Between the Woods and the Water (31 page)

In a continent where countless races had changed utterly or vanished into thin air, the Jews, however battered and woebegone, had altered least. Many things apart from religion singled them out, and here in the mountains especially they bore the stamp of an urban and indoor folk, different in everything from the surrounding rustics. Costume, diet, bearing, gesture, complexion and intonation—the insidious nasal note that their detractors mimicked so tirelessly—widened the gulf. (I could not look at the two boys without wishing their corkscrew-locks away, and felt guilty at once for doing so.) Parallel to the indignities inflicted by the gentiles, there was an array of self-imposed stigmata which seemed purposely designed to flaunt outside aesthetic notions and, should it be needed, choke off approach. (They were exactly the things, of
course, which anyone seeking assimilation—as, with a second guilty twinge, I felt I should have done—would most eagerly jettison.) But for those who looked on merging as treachery, it was utterly different. They clung to ancient ways as they had done for ever; but the marks left by the ghetto had become, if not emblems of martyrdom, at least treasured symbols of solidarity in hard times, for there had never been a moment when an end to persecution, by apostacy, was out of reach; a few words and a splash of water and their troubles would have been over. But they had chosen the edge of the sword and flight and the fate of outcasts rather than break faith. No wonder, once indoors and away from it all, that they shunned contact with the vile world outside, and, if the externals of their life seemed alien and rebarbative, so much the better; it would shoot home the excluding bolts. Skill and flair, in a world beset with difficulties, offered chances of survival, prosperity and brilliant achievement; but it struck me, in a moment of lamplit clairvoyance, that among devotees like my companions, all these were an illusion. The pre-occupation of the Rabbi and his sons—the columns of black-letter, hedged about with the glosses and footnotes and rubrics of two or three thousand years, represented the true aim of existence; something to be pursued and loved in secret and behind barred shutters: their scriptures, their poetry, their philosophy, their history and their laws. These were the lodestar of their passion, and the sea of outside troubles must have fallen back while they re-explored the mysteries of their religion and traced the subtleties of the law or unravelled the meanings of the Kabbala and the Zohar or weighed the tenets of the Hassidim against the refutations of the Gaon of Vilna; and, as they re-read the deeds of Joshua and David and the Maccabees, the oafish slogans in the lanes outside must have died away.

* * *

‘Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew...' The words kept floating to the surface during the following hours, next morning
in particular, when I woke up dry as a bone and remembered my damp resurrection at the swineherds' hut near Visegrad. There had been a drift or two of mackerel sky the evening before and I had slept under cover for the first time for a week. A timely cave, where part of the opening had been roughly walled in with dry-stone masonry to form a sheepfold, gaped invitingly at nightfall; but it was hopping with insects, so I left it for a smaller one about the size of an opera box and I can only have been asleep a little while when a liquid rippling, not caused by water, woke me up. Below, just discernible in the starlight, a great flock of sheep was on the move and hundreds of little cleft feet were trotting by. Shepherds and dogs passed in dead silence. It was as though the animals were being rustled; I watched until they had vanished, and next day they seemed like sheep in a dream.

There was no dew; but mist wreathed the clefts and ravines. Faraway spurs rose up, stage-wings only defined by the hair-thin line of their summits against the next vaporous upheaval, each a paler blue as it receded, while the valleys that twisted downhill were dusky with timber.

The mountains were full of echoes. Small landslides would spread like a rumour, and the four key-notes of an octave, sung loud enough, rocketed into the distance five or six times with a second or two between each chord, and branched off down side valleys, a little fainter after each encore. The mountains would have been a perfect auditorium for those Tibetan-looking horns six or ten feet long. (
Bucium
, the Rumanian word, is almost certainly from the Roman
buccina
, the long brazen tube on triumphal arches that distends legionaries' cheeks among looted tabernacles and candlesticks.) The other side of this watershed, at the storming of Sarmizegethusa, the fanfares of Trajan must have unloosed pandemonium. (Apart from those of the Rumanians, the other giant horns to be heard in this part of Europe were those of the Huzuls, shy, Slav-speaking Uniat Ruthenes living in a world of spells and legends two hundred-odd miles to the north-north-west in the Sub-Carpathian ranges next door to Bukovina.)

