A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Pincers in hand, the old blacksmith had watched all this with the mare’s near-fore hoof cupped in his lap while her colt tugged thirstily. A hush had spread among the wagons and the twinkling fires when I last looked back. The Gypsies were settling down to their evening hedgehog and dusk was beginning to fall.

  * * *

  Bratislava was full of secrets. It was the outpost of a whole congeries of towns where far-wanderers had come to a halt, and the Jews, the most ancient and famous of them, were numerous enough to give a pronounced character to the town. In Vienna, I had caught fleeting glimpses of the inhabitants of the Leopoldstadt quarter, but always from a distance. Here, very early on, I singled out one of the many Jewish coffee houses. Feeling I was in the heart of things, I would sit rapt there for hours. It was as big as a station and enclosed like an aquarium with glass walls. Moisture dripped across the panes and logs roared up a stove-chimney of black tin pipes that zigzagged with accordeon-pleated angles through the smoky air overhead. Conversing and arguing and contracting business round an archipelago of tables, the dark-clad customers thronged the place to bursting point. (Those marble squares did duty as improvised offices in thousands of cafés all through Central Europe and the Balkans and the Levant.) The minor hubbub of Magyar and Slovak was outnumbered by voices speaking German, pronounced in the Austrian way or with the invariable Hungarian stress on the initial syllable. But quite often the talk was in Yiddish, and the German strain in the language always made me think that I was going to catch the ghost of a meaning. But it eluded me every time; for the dialect—or the language, rather—though rooted in mediaeval Franconian German, is complicated by queer syntax and a host of changes and diminutives. Strange gutturals, Slav accretions and many words and formations remembered from the Hebrew have contributed to its idiosyncrasy. The up-and-down, rather nasal lilt makes it more odd than harmonious to an outsider but it is linguistically of enormous interest: a vernacular in which the history of the Jews of northern Europe and the centuries of their ebb and flow between the Rhine and Russia are all embedded. (Two years later, in London, when I felt I knew German a little better, I went twice to the Yiddish Theatre in Whitechapel; but I found the dialogue on the stage more fugitive than ever.) There were rabbis in the café now and then, easily singled out by their long beards and beaver hats and by black overcoats down to their heels. Occasionally they were accompanied by Talmudic students of about my age, some even younger, who wore small skullcaps or black low-crowned hats with the wide brims turned up, and queer elf-locks trained into corkscrews which hung beside their ears. In spite of these, pallor and abstraction stamped some of these faces with the beauty of young saints. They had a lost look about them as if they were permanently startled when they were away from their desks. Their eyes—bright blue, or as dark as midnight oil—were expanded to the innocent width of the eyes of gazelles. Sometimes they had a nearly blind expression; years of peering at texts seemed to have put their gaze out of focus for a wider field. I had visions of them, candle-lit behind sealed and cobwebbed windows, with the thick lenses of their spectacles gleaming close to the page as they re-unravelled Holy Writ: texts that had been commented on, recensed, annotated and bickered over in Babylon, Cordova, Kairouan, Vilna, Troyes and Mainz and Narbonne by fourteen centuries of scholiasts. Mists of dark or red fluff blurred a few of those chins that no razor touched, and their cheeks were as pale as the wax that lit the page while the dense black lettering swallowed up their youth and their lives.[4]

