Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Along the eaves of the precipice of roof overhead, the jutting towers ended in disengaged extinguisher-tops, cones that alternated with faceted octagonal pyramids and barbed the eaves with a procession of spikes, while beyond them coloured tiles diapered the roofs in intricate patterns, like those on St. Stephen’s in Vienna. Beyond the sallyport, the inner courtyard mounted in galleries and balustrades and tiers of Romanesque arches; cusped ogees led to spiralling steps; and indoors, springing from the leafy capitals of polygonal rose-coloured marble pillars, beautiful late gothic vaults closed over the Hall of the Knights. I had seen nothing like it since Vienna and Prague; the sudden outburst of flamboyant moulding conjured up the Hradcany and the banks of the Loire.[10]

  My head was full of Hunyadi and I paced the yards and climbed the steps and explored the vaulted chambers in a state of great excitement. He is the most celebrated hero in Hungarian history; Rumanians rightly claim him as a kinsman; and he was the greatest fifteenth-century champion of the whole of Christendom. When young, he entered the service of King Sigismund of Hungary (son of the blind King of Bohemia killed at Crecy; and, later, Holy Roman Emperor), whose natural son Hunyadi was sometimes rumoured to be. He won brilliant victories, ruled Transylvania in times of trouble and finally administered the whole kingdom. His campaign in the Balkans broke the Sultan’s power in Herzegovina, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania; and his greatest single achievement was the rout, outside beleaguered Belgrade, of the army of Mehmet II, three years after the conquering Sultan had captured Constantinople. This deliverance, and the triumph over the invincible Mehmet, were re-celebrated daily by church bells rung at noon throughout the Catholic world; in Hungary they still are. The victory had reprieved the kingdom for seventy more years, until the battle of Mohács, in fact. Known all over Europe as the White Knight, he was not only a great commander and statesman, but a rock of uprightness in a kingdom and an age that seethed with conspiracy.[11]

  Born in late Plantagenet times, he was coeval with Joan of Arc and the Wars of the Roses. (It is only by links like these, and sometimes by dress, that I can fix historical figures in their backgrounds, and I put them in these pages now and then in case the reader suffers in the same way.) The architectural flourishes on the castle may have been the work of his famous son, who enlarged it.[12] Matthias, in a slightly different way, was as remarkable as his father. Usually known as Matthias Corvinus or Corvin from the raven on their shield, he accompanied his father’s campaigns at the age of twelve; later he was elected to the throne of Hungary by forty thousand nobles precariously assembled on the frozen Danube and he became one of their greatest kings. Fresh victories over the Turks continued his father’s task in the Balkans; he scattered the armies of the Poles and the Emperor and strove with the Hussites; and the Czech Catholics elected him King of Bohemia. He invested Breslau, occupied Ancona, recovered Otranto from the Turks, and his reduction of half Austria was marked by a triumphal entry into Vienna. Apart from his martial gifts, he was a statesman, a legislator, an orator and a scholar of singular brilliance who used to sit up half the night over his books. ‘Undisputably the greatest man of his day,’ an English historian says, ‘and one of the greatest who ever reigned.’ He was profoundly learned, a polyglot, a passionate humanist, the collector of the fabulous Corvinus Library, and a great palace-builder—a splendid Renaissance prince, in fact; but, unlike many of these (the historian continues), ‘with his immeasurable experience of ingratitude and treachery, he was never guilty of a single cruel or vindictive action.’

  The fine state of the castle was an exception to the post-war neglect or abolition of Hungarian monuments which I had been hearing about, and for a very good reason. ‘János Hunyadi,’ says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and nearly all historians agree, ‘was the son of Vojk (or Vaic), a magyarised Vlach,’ which means that the great crusader was of Rumanian origin. The Rumanians felt, and still feel a justifiable pride in their share in these two paragons, especially in the father; perhaps the son’s Western field of activity, and an identification with the Catholic Church even closer than his father’s, carried him too far from the ambit of the Orthodox East. Of course Rumanians were proud of him, and with every right. But anyone reading the explanatory notices inside the castle might assume that Hunyadi was a purely Rumanian hero: the Hungarian activities with which his whole life was bound up were underplayed to such a degree that he might have had nothing to do with the kingdom. It was sad to see this shining figure dragged into the bitterness and murk of territorial rivalry. The splendour seemed all at once dim and parochial.