I came on some flocks and a shepherd playing a small bone flute: I soon learnt that something of the kind was as inseparable from herdsmen as a distaff and spindle from their wives and I wished I had looked at it closer: bone flutes are favourite instruments among the Sarakatsan nomads of northern Greece whom I got to know later; theirs are made out of the long bone in an eagle's wing. This was probably the shinbone of a sheep. A
tibia
, in fact.

But another reason made me wish, a year hence, that I had paid more attention. A later part of this journey carried me to eastern Rumania, and I returned there the following year; and, between then and the outbreak of war, I spent much time in a remote, Grand Meaulnes-like country house in Moldavia, not far from the present Russian frontier. They were long sojourns of unalloyed happiness: I adored the inhabitants; and while I was there, I picked up a slipshod fluency in Rumanian of which a few vestiges remain.

Like many another, I soon came under the spell of the oldest poem in the language. It is called
Mioritza
. Universally but sporadically known throughout the Rumanian-speaking world for hundreds of years, it was only taken down and printed during the last century, so it must be described as a folk-poem, but the classification fits these strange verses rather awkwardly. Many have pored over their arcane symbolism. Some say that they demonstrate a deep streak of fatalism among country Rumanians, while others find exactly the opposite: they deduce a kind of mystical triumph over precisely such an interpretation of fate. Perhaps its origins should be sought in pre-Christian times; the poem undoubtedly springs from abstruse and complex roots. But for me its magic lay, and lies, in its linking together of directness and the tragic sense, its capture of the isolated feeling that surrounds shepherds, and the forlorn exaltation that haunts their steep grazings and forests; all enhanced, here, by the charms and the frustration of half-apprehended mysteries. Above all, in my case, the poem conjures up early glimpses of shepherd life on these first mountain travels; half the setting is accordingly a high Carpathian shieling,
and the other, sheepfolds scattered, later on, across the dales of Moldavia.

The poem consists of 123 rhyming couplets (and occasionally triplets) of five syllables, which feminine endings often lengthen; the scansion is two or three feet to the line; and I can't resist giving a few key fragments of a ramshackle but pretty literal translation.

‘From an upland high,' it begins, ‘near the gates of the sky, / along a steep trail / dropping into the vale / come three flocks of sheep / that three young shepherds keep, / the first, a Moldavian, / the second a Vrancean, / and the third, Transylvanian...' (The slide into semi-poetic diction imposed by the search for rhymes—a necessary search, if one wants to get the feel of the poem—gives a dimmed idea of the spare rustic frugality of the original; I wish I could convey its almost runic pithiness. When the three shepherds meet, the scene darkens at once. While the sun sets, the Transylvanian and the Vrancean plot to murder the young Moldavian. He is braver than they; his sheep are sturdier and longer-horned, his horses better broken and his dogs fiercer. But what they do not know is that he also has a ewe lamb, Mioritza, the one the poem is named after, and she has the gift of second sight. Overhearing the whispered plot, she stops grazing and bleats desperately and without stopping for three days on end to give the alarm; and when the young shepherd asks what ails her, she bursts into speech), “O kind young man,” she says, “Drive down your flock / to the wood by the brook! / There is shade there for you / and grass for us, too. / Master, O master, / drive them down faster! / Call the dogs, call / one strong and tall, / the staunchest of all! / When the sun leaves the sky / they have said you must die / —that shepherd, the Vrancean, / and that Transylvanian!”

