A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Baron Pips kept me company across the fields till we said good-bye outside the little village of Kissujfalu. I looked back when I reached it. He waved when he saw I’d taken the right path, then turned and disappeared into his woods with the spaniel trotting behind.

  “Pips Schey?” someone, a vague relation-in-law, said to me, years later in Paris. “What a charming man! Magical company! And wonderful looking. But he never did anything, you know.” Well, he did in my case, as I have more than hinted. Though we never met again, we corresponded for years. He married soon afterwards, and, when things began to go wrong in Austria and Czechoslovakia, they left Kövecses and settled at Ascona, on the western shore of Lake Maggiore, just north of the Swiss-Italian frontier. He died in 1957 in his younger daughter’s country house in Normandy—about twenty miles, in fact, from Cabourg, which is the main candidate for the Proustian town of Balbec. The literary coincidence completes a fortuitous literary circle in my mind. I wish we had met again. I thought of him often, and I still do.

  * * *

  I felt so buoyed up by these days, that even the vague speculation as to how I might have struck him failed to damp my elation: precocious, immature, restless, voluble, prone to show off, unreliably bookish perhaps...it didn’t seem to matter a damn. My journey had taken on a new dimension and all prospects glowed.

  [1] Kis, little.

  [2] I can’t find this tiny village (which means ‘Big Hungarian’) in any map. There is a much larger place called Nagy Megyer some distance off, but it can’t be the same. It’s rather confusing.

  [3] Pronounced Követchesh.

  [4] They were married soon after.

  [5] I learnt later on that the eponymous hero (though not the plot) of Wassermann’s two-volume novel Christian Wahnschaffe—‘World’s Illusion’ in translation—was based on Baron Pips as a young man: and hastened to read it. It’s an extraordinary book, written before the first World War; rather turgid and very melodramatic. The hero is a young patrician of dazzling looks, brilliant talents and great wealth. Through idealism and some not very clearly expounded philosophy he gradually divests himself of all his friends, his money and his goods in order to live a life of Franciscan poverty and unworldliness among the poor and the criminals and the whores of a great city. There is a touch of resemblance, I think; with the exception that the saintly fictional figure is without a flicker of the humour of his living prototype.

  [6] He died in 1914.

  [7] “It’s incroyable, Princess! Your carriage seems quite introuvable.”

  [8] He abdicated in 1919.

  [9] Waag in German, Vag in Magyar.

  [10] Minka Strauss and Alix de Rothschild.

  [11] The diary lays a lot of stress on cigar- and pipe-smoking; I had forgotten the latter. I think they were both slightly self-conscious symbols of emancipation and maturity. I always seem to be ‘puffing away thoughtfully’ or ‘enjoying a quiet pipe,’ in these pages.

  11. THE MARCHES OF HUNGARY

  THIS BUOYANCY carried me all the way across the flat country from Kissujfalu to the little town of Nové Zamky—Érsekujvár in Hungarian, and Neuhäusl in German—an hour or two after dark. I can’t resist letting the diary take over for a few paragraphs:

  ...attracted by a tinkle of music, I found my way to this coffee house. Village chaps are sitting round and talking, shouting and playing billiards or skat, smacking the cards down defiantly. The acoustics of the room are deafening and every now and then the older people trying to read their newspapers shout for less noise. For a moment everyone speaks in a whisper, then the crescendo increases to its former timbre, the same grey-beards remonstrate again, e poi da capo. There is a very pretty, very made-up girl who sits behind a table laden with chocolates and strange Hungarian cakes. Her features are slightly Mongolian, with high cheekbones pushing up the corners of her enormous blue eyes. Her soft, heart-shaped mouth is painted crimson and her black velvet dress clings so tight it looks as though it might break. Blue-black hair falls over her brow in a fringe, and she keeps glancing over here. I can’t quite make it out. When I look up from this diary she stares me full in the eyes, then turns coyly away. I’m going to sit on for a bit before finding a bed.

