Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  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.

  There wasn’t much room in their stifling den and when they understood I wanted to sleep out they strewed brushwood in the lee of a rick. The old man put his hand on the grass and then laid it on mine with a commiserating look: it was wet with dew. He made gestures of rugging up and I put on everything I possessed, while they dossed down indoors.

  When we had said goodnight I lay gazing at the moon. The shadows of the trees lay like cut-out cloth across the clearing. Owls signalled to each other close by and there were sleepy grunts from the sties prompted by dreams, perhaps, or indigestion, and now and then a pig, roused in the small hours by night-starvation, munched in semi-liquid bliss.

  * * *

  It was still night when we got up, covered with damp as foretold, and while we ate bread and cheese Bálint, the elder, unlatched the sty. The pigs rushed out in a hysterical stampede then settled more temperately to a quiet day’s rooting among the acorns and beech-nuts scattered deep under the branches. To put me on the right path Géza led me across the woods, whistling and twirling his long tomahawk and tossing it in the air and catching it as he loped through the bracken; when he left me I went on by myself for two hours by moonlight, and at daybreak I was in the ruins of a huge castle over-grown with trees. The forest dropped steeply for over a thousand feet, and down below, between its leaf-covered mountains, the Danube valley coiled upstream from the east. It turned south beyond the battlements and after a mile twisted westwards, still deep in shadow, and out of sight at last between further green shoulders of forest. The track, following a wall of fortification downhill through slants of beech and hazel, levelled out before a great tower on a knoll; and a final wet scramble brought me down into Visegrád.[1]

  I had been told about this castle.

  The Magyars first settled in Central Europe at the end of the ninth century as fierce pagan invaders. Four hundred years later, when they had been respectable for at least three, their country had become a great Christian kingdom and the Arpáds, who ruled over it, by now an ancient dynasty of warrior-kings, legislators, crusaders and saints, were allied to most of the great houses of Christendom; King Béla IV, brother of St. Elizabeth, was the ablest of them. He lived in turbulent times. In recent decades, Jenghiz Khan and his descendants had laid Asia waste from the China Sea to the Ukraine and in the spring of 1241 news of great danger reached Hungary: after burning Kiev, Jenghiz Khan’s grandson, Batu, was heading for the eastern passes. Béla tried to prepare defences but the Mongols’ onslaught through the Carpathians was so fast that they surprised and routed the sleepy Magyar nobles and then ranged over the Great Plain, emptying and burning the towns all through the summer. Promising the peasants their lives if they brought in the harvest, they slaughtered them in the autumn when it was safely threshed; then, crossing the frozen river on Christmas Day, they set about the western regions. A few towns were saved by their walls or by the surrounding fens, but Esztergom was burnt and most of the others were soon in cinders and the inhabitants slain or driven off as slaves.

  Suddenly, there was a lull. Messengers had arrived in the Mongol camp with the news that five thousand miles away in Karakorum, Ogodai, the successor of Jenghiz Khan, had died; and all at once, on the marches of Siberia and beyond the Great Wall, in the ruined kingdoms of the Caliphate, among the wreckage of Cracow and Sandomir and the Moravian pine-forests and the smoking Magyar cities, a scattering of savage princes turned their slant-eyed boyish faces towards Chinese Tartary; the race for the succession was about to start; and by the middle of March, they had all vanished. Béla, returning from an island refuge in Dalmatia, found his kingdom in ruins. Death and capture had halved the population and the survivors were cautiously beginning to emerge from the woods. His task resembled the founding of a new kingdom, and the first step was to make it secure against the Mongols. Hence the castle that I was striding through at Visegrád. Up went this tremendous stronghold and many others followed; and the next time the Mongols invaded, they were repulsed.

  * * *

  As much German as Magyar was to be heard on the half-awake quay of Visegrád, for the speakers were Géza’s Swabians. When the Turks were driven out, thousands of peasant families from South Germany had boarded flat-bottomed boats and set off from the cities of the Upper Danube, chiefly from Ulm; sailing downstream, they landed on the depopulated shore and settled for good. Their language and their costumes on feast days were said to have remained unaltered since the time of Maria Theresa in whose reign they had taken root. There must have been a lot of intermarriage but spotting people with obligingly tow-coloured or raven hair, I thought—and probably wrongly—I could pick out a typical German from a typical Magyar.