  Count Jenö reacted with fatalism, “They seem to think the Treaty of Trianon awarded them Hungarian history as well as territory,” he said, moodily uncorking a bottle. “It’s like Corsicans celebrating Napoleon without mentioning France.” Turning our backs on the rust and slag of some iron-works nearby, we had settled under a tree. The castle soared straight ahead. “Well,” the Countess said, laying plates on the grass and handing round chicken sandwiches, “I expect the Hungarians underplayed the Rumanian side.”

  I expect they did.

  * * *

  So the first weeks of June slipped by with books and talk and jaunts and exchanges of visits. Many neighbours called; the hair of one of them was dyed a rich and obvious auburn. “He’s great fun,” said the Count. “But his appearance! O wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!” They took me with them to luncheon at the Nádasdy château across the river; it was inhabited by a tall, distinguished couple: Hunyadis, like the hero, but not relations, I believe. A Hungarian diplomatist called Baron Apor was staying with them—it is odd how figures seen only once suddenly shoot into the memory, complete at all points: he had a spherical, totally shaven head and I can see the shine of his scalp, and the veined bloodstone on his signet ring, as though he had left the room a minute ago; but can’t recall a syllable that was said.

  A cousin of the Countess lived at Bulci, a few miles away, and their family’s adherence to Rumanian causes in the pre-war Hungarian parliament had stood him in good stead when it was over. With a high-bridged nose and receding chin, fiftyish, cosmopolitan, urbane and clever, he was an excellent shot, and King Carol had appointed him Grand Veneur du Roi, or Master of the Royal Hunt; the position involved game, beaters and shooting rather than horses and hounds. (Count Jenö explained—with a sniff, I thought—that his cousin-in-law’s footing in both camps might have suggested him to the King as a possible bridge between the Rumanians and the Hungarian Transylvanians: then he shrugged dismissively, and said, “What a hope!”) The Grand Veneur had a house-party from Bucharest. “He’s bringing them over for a bite!” the Count announced; and there was daily to-and-fro movement during their stay.

  Apart from peasants and my hostess—who, in a way, only half counted—these were the only Rumanians I had met; and, from the Regat or the ‘Old Kingdom,’ absolutely the first. One was a tall diplomatist with a monocle, rather aloof and quiet, a minister on leave called Grégoire Duca.[13] The well-cut Paris country clothes and the pearls of the women, and their discreet but just detectable scent transported ported us to the pages of Vogue. All of them spoke English well, but, rather astonishingly, conversed among themselves in French as though it were their first language; and, strangely, so it was. One, extremely beautiful and with enormous grey-green eyes, was the daughter of a former Foreign Minister. (At the opera in Paris, where he was staying for the Peace Conference, a friend had asked him who someone—another Rumanian—had married; and he had answered, truthfully, “Une grue, hélas,” “Alas, a harlot”; and a few moments later, a hand appeared from the next box, holding a visiting card from the husband in question; there was a duel with pistols and her father was shot through the stomach and spent the rest of his life in great pain.) “Their duels are much worse than our affairs with sabres, where you just slash away,” the Count said. “They go in for pistols—or rapiers which are just as bad.” Another woman—chalk white, dressed all
in black with a long jade cigarette-holder and transfigured in a permanent cloud of smoke—was a passionate and famous bridge player and rather frightening; another, Marcelle, nice-looking and intelligent, was attached to a tall, charming and good-looking diplomatist called Josias v. Rantzau. When trim chauffeurs had driven them off in two dark and gleaming motor-cars, the Count suggested a wee drappie in the library and it was as we sipped that we learnt all about them. “Rantzau is First Secretary at the German Legation,” Count Jenö said, “comes from Holstein; they are great people there. Mixed up with the court of Mecklenburg-Strelitz or is it Schwerin?—I never can remember. Louis XIV made one of them a marshal of France but Mazarin locked him up in the Bastille...” (I repeat these details because these new acquaintances re-appear three hundred miles and five months further on; Josias v. Rantzau and I got to know each other well, as we shall see;[14] and some of them recurred in my life later still, and long after these travels came to an end.)