  Köbölkut. March 29

  I hadn’t waited long last night before the waiter brought a slip of paper with the word Mancsi written on it and an address in a nearby street. I was a bit mystified, but the waiter (who, like many of the people there, spoke quite a lot of German) said Mancsi was very nice: would I like an interview? I twigged then and thanked him and said I didn’t think I would. I saw him talking to her afterwards, both of them were looking at me and for the rest of the evening she looked no more my way but made eyes at a small businessman or commercial traveller playing billiards. I felt a bit sad and rather an idiot, I don’t know why. A chap was playing the violin accompanied by his wife on the piano and as he could speak some English he sat down to chat and drink cognac. He advised me not to have anything to do with Mancsi, she’d been with everyone in Nové Zamky; quicumque vult, in fact. But if I were going to Budapest, he told me to visit the Maison Frieda in the Kepiva utca, where, in his flowery words, everyone for five pengös can be a cavalier. This sort of advice is very frequent, ever since the beckonings from the windows of the Schlossberg and the headwaiter in the Astoria[1] asking Hans and me which of the ladies we would like. Hungarians are keen and direct about all this. I do like them. The violinist, after chatting with the owner, told me I could sleep in a room above the café for the equivalent of a shilling. So I did and set out early this morning.

  I crossed a bridge over the neck of a long marshy lake—part of the Nitra river and gentle hills began to rise. I fell in with three peasants and we kept each other company through the villages of Bajc and Perbete and at noon settled under a hazel-clump on the edge of a huge field. We shared the rest of the lunch Sari had put in my rucksack yesterday—a delicious whole roast chicken, like a tramp’s dream—and they offered me great slices of bread with paprika-spiced bacon and afterwards we puffed at baronial cigars.

  The old man was called Ferenc. He talked in rather bad German about the troubles of the Hungarians hereabouts. I do sympathise. It must be terrible having one’s country cut up like this and ending on the wrong side of the border. The Treaty of Trianon sounds a great mistake as all the local inhabitants, though Hungarians, are compulsory Czech citizens now. The children have to learn Czechoslovakian; the authorities hope to turn them into fervent Czechoslovaks in a couple of generations. The Hungarians hate the Czechs, and the Rumanians too, and on the same grounds—they feel less strongly about the Serbs, for some reason—and they mean to get back all their lost territory. This is why Hungary is a Kingdom still though it is governed by a regent. When a King is crowned on horseback with the old crown of St. Stephen, he has to swear a most sacred oath to keep Hungary’s ancient frontiers intact; so all Hungary’s neighbours look askance on the monarchy. Attempts have been made to steal the actual diadem from the coronation church in Budapest, but it’s impossible to get near it without electrocution. The Habsburgs are not very popular there, the old man said, as they have always looked on the Magyars as rebels. What a frightful problem.

  Under a broad-brimmed, flat-crowned hat which he wore at a rakish tilt, the old man’s face was tanned and seamed like old wood and the skin, stretched taut over his cheekbones, made a fan of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He looked a bit like a Red Indian, except for the black moustache that jutted over a long, thin, brass-bound pipe-stem made out of bamboo or reed. He wore shiny kneeboots that creased softly like concertinas at the ankles, so did his wife and daughter. The red silk kerchiefs that were tied under their chins made them look like figures out of the Russian ballet especially the daughter, who was ravishing. Her bodice, sleeves, skirt and apron were all different colours and she had soft blue eyes and hair loosely tied in a thick plait. They called her Irinka, a lovely name, short for Irene.

  We had hardly said good-bye w
hen a spectacled young man on a bike overtook me and dismounted, with a greeting in Slovak—‘Dobar den,’ I think, instead of ‘jo nápot kivánok’—and asked where I was going.[2] He fell in step beside me. He was a schoolmaster and he enlarged on the past sorrows of Slovakia. It is true that the local villages are Hungarian, but further north they are pure Slovak as far as the Polish border. They had been under the Magyars for a thousand years and always treated as an inferior race, and when any Slovak rose in the world he was promptly seduced into the lesser Magyar nobility—with the result that all local leadership evaporated. Slovak children used to be taken away from their parents and brought up as Magyars. Even when they were fighting the Austrians in defence of their nationality and language, the Hungarians were busy oppressing and Magyarizing their own Slovak subjects. The schoolmaster didn’t seem to like the Czechs much either, though this involved a different kind of resentment. The Czechs, it seems, regard the Slovaks as irredeemable bumpkins, while in Slovak eyes, the Czechs are bossy, petit bourgeois bureaucrats who take unfair advantage of their closeness to the government in Prague. The schoolmaster himself was from northern Slovakia, where—partly thanks to the Hussites, partly to the general spread of the Reformation in east Europe—much of the population is Protestant. I hadn’t realized this. It was touch and go in the Dark Ages whether the Slavs of the North became Catholic or Orthodox. Under the proselytizing influence of SS. Cyril and Methodius—the Byzantine missionaries who invented the Cyrillic script and translated the sacred writings into Old Slavonic—it could easily have been the latter. When I asked why it hadn’t, he laughed and said: “The damned Magyars came!” The link was severed, and the Czechs and Slovaks stuck to Rome and the West.