  I longed to attend a religious service, but without the guidance of some initiate friend, didn’t dare. This diffidence was broken many years later by Dr. Egon Wellesz’ book on Byzantine plainsong. In apostolic times, he writes, the Psalms formed the backbone of the Christian liturgy, chanted just as they were in the great temples of Jerusalem and Antioch. The same music is the common ancestor of the Jewish service, the chants of the Greek Orthodox Church and Gregorian plainsong; of the last, the cantus peregrinus, which appropriately accompanies the chanting of In exitu Israel, is considered the closest. Spurred by this, I ventured into the magnificent Carolean Portuguese-Dutch Synagogue in Artillery Row. By good luck, a visiting Sephardic choir of great virtuosity was singing, and I thought, perhaps rather sanguinely, that I could detect a point of union between the three kinds of singing. It was like singling out familiar notes faintly carried by the breeze from the other side of a dense forest of time. There was a comparably moving occasion many years later. Wandering about north-western Greece, I made friends with the rabbi of Yannina, and he invited me to attend the Feast of Purim. The old, once crowded Sephardic Jewish quarter inside Ali Pasha’s tremendous walls was already falling to ruin. The rabbi had assembled the little group which was all that had survived the German occupation and come safe home. Cross-legged on the low-railed platform and slowly turning the two staves of the scroll, he intoned the book of Esther—describing the heroine’s intercession with King Ahasuerus and the deliverance of the Jews from the plot of Haman—to an almost empty synagogue.

  * * *

  The Schlossberg, the rock which dominates the town with its colossal gutted castle, had a bad name, and I hadn’t climbed many of the steps of the lane before understanding why. One side of the path dropped among trees and rocks, but on the other, each of the hovels which clung to the mountain was a harlot’s nest. Dressed in their shifts with overcoats over their shoulders or glittering in brightly-coloured and threadbare satin, the inmates leaned conversationally akimbo against their door-jambs, or peered out with their elbows propped on the half-doors of their cells and asked passers-by for a light for their cigarettes. Most of them were handsome and seasoned viragos, often with peroxided hair as lifeless as straw and paint was laid on their cheeks with a doll-maker’s boldness. There were a few monsters and a number of beldames. Here and there a pretty newcomer resembled a dropped plant about to be trodden flat. Many sat indoors on their pallets, looking humble and forlorn, while Hungarian peasants and Czech and Slovak soldiers from the garrison clumped past in ascending and descending streams. During the day, except for the polyglot murmur of invitation, it was rather a silent place. But it grew noisier after dark when shadows brought confidence and the plum-brandy began to bite home. It was only lit by cigarette ends and by an indoor glow that silhouetted the girls on their thresholds. Pink lights revealed the detail of each small interior: a hastily tidied bed, a tin basin and a jug, some lustral gear and a shelf displaying a bottle of solution, pox-foiling and gentian-hued; a couple of dresses hung on a nail. There would be a crucifix, or an oleograph of the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption, and perhaps a print of St. Wenceslas, St. John Nepomuk or St. Martin of Tours. Postcards of male and female film stars were stuck in the frames of the looking-glasses, and scattered among them snapshots of Maszaryk, Admiral Horthy and Archduke Otto declared the allegiance of the inmates. A saucepan of water simmered over charcoal; there was little else. The continuity of these twinkling hollows was only broken when one of the incumbents charmed a stooping soldier under her lintel. Then a dowsed lamp and the closing of a flimsy door, or a curtain strung from nail to nail, masked their hasty embraces from the passers-by. This staircase of a hundred harlots was trodden hollow by decades of hobnails, and the lights, slanting across the night like a phosphorescent diagonal in a honeycomb, ended in the dark. One felt, but could not see, the huge battlemented ruin above. At the lower end, the diffused lights of the city cataracted downhill.

  This was the first quarter of its kind I had seen. Without knowing quite how I had arrived, I found myself wandering there again and again, as an auditor more than an actor. The tacit principle to flinch at nothing on this journey quailed here. These girls, after all, were not their Viennese sisters, who could slow up a bishop with the lift of an eye lash. And even without this embargo, the retribution that I thought inevitable—no nose before the year was out—would have kept me safely out of doors. The lure was more complicated. Recoil, guilt, sympathy, attraction, romantisme du bor
del and nostalgie de la boue wove a heady and sinister garland. It conjured up the abominations in the books of the Prophets and the stews of Babylon and Corinth and scenes from Lucian, Juvenal, Petronius and Villon. It was aesthetically astonishing too, a Jacob’s ladder tilted between the rooftops and the sky, crowded with shuffling ghosts and with angels long fallen and moulting. I could never tire of it.

