A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  It was a moment of jubilation! There was no time to go into detail, but it looked as though my problems were solved. (The lack of time was a boon; for, once again, disappointment lay in wait. None of the historical characters, even by the boldest feat of literary juggling, could be made to fit. Worse, I discovered that when Shakespeare took the story of The Winter’s Tale from Robert Greene’s Pandosto, or the Triumph of Time, he light-heartedly switched the names of Sicily and Bohemia! It was total defeat. I felt as though the poet himself had reached from the clouds to checkmate me by castling the pieces in a single unorthodox move. I understood at last what I should have divined at the outset: punctiliously exact in the historical plays, Shakespeare didn’t care a fig for the topography of the comedies. Unless it were some Italian town—Italy being the universal lucky dip for Renaissance playwrights—the spiritual setting was always the same. Woods and parkland on the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire borders, that is; flocks and fairs and a palace or two, a mixture of Cockayne- and Cloud-Cuckoo- and fairyland with stage mountains rather taller than the Cotswolds and full of torrents and caves, haunted by bears and washed, if need be, by an ocean teeming with foundering ships and mermaids.)

  But, it was an instant of seeming triumph in which Heinz and his wife and Paul and Hans all joined. Heinz was soon filling glasses of celebration from a decanter cut in a nail-head pattern as bold as the façade of the Czernin palace. It was a valedictory drink as well, for the night train was taking Hans and me back to Bratislava and I planned to cross the Danube into Hungary next day.

  The windows of the flat looked down on the whole of Prague. Towards the end of my search, the pale sun had set among those silver and purplish clouds and at lighting-up time all the lamps of the city had leapt simultaneously to life. Now, though the towers and pinnacles and the snow-covered domes were swallowed by the night, their presence was reaffirmed by the city-wide collusion of bells. Picked out by the embankment lights and the rushing headlamps of the traffic, the river was a curving band of darkness crossed by the many-beaded necklaces of the bridges. Directly below, between clusters of baroque lamp-brackets, the grouped statues dimly postured along the balustrades of the Charles Bridge. The lights grew scarcer as they climbed the citadel and dispersed round the steep dark wastes where the rooks had assembled for the night in the invading woods. It was a last glimpse of Prague which has had to last me from that evening to this.

  [1] They lost their kingdom forever when the Bohemian army was routed by Maximilian of Bavaria, Chief of the Catholic League, at the battle of the White Hill—only a mile from the citadel—on 8th November 1620.

  Question: Who is the most unexpected private soldier to be fighting as a volunteer in Maximilian’s army? Answer: Descartes.

  [2] These were bad decades for religious toleration in Europe. They include the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford, the expulsions beyond the Shannon and Cromwell’s resolute attempts to stamp out the Catholic Church in Ireland.

  [3] Other versions exist. There are several instances of defenestration in Czech history, and it has continued into modern times. The Martyrdom of St. Johannes is the only case of depontication, but it must be part of the same Tarpeian tendency.

  [4] The Waldstein Palace (as I learnt that it was more correctly called) was still owned by the family, and it harboured, among more usual heirlooms, the stuffed charger which had carried Wallenstein at Lützen. An eighteenth-century descendant befriended Casanova, who spent his last thirteen years as librarian composing his memoirs in Waldstein’s Bohemian castle. Another descendant was the friend to whom Beethoven dedicated the Waldstein Sonata. He was the most interesting figure of the Thirty Years’ War. Suspected by the Emperor of intriguing with the Swedes before actually changing sides—and perhaps planning, it was rumoured, to seize the Bohemian crown—he fled to a snow-bound castle near the Bavarian border. Four soldiers-of-fortune from the British Isles—Gordon, Leslie, Devereux and Colonel Butler of Butler’s Irish regiment of Dragoons—cut down Wallenstein’s henchmen over the dinner table. Then they sought out the great duke and Devereux ran him through with a pike. By far the best and most exciting book on the whole period is C.V. Wedgwood’s Thirty Years War. Dame Veronica delivers an adverse verdict on the last part of Wallenstein’s career; ruthlessness and megalomania and increasing trust in astrology had dimmed his earlier genius. He was tall, thin and pale with reddish hair and eyes of a remarkable brilliance.

