant of the Carpathians where they rush downhill and cohere in a great stream that wends south-westwards through minor ranges, sweeps past the Abbey, and then rolls on into Hungary. At Szeged it joins the Tisza about seventy miles south of the bridge that Melek and I had clip-clopped across at Szolnok; then the united waters drop deep into Yugoslavia and enter the Danube; soon the Sava, swollen with tribute from Slavonia and the Alps, joins the great river under the walls of Belgrade and then, with all their individualities drowned in the Danubian currents, they advance on the Iron Gates and head for the Black Sea.

Hills enclosed the north bank of this particular reach and the
monastery was hardly out of sight before the tapering ruins of the castle of Solymos jutted on a pedestal of rock; it was a stronghold of the great John Hunyadi but much older than he. Then the trees of the foothills began to pile up in waves, with sprays of wild lilac scattered among the branches. The hills on the other shore stood aloof, and between the two ranges the great river lazily unwound. Sometimes it looped away for a mile or two, then meandered back and the clouds of willows and aspens that marked its windings were interspersed with poplars tapering in spindles or expanding like butterfly nets. The women in the fields wore kerchiefs on their heads under hats of soft plaited straw as wide as cart-wheels; leaves like broken assegais plumed the tall maize; an occasional breeze ruffled the wheat; the vines, all sprayed with sulphate, climbed in tiers. Pale cattle with wide, straight horns grazed by the score and the fens and water-meadows that lay about the river were wallows for buffaloes; lustrous as seals, or caked in dried mud as armour against insects, they were sometimes only to be spotted in the slime and the swamps by bubbles or an emerging nostril. Wherever horses and mares with their foals moved loose about the grass, a few ragged tents were sure to be pitched. Everything in these reedy windings was inert and hushed under a sleepy spell of growth and untroubled plenty.