Between the Woods and the Water (30 page)

I wondered if these two had merely alighted on their morning rounds, or whether their nest were nearby. Better not to look! (I had a sudden vision of those blood-curdling front pages of the
Domenica del Corriere
, in cobalt, orange and sepia: a goalkeeper crushed to death by an anaconda under the eyes of awe-stricken teams: ‘Ofside! Un incidente in Torino'; three rhinoceroses chasing a Carmelite nun across a chaotic Apennine market-place: ‘Uno Sfortunato Incontro'; or, in this case, ‘Al Soccorso dei Bambini!'—a nestful of eaglets and two eagles tearing a marauder to bits, who desperately beats at them with an antler...)

I could follow their motionless hover and their languid circlings for a long time as I headed south. The encounter, within twenty-four hours of that brief Altdorfer-vision of the stag, was almost too much to take in. I wondered how near to wild boars my
path had gone, or might go; and to wolves and bears. They, too, were said to keep out of men's way at this time of the year. I hadn't seen any of them; but perhaps they had seen me as I crashed past. What about the famous passion of bears for honey and the bee-hives of those harvesters? I longed to catch a glimpse of one of them ambling bandy-legged across the middle distance or reaching on tip-toe, plagued by bees, into a hollow tree after a comb. There had been movements like an unquiet spirit in the branches during the night; larger than a squirrel, it had sounded: could it have been a wild cat or a lynx? Perhaps a pine-marten.

Starting at dawn, ending at dark and only separated by light sleep, each day in the mountains seemed to contain a longer sequence of phases than a week at ground level. Twenty-four hours would spin themselves into a lifetime, and thin mountain air, sharpened faculties, the piling-up of detail and a kaleidoscope of scene-changes seemed to turn the concatenation into a kind of eternity. I felt deeply involved in these dizzy solitudes, more reluctant each minute to come down again and ready to go on forever. Thank heavens, I thought, climbing along a dark canyon of pines, no likelihood of it ending yet. But suddenly, very faintly and a long way off, there was the sound of an axe falling; then two or three. However far away, the sound struck a baleful note; it spoke of people from the lower world and the two days' solitude since leaving the shepherds had installed feelings of unchallenged ownership of everything within sight or hearing.

* * *

The axes had been hard at work. Oaks, beeches and alders stood about in solitude amid a disorder of shorn stumps, rings of chips and felled pine-trees. They had been cut nearly through with two-handed saws then finished off with axe, beetle and wedge, and even as I watched, the woodmen were banging their wedges into the last victim of the day. The impacts only reached me when the
beetles were lifted for the next blow; and soon, with a splitting and a crash, down the tree came, and they fell on it, lopping and trimming the prone trunk with saws, axes and billhooks. When enough stripped timber had accumulated, a team of horses with grapples and hauling gear would be summoned and the trunks dragged to the edge of the clearing and tipped down a steep ride: a chaos of timber choked the grass all the way down to a point where waggons could load them. It reminded me of the stripes of snow I had seen in the forests round the Austrian Danube and the pine-trunks tumbling down them like spilt matchboxes: all to be sawn into deal planks or put together in rafts and floated downstream.

I learnt all this in German from a burly man in a red-checked flannel shirt and a celluloid eye-shade like a journalist's in a film. After leaving the team of woodmen, he had fallen in with me on his way to a log-cabin with a corrugated iron roof. Here, most incongruously seated at a table, a bearded man in a black suit and a black beaver hat turned up all round was poring over a large and well-thumbed book, his spectacles close to the print. In a few years' time he would look exactly like one of the Elders in The Temple by Holman Hunt and this is exactly what he was. Two sons about my age, also dressed in black, were on either side of him, equally rapt. They too were marked for religion: you could tell by their elf-locks and the unshorn down which fogged their waxy cheeks. How different from the man in the check shirt; he was the Rabbi's younger brother and his cast of feature might have been the work of a hostile cartoonist. He was foreman of this timber concession and he came from Satu Mare—Szatmár—a town in the Magyar belt to the north-west of Transylvania. The Rabbi and his sons were spending a fortnight with him and the loggers were mountain people from the same region.

