Between the Woods and the Water (3 page)

Not a light showed in the town except for the flames of thousands of candles stuck along the window-sills and twinkling in the hands of the waiting throng. The men were bareheaded, the women in kerchiefs, and the glow from their cupped palms reversed the daytime chiaroscuro, rimming the lines of jaw and nostril, scooping lit crescents under their brows and leaving everything beyond these bright masks drowned in shadow. Silently forested with flames, street followed street and as the front of the procession drew level everyone kneeled, only to rise to their feet again a few seconds after it had moved on. Then we were among glimmering ranks of poplars and every now and then the solemn music broke off. When the chanting paused, the ring of the censer-chains and the sound of the butt of the Archbishop's pastoral staff on the cobbles were joined by the croaking of millions of frogs. Woken by the bells and the music, the storks in the town were floating and crossing overhead and looking down on our little string of lights as it turned uphill into the basilica again. The intensity of the moment, the singing and candle flames and incense,
the feeling of spring, the circling birds, the smell of fields, the bells, the chorus from the rushes, thin shadows and the unreality of the moon over the woods and the silver flood—all these things hallowed the night with a spell of great beneficence and power.

When it was all over, everyone emerged once more on the Cathedral steps. The carriage was waiting; and the Archbishop, back in cardinal's robes and the wide ermine mantle that showed he was a temporal as well as an ecclesiastical Prince, climbed slowly in. His gentleman-at-arms, helped by a chaplain with a prominent Adam's apple and pincenez and a postillion in hussar's uniform, were gathering in his train, yard upon yard, like fishermen with a net, until it filled the carriage with geranium-coloured watered-silk. The chaplain climbed in and sat opposite, then the gentleman-at-arms, sitting upright with black-gloved hands on the hilt of his scimitar. The postillion folded the steps, a small busbied tiger slammed a door painted with arms under a tasselled hat and when both of them had leapt up behind, the similarly fur-hatted coachman gave a twitch to the reins, the ostrich feathers nodded and the four greys moved off. As the equipage swayed down the hill, applause rippled through the gathered crowd, all hats came off and a hand at the window, pastorally ringed over its red glove, fluttered in blessing.

On the moonlit steps everyone was embracing, exchanging East-er greetings and kissing hands and cheeks. The men put on their fur hats and readjusted the slant of their dolmans and, after the hours of Latin, Magyar was bursting out in a cheerful dactylic rush.

“Let's see how those birds are getting on,” my mentor said, polishing his monocle with a silk bandana. He sauntered to the edge of the steps, leant on his sword as though it were a shooting-stick and peered up into the night. The two beaks were sticking out of the twigs side by side and we could just make out the re-settled birds fast asleep in the shadows. “Good!” he said. “They're having a nice snooze.”

We rejoined the others and he offered his cigarette case round, chose one himself with care and tapped it on the gnarled gold.
Three plumes tilted round his lighter flame in a brief pyramid and fell apart. He drew in a deep breath, held it for a few seconds and then, with a long sigh, let the smoke escape slowly in the moonlight. “I've been looking forward to that,” he said. “It's my first since Shrove Tuesday.”

The evening ended in a dinner party at the Mayor's with
barack
to begin with and floods of wine all through, and then Tokay, and in the end a haze surrounded those gorgeously-clad figures. Afterwards the Mayor apologetically told me that as the house was crowded out, a room had been found for me at a neighbour's. No question of my stumping up! Next morning, soberly dressed in tweed and a polo-necked jersey, my stork-loving friend picked me up in a fierce Bugatti and only the scimitar among his bags on the back seat hinted at last night's splendours. We went to see the pictures in the Archbishop's palace; then he said, why not come in his car? We would be in Budapest in no time; but I stuck reluctantly to my rule—no lifts except in vile weather—and we made plans to meet in the capital. He scorched off with a wave and after farewells at the Mayor's I collected my things and set off too. I kept wondering if all Hungary could be like this.

* * *

From the path that climbed along the edge of the forest, backward glances revealed swamps and trees and a waste of tall rushes and the great river loosely dividing and joining again round a chain of islands. I could see the waterfowl rocketing up and circling like showers of motes and stippling the lagoon with innumerable splashes when they settled again. Then high ground put them out of sight. Foothills rose steeply on the other side, lesser hills overlapped each other downstream and the fleece of the treetops gave way to cliffs of limestone and porphyry, and where they converged, the green river ran fast and deep.