  When the path along the Danube turned east, the radiance of morning poured along the valley. Soon the cape of a slender isl
and, plumed with willow trees and patterned with fields of young wheat, divided the river in two. Nets were looped from branch to branch, fishing boats were moored to the trunks of aspens, poplars and willows and pewter-coloured stems lifted a silvery pale-green haze against the darker leaves of the riverside woods. The island followed the river’s windings for nearly twenty miles. A trim steamer ruffled the current now and then, and as the day advanced, the sparse traffic of barges multiplied.

  But within an hour or two, the river began to conduct itself in a fashion unprecedented since our first snowy meeting at Ulm eleven weeks earlier. (Only eleven weeks! It seemed half a lifetime already!) Indeed, ever since the river had first bubbled out of the underworld in Prince Fürstenberg’s park in the Black Forest. For the Danube, after describing two congruent semicircles, was turning due south; and so it would continue, flowing clean across Hungary for a hundred and eighty miles—from the top to the bottom of the atlas page, as it were—until it turned again and streamed eastwards under the battlements of Belgrade. It was an exciting moment.

  * * *

  By late afternoon, towards the end of the island which had kept me company all day, I reached Szentendre, a little baroque country town of lanes, cobbled streets, tiled roofs and belfries with onion cupolas. The hills were lower now; vineyards and orchards had replaced the cliffs and the forests and there was a feeling in the air that one was nearing a great city. The townspeople were the descendants of Serbians who had fled from the Turks three centuries ago; they still talked Serbian and worshipped in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral which their ancestors had built. Griechisch Orientalisch in German, they are distinct from the Uniats further east—Griechisch Katholisch—who, though they cling to the Orthodox rite, acknowledge the Pope. I only learnt about this later but an icon instead of a crucifix on my bedroom wall ought to have put me on the scent.

  [1] If I had come that way a few months later, I would have seen the first fragments of King Matthias’s palace dug up. I have seen it since: the magnificent Renaissance ruins give a clear idea of what royal Hungary was like before the Turkish conquest.

  2. BUDAPEST

  WHEN A mid-morning sunbeam prized one eyelid open a few days later, I couldn’t think where I was. An aroma of coffee and croissants was afloat under a vaulted ceiling; furniture gleamed with beeswax and elbow-grease; books ascended in hundreds, and across the arms of a chair embroidered with a blue rampant lion with a forked tail and a scarlet tongue, a dinner jacket was untidily thrown. An evening tie hung from the looking glass, pumps lay in different corners, the crumpled torso of a stiff shirt (still worn with a black tie in those days) gesticulated desperately across the carpet and borrowed links glittered in the cuffs. The sight of all this alien plumage, so unlike the travel-stained heap that normally met my waking eyes, was a sequence of conundrums.

  Then, suddenly, illumination came. I was in Budapest.

  * * *

  Little remains of the journey from Szentendre: a confused impression of cobbled approaches, the beginnings of tramlines, some steep streets and airy views of the Danube and its bridges and the search for the hill of Buda. The subsequent magnificence was due, at one or two removes, to the Baltic-Russian friends in Munich whose kindness had begun in recent weeks to scatter my rough itinerary with oases like this.

  I was back among barons and these ones lived on the steep hill of Buda (the Vár or citadel) which lifted the empty Royal Palace high above the right bank of the river. The Uri utca—die Herrengasse in German—a waving street of jutting windows, tiled roofs and arched doors with coats of arms, ran along the very summit of this castled height. It must have been built soon after 1686, when the city was recaptured from the Turks, and the foundations of many of the houses were tunnelled with sinister Turkish cellars. Perched above the din of the capital, this patrician quarter had something of the hush of a country town, and the houses, inhabited by the same families for generations, were called Palais so-and-so, including the charming one that harboured me. “All rot, of course,” my hostess said; she had been brought up largely in England. “We seem to have a passion for grand styles in Hungary. It’s a perfectly ordinary town house.”

  Tibor and Berta were in their mid-forties. Duly forewarned, they had taken me under their wing with a completeness for which Esztergom might have been some preparation; the way Hungarians construed hospitality seemed a recurring miracle. Tibor was a captain in a regiment of Horse-Gunners, and the lowness of his rank, for he had served all through the war, was due to the minute size of the Hungarian army after the Treaty of Trianon. Liked by everyone, amusing, rather caustic, intolerant of nonsense, and usually dressed in a tweed coat and skirt, Berta was tall and handsome with a stripe of grey in her dark hair. Her father, a distinguished Graf—or rather gróf in Hungarian—had been governor of Fiume before the war, and as we drove about Budapest in her small car she told me fascinating stories about the lost world of Trieste, Fiume, Pola and the Istrian peninsula. The family, like many another, was fairly hard-up now and some of the house was let; she sat on many committees and was always busy. I was caught up in her activities, accompanying her on shopping expeditions combined with sight-seeing. If she thought they promised interest or amusement, I went with her on calls, and when in a couple of days there was a dance in a house nearby, she got me asked and set about assembling evening things from Tibor’s wardrobe and then from neighbours’. When I asked if she were going, she laughed and said, “Catch me! But you’ll enjoy it.” And so I did.