  Loitering there one evening, and suddenly late for dinner, I began running downhill and nearly collided in the shadows with a figure that was burlier than the rest of us and planted like a celebrity in the centre of a dim and respectful ring. When the bystanders drew to one side, it turned out to be the brown Carpathian bear, unsteadily upright in their midst. His swart companion was at hand, and as I sped zigzagging among my fellow-spectres, I could hear the chink of a tambourine, the first choreographic trill of the wooden flute and the clapping hands and the cries of the girls.

  A few minutes later, safe in the brightly-lit anticlimax of the central streets, the stairs and their denizens and the secret pandemic spell that reigned there were as bereft of substance as figments from a dream in the small hours, and as remote. It was always the same.

  * * *

  Hans’s rooms, after all these mild forays, were a charmed refuge of books and drinks and talk. He was illuminating on the questions and perplexities I came home with and amused by my reactions, especially to the Schlossberg. When I asked him about the Czechs and the Austrians, he handed me an English translation of Hasvek’s Good Soldier Svvejk—or Schweik, as it was spelt in this edition—which had just come out.[5] It was exactly what I needed. (Thinking of Czechoslovakia, I was to remember it much later on, when the horrors of occupation from the West were followed by long-drawn-out and still continuing afflictions from the East; both of them still unguessed at then, in spite of the gathering omens.) It was rather broadminded of Hans, as the drift of the book is resolutely anti-Austrian. Though he was a dutiful citizen of the successor state, his heart, I felt, still lay with the order of things that had surrounded his early childhood. How could it be otherwise?

  At last, with a sigh, I began to assemble my gear, making ready to plunge into Hungary. I climbed to the castle for a final chance to spy out the land.

  Two nuns were gazing over the blowy void. They stood on the terrace exactly where an engraver would have placed them to balance his composition and give the castle scale. One, with a voluminous sleeve and a dynamically pointing forefinger outstretched, was explaining the vast landscape while her static companion listened in wonder. Their survey ended, they passed me, stooping into the wind with a rustle of their habits and a clash of beads, each with a hand across the crown of her head to steady the starch of her coif and her swirling veils. Their glances were lowered in the custody of the eyes that their rule enjoins. As they vanished downhill through a tall gateway of late gothic ashlars, I hoped they had found the more conventional of the two descending flights. Except for a throng of jackdaws perching in the chinks and sliding about noisily in the wind, I was alone.

  In the west, a narrow vista of the Marchfeld, which the Wolfsthal enclosed between the two tower-crowned headlands of the Porta Hungarica, brought the uncoiling Danube on the scene. It flowed under the great bridge; Hungary replaced Austria on its southern strand; then the plains to the south and the east spread the water in a shallow fan. These sudden lowlands, the antechamber to the puszta, had seduced the river into breaking loose. Flood and marsh expanded and streams wandered away in branching coils which an invisible tilt of the plain always guided back to their allegiance; and at each return, as though to atone for their truancy, the deserting streams brought a straggle of new tributaries with them. The flat islands of meadow and pasture retreated into the distance with the ampleness of counties. Snow striped the landscape still and the patches of grass between the stripes were beginning to revive again in sweeps of green. Brooks divided field from field and the trees that marked their windings were feathery with a purplish haze of buds. Spinneys of mist surrounded the barns and the manor-houses, and the copper domes of faraway parishes flashed back the light above these changing woods. The ice had all but thawed. The gleam beyond the film of rushes on the river had grown scarce. But the retreat of the racing cloud-shadows turned the streams from lead to steel and from steel to bright silver.