A village would appear below and storks stood on one leg among the twigs of old nests on thatch and chimney. There were
flurried claps as they took to the air, and when they dropped level with the treetops and crossed the river into Slovakia, sun-light caught the upper sides of their wings; then they tilted and wheeled back into Hungary with hardly a feather moving. Landing with sticks in their beaks, they picked their way along the roofs with black flight-feathers spread like tight-rope-walkers' fingers fumbling for balance. Being mute birds, they improvise an odd courting-song by leaning back and opening and shutting their scarlet bills with a high-speed clatter like flat sticks banging together: a dozen courtships in one of these riverside hamlets sounded like massed castanets. Carried away by sudden transports, they would leap a few yards in the air and land in disarray, sliding precariously on the thatch. Their wonderful procession had stretched across the sky for miles the night before; now they were everywhere, and all the following weeks I could never get used to them; their queerly stirring rattle was the prevalent theme of the journey, and the charm they cast over the ensuing regions lasted until August in the Bulgarian mountains, when I finally watched a host of them dwindling in the distance, heading for Africa.

It was the first of April 1934, and Easter Day: two days after full moon, eleven from the equinox, forty-seven since my nineteenth birthday and a hundred and eleven after I had set out, but less than twenty-four hours since crossing the frontier. The far bank was Slovakia still, but in a mile or two a tributary twisted through the northern hills, and the tiled roofs and belfries of the little tearful-sounding town of Szob marked the meeting place of the two rivers. The frontier wandered northwards up this valley and for the first time both sides of the Danube were Hungary.

For most of this journey the landscape had been under snow; icicle-hung and often veiled in falling flakes, but the last three weeks had changed all this. The snow had shrunk to a few discoloured patches and the ice on the Danube had broken up. When this is solid, the thaw sunders the ice with reports like a succession of thunderclaps. I had been out of earshot downstream when the giant slabs had broken loose, but all at once the water,
halted by occasional jams, was crowded with racing fragments. It was no good trying to keep pace: jostling triangles and polygons rushed past, cloudier at the edges each day and colliding with a softer impact until they were as flimsy as wafers; and at last, one morning, they were gone. These were mild portents, it seemed. When the sun reaches full strength, the eternal snows, the glaciers of the Alps and the banked peaks of the Carpathians look unchanged from a distance; but close to, the whole icy heart of Europe might be dissolving. Thousands of rivulets pour downhill, all brooks overflow and the river itself breaks loose and floods the meadows, drowns cattle and flocks, uproots the ricks and the trees and whirls them along until all but the tallest and stoutest bridges are either choked with flotsam or carried away.

Spring had begun as at a starter's pistol. Bird song had broken out in a frenzy, a fever of building had set in, and, overnight, swallows and swifts were skimming everywhere. Martins were setting their old quarters to rights, lizards flickered on the stones, nests multiplied in the reeds, shoals teemed and the frogs, diving underwater at a stranger's approach, soon surfaced again, sounding as though they were reinforced every hour by a thousand new voices; they kept the heronries empty as long as daylight lasted. The herons themselves glided low and waded through the flag-leaves with a jerky and purposeful gait, or, vigilantly on one leg like the storks, posed with cunning as plants. Flags crowded the backwaters and thick stems lifted enormous kingcups among the leaves of pink and white water-lilies that folded at sunset.

Between the shore and the reddish-mauve cliffs, aspens and poplars tapered and expanded in a twinkling haze and the willows, sinking watery roots, drooped over fast currents. Tight-lacing forced the yellow flood into a rush of creases and whorls and, after my earlier weeks beside the Danube, I could spot those ruffled hoops turning slowly round and round, telling of drowned commotion amidstream.