  “How smart they are,” the Countess said, rather ruefully. “They make one feel very rustic and dowdy.”

  “‘And what ho! when they lifted the lid!’” Count Jenö murmured, as he lifted the top off a freshly-arrived box of specimens. In spite of his eagerness for new limericks, he remained true to those he had learnt in his youth. “‘What ho! when they lifted the lid!’” he repeated in delectation, tweezers in hand; the word ‘chuckle’ might have been coined for him. I had thought of a riddle during the night and sprang it on him at breakfast:

  PLF, “Which is the most entomological of Shakespeare’s plays?”

  JT (after a pause), “I give up.”

  PLF, “Antennae and Coleoptera.”

  It was a great success and the words immediately wove themselves into the multilingual comment and soliloquy and the fragments of limerick that accompanied his task of unpacking and classification—“Ah! There’s a bonny wee fellow!... Kenspeckle! Antennae and Coleoptera, indeed! Retenetes!”[15] While he adjusted the milled controls of his microscope, I settled with a pile of books and a peaceful library morning lay ahead.

  But soon the Countess came in, looking troubled. Her mother had taken a steep and sudden turn for the worse: it looked as though the kastély might be turned into a house of mourning. My next stepping-stone had been arranged; it was the other side of the river at Zám, some miles upstream; and I determined, against polite demur, to set off in the morning.

  * * *

  Strictly speaking, Zám was the first real Transylvanian halt on this journey. The frontier of the old principality lay just west of the village, and its southern border was the river. Xenia, the kastély-dweller there, was thirty years old but looked much younger. She was very pretty and altogether unusual. Her father, Michael Csernovitz, whom everyone spoke of with affection, had been to school in England and travelled all over the world, and the tall, exotic trees he had brought back overshadowed the walks and the pools. When Count Jenö was mentor to a newcomer (as he was here, with me) history seemed to drop from the air and spring out of the ground. He told me that a collateral ancestor of Csernovitz had been the famous Arsenius, independent Orthodox Patriarch of Ipek,[16] which stands on the edge of Albania, Montenegro and the old Sanjak of Novipazar. At the Emperor Leopold’s prompting, he rose against the Turks at the time of Prince Eugene’s great advance in 1717 which led to yet another storming of Belgrade. But when the Turkish re-capture of the fortress threatened revenge, the Emperor granted asylum to Arsenius and his kin (hence the presence of Xenia’s family at Zám) and his 40,000 Serbian followers were scattered all over the Habsburg dominions. The Csernovitzes remained Orthodox—‘Greek Oriental’ as they called it thereabouts—and Count Jenö and Xenia’s other friends used to tease her about her wild Serbian blood. There was something arresting and unforgettable about her ivory complexion and raven hair and wide sloe-black eyes. The house had remained uninhabited for some time and there was a touch of melancholy about it, and of magic, too. At least, so it seemed for the few days I was there as we walked under the Himalayan and Patagonian trees and looked down at the Maros, which the full moon turned to mercury. The woods and streams were full of nightingales.

  * * *

  The last true Transylvanian sojourn and the longest unfolded some miles further along the Maros and every detail sticks in my mind.

