Between the Woods and the Water (22 page)

The wide main street of Turda—or Torda—reminded me of Honiton. “They're all cobblers and tanners and potters,” said István, “and lots of them are Socinians.” Angéla asked what Socinians were and, for once, I was able to enlarge: I had looked them up in Count Jenö's library. They were a sect of Unitarians which had sprung up in this part of the world and were named after a Sienese family of theologians, the Sozzini; they took their name, in these particular regions, from one Fausto Sossini, an adventurous nephew of the founder, who wandered to Transylvania from the court of Isabella dei Medici and settled at Kolozsvár in 1578, where his doctrines sank deep heterodox roots. Then he strolled on to Cracow.

“Yes,” said Angéla, “but what do they believe in?”

“Well,” István said doubtfully, “they don't believe in the Trinity for a start.”

“Oh?” After half a second's doctrinal pondering she said, “Silly asses,” and István and I laughed.

We strayed into the Calvinist church. The old building was as severe as a conventicle, with the Decalogue inscribed in Magyar over the Communion table. As in an English parish church, the numbers of last Sunday's hymns were framed in wood on a pillar by the tall pulpit. The only decorative things were the fine baroque pews: they were painted light green and picked out in gold, as though the pastors were determined the Catholics shouldn't have it all their own way. Three middle-aged sisters, with faces like pippins under their coifs, were polishing the pews with vigour, tidying prayer books and hymnals on the ledges and banging the dust out of hassocks.

* * *

We were storming and bucketing through the land of Canaan. Rows of beehives, brought up for the summer, were aligned by the edge of the woods. The slopes were striped with vines and scattered with sheaves and ricks, and chaff from threshing mingled
with the dust. Flocks and herds were beginning to throw longer shadows when we reached a high point with an entire town spread below; and, getting out under the walls of a vigilant eighteenth-century citadel, we gazed across an untidy fall of roofs. At the bottom bridges spanned a riverbend to an older part of the city the other side. It was Cluj to the Rumanians, Klausenburg to the early Saxon settlers who founded or re-founded it, but, inexpugnably and immutably to the Hungarians, Kolozsvár.
[2]
Dropping towards the watershed, the sun filled the place with evening light and kindled the windows and the western flanks of cupolas and steeples and many belfries, darkening the eastern walls with shadow; and as we gazed, one of them began to strike the hour and another took up the challenge, followed by a third and soon enormous tonnages of sectarian bronze were tolling their ancient rivalries into the dusk. Even the Armenians, who had settled here a couple of centuries ago, sent out a chime and only the synagogues were silent.

As we climbed back into the motor-car, a swarm of small Gypsies rushed on us from caves and shanties, crowded on the running board and the bonnet and entangled us in cries and supplication and a mesh of arms like brown tendrils, which we could only unloose by flinging coins beyond their heads like confetti. Set free in a second, the car slid downhill and across one of the bridges and into the old city.

* * *

Our journey was a secret. The town wasn't as perilous as it would have been in the winter season, with its parties and theatres and the opera in full blast, but we weren't supposed to be there, Angéla least of all. István revelled in the clandestine atmosphere and so
did we; it gave a stimulating, comic-opera touch to our journey; so we left the conspicuous motor outside our quarters and stole about the town like footpads. István went ahead and peered round corners for fear of bumping into acquaintances; and, sure enough, he suddenly whispered, “About turn!” and shepherded us into an ironmonger's and colourman's shop where, backs to the door, we stooped intently over a selection of mousetraps until the danger was past. It was someone he had been at school with in Vienna.

The old city was full of town-houses and palaces, most of them empty now, with their owners away for the harvest. Thanks to this, István had telephoned and borrowed a set of handsome vaulted rooms in one of them, not far from the house where Matthias Corvinus was born.

There was much evidence of his reign. In the great market square, a magnificent equestrian statue showed the king in full armour, surrounded by his knights and commanders, while armfuls of crescented and horse-tailed banners were piled as trophies at his feet. Only
Matthias Rex
was incised on the plinth—no need of
Hungariae
when it was set up—and Rumanians as well as Hungarians could rightly feel pride of kinship. Most of the names associated with the place were straight out of the novels of Jókai, and we had a quick look at the baroque arcades and books and treasures in the splendid Bánffy palace. I wonder whether I am right in remembering that Liszt gave recitals there? I think
Don Giovanni
was sung in Hungarian in the triple-named city even earlier than in Budapest. We entered the great Catholic church of St. Michael—a Gothic building which had looked enormous from the citadel—just as everyone was streaming out from Vespers, and the dusk indoors, lit only by flickering racks of tapers, looked vaster still, and umbrageously splendid; the clustered piers of the nave soared with no hindering capitals to halt the upward flight of the eye, then tilted over to join each other, form lancets and lose themselves in a brackeny network of liernes and groined vaulting and shadow.