  On the south side, so far downstream that they were hard to discern, a blur of low mountains marked the end of all this watery disintegration. On my side, as I climbed among the burnt-out fortifications and looked inland, I could follow the advance of another range, the Little Carpathians, of which I was standing on the smallest and southernmost spur. They flowed eastwards, rising gently out of the plain, the merest wave of the land at first. Then they slowly turned, as the shallow buttresses ascended, into the great range itself, steepening like a warning roll of thunder to soar into the distance, snow-covered and out of sight beyond the furthest ceiling of cloud. The invisible watershed shares its snowfalls with the Polish slopes and the tremendous Carpathian barrier, forested hiding-place of boars and wolves and bears, climbs and sweeps for hundreds of miles beyond the reach of even memory’s eye. It towers above southern Poland and the Ukraine and the whole length of Rumania in a thousand-mile-long boomerang-shaped curve until it retreats west again, subsides and finally drops into the lower Danube at the Iron Gates for its underwater meeting with the Great Balkan Range.

  From the foot of the castle’s north-western tower, a ravine sauntered towards Moravia. Then, as I rotated the beam of my glance westward, the valley-framed fragment of the Marchfeld—penultimate glimpse of Maria Theresa’s kind world—wheeled back into view. The western edge of the plain melted into the Leitha mountains of Lower Austria and the glimmering Neusiedlersee. This was the Burgenland, taken from Hungary two decades earlier to compensate Austria for the loss of the South Tyrol. It was once the most southern region of the vanished kingdom of Great Moravia, the last connecting filament which still united the North and the South Slavs when the Magyars sundered them forever.

  Craning from these ramparts and peering beyond the long and winding lake that was just out of sight, a giant with a telescope could have spotted the Italianate palace of the Eszterházys at Eisenstadt. He could also have picked out the chapel and the private theatre and the tiled roof under which Haydn had lived and composed for thirty years. A few miles further on, this giant would have pin-pointed the dairy-farm where Liszt was born—his father was a steward in the same music-loving family. A group of local noblemen subscribed for the young composer to study in Paris. Later on, they presented him with a sword of honour to cut a dash with in the courts of the West. It was just a thousand years since their pagan ancestors, who could only count up to seven, had drawn rein here. I liked to think of those country dynasts, with their theatres and their sword of honour and their passion for music. The memory of the two great composers hallowed the region and seemed to scatter the southern skyline with notes.

  My glance, having completed its circle, veered over the Hungarian border again and followed the eastward rush of the clouds. I should be on the march there next day.

  Or so I thought.

  [1] The word is pronounced as though it were French and spelt Pôjogne, with a heavy stress on the first syllable.

  [2] ‘East of Vienna, the Orient begins.’

  [3] But by no means at once. Even in the Mani, the southern tip of Europe where I am writing these pages, there are traces of their progress: the names of hill villages a couple of miles from my table, incomprehensible here, would be understood at once on the banks of the Don.

  [4] These days marked the resumption of an old obsession with alphabets. The back pages of a surviving notebook are full of Old Testament names laboriously transliterated into Hebrew characters, complete with their diacritics. There are everyday words copied down as well, for the ancient script was also used in the Yiddish vernacular on shop-fronts and in the newspapers I saw in cafés. (There are even words, similarly transliterated on late
r pages, from the old Spanish Ladino of the Constantinople and Salonica Jews.) Next, symptoms from the final stages of this journey, come Cyrillic and Arabic: Arab letters were still used among the unreformed Turks in Bulgaria and in Greek Thrace. There are struggles with obsolete Glagolitic and bold attempts at the twisted pothooks and hangers of the Armenians who scattered the Balkans like little colonies of toucans. The brief catalogue ends with a flood of Greek. The magic of all these letters largely depended on their inscrutability: when I learnt a bit of Bulgarian, Cyrillic lost some of its mana. But Arabic and Hebrew retain theirs to the last. Even today, a toothpaste advertisement in Arabic suggests the Thousand and One Nights, a message in Hebrew over a shop window—‘Umbrellas Repaired on the Spot,’ or ‘Daniel Kisch, Koscher Würste und Salami’—is heavy with glamour. The symbols carry a hint of the Kabala, an echo of Joshua’s ram’s horns and a whisper from the Song of Songs.