The path climbed, and as the hot afternoon passed, it was hard to believe that the nearly mythical country of Hungary lay all
around me at last; not that this part of it, the Pilis hills, tallied in the remotest degree with anything I had expected. When the climb had let the Danube drop out of sight, hills and woods swallowed the track and sunbeams slanted through young oak-branches. Everything smelt of bracken and moss, sprays of hazel and beech were opening, and the path, soft with rotten leaves, wound through great lichen-crusted trees with dog-violets and primroses among their roots. When the woods opened for a mile or two, steep meadows ran up on either hand to crests that were dark with hangers, and streams fledged with watercress ran fast and clear in the valleys. I was crossing one of them on stepping-stones when bleating and a jangle of bells sounded; then barking broke out, and the three demons that rushed down with bared fangs were called to heel by their shepherd. His sheep were up to their bellies in a drift of daisies; the ewes must have lambed about Christmas and some of them were already shorn. I had been in shirt-sleeves for several days, but a heel-length sheepskin cloak was thrown over the shepherd's shoulders; peasants are slow to cast clouts. I shouted, “Jó estét kivánok!”—a quarter of my stock of Hungarian—and the same evening-greeting came back, accompanied by the ceremonious lift of a narrow-brimmed black hat. (Ever since I had come across the Hungarian population in southern Slovakia I had longed for some head-gear for answering these stately salutes.) His flock was a blur of white specks and faraway tinklings by the time I caught sight of a different herd. A troop of still unantlered fallow deer were grazing by the edge of the forest across the valley. The sun setting on the other side of them cast their shadows across the slope to enormous lengths: a footfall across the still acres of air lifted all their heads at the same moment and held them at gaze until I was out of sight.

I had been thinking of sleeping out, and those shorn lambs clinched matters; the wind was so tempered that hardly a leaf moved. My first attempt, two nights before in Slovakia, had ended in brief arrest as a suspected smuggler; but nothing could be safer than these woods high above the hazards of the frontier.

I was casting about for a sheltered spot when a campfire showed in the dusk at the other end of a clearing where rooks were going noisily to bed. A pen of stakes and brushwood had been set up in a bay of the forest under an enormous oak-tree, a swineherd was making it fast with a stake between two twists of withy, and the curly and matted black pigs inside were noisily jostling for space. The hut next door was thatched with reeds and when I joined the two swineherds, both looked up puzzled in the firelight: who was I, and where did I come from? The answers—“Angol” and “Angolország”—didn't mean much to them, but their faces lit at the emergence of a bottle of
barack
which was parting loot from my friends in Esztergom, and a third stool was found.

They were cloaked in rough white woollen stuff as hard as frieze. In lieu of goads or crooks, they nursed tapering shafts of wood polished with long handling and topped with small axe-heads and they were shod in those moccasins I had first seen Slovaks wearing in Bratislava: pale canoes of raw cowhide turning up at the tips and threaded all round with thongs which were then lashed round their padded shanks till half-way up the calf of the leg; inside, meanwhile, snugly swaddled in layers of white felt, their feet were wintering it out till the first cuckoo.

The younger was a wild-looking boy with staring eyes and tousled hair. He knew about ten words of German, learnt from Schwobs in the neighbouring villages (I heard later that these were Swabians who were settled nearby) and he had an infectious, rather mad laugh. His white-headed father spoke nothing but Magyar and his eyes, deep-set in wrinkles, lost all their caution as we worked our way down the bottle. I could just make out that the deer, betokened by spread fingers for their missing antlers, belonged to a
föherceg
(which later turned out to mean an archduke). Continuing in sign-language, the younger swineherd grunted, scowled fiercely and curled up his forefingers to represent the tusks of the wild boars that lurked in brakes hereabouts; then he twirled them in spirals which could only mean moufflon. The sign-language grew blunter still when he jovially shadowed forth how
wild boars broke in and covered tame sows and scattered the pens with miscegenate farrow. I contributed some hard-boiled eggs to their supper of delicious smoked pork: they sprinkled it with paprika and we ate it with black bread and onions and some nearly fossilised cheese.

The swineherds were called Bálint and Géza and their names have stuck because, at this first hearing, they had so strange a ring. The fire-light made them look like contemporaries of Domesday Book and we ought to have been passing a drinking-horn from hand to hand instead of my anachronistic bottle. In defiance of language, by the time it was empty we were all in the grip of helpless laughter. Some kind of primitive exchange had cleared all hurdles and the drink and the boy's infectious spirits must have done the rest. The fire was nearly out and the glade was beginning to change; the moon, which looked scarcely less full than the night before, was climbing behind the branches.