When the foreman led me to the group at the table, they looked up apprehensively; almost with alarm. I was given a chair, but we were all overcome with diffidence. “Was sind Sie von Beruf?” The foreman, anything but shy, looked at me in frank
puzzlement. “Sind Sie Kaufmann?” Was I a pedlar? I felt slightly put out by the question, but it was perfectly reasonable. Nobody else was wandering about like this and I suppose the only itinerant strangers in these parts, if they were not beggars or out-and-out bad hats, must have been pedlars, though I had never come across any. (But a stranger in such a place obviously needed explanation. The shepherds and Gypsies had both shown a touch of misgiving at first: unknown figures in the wilderness bode no good. In the past, they were bent on rounding up laggards for feudal corvées; nowadays, it would be tax-gathering, census-compiling, exaction of grazing dues, the search for malefactors, deserters, or runaway recruits overdue for their military service—a whole range of vexatious interference with the freedom of the woods.) My interlocutors looked bewildered when I tried to explain my reasons for not staying at home. Why was I travelling? To see the world, to study, to learn languages? I wasn't quite clear myself. Yes, some of these things, but mostly—I couldn't think of the word at first—and when I found it—“for fun”—it didn't sound right and their brows were still puckered. “Also, Sie treiben so herum aus Vergnügen?” The foreman shrugged his shoulders and smiled and said something in Yiddish to the others; they all laughed and I asked what it was. “Es ist a goyim naches!” they said. ‘A goyim naches,' they explained, is something that the goyim like but which leaves Jews unmoved; any irrational or outlandish craze, a goy's delight or gentile's relish. It seemed to hit the nail on the head.

The initial reserve of the other dwellers in these mountains had not lasted long; nor did it here: but the Jews had other grounds for wariness. Their centuries of persecution were not ended; there had been trials for ritual murder late in the last century in Hungary and more recently in the Ukraine, and fierce deeds in Rumania and pogroms in Bessarabia and throughout the Russian Pale. Slanderous myths abounded and the dark rumours of the Elders of Zion had only been set in motion fifteen years earlier. In Germany, meanwhile, terrible omens were gathering, though how terrible none of us knew. They came into the conversation and—it
seems utterly incredible now—we talked of Hitler and the Nazis as though they merely represented a dire phase of history, a sort of transitory aberration or a nightmare that might suddenly vanish, like a cloud evaporating or a bad dream. The Jews in England—a happier theme—came next: they knew much more than I, which was not hard; and Palestine. Sighs and fatalistic humour spaced out the conversation.

Everything took a different turn when scripture cropped up. The book in front of the Rabbi was the Torah, or part of it, printed in dense Hebrew black-letter that was irresistible to someone with a passion for alphabets; especially these particular letters, with their aura of magic. Laboriously I could phonetically decipher the sounds of some of the simpler words, without a glimmer of their meanings, of course, and this sign of interest gave pleasure. I showed them some of the words I had copied down in Bratislava from shops and Jewish newspapers in cafés, and the meanings, which I had forgotten, made them laugh; those biblical symbols recommended a stall for repairing umbrellas, or ‘Daniel Kisch, Koscher Würste und Salami.'
[10]
How did the Song of Miriam sound in the original, and the Song of Deborah; David's lament for Absolom; and the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley? The moment it became clear, through my clumsy translations into German, which passage I was trying to convey, the Rabbi at once began to recite, often accompanied by his sons. Our eyes were alight; it was like a marvellous game. Next came the rivers of Babylon, and the harps hanging on the willows: this they uttered in unfaltering unison, and when they came to ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,' the moment was extremely solemn. In the back of my diary are a few lines in Hebrew inscribed there by the Rabbi himself; as they are in the cursive script, utterly indecipherable by me; and underneath them are the phonetic sounds I took down from his recitation of them.

Here it dies away for a moment, then resumes:

The few words that sound like proper nouns revealed what it must be: “Tell it not in Gath,” that is, “publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.” The next incomplete piece
must
be “Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew...” By this time the other-worldly Rabbi and his sons and I were excited. Enthusiasm ran high. These passages, so famous in England, were doubly charged with meaning for them, and their emotion was infectious. They seemed astonished—touched, too—that their tribal poetry enjoyed such glory and affection in the outside world; utterly cut off, I think they had no inkling of this. A feeling of great warmth and delight had sprung up and the Rabbi kept polishing his glasses, not for use, but out of enjoyment and nervous energy, and his brother surveyed us with benevolent amusement. It got dark while we sat at the table, and when he took off the glass chimney to light the paraffin lamp, three pairs of spectacles flashed. If it had been Friday night, the Rabbi said, they would have asked me to light it; he explained about the
shabbas goy
. This was the Sabbath-gentile whom well-off Jews—“not like us”—employed in their houses to light fires and lamps and tie and untie knots or perform the many tasks the Law forbids on the Seventh Day. I said I was sorry it was only Thursday (the Sabbath begins at
sunset on Friday) as I could have made myself useful for a change. We said good-night with laughter.