  I had heard of István[17] as far back as Budapest and we had met once or twice among the moths and the limericks at Kápolnás, where they loved him. He had been sent to school at the Theresianum, that Viennese establishment set up by Maria Theresa for sons of her noble subjects: kshatriyas in a Brahminical hierarchy which had remained unaltered until the Empire and the Kingdom had both vanished forever. (The place was closely linked to the Konsular Akademie, where I had pored over maps in February; and, which rather impressed me, the students of both places formerly wore cocked hats and dress-swords, like Young Törless.) He ran away to join a Hussar regiment during the War and was commissioned at once, just in time for all the disasters. Later, during the Béla Kun regime, he escaped from one of Szamuely’s execution squads and was involved in the troubled aftermath; and soon afterwards Transylvania was ceded to Rumania. Cultivated, tall, fine-looking with a hawk’s nose, a high forehead and wide clear blue eyes like a francolin’s, he was a brilliant shot, horseman and steeplechaser, and a virtuoso in all he took up. He was now in his early thirties and at the height of his vigour; and his dash, charm, enterprise and humour made him liked by everyone, though it sometimes landed him in scrapes, including four of ‘those affairs with sabres,’ each time as the challenged party. Land-reform soon left very little of an estate which, though it had always prospered, had never been enormous. His family’s tenure had been long; his elderly parents still lived there. He was linked with a deep atavistic attachment to the place, and though managing the remnant of arable and forest had kept him from seeking new fortunes abroad, the confinement irked him. When we talked of my earlier intention of joining the Indian army, his eyes kindled. “I’d have loved that!” he said. “Could I do it now, do you think?” Why not? An Irish O’Donnell had been governor of Transylvania in the eighteenth century; “and what about that chap Rantzau’s relation—a Holsteiner!—commanding an army for Louis XIV? I would be very happy with a squadron of Bengal Lancers!” He could see himself clearly in the role, and so could I.[18] He poured new drinks and sighed; how provincial and constricted the world had become! I admired him very much; he was tremendous fun, and we became great friends. (Like nearly everyone in these pages, he vanished from sight when the War came and the subsequent uprooting and dispersal interposed eight years before we were able to pick up the threads, and then it was by chance.)

  Why not stay on a month or two, he would urge. Or a year? And what was all the hurry, even when I did set off?

  “I’ve got an idea!” he exclaimed at luncheon. “We’ll all club together and buy you a calf! You could drive it along the road in front of you. When it grows up, you can introduce it to a bull; and then there’s another calf; and later on, another. You could arrive in Constantinople in a few years with an enormous herd...”

  Meanwhile, like a kind host, he was eager that I should miss nothing. One of the neighbours we called on was a serious, elderly Swabian who asked me what I was studying: “Was studieren Sie?” It was an awkward question; I couldn’t think of an answer. Languages? Art? Geography? Folklore? Literature? None of them seemed to fit. Seconds ticked by, and in desperation, I said, “Gar nichts!”—“Absolutely nothing!” The ensuing shocked silence lasted longer still and it was even more uncomfortable. For a German worshipper of diligence and application—Fleissigkeit, indeed—my confession was blasphemy, and István laughed intermittently all the way home. Absence prevented us from visiting another neighbour he thought I would be interested in. Gróf K, who lived in the Hátszeg valley beyond Vajdahunyad—Hunedoara—sounded a kind of Squire Weston, with a dash of Mytton and Waterton thrown in. “I once saw him get on a horse for a bet,” István said. “Then some
one tied a bag over its head. It went mad, but he managed to stay on for five minutes.”

  István’s Rumanian was fluent in practical country matters, and one or two farming details even came to him more readily in the vernacular, but too limited for anything abstract or high-flown. Once we supped with forty peasants and farmers, some of them the new owners of his land, at a trestle-table in a clump of beech trees; and he took me to see an old shepherd, who unfolded tales of spirits, fairies and werewolves. (Priculici, akin to the Slavonic vrkolak, were named; they were vampires. And stafi and strigoi, who sounded like a mixture of evil spirits and ghosts; and witches too, if strigoi, like the Italian strega, comes from the Latin stryx.) All the country people thereabouts believed in these supernaturals and dreaded them; werewolves lurked, ready to change shape at dusk; and woe to man or beast who drank the rainwater out of a bear’s footprint! He also took me to a withered crone who was a witch, and begged her to recite some metrical spells. She intoned them through gums which held one dark tooth like the single eye of the Three Grey Sisters and I took down a few of them phonetically: mysterious, alliterative incantations: descântece, as they are called. I met similar ones in Moldavia later on.