Between the Woods and the Water (33 page)

* * *

Running about in gym shoes next day, my foot landed on an inch of nail sticking out of a plank in a dismantled woodshed and it went clean through. There was little pain and not much blood but it hurt to walk on, so I lay reading in a deck-chair under a tree, then hobbled about with a stick. It healed in three days and on the fourth I set off.

The Maros had dominated the last months. Now the Cerna had taken its place and a few days earlier, just before dawn, I had ridden back upstream for a last look. The fleece of leaves soared to the watershed; underneath, the valley lay brooding and still in the half-light; it was a wilderness of green moss and grey creepers with ivy-clad watermills rotting along the banks and streams tumbling through the shadows; then shafts of lemon-coloured light struck down through the trunks into the vapour coiling along the stream-bed and into the branches. I might have been trotting through a world emerging from primordial chaos.

But today I was following a lower reach. Leaving its chasm and heading south, it joined a wide trough climbing north between
two great massifs which narrowed steadily until the road reached the pass; then, many leagues away, it dropped the other side into the valley of the Timis, and still further along it lay the point from which I had launched my private attack on the Carpathians two weeks earlier.

Striking south, I pursued a sheep-track in the lee of the woods, wondering how much the valley might have changed since Roman times and, looking up at the eagles and the beetling forests, thought: hardly at all.

The winding osier-bed shared the valley with a road and a railway and every now and then the loose triple plait would unravel and then nonchalantly assemble again. Buffaloes floundered in the reeds, a breath of wind tilted the threads of the Gypsies' fires and their horses, ranging loose among the flocks, grazed to the edge of the forest. There were fields of stubble and hundreds of sunflowers flaring yellow round their dark hearts; and the pale green sheaths of the Indian corn had withered long ago to a papery grey. Strings of waggons were returning empty upstream or labouring south loaded with tree-trunks to be lashed together and floated down the Danube; and when two of them crossed, ropes of dust lengthened in both directions and wrapped the road and its passengers in a cloud; it settled on the fruit trees that sometimes lined the road for furlongs on end, heavy with blue plums nobody picked that scattered the roadside in wasp-haunted rings.

Dipping to the river, the path crossed it again and again on wooden bridges. The sun splintered down through a colander of leaves and every so often, minor rapids twirled through the red and green rocks while mermaid-like water-weed streamed along the current. (Without knowing it, I must have stored up an almost photographic memory of this beautiful valley for when I travelled along it twenty years later, by the little train this time, forgotten landmarks kept recurring until I would begin to remember a stretch of flag-leaves, an islet with a clump of willows, a spinney, an oak tree struck by lightning or a solitary chapel a minute or two before they actually re-appeared; for suddenly, with an obliging
loop of the river, there they were, drowned twenty years deep but surfacing one by one in a chain of rescued visions like lost property restored.)

An old man under a mulberry tree asked me where I was going. When I said “Constantinopol,” he nodded mildly and asked no more, as though I had said the next village. A spectacular bird I had never seen before, about the size of a crow and of a brilliant light blue while it was in the air, flew to a nearby branch. “Dumbrăveancă,” the old man called it: “the one who loves oak-woods.” (It was a roller.) Hoping to catch another glimpse of its wonderful colours I clapped my hands and it flew into the air from its new perch like a Maeterlinckian figment.

The old man picked up a fallen mulberry from the grass, and, in dumb show, crooked a forefinger as though embedding a hook and then made a feint at casting a line over the river. Did he mean they used mulberries for bait? Surely not for trout? “No, no.” He shook his head and said another name, his gesture indicating a much larger fish until his hands were as far apart as a concertina player's at full stretch. A sterlet, from the Danube, perhaps. It was not far.

It was much closer than I thought, for all at once the sides of the valley fell apart and revealed the towers and trees of Orșova, then the troubled yellow and blue-grey waters of the Danube and the palisade of the Serbian mountains beyond. The vision was dramatic and sudden. The wide sweep of the river came on stage, as it were, through a precipitous overlap to the west; then, after dividing with a flutter round a feathery island and joining again, it pressed on to a scarcely less striking exit downstream.

