Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The village calendar was starred with feasts and saints’ days and weddings. Gypsies throve, the sound of their instruments was always within earshot and the village squares were suddenly ringed with great circular wreaths of dancers in wonderful clothes with their hands on each others’ shoulders, a couple of hundred or more: and the triple punctuating stamp of the horă and the sârbă, falling all together, would veil all their bravery for a mo-ment in dust-clouds. (I learnt all these dances later on.) It was at night that they impinged most insistently, especially on the eve of a wedding, when the groom and his paranymphs went through the slow stages of a mock abduction. If the rhythms of High Hat, The Continental or Get Along, Little Dogie flagged for a moment among the faded looking-glasses and sconces and portraits in the kastély, staccato cries, high-pitched and muted by distance, as the bride was hoisted aloft, would come sailing up from the village below and through the long windows. “Hai! Hai! Hai! Hai!”[21] The dancing was spurred on late into the night by the new apricot brandy, and the fiddles and zithers and clarinets and double-basses were heckled by the distant yelping of wild rustic epithalamia; then strings, hammers and the shrill reeds would be drowned once more by Dinah, and our own hullabaloo under the chandeliers.

  DINAH,

  IS THERE ANYONE FINER?

  IN THE STATE OF CAROLINA?

  IF THERE IS, AND YOU KNOW HER,

  SHOW HER TO ME!

  EVERY NIGHT,

  WHY DO I

  SHAKE WITH FRIGHT?

  BECAUSE MY DINAH MIGHT

  CHANGEHERMINDABOUTME!...

  “Hai, pe loc, pe loc, pe loc!” the dancers below were stamping in unison. “Să răsară busuioc!” (“Stamp on the ground, let the basil shoot up!”)

  DINAH,

  WITH HER DIXIE EYES BLAZIN’

  HOW I LOVE TO SIT AND GAZE IN-

  TO THE EYES OF DINAH LEE...

  “Foiae verde, spic de griu, măi!” A wailing doină of real Gypsies mounted through the glimmer, followed by a reedy twirl on the clarinet; but the green leaf and the wheat-ear of the local song hadn’t a chance:

  DINAH!

  IF SHE SHOULD WANDER TO CHINA,

  I WOULD BOARD AN OCEAN LINER,

  JUSTTOBEWITHDINAHLEE...[22]

  [1] The only followers of the Latin Rite in this part of Rumania were the Hungarians and the Swabians. The surrounding population were mostly Uniats, I think: Catholics of the Oriental Rite, that is, whose Orthodox liturgy had been sung in Rumanian since the late seventeenth century, after the Greek period which followed the original Church Slavonic.

  [2] The problem was solved twenty years later at the Abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy. It is the eleventh verse of Psalm 91 and, as it is sung every night at Compline, I must have heard it the night before.

  [3] The Rumanian, thus the official name is Mures, (pronounced ‘Mooresh’), but as chance willed that I only heard its Magyar form of Maros (pronounced ‘Marosh’) during this part of the journey, I find it unnatural to put it down differently. From now on there are often two or three names for geographical features, so confusions are bound to occur and I apologise for them in advance.

  [4] S, avars, in.

  [5] A ‘Ban,’ a Persian word first brought to these regions by the Avars, was a military governor and his jurisdiction was a Banat, a term later applied to some frontier provinces of Hungary, Slavonia and Croatia; but the unqualified ‘Banat’ has always meant this particular region. Rather oddly, a Ban never ruled over it.

  [6] The memory of Count Jenö’s prepossession cropped up at luncheon with Arthur Koestler in an Athens taverna about twenty years ago. Immediately alert, Koestler said it had interested him too, but he didn’t know as much about it as he would like. A year or two later The Thirteenth Tribe appeared, causing a stir among Jewish historians. Could this taverna conversation have been the impulse that prompted him to take it up again? It is too late to ask him.

  [7] Bruce Chatwin, for whom nomads and their history hold fewer and fewer secrets, tells me that this is borne out by finds from 400 BC, dug up in a Turkic kurgan (barrow) at Katanda in the Altai kept intact by the permafrost, of a nomad chief clad in a patchwork jerkin of lozenges, 4” x 3”, dyed orange, blue, yellow and red, skinned off small mammals—jerboas, perhaps, that bound about the steppe.

  [8] It is haunted by the sacrifice of the master mason’s wife, like the Bridge of Arta in Epirus and Curtea de Arges, in Wallachia. All three are the theme of old ballads.

  [9] Hunedoara.

