Between the Woods and the Water (19 page)

Why not stay on a month or two, he would urge. Or a year? And what was all the hurry, even when I
did
set off?

“I've got an idea!” he exclaimed at luncheon. “We'll all club together and buy you a calf! You could drive it along the road in front of you. When it grows up, you can introduce it to a bull; and then there's another calf; and later on, another. You could arrive in Constantinople in a few years with an enormous herd...”

Meanwhile, like a kind host, he was eager that I should miss nothing. One of the neighbours we called on was a serious, elderly Swabian who asked me what I was studying: “Was studieren Sie?” It was an awkward question; I couldn't think of an answer. Languages? Art? Geography? Folklore? Literature? None of them seemed to fit. Seconds ticked by, and in desperation, I said, “Gar nichts!”—“Absolutely nothing!” The ensuing shocked silence lasted longer still and it was even more uncomfortable. For a German worshipper of diligence and application—
Fleissigkeit
, indeed—my confession was blasphemy, and István laughed intermittently all the way home. Absence prevented us from visiting another neighbour he thought I would be interested in. Gróf K, who lived in the Hátszeg valley beyond Vajdahunyad—Hunedoara—sounded a kind of Squire Weston, with a dash of Mytton and Waterton thrown in. “I once saw him get on a horse for a bet,” István said. “Then someone tied a bag over its head. It went mad, but he managed to stay on for five minutes.”

István's Rumanian was fluent in practical country matters, and one or two farming details even came to him more readily in the vernacular, but too limited for anything abstract or high-flown. Once we supped with forty peasants and farmers, some of them the new owners of his land, at a trestle-table in a clump of beech trees; and he took me to see an old shepherd, who unfolded tales of spirits, fairies and werewolves. (
Priculici
, akin to the Slavonic
vrkolak
, were named; they were vampires. And
stafi
and
strigoi
, who sounded like a mixture of evil spirits and ghosts; and witches too, if
strigoi
, like the Italian
strega
, comes from the Latin
stryx
.) All the country people thereabouts believed in these supernaturals and dreaded them; werewolves lurked, ready to change shape at dusk; and woe to man or beast who drank the rainwater out of a bear's footprint! He also took me to a withered crone who was a witch, and begged her to recite some metrical spells. She intoned them through gums which held one dark tooth like the single eye of the Three Grey Sisters and I took down a few of them phonetically: mysterious, alliterative incantations:
descântece
, as they are called. I met similar ones in Moldavia later on.

* * *

The kastély was much older than any I had stayed in so far. In aspect a mixture of manor house, monastery and farmstead, it stood on a tree-covered knoll overlooking the Maros, and the woods, rolling on beyond, climbed into the distance. A flattened arch through the massive ochre walls gave on a courtyard where gigantic chestnut trees still dropped their petals and the pigeons on the cobbles underneath would suddenly take off with a noise like the wind. Two sheepdogs and their puppies always bounded forward in greeting and the young storks nesting on a moss-covered barn were beginning to stretch their necks among the scarlet legs of their parents. Stables, granaries and coach-houses with carriages, waggons and sleighs lined one side of the yard and the other three were colonnades, like a cloister of square pillars sliced at the
corners into octagons, and constantly traversed by the swish of the martins whose nests congregated there. Green and purple panes glimmered in a fanlight at the far end of an arcade, and the door beneath led to a loggia where we sat at night looking out over a wide vista of timber and water. Indoors, shaded paraffin lamps shed their lustre on the fine portrait of an ambassadorial ancestor and the familiar properties of a Transylvanian interior; the scutcheon scattered about the house and carved over the gate showed a bent bow with an arrow pointing skywards; at a venture, as it were.