An hotel at the end of the main square, called the New York—
a great meeting place in the winter season—drew my companions like a magnet. István said the barman had invented an amazing cocktail—only surpassed by the one called ‘Flying' in the Vier Jahreszeiten bar in Munich—which it would be criminal to miss. He stalked in, waved the all-clear from the top of some steps, and we settled in a strategic corner while the demon-barman went mad with his shaker. There was nobody else in the bar; it was getting late and the muffled lilt of the waltz from
Die Fledermaus
hinted that everyone was in the dining-room. We sipped with misgiving and delight among a Regency neo-Roman décor of cream and ox-blood and gilding: Corinthian capitals spread their acanthus leaves and trophies of quivers, and hunting horns, lyres and violins were caught up with festoons between the pilasters. Our talk, as we sipped, ran on secrecy and disguise. “Perhaps I should pretend to have toothache,” Angéla said, after the second cocktail, and wrapped the new kerchief round her head in a concealing bandage; “or,” holding it stretched across her face below the eyes, “wear a yashmak. Or simply cover the whole thing up.” She wrapped her head in the kerchief and tied it in a bow on top like a Christmas pudding. The barman imperturbably set down a third round of glasses and then vanished just as Angéla re-emerged, shaking her hair loose, to find the drinks there as though by magic. I suggested the helmet of darkness of Perseus. István thought Siegfried's Tarnhelm would be better still; then she could not only become invisible but turn into someone else: King Carol, Greta Garbo, Horthy, Mussolini and Groucho Marx were suggested, then the Prince of Wales, Jack Dempsey, Queen Marie and Charlie Chaplin; Laurel and Hardy, perhaps; one of the two; she would have to choose, but she insisted on both.

This led to talk of seeing double; the drinks were beginning to work. We left, walking with care and suitable stealth, and on air; then dived into a hooded carriage that would have been a sleigh in winter and clip-clopped to a discreet Gypsy restaurant outside the town, returning to our fine vaulted quarters fired with paprika and glissandoes.

* * *

How exhilarating it was next morning to be woken by the discord of reciprocally schismatic bells while the half-shuttered July sunlight scattered stripes across the counterpane! Furred and frogged, the magnates on the walls of the breakfast room surveyed us with their hands serenely crossed on the hilts of their scimitars. We looked at them in turn and admired the many tiers of emblazoned bindings. Heralded by fumes, a very old retainer in a baize apron brought coffee and croissants from a distant part of the house and talked to us as we spread and dipped and sipped; and his tidings from the night before unloosed a long moment of gloom: Dollfuss had been assassinated by the Nazis. But, as with the June purge a month earlier, our mood was such that the gloom didn't last much longer than breakfast: it all seemed such a long way to the west. But it was only five months since I had seen the small Chancellor leading that dismal procession in Vienna, after the February troubles. I hadn't even heard of Cluj or Klausenburg or Kolozsvár then. But Transylvania had been a familiar name as long as I could remember. It was the very essence and symbol of remote, leafy, half-mythical strangeness; and, on the spot, it seemed remoter still, and more fraught with charms. Under their sway, we were impervious to omens, and the spell of comedy, adventure and delight that surrounded our journey would have needed something still more drastic and closer at hand to break it.

Our euphoria was complete. It followed us all day along dark canyons and tilted woods and steep grazings and down into a valley where the serpentine haze of willows and poplars marked the windings of the Maros once again; and soon a subtle change came over the towns and villages, not in the landscape—that was changing all the time—but in the inhabitants.

There had been plenty of Hungarian spoken in the few Transylvanian towns I had seen, and, among the Swabians of Arad, German too; but in the villages and the country, Rumanian had been almost universal. Now all at once the drovers watering their horses
at the wooden troughs, the peasants in the fields, the shepherds nursing their crooks under the trees and the fishermen flinging their nets over the river were all speaking Magyar. We were among Szeklers, the Hungarians of Transylvania, half a million and more, who inhabit a great enclave of the eastern and southern Carpathians. It was this geographical position, isolated in a sea of Rumanians, which placed the ethnological problem beyond solution.