* * *

Stretched under one of the surviving oaks, I was brimming with excitement. I had thought I could never get on friendly terms with such unassailable-looking men. I had often caught glimpses of similar figures. The last time had been on the moonlit platform the night I entered Rumania; they had looked utterly separate and remote and unapproachable; I could as soon have asked a Trappist abbess for a light.

I thought about the shabbas goy. I would not have been indispensable after all, for a little way off, gathered round a low fire of their own, the loggers were quietly singing in Hungarian. It sounded indefinably different from Rumanian singing, but equally captivating and equally sad.

After I said goodbye next morning, the younger boy, who was wearing a skull-cap and carrying white prayer-shawls with black stripes at the ends, joined the other two indoors and as I left, I could hear them intoning their prayers in a harrowing lamentation while the foreman, no zealot, was pointing out a fresh stand of timber to the loggers.

* * *

For a remote shelf of the Carpathians, it had been an unexpected encounter. What itineraries had brought them all the way from Canaan and Jerusalem and Babylonia? A few Karaite schismatics, who had settled on the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, had made their way to Eastern Europe, but not much had been heard of them since; and a handful of Jews—by religion, if not by blood—may have come in with the Magyars; if, that is, the warlike Kabar tribesmen belonged to the élite among their fellow-Khazars who
had been converted to Jewry: for three Kabar tribes accompanied the Magyar move westward which ended on the Great Plain; they must surely have embraced Christianity when the rest were converted. The most probable ancestors of my hosts—in part, at any rate—would seem to have been the Jews who had settled along the Rhine in the early days of the Roman Empire, after making their way through Italy before the Babylonian dispersal; perhaps before the destruction of the Temple.

In early times, when all religions were polytheistic, gods were shared out and exchanged; they wandered from pantheon to pantheon and were welcome everywhere. The Manichaeans virtually reduced the Zoroastrian cast to two rivals of equal power: a perilous tendency, as its offspring heresies proved. But the Jews bowed down to a solitary god who tolerated no rivals and could neither be seen, graven as an image, nor even mentioned by name, and there was discord with neighbours from the start. (It seems at times that strife can no more be separated from monotheism than stripes from a tiger.) Their period of mundane glory passed away; hard days followed; and by the time it had given birth to Christianity and then to Islam, Judaism was in the position of a King Lear hag-ridden by Goneril and Regan, but with no part written for Cordelia, or anyone to act it—unless, for a century or two, it was the Khazar Empire. The promotion of Christianity from the catacombs to the state religion of the West made the solitary position of the Jews irretrievable. An inflexible programme of revenge for the Crucifixion was set on foot and the following centuries of outlawry and humiliation gave rise to a demonology and a mystique that are active still. In the Middle Ages the Jews were to blame not for deicide only, but for every calamity that smote the West, notably the Black Death and the invasions of the Mongols: these incarnate fiends were the Twelve Tribes galloping out of the East to reinforce the wicked plans of Jewish kinsmen in Europe... In German lands, especially, the ardour of the Crusades burst out in a grim series of massacres. These things set many of the Jews on the move once more and they came to a halt in Poland. (It was
their long German sojourn that had made a mediaeval German dialect, chiefly the Franconian, the basis of the Yiddish
lingua franca
of Eastern Europe.) The kingdom welcomed them at first. They settled and multiplied; but, with time, things began to change. The clergy denounced the kings for their protective policy and at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, persecution began: the Dominicans extorted a yearly fine and the usual charges of desecrated hosts and ritual murder reappeared... In spite of all this, it was a sort of heyday for Jewish scholarship and theology. They were too large a population to move on when fresh troubles beset them. The worst of these were the Cossack massacres of the seventeenth century; and after the partition of Poland, Russian persecution, and the pogroms in the Pale, set many thousands on their travels again. (The Rabbi and his brother were not quite sure, but they thought some of their ancestors might have come from those parts four or five generations back; Galicia was the other most likely provenance.) In spite of endemic anti-Jewish feeling in Hungary, Jews had managed to play a considerable part in the country's life—it had been better for them there than in Russia or Rumania. My companions felt patriotic about Hungary, they said: they talked Hungarian rather than Yiddish among themselves, and lamented their recent change of citizenship.