  [10] An exact replica of this castle stands among poplars on a lake-island in the City Park of Budapest. It was put up in honour of Hunyadi for the 1898 celebrations of a thousand years of Hungarian history, and it was the memory of this fleeting glimpse which, for a moment, had given the Transylvanian original its almost fictional look.

  [11] Some experts, including David Rosenthal, its most recent translator, are convinced that the great Catalan epic of chivalry, Tirant lo Blanc, was based on the feats of Hunyadi. Written a few decades after the hero’s death, it was one of the favourite books of Cervantes; and if, as some think, lo Blanc—‘the White’—is really ‘the Vlach’ (V and B being interchangeable), the theory of his Rumanian paternity is strengthened.

  [12] It was added to further by Gábor Bethlen, the celebrated Thirty Years’ War commander.

  [13] His brother Jean, the last Prime Minister, had been assassinated by the Iron Guard six months before. “A horrible lot of people,” Count Jenö succinctly said; then: “What a pity! Duca was the best politician in the country.”

  [14] He was a close friend of Adam v. Trott and was involved, later on, in the Stauffenberg Conspiracy, though it seems he had scruples about actual assassination. See Tatiana Metternich’s autobiography Tatiana in England, Under Five Passports in the United States and The Berlin Diaries 1940-45 of ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov (Chatto, 1986).

  [15] Pronounced ‘Rett-en-ett-esh!,’ it means ‘terrible.’

  [16] It is now Pec′, in southern Yugoslavia. The Patriarch’s old monastery still stands, shaded by plane trees and full of marvellous frescoes. The region is almost entirely inhabited today by those Albanian Moslems known as Kossovars.

  [17] Some of the people in these pages have vanished from the scene but here and there, when, like István, and Angéla in the next chapter, they are as extant as I am, it seems best to alter names. It gives greater freedom in piecing together their talk. Also, many things have changed since those easy-going times.

  [18] See A Time of Gifts, p. 219.

  [19] See Sir Roy Harrod The Life of John Maynard Keynes, David Garnett’s The Golden Echo and Dr G. Gömöri in the New Hungarian Quarterly (No. 79, Autumn 1980). Keynes was reproached by some of his Bloomsbury friends for arranging for the release of frozen funds for Békássy’s return to take part in the war instead of safe internment for the duration.

  [20] I think they must have belonged to the interesting ancient community of the Motsi, who inhabit peaks and valleys deep in the western Transylvanian massif.

  [21] At some of these rough nuptials, it was said, cries of acclaim would hail the display of a gory sheet or a shift from the bride’s window in proof of maidenhead now ended; a consummation said sometimes to be abetted, if doubt hovered, by her mother’s privy sacrifice of a pigeon behind the scenes.

  [22] Stop Press! Of course, it was Dinah’s Dixie eyes, not Gypsy eyes, that blazed, but the latter is what we mistakenly sang, and the error has got immovably lodged in the memory.

  6. TRIPLE FUGUE

  I KNEW that István and his family meant it when they suggested that I should stay all summer, but I had swerved so widely from my austere programme that the more I enjoyed these miraculous weeks the harder my conscience began to smite. So I wrote to London with rough dates and addresses for the despatch of cash: this parasitic castle-life had left my funds comparatively intact, but I would be needing some soon. Meanwhile, the valley cast a strong counter-spell and random notions suggesting delay kept droppi
ng out of the air. “If you stayed on,” István said one morning, “we could go and shoot chamois”; then, later, there would be stags; and, later still, bears. When I said I had never shot anything larger than a rabbit he said, “I’ll teach you.” And then, what about fox-hunting with Baron Wesselenyi’s pack? I could manage that, except that I had no money. István smiled.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “neither have I. Nobody has.”

  The topic was interrupted by the gathering of a party, twelve-strong and in two carriages, to catch crayfish in a mountain stream, and István and I were to go on ahead. We found the stream: it tumbled out of rocks and bracken in a clearing full of wood-pigeons where all the foxes in Transylvania, and their vixens too, could have been decadently gloved in magenta. The rest of the party arrived, and every boulder and clump of water-weed in the brook seemed to harbour our quarry; the baskets were soon full and we could hear the snapping of their fringed tails as we climbed downhill again. We had left our horses at a water-mill where the carriages had joined them, and now all the horses were grazing unsaddled and unharnessed in a sloping field; a fire was alight already and bottles were cooling in the mill-stream.