  When he reached his turning he asked me to stay in his village, but I had to press on. He pedalled away with a wave. A nice man.

  In these parts, SS. Cyril and Methodius, whose names are as inseparably joined as Swan is to Edgar, still enjoy great fame. In The Good Soldier Svvejk, the hero’s peculiar conduct lands him temporarily in a Prague lunatic asylum where he is surrounded by raving megalomaniacs. ‘A chap can pass himself off as God Almighty there,’ he said, ‘or the Virgin Mary, the Pope, the King of England, His Imperial Majesty or St. Wenceslas... One of them even pretended to be SS. Cyril and Methodius, just to get double rations.’

  * * *

  The dry paths had turned my boots and puttees white with dust. The empty sky was the clear blue of a bird’s egg and I was walking in my shirt sleeves for the first time. Slower and slower however: a nail in one of my boots had mutinied. I limped into the thatched and white-washed village of Köbölkut as it was getting dark. There was a crowd of villagers in the street and I drifted into the church with them and wedged myself into the standing congregation.

  The women all had kerchiefs tied under the chin. The men, shod in knee-boots, or in raw-hide moccasins cross-gartered halfway up their shanks, had wide felt hats in their hands, or cones of fleece. Over the shoulders of a couple of shepherds were flung heavy white capes of stiff homespun frieze. In spite of the heat and the crush, one of them was wrapped in a cloak of matted and uncured sheepskin, shaggy-side out, that reached down to the flagstones. Things had become much wilder in the last hundred miles. The faces had a knobbly, untamed look: they were peasants and countrymen to the backbone.

  The candles, spiked on a triangular grid, lit up these rustic masks and populated the nave behind them with a crowd of shadows. At a pause in the plainsong one of the tapers was put out. I realized, all at once, that it was Maundy Thursday. Tenebrae were being sung, and very well. The verses of the penitential psalms were answering each other across the choir and the slow recapitulations and rephrasings of the responsories were unfolding the story of the Betrayal. So compelling was the atmosphere that the grim events might have been taking place that night. The sung words crept step by step through the phases of the drama. Every so often, another candle was lifted from its pricket on the triangle and blown out. It was pitch dark out of doors and with the extinction of each flame the interior shadows came closer. It heightened the chiaroscuro of these rough country faces and stressed the rapt gleam in innumerable eyes; and the church, as it grew hotter, was filled by the smell of melting wax and sheepskin and curds and sweat and massed breath. There was a ghost of old incense in the background and a reek of singeing as the wicks, snuffed one after the other, expired in ascending skeins of smoke. “Seniores populi consilium fecerunt,” the voices sang, “ut Jesum dolo tenerent et occiderent”; and a vision sprang up of evil and leering elders whispering in a corner through toothless gums and with beards wagging as they plotted treachery and murder. “Cum gladiis et fustibus exierunt tamquam ad latronem...” Something in the half-lit faces and the flickering eyes gave a sinister immediacy to the words. They conjured up hot dark shadows under a town wall and the hoarse shouts of a lynch-mob; there was a flicker of lanterns, oafish stumbling in the steep olive groves and wild and wheeling shadows of torches through tree trunks: a scuffle, words, blows, a flash, lights dropped and trampled, a garment snatched, someone running off under the branches. For a moment, we—the congregation—became the roughs with the blades and the cudgels. Fast and ugly deeds were following each other in the ambiguity of the timbered slope. It was a split-second intimation! By the time the last of the candles was borne away, it was so dark that hardly a feature could be singled out. The feeling of shifted rôles had evaporated; and we poured out into the dust. Lights began to kindle in the windows of the village and a hint of moonrise shone at the other end of the plain.