* * *

Hastening into the town, I rushed to collect a clutch of letters from the poste-restante—and only just in time. I settled with them at a café table on the quay. One, full of geological advice, was from my father, posted two months before in Simla: ‘Everyone
has moved here for the Hot Weather,' he wrote. ‘I can see the western part of the Central Himalayan Chain from my window, and many of the snow-peaks of Tibet. It is a wonderful change from Calcutta...'

My mother's was in answer to what I had hoped was an amusing description of my parasitic summer; I sent her progress reports every week or so, half to amuse, and half to reinforce my diary later on.
[2]
‘...I see what you mean about
Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour
,' she wrote. ‘Are you going to follow the Danube? You'll come to a place called Rustchuk—I've just looked it up in the Atlas,' she went on. ‘Guess who was born there!' It was Michael Arlen. (Also, though I hadn't yet heard of him, Elias Canetti.) She was full of information like this, often not accurate but always interesting. She had a passion for cutting bits out of newspapers and a mass of clippings, full of London doings, soon covered the table.

There were several other letters and a canvas envelope crossed with blue chalk held last month's four pound notes; just in time, once more! But the letter I tore open first and with most excitement was written in French in Angéla's wild hand and posted the morning after she reached Budapest. All our schemes and subterfuges had been successful! The drift of the thick sheets was affectionate and funny and steeped in the delights of our triple fugue. I pushed the letters and clippings and books on one side and wrote back at once; then to London and Simla, and by the time I had finished the sun had set and left the river a pale zinc colour. A new moon showed wanly for an hour then dipped under the hills opposite.

I read and re-read Angéla's letter. Our feelings—mine, anyhow—had run deeper than we had admitted, and for as long as it lasted, involvement was total: affection and excitement had been showered with lavish hands; no wonder we had walked on air:
high spirits and feelings of adventure and comedy had pitched everything in a lighthearted key and I felt sure that it was to fend off later sorrow that Angéla had skilfully kept it there. Our short time together had been filled with unclouded delight—separation had been the fault of neither of us and there were no grounds for anything but thanks and perhaps we had been even luckier than we knew. But the exhilaration of Angéla's news was followed by a sharp fit of depression.

There was another minor source of distress: no more castles the other side of the Danube. These refuges had scattered my path intermittently ever since the Austrian border. Their inhabitants seemed doubly precious now, and I brooded with homesickness on feasts and libraries and stables and the endless talk by lamp- and candle-light; and all this led to a return of my earlier mood after our brief rush through the arcades and gables of Hermannstadt.
[3]
It had been a last outpost of the architecture of the West. I thought how romanesque, after branching into lancets and spires and flying buttresses, had given rise to these stalwart Carpathian bastions of the Reform; and, finally, to the splendour and hyperbole of the Counter-Reformation. It would be the last of the Jesuits too, and all their works: heroes, villains and saints by turns. They were at the heart of all the conflicts and the triumphs I had been reading about, daemons of the Counter-Reformation in Central Europe and harbingers of the Thirty Years' War. I had never met any, but even now some of the dark glamour remains: these were the men, I thought to myself, who had rifled the air with spiralling saints, twirled columns, broken pediments, groined cupolas and tilted thousands of heads backwards under the trompe-l'oeil pageants of a hundred baroque ceilings.

What a stamp they had left! (Or so I thought.)
Sint ut sunt aut non sint!
Even in this little riverside town, the note of the bell
striking the hour, the scrolls and volutes and the tired ochre walls would have been a little different if the Society had never existed.
[4]

* * *

For some vanished reason, instead of simply plunging into the Yugoslavian mountains opposite, I had planned to take the river-steamer round two small loops of the Danube to the Bulgarian town of Vidin.