  The most active of the party had been a pretty and funny girl in a red skirt called Angéla (hard ‘g’ and stress on the second syllable) who lived a few miles upstream from István and a little inland from the river. She was a few years older than I, and married, but not happily. We had caught a glimpse of each other at Count Jenö’s, and danced with improvised abandon on the noisy evening when Dinah and the Gypsy songs had tangled in mid-air; and I couldn’t stop dogging her footsteps. During the hunt, she leaped barefoot about the rocks as nimbly as an ibex, hair flying. As it turned out, she was just as rash and impulsive as I was supposed to be, and prompted, I think, by amused affection on her side and rapt infatuation on mine, a lighthearted affinity had sprung up in a flash. The feast went on late, and abetted by woods and nightfall and the remote part of the forest we had wandered to, all barriers broke down; and we weren’t sure where we were until at last we heard our Christian names being called, and ran to the assembly point where horses were being saddled and traces run through. On the return journey they had to brake hard on the steep grass rides and the lamps slotted on either side of the carriages shed a joggling beam on the tree-trunks.

  All had marvellously changed of a sudden and thanks to Angéla’s high spirits everything was gay and comic as well; during the next two nights and days, all unentwined moments seemed a waste. By a stroke of luck, Angéla’s family were in Budapest, but for many reasons, meetings were not easy and we cursed the intervening woods. István was an old friend and of course he saw at once how things were and came to the rescue with an irresistible plan: he would borrow a motor-car from a friend beyond Deva and the three of us would set out on a secret journey to the interior of Transylvania.

  I collected my stuff and made my farewells; for after the jaunt I would strike south. The die was cast. The car arrived, the two of us set off, and in a few miles, Angéla jumped in at the appointed place and we drove east rejoicing.

  The borrowed vehicle was an old-fashioned, well-polished blue touring car with room for all three in front. It had a canvas hood with a celluloid window in the back and a scarlet rubber bulb which, after a moment’s pressure, reluctantly sent a raucous moo out of a convoluted brass trumpet which echoed down the canyons and gave warning to all the livestock on the road—except buffaloes, when we would follow Count Jenö’s nautical maxim. The roads were not good: the car pitched about the ruts and the potholes like a boat in a choppy sea and the dust of our progress alongside the Maros formed a ghostly cylinder. Hovering in our wake, it rose and enfolded us at every stop and we arrived in the old princely capital of Transylvania like three phantoms.

  * * *

  The trouble over names, which vexes all these pages, boils over here. The Dacian Apulon became the Latin Apulum, and the place was full of traces of the old Roman colony. But both of these words were silenced when the hushed and muffling spread of the Slavs stifled the old names of Eastern Europe forever. They renamed it Bălgrad—‘the white town’ (one of many), perhaps because of its pale walls—and this white motif caught on. The Saxons called it Weissenburg and later Karlsburg, in honour of the Emperor Charles VI, who built the great eighteenth-century fortress here. The Hungarians had already adopted the notion of whiteness, but another crept in too: the word ‘Julius,’ after a mid-tenth-century Hungarian prince who had visited Constantinople and been baptised there. Gyulaféhervár, they called it, ‘the white city of Gyula.’ The Rumanians stuck to Bălgrad, then adopted the mediaeval Latin name of Alba Iulia.

  I wished Count Jenö and the Countess had been with us! She would have told us about Michael the Brave, the Prince of Wallachia who conquered Transylvania in the seventeenth century; and how, by seizing Moldavia as well, he briefly placed the three principalities under one sceptre and, for a single stormy year, anticipated the modern Rumanian kingdom. (It was in commemoration of this that King Ferdinand and Queen Marie were crowned here after the post-war transfer of sovereignty.) When the Count was out of earshot, she would probably have told us how prolonged misrule had culminated in 1784 in a Rumanian jacquerie of fire and slaughter and many horrors, ended by the breaking on the wheel of two of the leaders before the castle gate. Count Jenö, meanwhile, would have led us off to the cathedral, as István did. The old Romanesque building had been badly damaged by the Tatars and magnificently built up again in the late gothic style by John Hunyadi; we were among pointed arches once more. The whole city was steeped in Transylvanian history; it had become particularly famous in the era following the defeat at Mohács. The Great Hungarian Plain had been reduced to a Turkish pashalik and the north-western remnant beyond the Danube was claimed by the Emperor Charles V’s brother, King Ferdinand. Transylvania, the remaining third of the mangled kingdom, survived as the stronghold of a rival monarch, King John Zápolya; and when he died the resolute Queen Dowager, Isabella of Poland, kept the shrinking eastern part of the realm together; her son, John Sigismund, was the last Hungarian king-elect. Then nothing of it remained but Transylvania, and, when the young king died, these eastern dominions, a huge isolated province now, became a Principality which only managed to fend off Habsburg claims by accepting a shadowy vassaldom to the Ottoman Empire. Then, for more than a century, an extraordinary procession of Transylvanian princes followed each other until the Reconquest put an end to it in 1711, and Transylvania was once more part of Hungary; reassembled and redeemed, indeed, but a Habsburg kingdom.