The shepherd says, “Little ewe, all unbidden / you speak what is hidden! / Should I chance on my death / on this stretch of heath, / tell that Transylvanian / and the other, the Vrancean, / they should bury me near / in the pen, over here, / so I may sleep / among you, my sheep, / in my fold in the dark / and hear my dogs bark!” He gives the ewe lamb further instructions: “This too must
be said: / Let them place at my head / A small flute of beech / —of love, all its speech— /
and a small flute of bone / that mourns long and lone
, / and a small flute of elder / —quicker-noted and wilder— / so when wind blows through / it will play on them too, / and make my sheep crowd / and mourn me out loud / and shed tears of blood!” The mood shifts significantly now. “But of the murder,” he says, “tell them no word! / Just tell them outright / that I married tonight / a king's daughter, the bride / of the world, and its pride. / At my wedding, tell / how a star fell, / how the guests at the feast / were maples and firs, / the high mountains, priests, / and minstrels, the birds, / a thousand small birds, / and our candles the stars.”

“But,” he goes on, “if you should pass / running over the grass / in a sash made of wool / and with tears her eyes full, / a little old crone / astray and alone, / who asks everyone: / ‘Have you seen my son? / A young shepherd boy / as handsome and slim / as though drawn through a ring? / The white of his brow, / foam milked from the cow? / His whiskers as neat / as two young ears of wheat? / And thick curls that grow / like the plumes on a crow? / And two pretty eyes / like wild blackberries?' / Then, little ewe,” the young shepherd concludes:

But all this, a strange adumbration of a still unknown Rumania, lay far ahead. Meanwhile, a change was on the way. Thoughts of wolves had receded and the sheepfolds below the path were now flimsy rings of osier and brushwood. Sometimes the massif flung out peninsulas that dropped away into the void; and for once the bias of the mountains was more a help than a decoy and the circuit of the last of these headlands led to a high saddle and the brim of a tremendous valley.

On the one hand a canyon thrust a deep gash north-east into the range I had been skirting for days, and its climb into the Carpathians reached the foot of the great ashen peaks. On the other, it plunged south-west down a gorge that would lead to the lowlands, and, at last, to the everyday world: but there was no hint of this yet. The chasm was silent except for the sound of water and the echo of an occasional rock falling. But while I gazed, clouds at the head of the ravine were breaking loose and spreading crumpled shadows across the juts and the clefts; then they blotted out the sun in an abrupt upland storm. The wind sent a few sighting shots, followed by a swish of raindrops. Sheltering under an overhang, I watched them turn into hailstones the size of mothballs: they bounced and scattered downhill by the million; and in half an hour, their white drifts were all that was left. The washed rocks looked newly cut, there was not a cloud in sight and a breeze smelling of bracken and wet earth kept the air from stagnating.

Even jumping from ledge to ledge and sliding on wet pine-needles, the downward climb lasted for hours. Scree slowed the pace and buttresses of rock, smooth as boiler-plates or spiked like iguanas, imposed gruelling swerves. Gleams across the cliffs revealed faraway threads of water; close to, they coiled and cataracted
through the tree-trunks as the ledges of the forest dropped. The conifers abdicated when the hardwoods began to outnumber them; and the ravine, deepening fast, coaxed the trees higher and higher until the oaks, mantled with ivy, pronged with the antlers of dead boughs and tufted with mistletoe, grew into giants. Clearings of beech opened their forest-chambers and bracken gave way to mares' tails, hemlock and the tatters of old man's beard. The damp, which covered everything with moss, looped the branches with creepers and plumed the clefts and forks overhead, and the flaking bark, shaggy with lichen, greaved the tree-trunks like metal tainted with verdigris, filling the slanting world underneath with a stagey green-grey light. The woods had become an undercroft of acorns, beech-nuts and moaning wood-pigeons; the sound of water grew louder; and soon, flecked by leaf-shadows and askim with wagtails and redstarts, the ice-cold Cerna was rushing by under the branches. The mysterious river split and joined again round blades of rock, slid over shelves that combed it into symmetrical waterfalls and rushed on chopping and changing down the gorge. Then I came down into quieter reaches. Shoals of trout anchored themselves among the reflections of elderflower or glided to new retreats, deep in the shade, where only a few wrinkles hinted at the current, and the black rocks, which gave the river its dark Slavonic name, cumbered the depths.