  [5] The cause of his downfall was a public demonstration of the device by which Trygaeus, the hero of The Peace of Aristophanes, flew to the crest of Olympus to beg the Gods to end the Peloponnesian War. As this vehicle was a giant dung-beetle from Mount Etna which the protagonist refuelled with his own droppings on the long ascent, the exhibition may well have caused a stir. I would like to have seen it.

  [6] She died young and her tomb is in Westminster Abbey. It is her successor, the French Princess Isabelle, who, in Richard II, overhears the gardeners talking of the King’s fall as they bind up the dangling apricocks. She was only eleven when Richard was murdered. Back in France as a Queen Dowager, she married her cousin, the poet Charles d’Orléans, who was later captured at Agincourt by Henry V and held prisoner in England for a quarter of a century. She was only nineteen when she died.

  [7] Edmund Campion was also in Prague at the time, teaching at a Jesuit seminary. The two had long meetings and they liked and respected each other. Once, in honour of a state occasion, Campion wrote a long tragedy on the theme of Saul and the city produced it at vast expense; it was produced with great magnificence and although it lasted six hours, Rudolf ordered a special repeat performance. In England four years later, secretly ministering to harried recusants under the new penal laws, Campion was captured and after the customary tortures and a rushed trial, condemned to die at Tyburn. He endured the barbarous penalty with the courage of a saint.

  10. SLOVAKIA: A STEP FORWARD AT LAST

  MY ORIGINAL scheme, on leaving Bratislava, had been to cross the Danube, strike south-east to the Hungarian frontier and then follow the right bank to the old town of Györ. This itinerary, which would have led across those beginnings of the puszta I had spied out from the castle, was the traditional entrance to Hungary.

  But the plan had been changed at the last moment by friends of Hans. Gerti v. Thuroczy, who was married to one of the breezy Hungarian country-gentlemen I mentioned two chapters ago, suggested I should change my route and stay with her brother, Philipp Schey, on the way. The Barons Schey v. Koromla, to give them their full style, were an extremely civilized Austrian-Jewish family—friends of artists, poets, writers and composers and with kinsmen and ramifications in half a dozen countries—that had played an important part in the life of Central and Western Europe. They had once been very rich, but, like everyone else, they were less so now. I had met Pips Schey (as he was universally called) but only for a moment. He was a fascinating and many-legended figure and he lived about forty miles east of Bratislava. Telephones had rung and I was expected in two days.

  So I headed north-east instead of south. I was still on the wrong side of the Danube and getting further from the river with every step and deeper into Slovakia. My new plan was to make a wide Slovakian loop, strike the Danube again about a hundred miles downstream and cross into Hungary by the Parkan-Esztergom bridge.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, an important change has come over the raw-material of these pages.

  Recently—after I had set down all I could remember of these ancient travels—I made a journey down the whole length of the Danube, starting in the Black Forest and ending at the Delta; and in Rumania, in a romantic and improbable way too complicated to recount, I recovered a diary I had left in a country house there in 1939.

  I must have bought the manuscript book in Bratislava. It is a thick, battered, stiffly-bound cloth-backed volume containing 320 closely-written pages in pencil. After a long initial passage, the narrative breaks off for a month or two, then starts up
again in notes, stops once more, and blossoms out again in proper diary form. And so it goes on, sporadically recording my travels in all the countries between Bratislava and Constantinople, whence it moves to Mount Athos and stops. In the back of the book is a helpful list of overnight sojourns; there are rudimentary vocabularies in Hungarian, Bulgarian, Rumanian, Turkish and Modern Greek and a long list of names and addresses. As I read these, faces I had forgotten for many years began to come back to me: a vintner on the banks of the Tisza, an innkeeper in the Banat, a student in Berkovitza, a girl in Salonica, a Pomak hodja in the Rhodope mountains... There are one or two sketches of the details of buildings and costumes, some verses, the words of a few folk-songs and the alphabetical jottings I mentioned two chapters back. The stained covers are still warped from their unvarying position in my rucksack and the book seemed—it still seems—positively to smell of that old journey.