  Queen Isabella and John Sigismund were entombed under the vaults, as were John Hunyadi and his son Lászlo, who was beheaded in Buda; also the Apafi and the Bocskay princes, and the assassinated Cardinal Martinuzzi. The fine bishop’s palace, a peaceful warren of ochre-coloured walls, and the shade of the chestnut trees, turned this part of the city into a Transylvanian Barchester. (Later, in the eighteenth century, the Bishop Count Batthyány gave the town a magnificent library of precious books, including one of the earliest manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied.) The great Gabriel Bethlen had been another benefactor and founded an Academy.[1] Married to the sister of the Elector of Brandenburg, he was one of the most active of this succession of princes, a powerful westward-looking Protestant leader in the Thirty Years’ War, and an ally of the Elector Palatine, the Winter Queen and Gustavus Adolphus.

  The earlier of the Rákóczi princes were also champions of the Reformation. To strengthen the cause by the dynastic support of England and the Palatinate—and perhaps of Bohemia regained—Sigismund, brother of George Rákóczi II, married the Winter Queen’s daughter, Henrietta. So, for much of this strange period, Transylvania was not only a fortress of Hungarian liberties, but a refuge for the various Protestant sects that took root there; it was also a sort of golden age for the humanities. The Saxon part of the population followed Luther, the Hungarians adopted the Calvinism which was in the ascendant just over the border at Debrec
en, while Unitarians of various kinds prospered; all of them out of anti-Habsburg feeling and in reaction to Jesuit intransigence. The princes contrived to impose a remarkable degree of tolerance between the jarring churches. Sectarian fervour fell short of the passionate feelings that prevailed in Poland and Austria, and, even today, confessional rivalry was less acute. (István—though his personal leanings were strongly towards Catholicism—had been christened a Protestant like his father while his sister Ilona, like their mother, was Catholic. This arrangement with the children of mixed marriages was not uncommon in these parts.)

  * * *

  Down a side turning a few miles further north, much was afoot. The path to the village ahead was noisy with farmyard sounds and when we had breasted the livestock and a barrage of dust clouds, costumes from a score of villages crowded in. Booths were laden with studded leather belts, sheepskin jackets, blouses, kerchiefs and black and white conical fleece hats; there were girths, bits, stirrups, harness, knives, sickles, scythes and festoons of brass and iron sheep-bells bright from the forge; also, icons framed in tinsel for the Orthodox and bunches of rosaries for Catholics; strings of garlic and onions, incendiary green and red spikes of paprika; ashen helves, rakes, hay-forks, crooks, staves, troughs, churns, yokes, flails, carved flutes and wooden cutlery like those the Gypsies whittled in István’s courtyard. Pots and jugs and large pitchers for carrying on the shoulder or the head were assembled by the hundred, rows of shoes stood alternately at attention and at ease, and clusters of canoe-toed rawhide moccasins were strung up by their thongs. I bought Angéla a pocket-knife and an orange kerchief for the dust and she gave me a yard or two of red and yellow braid for a sash, three inches wide and shorn from a great cartwheel coil. We drank tzuica out of noggins with tall narrow necks at trestle tables under the acacia trees, striving to hear each other speak; but the animals, the shouting of wares, the bargaining, the fiddles, the shrill reeds, the tambourine and flute of a bear-leader and the siege of Gypsy beggars formed so solid a barrier that we bawled in each other’s ears in vain, then sat beaming and tongue-tied in the variegated light. Jews in black were sprinkled among the white tunics and the bright colours of the peasants. There were Gypsies everywhere: women like tattered mendicant rainbows; suckling infants, though too young for speech, were pitilessly grasping perishers already and the men were wilder-looking than any I had ever seen: dark as quadroons, with tousled beards, matted blue-black locks falling to their shoulders and eyes like maneaters. Drunks lurched in unsteady couples and snored under their carts. Towering hay-wains were drawn up all round with racks expanding in dizzy quadrilaterals: on one of them a nomadic hen, part of a brood roosting overhead, was rashly laying an egg. Carts tilted their shafts in the air in a tangle of diagonals and hundreds of horses of the sturdy Transylvanian breed fidgeted and whinnied and snorted on the outskirts of the village. The place might have been a Tatar camp; and beyond the thatched roofs and the leaves, the western mountain-mass of the old principality ascended in steps to a jagged skyline.