Some say the Szeklers are the oldest established inhabitants of the province; the Rumanians, as we know, fiercely contest this. The Szeklers were wrongly thought, in earlier times—like the Magyars themselves, indeed, but very much later—to have descended from the Huns. Others held that when Charlemagne swept the Avars from the Great Plain some of them might have landed up in these mountains. Or, it was wondered, could they be the offspring of the bellicose Kabars, a splinter-tribe that had joined the Magyars—later forming part of the vanguard of Arpad's host—during their cloudy sojourn in the Khazar empire? The most recent theory, I think, supports their Magyar beginnings: somehow they became separated from the main tribes when they moved west from Bessarabia with the Pechenegs at their heels; they must have made their way straight through the nearest passes to their present habitat, while the others pursued their more roundabout paths to the Great Plain. If this were so, the expanding Magyars, when they moved eastwards again and into Transylvania, would have found their Szekler kinsmen already settled. There is convincing evidence that the early Hungarian kings established or confirmed them along the Carpathian border as permanent frontiersmen, on the watch for the inroads of later barbarians; and there is nothing incompatible in the two last theories. At any rate, all through the Dark and Middle Ages they were the wardens and the light-horsemen of the eastern march, and in battle, when the main Hungarian cavalry took the field in full armour, they stuck to the fleet Parthian tactics of their nomad past. The Hungarians, the Szeklers and the Saxons were largely self-governing under the Hungarian crown, and many of the Szeklers, even if they were
moccasin-shod and still signed their names with their thumbs, were ennobled
en masse
; all three nations—or rather, their leaders and nobles—had a voice in the councils of Transylvania.
[3]

* * *

The motor-car crept through the waggons and the cattle of the metropolis of the Szeklers and, by the sounds in our ears, we might have been in the heart of a Hungarian country town. Târgu-Mures,—still Márosvasarhély to its inhabitants—was in the throes of yet another market-day. I thought I discerned, without any prompting, a different cast of feature—something simultaneously blunter and more angular about brow and cheek and chin—that corresponded to the change of language. There was a difference of costume, too, though the actual details have slipped away. Rawhide shoes and thongs were common to all, with the fleece headgear and the low-crowned black felt hat. But all along my itinerary the chief difference between country Hungarians and Rumanians had been the wide-skirted tunic or shirt, caught in by a wide belt, which the Rumanians wore outside their trousers. Both dressed in white homespun linen, but the Hungarians' shirts always buttoned tightly at the throat; their trousers were unusually wide from the waist down and sometimes pleated, which almost gave them the look of long skirts.
Gatya Hosen
, István called them; these were often replaced by loose black breeches and shiny knee-boots. But here the peasants, almost to a man, wore narrow white homespun trews like tights stitched together out of felt. Across the Hungarian plain and in Transylvania, the women's clothes had been varying all the time. Each village and valley enjoined a different assembly of colours and styles: braids, tunics, lace, ribands,
goffering, ruffs, sashes, caps, kerchiefs, coifs and plaits free or coiled: a whole array of details announced whether they were betrothed, brides, married, spinsters or widows. Sometimes coifs framed these heads like spathe and spadix; among Saxons, they shot up in stiff scarlet cylinders. There were bodices, flowing or panelled sleeves, embroidery, gold coins at brow or throat or both, aprons front and back, a varying number of petticoats and skirts jutting at the hips like farthingales, and occasionally these were accompanied by coloured Russian boots. This village finery gave all gatherings a festal air, especially as the level of beauty among Hungarian and Rumanian girls was very high. Populations were inclined to remain aloof; but the more they overlapped and mingled—Magyar, Rumanian, Serb, Slovak, Saxon, Swabian and sometimes Armenian and perhaps some Ruthenes in the north—the more striking they looked.
[4]
Their everyday dress was a sober version of their gala outfits; but these exploded on feast-days and at weddings in ravishing displays. Clothes were still emblematic, and not only among peasants: an expert in Rumanian and Hungarian symbols, looking at the passers-by in a market-place—a couple of soldiers, a captain in the Ros, iori, an Ursuline prioress, a sister of St. Vincent de Paul, a Poor Clare, an Hasidic rabbi, an Armenian deacon, an Orthodox nun, a Uniat archimandrite, a Calvinist pastor, an Augustinian canon, a Benedictine, a Minorite friar, a Magyar nobleman, an ostrich-feathered coachman, a shrill-voiced Russian cab-driver, a bear-leading Gypsy with his spoon-carving fellow-tribesmen, a wool-carder, a blacksmith, a drover, a chimney-sweep, a woodman or a waggoner, and above all, women from a dozen villages and ploughmen and shepherds from widely scattered valleys and highlands—would have been able to reel off their provenances as swiftly as a herald glancing along the flags and surcoats of a fourteenth-century battle.