Rather surprisingly, I had never met anyone who had been to Bulgaria. If the Hungarians were loth to cross the Carpathians into old Rumania, Bulgaria was even further from their minds; and the Rumanians, for all their earlier ties with Constantinople, were just as reluctant. Both countries looked westward to Vienna, Berlin, London and Paris and the benighted regions of the Balkans remained
terra incognita
. All they knew was that Bulgaria had been a province of the Ottoman Empire until sixty years earlier, and that the yoke had not been finally and formally shed until 1911. As we know, Hungary had been subjected to a long Turkish occupation, but that was nearly three centuries ago and it had left no trace beyond the smoking of long-stemmed pipes; Transylvania and the Rumanian principalities had been vassals of the Turks, but not occupied by them; their historical continuity had remained intact, and this was what counted. Bulgaria had a different past, a Balkan past; it was the first state the Turks enslaved and almost the last to get rid of them, after an occupation lasting five centuries, and in the eyes of everyone living north of the river, it seemed the darkest,
most backward and least inviting country in Europe except Albania—unjustly, as I was soon to learn.

For half a millennium then, the country had been a northern province of an empire stretching deep into Asia. Constantinople had been its beacon and lodestar; the Bulgarians still called it ‘Tzarigrad,' ‘the City of the Emperors,' though the Roman-Greek Orthodox Emperors, and not the Turkish Sultans who replaced them in 1453, were the sovereigns the name commemorated. The word also recalled, by association, early Bulgarian splendours, when these wild invaders from the Pontic steppes had ransacked the Balkans and established their dominion from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. Tsars of their own ruled over it—sovereigns who, at times, were almost rivals to the East Roman Emperors themselves. The aura of the country had acted as a magnet ever since I had set out, but my depression at saying goodbye to Central Europe had, for a moment, weakened this lure.

I was looking dejectedly at my old Austrian map of the region, when a voice said: “Können wir Ihnen helfen? Est-ce qu'on peut vous aider?” The speaker was a friendly land-surveyor from Bucharest. I told him I planned to cross to the other side the next day, after a look at the Iron Gates. He said, “Don't worry about the Iron Gates, the Kazan is much more important. But you'll never manage to see it in the time.” Two friends joined him and they all advised me to put off my departure and catch the Austrian river-steamer the day after. They were a topographical survey team on their way upstream to do some work at a place called Moldova Veche, beyond the defile of the Kazan, and if I really wanted to see this extraordinary region, they could drop me at a suitable place for it, and I could make my own way back downstream. They began to discuss arrangements, each offering a new suggestion, until the first speaker said something which made the others laugh: a proverb which is the Rumanian equivalent of ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth'—“A child with too many midwives remains with his navel-string uncut.” (
Copilul cu mai multe moas, e rămână cu buricul netaiat
.)

* * *

I slept on a sofa in the house where they were lodging. We got up in the dark, and settling among the ropes, chains, tripods, theodolites and the bi-coloured ten-foot poles in their little truck, set off. In the jerky beam of the headlamps, the tortuous road above the river seemed both wonderful and mysterious. It had been prised and hacked out of the perpendicular flank of the mountains, built up sometimes over the flood on tall supporting walls and sometimes lifted on arches; sometimes it plunged under caves scooped through towering headlands. Grottos and galleries uncoiled through the dark for mile after mile like some thoroughfare driving into the heart of an obsessional dream. Shadowy mountain masses soared out of the glimmering water below, leaving only a narrowing band of starlight overhead, as though the two cliffs might join. Then after an abrupt bend the other shore would swing away into the distance with the stars spreading like a momentary chart of the heavens, only to shrink again as the two precipices looked once more about to collide. The marvellous road had been built in the 1830s; it was one of the most important of the tangible mementos of the great István Széchenyi.
[5]
Invisible mountains soared in the dark and dropped again, small villages huddled for a lamplit moment over dim assemblies of canoes and were gone, and the woods and clefts closed in. At last the sky in the west began to widen in a final array of stars; they were beginning to pale; a village was half awake, and a small faintly-lit river-steamer with its bows pointing downstream was hauling in its gang-plank. “
Mama Dracului!
” the driver shouted and honked his horn, letting loose a pandemonium of echoes. The gang-plank stopped half-way, hesitated, then reversed and touched the landing-stage and before it could change its mind again I was across it and
waving back to my spectral friends as the boat swung out into the current.