  It was an exciting trove; a disturbing one too. There were some discrepancies of time and place between the diary and what I had already written but they didn’t matter as they could be put right. The trouble was that I had imagined—as one always does with lost property—that the contents were better than they were. Perhaps that earlier loss in Munich wasn’t as serious as it had seemed at the time. But, with all its drawbacks, the text did have one virtue: it was dashed down at full speed. I know it is dangerous to change key, but I can’t resist using a few passages of this old diary here and there. I have not interfered with the text except for cutting and condensing and clearing up obscurities. It begins on the day I set out from Bratislava.

  March 19th 1934.

  ... The sky was a lovely blue with big white clouds, and I walked along a twisting avenue of elm trees. The grass is a brilliant green and Spring has begun! Looking back, I could see all the chimney pots of Pressburg and the grey castle on the mountain and hear the bells over the fields. I wandered on, smoking contentedly, and at noon sat on a log and looked at the sun shining on the Little Carpathian mountains to the left of the road as I ate my brioches, speck and a banana. A troop of Czechoslovak cavalry were exercising in a field nearby. Their horses were lovely long-legged creatures, about sixteen hands, with undocked tails and uncobbed manes. The soldiers rode very well. Their shaven heads made them look tough and Kossack-like.

  I felt very drowsy sitting in the sun. My path ran through a hazel-wood where young roedeer bounced nimbly away, their white rumps twinkling in the undergrowth. Later, I must have been wandering along in a sort of trance, as by four o’clock I had no idea where I was, and whenever I stopped peasants and asked the way to Baron Schey’s at Kövecsespuszta, they gesticulated helplessly, saying ‘Mag-yar’ or ‘Slovenski,’ and I realized the difficulty I was going to have about languages. I must learn some Hungarian! I was miles off my way, close to a little town called Senec and about as far from Kövecses as Kövecses is from Pressburg. A country postman speaking a little German said I should head for Samorin, about twenty kilometres off; so I set out along a dismal track over an absolutely flat plain with a few white farmhouses dotted about. Occasionally I came on an old bent woman gathering catkins and pussy-willows (Next Sunday’s Palm Sunday.) They must be frightfully devout people. I’ve never seen anything like the reverence with which they knelt on the earth before wayside crucifixes, crossing themselves and laying sprigs of palm on the ledge. At last I came to a tributary of the Danube winding through water meadows and shaded by willows. It’s called the Kleine Donau, or in Magyar, Kish[1] Duna. I walked till I came to a ferry, and shouted across. An old man showed up and got in the boat and pulled it over by tugging at a taut rope stretched shoulder-high. I was on the edge of that marshy country, full of rivers and brooks, that I looked down on from the castle before we went to Prague.

  On the other side, I was walking through utterly flat fields again. The sun was setting in a soft pink sky with a few strands of lighted cloud. The gold bar of heaven! Everything was quiet and windless and high above the green fields larks were fluttering. I watched them soaring about the sky, hovering and sinking and ascending. It was lovely and it made me think of Spring in England.

  Soon, as the sky began to fade into twilight, I reached a little place called Nagy-Magyar,[2] a collection of white-washed houses thatched with long reeds, unkempt and desolate, with roads of rutted mud and no pavements or garden fences. The whole village teemed with swarthy black-haired children in coloured blankets. There were dark-skinned hags with strands of greasy hair hanging out of their headcloths and tall, dark, loose-limbed and shifty-eyed young men. Zigeunervolk! Hungarian Gipsies, like the ones I saw in Pozony. Amazing! Östlich von Wien fängt der Orient an!