  The ball was all that it should have been and, as she pointed out, it took place in a real palace; on the stairs leading to the ballroom, a friendly touch on the elbow revealed my stork-loving Esztergom ally, who promptly resumed his role of mentor. The ball ended with the band breaking into Gypsy tunes and launching a number of the dancers into the csárdás. One young couple, he with his hands on his partner’s hips and hers on his shoulders, threw themselves into it with a marvellously fierce and stamping brio, their hair flinging about like the manes of ponies. When all seemed over, I crammed with them, the stork-fancier, his beautiful partner, a girl I clove to called Annamaria, and several others, into a couple of cars and whirled downhill and across the Chain-Bridge to plunge into the scintillating cave of the most glamorous night-club I have ever seen. Did the floor of the Arizona really revolve? It certainly seemed to. Snowy steeds were careering round it at one moment, feathers tossing: someone said he had seen camels there, even elephants...A bit later, spangled acrobats were flying through the spot-lit cigarette smoke, joining, somersaulting, spiralling on their own axes, sailing with arms outstretched as timely rings flew to their palms from the temporary surrounding dark; and, finally, poised on the biceps of a sequin-studded titan, they built a human pagoda, skipping nimbly aloft over each others’ shoulders until, from the apex somewhere near the ceiling, a slim, frilled figure with a star on her brow was blowing kisses. There was something familiar about this blonde and smiling team...suddenly I recognised them: they were my old friends from those sketching forays in Vienna, Conrad’s and my indirect benefactors for a dozen himbeergeist, the Koschka Brothers![1] There they were, pyramidally extant, glittering in apotheosis! (The friendly impact of their posters—A CSODÁLATOS KOSCHKAK!—kept hitting me in the eye for the rest of my stay.) After this, we drank some more in a house in the Werböczy utca, and when Annamaria showed me the way back to the nearby Uri utca, we were not sure whether it was the moon or dawn that cast our shadows on the cobbles.

  So it was no wonder that the reflected eleven o’clock sunlight, when it hit the side of the silver coffee-pot, detonated like silent shell-fire... The door flung open and a black Alsatian called Tim bounded in and leapt on the bed. He was followed by his owner, Micky (Miklós), the son of the house, a rather unruly and very entertaining boy of fourteen or fifteen in Tintin plus-fours. “Here,” he said, giving me a tumbler of water with one hand and a bottle of Alka Seltzer with the other, “My ma says you’ll probably need these.”

&nb
sp; * * *

  I had drifted into a noctambulistic set and my stay in Budapest was punctuated by awakenings like this. Life seemed perfect: kind, uncensorious hosts; dashing, resplendent and beautiful new friends against the background of a captivating town; a stimulating new language, strong and startling drinks, food like a delicious bonfire and a prevailing atmosphere of sophistication and high spirits that it would have been impossible to resist even had I wanted. I was excited by the famous delights of the place, especially by certain haunts like Kakuk (the Cuckoo) on the slopes of Buda, where, late at night, half a dozen Gypsies bore down on the guests like smiling crows bent on steeping everything in their peculiar music. Badly played, this can sound like treacle and broken bottles and the tunes may not be authentically Hungarian—Bartók and Kodály are firm about their Gypsy and thus non-Magyar origin—but they deceived Liszt and they enraptured me. In the slow passages, the hammers of the czembalom fluttered and hesitated over the strings and the violins sank to a swooning langour, only to rekindle with an abrupt syncope when the hammers and the bows broke into double time and the czembalist went mad as the leading violinist, with his fingers crowding the strings in a dark tangle, stooped and slashed beside one listener’s ear after another and closed in on his instrument like a welterweight in a clinch; passages, one might think, which could only end in ecstasy or a dead faint. Soaring glissandos, cascading pengös: all eyes grew mistier as cork after cork was drawn... Who paid for all this? Certainly not me—even a gesture towards helping was jovially brushed aside as though it were not worth the waste of words. (The day after I arrived I had made for the Consulate in the Zoltán utca and picked up a registered envelope with an unprecedented six pounds which had mounted up since Vienna.)