  * * *

  I was looking for a barn for the night and a cobbler’s shop—or, linguistically more easily, a smithy—to get my boot-nail knocked in. But as Smith—Kovács—is the commonest Hungarian surname, just as it is in English, there was immediate confusion: which Kovács? János? Zoltán? Imre? Géza? At last a voice in a doorway said: “Was wollen Sie?” It was a red-haired Jewish baker and he not only hammered in the nail but put me up for the night as well. ‘We made a bed of straw and blankets on the stone floor of the dark bakery,’ my diary records, ‘and here I am, writing this by candlelight. Maundy Thursday is “Green Thursday” in German, Gründonnerstag. I wonder why? Good Friday is Karfreitag.’

  Next morning we talked in the sun outside the shop. There was a bench under a tree. My host was from a Carpathian village where quite a number of Jews, including his family, belonged to the Hasidim, a sect which sprang up two centuries ago in the province of Podolia—Russian then, Polish later—the other side of the Carpathians. The sect represented a break with Talmudic scholasticism and a plunge into mystic thought—the Cloud of Unknowing versus the Tree of Knowledge—and the belief of the Hasidim in a kind of all-englobing divine presence (a concept more familiar to Christians than to Jews) was condemned by the orthodox, in particular by a famous scholar and rabbi in the Lithuanian town of Vilna. But in spite of its heterodoxy and the anathema of the Gaons, the sect multiplied. It prospered especially in Podolia, Volhynia and the Ukraine and their tenets soon began to spread from these flat and Cossack-harried provinces and found their way south through the mountain passes. The baker himself was not a zealot: the face under the carroty hair was plump, shrewd and twinkling. I said I enjoyed reading the Bible. “So do I,” he said; then he added with a smile, “Especially the first part.” It took me a further couple of seconds to get the point.

  The church had lost its tenebrous mystery. But, by the end of the service, a compelling aura of extinction, emptiness and shrouded symbols pervaded the building. It spread through the village and over the surrounding fields. I could feel it even after Köbölkut had fallen below the horizon. The atmosphere of desolation carries far beyond the range of a tolling bell.

  When the low hills dropped, furrows fledged with young wheat-blades ran symmetrically into the distance under scores of larks. The footpath wandered through whitewashed farms and the yards of low manor-houses and later through spinneys filled with violets and primrose
s. Streams unwound under the willow branches, dwindling and expanding again into pools that were covered with watercress and duckweed and giant kingcups. The tadpole season was over and the water-lily leaves were rafts for little frogs. On a gregarious impulse, the shrill chorus would stop suddenly for a few seconds and then strike up again, and my advance touched off a mass of semicircular frog-trajectories and plops while herons cruised low and settled among the rushes balanced watchfully on one leg. On a bank tufted with sedge and reeds among mossy swamps a flock of sheep were tearing at the rough grass and black pigs snouted after last year’s acorns. The herdsman lay smoking under an oak tree in his sheepskin and there was no one else but scarecrows for miles. A fox trotted across a clearing in a wood. The overhead blaze had reduced me to shirt sleeves again and I was darkening like a piece of furniture. About four in the afternoon I got to the little village of Karva. The lane ended at the foot of a bank, and when I climbed it, there below—once again, long before I had expected it—the Danube was sweeping along.

  Close to the bank, where reeds and willow-herb grew thick, the water gave off a gaseous tang of stagnation; but the ripples and the creases in midstream showed the speed of its flow. The plains which had expanded from Bratislava, with all their deviations and marshes and loops and islands, had yielded a few miles upstream to the enclosing advance of the hills. All strays had been gathered in and the higher ground on my bank was answered on the Hungarian shore by the undulations of the Bakony Forest; and, at long last, I was face to face with Hungary. It was only a river’s width away. For a few miles it flowed unswerving between an escort of reflected woods and slid into the distance in either direction like a never-ending Champs Elysées of water.