Withdrawn from life in a cloud of smoke, István's elderly and heavily-moustached father puffed away testily behind the pages of a week-old
Pesti Hirláp
; but his mother, who spoke in French whenever I lagged behind in German, was quick and amusing, with a touch of severity and a clear glance like István's and that of his sister Ilona, who was quiet and good and kind; and after dinner they would bring their sewing out of doors, while Sándor, a correct, elderly manservant, arranged the coffee and decanters and glasses. (Several old servants wandered about the kastély; another man looked after the horses and drove the ancient carriage; and frail and aged dependants lingered in the offing. There was little actual cash about, but plenty of everything else, and I think the staff—like the family, so to speak—were paid in kind. This was exactly how Moldavian boyars managed, further east.) Every night István chopped up some peppery tobacco leaves on the side-board and Ilona would arrange the flakes on a strip of linen between the two spools of a patent machine and turn out beautifully made cigarettes for all of us; and, when she and her mother retired, she left a heap of new ones ready. Once or twice we sat up over old maps: István had a passion for Napoleon's campaigns; but usually we just sat and talked, sometimes till dawn. He hated going to bed as much as I did; when the supply of cigarettes ran out, he rolled them by hand with the careless skill of a cowboy (an art I mastered too) and sealed them with a flick of the tongue, then lit them at the lamp-chimney. I can still see the flame turning his face to a bright mask for a moment as he twisted up the wick.

Just past its full, the moon laid a gleam of metal on the river and a line of silver wire along the tops of the woods. The July constellations and the Milky Way showed bright in a sky empty of vapour and as the moon waned, stars began to shoot, dropping in great arcs, sometimes several a minute, and we would break off our talk to watch them. They were the Perseids, meteors which shower down late that month and in early August, from the bell- or flower-shaped constellation of Perseus, where Algol blinks among minor stars with a restless flash.
El Ghul
—the Ghoul or Fiend—is the Arabian astronomers' word for the Gorgon, and the starry hero, grasping the snake-locks, flourishes her head across the North and shakes these fragments loose; or so we decided after a decanter or two. If we were late enough, nightingales filled in the rare gaps in our talk; the Pleiades and then Orion followed the slant of Cassiopeia and Perseus above the trees.

* * *

Long before this, startling news from outside had reached our valley. In the middle of the night, Hitler, Goering and Himmler had rounded up and murdered many of their colleagues, and a number—perhaps several hundred—of the rank and file of the SA. Nobody knew how to interpret these bloody portents but they spread dismay and little else was spoken of for a day or two; and then the topic died, drowned by the heat and the weight of summer.

A few days later, a telephone message announced the death of the Countess's mother. A train, flying a pale feather of smoke and looking like a toy among the trees and the hills, travelled along the valley twice a day. It carried István and me downstream through fields of tall maize and wheat; we picked up Xenia, who was sheltering from the sun under the platform-acacias of Zám, and found the Kápolnás carriage waiting at Soborsin.

The Countess was all in black. The service was held in the hall, where three Uniat priests, with short beards and clipped hair, quite unlike the flowing locks and the voluminous beards of the
Orthodox clergy the other side of the Danube, intoned the funeral rite in Rumanian. (The coffin was open; it was the first time I saw anyone dead.) The ceremony ended at the family vault and, after luncheon back at the kastély where the last wisps of incense still lingered, the Count led us all to the library to show us some new specimens, “and while we're about it, we'll have a wee doch an doris afore ye gang awa'.” Travelling back, I felt I had known them all for ever.

* * *

When István was in training with his regiment of Honvéd Hussars in 1917, he won the third prize for dressage out of a hundred hussars, dragoons and uhlans, and came in second for jumping. “You should have seen us moving off for Galicia and Bukovina,” he said. “The uhlans in their square czapkas and red trousers, dragoons in long Waffenrocks, and hussars like us in pale blue.” He still had his uniform in a cupboard, and I drew him in it: a powder-blue frogged tunic and a fur-collared dolman to be slung loose over one shoulder—“an Attila, they called it,” he said, arranging the hang—Hessian boots, a shako with a white plume, and a frogged sabre. How strange this seemed, allied to that grim period of the war! I knew something about the campaigns of the Western Front; but those early mounted clashes with cossacks which led to terrible battlefields on the far slopes of the Carpathians were a matter of hearsay and dim conjecture.