  I found the Burgomaster’s house, I don’t know how, with all these people surging about. He was a splendid man, a typical Hungarian with a handsome hatchet-face, speaking German in the Hungarian way with the accent always on the first syllable and half the a’s turning to o. He at once said he would put me up, and we talked all the evening by the fire, smoking his very strong Hungarian tobacco and drinking golden wine. Wine is sor (pronounced shor); tobacco, dohányi; a light or matches gyufa; ‘Goodnight,’ ‘jó étszokát Kivánok,’ and ‘I kiss your hand,’ ‘kezeit csokolom!’ I know this because the old crone who brought in our supper said this and did it in a ceremonious and stately way. I was nonplussed, but it seems it’s usual, even to a tramp like me, if he is a stranger and a guest. (Only one word of Slovak so far: selo = village, like the Russian Tsarkoë Selo, the Tsar’s or Imperial village.) There are no boards on the floor, only earth stamped flat and so hard it seems to do as well. The house is thatched with rushes like the others. I went to bed in his spare room and, pulling the eiderdown over me, was soon asleep.

  I’ve just had breakfast, after scribbling the foregoing rot at high speed. I must say goodbye to the burgomaster and set out for Kövecsespuszta. It’s a lovely morning with a light wind.

  In for a penny, in for a pound! I will let my nineteen-year-old forerunner carry on till we get to Kövecses[3] and then stop.

  Kövecsespuszta, March 20th

  I was hardly out of Nagy Magyar this morning, when I saw swarms of tiny tots on the warpath, khaki or darker and later on, three Gipsy women walking towards me down the dusty road. They wore silk and cotton draperies of scarlet, green and purple. I’ve never seen anything so marvellous. One had a brown baby slung round her waist like a squaw’s papoose, but the other two were young and beautiful with brown cheeks and very large, very dark eyes and black, black hair. As we passed each other, they all three shouted something very matey in Magyar or Romany and I made cheerful noises back and beamed a bit. They were without any bashfulness. I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.

  I soon got to Samorin. Here, to my horror and surprise they told me I was going completely wrong for Sopornya(?) and that it was 30 miles away! It was getting late and I had promised to be at Kövecses by five or six—tea time, in fact; so I asked if I could get there by train. The only way was to go back to Bratislava by bus, they said, and take the train from there. There was nothing else for it.

  The bus was packed. As usual, there were two nuns with bulgy umbrellas, peasants in high boots, sheepskin caps and fleece jerkins, two fat, urban-looking men with gladstone bags on their laps and grey bowler hats, and a country gendarme, dripping with sweat in a thick greatcoat; his belt, with revolver and truncheon and a sword which was more like a cutlass hung swinging from the rack. It took an hour to get back to Pressburg and luckily there was a train leaving for Sered at once, the nearest station to Kövecsespuszta. We passed through Senec once again, then Galanta and Diosegh. In Sered I learnt it was a 10 kilometre march via Sopornya to Kövecses, which would make me two hours late. So I went to the Post Office and tried to telephone, but learnt that the nearest Post Office to Kövecses—a place called Sala-nad-Vahom, I think—closed at six. The boy at the office, though he didn’t speak a word of German, was frightfully helpful. He got someone round from the grocer’s who did, and th
is chap took me to the shop. His boss, a big jovial man, said he would send me in his car, with the boy at the wheel. The road got worse and worse. It was dark now and the headlights lit up the trees and the bushes and started a few rabbits, their eyes shining in the dark. At last we got there. The Schloss—the Kastely (pronounced koshtey) as the boy called it in Magyar—stood in a clump of trees. Only a few windows were lit. The baron’s housekeeper Sari let us in and gave the boy a drink. She was a dear old thing with a kerchief tied under her chin. Hand kissed for second time! I found Baron Schey in his library in a leather armchair and slippers reading Marcel Proust.

  * * *

  The house had the charm of a large and rambling rectory occupied by a long line of bookish and well-to-do incumbents torn between rival passions for field sports and their libraries. “It’s not a Schloss,” Baron Pips said when he was showing me my room, “though they call it that. It’s a shooting-box really. But it’s also Liberty Hall.” His English was so good that I never heard a single mistake during my whole stay, though he occasionally used an Edwardian turn of phrase that might have fallen into disuse in England a few decades earlier. He was spending the winter there. Except for his own bedroom and a couple of others in case friends turned up and the delightful library where I had found him, most of the rooms had been shut up.