Many years later, I thought of these late-night talks with István when I read and heard about the poet Férenc Békássy from his sister Eva. He was the son of a surprisingly liberal-minded landowner in western Hungary who sent all his sons and daughters to Bedales. From there he went on to King's, Cambridge, where his poems first became known. He was an Apostle, a friend of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey and especially Maynard Keynes, who went to stay with him in Hungary during a Long Vacation. His poems—one of them is a light-hearted skit on ‘A Toccata of
Galuppi'—show great promise, and his last letters to friends in England, delivered posthumously when the war was over, reveal a sensitive and engaging cast of mind. Returning to Hungary at the outbreak of war, he was soon a Lieutenant in the 7th Honvéd Hussars. At the end of a letter to Nowel Olivier, dated in Budapest, May 1915, he wrote, ‘By the time I go, there will be roses and I shall go with a crest of three red ones on my horse's head (but people won't know the reason) because there are three over the shield in our coat-of-arms. This isn't at all the letter I meant to write, but I can't help it. I long to see you... And we shall meet again, shan't we, one day?' He was killed in a cavalry engagement in Bukovina on June 25th, 1915, at the age of twenty-two.
[19]

* * *

One day when we were invited to luncheon by some neighbours, István said, “Let's take the horses” and we followed a roundabout, uphill track to look at a remaining piece of forest. “Plenty of common oak, thank God,” he said, turning back in the saddle as we climbed a path through the slanting sunbeams, “you can use it for everything.” The next most plentiful was Turkey oak, very good firewood when dry, also for stablefloors and barrelstaves. Beech came next, “It leaves scarcely any embers”; then yoke elm and common elm, “useful for furniture and coffins.” There was plenty of ash, too—handy for tools, axe-helves, hammers, sickles, scythes, spades and hay-rakes. Except for a few by the brooks, there were no poplars up there but plenty by the Maros: useless, though, except for troughs and wooden spoons and the like. Gypsies made these. They settled in the garden and courtyard of the kastély with their wives and their children and whittled away until they had finished. “There is no money involved,” István said. “We're
supposed to go halves, but, if it's an honest tribe, we're lucky to get a third. We do better with some Rumanians from out-of-the-way villages in the mountains, very poor and primitive chaps, but very honest.”
[20]

In a clearing we exchanged greetings with a white-haired shepherd leaning on a staff with a steel hook. The heavily embroidered homespun cloak flung across his shoulders and reaching to the ground was a brilliant green. His flock tore at the grass among the tree-stumps all round him. Then a path led steeply downhill through hazel-woods with old shells and acorns crunching and slipping under the horses' hoofs.

It was a boiling hot day. On the way back from a cheerful feast, we went down to the river to look at some wheat. Overcome by the sight of the cool and limpid flood, we unsaddled in a shady field about the size of a paddock, took off all our clothes, climbed down through the reeds and watercress and dived in. Swimming downstream with lazy breast-stroke or merely drifting in the shade of the poplars and the willows, we talked and laughed about our recent fellow guests. The water was dappled with leafy shade near the bank and scattered with thistle-down, and a heron made off down a vista of shadows. Fleets of moorhens doubled their speed and burst noisily out of the river, and wheat, maize and tiers of vineyard were gliding past us when all at once we heard some singing. Two girls were reaping the end of a narrow strip of barley; going by the colours of their skirts and their embroidered tops, braid sashes and kerchiefs, they had come for the harvest from a valley some way off. They stopped as we swam into their ken, and, when we drew level, burst out laughing. Apparently the river was less of a covering than we had thought. They were about nineteen or twenty, with sunburnt and rosy cheeks and thick dark plaits, and not at all shy. One of them shouted something, and we stopped and trod water in mid-Maros. István interpreted, “They
say we ought to be ashamed of ourselves,” he said, “and they threaten to find our clothes and run off with them.”

Then he shouted back, “You mustn't be unkind to strangers! You look out, or we'll come and catch you.”

“You wouldn't dare,” came the answer. “Not like that, naked as frogs.”

“What are these for?” István pointed to the branches by the shore. “We could be as smartly dressed as Adam.”

“You'd never catch us! What about your tender white feet in the stubble? Anyway, you're too respectable. Look at your hair, going bald in front.”

“
It's not!
” István shouted back.

“And that young one,” cried the second girl, “he wouldn't dare.”